The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “That will be fine, sir. Is the dining room still open?”

  “It is.”

  “Could you take care of twenty men?”

  “What about the others?”

  “They can be accommodated elsewhere, sir.”

  Simpson saluted casually and, turning to the men assembled stiffly in front of the hotel, issued a few quiet orders. Quickly and efficiently, the men in the troop parked their motorcycles at the curb. About a third of the group detached itself and came deferentially but steadily up the hotel steps. They passed Bleeker who found himself maneuvered aside and went into the lobby. As they passed him, Bleeker could see the slight converted movement of their faces—though not their eyes, which were covered by large green goggles—toward his daughter Cathy. Bleeker frowned after them but before he could think of anything to say, Simpson, standing at his left, touched his arm.

  “I’ve divided the others into two groups,” he said quietly. “One group will eat at the diner and the other at the Desert Hotel.”

  “Very good,” Bleeker said. “You evidently know the town like a book. The people, too. Have you ever been here before?”

  “We have a map of all the towns in this part of California, sir. And of course we know the names of all the principal hotels and their proprietors. Personally, I could use a drink. Would you join me?”

  “After you,” Bleeker said.

  He stood watching Simpson stride into the lobby and without any hesitation go directly to the bar. Then he turned to Cathy, seeing Timmons and LaSalle lounging on the railing behind her, their faces already indistinct in the plummeting California twilight.

  “You go help in the kitchen, Cathy,” Bleeker said. “I think it’d be better if you didn’t wait on tables.”

  “I wonder what they look like behind those goggles,” Cathy said.

  “Like anybody else,” Timmons said. He was about thirty, somewhat coarse and intolerant and a little embarrassed at being in love with a girl as young as Cathy. “Where did you think they came from? Mars?”

  “What did they say the name of their club was?” Cathy said.

  “Angeleno,” LaSalle said.

  “They must be from Los Angeles. Heigh-ho. Shall I wear my very best gingham, citizen colonel?”

  “Remember now—you stay in the kitchen,” Bleeker said.

  He watched her walk into the lobby, a tall slender girl of seventeen, pretty and enigmatic, with something of the brittle independence of her mother. Bleeker remembered suddenly, although he tried not to, the way her mother had walked away from him that frosty January morning two years ago saying, “I’m going for a ride.” And then the two-day search in the mountains after the horse had come back alone and the finding of her body—the neck broken—in the stream at the foot of the cliff. During the war he had never really believed that he would live to get back to Cathy’s mother, and after the war he hadn’t really believed he would be separated from her—not again—not twice in so short a time.

  Shaking his head—as if by that motion he could shed his memories as easily as a dog sheds water—Bleeker went in to join Gar Simpson who was sitting at a table in the barroom. Simpson stood politely when Bleeker took the opposite chair.

  “How long do you fellows plan to stay?” Bleeker asked. He took the first sip of his drink, looked up, and stared at Simpson.

  “Tonight and tomorrow morning,” Simpson said.

  Like all the others, he was dressed in a brown windbreaker, khaki shirt, khaki pants, and, as Bleeker had previously observed, wore dark calf-length boots. A cloth and leather helmet lay on the table beside Simpson’s drink, but he hadn’t removed his flat green goggles, an accouterment giving him and the men in his troop the appearance of some tropical tribe with enormous semiprecious eyes, lidless and immovable. That was Bleeker’s first impression and, absurd as it was, it didn’t seem an exaggeration of fancy but of truth.

  “Where do you go after this?”

  “North.” Simpson took a rolled map from a binocular case slung over his shoulder and spread it on the table. “Roughly we’re following the arc of an ellipse with its southern tip based on Los Angeles and its northern end touching Fresno.”

  “Pretty ambitious for a motorcycle club.”

  “We have a month,” Simpson said. “This is our first week, but we’re in no hurry and we’re out to see plenty of country.”

  “What are you interested in mainly?”

  “Roads. Naturally, being a motorcycle club—you’d be surprised at the rate we’re expanding—we’d like to have as much of California as possible opened up to us.”

  “I see.”

  “Keeps the boys fit, too. The youth of America. Our hope for the future.” Simpson pulled sternly at his drink, and Bleeker had the impression that Simpson was repressing, openly, and with pride, a vast sparkling ecstasy.

  Bleeker sat and watched the young men in the troop file upstairs from the public washroom and stroll casually but nevertheless with discipline into the dining room. They had removed their helmets and strapped them to their belts, each helmet in a prescribed position to the left of the belt-buckle, but—like Simpson—they had retained their goggles. Bleeker wondered if they ever removed the goggles long enough to wash under them and, if they did, what the flesh under them looked like.

  “I think I’d better help out at the tables,” Bleeker said. He stood up, and Simpson stood with him. “You say you’re from Troop B? Is that right?”

  “Correct. We’re forming Troop G now. Someday——”

  “You’ll be up to Z,” Bleeker said.

  “And not only in California.”

  “Where else for instance?”

  “Nevada—Arizona—Colorado—Wyoming.”

  Simpson smiled, and Bleeker, turning away from him abruptly, went into the dining room where he began to help the two waitresses at the tables. He filled water glasses, set out extra forks, and brought steins of beer from the bar. As he served the troop, their polite thank you’s ornate and insecure, irritated him. It reminded him of tricks taught to animals, the animals only being allowed to perform under certain obvious conditions of security. And he didn’t like the cool way they stared at the two waitresses, both older women and fixtures in the town, and then leaned their heads together as if every individual thought had to be pooled and divided equally among them. He admitted, after some covert study, that the twenty men were really only variations of one, the variations, with few exceptions, being too subtle for him to recognize and differentiate. It was the goggles, he decided, covering that part of the face which is most noteworthy and most needful for identification—the eyes and the mask around the eyes.

  Bleeker went into the kitchen, pretending to help but really to be near Cathy. The protective father, he thought ironically, watching his daughter cut pie and lay the various colored wedges on the white blue-bordered plates.

  “Well, Daddy, what’s the verdict?” Cathy looked extremely grave, but he could see that she was amused.

  “They’re a fine body of men.”

  “Uh-huh. Have you called the police yet?”

  He laughed. “It’s a good thing you don’t play poker.”

  “Child’s play.” She slid the last piece of blueberry pie on a plate. “I saw you through the door. You looked like you were ready to crack the Siegfried line—singlehanded.”

  “That man Simpson.”

  “What about him?”

  “Why don’t you go upstairs and read a book or something?”

  “Now, Daddy—you’re the only professional here. They’re just acting like little tin soldiers out on a spree.”

  “I wish to God they were made of tin.”

  “All right. I’ll keep away from them. I promise.” She made a gesture of crossing her throat with the thin edge of a knife. He leaned over and kissed her forehead, his hand
feeling awkward and stern on her back.

  After dinner the troop went into the bar, moving with a strange co-ordinated fluency that was both casual and military, and sat jealously together in one corner of the room. Bleeker served them pitchers of beer, and for the most part they talked quietly together, Simpson at their center, their voices guarded and urgent as if they possessed information which couldn’t be disseminated safely among the public.

  Bleeker left them after a while and went upstairs to his daughter’s room. He wasn’t used to being severe with Cathy and he was a little embarrassed by what he had said to her in the kitchen. She was turning the collars of some of his old shirts, using a portable sewing machine he had bought her as a present on her last birthday. As he came in, she held one of the shirts comically to the floor lamp, and he could see how thin and transparent the material was. Her mother’s economy in small things, almost absurd when compared to her limitless generosity in matters of importance, had been one of the family jokes. It gave him an extraordinary sense of pleasure, so pure it was like a sudden inhalation of oxygen, to see that his daughter had not only inherited this tradition but had considered it meaningful enough to carry on. He went down the hall to his own room without saying anything further to her. Cathy was what he himself was in terms which could mean absolutely nothing to anyone else.

  He had been in his room for perhaps an hour, working on the hotel accounts and thinking obliquely of the man Simpson, when he heard, faintly and apparently coming from no one direction, the sound of singing. He got up and walked to the windows overlooking the street. Standing there, he thought he could fix the sound farther up the block toward Cunningham’s bar. Except for something harsh and mature in the voices, it was the kind of singing that might be heard around a Boy Scout campfire, more rhythmic than melodic and more stirring than tuneful. And then he could hear it almost under his feet, coming out of the hotel lobby and making three or four people on the street turn and smile foolishly toward the doors of the veranda.

  Oppressed by something sternly joyous in the voices, Bleeker went downstairs to the bar, hearing, as he approached, the singing became louder and fuller. Outside of Simpson and the twenty men in the troop there were only three townsmen—including LaSalle—in the bar. Simpson, seeing Bleeker in the door, got up and walked over to him, moving him out into the lobby where they could talk.

  “I hope the boys aren’t disturbing you,” he said.

  “It’s early,” Bleeker said.

  “In an organization as large and selective as ours it’s absolutely necessary to insist on a measure of discipline. And it’s equally necessary to allow a certain amount of relaxation.”

  “The key word is selective, I suppose.”

  “We have our standards,” Simpson said primly.

  “May I ask you what the hell your standards are?”

  Simpson smiled. “I don’t quite understand your irritation, Mr. Bleeker.”

  “This is an all-year-round thing, isn’t it? This club of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have an all-year-round job with the club?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s my objection, Simpson. Briefly and simply stated, what you’re running is a private army.” Bleeker tapped the case slung over Simpson’s shoulder. “Complete with maps, all sorts of local information, and of course a lobby in Sacramento.”

  “For a man who has traveled as widely as you have, Mr. Bleeker, you display an uncommon talent for exaggeration.”

  “As long as you behave yourselves I don’t care what you do. This is a small town and we don’t have many means of entertainment. We go to bed at a decent hour and I suggest you take that into consideration. However, have your fun. Nobody here has any objections to that.”

  “And of course we spend our money.”

  “Yes,” Bleeker said. “You spend your money.”

  He walked away from Simpson and went out onto the veranda. The singing was now both in front and in back of him. Bleeker stood for a moment on the top steps of the veranda looking at the moon, hung like a slightly soiled but luminous pennant in the sky. He was embarrassed by his outburst to Simpson and he couldn’t think why he had said such things. Private army. Perhaps, as Simpson had said, he was exaggerating. He was a small-town man and he had always hated the way men surrendered their individuality to attain perfection as a unit. It had been necessary during the war but it wasn’t necessary now. Kid stuff—with an element of growing pains.

  He walked down the steps and went up the sidewalk toward Cunningham’s bar. They were singing there, too, and he stood outside the big plate-glass window peering in at them and listening to the harsh, pounding voices colored here and there with the sentimentalism of strong beer. Without thinking further he went into the bar. It was dim and cool and alien to his eyes, and at first he didn’t notice the boy sitting by himself in a booth near the front. When he did, he was surprised—more than surprised, shocked—to see that the boy wasn’t wearing his goggles but had placed them on the table by a bottle of Coca-Cola. Impulsively, he walked over to the booth and sat across from the boy.

  “This seat taken?”

  He had to shout over the noise of the singing. The boy leaned forward over the table and smiled.

  “Hope we’re not disturbing you.”

  Bleeker caught the word “disturbing” and shook his head negatively. He pointed to his mouth, then to the boy and to the rest of the group. The boy, too, shook his head. Bleeker could see that he was young, possibly twenty-five, and that he had dark straight hair cut short and parted neatly at the side. The face was square but delicate, the nose short, the mouth wide. The best thing about the boy, Bleeker decided, were his eyes, brown, perhaps, or dark gray, set in two distorted ovals of white flesh which contrasted sharply with the heavily tanned skin on the cheeks, forehead and jaws. With his goggles on he would have looked like the rest. Without them he was a pleasant young man, altogether human and approachable.

  Bleeker pointed to the Coca-Cola bottle. “You’re not drinking.”

  “Beer makes me sick.”

  Bleeker got the word “beer” and the humorous ulping motion the boy made. They sat exchanging words and sometimes phrases, illustrated always with a series of clumsy, groping gestures until the singing became less coherent and spirited and ended finally in a few isolated coughs. The men in the troop were moving about individually now, some leaning over the bar and talking in hoarse whispers to the bartender, others walking unsteadily from group to group and detaching themselves immediately to go over to another group, the groups, usually two or three men, constantly edging away from themselves and colliding with and being held briefly by others. Some simply stood in the center of the room and brayed dolorously at the ceiling.

  Several of the troop walked out of the bar, and Bleeker could see them standing on the wide sidewalk looking up and down the street—as contemptuous of one another’s company as they had been glad of it earlier. Or not so much contemptuous as unwilling to be coerced too easily by any authority outside themselves. Bleeker smiled as he thought of Simpson and the man’s talk of discipline.

  “They’re looking for women,” the boy said.

  Bleeker had forgotten the boy temporarily, and the sudden words spoken in a normal voice startled and confused him. He thought quickly of Cathy—but then Cathy was safe in her room—probably in bed. He took the watch from his vest pocket and looked at it carefully.

  “Five minutes after ten,” he said.

  “Why do they do that?” the boy demanded. “Why do they have to be so damned indecent about things like that? They haven’t got the nerve to do anything but stare at waitresses. And then they get a few beers in them and go around pinching and slapping—they——”

  Bleeker shivered with embarrassment. He was looking directly into the boy’s eyes and seeing the color run under the tears a
nd the jerky pinching movement of the lids as against something injurious and baleful. It was an emotion too rawly infantile to be seen without being hurt by it, and he felt both pity and contempt for a man who would allow himself to display such a feeling—without any provocation—so nakedly to a stranger.

  “Sorry,” the boy said.

  He picked up the green goggles and fitted them awkwardly over his eyes. Bleeker stood up and looked toward the center of the room. Several of the men turned their eyes and then moved their heads away without seeming to notice the boy in the booth. Bleeker understood them. This was the one who could be approached. The reason for that was clear, too. He didn’t belong. Why and wherefore he would probably never know.

  He walked out of the bar and started down the street toward the hotel. The night was clear and cool and smelled faintly of the desert, of sand, of heated rock, of the sweetly-sour plants growing without water and even of the sun which burned itself into the earth and never completely withdrew. There were only a few townsmen on the sidewalk wandering up and down, lured by the presence of something unusual in the town and masking, Bleeker thought, a ruthless and menacing curiosity behind a tolerant grin. He shrugged his shoulders distastefully. He was like a cat staring into a shadow the shape of its fears.

  He was no more than a hundred feet from the hotel when he heard—or thought he heard—the sound of automatic firing. It was a well-remembered sound but always new and frightening.

  Then he saw the motorcycle moving down the middle of the street, the exhaust sputtering loudly against the human resonance of laughter, catcalls, and epithets. He exhaled gently, the pain in his lungs subsiding with his breath. Another motorcycle speeded after the first, and he could see four of five machines being wheeled out and the figures of their riders leaping into the air and bringing their weight down on the starting pedals. He was aware, too, that the lead motorcycles, having traversed the length of the street, had turned and were speeding back to the hotel. He had the sensation of moving—even when he stood still—in the relation to the objects heading toward each other. He heard the high unendurable sound of metal squeezing metal and saw the front wheel of a motorcycle twist and wobble and its rider roll along the asphalt toward the gutter where he sat up finally and moved his goggled head feebly from side to side.