“U.S. or State?”
“U.S. Senator, what do you think? State Senators are a dime a dozen.”
“Democratic or Republican?”
“What’s the difference? Haven’t I earned my ten dollars, brain-picker? Sweat-shopper?”
“One more question, asphalt intellectual. Where did the money come from in the first place?”
“Am I the Bureau of Internal Revenue?” He started to shrug, but found it required too much effort. “I am not.”
“You know things they don’t know.”
“I know nothing. All I hear is rumors. You are inciting me to commit a libel.”
“Spill it,” I said.
“Storm-trooper.”
“Now that isn’t nice to call anybody,” Hilda said soothingly.
I reminded him of the question: “The money. Where did it come from?”
“It didn’t grow on trees,” he said, and smothered a yawn. “I heard that Kilbourne made a fine thing out of black-market cars in Detroit during the war. Then he rushed down here to invest his money legitimately before somebody took it away from him. Now he’s grand old California stock and politicians go to his parties. Don’t quote me, it’s only a rumor. He might have spread it himself to cover up something worse, now that I come to think of it.”
Morris looked around the room with a dreaming smile and went to sleep sitting up. Removing his glasses, Hilda laid the limp boyish body out on the bed. I handled her the ten and moved to the door.
She followed me. “Come round in the daytime, Lew, we got the new Strauss from Paris.”
“I will when I have some time. I’m on my way to Nevada at the moment.”
“Seriously?”
“It looks like it.”
“That’s where Sue’s living, isn’t she?” Her round fat face lit up. “You’re going to have a reconciliation!”
“Not a chance. This is business.”
“I know you’ll come back together. Wait and see.”
“The bottom dropped out. All the king’s horses couldn’t put it back in for us.”
“Oh, Lew.” She looked ready to cry. “You made such a nice couple together.”
I patted her arm. “You are lovely and good, Hilda.” Morris groaned in his sleep. I went.
Chapter 14
From the highway the Staffordshire Estates were a discreet brass marker bolted to a stone arch, through which a new blacktop turned off the public road. A metal sign on one side of the arch informed me further that they were PROTECTED BY PRIVATE PATROL. The rustic redwood gates stood open, and I drove through them. Morning haze was drifting slowly up the canyon ahead, a translucent curtain between the outside world and the privately patrolled world I was entering. There were trees along the road, tall cypresses and elms, and small birds singing in them. Behind adobe walls and thick square-cut hedges, sprinklers were whirling lariats of spray. The houses, massive and low and bright among banks of flowers set in billiard-table lawns, were spaced out of sight of each other, so that no one but the owners could enjoy them. In this corner of the San Fernando Valley, property had become a fine art that was an end in itself. There were no people in sight, and I had a queer feeling that the beautiful squatting houses had taken over the canyon for their own purposes.
Valmy, Arbuthnot, Romanovsky, the mailboxes announced as I drove by them: Lewisohn, Tappingham, Wood, Farrington, Von Esch. WALTER J. KILBOURNE was neatly stenciled on the ninth mailbox and I turned up the drive beside it. The house was built of pink brick and glass, with a flat jutting redwood roof. The drive was lined with twenty shades of begonia. I parked in the gravelled loop that went past the front door, and pressed the button beside it. Chimes echoed through the house. The place was as noisy as a funeral parlor at midnight, and I liked it almost as well.
The door was opened silently by a small Japanese whose footsteps made no sound. “You wish something, sir?” His lips were very careful with the sibilants. Over his white linen shoulder I could see an entrance loggia containing a white grand piano and a white-upholstered Hepplewhite sofa. A pool beyond the white-columned windows threw rippling sapphire shadows on the white walls.
“Mr. Kilbourne,” I said. “He told me he’d be home.”
“But he is not. I am sorry, sir.”
“It has to do with an oil lease. I need his signature.”
“He is not at home, sir. Do you wish to leave a message?”
There was no way to tell if he was lying. His black eyes were unblinking and opaque. “If you can tell me where he is—?”
“I do not know, sir. He has gone for a cruise. Perhaps if you were to try his office, sir. They have direct telephone communication with the yacht.”
“Thanks. May I call the office from here?”
“I am sorry, sir. Mr. Kilbourne has not authorized me to admit unknown persons to his home.” He ducked his bootbrush hair at me in a token bow, and shut the door in my face.
I climbed into my car, closing the door very gently so as not to start an avalanche of money. The loop in the drive took me past the garages. They contained an Austin, a jeep, and a white roadster, but no black limousine.
The limousine met me halfway back to the highway. I held the middle of the road and showed three fingers of my left hand. The black car braked to a stop a few feet short of my bumpers, and the chauffeur got out. His scarred eyes blinked in the brightening sun.
“What’s the trouble, mac? You give me the sign.”
I hitched the gun from my shoulder-holster as I stepped out of the car, and showed it to him. He raised his hands to shoulder level and smiled. “You’re screwy to try it, punk. I got nothing worth taking. I’m an old con myself but I got wise. Get wise like me and put away the iron.” The smile sat strangely, like a crooked Santa Claus mask, on his battered face.
“Save it for Wednesday night meeting.” I moved up to him, not too close. He was old, but strong and fast, and I didn’t want to shoot him.
He recognized me then. His face was expressive, like a concrete block. “I thought you was in the refrigerator.” The large hands closed and opened.
“Keep them up. What did you do with Reavis? Refrigerate him, too?”
“Reavis?” he said with laborious foxiness. “Who’s Reavis? I don’t know any Reavis.”
“You will, when they take you down to the morgue to look at him.” I improvised: “The Highway Patrol found him by the road outside of Quinto this morning. His throat was cut.”
“Uh?” The air issued from his mouth and nostrils as if I’d body-punched him.
“Let me see your knife,” I said, to keep his fifty points of I.Q. occupied.
“I got no knife. I had nothing to do with it. I dropped him over the Nevada line. He couldn’t come back that fast.”
“You came back that fast.”
His face worked with the terrible effort of thought. “You’re feeding me a sucker’s line,” he said. “He never went back to Quinto, they never found him.”
“Where is he now, then?”
“I ain’t talking,” the concrete block announced. “You might as well put your iron away and lam.”
We were in a dark-green valley walled with close-set laurel on both sides. The only sound was the hum of our idling cars. “You have a deceptive face,” I said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was alive. You want it gun-whipped.”
“Try it on,” he said stolidly. “See where it gets you.”
I wanted to hurt him, but the memory of the night was ugly in my mind. There had to be a difference between me and the opposition, or I’d have to take the mirror out of my bathroom. It was the only mirror in the house, and I needed it for shaving.
“Run along, quiz kid.” I slanted the gun at the road. He went back to his car.
“Punk,” he shouted in his thick, expressionless voice as he swerved in the ditch to pass me. His wrap-around bumper nicked the left rear fender of my car, and he blasted my ears with him horn to show it was deliberate. The roar of
his accelerating motor rose like a sound of triumph.
I put mine in gear. All the way across the desert I scanned the side of the road for blind cripples and old ladies that I could help across and minister to with potions of camomile tea.
Chapter 15
It was late afternoon when I crossed the great level pass. The shadow of my car was running ahead in fleet silence, and slowly increasing its lead. The sun was yellow on the arid slopes, the air so clear that the mountains lacked perspective. They looked like surrealist symbols painted on the shallow desert sky. The heat, which had touched 110 at one, was slackening off, but my hood was still hot enough to fry the insects that splattered it.
The Rush Apartments occupied a two-story frame building on the east side of Las Vegas. Jaundiced with yellow paint, it stood tiredly between a parking lot and a chain grocery store. An outside wooden staircase with a single sagging rail led up to a narrow veranda on which the second-floor apartments opened. An old man was sitting in a kitchen chair tipped back against the wall under the stairs. He had a faded bandana handkerchief around his scrawny neck, and was sucking on a corncob pipe. A week’s beard grew on his folded cheeks like the dusty gray plush in old-fashioned railway coaches.
I asked him where Mrs. Schneider lived.
“She lives right here,” he mumbled.
“Is she in now?”
He removed his empty pipe from his mouth and spat on the cement floor. “How do you expect me to know? I don’t keep track of women’s comings and goings.”
I laid a fifty-cent piece on the bony knee. “Buy yourself a bag of tobacco.”
He picked it up sulkily, and slipped it into a pocket of his food-crusted vest. “I s’pose her husband sent you? At least she says he’s her husband, looks more like her bully to me. Anyway, you’re out of luck now, slicker. She went out a while ago.”
“You wouldn’t know where?”
“To the den of iniquity, what do you think? Where she spends all her time.” He tipped his chair forward and pointed far down the street. “You see that green sign? You can’t make it out from here, but it says ‘Green Dragon’ on it. That’s the den of iniquity. And you want me to tell you the name of this town? Sodom and Gonorrhea.” He laughed an old man’s laugh, high-pitched and unamused.
“Is that Elaine Schneider?”
“I dont know any other Mrs. Schneiders.”
“What does she look like?” I said. “I never saw her.”
“She looks like Jezebel.” His watery eyes glittered like melting ice. “She looks like what she is, the whore of Babylon rolling her eyes and shaking her privates at Christian young men. Are you a Christian, son?”
I backed away thanking him and crossed the street, leaving my car at the curb. I walked the two blocks to the Green Dragon and worked some of the stiffness out of my legs. It was another seedy-looking bar. Signs in the dirty half-curtained windows advertised LIQUOR, BEER, HOT and COLD SANDWICHES and SHORT ORDERS. I pulled the screen door open and went in. A semi-circular bar with slot machines. Kitchen smells, the smell of stale spilled beer, the sick-sour smell of small-time gamblers’ sweat, were slowly mixed by a four-bladed fan suspended from the fly-specked ceiling.
There was only one customer at the bar, a thin boy with uncombed red hair hunched desolately over a short beer. The bartender sat on a stool in a corner, as far away from the desolate youth as possible. His greased black head leaned against a table radio. “Three nothing,” he announced to anyone who cared. “Top of the seventh.” No sign of Jezebel.
I took a seat beside the redheaded boy, ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of beer. The bartender went out reluctantly through the swinging door to the kitchen.
“Look at me, eh,” the man beside me said. The words twisted his mouth as if they hurt. “How do you like me?”
His thin unshaven face looked dirty. His eyes had blue hollows under them and red rims around them. One of his ears was caked with dry blood.
“I like you very much,” I said. “You have that beaten look that everybody admires.”
It took the raw edge off his mood of self-pity. He even managed a smile which made him look five years younger, hardly more than a kid. “Well, I asked for it.”
“Any time,” I said, “any time.”
“I asked for it in more ways than one, I guess. I should know better than to go on a bat in Las Vegas, but I guess I’ll never learn.”
“You have a few more years before you die. What happened to your ear?”
He looked sheepish. “I don’t even know. I met a guy in a bar last night and he roped me into a game in a poker-parlor on the other side of town. All I remember, I lost my money and my car. I had three aces when I lost my car, and somebody started an argument: I guess it was me. I woke up in a parking lot.”
“Hungry?”
“Naw. Thanks, though. I had a little change. The hell of it is I got to get back to L.A., and I got no car.”
The bartender brought my food and drink. “Stick around,” I told the young Dostoevsky. “I’ll give you a lift if I can.”
While I was eating, a woman came through a door at the end of the bar. She was tall and big-boned, with more than flesh enough to cover her bones. The skirt of her cheap black suit was wrinkled where her hips and thighs bulged out. Her feet and ankles spilled over the tops of very tight black pumps. Her north end was decorated with a single gray fox, a double strand of imitation pearls approximately the same color, and enough paint to preserve a battleship. Her chest was like a battleship’s prow, massive and sharp and uninviting. She gave me a long hard searchlight look, her heavy mouth held loose, all ready to smile. I took a bite of my sandwich and munched at her. The searchlights clicked off, almost audibly.
She turned to the bar and snapped open a shiny black plastic bag. The yellow hair which she wore in a braided coronet was dark at the roots, obviously dyed. Turn it back to brown, take off a few years and a few more pounds, chip the paint off her face, and she could be Reavis’s twin. They had the same eyes, the same thick handsome features.
The bartender clinched it: “Something for you: Elaine?”
She tossed a bill on the pitted woodstone surface. “Twenty quarters,” she growled in a whisky voice that wasn’t unpleasant. “For a change.”
“Your luck is bound to change.” He smiled insincerely. “The one you been playing is loaded to pay anytime.”
“What the hell,” she said, deadpan. “Easy come, easy go.”
“Especially easy go,” the boy beside me said to the beer-foam in the bottom of his glass.
Mechanically, without excitement or any sign of interest, she fed the quarters one by one into a machine near the door. Somebody phoning long-distance to somebody else who had been dead for years. Some twos and fours, a single twelve, stretched her money out. They went back in as a matter of course. She played the machine as if it was a toneless instrument made to express despair. When the jackpot came in a jangling rush of metal, I thought the machine had simply broken down. Then the slugs and quarters overflowed the bowl and rolled on the floor.
“I told you,” the bartender said. “I said she was set to pay.”
Paying no attention to her winnings, she crossed to the bar and took the seat beside me. He gave her a double whisky in a shot-glass without being asked.
“You pick it up, Simmie.” Her voice had a trace of weary coquetry. “I’m wearing a girdle.”
“Sure, but I don’t need to count them. I’ll give you the twenty-five.”
“I put thirty-five in.” The double shot went down like water down a drain.
“That’s the percentage, kid. You got to pay something for all the fun you get.”
“Yeah, fun.” She folded the twenty and the five he gave her, and tucked them away in her bag.
A newsboy came in with an armful of Evening Review-Journal’s and I bought one. The third page carried the story I was looking for, under the heading: EX-MARINE SOUGHT IN NOPAL VALLEY DEATH. It gave no inf
ormation I didn’t have, except that the police were maintaining an open mind as to the cause of death. Accompanying the story was a picture of Reavis, smiling incongruously over the caption: WANTED FOR QUESTIONING.
I folded the paper open at the third page and laid it on the bar between me and the big synthetic blonde. She didn’t notice it for a minute or two; she was watching the bartender gather up her jackpot. Then her gaze strayed back to the bar and saw the picture, tool hold of it. The breath wheezed asthmatically in her nostrils, and stopped entirely for a period of seconds. She took a pair of spectacles from her bag. With them on her face, she looked oddly like a schoolteacher gone astray.
“You mind if I look at your paper?” she asked me huskily. There was more south in her voice than there had been before.
“Go ahead.”
The bartender looked up from sorting the slugs and quarters on the bar. “Say, I didn’t know you wore glasses, Elaine. Very becoming.”
She didn’t hear him. With the aid of a scarlet-tipped finger moving slowly from word to word, she was spelling out the newspaper story to herself. When the slow finger reached the final period, she was silent and still for an instant. Then she said aloud: “Well I’ll be—!”
She flung the paper down, its edges crumpled by the moist pressure of her hands, and went to the street door. Her hips rolled angrily, her high heels spiked the floor. The screen door slammed behind her.
I waited thirty seconds and went after her. Rotating on his stool, the desolate youth followed me with his eyes, like a stray dog I had befriended and betrayed.
“Stick around,” I told him over my shoulder.
The woman was already halfway up the block. Though they were hobbled by her skirt, her legs were moving like pistons. The gray foxtail hung down her back, fluttering nervously. I followed her more slowly when I saw where she was going. She went up the outside door, and went in, leaving it open. I crossed the street and slid behind the wheel of my car.
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