“Come out of there.”
I froze in the doorway, half of my body exposed. I could feel the line between safety and danger bisecting my center.
“Out of there with your hands up.” It was the sheriff’s voice. “I’ll give you a count of three before I fire.” He began to count.
I dropped the flash in my pocket and raised my hands, stepping out of the friendly shadow. Church came through the arch. The crown of his Stetson brushed the curtain rod. He looked about seven feet tall.
“You.” He came up close, pressing the muzzle of his gun into my solar plexus. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“My job.”
“What job is that?”
“Meyer hired me to look for his truck.”
“And you thought it was concealed here, in Miss Meyer’s bathroom?”
“He also hired me to look for his daughter.”
He pushed the gun deeper into the hollow below my ribs, and leaned on it. “Where is she, Archer?”
I tensed myself against the gun’s sharp pressure, against the sharper pressure of panic. Church’s eyes were wide and blank. The muscles were ridged and dimpling around his mouth. He looked ready to kill.
“I wouldn’t know where she is,” I said. “I suggest you ask Kerrigan.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you’ll drop the tough-cop kick I’ll tell you what I mean. Iron isn’t good for my stomach. Neither is lead.”
He pulled the gun away, looking down at it as if it was a separate entity that resisted his control. But he didn’t return it to its holster.
“What about Kerrigan?”
“He crops up all over the place. When Aquista was shot, Kerrigan was the nearest citizen. The truck was loaded with Kerrigan’s whisky. Now your sister-in-law turns up missing. She was Kerrigan’s employee, very likely his mistress. And that’s only the beginning.” I was tempted to go on and tell him about the conversation I’d eavesdropped on in Sammy’s Oriental Gardens. But I decided not to. It belonged to me.
Church pushed his hat back as if it constricted his thoughts. His hand stayed up, rubbing a spot on his temple: a grooved bluish-white scar, which might have been left there by a bullet-welt. He looked like a different man with his high forehead uncovered—a puzzled, sensitive man who wore the Western hat and the hard-nosed front as protective coloration. Or a man so deeply split that he didn’t know himself. The gun hung down forgotten in his other hand.
When he spoke, it was in an altered voice, shallow and flat: “I’ve already questioned Kerrigan. He has an alibi for the shooting.”
“His wife?”
“Her word is good enough for me. I’ve known Kate Kerrigan for a long time. I knew her father, the Judge. She’s a woman I trust completely.”
“A woman like that would lie for her husband.”
“Maybe. She isn’t lying. In any case, Kerrigan doesn’t need an alibi. He’s a respectable businessman.”
“How respectable?”
“I’m not talking about his private life. When you’ve got as much to lose as Kerrigan has, you don’t shoot truck-drivers on the public highway.”
“Not even for seventy grand? That’s a tremendous order of whisky, by the way. What does he do, take baths in it?”
“He sells it.”
“In his motor court?”
“Not if I can help it. He owns a bar on the other side of town. The Golden Slipper Supper Club, he calls it.”
“On Yanonali Street?”
“You get around.”
“What else has he got that I don’t know about—political pull?”
“I guess he has some, through his wife’s connections.”
I pressed the needle in a little further: “That wouldn’t be influencing you on the subject of Kerrigan?”
This time it struck a nerve. A pulse jerked under the reddening scar on his temple. “You’re kind of free with your questions.”
“I have to take my answers where I can find them.”
“Don’t forget who you’re talking to.”
“You keep it in the forefront of my thoughts.”
“You don’t quite grasp the situation,” he said. “I’m leaning over backwards. I can’t promise it will last. If you want trouble, I can lock you up for breaking in the front door.”
“I do a neater job than that. It was broken when I got here.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. The place was burglarized, but not by an ordinary burglar. There’s an expensive wristwatch on the bedroom table. A burglar would have taken it. He wouldn’t have taken the other things that are missing.”
“What other things?”
“Personal stuff, toothbrush and so on. I think Anne Meyer went away for the weekend and didn’t come back when she expected to. Then somebody else broke in here and pried open her desk and removed various things, traces of her personal life: letters, address-book, telephone numbers—”
“You had no right to barge in here,” he said. “Even if you didn’t jimmy the door yourself, you’re breaking the law.”
“Your wife gave me permission to search the apartment.”
“What has she got to do with it?”
“Her sister is missing, she’s next of kin—”
“Where did you see her?”
“I drove her home from Meyer’s less than an hour ago.”
“Stay away from her, do you hear me?” he said in a rising voice. “Stay away from my house and my wife.”
“Maybe you better instruct your wife to stay away from me.”
I shouldn’t have said it. Anger shook and wrenched him. His gun swung up, and the barrel clipped my chin. My head snapped back against the wall. I heard plaster dropping down behind it. His tall figure blurred and swung sideways like a tree falling. My arm and shoulder struck the floor.
I got back onto my feet and wiped the blood from my chin with the back of my hand.
“You’ll probably regret this, sheriff.”
“Get out of here before I do something I’ll really regret.”
His long face slanting forward over the gun was like tortured bronze. His eyes were blind and empty.
I walked on remote legs to the open door. The radio music in the next cottage had been replaced by a manic voice asserting loudly that loneliness, fear, and unpopularity were things of the past, abolished by chlorophyll.
CHAPTER 9: Yanonali Street bent north at the city limits to join a state highway. A pair of two-story stucco buildings stood in the angle of the roads. One was the El Recreo Pool and Shuffleboard Arcade. Men and boys brandishing cues moved in its smoky green light like heavy-footed spear-fishers walking on the floor of the sea. On the roof of the other building, a high-heeled slipper outlined in yellow bulbs hinted broadly at women and champagne gaiety. Some of the bulbs were missing.
The champagne was domestic and flat. Three girls, two weary blondes and a blue brunette, were waiting on the three end stools at the bar. Their drooping bodies straightened when I entered. They inflated their chests and opened their paint-heavy mouths in welcoming smiles. Assuming a high-minded expression, I passed them and went to the far end of the bar.
The room was shaped like a flat bottle with the narrow end in front. At the rear, beyond an empty dancing space, a deserted bandstand supported a silver-painted piano and a few music-racks like leafless metal trees. A big neurotic jukebox voice was crying out loud in an echo-chamber for love that it didn’t deserve, except from tone-deaf women.
Four youths in Hawaiian-print shirts were sucking on beer bottles in one of the rear booths. Each of the four had white peroxided forelocks, as if the same lightning had blasted them all at once. They looked at me with disdain. I had ordinary hair. I wasn’t atomic.
The man behind the bar wasn’t atomic, either. His face resembled a tired bullfrog’s. His jacket had once been white. His nostrils sighed at me when I ordered beer.
“How’s business?” I said politely.
&
nbsp; He decapitated my bottle, savagely, and set it on the scarred formica between us. “If business improved five hundred per cent it wouldn’t even be lousy. Beer is the only order I get any more. You on the road?”
I said I was.
“There’s the life. I’d get out of here myself if I could. Wife and family, they hold a man down.” He let his shoulders slump and his jaw sag by way of illustration. “The last year, since the big shock, this place is as dead as King Tut.”
“The big shock?”
“The earthquake we had last summer. We took a beating from it, more ways than one. It scared the whole town crapless. I guess it did some people a lot of good. This was one wild town, brother. It ain’t so wild any more, since the big shock. A lot of leading citizens went on the wagon. I guess they thought it was a judgment on ’em. Some of them even started laying off of other people’s wives. It took an earthquake to do it. But oh what it did to this business. I must of been off my rocker when I bought it.”
“You own this place?”
He didn’t answer. He was glaring past me at the boys in the back booth. “Look at the class of customer I’m getting. I lose the spending trade and inherit the goof-ball set. They nurse one piddling beer all night, just so they’ll have a place to park their drooping tails.”
There was a lull in the music while the jukebox changed its tune. One of the platinum forelocks was telling the others how he had made a booboo with a pig. She had howitzers like your grandma, he said, only it turned out she was Quentin quail, a fugitive from the sixth grade. Their laughter sounded like a distant little battery of machineguns.
“Will Jo be here soon?” I asked the bartender.
He shook his head, slowly and carefully as though it hurt him. “If it’s Jo you’re looking for, no dice. She ain’t coming.”
“Isn’t she working tonight?”
“Not tonight or any night. She quit. Which suited me fine. I was going to fire her anyway.”
“I thought Don Kerrigan ran the Slipper.”
“He did. Not any more. I bought it from him this morning. For which I ought to have my head examined. You a friend of Kerrigan’s?”
“I’ve seen him around.”
“Friend of Jo’s?”
“I had hopes.”
“You’re wasting your time. She isn’t coming back and even if she was you wouldn’t have a chance. That mouse is all fixed up.”
“With anybody in particular?”
He regarded me pawkily. “I’m a married man with four income-tax deductions. Would she confide in me?”
“If she was desperate. Does the name Tony Aquista mean anything?”
His bulging eyes seemed to retract, like a frog’s eyes when it swallows. “I know Tony. He comes in, off and on.”
“He won’t be coming in any more. He’s dead.”
His face went dull and sleepy with surprise. “What happened to him?”
“Shot. On the highway south of town. He was hauling a truckload of bonded bourbon. The load was highjacked. It was billed to Kerrigan.”
“How much bourbon did you say?”
“Seventy thousand dollars’ worth.”
“One of you is crazy. He’s got no outlet for it.”
“The order must have gone in several days ago. Didn’t he tell you about it?”
“Maybe he did at that,” he answered cautiously. “I got a very poor memory.” He leaned across the bar, peering at my face from under ponderous lids. “Who are you, mister? Law?”
“A private detective. I’m investigating the job for the Meyer truck line.”
“Hell, you don’t think Jo had nothing to do with it?”
“That’s what I want to ask her. She knew Aquista, didn’t she?”
“Maybe she did. I don’t know.”
“You know damn well she did.”
His mouth closed, and the broad planes of his face assumed a massive dignity. “Have it your way. I’m not saying nothing. The kid was no great nightingale, but she was always cheerful around the place. Why should I talk her into trouble?”
“Where can I find her?”
“She don’t check back with me, paisan. And you’re getting a lot of conversation out of a thirty-cent beer.”
“I’ll have another.”
“I won’t sell you another. Go back to old man Meyer and tell him to bury his head. Then you can bury yours.”
I thanked him for his hospitality and slid off the barstool. The jukebox had a female organ now, yearning for lovers. Two of the girls from the front of the bar, the brunette and one of the blondes, were dancing on the edge of the floor. The brunette was doing the leading. I cut in on them and took the blonde.
She was pretty enough, and young, in spite of the professional glaze in her eyes. She danced expertly and eagerly, her syncopated bosom bobbing against my chest. We whirled around in a cloud of cheap perfume. That or the aftereffects of the sheriff’s blow made me dizzy.
She looked up after a while and showed me a double row of fine white teeth. “I’m Jerry Mae. I love to dance.”
“I used to.”
“You got tired blood? You could always sit down and buy me a drink.”
“I’d rather lie down.”
She chose to interpret this as a pass and giggled mechanically. “You’re a fast worker. I don’t even know your name.”
“Lew.”
“Where do you hail from, Lew?”
“Los Angeles.”
“I spent some time there myself. Los Angeles is a great town.”
“A great town,” I agreed.
Her fingertips moved on the sleeve of my jacket, assessing the probable cost of the fabric. “What do you do there, Lew?”
“Various things.”
“I’d love to hear about them. Come on and sit down and buy me a drink and tell me about yourself.”
“Isn’t there any place we can be alone?”
She pushed me roguishly. “My, you certainly sweep a girl off her feet. If you really feel like a party, there is a room upstairs.”
“Show me.”
I followed her out, running the gantlet of the bartender’s hostile stare. But he didn’t make a move to interfere. Business was business.
A flight of wooden steps slanted up the blank stucco wall of the building. Her slim nyloned ankles climbed ahead of me. She waited for me at the upper door. Caught in the light from the roof, her face was ghastly, as if it had been stricken with yellow disease.
She led me down a corridor to the little anonymous room where her nights ended. A Hollywood bed covered with red chenille, a powder-strewn dressing-table holding an imitation-ivory radio, a sink in one corner. She closed the Venetian blind over the single window and paused by the radio.
“You like music, Lew?”
“I can do without it.”
There were no chairs in the room. I sat on the bed. Love or something like it had broken its back.
She stood looking down at me with a puzzled expression. Her eyes had the hard dismay that comes from seeing too much for too many years and understanding too little of it. Swallowing her doubts, she perched on my knees, letting her skirt ride up over her thighs. The dead-white skin was pocked with needle-marks.
“Don’t you like baby?”
“I like you fine.”
“Then how do you want me, honey? Peeled?”
“On ice.”
“I don’t get it. That’s a new one, isn’t it?”
“I’d rather have information than fornication.” I lifted her by the waist and set her down beside me on the bed.
She looked at me with a kind of smiling pity. “You don’t look like one of the talkers. I’m clean, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“Nothing’s worrying me.”
“I have a regular weekly examination.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“For Christ’s sake,” she said. “If all you wanted to do was talk, we could of stayed downstairs. Now you got to pay for
the room.”
“How much?”
“Five bucks. And ten for me. I charge the same for talking, that’s only fair. So what do we talk about, how I got into the racket? Or do you want to hear about the various fellows?
“I’m interested in one fellow in particular. Tony Aquista. Know him?”
“Sure I know him. He never went with me, though. Personally, I wouldn’t have him. I always thought he was a little psycho.”
“Is that what Jo thought, too?”
Her face hardened under its mask of paint. “I wouldn’t know what Jo thought.”
“Didn’t she go with him?”
“Maybe she played around with him a little bit, strictly for laughs. I guess she took him home a few times.”
“Recently?”
“Yeah, the last couple of weeks. The boss brought him in one night—”
“Kerrigan brought him in?”
“Yeah. He must of told her to be nice to him. I don’t know of any other reason why she would bother with Tony. He hasn’t even got white blood in his veins, and he’s a kind of a psycho, like I said, and an awful lush. You should of seen him last time he was in. He was loaded to the gills, practically blind. Rocco had to put the dry sign on him.”
“When was this?”
Her eyes rolled up in thought. “Three-four nights ago. Sunday night.”
“Was Jo here?”
“Naturally. He took her home. Or she took him home. He wasn’t navigating so good.”
“What does Jo look like?”
“Why? Don’t you know her?”
“Not yet.”
“Seems to me you’re awful interested in a girl you never saw.”
“I have a reason.”
“What reason?”
“It doesn’t matter. Describe her.”
“Well, she’s a little slinky brunette, if you like the type. I was a brunette myself at one time, until I got bored with it.”
“We were talking about Jo,” I reminded her. “I need a complete description.”
“What the hell for? I thought you wanted to talk to me. Incidently, I haven’t got much more time, and you owe me fifteen.”
“Does Rocco time you?”
“With a stop-watch, practically.”
I took a twenty out of my wallet. It frisked away in her hand like a little green lizard with a homing instinct for the top of her stocking. The feel of the money seemed to encourage her:
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