“Andon did. Last night. Were you the one who assaulted that big, smelly man?”
“I rendered him unconscious, if that's what you mean. Only he assaulted me. He's not a friend of yours, is he?”
“I never saw him before. And I hope I never see him again.” She wrinkled her nose.
This Vera was a cute kid, actually. When I'd first seen her in the doorway, her skin had seemed awfully pale, and I like tanned skin and lots of it. But after a couple of minutes Vera's skin seemed more creamy white than pallid. I'm fickle.
I said, “Andon say anything else about me besides the fact that I'm a detective?”
“No. But he wasn't highly complimentary.” She paused. “Since you are a detective, what are you doing here? And why were you at Mother's last night?”
I made up a little story for her. “It has to do with that guy named Garlic. I'd like to know where he is. I've been sniffing all over, but he's either far away or not breathing.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn't know anything about him.”
“I should hope not. Andon around?”
“He'll be here any minute.”
I asked her, casually, how long she'd known the guy, and she told me of meeting him at her mother's house, and so on. It checked with the info and dates I'd got from Laurel. Every time she mentioned Andon's name she lit up like a Coleman lantern, and I got slightly tired of hearing her say what a wonderful creature he was. It seemed she was in love with the slob, so I kept my questions reasonably gentle.
“You didn't know him before last May, then?” She shook her head. “Where'd he come from? He an L.A. man?”
“No, he's from New York. He was in stocks and bonds and things there.”
“Do you know Paul Yates?”
“Yates? No. Who is he?”
“Fellow I know. Thought he might be a mutual acquaintance of Andon's and mine. Your husband ever mention the name?”
“No.”
“You have a sister, don't you?”
“Yes, Laurel. Why?”
“Where is she now?”
Vera didn't answer, narrowed her eyes slightly. “I don't think that's any of your business, Mr. Scott. I don't see that any of this is your business.”
“Probably not. I simply wondered if you knew where she was. I already know.”
Her eyes widened, then she pursed her lips. “You mean, out there?” She pointed toward the ocean.
I laughed. “No.” I pointed in the opposite direction, smack at Fairview. “Out there.”
“Fairview,” she said. I nodded and she said, “How did you find that out?”
“Is it a secret? By the way, does Andon know she's at Fairview?”
“I should hope not. I mean, I don't think so.”
“You haven't told him, then?”
“Don't be ridiculous. I think it's ... disgusting.”
“What's disgusting?”
“Why, they—they run around naked.”
“Some of the nicest people I know run around naked. That's what's nice about them. And they aren't even at Fairview.”
She was not amused. “Mr. Scott, did you come here to make remarks in such very poor taste, or did you want to see me about something else? I don't care to discuss ... nakedness.”
I said, “Actually I wanted to see your husband about another matter.”
You'd have thought he'd been gandering us through the keyhole. The door flew open and banged against the wall and Poupelle came charging in.
“Get out of here, you bastard!” he yelled.
I got up. “I came here to see you.”
“I've got nothing to say to you, sluefoot. Now, screw.”
I had a feeling this was not at all the way a “stocks and bonds and things” man would have expressed himself. I shrugged and walked toward the door. He followed me outside, as I'd thought maybe he would.
He pulled the door closed with another bang and said, “Mister, don't ever come here again.”
“Bag your head a minute. You seemed kind of chummy last night with Garlic and another big boy. Maybe you'll be kind enough to—”
He broke in, his face a brilliant red. “I'll be kind enough to kick your butt down the stairs.”
“Poopy, one of these days you'll push me too far, and your pretty teeth'll be few and far between.” His flush subsided somewhat. I said, “Anything you can tell me about why Garlic jumped me at the Redstone place?”
He swallowed. “I've got no idea. I told you to screw.”
I chewed on my lip a second. “Tell me, just for fun. What's A.T. and T. quoted at nowadays?”
He swung around, went into his suite, and slammed the door again. The neighbors were going to start complaining if he didn't quit that. I went down to the Cad. An uncooperative boy, Poupelle. But he'd told me a little. So had Vera.
It took me almost an hour to get out to Pasadena, visit the Palmer Hospital, and talk for two minutes with a bandaged Mr. Elder, then get back into L.A. Elder didn't tell me anything new, but it checked right down the line with what Laurel had told me. He'd just seen the rock and jumped at Laurel, shoved her, and bang. That was all he knew.
My office is in downtown L.A., between Third and Fourth on Broadway, second floor of the Hamilton Building. I went there and peeked at the guppy tank on top of the bookcase. The colorful little fish had a fit while I dropped some salmon meal into the feeding ring; then I climbed behind my desk and got busy on the phone.
It took half an hour to put out a dozen lines among informants, hoodlums, bootblacks, barbers, bartenders. I wanted information about Paul Yates, Andon Poupelle, Garlic, and any of his chums; any rumbles about people named Redstone, for that matter. And I was willing to pay for it. Much of what I was doing the police had already done, and done better; a number of my own informants, though, would never talk to a cop, but would to me. I might get something. Then I went carefully over the Yates report on Poupelle, the one Mrs. Redstone had given me. There were a couple of items where Yates had been specific enough with places and dates so that I could check his statements. I phoned Western Union and sent a couple of telegrams on those items, added another wire to a detective agency in New York, then left the office.
I started walking, headed for the back rooms, the smelly bars, the dumps and the dives. Some of the boys I wanted to see were seldom near a phone; some of them were seldom sober enough to use one. I'd been over this route dozens of times before, and always it made me a little sick, even a little sad. Lower Main Street and Spring, Los Angeles Street, the whole area I tramped, has a kind of horror about it in the daytime. At night the softer lights and shadows hide some of its squalor, but in sunlight it's hard and ugly.
I saw white-bearded men sprawled in doorways, wrapped in the sweet smell of wine; a young, empty-eyed man sitting on wooden steps at a dingy hotel entrance, his fly unzipped, something crusted on his chin and shirt front. I talked to an amazingly thin middle-aged woman with bones showing everywhere and a face like a skull with skin stretched over it, her voice mumbling as she stared at me fixedly from dark, burning eyes. But I didn't get a single slice of useful information. It's funny, but among the derelicts and hoodlums and alcoholics around me, there were probably the answers to a thousand crimes. There's an “underworld wireless” that they all seem to have an ear on. Often a torpedo can get knocked off at noon in Miami and the whispers will be going around among the stumblebums and small-time hoods in L.A. before the sun goes down. So I kept walking, talking, buying beers, and spending quarters. For two bits a man can buy a bottle of port. But I didn't get anything solid until almost four-thirty P. M. And even then I wasn't sure.
About that time a small-time grifter named Iggy the Wig, a bald-headed hoodlum who wore a rug to keep him glamorous, caught up with me in Jerry's, a beer joint on Main. He was one of the guys I'd phoned earlier. We sat at the bar and I bought two beers and gave one to him.
Iggy poured down half of his and said, “About Yates. Yeah, I heard a word. Not big, but I know
who can tell you. Lemme think a sec.” He pulled at his beer. “What's it worth—if I can think of it?”
“A fin.”
“A sawbuck?”
“A fin, Iggy. Give, or burp up that free beer.”
“Scott, a saw ain't much. This guy, he's gonna want a C. That's what he said.”
I almost fell off my stool. “He going to Europe? For that kind of dough he must have pooped Yates himself.”
“Nah. OK?”
I nodded.
“Three Eyes,” he said. “You know him?”
“Yeah, I know him.” He was a middle-aged character with one good eye, one glass one. I never did understand how that made him Three Eyes. He was so spindly and white and frail that he always looked as if he'd just come from donating blood and they'd forgotten to turn him off. He'd been in the money on several occasions, sometimes in the big dough, but he always wound up with empty pockets and an empty bottle.
I said, “Hangs out around Third and Main, doesn't he?”
“Not any more, he don't. He's scared about somep'n. Got hisself a room. I know where I can get him, bring him here. For a double saw.”
“What's he scared about?”
“I dunno. Not for sure. There's a rumble about that Poupelle, too, and some kind of push. Three Eyes was runnin’ off at the mouth about it. Maybe he can tell you. He must have somep'n. Deal?”
I sighed. This Iggy was a grifter, all right. He started out asking for five bucks, got a hunch I might pay a hundred to Three Eyes, and tapped me for twenty. “All right. Get with it.” I gave him two tens and he slid off the stool.
“Take a while,” he said. “I gotta go there. How about cab fare?”
“Get going, Iggy.”
“Make it here, OK? Say six.”
“Six.”
He left. I finished my beer, thinking. The Afrodite was only three blocks away, so I started walking again. I tried to recall the girl's name, the entertainer Carlos had mentioned. I needn't have bothered. It was plastered all over the outside of the club: JUANITA. Juanita with the Cubaneros. Juanita singing, dancing, entertaining. Everything but pictures of her.
The Afrodite was a cellar club on Sixth, down a short flight of cement steps to a pair of thick wooden doors. The doors were locked, so I pounded on one of them. I could hear a mumble of voices inside, but nobody let me in.
I kicked the door a couple of times. The voices stopped, footsteps thumped toward me, and I heard a bolt slide back inside. A white-jacketed man, the bartender, I supposed, cracked one of the doors and squinted out at me. “Yeah?”
“Place open?”
“Nah.” He shut the door on my shoe, looked down. “The foot,” he said. “Move the foot.”
“I want to talk to you a minute, friend.”
“The foot. Move—”
He was cut off by a deep voice from inside. “What's the trouble, Joe?”
“Some big ape got his foot stuck in the door. Wants to talk or something.”
The deep voice said, “Ask him who it is.”
“Who is it?” Joe said. “I mean, what's your name?”
“Shell Scott.”
He relayed the info. There was near silence, broken by undistinguishable conversation for almost a minute. Then: “Let him in, Joe.”
Chapter Eight
Joe shook his head, then stepped back and opened the door wide. “You heard the man,” he said.
I was getting a funny feeling about the Afrodite. I hadn't ever been inside the place, and already I was less than crazy about it. But I walked in. There was practically no light, or so it seemed until my eyes got accustomed to the change from the brightness out on Sixth. Then I almost wished it were darker. I'd walked in on two of the toughest hoods in town—the two I recognized; and the other two men with them looked at least as ugly. There was a woman there too; I'd seen her around with some of the racket boys. All five of them sat at a table close by on my left.
The guy with the deep voice said, “Be damned if it isn't Scott. What an honor for all us fellows.”
He was Chinese, a young, completely bald guy in his early twenties, maybe two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than I. He'd been a star center in college, and once, while he'd been carrying a big rally sign that said “Football,” the sign had got torn and he'd run around carrying the part that said “Foo.” He'd carried that name into his postcollege and extralegal activities, and because he was a youthful Chinese egg and bald, and because hoods are hoods, his moniker had become, almost inevitably, Young Egg Foo.
Foo had played center on that team so long that something had happened to his brain. Besides which, he had become suspicious of everybody. And he had no sense of humor, no graciousness. Ask him what time it was and he'd hit you over the head with the clock. That kind of guy.
With him at the table was a lop-eared gunman named Strikes. I remembered the gal as an ex-queen of the burlesque circuit. Five years ago she'd been in the big time, right at the top, known as Bebe Le Doux. But now she was Babe Le Toot, and in her set there were lots of gags like “Hey, boys, let's go on a Toot,” and “I got a Tootache,” and so on. The two other hard-looking men sat on either side of Babe.
“Hi, Foo,” I said finally.
There was no reply, no more conversation, so I walked to the bar. In the wall behind me, beyond a pane of thick glass, soft lights illuminated a bunch of fake trees and vines, and a couple of dozen odd-looking tropical birds with brilliant plumage. A small dance floor was a little to my left and behind me as I climbed onto a stool.
The white-jacketed guy went behind the bar and I said, “Got a beer?”
“Place don't open till seven. What you want to talk about?”
Foo said from the table, “Give him a beer, Joe. It's on us, Scott.”
I said thanks without turning around.
The bartender opened a bottle of Acme and slid it over the bar. “You don't use a glass, do you?”
“Not here. Tell me, Joe, did you get to know Paul Yates very well when he was hanging around here?”
He was wiping the bar top with a limp rag, and when I said “Paul Yates” he paused for a fraction of a second, then went on wiping. The soft buzz of conversation behind me stopped at the same time.
“Don't think I know the man,” Joe said.
“You must know him. I understand he was around here quite a lot. Here last Saturday night. A soft heel.”
“Like you?”
“Not quite. He's dead.”
The buzz of conversation behind me hummed again. A wall mirror ran left and right behind the bar; in the dimness I could see the five of them. Just so there were five of them.
“Still don't know the man,” Joe said.
“Try these. Andon Poupelle.” No reaction. “Garlic.” He kept on wiping the bar. I said, “Juanita. Ever hear of anybody named Juanita?”
He grinned. “Can't say I have. Don't know anybody you mention. I'm never gonna know anybody you mention, chump.”
I took a long pull at the beer, set the empty bottle on the bar, and said, “Joe, I'll bet you don't even know what day this is.”
He looked puzzled.
“This is the day you got hurt,” I said. “You cracked so wise you threw your whole face out of joint.” I grinned at him and looked at my watch. It was almost five P.M. “At five o'clock it happened,” I said. “Just a couple of minutes from now. So let me ask you again about Yates.”
There was movement in the mirror. While Joe stood there licking his lips as if they had molasses on them, I watched the mirror. There wasn't any sound of chairs being pushed back, but three figures stood up around the table. Behind the glass wall, a couple of birds flapped around. Two of the guys walked toward the bar. The other one went to the front door and stood there with his back, to it.
Young Egg Foo sat down on the stool to my right. The other guy was one of the two I didn't know. He took the stool to my left and slammed a beer can noisily on the bar. He was short, very chunky, wearing a
white T-shirt so his big biceps and knotted forearms would show.
Nobody said a word. I eased my stool back a bit from the bar, mainly to see if it would move. It moved. Muscles, on my left, put the beer can between the palms of his thick hands and squeezed it together without apparent strain.
“My name's Kid,” he said to me. “Just Kid. Be pleased to meet me. How you like that?” He held the squashed can between two fingers.
“You cheated,” I said. “You used both hands.”
His upper lip lifted slightly while he rolled that around in his head. But I was paying more attention to the bartender than to Kid. Joe wasn't looking at me, but at Foo, out of sight on my right. When Joe winced a little, I pushed with my hands on the bar, shoved backward, and let my feet hit the floor, then bent down in the same motion and grabbed the bar stool at its base—just as Foo's fist whistled by where my head had been.
That big fist was even bigger because of what looked like two pounds of metal wrapped around his fingers and resting against his palm. If he'd hit me with those knucks he'd probably have split my skull, but he missed and by that time I was coming up swinging the stool.
Foo was forward, pulled off balance by all that weight on his right hand, and he was all spread out when I hit him. But it was nothing to the way he spread out after I hit him. The metal of the stool's top bounced off his bald pate with a heartwarming clunk and he reeled back against the bar, his arms splayed out. Kid grunted and I spun back toward him, straightening my legs under me as I moved.
His fist smashed into my chest and threw me back a step, but I caught my balance as he jumped toward me. I was still holding the stool about head-high, arms stretched to my right, so I drove all four legs at him as hard as I could. One of the legs caught him on his left cheekbone. The metal was covered by a rubber cap, but it got him solidly and snapped his head to the side.
A chair crashed over at the table, but I couldn't look around. Kid was dazed just enough and I wasn't going to let him clear his head at this point. I swung the stool around in a circle and slammed it against his skull. Kid might never again clear his head. He went down like a poleaxed ox.
Strip for Murder Page 6
