Innocent Bystander

by Craig Rice

  Art Smith decided he might as well go back to his office and question Joe Wecheler at his leisure. Not that he expected to learn anything from him.

  Jack O’Mara came pushing through the crowd. “Caught this guy trying to hide under a pile of blankets,” he announced loudly.

  He was dragging by the collar a white-faced, shivering, and utterly terrified Amby.

  “What’s your name?” Art Smith demanded.

  Amby gave him a scared grin and shook his head.

  “What’s the idea of hiding?”

  Amby, still grinning, tried to inch away. O’Mara slapped him back in front of Art Smith. Amby whimpered and stood there.

  Tony Webb shoved his way through what was left of the crowd. He knew better than to mix in this, but he couldn’t do anything else.

  “Lay off,” he said. “Can’t you see the guy’s deaf and dumb?”

  Amby grinned with delighted relief at his friend.

  “I’ll talk to him for you,” Tony added.

  One of the cops stared at him. “Tony Webb! When did you get out?”

  “Last week,” Tony said. He signaled with his fingers to Amby, who nodded to him.

  “Cut that out,” Art Smith said sharply. He turned to one of his men and said, “Get Louie down here right away. He knows that finger talk.” Then he fixed a cold eye on Tony. “You worked for McGurn once. And when you went to San Quentin, you claimed he’d framed you.”

  “What a memory for details!” Tony said admiringly.

  Smith ignored that. “Where were you when this murder was going on?”

  Tony shrugged his shoulders, took out a cigarette, and tapped it against his thumb nail. “How do I know? Nobody’s told me what time it was going on.”

  O’Mara lifted a hand to slap him across the mouth. Tony brought a wrist down sharply on the upraised arm and said, “I’m an American citizen and I know my rights. As a matter of fact I’ve been down at Maritza’s for the last couple of hours. She’s an old friend, and I haven’t seen her for a long time. I left there and stopped in Pennyland to play a couple of games of skee-ball. I heard the sirens and came out to see what all the racket was about.”

  “Prove it,” Art Smith said.

  “Ask Maritza,” Tony told him easily. “Or ask any of the customers she had while I was there. They didn’t mind my sitting in a corner while she pried into their past, present, and future.” He added, “Hell, I was just trying to help you guys out. Amby knows me. But if I’m getting underfoot, I’ll blow.”

  “Stick around,” Art Smith said. He signaled to O’Mara and said, “Check Webb’s story and see if you can find any of those customers.”

  “You don’t think I’d lie to you, do you?” Tony said in a hurt voice.

  “Only if you thought you could get away with it,” Art Smith told him.

  By the time Louie, a police sergeant with a thorough knowledge of the deaf-and-dumb language, had arrived, Amby was slightly more reassured. But he still would talk to no one except Tony Webb. Louie, therefore, was directed to act as censor.

  “What was the idea of hiding?” Tony’s fingers asked.

  “Cops,” Amby signaled back.

  “Scared?”

  Amby shook his head and signaled, “Don’t like cops.”

  “Never mind the comments,” Art Smith said. “Just ask him the questions. Where was he when this guy was knocked off?”

  Tony did even better than that. He asked Amby to show them exactly where he had been when the murder took place. Amby, now completely self-confident again, was willing to oblige. He had been standing here, at his easel, sideways to the big wheel. The girl he was sketching had been there, on the stool. Like this.

  “Wait a minute!” Art Smith said. He climbed up on the stool and told Tony Webb, “Have him pose me just like this babe was posed.”

  Amby was glad to be helpful. He turned the police officer’s head a little more to the left, lifted his chin a quarter of an inch. The result was the standard pose Amby used for profiles. He found himself automatically reaching for a crayon.

  Detective Lieutenant Art Smith sat motionless. He realized that, from this point and in this pose, his gaze was concentrated on the wheel. He couldn’t see anything else without moving, but he could see that with startling clarity. He could see the cabs. More important still, he could have seen the riders if the cabs had been occupied.

  The girl sitting on that stool must have seen whoever was in the cab with the murdered man. She might even have seen the murder itself. It would be enough, though, if she could describe the murderer.

  The one important thing now was to find her.

  Tony Webb, watching him, realized the same thing. His dark eyes narrowed. Instinctively one hand reached toward the automatic in his armpit holster.

  Smith saw the motion and instantly guessed what was passing through Tony Webb’s mind. He knew in that moment that he had to find his missing witness before Tony did.

  Chapter Three

  A HELL OF A WAY TO MAKE A LIVING

  In the excitement of the moment everybody forgot that Amby couldn’t hear or speak. Automatically Detective Lieutenant Art Smith started asking questions. Just as automatically a cop took out a notebook to write down the answers.

  “Describe her. What color hair? What color eyes? How tall? Guess at her weight. What did she have on? Have you ever seen her before? Which way did she go when she left here?”

  Amby stared at him, bewildered and vaguely unhappy. Cops frightened him under any circumstances. He wished more than anything in the world that these would all go away, so that he could take his little fortune down to Harry’s place, eat a hot bowl of chili, buy a bottle of gin, and return to the warm, comfortable security of his blankets.

  “Was anyone with her? What did he look like? Have you ever seen him before?”

  Amby shook his head. Tears began to appear in his soft, brown eyes.

  Tony Webb had been watching the scene, a sardonic smile on his face. Now he stepped forward. “Hey, you guys forget he’s a dee-dee? He didn’t hear what you asked him, and he couldn’t answer you if he did.”

  He was just as anxious as Art Smith to get the answers to those questions.

  “Hey, Louie,” Art Smith said, his face grim.

  Tony Webb’s slender, agile fingers told Amby, “It’s okay, pal. Talk to the law.”

  “And you keep out of this,” Louie growled at him. “Where the hell did you learn finger talk anyway?”

  “In reform school, naturally,” Tony Webb said cheerfully. “Where did you?”

  “Shut up,” Art Smith said, as a matter of routine. “Go to work on him, Louie.”

  Amby was now willing to co-operate, but his answers weren’t particularly helpful. The girl had been alone. He didn’t know who she was. Describe her? Height? He shrugged his shoulders. Weight? He shrugged again and shook his head. The way she looked? He made vague gestures with his hands.

  A tall, thin reporter named Maury Godshaux stepped up and said, “Hey, Art, get him to draw her picture.”

  Art Smith ignored the reporter and said to Louie, “He drew her picture a little while ago. Tell him to draw it again from memory.”

  Amby did his willing best. He assumed his usual stance in front of the easel, crayon in hand. He squinted at the empty stool where his subject had been sitting. But it was so hard to remember. He’d drawn so many faces, at fifty cents apiece, and he hadn’t paid any particular attention to this one, having been most concerned at the time with his financial resources.

  Brown. He remembered brown. Not too dark. He’d used the same crayon for hair and coat collar. No hat. He looked at his crayons, lying just the way he’d put them down. Her eyes had been blue. An unusually dark blue. Not much color in her face. A very light, pink mouth.

  Amby turned and made apologetic signals with his fingers. Tony answered something reassuring with his.

  Louie snapped, “The dee-dee says he remembers colors good, not so good faces. W
ebb here told him to do his best.”

  Amby probably never had had such an interested audience in his life, nor ever would again. The reporters were silently figuring on hiring Amby to do a drawing of the missing eyewitness for a front-page spread. For anything up to fifty bucks.

  Just once Amby looked away from his easel, and that time his quick eye saw Tony Webb’s fingers forming three short words. He went on drawing as though he hadn’t seen a thing. Suddenly he finished, put down his crayon, stood squarely in front of the easel, and said something with his hands.

  “What the hell now?” Art Smith said.

  Tony grinned and said, “He wants his fifty cents for the picture.”

  For the first time a smile crossed Smith’s face. A wry and tired smile. He dug a half dollar from his pocket and handed it to the little artist, who promptly stepped aside.

  The finished picture showed a pale, pretty girl, light brown hair, dark blue eyes, pink lipstick, and a tan coat. That was all it told about her. A standard magazine-cover profile. It would have fitted any one of several thousand girls in Los Angeles. But Amby had done his best.

  “A hell of a thing to go on,” Art Smith said. “Stick this in the paper and every switchboard in town will be tied up for three days with people who claim they know her. Send it out in the bulletin and we’ll have a hundred cases of false arrest in forty-eight hours.” He paused, and added, “Still, we know her hair’s brown. Unless this guy’s color blind, too.”

  He sighed wearily, rolled up the drawing, and stuck it in his pocket. “Bring the little guy along with us, Louie,” he said. “Material witness.”

  “Bring who along with us?” Louie asked.

  Amby was gone. Somehow he’d slipped away from the police, the reporters, and the remaining spectators. His crayons were gone, too. It was fairly plain that he didn’t intend to come back.

  Detective Lieutenant Art Smith groaned and detailed four men to search the Pier from end to end.

  The Manual of Police Procedure said, … suspicious characters at the scene of a crime … Alibi or no alibi, Tony Webb was going to the station, to be held for questioning. Not that Art Smith expected to learn anything by questioning Tony, but he wanted to be sure that character was safe in jail until the girl was found.

  But Tony Webb, too, was gone.

  Art Smith talked quietly to his subordinates about the intelligence of policemen who let important witnesses vanish from the scene of a crime. Then he lifted his eyes and, in an equally quiet tone, talked to God about the kind of subordinates with which he had been cursed.

  Finally he signaled the police car to drive on, nodded to O’Mara, and walked down the Pier toward its exit, Amby’s picture in his hand, O’Mara at his side.

  He paused doggedly at every booth. “Seen this girl tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Booth after booth. Same questions. Same answers.

  In his heart he had known it would be that way. Art Smith knew just enough about these people to realize that they wouldn’t answer a cop’s questions. No, not even if the answers wouldn’t involve themselves or their friends.

  But he had to make the tour and ask the questions just the same. Routine procedure. A damned nuisance, routine procedure. But nine times out of ten it ran down a wanted witness, a suspect, or sometimes a killer. He was confident that sooner or later it would run down this brown-haired girl.

  Right at this point luck decided to put in its twenty-five cents’ worth. A big scrap of paper was caught by a sudden gust of wind and blown against Sergeant O’Mara’s thick ankles. He kicked it, cursed it, and finally looked at it. Then he picked it up, smoothed it out, and silently handed it to Art Smith.

  It was the lower half of a drawing, obviously made by Amby, which had been torn squarely across the middle. It showed the throat, chin, lips, and half the nose of a girl. The color of the lips and hair and coat matched the drawing that Art Smith was carrying. The delicate line of the chin was the same.

  The pale pink shade of the lipstick curiously seemed to accentuate the sensuous quality of the mouth that was smiling seductively, wickedly.

  O’Mara looked at the drawing and whistled appreciatively. Smith scowled at him.

  “There’s one damn funny thing,” O’Mara said. “Why would a babe like that come down to this guy to have her picture drawed? By herself, I mean. Most always it’s a fella and a gal, and he has her picture drawed for laughs.”

  Smith said nothing.

  “Sure, maybe she wanted a picture to send to some guy,” O’Mara persisted. “Only then, why didn’t she go to a regular photographer and get her picture took? It don’t cost much money. And anyhow, after she did have this picture made, how come she tore it up?”

  “Maybe she didn’t like it,” Art Smith growled. “Never mind why. Just find the other half.”

  O’Mara did his diligent best, but the Pier was littered with papers. Smith said after a gloomy half-hour, “The hell with it. We’ve got more guys to question.” He glared down the length of the Pier.

  “If we can get any of these bastards to talk,” O’Mara said. “Maybe you’re going at it the wrong way.” He tried to sound tactful. “Maybe you ought to make friends with some of ’em. Try playing some of the games.”

  Art Smith grunted something about damned foolishness. Still, he told himself, it wouldn’t do any harm to try.

  At a booth where a barker was inviting all comers to try and drive six nails for a dime, he won a gaudily painted doll, to his great embarrassment. But got no information about the girl. O’Mara flatly refused to carry the doll, superior officer or no superior officer. Finally Smith managed to slip it very surreptitiously into a trash can.

  Art Smith would never have admitted it, but by the time he neared the end of the Pier he was enjoying himself in spite of his weariness. There were the pinball machines that sent tiny horses racing around a brightly lighted enclosure. There was the Penny Arcade. The bandit-car concession.

  O’Mara watched him with amusement. His opinion of his superior was not too high. One of these days, O’Mara told himself, he was going to get Smith’s job.

  They reached the knife game near the end of the Pier. Art Smith put down his coin and picked up a knife. Suddenly he paused, staring at it.

  “Three wins and you get one, mister.”

  Art Smith started to speak, caught himself, looked at the knife again, aimed it straight for the target, and missed. Swearing softly under his breath, he tried again. Missed again.

  “Not your lucky night, mister.”

  “I’ll try it,” O’Mara said quietly.

  Suddenly Smith said, “Forget it. Where do you get these knives?”

  In a puzzled tone the man back of the counter named a concession supply house.

  “Many of them been won lately?”

  “A few. Why?” The man scowled. “I get it. You’re a cop.”

  And then the wall of silence went up. No, he couldn’t remember who’d won any of the knives. No, he’d never heard of Tony Webb. No, he didn’t know there had been a murder on the Pier. No, he’d never seen the girl in the picture.

  At last, completely exasperated, Art Smith sent for a squad car to take the man and several of his knives to the station, knowing in his heart that it was a waste of time, that no amount of questioning was going to do any good.

  “At least we got a pretty good idea where the knife came from,” O’Mara said. “That’s something.”

  “Something and nothing,” Art Smith said in disgust. “Let’s get back to Headquarters.”

  He paused as they reached the end of the Pier. A small crowd was watching an enclosure at the end of which a girl in a bathing-suit sat poised above a tank of water. In front of it a barker held up baseballs.

  “Only ten cents for three throws. Hit the target and dunk the girl.”

  The girl called out a ribald comment to a sailor who had just missed the target, and the
crowd laughed.

  Smith grinned, “I used to play baseball in school.” He put down his dime, picked up a baseball, took careful aim, and threw. The ball hit the target with a resounding thud. The girl squealed and fell splashing into the water tank.

  Neither he nor O’Mara had noticed that she had soft brown hair and a soft seductive smile, outlined in pink lipstick. Indeed, neither of them noticed her at all or recognized her.

  “A hell of a way to make a living,” Art Smith said.

  Chapter Four

  MIDWAY GRAPEVINE

  “Sure, I told the cop’s fortune,” Maritza said, grinning. “He paid for it, didn’t he?”

  She added a few very personal comments about Art Smith, touching briefly on his family tree and predicting his probable future. “He came in here with his handsome stooge, trying to act like a jasper.”

  “Never mind that,” Tony said with a scowl. “What did he ask you?”

  She went straight into her act. “What does anyone ask Maritza? Maritza knows. The future, present, and the past.” She located a slightly bent cigarette in her pocket, straightened and lighted it. “And some of them do want to know about the past, Tony.”

  “Skip it,” Tony said. “I read it in a comic book once. They don’t care where they’re going, they’d just like to remember where they’ve been. What did Smith ask you?”

  Maritza shook her head and sighed. “Honey, why don’t you ask what I told him?” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Sit down, honey, and relax. You know you can’t prowl the Pier till the Law has gone home.”

  He looked at her for a long minute. His dark, handsome face managed to work up a smile. He dropped his cigarette butt on the floor, started to step on it, then suddenly stopped and scooped it up quickly, looking like a shamefaced little boy.

  “Sorry, Mamie. I forgot about the carpet.”

  He pushed aside a curtain heavily decorated with signs of the zodiac and flung the still lighted cigarette toward the ocean. There was a tiny shower of sparks against the dark. For just one moment they seemed to be part of the lights of the Pier.