77 Sunset Strip

by Roy Huggins

  She said, “Why, I—I thought the police were—” She stopped talking and stood in the doorway a little irresolutely, not asking me to come in.

  “Your husband asked me out the other night, Mrs. Trist. The police know that now. I’d like to talk with you . . . if you feel up to it.”

  She frowned nicely, hesitated for a fleeting moment, and said, “Of course. Please come in.”

  She took me into a little library with leather furniture and pickled-pine walls, a fire burning in the grate and a cozy feeling in the place that didn’t go with mourning clothes and talk of sudden death.

  She sat me in a deep chair, got comfortable across from me, and before I could get my legs crossed had shot a question. “Why did Mr. Trist hire you, Mr. Bailey?”

  I said, “I think you know, don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, Mr. Bailey. But Mr. Trist’s affairs are my affairs now. I may decide to retain you if it seems indicated.”

  “I wouldn’t be much good on a murder case.”

  The wide eyes narrowed a little and she leaned forward in a cozy way and clasped her hands. “I believe the police are investigating that. And I don’t assume for a moment that my husband hired you as a bodyguard. You don’t seem quite the type.” She smiled, the smile of a widow with a short memory.

  “Thanks.”

  “You apparently don’t intend to tell me why Mr. Trist hired you.”

  “I don’t know why, Mrs. Trist” I took the three bills that were beginning to lose that crisp new look out of my wallet and held them out to her. “This was by way of a retainer. I’m afraid I didn’t earn it.”

  She shook her head. “It’s your money, Mr. Bailey. You’ve been put to a good deal of inconvenience . . . and you never did make that plane to San Francisco, did you?” The eyes were a part of the smile now, starry and cold.

  “I haven’t had a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of inconvenience, Mrs. Trist.”

  “Why don’t you know why my husband hired you?”

  “He was killed before he got a chance to tell me. If I keep this money, I’d like to earn it. Maybe I could find out for you why he hired me.”

  Her eyebrows rose, making neat, worried little furrows in the skin of her forehead. “Thank you, Mr. Bailey. I—I knew you’d want to help if you could. I thought for just a moment there that you were lying to me.”

  “What’s happened to the maid and the butler?”

  “They asked for time off. They were both pretty upset.”

  “Been with you for some time?”

  “No, we have the usual turnover—every three months.”

  I stood up. “Have the police taken the lock off the room?”

  “Why, yes, but they’ve asked that nothing be disturbed. I’m certainly not going to use the room until this is all straightened out.”

  “Can I have a quick look at it?”

  “I—I guess it would be all right.”

  The room looked larger by daylight, and it showed the going-over the police had given it. I lit a cigarette and started round, with Mrs. Trist following silently behind me. I could understand her silence. There was a cold, quiet threat of terror in the place. I looked for light switches. I found three, and they were in places that, according to my recollection, would have made it almost impossible for either Freddie or Mrs. Trist to turn off the lights without being noticed. I didn’t find anything else, and I hadn’t really expected to.

  I stopped and dropped an ash tray into a round glass tray on the coffee table and said, “What was Crukston’s relation to the Trist family?”

  “He was Gordon’s real-estate broker. Not in the usual sense. My husband invested a good deal of his money in business property; Mr. Crukston did the buying, but instead of taking a commission, he took a share in the ownership and managed the property.” She smiled. “Gordon used to say he had Greg—Mr. Crukston, that is—on an incentive system.”

  I turned to stub the cigarette out in the little glass tray. Something about the tray hit me. It was strictly a ten-cent item in a million-dollar layout. I picked it up. It didn’t feel like glass.

  I said, “Does this go with the rest of the furniture, Mrs. Trist?”

  “I wish you’d call me anything but ‘Mrs. Trist,’ Mr. Bailey. It makes me feel like an old woman.” She frowned at me and then smiled through it.

  “All right, toots.” I grinned. “What do you know about this bit of crystal ware?”

  She looked up and laughed. It was a nice little laugh, and the eyes were still starry, but no longer cold. She took the ash tray, looked at it briefly, and said “Why, no-o, it doesn’t belong in here. Maybe it found its way up from the kitchen.” She put it back on the table.

  I spent five more minutes and said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing for me in here.” She turned and started for the door, and I followed, but as I went by the coffee table I reached down and pocketed the ash tray. It didn’t mean a thing to me, but it was something that didn’t belong in the room. And I could use an extra ash tray anyway.

  In the hall she gave me the dancing eyes again and asked me to stay for a drink. I thanked her and said no, and she looked worried and said, “Mr. Bailey, I think you can see that I might feel a little uneasy. I don’t know why Gordon was killed. I was close to him. Who knows what might happen next?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think you ought to be alone here. But as you say, I’m not the bodyguard type.”

  At the door she gave me the widow’s smile again, and I went away, wondering what it was for.

  NINETEEN

  By the time I got to Beverly Glen Boulevard it was pretty clear that the powder-blue convertible behind me intended to stay there for a while. Not even in Hollywood do the police use powder-blue convertibles. I swung right at Hamstead, cut into a clean little alley —they probably had another word for it in Westwood— drove a block, turned right again and finally came back onto Hamstead. The blue car was a block ahead, hesitating at an intersection, trying to make up its mind. It moved forward. I put on some speed for effect and let my brakes scream a bit as I pulled in close. The blue car came to an abrupt stop. I set my hand brake and went around to the right side of the blue car.

  Freddie was at the wheel. He was sitting back, lighting a cigarette and getting a leer ready for me. I got in and sat down, and he gave me the leer along with some heavy white smoke. Freddie didn’t inhale his cigarettes. He just smoked for effect.

  I said, “We seem to be going to same way.”

  “Do we?” His voice was quiet, but there was an almost feverish glow along the ridge of his hollowed cheeks, and his eyes were bright.

  “Relax,” I said. “My horoscope says I shouldn’t kill anyone today.”

  He took another mouthful of smoke and tried to blow a ring. “You’re quite a kidder. How long does it take for murder to seem funny?”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “You’re confused. You stopped me.”

  “Don’t annoy me, Freddie. I’m tired and hungry, and I’m bigger than you are.”

  “So?”

  I took the ash tray out of my pocket and said, “Ever see this before?”

  He dropped his eyes briefly and they came up again just as they had been, bright and a little scared. “No.”

  “How do you know? I’d guess it would be hard to really be sure.”

  Freddie curled a lip and said, “I don’t mind your splitting infinitives, but your hairsplitting bores me. Let’s say I don’t remember seeing it before.”

  “I’d like to go on letting you be worldly,” I growled, “but I need a short bath, a square meal and a long sleep, but before I can have those things I’ve got to find out if you were following me because you think I’m mixed up in your father’s death or because you’re mixed up in it.”

  “That’s easy. I’ll tell you. Because you’re mixed up in it, and I intend to find out how.” It was getting dark now, but even in the gray light I could see the heightening color in his cheeks,
and the brightness in his eyes like a thick glaze.

  I looked at him for a long time. Then I shook my head and said, “Brother, I just don’t think you’re that smart.” I got out and closed the door and drove away.

  I went home and thought about my problems and looked at the ash tray and wondered if I shouldn’t just forget the whole thing and call Betty Callister. I went into the kitchen and mixed a drink. While I was there I took a knife and scratched the bottom of the tray. Not glass.

  You don’t find clues very often in this business. You push around on the margin among the dirt and the despair and the occasional violence, and sometimes you get your job done and sometimes you don’t. But you seldom do it with clues. Now I had something that might be a clue, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

  I put it back in the coat pocket, had a bath, fixed a meal and went to bed.

  That night I dreamed. I dreamed I had solved the case. Through a clever analysis, I discovered that Trist had smoked himself to death.

  It was nine o’clock when I looked in on Suzanne. She was bright and cheerful as usual, and so was the morning. I had the world in one pocket and the ash tray in the other. There were no messages, so I stepped across the hall and opened my office door. It wasn’t the most sumptuous office on Sunset Strip, but I had never had any trouble keeping it neat.

  It wasn’t neat now. It was untidy. Drawers pulled out and left that way, a few papers scattered on the floor. It wasn’t havoc, just the casual disorder of someone looking for something nervously and in a hurry. Nothing had been overlooked. The hand had been into every spot where something could be put away or hidden. That seemed to call for a deduction: The party hadn’t found what he was looking for.

  I didn’t waste any time. But I had had breakfast at Schwabs and had been gone for more than an hour and a half. The nervous Nimrod would have been to my apartment and goile by now. But ten minutes later I was at my door, trying the knob. The door was unlocked. I opened it slowly. Here was the havoc, an aspect of sheer meaningless rage. That suggested a deduction: The party hadn’t found what he was looking for here, either.

  I heard a sound from the kitchen, remote, unhurried. I had him trapped! Then another sound with more urgency in it, the hiss of a siphon sending its carbonated joy into a glass of ice cubes and whisky. I turned toward the open kitchen door.

  Freddie was trying out my last bottle of Canadian whisky. He saw me, looked only faintly surprised, and said, “Not the kind of liquor you expect to find consorting with folding beds and gas heaters.”

  I said, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I certainly did,” he chirped, and raised the glass and peered at it.

  “How long have you been here,” I asked, “and what do you know about the treasure hunt that’s being run through here?”

  He brought his eyes back to mine. They weren’t bleary, but they didn’t focus readily.

  He took a polite sip at the drink and said, “I’ve changed my mind about you, Bailey. I’ve been talking to your gravel-pussed friend, Quint. He tells me you think you’re obligated to act like a hard guy, and that you almost never kill anyone.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Then there was another reason,” he went on amiably. “One that you might be interested in.”

  “Why-should I be interested?”

  He walked past me into the living room, looked the place over, and said, “My ex-stepmother told me you were working on the case.” He pushed a pair of pants down to the other end of the davenport and sat down. “All right.”

  He smiled suavely and took another drink. He was having the time of his life. “I had dinner at the Sportsman’s Lodge last night. Friend Greg Crukston and the widow of my late father were enjoying an intimate tete-a-tete in one of the dimmer corners of the place.” I said, “Incidentally, how long have you been here?” He put his glass down and looked dignified. I wandered if he was drunk and trying to act sober, or sober and trying to act drunk. “I went to your office,” he said ponderously. “You weren’t there, so I called Quint, got your address and came up here. I’ve been here about one half hour, and I got in through that door.” He pointed at it. “It was open and unlocked. Naturally, if it’s open, it’s unlocked.”

  “And. you came up to tell me about seeing Crukston and Mrs. Trist together. Didn’t you ever see them out together before?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t start hunting bluebirds after you got up here?”

  “Never! Don’t believe in bluebirds.” His voice broke a little. He sounded very sad.

  “Why shouldn’t she and Crukston get together? He’s pretty well tied up with most of your father’s property, isn’t he?”

  He leered knowingly, nodded, and finished his drink.

  “You can say that again and again and again,” he said.

  “Are you trying to tell me something or just beings entertaining?”

  He stood up. “Let’s go see Crukston and find out.”

  “Let’s clean house first.” Freddie helped me clean house then I took him down to the comer drugstore, got Crukston’s address from him and left him there with a cup of coffee, drawing maps on the napkins.

  TWENTY

  Crukston was home, and he didn’t seem unhappy to see me. He showed me out onto his sun deck on the eighth floor of the Wilshire Tower. He waved me into a blue-cushioned beach chair, stretched out in another across from me and smiled.

  “Glad you came by,” he said in a brisk, easy, untroubled tone. “I was going to call on you later in the day myself.” He was dressed in a blue silk robe and he sounded like someone with all the cares of a man of simple appetites and an irrefutable answer to the problem of evil.

  “Sorry to see you so broken up,” I said. “Maybe I ought to come back some other time.”

  He gave me a watery smile and said, “Like all people who think they’re tough, you’re actually a sniveling sentimentalist. I liked Trist, but I don’t feel a compulsion to shed any tears for him.”

  “You say you were going to call on me. Who told you I wasn’t in the clink?”

  He laughed now. It was a nice full laugh, as practiced as a debutante’s walk. “I knew Trist had hired you. I gave you credit for being able to prove it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Like some coffee?”

  I nodded, and he padded into his apartment. He didn’t come back for ten minutes, but it was worth it. The coffee was fine.

  “You’re supposed to ask me,” Crukston smiled, “why I was planning to see you.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to get around to it.”

  “I wanted to find out how much of my own private affairs I might have to tell the police.”

  “Depending on what?”

  “On how much Trist told you, and how much of that you passed on to the police.”

  I didn’t say anything. Since Trist had told me exactly nothing, that seemed like the best idea at the time.

  After a while, Crukston leered and said, “How I hate the strong silent type.”

  I grinned. “I like to talk. But why should I let you in on what Trist told me?”

  “Because I know what Trist told you.”

  “Fine. Let’s move on to the next topic.”

  He hunched his shoulders, and his dark neck seemed to grow darker still.

  “I thought Trist decided not to hire you.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because I proved that he was all wrong about Mildred and me.”

  “I guess he didn’t believe you.”

  Crukston leaned back and put his feet up on a blue canvas hassock. He cocked his head at me and said, “I’m going to meet you more than halfway, Bailey. You see, I’ve got an idea Trist told you things when he first contacted you that he found out later were not true. Perhaps he never got the opportunity to tell you.”

  “Could be.”

  Crukston sat for a while longer, then stood
up abruptly and went into the apartment. He was back again in about two minutes. There was someone with him. She was wearing lounging pajamas that fit her like a coat of paint. Her hair was long and loose and red—a red that nature could never have achieved, and would never want to. She was smiling a little inanely, like a bride at her first breakfast. But everything else about her said that she had breakfasted before. Crukston said, “Mr. Bailey, Mrs. Greg Crukston.”

  I said, “How do you do?”

  She nodded ever so vaguely, and sat down.

  Crukston said, “Better known as Miss Rita Rogell,” and his voice had a question in it, as if the name was supposed to have meant something to me.

  Crukston poured her some coffee, and pretty soon we were all seated and Crukston was saying, “This is in the strictest confidence, Bailey—this matter of our marriage. Rita’s studio wants it hushed for a while.”

  “It’ll be a struggle,” I whispered, “but I’ll try not to let it out.”

  “Trist knew, of course. I had to tell him when I found that he was imagining things about Mildred and me. That was the afternoon before he died.”

  “Maybe the studio had him killed,” I said. “He knew too much.” Rita Rogell thought that was real funny.

  Crukston said, “Why didn’t he cancel your services? He said he was going to.”

  “Maybe he had something else in mind.”

  Crukston had been half smiling. The smile froze. “You cultivate the mysterious mood,” he purred. “That could be almost a dangerous habit.”

  I grinned. “It seems to make you nervous. When you get nervous you talk.”

  He glanced at Rita Rogell and his face flushed.

  I said, “Any idea who killed him?”

  He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and said, “Maybe,” through the thin blue smoke that came up from his lungs. “But I’d rather not discuss the subject in front of Rita or so early in the morning.”

  I looked at Crukston. His tanned face was getting a little gray, and his eyes were cloudy. There wasn’t anything more for me there, except maybe a knife in the back. I stood up and said, “Thanks for the coffee,” and started out.