The memory of my failure was bitter and obscure, mixed with the ash-blonde memory of a woman I’d once been married to. I put both memories out of my mind.
Tom was steadying down to his driving. The big car held the road, and even stayed in one lane most of the time. The road straightened out, and began to climb. Just beyond the crest of the rise, a hundred feet or more above the invisible sea, a red neon sign flashed at the entrance to a private parking lot: Buenavista Inn.
The Cadillac turned in under the sign. I stopped before I got to it, and left my car on the shoulder of the road. The inn lay below, a pueblo affair with a dozen or more stucco cottages staggered along the shadowy terraces. About half of them had lights behind their blinds. There was a red neon Office sign above the door of the main building beside the parking lot.
Tom parked the Cadillac with several other cars, and left it with its lights burning. I kept the other cars between me and him. I didn’t think he saw me, but he began to run toward the main building. He moved in a jerky knock-kneed fashion, like an old man trying to catch a bus which had already left.
The door under the red sign opened before he reached it. A big woman stepped out onto the platform of light projected from the doorway. Her hair was gold, her skin a darker gold. She wore a gold lamé gown with a slashed neckline. Even at a distance, she gave the impression of a shining hardness, as though she’d preserved her body from age by having it cast in metal. Her voice had a metallic carrying quality:
“Tommy! Where’ve you been?”
If he answered, I couldn’t hear him. He stopped on his heels in front of her, feinted to the left, and tried to move past her on the right. The action was a sad parody of the broken-field running he’d once been pretty good at. Her flashing body blocked him in the doorway, and one of her round gold arms encircled his neck. He struggled weakly. She kissed him on the mouth, then looked out over his shoulder across the parking lot.
“You took my car, you naughty boy. And now you left the lights on. Get inside now, before somebody sees you.”
She slapped him half-playfully, and released him. He scuttled into the lighted lobby. She marched across the parking lot, an unlikely figure of a woman with a broad serene brow, deep eyes, an ugly hungry tortured mouth, a faint pouch under her chin. She walked as if she owned the world, or had owned it once and lost it but remembered how it felt.
She switched off the lights of the car, removed the ignition key and pulled up her skirt to slip it into the top of her stocking. Her legs were heavy and shapely, with slender ankles. She slammed the door of the Cadillac and said out loud, in a tone of mingled anger and indulgence:
“Silly damn little fool.”
She breathed and sighed, and noticed me in the middle of the sigh. Without changing the rhythm of her breathing, she smiled and nodded: “Hello there. What can I do for you?”
“You look as if you could do plenty.”
“Kidder.” But her smile widened, revealing bright gold inlays in its corners. “Nobody’s interested in Maude any more. Except Maude. I’m very much interested in Maude.”
“That’s because you’re Maude.”
“You bet your sweet life I am. Who are you?”
I told her as I got out of my car, and added: “I’m looking for a friend.”
“A new friend?”
“No, an old friend.”
“One of my dolls?”
“Could be.”
“Come on inside if you want to.”
I followed her in. I’d hoped to find Tom Rica in the lobby, but he’d evidently gone through into the private part of the building.
The lobby was surprisingly well furnished with pastel leather chairs, potted palms. One end wall was covered with a photomural of Hollywood at night, which gave the effect of a picture window overlooking the city. The opposite wall was an actual window overlooking the sea.
Maude went around the curved teakwood counter across from the door. The inner door behind the counter was partly open. She closed it. She unlocked a drawer and took out a typewritten sheet, much interlined.
“I mayn’t have her listed any more. My turnover is terrific. The girls get married.”
“Good for them.”
“But not so good for me. I’ve had a recruiting problem ever since the war. You’d think I was running a matrimonial bureau or something. Well, if she isn’t with me any more I can always get you another one. It’s early. What did you say her name was?”
“I didn’t say. And it’s not a her.”
She gave me a slightly disappointed look. “You’re in the wrong pew. I run a clean place, strictly from heterosex.”
“Who said I had sex on my mind?”
“I thought everybody had,” she said with a kind of habitual wiggle.
“All the time?”
She glanced at me from the hard gray surface of her deep-set eyes. “What happened to you?”
“A lot of things. I’m trying to sell the movie rights to my life. Somebody down here hates me.”
“I mean your face.”
“Oh, that.”
“What are you stalling for? My God, don’t tell me you’re a lamster, too. The woods are crawling with them.”
“Could you put me up if I was?”
She took it as the fact, with the gullibility of cynicism: “How hot are you?”
“Not very.”
“That car outside belong to you?”
“It’s mostly the bank’s.”
“My God, you robbed a bank?”
“They’re robbing me. Ten per cent interest on the money I borrowed to buy the crate.”
She leaned forward across the counter, her ringed hands flat on its top, her eyes hard-bright as the cut stones in the rings:
“What kind of a joker are you? If you’re thinking of knocking me over, I warn you I got protection, plenty of it.”
“Don’t get hinky.”
“I’m not hinky. I get a little irritated, is all, when a beat-up punk walks into my place and won’t tell me what he wants.” She moved quickly to a small switchboard at the end of the counter, picked up a headphone, and said over her shoulder: “So get to the point, brother.”
“Tom Rica is the friend I’m looking for.”
A ripple of nerves went through her. Then she stood heavy and solid again. Her eyes didn’t shift, but their bright stare became more intense.
“Who sent you here?”
“I came on my own.”
“I doubt that. Whoever it was gave you the wrong information.” She put down the phone and returned to the counter. “Come to think of it, there was a boy named Rica worked here a while back. What did you say the first name was?”
“Tom.”
“What do you want with him?”
“A chance to talk, that’s all.”
“What about?”
“Old times.”
She struck the countertop with the front of her fist. “Cut the doubletalk, eh? You’re no friend of his.”
“Better than some he has. I hate to see him poison his brains with heroin. He used to be a smart boy.”
“He still is,” she said defensively. “It isn’t his fault he was sick.” In a sudden gesture of self-contempt, self-doubt, she tugged at the pouch of flesh under her chin, and went on worrying it. “Who are you, anyway? Are you from the hospital?”
“I’m a private detective investigating a murder.”
“That shooting in the country?” For the first time she seemed afraid. “You can’t tie Tom in with it.”
“What makes you think I’m trying to?”
“You said you wanted to see him, didn’t you? But you’re not seeing him. He had nothing to do with that killer.”
“They escaped together last night.”
“That proves nothing. I got rid of that Hallman character soon as we hit the main road. Him I wanted no part of. I see enough of them in line of business. And Tom hasn’t seen him since, or gone anywhere. He’s been here all day.
With me.”
“So you helped them get away from the hospital.”
“What if I did?”
“You weren’t doing Hallman a favor. Or Tom, either.”
“I beg to differ. They were torturing him. They cut him off cold turkey. He had nothing to eat for over a week. You ought to’ve seen him when I picked him up.”
“So you put him back on horse.”
“I did not. He begged me to get him some caps, but I wouldn’t do it. It’s the only one thing I wouldn’t do for Tom. I did buy him some bottles of cough medicine with the codeine in it. I couldn’t just sit there and watch him suffer, could I?”
“You want him to be a hype for the rest of his life? And die of it?”
“Don’t say that.”
“What are you trying to do to him?”
“Look after him.”
“You think you’re qualified?”
“I love the boy,” she said. “I did what I could for him. Does that make me so lousy?”
“Nobody said you’re lousy.”
“Nobody has to say it. I tried to make him happy. I didn’t have what it takes.”
Fingering her heavy breasts, she looked down at herself in sorrow.
chapter 21
THE door behind her opened. Tom Rica leaned in the opening, with one frail shoulder propped against the doorframe. His sharp tweed jacket hung loosely on him.
“What’s the trouble, Maudie?” His voice was thin and dry, denatured. His eyes were puddles of tar.
Maude resumed her smiling mask before she turned to him. “No trouble. Go back in.”
She put her hands on his shoulders. He smiled past her at me, detachedly, pathetically, as if there was a thick glass wall between us. She shook him: “Did you get a needle? Is that where you were?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said in dull coquetry, using his hollow face as if it was young and charming.
“Where did you get it? Where did you get the money?”
“Who needs money, honey?”
“Answer me.” Her shoulders bowed across him. She shook him so that his teeth clicked. “I want to know who gave you the stuff and how much you got and where the rest of it is.”
He collapsed against the doorframe. “Lay off me, bag.”
“That isn’t a bad idea,” I said, coming around the counter.
She whirled as if I’d stuck a knife in her back. “You stay out of this, brother. I’m warning you. I’ve taken enough from you, when all I want is to do what’s right for my boy.”
“You own him, do you?”
She yelled in a brass tenor: “Get out of my place.”
Tom moved between us, like a vaudeville third man. “Don’t talk like that to my old buddy.” He peered at me through the glass wall. His eyes and speech were more focused, as though the first shock of the drug was passing off. “You still a do-gooder, old buddy? Myself, I’m a do-badder. Every day in every way I’m doing badder and badder, as dear old mother used to say.”
“You talk too much,” Maude said, laying a heavy arm across his shoulders. “Come in and lie down now.”
He turned on her in a sudden spurt of viciousness. “Leave me be. I’m in good shape, having a nice reunion with my old buddy. You trying to break up my friendships?”
“I’m the only friend you got.”
“Is that so? Let me tell you something. You’ll have dirt in your eyes, and I’ll be riding high, living the life of Riley. Who needs you?”
“You need me, Tom,” she said, without assurance. “You were on your uppers when I took you in. If it wasn’t for me you’d be in the pen. I got your charge reduced, and you know it, and it cost me plenty. So here you go right back on the same crazy kick. Don’t you ever learn?”
“I learn, don’t worry. All these years I been studying the angles, see, like an apprenticeship. I know the rackets like I know the back of my hand. I know where you stupid hustlers make your stupid mistakes. And I’m not making any. I got a racket of my own now, and it’s as safe as houses.” His mood had swung violently upward, in anger and elation.
“Houses with bars on the windows,” the blonde woman said. “You stick your neck out again, and I can’t cover for you.”
“Nobody asked you to. I’m on my own now. Forget me.”
He turned his back on her and went through the inner door. His body moved loosely and lightly, supported by invisible strings. I started to follow him. Maude turned her helpless anger on me:
“Stay out of there. You got no right in there.”
I hesitated. She was a woman. I was in her house. With the toe of her shoe, Maude pressed a faintly worn spot in the carpet behind the counter:
“You better beat it out of here, I’m warning you.”
“I think I’ll stay for a while.”
She folded her arms across her breasts and looked at me like a lioness. A short broad man in a plaid shirt opened the front door and came in quietly. His smile was wide and meaningless under a hammered-in nose. A leather blackjack, polished like a keepsake, swung from his hand.
“Dutch, take this one out,” Maude said, standing away.
I went around the counter and took Dutch out instead. Perhaps bouncing drunks had spoiled him. Anyway, he was easy to hit. Between his wild swings, I hit him with a left to the head, a right cross to the jaw, a long left hook to the solar plexus which bent him over into my right coming up. He subsided. I picked up his blackjack and moved past Maude through the inner door. She didn’t say a word.
I went through a living-room crowded with overstuffed furniture in a green-and-white jungle design from which eyes seemed to watch me, down a short hallway past a pink satin bedroom which reminded me of the inside of a coffin in disarray, to the open door of a bathroom. Tom’s jacket lay across the lighted threshold like the headless torso of a man, flattened by the passage of some enormous engine.
Tom was sitting on the toilet seat with his left shirtsleeve rolled up and a hypodermic needle in his right hand. He was too busy looking for a vein to notice me. The veins he had already used and ruined writhed black up his arm from wrist to wasted biceps. Blue tattoo marks disguised the scars on his wrists.
I took the needle away from him. It was about a quarter full of clear liquid. Upturned in the bright bathroom light, his face set in hard wrinkles like a primitive mask used to conjure evil spirits, its eyeholes full of darkness.
“Give it back. I didn’t get enough.”
“Enough to kill yourself?”
“It keeps me alive. I almost died without it, there in the hospital. My brains were running out of my ears.”
He made a sudden grab for the needle in my hand. I held it out of his reach.
“Go back to the hospital, Tom.”
He swung his head slowly from side to side. “There’s nothing for me there. Everything I want is on the outside.”
“What do you want?”
“Kicks. Money and kicks. What else is there?”
“A hell of a lot.”
“You’ve got it?” He sensed my hesitation, and looked up slyly. “Do-gooder ain’t doing so good, eh? Don’t go into the old look-to-the-future routine. It makes me puke. It always made me puke. So save it for the birds. This is my future, now.”
“You like it?”
“If you give me back my needle. It’s all I need from you.”
“Why don’t you kick it, Tom? Use your guts for that. You’re too young to go down the drain.”
“Save it for the boy scouts, den-father. You want to know why I’m a hype? Because I got bored with double-mouthed bastards like you. You spout the old uplift line, but I never seen a one of you that believed in it for himself. While you’re telling other people how to live, you’re double-timing your wife and running after gash, drinking like a goddam fish and chasing any dirty nickel you can see.”
There was enough truth in what he said to tie my tongue for a minute. The obscure pain of memory came back. It centered in an image in my min
d: the face of the woman I had lost. I blotted the image out, telling myself that that was years ago. The important things had happened long ago.
Tom spoke to the doubt that must have showed in my face:
“Give me back my needle. What’s to lose?”
“Not a chance.”
“Come on,” he wheedled. “The stuff is weak. The first shot didn’t even give me a lift.”
“Then you don’t have so far to fall.”
He beat his sharp knees with his fists. “Give me my needle, you hot-and-cold-running false-faced mother-lover. You’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes and sell his body for soap.”
“Is that how you feel? Dead?”
“The hell I am. I’ll show you. I can get more.”
He got up and tried to push past me. He was frail and light as a scarecrow. I forced him back onto the seat, holding the needle carefully out of his reach.
“Where did you get it in the first place, Tom?”
“Would I tell you?”
“Maybe you don’t have to.”
“Then why ask?”
“What’s this fine new racket of yours that you were warbling about?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“Pushing reefers to school kids?”
“You think I’m interested in peanuts?”
“Buying and selling old clothes?”
His ego couldn’t stand to be downgraded. The insult blew it up like a balloon. “You think I’m kidding? I got a piece of the biggest racket in the world. Before I’m through I’ll be buying and selling peanut-eaters like you.”
“By saving green stamps, no doubt.”
“By putting on the squeeze, jerk, where the money is. You get something on somebody, see, and you sell it back a little piece at a time. It’s like an annuity.”
“Or a death-warrant.”
He looked at me imperviously. Dead men never die.
“The good doctor could be very bad medicine.”
The Doomsters Page 12
