by Unknown
My imagination put Skalla across the table from me. His flat black eyes had something in them that was more than mere pain, something he wanted me to do. Part of the time he was trying to tell me what it was, and part of the time he was holding his belly in one piece and saying again: “Leave her alone. Maybe she loved the guy.”
I left there and drove north to Franklin and over Franklin to Beachwood and up to Heather Street. It wasn’t staked. They were that sure of her.
I drifted along the street below and looked up the scrubby slope spattered with moonlight and showing her house from behind as if it were three stories high. I could see the metal brackets that supported the porch. They looked high enough off the ground so that a man would need a balloon to reach them. But there was where he had gone up. Always the hard way with him.
He could have run away and had a fight for his money or even bought himself a place to live up in. There were plenty of people in the business, and they wouldn’t fool with Skalla. But he had come back instead to climb her balcony, like Romeo, and get his stomach full of slugs. From the wrong woman, as usual.
I drove around a white curve that looked like moonlight itself and parked and walked up the hill the rest of the way. I carried a flash, but I didn’t need it to see there was nobody on the doorstep waiting for the milk. I didn’t go in the front way. There might just happen to be some snooper with night glasses up on the hill.
I sneaked up the bank from behind, between the house and the empty garage. I found a window I could reach and made not much noise breaking it with a gun inside my hat. Nothing happened except that the crickets and tree frogs stopped for a moment.
I picked a way to the bedroom and prowled my flash around discreetly, after lowering the shades and pulling the drapes across them. The light dropped on a tumbled bed, on daubs of print powder, on cigarette butts on the window sills and heel marks in the nap of the carpet. There was a green and silver toilet set on the dressing table and three suitcases in the closet. There was a built-in bureau back in there with a lock that meant business. I had a chilled-steel screwdriver with me as well as the flash. I jimmied it.
The jewelry wasn’t worth a thousand dollars. Perhaps not half. But it meant a lot to a girl in show business. I put it back where I got it.
The living room had shut windows and a queer, unpleasant, sadistic smell. The law enforcement had taken care of the Vat 69, to make it easier for the fingerprint men. I had to use my own. I got a chair that hadn’t been bled on into a corner, wet my throat and waited in the darkness.
A shade flapped in the basement or somewhere. That made me wet my throat again. Somebody came out of a house half a dozen blocks away and whooped. A door banged. Silence. The tree frogs started again, then the crickets. Then the electric clock on the radio got louder than all the other sounds together.
Then I went to sleep.
When I woke up the moon had gone from the front windows and a car had stopped somewhere. Light, delicate, careful steps separated themselves from the night. They were outside the front door. A key fumbled in the lock.
In the opening door the dim sky showed a head without a hat. The slope of the hill was too dark to outline any more. The door clicked shut.
Steps rustled on the rug. I already had the lamp cord in my fingers. I yanked it and there was light.
The girl didn’t make a sound, not a whisper of sound. She just pointed the gun at me.
I said, “Hello, Beulah.”
She was worth waiting for.
Not too tall, not too short; that girl. She had the long legs that can walk and dance. Her hair even by the light of the one lamp was like a brush fire at night. Her face had laughter wrinkles at the corner of the eyes. Her mouth could laugh.
The features were shadowed and had that drawn look that makes some faces more beautiful because it makes them more delicate. I couldn’t see her eyes. They might have been blue enough to make you jump, but I couldn’t see.
The gun looked about a .32, but had the extreme right-angled grip of a Mauser.
After a while she said very softly, “Police, I suppose.”
She had a nice voice, too. I still think of it, at times.
I said, “Let’s sit down and talk. We’re all alone here. Ever drink out of the bottle?”
She didn’t answer. She looked down at the gun she was holding, half smiled, shook her head.
“You wouldn’t make two mistakes,” I said. “Not a girl as smart as you are.”
She tucked the gun into the side pocket of a long ulster-like coat with a military collar.
“Who are you?”
“Just a shamus. Private detective to you. Carmady is the name. Need a lift?”
I held my bottle out. It hadn’t grown to my hand yet. I still had to hold it.
“I don’t drink. Who hired you?”
“KLBL. To protect you from Steve Skalla.”
“So they know,” she said. “So they know about him.”
I digested that and said nothing.
“Who’s been here?” she went on sharply. She was still standing in the middle of the room, with her hands in her coat pockets now, and no hat.
“Everybody but the plumber,” I said. “He’s a little late, as usual.”
“You’re one of those men.” Her nose seemed to curl a little. “Drugstore comics.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. It’s just a way I get talking to the people I have to talk to. Skalla came back again and ran into trouble and got shot up and arrested. He’s in the hospital. Pretty bad.”
She didn’t move. “How bad?”
“He might live if he’d have surgery. Doubtful, even with that. Hopeless without. He has three in the intestines and one in the liver.”
She moved at last and started to sit down. “Not in that chair,” I said quickly. “Over here.”
She came over and sat near me, on one of the davenports. Lights twisted in her eyes. I could see them now. Little twisting lights like Catherine wheels spinning brightly.
She said, “Why did he come back?”
“He thought he ought to tidy up. Remove the body and so on. A nice guy, Skalla.”
“Do you think so?”
“Lady, if nobody else in the world thinks so, I do.”
“I’ll take that drink,” she said.
I handed her the bottle. I grabbed it away in a hurry. “Gosh,” I said. “You have to break in on this stuff.”
She looked towards the side door that led to the bedroom back of me.
“Gone to the morgue,” I said. “You can go in there.”
She stood up at once and went out of the room. She came back almost at once.
“What have they got on Steve?” she asked. “If he recovers.”
“He killed a nigger over on Central this morning. It was more or less self-defense on both sides. I don’t know. Except for Marineau he might get a break.”
“Marineau?” she said.
“Yeah. You knew he killed Marineau.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I killed Dave Marineau.”
“Okay,” I said. “But that’s not the way Steve wants it.”
She stared at me. “You mean Steve came back here deliberately to take the blame?”
“If he had to, I guess. I think he really meant to cart Marineau off to the desert and lose him. Only a woman showed up here—Mrs. Marineau.”
“Yes,” the girl said tonelessly. “She thinks I was his mistress. That greasy spoon.”
“Were you?” I asked.
“Don’t try that again,” she said. “Even if I did work on Central Avenue once.” She went out of the room again.
Sounds of a suitcase being yanked about came into the living room. I went in after her. She was packing pieces of cobweb and packing them as if she liked nice things nicely packed.
“You don’t wear that stuff down in the tank,” I told her, leaning in the door.
She ignored me some more. “I was going to make a break for M
exico,” she said. “Then South America. I didn’t mean to shoot him. He roughed me up and tried to blackmail me into something and I went and got the gun. Then we struggled again and it went off. Then I ran away.”
“Just what Skalla said he did,” I said. “Hell, couldn’t you just have shot the —— on purpose?”
“Not for your benefit,” she said. “Or any cop. Not when I did eight months in Dalhart, Texas, once for rolling a drunk. Not with that Marineau woman yelling her head off that I seduced him and then got sick of him.”
“A lot she’ll say,” I grunted. “After I tell how she spat in Skalla’s face when he had four slugs in him.”
She shivered. Her face whitened. She went on taking the things out of the suitcase and putting them in again.
“Did you roll the drunk really?”
She looked up at me, then down. “Yes,” she whispered.
I went over nearer to her. “Got any bruises or torn clothes to show?” I asked.
“No.”
“Too bad,” I said, and took hold of her.
Her eyes flamed at first and then turned to black stone, I tore her coat off, tore her up plenty, put hard fingers into her arms and neck and used my knuckles on her mouth. I let her go, panting. She reeled away from me, but didn’t quite fall.
“We’ll have to wait for the bruises to set and darken,” I said. “Then we’ll go downtown.”
She began to laugh. Then she went over to the mirror and looked at herself. She began to cry.
“Get out of here while I change my clothes!” she yelled. “I’ll give it a tumble. But if it makes any difference to Steve—I’m going to tell it right.”
“Aw, shut up and change your clothes,” I said.
I went out and banged the door.
I hadn’t even kissed her. I could have done that, at least. She wouldn’t have minded any more than the rest of the knocking about I gave her.
We rode the rest of the night, first in separate cars to hide hers in my garage, then in mine. We rode up the coast and had coffee and sandwiches at Malibu, then on up and over. We had breakfast at the bottom of the Ridge Route, just north of San Fernando.
Her face looked like a catcher’s mitt after a tough season. She had a lower lip the size of a banana and you could have cooked steaks on the bruises on her arms and neck, they were so hot.
With the first strong daylight we went to the City Hall.
They didn’t even think of holding her or checking her up. They practically wrote the statement themselves. She signed it blank-eyed, thinking of something else. Then a man from KLBL and his wife came down to get her.
So I didn’t get to ride her to a hotel. She didn’t get to see Skalla either, not then. He was under morphine.
He died at two-thirty the same afternoon. She was holding one of his huge, limp fingers, but he didn’t know her from the Queen of Siam.
Don’t You Cry for Me
Norbert Davis
NORBERT DAVIS (1909–1949) was born in Morrison, Illinois, and moved with his family when he was a teenager to California, where he earned a law degree at Stanford University. By the time he had graduated, however, he had already established himself as a successful pulp writer and, having always desired the writer’s life, never bothered to take the bar exam.
While he is most remembered today for his detective fiction (and rightly so), he also wrote other pulp fiction, including Westerns, romances, and adventure stories, as well as humor for the top slick magazines. He joined a group called the Fictioneers, Southern Californian fiction writers who met regularly to discuss writing and marketing tips; Raymond Chandler was an occasional participant. Davis’s best-known characters are the private-eye team of Doan and Carstairs—the latter being a giant Great Dane, who, after closely reading their five cases, has proven to be the smarter half of the team. They appeared in two short stories—“Cry Murder” and “Holocaust House”—and three novels: The Mouse in the Mountain (1943), Sally’s in the Alley (1943), and Oh, Murderer Mine (1946). The Doan and Carstairs stories are notable for being among the funniest of the “hard-boiled” genre of their time. Toward the end of his career, Davis abandoned the pulps, and then the slick magazines began to reject his stories. He split up with his wife, his agent died, and he was diagnosed with cancer. It was all too much, and at the age of forty he committed suicide.
“Don’t You Cry for Me,” one of Davis’s thirteen Black Mask stories, was published in May 1942.
Don’t You Cry for Me
Norbert Davis
The brawny piano-player had had his run-ins with the ghoulish Gestapo in the beer halls of Europe, but when he promised Myra Martin’s mother to find the girl in the Mecca of the movie-struck, he ran afoul of a plot as fantastic as any Hitler pipe-dream.
OHN COLLINS WAS playing the Beale Street Blues and playing it soft and sad because that was the way he felt. The notes dripped through the dingy dimness of the room like molasses and provided an appropriate accompaniment to his thoughts. He had a hangover.
He was short and squat and immensely wide. He looked a little bit like a frog—a friendly one. His hair was blond and as softly fuzzy as a baby’s on top, and he had a scar on his right cheek.
The door-bell trilled faintly through the music. Collins stopped playing and sighed. He didn’t really feel in the mood for company, but he got up and went across the rumpled living-room into the little entry-hall and opened the front door.
“Yes?” he said.
“You’re Mr. John Collins, aren’t you?”
The soft California dusk had gathered shadows against the front of the bungalow, and the woman was part of them, small and faintly rustling, dressed in black. Her voice was breathless and high, shaking slightly.
“Yes,” said Collins.
“May I—see you for a moment?”
“Certainly. Come in.”
Collins went back into the living-room and turned on the lamp with the pink shade. There were three empty highball glasses and an overflowing ashtray on the coffee table in front of the chesterfield, and he said: “The place is in a mess. Excuse it, please.”
“You’re—not married?”
“No,” said Collins.
She sat erect and prim on the edge of the chesterfield just outside the throw of light from the pink lamp, and she was like a faded portrait painting against the cheap garishness of the room. She wore white silk gloves and a white scarf fastened with a cameo brooch and a black bonnet of a hat with a black half-veil. There were lines in her cheeks, and her hair glinted silvery-white. Collins caught the faintly old-fashioned odor of lilac toilet water through the smell of stale tobacco and old gin that hung in the room like a shroud.
“I’m Mrs. Della Martin,” she said. “From Brill Falls, South Dakota.”
“Oh?” said Collins blankly.
“I’m Myra Martin’s mother.”
“Is that so?” Collins asked, mentally running through the list of his feminine associates. He couldn’t locate any Myras.
“She wrote me about you.”
“That was nice of her,” Collins said, wondering if it was.
“She said you were a detective.”
“A what?” Collins inquired, startled.
“She said you knew how to locate people. She said you’d done a lot of that work in Prague and in Warsaw and in Berlin—finding people for their relatives over here. That is, before we declared war, of course.”
“Oh, that was just amateur stuff,” Collins said. “I happened to be playing in beer halls and cafes, and I did some investigation for friends in my spare time.”
“Myra said it was very dangerous work.”
Collins fingered the scar on his cheek. “I did have a run-in or two with the Gestapo. Nothing much.”
“Would you—could you locate someone here in Hollywood? Will you find Myra for me, Mr. Collins?”
Collins stared at her. “What?”
Mrs. Martin twisted her slim gloved hands together. “Myra left Br
ill Falls a year ago to come to Hollywood to get into the motion pictures. She’s very beautiful, and she’s always been interested in theatricals. And then she won a Most-Beautiful-Back contest and got her name and picture in the papers, and several agencies and acting schools wrote her.”
“Yes,” said Collins. “Oh, yes.”
“I have a little dressmaking shop, and I couldn’t come with her, but I wanted her to have her chance. We saved the money for the trip, and she came alone. She was only going to stay two months if she didn’t find some sort of picture work, but after the two months were up she said things looked so encouraging—”
Collins nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“She stayed on and on, and I sent her what money I could. Then six weeks ago, she wrote me that she had her big chance at last, but that it was all a big secret yet, and she couldn’t tell me anything about it. She didn’t write me any more, Mr. Collins.”
“Six weeks—” Collins said.
“She had always written me twice a week before. And then—just nothing. I wrote and telegraphed, and the letters came back, and the telegrams couldn’t be delivered because they couldn’t find her. I—couldn’t stand it, and so I sold my business and came here. I went to the Central Casting Office and the studios. They had Myra’s name on their lists, but they hadn’t heard anything of her for months. I went to the place where she had been living, and there was a horrible foreign man in a fez who owned the place, and he wouldn’t tell me anything except that she had moved out six weeks before and hadn’t left any address.”
“Have you seen the police?” Collins asked.
“No,” said Mrs. Martin.
“Why not?”
Mrs. Martin looked down at her hands. “Perhaps Myra doesn’t want—to be found.”
“Oh,” said Collins.
“I don’t want to bother Myra,” Mrs. Martin said in a low strained voice. “If she doesn’t want me … If I just knew she was safe and all right, if I just knew … Will you help me, Mr. Collins?”
“Yes,” said Collins. “Of course. I’ll try. I’ll do all I can.”
