Headlights glowed in my rear view mirror. They got larger. I stepped on the gas and reached keys out of my pocket and unlocked the glove compartment. I took a .38 out and laid it on the car seat close to my leg.
Beyond the junk yards there was a brick field. The tall chimney of the kiln was smokeless, far off over waste land. Piles of dark bricks, a low wooden building with a sign on it, emptiness, no one moving, no light.
The car behind me gained. The low whine of a lightly touched siren growled through the night. The sound loafed over the fringes of a neglected golf course to the east, across the brickyard to the west. I speeded up a bit more, but it wasn’t any use. The car behind me came up fast and a huge red spotlight suddenly glared all over the road.
The car came up level and started to cut in. I stood the Chrysler on its nose, swung out behind the police car, and made a U-turn with half an inch to spare. I gunned the motor the other way. Behind me sounded the rough clashing of gears, the howl of an infuriated motor, and the red spotlight swept for what seemed miles over the brickyard.
It wasn’t any use. They were behind me and coming fast again. I didn’t have any idea of getting away. I wanted to get back where there were houses and people to come out and watch and perhaps to remember.
I didn’t make it. The police car heaved up alongside again and a hard voice yelled:
“Pull over, or we’ll blast a hole in you!”
I pulled over to the curb and set the brake. I put the gun back in the glove compartment and snapped it shut. The police car jumped on its springs just in front of my left front fender. A fat man slammed out of it roaring.
“Don’t you know a police siren when you hear one? Get out of that car!”
I got out of the car and stood beside it in the moonlight. The fat man had a gun in his hand.
“Gimme your license!” he barked in a voice as hard as the blade of a shovel.
I took it out and held it out. The other cop in the car slid out from under the wheel and came around beside me and took what I was holding out. He put a flash on it and read.
“Name of Marlowe,” he said. “Hell, the guy’s a shamus. Just think of that, Cooney.”
Cooney said: “Is that all? Guess I won’t need this.” He tucked the gun back in his holster and buttoned the leather flap down over it. “Guess I can handle this with my little flippers,” he said. “Guess I can at that.”
The other one said: “Doing fifty-five. Been drinking, I wouldn’t wonder.”
“Smell the bastard’s breath,” Cooney said.
Theother one leaned forward with a polite leer. “Could I smell the breath, shamus?”
I let him smell the breath.
“Well,” he said judiciously, “he ain’t staggering. I got to admit that.”
“ ’S a cold night for summer. Buy the boy a drink, Officer Dobbs.”
“Now that’s a sweet idea,” Dobbs said. He went to the car and got a half pint bottle out of it. He held it up. It was a third full. “No really solid drinking here,” he said. He held the bottle out. “With our compliments, pal.”
“Suppose I don’t want a drink,” I said.
“Don’t say that,” Cooney whined. “We might get the idea you wanted feetprints on your stomach.”
I took the bottle and unscrewed the cap and sniffed. The liquor in the bottle smelled like whiskey. Just whiskey.
“You can’t work the same gag all the time,” I said.
Cooney said: “Time is eight twenty-seven. Write it down, Officer Dobbs.”
Dobbs went to the car and leaned in to make a note on his report. I held the bottle up and said to Cooney: “You insist that I drink this?”
“Naw. You could have me jump on your belly instead.”
I tilted the bottle, locked my throat, and filled my mouth with whiskey. Cooney lunged forward and sank a fist in my stomach. I sprayed the whiskey and bent over choking. I dropped the bottle.
I bent to get it and saw Cooney’s fat knee rising at my face. I stepped to one side and straightened and slammed him on the nose with everything I had. His left hand went to his face and his voice howled and his right hand jumped to his gun holster. Dobbs ran at me from the side and his arm swung low. The blackjack hit me behind the left knee, the leg went dead and I sat down hard on the ground, gritting my teeth and spitting whiskey.
Cooney took his hand away from his face full of blood.
“Jesus,” he cracked in a thick horrible voice. “This is blood. My blood.” He let out a wild roar and swung his foot at my face.
I rolled far enough to catch it on my shoulder. It was bad enough taking it there.
Dobbs pushed between us and said: “We got enough, Charlie. Better not get it all gummed up.”
Cooney stepped backwards three shuffling steps and sat down on the running board of the police car and held his face. He groped for a handkerchief and used it gently on his nose.
“Just gimme a minute,” he said through the handkerchief. “Just a minute, pal. Just one little minute.”
Dobbs said, “Pipe down. We got enough. That’s the way it’s going to be.” He swung the blackjack slowly beside his leg. Cooney got up off the running board and staggered forward. Dobbs put a hand against his chest and pushed him gently. Cooney tried to knock the hand out of his way.
“I gotta see blood,” he croaked. “I gotta see more blood.”
Dobbs said sharply, “Nothing doing. Pipe down. We got all we wanted.”
Cooney turned and moved heavily away to the other side of the police car. He leaned against it muttering through his handkerchief. Dobbs said to me:
“Up on the feet, boy friend.”
I got up and rubbed behind my knee. The nerve of the leg was jumping like an angry monkey.
“Get in the car,” Dobbs said. “Our car.”
I went over and climbed into the police car.
Dobbs said: “You drive the other heap, Charlie.”
“I’ll tear every god damn fender off’n it,” Cooney roared.
Dobbs picked the whiskey bottle off the ground, threw it over the fence, and slid into the car beside me. He pressed the starter.
“This is going to cost you,” he said. “You hadn’t ought to have socked him.”
I said: “Just why not?”
“He’s a good guy,” Dobbs said. “A little loud.”
“But not funny,” I said. “Not at all funny.”
“Don’t tell him,” Dobbs said. The police car began to move. “You’d hurt his feelings.”
Cooney slammed into the Chrysler and started it and clashed the gears as if he was trying to strip them. Dobbs tooled the police car smoothly around and started north again along the brickyard.
“You’ll like our new jail,” he said.
“What will the charge be?”
He thought a moment, guiding the car with a gentle hand and watching in the mirror to see that Cooney followed along behind.
“Speeding,” he said. “Resisting arrest. H. B. D.” H.B.D. is police slang for “had been drinking.”
“How about being slammed in the belly, kicked in the shoulder, forced to drink liquor under threat of bodily harm, threatened with a gun and struck with a blackjack while unarmed? Couldn’t you make a little something more out of that?”
“Aw forget it,” he said wearily. “You think this sort of thing is my idea of a good time?”
“I thought they cleaned this town up,” I said. “I thought they had it so that a decent man could walk the streets at night without wearing a bulletproof vest.”
“They cleaned it up some,” he said. “They wouldn’t want it too clean. They might scare away a dirty dollar.”
“Better not talk like that,” I said. “You’ll lose your union card.”
He laughed. “The hell with them,” he said. “I’ll be in the army in two weeks.”
The incident was over for him. It meant nothing. He took it as a matter of course. He wasn’t even bitter about it.
TW
ENTY-SIX
The cell block was almost brand-new. Thebattleship gray paint on the steel walls and door still had the fresh gloss of newness disfigured in two or three places by squirted tobacco juice. The overhead light was sunk in the ceiling behind a heavy frosted panel. There were two bunks on one side of the cell and a man snored in the top bunk, with a dark gray blanket wrapped around him. Since he was asleep that early and didn’t smell of whiskey or gin and had chosen the top berth where he would be out of the way, I judged he was an old lodger.
I sat on the lower bunk. They had tapped me for a gun but they hadn’t stripped my pockets. I got out a cigarette and rubbed the hot swelling behind my knee. The pain radiated all the way to the ankle. The whiskey I had coughed on my coat front had a rank smell. I held the cloth up and breathed smoke into it. The smoke floated up around the flat square of lighted glass in the ceiling. The jail seemed very quiet. A woman was making a shrill racket somewhere very far off, in another part of the jail. My part was as peaceful as a church.
The woman was screaming, wherever she was. The screaming had a thin sharp unreal sound, something like the screaming of coyotes in the moonlight, but it didn’t have the rising keening note of the coyote. After a while the sound stopped.
I smoked two cigarettes through and dropped the butts into the small toilet in the corner. The man in the upper berth still snored. All I could see of him was damp greasy hair sticking out over the edge of the blanket. He slept on his stomach. He slept well. He was one of the best.
I sat down on the bunk again. It was made of flat steel slats with a thin hard mattress over them. Two dark gray blankets were folded on it quite neatly. It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hall. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty-fifth Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City.
She wouldn’t think about the Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marihuana joints, the narrow fox faces watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk.
I went over to stand by the door. There was nobody stirring across the way. The lights in the cell block were bleak and silent. Business in the jail was rotten.
I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.
A man in the blue-gray jail uniform came along between the cells reading numbers. He stopped in front of mine and unlocked the door and gave me the hard stare they think they have to wear on their pans forever and forever and forever. I’m a cop, brother, I’m tough, watch your step, brother, or we’ll fix you up so you’ll crawl on your hands and knees, brother, snap out of it, brother, let’s get a load of the truth, brother, let’s go, and let’s not forget we’re tough guys, we’re cops, and we do what we like with punks like you.
“Out,” he said.
I stepped out of the cell and he relocked the door and jerked his thumb and we went along to a wide steel gate and he unlocked that and we went through and he relocked it and the keys tinkled pleasantly on the big steel ring and after a while we went through a steel door that was painted like wood on the outside and battleship gray on the inside.
Degarmo was standing there by the counter talking to the desk sergeant.
He turned his metallic blue eyes on me and said: “How you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Like our jail?”
“I like your jail fine.”
“Captain Webber wants to talk to you.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Don’t you know any words but fine?”
“Not right now,” I said. “Not in here.”
“You’re limping a little,” he said. “You trip over something?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I tripped over a blackjack. It jumped up and bit me behind the left knee.”
“That’s too bad,” Degarmo said, blank-eyed. “Get your stuff from the property clerk.”
“I’ve got it,” I said. “It wasn’t taken away from me.”
“Well, that’s fine,” he said.
“It sure is,” I said. “It’s fine.”
The desk sergeant lifted his shaggy head and gave us both a long stare. “You ought to see Cooney’s little Irish nose,” he said. “If you want to see something fine. It’s spread over his face like syrup on a waffle.”
Degarmo said absently: “What’s the matter? He get in a fight?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the desk sergeant said. “Maybe it was the same blackjack that jumped up and bit him.”
“For a desk sergeant you talk too damn much,” Degarmo said.
“A desk sergeant always talks too God damn much,” the desk sergeant said. “Maybe that’s why he isn’t a lieutenant on homicide.”
“You see how we are here,” Degarmo said. “Just one great big happy family.”
“With beaming smiles on our faces,” the desk sergeant said, “and our arms spread wide in welcome, and a rock in each hand.”
Degarmo jerked his head at me and we went out.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Captain Webber pushed his sharp bent nose across the desk at me and said: “Sit down.”
I sat down in a round-backed wooden armchair and eased my left leg away from the sharp edge of the seat. It was a large neat corner office. Degarmo sat at the end of the desk and crossed his legs and rubbed his ankle thoughtfully, looked out of a window.
Webber went on: “You asked for trouble, and you got it. You were doing fifty-five miles an hour in a residential zone and you attempted to get away from a police car that signaled you to stop with its siren and red spotlight. You were abusive when stopped and you struck an officer in the face.”
I said nothing. Webber picked a match off his desk and broke it in half and threw the pieces over his shoulder.
“Or are they lying—as usual?” he asked.
“I didn’t see their report,” I said. “I was probably doing fifty-five in a residential district, or anyhow within city limits. The police car was parked outside a house I visited. It followed me when I drove away and I didn’t at that time know it was a police car. It had no good reason to follow me and I didn’t like the look of it. I went a little fast, but all I was trying to do was get to a better lighted part of town.”
Degarmo moved his eyes to give me a bleak meaningless stare. Webber snapped his teeth impatiently.
He said: “After you knew it was a police car you made a half turn in the middle of the block and still tried to get away. Is that right?”
I said: “Yes. It’s going to take a little frank talk to explain that.”
“I’m not afraid of a little frank talk,” Webber said. “I tend to kind of specialize in frank talk.”
I said: “These cops that picked me up were parked in front of the house where George Talley’s wife lives. They were there before I got there. George Talley is the man who used to be a private detective down here. I wanted to see him. Degarmo knows why I wanted to see him.”
Degarmo picked a match out of his pocket and chewed on the soft end of it quietly. He nodded, without expression. Webber didn’t look at him.
I said: “You are a stupid man, Degarmo. Ev
erything you do is stupid, and done in a stupid way. When you went up against me yesterday in front of Almore’s house you had to get tough when there was nothing to get tough about. You had to make me curious when I had nothing to be curious about. You even had to drop hints which showed me how I could satisfy that curiosity, if it became important. All you had to do to protect your friends was keep your mouth shut until I made a move. I never would have made one, and you would have saved all this.”
Webber said: “What the devil has all this got to do with your being arrested in the twelve hundred block on Westmore Street?”
“It has to do with the Almore case,” I said. “George Talley worked on the Almore case—until he was pinched for drunk driving.”
“Well, I never worked on the Almore case,” Webber snapped. “I don’t know who stuck the first knife into Julius Caesar either. Stick to the point, can’t you?”
“I am sticking to the point. Degarmo knows about the Almore case and he doesn’t like it talked about. Even your prowl car boys know about it. Cooney and Dobbs had no reason to follow me unless it was because I visited the wife of a man who had worked on the Almore case. I wasn’t doing fifty-five miles an hour when they started to follow me. I tried to get away from them because I had a good idea I might get beaten up for going there. Degarmo had given me that idea.”
Webber looked quickly at Degarmo. Degarmo’s hard blue eyes looked across the room at the wall in front of him.
I said: “And I didn’t bust Cooney in the nose until after he had forced me to drink whiskey and then hit me in the stomach when I drank it, so that I would spill it down my coat front and smell of it. This can’t be the first time you have heard of that trick, captain.”
Webber broke another match. He leaned back and looked at his small tight knuckles. He looked again at Degarmo and said: “If you got made chief of police today, you might let me in on it.”
Degarmo said: “Hell, the shamus just got a couple of playful taps. Kind of kidding. If a guy can’t take a joke—”
The Lady in the Lake Page 15
