by James M. Fox
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay, get lost. Stay off our reservation. I dunno who let you out after dark in the first place.”
They were gone in a sudden hot rush of exhaust smoke, the radio’s strident cackle trailing in their wake until after they’d turned the block. I struggled to my feet and staggered away from there in the opposite direction, away from the ocean’s distant angry rumble, back to Main Street and past the endless parking-line to where the Ford was waiting meekly, jammed between the bumpers of two other rusty wrecks.
It took me five minutes of torture to batter myself out of hock, and by the time I hit the parkway going north it became pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to make it back to Palm Springs, or at least not all in one piece. Chloral hydrate is tricky stuff—it plays hell with your co-ordination. I must have thrown most of it off being sick in the gutter, but driving was largely still a matter of wobbling and weaving all over the road, like learning to ride a bicycle. There were stretches of a hundred yards at a time where I couldn’t even see where I was going, and moments when I had to slam the brakes on in the middle of the center lane, to be sick some more, out the window to leeward. There were various sorts of funny buzzing noises, and weird whistling noises, and delusions about swarms of multicolored fireflies spattering into my windshield. Then an arm or a leg would check out for a spell, and would have to be deliberately called back to order, usually by punishing the numb spots with a fist.
I got off the parkway somehow, and made a wrong turn without being aware of it. Whatever twilight instincts will stay on the job in such a situation guided me through the late supper traffic out on Wilshire Boulevard. I woke up with a sudden start slewed half across the driveway curb in front of Marion’s apartment house. Pablo, the Filipino elevator jockey, leaned in over the wheel and was slapping my face and hissing at me in almost comical distress.
“Yes, sir, yes, sir! I go fetch doctor, Mr. Bailey. You just keep still, yes, sir.” He saw me stare and shake my head. “Cops chasing you that shot you up, Mr. Bailey?” he pressed me, and his cocky sparrow eyes were big and round.
“No cops,” I mumbled. “No doctor. Go ’way, lea’me ’lone.”
“Gee, you look pretty awful, Mr. Bailey,” he assured me solemnly. “You ain’t just plastered up, are you? Your shirt’s all over blood, yes, sir.”
I roused myself enough to muster a growl. “Beat it, you lousy spig. Thish isn’t any of your businesh. Business. For crying out loud, why can’t you let me sit here for a little while?”
“Dontcha want to go up, Mr. Bailey?” He was studying me now with an air of quizzical perplexity, like a robin with a nestful of cuckoo’s young.
“I’ll be all right. I didn’t mean to come here in the first place. You wanna help, get thish heap off the shidewalk. Sidewalk—”
“Yes, sir, yes, sir.”
He shoved my feet from the pedals and slid in beside me. The Ford backed up and puttered smoothly down the driveway ramp into the sepulchral white cement cavern of the basement garage. I dozed off again while he parked it and didn’t wake up until the elevator door snarled open on the sixth-floor landing. He’d managed somehow to drag me out of the car and prop me up on the floor of the elevator.
“Hey, jus’ a minute! Take me down!”
He neatly blocked my lunge at the controls. “I phone Miss Faraday. First she give me hell, then she tell me to bring you up, yes, sir.”
Marion came sweeping down the hall in a rustle of black lace and baby-blue kimono silk. Her face was still glistening with cold cream, but she’d wielded a lipstick and hurriedly tied a scarf around her curlers.
“Oh, Rick, really! Are you out of your mind? What in God’s name has happened to you now?”
They were both of them pulling at me, like two small tugs attempting to dock a fractious ocean liner. I shook them off and wandered dizzily into the apartment and sat down on the davenport, swaying with the breeze. There was excited whispering behind my back, and then the door slammed shut, and Marion came flouncing past me on a beeline for the liquor cabinet. I fought off a shudder and caught the hem of her negligee just in time.
“Coffee,” I croaked. “Strong black coffee. Lots of it.”
“Oh, all right.”
She shied away from me into the kitchenette. I made it to the bathroom, not quite on all fours, and sat on the tiles struggling out of my filthy clothes, and crawled under the shower like a dog. The rush of cold water blacked me out again before it whipped my blood back into circulation.
I was fixing the cut in my chin with a Band-Aid when Marion stuck her head around the door. “Your old suit’s on the bed,” she informed me coldly. “You left it here last Monday, in a package. I pressed it for you.”
Thanking her sounded a little silly. I succeeded in making myself halfway presentable again and in navigating back to the living-room under my own steam. My head was still throbbing, and my eyes were still playing tricks on me, but I knew the coffee would take care of that. The coffee was waiting for me, boiling in the percolator, strong enough to wrestle a grizzly bear. It raced through my system like a dose of cauterizer, burning out the dross.
She watched me from the couch; she sat very straight, with her head held high, the folds of her kimono decorously arranged. She had wiped off the cold cream and fluffed out her long blond bob and organized herself. Now I was getting the silent treatment, the level, expressionless stare, the full red lips compressed in a straight, disapproving line. I poured myself a third large breakfast cup and lighted a cigarette with hands that were almost useful again. It didn’t seem as if there was anything to say, anywhere to look.
“Are you sure you don’t need a doctor?”
“Quite sure.”
“It might be concussion or something.”
“I know what it is. This stuff will fix it.”
There was another longish pause. Down the block on Wilshire the banshee scream of an ambulance went by like a streak of lightning. The kitchen refrigerator turned itself on with a sudden high-pitched whine.
“I told you you’d be back pretty soon,” she said at last, quietly and with no hint of complacency in her tone.
There was nothing I could say to that either, so I let it hang in the air between us. The city had a hundred thousand rooms, that night and every night, in which a man and a woman were confronting each other and letting words and sentences hang in the air between them. Maybe there should be a law.
“You might as well tell me. About the fight.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Oh, Rick, don’t be childish.”
“I’m not. Just a slight misunderstanding. They threw me out. The cut is where I slipped on the pavement.”
“Were you gambling?”
“No.”
She sighed, and the warm hazel eyes flickered dangerously. “I suppose there was a girl involved—”
I matched the sigh and set my teeth. The reaction was meaningless, automatic, an ancient rite all men have performed and all women have expected through the ages of history, whenever that subject was brought up. I didn’t get any kind of a charge out of it. The night’s events had drained me of emotion, but good.
“No girl,” I said dully. “It’s much more complicated than that.”
“Oh. Is it?”
“Yeah, it sure is.”
She rose impulsively, and came over to sit on the arm of my chair. Her long, slender, capable hand touching my cheek brought me a faint bitter-almond scent of Jergens Lotion. “Darling—Why can’t you be sensible and quit acting like a half-neurotic playboy. If you’d only take a grip on yourself, get a job, start all over again fresh. Rick, you could lick the world, don’t you realize that?”
“Rule number three,” I said. “When the animal shows signs of being depressed, feed his ego.”
“Must you be cynical on top of everything?” she flamed, and just as quickly subsided into contrition. “I’m sorry, darling. But you know yourself how you always come to
me when you’re in trouble. Isn’t it logical then that if we were married you’d never be in trouble at all? Can’t you see where that proves we belong together?”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It wouldn’t work. I wish I thought it would.”
I could feel her wince, but she kept silent for a while and went on rubbing the back of my neck, absent-mindedly. When she spoke at last her voice had a funny little catch in it, as if the situation had moved an inch or two from under her control.
“Rick, who is she?”
“Huh?”
“Please don’t lie to me. Any woman can tell.”
“Stop kidding yourself with that bunk. They can’t either. They just think they can. This is something else altogether.”
“Then you’ve got to explain.”
“I can’t. It’s not my secret.”
She slipped off my chair and walked over to the fireplace for a cigarette from the box on the shelf, striking the match before I could get up to serve her and holding the flame cupped in her hands, like a man. She appeared relaxed, almost vindictively satisfied, leaning back against the mantelpiece, smoking thoughtfully in long, slow drags. “At least you could let me in on where you’ve been all this time since Monday,” she suggested carelessly.
It may have been the drug or its aftereffects that scoured my perceptions and afforded me a bright flash of memory. I was sixteen years old, and I’d sneaked out of our hotel suite in Boston as soon as she left for the auditorium. That was the night they’d had to cancel her concert, because of the fire backstage, and when I came home she was waiting for me, leaning against the mantelpiece, still wearing the dramatic white satin formal that made her look like a golden-haired angel, with proud high breasts instead of wings. But Rick, where were you? Carelessly, yes, as in a rippling arpeggio of the strings up to high F, touched off lightly by slender, skillfully caressing fingers. And in the morning she’d seen to it that the management dismissed the girl.F
“Darling, what’s wrong?”
For the first time she appeared genuinely alarmed. I came up for air and forced my eyes back into focus.
“Don’t worry. You just reminded me of my mother. The good old silver cord and all that stuff. All right, I’ll tell you this much. I’m supposed to be doing a job, no kidding. They’re paying me money, and it’s nothing illegal, but the deal happens to be very definitely under wraps. If I showed you any cards it might be very dangerous for both of us.”
“Who are they? Mr. Hitchcock?” She saw me shake my head and frowned at me in quick vexation. “There, you see? I never know when to believe you. At least he wouldn’t be dangerous to work for.”
I didn’t even want to laugh. “Never mind, skip it. This thing is bound to fall through as it is. All it amounts to is a college boy in some kind of a jam. I’ll be on it a few more days, maybe. After that, nigger bet.”
“You sound like a private detective or something just as nasty,” she said disdainfully. “And you still haven’t told me where you’ve been all this while, or how you got into a fight.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, Rick, honestly—”
I got up on my two big feet and tested the floor. It felt steady again, not as if this were opening night at the Starlight Roof. “What more do you want me to say? I can’t sit here arguing about it all night.”
“You’re not thinking of leaving?”
“Of course. I’ve got to.”
She took her shoulders off the mantelpiece and came sailing into me in a burst of angry tears, a flurry of silk and scented skin and clawing nails. The idea seemed to be that I was too sick to go out, but not sick enough to escape a wrestling-match. She nearly succeeded in pinning my shoulders to the mat on her first wild rush, and for a minute or so we were locked in a struggle that knocked over several assorted pieces of furniture, brought down two pictures from the walls, and wound up on the davenport in pretty much of a draw. There is nothing funny about fighting a woman: it makes you feel stupid and clumsy and horribly mixed up. I even began wanting her all over again, almost mechanically, or from sheer force of animal habit, or because of something that would have caused Dr. Schwartz to purse his lips.
“I’m going. All through?”
“No! No, no, no. You can’t. I won’t let you.”
“I can. I will.”
“Darling. Kiss me!”
I tore loose an arm and struck out blindly. The blow caught her high on the cheek, and she sagged under me, instantly limp and peacefully and wearily asleep. I squirmed off the couch and stood watching her, biting my knuckles, leaning into wave after wave of black remorse. Then the icebox in the kitchen switched out with a click like the cocking of a gun and made me bolt from the apartment in a crazy, headlong rush, down six flights of stairs into the basement garage, and up the driveway ramp, down to Wilshire and east once more, as fast as the clattering old Ford would carry me away.
Chapter Twelve: EIGHTY-GRAND GAG
THE rain started at Alhambra. It kept on coming for the next seventy-five miles, sometimes no worse than a hazy drizzle, sometimes in sudden, impetuous torrents. They swamped the windshield wipers and turned the highway’s broad dark asphalt ribbon into a blur of shallow, racing water, soaking up the feeble yellow glare of my headlights.
It was just the kind of trip to kill or cure a man with a hole in his head. It didn’t do either for me, but a couple of hours of fighting the wheel, the road, and the elements will usually take your mind off your troubles. By 2:30 a.m. on the dashboard clock I was cold, tired, sober, and doing sixty miles an hour through Cabazon, which is where the desert takes over and the clouds pile up in helpless frustration, against the towering crest of the San Jacinto range. Here the rain stopped dead in its tracks, and the sky was swept clear as if by a single stroke of some gigantic broom; where the canyon’s narrow defile broke through, the night acquired a sudden tropical brilliance of velvet and gold, and the temperature rose twenty degrees. It was late enough for the evening wind to have blown itself out, but on the road my tires changed tune from a whistle to a dry, gritty wheeze through the drifting sands.
Palm Springs was still a carnival of neon signs and jukebox music. There were crowds in evening dress on the Doll House terrace and at the sidewalk cafés, behind the lines of parked limousines. The Desert Inn garden shimmered in a flutter of Chinese lanterns and had couples in period costume dancing on the lawn to the frenzied strings of a gypsy band. The smell of money was heavy in the air, mixed in with the scent of women and the fumes of high-test gasoline; together they easily overrode the cloying aroma of the sagebrush.
I bullied through a mile of traffic and picked up the highway again at the edge of town, where it veered away from the somber bastion of the mountains and plunged south into the valley, between the country clubs, the dude ranches, the flossy motor courts, and the last few blocks of privately supported white stucco caravansaries. Most of these were in darkness and silence, but halfway around a familiar-looking greasewood copse there was light and noise again. My feet came down hard on the pedals before I consciously recognized the place.
For five minutes or so I sat staring at it from the shoulder of the road, brooding like a pickpocket at a nudist camp. Get wise to yourself, soldier—That was all right, that part of it. By that time I knew which way the dice were loaded. I didn’t want Lorna to be there. Not because of the job I was supposed to do, but because I wanted to believe in her. I wanted her to be what she seemed to be, not what a detective agency or a file clerk in an airline office claimed she was.
I got out of the car and started walking.
The light came from a square of baby arcs mounted on tall steel poles to illuminate the patio. The noise was a composite of shouting and laughter, the splash of water from the pool and the booming of a large panatrope going all out on a resonant selection of tunes from South Pacific. That much intelligence was easily available as far as the mouth of the driveway, but it needed a regular jungle patrol to fill in the ske
tch. There were picket fences, barbed-wire fences, hedges of ironwood and jacaranda, rhododendron bushes ten feet high, and cactus patches big enough to stop a cattle stampede. I threshed about in there for quite some little spell and never got much closer to the patio than hand-grenade distance, which allowed me to confirm that a party was going on, but not to identify the guests.
It was the sort of situation where you’ve got a choice—drop out of the pot or bet the limit on a pair of deuces. I cut back to the driveway and hung around flexing my pride for a while, and marched right on up to the front porch of Mr. Alfredo Vanni’s elegant Monterey villa. A dozen cars lined the courtyard circle, but the small yellow Buick coupe failed to catch my eye until the very instant I leaned a thumb on the button of the doorbell chimes.
The yellow Buick confused me. It was exactly where I might have expected to find it, but it confused me anyway. It had never occurred to me that the Joneses might not, after all, have been scared away. They had simply checked out at the Hacienda to save the bill for a night’s lodging. It followed that whatever they were after was just about to blow up in my face. The notion was one I couldn’t use at all. I almost decided on the spot to pull out again. I simply wasn’t prepared to meet that much more of a raise.
The butler was coughing discreetly in my ear. He had quietly opened the door behind me, opened it far enough to let him look me over and no more. His face had a slightly pained expression showing me he didn’t approve of what he saw. He was a small, wrinkled, elderly Negro dressed up in black tie and brass-button tails; they had probably found him wandering around the old plantation set of Gone with the Wind, on the Selznick back lot.
