When she agreed, they got out and walked for several blocks to make sure they weren’t being followed. Then he led her into the dusty lobby of the Royal Palms Hotel. The lobby looked about as bright and clean as the inside of a well-worn vacuum cleaner bag. The furnishings consisting chiefly of a pair of sagging couches and a few small tables, had the verve and sparkle of a tired dish mop.
The decrepit old night clerk behind the desk let a pair of washed-out looking blue eyes trail over Ruth Jordon, cataloguing in this order, the highlights sparkling in the golden ringlets that curled around her head, her wide open azure-tinted eyes, her perky nose, soft red mouth, her breasts that strained impatiently at the hampering, thin dress, and her long, nylon encased legs. Then his eyes checked on the fact that the pair before him had no baggage and finally is gaze came to rest on Johnny disapprovingly.
“All filled up, young feller.”
Johnny placed his hand, palm down, on the register. A corner of the ten dollar bill under his hand drew the oldster’s eyes like a puppet string.
“The room is just for my sister, Miss Jones.”
“Sign the register, he grunted querulously.
Johnny took his hand off the ten spot and the old man pounced on it. Nickles signed the book. The night clerk leaned over. “Jest no noise, son,” he warned confidentially. “Have all the fun you want, but don’t go bustin’ up the furniture and bring the law down on our neck.” He winked. “You want me to bring up some ice and ginger ale?”
“Like I said, Dad,” Johnny swore, “she’s my sister.”
The old man settled back, miffed. “Okay,” he muttered sourly. “Jest tryin’ to be helpful....”
Walking up the dark stairway, Ruth shuddered. “The way he looked at me! I feel dirty inside, Johnny. I feel like I need a bath to wash his eyes off me.”
“Guys that work in hotels,” Johnny said grimly, “get cynical.”
He found the room on the second floor, unlocked the door and followed her in.
It was the size of a large bathroom. A chipped enamel bed was wedged into one corner. Close to it—so close you’d put your foot in a drawer if it were open—stood an old fashioned dresser. The carpet had long ago been pounded into a threadbare rag. There was one closet almost big enough to hand a necktie in and a cramped bathroom with all the necessary plumbing but in doubtful condition.
“You think you can stand it for one night?”
She smiled up at him brightly. “It’ll be fun, Johnny. I always wondered what it would be like to spend a night in a flea bag like this.”
“You’re a good sport. I’m sorry I have to put you in a dump like this. But I don’t know what else to do. You can’t trust anybody, least of all the police in this town. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to put you on a plane headed for your parents.”
She moved a step closer to him, her dress rustling seductively. She straightened his tie and grinned up at him. “I like you when you’re domineering and gruff, darling. You make me feel safe. But I won’t go.”
She was very near to him. A faint aura of perfume that surrounded her teased his nostrils. She was so close he could look down and see the smooth, clean pores of her cheeks. And by lowering his gaze a half-inch, he could see the provocative neckline of the simple blue dress, baring the shadowy valley of the rapidly rising and falling bosom.
“Johnny...,” she whispered thickly. She slid her arm around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers. Her lips were warm and moist and they parted readily. He could feel the firm strong young figure pressing against him through the gossamer sheerness of her dress.
The room spun. He dug his fingers into her back, tearing her dress with the urgency of his grip.
She sighed. “You love savagely, don’t you?” she whispered dreamily, her eyes closed. “The way you play your horn savagely and drink yourself to hell savagely. The way you hate the person who killed Miff Smith savagely.” She opened her eyes. Don’t you ever do anything civilized, Johnny Nickles?”
He relaxed and pulled her arms away from his neck. “You and your big college words. You started this—”
She touched his lips with her fingers. “I like you the way you are, Johnny darling. I wouldn’t want anything about you changed. There are too many so called civilized men in he world.” Her voice was suddenly harsh. “Civilized men with their lies and deceits and crookedness....” She looked away from him briefly. Then suddenly she lifted his hand and kissed his fingers. “Don’t leave me alone tonight, Johnny.”
It would be easy to stay. A few more kisses like the first one, and her restraint would melt away. She would go limp and he could pick her up and carry her across the room and lay her down gently and make love together.... It would be nice to lie close to her, to kiss the perfumed sweetness of her mouth, her neck, her ears, the soft hollow of her throat. And it would be a special kind of heaven to brush back the hem of her dress and touch the soft white flesh and feel her skin go hot and dry and hear the whispered groans in her throat.
The memory of her drunken abandoned dance in the Mexican café was still fresh in his mind.
Then he pushed her away. Yeah, it would be too nice. He would want to spend the night here—then tomorrow too, forgetting that their time was running out and the hovering shadows were closing in on them with each passing minute.
“There’s a bolt on the inside of the door. Don’t unlock it for anyone but me. Remember that.”
“Johnny—”
He hurried out and closed the door after him. He knew if he were to look again at the tearful disappointment in her eyes, he’d never leave. He walked out of the hotel feeling the night clerk’s rheumy eyes boring into his back.
He walked back down to Honky-Tonk Street.
It was nearly midnight. He stared curiously at the faces of the pleasure-seeking crowd as it milled around him along the walks. For an hour he tramped along, looking through bars, down alleys and along the sidewalks. He was about to give up when at last he spotted her crossing the street.
Jean Nathan, the two-timing wife of Dr. Ed Nathan, housewife by day, streetwalker by night. The gal who had some answers to the riddle of Miff Smith’s death—answers she hadn’t given out, not yet.
She was dressed in her shiny black satin dress and high-heeled ankle strap shoes. She was strolling insolently along, swinging the red patent leather bag at her side.
He waited until she was near him, threading through the crowd. Then he grabbed her arm and pulled her into the dark mouth of an alley. She started to yell but then she recognized him and said some unprintable words, instead. “What the hell are you up to, Johnny Nickles? Aren’t you a little too old or too young to be grabbing girls in alleys?”
“Shut up!”
He led her through the alley to a dingy bar on another street. They were in the Mexican section of town now. The bar was run by a swarthy scar-faced man who claimed to be a first cousin to one of Mexico’s early heroes—Pancho Villa.
Johnny pushed Jean into a dark booth at the back of the place, ordered two drinks and told the waiter to leave them alone. A nickelodeon was playing La Paloma.
She said, “You still look like hell. You look like a prizefighter who got hit by a truck.”
“Forget about that,” Nickles said. “Last night—” God, had it been only last night? It seemed like a year ago! “—last night I asked you some questions in a nice, polite way. But that was last night when I had more time and I wasn’t too sure of myself. Tonight I’m going to ask those questions again and I haven’t any time at all and I’m damned sure of one thing—that you’ll answer them!”
Her face paled under her thick make-up and greasy eye shadow. “What do you mean, Johnny Nickles?”
“You know what I mean, you filthy, common, cheating bitch!”
She jumped up and leaped out of the booth. She was shaking all over and her mouth wobbled. Her voice sounded like a parrot’s broken squawk. “I’m gettin’ out of here. You can’t talk like—”
; “The hell I can’t!” He grabbed her wrist and threw her back into the booth. Her red patent leather purse dropped out of her hand and spilled its contents over the floor. Sobbing, she got down on her knees and groped for the scattered items.
From behind the bar, the bartender glanced at them once, his face a swarthy mask. Then he shrugged and went back to his conversation with another customer.
She put everything back into her purse, then sat in the booth, crying softly. Her eye make-up ran down her cheeks in splotched streaks. “You don’t know, Johnny,” she whispered. “You don’t know everything. You think I’m pretty lousy. But you don’t know. Not everything—”
“I think you’re about as lousy as they come. What else am I supposed to think? Does he know? Does your husband know about your little trips down to Honky-Tonk Street?”
She shook her head silently. She wiped her fingers across her face, smearing the wet make-up into grotesque blobs. “...don’t understand,” she mumbled. “Not him.... I don’t care about him. But I don’t want you to think—” she buried her face in her hands. “Oh, what’s the use! What the hell’s the use of anything...!”
“Tell me about Monday night,” Johnny said through his teeth. “Tell me, dammit! I haven’t much time anymore. This thing is closing around me like a steel trap. I’ve got to know. Were you with Miff Smith Monday night?”
“I already told you. Yes, for a little while.”
“But how long? From when to when?”
“I don’t know exactly. From about seven-thirty until nearly nine, I think. Yeah, that was about when—”
He reached over and clamped his fingers around her wrist. “You could scream your lungs out here and nobody would pay any attention to you. Now tell me the truth. Did anybody come in during that time?”
She shook her head. “Don’t ask me, Johnny.”
“Okay, you want Ed to know? You want me to go to Dr. Ed Nathan, the respected psychiatrist, and tell him his wife is a Honky-Tonk Street tart?”
“Not yet,” she said numbly. “No, not yet—”
“Then tell me.”
She laughed without mirth. “That will solve nothing. Then it would all come out in the open. I’d have to testify.” She seemed to be talking aloud to herself. And she suddenly smiled. A strange, mysterious smile, like a little girl with a big secret. “Okay. Maybe that would be a good way.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You sound like a hophead. Just tell me some facts. What happened Monday night while you were with Miff—”
She threw her head back and lifted her long black hair off the back of her neck. “Okay. Sure, Johnny. Sure, I’ll tell you.” The corners of her mouth quirked and she started to giggle. She put her fingers over her mouth and laughed louder and louder until she was almost hysterical and Johnny reached across the table and slapped her hard.
But still she giggled. “It was so damned funny, Johnny,” she choked. “There we were—in each other’s arms—when she came in. Oh brother, you should have seen her face! She could have bitten the place in two!”
“Who?” Johnny asked carefully, an empty cold fear in him. “Who found you with him? Ruth Jordon?”
“No. Not her. The other one. The society dame. Raye Cowles.”
Johnny slapped his palm on the table. “I knew it. That was her pin I showed you, wasn’t it?”
Jean nodded. “Yeah. She was wearing it that night.”
“What did she do when she walked in on you?”
“She raised all kinds of hell. She screamed and threw things. When Miff got up and kicked her out, she swore she was going to get a gun and come back and kill both of us.”
“What did you do then?”
“Miff made me get out.”
“You don’t know if Raye Cowles came back?”
“I wasn’t there, but she was so made when she left, I’d give big odds she did.” She shivered. “I did come back afterwards. It must have been a few minutes after Miff was killed. I turned him over. He stared at me with his mouth all open and his eyes wide.”
“She wasn’t there then?”
Jean shook her head. “Nobody.”
“That’s okay. It’s the best motive that’s been found yet. And with your testimony and my swearing I found the pin—”
Johnny’s brain raced. With a witness like this, he was getting closer and closer to the truth. He’d get George Swenninger to back him and they’d find out if Raye Cowles had killed Miff.
But he had to find Raye first. He had to confront her with this evidence, make her sign a confession if possible, and turn over the murder weapon. If he broke the news about his witness, Jean Nathan, then the Cowles’ girl’s crooked old man would whisk her away to some safe place in Mexico or South America before they could touch her.
But would the testimony of a Honky-Tonk streetwalker and a broken down trumpet player be enough to convict the daughter of Sam Cowles? He doubted it. It would take more—a signed confession, the murder weapon. These things he still had to get.
He stood up.
“Run along and steer clear of the cops. I’ll call on you as soon as I locate Raye Cowles.”
“Maybe I can help you there, too,” Jean surprised him by saying. “My husband has treated her in the past for migraine headaches or she goes nuts. I’ll check with the drugstore and see if they’’ve sent out any refill on her prescriptions in the last couple of days—and if so, maybe I can find out where it was delivered. They know I’’m a doctor’s wife, so it won’t be difficult.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “Why are you suddenly so helpful?”
She smiled in that same mysterious way she had smiled a few minutes earlier. “Later, Johnny...later.”
“I’ll phone you tomorrow evening,” Johnny told her. “If you’ve found out anything by then, we’ll try to run down this Cowles dame. If not, we’ll go to the newspaper anyway and see if we can force the crooked police department to do something.”
He left her and started back to the hotel. When he got halfway down Honky-Tonk Street, someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was the match-chewing city detective, Harrison.
“Hi, Johnny. Still around, I see....”
Nickles muscles tensed. “Yeah, still around.”
“Well, that’s the way it goes. Some people appreciate a gift, some don’t. Those tickets now,” he recalled sadly, “we went to right smart trouble, buying them.”
Johnny was going to tell him, with considerable pleasure, to go to hell, but the cop interrupted.
“Well, since you’re still around, I guess we’d better go down and pay the Sheriff a visit. He has all the boys out looking for you, you know.” We been checking bus stations, airports and railroad depots all day.”
“You’re nuts,” Johnny said flatly. “You haven’t got a charge you can take me in on legally, unless it’s knowing too much about who killed Miff Smith, and—”
“That’s just the charge, Johnny,” the detective informed him blandly. “You know who did it all right. We’re taking you in on the charge of murdering Miff Smith....”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PERFECT SETUP
Friday Morning, 1:00 A.M.
Fred Botello sat behind his desk with his shoes off, staring gloomily at Johnny and the two men who had ushered him in. An electric fan buzzed softly at one corner of Botello’s desk. When it oscillated his way, it ruffled the few strands of iron gray hair on the top of his shiny scalp, making them stand up. From a half-opened window, the distant sounds of night traffic filtered into the room.
At first, Botello didn’t speak. He just sat scowling, silently. He burped once, softly, and the escaping gas made his fat lips pout. Then he fumbled in his drawer for his pills, found them and padded over to the water cooler with one pill held carefully in the palm of his left hand. He pulled down a paper cup with the other hand and filled it with water.
“Nickles,” he began at last in a grating tone, “where did you hide the gun yo
u killed Miff Smith with?”
Johnny swore at him.
The sheriff cupped his palm and tossed the pill into his mouth, gulping water after it. He squashed the paper cup, let it fall to the floor and padded back to Nickles. Then he slapped the trumpet player hard across the face first with one heavy hand then the other. When Johnny tried to spring at him, the two pokerfaced deputies grabbed him from behind and held him while Botello had his fun.
“So you were the first person to find Miff Smith Monday night, eh? And when you walked in, you saw a lady’s pin on the floor.”
“Not just a lady’s pin,” Johnny panted. “Raye Cowles’ pin—”
Botello slapped Johnny’s mouth again. “Shuddup, you lyin’ tinhorn bastard!” he yelled, the veins standing out at his temples.
He paced back to the windows, slammed them down and shut the venetian blinds. One of the deputies closed and locked the door leading to the hall.
Botello took a small blackjack from a desk drawer and sat on the edge of the desk, slapping the weapon gently against his palm. He was grinning, but there was a chilling gleam in his eyes. “This is a soundproof room, Johnny. A man could scream his lungs out in here and nobody’d know. I just wanted to explain that sometimes we get a criminal in here that gives us a little trouble. Gotta use some persuasion. You’d be surprised how a man’s tongue loosens up after you’ve kicked him in the kidneys a few times or given him a boiling water enema.” Botello grinned, the skin on his face pulling tightly. “I know you ain’t going to cause us to use them kinda measures. I’m goin’ to ask you a few simple questions and you’re goin’ to answer them, ain’t you? You’re smart, Johnny...you’ll make it easy for yourself.”
Johnny didn’t say anything.
“This boy that got himself killed, this Miff Smith. He was a good friend of yours?”
Johnny nodded. “Hell, yes—he was a good friend of mine. We played together all our lives.”
Botello took up a clipboard from his desk and leafed through some papers. His next question caught Johnny off guard. “You ever know,” he asked silkily, “a girl named Christine Roberts?”
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