A Nice Girl Like You (Lt. Andy Bastian Mysteries Book 2)

by Richard Wormser

  They scanned the licence plate of every car they passed, looking for stolen vehicles; that is, they did till they came to the pencilled police car. Then they snapped their heads away and looked at the bar-fronts for a car’s length before they resumed their scrutiny.

  “Rookies,” I said. I was laughing. “They’ll snap right-dress again when they pass the Narcotics Squad kids.”

  “Yours is such a glamorous profession,” Olga said.

  “Well, at least, I’ve never had to carry bedpans in the state insane asylum to study it. I’ll buy you a drink in here.”

  “If they’d used the bedpans, it wouldn’t have been so bad,” Olga said. “A big drink, daddy?’

  This bar was called the T-Star, for some reason; all the worse bars had names, unlike the worst ones. It stood between a row of three hock shops and a dollar-shirt store. We turned in, unconsciously bracing ourselves with deep chests-full of the stale street air.

  “Two whiskies, water back,’ I told the bartender.

  He was fat looking, but only at first glance; then you saw that the bulge under the cowboy shirt was hard as a drum, that the pudgy-looking arms were tightly muscled. He gave us the same sort of look we’d gotten on the other two blocks; whisky is not often ordered on Skid Row. The scrawny tall guy on my right was drinking Green Death, which is a cheap, strong ale; the two fat bimbos past Olga were both indulging in a little cream sherry, not from Spain. By the time they get to the Row, their stomachs are usually too riddled to swallow hard liquor; the sugar in the wine, the grain in the beer is necessary.

  The barman was looking at Olga. Without make-up, with her beatnik hairdo, she looked gaunt enough to him, I guess. He said: “Two schnapps, water onna side.”

  I turned my back on him, put my elbows on the bar, looked the room over. A bum was asleep on a splintery table, his head on his arm, his legs sprawled under the table as though they were broken. For a moment he looked a little like Walt Adams, and I half pushed away from the bar; then I saw it wasn’t.

  “Pay the man, daddy,” Olga said.

  Turning, I put four bits on the bar in small change. It was not sipping whisky; we gulped, and were glad of the chasers. I was beginning to get indigestion.

  “Let’s roll, babe,” I said.

  “I’m not oiled yet, daddy,” she said. “You promised to get me good and oiled.”

  “That’s a good girl,” the bartender said. “You sell him, now.”

  But something in her voice had caught me. I looked at her, and then where she was looking.

  There was a huge Negro in the doorway, dressed in blue jeans and a white Levi workshirt. He stepped aside, and there was Walt Adams.

  He looked beat and he looked drunk, but he was not yet so dirty as the rest of Skid Row. He slopped to an empty table and sat down, and a redheaded waitress toddled towards him on weak ankles.

  There was no use going to all this trouble and then panicking him. I wanted to reason with Walt, not put the collar on him. I turned back and put another four bits out. “Oil the lady, Mac.”

  “Sure,” Olga said. “I got dry bearings.”

  The bartender laughed. At that, it was probably a funnier remark than he usually heard in a week; one of the sherry drinkers was telling the other how she had a rich uncle, if the old bastard would just take the rubber off his wallet; the Green Death man was talking to himself, assuring himself he was the greatest pitcher in the big leagues.

  We held our drinks in our hands, the thin smell of blended whisky making me gag a little. Olga said: “That fella there’s a friend of mine. Okay if we talk to him a bitty minute?”

  Playing it cool. I went along with her: “Okay with me if it is with the man here. Can we take our glasses to the table?”

  The bartender looked at me, and deadpan, said: “You can take them if you’re strong enough. You may take them for all of me. How the waitress feels about being beat from a tip, I dunno.”

  So we joined Walt, and I signalled the redheaded waitress and ordered three. Olga said: “It’s good to see you, Walt.”

  Walt Adams stared at her. “It won’t take hold,” he said. “I’ve drunk and drunk, but it won’t take hold.”

  “Keep trying, boy.” This was me, with my two-and-a-half cents’ worth.

  Walt stared at me with the beginnings of hatred in his eyes. “Andy the cop. St. Andrew the Upholder of the Righteous. Come to arrest me, Andy?”

  The girl brought our drinks. I paid her, tipped her the rest of a dollar, and she went away. All around us the sounds and the smells and the drab sights of Skid Row went on. At another table, a man was drinking a glass of Tokay by bending over to it; his hands shook too hard to hold it.

  Slowly, I said: “It all depends, Walt. I couldn’t do it without hearing your side first. . . . After Ellie said you had a gun with you. I couldn’t put out a bulletin and have some casual cop pick you up. He’d see the gun and shoot, and –” I let him imagine the rest.

  Some bravado came into his voice. “Huh. Who’d shoot who? I’ve had that gun for a long time, sixteen years.”

  Now it was my turn to be tired. “You’ve been drinking. And how many times a year do you go out on a target range? You think a pistol aims itself?”

  Olga drained her little jigger, set it down on the table with a thump. “Stop it, Andy. Guns and violence, and who shoots who – that’s no way to talk. You sound like a five-year-old boy playing television cowboy.”

  Walt Adams said: “Do you know, they operate on the actors before they make them cowboys? Remove all their brains but ten per cent.”

  This was the Walt Adams who was our friend, my best friend in Naranjo Vista.

  Olga saw it as quickly as I did. She said: “Give Andy your gun, Walt.”

  I said, fast: “Pass it under the table. We don’t want it seen in a place like this.”

  “By God, no. A man’s got the right to protect himself.”

  Olga said: “Andy threw away his protection for you. He’s risked his job, our home, his career by not sending out word to pick you up.”

  Walt said suddenly: “Could I have a cup of black coffee?”

  I ordered it from the waitress. Olga switched her empty shot glass for mine. I wanted to tell her to knock off, to stop drinking, but I had better sense than to take a chance of losing her help.

  The coffee came, a dime; I gave the girl a quarter. My eyes never left Walt’s as I fumbled in my pocket for the coin and handed it out.

  Walt Adams said: “I could pull my gun on you and walk out. I could shoot you under the table, and in all this noise I could get away.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Why not? Andy, why not?”

  Here we went. “For the same reason that you didn’t attack that Patterson girl.”

  Olga gasped; Walt’s breath went out in a sigh that carried waves of liquor to me, though I’d been drinking myself. He dumped his whisky into his black coffee, and drank it in two gulps. His face seemed to pull together. “I thought there was no such thing as a criminal type?”

  “That’s what every police officer says. And then, when a crime is committed, the first thing he does is run to the M.O. file, convinced that whoever did the crime is probably in the habit of committing that crime, and few others.”

  The black coffee, lightly diluted with a half ounce of light whisky, had pulled him together; or maybe the steady talk was doing it. “That’s interesting. I guess it’s interesting. So I’m not a criminal assaulter?”

  “Olga thinks you’re not, and she’s a psychologist. Hal Levy thinks you’re not, and he’s your doctor. I’m just a dope, but I’m your friend. I’d rather think not.”

  Anger flared in his tired face, and I shifted my weight, ready to hit him if I had to. But his anger was not for me; he said: “Hal Levy has no right to give away his patient’s secrets!”

  Of course. Oh, of course. Dr. Levy hadn’t meant that Walt Adams was too gentle; he had meant that Walt was unable. I am always so damned slow
that it irritates me; stupid is a better word. I have to make up for it with training and energy.

  “Give me your gun, Walt.” Now I knew how to proceed. “You’d rather be dead than have it come out in public, but it doesn’t have to. I’m a good detective, Walt. Maybe the best you’ll ever meet. Give me the gun, and then give me the facts, and I’ll get this thing solved and broken without – without anything having to come out that isn’t really involved.”

  “You say.”

  “I say.”

  My eyes had never left his; now I saw him falter, waver, look hopeful. I was looking as self-confident as a girl who’s just been crowned Miss America. But I didn’t have a bathing suit on. I must remember to tell Olga my thoughts at that moment, the moment when something nudged my knee, and my hand closed around the butt of Walt Adam’s pistol and snaked it into my belt, under my shabby coat.

  My clever wife must have known what happened, because her voice was less tense, less professional as she said: “What really happened, Walt?”

  He shrugged a little. “Do I have to go into it all? I mean about Ellie and me and then –”

  “And then, Miss Crowthers and you,” I said, as he broke off. “I knew about that. I took her home, she had a breakdown, and she was muttering your name. I found a picture of you in her drawer. But nobody knows about it except me and her headshrinker.”

  “Professor Barnhart is a psychiatrist,” Olga said, automatically.

  “That Patterson kid,” Walt said. “My God, I’ve been a schoolteacher for years and years, and I never looked at a high school girl before as anything but a problem or a no-problem. But she was working in the office, and she kept brushing against me and – you know.”

  I said: “Nineteen years old is not a kid, Walt.” I thought of some of the girls that age I’d known in occupied territory. I thought of myself, two years after I’d first enlisted. I’d put childish things far behind me by then.

  “Then,” Walt said, “she laughed at me.”

  There was a little island of silence in that raucous joint, a little island around our table. I’d stopped looking into Walt Adams’s eyes. I didn’t know what to say. But Olga did. She put her hand on Walt’s and said: “We’re not laughing, Walt.”

  “She wanted money,” Walt said. “She’d kept little notes I’d passed her. She wanted more money than I could afford, and we met and I hit her, just a slap, and she scratched my face, and then I really socked her, and she went down. Down and out,” said Walt Adams.

  “Did you choke her?” I asked.

  “No. Why should I? She was knocked out, and Ellie was having this party, and I went back to the house. Hal Levy patched me up; I’d been socked by that gunthug, Bailey Spratt, too.”

  “If you hadn’t you wouldn’t have hit the girl,” my headshrinker wife said.

  Walt Adams said: “I suppose not.” Then he sank back into his apathy again. They always do that, after they confess; they sort of collapse, as though they’d reached the top of a steep hill.

  I wanted to ask him if he’d told Hal Levy about the girl. I started to, and then I realized that he hadn’t; Levy was too much of a doctor not to have rushed right out and tended her.

  “Simple assault,” I said. “A punch in the jaw. Not much of a crime, Walt.”

  He said suddenly: “Olga, if you see Hal Levy, don’t tell him I got mad at what he told Andy, here. He’s been a damned good friend to me.”

  “What did he do for you, Walt?”

  Olga said, sharply: “Andy, shut up!”

  I shot my hand out and grabbed her thin wrist. “You can be my girl, or you can be Hal Levy’s girl, but you can’t be both.”

  She stared at me. This was not the way to talk to a wife you planned on keeping.

  I doubt if Walt Adams had heard us. He said: “When we got back from looking at – identifying –”

  He was going to cry. I kept my voice as soft as possible, and said: “I know where you were. What happened?”

  Walt said, simply: “I put myself in Hal Levy’s hands. I told him I had hit Nora, but not assaulted her. He undressed me for bed and examined me and said he wouldn’t turn me in to the police. He was – I realize it – putting his whole professional career in my hands.”

  “For which you’ve certainly repaid him,” Olga said.

  I looked around the T-Star. This was the world, looked up at. From a doctor’s office, it was the same world, but from the opposite point of view. I made my decision: “Olga you were a fool to marry a man as old as I am. Did you know I was beginning to get deaf?” I pushed back from the filthy table.

  “Andy –” My girl had tears in her fine eyes. But she was still my girl.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “We’re taking you home, Walt.”

  Now I knew what I had to do. It would cost about forty-five cents and some gas. In Jack Davis’s present mood, I’d be damned if I’d turn in a bill to the city; this would come out of my own pocket.

  Slowly we walked back to our car. We passed bums and tramps, street walkers and dames that were just pub crawlers; uniformed cops and undercover men; hopheads and people who just smoked a little pot now and then. Humanity. A low stratum, but people; the ones I was sworn to protect.

  As we passed the uniformed rookies, swinging their nightsticks, flaunting their guns, I wondered if any of them had yet realized the awful weight on a cop’s shoulders, not at all offset by the weight of the gun on his hip.

  From their unlined faces, I didn’t think that the thought, or much of any thought, had bothered them. If it did, would they quit police work now, with their lives ahead of them?

  Me, I couldn’t quit. I was pushing forty, and I didn’t know anything else. I could pump gas in a filling station, or pass out cigars in a drug store, but I couldn’t make enough money to keep my house – and, I thought, my wife – any way but by wearing the old badge and gun.

  We were almost at the parking lot. Where a liquor store window threw a bright patch of golden light on the sidewalk, I stopped. “You two go ahead. I’ll join you at the car.”

  Walt Adams swung around and faced me. “Go on, by myself?”

  “You’ve run away once,” I said. “You’re too smart to repeat yourself.”

  He stared at me, and a tiny, half-smile twisted his lips. Olga took his arm, and they walked on.

  The liquor store had a phone on the wall, no booth. I bought a pint of the cheapest Tokay before I used the phone to call the sheriff’s office, back in our county seat. When I asked for the detectives, a Lieutenant Hansen answered. I told him who I was. “I’m in Los Angeles. I’ll be out there in an hour. Could you have a police stenographer and someone from the D.A.’s office meet me?”

  Hansen said: “Sure. What have you got, Bastian?”

  “Crack in the Patterson case. Think we can wind it up tonight.”

  My pockets bulky with the pint and with Walt Adams’s gun, I went on to my car, paying the parking lot man as I went by. That was something I’d forgotten; I could park cars, too.

  But this was a park-yourself lot. Olga was behind the wheel, Walt Adams in the back seat. Olga asked me if I wanted to drive. I shook my head and got in beside her, and she started off smoothly, twisted in and out of traffic for a couple of blocks, and put us on the freeway. heading for the county seat and home.

  I said: “I owe your friend Levy an apology.”

  “You apologize to Hal Levy and I’ll – I’ll put salt in your coffee.”

  This brought me straight up in my seat. “Hey, Olga, what are you mad about?”

  “You put in seven hundred and twenty hours a week trying to keep our town running nicely, and then an educated floop like Hal Levy holds out on you – I suppose because good guys don’t snitch – and almost ruins everything.”

  I took this one thing at a time. “An educated what?”

  “A floop. Hal Levy is a floop.”

  “Certainly wish I had your educated vocabulary. . . . And there aren’t seven hundred and tw
enty hours in a week.”

  “Don’t be any squarer than you have to.”

  “Just a cube, that’s me. Andy Bastian, square any way you look at me.”

  She laughed a little. I looked in the back seat. Walt Adams was asleep. I put my chin down and rested, but I didn’t shut my eyes. We left Los Angeles County, and, after awhile, we crossed into our own. I was again on duty, as a sworn deputy. I told Olga to turn off for the County General Hospital.

  She nodded, and made the switch. It was only about ten o’clock, though it felt like four in the morning; the big County General, looming beside the freeway, was still lit up.

  “Back door,” I said, and showed her where to park, in the space reserved for police cars. Then I got out and walked away, and, after a second, walked back again and around to her side of the car.

  The night was getting damp and chilly, but she had her window down; I had no trouble at all kissing her. In return, I got one of her grins; they had been a little rare, lately.

  The police ward was familiar to me; we’d had a hit-and-run violator there for a few days. But the guard on the gate didn’t know me. I had to show him my I.D. Then he stood aside, saluting, and I went through the barred gate and he locked me in.

  A male nurse was on the desk. I asked him for Junior Wright. I had forgotten the first name again.

  No one is more bored than a male nurse; I’ve never known one to show the slightest interest in anyone. This one went slowly through his whole list before he deigned to look at the Ws. Then he said: “Sorry. Not here.”

  “What do you mean, he’s not here?”

  “No Wright.” He picked up a temperature chart and examined it with intense, devoted interest, a scientist about to discover something to shake the medical world.

  “He was here,” I said. “Where did he go?”

  He didn’t look up. “They come and they go. How should I know?”

  “Who would?”