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

by Richard Wormser

“Maybe Dr. Eastman. I’ll turn his light on.” He pressed a button on his desk, and leaned back, exhausted.

  Dr. Eastman was young, black haired, thin moustached, peppy. He was the man I’d talked to on the phone; his voice sounded older than he looked. When he heard my name, he said he was glad to see me.

  “Where’s my boy, doctor?”

  “Flew away. A lawyer named Leonard came in with a habeas corpus and I had to let him go.”

  Of course. Junior had gotten over his aversion to his father and his father’s lawyer. I said: “Found out where they were taking him?”

  Eastman grinned. “There was a lot of talk about an ambulance plane to take him upstate. It occurred to me that you might not like that, so I waved my little learning around, and convinced them he’d be better off just riding one of our elevators to a private room.”

  “Why, thanks. That’s a high grade of cooperation.”

  The grin twisted the hair-line moustache again. “The police helped me through school,” he said. “They gave me a job tending short-wave radios. I like cops. It may not be fashionable, but I am a copper-bug. Your little hunk of nothing is in Room 2332.”

  “And thanks a lot.”

  “Any time,” he said, and turned back towards the ward.

  It was nice timing; the gate clanged just as his door closed, and my men were there. Lieutenant Hansen, big in plainclothes, and an assistant District Attorney he introduced as Mr. Norris.

  When I told them our man had been moved to the twenty-third floor, we went out through the gate again. Hansen stopped to get his .38 back from the guard; it is improper and illegal to carry a firearm into a prison ward, just like a jail. I kept my mouth shut about my gun – and Walt Adams’s – in my pocket. The guard had forgotten to ask me if I was armed.

  The male nurse didn’t look up to watch us go; we didn’t exist for him. I wondered what possible good he did the county payroll sitting at that desk. It didn’t seem to be any of my business.

  An elevator took us down to the twenty-third, a walk took us to 2332. There was no Do Not Disturb or No Visitors sign on the door, for which I thanked my tiny luck.

  There was no doctor or private nurse in attendance.

  Junior Wright was there, all right, small in a big bed. The bandages around his ribs bulked up through the bed-clothes; his eyes were bright with fever, and the stench of paraldehyde was strong in the room.

  Hansen said: “Let me know when to start writing,” and took a notebook out of his pocket.

  I said: “Hello Junior.”

  “Ya kin go t’hell,” he said. He was using his Skid Row accent.

  “Now Junior, I don’t think we’re going to do that.”

  “Don’t call me Junior.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “When you go into the gas chamber, don’t you want everyone to read your real name in the papers? That’ll really peeve your old man.”

  “You can drop that hard-boiled cop talk,” he said. “You don’t have anything on me, or you wouldn’t have let me out of that terrible prison ward.” He was being cultured for awhile.

  “With that crease on your ribs, you weren’t going anyplace,” I said. “I needed a little time to hang it on you, and here it comes. You attacked that girl.”

  “What you bin sniffin’?” Skid Row again.

  “No sniff. Just a swallow.” I took the bottle of Tokay out of my pocket, let its paper bag fall rustling to the floor.

  The D.A., Mr. Norris, said: “You can’t give liquor to a prisoner.”

  “If you want to get technical, he isn’t a prisoner. After awhile I’ll book him, and then he won’t get another drink for the rest of his life.”

  Lieutenant Hansen said: “Take it easy, Norrie. I think Bastian’s on to something.” He still held his notebook and pencil, but he hadn’t started writing again. It was obvious that this was no new scene to him. I wanted Junior to have time to think long, juicy thoughts, so I looked at Lieutenant Hansen.

  He had blue eyes, not surprising in a Hansen. But blue, grey, brown or black, all police eyes look the same, I thought. Hard and bright and not interested in anything at all.

  I wondered if mine had that look. I hoped not.

  And then I chuckled under my breath. Schizoid, in my wife’s language. As two-way as little Junior, with his Skid Row-Ivy League personalities.

  People who looked down on cops made me mad, and cops made me mad, and what did that make me? A poor, shorn lamb in a world of misunderstanding, a concept that hardly fitted my long, tough frame, the two guns in my pocket, or my background.

  Junior Wright moved uncomfortably in the bed, and said: “Whatta I got to do to get that vino? Like talk?”

  “Like talk, Junior,” I said. “About the girl. About everything that happened. What you were doing in Naranjo Vista, what you’d been doing, how you got there. And about the girl.”

  “I never hit her,” Junior said. His tongue was thickening in his mouth. The sweat on his forehead was, I knew, cold; I didn’t touch him to find out. Surely the nurses had bathed him, but I didn’t want to touch him, anyway.

  “No,” I said. “You never hit her.” I put the bottle back in my pocket, and smiled at his horrible little face. “You found her knocked out on the ground, before you ever got there.”

  He blinked at me, running his tongue across his lips. Not being a drinking man, I had only a vague idea what he was going through. It looked horrible. “You see,” I said, “I know what happened. But you can save me a lot of trouble by admitting it.” I took the bottle out, and said: “You may have one swallow.” I split the plastic seal with my thumbnail, took the screw cap off, let the sweet, heavy odour go up his nose. His Adam’s apple was jerking like on a hooked trout, or a hanged man.

  “She was on the ground,” he said. The lights in the pint bottle had him hypnotized. “Her skirt was up.” He was using his Ivy League accent. Then he cracked. “For God’s sake, give me the drink, cap.”

  Hansen was writing. I handed Junior the wine. He gulped, and would have gone on gulping, but I bent the bottle down, and took it away from him. Sticky wine ran down his chin, pursued by his too-short tongue. He brought a finger up, mopped the wine, licked the finger. The nurses had scrubbed his hands clean, but they hadn’t been able to do much about his fingernails.

  Taking my time, hammering it up, I screwed the cap back on the bottle. I started to slide it back into my pocket.

  Junior’s voice was almost a scream. “Nice, clean girl, laying there. She come to.” But his eyes were on my pocket. I gave him another snort.

  Hansen looked up from his book and gave me a sour grin. We knew, we were cops, we’d been there before.

  Back to dear Junior.

  Business of drops down the chin, business of tongue and fingers all over again. I had had enough of this, but I was not being paid to quit when I had enough, but when the people did. The People, versus.

  “What were you doing in Naranjo Vista?”

  He shrugged, then winced; he’d hurt his ribs. “Employment agency, state employment agency sent me out,” he said. “I had the shorts, down to my last deemo,” he said.

  Hansen sighed and cut in. “Deemo?”

  “Dime,” Junior Wright said. “A job washing cars. Supposed to be a buck an hour, but this guy wouldn’t pay more’n fifty cents.”

  “What was his name?”

  “A big shot. They make it in wheelbarrow loads, but he wouldn’t pay more’n fifty cents. I ain’t no scab,” Junior Wright said, with dignity. “I don’t work for four bits the hour. He think I’m a bum?”

  “His name?”

  “Sprigg or Spratt or something.”

  “Bailey Spratt?”

  “I dunno. So I walked out on him. Now I’m in the boon-docks, no money, can’t even get to Skid Row, where maybe I can make a contact.”

  They are generous on the Row, knowing each other’s needs. They buy friendship on the Row, a pal for a swallow, a lifelong buddy for a pint. They mean it, at th
e time.

  “I try the liquor store,” Junior Wright said. “I’ll wash his windows, scrub his floor, but it’s no contact. I cannot make a buy,” Junior said, and his eyes were luminous with memory of his pain. “There’s nothing for it but the backyard route.” He shook his head. “That’s when I got the fright. You can’t backyard it when you’re in a town where everybody is in the right place.”

  Norris was looking a question. I gave Junior Wright another swallow, and said: “He means going along an alley, looking into kitchen windows till you see a bottle of cooking sherry.”

  “Huh,” Junior said, licking his finger, “beer in an icebox, too. Who misses one?”

  Hansen and I looked at each other. It was a thought. If a bum slipped into a kitchen, took a beer, and ran, who would ever know to report it? Each of us filed it away in our police minds. Sometime it would be valuable.

  “Too much risk,” Junior Wright said. “And then I see this Mr. Sprigg again. The one who wanted to pay me fifty cents an hour. I’m gonna pitch him the tale, tell him I’ve thought it over, anything to get a buck advance out of him. He’s driving, but he is driving slow, like he’s about to stop. And that he does, out by the golf course, like, and there’s a girl, and she gets in with him, and they have a drink. I’m behind some trees. They drink out of a bottle, and he puts it in the glove compartment and they go into the trees and I come out, and get the bottle.”

  His eyes were bright with the memory. Mine felt bright, too. From the dronings of Sunday-fools back in the Orphan Home, a phrase boiled up: “Mine enemy is delivered into my hands.” I gave Junior Wright another snort.

  “I’m awake when Mr. Spratt comes out of the woods and gets in his car,” Junior said, getting Bailey’s name right for once. “Then the girl is walking away, and I am taking a little nap. Then I wake up, and there’s still two good snorts in the bottle. While I am repasting myself with those the girl comes back.” He was lit, now; his language getting flossy and Skid Row elegant. “She waits, smoking a cigarette. A guy comes along, walking. She throws her cigarette away. You should never throw a lighted butt away in the country,” Junior Wright said. “It, starts forest fires.”

  The D.A., Norris, let out a snort, and concealed his face in the palm of his hand.

  Junior Wright said, “Mr. Spigot’s bottle is empty. I move over there, soft like a pussycat, just as the guy socks her. She goes for his face, wow, wow, scratching away, and he socks her again, and she goes down, and he goes away, fast. I move in and look her over.”

  A pretty picture was conjured up; Nora Patterson lying sprawled on her back, skirt up, maybe the pink rayon panties showing. And Junior Wright, filthy, reeking with stolen whisky – he’d been lucky he could keep it down – looking her over.

  “So,” Junior Wright said, “I’m right there.”

  I gave him the bottle; this time I didn’t pull it away. There was one more question, and the drunker he was, the better for my purposes.

  Norris asked it: “Could you identify the man who hit this girl?”

  “Kinda fat,” Junior Wright said dreamily. He held a firm grip on the pint. It wasn’t nearly enough for him, but he nursed the last inch in the bottom, sipping. Afterwards would come the paraldehyde again. “About forty,” Junior Wright said. He liked being the centre of all this attention now. The wine had drawn a blanket over his personal danger.

  “Could it have been this Bailey Spratt?” I asked.

  “Could be,” Junior Wright said. “Could not be.” He drained the bottle, and I looked at Hansen and Norris.

  “Enough,” Mr. Norris said.

  But Junior had not had an audience like this in years.

  “Whataya mean, Bailey Spratt?” Junior asked. “I never heard of no Bailey Spratt. You’re trying to put words into my mouth,” he wailed. “It ain’t fair.”

  “The man who wanted you to wash cars.” My voice was its most patient. I didn’t feel that way myself.

  “His name was Luther Schmidt,” Junior Wright said, with great clarity.

  “And he was a new car dealer in Naranjo Vista?” Junior crouched under the whip of my voice; Norris and Hansen were looking at me curiously.

  “I never said that,” Junior cried. Tears were running down his scrubbed – by the nurses – face. “He’s like a used-car dealer an’ bus operator over in Citrus Grove. I was walkin’ back through Naranjo Whatsit, tryin’ for a back door.”

  My breath came ripping out so hard that I choked and coughed. Mine enemy was no longer in my hands. I had seen Luther Schmidt’s sign driving by Citrus Grove, which was the next subdivision over.

  Norris and Hansen were still looking at me. If they had been my men, would I have tried to bully Junior into changing his story a little bit, and naming Bailey Spratt? I don’t know.

  “We’ve got enough,” Mr. Norris said again.

  I nodded slowly.

  “I’ll type it up fast in the nurse’s office, and get him to sign it,” Hansen said. “Even with three witnesses, it’s better to get them to sign it.”

  I said that it certainly was always better to get them to sign it, and shook hands all around, and we walked down the hall.

  Hansen asked the floor nurse if he could use her typewriter. Before sitting down to it, he hitched his gun out of the way so it wouldn’t stick into his prosperous belly. He carried an awful lot of gun barrel for a plain-clothes man.

  Riding down in the elevator, Norris asked me what I thought.

  “What do you lawyers say? Nolle prosequi?”

  “That’s the noun,” Norris said, sourly. “The verb is ‘nol pros.’ You think we have no case?”

  “Depends,” I said. “I’ve got an awful lot of stuff, too. This Patterson girl was running for money. Middle-aged men are fools.”

  “Nineteen,” Mr. Norris said. “Well above the age of consent.”

  “There’s still contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” I said. “A high misdemeanour, if not a felony. There’s still the simple old fact that a guy who has been seeing a high school girl wouldn’t want his wife to know about it. Taxpayers, friends. I’ve uncovered two guys she was collecting from, but I’ll bet there were more.”

  We were at the bottom. We walked out to the parking lot. I could make out the dim figures of Olga and Walt in my car. I did not want Mr. Norris to meet Walt.

  He said: “One thing certain. We would never get to prosecute the girl for blackmail. Don’t know that I’d want to. She’s had enough. Imagine her family’ll move away and leave this county in peace and quiet. Wright, upstairs? I understand his old man’s rich.”

  “Yes. He brought a lawyer down from Stockton. Shyster named Leonard.”

  Mr. Norris let out a big sigh, aimed at the stars, which were invisible in the smog that had started to bless us again. “Leonard’s no shyster. A very successful banker-and-broker attorney. Surprised he’d step into a criminal affair; means Wright Senior is really loaded. Well, that does it. The girl was unconscious but how do we prove a thing like that? Junior says she opened one eye and winked at him, and who’s to prove she didn’t?”

  “He said she came to.”

  “He’ll lie better,” Mr. Norris said. “Have a cigarette? Yes, he’ll lie better when his lawyer tells him we have to prove she was unconscious. Which we can’t.”

  We lit up. In the glow, his face was strained and serious. “You’re lucky, being a cop,” he said. “All you have to do is arrest the right man. Me, us, the prosecutors, we have to block all the loopholes, and if we don’t, we have to figure we’re turning all kinds of criminals loose, letting them laugh at the law.”

  My smoke curled up in front of me. It was a very still night, down where we were, but there must have been air currents up above; the smog smelled of Fontana, twenty miles away. “Considering the sort of girl Nora Patterson is, it would be a shame to sock Junior Wright with a criminal assault charge.”

  “How about the next girl he finds – No, that’s silly. A man doesn’t stumb
le on two girls like that in a lifetime.”

  “No,” I said. “A man doesn’t find two girls like that in a lifetime. But it seems a lousy shame that Junior goes free as an eagle in a windstorm. It is sort of an insult to your profession, and mine, and to every decent citizen in the whole damned United States.”

  “Any suggestions, lieutenant?”

  We were two sworn officers of the law, but we were alone in a dark parking lot. We couldn’t see each other’s eyes, at least I couldn’t see his. I said: “Mr. Leonard is a civil lawyer, he wouldn’t know much about criminal courts and criminal charges. Think he’d fall for a bluff?”

  Mr. Norris said: “Till I hear what the bluff is, I couldn’t say.”

  The next step up for him was as an elective officer, not appointed as cops are. Junior’s father had money. Money comes in handy when you’re running for office. I said: “Offer to let Junior go if he will sign a voluntary commitment to a state mental institution. For drying out, for mental therapy.”

  Mr. Norris teetered on his heels. He locked his hands behind his back, and looked up, consulting the smog-hidden stars. “It would sound very, very good,” he said. “Yes. I do the Wrights a favour. And I do the community one, too.” He chuckled. “And poor Junior. There’s one hospital, I have to look up to see which one, where the doctors believe in a wino quitting cold turkey, no tapering off at all. I’ll make it that one.”

  “He’ll at least not be any trouble to any cops for awhile. What’s left of the case, Mr. Norris?”

  “How about the man who knocked Nora Patterson out? A thousand dollars, six months in county jail, there.”

  “For socking a blackmailer, male or female?”

  Mr. Norris waved smoke away from in front of him. “If we’re so damned prosperous,” he asked, “why can’t we get air to breathe? No fun smoking in this stuff.” He ground his cigarette out, viciously. “Yeah, I guess I sympathize with the guy, even though I was brought up never to sock a lady . . . I’m past forty myself. It could be an awful temptation.”

  “I’m in my late thirties,” I said.

  “Watch it, in a couple of years,” Mr. Norris said. He put out his hand again, and we separated.