He poured a real drink this time.
We sat around and waited for the phone to ring. I got my fifty bucks to play with.
The phone rang four times and it sounded from his voice as if women were talking to him. The call we wanted didn’t come through until ten-forty.
Two—I Lose My Client
I drove. Or rather I held the wheel of the big black car and let it drive itself. I was wearing a sporty light-colored overcoat and hat belonging to Lindley Paul. I had ten grand in hundred dollar bills in one of the pockets. Paul was in the back seat. He had a silver-mounted Luger that was a pip to look at, and I hoped he knew how to use it. There wasn’t anything about the job I liked.
The meeting place was a hollow at the head of Purissima Canyon, about fifteen minutes from the house. Paul said he knew the spot fairly well and wouldn’t have any trouble directing me.
We switchbacked and figure-eighted around on the side of the mountain until I got dizzy and then all of a sudden we were out on the state highway, and the lights of the streaming cars were a solid white beam as far as you could see in either direction. The long-haul trucks were on their way.
We turned inland past a service station at Sunset Boulevard. There was loneliness then, and for a while the smell of kelp, not very strong, and the smell of wild sage dripping down the dark slopes much stronger. A dim, distant yellow window would peek down at us from the crest of some realtor’s dream. A car would growl by and its white glare would hide the hills for a moment. There was a half-moon and wisps of cold fog chasing it down the sky.
“Off here is the Bel-Air Beach Club,” Paul said. “The next canyon is Las Pulgas and the next after that is Purissima. We turn off at the top of the next rise.” His voice was hushed, taut. It didn’t have any of the Park Avenue brass of our earlier acquaintance.
“Keep your head down,” I growled back at him. “We may be watched all the way. This car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic.”
The car purred on in front of me until, “Turn right here,” he whispered sharply at the top of the next hill.
I swung the black car into a wide, weed-grown boulevard that had never jelled into a traffic artery. The black stumps of unfinished electroliers jutted up from the crusted pavement. Brush leaned over the concrete from the waste land behind. I could hear crickets chirp and tree frogs drone behind them. The car was that silent.
There was a house to a block now, all dark. The folks out there went to bed with the chickens it seemed. At the end of this road the concrete stopped abruptly and we slid down a dirt slope to a dirt terrace, then down another slope, and a barricade of what looked like four-by-fours painted white loomed across the dirt road.
I heard a rustling behind me and Paul leaned over the seat, with a sigh in his whispered voice. “This is the spot. You’ve got to get out and move that barricade and drive on down into the hollow. That’s probably so that we can’t make a quick exit, as we’d have to back out with this car. They want their time to get away.”
“Shut up and keep down unless you hear me yell,” I said.
I cut the almost noiseless motor and sat there listening. The crickets and tree frogs got a little louder. I heard nothing else. Nobody was moving nearby, or the crickets would have been still. I touched the cold butt of the gun under my arm, opened the car door and slid out on to the hard clay, stood there. There was brush all around. I could smell the sage. There was enough of it to hide an army. I went towards the barricade.
Perhaps this was just a tryout, to see if Paul did what he was told to do.
I put my hands out—it took both of them—and started to lift a section of the white barrier to one side. It wasn’t a tryout. The largest flashlight in the world hit me square in the face from a bush not fifteen feet away.
A thin, high, niggerish voice piped out of the darkness behind the flash: “Two of us with shotguns. Put them mitts up high an’ empty. We ain’t takin’ no chances.”
I didn’t say anything. For a moment I just stood holding the barricade inches off the ground. Nothing from Paul or the car. Then the weight of the four-by-fours pulled my muscles and my brain said let go and I put the section down again. I put my hands slowly into the air. The flash pinned me like a fly squashed on the wall, I had no particular thought except a vague wonder if there hadn’t been a better way for us to work it.
“Tha’s fine,” the thin, high, whining voice said. “Jes’ hold like that until I git aroun’ to you.”
The voice awakened vague echoes in my brain. It didn’t mean anything though. My memory had too many such echoes. I wondered what Paul was doing. A thin, sharp figure detached itself from the fan of light, immediately ceased to be sharp or of any shape at all, and became a vague rustling off to the side. Then the rustling was behind me. I kept my hands in the air and blinked at the glare of the flash.
A light finger touched my back, then the hard end of a gun. The half-remembered voice said: “This may hurt jes’ a little.”
A giggle and a swishing sound. A white, hot glare jumped through the top of my head. I piled down on the barricade and clawed at it and yelled. My right hand tried to jerk down under my left arm.
I didn’t hear the swishing sound the second time. I only saw the white glare get larger and larger, until there was nothing else anywhere but hard, aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under the microscope. Then there was nothing red and nothing wriggling, just darkness and emptiness, and a falling sensation.
I woke up looking fuzzily at a star and listening to two goblins talking in a black hat.
“Lou Lid.”
“What’s that?”
“Lou Lid.”
“Who’s Lou Lid?”
“A tough dinge gunman you saw third-degreed once down at the Hall.”
“Oh…Lou Lid.”
I rolled over and clawed at the ground and crawled up on one knee. I groaned. There wasn’t anybody there. I was talking to myself, coming out of it. I balanced myself, holding my hands flat on the ground, listening, not hearing anything. When I moved my hands, dried burrs stuck to the skin and the sticky ooze from the purple sage from which wild bees get most of their honey.
Honey was sweet. Much, much too sweet, and too hard on the stomach. I leaned down and vomited.
Time passed and I gathered my insides together again. I still didn’t hear anything but the buzzing in my own ears. I got up very cautiously, like an old man getting out of a tub bath. My feet didn’t have much feeling in them and my legs were rubbery. I wobbled and wiped the cold sweat of nausea off my forehead and felt the back of my head. It was soft and pulpy, like a bruised peach. When I touched it I could feel the pain clear down to my ankles. I could feel every pain I ever felt since the first time I got kicked in the rear in grade school.
Then my eyes cleared enough for me to see the outlines of the shallow bowl of wild land, with brush growing on the banks all around like a low wall, and a dirt road, indistinct under the sinking moon, crawling up one side. Then I saw the car.
It was quite close to me, not more than twenty feet away. I just hadn’t looked in that direction. It was Lindley Paul’s car, lightless. I stumbled over to it and instinctively grabbed under my arm for a gun. Of course there wasn’t any gun there now. The whiny guy whose voice reminded me of someone would have seen to that. But I still had a fountain pen flash. I unshipped it, opened the rear door of the car and poked the light in.
It didn’t show anything—no blood, no torn upholstery, no starred or splintered glass, no bodies. The car didn’t seem to have been the scene of a battle. It was just empty. The keys hung on the ornate panel. It had been driven down there and left. I pointed my little flash at the ground and began to prowl, looking for him. He’d be around there all right, if the car was.
Then in the cold silence a motor throbbed above the rim of the bowl. The light in my hand went out. Other lights— headlights—tilted up over the frayed bushes. I dropped and craw
led swiftly behind the hood of Lindley Paul’s car.
The lights tilted down, got brighter. They were coming down the slope of the dirt road into the bowl. I could hear the dull, idling sound of a small motor now.
Halfway down the car stopped. A spotlight at the side of the windshield clicked on and swung to one side. It lowered, held steady on some point I couldn’t see. The spot clicked off again and the car came slowly on down the slope.
At the bottom it turned a little so that its headlights raked the black sedan. I took my upper lip between my teeth and didn’t feel myself biting it until I tasted the blood.
The car swung a little more. Its lights went out abruptly. Its motor died and once more the night became large and empty and black and silent. Nothing—no movement, except the crickets and tree frogs far off that had been droning all the time, only I hadn’t been hearing them. Then a door latch snapped and there was a light, quick step on the ground and a beam of light cut across the top of my head like a sword.
Then a laugh. A girl’s laugh—strained, taut as a mandolin wire. And the white beam jumped under the big black car and hit my feet.
The girl’s voice said sharply: “All right, you. Come out of there with your hands up—and very damned empty! I’ve got you covered!”
I didn’t move.
The voice stabbed at me again. “Listen, I’ve got three slugs for your feet, mister, and seven more for your tummy, and spare clips, and I change them plenty fast. Coming?”
“Put that toy up!” I snarled. “Or I’ll blow it out of your hand.” My voice sounded like somebody else’s voice. It was hoarse and thick.
“Oh, a hard-boiled gentleman.” There was a little quaver in the voice now. Then it hardened again, “Coming? I’ll count three. Look at all the odds I’m giving you—twelve big fat cylinders to hide behind—or is it sixteen? Your feet will hurt you though. And anklebones take years to get well when they’ve been hurt, and sometimes—”
I straightened up and looked into her flashlight. “I talk too much when I’m scared, too,” I said.
“Don’t—don’t move another inch! Who are you?”
“A bum private dick—detective to you. Who cares?”
I started around the car towards her. She didn’t shoot. When I was six feet from her I stopped.
“You stay right there!” she snapped angrily—after I had stopped.
“Sure. What were you looking at back there, with your windshield spotlight?”
“A man.”
“Hurt bad?”
“I’m afraid he’s dead,” she said simply. “And you look half dead yourself.”
“I’ve been sapped,” I said. “It always makes me dark under the eyes.”
“A nice sense of humor,” she said. “Like a morgue attendant.”
“Let’s look him over,” I said gruffly. “You can stay behind me with your popgun, if it makes you feel any safer.”
“I never felt safer in my life,” she said angrily, and backed away from me.
I circled the little car she had come in, An ordinary little car, nice and clean and shiny under what was left of the moon. I heard her steps behind me but I didn’t pay any attention to her. About halfway up the slope a few feet off to the side I saw his foot.
I put my own little flash on him and then the girl added hers. I saw him all. He was smeared to the ground, on his back, at the base of a bush. He was in that bag-of-clothes position that always means the same thing.
The girl didn’t speak. She kept away from me and breathed hard and held her light as steadily as any tough old homicide veteran.
One of his hands was flung out in a frozen gesture. The fingers were curled. The other hand was under him and his overcoat was twisted as though he had been thrown out and rolled. His thick blond hair was matted with blood, black as shoe polish under the moon, and there was more of it on his face and there was a gray ooze mixed in with the blood. I didn’t see his hat.
Then was when I ought to have got shot, Up to that instant I hadn’t even thought of the packet of money in my pocket. The thought came to me so quickly now, jarred me so hard, that I jammed a hand down into my pocket. It must have looked exactly like a hand going for a gun.
The pocket was quite empty. I took the hand out and looked back at her.
“Mister,” she half sighed, if I hadn’t made my mind up about your face—”
“I had ten grand,” I said. “It was his money. I was carrying it for him. It was a pay-off. I just remembered the money. And you’ve got the sweetest set of nerves I ever met on a woman. I didn’t kill him.”
“I didn’t think you killed him,” she said. “Somebody hated him to smash his head open like that.”
“I hadn’t known him long enough to hate him,” I said. “Hold the flash down again.”
I knelt and went through his pockets, trying not to move him much. He had loose silver and bills, keys in a tooled leather case, the usual billfold with the usual window for a driver’s licence and the usual insurance cards behind the licence. No money in the folder. I wondered why they had missed his trouser pockets. Panicked by the light, perhaps. Otherwise they’d have stripped him down to his coat lining. I held more stuff up in her light: two fine handkerchiefs as white and crisp as dry snow; half a dozen paper match folders from swank night traps; a silver cigarette case as heavy as a buggy weight and full of his imported straightcuts; another cigarette case, with a tortoise-shell frame and embroidered silk sides, each side a writhing dragon. I tickled the catch open and there were three long cigarettes under the elastic, Russians, with hollow mouthpieces. I pinched one. It felt old, dry.
“Maybe for ladies,” I said. “He smoked others.”
“Or maybe jujus,” the girl said behind me, breathing on my neck. “I knew a lad who smoked them once. Could I look?”
I passed the case up to her and she poked her flash into it until I growled at her to put it on the ground again. There wasn’t anything else to examine. She snapped the case shut and handed it back and I put it in his breast pocket.
“That’s all. Whoever tapped him down was afraid to wait and clean up. Thanks.”
I stood up casually and turned and speared the little gun out of her hand.
“Darn it, you didn’t have to get rough!” she snapped.
“Give,” I said. “Who are you, and how come you ride around this place at midnight?”
She pretended I had hurt her hand, put the flash on it and looked at it carefully.
“I’ve been nice to you, haven’t I?” she complained. “I’m burning up with curiosity and scared and I haven’t asked you a single question, have I?”
“You’ve been swell,” I said. “But I’m in a spot where I can’t fool around. Who are you? And douse the flash now. We don’t need light any more.”
She put it out and the darkness lightened for us gradually until we could see the outlines of the bushes and the dead man’s sprawled body and the glare in the southeastern sky that would be Santa Monica.
“My name is Carol Pride,” she said. “I live in Santa Monica. I try to do feature stories for a newspaper syndicate. Sometimes I can’t get sleepy at night and I go out riding—just anywhere. I know all this country like a book. I saw your little light flickering around down in the hollow and it seemed to me it was pretty cold for young love—if they use lights.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I never did. So you have spare clips for this gun. Would you have a permit for it?”
I hefted the little weapon. It felt like a Colt .25 in the dark. It had a nice balance for a small gun. Plenty of good men have been put to sleep with .25’s.
“Certainly I have a permit. That was just bluff about the spare clips though.”
“Not afraid of things are you, Miss Pride? Or would it be Mrs.?”
“No, it wouldn’t. This neighborhood isn’t dangerous. People don’t even lock their doors around here. I guess some bad men just happened to get wise how lonely it is.”
&nbs
p; I turned the little gun around and held it out. “Here. It’s not my night to be clever. Now if you’ll be good enough to ride me down to Castellamare, I’ll take my car there and go find some law.”
“Shouldn’t somebody stay with him?”
I looked at the radiolite dial of my wrist watch. “It’s a quarter to one,” I said. “We’ll leave him with the crickets and the stars. Let’s go.”
She tucked the gun in her bag and we went back down the slope and got into her car. She jockeyed it around without lights and drove it back up the slope. The big black car looked like a monument standing there behind us.
At the top of the rise I got out and dragged the section of white barricade back into position across the road. He was safe for the night now, and likely enough for many nights.
The girl didn’t speak until we had come near the first house. Then she put the lights on and said quietly: “There’s blood on your face, Mr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is, and I never saw a man who needed a drink worse. Why not go back to my house and phone West Los Angeles from there? There’s nothing but a fire station in this neighborhood.”
“John Dalmas is the name,” I said. “I like the blood on my face. You wouldn’t want to be mixed up in a mess like this. I won’t even mention you.”
She said: “I’m an orphan and live all alone. It wouldn’t matter in the slightest.”
“Just keep going down to the beach,” I said. “I’ll play it solo after that.”
But we had to stop once before we got to Castellamare, The movement of the car made me go off into the weeds and be sick again.
When we came to the place where my car was parked and the steps started up the hill I said good night to her and sat in the Chrysler until I couldn’t see her taillights any more.
The pavement cafÈ was still open. I could have gone in there and had a drink and phoned. But it seemed smarter to do what I did half an hour later—walk into the West Los Angeles Police Station cold sober and green, with the blood still on my face.
Cops are just people. And their whisky is just as good as what they push across bars at you.
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 61
