33
The car drifted quietly along a quiet street of homes. Arching pepper trees almost met above it to form a green tunnel. The sun twinkled through their upper branches and their narrow light leaves. A sign at the corner said it was Eighteenth Street.
Hemingway was driving and I sat beside him. He drove very slowly, his face heavy with thought.
“How much you tell him?” he asked, making up his mind.
“I told him you and Blane went over there and took me away and tossed me out of the car and socked me on the back of the head. I didn’t tell him the rest.”
“Not about Twenty-third and Descanso, huh?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I thought maybe I could get more co-operation from you if I didn’t.”
“That’s a thought. You really want to go over to Stillwood Heights, or was that just a stall?”
“Just a stall. What I really want is for you to tell me why you put me in that funnyhouse and why I was kept there?”
Hemingway thought. He thought so hard his cheek muscles made little knots under his grayish skin.
“That Blane,” he said. “That sawed-off hunk of shin meat. I didn’t mean for him to sap you. I didn’t mean for you to walk home neither, not really. It was just an act, on account of we are friends with this swami guy and we kind of keep people from bothering him. You’d be surprised what a lot of people would try to bother him.”
“Amazed,” I said.
He turned his head. His gray eyes were lumps of ice. Then he looked again through the dusty windshield and did some more thinking.
“Them old cops get sap-hungry once in a while,” he said. “They just got to crack a head. Jesus, was I scared. You dropped like a sack of cement. I told Blane plenty. Then we run you over to Sonderborg’s place on account of it was a little closer and he was a nice guy and would take care of you.”
“Does Amthor know you took me there?”
“Hell, no. It was our idea.”
“On account of Sonderborg is such a nice guy and he would take care of me. And no kickback. No chance for a doctor to back up a complaint if I made one. Not that a complaint would have much chance in this sweet little town, if I did make it.”
“You going to get tough?” Hemingway asked thoughtfully.
“Not me,” I said. “And for once in your life neither are you. Because your job is hanging by a thread. You looked in the Chief’s eyes and you saw that. I didn’t go in there without credentials, not this trip.”
“Okey,” Hemingway said and spat out of the window. “I didn’t have any idea of getting tough in the first place except just the routine big mouth. What next?”
“Is Blane really sick?”
Hemingway nodded, but somehow failed to look sad. “Sure is. Pain in the gut day before yesterday and it bust on him before they could get his appendix out. He’s got a chance—but not too good.”
“We’d certainly hate to lose him,” I said. “A fellow like that is an asset to any police force.”
Hemingway chewed that one over and spat it out of the car window.
“Okey, next question,” he sighed.
“You told me why you took me to Sonderborg’s place. You didn’t tell me why he kept me there over forty-eight hours, locked up and shot full of dope.”
Hemingway braked the car softly over beside the curb. He put his large hands on the lower part of the wheel side by side and gently rubbed the thumbs together.
“I wouldn’t have an idea,” he said in a far-off voice.
“I had papers on me showing I had a private license,” I said. “Keys, some money, a couple of photographs. If he didn’t know you boys pretty well, he might think the crack on the head was just a gag to get into his place and look around. But I figure he knows you boys too well for that. So I’m puzzled.”
“Stay puzzled, pally. It’s a lot safer.”
“So it is,” I said. “But there’s no satisfaction in it.”
“You got the L.A. law behind you on this?”
“On this what?”
“On this thinking bout Sonderborg.”
“Not exactly.”
“That don’t mean yes or no.”
“I’m not that important,” I said. “The L.A. law can come in here any time they feel like it—two thirds of them anyway. The Sheriff’s boys and the D.A.‘s boys. I have a friend in the D.A.‘s office. I worked there once. His name is Bernie Ohls. He’s Chief Investigator.”
“You give it to him?”
“No. I haven’t spoken to him in a month.”
“Thinking about giving it to him?”
“Not if it interferes with a job I’m doing.”
“Private job?”
“Yes.”
“Okey, what is it you want?”
“What’s Sonderborg’s real racket?”
Hemingway took his hands off the wheel and spat out of the window. “We’re on a nice street here, ain’t we? Nice homes, nice gardens, nice climate. You hear a lot about crooked cops, or do you?”
“Once in a while,” I said.
“Okey, how many cops do you find living on a street even as good as this, with nice lawns and flowers? I’d know four or five, all vice squad boys. They get all the gravy. Cops like me live in itty-bitty frame houses on the wrong side of town. Want to see where I live?”
“What would it prove?”
“Listen, pally,” the big man said seriously. “You got me on a string, but it could break. Cops don’t go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes smell like violets, only it don’t—he ain’t giving the orders either. You get me?”
“What kind of a man is the mayor?”
“What kind of guy is a mayor anywhere? A politician. You think he gives the orders? Nuts. You know what’s the matter with this country, baby?”
“Too much frozen capital, I heard.”
“A guy can’t stay honest if he wants to,” Hemingway said. “That’s what’s the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don’t eat. A lot of bastards think all we need is ninety thousand FBI men in clean collars and brief cases. Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think we gotta make this little world all over again. Now take Moral Rearmament. There you’ve got something. M.R.A. There you’ve got something, baby.”
“If Bay City is a sample of how it works, I’ll take aspirin,” I said.
“You could get too smart,” Hemingway said softly. “You might not think it, but it could be. You could get so smart you couldn’t think about anything but bein’ smart. Me, I’m just a dumb cop. I take orders. I got a wife and two kids and I do what the big shots say. Blane could tell you things. Me, I’m ignorant.”
“Sure Blane has appendicitis? Sure he didn’t just shoot himself in the stomach for meanness?”
“Don’t be that way,” Hemingway complained and slapped his hands up and down on the wheel. “Try and think nice about people.”
“About Blane?”
“He’s human—just like the rest of us,” Hemingway said. “He’s a sinner—but he’s human.”
“What’s Sonderborg’s racket?”
“Okey, I was just telling you. Maybe I’m wrong. I had you figured for a guy that could be sold a nice idea.”
“You don’t know what his racket is,” I said.
Hemingway took his handkerchief out and wiped his with it. “Buddy, I hate to admit it,” he said. “But you ought to know damn well that if I knew or Blane knew Sonderborg had a racket, either we wouldn’t of dumped you in there or you wouldn’t ever have come out, not walking. I’m talking about a real bad racket, naturally. Not fluff stuff like telling old women’s fortunes out of a crystal ball.”
“I don’t think I was meant to come out walking,” I said. “There’s a drug called scopolamine, truth serum, that sometimes makes people talk without their knowing it. It’s not sure fire, any more than hypnotism is. But it sometimes works. I think I was being milked in there to find out what I knew. But there are only three ways Sonderborg could have known that there was anything for me to know that might hurt him. Amthor might have told him, or Moose Malloy might have mentioned to him that I went to see Jessie Florian, or he might have thought putting me in there was a police gag.”
Hemingway stared at me sadly. “I can’t even see your dust,” he said. “Who the hell is Moose Malloy?”
“A big hunk that killed a man over on Central Avenue a few days ago. He’s on your teletype, if you ever read it. And you probably have a reader of him by now.”
“So what?”
“So Sonderborg was hiding him. I saw him there, on a bed reading newspapers, the night I snuck out.”
“How’d you get out? Wasn’t you locked in?”
“I crocked the orderly with a bed spring. I was lucky.”
“This big guy see you?”
“No.”
Hemingway kicked the car away from the curb and a solid grin settled on his face. “Let’s go collect,” he said. “It figures. It figures swell. Sonderborg was hiding hot boys. If they had dough, that is. His set-up was perfect for it. Good money, too.”
He kicked the car into motion and whirled around a corner.
“Hell, I thought he sold reefers,” he said disgustedly. “With the right protection behind him. But hell, that’s a small time racket. A peanut grift.”
“Ever hear of the numbers racket? That’s a small time racket too—if you’re just looking at one piece of it.”
Hemingway turned another corner sharply and shook his heavy head. “Right. And pin ball games and bingo houses and horse parlors. But add them all up and give one guy control and it makes sense.”
“What guy?”
He went wooden on me again. His mouth shut hard and I could see his teeth were biting at each other inside it. We were on Descanso Street and going east. It was a quiet street even in late afternoon. As we got towards Twenty-third, it became in some vague manner less quiet. Two men were studying a palm tree as if figuring out how to move it. A car was parked near Dr. Sondeborg’s place, but nothing showed in it. Halfway down the block a man was reading water meters.
The house was a cheerful spot by daylight. Tea rose begonias made a solid pale mass under the front windows and pansies a blur of color around the base of a white acacia in bloom. A scarlet climbing rose was just opening its buds on a fan-shaped trellis. There was a bed of winter sweet peas and a bronze-green humming bird prodding in them delicately. The house looked like the home of a well-to-do elderly couple who like to garden. The late afternoon sun on it had a hushed and menacing stillness.
Hemingway slid slowly past the house and a tight little smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. His nose sniffed. He turned the next corner, and looked in his rear view mirror and stepped up the speed of the car.
After three blocks he braked at the side of the street again and turned to give me a hard level stare.
“L.A. law,” he said. “One of the guys by the palm tree is called Donnelly. I know him. They got the house covered. So you didn’t tell your pal downtown, huh?”
“I said I didn’t.”
“The Chief’ll love this,” Hemingway snarled. “They come down here and raid a joint and don’t even stop to say hello.”
I said nothing.
“They catch this Moose Malloy?”
I shook my head. “Not so far as I know.”
“How the hell far do you know, buddy?” he asked very softly.
“Not far enough. Is there any connection between Amthor and Sonderborg?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Who runs this town?” Silence.
“I heard a gambler named Laird Brunette put up thirty grand to elect the mayor. I heard he owns the Belvedere Club and both the gambling ships out on the water.”
“Might be,” Hemingway said politely.
“Where can Brunette be found?”
“Why ask me, baby?”
“Where would you make for if you lost your hideout in this town?”
“Mexico.”
I laughed. “Okey, will you do me a big favor?”
“Glad to.”
“Drive me back downtown.”
He started the car away from the curb and tooled it neatly along a shadowed street towards the ocean. The car reached the City Hall and slid around into the police parking zone and I got out.
“Come round and see me some time,” Hemingway said. “I’ll likely be cleaning spittoons.”
He put his big hand out. “No hard feelings?”
“M.R.A.” I said and shook the hand.
He grinned all over. He called me back when I started to walk away. He looked carefully in all directions and leaned his mouth close to my ear.
“Them gambling ships are supposed to be out beyond city and state jurisdiction,” he said. “Panama registry. If it was me that was—” he stopped dead, and his bleak eyes began to worry.
“I get it,” I said. “I had the same sort of idea. I don’t know why I bothered so much to get you to have it with me. But it wouldn’t work—not for just one man.”
He nodded, and then he smiled. “M.R.A.” he said.