“Cut the doodads and get back to Mitchell,” he said briskly. “And to the dish you was trying to fumble up the hill.”
“Mitchell is a man she met on a train. He had the same effect on her that you have on me. He created in her a burning desire to travel in the opposite direction.”
It was a waste of time. The guy was as invulnerable as my great-great-grandfather.
“So,” he sneered, “Mitchell to her is just a guy she met on a train and didn’t like when she got to know him. So she ditched him for you? Convenient you happened to be around.”
The waiter came with the food. He set it out with a flourish. Vegetables, salad, hot rolls in a napkin.
“Coffee?”
I said I’d rather have mine later. Goble said yes and wanted to know where his drink was. The waiter said it was on the way—by slow freight, his tone suggested. Goble tasted his meat loaf and looked surprised. “Hell, it’s good,” he said. “What with so few customers I thought the place was a bust.”
“Look at your watch,” I said. “Things don’t get moving until much later. It’s that kind of town. Also, it’s out of season.”
“Much later is right,” he said, munching. “An awful lot later. Two, three in the A.M. sometimes. People go calling on their friends. You back at the Rancho, friend?”
I looked at him without saying anything.
“Do I have to draw you a picture, friend? I work long hours when I’m on a job.”
I didn’t say anything.
He wiped his mouth. “You kind of stiffened up when I said that about the guy stuck under a rock. Or could I be wrong?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Okay, clam up,” Goble sneered. “I thought maybe we could do a little business together. You got the physique and you take a good punch. But you don’t know nothing about nothing. You don’t have what it takes in my business. Where I come from you got to have brains to get by. Out here you just got to get sunburned and forget to button your collar.”
“Make me a proposition,” I said between my teeth.
He was a rapid eater even when he talked too much. He pushed his plate away from him, drank some of his coffee and got a toothpick out of his vest.
“This is a rich town, friend,” he said slowly. “I’ve studied it. I’ve boned up on it. I’ve talked to guys about it. They tell me it’s one of the few spots left in our fair green country where the dough ain’t quite enough. In Esmeralda you got to belong, or you’re nothing. If you want to belong and get asked around and get friendly with the right people you got to have class. There’s a guy here made five million fish in the rackets back in Kansas City. He brought up property, subdivided, built houses, built some of the best properties in town. But he didn’t belong to the Beach Club because he didn’t get asked. So he bought it. They know who he is, they touch him big when they got a fund-raising drive, he gets service, he pays his bills, he’s a good solid citizen. He throws big parties but the guests come from out of town unless they’re moochers, no-goods, the usual trash you always find hopping about where there’s money. But the class people of the town? He’s just a nigger to them.”
It was a long speech and while he made it he glanced at me casually from time to time, glanced around the room, leaned back comfortably in his chair and picked his teeth.
“He must be breaking his heart,” I said. “How did they find out where his dough came from?”
Goble leaned across the small table. “A big shot from the Treasury Department comes here for a vacation every spring. Happened to see Mr. Money and know all about him. He spread the word. You think it’s not breaking his heart? You don’t know these hoods that have made theirs and gone respectable. He’s bleeding to death inside, friend. He’s found something he can’t buy with folding money and it’s eating him to a shell.”
“How did you find out all this?”
“I’m smart. I get around. I find things out.”
“All except one,” I said.
“Just what’s that?”
“You wouldn’t know if I told you.”
The waiter came up with Goble’s delayed drink and took dishes away. He offered the menu.
“I never eat dessert,” Goble said. “Scram.”
The waiter looked at the toothpick. He reached over and deftly flicked it out from between Goble’s fingers. “There’s a Men’s Room here, chum,” he said. He dropped the toothpick into the ash tray and removed the ash tray.
“See what I mean?” Goble said to me. “Class.”
I told the waiter I would have a chocolate sundae and some coffee. “And give this gentleman the check,” I added.
“A pleasure,” the waiter said. Goble looked disgusted. The waiter drifted. I leaned across the table and spoke softly.
“You’re the biggest liar I’ve met in two days. And I’ve met a few beauties. I don’t think you have any interest in Mitchell. I don’t think you ever saw or heard of him until yesterday when you got the idea of using him as a cover story. You were sent here to watch a girl and I know who sent you—not who hired you, but who had it done. I know why she is being watched and I know how to fix it so that she won’t be watched. If you’ve got any high cards, you’d better play them right away quick. Tomorrow could be too late.”
He pushed his chair back and stood up. He dropped a folded and crimped bill on the table. He looked me over coolly.
“Big mouth, small brain,” he said. “Save it for Thursday when they set the trash cans out. You don’t know from nothing, friend. My guess is you never win.”
He walked off with his head thrust forward belligerently.
I reached across for the folded and crimped bill Goble had dropped on the table. As I expected it was only a dollar. Any guy who would drive a jalopy that might be able to do forty-five miles an hour downhill would eat in joints where the eighty-five cent dinner was something for a wild Saturday night.
The waiter slid over and dumped the check on me. I paid up and left Goble’s dollar in his plate.
“Thanks,” the waiter said. “That guy’s a real close friend of yours, huh?”
“The operative word is close,” I said.
“The guy might be poor,” the waiter said tolerantly. “One of the choice things about this town is that the people who work here can’t afford to live here.”
There were all of twenty people in the place when I left, and the voices were beginning to bounce down off the low ceiling.
17
The ramp down to the garage looked just the same as it had looked at four o’clock in the morning, but there was a swishing of water audible as I rounded the curve. The glassed-in cubicle office was empty. Somewhere somebody was washing a car, but it wouldn’t be the attendant. I crossed to the door leading into the elevator lobby and held it open. The buzzer sounded behind me in the office. I let the door close and stood outside it waiting and a lean man in a long white coat came around the corner. He wore glasses, had a skin the color of cold oatmeal and hollow tired eyes. There was something Mongolian about his face, something south-of-the-border, something Indian, and something darker than that. His black hair was flat on a narrow skull.
“Your car, sir? What name, please?”
“Mr. Mitchell’s car in? The two-tone Buick hardtop?”
He didn’t answer right away. His eyes went to sleep. He had been asked that question before.
“Mr. Mitchell took his car out early this morning.”
“How early?”
He reached for a pencil that was clipped to his pocket over the stitched-on scarlet script with the hotel name. He took the pencil out and looked at it.
“Just before seven o’clock. I went off at seven.”
“You work a twelve-hour shift? It’s only a little past seven now.”
He put the pencil back in his pocket. “I work an eight-hour shift but we rotate.”
“Oh. Last night you worked eleven to seven.”
“That’s right.” He was looking past my shoulder at something far away. “I’m due off now.”
I got out a pack of cigarettes and offered him one.
He shook his head.
“I’m only allowed to smoke in the office.”
“Or in the back of a Packard sedan.”
His right hand curled, as if around the haft of a knife.
“How’s your supply? Needing anything?”
He stared.
“You should have said ‘Supply of what?’” I told him.
He didn’t answer.
“And I would have said I wasn’t talking about tobacco,” I went on cheerfully. “About something cured with honey.”
Our eyes met and locked. Finally he said softly: “You a pusher?”
“You snapped out of it real nice, if you were in business at seven A.M. this morning. Looked to me as if you would be out of circulation for hours. You must have a clock in your head—like Eddie Arcaro.”
“Eddie Arcaro,” he repeated. “Oh yes, the jockey. Has a clock in his head, has he?”
“So they say.”
“We might do business,” he said remotely. “What’s your price?”
The buzzer sounded in the office. I had heard the elevator in the shaft subconsciously. The door opened and the couple I had seen holding hands in the lobby came through. The girl had on an evening dress and the boy wore a tux. They stood side by side, looking like two kids who had been caught kissing. The attendant glanced at them and went off and a car started and came back. A nice new Chrysler convertible. The guy handed the girl in carefully, as if she was already pregnant. The attendant stood holding the door. The guy came around the car and thanked him and got in.
“Is it very far to The Glass Room?” he asked diffidently.
“No, sir.” The attendant told them how to get there.
The guy smiled and thanked him and reached in his pocket and gave the attendant a dollar bill.
“You could have your car brought around to the entrance, Mr. Preston. All you have to do is call down.”
“Oh thanks, but this is fine,” the guy said hurriedly. He started carefully up the ramp. The Chrysler purred out of sight and was gone.
“Honeymooners,” I said. “They’re sweet. They just don’t want to be stared at.”
The attendant was standing in front of me again with the same flat look in his eyes.
“But there’s nothing sweet about us,” I added.
“If you’re a cop, let’s see the buzzer.”
“You think I’m a cop?”
“You’re some kind of nosy bastard.” Nothing he said changed the tone of his voice at all. It was frozen in B Flat. Johnny One-Note.
“I’m all of that,” I agreed. “I’m a private star. I followed somebody down here last night. You were in a Packard right over there”—I pointed—“and I went over and opened the door and sniffed the weed. I could have driven four Cadillacs out of here and you wouldn’t have turned over in bed. But that’s your business.”
“The price today,” he said. “I’m not arguing about last night.”
“Mitchell left by himself?”
He nodded.
“No baggage?”
“Nine pieces. I helped him load it. He checked out. Satisfied?”
“You checked with the office?”
“He had his bill. All paid up and receipted.”
“Sure. And with that amount of baggage a hop came with him naturally.”
“The elevator kid. No hops on until seven-thirty. This was about one A.M.”
“Which elevator kid?”
“A Mex kid we call Chico.”
“You’re not Mex?”
“I’m part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part nigger. You’d hate to be me.”
“Just one more question. How in hell do you get away with it? The muggles, I mean.”
He looked around. “I only smoke when I feel extra special low. What the hell’s it to you? What the hell’s it to anybody? Maybe I get caught and lose a crummy job. Maybe I get tossed in a cell. Maybe I’ve been in one all my life, carry it round with me. Satisfied?” He was talking too much. People with unstable nerves are like that. One moment monosyllables, next moment a flood. The low tired monotone of his voice went on.
“I’m not sore at anybody. I live. I eat. Sometimes I sleep. Come around and see me some time. I live in a flea bag in an old frame cottage on Polton’s Lane, which is really an alley. I live right behind the Esmeralda Hardware Company. The toilet’s in a shed. I wash in the kitchen, at a tin sink. I sleep on a couch with broken springs. Everything there is twenty years old. This is a rich man’s town. Come and see me. I live on a rich man’s property.”
“There’s a piece missing from your story about Mitchell,” I said.