SIX
The room was at the back of the house to the left. The girl took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. There was a low light on a table, and the venetian blinds were drawn. Steve went in past her silently, on cat feet.
Leopardi lay squarely in the middle of the bed, a large smooth silent man, waxy and artificial in death. Even his mustache looked phony. His half-open eyes, sightless as marbles, looked as if they had never seen. He lay on his back, on the sheet, and the bedclothes were thrown over the foot of the bed.
The King wore yellow silk pajamas, the slip-on kind, with a turned collar. They were loose and thin. Over his breast they were dark with blood that had seeped into the silk as if into blotting-paper. There was a little blood on his bare brown neck.
Steve stared at him and said tonelessly: “The King in Yellow. I read a book with that title once. He liked yellow, I guess. I packed some of his stuff last night. And he wasn’t yellow either. Guys like him usually are—or are they?”
The girl went over to the corner and sat down in a slipper chair and looked at the floor. It was a nice room, as modernistic as the living room was casual. It had a chenille rug, caf�-aulait color, severely angled furniture in inlaid wood, and a trick dresser with a mirror for a top, a kneehole and drawers like a desk. It had a box mirror above and a semi-cylindrical frosted wall light set above the mirror, In the corner there was a glass table with a crystal greyhound on top of it, and a lamp with the deepest drum shade Steve had ever seen.
He stopped looking at all this and looked at Leopardi again. He pulled the King’s pajamas up gently and examined the wound. It was directly over the heart and the skin was scorched and mottled there. There was not so very much blood. He had died in a fraction of a second.
A small Mauser automatic lay cuddled in his right hand, on top of the bed’s second pillow.
“That’s artistic,” Steve said and pointed. “Yeah, that’s a nice touch. Typical contact wound, I guess. He even pulled his pajama shirt up. I’ve heard they do that. A Mauser seven-sixthree about. Sure it’s your gun?”
“Yes.” She kept on looking at the floor. “It was in a desk in the living room—not loaded. But there were shells. I don’t know why. Somebody gave it to me once. I didn’t even know how to load it.”
Steve smiled. Her eyes lifted suddenly and she saw his smile and shuddered. “I don’t expect anybody to believe that,” she said. “We may as well call the police, I suppose.”
Steve nodded absently, put a cigarette in his mouth and flipped it up and down with his lips that were still puffy from Leopardi’s punch. He lit a match on his thumbnail, puffed a small plume of smoke and said quietly: “No cops. Not yet. Just tell it.’
The red-haired girl said: “I sing at KFQc, you know. Three nights a week—on a quarter-hour automobile program. This was one of the nights. Agatha and I got home—oh, close to half-past ten. At the door I remembered there was no fizzwater in the house, so I sent her back to the liquor store three blocks away, and came in alone. There was a queer smell in the house. I don’t know what it was. As if several men had been in here, somehow. When I came in the bedroom—he was exactly as he is now. I saw the gun and I went and looked and then I knew I was sunk. I didn’t know what to do. Even if the police cleared me, everywhere I went from now on—”
Steve said sharply: “He got in here—how?”
“I don’t know.”
“Goon,” hesaid.
“I locked the door. Then I undressed—with that on my bed. I went into the bathroom to shower and collect my brains, if any. I locked the door when I left the room and took the key. Agatha was back then, but I don’t think she saw me. Well, I took the shower and it braced me up a bit. Then I had a drink and then I came in here and called you.”
She stopped and moistened the end of a finger and smoothed the end of her left eyebrow with it. “That’s all, Steve— absolutely all.”
“Domestic help can be pretty nosy. This Agatha’s nosier than most—or I miss my guess.” He walked over to the door and looked at the lock. “I bet there are three or four keys in the house that knock this over.” He went to the windows and felt the catches, looked down at the screens through the glass. He said over his shoulder, casually: “Was the King in love with you?”
Her voice was sharp, almost angry. “He never was in love with any woman. A couple of years back in San Francisco, when I was with his band for a while, there was some slapsilly publicity about us. Nothing to it. It’s been revived here in the hand-outs to the press, to build up his opening. I was telling him this afternoon I wouldn’t stand for it, that I wouldn’t be linked with him in anybody’s mind. His private life was filthy. It reeked. Everybody in the business knows that. And it’s not a business where daisies grow very often.”
Steve said: “Yours was the only bedroom he couldn’t make?”
The girl flushed to the roots of her dusky red hair.
“That sounds lousy,” he said. “But I have to figure the angles. That’s about true, isn’t it?”
“Yes—I suppose so. I wouldn’t say the only one.”
“Go on out in the other room and buy yourself a drink.”
She stood up and looked at him squarely across the bed. “I didn’t kill him, Steve. I didn’t let him into this house tonight. I didn’t know he was coming here, or had any reason to come here. Believe that or not. But something about this is wrong. Leopardi was the last man in the world to take his lovely life himself.”
Steve said: “He didn’t, angel. Go buy that drink. He was murdered. The whole thing is a frame—to get a cover-up from Jumbo Walters. Go on out.”
He stood silent, motionless, until sounds he heard from the living room told him she was out there. Then he took out his handkerchief and loosened the gun from Leopardi’s right hand and wiped it over carefully on the outside, broke out the magazine and wiped that off, spilled out all the shells and wiped every one, ejected the one in the breech and wiped that. He reloaded the gun and put it back in Leopardi’s dead hand and closed his fingers around it and pushed his index finger against the trigger. Then he let the hand fall naturally back on the bed.
He pawed through the bedclothes and found an ejected shell and wiped that off, put it back where he had found it. He put the handkerchief to his nose, sniffed it wryly, went around the bed to a clothes closet and opened the door.
“Careless of your clothes, boy,” he said softly.
The rough cream-colored coat hung in there, on a hook, over dark gray slacks with a lizard-skin belt. A yellow satin shirt and a wine-colored tie dangled alongside. A handkerchief to match the tie flowed loosely four inches from the breast pocket of the coat. On the floor lay a pair of gazelle-leather nutmegbrown sports shoes, and socks without garters. And there were yellow satin shorts with heavy black initials on them lying close by.
Steve felt carefully in the gray slacks and got out a leather keyholder. He left the room, went along the cross-hall and into the kitchen. It had a solid door, a good spring lock with a key stuck in it. He took it out and tried keys from the bunch in the keyholder, found none that fitted, put the other key back and went into the living room. He opened the front door, went outside and shut it again without looking at the girl huddled in a corner of the davenport. He tried keys in the lock, finally found the right one. He let himself back into the house, returned to the bedroom and put the keyholder back in the pocket of the gray slacks again. Then he went to the living room.
The girl was still huddled motionless, staring at him.
He put his back to the mantel and puffed at cigarette. “Agatha with you all the time at the studio?”
She nodded. “I suppose so. So he had a key. That was what you were doing, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Had Agatha long?”
“About a year.”
“She steal from you? Small stuff, I mean?”
Dolores Chiozza shrugged wearily. “What does it matter? Most of them do. A little face cream or powder, a handkerchief, a pair of stockings once in a while. Yes, I think she stole from me. They look on that sort of thing as more or less legitimate.”
“Not the nice ones, angel.”
“Well—the hours were a little trying, I work at night, often get home very late. She’s a dresser as well as a maid.”
“Anything else about her? She use cocaine or weed. Hit the bottle? Ever have laughing fits?”
“I don’t think so. What has she got to do with it, Steve?”
“Lady, she sold somebody a key to your apartment. That’s obvious. You didn’t give him one, the landlord wouldn’t give him one, but Agatha had one. Check?”
Her eyes had a stricken look. Her mouth trembled a little, not much. A drink was untasted at her elbow. Steve bent over and drank some of it.
She said slowly: “We’re wasting time, Steve. We have to call the police. There’s nothing anybody can do. I’m done for as a nice person, even if not as a lady at large. They’ll think it was a lovers’ quarrel and I shot him and that’s that. If I could convince them I didn’t, then he shot himself in my bed, and I’m still ruined. So I might as well make up my mind to face the music.”
Steve said softly: “Watch this. My mother used to do it.”
He put a finger to his mouth, bent down and touched her lips at the same spot with the same finger. He smiled, said: “We’ll go to Walters—or you will. He’ll pick his cops and the ones he picks won’t go screaming through the night with reporters sitting in their laps. They’ll sneak in quiet, like process servers. Walters can handle this. That was what was counted on. Me, I’m going to collect Agatha. Because I want a description of the guy she sold that key to—and I want it fast. And by the way, you owe me twenty bucks for coming over here. Don’t let that slip your memory.”
The tall girl stood up, smiling. “You’re a kick, you are,” she said. “What makes you so sure he was murdered?”
“He’s not wearing his own pajamas. His have his initials on them. I packed his stuff last night—before I threw him out of the Canton, Get dressed, angel—and get me Agatha’s address.”
He went into the bedroom and pulled a sheet over Leopardi’s body, held it a moment above the still, waxen face before letting it fall.
“So long, guy,” he said gently. “You were a louse—but you sure had music in you.”
It was a small frame house on Brighton Avenue near Jefferson, in a block of small frame houses, all old-fashioned, with front porches. This one had a narrow concrete walk which the moon made whiter than it was.
Steve mounted the steps and looked at the light-edged shade of the wide front window. He knocked. There were shuffling steps and a woman opened the door and looked at him through the hooked screen—a dumpy elderly woman with frizzled gray hair. Her body was shapeless in a wrapper and her feet slithered in loose slippers. A man with a polished bald head and milky eyes sat in a wicker chair beside a table. He held his hands in his lap and twisted the knuckles aimlessly. He didn’t look towards the door.
Steve said: “I’m from Miss Chiozza. Are you Agatha’s mother?”
The woman said dully: “I reckon. But she ain’t home, mister.” The man in the chair got a handkerchief from somewhere and blew his nose. He snickered darkly.
Steve said: “Miss Chiozza’s not feeling so well tonight. She was hoping Agatha would come back and stay the night with her.”
The milky-eyed man snickered again, sharply. The woman said: “We dunno where she is. She don’t come home. Pa’n me waits up for her to come home. She stays out till we’re sick.”
The old man snapped in a reedy voice: “She’ll stay out till the cops get her one of these times.”
“Pa’s half blind,” the woman said. “Makes him kinda mean. Won’t you step in?”
Steve shook his head and turned his hat around in his hands like a bashful cowpuncher in a horse opera. “I’ve got to find her,” he said. “Where would she go?”
“Out drinkin’ liquor with cheap spenders,” Pa cackled. “Pantywaists with silk handkerchiefs ‘stead of neckties. If I had eyes, I’d strap her till she dropped.” He grabbed the arms of his chair and the muscles knotted on the backs of his hands. Then he began to cry. Tears welled from his milky eyes and started through the white stubble on his cheeks, The woman went across and took the handkerchief out of his fist and wiped his face with it, Then she blew her nose on it and came back to the door.
“Might be anywhere,” she said to Steve, “This is a big town, mister, I dunno where at to say.”
Steve said dully: “I’ll call back. If she comes in, will you hang onto her, What’s your phone number?”
“What’s the phone number, Pa?” the woman called back over her shoulder.
“I ain’t sayin’,” Pa snorted.
The woman said: “I remember now. South Two-four-fivefour. Call any time. Pa’n me ain’t got nothing to do.”
Steve thanked her and went back down the white walk to the street and along the walk half a block to where he had left his car. He glanced idly across the way and started to get into his car, then stopped moving suddenly with his hand gripping the car door. He let go of that, took three steps sideways and stood looking across the street tight-mouthed.
All the houses in the block were much the same, but the one opposite had a FOR RENT placard stuck in the front window and a real-estate sign spiked into the small patch of front lawn. The house itself looked neglected, utterly empty, but in its little driveway stood a small neat black coupe.
Steve said under his breath: “Hunch. Play it up, Stevie.”
He walked almost delicately across the wide dusty street, his hand touching the hard metal of the gun in his pocket, and came up behind the little car, stood and listened. He moved silently along its left side, glanced back across the street, then looked in the car’s open left-front window.
The girl sat almost as if driving, except that her head was tipped a little too much into the corner. The little red hat was still on her head, the gray coat, trimmed with fur, still around her body. In the reflected moonlight her mouth was strained open. Her tongue stuck out. And her chestnut eyes stared at the roof of the car.
Steve didn’t touch her. He didn’t have to touch her to look any closer to know there would be heavy bruises on her neck.
“Tough on women, these guys,” he muttered.
The girl’s big black brocade bag lay on the seat beside her, gaping open like her mouth—like Miss Marilyn Delorme’s mouth, and Miss Marilyn Delorme’s purple bag.
“Yeah—tough on women.”
He backed away till he stood under a small palm tree by the entrance to the driveway. The street was as empty and deserted as a closed theater, He crossed silently to his car, got into it and drove away.
Nothing to it. A girl coming home alone late at night, stuck up and strangled a few doors from her own home by some tough guy. Very simple. The first prowl car that cruised that block—if the boys were half awake—would take a look the minute they spotted the FOR RENT sign. Steve tramped hard on the throttle and went away from there.
At Washington and Figueroa he went into an allnight drugstore and pulled shut the door of the phone booth at the back. He dropped his nickel and dialed the number of police headquarters.
He asked for the desk and said: “Write this down, will you, sergeant? Brighton Avenue, thirtytwo-hundred block, west side, in driveway of empty house. Got that much?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Car with dead woman in it,” Steve said, and hung up.
SEVEN
Quillan, head day clerk and assistant manager of the Carlton Hotel, was on night duty, because Millar, the night auditor, was off for a week. It was half-past one and things were dead and Quilian was bored. He had done everything there was to do long ago, because he had been a hotel man for twenty years and there was nothing to it.
The night porter had finished cleaning up and was in his room beside the elevator bank. One elevator was lighted and open, as usual. The main lobby had been tidied up and the lights had been properly dimmed. Everything was exactly as usual.
Quillan was a rather short, rather thickset man with clear bright toadlike eyes that seemed to hold a friendly expression without really having any expression at all. He had pale sandy hair and not much of it. His pale hands were clasped in front of him on the marble top of the desk. He was just the right height to put his weight on the desk without looking as if he were sprawling. He was looking at the wall across the entrance lobby, but he wasn’t seeing it, He was half asleep, even though his eyes were wide open, and if the night porter struck a match behind his door, Quillan would know it and bang on his bell.
The brass-trimmed swing doors at the street entrance pushed open and Steve Grayce came in, a summer-weight coat turned up around his neck, his hat yanked low and a cigarette wisping smoke at the corner of his mouth. He looked very casual, very alert, and very much at ease. He strolled over to the desk and rapped on it.
“Wake up!” he snorted.
Quillan moved his eyes an inch and said: “All outside rooms with bath. But positively no parties on the eighth floor. Hiyah, Steve. So you finally got the axe. And for the wrong thing. That’s life.”
Steve said: “O.K. Have you got a new night man here?”
“Don’t need one, Steve. Never did, in my opinion.”
“You’ll need one as long as old hotel men like you register floozies on the same corridor with people like Leopardi.”
Quillan half closed his eyes and then opened them to where they had been before. He said indifferently: “Not me, pal. But anybody can make a mistake. Millar’s really an accountant— not a desk man.”
Steve leaned back and his face became very still. The smoke almost hung at the tip of his cigarette. His eyes were like black glass now. He smiled a little dishonestly.
“And why was Leopardj put in an eight-dollar room on Eight instead of in a tower suite at twenty-eight per?”
Quillan smiled back at him. “I didn’t register Leopardi, old sock. There were reservations in. I supposed they were what he wanted. Some guys don’t spend. Any other questions, Mr. Grayce?”
“Yeah. Was Eight-fourteen empty last night?”
“It was on change, so it was empty. Something about the plumbing. Proceed,”
“Who marked it on change?”
Quillan’s bright fathomless eyes turned and became curiously fixed. He didn’t answer.
Steve said: “Here’s why. Leopardi was in Eightfifteen and the two girls in Eighteleven. Just Eight-thirteen between. A lad with a passkey could have gone into Eight-thirteen and turned both the bolt locks on the communicating doors. Then, if the folks in the two other rooms had done the same thing on their side, they’d have a suite set up.”