“That’s it,” Sam chortled. “Just like a councilman’s number that number is.”
“Know the driver?”
“Shuah—” Sam began, and then stopped cold. He raked a black jaw with a white finger the size of a banana. “Well, Ah’ll be a big black slob if he ain’t got hisself a new driver again. I ain’t know that man, sure’nough.”
De Ruse poked the rolled bill into Sam’s big white paw. Sam grabbed it but his large eyes suddenly got suspicious.
“Say, for what you ask all of them questions, mistah man?”
De Ruse said: “I paid my way, didn’t I?”
He went back around the corner to Hudson and got into his black Packard sedan. He drove it out on to Sunset, then west on Sunset almost to Beverly Hills, then turned towards the foothills and began to peer at the signs on street corners. Clearwater Street ran along the flank of a hill and had a view of the entire city. The Casa de Oro, at the corner of Parkinson, was a tricky block of high-class bungalow apartments surrounded by an adobe wall with red tiles on top. It had a lobby in a separate building, a big private garage on Parkinson, opposite one length of the wall.
De Ruse parked across the street from the garage and sat looking through the wide window into a glassed-in office where an attendant in spotless white coveralls sat with his feet on the desk, reading a magazine and spit over his shoulder at an invisible cuspidor.
De Ruse got out of the Packard, crossed the street farther up, came back and slipped into the garage without the attendant seeing him.
The cars were in four rows. Two rows backed against the white walls, two against each other in the middle. There were plenty of vacant stalls, but plenty of cars had gone to bed also. They were mostly big, expensive closed models, with two or three flashy open jobs.
There was only one limousine. It had License No. 5A6.
It was a well-kept car, bright and shiny; royal blue with a buff trimming. De Ruse took a glove off and rested his hand on the radiator shell. Quite cold. He felt the tires, looked at his fingers. A little fine dry dust adhered to the skin. There was no mud in the treads, just bone-dry dust.
He went back along the row of dark car bodies and leaned in the open door of the little office. After a moment the attendant looked up, almost with a start.
“Seen the Candless chauffeur around?” De Ruse asked him.
The man shook his head and spat deftly into a copper spittoon.
“Not since I came on—three o’clock.”
“Didn’t he go down to the club for the old man?”
“Nope. I guess not. The big hack ain’t been out. He always takes that.”
“Where does he hang his hat?”
“Who? Mattick? They got servants’ quarters in back of the jungle. But I think I heard him say he parks at some hotel. Let’s see—” A brow got furrowed.
“The Metropole?” De Ruse suggested.
The garage man thought it over while De Ruse stared at the point of his chin.
“Yeah. I think that s it. I ain’t just positive though. Mattick don’t open up much.
De Ruse thanked him and crossed the street and got into the Packard again. He drove downtown.
It was twentyfive minutes past nine when he got to the corner of Seventh and Spring, where the Metropole was.
It was an old hotel that had once been exclusive and was now steering a shaky course between a receivership and a bad name at Headquarters. It had too much oily dark wood paneling, too many chipped gilt mirrors. Too much smoke hung below its low beamed lobby ceiling and too many grifters bummed around in its worn leather rockers.
The blonde who looked after the big horseshoe cigar counter wasn’t young any more and her eyes were cynical from standing off cheap dates. De Ruse leaned on the glass and pushed his hat back on his crisp black hair.
“Camels, honey,” he said in his low-pitched gambler’s voice.
The girl smacked the pack in front of him, rang up fifteen cents and slipped the dime change under his elbow, with a faint smile. Her eyes said they liked him. She leaned opposite him and put her head near enough so that he could smell the perfume in her hair.
“Tell me something,” De Ruse said.
“What?” she asked softly.
“Find out who lives in eight-o-ninc, without telling any answers to the clerk.”
The blonde looked disappointed. “Why don’t you ask him yourself, mister?”
“I’m too shy,” De Ruse said.
“Yes you arc!”
She went to her telephone and talked into it with languid grace, came back to De Ruse.
“Name of Mattick. Mean anything?”
“Guess not,” De Ruse said. “Thanks a lot. How do you like it in this nice hotel?”
“Who said it was a nice hotel?”
De Ruse smiled, touched his hat, strolled away. Her eyes looked after him sadly. She leaned her sharp elbows on the counter and cupped her chin in her hands to stare after him.
De Ruse crossed the lobby and went up three steps and got into an open-cage elevator that started with a lurch.
“Eight,” he said, and leaned against the cage with his hands in his pockets.
Eight was as high as the Metropole went. De Ruse followed a long corridor that smelled of varnish. A turn at the end brought him face to face with 809. He knocked on the dark wood panel. Nobody answered. He bent over, looked through an empty keyhole, knocked again.
Then he took the tabbed key out of his pocket and unlocked the door and went in.
Windows were shut in two walls. The air reeked of whiskey. Lights were on in the ceiling. There was a wide brass bed, a dark bureau, a couple of brown leather rockers, a stiff-looking desk with a flat brown quart of Four Roses on it, nearly empty, without a cap. De Ruse sniffed it and set his hips against the edge of the desk, let his eyes prowl the room.
His glance traversed from the dark bureau across the bed and the wall with the door in it to another door behind which light showed. He crossed to that and opened it.
The man lay on his face, on the yellowish brown woodstone floor of the bathroom. Blood on the floor looked sticky and black. Two soggy patches on the back of the man’s head were the points from which rivulets of dark red had run down the side of his neck to the floor. The blood had stopped flowing a long time ago.
De Ruse slipped a glove off and stooped to hold two fingers against the place where an artery would beat. He shook his head and put his hand back into his glove.
He left the bathroom, shut the door and went to open one of the windows. He leaned out, breathing clean rain-wet air, looking down along slants of thin rain into the dark slit of an alley.
After a little while he shut the window again, switched off the light in the bathroom, took a “Do Not Disturb” sign out of the top bureau drawer, doused the ceiling lights, and went out.
He hung the sign on the knob and went back along the corridor to the elevators and left the Hotel Metropole.
SIX
Francine Ley hummed low down in her throat as she went along the silent corridor of the Chatterton. She hummed unsteadily without knowing what she was humming, and her left hand with its cherryred fingernails held a green velvet cape from slipping down off her shoulders. There was a wrapped bottle under her other arm.
She unlocked the door, pushed it open and stopped, with a quick frown. She stood still, remembering, trying to remember. She was still a little tight.
She had left the lights on, that was it. They were off now. Could be the maid service, of course. She went on in, fumbled through the red curtains into the living room.
The glow from the heater prowled across the red and white rug and touched shiny black things with a ruddy gleam. The shiny black things were shoes. They didn’t move.
Francine Ley said: “Oh—oh,” in a sick voice. The hand holding the cape almost tore into her neck with its long, beautifully molded nails.
Something clicked and light glowed in a lamp beside an easy chair. De Ruse sat in the chair, looking at her woodenly.
He had his coat and hat on. His eyes shrouded, far away, filled with a remote brooding.
He said: “Been out, Francy?”
She sat down slowly on the edge of a half-round settee, put the bottle down beside her.
“I got tight,” she said. “Thought I’d better cat. Then I thought I’d get tight again.” She patted the bottle.
De Ruse said: “I think your friend Dial’s boss has been snatched.” He said it casually, as if it was of no importance to him.
Francine Ley opened her mouth slowly and as she opened it all the prettiness went out of her face. Her face became a blank haggard mask on which rouge burned violently. Her mouth looked as if it wanted to scream.
After a while it closed again and her face got pretty again and her voice, from far off, said: “Would it do any good to say I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
De Ruse didn’t change his wooden expression. He said: “When I went down to the street from here a couple of hoods jumped me. One of them was stashed in the car. Of course they could have spotted me somewhere else—followed me here.”
“They did,” Francine Ley said breathlessly. “They did, Johnny.”
His long chin moved an inch. “They piled me into a big Lincoln, a limousine. It was quite a car. It had heavy glass that didn’t break easily and no door handles and it was all shut up tight. In the front seat it had a tank of Nevada gas, cyanide, which the guy driving could turn into the back part without getting it himself. They took me out Griffith Parkway, towards the Club Egypt. That’s that joint on county land, near the airport.” He paused, rubbed the end of one eyebrow, went on: “They overlooked the Mauser I sometimes wear on my leg. The driver crashed the car and I got loose.”
He spread his hands and looked down at them. A faint metallic smile showed at the corners of his lips.
Francine Ley said: “I didn’t have anything to do with it, Johnny.” Her voice was as dead as the summer before last.
De Ruse said: “The guy that rode in the car before I did probably didn’t have a gun. He was Hugo Candlcss. The car was a ringer for his car—same model, same paint job, same plates—but it wasn’t his car. Somebody took a lot of trouble. Candless left the Delmar Club in the wrong car about six-thirty. His wife says he’s out of town. I talked to her an hour ago. His car hasn’t been out of the garage since noon … Maybe his wife knows he’s snatched by now, maybe not.”
Francine Ley’s nails clawed at her skirt. Her lips shook.
De Ruse went on calmly, tonelessly: “Somebody gunned the Candless chauffeur in a downtown hotel tonight or this afternoon. The cops haven’t found it yet. Somebody took a lot of trouble, Francy. You wouldn’t want to be in on that kind of a set-up, would you, precious?”
Francine Ley bent her head forward and stared at the floor. She said thickly: “I need a drink. What I had is dying in me. I feel awful.”
De Ruse stood up and went to the white desk. He drained a bottle into a glass and brought it across to her. He stood in front of her, holding the glass out of her reach.
“I only get tough once in a while, baby, but when I get tough I’m not so easy to stop, if I say it myself. If you know anything about all this, now would be a good time to spill it.”
He handed her the glass. She gulped the whiskey and a little more light came into her smoke-blue eyes. She said slowly: “I don’t know anything about it, Johnny. Not in the way you mean. But George Dial made me a love-nest proposition tonight and he told mc he could get money out of Candless by threatening to spill a dirty trick Candless played on some tough boy from Rcno.”
“Damn clever, these greasers,” De Ruse said. “Reno’s my town, baby. I know all the tough boys in Reno. Who was it?”
“Somebody named Zapparty.”
De Ruse said very softly: “Zapparty is the name of the man who runs the Club Egypt.”
Francine Ley stood up suddenly and grabbed his arm. “Stay out of it, Johnny! For Christ sake, can’t you stay out of it for just this once?”
De Ruse shook his head, smiled delicately, lingeringly at her. Then he lifted her hand off his arm and stepped back.
“I had a ride in their gas car, baby, and I didn’t like it. I smelled their Nevada gas. I left my lead in somebody’s gun punk. That makes mc call copper or get jammed up with the law. If someody’s snatched and I call copper, there’ll be another kidnap victim bumped off, more likely than not. Zapparty’s a tough boy from Reno and that could tie in with what Dial told you, and if Mops Parisi is playing with Zapparty, that could make a reason to pull mc into it. Parisi loathes my guts.”
“You don’t have to be a one-man riot squad, Johnny,” Francine Ley said desperately.
He kept on smiling, with tight lips and solemn eyes. “There’ll be two of us, baby. Get yourself a long coat. It’s still raining a little.”
She goggled at him. Her outstretched hand, the one that had been on his arm, spread its fingers stiffly, bent back from the palm, straining back. Her voice was hollow with fear.
“Me, Johnny? Oh, please, not .
De Ruse said gently: “Get that coat, honey. Make yourself look nice. It might be the last time we’ll go out together.”
She staggered past him. He touched her arm softly, held it a moment, said almost in a whisper:
“You didn’t put the finger on me, did you, Francy?”
She looked back stonily at the pain in his eyes, made a hoarse sound under her breath and jerked her arm loose, went quickly into the bedroom.
After a moment the pain went out of De Ruse’s eyes and the metallic smile came back to the corners of his lips.