THIRTEEN
Marcus braked the car to a stop and grinned admiringly at the big treeshaded house.
“Pretty nice,” he said. “I could go for a long rest there myself.”
Delaguerra got out of the car slowly, as if he was stiff and very tired. He was hatless, carried his straw under his arm. Part of the left side of his head was shaved and the shaved part covered by a thick pad of gauze and tape, over the stitches. A wick of wiry black hair stuck up over one edge of the bandage, with a ludicrous effect.
He said: “Yeah—but I’m not staying here, sap. Wait for me.”
He went along the path of stones that wound through the grass. Trees speared long shadows across the lawn, through the morning sunlight. The house was very still, with drawn blinds, a dark wreath on the brass knocker. Delaguerra didn’t go up to the door. He turned off along another path under the windows and went along the side of the house past the gladioli beds.
There were more trees at the back, more lawn, more flowers, more sun and shadow. There was a pond with water lilies in it and a big stone bullfrog. Beyond was a half-circle of lawn chairs around an iron table with a tile top. In one of the chairs Belle Marr sat.
She wore a black-and-white dress, loose and casual, and there was a wide-brimmed garden hat on her chestnut hair. She sat very still, looking into the distance across the lawn. Her face was white. The make-up glared on it.
She turned her head slowly, smiled a dull smile, motioned to a chair beside her. Delaguerra didn’t sit down. He took his straw from under his arm, snapped a finger at the brim, said: “The case is closed. There’ll be inquests, investigations, threats, a lot of people shouting their mouths off to horn in on the publicity, that sort of thing. The papers will play it big for a while. But underneath, on the record, it’s closed. You can begin to try to forget it.”
The girl looked at him suddenly, widened her vivid blue eyes, looked away again, over the grass.
“Is your head very bad, Sam?” she asked softly.
Delaguerra said: “No. It’s fine … What I mean is the La Motte girl shot Masters—and she shot Donny. Aage shot her. I shot Aage. All dead, ring around the rosy. Just how Imlay got killed we’ll not know ever, I guess. I can’t see that it matters now.”
Without looking up at him Belle Marr said quietly: “But how did you know it was Imlay up at the cabin? The paper said—” She broke off, shuddered suddenly.
He stared woodenly at the hat he was holding. “I didn’t. I thought a woman shot Donny. It looked like a good hunch that was Imlay up at the lake. It fitted his description.”
“How did you know it was a woman … that killed Donny?” Her voice had a lingering, half-whispered stillness.
“I just knew.”
He walked away a few steps, stood looking at the trees. He turned slowly, came back, stood beside her chair again. His face was very weary.
“We had great times together—the three of us. You and Donny and I. Life seems to do nasty things to people. It’s all gone now—all the good part.”
Her voice was still a whisper saying: “Maybe not all gone, Sam. We must see a lot of each other, from now on.”
A vague smile moved the corners of his lips, went away again. “It’s my first frame-up,” he said quietly. “I hope it will be my last.”
Belle Marr’s head jerked a little. Her hands took hold of the arms of the chair, looked white against the varnished wood. Her whole body seemed to get rigid.
After a moment Delaguerra reached in his pocket and something gold glittered in his hand. He looked down at it dully.
“Got the badge back,” he said. “It’s not quite as clean as it was. Clean as most, I suppose. I’ll try to keep it that way.” He put it back in his pocket.
Very slowly the girl stood up in front of him. She lifted her chin, stared at him with a long level stare. Her face was a mask of white plaster behind the rouge.
She said: “My God, Sam—I begin to understand.”
Delaguerra didn’t look at her face. He looked past her shoulder at some vague spot in the distance. He spoke vaguely, distantly.
“Sure … I thought it was a woman because it was a small gun such as a woman would use. But not only on that account. After I went up to the cabin I knew Donny was primed for trouble and it wouldn’t be that easy for a man to get the drop on him. But it was a perfect set-up for Imlay to have done it. Masters and Aage assumed he’d done it and had a lawyer phone in admitting he did it and promising to surrender him in the morning. So it was natural for anyone who didn’t know Imlay was dead to fall in line. Besides, no cop would expect a woman to pick up her shells.
“After I got Joey Chill’s story I thought it might be the La Motte girl. But I didn’t think so when I said it in front of her. That was dirty. It got her killed, in a way. Though I wouldn’t give much for her chances anyway, with that bunch.”
Belle Marr was still staring at him. The breeze blew a wisp of her hair and that was the only thing about her that moved.
He brought his eyes back from the distance, looked at her gravely for a brief moment, looked away again. He took a small bunch of keys out of his pocket, tossed them down on the table.
“Three things were tough to figure until I got completely wise. The writing on the pad, the gun in Donny’s hand, the missing shells. Then I tumbled to it. He didn’t die ‘right away. He had guts and he used them to the last flicker—to protect somebody. The writing on the pad was a bit shaky. He wrote it afterwards, when he was alone, dying. He had been thinking of Imlay and writing the name helped mess the trail. Then he got the gun out of his desk to die with it in his hand. That left the shells. I got that too, after a while.
“The shots were fired close, across the desk, and there were books on one end of the desk. The shells fell there, stayed on the desk where he could get them. He couldn’t have got them off the floor. There’s a key to the office on your ring. I went there last night, late. I found the shells in a humidor with his cigars. Nobody looked for them there. You only find what you expect to find, after all.”
He stopped talking and rubbed the side of his face. After a moment he added: “Donny did the best he could—and then he died. It was a swell job—and I’m letting him get away with it.”
Belle Marr opened her mouth slowly. A kind of babble came out of it first, then words, clear words.
“It wasn’t just women, Sam. It was the kind of women he had.” She shivered. “I’ll go downtown now and give myself up.”
Delaguerra said: “No. I told you I was letting him get away with it. Downtown they like it the way it is. It’s swell politics. It gets the city out from under the Masters-Aage mob. It puts Drew on top for a little while, but he’s too weak to last. So that doesn’t matter … You’re not going to do anything about any of it. You’re going to do what Donny used his last strength to show he wanted. You’re staying out. Goodbye.”
He looked at her white shattered face once more, very quickly. Then he swung around, walked away over the lawn, past the pool with the lily pads and the stone bullfrog along the side of the house and out to the car.
Pete Marcus swung the door open. Delaguerra got in and sat down and put his head far back against the seat, slumped down in the car and closed his eyes. He said flatly: “Take it easy, Pete. My head hurts like hell.”
Marcus started the car and turned into the street, drove slowly back along De Neve Lane towards town. The treeshaded house disappeared behind them. The tall trees finally hid it.
When they were a long way from it Delaguerra opened his eyes again.
I’LL BE
WAITING
At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.
Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned. That should be his radio room after one A.M. Nobody should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.
The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleightof-hand artist, fingers with shiny, molded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-gray eyes.
The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing perfectly perceived, an error of vision.
He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.
She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-colored knee. She was wearing lounging pajamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.
“You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Tony Reseck asked.
The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.
She said nothing.
Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” he repeated gently.
“Not to cry over,” the girl said tonelessly.
Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes. Large, deep, empty eyes. Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”
“Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.
“Go on, kid me,” the girl said.
“I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”
“I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.
“Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.
“It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”
She gave him another long lucid glance. “Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?” She laughed a little, almost under her breath. “What did I do wrong?”
Tony smiled his toy smile. “Nothing, Miss Cressy. Nothing at all. But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.”
She laughed again. “Make me a story about it. I’m bored.”
“There was a girl here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She didn’t speak to anybody hardly. What do you think she did then?”
The girl eyed him gravely. “She jumped her bill.”
He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking. ‘Unh-uh. She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.”
The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-colored knee. “What did you say your name was?”
“Tony Reseck.”
“Sounds like a flunky.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Polish.”
“Go on, Tony.”
“All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen stories above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.” He dropped his hand with’a final gesture, a farewell gesture. “Nobody saw her jump. But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.”
“You’re making it up, Tony.” Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.
He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. “Eve Cressy,” he said musingly. “A name waiting for lights to be in.”
“Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony. You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like the little polished bones. “I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place—without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.”
He leaned over softly and turned the knob on the radio. A waltz formed itself dimly on the warm air. A tinsel waltz, but a waltz. He turned the volume up. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed.
The girl put her hand on one side and hummed three or four bars and stopped with a sudden tightening of her mouth.
“Eve Cressy,” she said. “It was in lights once. At a bum night club. A dive. They raided it and the lights went out.”
He smiled at her almost mockingly. “It was no dive while you were there, Miss Cressy … That’s the waltz the orchestra always played when the old porter walked up and down in front of the hotel entrance, all swelled up with his medals on his chest. The Last Laugh. Emil Jannings. You wouldn’t remember that one, Miss Cressy.”
“‘Spring, Beautiful Spring,’” she said. “No, I never saw it.”
He walked three steps away from her and turned. “I have to go upstairs and palm doorknobs. I hope I didn’t bother you. You ought to go to bed now. It’s pretty late.”
The tinsel waltz stopped and a voice began to talk. The girl spoke through the voice. “You really thought something like that—about the balcony?”
He nodded. “I might have,” he said softly. “I don’t any more.”
“No chance, Tony.” Her smile was a dim lost leaf. “Come and talk to me some more. Redheads don’t jump, Tony. They hang on—and wither.”
He looked at her gravely for a moment and then moved away over the carpet. The porter was standing in the archway that led to the main lobby. Tony hadn’t looked that way yet, but he knew somebody was there. He always knew if anybody was close to him. He could hear the grass grow, like the donkey in The Blue Bird.
The porter jerked his chin at him urgently. His broad face above the uniform collar looked sweaty and excited. Tony stepped up close to him and they went together through the arch and out to the middle of the dim lobby.
“Trouble?” Tony asked wearily.
“There’s a guy outside to see you, Tony. He won’t come in. I’m doing a wipe—off on the plate glass of the doors and he comes up beside me, a tall guy. ‘Get Tony,’ he says, out of the side of his mouth.”
Tony said: “Uh-huh,” and looked at the porter’s pale blue eyes. “Who was it?”
“Al, he said to say he was.”
Tony’s face became as expressionless as dough. “Okey.” He started to move off.
The porter caught his sleeve. “Listen, Tony. You got any enemies?”
Tony laughed politely, his face still like dough.
“Listen, Tony.” The porter held his sleeve tightly. “There’s a big black car down the block, the other way from the hacks. There’s a guy standing beside it with his foot on the running board. This guy that spoke to me, he wears a dark-colored, wrap-around overcoat with a high collar turned up against his ears. His hat’s way low, You can’t hardly see his face. He says, ‘Get Tony,’ out of the side of his mouth. You ain’t got any enemies, have you, Tony?”
“Only the finance company,” Tony said. “Beat it.”
He walked slowly and a little stiffly across the blue carpet, up the three shallow steps to the entrance lobby with the three elevators on one side and the desk on the other. Only one elevator was working. Beside the open doors, his arms folded, the night operator stood silent in a neat blue uniform with silver facings. A lean, dark Mexican named Gomez. A new boy, breaking in on the night shift.
The other side was the desk, rose marble, with the night clerk leaning on it delicately. A small neat man with a wispy reddish mustache and cheeks so rosy they looked roughed. He stared at Tony and poked a nail at his mustache.
Tony pointed a stiff index finger at him, folded the other three fingers tight to his palm, and flicked his thumb up and down on the stiff finger. The clerk touched the other side of his mustache and looked bored.
Tony went on past the closed and darkened newsstand and the side entrance to the drugstore, out to the brassbound plateglass doors. He stopped just inside them and took a deep, hard breath. He squared his shoulders, pushed the doors open and stepped out into the cold damp night air.
The street was dark, silent. The rumble of traffic on Wilshire, two blocks away, had no body, no meaning. To the left were two taxis. Their drivers leaned against a fender, side by side, smoking. Tony walked the other way. The big dark car was a third of a block from the hotel entrance. Its lights were dimmed and it was only when he was almost up to it that he heard the gentle sound of its engine turning over.
A tall figure detached itself from the body of the car and strolled toward him, both hands in the pockets of the dark overcoat with the high collar. From the man’s mouth a cigarette tip glowed faintly, a rusty pearl.
They stopped two feet from each other.
The tall man said, “Hi, Tony. Long time no see.”
“Hello, Al. How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain.” The tall man started to take his right hand out of his overcoat pocket, then stopped and laughed quietly. “I forgot. Guess you don’t want to shake hands.”
“That don’t mean anything,” Tony said. “Shaking hands. Monkeys can shake hands. What’s on your mind, Al?”
“Still the funny little fat guy, eh, Tony?”
“I guess.” Tony winked his eyes tight. His throat felt tight.
“You like your job back there?”
“It’s a job.”
Al laughed his quiet laugh again. “You take it slow, Tony. I’ll take it fast. So it’s a job and you want to hold it. Okey. There’s a girl named Eve Cressy flopping in your quiet hotel. Get her out. Fast and right now.”
“What’s the trouble?”
The tall man looked up and down the street. A man behind in the car coughed lightly. “She’s hooked with a wrong number. Nothing against her personal, but she’ll lead trouble to you. Get her out, Tony. You got maybe an hour.”
“Sure,” Tony said aimlessly, without meaning.
Al took his hand out of his pocket and stretched it against Tony’s chest. He gave him a light lazy push. “I wouldn’t be telling you just for the hell of it, little fat brother. Get her out of there.”
“Okey,” Tony said, without any tone in his voice.
The tall man took back his hand and reached for the car door. He opened it and started to slip in like a lean black shadow.
Then he stopped and said something to the men in the car and got out again. He came back to where Tony stood silent, his pale eyes catching a little dim light from the street.
“Listen, Tony. You always kept your nose clean. You’re a good brother, Tony.”
Tony didn’t speak.
Al leaned toward him, a long urgent shadow, the high collar almost touching his ears. “It’s trouble business, Tony. The boys won’t like it, but I’m telling you just the same. This Cressy was married to a lad named Johmy Rails. Rails is out of Quentin two, three days, or a week. He did a three-spot for manslaughter. The girl put him there. He ran down an old man one night when he was drunk, and she was with him. He wouldn’t stop. She told him to go in and tell it, or else. He didn’t go in. So the Johns come for him.”
Tony said, “That’s too bad.”
“It’s kosher, kid. It’s my business to know. This Ralls flapped his mouth in stir about how the girl would be waiting for him when he got out, all set to forgive and forget, and he was going straight to her.”
Tony said, “What’s he to you?” His voice had a dry, stiff crackle, like thick paper.
Al laughed. “The trouble boys want to see him. He ran a table at a spot on the Strip and figured out a scheme. He and another guy took the house for fifty grand. The other lad coughed up, but we still need Johnny’s twentyfive. The trouble boys don’t get paid to forget.”
Tony looked up and down the dark street. One of the taxi drivers flicked a cigarette stub in a long arc over the top of one of the cabs. Tony watched it fall and spark on the pavement. He listened to the quiet sound of the big car’s motor.
“I don’t want any part of it,” he said. “I’ll get her out.”
Al backed away from him, nodding. “Wise kid. How’s mom these days?”
“Okey,” Tony said.
“Tell her I was asking for her.”
“Asking for her isn’t anything,” Tony said.
Al turned quickly and got into the car. The car curved lazily in the middle of the block and drifted back toward the corner. Its lights went up and sprayed on a wall. It turned a corner and was gone. The lingering smell of its exhaust drifted past Tony’s nose. He turned and walked back to the hotel and into it. He went along to the radio room.
The radio still muttered, but the girl was gone from the davenport in front of it. The pressed cushions were hollowed out by her body. Tony reached down and touched them. He thought they were still warm. He turned the radio off and stood there, turning a thumb slowly in front of his body, his hand flat against his stomach. Then he went back through the lobby toward the elevator bank and stood beside a majolica jar of white sand. The clerk fussed behind a pebbled-glass screen at one end of the desk. The air was dead.
The elevator bank was dark. Tony looked at the indicator of the middle car and saw that it was at 14.
“Gone to bed,” he said under his breath.
The door of the porter’s room beside the elevators opened and the little Mexican night operator came out in street clothes. He looked at Tony with a quiet sidewise look out of eyes the color of dried-out chestnuts.
“Good night, boss.”
“Yeah,” Tony said absently.
He took a thin dappled cigar out of his vest pocket and smelled it. He examined it slowly, turning it around in his neat fingers. There was a small tear along the side. He frowned at that and put the cigar away.
There was a distant sound and the hand on the indicator began to steal around the bronze dial. Light glittered up in the shaft and the straight line of the car floor dissolved the darkness below. The car stopped and the doors opened, and Carl came out Qf it.
His eyes caught Tony’s with a kind of jump and he walked over to him, his head on one side, a thin shine along his pink upper lip.
“Listen, Tony.”
Tony took his arm in a hard swift hand and turned him. He pushed him quickly, yet somehow casually, down the steps to the dim main lobby and steered him into a corner. He let go of the arm. His throat tightened again, for no reason he could think of.
“Well?” he said darkly. “Listen to what?”
The porter reached into a pocket and hauled out a dollar bill. “He gimme this,” he said loosely. His glittering eyes looked past Tony’s shoulder at nothing. They winked rapidly. “Ice and ginger ale.”
“Don’t stall,” Tony growled.
“Guy in FourteenB,” the porter said.
“Lemme smell your breath.”
The porter leaned toward him obediently.
“Liquor,” Tony said harshly.
“He gimme a drink.”
Tony looked down at the dollar bill. “Nobody’s in FourteenB. Not on my list,” he said.
“Yeah. There is.” The porter licked his lips and his eyes opened and shut several times. “Tall dark guy.”
“All right,” Tony said crossly. “All right. There’s a tall dark guy in FourteenB and he gave you a buck and a drink. Then what?”
“Gat under his arm,” Carl said, and blinked.
Tony smiled, but his eyes had taken on the lifeless glitter of thick ice. “You take Miss Cressy up to her room?”
Carl shook his head. “Gomez. I saw her go up.”
“Get away from me,” Tony said between his teeth. “And don’t accept any more drinks from the guests.”
He didn’t move until Carl had gone back into his cubbyhole by the elevators and shut the door. Then he moved silently up the three steps and stood in front of the desk, looking at the veined rose marble, the onyx pen set, the fresh registration card in its leather frame. He lifted a hand and smacked it down hard on the marble. The clerk popped out from behind the glass screen like a chipmunk coming out of its hole.
Tony took a flimsy out of his breast pocket and spread it on the desk. “No FourteenB on this,” he said in a bitter voice.
The clerk wisped politely at his mustache. “So sorry. You must have been out to supper when he checked in.”
“Who?”
“Registered as James Watterson, San Diego.” The clerk yawned.
“Ask for anybody?”
The clerk stopped in the middle of the yawn and looked at the top of Tony’s head. “Why yes. He asked for a swing band. Why?”
“Smart, fast and funny,” Tony said. “If you like ‘em that way.” He wrote on his flimsy and stuffed it back into his pocket. “I’m going upstairs and palm doorknobs. There’s four tower rooms you ain’t rented yet. Get up on your toes, son. You’re slipping.”
“I made out,” the clerk drawled, and completed his yawn. “Hurry back, pop. I don’t know how I’ll get through the time.”
“You could shave that pink fuzz off your lip,” Tony said, and went across to the elevators.
He opened up a dark one and lit the dome light and shot the car up to fourteen. He darkened it again, stepped out and closed the doors. This lobby was smaller than any other, except the one immediately below it. It had a single blue-paneled door in each of the walls other than the elevator wall. On each door was a gold number and letter with a gold wreath around it. Tony walked over to 14A and put his ear to the panel. He heard nothing. Eve Cressy might be in bed asleep, or in the bathroom, or out on the balcony. Or she might be sitting there in the room, a few feet from the door, looking at the wall. Well, he wouldn’t expect to be able to hear her sit and look at the wall. He went over to 14B and put his ear to that panel. This was different. There was a sound in there. A man coughed. It sounded somehow like a solitary cough. There were no voices. Tony pressed the small nacre button beside the door.
Steps came without hurry. A thickened voice spoke through the panel. Tony made no answer, no sound. The thickened voice repeated the question. Lightly, maliciously, Tony pressed the bell again.
Mr. James Watterson, or San Diego, should now open the door and give forth noise. He didn’t. A silence fell beyond that door that was like the silence of a glacier. Once more Tony put his ear to the wood. Silence utterly.
He got out a master key on a chain and pushed it delicately into the lock of the door. He turned it, pushed the door inward three inches and withdrew the key. Then he waited.
“All right,” the voice said harshly. “Come in and get it.”
Tony pushed the door wide and stood there, framed against the light from the lobby. The man was tall, black-haired, angular and whitefaced. He held a gun. He held it as though he knew about guns.
“Step right in,” he drawled.
Tony went in through the door and pushed it shut with his shoulder. He kept his hands a little out from his sides, the clever fingers curled and slack. He smiled his quiet little smile.
“Mr. Watterson?”
“And after that what?”
“I’m the house detective here.”
“It slays me.”