* * *
THE CURTAIN
* * *
ONE
The first time I ever saw Larry Batzel he was drunk outside Sardi’s in a secondhand Rolls-Royce. There was a tall blonde with him who had eyes you wouldn’t forget. I helped her argue him out from under the wheel so that she could drive.
The second time I saw him he didn’t have any Rolls-Royce or any blonde or any job in pictures. All he had was the jitters and a suit that needed pressing. He remembered me. He was that kind of drunk.
I bought him enough drinks to do him some good and gave him half my cigarettes. I used to see him from time to time “between pictures.” I got to lending him money. I don’t know just why. He was a big, handsome brute with eyes like a cow and something innocent and honest in them. Something I don’t get much of in my business.
The funny part was he had been a liquor runner for a pretty hard mob before Repeal. He never got anywhere in pictures, and after a while I didn’t see him around any more.
Then one day out of the clear blue I got a check for all he owed me and a note that he was working on the tables– gambling not dining–at the Dardanella Club, and to come out and look him up. So I knew he was back in the rackets.
I didn’t go to see him, but I found out somehow or other that Joe Mesarvey owned the place, and that Joe Mesarvey was married to the blonde with the eyes, the one Larry Batzel had been with in the Rolls that time. I still didn’t go out there.
Then very early one morning there was a dim figure standing by my bed, between me and the windows. The blinds had been pulled down. That must have been what wakened me. The figure was large and had a gun.
I rolled over and rubbed my eyes.
“Okay,” I said sourly. “There’s twelve bucks in my pants and my wrist watch cost twenty-seven fifty. You couldn’t get anything on that.”
The figure went over to the window and pulled a blind aside an inch and looked down at the street. When he turned again I saw that it was Larry Batzel.
His face was drawn and tired and he needed a shave. He had dinner clothes on still and a dark double-breasted overcoat with a dwarf rose drooping in the lapel.
He sat down and held the gun on his knee for a moment before he put it away, with a puzzled frown, as if he didn’t know how it got into his hand.
“You’re going to drive me to Berdoo,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of town. They’ve put the pencil on me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about it.”
I sat up and felt the carpet with my toes and lit a cigarette. It was a little after five-thirty.
“I jimmied your lock with a piece of celluloid,” he said. “You ought to use your night latch once in a while. I wasn’t sure which was your flop and I didn’t want to rouse the house.”
“Try the mailboxes next time,” I said. “But go ahead. You’re not drunk, are you?”
“I’d like to be, but I’ve got to get away first. I’m just rattled. I’m not so tough as I used to be. You read about the O’Mara disappearance of course.”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, anyway. If I keep talking I won’t blow up. I don’t think I’m spotted here.”
“One drink won’t hurt either of us,” I said. “The Scotch is on the table there.”
He poured a couple of drinks quickly and handed me one. I put on a bathrobe and slippers. The glass rattled against his teeth when he drank.
He put his empty glass down and held his hands tight together.
“I used to know Dud O’Mara pretty well. We used to run stuff together down from Hueneme Point. We even carried the torch for the same girl. She’s married to Joe Mesarvey now. Dud married five million dollars. He married General Dade Winslow’s rickety-rackety divorcée daughter.”
“I know all that,” I said.
“Yeah. Just listen. She picked him out of a speak, just like I’d pick up a cafeteria tray. But he didn’t like the life. I guess he used to see Mona. He got wise Joe Mesarvey and Lash Yeager had a hot car racket on the side. They knocked him off.”
“The hell they did,” I said. “Have another drink.”
“No. Just listen. There’s just two points. The night O’Mara pulled down the curtain–no, the night the papers got it– Mona Mesarvey disappeared too. Only she didn’t. They hid her out in a shack a couple of miles beyond Realito in the orange belt. Next door to a garage run by a heel named Art Huck, a hot car drop. I found out. I trailed Joe there.”
“What made it your business?” I asked.
“I’m still soft on her. I’m telling you this because you were pretty swell to me once. You can make something of it after I blow. They hid her out there so it would look as if Dud had blown with her. Naturally the cops were not too dumb to see Joe after the disappearance. But they didn’t find Mona. They have a system on disappearances and they play the system.”
He got up and went over to the window again, looked through the side of the blind.
“There’s a blue sedan down there I think I’ve seen before,” he said. “But maybe not. There’s a lot like it.”
He sat down again. I didn’t speak.
“This place beyond Realito is on the first side road north from the Foothill Boulevard. You can’t miss it. It stands all alone, the garage and the house next door. There’s an old cyanide plant up above there. I’m telling you this–”
“That’s point one,” I said. “What was the second point?”
“The punk that used to drive for Lash Yeager lit out a couple of weeks back and went East. I lent him fifty bucks. He was broke. He told me Yeager was out to the Winslow estate the night Dud O’Mara disappeared.”
I stared at him. “It’s interesting, Larry. But not enough to break eggs over. After all we do have a police department.”
“Yeah. Add this. I got drunk last night and told Yeager what I knew. Then I quit the job at the Dardanella. So somebody shot at me outside where I live when I got home. I’ve been on the dodge ever since. Now, will you drive me to Berdoo?”
I stood up. It was May but I felt cold. Larry Batzel looked cold, even with his overcoat on.
“Absolutely,” I said. “But take it easy. Later will be much safer than now. Have another drink. You don’t know they knocked O’Mara off.”
“If he found out about the hot car racket, with Mona married to Joe Mesarvey, they’d have to knock him off. He was that kind of guy.”
I stood up and went towards the bathroom. Larry went over to the window again.
“It’s still there,” he said over his shoulder. “You might get shot at riding with me.”
“I’d hate that,” I said.
“You’re a good sort of heel, Carmady. It’s going to rain. I’d hate like hell to be buried in the rain, wouldn’t you?”
“You talk too damn much,” I said, and went into the bathroom.
It was the last time I ever spoke to him.
TWO
I heard him moving around while I was shaving, but not after I got under the shower, of course. When I came out he was gone. I padded over and looked into the kitchenette. He wasn’t in there. I grabbed a bathrobe and peeked out into the hail. It was empty except for a milkman starting down the back stairs with his wiry tray of bottles, and the fresh folded papers leaning against the shut doors.
“Hey,” I called out to the milkman, “did a guy just come out of here and go by you?”
He looked back at me from the corner of the wall and opened his mouth to answer. He was a nice-looking boy with fine large white teeth. I remember his teeth well, because I was looking at them when I heard the shots.
They were not very near or very far. Out back of the apartment house, by the garages, or in the alley, I thought. There were two quick, hard shots and then the riveting machine. A burst of five or six, all a good chopper should ever need. Then the roar of the car going away.
The milkman shut his mouth as if a winch controlled it. His eyes were huge and empty looking at me. Then he very carefully set his bottles down on the top step and leaned against the wall.
“That sounded like shots,” he said.
All this took a couple of seconds and felt like half an hour. I went back into my place and threw clothes on, grabbed odds and ends off the bureau, barged out into the hall. It was still empty, even of the milkman. A siren was dying somewhere near. A bald head with a hangover under it poked out of a door and made a snuffling noise.
I went down the back stairs.
There were two or three people out in the lower hail. I went out back. The garages were in two rows facing each other across a cement space, then two more at the end, leaving a space to go out to the alley. A couple of kids were coming over a fence three houses away.
Larry Batzel lay on his face, with his hat a yard away from his head, and one hand flung out to within a foot of a big black automatic. His ankles were crossed, as if he had spun as he fell. Blood was thick on the side of his face, on his blond hair, especially on his neck. It was also thick on the cement yard.
Two radio cops and the milk driver and a man in a brown sweater and bibless overalls were bending over him. The man in overalls was our janitor.
I went up to them, about the same time the two kids from over the fence hit the yard. The milk driver looked at me with a queer, strained expression. One of the cops straightened up and said: “Either of you guys know him? He’s still got half his face.”
He wasn’t talking to me. The milk driver shook his head and kept on looking at me from the corner of his eyes. The janitor said: “He ain’t a tenant here. He might of been a visitor. Kind of early for visitors, though, ain’t it?”
“He’s got party clothes on. You know your flophouse better’n I do,” the cop said heavily. He got out a notebook.
The other cop straightened up too and shook his head and went towards the house, with the janitor trotting beside him.
The cop with the notebook jerked a thumb at me and said harshly: “You was here first after these two guys. Anything from you?”
I looked at the milkman. Larry Batzel wouldn’t care, and a man has a living to earn. It wasn’t a story for a prowl car anyway.
“I just heard the shots and came running,” I said.
The cop took that for an answer. The milk driver looked up at the lowering gray sky and said nothing.
After a while I got back into my apartment and finished my dressing. When I picked my hat up off the window table by the Scotch bottle there was -a small rosebud lying on a piece of scrawled paper.
The note said: “You’re a good guy, but I think I’ll go it alone. Give the rose to Mona, if you ever should get a chance. Larry.”
I put those things in my wallet, and braced myself with a drink.
THREE
About three o’clock that afternoon I stood in the main hallway of the Winslow place and waited for the butler to come back. I had spent most of the day not going near my office or apartment, and not meeting any homicide men. It was only a question of time until I had to come through, but I wanted to see General Dade Winslow first. He was hard to see.
Oil paintings hung all around me, mostly portraits. There were a couple of statues and several suits of time-darkened armor on pedestals of dark wood. High over the huge marble fieplace hung two bullet-torn–or moth-eaten–cavalry pennants crossed in a glass case, and below them the painted likeness of a thin, spry-looking man with a black beard and mustachios and full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican War. This might be General Dade Winslow’s father. The general himself, though pretty ancient, couldn’t be quite that old.
Then the butler came back and said General Winslow was in the orchid house and would I follow him, please.
We went out of the french doors at the back and across the lawns to a big glass pavilion well beyond the garages. The butler opened the door into a sort of vestibule and shut it when I was inside, and it was already hot. Then he opened the inner door and it was really hot.
The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the greenhouse dripped. In the half light enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.
The butler, who was old and thin and very straight and whitehaired, held branches of the plants back for me to pass, and we came to an opening in the middle of the place. A large reddish Turkish rug was spread down on the hexagonal flagstones. In the middle of the rug, in a wheel chair, a very old man sat with a traveling rug around his body and watched us come.
Nothing lived in his face but the eyes. Black eyes, deep-set, shining, untouchable. The rest of his face was the leaden mask of death, sunken temples, a sharp nose, outward-turning ear lobes, a mouth that was a thin white slit. He was wrapped partly in a reddish and very shabby bathrobe and partly in the rug. His hands had purple fingernails and were clasped loosely, motionless on the rug. He had a few scattered wisps of white hair on his skull.
The butler said: “This is Mr. Carmady, General.”
The old man stared at me. After a while a sharp, shrewish voice said: “Place a chair for Mr. Carmady.”
The butler dragged a wicker chair out and I sat down. I put my hat on the floor. The butler picked it up.
“Brandy,” the general said. “How do you like your brandy, sir?”
“Any way at all,” I said.
He snorted. The butler went away. The general stared at me with his unblinking eyes. He snorted again.
“I always take champagne with mine,” he said. “A third of a glass of brandy under the champagne, and the champagne as cold as Valley Forge. Colder, if you can get it colder.”
A noise that might have been a chuckle came out of him.
“Not that I was at Valley Forge,” he said. “Not quite that bad. You may smoke, sir.”
I thanked him and said I was tired of smoking for a while. I got a handkerchief out and mopped my face.
“Take your coat off, sir. Dud always did. Orchids require heat, Mr. Carmady–like sick old men.”
I took my coat off, a raincoat I had brought along. It looked like rain. Larry Batzel had said it was going to rain.
“Dud is my son-in-law. Dudley O’Mara. I believe you had something to tell me about him.”
“Just hearsay,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to go into it, unless I had your O.K., General Winslow.”
The basilisk eyes stared at me. “You are a private detective. You want to be paid, I suppose.”
“I’m in that line of business,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to be paid for every breath I draw. It’s just something I heard. You might like to pass it on yourself to the Missing Persons Bureau.”
“I see,” he said quietly. “A scandal of some sort.”
The butler came back before I could answer. He wheeled a tea wagon in through the jungle, set it at my elbow and mixed me a brandy and soda. He went away.
I sipped the drink. “It seems there was a girl,” I said. “He knew her before he knew your daughter. She’s married to a racketeer now. It seems–”
“I’ve heard all that,” he said. “I don’t give a damn. What I want to know is where he is and if he’s all right. If he’s happy.”
I stared at him popeyed. After a moment I said weakly: “Maybe I could find the girl, or the boys downtown could, with what I could tell them.”
He plucked at the edge of his rug and moved his head about an inch. I think he was nodding. Then he said very slowly: “Probably I’m talking too much for my health, but I want to make something clear. I’m a cripple. I have two ruined legs and half my lower belly. I don’t eat much or sleep much. I’m a bore to myself and a damn nuisance to everybody else. So I miss Dud. He used to spend a lot of time with me. Why, God only knows.”
“Well–” I began.
“Shut up. You’re a young man to me, so I can be rude to you. Dud left without saying goodbye to me. That wasn’t like him. He drove his car away one evening and nobody has heard from him since. If he got tired of my fool daughter and her brat, if he wanted some other woman, that’s all right. He got a brainstorm and left without saying goodbye to me, and now he’s sorry. That’s why I don’t hear from him. Find him and tell him I understand. That’s all–unless he needs money. If he does, he can have all he wants.”
His leaden cheeks almost had a,pink tinge now. His black eyes were brighter, if possible. He leaned back very slowly and closed his eyes.
I drank a lot of my drink in one long swallow, I said: “Suppose he’s in a jam. Say, on account of the girl’s husband. This Joe Mesarvey.”
He opened his eyes and winked. “Not an O’Mara,” he said. “It’s the other fellow would be in a jam.”
“Okay. Shall I just pass on to the Bureau where I heard this girl was?”
“Certainly not. They’ve done nothing. Let them go on doing it. Find him yourself. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars–even if you only have to walk across the street. Tell him everything is all right here. The old man’s doing fine and sends his love. That’s all.”
I couldn’t tell him. Suddenly I couldn’t tell him anything Larry Batzel had told me, or what had happened to Larry, or anything about it. I finished my drink and stood up and put my coat back on. I said: “That’s too much money for the job, General Winslow. We can talk about that later. Have I your authority to represent you in my own way?”
He pressed a bell on his wheel chair. “Just tell him,” he said. “I want to know he’s all right and I want him to know I’m all right. That’s all–unless he needs money. Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’m tired.”
He closed his eyes. I went back through the jungle and the butler met me at the door with my hat.
I breathed in some cool air and said: “The general wants me to see Mrs. O’Mara.”
FOUR
This room had a white carpet from wall to wall. Ivory drapes of immense height lay tumbled casually on the white carpet inside the many windows. The windows stared towards the dark foothills, and the air beyond the glass was dark too. It hadn’t started to rain yet, but there was a feeling of pressure in the atmosphere.
Mrs. O’Mara was stretched out on a white chaise longue with both her slippers off and her feet in the net stockings they don’t wear any more. She was tall and dark, with a sulky mouth. Handsome, but this side of beautiful.
She said: “What in the world can I do for you? It’s all known. Too damn known. Except that I don’t know you, do I?”
“Well, hardly,” I said. “I’m just a private copper in a small way of business.”
She reached for a glass I hadn’t noticed but would have looked for in a moment, on account of her way of talking and the fact she had her slippers off. She drank languidly, flashing a ring.
“I met him in a speakeasy,” she said with a sharp laugh. “A very handsome bootlegger, with thick curly hair and an Irish grin. So I married him. Out of boredom. As for him, the bootlegging business was even then uncertain–if there were no other attractions.”
She waited for me to say there were, but not as if she cared a lot whether I came through. I just said: “You didn’t see him leave on the day he disappeared?”
“No. I seldom saw him leave, or come back. It was like that.” She drank some more of her drink,
“Huh,” I grunted. “But, of course, you didn’t quarrel.” They never do,
“There are so many ways of quarreling, Mr. Carmady.”
“Yeah. I like your saying that. Of course you knew about the girl.”
“I’m glad I’m being properly frank to an old family detective. Yes, I knew about the girl.” She curled a tendril of inky hair behind her ear.
“Did you know about her before he disappeared?” I asked politely.
“Certainly.”
“How?”
“You’re pretty direct, aren’t you? Connections, as they say. I’m an old speak fancier. Or didn’t you know that?”
“Did you know the bunch at the Dardanella?”
“I’ve been there.” She didn’t look startled, or even surprised. “In fact I practically lived there for a week. That’s where I met Dudley O’Mara.”
“Yeah. Your father married pretty late in life, didn’t he?”
I watched color fade in her cheeks. I wanted her mad, but there was nothing doing. She smiled and the color came back and she rang a push bell on a cord down in the swansdown cushions of the chaise longue.
“Very late,” she said, “if it’s any of your business.”
“It’s not,” I said.
A coy-looking maid came in and mixed a couple of drinks at a side table. She gave one to Mrs. O’Mara, put one down beside me. She went away again, showing a nice pair of legs under a short skirt.
Mrs. O’Mara watched the door shut and then said: “The whole thing has got Father into a mood. I wish Dud would wire or write or something.”
I said slowly: “He’s an old, old man, crippled, half buried already. One thin thread of interest held him to life. The thread snapped and nobody gives a damn. He tries to act as if he didn’t give a damn himself. I don’t call that a mood. I call that a pretty swell display of intestinal fortitude.”
“Gallant,” she said, and her eyes were daggers. “But you haven’t touched your drink.”
“I have to go,” I said. “Thanks all the same.”
She held a slim, tinted hand out and I went over and touched it. The thunder burst suddenly behind the hills and she jumped. A gust of air shook the windows.
I went down a tiled staircase to the hallway and the butler appeared out of a shadow and opened the door for me.
I looked down a succession of terraces decorated with flower beds and imported trees. At the bottom a high metal railing with gilded spearheads and a six-foot hedge inside. A sunken driveway crawled down to the main gates and a lodge inside them.
Beyond the estate the hill sloped down to the city and the old oil wells of La Brea, now partly a park, partly a deserted stretch of fenced-in wild land. Some of the wooden derricks still stood. These had made the wealth of the Winslow family and then the family had run away from them up the hill, far enough to get away from the smell of the sumps, not too far for them to look out of the front windows and see what made them rich.
I walked down brick steps between the terraced lawns. On one of them a dark-haired, pale-faced kid of ten or eleven was throwing darts at a target hung on a tree. I went along near him.
“You young O’Mara?” I asked.
He leaned against a stone bench with four darts in his hand and looked at me with cold, slaty eyes, old eyes.
“I’m Dade Winslow Trevillyan,” he said grimly.
“Oh, then Dudley O’Mara’s not your dad.”
“Of course not.” His voice was full of scorn. “Who are you?”
“I’m a detective. I’m going to find your–I mean, Mr. O’Mara.”
That didn’t bring us any closer. Detectives were nothing to him. The thunder was tumbling about in the hills like a bunch of elephants playing tag. I had another idea.
“Bet you can’t put four out of five into the gold at thirty feet.”
He livened up sharply. “With these?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much you bet?” he snapped.
“Oh, a dollar.”
He ran to the target and cleaned darts off it, came back and took a stance by the bench.
“That’s not thirty feet,” I said.
He gave me a sour look and went a few feet behind the bench. I grinned, then I stopped grinning.
His small hand darted so swiftly I could hardly follow it. Five darts hung in the gold center of the target in less than that made seconds. He stared at me triumphantly.
“Gosh, you’re pretty good, Master Trevillyan,” I grunted, and got my dollar out.
His small hand snapped at it like a trout taking the fly. He had it out of sight like a flash.
“That’s nothing,” he chuckled. “You ought to see me on our target range back of the garages. Want to go over there and bet some more?”
I looked back up the hill and saw part of a low white building backed up to a bank,
“Well, not today,” I said. “Next time I visit here maybe. So Dud O’Mara is not your dad. If I find him anyway, will it be all right with you?”
He shrugged his thin, sharp shoulders in a maroon sweater. “Sure. But what can you do the police can’t do?”
“It’s a thought,” I said, and left him.