She gave me some more. Blood began to move in my stiffened body.
“I kind of like you,” she said. “Even if your face does look like a collision mat.”
“Make the most of it,” I said. “It won’t last long even this good.”
She looked around swiftly and seemed to listen. One of the two doors was ajar. She looked towards that. Her face seemed pale. But the sounds were only the rain.
She sat down by the lamp again.
“Why did you come here and stick your neck out?” she asked slowly, looking at the floor.
The carpet was made of red and tan squares. There were bright green pine trees on the wallpaper and the curtains were blue. The furniture, what I could see of it, looked as if it came from one of those places that advertise on bus benches.
“I had a rose for you,” I said. “From Larry Batzel.”
She lifted something off the table and twirled it slowly, the dwarf rose he had left for her.
“I got it,” she said quietly. “There was a note, but they didn’t show me that. Was it for me?”
“No, for me. He left it on my-table before he went out and got shot.”
Her face fell apart like something you see in a nightmare. Her mouth and eyes were black hollows. She didn’t make a sound. And after a moment her face settled back into the same calmly beautiful lines.
“They didn’t tell me that either,” she said softly.
“He got shot,” I said carefully, “because he found out what Joe and Lash Yeager did to Dud O’Mara. Bumped him off.”
That one didn’t faze her at all. “Joe didn’t do anything to Dud O’Mara,” she said quietly. “I haven’t seen Dud in two years. That was just newspaper hooey, about me seeing him.”
“It wasn’t in the papers,” I said.
“Well, it was hooey wherever it was. Joe is in Chicago. He went yesterday by plane to sell out. If the deal goes through, Lash and I are to follow him. Joe is no killer.”
I stared at her.
Her eyes got haunted again. “Is Larry–is he–?”
“He’s dead,” I said. “It was a professional job, with a tommy gun. I didn’t mean they did it personally.”
She took hold of her lip and held it for a moment tight between her teeth. I could hear her slow, hard breathing. She jammed her cigarette in an ashtray and stood up.
“Joe didn’t do it!” she stormed. “I know damn well he didn’t. He–” She stopped cold, glared at me, touched her hair, then suddenly yanked it off. It was a wig. Underneath her own hair was short like a boy’s, and streaked yellow and whitish brown, with darker tints at the roots. It couldn’t make her ugly.
I managed a sort of laugh. “You just came out here to molt, didn’t you, Silver-Wig? And I thought they were hiding you out–so it would look as if you had skipped with Dud O’Mara.”
She kept on staring at me. As if she hadn’t heard a word I said. Then she strode over to a wall mirror and put the wig back on, straightened it, turned and faced me.
“Joe didn’t kill anybody,” she said again, in a low, tight voice. “He’s a heel–but not that kind of heel. He doesn’t know anything more about where Dud O’Mara went than I do. And I don’t know anything.”
“He just got tired of the rich lady and scrammed,” I said dully.
She stood near me now, her white fingers down at her sides, shining in the lamplight. Her head above me was almost in shadow. The rain drummed and my jaw felt large and hot and the nerve along the jawbone ached, ached.
“Lash has the only car that was here,” she said softly. “Can you walk to Realito, if I cut the ropes?”
“Sure. Then what?”
“I’ve never been mixed up in a murder. I won’t now. I won’t ever.”
She went out of the room very quickly, and came back with a long kitchen knife and sawed the cord that tied my ankles, pulled it off, cut the place where it was tied to the handcuffs. She stopped once to listen, but it was just the rain again.
I rolled up to a sitting position and stood up. My feet were numb, but that would pass. I could walk. I could run, if I had to.
“Lash has the key of the cuffs,” she said dully.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Got a gun?”
“No. I’m not going. You beat it. He may be back any minute. They were just moving stuff out of the garage.”
I went over close to her. “You’re going to stay here after turning me loose? Wait for that killer? You’re nuts. Come on, Silver-Wig, you’re going with me.”
“No.”
“Suppose,” I said, “he did kill O’Mara? Then he also killed Larry. It’s got to be that way.”
“Joe never killed anybody,” she almost snarled at me.
“Well, suppose Yeager did.”
“You’re lying, Carmady. Just to scare me. Get out. I’m not afraid of Lash Yeager. I’m his boss’s wife.”
“Joe Mesarvey is a handful of mush,” I snarled back. “The only time a girl like you goes for a wrong gee is when he’s a handful of mush. Let’s drift.”
“Get out!” she said hoarsely.
“Okay.” I turned away from her and went through the door.
She almost ran past me into the hallway and opened the front door, looked out into the black wetness. She motioned me forward.
“Goodbye,” she whispered. “I hope you find Dud. I hope you find who killed Larry. But it wasn’t Joe.”
I stepped close to her, almost pushed her against the wall with my body.
“You’re still crazy, Silver-Wig. Goodbye.”
She raised her hands quickly and put them on my face. Cold hands, icy cold. She kissed me swiftly on the mouth with cold lips.
“Beat it, strong guy. I’ll be seeing you some more. Maybe in heaven.”
I went through the door and down the dark slithery wooden steps of the porch, across gravel to the round grass plot and the clump of thin trees. I came past them to the roadway, went back along it towards Foothill Boulevard. The rain touched my face with fingers of ice that were no colder than her fingers.
The curtained roadster stood just where I had left it, leaned over, the left front axle on the tarred shoulder of the highway. My spare and one stripped rim were thrown in the ditch.
They had probably searched it, but I still hoped. I crawled in backwards and banged my head on the steering post and rolled over to get the manacled hands into my little secret gun pocket. They touched the barrel. It was still there.
I got it out, got myself out of the car, got hold of the gun by the right end and looked it over.
I held it light against my back to protect it a little from the rain and started back towards the house.
EIGHT
I was halfway there when he came back. His lights turning quickly off the highway almost caught me. I flopped into the ditch and put my nose in the mud and prayed.
The car hummed past. I heard the wet rasp of its tires shouldering the gravel in front of the house. The motor died and lights went off. The door slammed. I didn’t hear the house door shut, but I caught a feeble fringe of light through the trees as it opened.
I got up on my feet and went on. I came up beside the car, a small coupé, rather old. The gun was down at my side, pulled around my hip as far as the cuffs would let it come.
The coupé was empty. Water gurgled in the radiator. I listened and heard nothing from the house. No loud voices, no quarrel. Only the heavy bong-bong-bong of the raindrops hitting the elbows at the bottom of rain gutters.
Yeager was in the house. She had let me go and Yeager was in there with her. Probably she wouldn’t tell him anything. She would just stand and look at him. She was his boss’s wife. That would scare Yeager to death.
He wouldn’t stay long, but he wouldn’t leave her behind, alive or dead. He would be on his way and take her with him. What happened to her later on was something else.
All I had to do was wait for him to come out. I didn’t do it.
I shifted the gun into my left hand and leaned down to scoop up some gravel. I threw it against the front window. It was a weak effort. Very little even reached the glass.
I ran back behind the coupé and got its door open and saw the keys in the ignition lock. I crouched down on the running board, holding on to the door post.
The house had already gone dark, but that was all. There wasn’t any sound from it. No soap. Yeager was too cagy.
I reached it with my foot and found the starter, then strained back with one hand and turned the ignition key. The warm motor caught at once, throbbed gently against the pounding rain.
I got back to the ground and slid along to the rear of the car, crouched down.
The sound of the motor got him. He couldn’t be left there without a car.
A darkened window slid up an inch, only some shifting of light on the glass showing it moved. Flame spouted from it, the racket of three quick shots. Glass broke in the coupé.
I screamed and let the scream die into a gurgling groan. I was getting good at that sort of thing. I let the groan die in a choked gasp. I was through, finished. He had got me. Nice shooting, Yeager.
Inside the house a man laughed. Then silence again, except for the rain and the quietly throbbing motor of the coupé.
Then the house door inched open. A figure showed in it. She came out on the porch, stiffly, the white showing at her collar, the wig showing a little but not so much. She came down the steps like a wooden woman. I saw Yeager crouched behind her.
She started across the gravel. Her voice said slowly, without any tone at all:
“I can’t see a thing, Lash. The windows are all misted.”
She jerked a little, as if a gun had prodded her, and came on. Yeager didn’t speak. I could see him now past her shoulder, his hat, part of his face. But no kind of a shot for a man with cuffs on his wrists.
She stopped again, and her voice was suddenly horrified.
“He’s behind the wheel!” she yelled. “Slumped over!”
He fell for it. He knocked her to one side and started to blast again. More glass jumped around. A bullet hit a tree on my side of the car. A cricket whined somewhere. The motor kept right on humming.
He was iow, crouched against the black, his face a grayness without form that seemed to come back very slowly after the glare of the shots. His own fire had blinded him too–for a second. That was enough.
I shot him four times, straining the pulsing Colt against my ribs.
He tried to turn and the gun slipped away from his hand. He half snatched for it in the air, before both his hands suddenly went against his stomach and stayed there. He sat down on the wet gravel and his harsh panting dominated every other sound of the wet night.
I watched him lie down on his side, very slowly, without taking his hands away from his stomach. The panting stopped.
It seemed like an age before Silver-Wig called out to me. Then she was beside me, grabbing my arm.
“Shut the motor off!” I yelled at her. “And get the key of these damn irons out of his pocket.”
“You d-darn fool,” she babbled. “W-what did you come back for?”
NINE
Captain Al Root of the Missing Persons Bureau swung in his chair and looked at the sunny window. This was another day, and the rain had stopped long since.
He said gruffly: “You’re making a lot of mistakes, brother. Dud O’Mara just pulled down the curtain. None of those people knocked him off. The Batzel killing had nothing to do with it. They’ve got Mesarvey in Chicago and he looks clean. The Heeb you anchored to the dead guy don’t even know who they were pulling the job for. Our boys asked him enough to be sure of that.”
“I’ll bet they did,” I said. “I’ve been in the same bucket all night and I couldn’t tell them much either.”
He looked at me slowly, with large, bleak, tired eyes. “Killing Yeager was all right, I guess. And the chopper. In the circumstances. Besides I’m not homicide. I couldn’t link any of that to O’Mara–unless you could.”
I could, but I hadn’t. Not yet. “No,” I said. “I guess not.” I stuffed and lit my pipe. After a sleepless night it tasted better,
“That all that’s worrying you?”
“I wondered why you didn’t find the girl, at Realito. It couldn’t have been very hard–for you.”
“We just didn’t. We should have. I admit it. We didn’t. Anything else?”
I blew smoke across his desk. “I’m looking for O’Mara because the general told me to. It wasn’t any use my telling him you would do everything that could be done. He could afford a man with all his time on it. I suppose you resent that.”
He wasn’t amused. “Not at all, if he wants to waste money. The people that resent you are behind a door marked Homicide Bureau.”
He planted his feet with a slap and elbowed his desk.
“O’Mara had fifteen grand in his clothes. That’s a lot of jack but O’Mara would be the boy to have it. So he could take it out and have his old pals see him with it. Only they wouldn’t think it was fifteen grand of real dough. His wife says it was. Now with any other guy but an ex-legger in the gravy that might indicate an intention to disappear. But not O’Mara. He packed it all the time.”
He bit a cigar and put a match to it. He waved a large finger. “See?”
I said I saw.
“Okay. O’Mara had fifteen grand, and a guy that pulls down the curtain can keep it down only so long as his wad lasts. Fifteen grand is a good wad. I might disappear myself, if I had that much. But after it’s gone we get him. He cashes a check, lays down a marker, hits a hotel or store for credit, gives a reference, writes a letter or gets one. He’s in a new town and he’s got a new name, but he’s got the same old appetite. He has to get back into the fiscal system one way or another. A guy can’t have friends everywhere, and if he had, they wouldn’t all stay clammed forever. Would they?”
“No, they wouldn’t,” I said.
“He went far,” Roof said. “But the fifteen grand was all the preparation he made. No baggage, no boat or rail or plane reservation, no taxi or private rental hack to a point out of town. That’s all checked. His own car was found a dozen blocks from where he lived. But that means nothing. He knew people who would ferry him several hundred miles and keep quiet about it, even in the face of a reward. Here, but not everywhere. Not new friends.”
“But you’ll get him,” I said.
“When he gets hungry.”
“That could take a year or two. General Winslow may not live a year. That is a matter of sentiment, not whether you have an open file when you retire.”
“You attend to the sentiment, brother.” His eyes moved and bushy reddish eyebrows moved with them. He didn’t like me. Nobody did, in the police department, that day.
“I’d like to,” I said and stood up. “Maybe I’d go pretty far to attend to that sentiment.”
“Sure,” Roof said, suddenly thoughtful. “Well, Winslow is a big man. Anything I can do let me know.”
“You could find out who had Larry Batzel gunned,” I said. “Even if there isn’t any connection.”
“We’ll do that. Glad to,” he guffawed and flicked ash all over his desk. “You just knock off the guys who can talk and we’ll do the rest. We like to work that way.”
“It was self-defense,” I growled. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“Sure. Take the air, brother. I’m busy.”
But his large bleak eyes twinkled at me as I went out.
TEN
The morning was all blue and gold and the birds in the ornamental trees of the Winslow estate were crazy with song after the rain.
The gatekeeper let me in through the postern and I walked up the driveway and along the top terrace to the huge carved Italian front door. Before I rang the bell I looked down the hill and saw the Trevillyan kid sitting on his stone bench with his head cupped in his hands, staring at nothing.
I went down the brick path to him. “No darts today, son?”
He looked up at me with his lean, slaty, sunken eyes.
“No. Did you find him?”
“Your dad? No, sonny, not yet.”
He jerked his head. His nostrils flared angrily. “He’s not my dad I told you. And don’t talk to me as if I was four years old. My dad he’s–he’s in Florida or somewhere.”
“Well, I haven’t found him yet, whoever’s dad he is,” I said.
“Who smacked your jaw?” he asked, staring at me.
“Oh, a fellow with a roll of nickels in his hand.”
“Nickels?”
“Yeah. That’s as good as brass knuckles. Try it sometime, but not on me,” I grinned.
“You won’t find him,” he said bitterly, staring at my jaw. “Him, I mean. My mother’s husband.”
“I bet I do.”
“How much you bet?”
“More money than even you’ve got in your pants.”
He kicked viciously at the edge of a red brick in the walk. His voice was still sulky, but more smooth. His eyes speculated.
“Want to bet on something else? C’mon over to the range. I bet you a dollar I can knock down eight out of ten pipes in ten shots.”
I looked back towards the house. Nobody seemed impatient to receive me.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll have to make it snappy. Let’s go.”
We went along the side of the house under the windows. The orchid green-house showed over the tops of some bushy trees far back. A man in neat whipcord was polishing the chromium on a big car in front of the garages. We went past there to the low white building against the bank.
The boy took a key out and unlocked the door and we went into close air that still held traces of cordite fumes. The boy clicked a spring lock on the door.
“Me first,” he snapped.
The place looked something like a small beach shooting gallery. There was a counter with a .22 repeating rifle on it and a long, slim target pistol. Both well oiled but dusty. About thirty feet beyond the counter was a waist-high, solid-looking partition across the building, and behind that a simple layout of clay pipes and ducks and two round white targets marked off with black rings and stained by lead bullets.
The clay pipes ran in an even line across the middle, and there was a big skylight, and a row of hooded overhead lights.
The boy pulled a cord on the wall and a thick canvas blind slid across the skylight. He turned on the hooded lights and then the place really looked like a beach shooting gallery.
He picked up the .22 rifle and loaded it quickly from a cardboard box of shells, .22 shorts.
“A dollar I get eight out of ten pipes?”
“Blast away,” I said, and put my money on the counter.
He took aim almost casually, fired too fast, showing off. He missed three pipes. It was pretty fancy shooting at that. He threw the rifle down on the counter.
“Gee, go set up some more. Let’s not count that one. I wasn’t set.”
“You don’t aim to lose any money, do you, son? Go set ’em up yourself. It’s your range.”
His narrow face got angry and his voice got shrill. “You do it! I’ve got to relax, see. I’ve got to relax.”
I shrugged at him, lifted a flap in the counter and went along the whitewashed side wall, squeezed past the end of the low partition. The boy clicked his reloaded rifle shut behind me.
“Put that down,” I growled back at him. “Never touch a gun when there’s anyone in front of you.”
He put it down, looking hurt.
I bent down and grabbed a handful of clay pipes out of the sawdust in a big wooden box on the floor. I shook the yellow grains of wood off them and started to straighten up.
I stopped with my hat above the barrier, just the top of my hat. I never knew why I stopped. Blind instinct.
The .22 cracked and the lead bullet bonged into the target in front of my head. My hat stirred lazily on my head, as though a blackbird had swooped at it during the nesting season.
A nice kid. He was full of tricks, like Red-eyes. I dropped the pipes and took hold of my hat by the brim, lifted it straight up off my head a few inches. The gun cracked again. Another metallic bong on the target.
I let myself fall heavily to the wooden flooring, among the pipes.
A door opened and shut. That was all. Nothing else. The hard glare from the hooded lights beat down on me. The sun peeked in at the edges of the skylight blind. There were two bright new splashes on the nearest target, and there were four small round holes in my hat, two and two, on each side.
I crawled to the end of the barrier and peeked around it. The boy was gone. I could see the small muzzles of the two guns on the counter.
I stood up and went back along the wall, switched the lights off, turned the knob of the spring lock and went out. The Winslow chauffeur whistled at his polish job around in front of the garages.
I crushed my hat in my hand and went back along the side of the house, looking for the kid. I didn’t see him. I rang the front door bell.
I asked for Mrs. O’Mara. I didn’t let the butler take my hat.
ELEVEN
She was in an oyster-white something, with white fur at the cuffs and collar and around the bottom. A breakfast table on wheels was pushed to one side of her chair and she was flicking ashes among the silver.
The coy-looking maid with the nice legs came and took the table out and shut the tall white door. I sat down.
Mrs. O’Mara leaned her head back against a cushion and looked tired. The line of her throat was distant, cold. She stared at me with a cool, hard look, in which there was plenty of dislike.
“You seemed rather human yesterday,” she said. “But I see you are just a brute like the rest of them. Just a brutal cop.”
“I came to ask you about Lash Yeager,” I said.
She didn’t even pretend to be amused. “And why should you think of asking me?”
“Well–if you lived a week at the Dardanella Club–” I waved my crunched-together hat.
She looked at her cigarette fixedly. “Well, I did meet him, I believe. I remember the rather unusual name.”
“They all have names like that, those animals,” I said. “It seems that Larry Batzel–I guess you read in your paper about him too–was a friend of Dud O’Mara’s once. I didn’t tell you about him yesterday. Maybe that was a mistake.”
A pulse began to throb in her throat. She said softly: “I have a suspicion you are about to become very insolent, that I may even have to have you thrown out.”
“Not before I’ve said my piece,” I said. “It seems that Mr. Yeager’s driver–they have drivers as well as unusual names, those animals–told Larry Batzel that Mr. Yeager was out this way the night O’Mara disappeared.”
The old army blood had to be good for something in her. She didn’t move a muscle. She just froze solid.
I got up and took the cigarette from between her frozen fingers and killed it in a white jade ashtray. I laid my hat carefully on her white satin knee. I sat down again.
Her eyes moved after a while. They moved down and looked at the hat. Her face flushed very slowly, in two vivid patches over the cheekbones. She fought around with her tongue and lips.
“I know,” I said. “It’s not much of a hat. I’m not making you a present of it. But just look at the bullet holes in it once.”
Her hand became alive and snatched at the hat. Her eyes became flames.
She spread the crown out, looked at the holes, and shuddered.
“Yeager?” she asked, very faintly. It was a wisp of a voice, an old voice.
I said very slowly: “Yeager wouldn’t use a .22 target rifle, Mrs. O’Mara.”
The flame died in her eyes. They were pools of darkness much emptier than darkness.
“You’re his mother,” I said. “What do you want to do about it?”
“Merciful God! Dade! He … shot at you!”
“Twice,” I said.
“But why? Oh, why?”
“You think I’m a wise guy, Mrs. O’Mara. Just another hardeyed boy from the other side of the tracks. It would be easy in this spot, if I was. But I’m not that at all, really. Do I have to tell why he shot at me!”
She didn’t speak. She nodded slowly. Her face was a mask now.