“I’d say he probably can’t help it,” I said. “He didn’t want me to find his stepfather, for one thing. Then he’s a little lad that likes money. That seems small, but it’s part of the picture. He almost lost a dollar to me on his shooting. It seems small, but he lives in a small world. Most of all, of course, he’s a crazy little sadist with an itchy trigger finger.”
“How dare you!” she flared. It didn’t mean anything. She forgot it herself instantly.
“How dare I? I do dare. Let’s not bother figuring why he shot at me. I’m not the first, am I? You wouldn’t have known what I was talking about, you wouldn’t have assumed he did it on purpose.”
She didn’t move or speak. I took a deep breath.
“So let’s talk about why he shot Dud O’Mara,” I said. If I thought she would yell even this time, I fooled myself. The old man in the orchid house had put more into her than her tallness and her dark hair and her reckless eyes.
She pulled her lips back and tried to lick them, and it made her look like a scared little girl, for a second. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up like an artificial hand moved by wires and took hold of the white fur at her throat and pulled it tight and squeezed it until her knuckles looked like bleached bone. Then she just stared at me.
Then my hat slid off her knee on to the floor, without her moving. The sound it made falling was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard.
“Money,” she said in a dry croak. “Of course you want money.”
“How much money do I want?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars.”
I nodded, stiff-necked as a floorwalker trying to see with his back.
“That would be about right. That would be the established retainer. That would be about what he had in his pockets and what Yeager got for getting rid of him.”
“You’re too–damned smart,” she said horribly. “I could kill you myself and like it.”
I tried to grin. “That’s right. Smart and without a feeling in the world. It happened something like this. The boy got O’Mara where he got me, by the same simple ruse. I don’t think it was a plan. He hated his stepfather, but he wouldn’t exactly plan to kill him.”
“He hated him,” she said.
“So they’re in the little shooting gallery and O’Mara is dead on the floor, behind the barrier, out of sight. The shots, of course, meant nothing there. And very little blood, with a head shot, small caliber. So the boy goes out and locks the door and hides. But after a while he has to tell somebody. He has to. He tells you. You’re his mother. You’re the one to tell.”
“Yes,” she breathed. “He did just that.” Her eyes had stopped hating me.
“You think about calling it an accident, which is okay, except for one thing. The boy’s not a normal boy, and you know it. The general knows it, the servants know. There must be other people that know it. And the law, dumb as you think they are, are pretty smart with subnormal types. They get to handle so many of them. And I think he would have talked. I think, after a while, he would even have bragged.”
“Go on,” she said.
“You wouldn’t risk that,” I said. “Not for your son and not for the sick old man in the orchid house. You’d do any awful criminal callous thing rather than risk that. You did it. You knew Yeager and you hired him to get rid of the body. That’s all–except that hiding the girl, Mona Mesarvey, helped to make it look like a deliberate disappearance.”
“He took him away after dark, in Dud’s own car,” she said hollowly.
I reached down and picked my hat off the floor. “How about the servants?”
“Norris knows. The butler. He’d die on the rack before he told.”
“Yeah. Now you know why Larry Batzel was knocked off and why I was taken for a ride, don’t you?”
“Blackmail,” she said. “It hadn’t come yet, but I was waiting for it. I would have paid anything, and he would know that.”
“Bit by bit, year by year, there was a quarter of a millon in it for him, easy. I don’t think Joe Mesarvey was in it at all. I know the girl wasn’t.”
She didn’t say anything. She just kept her eyes on my face.
“Why in hell,” I groaned, “didn’t you take the guns away from him?”
“He’s worse than you think. That would have started something worse. I’m–I’m almost afraid of him myself.”
“Take him away,” I said. From here. From the old man. He’s young enough to be cured, by the right handling. Take him to Europe. Far away. Take him now. It would kill the general out of hand to know his blood was in that.”
She got up draggingly and dragged herself across to the windows. She stood motionless, almost blending into the heavy white drapes. Her hands hung at her sides, very motionless also. After a while she turned and walked past me. When she was behind me she caught her breath and sobbed just once.
“It was very vile. It was the vilest thing I ever heard of. Yet I would do it again. Father would not have done it. He would have spoken right out. It would, as you say, have killed him.”
“Take him away,” I pounded on. “He’s hiding out there now. He thinks he got me. He’s hiding somewhere like an animal. Get him. He can’t help it.”
“I offered you money,” she said, still behind me. “That’s nasty. I wasn’t in love with Dudley O’Mara. That’s nasty too. I can’t thank you. I don’t know what to say.”
“Forget it,” I said. “I’m just an old workhorse. Put your work on the boy.”
“I promise. Goodbye, Mr. Carmady.”
We didn’t shake hands. I went back down the stairs and the butler was at the front door as usual. Nothing in his face but politeness.
“You will not want to see the general today, sir?”
“Not today, Norris.”
I didn’t see the boy outside. I went through the postern and got into my rented Ford and drove on down the hill, past where the old oil wells were.
Around some of them, not visible from the street, there were still sumps in which waste water lay and festered with a scum of oil on top. They would be ten or twelve feet deep, maybe more. There would be dark things in them. Perhaps in one of them– I was glad I had killed Yeager.
On the way back downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of drinks. They didn’t do me any good.
All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.
* * *
TRY
THE GIRL
* * *
The big guy wasn’t any of my business. He never was, then or later, least of all then.
I was over on Central, which is the Harlem of Los Angeles, on one of the “mixed” blocks, where there were still both white and colored establishments. I was looking for a little Greek barber named Tom Aleidis whose wife wanted him to come home and was willing to spend a little money to find him. It was a peaceful job. Tom Aleidis was not a crook.
I saw the big guy standing in front of Shamey’s, an all-colored drink and dice second-floor, not too savory. He was looking up at the broken stencils in the electric sign, with a sort of rapt expression, like a hunky immigrant looking at the Statue of Liberty, like a man who had waited a long time and come a long way.
He wasn’t just big. He was a giant. He looked seven feet high, and he wore the loudest clothes I ever saw on a really big man.
Pleated maroon pants, a rough grayish coat with white billiard balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid on them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front-door handkerchief the color of the Irish flag. It was neatly arranged in three points, under the red carnation. On Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, with that size and that make-up he looked about as unobtrusive as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
He went over and swung back the doors into Shamey’s. The doors didn’t stop swinging before they exploded outward again. What sailed out and landed in the gutter and made a high, keening noise, like a wounded rat, was a slick-haired colored youth in a pinchback suit. A “brown,” the color of coffee with rather thin cream in it. His face, I mean.
It still wasn’t any of my business. I watched the colored boy creep away along the walls. Nothing more happened. So I made my mistake.
I moved along the sidewalk until I could push the swing door myself. Just enough to look in. Just too much.
A hand I could have sat in took hold of my shoulder and hurt and lifted me through the doors and up three steps.
A deep, soft voice said in my ear easily, “Smokes in here, pal. Can you tie that?”
I tried for a little elbow room to get to my sap. I wasn’t wearing a gun. The little Greek barber business hadn’t seemed to be that sort of job.
He took hold of my shoulder again.
“It’s that kind of place,” I said quickly.
“Don’t say that, pal. Beulah used to work here. Little Beulah.”
“Go on up and see for yourself.”
He lifted me up three more steps.
“I’m feeling good,” he said. “I wouldn’t want anybody to bother me. Let’s you and me go on up and maybe nibble a drink.”
“They won’t serve you,” I said.
“I ain’t seen Beulah in eight years, pal,” he said softly, tearing my shoulder to pieces without noticing what he was doing. “She ain’t even wrote in six. But she’ll have a reason. She used to work here. Let’s you and me go on up.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go up with you. Just let me walk. Don’t carry me. I’m fine. Carmady’s the name. I’m all grown up. I go to the bathroom alone and everything. Just don’t carry me.”
“Little Beulah used to work here,” he said softly. He wasn’t listening to me.
We went on up. He let me walk.
A crap table was in the far corner beyond the bar, and scattered tables and a few customers were here and there. The whiny voices chanting around the crap table stopped instantly. Eyes looked at us in that dead, alien silence of another race.
A large Negro was leaning against the bar in shirt-sleeves with pink garters on his arms. An ex-pug who had been hit by everything but a concrete bridge. He pried himself loose from the bar edge and came towards us in a loose fighter’s crouch.
He put a large brown hand against the big man’s gaudy chest. It looked like a stud there.
“No white folks, brother. Jes’ fo’ the colored people. I’se sorry.”
“Where’s Beulah?” the big man asked in his deep, soft voice that went with his big white face and his depthless black eyes.
The Negro didn’t quite laugh. “No Beulah, brother. No hooch, no gals, jes’ the scram, brother. Jes’ the scram.”
“Kind of take your goddam mitt off me,” the big man said.
The bouncer made a mistake, too. He hit him. I saw his shoulder drop, his body swing behind the punch. It was a good clean punch. The big man didn’t even try to block it.
He shook his head and took hold of the bouncer by the throat. He was quick for his size. The bouncer tried to knee him. The big man turned him and bent him, took hold of the back of his belt. That broke. So the big man just put his huge hand flat against the bouncer’s spine and threw him, clear across the narrow room. The bouncer hit the wall on the far side with a crash that must have been heard in Denver. Then he slid softly down the wall and lay there, motionless.
“Yeah,” the big man said. “Let’s you and me nibble one.”
We went over to the bar. The barman swabbed the bar hurriedly. The customers, by ones and twos and threes, drifted out, silent across the bare floor, silent down the dim uncarpeted stairs. Their departing feet scarcely rustled.
“Whisky sour,” the big man said.
We had whisky sours.
“You know where Beulah is?” the big man asked the barman impassively, licking his whisky sour down the side of the thick glass.
“Beulah, you says?” the barman whined. “I ain’t seen her roun’ heah lately. Not right lately, no suh.”
“How long you been here?”
‘Bout a yeah, Ah reckon. ‘Bout a yeah. Yes suh. ‘Bout–” “How long’s this coop been a dinge box?”
“Says which?”
The big man made a fist down at his side, about the size of a bucket.
“Five years anyway,” I put in. “This fellow wouldn’t know anything about a white girl named Beulah.”
The big man looked at me as if I had just hatched out. His whisky sour didn’t seem to improve his temper.
“Who the hell asked you to stick your face in?”
I smiled. I made it a big, friendly smile. “I’m the fellow came in here with you. Remember?”
He grinned back, a flat, white grin. “Whisky sour,” he told the barman. “Get them fleas outa your pants. Service.”
The barman scuttled around, hating us with the whites of his eyes.
The place was empty now, except for the two of us and the barman, and the bouncer over against the far wall.
The bouncer groaned and stirred. He rolled over and began to crawl softly along the baseboard, like a fly with one wing. The big man paid no attention to him.
“There ain’t nothing left of the joint,” he complained. “They was a stage and a band and cute little rooms where you could have fun. Beulah did some warbling. A redhead. Awful cute. We was to of been married when they hung the frame on me.”
We had two more whisky sours before us now. “What frame?” I asked.
“Where you figure I been them eight years I told you about?”
“In somebody’s Stony Lonesome,” I said.
“Right.” He prodded his chest with a thumb like a baseball bat. “Steve Skalla. The Great Bend job in Kansas. Just me. Forty grand. They caught up with me right here. I was what that–hey!”
The bouncer had made a door at the back and fallen through it. A lock clicked.
“Where’s that door lead to?” the big man demanded.
“Tha–tha’s Mistah Montgom’ry’s office, suh. He’s the boss. He’s got his office back–”
“He might know,” the big man said. He wiped his mouth on the Irish flag handkerchief and arranged it carefully back in his pocket. “He better not crack wise neither. Two more whisky sours.”
He crossed the room to the door behind the crap table. The lock gave him a little argument for a moment, then a piece of the panel dropped off and he went through, shut the door after him.
It was very silent in Shamey’s now. I looked at the barman.
“This guy’s tough,” I said quickly. “And he’s liable to go mean. You can see the idea. He’s looking for an old sweetie who used to work here when it was a place for whites. Got any artillery back there?”
“I thought you was with him,” the barman said suspiciously. “Couldn’t help myself. He dragged me up. I didn’t feel like being thrown over any houses.”
“Shuah. Ah got me a shotgun,” the barman said, still suspicious.
He began to stoop behind the bar, then stayed in that position rolling his eyes.
There was a dull flat sound at the back of the place, behind the shut door. It might have been a slammed door. It might have been a gun. Just the one sound. No other followed it.
The barman and I waited too long, wondering what the sound was. Not liking to think what it could be.
The door at the back opened and the big man came through quickly, with a Colt army .45 automatic looking like a toy in his hand.
He looked the room over with one swift glance. His grin was taut. He looked like the man who could take forty grand singlehanded from the Great Bend Bank.
He came over to us in swift, almost soundless steps, for all his size.
“Rise up, nigger!”
The barman came up slowly, gray; his hands empty, high.
The big man felt me over, stepped away from us.
“Mr. Montgomery didn’t know where Beuiah was either,” he said softly. “He tried to tell me–with this.” He waggled the gun. “So long, punks. Don’t forget your rubbers.”
He was gone, down the stairs, very quickly, very quietly.
I jumped around the bar and took the sawed-off shotgun that lay there, on the shelf. Not to use on Steve Skalla. That was not my job. So the barman wouldn’t use it on me. I went back across the room and through that door.
The bouncer lay on the floor of a hall with a knife in his hand. He was unconscious. I took the knife out of his hand and stepped over him through a door marked Office.
Mr. Montgomery was in there, behind a small scarred desk, close to a partly boarded-up window. Just folded, like a handkerchief or a hinge.
A drawer was open at his right hand. The gun would have come from there. There was a smear of oil on the paper that lined it.
Not a smart idea, but he would never have a smarter one– not now.
Nothing happened while I waited for the police.
When they came both the barman and the bouncer were gone. I had locked myself in with Mr. Montgomery and the shotgun. Just in case.
Hiney got it. A lean-jawed, complaining, overslow detective lieutenant, with long yellow hands that he held on his knees while he talked to me in his cubicle at Headquarters. His shirt was darned under the points of his old-fashioned stiff collar. He looked poor and sour and honest.
This was an hour or so later. They knew all about Steve Skalla then, from their own records. They even had a ten-year-old photo that made him look as eyebrowless as a French roll. All they didn’t know was where he was.
“Six foot six and a half,” Kiney said. “Two hundred sixtyfour pounds. A guy that size can’t get far, not in them fancy duds. He couldn’t buy anything else in a hurry. Whyn’t you take him?”
I handed the photo back and laughed.
Hiney pointed one of his long yellow fingers at me bitterly. “Carmady, a tough shamus, huh? Six feet of man, and a jaw you could break rocks on. Whyn’t you take him?”
“I’m getting a little gray at the temples,” I said. “And I didn’t have a gun. He had. I wasn’t on a gun-toting job over there. Skalla just picked me up. I’m kind of cute sometimes.”
Hiney glared at me.
“All right,” I said. “Why argue? I’ve seen the guy. He could wear an elephant in his vest pocket. And I didn’t know he’d killed anybody. You’ll get him all right.”
“Yeah,” Hiney said. “Easy. But I just don’t like to waste my time on these shine killings. No pix. No space. Not even three lines in the want-ad section. Heck, they was five smokes– five, mind you–carved Harlem sunsets all over each other over on East Eight-four one time. All dead. Cold meat. And the—-newshawks wouldn’t even go out there.”
“Pick him up nice,” I said. “Or he’ll knock off a brace of prowlies for you. Then you’ll get space.”
“And I wouldn’t have the case then neither,” Hiney jeered. “Well, the hell with him. I got him on the air. Ain’t nothing else to do but just sit.”
“Try the girl,” I said. “Beulah. Skalla will. That’s what he’s after. That’s what started it all. Try her.”
“You try her,” Hiney said. “I ain’t been in a joy house in twenty years.”
“I suppose I’d be right at home in one. How much will you pay?”
“Jeeze, guy, coppers don’t hire private dicks. What with?” He rolled a cigarette out of a can of tobacco. It burned down one side like a forest fire. A man yelled angrily into a telephone in the next cubbyhole. Hiney made another cigarette with more care and licked it and lighted it. He clasped his bony hands on his bony knees again.
“Think of your publicity,” I said. “I bet you twenty-five I find Beulah before you put Skalla under glass.”
He thought it over. He seemed almost to count his bank balance on his cigarette puffs.
“Ten is top,” he said. “And she’s all mine–private.”
I stared at him.
“I don’t work for that kind of money,” I said. “But if I can do it in one day–and you let me alone–I’ll do it for nothing. Just to show you why you’ve been a lieutenant for twenty years.”
He didn’t like that crack much better than I liked his about the joy house. But we shook hands on it.
I got my old Chrysler roadster out of the official parking lot and drove back towards the Central Avenue district.
Shamey’s was closed up, of course. An obvious plainclothes man sat in a car in front of it, reading a paper with one eye. I didn’t know why. Nobody there knew anything about Skalla.
I parked around the corner and went into the diagonal lobby of a Negro hotel called the Hotel Sans Souci. Two rows of hard, empty chairs stared at each other across a strip of fiber carpet. Behind a desk a bald-headed man had his eyes shut and his hands clasped on the desk top. He dozed. He wore an ascot tie that had been tied about 1880, and the green stone in his stickpin was not quite as large as a trash barrel. His large, loose chin folded down on it gently, and his brown hands were soft, peaceful, and clean.
A metal embossed sign at his elbow said: This Hotel Is Under the Protection of the International Consolidated Agencies, Inc.
When he opened one eye I pointed to the sign and said: “H.P.D. man checking up. Any trouble here?”
H.P.D. means Hotel Protective Department, which is the part of a large agency that looks after check bouncers and people who move out by the back stairs, leaving second-hand suitcases full of bricks.
“Trouble, brother,” he said, in a high, sonorous voice, “is something we is fresh out of.” He lowered the voice four or five notches and added, “We don’t take no checks.”
I leaned on the counter across from his folded hands and started to spin a quarter on the bare, scarred wood.
“Heard what happened over at Shamey’s this morning?”
“Brother, I forgit.” Both his eyes were open now and he was watching the blur of light made by the spinning quarter.
“The boss got bumped off,” I said. “Montgomery. Got his neck broken.”
“May the Lawd receive his soul, brother.” The voice went down again. “Cop?”
“Private–on a confidential lay. And I know a man who can keep one that way when I see one.”
He looked me over, closed his eyes again. I kept spinning the quarter. He couldn’t resist looking at it.
“Who done it?” he asked softly. “Who fixed Sam?”
“A tough guy out of the jailhouse got sore because it wasn’t a white joint. It used to be. Remember?”
He didn’t say anything. The coin fell over with a light whirr and lay still.
“Call your play,” I said. “I’ll read you a chapter of the Bible or buy you a drink. Either one.”
“Brother,” he said sonorously, “I kinda like to read my Bible in the seclusion of my family.” Then he added swiftly, in his business voice, “Come around to this side of the desk.”
I went around there and pulled a pint of bonded bourbon off my hip and handed it to him in the shelter of the desk. He poured two small glasses, quickly, sniffed his with a smooth, expert manner, and tucked it away.
“What you want to know?” he asked. “Ain’t a crack in the sidewalk I don’t know. Mebbe I ain’t tellin’ though. This liquor’s been in the right company.”
“Who ran Shamey’s before it was a colored place?”
He stared at me, surprised. “The name of that pore sinner was Shamey, brother.”
I groaned. “What have I been using for brains?”
“He’s daid, brother, gathered to the Lawd. Died in nineteen and twenty-nine. A wood alcohol case, brother. And him in the business.” He raised his voice to the sonorous level. “The same year the rich folks lost their goods and chattels, brother.” The voice went down again. “I didn’t lose me a nickel.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t. Pour some more. He leave any folks– anybody that’s still around?”
He poured another small drink, corked the bottle firmly. “Two is all–before lunch,” he said. “I thank you, brother. Yo’ method of approach is soothin’ to a man’s dignity.” He cleared his throat. “Had a wife,” he said. “Try the phone book.”
He wouldn’t take the bottle. I put it back on my hip. He shook hands with me, folded his on the desk once more and closed his eyes.
The incident, for him, was over.