“You–” I started to say, staring at him. I heard a queer, strained whine behind me, from the woman.
“Who else, pal? Who else? Let’s all go back in that livin’ room. Seems to me they was a bottle of nice-looking hooch there. And you need some stuff on that head.”
“You’re crazy to stick around here,” I growled. “There’s a general pickup out for you. The only way out of this canyon is back down Beachwood or over the hills–on foot.”
Skalla looked at me and said very quietly, “Nobody’s phoned no law from here, pal.”
Skalla watched me while I washed and put some tape on my head in the bathroom. Then we went back to the living room. Mrs. Marineau, curled up on one of the davenports, looked blankly at the unlit fire. She didn’t say anything.
She hadn’t run away because Skalla had her in sight all the time. She acted resigned, indifferent, as if she didn’t care what happened now.
I poured three drinks from the Vat 69 bottle, handed one to the brunette. She held her hand out for the glass, half smiled at me, crumpled off the davenport to the floor with the smile still on her face.
I put the glass down, lifted her and put her back on the davenport with her head low. Skalla stared at her. She was out cold, as white as paper.
Skalla took his drink, sat down on the other davenport and put the .45 beside him. He drank his drink looking at the woman, with a queer expression on his big pale face.
“Tough,” he said. “Tough. But the louse was cheatin’ on her anyways. The hell with him.” He reached for another drink, swallowed it, sat down near her on the other davenport right-angled to the one she lay on.
“So you’re a dick,” he said.
“How’d you guess?”
“Lu Shamey told me about a guy goin’ there. He sounded like you. I been around and looked in your heap outside. I walk silent.”
“Well–what now?” I asked.
He looked more enormous than ever in the room in his sports clothes. The clothes of a smart-aleck kid. I wondered how long it had taken him to get them together. They couldn’t have been ready-made. He was much too big for that.
His feet were spread wide on the apricot rug, he looked down sadly at the white kid explosions on the suede. They were the worst-looking shoes I ever saw.
“What you doin’ here?” he asked gruffly.
“Looking for Beulah. I thought she might need a little help. I had a bet with a city cop I’d find her before he found you. But I haven’t found her yet.”
“You ain’t seen her, huh?”
I shook my head, slowly, very carefully.
He said softly, “Me neither, pal. I been around for hours. She ain’t been home. Only the guy in the bedroom come here. How about the dinge manager up at Shamey’s?”
“That’s what the tag’s for.”
“Yeah. A guy like that. They would. Well, I gotta blow. I’d like to take the stiff, account of Beulah. Can’t leave him around to scare her. But I guess it ain’t any use now. The dinge kill queers that.”
He looked at the woman at his elbow on the other little davenport. Her face was still greenish white, her eyes shut. There was a movement of her breast.
“Without her,” he said, “I guess I’d clean up right and button you good.” He touched the .45 at his side. “No hard feelings, of course, just for Beulah. But the way it is–heck, I can’t knock the frail off.”
“Too bad.” I snarled, feeling my head.
He grinned. “I guess I’ll take your heap. For a short ways. Throw them keys over.”
I threw them over. He picked them up and laid them beside the big Colt. He leaned forward a little. Then he reached back into one of his patch pockets and brought out a small pearlhandled gun, about .25 caliber. He held it on the Hat of his hand.
“This done it,” he said. “I left a rent hack I had on the street below and come up the bank and around the house. I hear the bell ring. This guy is at the front door. I don’t come up far enough for him to see me. Nobody answers. Well, what do you think? The guy’s got a key. A key to Beulah’s house!”
His huge face became one vast scowl. The woman on the davenport was breathing a little more deeply, and I thought I saw one of her eyelids twitch.
“What the hell,” I said. “He could get that a dozen ways. He’s a boss at KLBL where she works. He could get at her bag, take an impression. Hell, she didn’t have to give it to him.”
“That’s right, pal.” He beamed. “0′ course, she didn’t have to give it to the–. Okay, he went in, and I made it fast after him. But he had the door shut. I opened it my way. After that it didn’t shut so good, you might of noticed. He was in the middle of this here room, over there by a desk. He’s been here before all right though”–the scowl came back again, although not quite so black–because he slipped a hand into the desk drawer and come up with this.” He danced the pearl-handled thing on his enormous palm.
Mrs. Marineau’s face now had distinct lines of tensity.
“So I start for him. He lets one go. A miss. He’s scared and runs into the bedroom. Me after. He lets go again. Another miss. You’ll find them slugs in the wall somewheres.”
“I’ll make a point of it,” I said.
“Yeah, then I got him. Well, hell, the guy’s only a punk in a white muffler, If she’s washed up with me, okay. I want it from her, see? Not from no greasy-faced piece of cheese like him. So I’m sore. But the guy’s got guts at that.”
He rubbed his chin. I doubted the last bit.
“I say: ‘My woman lives here, pal. How come?’ He says: ‘Come back tomorrow. This here is my night.'”
Skalla spread his free left hand in a large gesture. “After that nature’s got to take its course, ain’t it? I pull his arms and legs off. Only while I’m doing it the damn little gat pops off and he’s as limp as–as–” he glanced at the woman and didn’t finish what he was going to say. “Yeah, he was dead.”
One of the woman’s eyelids flickered again. I said, “Then?”
“I scrammed. A guy does. But I come back. I got to thinkin’ it’s tough on Beulah, with that stiff on her bed. So I’ll just go back and ferry him out to the desert and then crawl in a hole for a while. Then this frail comes along and spoils that part.”
The woman must have been shamming for quite a long time. She must have been moving her legs and feet and turning her body a fraction of an inch at a time, to get in the right position, to get leverage against the back of the davenport.
The pearl-handled gun still lay on Skalla’s flat hand when she moved. She shot off the davenport in a flat dive, gathering herself in the air like an acrobat. She brushed his knees and picked the gun off his hand as neatly as a chipmunk peels a nut.
He stood up and swore as she rolled against his legs. The big Colt was at his side, but he didn’t touch it or reach for it. He stooped to take hold of the woman with his big hands empty.
She laughed just before she shot him.
She shot him four times, in the lower belly, then the hammer clicked. She threw the gun at his face and rolled away from him.
He stepped over her without touching her. His big pale face was quite empty for a moment, then it settled into stiff lines of torture, lines that seemed to have been there always.
He walked erectly along the rug towards the front door. I jumped for the big Colt and got it. To keep it from the woman. At the fourth step he took, blood showed on the yellowish nap of the rug. After that it showed at every step he took.
He reached the door and put his big hand flat against the wood and leaned there for a moment. Then he shook his head and turned back. His hand left a bloody smear on the door from where he had been holding his belly.
He sat down in the first chair he came to and leaned forward and held himself tightly with his hands. The blood came between his fingers slowly, like water from an overflowing basin.
“Them little slugs,” he said, “hurt just like the big ones, down below anyways.”
The dark woman walked towards him like a marionette. He watched her come unblinkingly, under his half-lowered, heavy lids.
When she got close enough she leaned over and spat in his face.
He didn’t move. His eyes didn’t change. I jumped for her and threw her into a chair. I wasn’t nice about it.
“Leave her alone,” he grunted at me. “Maybe she loved the guy.”
Nobody tried to stop me from telephoning this time.
Hours later I sat on a red stool at Lucca’s, at Fifth and Western, and sipped a martini and wondered how it felt to be mixing them all day and never drink one.
I took another martini over and ordered a meal. I guess I ate it. It was late, past one, Skalla was in the prison ward of the General Hospital. Miss Baring hadn’t showed up yet, but they knew she would, as soon as she heard Skalla was under glass, and no longer dangerous.
KLBL, who didn’t know anything about it at first, had got a nice hush working. They were to have twenty-four clear hours to decide how to release the story.
Lucca’s was almost as full as at noon. After a while an Italian brunette with a grand nose and eyes you wouldn’t fool with came over and said: “I have a table for you now.”
My imagination put Skalla across the table from me. His flat black eyes had something in them that was more than mere pain, something he wanted me to do. Part of the time he was trying to tell me what it was, and part of the time he was holding his belly in one piece and saying again: “Leave her alone, Maybe she loved the guy.”
I left there and drove north to Franklin and over Franklin to Beachwood and up to Heather Street. It wasn’t staked. They were that sure of her.
I drifted along the street below and looked up the scrubby slope spattered with moonlight and showing her house from behind as if it were three stories high. I could see the metal brackets that supported the porch. They looked high enough off the ground so that a man would need a balloon to reach them. But there was where he had gone up. Always the hard way with him.
He could have run away and had a fight for his money or even bought himself a place to live up in. There were plenty of people in the business, and they wouldn’t fool with Skalla. But he had come back instead to climb her balcony, like Romeo, and get his stomach full of slugs. From the wrong woman, as usual.
I drove around a white curve that looked like moonlight itself and parked and walked up the hill the rest of the way. I carried a flash, but I didn’t need it to see there was nobody on the doorstep waiting for the milk. I didn’t go in the front way. There might just happen to be some snooper with night glasses up on the hill.
I sneaked up the bank from behind, between the house and the empty garage. I found a window I could reach and made not much noise breaking it with a gun inside my hat. Nothing happened except that the crickets and tree frogs stopped for a moment.
I picked a way to the bedroom and prowled my flash around discreetly, after lowering the shades and pulling the drapes across them. The light dropped on a tumbled bed, on daubs of print powder, on cigarette butts on the window sills and heel marks in the nap of the carpet. There was a green and silver toilet set on the dressing table and three suitcases in the closet. There was a built-in bureau back in there with a lock that meant business. I had a chilled-steel screwdriver with me as well as the flash. I jimmied it.
The jewelry wasn’t worth a thousand dollars. Perhaps not half. But it meant a lot to a girl in show business. I put it back where I got it.
The living room had shut windows and a queer, unpleasant, sadistic smell. The law enforcement had taken care of the Vat 69, to make it easier for the fingerprint men. I had to use my own. I got a chair that hadn’t been bled on into a corner, wet my throat and waited in the darkness.
A shade flapped in the basement or somewhere. That made me wet my throat again. Somebody came out of a house half a dozen blocks away and whooped. A door banged. Silence. The tree frogs started again, then the crickets. Then the electric clock on the radio got louder than all the other sounds together.
Then I went to sleep.
When I woke up the moon had gone from the front windows and a car had stopped somewhere. Light, delicate, careful steps separated themselves from the night. They were outside the front door. A key fumbled in the lock.
In the opening door the dim sky showed a head without a hat. The slope of the hill was too dark to outline any more. The door clicked shut.
Steps rustled on the rug. I already had the lamp cord in my fingers. I yanked it and there was light.
The girl didn’t make a sound, not a whisper of sound. She just pointed the gun at me.
I said, “Hello, Beulah.”
She was worth waiting for.
Not too tall, not too short; that girl. She had the long legs that can walk and dance. Her hair even by the light of the one lamp was like a brush fire at night. Her face had laughter wrinkles at the corner of the eyes. Her mouth could laugh.
The features were shadowed and had that drawn look that makes some faces more beautiful because it makes them more delicate. I couldn’t see her eyes. They might have been blue enough to make you jump, but I couldn’t see.
The gun looked about a .32, but had the extreme rightangled grip of a Mauser.
After a while she said very softly, “Police, I suppose.”
She had a nice voice, too. I still think of it, at times.
I said, “Let’s sit down and talk. We’re all alone here. Ever drink out of the bottle?”
She didn’t answer. She looked down at the gun she was holding, half smiled, shook her head.
“You wouldn’t make two mistakes,” I said. “Not a girl as smart as you are.”
She tucked the gun into the side pocket of a long ulsterlike coat with a military collar.
“Who are you?”
“Just a shamus. Private detective to you. Carmady is the name. Need a lift?”
I held my bottle out. It hadn’t grown to my hand yet. I still had to hold it.
“I don’t drink, Who hired you?”
“KLBL. To protect you from Steve Skalla.”
“So they know,” she said. “So they know about him.”
I digested that and said nothing.
“Who’s been here?” she went on sharply. She was still standing in the middle of the room, with her hands in her coat pockets now, and no hat.
“Everybody but the plumber,” I said. “He’s a little late, as usual.”
“You’re one of those men.” Her nose seemed to curl a little. “Drugstore comics.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. It’s just a way I get talking to the people I have to talk to. Skalla came back again and ran into trouble and got shot up and arrested. He’s in the hospital. Pretty bad.”
She didn’t move. “How bad?”
“He might live if he’d have surgery. Doubtful, even with that. Hopeless without. He has three in the intestines and one in the liver.”
She moved at last and started to sit down. “Not in that chair,” I said quickly. “Over here.”
She came over and sat near me, on one of the davenports. Lights twisted in her eyes. I could see them now. Little twisting lights like Catherine wheels spinning brightly.
She said, “Why did he come back?”
“He thought he ought to tidy up. Remove the body and so on. A nice guy, Skalla.”
“Do you think so?”
“Lady, if nobody else in the world thinks so, I do.”
“I’ll take that drink,” she said.
I handed her the bottle. I grabbed it away in a hurry. “Gosh,” I said. “You have to break in on this stuff.”
She looked towards the side door that led to the bedroom back of me.
“Gone to the morgue,” I said. “You can go in there.”
She stood up at once and went out of the room. She came back almost at once.
“What have they got on Steve?” she asked. “If he recovers.”
“He killed a nigger over on Central this morning. It was more or less self-defense on both sides. I don’t know. Except for Marineau he might get a break.”
“Marineau?” she said.
“Yeah. You knew he killed Marineau.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I killed Dave Marineau.”
“Okay,” I said. “But that’s not the way Steve wants it.”
She stared at me. “You mean Steve came back here deliberately to take the blame?”
“If he had to, I guess. I think he really meant to cart Marineau off to the desert and lose him. Only a woman showed up here–Mrs. Marineau.”
“Yes,” the girl said tonelessly. “She thinks I was his mistress. That greasy spoon.”
“Were you?” I asked.
“Don’t try that again,” she said. “Even if I did work on Central Avenue once.” She went out of the room again.
Sounds of a suitcase being yanked about came into the living room. I went in after her. She was packing pieces of cobweb and packing them as if she liked nice things nicely packed.
“You don’t wear that stuff down in the tank,” I told her, leaning in the door.
She ignored me some more. “I was going to make a break for Mexico,” she said. “Then South America. I didn’t mean to shoot him. He roughed me up and tried to blackmail me into something and I went and got the gun. Then we struggled again and it went off. Then I ran away.”
“Just what Skalla said he did,” I said. “Hell, couldn’t you just have shot the–on purpose?”
“Not for your benefit,” she said. “Or any cop. Not when I did eight months in Dalhart, Texas, once for rolling a drunk. Not with that Marineau woman yelling her head off that I seduced him and then got sick of him.”
“A lot she’ll say,” I grunted. “After I tell how she spat in Skalla’s face when he had four slugs in him.”
She shivered. Her face whitened. She went on taking the things out of the suitcase and putting them in again.
“Did you roll the drunk really?”
She looked up at me, then down. “Yes,” she whispered.
I went over nearer to her. “Got any bruises or torn clothes to show?” I asked.
“No.”
“Too bad,” I said, and took hold of her.
Her eyes flamed at first and then turned to black stone, I tore her coat off, tore her up plenty, put hard fingers into her arms and neck and used my knuckles on her mouth. I let her go, panting. She reeled away from me, but didn’t quite fall.
“We’ll have to wait for the bruises to set and darken,” I said. “Then we’ll go downtown.”
She began to laugh. Then she went over to the mirror and looked at herself. She began to cry.
“Get out of here while I change my clothes!” she yelled. “I’ll give it a tumble. But if it makes any difference to Steve–I’m going to tell it right.”
“Aw, shut up and change your clothes,” I said.
I went out and banged the door.
I hadn’t even kissed her. I could have done that, at least. She wouldn’t have minded any more than the rest of the knocking about I gave her.
We rode the rest of the night, first in separate cars to hide hers in my garage, then in mine. We rode up the coast and had coffee and sandwiches at Malibu, then on up and over. We had breakfast at the bottom of the Ridge Route, just north of San Fernando.
Her face looked like a catcher’s mitt after a tough season. She had a lower lip the size of a banana and you could have cooked steaks on the bruises on her arms and neck, they were so hot.
With the first strong daylight we went to the City Hall.
They didn’t even think of holding her or checking her up. They practically wrote the statement themselves. She signed it blank-eyed, thinking of something else. Then a man from KLBL and his wife came down to get her.
So I didn’t get to ride her to a hotel. She didn’t get to see Skalla either, not then. He was under morphine.
He died at two-thirty the same afternoon. She was holding one of his huge, limp fingers, but he didn’t know her from the Queen of Siam.