Now that the elevator door was open, I smelled something up here in my little slice of heaven that was so out of place it took a moment for me to recognize it: fresh paint. Once it was noted, I filed it. I had other fish to fry.
‘This isn’t right,’ I said. ‘You know it isn’t, Vern.’
He turned his frightening vacant eyes on me. Death in them, a black shape flapping and beckoning just beyond the faded blue. ‘What isn’t right, Mr. Umney?’
‘You’re supposed to be here, damn it! Right here! Sitting on your stool with Jesus and your wife over your head. Not this!’ I reached up, grabbed the card with the picture of the man fishing on the lake, tore it in two, put the pieces together, tore it in four, and then gave them the toss.
They fluttered to the faded red rug on the floor of the elevator car like confetti.
‘S’posed to be right here,’ he repeated, those terrible eyes of his never leaving mine. Beyond us, two men in paint-splattered coveralls had turned to look in our direction.
‘That’s right.’
‘For how long, Mr. Umney? Since you know everything else, you can probably tell me that, can’tcha? How long am I supposed to keep drivin this damned car?’
‘Well . . . forever,’ I said, and the word hung between us, another ghost in the cigarette-smokey elevator car. Given a choice of ghosts, I guess I would have picked Bill Tuggle’s BO . . . but I wasn’t given a choice. Instead, I said it again. ‘Forever, Vern.’
He dragged on his Camel, coughed out smoke and a fine spray of blood, and went on looking at me. ‘It ain’t my place to give the tenants advice, Mr. Umney, but I guess I’ll give you some, anyway — it being my last week and all. You might consider seeing a doctor. The kind that shows you ink-pitchers and you say what they look like.’
‘You can’t retire, Vern.’ My heart was beating harder than ever, but I managed to keep my voice level. ‘You just can’t.’
‘No?’ He took his cigarette out of his mouth — fresh blood was already soaking into the tip —
and then looked back at me. His smile was ghastly. ‘The way it looks to me, I ain’t exactly got a choice, Mr. Umney.’
III. Of Painters and Pesos
The smell of fresh paint seared my nose, overpowering both the smell of Vernon’s smoke and Bill Tuggle’s armpits. The men in the coveralls were currently taking up space not far from my office door. They had put down a dropcloth, and the tools of their trade were spread out all along it — tins and brushes and turp. There were two step-ladders as well, flanking the painters like scrawny bookends. What I wanted to do was to run down the hall, kicking the whole works every whichway as I went. What right had they to paint these old dark walls that glaring, sacrilegious white?
Instead, I walked up to the one who looked as if it might take a two-digit number to express his IQ and politely asked what he and his fellow mug thought they were doing. He glanced around at me. ‘Hellzit look like? I’m givin Miss America a finger-frig and Chick there’s puttin rouge on Betty Grable’s nippy-nips.’
I’d had enough. Enough of them, enough of everything. I reached out, grabbed the quiz-kid under the armpit, and used my fingertips to engage a particularly nasty nerve that hides up there.
He screamed and dropped his brush. White paint splattered his shoes. His partner gave me a timid doe-eyed look and took a step backward.
‘If you try taking off before I’m done with you,’ I snarled, ‘you’re going to find the handle of your paint-brush so far up your ass you’ll need a boathook to find the bristles. You want to try me and see if I’m lying?’
He stopped moving and just stood there on the edge of the dropcloth, eyes darting from side to side, looking for help. There was none to be had. I half-expected Candy to open my door and look out to see what the fracas was, but the door stayed firmly closed. I turned my attention back to the quiz-kid I was holding onto.
‘The question was simple enough, bud — what the hell are you doing here? Can you answer it, or do I give you another blast?’
I twiddled my fingers in his armpit just to refresh his memory and he screamed again. ‘Paintin the hall! Jeezis, can’t you see?’
I could see, all right, and even if I’d been blind, I could smell. I hated what both of those senses were telling me. The hallway wasn’t supposed to be painted, especially not this glaring, light-reflecting white. It was supposed to be dim and shadowy; it was supposed to smell like dust and old memories. Whatever had started with the Demmicks’ unaccustomed silence was getting worse all the time. I was mad as hell, as this unfortunate fellow was discovering. I was also scared, but that was a feeling you get good at hiding when carrying a heater in a clamshell holster is part of the way you make your living.
‘Who sent you two dubs down here?’
‘Our boss,’ he said, looking at me as if I were crazy. ‘We work for Challis Custom Painters, on Van Nuys. The boss is Hap Corrigan. If you want to know who hired the cump’ny, you’ll have to ask h — ‘
‘It was the owner,’ the other painter said quietly. ‘The owner of this building. A guy named Samuel Landry.’
I searched my memory, trying to put the name of Samuel Landry together with what I knew of the Fulwider Building and couldn’t do it. In fact, I couldn’t put the name of Samuel Landry together with anything . . . yet for all that it seemed almost to chime in my head, like a church-bell you can hear from miles away on a foggy morning.
‘You’re lying,’ I said, but with no real force. I said it simply because it was something to say.
‘Call the boss,’ the other painter said. Appearances could be deceiving; he was apparently the brighter of the two, after all. He reached inside his grimy, paint-smeared coverall and brought out a little card.
I waved it away, suddenly tired. ‘Who in the name of Christ would want to paint this place, anyway?’
It wasn’t them I was asking, but the painter who’d offered me the business card answered just the same. ‘Well, it brightens the place up,’ he said cautiously. ‘You gotta admit that.’
‘Son,’ I asked, taking a step toward him, ‘did your mother ever have any kids that lived, or did she just produce the occasional afterbirth like you?’
‘Hey, whatever, whatever,’ he said, taking a step backward. I followed his worried gaze down to my own balled-up fists and forced them open again. He didn’t look very relieved, and I actually didn’t blame him very much. ‘You don’t like it — you’re coming through loud and clear on that score. But I gotta do what the boss tells me, don’t I? I mean, hell, that’s the American way.’
He glanced at his partner, then back to me. It was a quick glance, really no more than a flick, but in my line of work I’d seen it more than once, and it’s the kind of look you file away. Don’t bother this guy, it said. Don’t bump him, don’t rattle him. He’s nitro.
‘I mean, I’ve got a wife and a little kid to take care of,’ he went on. ‘There’s a Depression going on out there, you know.’
Confusion came over me then, drowning my anger the way a downpour drowns a brushfire.
Was there a Depression going on out there? Was there?
‘I know,’ I said, not knowing anything. ‘Let’s just forget it, what do you say?’
‘Sure,’ the painters agreed, so eager they sounded like half of a barbershop quartet. The one I’d mistakenly tabbed as half-bright had his left hand buried deep in his right armpit, trying to get that nerve to go back to sleep. I could have told him he had an hour’s work ahead of him, maybe more, but I didn’t want to talk to them anymore. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone —
not even the delectable Candy Kane, whose humid glances and smooth, subtropical curves have been known to send seasoned street-brawlers reeling to their knees. The only thing I wanted to do was to get across the outer office and into my inner sanctum. There was a bottle of Robb’s Rye in the bottom lefthand drawer, and right now I needed a shot in the worst way.
I walked down toward the frosted-glass door marked CLYDE UMNEY PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, restraining a renewed urge to see if I could drop-kick a can of Dutch Boy Oyster White through the window at the end of the hall and out onto the fire-escape. I was actually reaching for my doorknob when a thought struck me and I turned back to the painters . . . but slowly, so they wouldn’t believe I was being gripped by some new seizure. Also, I had an idea that if I turned too fast, I’d see them grinning at each other and twirling their fingers around their ears — the looney-gesture we all learned in the schoolyard.