Stephen King – Umney’s last case
Stephen King “Umney’s Last Case”
The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high
mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins
are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are
beginning to bloom.
Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister
I. The News from Peoria.
It was one of those spring mornings so L.A.-perfect you keep expecting to see that little trademark
symbol–(R)–stamped on it somewhere. The exhaust of the vehicles passing on Sunset smelled faintly of oleander, the
oleander was lightly perfumed with exhaust, and the sky overhead was as clear as a hardshell Baptist’s conscience.
Peoria Smith, the blind paperboy, was standing in his accustomed place on the corner of Sunset and Laurel, and if that
didn’t mean God was in His heaven and all was jake with the world, I didn’t know what did.
Yet since I’d swung my feet out of bed that morning at the unaccustomed hour of 7:30
a.m., things had felt a little
off-kilter, somehow; a tad woozy around the edges. It was only as I was shaving –or at least showing those pesky
bristles the razor in an effort to scare them into submission–that I realized part of the reason why. Although I’d been
up reading until at least two, I hadn’t heard the Demmicks roll in, squiffed to the earlobes and trading those snappy
one-liners that apparently form the basis of their marriage.
Nor had I heard Buster, and that was maybe even odder. Buster, the Demmicks’ Welsh Corgi, has a high-pitched bark
that goes through your head like slivers of glass, and he uses it as much as he can.
Also, he’s the jealous type. He lets
loose with one of his shrill barking squalls every time George and Gloria clinch, and when they aren’t zinging each
other like a couple of vaudeville comedians, George and Gloria usually are clinching.
I’ve gone to sleep on more than
one occasion listening to them giggle while that mutt prances around their feet going yarkyarkyark and wondering how
difficult it would be to strangle a muscular, medium-sized dog with a length of pianowire.
Last night, however, the
Demmicks’ apartment had been as quiet as the grave. It was passing strange, but a long way from earth-shattering; the
Demmicks weren’t exactly your perfect life-on-a-timetable couple at the best of times.
Peoria Smith was all right, though–chipper as a chipmunk, just as always, and he’d recognized me by my walk even
though it was at least an hour before my usual time. He was wearing a baggy CalTech
sweatshirt that came down to his
thighs and a pair of corduroy knickers that showed off his scabby knees. His hated white cane leaned casually against
the side of the card-table he did business on.
“Say, Mr. Umney! Howza kid?’
Peoria’s dark glasses glinted in the morning sunlight, and as he turned toward the sound of my step with my copy of the
L.A. Times held up in front of him, I had a momentary unsettling thought: it was as if someone had drilled two big
black holes into his face. I shivered the thought off my back, thinking that maybe the time had come to cut out the
before-bedtime shot of rye. Either that or double the dose.
Hitler was on the front of the Times, as he so often was these days. This time it was something about Austria. I thought,
and not for the first time, how at home that pale face and limp forelock would have looked on a post-office bulletin
board.
“The kid is just about okay, Peoria,” I said. `Ìn fact, the kid is as fine as fresh paint on an outhouse wall.”
I dropped a dime into the Corona box resting atop Peoria’s stack of newspapers. The Times is a three-center, and
over-priced at that, but I’ve been dropping that same chip into Peoria’s change-box since time out of mind. He’s a good
kid, and making good grades in school–I took it on myself to check that last year, after he’d helped me out on the