by Roy Huggins
I went up there and found her dead on the door.”
He whipped out a watch. I was going to lose him. He said, “It’s now exactly eleven-fifty.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look up a lawyer?”
I counted to five this time and said, “Why would I do that?”
He opened his right drawer with one hand, got out a match with another and popped a cigarette into his mouth. The lighted match was waiting for it. Then he talked to me with the cigarette in his mouth, and it bobbed like a fretful finger.
“People report murder immediately,” he snapped. “They don’t wait three hours.”
I took a slow drag on the cigarette and said, “I had to make up my mind whether I liked the idea of being held as a material witness.”
He grabbed the phone, asked for a number and said, “Gimme the coroner . . . Joe, meet me out at the Lennox Arms, out there by the U. Got a body for ya. . . Okay.” He hung up. He looked at me and said, “What was this girl’s name?” I told him, and he jumped up and grabbed a hot and went to the door. At the door he turned and said, “You’d better come with me.”
Captain Farr drove. He drove fast. We parked in front of the Lennox Arms apartments and went in. The lobby was empty.
Going up the stairs, Farr said, “You say you walked in. She didn’t wire you a key, which means the door was unlocked, which means we won’t have to have a key. Right?”
“Wrong.”
“Then you’d better rework that story of yours.”
“There was a key on the table when I went in. I decided it would be a good idea to lock the place up.”
We were at the door now. Farr turned to me, and his face was red. “So you pick up something at the scene of the crime, ruin any chance of getting fingerprints off it, then take three hours to report! My boys are going to love you, Bailey. Gimme the key.”
I took it out and said, “I figured locking the door and taking the key was better than leaving the apartment unlocked and letting someone come in and really mess things up.”
Farr was unlocking the door when a tail man in a black suit came down the hall. Farr said, “Hi, Joe. This is a guy named Bailey, Sham us from L.A.”
Joe was an elective officer. He smiled broadly and shook my hand. He said he was glad to know me. Farr had the door unlocked. He opened it and we all went in. The room was touched with a faint odor of whisky. The room was hot, the air thick and still. And the room was also empty. There was no body on the floor.
I removed the gray gallows I had been building in the back of my mind, sang a brief inward hosanna, and sneered at the man with the bad breath.
I asked him if he thought I had come back and hauled Dorothy Halloran’s body away.
He didn’t answer.
Farr made a sound in his throat like a butcher bird, glared at me and said, “What’s the game?”
“There was a corpse here at nine o’clock.”
He groaned.
I didn’t say anything. I was looking over the room, trying to get even just a theory. I figured that it was easy enough to make a complicated way into the room, but I couldn’t see why anyone would bother.
The man in the dark suit asked, “How was he killed?”
“It was a girl. It looked like strangulation.”
“How did you know she was dead?”
“No pulse, among other things.”
“Pulses are pretty hard to find sometimes.”
Farr said, “Nuts. This guy’s in on it. He waited three hours to report the thing.”
The coroner said, “Let’s look up the manager and ask some questions. While you’re doing that. I’ll call the hospitals. What was her name?”
I said, “Dorothy Halloran or Dorothy Dreves. Try both.”
Farr looked the room over. He pulled the bed part way down and looked behind it. When he opened the closet door, I noticed the mink coat was still hanging where she’d hung it the night before. He finished and we went out and locked the door and went downstairs. The manager was waiting for us. The coroner had borrowed her phone and she had questions to ask. She bad a long yellow face and tired eyes.
Farr cut her short and said, “Anything unusual happen around here in the past ten hours?”
“No-o——Yes! One of my keys was stolen.”
“Which room?”
She glanced at me. “Miss Halloran’s room.”
“When?”
“I keep ’em on a rack right inside my door. When they’re gone, I notice it. I saw the empty place there on the board around noon today, so it couldn’t of been very long ago.”
Farr brought out the key I had given him “This fits her room. Is this it?”
“Couldn’t say. Maybe it’s hers.”
“Seen anyone hanging around?” She sniffed and pointed a long finger at me. “Yea, him.”
“When was that?”
“Around nine.” She leered and added, “They had the bed down.”
“How do you know?”
“Mrs. Grimes heard it go up—it’s a teensy bit noisy—and then she saw him come out.”
“How do you know what Mrs. Grimes saw?”
”It’s only a little way from here to that room. I saw him, too, remember.”
Farr was bouncing on the balls of his feet now. He had stayed in one place too long. But he was a thorough man. He said, “And how did Mrs. Grimes know the tied was going up when she heard it? Maybe it was going down.”
“Because he come out right after. The rooms on that side of the house have beds that have to be up or you can’t get the door open.”
That gave Farr something to think about. For a long moment he was quite still. He didn’t flex a muscle. Then he said, “See anyone else?”
“A blond woman come in. Pretty. Flashy dresser. Never did see her before and don’t know who she called on.” She sounded a little bitter about it.
I said, “Did you see her come down?”
She glared at me and said, “No.” Farr said, “Is there a back way out of here?”
“I keep it locked. Say, what’s up, anyhow?”
“Do you think someone could have carried a bulky object out of here without you seeing them? Sometime this morning.”
“Not likely! What’s missing?”
“But possible.”
“I doubt it. You’ll notice they’s a clear glass on my door. I don’t miss much.”
That called for a glare in my direction.
“Then,” Farr said, “you haven’t gone shopping yet today?”
The long face grew longer. “All right, that’s the only time it could of happened. What’s missing—her mink coat?”
But Farr was off. She had really lost him. He was in her apartment, leaning over the coroner’s shoulder.
I said, “Tell me, did this blond woman come in before or after you went shopping?”
“I don’t have to talk to you.”
Farr and the coroner came out, and I repeated my question as if it was the first time it had come up. She looked at Farr, who was rolling back and forth on his feet, wailing for her to answer.
She said, “She went up just before I left.”
I said, “Do you keep your apartment door locked?”
“When I go downtown to shop, yes.”
“Did you go downtown today?” She glanced at Farr. “No.”
“Come on, Bailey.” Farr was out the door, shouting a “Good-by, Joe,” and sliding into his car.
I got in beside him and we shot out from the curb.
I said, “No luck with the hospitals?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“You forgot to ask her a very important question.”
“You tell me how I should have done it.”
“You didn’t ask which way I was going when she saw me—in or out?”
“I didn’t have to.”
“I was afraid you’d make something out of her story about the bed,” I said. “Mrs. Grimes heard some
other bed going up, Farr, not the one in the girl’s room.”
He snorted. “She heard that bed, all right. Which means you couldn’t have walked in there. When the bed’s down, it blocks the door. That means she heard you putting the bed up so you could get out. So you were in the room all night. This morning you had a quarrel when you both woke up with hang-overs. Yeah, I smelled the whisky too. She didn’t look so good to you hung over, huh, Bailey?”
“So you book me for murder?”
“Maybe they’d do that in L.A. This is Tucson. It’s a wealthy town. We can afford a competent police department. We don’t book you for murder until we find the body.”
“In the meantime you book me for what?”
“You haven’t got a place to stay. Right?”
“No, but I’ve got a car and a wallet full of dough, plus a record at Western Union that shows I’m here on business.”
“No place to stay. We’ll vag you. You’ll like our hotel.” He grinned. It was wide, loose-lipped, out of character, and he seemed to know it, because he stopped grinning suddenly and put his jaw out.
We didn’t say any more until we arrived at headquarters and were sitting in Farr’s two-by-four office. He said, “I don’t think you killed anybody, Bailey. Reporting the murder after you got away with the body would be awful dumb. But I’m going to take a statement from——”
His phone rang. He picked it up, said “Hello,” and listened for a while. He said, “Doc Blair, huh? Get a description? . . . That so? Okay. Report up here.” He hung up and looked at me.
The gallows was building again. But this time I wasn’t building it myself. Farr was building it, and Blair, and the woman with the bullet eyes, and the long-faced manager, and a little girl with a bruised neck who didn’t want to stay alone. I felt as if I had stopped breathing.
Farr said, “Never mind the statement. We’ve got a line on the killer. A maniac. A guy named Roark.”
I stood up. “That’s great. I suppose you’ll want me to stick around town for a few days.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, we’ll want you to do that.” The sarcasm was elaborate. He lowered his eyes and looked past me out into the corridor. He opened his mouth and shouted, “Huffschmidt!” A man hurried in. He had a wide, bumpy face, soft brown eyes and a baggy uniform.
Farr said, “Huffschmidt, vag this man. And nothing goes with him until I say so. Better see if he’s armed.” Huffschmidt grinned at me and said, “Come on up front and we’ll take care of a couple of details.” The voice was soft and the grin was warm and friendly. I liked Huffschmidt. I was glad Huffschmidt was going to vag me. I had an idea Huffschmidt was too nice a guy to make a really good cop, I had an idea he’d be thinking about how to cheer me up instead of whatever it is that the cops with the steel minds think about. And I had an idea that I was going to cause Huffschmidt a lot of trouble just because he was a nice. Warm, friendly guy. I stood up and he went over me gently, came up with my .38 and dropped it into his baggy side pocket. We started down the corridor. There was activity there. The corridor wouldn’t do at all. We turned into the room with the benches leading to the outside door. There were people in this room. It was a large room, the benches lined up in front of a platform. There were four or five Mexicans there, sitting against one wall with an air of mute and quiet desperation. There was no one else in the room.
Huffschmidt had a gentle hold on my left arm, and he had just winked at me and said, “Farr’s not so bad. Don’t let him get you down.”
I looked back over my shoulder and couldn’t see anyone in the corridor. I winked back at Huffschmidt. Then I put out my left foot and pulled. Huffschmidt fell and I followed him down with my knees in his back, fumbled my .38 out of his pocket and brought it down on the back of his head. The gun cut into hat and hair and skin, and jarred against skull. Huffschmidt lay still on the floor. I looked up. The Mexicans were all staring at me. They smiled their slow sweet smiles, and I went out of there, out the door, up the ramp, across the street, through an alley and up to my car. Huffschmidt.
I liked him. He would probably lose his job. Which was all to the good. Huffschmidt would never have been happy as a cop.
I was on Highway 84 and no one was coming up behind me with screaming sirens. The gas was low, which was just what I wanted. I figured I’d run out in about twelve miles. It actually lasted fifteen. The car choked to a stop, the nose pointed at Los Angeles, and I jumped out and ran back about fifty feet until a car began to show from the southeast where Tucson lay. I turned off to the left and dropped down behind some mesquite. The car whined up and then swept on. I got up and crossed the railroad tracks, crawled under a barbed-wire fence and stumbled out onto the desert floor.
I bent low and started at a dogtrot away from the highway. The mesquite was low and there was nothing to hide me. I stayed bent and kept on running. I could feel the hot ground on my face. I stumbled once and almost fell, holding myself up by my hands while the desert layer cut into them. The heat was low and heavy and there were no shadows, except the cloud shadows playing cragsman along the Santa Catalina Range ahead of me. I went a long way east before I stopped and slowly straightened up and stood breathing, nose and throat dry and raw with desert pollen, trying to see the place I was going back to: Tucson.
IT WAS sunset before I saw it—a lace-work of paloverdes, a school building, and in the distance an elevated water tank looking like a silver blimp in the sky. I figured that would be Tucson. And then I stopped abruptly. Off to the left, the green sky was crossed with great striations of pink, shade on shade.
It was a nice sunset, but it wasn’t right.
I got out a handkerchief and wiped my face.
I was facing southeast, but there on the left was the sunset. So I wasn’t facing southeast. I put the handkerchief away and sat down on the hard earth. I shook my head.
“It’s this trip, Bailey,” I croaked. “It’s done something to you. Get up, turn around and go back. Don’t hurry. Time doesn’t really matter now. You’ll walk all night, hide the next day; then go in and do what you can. It probably won’t be good.”
I stood up slowly and turned around. And there it was. An orgy of color laid across the desert sky with a wanton violence so turbulent that its reflection in the eastern sky had seemed as bright as any sunset I could remember. I grinned and turned back and walked on toward the city. I went through the school grounds, crossed a paved street and came out on a long, wide, dusty road that pointed thirstily at the water tank in the sky. It was called Geronimo Road, and I had walked about half a mile in the drifting twilight when a car pulled up beside me and a voice said, “Ride?”
I hesitated for a brief moment, but there was nothing I could do about it. It would be as bad to say no as it would be to get in and let him have a good look at me. I got in and said, “Thanks.” It was a fairly new car and the man at the wheel looked fresh and clean, as if he’d just had a long cool drink of water. I wondered if he’d appreciated it, noticed that it had body and flavor. And then I stopped thinking about water, because the man was looking at me as he drove. He drove slowly so he could do a thorough job.
He said, “Sorry to stare at you, but when I picked you up, I thought you were a neighbor of mine.”
I didn’t like it. It didn’t go with the way he’d said “Ride?” It didn’t go with the way he was looking at me. I wondered why he felt called upon to explain the inspection.
I said, “We are almost neighbors.
I live up by the water tank.”
“Oh. Been out for a walk?”
“Yeah.”
We didn’t say any more. Pretty soon we were at the tank. The man said, “The city did a pretty good job of construction on that, didn’t they?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You can let me out here. I’d like to walk the rest of the way.”
“Okay.” He pulled up, and I opened the door and jumped out.
“Thanks a lot.”
“Not at all. Glad to help a neighbor.”
He pulled out, going fast. I waited till he was out of sight, then hit off to the left. I had gone a few feet past the great steel stilts that held up the tank when something stopped me. I didn’t know what it was. I looked back. There was a rectangle of concrete at the base of the tank with a plaque set in it. I went back and looked at it. The plaque said that the tank had been built by the Works Progress Administration. I got out of there. The man had said the city built it. That spelled a lot of things. The Daring Daylight Jail Break was probably being played up big. Maybe a description had gone out over the air.
A few blocks down, a cab was letting two old ladies out at a pink Spanish bungalow. I had to get out of that neighborhood. It was important enough to take a chance on the cab. I hailed him and he backed up to me and I hopped in.
“Pioneer Hotel,” I said.
He grinned and said, “There’s nothing like getting a fare both ways.”
It was almost dark now; the street lights were on. I lay back in the shadow and breathed easy. This was all right. He hadn’t looked at me twice. There wasn’t anything to worry about. I got out a cigarette and lit up. But I didn’t want it. I wanted a drink of water. I put it out. I grinned. Things were okay when all I worried about was a drink of water.
And then suddenly things stopped being okay. The driver said, “Read about this guy from L.A.?”
“We take the morning paper.”
“Don’cha listen to the radio?”
“Ten o’clock every night. What’s this about?”
“This guy come into town and killed a dame. The cops caught up with him when he was trying to get out of town, and then he knifed one of them and got away again. Boy! They think he’s a nut.”
“They’ll get him again.”
“Don’t be too sure. Paper says he’s on his way back to California.”
I heard the siren with my stomach first. Then with the muscles across my back, as they crawled and drew the skin at the back of my neck tight. Finally I heard it with my mind, and looked back. The red light was on. It was a half mile behind. I reached for the door handle and then stopped. It was no good that way, ending up cornered in a basement, or running horror-style across a roof, or giving myself up to a trigger-happy cop and getting a hot and fatal belly.