The Noir Novel

by Thomas B. Dewey

  “Captain—”

  “Let me finish! I checked some more. I got a make on Roberts from Denver. I got one on you, from some hotel dick that didn’t like you. I went to Denver. I missed you by a few hours, but I had a talk with that broad in the hotel. I tailed her to the airport. But I lost you after you left.

  “The only lead I had was to Las Vegas, where we knew Roberts had spent some time. But I figured if you were going to Las Vegas, you’d have got on the plane with the broad. I went back to do some checking with the Denver police and—a thing happened.”

  The Captain went out of focus. Mickey shook his head.

  “What—happened—Captain?”

  “A report came down out of the mountains. That old hotel up there—the fire went out. Couple of guys up there knew somebody was at the hotel. But the fire was out! They started nosing around. They found Lou Roberts in that mine shaft, where you dumped him.”

  Mickey stood silent, waiting.

  “So I was back with my Las Vegas lead,” the Captain said. “The Denver police got out bulletins on you everywhere. There was nothing I could do for them. I knew you were driving, so if you were heading for Las Vegas you’d go the southern route because up north it was all snowed in. I went south out of Denver and west on Sixty-six. I been hanging around this Godforsaken desert for a week, because I got a tip on you around town. I got a description of your car. I been driving up and down every street in town. Today I finally made it.”

  There was a long pause while they looked at each other over the hard time.

  Then Mickey said, “Have you been in touch with the local police?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the score, Captain?”

  “You tell me first what the score is. Tell me about Roberts. This is a public police matter and I’m in it.”

  Mickey wet his lips with his tongue, glanced toward the closed bedroom door and started to talk. He told the Captain everything that had happened with Roberts. It took longer than it had taken to tell the other thing, because he was trying to explain to the Captain how he had felt at the time and it was difficult. The Captain never took his eyes off Mickey’s face.

  “I killed Roberts in self-defense,” Mickey said, finishing it. “I dumped him and left him so there wouldn’t be any chance for anybody to tip Wister. I didn’t think about the fire going out.”

  The Captain looked at him a while longer, then turned his back and looked at the rain. Mickey felt a painful, irregular throbbing in his neck.

  “How come it wasn’t in the papers?” he said finally. “About Roberts?”

  “Because I sweated and argued and fought with the Denver people to keep it out. For the same reason you just gave me.”

  “But the local police know about it?”

  “Yeah, they know. But they haven’t found you yet. Only me, I found you.”

  “Well, Captain, what do you think?”

  The Captain turned to face him.

  “I believe you,” he said. “But I’m only the start. You’ll have to go back a long time and convince a lot of people. There’s no other way out—unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “We can get it out of Teller. You say he’s due back tonight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can wait a few hours before reporting in—”

  “Captain, I have to do it myself.”

  “You’re crazy! Why? Haven’t you got the thing out of your system yet?”

  “As a practical matter. If you go to the inn with me, somehow Teller will get tipped. He won’t show up.”

  “Why! Tell me why!”

  “Because you’re a cop. You look and smell like a cop. You’re a cop a million miles away!”

  “You’re not, Phillips? You’re not a cop?”

  “Not anymore.”

  The Captain’s shoulders sagged. He moved wearily to the big chair, sat down on the edge of it and clamped his hands together tight.

  “Then I’ll have to take you in and we’ll do the best we can with Teller,” he said.

  “Give me a break, Captain.”

  “A break? To murder Teller?”

  “I won’t kill him. Not even in self-defense.”

  It was a wild, unbelievable statement, he knew the moment the words were out. The Captain’s face twisted.

  “I’ve got plenty of reason to live,” Mickey said. “Wait just a minute.”

  He went to the bedroom and inside. She was standing just inside the door and she moved against him at once, full and warm, as if to comfort him. It had grown dark in the room and he could barely see the pale oval of her face. But he could feel her vitality, the wiry-soft, restless thrust, supple and catlike, yet caressing, too, as if she would enfold all of him at once.

  “Joe—”

  “Sí, chiquita,” he said gently. “Everything will be all right. Por favor, I want the Captain to meet you.”

  “Poleecy?”

  “Old friend. Amigo” he said.

  “Okay, Joe.”

  He switched on the light and she fussed at her hair before the mirror and straightened her new skirt. When she slipped her hand under his arm, it was trembling. They went into the next room and the Captain rose slowly, seeing her.

  “Captain,” Mickey said, “amigo, this is Senorita Margarita Sandoval.”

  The Captain nodded hesitantly. Margarita glanced at Joe, then bowed a little, somewhat awkwardly. She murmured a formal greeting in Spanish.

  “Do you like Mexican food?” Mickey asked.

  The Captain blinked at him.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “We will be pleased to have you eat with us,” Mickey said. “Okay, Margarita?”

  She looked up at him quickly, shyly, then bowed.

  “Sí. Okay, Joe. I fix.”

  * * * *

  The Captain didn’t say much during the meal. When they finished, he thanked Margarita graciously. Margarita was still nervous in his presence, but she had relaxed from her earlier tension, Mickey thought. She excused herself and disappeared in the bedroom. A few minutes later, Mickey saw her peering out through a narrow opening, beckoning him urgently. When he went in to her, she was stiff and anxious. He had no idea how much of his conversation with the Captain she had heard nor how much of that she had understood.

  “Joe,” she said, “por favor, the cine—movies—not tonight, huh? You stay tonight?”

  He gathered her close, kissed her deeply, holding her till she responded, her mouth warm and mobile against his.

  “I must go tonight,” he said. “It’s the last time. Everything will be all right. Don’t be afraid.”

  “It is a bad thing you do,” she said.

  “It must be done. Only I can do it.”

  “Joe, the picture I show you—that woman—”

  “Sí?”

  “Señor Wister do that.”

  “He told you?”

  “Sí. He say I stay with him, do like he says, or he do that to me. He was—crazy—talk funny. How you say?”

  “Drunk?”

  “Sí, very drunk. He tell me Señor Teller make him do it.”

  He led her to the bed, made her sit down. He put his hand over hers in her lap and held them tightly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked.

  “I was afraid. For you. I don’t know w’at you do at the een—with Mr. Teller.”

  Pretty soon she said, “I was wrong, Joe?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything will be all right.” He sat in silence, thinking about it.

  “Joe,” Margarita said, “Señor Wister not dead. Last night I see him—at the cine.”

  It took him a while to get the words sorted out in his throat.

  “Did he see you?” he said quietly.

  “Sí, I think so. He look at me long time. I wait for you. When you come, he is not there.”

  “Are you sure it was Señor Wister?”

  “Sí, I am sure
.”

  He released her hands and got up. There were two windows in the room. He made sure each one was locked and he lowered the blinds on each. He paused by the bed and touched her arms lightly.

  “You stay right here,” he said, “while I talk to the Captain. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Okay, Joe,” she said.

  The trust in her voice was a knife-thrust under his heart as he left the room to tell the Captain what he had learned.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Captain listened calmly.

  “So,” Mickey said, finishing it up, “it looks as if they rigged the telephone call to make me think Wister was dead.”

  “They were probably both on to you by the time you got here,” the Captain said.

  “But how could they know about Roberts?”

  “I knew about Roberts. You said Teller had friends on the local police.”

  “All right. But why go to all that trouble? They could have had me thirty different ways—”

  “It might have meant another killing. They just wanted you to go away. They would figure, because of the Roberts thing, you were too hot to do any talking, especially to the law. As far as they knew, you had nothing on Teller. If you thought Wister was dead, maybe you would give up. It could have worked—anyway long enough for both of them to get far away. With his ex-wife coming back to take over, Teller had a logical excuse to disappear.”

  “Then why not disappear? Why stall around?”

  “Because you didn’t disappear. And because when Teller went to Wister’s strongbox, the evidence was gone. They need that.”

  Mickey pounded his fist on his knee in helpless fury.

  “It was so convincing—him banging that box on the floor. I swallowed the whole pitch—”

  “He wasn’t acting. Besides, he couldn’t have counted on you watching. Wister probably told him where to look. It must have been quite a shock to him to find the stuff missing. He doubtless guessed you had got hold of it, and he would have to get it back.”

  “And I took it the way Teller played it. The only break we got was that he didn’t know how it was with Margarita and me. If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have waited till morning to open that box—”

  He broke off. They looked at each other.

  “Margarita—” Mickey said.

  “They need her, too,” the Captain said. “You think they know where she is, for sure?”

  “It would have been easy enough for Wister to tail us from the theater last night. They may not know yet that you’re here. If they’re out there somewhere now, they’re probably waiting till the street quiets down, people go to bed…”

  The Captain sat in the big armchair with his head back, looking like a man who had a mildly irritating day at the office and was glad for a little rest.

  “What do you think?” he asked after a minute. Mickey’s answer was prompt.

  “The first thing to do is to get Margarita in a safe place—like in the hands of Immigration. They’d keep her at least overnight.”

  “Where are they?” the Captain said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have a telephone?”

  “No.”

  “Neighbors have a telephone?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Turn off the lights,” the Captain said.

  Mickey got up, moving casually, and switched off the overhead light and the lamp beside the Captain’s chair. The Captain got up, went to the window and stood looking out. After a long time he turned back to the chair. “Hard to tell,” he said. “There’s nobody on the street. Can’t see anything in that park. It’s not raining anymore.”

  “Captain, do you have a gun?”

  “No. I didn’t plan to shoot it out with you.”

  Mickey took his turn at the window, with no better results than the Captain had got. He went across the dark room and into the bedroom, where Margarita was sitting, just as he had left her, her hands curled together in her lap.

  “Margarita,” he said, “I’m not going out tonight. We’ll just stay together. Pretty soon, we’ll go for a ride in the car, take the Captain to his hotel. Maybe we’ll get some ice cream on the way home.”

  “Sí, okay,” she said.

  “You wait a minute and I’ll go out and start the car. When the Captain says it’s time, you come out with the Captain to the car.”

  “Okay, Joe. I come.”

  “Better put your coat on, huh? It’s cold outside.”

  “Sí.”

  He disliked using the confidence stuff on her, but it would be easier to explain to her after they got started, about the Immigration people and that he would come and pick her up in Mexico the next day; and it would give her less time to worry about it before it happened.

  He went back to the living room and the Captain was waiting in the dark.

  “I’ll go out alone to the car,” Mickey said. “If it looks clear all around, I’ll give you a horn. You bring Margarita out then. Okay?”

  “Okay, but let me go. They don’t want me for anything—”

  “They will, if they’re out there, when they see you come out of here.”

  “Well—”

  “I’ll give you a horn, Captain,” Mickey said firmly. “Or I’ll come back.”

  He twisted the knob and opened the door, took a glance outside and went out. There was a thirty-foot walk to the street. The rain had stopped, but the flagstone walk was wet and he could see the wet grass glistening in the faint light from the street lamp, nearly a block away. There were no pedestrians in sight on the street in either direction and he could see nobody on the near edge of the park across the way.

  He got into the car, slid under the wheel, found his keys and switched on the ignition. He pressed the starter and nothing happened. It turned over all right, but there was no spark, no igniting. He tried it several times, checked his gasoline supply, which was adequate, and finally knew it was hopeless. He got out, went to the back and saw that the engine hood was unlatched. So they had been at it. He didn’t bother to inspect the damage. It would be sufficient to make the car useless.

  He looked the street over carefully in both directions. A few cars were parked at long intervals, none but his own near the court where they lived. The parking lot for the court was on the next street and he had never used it. He checked the telephone wires as far as he could see in the darkness. The only line leading to the court ran to a unit toward the back. There were no lights in the house. There was no line to either house next door. A line connected the second house to his left, fifty yards down the street. It was dark, but a car was parked in front of it. He thought he might rouse somebody, or anyway get inside the house. But it was too far. It would be too long to leave the Captain, alone, unarmed, and Margarita—

  He returned to the house, not hurrying, but not wasting any time either. Before he spoke to the Captain, he went to the kitchen. He hooked the screen door that led outside off the service porch, and he locked the inside kitchen door and closed the blind on its small, square window. It wasn’t much of a door, he thought, turning back to the living room.

  He stood in the middle of the room and traded looks with the Captain.

  “Car won’t start,” he said.

  The Captain nodded.

  “I guess we could shade that window,” he said, “and turn on a light and see what happens.”

  Mickey ground his teeth.

  “We don’t even know if they’re out there,” he said.

  “I know,” the Captain said, “but if we were in their shoes, we would be out there, and we know somebody monkeyed with the car. If you want to try it on foot to the nearest well-lighted street, I’ll go along. But it’s a lot to ask of Margarita.”

  Mickey pulled down the shade on the front window and switched on the overhead light. It threw harsh shadows over the old, faded wallpaper, the chain-store furniture, the frayed carpet. He cringed at the sight of it, a cheap, threadbare hideout, where he had brought Margarita. An
d it could turn out to be her tomb—and his, and the Captain’s—because he had fouled up. The foul-up with Teller, being outsmarted, manipulated by Teller, was only the last of a series. The big foul-up was the first, when he had walked out on the Captain, to do it himself, alone. Big man!

  Because they always came to this cheap, threadbare end. When you used the methods of thief, hoodlum, killer, you became one of them. You could expect to go down like them, and bring others down with you. That would be the hell you went to, living or dying, the faces of the people you had loved and brought down.

  He was moving toward the bedroom. He was wondering how he could explain this to Margarita, and ask her forgiveness, in the short, bad time that might remain, when he heard the footsteps outside. He halted, feeling the knot of fear like a hot fist between his shoulder blades. He turned slowly and saw that the Captain had heard, too. They listened together to the soggy, measured tramp of feet on the wet flagstones. There were at least two men.

  They reached the door and stopped. Mickey’s nails dug sharply at his moist palms. He began to count—one, two, three—in time with his racing pulse. Then the knock came, hard, quick, a staccato bark against the old, cheap panel. The Captain was looking up at him from the chair. Mickey moved closer to the door.

  “What do you want?” he called.

  Up in that hotel in the mountains, Roberts, desperate with fear, had said to him, “What do you want?”

  One of them outside answered, “Mr. Marine? Joe Marine?”

  It was not a voice he had heard before. He glanced at the Captain, who had his hands now on the arms of the chair, gripping. The Captain nodded.

  “All right,” Mickey said. “What is it?”

  “…officers,” the voice said. “Bureau of Immigration. Open up.”

  The sweat of sudden relief washed over him from forehead to shaking knees. His hand groped for the doorknob. But the Captain was up from the chair now, moving past him, and he touched Mickey’s arm in passing.

  “Easy,” he muttered.