The Noir Novel

by Thomas B. Dewey

  Haggart didn’t answer. He didn’t move a muscle. Then suddenly he was flying up toward me to take me in the gut with the back of his head like a ton of bricks. I went into the trunk of a tree but kicked out and up as hard as I could. Haggart leaned in to take my shoe full in the mouth and he collapsed against the side of the wall, sputtering, and in the wan light I could see there was a dark smear where his mouth had been.

  As I dove forward to really do a paint job on him I was aware of the headlights stopping in the street below and I glanced around just long enough for Haggart to take me with the old schoolboy trip, and send me spinning into the drive. I took a header down the incline and ground the skin off the left side of my face as the gravel bit into the flesh of my hands. A car door slammed and there were running footsteps. I shook my head but it wouldn’t clear.

  “Up here!” Haggart yelled. “Help!”

  By reflex I made the world steady around me as I pushed myself to my knees, groped for the .38, found it, and managed to make it to my feet just as the cops came up the rise. And as I rose, the .38 in my hand, they stopped in their tracks.

  “Put that gun down, Walters,” one of them called to me. “Make it easy on yourself.”

  I backed toward the garage and Haggart, who was just inside the mouth of the doorway, obscured by the shadows. Now I was definitely between two fires and it looked like there wasn’t much to do but take money on which one would plug me first.

  But as I retreated I gambled that Haggart wasn’t likely to shoot me down until he had a better chance of getting away, which left me the slimmest margin. If I could get Haggart before the cops got me, that would be something accomplished. I tried to shadow the .38 as I eased it up into firing position.

  “Drop it, Walters!” the cop called again. “You’re dead if you don’t.”

  I stood there, giving out with the dazed act but from the corner of my eye saw the cop take aim on me. At the same time I caught a glimpse of Haggart moving out of the garage and into the shadow at the side. There wasn’t any time to waste.

  I whirled toward Haggart and dropped at the same time because I meant to get him as I went down—and I might have if my head had been clearer. I fired as my elbow struck the gravel and the shot went wild.

  That opened it up like a can of beans. Shots came from everywhere. Dirt kicked up in my face and I rolled over and over downhill into the cover of a bank of shrubs. Then I heard a startled cry of pain which heralded a tense silence. I peered out from the camouflaging shrubs and saw one of the cops lying on the ground, curled into a knot of agony. The other one, who had taken cover at the corner of the house, was; edging out toward me.

  For a moment it didn’t make sense, then I realized Haggart must have got the cop. Evidently he had fired at me and the cop had been unlucky enough to be in the line of fire. The cop moaned, made a gurgling sound, then lay still. I shrank back into the shadows as the second con took a wild one at me but it fanned wide. I edged through the brush and circled around toward the place where I thought Haggart had taken cover—and I was right. I moved carefully until I saw him flattened against the wall, tensing as if he was about to make a dash for it and clear out. I had to get to him now.

  I was too anxious. I didn’t feel out the path ahead of me, stumbled, and fell against a bush just as the beam of a flashlight reached out from down the drive and I saw Haggart who must have been as tense as a fully-wound mainspring, for his reflexes were set for a leap into the open, and the moment he heard me stumble he leaped directly into the beam of fight which outlined him fully against the black background of the hillside, and his silhouette seemed to linger, fixed momentarily in the spotlight. A gun flashed flame—exploded—then another and another to shatter the tableau. The light wavered but stayed with Haggart as he staggered crazily toward me and fell in the darkness. The light lost him and I moved in.

  He moaned as I reached down to touch his face before I managed to grasp him under the arms. The cop was out to finish him off, but I wanted him worse than the cop.

  I lifted Haggart. He made small whimpering sounds as my hands became sticky with his blood. I prayed the cop would lay low out there a little bit longer as I moved off into the bushes carrying a wounded man and attempting to do so quietly. Haggart trembled convulsively and I had to go down on my knees to keep from dropping him as a shot rang out overhead.

  I got back to my feet, braced him solidly across my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and edged downhill toward the side street where I’d left my car. He groaned on the way down, but not loud enough to draw any more shots. I didn’t want to save his filthy hide, but had to.

  When we reached the road I carried him over to the car, opened the back door and lowered him face up on the floor, then crossed around front and climbed in.

  “You’ve got a doctor for this kind of job?” I leaned over the back seat.

  He didn’t answer but I could hear him breathing, so I reached down to touch his forehead. Haggart stirred and muttered.

  “A doctor?” I repeated.

  His voice was a weak whisper. “Deitrich,” he said. “9634 Wilshire.”

  That’s all I wanted. I raced the engine, pulled out, and didn’t bother about the shouted commands behind me.

  It was only animal instinct that took me out of the hills because I came out on Sunset at the end of the Strip with the cops on my tail. I cut down to Santa Monica and headed east. Haggart moaned from the floor of the back seat and I turned to look at him. I saw enough to make me press down harder on the gas: his chest was a smear of blood. I started talking to keep him alive.

  “Can you hear me?” I said.

  He groaned.

  “Now you know how Mike French felt when you let him have it.”

  He was silent but his breath came in heavy rasps now.

  “How about it?” I yelled.

  He began to murmur. Suddenly his voice came from the back with startling force. “Doctor!” he cried. “Doctor!”

  “Sure,” I said. “Don’t you crap out on me before you give me a statement.”

  I heavy-footed the gas pedal and crossed my sweating fingers. Everything, but everything depended on me saving Haggart’s life. It was wild. The one guy in the world I’d really enjoy seeing die and I was risking my own life to get him to the doctor. I wheeled into Fairfax, headed south, and cocked an ear toward the back seat. Haggart’s breathing was getting shallower. He had to last. I was frantic.

  I kept a lookout for cops. By morning it would be around that I was a cop killer. Suddenly the hairs at the back of my neck bristled as the scream of a siren rose out of the night from somewhere behind me and a police car took after me from a side street. It was almost funny, he probably wanted to give me a ticket for speeding.

  I took the next turn that came along, wheeled into a walled-in parking lot behind a supermarket, pulled into a space between two other cars to keep me company and slid down in the seat. I didn’t have time to give the boys a chase, not with my future dying in the back seat. I lay across the seat and listened as the sirens screamed for the turn and wailed past. I breathed a sigh of relief and I closed my eyes for a moment to get the ache out of them, and when I opened them again I noticed, for the first time, that the sky was getting lighter. Dawn was breaking in the east. I caught a look at myself in the mirror and flinched. The left side of my face was a solid smear. The siren died somewhere in the distance. I started to throw the car in gear again, then stopped, to swing around and look at Haggart.

  He was still, too still. I opened the door, shoved out of the seat, and opened the rear door closest to his head.

  “Haggart,” I bent over him. “Haggart!”

  I waited for him to breathe, for him to force just one rattling gasp. I waited, but it didn’t come. He was dead as a fish on a cake of ice.

  Suddenly I was too tired to stand up straight like a human being and I sank down close to him and leaned my head forward against the cold metal of the car.

  “Haggart!” I
cried through clenched teeth. “You dirty, lousy sonofabitch!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  My head ached like the devil when I put my hands to my eyes, then traced the tips of my fingers over the raw bruise that was one side of my face.

  My clothes. My coat was smeared with Haggart’s blood. I looked as if I’d slept in a slaughterhouse.

  Haggart was the only guy in the world who looked worse than I did. The sun rose steadily to make the scene even more bizarre. Haggart’s face was as white as funeral linen. The smear at his mouth stood out with obscene vividness. My only regret was that he had died even as peacefully as he had. His coat had fallen open and his wallet had slid half out of the inner pocket.

  It was a flat cowhide job, gold initials, and he had plenty of cash on hand. I went through his pockets and found the usual: a driver’s license, receipts for bills, the rest. I was about to snap the billfold shut when a small clip of cardboard dropped from one of the inner pockets meant for stamps. It was the stub for a plane ticket to Vegas. Haggart had been in Vegas over the weekend, all right. Sure. Gwynn had seen him. But I checked the date and wanted to weep. Haggart hadn’t been there for the entire weekend: he hadn’t been there the night Mike French was killed. He hadn’t arrived until the next morning, the morning Gwynn had seen him I was too tired, too defeated, too confused to figure it. I closed the wallet and shoved it into my pocket along with the diary, then stared at Haggart for a long moment. I couldn’t figure what to do with him, but it didn’t matter much now. I closed the door just to get him out of my sight and climbed into the front of the car to lean my head against the wheel and think of someplace safe to ditch the body, a place where it wouldn’t be found too soon. My mind could only grasp the obvious: I had to get him out of the center of town. I started the engine, backed around and headed out toward the street.

  I got as far as the mouth of the lot entrance, jammed on the brakes and jarred to a stop. The cops, taking it easy, keeping a close watch, were cruising back along the street and they saw me.

  I slammed the car into reverse and wheeled in a wide circle, frantically scanning the wall at the far end for an exit. There was one, just beyond an enormous incinerator, but it was closed off by a tall wire netting. I braked to a skidding stop, slid across the seat and jumped out as a cop shouted at me, but I wasn’t stopping to chat. I took to the side of the incinerator for protection, stood there for a moment, undecided, then I started to climb. If I was going to be on foot I might as well have a wall between me and the police.

  The incinerator was pyramidal in structure, rough surfaced, easy to climb, and I made it to the stack at the top in a moment. Now I was level with the top of the wall. I poised for the jump, but a blast from a gun sent me over before I was ready and as a bullet dug into the incinerator I landed in a heap on the other side of the wall.

  I found myself in an alley and started to run, then stopped to take cover in a deeply recessed doorway. I heard a second wild shot behind me. Panting for breath I made the end of the alley. Behind me the cops were racing their car out of the lot. In a minute they would be around the block to pick me up, so I reversed myself to reenter the alley. It was a simple strategy, desperate, but it was worth trying. My feet felt as if they were solid concrete and every jarring, running step was like the blow of a hammer inside my skull. I came to the end of the block, crossed the street, and keeping to the alley, kept going. At the end of the second block I turned the corner and stopped. There was no sign of a police car; apparently the cops had gone in the opposite direction. Completely spent I leaned up against a brick wall for breath, but still managed to turn away as two men who carried lunch boxes crossed the street at the intersection. One look at my face and clothes and I was through. When they were gone I stripped off my coat and dropped it into a cardboard carton, shoved the .38 in my pocket, and unbuckled my holster. I dropped the holster with the coat and took off as not too far off a siren began its searching wail.

  I walked to the intersection at the end of the block, hoping to pick up a taxi, at gunpoint if necessary, but it wasn’t that kind of neighborhood.

  People were beginning to appear in greater numbers on the street: storekeepers, clerks, and workmen, the early risers. Traffic was beginning to move.

  Across from me was a drugstore with newspaper racks out front. I crossed over, took up a newspaper, and spread it in front of my face. A second siren sounded from the opposite direction. The alarm was out; they were beginning to converge. I moved off.

  I had to get out of there, out of the neighborhood. At the corner a man came out of a beanery and looked down the street.

  I started to move away across the street, then stepped back as competing with the siren there was the sound of a bell. A streetcar rounded the corner a block away and started toward me. Three or four puffy-eyed girls appeared hurriedly from around the corner and moved out to the passenger zone in the street. Using the newspaper to shield my face I followed them.

  Just as the police car entered the block the car stopped, the doors swung open, and the girls climbed aboard. I stepped up on the level. The girls were groping in their purses for the right change so I reached past them, dropped a couple of coins in the box and started to shove past them when the motorman called out to me.

  “Hey, buddy!”

  I turned back, holding my profile to him. “Yeah?”

  “Your zone ticket,” he held it out to me.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  The sirens screamed past on the street as the doors of the streetcar sighed in closing behind me. Toward the rear of the car I spotted an empty seat and started toward it. At the same moment the conductor threw the switch and the car lurched forward. I felt myself go off my feet and plunge forward as my hand which held the paper reached out for protection. I caught myself against the back of one of the seats and found myself staring directly into the sharp, blue eyes of an austere female with iron-grey hair.

  Her expression of annoyance held for a moment, then twisted into one of horrified dismay as she took in my face. I boosted myself quickly away from her and drawing the newspaper up in place again continued back to the seat without turning around, but I could feel her watching me.

  Danger prodded me to leave the car at the next stop but an overwhelming weariness glued me to the seat. I spread the paper before me as though I was reading it and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again the car had stopped to pick up more passengers. Mine was a side seat so I didn’t have to worry about anyone sitting next to me. The crack on the head was beginning to catch up with me because I was dizzy. The streets moved past in a blur. I tried to read the names on the markers but couldn’t. I turned from the window and looked beyond the edge of my paper down the length of the car. Now my vision was getting foggy.

  At the very last moment, by sheer force of will, I resisted slipping into unconsciousness. I leaned forward, put my head down, and was only vaguely aware of the newspaper slipping from my hands to the floor as I sat there swaying, the pulses throbbing at my temples. The attack of nausea receded, the dizzy, sick feeling subsided like the backwash of a heavy tide. I straightened up to lean back into my seat.

  My face was exposed! My eyes moved fearfully toward the woman with grey hair. She was staring at me with recognition in her eyes. I looked down at the paper on the floor and saw my own picture staring back at me. I looked back at the woman. Alarm was fast filling her face.

  Not caring whether anyone could see my face or not, I got up from the seat, and steadying myself against the backs of the seats shoved toward the door.

  As I moved toward the exit in the center of the car I could see the scream growing in the tightening muscles of her throat; I could almost hear it. Then her lips began to tremble and I knew it was coming. I reached to the side of the car and pressed the buzzer for the stop. At the same moment she screamed.

  The sound split the air. Heads turned to her, then followed her riveted glance to me. Eyes widened.
At the front of the car the motorman swiveled around in his seat and looked back with surprise before he braked the car to a stop. The woman was pointing at me.

  “It’s him!” she cried. “It’s the one in the paper!”

  Recognition flooded the eyes around me. Dizziness came back, but I forced it away. I had a feeling of insanity, standing there in the middle of the motionless car with all those people staring at me.

  I turned toward the motorman. “Open up,” I said, almost pleadingly. “Open the door.”

  He didn’t move. A man rose from his seat. My gaze shot in his direction, then to his hand moving for the inside of his coat.

  Maybe he was a watchman or something; anyway he was heeled. I pulled the .38, fast.

  “Just be still all of you,” I said. “Don’t do anything. I don’t want to hurt you.” The man sank back down in his seat, drew his hand away. I turned again to the motorman.

  “Open up,” I ordered. “You don’t want any of these people hurt.”

  He hesitated only a moment before he threw the switch.

  The door swung open behind me. I stepped backwards down the steps as three girls, all bound for the car, bustled up to the front entrance and started to shove aboard.

  “What’s he stopped in the middle of the block for?” one of them asked. Then they saw the gun in my hand and froze in their tracks.

  The girls made good cover. I turned, ran for the parked cars along the curb and almost made it when I heard the report behind me and felt a slug slam into my upper arm.

  It was a moment before the pain began to come and I skidded around a parked car and looked back. The guy I figured as a watchman was at the window of the streetcar, the revolver in his hand. I turned away and kept on running, gripping my arm, and came to the entrance of an alley—L.A. is a city of alleys—and ducked in. Pain stabbed my arm and blood oozed through my fingers as I ran until pain and nausea made me lean against a paint-scabbed wall.