by Roy Huggins
“How would you like to have the answer to this tomorrow—before Murdock gets on it with you?”
Quint's face tightened and became almost foxy.
“Huh-uh,” I said. “Don't get any ideas. I don't know who killed her, but a lot of things have been happening around me and I think they'll keep happening. I might get lucky.
Quint closed an eye and cocked his head up at the patches of deep blue behind the fog patterns. “You know,” he drawled, “you might get lucky at that—but you've been pressing it kind of hard.” He got up and walked away. After a while the men with the cameras and string were sliding down the bank. I threw the cigar into the drain and went away.
Driving home a lonely, terrifying idea rode me: That Mrs. Johnston was dead at five-thirty; that she was dead at four o'clock; that she had never called Barky Northwick at all; that she had never called Norma Shannon. If Keller stepped into the picture that idea would become a conviction. It would be the piece that would make the pattern of, meaningless things suddenly shift and re-form and take on a grisly clarity.
I left the car in the street and went up and brewed myself some coffee and opened a can of soup. I ate, got out of my clothes, ran a tub full of hot water and stretched out in it with my head against a towel and went to sleep.
I woke with icy threads of sweat running down my face and chest, my mouth as dry as sage, and the telephone ringing, and sounding like a call to the last judgment. I got out and put a towel around my shoulders and went to the phone. I coughed a couple of times to make sure I could talk, and said hello.
He still had marbles in his throat. All he said was, “Is this Mr. Bailey?,” but I knew it was Keller.
“In the flesh,” I said, and grinned at my racy wit.
“I'm told you want to do business.”
“Yeah.”
“Uh... No hard feelings? I hear Jake got a little exuberant.”
“That was Jake,” I said, and grinned some more. I was talking to Keller. I was feeling fine. I had murder by the tail.
Chapter Twenty-Six
KELLER COUGHED INTO the phone and said, “I've been trying to get hold of you. Is it too late tonight for some conversation?”
I looked at the clock on the bookcase. It was after midnight. “I've got an errand to run,” I said. “Can you come up here in about an hour-and-a-half?”
Silence and suspicion. “Why the delay?”
“If I was trying to run one on you, I'd be a wee bit more subtle. You can bring your boys with you but check 'em outside. They can tell you the room number.”
“All right. Ah—how much would you suggest I bring along—more or less?”
“You couldn't get enough tonight to cover it, Mr. Keller. Bring what you can.” I hung up.
I got into some clothes, grabbed a coat and went out the door. Sixteen minutes later I was ringing Norma Shannon's doorbell. She didn't answer. I looked in at the corner window. A light burned in the hall. A fire was dying in the fireplace. I tried knocking. Nothing happened. I began to feel like the Traveler in the poem, sensing the phantom listeners in the house. I turned and went down the stairs muttering, “'Tell them I came, and no one answered....'”
Back at my door I fumbled for my keys. I didn't have them. I had gone off without locking the door. That is a bad habit. People might walk right in and make themselves at home.
Someone had. She was reclining lavishly on my sofa, a cigarette in her hand and a bland and lovely smile on her face. She was arching her neck for me and dusting her alabaster cheeks with long black lashes.
I took off my coat and put it in the closet. It was cold in the place. I set fire to the foul little gas burner by the kitchen door and stood in the middle of the room looking at her. She went on softening me up with the smile.
I said, “Got an aspirin on you?”
“Is that a nice thing to say?”
“No offense, Mrs. Cabrillo. I had the headache before I saw you.”
She arched her full black brows, cocked her head and patted the cushion beside her with wordless eloquence.
“Huh-uh. Anyone as beautiful as you, I'm afraid of— in my condition.”
Her eyebrows dipped and turned up at the inner ends and she looked concerned. She got up in one slow effortless movement and came toward me. She came close and peered at my swollen lip and then looked at my eyes as if she were counting the red blood cells in them. And for a moment she forgot to pose. Her head came forward, hiding the long neck, and her eyes opened wide and became just eyes, and her mouth puckered a little, and tiny even furrows formed in the satin skin of her forehead. But she was still the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen this side of the big gate at Warner Bros.
“I'll bet I'm real pretty,” I said. “My eyes feel like a couple of knot holes in a charred stump.”
“What has happened to you?” she murmured. “You look like a ver-ry sick man.” One soft hand came up and touched my temple, and the vein there leaped up to meet it and began to pound hysterically against her fingers.
I leered and said, “Did you come up to see me or are you from the Visiting Nurse Association?”
She took her hand away and smiled. “If you'll sit down and stop chattering I'll make you a hot drink and perhaps even tell you why I am here.”
It sounded like a fine idea. I sat down on the sofa and closed my eyes. And after a while someone was putting something warm into my hand. It was a tall glass with little pieces of lemon pulp floating on top, and steam curling warmly upward. I took a deep swallow. It was hot and mellow, and it gathered greater heat from somewhere as it went down. It had authority. My private wrecking crew laid down its pneumatic drills and pickaxes and went home for the night on tiptoe.
I thanked her. She had squeezed down beside me so that the light was behind her. She was wearing black again, a soft-flowing stuff that clung to her and caressed her gently.
“Where's Martin?” I asked. “Under the bed?”
She gave me the raised eyebrow and the look of delicate alarm that she had used at our first meeting. But it didn't look genuine.
“Martin is my chauffeur, darling. Not my lover.” She smiled again.
I drank some more of the hot toddy, put it down on the side table, and said, “Shall we go right into whatever it is you're afraid of, Mrs. Cabrillo? Or shall we have ourselves some gay repartee first?”
She didn't answer right away. I turned and looked at her. She was giving me a look of steady, cool speculation. But her eyes were bright with something that may have been excitement, or fear, or perhaps both. Or maybe neither.
She said, “I am not afraid of anything, Mr. Bailey. You are far too modest. But I am curious about something.” She paused and said, with a slow emphasis, “You see, I know Gloria Gay.” She settled back against the arm of the sofa to wait for me to recover.
I went on looking at her. I reached for the glass and took another drink. She leaned forward again and frowned, and said, “Perhaps you do not know that she spent some time in Brazil. I... I have a reason to be curious about your interest in her. We may be able to help each other....”
I was listening now. Not so much because I thought she would help, but because the theory that had sprung full grown to lusty life when Keller called was beginning to curl up at the edges and fall away in my hands. And I was tired.
“Let's start with what it costs me,” I said. “How can I help you?”
“By telling me why you are looking into Gloria Gay's past.”
“Why is it important to you?”
“A very important but very personal reason that couldn't be of help to you. But I have something you can use.”
“I'd have to know what it was before I could tell you anything.”
“Of course.” She stood up and went over to the easy chair where she had put her furs and her bag. She took out a cigarette and lit it, standing in the center of the room near the foot of the pull-down bed. She blew smoke into the room and looked at me through it.
&nbs
p; “I know where you can find her, where she lives,” she said. “It would help you a lot to know that right now, wouldn't it?”
I sat up and gave her my knowing smile. “You know what I'm thinking, Mrs. Cabrillo? I'm thinking that my answer to that last question is really all you want to know. If I said, 'Nix, baby, I know where she lives,' you could pick up your mink and walk out of here as happy as a debutante who's just been told she isn't pregnant.” She forgot to smile for a long moment. But it finally broke through and she said, “You just can't help being vulgar, can your But if that is all I want to know, it doesn't seem much to ask.”
I stood up and stepped over beside her and she arched her neck and looked up at me warmly. She leaned closer. I put my arms around her, lifted her head, and I kissed her.
“What was she doing in Brazil, angel?”
“Entertainer. She was trying to prepare a Brazilian act to bring back to the states.”
“What's she hiding from?”
She looked up at me. “I don't know,” she murmured. “Who is behind you? Is it her husband trying to find out about his wife's past?” Her voice was choked with an urgent pleading.
I didn't say anything.
She clung to me. “Please, it's so little to ask!”
I kissed her again and she pressed against me and kissed my mouth with a sudden desperate forgetting. But after a while she remembered. She whispered, “Can't you tell me just yes or no?”
I reached down and lifted her gently and stepped over to the bed. I said, “Sure, angel, I'll tell you.” I felt her stiffen just a little and the long muscles of her legs hardened under my hand and wrist. But she still clung warmly. And as I put her down on the dark bed I thought I heard her murmur, “Tell me now.”
The muscles across her stomach crawled and tightened beneath my hand, and her breath slowed and grew silent. I looked at her face. I waited until I could see it clearly. It was drawn, the eyes open, watching me, the tiny nostrils wide and pale. I brought my hand down across her stomach and along her hard thigh. I made a febrile animal sound in my throat and watched her fragile face.
The dark cherry mouth opened and she drew a sharp retching breath and pulled up suddenly like a sprung trap and clung to the post at the far side of the bed, trembling. Her eyes were wide and white-rimmed. She stared at me over the edge of hysteria, like a cornered animal peering from a hedge.
I got up from the bed and leaned over and leered at her. “Take it easy, Gloria,” I said. “You weren't in any danger. As your husband would say, I was just testing an hypothesis. I wanted to be sure you were Margaret Bleeker before I started talking things over with you.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
HER MOUTH DREW DOWN and came apart, and she hissed, “Crazy... you're crazy. What are you talking...”
“Huh-uh, Peg. Let's get together. I got it all figured out, all the main items. Let's sit down and fill in the interesting details.”
She got off the bed and came around the foot of it and walked over to the easy chair. She picked up her bag and began to open it with fingers that trembled like the last leaves on a wind-blown tree. I stepped over quickly and took hold of it and opened it for her and looked in. No gun. She said, “Thank you,” politely and took a cigarette out and lit it. She sat down in the chair on her nice furs and stared at me. There were little red lines about her mouth and the shadows were green under the high bone of her cheeks.
“What has my aversion to being seduced on a wall-bed in a smelly room have to do with someone named Margaret Bleeker?” She was trying hard, but her voice was like a last leaf, too; a tiny leaf trembling and holding on by a little finger of courage.
“Stop it, Peggy.” I looked at my watch. “Keller will be here in twenty-five minutes. You can waste those minutes trying to be foxy or you can help me straighten a few things out.”
“Am I supposed to know this man Keller?” Her lip curled, weakly.
“Okay, baby. We'll wait.”
I sat down on the sofa. She watched me blankly while I got out my pipe and filled it. Her eyes followed me with an empty concentration as I reached for a match and lit it and got a bright red coal burning evenly in the bowl. We sat and looked at the walls and listened to the heater hissing its nasty warmth into the room. She leaned forward suddenly and grasped her bag and looked around the room.
“The powder room's through this door,” I said and pointed with my thumb. When she came out again there weren't any signs left of the emotional wing-ding she'd been on. She picked up the fur coat carefully and sat down, holding it across her lap. She smiled insouciantly and said, “Unburden yourself, darling. Your ego must need it ver-ry much.”
“Wrong, angel. I wasn't trying to seduce you. I knew it couldn't be done. It was just one way of testing a hunch. Not the nicest way but the only one I had on hand.
“There was a little thing about Peg Bleeker that people kept throwing at me, something they felt called on to remark about. She was a hard gal to make, impossible it seemed. And there were other things that tied into it. For instance, when she left here to go to Mexico she went with a fellow who was teaching women to walk like ladies.
“It didn't mean a thing to me until it got to be obvious that Keller wanted to find Mrs. Johnston. That didn't fit my facts. If Mrs. Johnston was Peggy Bleeker it didn't make sense for Keller to be looking for her now. He could have found her easy enough six years ago. And then there was your little friend, Norma Shannon. I've been wrong about people lots of times, but not that wrong. I wanted to find some facts that would fit those eyes of hers. And there were some telephone calls, too, that I didn't think a corpse could have made. But the really important thing was you. And that blue lace-covered iceberg you sleep on kept it from being too hard to guess where you fit in.”
Mrs. Cabrillo wasn't smiling now, and she didn't ask me whose corpse I had in mind.
“Tonight Keller called,” I went on, “and I knew I was right. Mrs. Johnston wasn't Peggy Bleeker, or Gloria Gay, at all. She came from Portland, yes. She was an entertainer at the Hofbrau, too. Maybe she even went to Jefferson High School. But she wasn't the girl who came to Los Angeles in 1938 with Buster Buffin. She came down here only a couple of years ago. And she wanted to hide. She chose a college campus; but she needed a record, a transcript, so she sent for yours.... You were friends, weren't you?”
She didn't answer.
“I tried to find Norma Shannon tonight. I was going to take her to Pasadena and show you to her. But she wasn't home. And when I got back you were here.”
She stood up slowly and her eyes came up and met mine, shy and empty eyes.
“I'm sorry about the clumsy pass,” I said. “But you were making me wonder about my theory. I was beginning to lose confidence in it and Keller was on his way. I had to find out—in a hurry. I'm sorry it had to be done that way.”
She rearranged the furs across her arm and managed a smile as warm and cheerful as a shot of carbon dioxide.
She said, “Have you talked about this fantastic notion to anyone else?”
“No. Too fantastic.”
Her hand seemed to caress the furs. It disappeared into a pocket and then came up and out, quickly. There was a little revolver with an ivory grip in her hand and it was pointed at my mouth.
“I killed a man with this revolver once, darling. In Acapulco. He was a Romanian. He tried to... to rape me.” She still smiled and she talked in a breezy voice like someone discussing an indoor sport.
“You just thought he was trying to rape you,” I said. “He was probably just taking a piece of lint off your bosom.” The revolver moved around a little but with a purposeful attitude as if it were looking for a likely spot to do business.
“I like being Mrs. John Vega Cabrillo,” she purred. “I wouldn't want anyone to spoil it.”
I lifted my arm slowly and looked at my watch but I didn't see it. “Keller is five minutes overdue right how. There's only one way out of here and he's probably just coming in the door.
He'll have at least three of his hoods posted outside....”
She laughed and walked over to the door. She put the gun in the coat pocket and left it there. She left her hand there too.
“Wipe off the sweat,” she sneered. “I didn't intend to shoot you. I didn't kill anyone in Acapulco either. I wanted to see what was under that Tough-Tommy exterior of yours...”
“Sweat glands,” I said.
She jerked the hand out of the pocket, empty, and turned and pulled open the door.
I said, “Hey.” She turned and stared back at me from the dim hallway. The smile was all gone. “Why don't you give the old man in Pasadena a break?” I said and leered at her.
She took a quick, almost stumbling, step into the room and her face swelled and darkened. There was a picture on the wall beside her, a picture of Abe Lincoln, a mantle over his tired shoulders and the infinite wisdom of the common man in his eyes. She tore the picture from the wall and lifted it. But it stayed there. And then, slowly, she lowered it and dropped it on the floor. The color ebbed and her eyes widened and became dark and shimmering.
“You're an inhuman thing, Bailey.” Her voice was small and tight, and it trembled as her lips were trembling. “No one... no one has ever known it... or even guessed it.” She raised her head and arched her neck. She wasn't posing; it was just a habit because it wasn't the same face. It was a little lost girl's face. “I... I lived with an uncle...” Her voice fell away and she seemed to have forgotten what it was she was going to say—or maybe she was remembering. “... then there was another, a teacher, an ugly, twisted man... on a dirty laboratory floor...” She wasn't trying to tell me anything. I wasn't even there any more.
I whispered, “Listen, angel. You can lick all that. I've got a friend. You'd like him a lot. He teaches psych at...” But I wasn't talking to anyone either. She had turned and gone and I could hear her, half-running down the dark corridor toward the stairs.