“Because she feeds on people, more talented people, more truly important people. Her money attracts them and her parasitic ego finally kills them.”
“You think Roger Scott was talented and important?”
“I certainly do.”
“And handsome, too, wasn’t he? A real lady-killer.”
The brown eyes were neither soft nor warm. “That was cheap.”
“I try to deal in the realities,” I said. “He was a reading fee agent and a vanity press author. He was apparently shacked up with a honky-tonk stripper when he died. For a woman in business, you certainly have a strange soap-opera outlook, Jan Bonnet.”
Her voice was low. “You didn’t even know him, did you?”
“Not when he was alive. How well did you know him?”
“I knew him very well.’.’
“All right,” I said. “I could be wrong. Is Glenys stifling your talent, too?”
Her voice was a monotone. “I don’t think, Mr. Callahan, that you and I have anything to say to each other. Couldn’t you find some other guest to annoy?”
“I’ll try.” I stood up. “If I’ve been rude, I’m sorry.”
For a moment, I thought I saw a flicker of apology in the brown eyes. But she said nothing, and I went away from there.
I talked with the gag man, but he was out of gags. I talked with the sculptor, but it didn’t take him long to realize my interest was more polite than informed. I talked with the sports announcer, but he was a Forty-niner partisan. The folk singer had big hips and no bust and a heavy mustache and very little party dialogue.
I got another bottle of Einlicher and was heading for a corner to sulk in, when Bobby came back with his date. She was only about eighteen, but she would never need any more than she had right now.
Bobby said, “C’mon, Brock, these people will bore you silly. We’re getting up two teams for water polo.”
In the men’s dressing room, the freshly laundered trunks were stacked according to size, each in its own pliofilm wrapping. There were lockers along the wall with built-in coat hangers, and there were sun lamps set into the tile walls. The muscle-building equipment was in here, too, a rowing machine, bar bells, forearm developer.
Bobby’s smile was wry. “From my Muscle Beach days. What a freak I was turning into until I got smart.”
“Muscle-bound?” I asked.
He nodded. “I looked like Mr. America. I couldn’t catch a baseball or throw one. I couldn’t run to the corner without falling over my own feet. It took a lot of tennis and swimming to make me look like a human being again.”
“I never went down to Muscle Beach,” I said, “but I’ve seen the boys in the newsreels.”
Bobby inclined his head toward the living room. “That would-be wrestler in there is one of them. Maybe he’ll get into trunks later and you can see what I almost became.”
I captained one team, and Bobby the other. We started with two people on a side and wound up with five. The wrestler joined my team about halfway through the game, and I saw what Bobby meant.
He was all bunched muscle and barrel-chest. His thighs were outsized hams and his stomach was a washboard. He was as agile as an elephant on stilts.
Half the players were feminine and he concentrated his contact work on them. He was a great man for the underwater caress.
A few of the girls withdrew from the game and a few of the husbands and boy friends began to mutter.
I said to Bobby, “We’d better break this up before there’s a riot. Or one of us could drown the bum?”
“We’ll break it up,” Bobby said. “I’ll concede the game, and Muscles won’t have any beef.”
Which he did.
I put on a terry cloth robe supplied by the management and retired to the pool’s edge with a bottle of beer. The divers took over, the exhibitionists.
There was a full moon, and it was a warm night. This should have been fun, but I got to thinking of Roger Scott and Rosa Carmona.
On the high board, Glenys Christopher was poised. She had the most beautiful long legs I’d ever seen on a woman and unless her suit had built-in cheaters, she was properly endowed above the waist.
Her slim body arched in a full gainer and straightened in time for perfect, splashless symmetry.
Jan Bonnet came along the pool-side marble in a Bikini suit, and the image of Glenys dimmed. Jan had one of those perfect, small figures. She was carrying another Bloody Mary.
She sat down next to me. “I want to apologize.”
“Accepted. Have you a crooked eyetooth?”
“Uh-huh?” Her lips parted. “See?”
“Cute,” I said. “It saves you from being perfect. Are we friends?”
“We’re not enemies, I guess. Why?”
“I want to be friends with you. There aren’t many interior decorators who can decorate the interior of a swimming suit like you can.”
“Thank you. Who told you about the eyetooth, or did you notice it before?”
“Glenys Christopher told me about it. And she told me you were an incurable sentimentalist.”
“That’s not true. I’m in business. There are no sentimentalists in business in this town.”
“Shall we go back to Roger Scott?”
She looked at me frankly. “Why? What’s there to be said about him now? What’s there to be gained by talking about him?”
“I’ve been hired to find his killer. You might know something that would help me do that.”
She shook her head slowly. “I can’t think of anything that would help. He gambled, some, I know. Do you think that perhaps some gambler might — ?” She looked at me quizzically.
“Not fourteen times with a knife,” I said. “Most gamblers I’ve met would play it cooler than that.”
She looked down at her drink. “I suppose. Who is this — this Rosa person the police are looking for?”
“She’s a singer. She’s how I got into the case. Her fiancé hired me to find her.”
“A — singer? Is she the — stripper you mentioned before?”
“That’s right.”
A pair of slim, tanned, wet legs came into my line of vision and I looked up to see Glenys smiling at me. “You two are being very exclusive, aren’t you? I don’t think Brock could afford a really expensive decorator, Jan.”
“She wasn’t selling me,” I said. “I was trying to sell her.”
“Oh?” Glenys didn’t smile. “Yourself or your services?”
Jan got to her feet. “I’ll mix. I can use the business.” She went over to put her drink on a table. She took two quick steps and her fine body slanted down into a shallow, racing dive. She went the length of the pool in a lazy crawl.
Glenys dropped down beside me. “She has a fine figure for a small woman, hasn’t she?”
I nodded, and swigged at my beer.
“I suppose she’s been filling you up with a lot of misinformation about Roger.”
I shook my head. “I tried to get her to talk about him, but she didn’t want to.”
At the other end of the pool, the wrestler had plopped into the water next to Jan.
“She adored him,” Glenys said quietly. “She hated me when I was going with Roger. She’s man-crazy.”
“Not completely, the way it looks,” I said.
Jan had just brought a right hand from right field and the wrestler had been on the receiving end. He reached for her as I stood up.
I said, “We don’t want any unpleasantness at your party, do we?” I trotted down the near side of the pool.
Jan had gone under water, and the wrestler was still on top, about to dive under after her.
“Look out below,” I shouted in my jovial voice. And threw my scant two hundred and seven pounds onto his broad back.
He went down like a rock and came up gasping. Water was mixed with his curses and then he got one of those set, theatrical grins and he reached out for my arm.
I saw Jan climbing out of the pool, an
d I swam away from Muscles. He came churning after but I had twenty feet on him when I climbed out again at the end where Glenys still sat.
The water was only hip-high, here. Muscles stood in it, looking up at us. “That wasn’t very funny, big boy. You could have broke my back.”
I nodded. “I know. I considered that.”
“Maybe you wanna fight, huh?”
“Without a rehearsal? Don’t be silly, Muscles; Equity would take away your card.”
Glenys said soothingly, “Let’s not get riled, Duke. Brock didn’t mean any harm, I’m sure. That girl is a particular friend of his.”
“Okay,” Duke said. “So that’s different. Whyn’t he just tell me, lay off? So, okay.”
He went churning off toward the deep end again, agile as a pig with a broken back.
Glenys smiled. “You’re big, but not big enough to fight professionals, are you?”
“Wrestlers are not professionals,” I said. “Unless you mean professional actors, and they wouldn’t qualify as that by theatrical standards.”
“My, we’re angry.”
“Yes. I love all kinds of sports and in sports, professional means the top. I hate people who debase any sport, and that’s what wrestlers have done.”
“And made millions doing it.”
I looked at her. “Does that make it all right?”
A voice from my other side said, “I guess it does, today.”
I turned to see that Jan had sat down next to me. She was holding a big hamburger sandwich. She said, “Thank you for the rescue, Sir Launcelot. You do improve with knowing, don’t you?”
Glenys said, “Well, I must circulate.” She stood up and moved toward the living room.
Bobby’s girl friend was on the high board and a lot of eyes were turned her way.
Jan asked, “Why do young and shapely girls attract more attention than older shapely girls?”
“From men?”
“Well — yes, from men.”
“If used cars and new cars were the same price,” I asked, “who’d buy a used car?”
The young body came hurtling down, the arms wide in a swan dive. At the deep end, Duke swam over toward where the girl had gone in.
“I think I’ll get one of those hamburgers,” I said. “Where are they handing them out?”
“Next to the bar. Hurry back, won’t you?”
Too many Bloody Marys? The door-like contours of my big body? My witty conversation? There had been a change in the attitude of Jan Bonnet.
I came back. And later, after we’d dressed again, I danced with her to the music of the big record player in the play room. I danced with Glenys, too, and Bobby’s girl, who was named Dianne. I even danced with the folk singer, though she was harder to move than the Bear line. I’d had enough Einlicher by then; I would have danced with Duke if he could follow.
I kept coming back to Jan and she didn’t seem to mind. And then people began to leave, and Jan said, “Well, tomorrow is a working day. It’s been fun, Brock Callahan.”
I nodded. “I hope I’ll see you again.”
“Professionally?”
I shook my head.
She smiled. “You probably will.”
It was a remark I was to wonder about later, and not much later. Because she came back in a few minutes, and said her car wouldn’t start, and did I know anything about cars?
“Not Chevs,” I told her, “but I can take a look at it.”
So I looked under the hood and saw nothing wrong and tried to start it with no success. So I suggested she leave it here, and I would take her home.
And I went in to pay my respects to my hostess and I told her about Jan’s car.
Glenys’ smile looked a little frigid to me. She made no comment, however.
In the parking area, the interior lights went on as I opened the door of my flivver.
Jan saw the slashed upholstery and said, “Migawd, what happened?”
I told her what had happened as we drove down to Sunset. Here, I turned right automatically.
“Hoodlums,” she said. “The papers are full of them. Doesn’t it frighten you?”
“A little.”
“How did you know I lived this way?”
“I was going home, today, from the office and I saw you turn into Beverly Glen. Is that where you live, or were you taking it to the Valley?”
“No, I live in the Canyon. It was just chance that you saw me, Brock?”
“Of course. What else?”
“Nothing else. I’m sorry. I’m a — a — an old maid in a lot of ways, I guess.”
I turned on the radio and got a platter program. The moonlight bright bends of Sunset unwound under the flivver’s humming tires. Soft and sentimental music came from the speaker.
Jan asked softly, “What did Glenys say when you told her you were taking me home?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“Mmmm-hmmm. This is a ridiculous town, isn’t it?”
“How?”
“She hates me and I hate her. And she has a party and I come running. How phony can people get?”
Nothing from me. The radio came through with a commercial, and I swung the flivver up Beverly Glen. There shouldn’t be any reason for me to be a little short of breath; the Chev wouldn’t start, and I was simply a means of transportation to the girl. I was wrong, I told myself, in putting a Duke connotation on it.
Jan said, “Turn left at the next side road.”
I turned left and followed a narrower road up an incline to a small house on the right.
Jan said, “This is home. Could I interest you in one more bottle of beer?”
7
IN THE MORNING, I wakened to the sound of a dog barking and the smell of coffee. From the big bed, I could see the living room but not the kitchen. The coffee smell must come from the kitchen; I didn’t know where the dog’s bark was coming from.
We’d talked a little, last night, and she’d told me this was too small a house to do anything spectacular with. So she’d torn out a lot of walls, giving some impression of spaciousness and tried to make the place comfortable, if not impressive. It had an open feeling, each specialized area melted into the other without an effect of rooms, but also without an air of the one-room, utility cabin effect.
The dog continued to bark and the coffee smell grew richer. I climbed out of bed and found a razor in the bathroom. The bathroom must be new; there was a really deluxe stall shower, tiled to the ceiling, and with a ribbed floor.
I shaved before my shower and saw the bruised cut on my lower lip. Her eyetooth must have been sharp as well as crooked.
When I came into the kitchen, she smiled. Then she saw the cut lip and looked away. I thought she blushed a little.
“Peaceful up here, isn’t it?” I asked. “Except for that damned dog. Is it yours?”
“No. A neighbor’s. I — Do — I — What the hell does one say in the morning?”
“Good morning. Are we having eggs?”
“If you want. Don’t get any ideas, Brock Callahan. There are times when I simply — I mean, there’s a definite therapeutical need for some form of release in a society as hectic as — ”
“Relax, Jan,” I said. “Don’t beat it to death, honey.”
She smiled. “I told you I was an old maid.”
“You lied,” I said. “Should I fix the eggs? I’m pretty good at it.”
“All right. Sunnyside up for me.”
The kitchen was a farm kitchen, beamed, and with one old brick wall into which the range was built. We ate in a windowed corner, and the Times was on the table.
The police, I saw at a glance, were still seeking Rosa Carmona and she was now identified as the fiancée of Juan Mira. There wasn’t too much space given to the story.
Jan said, “You’d better not drive me back for my car. Glenys will see us and add two and two.”
“Why don’t you have a garage man pick it up, fix it, and deliver it here?” I sugg
ested.
“That’s an idea,” she said.
I smiled. “Did you try to fix it, last night?”
She frowned, and shook her head.
I said, “I noticed some grease on your fingers, and I thought that maybe you — ”
She was blushing fully now, and looking intently at the window to her left.
I said softly, “I am a beast. And there is a definite therapeutical need for some sort — ”
“Shut up!” she said. Her brown eyes blazed at me.
“I should have checked the distributor rotor,” I ploughed on. “Do you have it in your purse?”
“Please,” she said hoarsely. “Would you leave?”
“No. Jan, honey, you’re a sweet and honest girl and that’s wonderful. You and I don’t need to be phony with each other. We’re friends, remember?”
She was still blushing, but the eyes no longer blazed. “All right, guilty. Couldn’t we talk about something else?”
“I’d like to talk about Roger Scott,” I told her, “but I’ve a feeling you don’t. At any rate, you don’t want to tell me much about him.”
“I don’t know much about him.”
“But you do know some things you haven’t told me, don’t you?”
“No. And why should you think I do?”
“Because you had a reason for going to Glenys’ party; you need those upper class contacts. But what reason could she have for inviting you? Why does she need you?”
Jan stared at me silently.
“You admit you both hate each other,” I pointed out.
She took a deep breath. “Maybe I add something. Maybe I’m the kind of person she likes to collect.”
“Maybe. And you still cherish this great admiration for Roger Scott. Aren’t you interested in knowing who killed him?”
She looked at me quietly and shook her head.
I ate some egg and toast.
“You don’t trust anybody, do you?” she asked, after a few moments.
“I’ve never been suspicious of people until I opened the office. I’ve never had reason to be.”
“But you’re suspicious of me, now.”
I said nothing. I didn’t look at her.
“What was last night to you, just a frolic in the hay?”
I looked at her. “You tell me. And get that wronged woman look off your lovely face.”
Murder in the Raw Page 7