The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

by Otto Penzler

  Then he dropped the cigarette and stepped on it and a quick, light step made faint noise behind me. I was far too late turning.

  Something swished and I went out like a light.

  FOUR

  When I came to I was cold and wet and had a headache a yard wide. There was a soft bruise behind my right ear that wasn’t bleeding. I had been put down with a sap.

  I got up off my back and saw that I was a few yards from the driveway, between two trees that were wet with fog. There was some mud on the backs of my shoes. I had been dragged off the path, but not very far.

  I went through my pockets. My gun was gone, of course, but that was all—that and the idea that this excursion was all fun.

  I nosed around through the fog, didn’t find anything or see anyone, gave up bothering about that, and went along the blank side of the house to a curving line of palm trees and an old type arc light that hissed and flickered over the entrance to a sort of lane where I had stuck the 1925 Marmon touring car I still used for transportation. I got into it after wiping the seat off with a towel, teased the motor alive, and choked it along to a big empty street with disused car tracks in the middle.

  I went from there to De Cazens Boulevard, which was the main drag of Las Olindas and was called after the man who built Canales’ place long ago. After a while there was town, buildings, dead-looking stores, a service station with a night-bell, and at last a drugstore which was still open.

  A dolled-up sedan was parked in front of the drugstore and I parked behind that, got out, and saw that a hatless man was sitting at the counter, talking to a clerk in a blue smock. They seemed to have the world to themselves. I started to go in, then I stopped and took another look at the dolled-up sedan.

  It was a Buick and of a color that could have been Nile-green in daylight. It had two spotlights and two little egg-shaped amber lights stuck up on thin nickel rods clamped to the front fenders. The window by the driver’s seat was down. I went back to the Marmon and got a flash, reached in and twisted the license holder of the Buick around, put the light on it quickly, then off again.

  It was registered to Louis N. Harger.

  I got rid of the flash and went into the drugstore. There was a liquor display at one side, and the clerk in the blue smock sold me a pint of Canadian Club, which I took over to the counter and opened. There were ten seats at the counter, but I sat down on the one next to the hatless man. He began to look me over, in the mirror, very carefully.

  I got a cup of black coffee two-thirds full and added plenty of the rye. I drank it down and waited for a minute, to let it warm me up. Then I looked the hatless man over.

  He was about twenty-eight, a little thin on top, had a healthy red face, fairly honest eyes, dirty hands and looked as if he wasn’t making much money. He wore a gray whipcord jacket with metal buttons on it, pants that didn’t match.

  I said carelessly, in a low voice: “Your bus outside?”

  He sat very still. His mouth got small and tight and he had trouble pulling his eyes away from mine, in the mirror.

  “My brother’s,” he said, after a moment.

  I said: “Care for a drink? … Your brother is an old friend of mine.”

  He nodded slowly, gulped, moved his hand slowly, but finally got the bottle and curdled his coffee with it. He drank the whole thing down. Then I watched him dig up a crumpled pack of cigarettes, spear his mouth with one, strike a match on the counter, after missing twice on his thumbnail, and inhale with a lot of very poor nonchalance that he knew wasn’t going over.

  I leaned close to him and said evenly: “This doesn’t have to be trouble.”

  He said: “Yeah … Wh-what’s the beef?”

  The clerk sidled towards us. I asked for more coffee. When I got it I stared at the clerk until he went and stood in front of the display window with his back to me. I laced my second cup of coffee and drank some of it. I looked at the clerk’s back and said: “The guy the car belongs to doesn’t have a brother.”

  He held himself tightly, but turned towards me. “You think it’s a hot car?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think it’s a hot car?”

  I said: “No. I just want the story.”

  “You a dick?”

  “Uh-huh—but it isn’t a shakedown, if that’s what worries you.”

  He drew hard on his cigarette and moved his spoon around in his empty cup.

  “I can lose my job over this,” he said slowly. “But I needed a hundred bucks. I’m a hack driver.”

  “I guessed that,” I said.

  He looked surprised, turned his head and stared at me. “Have another drink and let’s get on with it,” I said. “Car thieves don’t park them on the main drag and then sit around in drugstores.”

  The clerk came back from the window and hovered near us, busying himself with rubbing a rag on the coffee urn. A heavy silence fell. The clerk put the rag down, went along to the back of the store, behind the partition, and began to whistle aggressively.

  The man beside me took some more of the whiskey and drank it, nodding his head wisely at me. “Listen—I brought a fare out and was supposed to wait for him. A guy and a jane come up alongside me in the Buick and the guy offers me a hundred bucks to let him wear my cap and drive my hack into town. I’m to hang around here an hour, then take his heap to the Hotel Carillon on Towne Boulevard. My cab will be there for me. He gives me the hundred bucks.”

  “What was his story?” I asked.

  “He said they’d been to a gambling joint and had some luck for a change. They’re afraid of holdups on the way in. They figure there’s always spotters watchin’ the play.”

  I took one of his cigarettes and straightened it out in my fingers. “It’s a story I can’t hurt much,” I said. “Could I see your cards?”

  He gave them to me. His name was Tom Sneyd and he was a driver for the Green Top Cab Company. I corked my pint, slipped it into my side pocket, and danced a half-dollar on the counter.

  The clerk came along and made change. He was almost shaking with curiosity.

  “Come on, Tom,” I said in front of him. “Let’s go get that cab. I don’t think you should wait around here any longer.”

  We went out, and I let the Buick lead me away from the straggling lights of Las Olindas, through a series of small beach towns with little houses built on sandlots close to the ocean, and bigger ones built on the slopes of the hills behind. A window was lit here and there. The tires sang on the moist concrete and the little amber lights on the Buick’s fenders peeped back at me from the curves.

  At West Cimarron we turned inland, chugged on through Canal City, and met the San Angelo Cut. It took us almost an hour to get to 5640 Towne Boulevard, which is the number of the Hotel Carillon. It is a big, rambling slate-roofed building with a basement garage and a forecourt fountain on which they play a pale green light in the evening.

  Green Top Cab No. 469 was parked across the street, on the dark side. I couldn’t see where anybody had been shooting into it. Tom Sneyd found his cap in the driver’s compartment, climbed eagerly under the wheel.

  “Does that fix me up? Can I go now?” His voice was strident with relief.

  I told him it was all right with me, and gave him my card. It was twelve minutes past one as he took the corner. I climbed into the Buick and tooled it down the ramp to the garage and left it with a colored boy who was dusting cars in slow motion. I went around to the lobby.

  The clerk was an ascetic-looking young man who was reading a volume of California Appellate Decisions under the switchboard light. He said Lou was not in and had not been in since eleven, when he came on duty. After a short argument about the lateness of the hour and the importance of my visit, he rang Lou’s apartment, but there wasn’t any answer.

  I went out and sat in my Marmon for a few minutes, smoked a cigarette, imbibed a little from my pint of Canadian Club. Then I went back into the Carillon and shut myself in a pay booth. I dialed the Telegram,
asked for the City Desk, got a man named Von Ballin.

  He yelped at me when I told him who I was. “You still walking around? That ought to be a story. I thought Manny Tinnen’s friends would have had you laid away in old lavender by this time.”

  I said: “Can that and listen to this. Do you know a man named Lou Harger? He’s a gambler. Had a place that was raided and closed up a month ago.”

  Von Ballin said he didn’t know Lou personally, but he knew who he was.

  “Who around your rag would know him real well?”

  He thought a moment. “There’s a lad named Jerry Cross here,” he said, “that’s supposed to be an expert on night life. What did you want to know?”

  “Where would he go to celebrate,” I said. Then I told him some of the story, not too much. I left out the part where I got sapped and the part about the taxi. “He hasn’t shown at his hotel,” I ended. “I ought to get a line on him.”

  “Well, if you’re a friend of his—”

  “Of his—not of his crowd,” I said sharply.

  Von Ballin stopped to yell at somebody to take a call, then said to me softly, close to the phone: “Come through, boy. Come through.”

  “All right. But I’m talking to you, not to your sheet. I got sapped and lost my gun outside Canales’ joint. Lou and his girl switched his car for a taxi they picked up. Then they dropped out of sight. I don’t like it too well. Lou wasn’t drunk enough to chase around town with that much dough in his pockets. And if he was, the girl wouldn’t let him. She had the practical eye.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Von Ballin said. “But it don’t sound promising. I’ll give you a buzz.”

  I told him I lived at the Merritt Plaza, in case he had forgotten, went out and got into the Mar-mon again. I drove home and put hot towels on my head for fifteen minutes, then sat around in my pajamas and drank hot whiskey and lemon and called the Carillon every once in a while. At two-thirty Von Ballin called me and said no luck. Lou hadn’t been pinched, he wasn’t in any of the Receiving Hospitals, and he hadn’t shown at any of the clubs Jerry Cross could think of.

  At three I called the Carillon for the last time. Then I put my light out and went to sleep.

  In the morning it was the same way. I tried to trace the red-haired girl a little. There were twenty-eight people named Glenn in the phone book, and three women among them. One didn’t answer, the other two assured me they didn’t have red hair. One offered to show me.

  I shaved, showered, had breakfast, walked three blocks down the hill to the Condor Building.

  Miss Glenn was sitting in my little reception room.

  FIVE

  I unlocked the other door and she went in and sat in the chair where Lou had sat the afternoon before. I opened some windows, locked the outer door of the reception room, and struck a match for the unlighted cigarette she held in her ungloved and ringless left hand.

  She was dressed in a blouse and plaid skirt with a loose coat over them, and a close-fitting hat that was far enough out of style to suggest a run of bad luck. But it hid almost all of her hair. Her skin was without make-up and she looked about thirty and had the set face of exhaustion.

  She held her cigarette with a hand that was almost too steady, a hand on guard. I sat down and waited for her to talk.

  She stared at the wall over my head and didn’t say anything. After a little while I packed my pipe and smoked for a minute. Then I got up and went across to the door that opened into the hallway and picked up a couple of letters that had been pushed through the slot.

  I sat down at the desk again, looked them over, read one of them twice, as if I had been alone. While I was doing this I didn’t look at her directly or speak to her, but I kept an eye on her all the same. She looked like a lady who was getting nerved for something.

  Finally she moved. She opened up a big black patent-leather bag and took out a fat manila envelope, pulled a rubber band off it and sat holding the envelope between the palms of her hands, with her head tilted way back and the cigarette dribbling gray smoke from the corners of her mouth.

  She said slowly: “Lou said if I ever got caught in the rain, you were the boy to see. It’s raining hard where I am.”

  I stared at the manila envelope. “Lou is a pretty good friend of mine,” I said. “I’d do anything in reason for him. Some things not in reason—like last night. That doesn’t mean Lou and I always play the same games.”

  She dropped her cigarette into the glass bowl of the ash tray and left it to smoke. A dark flame burned suddenly in her eyes, then went out.

  “Lou is dead.” Her voice was quite toneless.

  I reached over with a pencil and stabbed at the hot end of the cigarette until it stopped smoking.

  She went on: “A couple of Canales’ boys got him in my apartment—with one shot from a small gun that looked like my gun. Mine was gone when I looked for it afterwards. I spent the night there with him dead … I had to.”

  She broke quite suddenly. Her eyes turned up in her head and her head came down and hit the desk. She lay still, with the manila envelope in front of her lax hands.

  I jerked a drawer open and brought up a bottle and a glass, poured a stiff one and stepped around it, heaved her up in her chair. I pushed the edge of the glass hard against her mouth— hard enough to hurt. She struggled and swallowed. Some of it ran down her chin, but life came back into her eyes.

  I left the whiskey in front of her and sat down again. The flap of the envelope had come open enough for me to see currency inside, bales of currency.

  She began to talk to me in a dreamy sort of voice.

  “We got all big bills from the cashier, but makes quite a package at that. There’s twenty-two thousand even in the envelope. I kept out a few odd hundreds.

  “Lou was worried. He figured it would be pretty easy for Canales to catch up with us. You might be right behind and not be able to do very much about it.”

  I said: “Canales lost the money in full view of everybody there. It was good advertising—even if it hurt.”

  She went on exactly as though I had not spoken. “Going through the town we spotted a cab driver sitting in his parked cab and Lou had a brain wave. He offered the boy a C note to let him drive the cab into San Angelo and bring the Buick to the hotel after a while. The boy took us up and we went over on another street and made the switch. We were sorry about ditching you, but Lou said you wouldn’t mind. And we might get a chance to flag you.

  “Lou didn’t go into his hotel. We took another cab over to my place. I live at the Hobart Arms, eight hundred block on South Minter. It’s a place where you don’t have to answer questions at the desk. We went up to my apartment and put the lights on and two guys with masks came around the half-wall between the living room and the dinette. One was small and thin and the other one was a big slob with a chin that stuck out under his mask like a shelf. Lou made a wrong motion and the big one shot him just the once. The gun just made a flat crack, not very loud, and Lou fell down on the floor and never moved.”

  I said: “It might be the ones that made a sucker out of me. I haven’t told you about that yet.”

  She didn’t seem to hear that either. Her face was white and composed, but as expressionless as plaster. “Maybe I’d better have another finger of the hooch,” she said.

  I poured us a couple of drinks, and we drank them. She went on: “They went through us, but we didn’t have the money. We had stopped at an all-night drugstore and had it weighed and mailed it at a branch post office. They went through the apartment, but of course we had just come in and hadn’t had time to hide anything. The big one slammed me down with his fist, and when I woke up again they were gone and I was alone with Lou dead on the floor.”

  She pointed to a mark on the angle of her jaw. There was something there, but it didn’t show much. I moved around in my chair a little and said: “They passed you on the way in. Smart boys would have looked a taxi over on that road. How did they know where to go?”<
br />
  “I thought that out during the night,” Miss Glenn said. “Canales knows where I live. He followed me home once and tried to get me to ask him up.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but why did they go to your place and how did they get in?”

  “That’s not hard. There’s a ledge just below the windows and a man could edge along it to the fire escape. They probably had other boys covering Lou’s hotel. We thought of that chance but we didn’t think about my place being known to them.”

  “Tell me the rest of it,” I said.

  “The money was mailed to me,” Miss Glenn explained. “Lou was a swell boy, but a girl has to protect herself. That’s why I had to stay there last night with Lou dead on the floor. Until the mail came. Then I came over here.”

  I got up and looked out of the window. A fat girl was pounding a typewriter across the court. I could hear the clack of it. I sat down, stared at my thumb.

  “Did they plant the gun?” I asked.

  “Not unless it’s under him. I didn’t look there.”

  “They let you off too easy. Maybe it wasn’t Canales at all. Did Lou open his heart to you much?”

  She shook her head quietly. Her eyes were slate-blue now, and thoughtful, without the blank stare.

  “All right,” I said. “Just what did you think of having me do about it all?”

  She narrowed her eyes a little, then put a hand out and pushed the bulging envelope slowly across the desk.

  “I’m no baby and I’m in a jam. But I’m not going to the cleaners just the same. Half of this money is mine, and I want it with a clean getaway. One-half net. If I’d called the law last night, there’d have been a way to chisel me out of it … I think Lou would like you to have his half, if you want to play with me.”

  I said: “It’s big money to flash at a private dick, Miss Glenn,” and smiled wearily. “You’re a little worse off for not calling cops last night. But there’s an answer to anything they might say. I think I’d better go over there and see what’s broken, if anything.”