Sleep with Strangers

by Dolores Hitchens

  The brown eyes looked at him quickly from under thick dark lashes. “With nothing in it?”

  “That’s right.”

  She thought about it while Sader offered her a cigarette and lit it. “I’ll have a waterball,” she decided. The bartender came over and she told him what she wanted. He looked as if he’d heard it before. She turned to Sader. “Now. Down to business. What do you want to know?”

  “Do you have any idea where Mrs. Wanderley might be?”

  “Oh, quite a few.” She tapped the cigarette into a tray, loosened the throat of the red raincoat, pushed back a strand of hair. “But Kay knows all those places I’d think of. She must have checked them.”

  “Name one,” he invited.

  He thought he saw laughter in the depths of her eyes. “There’s the pig concession.” She expected him to ask her to repeat this insanity but he was stubborn.

  He nodded evenly. “Could we go there tonight?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AS THEY left the shelter of the Starshine’s entry, the rain swept down on them. It was changing now to a fine blowing mist. Mrs. Griffin looked at Sader with the sidewise glance. “You aren’t wearing any hat.”

  “Neither are you. On you, it’s becoming.” He touched her arm at the curb. “How did you know who I was when you came in?”

  “Oh, Charlie Ott described you to a T. And with venom, I might add. Of course he’s an awful old hen of a man.” Again she gave the impression of sly, silent laughter. “Aren’t you curious as to where we’re going?”

  “Just lead me there.”

  She took him to Pine Avenue, turned south toward the beach. This was the center of Long Beach’s downtown business district. The store windows were brilliantly lit, but nobody was looking in at them. For two blocks Sader walked with her; they crossed First Street and came to the intersection of Pine and Ocean. It was busy here, because of the concentration of theaters and restaurants along Ocean Avenue. Pedestrians hurried past under umbrellas. Wet tires sang in the street. From a corner drugstore floated the smell of fresh coffee. Mrs. Griffin paused at the light. “Can’t you guess, now?”

  Ahead of them, Pine Avenue ended in a short block that slanted steeply down to the beach. He saw through the rain the curve of lights on the circling pier, the indistinct glow which was the amusement zone. “The Pike?” She had said the pig concession, and he tried to imagine an amusement in which one participated with—or for—pigs. Perhaps the price of pork had changed the nature of the prizes offered in the games of darts and bingo. She hadn’t said ham or bacon, though. The word most distinctly had been pig.

  He met Mrs. Griffin’s exotically slanted eyes and pleased her by showing his helpless mystification. At the same time, he was sizing up the woman. She was younger than Mrs. Wanderley. He would not have placed her age above thirty-five. Of course, Kay had said that her mother didn’t look her age, so the two may not have been an ill-assorted pair, one black-haired and slightly oriental in appearance, the other fluffy, blonde, and pouting.

  She was quick to see his study of her. “Is my lipstick on crooked, or something?”

  “No. I was wondering about that Chinese father of yours.”

  She laughed aloud now in genuine pleasure. He saw that she loved puzzling people, that she possessed a sly sense of mischief. “That’s my deep, dark secret,” she told him. “Come along now.”

  They went down the sloping sidewalk to the level of the beach, turned right through a short arcade into the garish lights of the amusement zone. The noise was muted tonight, there was a pall of quiet, and the smells from the open-fronted cafés hadn’t their usual fierce burnt-onion tang. The customers were mostly rather lost-looking sailors, obviously killing time. Sader looked in at the penny arcade in passing; there was a great jangle of music, but the idle cashier in her cage met his gaze stonily.

  “The rain has kept everyone away,” Mrs. Griffin said. She hesitated for a moment. “He won’t be down here.”

  “Let’s see this pig place, anyway,” Sader said. “I’m curious.”

  At the end of the block they turned left. Ahead was the spindling framework of the roller coaster, its high lights lost up in the blowing rain. Mrs. Griffin stopped before a small booth in a row of concessions. A single light bulb burned in the wall; but as she had speculated, the owner and his array of goods to be won were missing.

  Sader examined the set-up inside the concession with interest. He recalled something much like it down here when he had come as a kid. The booth was perhaps thirty feet in depth. At its rear, at about eye level, were five little barred pens, supported on some sort of framework that was covered in bright red bunting. Above each little pen was a mounted target, red and white circles surrounding a bull’s-eye painted gilt. In front of the pens was a narrow ramp, leading from left and right at a slight angle to end at the middle at the top of a child’s slide.

  A sign painted on white oilcloth, hung from the ceiling across the room, said:

  ! ! GIVE THE PIGS A SLIDE ! !

  3 BALLS 25¢

  “I get it,” said Sader. “You hit the center of the target with a baseball and a pig comes out and runs to the slide and slides down it. The owner gives the pig a bite to eat, so he won’t mind coming down again next time. The sucker wins a plaster ash tray worth one tenth of a cent, plus a feeling of happiness over having given the pig a thrill. They’ve had something like this, off and on, down here for years. What puzzles me is that the suckers still go for it.” He took a long look at Mrs. Griffin. “This is a place Mrs. Wanderley might be?”

  Her eyes hardened, meeting his. “I thought you ought to talk to the man, that’s all.”

  “Who is he?”

  She turned her head slightly. “You ought to meet him,” she evaded.

  “Look, this business of your friend being missing is a pretty serious affair.”

  “I’m taking it seriously,” she insisted.

  “You’re playing games.”

  A lash of color showed in her cheeks, as if he’d struck her. “I thought a detective would want to draw his own conclusions. I can take you to this man. I’d be a fool to tell you how to size him up.”

  “All right.” Sader controlled his anger. “I’ll meet him. Where is he when he isn’t selling baseballs at three for a quarter?”

  “He lives on Signal Hill.”

  Sader felt his face twitch. Mrs. Griffin did not seem to notice. They turned their backs on the empty booth, the lonely little cages, and walked up the broad cement stairs at Pacific Avenue, and so back to Ocean. Inside ten minutes, Sader and Mrs. Griffin were at his car.

  She held back a little. “I could drive my own, follow you.”

  “This will be quicker.” He held the door for her; she entered quickly. When he got in behind the wheel, he saw that she was rubbing her wet hair with a handkerchief. Her face looked set, disappointed, as if Sader hadn’t come up to her expectations. It occurred to Sader that she might be a little drunk, just enough to put an unreasonable edge to her temper.

  He drove over to Cherry Avenue. The town was quieting under the rainy night; traffic was sparse. He took the Cherry Avenue grade to the top of the Hill, and when they were almost at the summit, he said, “You’ll have to tell me where to go.”

  “Turn right at the next corner.”

  After some blocks on the paved street, which led to the very crest, she had him turn off into a dirt track. Sader looked about, trying to fix the route in his memory. He could make out the black skeletons of oil rigs in the mist, and here and there a tank shone out with a silvery bulk against the dark. Below and to the right, the carpet of lights that was Long Beach made a fuzzy glow all the way to the edge of the Pacific.

  “Park here,” she said suddenly.

  Sader had just caught sight of the house in the glow of his headlights. In the glimpse he got before she had him draw off the street to park, he thought the place looked old-fashioned, small, and shabby. It would be, he thought, up here. Nobody had
built on Signal Hill, the part where the rigs were, since oil was found here back in the early twenties.

  Mrs. Griffin touched his hand on the wheel. Her fingers were unexpectedly soft, warm, clinging. Mrs. Griffin had not done any hard work for a long time, if ever, Sader thought in that instant. The next moment, in the dash light, he saw that she was leaning forward and that the sly amusement dwelt again in her eyes. “You don’t like people to keep you in suspense,” she said. “I should have just told you flatly what I knew and let you come up here alone. Only, you see, I’ve never met a real detective before. And I am worried about Felicia.”

  Perhaps she was, in her own way, trying to make amends, to get them back again on the first friendly basis. He said, “Detectives aren’t half as glamorous in real life as they are on TV, or in the movies.”

  “I think you’re very nice.”

  “Thanks.” He felt suddenly awkward and disliked her for somehow making him feel a fool. He got out of the car, shut the door, went around and opened her side, and helped her out. The footing was muddy. All around in the dark was the soft chuckle of pumping engines. Water was running into a tank somewhere with a muted splash, and there was a strong smell of oil. Sader thought, here we are, right in the very middle of Long Beach, and as far as the surroundings go we might as well be on the other side of the world. An oil field is a place like no other place.

  She had turned toward the panorama of lights, far below, a misty glow softened by the veil of the rain. “It’s quite a town, isn’t it?”

  “I guess it is. I think sometimes I’ve been in it too long.”

  He sensed that her eyes slid around at him. “How long have you had an agency here?”

  “Since the war. A little less than ten years.” He took out cigarettes, offered her one, lit both with a match. “Before the war I had a wholesale magazine agency. Somehow I got the idea that being a private detective would be more exciting, and less work.” He laughed without humor. “I was in Intelligence, in the Army. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. It gave me a totally distorted notion of what a detective’s work was like.”

  “What is it like?” she asked.

  “Mostly it’s little frightened men who can’t pay their bills, or big defiant men who won’t support their families,” Sader told her. “Once in a while it will be a blonde, and blackmail. Rarely it’s something very dirty like pictures taken through a peephole.”

  “You can’t meet many nice people,” she commiserated.

  He smiled at her in the dim, rainy light. “I find them now and then. Shall we see if your pig-owning friend is home?”

  “All right. Maybe you’d better take my arm. I’m afraid I’ll slip.”

  There was a sudden sense of companionship between them, Sader felt. He wondered if she felt as he did, shut in by the rain, the memories of a lifetime spread out there in the glow from the town. He held her arm, and they walked down the slight muddy slope to the front porch of the house. He smelled wet shrubbery, geraniums, he thought, amid the over-all stench of oil. Mrs. Griffin stepped ahead, to rap at the door, whose pane showed a light.

  A shadow drifted into place on the pane, a curtain was pulled back, a man looked out at them. He had a heavy face on which the flesh was sagging. Sparse blond hair. Big ears that caught the light behind him. He peered through the pane at Mrs. Griffin and then pulled the door open. “Hello, Tina.”

  “I’ve brought someone to see you.” She stepped in, and he peered in turn at Sader in the doorway.

  Sader offered his hand. “I’m a private detective, looking for Mrs. Wanderley. Sader’s the name.” The man took his hand uncertainly, let it go quickly. “Mrs. Griffin thought you might know something that would explain her disappearance.”

  He was heavily built, and he sagged all over as his face sagged. He looked as if he’d gotten fat, up to a point, and then started to melt. He wore blue slacks; they needed cleaning. His shirt was white cotton. It had been washed, put on without ironing. His bare feet were stuck into straw house slippers. He rubbed a hand over the thin yellow hair on his head and looked bewilderedly from Sader to Mrs. Griffin.

  She said, “Mr. Sader, this is Milton Wanderley. He is Felicia’s cousin.”

  Sader was jolted by surprise, and then he knew that this was the secret Mrs. Griffin had kept carefully because she loved not only to mystify but to end the mystery with a clash of cymbals. To find here the cousin of the woman who lived in that great house on Scotland Place——He was taking in the small shabby room, and something more, an incredible noise. Inside this house were pigs squealing.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Sader,” said Milton Wanderley. “I guess I got confused for a minute. I hadn’t heard that my cousin was gone.”

  “She disappeared Tuesday night,” Sader said.

  “Well. . . . Sit down, both of you.” Milton hurried to arrange chairs. They were very old, mismatched, had once been bouncy with good springs and covered with mohair. Now they were slick with soil, and lumpy. The three of them sat down. Sader offered Milton Wanderley a cigarette.

  “I don’t smoke. I’ll have a stick of gum, though.” He took gum from his slacks pocket, unwrapped it slowly, folded it, and put it in his mouth. “Gee, I wish I could help you.”

  “Did you see your cousin Tuesday?”

  The pale blue eyes flickered with the effort to think. “Let’s see, on Mondays I don’t open at all. There’s never anything doing down there, you know, so soon after the week end. Even Tuesdays . . .” He frowned, wrinkling brows so colorless that the hair seemed to be worn away. “Last Tuesday, I recall now, I didn’t feel too good. I was wondering if I might open up, or not. I know that’s the day, because it would of meant two days off in a row. Felicia came here just as I decided to get ready. I was putting the pigs in their box. It was close to seven o’clock.”

  Above Milton’s voice, Sader caught other sounds. A lot of little feet running in a muffled trot. Grunts. Squeals. There was an odor, too, but it was faint. He noticed then that Milton had a deodorant candle burning on the round table in the middle of the room. A sign on the tin candleholder said Smelz-off. It must work pretty well, Sader thought. He said, “How was Mrs. Wanderley?”

  “She was pretty drunk,” said Milton, with a touch of embarrassment.

  “How long did she stay?”

  “Not very long. It was like a lot of other times—she gets liquored up and comes up here to cuss me out for being a disgrace to the family.”

  “Did she mention any other appointments?”

  The pale eyes clouded again with the effort to remember. “I’m afraid not.”

  There was a sudden burst of trotting, a chorus of squeals. Sader couldn’t hold the question back any longer. “Where do you keep them?”

  “The pigs? Back there.” Milton seemed surprised that Sader had guessed. “Would you like to take a look at them? They’re cute little devils.”

  Sader expressed his interest, and Milton rose proudly. He led the way through a hall, past the open door of the room in which he must sleep. There was a narrow bed made up with a patchwork quilt, a lighted bridge lamp, and, on the floor, a great bright fan of comic books. Next was the bath; it was dark, but Sader glimpsed the claw-footed white tub in the gloom. Milton stopped before a shut door which should, according to the usual plan of places like this, lead to the rear bedroom. He said, “Keep an eye out. They’ll run through, trip you up, if they get away.” He opened the door and clicked a light switch on the wall.

  On the sawdust-covered floor, five little black-and-white pigs stood blinking at them.

  Sader wanted to laugh. Behind him, he heard Tina Griffin suppress a giggle. There was something so cockeyed, he thought, in the sight of those pigs shut in by rose-patterned wallpaper. Where the sawdust had thinned in spots, he saw battleship linoleum. It all looked very clean, as clean as it could with five little pigs living here. There was a white-painted trough, a regular pig trough, and a pan of clean water in one corner.

  “Why
do you keep them inside?” Sader wondered.

  “Got to,” Milton explained. “Two reasons. One, nobody’s supposed to keep pigs inside the city limits. Of course this isn’t Long Beach, it’s Signal Hill—separate, you know. But the health officer’s just as stuffy. So I have to hide them. That isn’t all. I lost several pigs in the oil sumps around here. It’s awful hard to keep a little pig from going under a fence.”

  The pigs made a sudden concerted dash for the door. Milton slammed it shut. “They’re quicker’n lightning,” he complained. “But they are cute, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, they are.” Sader meant it. There was something impish and appealing about the little animals. “Don’t they get too big for your concession in time, though?”

  “Right along.” Milton led the way back to the front room. “I have to keep selling, and buying new ones, littler ones. I hate it, too. I get fond of them. Some of them have a lot of personality. They get tame.” He looked depressed all at once. He sat down with a sigh.

  Sader sat down opposite. Tina Griffin wandered to the center table and leafed through a comic book idly, though Sader sensed that her attention was fixed on Milton and himself. Milton stared at Sader as if wondering what more Sader wanted of him. Sader began, “Mr. Wanderley, I hope I don’t try your patience too much when I ask you to go back over your cousin’s last visit here and try to remember every detail of it.”

  “That’s okay. I just wish there was something unusual to remember.”

  “Why should she walk out, leave her home and her daughter like that?”

  “You mean, just drop from sight?” Milton shook his head. “No, she sure didn’t do that, Mr. Sader. She’s too proud of the big house, of living there with the rich people. And she’s fond of Kay, in spite of the way she jumps all over her when she gets mad. Felicia’s a determined woman. Not as determined as that Annie, but plenty. If she’s been gone since Tuesday, something’s happened to her.” He snapped his fingers suddenly. “I just got it, the thing that’s been teasing me, a thing she said.”