It was a big old-fashioned restaurant with a crowded bar along one side and wooden booths on the other, painted black and orange. Unlit paper lanterns hung dismally from the smoky pressed-iron ceiling. A languid ceiling fan stirred an atmosphere compounded of rancid grease and soy sauce, whisky-laden breath and human sweat. The people were from the lower echelons of valley life: oilfield roughnecks and their women, cowpokes in high-heeled riding boots, an old rumdum sitting in a booth in alcoholic isolation, waiting for dreams to begin.
The Chinese waiter came forward from the rear and showed me his teeth and gums.
“You wish a booth, sir?” he said precisely.
“I’d prefer a private room.”
“Sorry, sir, it’s been taken. If you had come one minute earlier.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I sat down in one of the front booths so that I could watch the archway in the mirror behind the bar. The waiter called for a double rye on the rocks and carried it out through the archway. When he brought me my menu I said:
“Those paper lanterns are a fire hazard, aren’t they? I’m a little nervous about fires. Does this building have a rear exit?”
“No, sir, but it’s perfectly safe. We’ve never had a fire. Do you wish to order now, sir?”
I remembered that I hadn’t eaten since noon, and ordered a bottle of beer and a New York cut. Fit for a King, the menu said, So Bring Your Queen. It lied.
I was washing down the last leathery shreds of the steak with beer when a girl sauntered in from the street. Her head was small and beautifully molded, capped with short black hair like glistening satin. She had flat black eyes, a mouth as sullen as sin. Her mink-dyed rabbit coat hung open, and her hips swayed as she walked to an obvious rhythm.
Every man at the bar, including the Filipino bartender, was simultaneously aware of her. She loitered near the entrance, soaking up their awareness as if it was a fuel or a food. Her soft tiny-waisted body seemed to swell and luxuriate, and her breasts rose against the pressure of eyes.
My eyes met hers. I couldn’t help smiling at her. She gave me a scornful look, and turned to the waiter:
“Is he here?”
“He just came in, miss. He’s waiting for you in the back room.”
I watched her sway out after him, wondering if she could be Anne Meyer. She didn’t look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn’t quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn’t begun to sour.
I waited until the waiter had disappeared through the swinging door to the kitchen. Then I got up and moved to the curtained archway. The corridor beyond it was narrow and ill-lit, with doors marked MEN and LADIES at the far end. A nearer doorway was hung with a thick green curtain, through which I could hear a muffled conversation. I leaned on the wall beside it.
The girl’s voice said: “Was that your wife on the phone? I never talked to her before. She’s got a very educated diction.”
“She’s educated, all right. Too damn educated.” Kerrigan let out a mirthless snort. “You shouldn’t have telephoned me at the court. She caught me packing my bags last night, I’m afraid she’s catching on.”
“To us, you mean?”
“To everything.”
“Does it matter? There’s nothing she can do to stop us.”
“You don’t know her,” he said. “She’s still stuck on me, in a way. And every little thing matters right now. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Of course I’m glad to see you. I just think we should have waited.”
“I waited all day, Donny. I didn’t hear from you, I didn’t have any weed, and my nerves were screaming. I had to see you. I had to know what happened.”
“Nothing happened. It worked. It’s all over.”
“Then we can go? Now?” She sounded young and eager.
“Not yet. I have things to do. I have to contact Bozey—”
“Isn’t he gone?”
“He better not be. He still owes me money.”
“He’ll pay you. You can trust him, Bozey’s no con man. When do you see him?”
“Later. He isn’t the only one I’ve got to see.”
“When you see him, will you do something for me, Donny?” Her voice was a kittenish mew. “Ask him for a couple of reefers for me? I can get plenty in Mexico, only I need them now, tonight. I can’t stand this waiting.”
“You think I’m enjoying the strain?” Self-pity whined in his tone. “It’s tearing me apart. I can hardly sit still. If I wasn’t crazy I wouldn’t be here at all.”
“Don’t worry, honey. Nothing can happen here. Sammy knows about us.”
“Yeah. How many other people know about us? And how much do they know? There was a private detective snooping around the motor court—”
“Forget about it, Donny.” The kitten in her throat was purring now. “Come over here and tell me about the place. You know? How we’ll lie in the sun all day without any clothes and have fun and watch the birds and the clouds and have servants to wait on us. Tell me about that.”
I heard his feet on the floor and looked in through the narrow crack between the doorframe and the edge of the curtain. He was standing behind her chair with a doped expression on his face, a Band-aid cross on his chin. His hands moved downward from her neck.
She put her hands over his and lifted one of them to her mouth. It came away red-smeared. Kerrigan bent over her face, his fingers plucking at her clothes like a dying man at his sheets.
A sibilant voice said behind me: “Looking for something, sir?”
The Chinese waiter was in the archway, balancing a tray on which a pair of steaks sizzled.
“The men’s room?”
“At the end of the hall, sir.” His smile looked ready to bite me. “It’s plainly marked.”
“Thank you. I’m very shortsighted.”
“Don’t mention it, sir.”
I went to the men’s room and used it. When I came out, the private room was empty. The steaks sat untouched on the table with Kerrigan’s empty glass. I went out through the restaurant. The Chinese waiter was behind the bar.
“Where did they go?” I said.
He looked at me as if he had never seen me before, and answered in singsong Chinese.
Outside, the street was deserted. Kerrigan’s red convertible had left its parking place. I circled the block in my car, fruitlessly, and widened the circle to take in several blocks. Near the corner of Main and a street called Yanonali, I saw the girl walking in a westerly direction on Yanonali.
She was by herself, but her body swayed and swung as if she had an audience. I double-parked to let her get well ahead, then crawled along in second half a block behind her. The pavement and the buildings deteriorated as we left the downtown section. Dilapidated flats and boarding-houses whose windows gave fleeting glimpses of permanent depression were interspersed with dim little bars and sandwich counters. The people in the bars and on the streets, brown and black and dirty gray, had dim and dilapidated personalities to match the buildings. All but the girl I was following. She swaggered along through the lower depths of the city as if she was drunk with her own desirability.
Street lights were few and far between. On a corner under one of them a gang of Negro boys too young for the bars were horsing in the road, projecting their black identities against the black indifference of the night. They froze when the girl went by, looking at her from eyes like wet brown stones. She paid no attention to them.
In the middle of the next block she entered the lobby of an apartment building. I parked near the corner and surveyed the building from the other side of the street. It was big for the street, three-storied, and had once been fairly pretentious. Tile facing surmounted its stucco cornice. Its second- and third-floor windows were
masked with shallow wrought-iron balconies.
But the dark tides of Yanonali Street had lapped at its foundations and surrounded it with an atmosphere of hopelessness. A patched earthquake scar zigzagged across its face. Yellow rust-streaks ran down from the balconies like iron tears. The lights behind the blinded windows, the illlit lobby open on the street, gave an impression of furtive transiency.
I didn’t know the girl’s name, and she would be almost impossible to find in the warren of the building’s rooms and corridors. I went back to my car. The Negro boys were Standing around it on the road in a broken semi-circle.
“How fast will she go?” the smallest one said.
“I’ve hit the peg a couple of times. A hundred. Who was the girl that just went past, the one in the fur coat?”
They looked at each other blankly.
“We don’t pay no mind to girls,” the tallest one said.
“You want a girl? Trotter can get you a girl,” the smallest one said. “He got six sisters.” He performed a brief skinny-hipped hula.
The tall one kicked him sharply in the rear. “You silence yourself, my sisters is all working.”
The small one skipped out of his reach. “Sure. They working night and day.” He did a couple of bumps.
I said: “Where’s the Meyer truck line?”
“I thought he wanted a girl,” one of them said to the other. “Now he wants a truck. He can’t make up his mind.”
“Keep right on going west,” the tall one said. “You know where the big overpass is?”
“No.”
“Well, you’ll see it, off to the left. Meyer’s is on the other side of the highway.”
I thanked him and gave him a dollar. The others watched the transaction with the same bright stony look that they had given the girl. As I drove away, a tin can rattled on my turtleback. Their rattling laughter followed me down the street.
CHAPTER 5: The road bumped over railroad tracks, twisted through pine-smelling lumberyards, ducked under the overpass that carried the highway. Night-running trucks went over my head like thunder. The Meyer yard was almost in the shadow of the overpass, a black-top square hemmed in by high wire fence and flanked by a storage building. A truck was backed in to the loading dock, another stood under an open-sided shelter supported on concrete columns, and two others were parked inside the gate. The gate was open. I drove through and pulled up at the platform.
A bald man in an oil-stained T-shirt was sitting on a packing case at the back of the platform. A thousand-watt bulb over the door of the warehouse held him in pitiless light. He was freckled and blotched all over, head and neck and arms, as if his maker had flicked a paintbrush at him. His scarred brown hands were rolling a Bull Durham cigarette. When I got out of the car, his pinkish lashless eyes moved in my direction.
“What can I do for you, bud?”
“I’d like to see Mr. Meyer.”
“Meyer ain’t here. He went off with his son-in-law.”
“His son-in-law?”
“Brand Church. The sheriff. Maybe you can catch him at home. Is it business?”
“More or less. I hear you lost a rig.”
“That’s right.” He licked the edge of his tan cigarette paper and pressed it into place. “And a driver.”
“What kind of a rig?”
“Twenty-ton semi-trailer.” He lit a kitchen match with his thumbnail and held it to his cigarette. “Cost the old man forty grand last year.”
“What was it carrying?”
He came to the edge of the platform, blinking down at me suspiciously. “I wouldn’t know. The old man told me not to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“He’s sore as a boil. The rig and the payload was both insured, but when a firm loses a truck, shippers start getting leery.” He glanced at the license number on the front of my car. “You from a newspaper?”
“Not me.”
“The bonding company?”
“Guess again.” I climbed up the concrete steps to the platform. “What was the payload?”
Turning quickly, he stepped inside the open back of the truck and came out with a long curved piece of steel like a blunt saber. He swung the tire-iron idly in his hand. “I don’t know you. Now what’s your interest?”
“Take it easy—”
“The hell. A chum of mine gets shot like a dog in the road and you tell me to take it easy. What’s your interest?”
His voice was a fox-terrier yap, a high bark that sounded strange coming from a body like a flayed bear’s. The tire-iron swung faster, moving in a tight circle beside his leg. The muscles in his arm knotted and swelled like angry speckled snakes.
I lifted my weight forward onto the balls of my feet, ready to move either way. “Take it hard, then. I found your friend on the highway. I didn’t like it, either.”
“You found Tony after they killed him?”
“He wasn’t dead when I picked him up. He died at the hospital a few minutes later.”
“Did he say anything, tell you who drilled him?”
“Tony wasn’t talking. He was unconscious, in deep shock. My interest is finding the people that did it to him.”
“You a cop? State police?” His iron weapon was still, forgotten in his hand.
“I’ve worked for the state police. I’m a private detective.”
“Old man Meyer hire you?”
“Not yet.”
“You think he’s going to?”
“If he’s smart.”
“That’s what you think. Meyer still has his first nickel.” His rubbery mouth stretched in a broken-toothed grin. He laid the iron on the packing case behind him, ready to his hand.
I reached for my cigarettes, then thought better of it. “I’m out of smokes. Can I roll one?”
“Sure thing.”
He handed me his tobacco and papers and watched me critically while I rolled a cigarette. My fingers remembered the knack. He lit it for me.
“So you’re a detective, eh?”
“That’s right. My name is Archer.”
“Tarko.” He thumbed his chest. “They call me Hairless.”
“Glad to meet you, Tarko. What was Tony’s run?”
“It varied. Mostly he drove the San Francisco run. He was coming up from L.A. today, though. Special shipment.”
“What kind of a truck was he driving?”
“One of the new semis, GMC tractor, Fruehauf box. A twenty-tonner, same as that one there.”
He pointed across the yard with his cigarette, to one of the trucks that were standing inside the gate. It was a closed semi-trailer the size of a small house. Its corrugated metal sides were bright with aluminum paint, except for the red and black sign: MEYER LINE—LOCAL AND LONG DISTANCE LAS CRUCES, CALIF.
“And the payload?” I said.
“You’ll have to ask the old man. I’m not supposed to know. I’m just watchman here since I had my accidents.”
“But you do know?”
He didn’t answer for a minute. He looked behind him, then up at the long lighted arc of the overpass where the big night trucks were rolling, southward to Los Angeles and the Imperial Valley, northward to Fresno, San Francisco, Portland. His eyes glazed with desire. He wished that he was rolling, headed north for Portland or south or east, anywhere so long as he was wheeling with horsepower under his toe.
“Can you keep it under your hat?”
I told him I could.
He lowered his voice. “I heard the old man talking to the sheriff. He said it was bonded bourbon.”
“The whole truckload?”
“Must have been. The load alone was insured for sixty-five gees.”
“Was Tony bonded?”
“For a hundred, yep. He’s our bonded driver. I thought at first you was from the bonding company. The first idea they ever get in their little pointed heads is jumping on our necks.”
“Tony’s in the clear, anyway.”
“Yeah. But I can’t figure it. He
had his orders not to stop for anybody or anything. The old man always says we shouldn’t stop for the Governor himself if he wanted a lift. Anybody tries to cut over on us, we’re supposed to bull on through, smash them if we have to.” He brought his right fist up and smacked the inside of his other hand. “Only way I can see it, Tony forgot his orders and stopped on the highway for somebody. The poor little son of gun.” His left hand clenched his fist in a grip that left fingernail marks.
“You were fond of Tony.”
“Call it that. We live—we lived in the same boarding-house. I liked him better than most. I owed him something. The time my brakes went out on the Nojoqui grade, he was my helper. I was driving a tanker full of high-octane stuff. Took the ditch at a hundred. Tony jumped out at the top of the hill and ran the hell down and pulled me out of it. All I lost was my hair.”
“Who would he stop for?” I said. “I heard he liked women.”
“Who doesn’t?” He smiled ruefully. “The broads run like a deer when I take off my hat now.”
I brought him back to the subject: “What about Tony’s women? Drivers have been fingered by a woman before.”
“You’re telling me.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking hard. “There was a dame, yeah. I don’t hardly like to say it. I don’t know nothing against the dame for sure.”
“It wouldn’t be a woman called Anne Meyer?”
“Annie Meyer? Hell, no. She’s Meyer’s daughter. What would she be doing fingering one of her old man’s trucks?”
“I understood that she was Tony’s love interest.”
“She was in a way, I guess. He talked about her a lot. Sure, he was stuck on her. But she could never see him. Annie’s got other interests. That was the big sorrow in his life. But it didn’t amount to anything real. Know what I mean? This other dame was different. She made a big play for Tony the last week or so. He told me she was nuts about him. I dunno. It appeared to me he was stepping out of his class, same as he tried to do with Annie Meyer. The dame is a nightclub singer, a real doll. I never see her, but he showed me her picture in the front of the club.”
“In town here?”
“Yeah. The Slipper, out at the end of Yanonali Street. He spent a lot of time there the last few days. And the way he talked, he’d stop a truck for her.” It was the highest compliment he could pay.
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