by Basil Copper
She paused. I joined her at the window. The night wind rustled the blind. “You get a lot of value out of your mirrors,” I said lightly. “The one in my room never does that. It just reflects back the same cock-eyed guy from day to day.”
She smiled but still stood looking into the glass. From where I was standing I couldn’t see much; just darkness, sliced by the green and red segments of the neon. The way she put it, it did sound kinda spooky. A queer kid, but nice. She thought too much.
“A lot of people in this world never get to be twenty-four,” I said. “Sling out your mirror and live a long and happy life.” She did give a laugh at that. She came into my arms all of a sudden.
“Oh, Mike,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone quite so matter-of-fact as you. It’s reassuring in some ways. I’m glad we met.”
“Even though it’s costing you expenses-plus a day,” I said.
She thumped me then. It hurt and I pinched her. After we finished horsing around we went in the shower. She drew the blinds and put on the light. We stood under the scalding water and soaped one another. It was like the dawn of the world. It was too good to last and we both knew it. Then she went out to dress and I stayed to finish towelling myself. When I came out she was half standing, one knee on a chair. She had on the smallest black suspender belt I had ever seen, the black shoes and the sheerest nylons, which she was adjusting. I took one look and knew what I wanted. I went at her in a run leaving the towel way behind.
“Mike!” she shouted, but it was delight and not approbation in her voice. I gave it to her the best way I knew how. We went at it hot and strong; her legs were somewhere around my neck but I didn’t give a damn. We both seemed to think it was pretty urgent. I know it was the best quarter of an hour of my life up to now. When we finished we both took a long time to come apart.
“You must think I’m a loose woman,” she said.
“I thought you were pretty tight,” I said. She aimed a blow at me.
“Bastard!” she said, but the way she bit my ear wasn’t serious. Then I dressed her, then I dressed myself. When I came back from the bedroom I could smell food. I went into the lounge and found a fully laden trolley, with enough stuff on it to last a couple of weeks. The waiter had gone.
She had chosen a white dress with a floral pattern and she had done something to her hair while I had been away, which made it look stunning. We had breakfast sitting there with the sun blazing away up over the foothills, and the morning wind rustling the curtains and I thought the life of a P.I. might be worth it, after all. It was the high peak of the case and I knew I should never hit this stride again. I kissed her on the cheek when I got up to go.
“Thanks for everything,” I said, and meant it. She clung to me for a moment and then slowly pushed me away. “Call me, Mike,” she said. I nodded and went on out. I walked down to the lift like I had blocks of foam rubber under my size nines.
8 - Paul Mellow
I got out at the ground floor, walked across the lobby and out through the main entrance. It was only around half-seven and no one appeared to be on duty. The air smelled good. I went on over to the parking lot. The car was drenched with a heavy dew and it took three pulls to start her. I tooled gently back along the parkway and stopped the car near the board fence where I had the shoot-out with my friend. I must have slipped a cog not to have thought of it sooner.
I put the car in front of the fence to shield what I was doing, though there was no one about. After a few minutes I found a biggish hole near the top, which had new edges. If the bullet had gone on through without hitting anything else it would be useless to look any farther, for it was a vacant lot beyond and it could have carried a long way. I went back down the fence. There was a small gate let into it. It was unlocked and I went on in. When I got back to the hole I found I was in luck for once.
The bullet had deflected off a metal stanchion belonging to a telephone pole and there, ten minutes later, I found it embedded in the thick timber. It took me another five to prise it out with a pen-knife. It had spread out, of course, but it should be an easy job for the ballistics boys. At least it would tie up, or not, with the joker who was leaving his calling card.
But there couldn’t be two choppers operating with silenced revolvers of the same calibre in the same area.
I put the shapeless piece of lead in my pocket and drove off across town. I couldn’t find a place to park the Buick near my office so I took it in for a wash and polish and then rode up in the creaking lift. As usual, Bert Dexter was nowhere about; it was still a little before nine, but even so Stella had already completed two letters and the coffee was beginning to come to the boil. She was sitting behind my desk, pert, freshly groomed and as clean-scrubbed as the morning.
She grinned as I came in through the door and for a minute or two I felt a heel. Then it passed; we had no formal arrangement and I had to let off steam sometimes. I dictated a few notes over a cup of coffee. She never said a word about anything, but she looked quietly sure of herself, like she had caught me out in something crooked. Very likely she had.
Besides being very efficient, Stella was very beautiful, I thought to myself; but not in an obvious, sexy way. More than once I caught myself glancing at her stockings. These were legs I had never seen above the knee. Curious thing was that the sight of them aroused more interest in me than the sight of Carol Channing naked. Strange. There was a Thought for the Week, if you like.
While I sipped another cup of coffee I gave Stella a rundown on some of the more outstanding events of the last twenty-four hours. She frowned and bit on her pencil.
“Not a very impressive effort,” she said of my debacle outside the Channing girl’s window. I let that go, too. The door opened and Bert Dexter came in. He nodded in a friendly manner and sat down at his desk. The room was so big it was like being at opposite ends of a baseball court. When we wanted to talk it was really easier to use the phone. I suppose it would have been better to have partitioned the room off, but we never got around to it.
I asked Stella to call Mandy Mellow and tell him I was making progress and then sauntered over to Bert’s desk. He was quite the nicest guy I knew; almost without exception among the people I had met he was completely without a personal axe to grind, which was a rarity in this world. We ran off at the mouth about this and that while Stella made her calls. Around ten I shut up shop for an hour and rode Stella down to the ground floor. I had a little job for her to do. We walked around the next block to collect the car.
We drove out of the garage and across town. It was another beautiful day or would have been if they could have found some way of extracting the smog from the atmosphere, the cars from the through-ways and the noise from the eardrums. Otherwise, like I said, it was real swell. When we got to the house one of the two cops on duty came out on to the porch. It was the tough-looking, pleasant one who had been on before.
“Morning, Mr. Faraday. Morning, miss.” He looked pleased with himself. He’d probably been at the coffee beans again.
“This came special delivery this morning.” He pointed over at my desk. It was the registered package containing the key. This was getting to be a damned nuisance. Ever since Margaret Standish had given it me, it had burned a hole in my pocket; I daren’t hang on to it, and yet I never could find time to go down to the bank and use it. I had an idea that the whole of the case was somehow wrapped up in it, but I didn’t want to move until the heat was off. That was why I wanted Stella to come up.
When the patrolman went out into the kitchen again I tore the package open; shredded it until the address and postal details were illegible and then put the key in Stella’s handbag. It fitted nicely on her key ring with a lot of other stuff.
“Hang on to this,” I told her. “It might make the difference between eating and really living.”
Then I drove her downtown again; and decanted her outside the office. It was a quarter to eleven so I drove on over to Central Police HQ. The Goon Squad was just co
ming off as I arrived and apes in policemen’s caps were spreading out in all directions along the sidewalks. It made me feel nervous. I reported to the desk sergeant and then went on up to Dan Tucker’s office.
It had the same sort of lino, carpets, institutional furniture as Jacoby’s precinct office, except that Tucker’s was clean; surprising what you can do with soap, water and wax. Dan Tucker sat solidly behind his desk; there were two of the inevitable apple cores in the ashtray before him. He looked clean, well shaved and rested.
He nodded with gloomy pleasure when I came in, motioned me into a steel and leather arm-chair. He dumped wads of official paper in brown bindings and card folders into my hands. Then he grunted again, picked up the phone and leaned back. “Excuse me if I get on with some work while you read,” he said. “We do have other cases on the county files.”
I looked at the folders. There was an autopsy report on the late Horvis; another on Braganza — I noticed that the sour MacNamara had carried out this one as well. He seemed to have the monopoly. The minutes ticked by as I read on. There were reports on the hire firm and the car used for the getaway after the Horvis shooting; whoever had done the job had worn gloves. The bullets in the two shootings matched, as Tucker had told me; then there was a file from Detroit on the Ralph Johnson murder.
This interested me more. I noticed that very little was said about Carol Channing. There was a reference to a man with white hair — Dan Tucker had appended a couple of pencilled notes — on two occasions; both limited to about five lines. One the gas station woman in the Braganza case, the other a witness in the Johnson shooting. I read for perhaps half an hour and then threw the heavy bundle back on the desk. There was very little new that we didn’t already know. We were really no further forward and yet I felt we were very close to the big break.
“How you make out with Miss Channing?” said Tucker suddenly.
“I’ve been in close contact with her,” I told him. His face was inscrutable but there was a twinkle at the back of his eyes; I wondered for a minute whether he’d had a couple of his goons staked out round the Bissell Building last night. What the hell, anyway, I thought; it’s a free country.
“About that revolver …” I said. Tucker’s face lit up.
“You’ve done well, Mike,” he said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. I’ve been on to the D.A.”
“I thought you said last night …” I went on.
“That was last night,” he said hurriedly. “Neither of us did too well last night.”
“You can say that again,” I said.
“The revolver … well it hadn’t been fired, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the shootings, but it had one or two prints. They were a bit blurred but one was useable. It’s on file.”
He rubbed his hands with suppressed excitement. He went over to the window blinds and pulled the slats of the Venetian shutters closed. The room went into darkness.
“Take a look at this.” He sat down at the desk and pressed a button. I hadn’t noticed but there was a small slide projector at one end of his table. A fan whirred and a beam of light picked out a rectangle on a small roll-down screen at the other side of the room. Dan Tucker swore. “Damn this thing,” he said. Sounded as though he had burned himself. He fumbled around in the gloom and then a picture slid on to the screen.
It seemed to be a group of cons. There was a negro and two other men standing against a wall in those rough grey costumes that make them look like something out of an old James Cagney movie, only one of the men interested me but his face was too screwed up to make out properly. Another picture went on; this was a good, clear head and shoulders, taken full face. I didn’t need to look any further. Despite the bruise on the temple, the open-neck shirt and the flat, grainy photography I would have known him anywhere.
“That’s him,” I said. “Only now he’s got a bruise to match on the other side.”
Tucker’s breath went out in a long whoosh. He switched the machine off. Then sunlight came back into the room. He came over from the blind.
“Gone With The Wind was better acted,” I said. Tucker flicked me a piece of pasteboard. He got on the phone. “And don’t forget the airports,” I heard him say.
I stared at the index card. It contained another paste-on photograph; it was divided into three sections, two profiles and a full-face. The typed data said; Sirocco, Johnny, alias John Meacham, alias James Mitchum. He was a small-time hoodlum who had done two longish stretches in the state penitentiary, one for murder, another for robbery with violence. There was a lot more too about dope peddling, being in possession of narcotics, sexual assaults against women and a bit of procurement on the side. A thoroughly likeable character.
“Shouldn’t be too difficult now,” I said. “But this still doesn’t tie Sirocco in with the silenced revolver. From what I can see, he used an entirely different type of gun. In fact, there’s no evidence about anything except that he wouldn’t qualify for the scout movement. The gun I took off him hadn’t even been fired.”
Dan scratched his chin. His chair creaked under him as he sat back and folded his hands.
“True,” he said. “But once we nab him, things will start beginning to crack. In the first place you wouldn’t expect him to carry a gun with that record unless he was actually on a job. Secondly, he may lead us to the chief joker.”
I conceded a couple of good points. Whatever else we might have discussed would have to wait, as there came a sudden buzz on the intercom; Tucker spoke into it and then turned to me.
“Horvis just arrived,” he said. “You’d better let me start off. I’ll introduce you and afterwards you can take it on. Though I don’t think you can squeeze out any angles that we haven’t thought of. He sighed. “It’s been a heavy case.”
*
Horvis had come and gone. We hadn’t learned anything new but it was pretty obvious he was on the up and up. Dan Tucker leaned back in his chair, took an apple out of the drawer and started to scrunch. I put up with this for a bit and then went out. I wanted to find a toilet. The desk sergeant directed me. I washed my hands and went on out. Seemed to me the police dossiers had produced little except for tying Sirocco in with the killings.
I knocked on Tucker’s door and went in. It was quite a surprise. The other chair was occupied by Captain Jacoby.
“Come in,” said Tucker without looking up. Jacoby’s neck turned a dull red.
“I didn’t know you were planning out the police concert or I would have waited outside,” I said.
Tucker grinned and indicated a chair. Jacoby scowled. He looked like Akim Tamiroff without the talent. He wore maroon socks under brown trousers and the hairy suit made him look simian; he reminded me of an ape I once saw at the Bronx Zoo. This one had a sore ass; I couldn’t tell about Jacoby. He was sitting down and he didn’t wriggle his can so I guessed I shouldn’t take the analogy too far.
“The captain’s come to give me some advice,” Tucker explained.
“They run out of ideas down at the precinct?” I asked.
Jacoby’s flush flushed. He cleared his throat. “Now look, Faraday,” he started to rumble. Tucker cut in. He seemed overlong on tact today.
“Let’s relax gentlemen, shall we?”
Before he could get on to anything else, I thought I’d produce my little bonus. I picked the lead ingot out of my pocket and plopped it down on to Tucker’s blotter.
“Compliments of the management,” I said. The two men goggled.
“What’s this?” said Tucker. I told him.
“If my hunch is correct the bullet will match up with the others,” I said. “It wouldn’t take Einstein to link up this little lot. Whoever is doing the skin-perforating around here, has left a complete set by now.”
No one said anything for a minute. Jacoby’s ugly face looked like an Indian totem pole. Then a choking noise came out of Dan Tucker’s face.
“And you mean to tell me that this happened some nights ago?” he s
tarted.
“Take the strain off your gall bladder,” I told him. “It wouldn’t have done any good. There was no point in mentioning it and I was in enough trouble already.”
Tucker looked down disgustedly at the shapeless chunk of lead.
“Well, all right,” he said at length. “But next time, if a fly leaves a hoof mark on your wristlet watch, tell me … that’s what I’m paid for and I want to know. It may be important.”
I tried to look frightened — for the record. Then Tucker buzzed for one of his flunkeys and we all went up to a lab on the second floor of the building. A small, wizened chemist in a white coat took the bullet. He labelled it, took it away and fussed about with microscopes and things. About a year and a half later he came back.
“They match,” he said in an expressionless voice. “Send you prints and a record card down.”
“Thanks, Mac,” Tucker said. All his staff seemed to be expatriate Scotsmen. He rubbed his hands. We went down to his office again. Jacoby excused himself. He seemed excited about something. He shot me a venomous glance, shook hands absently-mindedly with Tucker and went away pretty quickly. I sat down and drank a cup of coffee. After, I checked out with Stella on the phone and told her I’d pick her up for lunch. Then it was pretty close on midday. Time we were moving.
*
We got in the same black prowl car and drove across town. It was time we had a word with Paul Mellow. Tucker didn’t use the siren. The address Mandy had given me was over in a cheap neighbourhood. It was a surprisingly long way and Tucker was sweating as the sun beat through the windshield as he drove.
I took off my coat but it didn’t do much good. A brilliant blue sky emphasized the essential ugliness of much of L.A. We passed a section of cheap delicatassens, TV hire stores with fluorescent signs losing in competition with the sun; a row of hackies outside a bus terminal; super-markets, liquor stores, tailors’ shops, two or three B-feature cinemas, a drive-in hash joint; a couple of Italian restaurants.