1949 - You're Lonely When You Dead

by James Hadley Chase

  ‘I wish I knew what was going on in your mind,’ Miss Eolus said uneasily. ‘Has something happened? I mean apart from Benny?’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you call it a mind,’ I said. ‘You should hear what some people call it. No, nothing’s happened apart from Benny. Nothing at all.’ The two additional aspirins were on the job now. The pain in my head began to recede.

  ‘Why don’t you run along?’ I went on. ‘You must have things to do.’

  She smoothed down her dress over her hips. She had nice hips: just the right shape and just the right weight. This wasn’t a new discovery. I had noticed them before.

  ‘Well, isn’t that fine?’ she said bitterly. ‘After all I’ve done for you. A brush-off. I don’t know why I bother with you. Can you tell me why I bother with you?’

  ‘Not right now,’ I said, not wishing to hurt her feelings, but wanting her to go very badly. ‘We’ll talk about that some other time. I’ll call you in a day or so. I must hurry up and change. You won’t mind if I say goodbye now, will you?’ and I went into the bedroom and closed the door.

  After a couple of minutes I heard her car start up. I didn’t wave out of the window and I forgot her as soon as the sound of the car engine died away.

  IV

  The air taxi touched down on the long runway of the Portola airport, San Francisco, at twenty minutes past three. We came in on the tail of an air-liner full of movie stars, and when we reached the main gates of the airport there was a big crowd waiting to see the stars. A couple of excited bobby-soxers waved the-r handkerchiefs and screamed at us as we drove past, but we didn’t wave back. We weren’t in that kind of mood.

  Kerman said, ‘You know it’s a funny thing, Vic, but a guy has to die before you get to know anything about him. I had no idea Ed had a wife and a couple of kids. He never mentioned them. He never told me his mother was living either. He never acted like a man with a wife and a couple of kids, did he? The way he used to horse around.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ I said. ‘What do we want to talk about his wife and kids for?’

  Kerman took out his handkerchief and mopped his face.

  ‘I guess that’s right.’ And after a while he said, ‘I’ll be glad when it gets a bit cooler. March and a heat wave. It’s all wrong. Now, last night…’

  ‘And shut up about the weather too,’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’ Kerman said.

  During the silence that followed, and while we drove along Market Street, I reconstructed the happenings of the morning. Paula had come over. Brandon had already been to see her about Benny. She had told the same tale as I had: that Benny had gone to San Francisco for the weekend. He hadn’t gone on business. He had gone up there on a sight-seeing trip. He did that sort of thing, Paula had said. I had said much the same thing. Brandon hadn’t believed us, but there was nothing he could do about it because Benny’s murder was out of his district.

  While we talked Jack Kerman had arrived. Barclay’s alibi, he told us, after we had talked about Benny, was as water-tight as a submarine. He had been with Kitty Hitchens as he had said and hadn’t left her apartment until three-thirty of the afternoon following Dana’s murder. That put Barclay out of the running.

  I then told them about Anita Cerf. By the way Paula and Kerman went over my rooms I could see they didn’t believe me. It was hard to believe, because there just wasn’t a trace of her ever having been in the cabin. But they both remembered the yellow cushion. The fact it wasn’t in the cabin finally convinced them I hadn’t imagined it: the cushion and the pulpy softness at the back of my head.

  Paula didn’t want to go to San Francisco, but I said I was going. Around one o’clock I phoned through to the Orchid City airport and ordered an air taxi to take us out.

  The trip in the aircraft didn’t do my head any good, and I kept thinking of Benny. I had known him for about four years. We had worked and played together. He was an irresponsible, crazy kind of guy, but I liked him. It gave me a sick feeling to think he was dead.

  Kerman had said there was no proof to connect Ed’s death with the murder of Dana, Leadbetter and Am a. There wasn’t, but I was convinced that in some way or other there was a connection. Kerman’s theory was that Ed had got into a gambling game and had struck lucky and someone had taken his winnings and had thrown him into the harbour.

  Kerman wasn’t sold on the theory, but he said Ed was a wild character and he could have got into that kind of trouble.

  I said no. Ed was working. Maybe he was wild, but not when he had a job on, and he had a job on. He had arrived in San Francisco around four-thirty yesterday afternoon. At one o’clock in the morning the police had fished his body out of Indian Basin. The medical report showed he had been dead about four hours. If that was anything to go by he had been killed around nine o’clock: four and a half hours after arriving in San Francisco. Time enough to begin his inquiries into Anita Cerf’s private life, but not time enough to get into a gambling game: work first, play after. We all followed that rule, and Ed was no exception.

  Had he been followed to Frisco? If he had been killed at nine o’clock there would have been time for the killer to hop a plane and get back to Orchid City and shoot Anita.

  Kerman asked me if I wasn’t getting fancy ideas, and where was my proof. Maybe I was getting fancy ideas, but I didn’t think so. I had no proof that was the way it happened, but I had a hunch I was right, and I’d rather play a good hunch against proof when proof was as non-existent as it was now.

  By this time the taxi had reached Third Street and pulled up outside Police Headquarters.

  ‘Leave the talking to me,’ I said to Kerman.

  We climbed the worn stone steps, pushed open the double swing doors and asked a patrolman going off duty where we could find the Desk Lieutenant.

  He was a nice civil cop, and although he was going off duty, he retraced his steps down the passage to show us the way.

  As soon as I told the Desk Lieutenant who I was and what I had come about, he told the patrolman to take us to the Homicide Department. The patrolman led the way up a flight of stone stairs, along another passage to a small room furnished with four chairs, two desks, a window with bars and yellow walls and ceiling There was a smell of stale bodies, dirt and vomit in the room: the smell of most police stations.

  We sat around, not saying anything and waited. About five minutes crawled by, and then the door opened and a couple of plain-clothes dicks came in.

  One of them, a big, square-faced man with the usual hard eyes, set mouth, big feet’ that are more or less the standard uniform of a copper, waved us to a couple of straight-backed chairs, and waved the other dick to one of the desks.

  ‘I’m Dunnigan,’ he said, as if he wasn’t particularly proud of the fact. ‘Detective district commander. Are you relations of the deceased?’

  It seemed odd to talk of Ed Benny as the deceased, and it gave me a cold, spooked feeling. I said we weren’t relations, but friends, and when I told him our names I saw his mouth tighten, and guessed Brandon had been telling him about us.

  ‘We’ll want you to identify him,’ he said. ‘Give this officer your names and addresses, and then I’ll take you along to the morgue.’

  We helped the plain-clothes dick fill up a couple of forms, then followed Dunnigan from the room, down the corridor, down the stairs into a yard, across to a squat brick building.

  There were three bodies under the sheets on the long marble slab facing us as we entered the morgue. The attendant in a long white overall rolled back the sheet covering the body in the middle.

  Dunnigan said curtly, ‘Is that him?’

  It was Benny all right.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  He looked over at Kerman, whose face had gone the colour of a fish’s belly.

  ‘You, too?’

  Kerman nodded.

  The attendant dropped the sheet back over Benny’s face.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Dunnigan
said. ‘You don’t have to be sorry for him. It comes to us all, and it was quick. He was socked at the back of his head with a sandbag. He didn’t know anything about the water. Come on; let’s get out of here.’

  As we went across the yard my head began to ache again.

  V

  The bellhop was lean and grey-faced and about thirty-three, and his uniform was too tight for him. He took us up the stairs and along a dim corridor. He had a kind of dancing walk, and his behind stuck out either because his trousers were so tight or because that was the way he was made. I couldn’t make up my mind about this; not that it mattered.

  The rattled a key in the lock, opened the door and sneered at the room beyond. Kerman and I sneered at it too. There were two beds, a bamboo table, an armchair that looked as if an elephant had once sat in it, a carpet that once had some pile, but had long since lost its self-respect. In places it showed its canvas backing: by the bed, by the window and by the armchair; the three places where people used their feet the most. Over one of the beds there was a coloured print of a pretty girl on a ladder. There was a dog at the foot of the ladder and it was looking up at the girl and it had a leer in its eyes. The girl was pretending to look embarrassed, but she wasn’t making much of a job of it. Over the other bed there was another print of the same girl. This time she was standing on a chair, holding her dress up round her neck, and it was a mouse and not a dog that was leering at her.

  ‘Shower cabinet in there,’ the bellhop said, jerking his thumb. He crossed to the window, pulled down the blind and let it snap up with a bang. ‘Everything works if you handle it right,’ he said. ‘Careful how you use the shower. The system’s a mite old, and it’s got to be handled right.’

  He ran his rat’s eyes along the ceiling, down the wall on to our feet and up to our faces.

  ‘Got all you want?’ he went on, hopefully expectant.

  ‘What else have you got?’ Kerman asked, edging his way into the room.

  ‘Liquor or women or dope,’ the bellhop said, eyeing us speculatively. ‘So long as you can pay for it I can fix it. I know a blonde who can be over here in three minutes.’

  We settled for liquor.

  When he had gone, Kerman said, ‘Do we have to get fixed up in a joint like this? Couldn’t our expense sheet run to something a little less murky?’

  I went over to the window and beckoned. When he joined me I pointed to a building across the street, exactly opposite the hotel. The first floors were dingy-looking dwelling apartments. The ground floor was a photographer’s shop. The word LOUIS was spelt out across the facia in black letters against a yellow background.

  ‘See that,’ I said. ‘That’s where Ed started his investigation. Wait a minute. Let me show you.’ I opened my suitcase, produced from the bottom of it the photograph of Anita Cerf I had found in Barclay’s bedroom. ‘You haven’t caught up with this yet,’ I said, and told him how I had got it. ‘The first thing Ed said he would do when he got here was to check on the photo. I had a copy made for him before he caught the plane.’ I turned the photograph over and showed Kerman the rubber-stamped name and address on the back. ‘That’s why we’re here.’ I jerked my head to the shop across the way. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Not much of a joint,’ Kerman said, studying it.

  I put the photograph back in the suitcase and sat on the bed. My head was aching badly now, and I wanted a drink. I hoped the bellhop wouldn’t take all night.

  D.D.C. Dunnigan had asked a lot of questions, but our story was that Ed had come up here for a weekend of sight-seeing and we had no idea why he should have landed up in Indian Basin, and we stuck to it.

  I felt sorry for Dunnigan. He obviously wanted to find the killer. But we couldn’t help him without giving Cerf away, so we had to sit around in the yellow-walled room and lie ourselves black in the face. He told us he was checking all the hotels, and that worried me. Sooner or later he would find out Ed stayed in this joint, and that might lead him to the photographer’s shop across the way. It might, but I doubted it, although some coppers get a break, and he might be one of them.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Kerman asked. He lowered himself carefully into the armchair. It held him, but only just.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do tonight,’ I said. ‘The shops shut; everything’s shut, but first thing tomorrow we’ll get going. We have no more to work on than Ed had. Somewhere along the line he stepped out of turn and tipped his hand. That’s something we have to watch. The quickest way to work this, Jack, is for me to go to work exactly the way Ed did, and for you to lurk in the background. Tomorrow morning I’ll go over to that shop and show this guy Louis the photo. I don’t know what will happen, but you can bet something will happen. Your job is to stick to me like glue without being seen. If I run into trouble, you’ll be on the spot to get me out of it. I’m going straight ahead as if Ed had never been here. Maybe I’ll end up in the Basin too, only this time you’ll be around to fish me out. Do you get it?’

  Kerman stroked his dapper moustache and said he did.

  He said, ‘I’d just as soon do the job and you did the body-guard business, but if that’s the way you want to play it, okay.’

  A tap sounded on the door at this moment, and the bellhop slid into the room. He brought with him two bottles of whisky, some ginger-ale and glasses. These he set down on the bamboo table.

  Kerman looked the assignment over and asked, ‘What’s the third glass for?’

  The bellhop leered at him.

  ‘You might bust one or you might want to give a guy a drink. A third glass is always useful, mister. The drinks I’ve missed because there ain’t been a third glass.’

  ‘We’ll all have a drink,’ I said. ‘Make them big ones, Jack.’”

  I said to the bellhop, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Carter,’ he told me, and fetched out a crumpled cigarette from inside his pillbox hat, wrapped his lips around it and set fire to it.

  ‘Been here long?’ I asked, leaning back on my elbows and looking beyond him at the girl on the ladder. I wondered what the dog could see that I couldn’t that made him leer.

  ‘Ten years,’ the bellhop said. ‘When I first came the joint wasn’t bad. But the war knocked it. The war knocked everything.’

  Kerman gave him a drink you could have floated a duck on. He sniffed at it, poured a little of it into his mouth, and rinsed his teeth with it.

  ‘See what I mean about the third glass?’ he said when he finally got it down.

  I shook four aspirins into my hand, washed them down with whisky. He watched me without interest.

  ‘How would you like to earn a little money?’ I asked.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Exercising your memory?’

  He took another pull at his glass, went through his rinsing movements and swallowed.

  ‘What’s my memory got to do with it?’

  I took out my wallet, produced a photograph of Ed Benny and handed it to him.

  ‘Ever seen this guy?’

  He didn’t take the photograph, but leaned forward and peered at it. The seams of his trousers creaked but held.

  Then he straightened, poured the rest of the whisky down his throat, put the glass on the bamboo table and slid to the door.

  ‘All right, guys,’ he said, his hand on the doorknob. ‘It was a beautiful act while it lasted, and you certainly fooled me. Coppers buying a guy a drink! Ain’t that something? For crying out loud! Who would believe it? But you don’t get anything from me. I don’t talk to coppers.’

  Kerman hauled himself out of his chair, grabbed the bellhop by the scruff of the neck and sat him on the bed by my side.

  ‘Do we look like coppers?’ he demanded furiously. ‘I’ve a mind to shove that ugly snout of yours through the back of your neck!’

  ‘Well ain’t you coppers?’

  I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and laid it on the bed between us.
r />   ‘Do we act like coppers?’

  He eyed the bill avidly.

  ‘Can’t say you do,’ he said, and licked his lips. ‘They were here this afternoon asking questions. He’s dead, isn’t he? They showed me a photo of him: a morgue photo.’

  ‘So he did stay here?’

  His hand strayed towards the bill.

  ‘Yeah, he stayed here all right. The manager didn’t want the cops tramping over the joint. He told them he didn’t know the guy.’

  I picked up the bill and gave it to him.

  ‘Give him another drink,’ I said to Kerman. ‘Can’t you see he’s thirsty?’

  ‘You’ll keep this to yourselves?’ the bellhop said, a little anxiously. ‘I wouldn’t like to get the sack.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ Kerman said. ‘By the way you talk I should have thought it was the one thing you prayed for.’ He thrust another man’s-sized drink into the bellhop’s hand.

  ‘Look,’ I said, as he started to go through his rinsing movements again, ‘this guy was a friend of ours. Someone sapped him and threw him into the Basin. We’re trying to find out why. Have you any ideas?’

  The bellhop shook his head.

  ‘I guess not. He booked in at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. He took the room next to this one. He went out almost immediately after, and that’s the last we saw of him.’