Blue City

by Ross Macdonald

  He took the eleven. “Opposite the main entrance of the park. On the top floor, up above the liquor store. If you do any business, tell him Whitey sent you.”

  He missed the twelve. I sank the twelve and then the rest of the balls. He grunted audibly when the fifteen went in.

  “That was game ball,” I said. “Tough luck.”

  He looked at me sadly. “I can put the game on the slate, but I ain’t got your two bits. I got cleaned out in the back room. I didn’t think you’d win.”

  “Forget it.” I went away and left him knocking the balls around by himself.

  My taxi dropped me in front of the closed iron gates of a municipal park. The night air was beginning to turn chilly, and the dark lawns beyond the gates, shaded by unbudding trees, were as desolate as any cemetery. In the center of the paved triangle of which the gates formed the base, there was a statue I remembered, an early French explorer in bronze buckskins.

  “Meeting somebody?” the driver asked as I paid him off.

  “Got an appointment with this statue. We get together every now and then to talk over old times.”

  He looked at me vacuously and I didn’t tip him. When he had gone away I turned and looked at the statue. The statue didn’t say anything. He stood calmly gazing with blind, metal eyes across a virgin country that no longer existed. I remembered from school that he had left France with the intention of bringing Christianity to the heathen.

  On the opposite corner there was a palsied neon sign: “Liquor Store.” Above it were three stories of flats. Five or six of the windows on the top floor were lighted, but all the blinds were drawn. They weren’t drawn tight enough to contain the shouts and laughter which I heard. It was high, wild laughter, definitely not merry, but I didn’t mind. Merry laughter would have conflicted with my mood.

  I crossed the street and found the entrance to the flats beside the store front. The narrow stairs were lit, or unlit, by red twenty-watt bulbs, one to each flight. The bulb at the top of the fourth flight was white but grimy. It cast a bad light on a sky-blue door trimmed with red by an amateurish hand. The same hand had painted “F. Garland” on the door in tall, red letters which bled a little.

  The sounds of the party came through the thin panels like water through a sieve. I had listened to a lot of parties, and I knew that mixed parties sound like a monkeyhouse, female parties like an aviary, and stag parties like a kennel. This party sounded like a kennel, though some of the voices were lap-dog voices, high and querulous.

  I knocked on F. Garland’s door, wondering where the girls were. The yapping and whining and howling and barking went right on. A fire-siren laugh climbed little steps all the way up to a high, idiot cackle, and teetered shakily down. I knocked again.

  A small man came to the door and opened it, still buttoning up his clothes. The smudge of lipstick on his narrow chin was the only spot of color in his face. It was a pathetic little face, with hollow cheeks, high, thin temples, a young, sensitive mouth, whose upper lip overlapped the lower lip a trifle. His voice was soft and pleasant:

  “I don’t think I know you, do I?”

  “The loss is mine. Is Joe Sault here?”

  “Joey is occupied at present.” He uttered a shameful, little, lilting laugh. His gray eyes were as amiable as ground glass.

  “Will you tell him I’d like to see him for a minute? Out here will do.”

  “Is it business?”

  “Call it that.”

  “He’s not doing business yet tonight. He’s waiting for more stock.”

  “Not that kind of business. I have to talk to him.”

  “What name shall I give him, fellow?”

  “John Weather. You his secretary?”

  An angry flush pumped a little color into his phthisical cheeks. He sneered at me with his expressive nostrils. “My name is Garland,” he said softly. “Maybe you’d better remember that.”

  “Delighted, I’m sure. Convey my respects to Mr. Sault, and tell him I await his pleasure in the antechamber.”

  “A gagman,” he chirped. He shut the door, but before it closed I saw the scrambled bodies inside the room. They were live bodies, but I had experienced stronger fellow feeling with corpses.

  A minute later the handsome boy came to the door. He had sideburns, dimples, swimming black eyes. He had chocolate-brown high-rise trousers with three pleats on each side, and scarlet silk suspenders to hold them up under his armpits. His shirt was made of beige silk. He had the rank masculinity of a tomcat, but his dark face was emotionally versatile. The cigarette between his slender brown fingers burned unevenly and did not smell like tobacco.

  “Joe Sault?”

  “You’ve got me.” He smiled engagingly. “Garland doesn’t like you.”

  “I like Garland ever so much.”

  “He’s screwy, but he’s got a good nose. When he don’t like ’em, I often don’t like ’em.”

  “And here I was thinking my personality was irresistible. You’re destroying my dream.”

  “You talk too much, like Garland says.” His expression shifted easily from boyish friendliness to blank hostility. “If you got something to say to me, say it.” His cigarette had burnt down to his fingers. He ground it out on the doorjamb and put the butt in his pocket.

  I drew back on my right foot and shifted my weight to a position of equilibrium, ready to move in any direction. “I need a gun,” I said.

  He slid past me on quiet feet and leaned over the shaky banister to peer down the stairs to the next landing. “Why come to me?” he asked me over his shoulder. “They got guns for sale in stores.”

  “I’m hot. A couple of years ago—” I paused, waiting for his mind to add one and one.

  He straightened up and faced me. He was almost as tall as I was, and his shoulders were very good. I readjusted my weight in relation to his new position.

  He said in a tone of gentle reminiscence: “You were saying: ‘A couple of years ago.’ ”

  “You helped out a friend of mine.”

  “Who is this friend of yours?” He stood back and watched my face impassively, with both hands in his pockets.

  “He wouldn’t want his name used. You know that.”

  “How did I help this friend of yours a couple of years ago that wouldn’t want his name used?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I helped a lot of people. I’m a very helpful guy.”

  “You got him a Smith and Wesson revolver—”

  The muscles moved in his right arm, all the way up to the shoulder and across to the pectoral. He said very quietly: “What did you say your name was?”

  “Your memory is bad.” I was as tense as he was. “John Weather.”

  The knife flew open as it came out of the pocket. My left hand was ready and caught his right wrist. My right arm put a lock on it. He twisted quickly and pulled hard, but not out of my grasp. He was hard to bend, but he bent slowly as I raised my hands locked over his wrist. Slowly his head went down. He sighed almost inaudibly and the knife fell free just before I tore his shoulder loose in its socket.

  Suddenly I let go, stepped in close to him, and brought my right fist up from the knee. The point of his chin bruised my knuckles, his head went back and rapped on the wall. For a moment he stood there on weak knees, both hands outspread flat against the wall, his head sagging. A voice from the doorway stopped my left in the middle of the concluding punch:

  “Don’t hit Joey again. It could spoil our party if you did.”

  Garland stepped through the door and closed it behind him. His sensitive little mouth was quivering, but his right hand was in his coat pocket holding something solid and steady.

  I took a step backwards so that I could watch both of them, and in the same movement I stooped and had the knife. “I’ll keep this. I make a collection of knives that try to cut me.” I pressed the catch and forced the four-inch blade back to its place in the handle, then dropped it in my pocket.

  “You wan
t me to call some of the fellows, Joey?” Garland said.

  Sault was smoothing his hair, rubbing his jaw, massaging his dented personality. “We handle this hard boy ourselves. Tell him to give me back my knife.”

  “Give him back his knife.”

  “I wouldn’t want him to cut himself.”

  He jerked his heavy pocket. “Give it back.”

  “It’s for my collection,” I said. “My friend who sent me here wouldn’t like it if you shot me. And most wounds would give me time to throw you downstairs.”

  “He thinks I couldn’t give him a head wound from the hip,” Garland said to Sault. He giggled like a mischievous little girl. “Tell him about me, Joey.”

  “He’s fast,” Joey said sullenly. “And his name’s Weather, he says. We wouldn’t want to kill him here and spoil the party, like you said.”

  “Sault doesn’t sound gay,” I said to Garland. I was getting tired of watching both of them, shifting my weight with every heartbeat. “Maybe what he needs is for you to get him another reefer.”

  “Say the word, Joey. It would be nice to shoot him.”

  Sault’s face was working with thought. Finally he said: “Lay off him, Garland. Maybe we better take it to Kerch.”

  “Who is Kerch?” I said.

  “You don’t want to know,” Sault said. “You may think you do, but you don’t want to know.”

  “Kerch is the man I work for,” Garland said. “I work for Kerch twenty-four hours a day.”

  “You better take some of your overtime and buy yourself something to eat. You look hungry.”

  “I look better than dead people look.”

  “Take a look in your mirror. You’ll be surprised.”

  “You go away from here,” Garland said in a thin menacing voice. “But quick.”

  “Natch, Gloria. Natch.”

  I went down the stairs, not too fast and not too slow, feeling five eyes on my back: Sault’s black eyes, Garland’s gray eyes, and the hidden eye of the gun.

  chapter 7

  There was nothing Oriental about the Cathay Club except its name and an insane plaster turret, of remotely Byzantine influence, over the front entrance. It was a long, white two-storied building, standing by itself a hundred feet back from the highway on the west side of town. It was just outside the city limits, and the taxi driver charged me two dollars to take me there.

  It cost me another dollar to get in, since a fat man in a decaying tuxedo collected the cover charge at the door. I had seen the place before, but I had never been inside. It was like a hundred other city-limit night clubs all over the country—a room as big and as roughly built as a barn, the cheap simplicity of its construction concealed by dim lighting and fire-hazard decorations. A tiered orchestra stand at the back, precariously supporting an apathetic and underpaid Negro orchestra. In front of the orchestra stand, a dance floor, where the crowds of paying customers walked around in time to the music, and the paid entertainers sweated out their three-a-day. The rest of the floor was packed elbow to elbow and back to back with rickety little tables and uncomfortable little chairs. A blonde waitress in a bright red slack suit led me to one of them, and brought me a ninety-cent drink as hard to swallow as an insult.

  “You missed Archie Calamus,” she said. “He’s the best number in the floor show. Where he takes off the young girl getting ready to go to a party—”

  “I’d certainly hate to miss Archie,” I told her.

  “He comes on again at 3 A.M., if you want to wait. This is only the second show.”

  “That’s swell,” I said, thinking how disappointed she’d be when she didn’t get the tip she was working for.

  A Hawaiian dancer with Polish blue eyes from the northwest side of Chicago came on the floor and rotated her hips, which looked fine for child-bearing. She did a few concluding bumps, with percussion accompaniment by the orchestra, and swaggered massively off. The crowd clapped.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” said the slender, dark young man who served as master of ceremonies, “I take great pride and pleasure in presenting to you a fine young singer whom you all know. That sensational lyric tenor, Ronald Swift.”

  The crowd clapped and laughed. “You tell ’em, Ronnie,” a woman yelled.

  The dark young man stayed where he was at the microphone and began to sing in a limply endearing way. I looked around at the audience. It seemed prosperous and indiscriminate. Young couples waiting for their chance to dance, and above all to take or be taken home. Older couples from the stores and insurance companies and factory offices nibbling with a delightful sense of shame and daring at their bimonthly slice of life. Middle-aged men paternally fondling their young companions. Some middle-aging women striving a little desperately with smiles and chatter to hold the attention of their younger escorts. A few unattached girls and women drinking alone, their eyes on the prowl. All but the last were drunk enough to be enjoying themselves.

  The sensational lyric tenor became a master of ceremonies again, and announced a sensational Spanish dance team. The man was drying up with age, and the woman was getting too heavy, but they danced well. The dialogue of their castanets was as sharp as good repartee. When their intricate steps brought them together, passion crackled between them like electricity. Their stamping was as violent and real as love or hate. They left the floor with wet faces, walking stately together.

  Somebody close behind me was saying: “I didn’t think Kerch’d be able to keep his slot-machine racket after Allister got in.”

  “He had a lot of you bastards fooled,” a brash salesman’s voice cut in. “I could’ve told you what’d happen, and it happened.”

  “You mean nothing happened.”

  “Absolutely. What’d you expect to happen? It’s always the same when these wild-eyed reformers get in. I seen it happen when I was a kid in Cleveland. But what the hell are you kickin’ about?”

  “Who’s kickin’! I always said a wide-open town was good for business. Which is why I didn’t come out for Allister.”

  “You might as well next time. Looks as if he’s going to be with us a long time.”

  The orchestra began to play dance music. “C’mon, Bert,” a woman whined. “We didn’t come here to talk politics. Let’s dance before it gets too crowded.”

  “Absolutely, Marge. Absolutely.”

  I saw them step onto the dance floor, a florid man in Harris tweeds, with his thick arm around the waist of a fading blonde.

  “He knows his way around,” the other man said behind me. “Bert’s a good head.”

  “He’s too fat,” a woman said. “You’re not too fat.”

  One of the unattached girls sat down opposite me at my table. Her thick brown hair swung forward and brushed her white shoulders. Her face was solemn and young, with steady somber eyes and a still mouth too garishly painted.

  “A nice boy like you,” she recited, “shouldn’t be sitting all by his lonesome.”

  “A nice girl like you shouldn’t be wasting her time on a guy like me.”

  “Why, what’s the matter with you? I think you’re kind of cute.”

  “You flatter me.”

  “Sure. Now that I’ve flattered you, you can buy me a drink.”

  I said: “The approach abrupt. Do I look well heeled?”

  “Appearances are so deceptive.”

  “In your case, for example. You’ve got your face made up to suit this joint. Protective coloration, they call it in biology.”

  “Kid me some more,” she said flatly. “You can if you buy me a drink. Biology is a very interesting subject.”

  “I like my biology experimental. Not cut and dried.”

  “You’re not flattering me. I’ll go away unless you buy me a drink.”

  “And take all the beauty out of my life? Just when my heart was opening up like a flower?”

  “To hell with you!” she said suddenly and fiercely. She stood up and flung back her hair. Her slender body looked a little incongruous in
a low-cut gown.

  “Sit down again,” I said. “What are you drinking?”

  She sat down again. “Scarlett O’Hara.”

  “Are you on the staff of this enterprise?”

  “Now, what would make you think that?” she said bitterly. “I come out here every night because I like it.”

  “You should be studying biology in school.”

  “I tried that. It didn’t pay well. They expected to get it for free.”

  The waitress came over, and I ordered our drinks.

  “Well,” the girl said. “You certainly made me work for it.”

  “I’m not as well heeled as my appearance deceived you into not thinking I was.”

  “How you twist the language. You remind me of my grandfather.”

  “I’m not really that old. It’s just the hard life I’ve led.”

  She raised her thin eyebrows. Her eyes were soft and young, but there was a hard glaze over them. “Quite a line you’ve got. I never saw you here before, did I?”

  “Never been here before. Think of what I’ve been missing.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “John. What’s yours?”

  “Carla.” So this was Kaufman’s granddaughter.

  “What’s the name of your boss?”

  “Kerch. Mr. Kerch is so lovely to work for.”

  “Everywhere I go,” I said, “people tell me the most wonderful things about Mr. Kerch.”

  “You must run in some awful peculiar circles.”

  “I do—and Mr. Kerch is always at the center of them.”

  “You’re kidding me again.”

  “I never kid when I’m talking about Mr. Kerch.”

  “You sound as if you don’t like him.”

  “Do you?”

  She leaned forward with her elbows on the table, her pointed chin supported on her palms. Her arms were round and slender, covered with a light golden fuzz, which caught the light like a faint phosphorescence. “It turns my stomach when he looks at me,” she said. “When he touches me, I want to go home and take a bath.”

  “Does he go in for touching you a good deal?”

  She lengthened her mouth at the corners in an expression of dull irony. “More or less.”