The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

by Penzler, Otto

  “No.”

  “He ought to go home, kind of. I ought to call a taxi and send him home. He’s doing his next week’s drinking too soon.”

  “A night like this,” I said. “Let him alone.”

  “It’s not good for him,” the kid said, scowling at me.

  “Rye!” the drunk croaked, without looking up. He snapped his fingers so as not to disturb his piles of dimes by banging on the bar.

  The kid looked at me and shrugged. “Should I?”

  “Whose stomach is it? Not mine.”

  The kid poured him another straight rye and I think he doctored it with water down behind the bar because when he came up with it he looked as guilty as if he’d kicked his grandmother. The drunk paid no attention. He lifted coins off his pile with the exact care of a crack surgeon operating on a brain tumor.

  The kid came back and put more beer in my glass. Outside the wind howled. Every once in a while it blew the stained-glass door open a few inches. It was a heavy door.

  The kid said: “I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.”

  “Warner Brothers could use that,” I said.

  “They did.”

  Just then we had another customer. A car squeaked to a stop outside and the swinging door came open. A fellow came in who looked a little in a hurry. He held the door and ranged the place quickly with flat, shiny, dark eyes. He was well set up, dark, good-looking in a narrow-faced, tight-lipped way. His clothes were dark and a white handkerchief peeped coyly from his pocket and he looked cool as well as under a tension of some sort. I guessed it was the hot wind. I felt a bit the same myself only not cool.

  He looked at the drunk’s back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in— down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself—and spoke to the bar kid.

  “Seen a lady in here, buddy? Tall, pretty, brown hair, in a print bolero jacket over a blue crepe silk dress. Wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat with a velvet band.” He had a tight voice I didn’t like.

  “No, sir. Nobody like that’s been in,” the bar kid said.

  “Thanks. Straight Scotch. Make it fast, will you?”

  The kid gave it to him and the fellow paid and put the drink down in a gulp and started to go out. He took three or four steps and stopped, facing the drunk. The drunk was grinning. He swept a gun from somewhere so fast that it was just a blur coming out. He held it steady and he didn’t look any drunker than I was. The tall dark guy stood quite still and then his head jerked back a little and then he was still again.

  A car tore by outside. The drunk’s gun was a .22 target automatic, with a large front sight. It made a couple of hard snaps and a little smoke curled—very little.

  “So long, Waldo,” the drunk said.

  Then he put the gun on the barman and me.

  The dark guy took a week to fall down. He stumbled, caught himself, waved one arm, stumbled again. His hat fell off, and then he hit the floor with his face. After he hit it he might have been poured concrete for all the fuss he made.

  The drunk slid down off the stool and scooped his dimes into a pocket and slid towards the door. He turned sideways, holding the gun across his body. I didn’t have a gun. I hadn’t thought I needed one to buy a glass of beer. The kid behind the bar didn’t move or make the slightest sound.

  The drunk felt the door lightly with his shoulder, keeping his eyes on us, then pushed through it backwards. When it was wide a hard gust of air slammed in and lifted the hair of the man on the floor. The drunk said: “Poor Waldo. I bet I made his nose bleed.”

  The door swung shut. I started to rush it— from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn’t matter. The car outside let out a roar and when I got onto the sidewalk it was flicking a red smear of taillight around the nearby corner. I got its license number the way I got my first million.

  There were people and cars up and down the block as usual. Nobody acted as if a gun had gone off. The wind was making enough noise to make the hard quick rap of .22 ammunition sound like a slammed door, even if anyone heard it. I went back into the cocktail bar.

  The kid hadn’t moved, even yet. He just stood with his hands flat on the bar, leaning over a little and looking down at the dark guy’s back. The dark guy hadn’t moved either. I bent down and felt his neck artery. He wouldn’t move— ever.

  The kid’s face had as much expression as a cut of round steak and was about the same color. His eyes were more angry than shocked.

  I lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling and said shortly: “Get on the phone.”

  “Maybe he’s not dead,” the kid said.

  “When they use a twenty-two that means they don’t make mistakes. Where’s the phone?”

  “I don’t have one. I got enough expenses without that. Boy, can I kick eight hundred bucks in the face!”

  “You own this place?”

  “I did till this happened.”

  He pulled his white coat off and his apron and came around the inner end of the bar. “I’m locking this door,” he said, taking keys out.

  He went out, swung the door to and jiggled the lock from the outside until the bolt clicked into place. I bent down and rolled Waldo over. At first I couldn’t even see where the shots went in. Then I could. A couple of tiny holes in his coat, over his heart. There was a little blood on his shirt.

  The drunk was everything you could ask—as a killer.

  The prowl-car boys came in about eight minutes. The kid, Lew Petrolle, was back behind the bar by then. He had his white coat on again and he was counting his money in the register and putting it in his pocket and making notes in a little book.

  I sat at the edge of one of the half-booths and smoked cigarettes and watched Waldo’s face get deader and deader. I wondered who the girl in the print coat was, why Waldo had left the engine of his car running outside, why he was in a hurry, whether the drunk had been waiting for him or just happened to be there.

  The prowl-car boys came in perspiring. They were the usual large size and one of them had a flower stuck under his cap and his cap on a bit crooked. When he saw the dead man he got rid of the flower and leaned down to feel Waldo’s pulse.

  “Seems to be dead,” he said, and rolled him around a little more. “Oh yeah, I see where they went in. Nice clean work. You two see him get it?”

  I said yes. The kid behind the bar said nothing. I told them about it, that the killer seemed to have left in Waldo’s car.

  The cop yanked Waldo’s wallet out, went through it rapidly and whistled. “Plenty jack and no driver’s license.” He put the wallet away. “O.K., we didn’t touch him, see? Just a chance we could find did he have a car and put it on the air.”

  “The hell you didn’t touch him,” Lew Patrolle said.

  The cop gave him one of those looks. “O.K., pal,” he said softly. “We touched him.”

  The kid picked up a clean highball glass and began to polish it. He polished it all the rest of the time we were there.

  In another minute a homicide fast-wagon sirened up and screeched to a stop outside the door and four men came in, two dicks, a photographer and a laboratory man. I didn’t know either of the dicks. You can be in the detecting business a long time and not know all the men on a big city force.

  One of them was a short, smooth, dark, quiet, smiling man, with curly black hair and soft intelligent eyes. The other was big, raw-boned, long-jawed, with a veined nose and glassy eyes. He looked like a heavy drinker. He looked tough, but he looked as if he thought he was a little tougher than he was. He shooed me into the last booth against the wall and his partner got the kid up front and the bluecoats went out. The fingerprint man and photographer set about their work.

  A medical examin
er came, stayed just long enough to get sore because there was no phone for him to call the morgue wagon.

  The short dick emptied Waldo’s pockets and then emptied his wallet and dumped everything into a large handkerchief on a booth table. I saw a lot of currency, keys, cigarettes, another handkerchief, very little else.

  The big dick pushed me back into the end of the half-booth. “Give,” he said. “I’m Copernik, Detective Lieutenant.”

  I put my wallet in front of him. He looked at it, went through it, tossed it back, made a note in a book.

  “Philip Marlowe, huh? A shamus. You here on business?”

  “Drinking business,” I said. “I live just across the street in the Berglund.”

  “Know this kid up front?”

  “I’ve been in here once since he opened up.”

  “See anything funny about him now?”

  “No.”

  “Takes it too light for a young fellow, don’t he? Never mind answering. Just tell the story.”

  I told it—three times. Once for him to get the outline, once for him to get the details and once for him to see if I had it too pat. At the end he said: “This dame interests me. And the killer called the guy Waldo, yet didn’t seem to be anyways sure he would be in. I mean, if Waldo wasn’t sure the dame would be here, nobody could be sure Waldo would be here.”

  “That’s pretty deep,” I said.

  He studied me. I wasn’t smiling. “Sounds like a grudge job, don’t it? Don’t sound planned. No getaway except by accident. A guy don’t leave his car unlocked much in this town. And the killer works in front of two good witnesses. I don’t like that.”

  “I don’t like being a witness,” I said. “The pay’s too low.”

  He grinned. His teeth had a freckled look. “Was the killer drunk really?”

  “With that shooting? No.”

  “Me too. Well, it’s a simple job. The guy will have a record and he’s left plenty prints. Even if we don’t have his mug here we’ll make him in hours. He had something on Waldo, but he wasn’t meeting Waldo tonight. Waldo just dropped in to ask about a dame he had a date with and had missed connections on. It’s a hot night and this wind would kill a girl’s face. She’d be apt to drop in somewhere to wait. So the killer feeds Waldo two in the right place and scrams and don’t worry about you boys at all. It’s that simple.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “It’s so simple it stinks,” Copernik said.

  He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair—he looked worse with it combed—and put his hat back on.

  “I was just thinking.” I said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “This Waldo knew just how the girl was dressed. So he must already have been with her tonight.”

  “So, what? Maybe he had to go to the can. And when he came back she’s gone. Maybe she changed her mind about him.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Waldo had described the girl’s clothes in a way the ordinary man wouldn’t know how to describe them. Printed bolero jacket over blue crepe silk dress. I didn’t even know what a bolero jacket was. And I might have said blue dress or even blue silk dress, but never blue crepe silk dress.

  After a while two men came with a basket. Lew Petrolle was still polishing his glass and talking to the short dark dick.

  We all went down to Headquarters.

  Lew Petrolle was all right when they checked on him. His father had a grape ranch near Anti-och in Contra Costa County. He had given Lew a thousand dollars to go into business and Lew had opened the cocktail bar, neon sign and all, on eight hundred flat.

  They let him go and told him to keep the bar closed until they were sure they didn’t want to do any more printing. He shook hands all around and grinned and said he guessed the killing would be good for business after all, because nobody believed a newspaper account of anything and people would come to him for the story and buy drinks while he was telling it.

  “There’s a guy won’t ever do any worrying,” Copernik said, when he was gone. “Over anybody else.”

  “Poor Waldo,” I said. “The prints any good?”

  “Kind of smudged,” Copernik said sourly. “But we’ll get a classification and teletype it to Washington some time tonight. If it don’t click, you’ll be in for a day on the steel picture racks downstairs.”

  I shook hands with him and his partner, whose name was Ybarra, and left. They didn’t know who Waldo was yet either. Nothing in his pockets told.

  TWO

  I got back to my street about 9 p.m. I looked up and down the block before I went into the Berglund. The cocktail bar was farther down on the other side, dark, with a nose or two against the glass, but no real crowd. People had seen the law and the morgue wagon, but they didn’t know what happened. Except the boys playing pinball games in the drugstore on the corner. They know everything, except how to hold a job.

  The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.

  I went into the lobby of the apartment house and rode the automatic elevator up to the fourth floor. I unwound the doors and stepped out and there was a tall girl standing there waiting for the car.

  She had brown wavy hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat with a velvet band and loose bow. She had wide blue eyes and eyelashes that didn’t quite reach her chin. She wore a blue dress that might have been crepe silk, simple in lines but not missing any curves. Over it she wore what might have been a print bolero jacket.

  I said: “Is that a bolero jacket?”

  She gave me a distant glance and made a motion as if to brush a cobweb out of the way.

  “Yes. Would you mind—I’m rather in a hurry. I’d like—”

  I didn’t move. I blocked her off from the elevator. We stared at each other and she flushed very slowly.

  “Better not go out on the street in those clothes,” I said.

  “Why, how dare you—”

  The elevator clanked and started down again. I didn’t know what she was going to say. Her voice lacked the edgy twang of a beer-parlor frill. It had a soft light sound, like spring rain.

  “It’s not a make,” I said. “You’re in trouble. If they come to this floor in the elevator, you have just that much time to get off the hall. First take off the hat and jacket—and snap it up!”

  She didn’t move. Her face seemed to whiten a little behind the not-too-heavy make-up.

  “Cops,” I said, “are looking for you. In those clothes. Give me the chance and I’ll tell you why.”

  She turned her head swiftly and looked back along the corridor. With her looks I didn’t blame her for trying one more bluff.

  “You’re impertinent, whoever you are. I’m Mrs. Leroy in Apartment Thirty-one. I can assure—”

  “That you’re on the wrong floor,” I said. “This is the fourth.” The elevator had stopped down below. The sound of doors being wrenched open came up the shaft.

  “Off!” I rapped. “Now!”

  She switched her hat off and slipped out of the bolero jacket, fast. I grabbed them and wadded them into a mess under my arm. I took her elbow and turned her and we were going down the hall.

  “I live in Forty-two. The front one across from yours, just a floor up. Take your choice. Once again—I’m not on the make.”

  She smoothed her hair with that quick gesture, like a bird preening itself. Ten thousand years of practice behind it.

  “Mine,” she said, and tucked her bag under her arm and strode down the hall fast. The elevator stopped at the floor below. She stopped when it stopped. She turned and faced me.

  “The stairs are back by the elevator shaft,” I said gently.

  “I don’t have an apartment,” she said.

  �
��I didn’t think you had.”

  “Are they searching for me?”

  “Yes, but they won’t start gouging the block stone by stone before tomorrow. And then only if they don’t make Waldo.”

  She stared at me. “Waldo?”

  “Oh, you don’t know Waldo,” I said.

  She shook her head slowly. The elevator started down in the shaft again. Panic flicked in her blue eyes like a ripple on water.

  “No,” she said breathlessly, “but take me out of this hall.”

  We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. San-dalwood floated on the air, very faint.

  I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn’t solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her.

  “So you’re a chess player,” she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had.

  We both stood still then and listened to the distant clang of elevator doors and then steps— going the other way.

  I grinned, but with strain, not pleasure, went out into the kitchenette and started to fumble with a couple of glasses and then realized I still had her hat and bolero jacket under my arm. I went into the dressing room behind the wall bed and stuffed them into a drawer, went back out to the kitchenette, dug out some extra-fine Scotch and made a couple of highballs.

  When I went in with the drinks she had a gun in her hand. It was a small automatic with a pearl grip. It jumped up at me and her eyes were full of horror.

  I stopped, with a glass in each hand, and said: “Maybe this hot wind has got you crazy too. I’m a private detective. I’ll prove it if you let me.”

  She nodded slightly and her face was white. I went over slowly and put a glass down beside her, and went back and set mine down and got a card out that had no bent corners. She was sitting down, smoothing one blue knee with her left hand, and holding the gun on the other. I put the card down beside her drink and sat with mine.