Merchants of Menace

by Joan Aiken

  Along toward morning one of them got frightened, through no fault of mine, and began to scream her little Circassian lungs out. I sat up in bed, making soothing noises, and woke up. It was nearly nine by my wristwatch. The screaming ceased and began again, spoiling the morning like a fire siren outside the window. I pulled on my trousers over the underwear I’d been sleeping in, and went outside.

  A young woman was standing on the walk outside the next room. She had a key in one hand and a handful of blood in the other. She wore a wide multi-colored skirt and a low-cut gypsy sort of blouse. The blouse was distended and her mouth was open, and she was yelling her head off. It was a fine dark head, but I hated her for spoiling my morning sleep.

  I took her by the shoulders and said, “Stop it.”

  The screaming stopped. She looked down sleepily at the blood on her hand. It was as thick as axle grease, and almost as dark in color.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I slipped and fell in it. I didn’t see it.”

  Dropping the key on the walk, she pulled her skirt to one side with her clean hand. Her legs were bare and brown. Her skirt was stained at the back with the same thick fluid.

  “Where? In this room?”

  She faltered, “Yes.”

  Doors were opening up and down the drive. Half a dozen people began to converge on us. A dark-faced man about four and a half feet high came scampering from the direction of the office, his little pointed shoes dancing in the gravel.

  “Come inside and show me,” I said to the girl.

  “I can’t. I won’t.” Her eyes were very heavy, and surrounded by the bluish pallor of shock.

  The little man slid to a stop between us, reached up and gripped the upper part of her arm. “What is the matter, Ella? Are you crazy, disturbing the guests?”

  She said, “Blood,” and leaned against me with her eyes closed.

  His sharp glance probed the situation. He turned to the other guests, who had formed a murmuring semicircle around us. “It is perfectly hokay. Do not be concerned, ladies and gentle­men. My daughter cut herself a little bit. It is perfectly all right.”

  Circling her waist with one long arm, he hustled her through the open door and slammed it behind him. I caught it on my foot and followed them in.

  The room was a duplicate of mine, including the reproduction over the unmade bed, but everything was reversed as in a mirror image. The girl took a few weak steps by herself and sat on the edge of the bed. Then she noticed the blood spots on the sheets. She stood up quickly. Her mouth opened, rimmed with white teeth.

  “Don’t do it,” I said. “We know you have a very fine pair of lungs.”

  The little man turned on me. “Who do you think you are?”

  “The name is Archer. I have the next room.”

  “Get out of this one, please.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  He lowered his greased black head as if he were going to butt me. Under his sharkskin jacket, a hunch protruded from his back like a displaced elbow. He seemed to reconsider the butting gambit, and decided in favor of diplomacy.

  “You are jumping to conclusions, mister. It is not so serious as it looks. We had a little accident here last night.”

  “Sure, your daughter cut herself. She heals remarkably fast.”

  “Nothing like that.” He fluttered one long hand. “I said to the people outside the first thing that came to my mind. Actually, it was a little scuffle. One of the guests suffered a nosebleed.”

  The girl moved like a sleepwalker to the bathroom door and switched on the light. There was a pool of blood coagulating on the black and white checkerboard linoleum, streaked where she had slipped and fallen in it.

  “Some nosebleed,” I said to the little man. “Do you run this joint?”

  “I am the proprietor of the Siesta motor hotel, yes. My name is Salanda. The gentleman is susceptible to nosebleed. He told me so himself.”

  “Where is he now?’’

  “He checked out early this morning.”

  “In good health?”

  “Certainly in good health.”

  I looked around the room. Apart from the unmade bed with the brown spots on the sheets, it contained no signs of occupancy. Someone had spilled a pint of blood and vanished.

  The little man opened the door wide and invited me with a sweep of his arm to leave. “If you will excuse me, sir, I wish to have this cleaned up as quickly as possible. Ella, will you tell Lorraine to get to work on it right away pronto? Then maybe you better lie down for a little while, eh?”

  “I’m all right now, father. Don’t worry about me.”

  When I checked out a few minutes later, she was sitting behind the desk in the front office, looking pale but composed.

  I dropped my key on the desk in front of her. “Feeling better, Ella?”

  “Oh. I didn’t recognize you with all your clothes on.”

  “That’s a good line. May I use it?”

  She lowered her eyes and blushed. “You’re making fun of me. I know I acted foolishly this morning.”

  “I’m not so sure. What do you think happened in thirteen last night?”

  “My father told you, didn’t he?”

  “He gave me a version, two of them, in fact. I doubt that they’re the final shooting script.”

  Her hand went to the central hollow in her blouse. Her arms and shoulders were slender and brown, the tips of her fin­gers carmine. “Shooting?”

  “A cinema term,” I said. “But there might have been a real shooting at that. Don’t you think so?”

  Her front teeth pinched her lower lip. She looked like some­body’s pet rabbit. I restrained an impulse to pat her sleek brown head.

  “That’s ridiculous. This is a respectable motel. Anyway, father asked me not to discuss it with anybody.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He loves this place, that’s why. He doesn’t want any scandal made out of nothing. If we lost our good reputation here, it would break my father’s heart.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”

  She stood up, smoothing her skirt. I saw that she’d changed it. “You leave him alone. He’s a dear little man. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, trying to stir up trouble where there isn’t any.”

  I backed away from her righteous indignation—female indignation is always righteous—and went out to my car. The early spring sun was dazzling. Beyond the freeway and the drifted sugary dunes, the bay was Prussian blue. The road cut inland across the base of the peninsula and returned to the sea a few miles north of the town. Here a wide blacktop parking space shelved off to the left of the highway, overlook­ ing the white beach and whiter breakers. Signs at each end of the turnout stated that this was a County Park, No Beach Fires.

  The beach and the blacktop expanse above it were deserted except for a single car, which looked very lonely. It was a long black Cadillac nosed into the cable fence at the edge of the beach. I braked and turned off the highway and got out. The man in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac didn’t turn his head as I approached him. His chin was propped on the steering wheel, and he was gazing out across the endless blue sea.

  I opened the door and looked into his face. It was paper white. The dark brown eyes were sightless. The body was un­clothed except for the thick hair matted on the chest, and a clumsy bandage tied around the waist. The bandage was com­posed of several blood-stained towels, held in place by a knotted piece of nylon fabric whose nature I didn’t recognize immediately. Examining it more closely, I saw that it was a woman’s slip. The left breast of the garment was embroidered in purple with a heart, containing the name, “Fern,” in slanting script. I wondered who Fern was.

  The man who was wearing her purple heart had dark curly hair, heavy black eyebrows, a heavy chin sprouting black beard. He was rough-looking in spite of his anemia and the lipstick smudged on his mouth.

  There was no registration on
the steering post, and nothing in the glove compartment but a half-empty box of shells for a .38 automatic. The ignition was still turned on. So were the dash and headlights, but they were dim. The gas gauge registered empty. Curlyhead must have pulled off the highway soon after he passed me, and driven all the rest of the night in one place.

  I untied the slip, which didn’t look as if it would take finger­prints, and went over it for a label. It had one: Gretchen, Palm Springs. It occurred to me that it was Saturday morning, and that I’d gone all winter without a weekend in the desert. I retied the slip the way I’d found it, and drove back to the Siesta Motel.

  Ella’s welcome was a few degrees colder than absolute zero. “Well!” She glared down her pretty rabbit nose at me. “I thought we were rid of you.”

  “So did I. But I just couldn’t tear myself away.”

  She gave me a peculiar look, neither hard nor soft. but mixed. Her hand went to her hair, then reached for a registration card. “I suppose if you want to rent a room, I can’t stop you. Only please don’t imagine you’re making an impression on me. You’re not. You leave me cold, mister.”

  “Archer,” I said. “Lew Archer. Don’t bother with the card. I came back to use your phone.”

  “Aren’t there any other phones?” She pushed the telephone across the desk. “I guess it’s all right, long as it isn’t a toll call.”

  “I’m calling the Highway Patrol. Do you know their local number?”

  “I don’t remember.” She handed me the telephone directory.

  “There’s been an accident,” I said as I dialed.

  “A highway accident? Where did it happen?”

  “Right here, sister. Right here in room thirteen.”

  But I didn’t tell that to the Highway Patrol. I told them I had found a dead man in a car on the parking lot above the county beach. The girl listened with widening eyes and nostrils. Before I finished, she rose in a flurry and left the office by the rear door.

  She came back with the proprietor. His eyes were black and bright, like nailheads in leather, and the scampering dance of his feet was almost frenzied. “What is this?”

  “I came across a dead man up the road a piece.”

  “So why do you come back here to telephone?” His head was in butting position, his hands outspread and gripping the corners of the desk. “Has it got anything to do with us?”

  “He’s wearing a couple of your towels.”

  “What?”

  “And he was bleeding heavily before he died. I think some­body shot him in the stomach. Maybe you did.”

  “You’re loco,” he said, but not very emphatically. “Crazy accu­sations like that, they will get you into trouble. What is your business?”

  “I’m a private detective.”

  “You followed him here, is that it? You were going to arrest him, so he shot himself?”

  “Wrong on both accounts,” I said. “I came here to sleep. And they don’t shoot themselves in the stomach. It’s too uncer­tain, and slow. No suicide wants to die of peritonitis.”

  “So what are you doing now, trying to make scandal for my business?”

  “If your business includes trying to cover for murder.”

  “He shot himself,” the little man insisted.

  “How do you know?”

  “Donny. I spoke to him just now.”

  “And how does Donny know?”

  “The man told him.”

  “Is Donny your night keyboy?”

  “He was. I think I will fire him, for stupidity. He didn’t even tell me about this mess. I had to find it out for myself. The hard way.”

  “Donny means well,” the girl said at his shoulder. “I’m sure he didn’t realize what happened.”

  “Who does?” I said. “I want to talk to Donny. But first let’s have a look at the register.”

  He took a pile of cards from a drawer and riffled through them. His large hands, hairy-backed, were calm and expert, like animals that lived a serene life of their own, independent of their emotional owner. They dealt me one of the cards across the desk. It was inscribed in block capitals: Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.

  I said: “There was a woman with him.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Or he was a transvestite.”

  He surveyed me blankly, thinking of something else. “The HP, did you tell them to come here? They know it happened here?”

  “Not yet. But they’ll find your towels. He used them for a band­age.”

  “I see. Yes. Of course.” He struck himself with a clenched fist on the temple. It made a noise like someone maltreating a pumpkin. “You are a private detective, you say. Now if you informed the police that you were on the trail of a fugitive , a fugitive from justice... He shot himself rather than face arrest... For five hundred dollars?’’

  “I’m not that private,” I said. “I have some public responsibility. Besides, the cops would do a little checking and catch me out.”

  “Not necessarily. He was a fugitive from justice, you know.”

  “I hear you telling me.”

  “Give me a little time, and I can even present you with his record.”

  The girl was leaning back away from her father, her eyes starred with broken illusions. “Daddy,” she said weakly.

  He didn’t hear her. All of his bright black attention was fixed on me. “Seven hundred dollars?”

  “No sale. The higher you raise it, the guiltier you look. Were you here last night?”

  “You are being absurd,” he said. “I spent the entire evening with my wife. We drove up to Los Angeles to attend the ballet.” By way of supporting evidence, he hummed a couple of bars from Tchaikovsky. “We didn’t arrive back here in Emerald Bay until nearly two o’clock.”

  “Alibis can be fixed.”

  “By criminals, yes,” he said. “I am not a criminal.”

  The girl put a hand on his shoulder. He cringed away, his face creased by monkey fury, but his face was hidden from her.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Was he murdered, do you think?”

  “How do I know?” His voice was wild and high, as if she had touched the spring of his emotion. “I wasn’t here. I only know what Donny told me.”

  The girl was examining me with narrowed eyes, as if I were a new kind of animal she had discovered and was trying to think of a use for.

  “This gentleman is a detective,” she said, “or claims to be.”

  I pulled out my photostat and slapped it down on the desk. The little man picked it up and looked from it to my face. “Will you go to work for me?”

  “Doing what, telling little white lies?”

  The girl answered for him: “See what you can find out about this—this death. On my word of honor, Father had nothing to do with it.”

  I made a snap decision, the kind you live to regret. “All right. I’ll take a fifty-dollar advance. Which is a good deal less than five hundred. My first advice to you is to tell the police everything you know. Provided that you’re innocent.”

  “You insult me,” he said.

  But he flicked a fifty-dollar bill from the cash drawer and pressed it into my hand fervently, like a love token. I had a queasy feeling that I had been conned into taking his money, not much of it, but enough. The feeling deepened when he still refused to talk. I had to use all the arts of persuasion even to get Donny’s address out of him.

  The keyboy lived in a shack on the edge of a desolate stretch of dunes. I guessed that it had once been somebody’s beach house before sand had drifted like unthawing snow in the angles of the walls and winter storms had broken the tiles and cracked the concrete foundations. Huge chunks of concrete were piled haphazardly on what had once been a terrace overlooking the sea.

  On one of the tilted slabs, Donny was stretched like a long albino lizard in the sun. The onshore wind carried the sound of my motor to his ears. He sat up blinking, recognized me when I stopped the car, and ran into the house.

  I descen
ded flagstone steps and knocked on the warped door. “Open up, Donny.”

  “Go away,” he answered huskily. His eye gleamed like a snail through a crack in the wood.

  “I’m working for Mr. Salanda. He wants us to have a talk.”

  “You can go and take a running jump at yourself, you and Mr. Salanda both.”

  “Open it or I’ll break it down.”

  I waited for a while. He shot back the bolt. The door creaked reluctantly open. He leaned against the doorpost, searching my face with his eyes, his hairless body shivering from an internal chill.

  I pushed past him, through a kitchenette that was indescribably filthy, littered with the remnants of old meals, and gaseous with their odors. He followed me silently on bare soles into a larger room whose sprung floorboards undulated under my feet. The picture window had been broken and patched with cardboard. The stone fireplace was choked with garbage. The only furniture was an army cot in one corner where Donny apparently slept.

  “Nice homey place you have here. It has that lived-in quality.”

  He seemed to take it as a compliment, and I wondered if I was dealing with a moron. “It suits me. I never was much of a one for fancy quarters. I like it here, where I can hear the ocean at night.”

  “What else do you hear at night, Donny?”

  He missed the point of the question, or pretended to. “All different things. Big trucks going past on the highway. I like to hear those night sounds. Now I guess I can’t go on living here. Mr. Salanda owns it, he lets me live here for nothing. Now he’ll be kicking me out of here, I guess.”

  “On account of what happened last night?”

  “Uh-huh.” He subsided onto the cot, his doleful head supported by his hands.

  I stood over him. “Just what did happen last night, Donny?”

  “A bad thing,” he said. “This fella checked in about ten o’clock—”

  “The man with the dark curly hair?”

  “That’s the one. He checked in about ten, and I gave him room thirteen. Around about midnight I thought I heard a gun go off from there. It took me a little while to get my nerve up, then I went back to see what was going on. This fella came out of the room, without no clothes on. Just some kind of bandage around his waist. He looked like some kind of a crazy Indian or something. He had a gun in his hand, and he was staggering, and I could see that he was bleeding some. He come right up to me and pushed the gun in my gut and told me to keep my trap shut. He said I wasn’t to tell anybody I saw him, now or later. He said if I opened my mouth about it to anybody, that he would come back and kill me. But now he’s dead, isn’t he?”