by Day Keene
He said, “Of course.”
We were making good time now. Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas grew out of the fog in a blur of haloed lights, then dropped behind us.
I sat straighter in the seat. I doubted if Sheriff Cooper or Captain Marks would reason I’d double back. They’d be more apt to figure that I’d either gone on up the coast or holed up in L.A. But the chances were they’d set up a roadblock in Palm Grove just in case I should head for Mexico.
“Cigarette?” my host asked.
I took one, careful to use my left hand, having a little trouble getting the cigarette out of the pack.
He was sympathetic. “What’s the matter, mate? You bust your other hand in that fight back there?”
“It bothers me,” I admitted. I used the lighter on the dash. “Let me out just this side of those spotlighted palm trees, please.”
He stopped the car a hundred yards above the Purple Parrot. “What’s the idea? I thought you were going to Dago.”
“Did I say so?”
He thought back. “No.”
I opened the door of the car. “I merely asked how far you were going. Anyway, thanks. Thanks a lot for the ride.”
He sat looking at the hand he couldn’t see. “You’re welcome, I’m certain,” he said. Then he fed gas to the car too fast, forgetting to shift into low, bucking it down 101, probably thanking his lucky stars, thinking, That guy has a gun in his pocket.
I watched the taillights of his car climb the hill beyond the Purple Parrot. Then I limped down the shoulder of the road.
Cooper hadn’t bothered to leave a stake-out. There were no cars in front of the bar. Even Wally’s beaten-up Ford was gone. The ceiling and the side lights in the bar were out but the night light was on.
I looked in through one of the front windows. Meek was alone in the bar. He was sitting on a stool looking into the bottom of an empty glass as if he wished he could fill it again but didn’t dare.
As I watched him, the phone on the end of the bar rang. Meek climbed down off the stool and answered it. He listened intently a moment. Then, after speaking a few monosyllabic sentences into the mouthpiece, he cradled the phone and stood patting his face and neck with a soiled handkerchief. I was glad to know he had one. It would be something to stuff down his throat after he and I had finished our talk.
I didn’t have much time. If there was a roadblock in Palm Grove, the lad who had picked me up would tell the officers about his seaman hitchhiker who had kept his hand in his coat pocket. The officers at the block would radio Cooper on their two-way. After that it would be a matter of minutes until the highway was filled with sirens.
I gripped the sill with my fingers, debating talking to Mamie first. She should be sober by now. What Mamie knew, she would tell me. I’d have to beat whatever I got out of Meek.
Meek took the decision out of my hands by scuttling out the side door of the bar and crunching across the gravel to the office cottage.
I walked around the back of the bar to come at the cottage from its blind side. The grass on both sides of the path was wet with fog and dew. Here in the pocket at the foot of the hill the night air was hot and humid. The smell of the flowers was almost overpowering. The crickets and the cicadas were a full-scale orchestra.
I cut through between Cottages 4 and 5. The couple in Number 4 was still awake, still arguing in the dark. Her voice was shrilly insistent. His was heavy with fatigue.
As I passed their open window she said, “I still think we ought to have told the officers what we saw when we drove in last night.”
He said something about being on a vacation.
She wanted to know what difference that made.
“All right. All right,” he conceded. “We’ll tell them in the morning. Now for God’s sake shut up and let me get some sleep.”
I started on, then turned back on impulse and tried the screen door of their porch. The screen was unhooked. I opened it and crossed the porch and rapped softly on the closed door of the cottage proper.
“Who’s there?” the man demanded.
I lied, “An officer. Please don’t be alarmed and please don’t light your light. But this is the second time you folks have been overheard discussing something you’re concealing from the law. What is it?”
I hoped I sounded like an officer.
The woman said, “See? I told you.”
He padded across the asphalt tile and opened the door. “O.K. Maybe we should have told you.”
“Told us what?”
He padded back to the bed for his cigarettes.
She said, “What we saw when we drove in last night.”
He came back to the door lighting a cigarette.
I said curtly, “Your names, please?”
She joined him in the doorway, struggling into a dressing gown. “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lewis of Carbondale, Illinois. We’re on our vacation. And we came all the way from Salt Lake City yesterday.”
He blew smoke past my face. “Seven hundred and thirty-eight miles. That’s the most we ever made in one day.”
I couldn’t see either of their faces. She sounded as if her lips were pursed. “And when Joe and I drove in last night, a little after midnight, we saw something I think you officers ought to know. You are investigating a murder?”
I said, “We are. What did you see?”
Mrs. Lewis said, “A naked woman.”
“Where? In what cottage?”
“In Cottage Number One.”
“What was she doing?”
“She was lying on the bed.”
“This naked woman was alive?”
Lewis laughed. “Very much so. It was rare, believe me, Officer. We wondered what kind of joint we’d stumbled into.”
I swallowed my heart. “Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me everything you saw.”
Mrs. Lewis unpursed her lips. “Well, it was midnight. Perhaps a few minutes after midnight when we saw the vacancy sign. Like Joe told you, we’d driven seven hundred and thirty-eight miles and we were beat. So we parked in front of the office unit next door and rang the bell. We rang it several times. Then, when no one came to the door, we walked across the court toward the only other light we could see, hoping to find the manager, too tired to push on. It was then we saw the girl.”
She pursed her lips again. “The blinds were closed but up an inch from the sill, enough so we could see the girl distinctly. We could also see the man.”
“Describe him.”
She said, “I’m afraid I can’t. His back was to us.”
“Was he a big man or a little man?”
“A big man. Rather fat.”
“How was he dressed?”
“He wasn’t. He was as naked as the girl.”
Lewis laughed again. “I tell you, it was rich, Officer. The girl don’t want to, see. She’s lying on the bed crying like her heart is broken. But he keeps pestering her, feeling this and that. And, well, finally she just lets him have it. Like it don’t mean a damn to her one way or another. And all the time he’s doing it, she goes right on crying.”
Mrs. Lewis said primly, “There’s no need for you to be so graphic, Joe.”
“What happened then?” I asked. “I mean, what did you folks do?”
Lewis said, “Well, by that time Eve was tugging at my shirttail. She said, “This is no place for us. So we walked back to the car and I was about to drive on when a little guy in blue dungarees came out of the bar and said he was the manager and did we want a cottage. And so help me, by then I was so beat I didn’t care what kind of a joint it was.”
“You told him what you’d seen?”
Mrs. Lewis said, “Certainly not. I don’t know about California, but back in Carbondale we don’t discuss such things. We merely told him we wanted to rent a unit. And we did. Although if Joe hadn’t been so tired, I certainly would have insisted on driving on until we found another court with a vacancy.”
Lewis added, “Shortly after that, may
be ten or fifteen minutes later, the cottage in which we’d seen the girl went dark and someone came out and drove away. We couldn’t tell if it was the girl or the man. Then today we heard that the girl who owns these cottages was killed last night and that she lived in Cottage Number One. So Eve thought we ought to tell you fellows what we’d seen.”
I said, “I’m glad you did.”
He asked, “Who killed her? Her husband?”
I said, “That’s the supposition. Was the girl a blonde or a brunette?”
“She was a blonde.”
“Natural?”
“Decidedly.”
“Pretty?”
“Very.”
“And it was what time when you saw her?”
“After midnight. Say between fifteen after and half past.” Lewis shifted his cigarette to his other band. “Does the information help you any?”
“Yes,” I said. “It helps a lot. Thanks for telling me.”
Mrs. Lewis was tardily suspicious. “What’s your name, Officer?”
I walked off the porch without answering her and waded the wet grass to the office cottage. The door was shut. The Venetian blinds were closed. Mamie was crying. I stood straddling a wedge of light leaking out from under a blind, listening to Meek lay down the law.
He said, “I haven’t told you anything. I’m not going to. What you don’t know you can’t tell. If the deal levels off the way I hope it will, it means a nice piece of change for me. And God knows I can use it. You think I like to mess around dirt?”
Mamie sobbed, “But if Swede—”
“Swede, Swede, Swede,” Meek mimicked her. “That’s all you’ve been able to think about since the big squarehead first showed up.” Liquid gurgled as someone drank from a bottle.
Mamie cried even harder.
Meek sounded as if he was pacing the floor. “You’d have wised off again this afternoon and maybe queered the whole thing if I hadn’t passed you out. Next time I’ll give you so many pills you won’t come out of it.”
“I don’t care what you do,” Mamie sobbed.
I walked around to the front of the cottage. The screen on the porch was unhooked. The inside door was locked. I turned the knob and put my shoulder to it. The door opened with a rasp of metal being torn out of wood.
Mamie was sitting on the rumpled bed. Her hair was disordered. Her make-up was streaked with tears. Her eyes were puffed with seconal. When she saw me she sat straight on the bed and her breasts thrust upward against the thin silk of her only garment. The back of one small white hand brushed hair and tears from her eyes. Her lips parted. She screamed:
“Swede!”
Meek dropped the pint of whisky he was holding and tried to climb the wall. His scrawny chest labored. His eyes darted from side to side like a trapped rat trying to find a taut hawser he could use to desert a sinking ship.
Mamie screamed again. “Swede!”
Between the noise I’d made breaking down the door and Mamie’s screams, lights were springing on in the dark units around the court. Lewis and his wife walked out on their porch. I heard him say, “What the hell?”
Meek was still trying to climb the wall. “Get out of here,” he squealed. “Get out of here, you dirty killer.”
I took another step toward him. He stopped trying to climb the wall and flicked open a four-inch switch blade, holding it with his knuckles up and the handle pressed against his belly.
I could hear voices on the drive now. In the distance a siren began to undulate. There’d been a roadblock in Palm Grove. The former merchant marine who had picked me up had talked.
Meek’s lips were flecked with fear froth. “Don’t you dare touch me. If you do I’ll tell Sheriff Cooper you killed Jerry Wolkowysk and drove his car over that cliff.”
He jabbed at me with the knife. I slapped him away from the wall and up against the dresser. “I’m not interested in Wolkowysk. I know where he is. Where’s Sophia?”
Mamie got to her feet.
“What did you say?” Meek gasped.
I repeated. “I asked you where Sophia was. You know. Sophia Palanka. My wife.”
Chapter Twenty
The Mission Hotel was well named. Most of the couples who checked in were looking for something. It was on the fringe of the Mexican district, not far from San Diego’s version of Skid Row.
I parked the Chrysler with Illinois plates in front of a bar across the street and looked at the hotel for a moment. The sidewalk in front of it was crowded with sailors and their girls and sailors who wished they had girls. As I watched, an alert shore patrol walked by.
I glanced in the rear-vision mirror of my borrowed car. Outside of the blood on my right coat sleeve and the general pummeling I’d taken, I didn’t look too bad. I looked like the first mate of a freighter who had been on a hell of a binge.
The bar in front of which I was parked was crowded with sailors. I walked in and bought a drink and a package of cigarettes with the tuck-away twenty I always keep folded in my watch pocket.
The barman was used to sailors. “Been in a fight, mate?” he asked.
I nodded over the rum.
The barman looked at my sleeve. “Her husband came home too soon, huh? Looks like he used a knife on you.”
I finished the drink and set the glass back on the wood. “Yeah. But you ought to see him.”
He laughed as he mopped at a puddle of spilled beer. I tore the package of cigarettes open with my teeth and lighted one.
The San Diego police were on the job. As I walked from the bar a radio prowl car parked in front of the green Chrysler, at an angle, effectively blocking it. A young officer got out of the police car with a clip board in one hand.
He looked at the plates on the Chrysler, then grinned at his partner. “Talk about service. This is the one that just came on the air. The green Chrysler with Illinois plates that guy Nelson borrowed at the Purple Parrot. Call in and tell Paddy we’ve found it.”
The usual curious crowd began to form. I walked across the street and into the lobby of the Mission Hotel.
A young desk clerk was checking the entries at Santa Anita. He put his Racing Form aside. “Yes, sir?”
I laid down one of the fives the barman had given me in change. “I’d like a room. With or without bath. It doesn’t matter. But preferably on the fifth floor.”
The clerk pushed a registration card at me. “Yes, sir.” He laid a key on the counter. “That will be three-fifty.” He gave me my change. “Had a little trouble, eh, mate?”
“Yeah. A little,” I admitted. I kept my right hand in my pocket. “Sign the card for me, will you, fellow? Swen Nelson. Simmons Line. San Pedro.”
“Sure thing, mate.” He wrote the information on the card. “But that arm looks bad to me. Maybe you ought to see a doctor about it.”
I said, “I intend to. Later.”
I picked up my change and the key. In the elevator I looked at the key for the first time. The tag on it read 519. I asked the pretty Mexican girl running the cage if Room 519 was in the front or the back of the hotel.
She stopped the cage on the fifth floor and graciously pointed down the hall. “Five-nineteen is at the end of the hall, señor. In the back. You cannot possibly miss it.”
I thanked her and walked down the hall in the direction she’d pointed until she’d closed the cage door. Then I stopped and looked at the numbers. The room I wanted was in the front of the hotel.
I leaned against the wall and lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one that was burning my fingers. Most of the transoms along the hall were lighted and open. The voices I could hear were young. Listening to them gave me a funny feeling. Behind the closed doors couples were loving, quarreling, making up, worrying about money, his job, her health, happy to be together. Living.
The hall smelled like all cheap hotel hallways. I tried to take my right hand out of my pocket. I couldn’t. Meek had done a good job with his knife.
I pushed my back away from th
e wall and walked down the faded runner toward the window I could see in the front of the hotel. The window was open. There was a red light over it. I looked out and down. The fire-escape platform was square with a hole in it next to the wall and a rusted iron ladder running down through the hole to the next square landing.
For a man with two hands it was an easy swing from the fire-escape platform to the sill of the front window with the drawn shade. With one hand I didn’t dare chance it. It was five floors down to the sidewalk.
There was a light in 501, but the shade was drawn and the transom was closed. I could hear a splashing of water back of the shade.
I looked across the street at the green Chrysler I’d borrowed. Without the owner’s permission. From Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lewis of Carbondale, Illinois. There was an even bigger crowd around it now. The two prowl-car cops, augmented by two plain-clothes men, were fanning through the crowd asking questions. When he next put his feet under the poker table in the back room of the Elks Club in Carbondale, Lewis would have quite a story to toss in the pot with his ante.
I heard a faint snick behind me. As if someone had closed a door, trying to be quiet about it. I swung around and sat on the sill, breathing hard. All the closed doors in the hall looked the same.
I stood up and rapped on the door of Room 501.
The faint sound of running water stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then Wally asked, “Who is it?”
I tossed my cigarette out the open window. “It isn’t Western Union.”
A key turned in the lock. The door opened. Wally thrust a gun into my stomach. “Come in.”
I walked into the room and closed the door.
Wally leaned even harder on the gun. “How did you get away from the cops? How did you know we were here?”
I said, “Meek told me. Under protest. In fact, we had quite a go-around about it, during which Mamie took a knife thrust that was intended for me. I just left her in the emergency room at the hospital with two nurses and an intern. She may live. She may not.”
I looked past Wally at Corliss. She was standing in front of the washbasin in the bathroom holding a glass of brown dye over a mop of wet brown hair. Her mouth was open but no sound was coming out. All she had on was a sheer slip liberally splattered with dye. She was even prettier as a brunette than she had been blonde.