The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  The bell didn’t work, so I knocked. A woman opened the door blowing her nose. A long yellow face with weedy hair growing down the sides of it. Her body was shapeless in a flannel bathrobe long past all color and design. It was just something around her. Her toes were large and obvious in a pair of broken man’s slippers.

  I said, “Mrs. Shamey?”

  “You the—?”

  “Yeah. I just called you.”

  She gestured me in wearily. “I ain’t had time to get cleaned up yet,” she whined.

  We sat down in a couple of dingy mission rockers and looked at each other across a living room in which everything was junk except a small new radio droning away behind its dimly lighted panel.

  “All the company I got,” she said. Then she tittered. “Bert ain’t done nothing, has he? I don’t get cops calling on me much.”

  “Bert?”

  “Bert Shamey, mister. My husband.”

  She tittered again and flopped her feet up and down. In her titter was a loose alcoholic overtone. It seemed I was not to get away from it that day.

  “A joke, mister,” she said. “He’s dead. I hope to Christ there’s enough cheap blondes where he is. He never got enough of them here.”

  “I was thinking more about a redhead,” I said.

  “I guess he’d use one of those too.” Her eyes, it seemed to me, were not so loose now. “I don’t call to mind. Any special one?”

  “Yeah. A girl named Beulah. I don’t know her last name. She worked at the Club on Central. I’m trying to trace her for her folks. It’s a colored place now and, of course, the people there never heard of her.”

  “I never went there,” the woman yelled, with unexpected violence. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “An entertainer,” I said. “A singer. No chance you’d know her, eh?”

  She blew her nose again, on one of the dirtiest handkerchiefs I ever saw. “I got a cold.”

  “You know what’s good for it,” I said.

  She gave me a swift, raking glance. “I’m fresh out of that.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Gawd,” she said. “You’re no cop. No cop ever brought a drink.”

  I brought out my pint of bourbon and balanced it on my knee. It was almost full still. The clerk at the Hotel Sans Souci was no reservoir. The woman’s seaweed-colored eyes jumped at the bottle. Her tongue coiled around her lips.

  “Man, that’s liquor,” she sighed. “I don’t care who you are. Hold it careful, mister.”

  She heaved up and waddled out of the room and came back with two thick, smeared glasses.

  “No fixin’s,” she said. “Just what you brought.” She held the glasses out.

  I poured her a slug that would have made me float over a wall. A smaller one for me. She put hers down like an aspirin tablet and looked at the bottle. I poured her another. She took that over to her chair. Her eyes had turned two shades browner.

  “This stuff dies painless with me,” she said. “It never knows what hit it. What was we talkin’ about?”

  “A red-haired girl named Beulah. Used to work at the joint. Remember better now?”

  “Yeah.” She used her second drink. I went over and stood the bottle on the table beside her. She used some out of that.

  “Hold on to your chair and don’t step on no snakes,” she said. “I got me a idea.”

  She got up out of the chair, sneezed, almost lost her bathrobe, slapped it back against her stomach and stared at me coldly.

  “No peekin’,” she said, and wagged a finger at me and went out of the room again, hitting the side of the door casement on her way.

  From the back of the house presently there were various types of crashes. A chair seemed to be kicked over. A bureau drawer was pulled out too far and smashed to the floor. There was fumbling and thudding and loud language. After a while, then, there was the slow click of a lock and what seemed to be the screech of a trunk top going up. More fumbling and banging things around. A tray landed on the floor, I thought. Then a chortle of satisfaction.

  She came back into the room holding a package tied with faded pink tape. She threw it in my lap.

  “Look ’em over, Lou. Photos. Newspaper stills. Not that them tramps ever got in no newspapers except by way of the police blotter. They’re people from the joint. By God, they’re all the —— left me. Them and his old clothes.”

  She sat down and reached for the whisky again.

  I untied the tape and looked through a bunch of shiny photos of people in professional poses. Not all of them were women. The men had foxy faces and racetrack clothes or make-up. Hoofers and comics from the filling-station circuits. Not many of them ever got west of Main Street. The women had good legs and displayed them more than Will Hays would have liked. But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s coat. All but one.

  She wore a Pierrot costume, at least from the waist up. Under the high conical white hat her fluffed-out hair might have been red. Her eyes had laughter in them. I won’t say her face was unspoiled. I’m not that good at faces. But it wasn’t like the others. It hadn’t been kicked around. Somebody had been nice to that face. Perhaps just a tough mug like Steve Skalla. But he had been nice. In the laughing eyes there was still hope.

  I threw the others aside and carried this one over to the sprawled, glassy-eyed woman in the chair. I poked it under her nose.

  “This one,” I said. “Who is she? What happened to her?”

  She stared at it fuzzily, then chuckled.

  “Tha’s Steve Skalla’s girl, Lou. Heck, I forgot her name.”

  “Beulah,” I said. “Beulah’s her name.”

  She watched me under her tawny, mangled eyebrows. She wasn’t so drunk.

  “Yeah?” she said. “Yeah?”

  “Who’s Steve Skalla?” I rapped.

  “Bouncer down at the joint, Lou.” She giggled again. “He’s in the pen.”

  “Oh no, he isn’t,” I said. “He’s in town. He’s out. I know him. He just got in.”

  Her face went to pieces like a clay pigeon. Instantly I knew who had turned Skalla up to the local law. I laughed. I couldn’t miss. Because she knew. If she hadn’t known, she wouldn’t have bothered to be cagey about Beulah. She couldn’t have forgotten Beulah. Nobody could.

  Her eyes went far back into her head. We stared into each other’s faces. Then her hand snatched at the photo.

  I stepped back and tucked it away in an inside pocket.

  “Have another drink,” I said. I handed her the bottle.

  She took it, lingered over it, gurgled it slowly down her throat, staring at the faded carpet.

  “Yeah,” she said whisperingly. “I turned him in but he never knew. Money in the bank he was. Money in the bank.”

  “Give me the girl,” I said. “And Skalla knows nothing from me.”

  “She’s here,” the woman said. “She’s in radio. I heard her once on KLBL. She’s changed her name, though. I dunno.”

  I had another hunch. “You do know,” I said. “You’re bleeding her still. Shamey left you nothing. What do you live on? You’re bleeding her because she pulled herself up in the world, from people like you and Skalla. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Money in the bank,” she croaked. “Hundred a month. Reg’lar as rent. Yeah.”

  The bottle was on the floor again. Suddenly, without being touched, it fell over on its side. Whisky gurgled out. She didn’t move to get it.

  “Where is she?” I pounded on. “What’s her name?”

  “I dunno, Lou. Part of the deal. Get the money in a cashier’s check. I dunno. Honest.”

  “The hell you don’t!” I snarled. “Skalla—”

  She came to her feet in a surge and screamed at me, “Get out, you! Get out before I call a cop! Get out, you ——!”

  “Okay, okay.” I put a hand out soothingly. “Take it easy. I won’t tell Skalla. Just take it easy.”

  She sat down again slowly and retrieved the almost empty bottl
e. After all I didn’t have to have a scene now. I could find out other ways.

  She didn’t even look towards me as I went out. I went out into the crisp fall sunlight and got into my car. I was a nice boy, trying to get along. Yes, I was a swell guy. I liked knowing myself. I was the kind of guy who chiseled a sodden old wreck out of her life secrets to win a ten-dollar bet.

  I drove down to the neighborhood drugstore and shut myself in its phone booth to call Hiney.

  “Listen,” I told him, “the widow of the man that ran Shamey’s when Skalla worked there is still alive. Skalla might call to see her, if he thinks he dares.”

  I gave him the address. He said sourly, “We almost got him. A prowl car was talkin’ to a Seventh Street conductor at the end of the line. He mentioned a guy that size and with them clothes. He got off at Third and Alexandria, the conductor says. What he’ll do is break into some big house where the folks is away. So we got him bottled.”

  I told him that was fine.

  KLBL was on the western fringe of that part of the city that melts into Beverly Hills. It was housed in a flat stucco building, quite unpretentious, and there was a service station in the form of a Dutch windmill on the corner of the lot. The call letters of the station revolved in neon letters on the sails of the windmill.

  I went into a ground-floor reception room, one side of which was glass and showed an empty broadcasting studio with a stage and ranged chairs for an audience. A few people sat around the reception room trying to look magnetic, and the blond receptionist was spearing chocolates out of a large box with nails that were almost royal purple in color.

  I waited half an hour and then got to see a Mr. Dave Marineau, studio manager. The station manager and the day-program manager were both too busy to see me. Marineau had a small sound-proofed office behind the organ. It was papered with signed photographs.

  Marineau was a handsome tall man, somewhat in the Levantine style, with red lips a little too full, a tiny silky mustache, large limpid brown eyes, shiny black hair that might or might not have been marceled, and long, pale, nicotined fingers.

  He read my card while I tried to find my Pierrot girl on his wall and didn’t.

  “A private detective, eh? What can we do for you?”

  I took my Pierrot out and placed it down on his beautiful brown blotter. It was fun watching him stare at it. All sorts of minute things happened to his face, none of which he wanted known. The sum total of them was that he knew the face and that it meant something to him. He looked up at me with a bargaining expression.

  “Not very recent,” he said. “But nice. I don’t know whether we could use it or not. Legs, aren’t they?”

  “It’s at least eight years old,” I said. “What would you use it for?”

  “Publicity, of course. We get one in the radio column about every second month. We’re a small station still.”

  “Why?”

  “You mean you don’t know who it is?”

  “I know who she was,” I said.

  “Vivian Baring, of course, Star of our Jumbo Candy Bar program. Don’t you know it? A triweekly serial, half an hour.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said. “A radio serial is my idea of the square root of nothing.”

  He leaned back and lit a cigarette, although one was burning on the edge of his glass-lined tray.

  “All right,” he said sarcastically. “Stop being fulsome and get to business. What is it you want?”

  “I’d like her address.”

  “I can’t give you that, of course. And you won’t find it in any phone book or directory. I’m sorry.” He started to gather papers together and then saw the second cigarette and that made him feel like a sap. So he leaned back again.

  “I’m in a spot,” I said. “I have to find the girl. Quickly. And I don’t want to look like a blackmailer.”

  He licked his very full and very red lips. Somehow I got the idea he was pleased at something.

  He said softly, “You mean you know something that might hurt Miss Baring—and incidentally the program?”

  “You can always replace a star in radio, can’t you?”

  He licked his lips some more. Then his mouth tried to get tough. “I seem to smell something nasty,” he said.

  “It’s your mustache burning,” I said.

  It wasn’t the best gag in the world, but it broke the ice. He laughed. Then he did wingovers with his hands. He leaned forward and got as confidential as a tipster.

  “We’re going at this wrong,” he said. “Obviously. You’re probably on the level—you look it—so let me make my play.” He grabbed a leatherbound pad and scribbled on it, tore the leaf off and passed it across.

  I read: 1737 North Flores Avenue.

  “That’s her address,” he said. “I won’t give the phone number without her O.K. Now treat me like a gentleman. That is, if it concerns the station.”

  I tucked his paper into my pocket and thought it over. He had suckered me neatly, put me on my few remaining shreds of decency. I made my mistake.

  “How’s the program going?”

  “We’re promised network audition. It’s simple, everyday stuff called ‘A Street in Our Town,’ but it’s done beautifully. It’ll wow the country some day. And soon.” He wiped his hand across his fine white brow. “Incidentally, Miss Baring writes the scripts herself.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Well, here’s your dirt. She had a boyfriend in the big house. That is he used to be. She got to know him in a Central Avenue joint where she worked once. He’s out and he’s looking for her and he’s killed a man. Now wait a minute—”

  He hadn’t turned as white as a sheet, because he didn’t have the right skin. But he looked bad.

  “Now wait a minute,” I said. “It’s nothing against the girl and you know it. She’s okay. You can see that in her face. It might take a little counterpublicity, if it all came out. But that’s nothing. Look how they gild some of those tramps in Hollywood.”

  “It costs money,” he said. “We’re a poor studio. And the network audition would be off.” There was something faintly dishonest about his manner that puzzled me.

  “Nuts,” I said, leaning forward and pounding the desk. “The real thing is to protect her. This tough guy—Steve Skalla is his name—is in love with her. He kills people with his bare hands. He won’t hurt her, but if she has a boyfriend or a husband—”

  “She’s not married,” Marineau put in quickly, watching the rise and fall of my pounding hand.

  “He might wring his neck for him. That would put it a little too close to her. Skalla doesn’t know where she is. He’s on the dodge, so it’s harder for him to find out. The cops are your best bet, if you have enough drag to keep them from feeding it to the papers.”

  “Nix,” he said. “Nix on the cops. You want the job, don’t you?”

  “When do you need her here again?”

  “Tomorrow night. She’s not on tonight.”

  “I’ll hide her for you until then,” I said. “If you want me to. That’s as far as I’d go alone.”

  He grabbed my card again, read it, dropped it into a drawer.

  “Get out there and dig her out,” he snapped. “If she’s not home, stick till she is. I’ll get a conference upstairs and then we’ll see. Hurry it!”

  I stood up. “Want a retainer?” he snapped.

  “That can wait.”

  He nodded, made some more wingovers with his hands and reached for his phone.

  That number on Flores would be up near Sunset Towers, across town from where I was. Traffic was pretty thick, but I hadn’t gone more than twelve blocks before I was aware that a blue coupé which had left the studio parking lot behind me was still behind me.

  I jockeyed around in a believable manner, enough to feel sure it was following me. There was one man in it. Not Skalla. The head was a foot too low over the steering wheel.

  I jockeyed more and faster and lost it. I didn’t know who it was, and at the moment, I hadn
’t time to bother figuring it out.

  I reached the Flores Avenue place and tucked my roadster into the curb.

  Bronze gates opened into a nice bungalow court, and two rows of bungalows with steep roofs of molded shingles gave an effect a little like the thatched cottages in old English sporting prints. A very little.

  The grass was almost too well kept. There was a wide walk and an oblong pool framed in colored tiles and stone benches along its sides. A nice place. The late sun made interesting shadows over its lawns, and except for the motor horns, the distant hum of traffic up on Sunset Boulevard wasn’t unlike the drone of bees.

  My number was the last bungalow on the left. Nobody answered the bell, which was set in the middle of the door so that you would wonder how the juice got to where it had to go. That was cute too. I rang time after time, then I started back to the stone benches by the pool to sit down and wait.

  A woman passed me walking fast, not in a hurry, but like a woman who always walks fast. She was a thin, sharp brunette in burnt-orange tweeds and a black hat that looked like a pageboy’s hat. It looked like the devil with the burnt-orange tweeds. She had a nose that would be in things and tight lips and she swung a key container.

  She went up to my door, unlocked it, went in. She didn’t look like Beulah.

  I went back and pushed the bell again. The door opened at once. The dark, sharp-faced woman gave me an up-and-down look and said: “Well?”

  “Miss Baring? Miss Vivian Baring?”

  “Who?” It was like a stab.

  “Miss Vivian Baring—of KLBL,” I said. “I was told—”

  She flushed tightly and her lips almost bit her teeth. “If this is a gag, I don’t care for it,” she said. She started the door towards my nose.

  I said hurriedly, “Mr. Marineau sent me.”

  That stopped the door closing. It opened again, very wide. The woman’s mouth was as thin as a cigarette paper. Thinner.

  “I,” she said very distinctly, “happen to be Mr. Marineau’s wife. This happens to be Mr. Marineau’s residence. I wasn’t aware that this—this—”

  “Miss Vivian Baring,” I said. But it wasn’t uncertainty about the name that had stopped her. It was plain, cold fury.

  “—that this Miss Baring,” she went on, exactly as though I had not said a word, “had moved in here. Mr. Marineau must be feeling very amusing today.”