San Diego Lightfoot Sue

by Tom Reamy

  “You haven’t seen it? My God, I thought everyone in the world had seen it. I don’t know what possessed that mad artist to paint it. I don’t know what possessed me to accept it.

  “It’s too horrible to even think about. It’s just the same as all the gothic covers except there’s no girl in the foreground. There’s just the house. And in the house all the windows are lit. All the windows are lit except one!

  “Please don’t call me at the office again, darling, until R. T. gets over his little snit. Cocktails tomorrow? See you then, darling. Bye, bye.”

  The Detweiler Boy

  The room had been cleaned with pine oil disinfectant and smelled like a public toilet. Harry Spinner was on the floor behind the bed, scrunched down between it and the wall. The almost colorless chenille bedspread had been pulled askew exposing part of the clean, but dingy, sheet. All I could see of Harry was one leg poking over the edge of the bed. He wasn’t wearing a shoe, only a faded brown and tan argyle sock with a hole in it. The sock, long bereft of any elasticity, was crumpled around his thin rusty ankle.

  I closed the door quietly behind me and walked around the end of the bed so I could see all of him. He was huddled on his back with his elbows propped up by the wall and the bed. His throat had been cut. The blood hadn’t spread very far. Most of it had been soaked up by the threadbare carpet under the bed. I looked around the grubby little room but didn’t find anything. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of forced entry—but then, my BankAmericard hadn’t left any signs either. The window was open, letting in the muffled roar of traffic on the Boulevard. I stuck my head out and looked, but it was three stories straight down to the neon-lit marquee of the movie house.

  It had been nearly two hours since Harry called me. “Bertram, my boy, I’ve run across something very peculiar. I don’t really know what to make of it.” I had put away the report I was writing on Lucas McGowan’s hyperactive wife. (She had a definite predilection for gas-pump jockeys, car-wash boys, and parking-lot attendants. I guess it had something to do with the Age of the Automobile. ) I propped my feet on my desk and leaned back until the old swivel chair groaned a protest.

  “What did you find this time, Harry? A nest of international spies or an invasion from Mars?” I guess Harry Spinner wasn’t much use to anyone, not even himself, but I liked him. He’d helped me in a couple of cases, nosing around in places only the Harry Spinners of the world can nose around in unnoticed. I was beginning to get the idea he was trying to play Doctor Watson to my Sherlock Holmes.

  “Don’t tease me, Bertram. There’s a boy here in the hotel. I saw something I don’t think he wanted me to see. It’s extremely odd.”

  Harry was also the only person in the world, except my mother, who called me Bertram. “What did you see?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it over the phone. Can you come over?”

  Harry saw too many old private-eye movies on the late show. “It’ll be a while. I’ve got a client coming in in a few minutes to pick up the poop on his wandering wife.”

  “Bertram, you shouldn’t waste your time and talent on divorce cases.”

  “It pays the bills, Harry. Besides, there aren’t enough Maltese falcons to go around.”

  By the time I filled Lucas McGowan in on all the details (I got the impression he was less concerned with his wife’s infidelity than with her taste; that it wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been shacking up with movie stars or international playboys), collected my fee, and grabbed a Thursday special at Colonel Sanders, almost two hours had passed. Harry hadn’t answered my knock, and so I let myself in with a credit card.

  Birdie Pawlowicz was a fat, slovenly old broad somewhere between forty and two hundred. She was blind in her right eye and wore a black felt patch over it. She claimed she had lost the eye in a fight with a Creole whore over a riverboat gambler. I believed her. She ran the Brewster Hotel the way Florence Nightingale must have run that stinking army hospital in the Crimea. Her tenants were the losers habitating that rotting section of the Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. She bossed them, cursed them, loved them, and took care of them. (Once, a couple of years ago, a young black buck thought an old fat lady with one eye would make easy pickings. The cops found him three days later, two blocks away, under some rubbish in an alley where he’d hidden. He had a broken arm, two cracked ribs, a busted nose, a few missing teeth, and was stone-dead from internal hemorrhaging. )

  The Brewster ran heavily in the red, but Birdie didn’t mind. She had quite a bit of property in Westwood which ran very, very heavily in the black. She gave me an obscene leer as I approached the desk, but her good eye twinkled.

  “Hello, lover!” she brayed in a voice like a cracked boiler, “I’ve lowered my price to a quarter. Are you interested?” She saw my face and her expression shifted from lewd to wary. “What’s wrong, Bert?”

  “Harry. Spinner. You’d better get the cops, Birdie. Somebody killed him.”

  She looked at me, not saying anything, her face slowly collapsing into an infinitely weary resignation. Then she turned and telephoned the police.

  Because it was just Harry Spinner at the Brewster Hotel on the wrong end of Hollywood Boulevard, the cops took over half an hour to get there. While we waited I told Birdie everything I knew, about the phone call and what I’d found.

  “He must have been talking about the Detweiler boy,” she said, frowning. “Harry’s been kinda friendly with him, felt sorry for him, I guess.”

  “What’s his room? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “He checked out.”

  “When?”

  “Just before you came down.”

  “Damn!”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t think the Detweiler boy killed him.”

  “Why?”

  “I just don’t think he could. He’s such a gentle boy.”

  “Oh, Birdie,” I groaned, “you know there’s no such thing as a killer type. Almost anyone will kill with a good enough reason.”

  “I know,” she sighed, “but I still can’t believe it.” She tapped her scarlet fingernails on the dulled Formica desk top. “How long had Harry been dead?”

  He had phoned me about ten after five. I had found the body at seven. “A while,” I said. “The blood was mostly dry.”

  “Before six-thirty?”

  “Probably.”

  She sighed again, but this time with relief. “The Detweiler boy was down here with me until six thirty. He’d been here since about four fifteen. We were playing gin. He was having one of his spells and wanted company.”

  “What kind of spell? Tell me about him, Birdie.”

  “But he couldn’t have killed Harry,” she protested. “Okay,” I said, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. Why would anyone deliberately and brutally murder inoffensive, invisible Harry Spinner right after he told me he had discovered something “peculiar” about the Detweiler boy? Except the Detweiler boy?

  “Tell me anyway. If he and Harry were friendly, he might know something. Why do you keep calling him a boy; how old is he?”

  She nodded and leaned her bulk on the registration desk. “Early twenties, twenty-two, twenty-three, maybe. Not very tall, about five five or six. Slim, dark curly hair, a real good-looking boy. Looks like a movie star except for his back.”

  “His back?”

  “He has a hump. He’s a hunchback.”

  That stopped me for a minute, but I’m not sure why. I must’ve had a mental picture of Charles Laughton riding those bells or Igor stealing that brain from the laboratory. “He’s good-looking and he’s a hunchback?”

  “Sure.” She raised her eyebrows. The one over the patch didn’t go up as high as the other. “If you see him from the front, you can’t even tell.”

  “What’s his first name?”

  “Andrew.”

  “How long has he been living here?”

  She consulted a file card. “He checked in last Friday night. The 22nd. Six days.”


  “What’s this spell he was having?”

  “I don’t know for sure. It was the second one he’d had. He would get pale and nervous. I think he was in a lot of pain. It would get worse and worse all day; then he’d be fine, all rosy and healthy-looking.”

  “Sounds to me like he was hurtin’ for a fix.”

  “I thought so at first, but I changed my mind. I’ve seen enough of that and it wasn’t the same. Take my word. He was real bad this evening. He came down about four fifteen, like I said. He didn’t complain, but I could tell he was wantin’ company to take his mind off it. We played gin until six thirty. Then he went back upstairs. About twenty minutes later he came down with his old suitcase and checked out. He looked fine, all over his spell.”

  “Did he have a doctor?”

  “I’m pretty sure he didn’t. I asked him about it. He said there was nothing to worry about, it would pass. And it did.”

  “Did he say why he was leaving or where he was going?”

  “No, just said he was restless and wanted to be movin’ on. Sure hated to see him leave. A real nice kid.”

  When the cops finally got there, I told them all I knew—except I didn’t mention the Detweiler boy. I hung around until I found out that Harry almost certainly wasn’t killed after six thirty. They set the time somewhere between five ten, when he called me, and six. It looked like Andrew Detweiler was innocent, but what “peculiar” thing had Harry noticed about him, and why had he moved out right after Harry was killed? Birdie let me take a look at his room, but I didn’t find a thing, not even an abandoned paperclip.

  Friday morning I sat at my desk trying to put the pieces together. Trouble was, I only had two pieces and they didn’t fit. The sun was coming in off the Boulevard, shining through the window, projecting the chipping letters painted on the glass against the wall in front of me. BERT MALLORY Confidential Investigations. I got up and looked out. This section of the Boulevard wasn’t rotting yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

  There’s one sure gauge for judging a part of town: the movie theaters. It never fails. For instance, a new picture hadn’t opened in downtown L. A. in a long, long time. The action ten years ago was on the Boulevard. Now it’s in Westwood. The grand old Pantages, east of Vine and too near the freeway, used to be the site of the most glittering premieres. They even had the Oscar ceremonies there for a while. Now it shows exploitation and double-feature horror films. Only Graumann’s Chinese and the once Paramount, once Loew’s, now Downtown Cinema (or something) at the west end got good openings. The Nu-View, across the street and down, was showing an X-rated double feature. It was too depressing. So I closed the blind.

  Miss Tremaine looked up from her typing at the rattle and frowned. Her desk was out in the small reception area, but I had arranged both desks so we could see each other and talk in normal voices when the door was open. It stayed open most of the time except when I had a client who felt secretaries shouldn’t know his troubles. She had been transcribing the Lucas McGowan report for half an hour, humphing and tsk-tsking at thirty-second intervals. She was having a marvelous time. Miss Tremaine was about forty-five, looked like a constipated librarian, and was the best secretary I’d ever had. She’d been with me seven years. I’d tried a few young and sexy ones, but it hadn’t worked out. Either they wouldn’t play at all, or they wanted to play all the time. Both kinds were a pain in the ass to face first thing in the morning, every morning.

  “Miss Tremaine, will you get Gus Verdugo on the phone, please?”

  “Yes, Mr. Mallory.” She dialled the phone nimbly, sitting as if she were wearing a back brace.

  Gus Verdugo worked in R&I. I had done him a favor once, and he insisted on returning it tenfold. I gave him everything I had on Andrew Detweiler and asked him if he’d mind running it through the computer. He wouldn’t mind. He called back in fifteen minutes. The computer had never heard of Andrew Detweiler and had only seven hunchbacks, none of them fitting Detweiler’s description.

  I was sitting there, wondering how in hell I would find him, when the phone rang again. Miss Tremaine stopped typing and lifted the receiver without breaking rhythm. “Mr. Mallory’s office,” she said crisply, really letting the caller know he’d hooked onto an efficient organization. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and looked at me. “It’s for you—an obscene phone call.” She didn’t bat an eyelash or twitch a muscle.

  “Thanks,” I said and winked at her. She dropped the receiver back on the cradle from a height of three inches and went back to typing. Grinning, I picked up my phone. “Hello, Janice,” I said.

  “Just a minute till my ear stops ringing,” the husky voice tickled my ear.

  “What are you doing up this early?” I asked. Janice Fenwick was an exotic dancer at a club on the Strip nights and was working on her master’s in oceanography at UCLA in the afternoons. In the year I’d known her I’d seldom seen her stick her nose into the sunlight before eleven.

  “I had to catch you before you started following that tiresome woman with the car.”

  “I’ve finished that. She’s picked up her last parking-lot attendant—at least with this husband.” I chuckled.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I haven’t had an indecent proposition from you in days. So I thought I’d make one of my own.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We’re doing some diving off Catalina tomorrow. Want to come along?”

  “Not much we can do in a wetsuit.”

  “The wetsuit comes off about four; then we’ll have Saturday night and all of Sunday.”

  “Best indecent proposition I’ve had all week.”

  Miss Tremaine humphed. It might have been over something in the report, but I don’t think it was.

  I picked up Janice at her apartment in Westwood early Saturday morning. She was waiting for me and came striding out to the car all legs and healthy golden flesh. She was wearing white shorts, sneakers, and that damned Dallas Cowboys jersey. It was authentic. The name and number on it were quite well-known—even to non-football fans. She wouldn’t tell me how she got it, just smirked and looked smug. She tossed her suitcase in the back seat and slid up against me. She smelled like sunshine.

  We flew over and spent most of the day glubbing around in the Pacific with a bunch of kids fifteen years younger than I and five years younger than Janice. I’d been on these jaunts with Janice before and enjoyed them so much I’d bought my own wetsuit. But I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I did Saturday night and all of Sunday.

  I got back to my apartment on Beachwood fairly late Sunday night and barely had time to get something to eat at the Mexican restaurant around the corner on Melrose. They have marvelous carné asada. I live right across the street from Paramount, right across from the door people go in to see them tape The Odd Couple. Every Friday night when I see them lining up out there, I think I might go someday, but I never seem to get around to it. (You might think I’d see a few movie stars living where I do, but I haven’t. I did see Seymour occasionally when he worked at Channel 9, before he went to work for Gene Autry at Channel 5. )

  I was so pleasantly pooped I completely forgot about Andrew Detweiler. Until Monday morning when I was sitting at my desk reading the Times.

  It was a small story on page three, not very exciting or newsworthy. Last night a man named Maurice Milian, age 51, had fallen through the plate-glass doors leading onto the terrace of the high rise where he lived. He had been discovered about midnight when the people living below him had noticed dried blood on their terrace. The only thing to connect the deaths of Harry Spinner and Maurice Milian was a lot of blood flowing around. If Milian had been murdered, there might be a link, however tenuous. But Milian’s death was accidental—a dumb, stupid accident. It niggled around in my brain for an hour before I gave in. There was only one way to get it out of my head.

  “Miss Tremaine, I’ll be back in an hour or so. If any slinky blondes com
e in wanting me to find their kid sisters, tell ’em to wait.”

  She humphed again and ignored me.

  The Almsbury was half a dozen blocks away on Yucca. So I walked. It was a rectangular monolith about eight stories tall, not real new, not too old, but expensive-looking. The small terraces protruded in neat, orderly rows. The long, narrow grounds were immaculate with a lot of succulents that looked like they might have been imported from Mars. There were also the inevitable palm trees and clumps of birds of paradise. A small, discreet, polished placard dangled in a wrought-iron frame proclaiming, ever so softly, NO VACANCY.

  Two willowy young men gave me appraising glances in the carpeted lobby as they exited into the sunlight like exotic jungle birds. It’s one of those, I thought. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked over the tenant directory. All the names seemed to be male, but none of them was Andrew Detweiler.

  Maurice Milian was still listed as 407. I took the elevator to four and rang the bell of 409. The bell played a few notes of Bach, or maybe Vivaldi or Telemann. All those old Baroques sound alike to me. The vision of loveliness who opened the door was about forty, almost as slim as Twiggy, but as tall as I. He wore a flowered silk shirt open to the waist, exposing his bony hairless chest, and tight white pants that might as well have been made of Saran Wrap. He didn’t say anything, just let his eyebrows rise inquiringly as his eyes flicked down, then up.

  “Good morning,” I said and showed him my ID. He blanched. His eyes became marbles brimming with terror. He was about to panic, tensing to slam the door. I smiled my friendly, disarming smile and went on as if I hadn’t noticed. “I’m inquiring about a man named Andrew Detweiler.” The terror trickled from his eyes, and I could see his thin chest throbbing. He gave me a blank look that meant he’d never heard the name.

  “He’s about twenty-two,” I continued, “dark, curly hair, very good-looking.”