by James M. Fox
“I’m still worried,” I said, and absent-mindedly allowed my hands to ramble on the keyboard.
Any hack pianist can perform in this manner for hours on end, without thinking or listening to himself or doing anything at all except moving a few muscles long accustomed to expand and contract by routine coordination, the way a bicyclist keeps his balance and stays on the road as a matter of course. What comes out in such cases is usually a pretty colorless medley of various popular and semi-classical tunes, the whistling-butcher-boy kind that sold a million copies back in ’25, the kind that stays put in your fingers until the day the undertaker straightens them out on your chest—the early Irving Berlin, Walter Donaldson, selections from Rose Marie and Showboat, snatches from a Strauss waltz. I must have done all of those in the next fifteen minutes, probably quite competently. And all the time I was looking down into a huge mouthful of handsome, sparkling, smiling white teeth clamped firmly on a fat, expensive black cigar.
Banco! One t’ousand dollar’—
I thought how easy it would be to pin her down on that one. I could switch to the classics, serve up a piece from Madame Butterfly or La Traviata, to keep things in character. She’d be a cinch to give the show away and start talking; she’d admitted herself about being a terrible actress. Only there wasn’t anything in that for me. It never helps to put them on the spot, making them talk about the other guy. They go coy on you, or remorseful, or just plain annoyed. So he made music, too, and he was a big shot in pictures, and he’d had the inside track with her for a couple of years. That was all right. I was still young and six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, and I didn’t smoke cigars.
She was watching my hands on the keyboard, the way she’d watched them Tuesday night at the card table, smiling a little, a vague smile of polite disinterest. The queen of diamonds behind the jack, and all the kings were in their counting-house. I suppressed a shrug and dragged my attention back to the Blüthner; it was urbanely tinkling away on an old French ballad, one of the first pieces I’d learned as a boy when my mother started to teach me at the age of four—its title was something like “Pleasures of Love,” I recalled. It didn’t seem to fit the mood exactly. I shifted keys and started improvising to get back into the groove; what was needed here would be more in the nature of a dose of clever schmaltz, I thought. Then one of Jerome Kern’s best efforts came to mind, the song we’d featured in a special arrangement with an organ choir effect on our last tour in ’41, just before things went haywire. For sparking purposes, there’s no modern composer who can match his stuff in sheer lyrical ardor, both of melody and harmony. Cole Porter is too sophisticated, Berlin too simple, Youmans too frivolous, Gershwin too much inclined to compromise, too conscious of his own importance. It is only Kern who will sometimes pull all the stops and really sound like a man going down on his knees:
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song…
The words themselves are in the music—no human voice is needed to convey them. The Blüthner responded royally, giving me a warm tenor-saxophone effect against a somber bass counterpoint, fairly dripping with romantic modulation.
You are the angel glow that lights a star
The dearest things I know are what you are…
A solo clarinet, in the middle register, pleading from its melancholy heart of seasoned grenadillo wood and supported by three carefully blended trombones serenading judiciously in a mellow legato. It wasn’t particularly good, or difficult, but it was effective, the way a crowbar is effective. It changed the emotional climate in that room as thoroughly as if Frank Sinatra had made an entrance fingering his bow tie and looking soulful.
Some day my happy arms will hold you
And some day I’ll know that moment divine
When all the things you are, are mine.
The full ensemble, bass sliding down resonantly into the depths of joyful despair, and a single trumpet riding high above the rest, like a handsome young troubadour on a great white stallion. I was actually pleased with it myself and gave it everything I had to offer, winding up in a rapid-fireworks arpeggio, all the way up to high A-flat.
Silence came quivering with the echo of the Blüthner’s strings. The girl beside me was not smiling any more. She stared straight ahead through the window at the pool’s reflection of the last few shimmerings of twilight.
“Lorna—” I said. It was the first time I had ever spoken her name.
She turned; the movement brought her face into the shadows, eyes half closed, lips tarnished suddenly from carmine to a dusky violet. She did not struggle when I pulled her off the bench, and for a few brief seconds my senses registered nothing but darkness and the elusive fragrance of Cassandra and the flavor of warm spiced honey. Then my knees started shaking, and she pushed me back with unexpected strength, sharply enough to make me stagger.
“You mustn’t. Please. I mean it.”
“What’s wrong?” I demanded stupidly.
“There’s nothing wrong. I don’t want you to kiss me. Not like this.”
“Oh, you know a better way,” I said, more bewildered than sarcastic.
She confronted me squarely; she seemed perfectly composed, although I suspected she was very close to tears. “It isn’t that,” she said naïvely. “You don’t understand. If you were in love with me it would be different, maybe, but you’re not. You don’t even think you are. Do you?”
My hands were fists, my toes clawing into the rug. “Of course I am,” I said thickly.
“No. You’re just restless and nervous, after all those years in the hospital. And you want to make sure you remember what girls are like—any girl. You’re doing this to me only because I happen to be around. It isn’t fair, not even to yourself.”
“But it’s not like that at all!” I protested, sounding about as baffled as a character in a soap opera. “Maybe I’ve been impatient, but you don’t realize—”
“Please, let’s don’t wrangle.” She retrieved her arm out of my grasp and administered a sisterly pat to my shoulder. “If you’ll think about it, I’m sure you’ll agree with me. Impatience doesn’t enter into it. When people are in love, there’s never any doubt, is there?” She was already at the door, although it seemed as if she’d hardly moved, and my legs refused point-blank to help me stop her. “You do play very well,” she told me with her parting smile and walked quietly, gracefully away into the gathering darkness of the palm trees.
I sat on the bench for a while, with my back to the keyboard, not even swearing at myself. The hard-faced blonde from the Tahquitz Casino bar was scoffing in my ear. A good fast line that winds up, ‘Ah-ah, mustn’t touch—’ Something was wrong all right, some cockeyed little thing had thrown my picture of the situation altogether out of focus. I had no business at all feeling and acting like a college freshman, on the morning after his first prom. The pot had been built up too much, and these were table stakes, to me.
Of course there isn’t any question that by then I had already fallen for her; if she’d pushed me off the roof of City Hall I might have been in better shape. The trouble was I didn’t know about that, yet. It’s quite a laugh, the way a man will con himself into the firm belief he has a drop on his emotions. I told myself I’d simply rushed my fences without taking time to scout the course. Maybe I should’ve listened to the Garand woman’s warning. An unsophisticated girl who’d spent most of her life in convent school would need a different approach.
So far I had no other proof that she was Vanni’s mistress than that damned detective-agency report. But even a detective agency can make mistakes, and I remembered how they’d hedged the real issue. Subject is thought to exercise a more than average discretion in behavior. Mere weasel words they’d used to camouflage their failure to deliver concrete evidence.
It struck me then that I might easily be ab
le to do better. She’d flown out West in March last year, following Vanni in a matter of weeks after his return to Hollywood—she’d mentioned it to me herself and laughed it off, saying she had been movie-struck. There were at least three airlines which she might have patronized, but Intercontinental was the only one that got the movie trade.
I snapped a finger at myself and made a beeline for the phone extension on the bar. The clerk in the Hacienda office sounded peeved with me and made a big show out of getting my apartment number straight before he’d furnish me a city line. I didn’t even care if he was listening. I wanted information, but right away quick, and I knew just where to look for it.
Bill Jeffers was off duty, but the downtown reservations desk gave me the number of his home. I flashed Long Distance back and got him on the wire. He was at dinner, judging by the offstage clink of crockery, the fretful baby wail, and the radio droning away on a comedy program.
“Who did you say?” It took him something of an effort to recall the name, and in between he had to shout for them to close the kitchen door. “Bailey? Oh, yeah. Yeah! Well, gee, Sarge, how’re you? Long time no see. Whaddaya hear from the gang?”
“All I know is what I read in the newspapers,” I told him. “Things like you growing up into a big shot, with a job at Intercontinental and a family and everything. Pretty nice work, for the lousiest gunner in Company B.”
“Yes, sir, I’m doing swell,” he assured me. “Well, shucks, it’s been three years, how do you like that! What cooks with you, Sarge?”
“Aah, nothing much,” I said. “You know me, Bill—anything for a gag. Listen, this music store I work for, girl came in today who wants us to deliver a piano, on terms. But Retail Credit doesn’t have a rating on her, and the deal looks just a little funny. She hasn’t been here long and wouldn’t give us any reference. So then we asked around and got one anyway, only we can’t afford to check on it direct. You wanna help us out?”
He was intrigued, just as I knew he would be. “Sure be glad to, Sarge, but how?”
I told him how. That left him still intrigued, if slightly dubious. He didn’t like it, and he didn’t think it would do any good. I had to kid him along and coax him into it before he would play ball. Then he wanted to call me back, because he’d have to talk to his own office first, and of course that wouldn’t have worked out at all. So I had to improvise a yarn about the switchboard being closed, and promise to call him again in fifteen minutes. He didn’t ask me why a music store should need a switchboard.
Those fifteen minutes lasted long enough for me to wear a groove into the rug. The mountain-lion skull kept up its eerily translucent grin; it got so hot in there that I was forced to disconnect the fireplace log and find another towel to mop up the sweat. I almost talked myself into a flat walkout, simply from being tired and hungry and sick of the whole dirty business. But when time was up at last, I caught myself pouncing on that phone as if it was fixing to spit in my eye.
Bill Jeffers sounded much impressed if somewhat scandalized. “Hey, Sarge, this long shot of yours ran in the money. We have the dope on her, at Records here. I didn’t think we would, because New York was where she’d normally have booked. But as it happens our Hollywood office made the reservation and issued a passage voucher. That’s the procedure when you’re taking care of someone out of town; you mail it to them, and they exchange it for a regular ticket at the local office, which has already been advised by teletype.”
“That’s how I figured it,” I said. “You get the name?”
“We wouldn’t, not if he’d paid cash. But on the docket there’s a note that says paid for by check No. 3228 on the Sherman Oaks branch of the California Security Trust, personal account, Mr. Alfredo Vanni.”
“Good deal,” I said, riding with the punch. “Thanks very much, Bill. I guess it means we make a sale.”
“I guess you do. Say, listen, take it easy, will ya, Sarge? That sort of stuff is dynamite, if there’s a leak.”
I forced a chuckle, telling him I knew it was.
On the walk back to my bungalow the desert wind screamed at me like a siren. I had to break into a run again, and wound up on the front porch, gasping, with my lungs on fire. It brought the Jones woman’s admonishment to mind. Let up on the throttle, handsome, you’re burning out a bearing. Then it occurred to me that I was overlooking something of a bet in failing to keep up with the Joneses. Both of them were evidently pretty well informed, and their bedtime sermonizing of the night before had seemed to indicate a faintly sinister connection. Moreover, for some reason Burt had sounded as if he might actually be afraid of me. The idea struck me as a little quaint, but I saw no objection to my cashing in on it, if necessary.
Across the lawn, lights blazed through open shades in both rooms of the Jones domain. I trotted over, still in trunks and robe, and found the front door half ajar. Two buxom, trimly uniformed Negro maids were hustling all over the place behind vacuum cleaners, dust rags, and a basket of fresh linens. The apartment had already acquired the bleak, impersonal look of vacant hotel rooms everywhere.
For no good reason sudden panic squeezed my stomach into something like a solid rubber ball. I shouldered past the curiously staring maids and made the house phone on the bedroom dresser.
“What happened to the party in Fifteen?”
The surly clerk in the Hacienda office recognized my voice and contrived to raise an eyebrow at me in his. “Since that is where you’re calling from, sir, you ought to see for yourself. They checked out an hour ago.”
So Burt’s cold feet had run away with him and made him drop this badger game I had suspected him of playing on the side. Somehow it seemed to me even more vitally important now to tackle both of them, but instantly. Bill Jeffers’s tip-off should have been enough, but after all that trouble I was still dissatisfied. I wanted to make sure I got the pitch. The notion that I might not really care to think in terms of anything except Miss Lorna Ryan’s innocence never quite managed to suggest itself.
The clerk was coughing in my ears impatiently. I bared a fang at him and asked, “You have a forwarding address?”
“No, sir. But if you’re interested, it is customary for our guests to sign the register when they arrive.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Get flip with me and give me an excuse to hurry down and bust you in the snoot. It just so happens that I’m working for the big boss, fella. What address did they give you on the register?”
He gulped and read it off to me, in such a rush I had to make him tell me twice.
The bungalow next door was dark. She’d be at dinner, and the menu would have brook trout, roast capon, and crêpes Suzette. I dashed into my clothes and sprinted for the parking-lot. For me there would be hamburger, at Joe’s Drive-in on Highway Sixty, East of Riverside.
Chapter Ten: WRONG QUESTION
THE incorporated city of Formosa, California appeared on my motoring-map of Los Angeles county as a tiny speck just off the Harbor Parkway, strategically located within a dollar taxi ride from both the dockyards of San Pedro and the oil refineries of Wilmington. The name means beautiful, in Italian. I knew that much, and nothing else, about the place. It didn’t take me long to learn a little more.
They had a banner sign up with a spotlight on it where the highway entered town. The sign said Jesus Saves, summarily, as if that were all there was to it. They must have needed the reminder; all they had to offer was a mile of clapboard frame and ancient yellow brick, dumped squarely in the middle of an endless stretch of flat and barren fields. On Main Street the used-car lots and the shabby real-estate operators were crowding each other to death; at Main and First, four corners featured a flyblown little drugstore, an establishment selling Rabbits on Ice, the redwood shack of an expert in Palmistry, and a brisk new stucco box labeled Happy Valley Mortuary. This seemed to be the only intersection with a traffic light, presumably intended to protect the drunks when they came staggering out of the poolroom next to the drugstore.
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nbsp; The City Hall was something else again, a tall modern sandstone structure set apart from the common herd in a tile-paved square of its own, complete with trees, two hundred feet of lawn, a huge steel flagpole, and the only six street lamps in town. They caught a glitter of chrome and polished brass for me from two big, beautiful, streamlined engines proudly on display behind the open doors of the Fire Department wing. Across the square a nice, clean, prosperous little glass-brick edifice proclaimed itself the home of the Formosa Enquirer.
I kept on going at the legal rate of twenty-five past all this impressive array of civic progress. The sixteen hundred block on South Main turned out to be at the very edge of open country. It was occupied on the east side by a couple of Quonset huts casually deposited on the verge of a stretch of dark pastureland and casually marked Formosa Airport. On the west side rose a large, solid-looking, windowless white concrete building, brilliantly floodlighted and sporting a roof sign in flashing red-and-green neon that announced Club Gaucho. Behind it, less than half a mile away, the ocean muttered sullenly against the cliffs.
The night was still a pup, but business seemed to be pretty good; the big cement parking-lot was jammed to capacity, and cars were stacked along the shoulders of the road for several hundred yards. Most of them needed a wash job and a turn in the body-repair shop. I rolled the Ford to the end of the line and wandered back; the brightly trimmed canvas marquee split like a Y toward separate entrances. Five aces spread into a neon fan were featured over the revolving door to starboard, while the one to port displayed the female form divine arising from a cocktail glass. An elderly police sergeant in full dress blues assisted me from the foyer in pushing through the door below the poker hand. His ruddy moonface smiled attentively, listening to me. “Jones, did you say, sir? Sure, now, and ’tis a good many customers we have here by that name.”