1970 - There's a Hippie on the Highway

by James Hadley Chase

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she said, keeping her broad back turned to him. ‘You scared away four good customers. You’ve fouled up my restaurant. Don’t you understand a cop is as welcome here as a skunk?’ She swung around; her eyes flashing furiously. ‘Another visit like this, Lepski, and you and me don’t work together.’

  Lepski sipped his Scotch.

  ‘Put that big fanny of yours in a chair, Do-Do,’ he said. ‘You and me will always work together until I say so.’ He paused and stared at her with his cop eyes, then grinned. ‘Come on, you great, fat baby, sit down and don’t talk rough to me.’

  ‘One of these days I hope someone with sense will put a slug into you,’ Do-Do said, but she lowered her great body into a chair. ‘I’ll send flowers, but I won’t cry. What is it?’

  ‘I’m looking for Mai Langley,’ Lepski said.

  Do-Do sighed and shook her head with grudging admiration.

  ‘You’re a clever bastard. I can’t think why you haven’t been upgraded.’

  ‘Jealousy,’ Lepski said bitterly. ‘You mean she’s here?’

  ‘Yes, she’s here. Is she hot? I wouldn’t have taken her in if I’d known she was hot.’

  Lepski sneered.

  ‘Oh, yeah? I want to talk to her . . . she isn’t hot yet, but she could be. When did she arrive?’

  ‘A couple of days ago.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Of course. This is a respectable house!’

  ‘I knew there was something about it I didn’t like,’ Lepski said, grinning. ‘Is she in now?’

  ‘In? She hasn’t moved from her room for two days. She’s acting like a fugitive from a Hitchcock movie.’

  Lepski finished his drink and stood up.

  ‘What room?’

  Do-Do held out her big white hand. With a resigned shake of his head, Lepski produced his wallet and handed her a $10 bill.

  ‘Don’t ruin yourself,’ Do-Do said with disgust. She put the bill down into her cleavage.

  ‘You keep that there long enough and it will hatch out,’ Lepski said. ‘What room?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’ As Lepski started for the door, she went on, ‘Next time you call come around the back.’

  ‘Sure. So long, Do-Do. Watch out you don’t catch your dairy in a revolving door.’

  He made his way up the stairs to the next floor. He paused outside Room 23, put his ear against the door panel and listened. He could hear a radio playing swing softly. He put his hand on his gun butt and the other on the door handle, then walked in.

  The girl who was lying on the divan in bra and panties cowered against the wall at the sight of him, her large eyes opening wide, her mouth turning slack with terror. She was around

  twenty-five years of age, vapidly pretty, with long blonde hair and a fringe.

  Lepski could see in a moment she would begin screaming. He said sharply, ‘Police . . . relax. Take a look.’ He tossed his shield which fell by her side, then he closed the door.

  She stared at the shield, then grabbed up a wrap and covered herself. She stared at him, her eyes still dark with terror.

  Lepski pulled up a chair, sat astride it, pushed his hat to the back of his head and produced a pack of cigarettes. He fed one into his mouth, set fire to it with a kitchen match which he ignited with his thumbnail then satisfied he was giving her a movie image of a tough cop, he suddenly smiled at her.

  ‘Hi, Mai . . . what’s scaring you?’

  ‘What do you want?’ she said huskily. ‘You can’t come busting in like this . . . get out!’

  ‘I’m looking for Riccard,’ Lepski said. ‘You and he left Paradise three days ago. Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Try and do better than that, baby. Who is he running away from?’

  She flinched and shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Lepski stabbed a forefinger in her direction.

  ‘If this is all I’m going to get out of you, you and me will have to take a ride back to headquarters when you will be shut up in a smelly cell and you won’t get your fix. You wouldn’t like that, would you?’

  Her eyes burned with sudden hate.

  ‘I tell you I don’t know!’ she said shrilly. ‘You can’t take me in! You’ve got nothing on me! Get out!’

  Lepski shook his head sadly.

  ‘When I call on junkies who I think won’t cooperate, baby, I bring along some of the white stuff. I tell my Chief I found it in her purse. Invariably he believes me, invariably he puts her in the tank. That’s the way it is, baby. Sorry . . . it’s a rotten way to live, but we all have our jobs to do. Where’s Baldy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She hesitated, then seeing Lepski was losing his smile, she went on hurriedly, ‘Someone was after him. He came to me and asked me to drive him here. I did. He was trying to hire a boat, but after the first time, no one would rent him one. He was in a terrible state. He told me to stay with Do-Do and he hired a car and went back to Paradise City. He said he was going to leave his bag at the airport. He said he had friends in Paradise and he could raise some money. He left me here and I haven’t seen him since.’

  Lepski turned this over in his mind. He decided that most of it was true, but not all of it.

  ‘What do you mean . . . he was trying to hire a boat, but after the last time, no one would rent him one?’

  ‘He was here a couple of months ago. He hired a motor boat and ran into trouble. The boat was sunk.’

  Lepski squinted at her.

  ‘Sunk? How?’

  ‘Someone shot holes in it. Don’t ask me. I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. All I know is the boat was sunk.’

  ‘Who rented the boat to him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who were his friends in Paradise?’

  Mai hesitated, then said sullenly, ‘Solo Dominico and Danny O’Brien.’

  Well, that checked, Lepski thought. At least she seemed to be telling the truth.

  ‘So he left you here and took his bag back to Paradise City’s airport. Why did he do that?’

  ‘He wanted a safe place to leave the bag.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There was something in it he wanted to guard.’’

  ‘What?’

  She clenched her fists.

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you leave me alone?’

  ‘Did he say he wanted to guard something in the bag?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he didn’t say what?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t ask him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How big was the bag, Mai?’

  ‘An ordinary suitcase . . . white plastic with a red band around it . . . an ordinary suitcase.’

  Lepski stiffened. He had a feeling he was walking over someone’s grave.

  ‘Let’s have that again.’

  She stared at him. The tip of her tongue passed over her lips.

  ‘It was just an ordinary suitcase.’

  ‘Go on . . . describe it.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. It was old and shabby and white, made of plastic with a red band painted around it.’

  Lepski decided fate was taking a hand in getting him his promotion.

  It was only with difficulty that he kept his face deadpan.

  ‘Now tell me who he was afraid of.’

  She shifted further back on the divan, her eyes suddenly scared.

  ‘I told you . . . I don’t know.’

  Lepski got to his feet. He picked up his shield and put it in his wallet. He was now sure she did know who was after Baldy and this could come out only under an official interrogation. He was wasting time trying to get anything further out of her.

  ‘Okay, Mai, get your clothes on. We’re going to Headquarters.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know! You can’t take me back!’

  ‘Don’t get excited,’ Lepski said. ‘You’ve got to come, baby. You’ve already t
alked too much. So get your clothes on. Don’t mind me. I’m a married man.’

  Then two things happened almost at once. The door flung open and Mai screamed as she threw herself flat on the divan, burying her face in the cover as if trying to hide herself.

  Lepski swung around.

  A short, squat man, a white handkerchief masking his face, was already shooting. Lepski saw the gun flashes, saw Mai bounce high on the divan, saw blood spray the wall as bullets smashed into her head. Then he threw himself flat, clawing at his gun as the door slammed shut.

  He was up again, gun in hand, racing for the door as feet pounded down the stairs.

  He could hear Do-Do screaming and again the deafening bang of a gun. He reached the head of the stairs to find Do-Do’s vast body blocking the corridor. He took the flight in a leap, crashing onto the lower landing, jarring his bones, staggered, recovered himself as he heard the roar of a high powered car taking off.

  By the time he had got onto the waterfront, the large, excited milling crowd made any attempt at pursuit impossible.

  Chapter Six

  As red streaks began to lighten the night sky, Harry Mitchell came cautiously out of his cabin. He had on swim trunks and was carrying Baldy Riccard’s suitcase. The only two things he had kept from the case was the Luger automatic pistol and the box of cartridges. These he had hidden under a loose board by his bed.

  He stood in the doorway for a long moment. The time was 04.55. No lights showed. Nothing was to be heard except the rustling of palm leaves as the slight breeze stirred the hot air.

  Satisfied he had the place to himself, he walked quickly and silently down to the beach and into the sea. He turned on his back, holding the suitcase on his chest, and with powerful leg movements, headed away from the shore. When he was above deep water, he twisted over, releasing the case. Then diving, he followed its slow descent until it settled on the ocean bed. He surfaced and peered down, but the suitcase was gone: only the inky water marked the spot where it was.

  He swam slowly back to the beach, and as he began to walk across the sand to his cabin, he saw a light go up in Solo Dominico’s room.

  He reached the cabin, shut himself in and dried himself off.

  Then he put on slacks, a short-sleeved shirt and rope soled shoes.

  He had a little over twenty minutes before he had to join Solo. He sat on his bed and lit a cigarette. While he smoked, his mind went to the previous night. He felt hot blood move through his veins as he pictured again his explosive coupling with Nina. As a sexual experience, this had been unique. He thought of his dead wife, Joan, who had been afraid of sex, and with whom he finally was unable to live. The draft order, calling him to the Army, when he had almost made up his mind to leave her, had given him the welcomed excuse. So he had gone. He had realised when he got the news of her suicide that he had failed to conceal his eagerness to leave her. He hadn’t intentionally meant to hurt her, but because the two years he had lived with her had stifled him as nothing he could imagine could ever stifle a man, he had become indifferent to her feelings. If he had been more patient, he told himself, more understanding, if he had made an effort to help her, they might have ironed out their problems.

  Thinking about this and thinking honestly, he doubted it. Sex to him was the most natural thing: something to enjoy, not to brood about, not to make more important than anything else in his life. Sex was to have when the urge came and to wait for when the urge wasn’t there. Her complications and her fears had hurt him, then finally bored him.

  There was a letter waiting for him when he left the ship at Saigon. She said she was a mess. One of the things for which he had once loved her was her complete honesty. She said she should never have married, and she was sorry.

  She concluded: I guess I’m not the only woman who feels as I do, Harry. It’s not that I am incapable of loving a man - it’s the bed business I can’t go along with. I do love you . . . enough to give you your freedom. Be happy, Harry. Find some other girl who is not the mess I am. I am a mess . . . such a mess. I don’t want to go on. They say you come back again. With luck, I might have a second chance. It would be wonderful if we met again, after years and years, and I wasn’t the mess I am now, wouldn’t it? Goodbye. Joan.

  He had a telegram from his father saying she had been found in the bath with her wrists slashed and he had better apply for compassionate leave and come home. But there was a battle about to begin, and Harry didn’t apply for leave. He went into battle, depressed and shocked and guilt ridden. By the time the battle was over, after he had seen the dead and the wounded, after he had dropped out of the hot sky through a hail of machine gun bullets, after he had spent two weeks in a foxhole, hating himself for his own awful body smell and after he had killed four little yellow men, Joan’s suicide was no longer important.

  More important to him had been Nhan, the Vietnamese girl whom he had discovered on a street corner, stirring a delicious smelling soup made in a battered can that had once held a gallon of sweet-sour cucumbers. The whiff of cooking had made him stop, and he had squatted by her side, accepting the bowl of soup she had offered, and they had talked.

  Nhan spoke fair English. She wore her long, black hair in a pigtail: that told him she was a virgin: only married Vietnamese women wore their hair up.

  He had been on leave for two weeks. Every morning around 11.00, he had arrived at the street corner to drink Nhan’s soup. Then one day, he discovered he was in love with her. Later, she told him she had fallen in love with him the moment she had seen him.

  They had begun an association which was to Harry the fulfillment of a dream: love with no complications.

  He stubbed out his cigarette, wincing as he thought of that day when he had come back to Saigon after four weeks in the bullet torn paddy field and was told Nhan was dead. A bomb, viciously tossed into the market, had killed ten Vietnamese, including Nhan, plastering their bodies against a wall in a messy horror that had to be hosed away by the fire brigade.

  Harry rubbed his temples with his fingers. Now last night and the beginning of something new. This was his first encounter with a woman who felt about sex as he did: utterly uninhibited, using him to satisfy her sexual demands. Thinking about this, Harry decided it was what he needed. He was sick of complications: so sick of women who gave themselves to him only to involve him, to shackle him, to stifle him in their web of possessiveness.

  Nina, with her sensual beauty, had been a devastating surprise of the unexpected. Now, she promised to give him what he had been seeking.

  He remembered Randy’s warning: She’s for nobody, unless you want to tangle with Solo.

  Solo didn’t worry him. He was sure that if it came to a real fight, he could take Solo, but that wasn’t the problem. Solo was Nina’s father.

  He rubbed his temples, frowning. She had come to him. She had thrown herself at him. Could Solo complain? His chattel, she had said. What right had any father to regard his daughter as his chattel?

  Complications . . . problems . . . complications . . . problems.

  Impatiently, Harry got to his feet and left the cabin. He went along to the kitchen where he found Solo sipping steaming coffee, a cigar between his thick fingers as he sat at the table, the overhead light casting his enormous shadow half on the table and half on the floor.

  ‘Hi, Harry!’ Solo grinned. ‘I tried to tell you last night. I won’t need you this morning. I want you to get on with the high dive board. I talked to Hammerson. He is sending the timber this morning.’ Solo’s little eyes screwed up as he regarded Harry. ‘I came to your cabin late to tell you, but you weren’t there.’ He leaned forward, his eyes quizzing. ‘Did you find a little girl to spread on the sand?’

  His face wooden, Harry said, ‘That’s my business, Solo.’

  Solo finished his coffee at a gulp.

  ‘I don’t care if you stick it into them, Harry, but no pups. I don’t want trouble around my beautiful restaurant.’

  ‘I am an adult,’
Harry said impatiently. ‘I’m not one of your hired kids . . . relax.’

  ‘Yeah . . . I was forgetting. Excuse me.’ Solo crossed the kitchen and picked up four big wicker baskets. ‘You get on with the high dive board, hey?’ He started for the door, then paused, his head on one side as he peered at Harry. ‘What did you say you were?’

  ‘An adult . . . a grown up person.’ Harry felt a warning prickle of danger.

  ‘Is that right? A grown up person, hey?’ Solo suddenly released a harsh bellow of laughter. ‘Excuse me. That’s what we’re all supposed to be . . . hey?’

  ‘That’s the theory,’ Harry said quietly.

  ‘But some are more than others, hey?’ Solo’s little eyes turned misty. ‘I bet you think you’re a little more grown up than me, hey?’

  ‘Did I say so, Solo?’

  ‘Oh no, but then you say very little, Harry, and that makes you a very smart boy.’ Solo opened the door. ‘I’ll be back around ten.’ He went out into the half-light and Harry, standing motionless, waited for some minutes. It wasn’t until he heard the Buick start up and drive away that he relaxed. He looked at his wristwatch. The time was 05.40. He crossed to the stove, took off the coffee pot and poured himself a cup.

  Something wrong, he thought. Could Solo have become suspicious already? He sipped the hot, black coffee, uneasy and puzzled. Something wrong, he told himself again.

  ‘Harry?’

  The soft whisper made him turn sharply, slopping his coffee.

  Nina stood in the doorway. She had on a shortie, see-through nightdress, her silky hair in disorder. She looked as if she had just rolled out of bed.

  Harry felt a rush of blood through his body at the sight of her. He put down the cup and crossed towards her. She retreated, beckoning to him. Following her down the passage, he came to her room.

  He was too aware of her to register much of the room except it seemed to fit her personality. It was bright, gay, big and neat and a blaze of colours.

  He stood by the door which he had closed and watched her slip out of her nightdress. Then naked, she faced him, her arms thrown wide, her lips parted in a fixed smile of desire, her dark nipples erect and hard.