Built for Trouble

by Al Fray

  “What! But this was just a local thing!”

  “Put it this way,” he said. “Suppose you were a newspaper editor and had to fill up space with a picture of the kids splashing in the creek and some tired copy about the heat and humidity and then a thing like this came in on the wire, which would you run? You’d take one peek at the top half of that two-piece bathing suit with the round, firm, fully packed look and you’d do exactly what they’ve done from Los Angeles to New York. It’s just one of those things.”

  Driving back to my place at Playa Del Rey, it really hit me. I was through as a lifeguard, and not just on L.A. beaches. This coast-to-coast publicity was going to finish Eddie Baker all the way. No public park pool, no lake resort job. Lifeguards are pretty easy to come by and no employer has to settle for anyone not in A-1 shape.

  Feeling lower than an earthworm’s bellybutton, I dialed Judy’s number, but her mother said Judy was at the beach. I put on swim trunks and went over, but it was a mistake. Ted was holding down my station and he was a little embarrassed about it. When I sat down with the gang watching volleyball someone asked me to tell them all about the Norton girl and had I seen her and was she really as good a swimmer as the papers claimed. I turned it into a feeble joke and asked where Judy was, but she’d gone down to Hermosa Beach.

  When one of the gang called me aside and said he’d heard they were looking for help in one of the meat markets over in Inglewood, I knew I’d had it. I forced a grin and thanked him and a few minutes later I trekked across the sand toward Culver Boulevard.

  What did I know about cutting meat? Not a damn thing! And what did I know about any other kind of work? All I’d ever done was hang around the beach. My hitch in the Navy? They’d sent me to duty as a swimming instructor the day I left boot camp. It hadn’t taken them long to see where Eddie Baker would fit best, and although I had worn Uncle Sam’s blue for the full four years, I wasn’t even qualified to go to sea on a freighter.

  Sure, I could punch rivets or apprentice out to plumbing or a lot of other things and start at the bottom and work like hell and learn a trade, but there was only one trade I cared anything about, and it was being jerked out from under my feet with sickening speed.

  The afternoon papers had me on the second page, a three-column spread showing the lie test. The reporters had been kind to me, but a little final, I thought. I was a pure and honest boy, but with a tendency to pass out when the going got rough. It was fortunate that Nola Norton had been there to haul me out. They concluded that she was a rare combination of beauty and aquatic skill while Eddie Baker was an unfortunate victim of some obscure but very real physical ailment.

  The way they leaned on that blackout rap Wahlstrom hung on me, you’d have thought I had bubonic plague. It was plenty clear that if Eddie Baker wanted to make his living around the beach, he’d have to do it frying hamburgers in one of the concessions along the strand.

  In the evening I drove the Ford over to Judy’s place and picked her up, but it turned out to be a hell of a date. We talked some about the rescue and how bad things looked for me and before long we got around to the future.

  “Where do we go from here?” Judy wanted to know. We were sitting in the car and looking toward a bright path of moonlight shimmering across the water.

  “Damn if I know. Any suggestions?”

  “Eddie, you don’t suppose—I mean this business about your being sick. Could that be—well, true?”

  “Not that I know of. Why?”

  “Well, I guess we’re going to have to scrap some of our plans, aren’t we? About the beach. I mean?”

  “Could be. So?”

  “It’s going to be—be difficult.”

  She was getting through to me now, but I rode it a few minutes more just to be sure. And it didn’t take long. She still liked me; it was just that she wondered if she could face being married to a drill-press operator or maybe a bus driver. Without a word I slipped the shift into drive and rolled the car over to her house. I reached across her and opened the car door.

  “You aren’t mad? It was something we couldn’t help, Eddie.”

  “Good night.”

  “Please, Eddie. I didn’t want to hurt you. It’s just that—”

  “Good night,” I said again. “Be seeing you around.”

  I pulled away from the curb. Not fast. I didn’t want to dig out like an enraged kid, but I wasn’t a damn bit happy about getting the dear John routine. I headed for the closest bar and had a couple of fast drinks, then went down to the beach, took off my shoes and socks, and walked barefooted on the wet sand. One way and another it had been a fast two days. And what was the next step?

  It was easy to brew the sour grapes, tell myself that I was better off finding out right away that Judy was just a beach-happy babe and ours wasn’t a romance meant to last. But it was bitter in my mouth just the same. And my job. Demand a hearing? Not Eddie Baker; I wasn’t going to hang around L.A. and fight to make them keep me on a job where they didn’t want me. So?

  So Tuesday morning I wrote my resignation and enclosed a note asking them to send my last paycheck to me, general delivery, San Francisco. Then I cleared my things out of the room, gave my landlady her key, drew out the nine hundred and some odd bucks I had in a Culver City bank, and got into the Ford again.

  I shot a week in San Francisco without even looking for work. A little of this and that, a lot of newspaper reading. I kept picking up L.A. papers to follow Nola Norton’s publicity, but on Wednesday they dropped her to casual mention in the movie section. On Friday she wasn’t even in that.

  On Saturday Hank Sawyer was dead.

  It wasn’t much of an item, just a five-inch, one-column piece hidden away on page four. Age forty-six, occupation lifeguard, eleven years with the city. Cause of death—bad booze, a batch of the tax-free bootleg variety available, if you know where to go, for very little money.

  According to the police, Hank had been addicted to the not uncommon practice of buying rotgut and pouring it into bottles from Johnny Walker and other name brands, for the benefit of the few visitors he had in for drinks. The investigators found his empty gallon jug, some full bottles with fancy labels, broken seals, and cheap hooch, and a half empty fifth he’d been pulling on at (he time of his death. Tests, so the item said, showed amyl alcohol, a product which is removed in proper distillation but occasionally left in in the bathtub merchandise. It sometimes causes blindness, often death, and Hank had gotten quite a jag on. The police were having trouble tracing the peddler of the illegal booze; understandably there wasn’t a bill of sale lying around.

  The paper also mentioned that five photographs were apparently missing from what the paper called “a panel of sexy pinup shots” on the wall.

  I had noticed those blank spaces earlier but it wasn’t surprising that no one could find them. The mess Hank’s place was in, they were lucky to find their way to the door. I grinned, thinking that if they looked long enough the pix would turn up. Sawyer was mighty proud of those shots and they’d be around some place. The fact that they were missing didn’t have to mean anything in particular.

  When I finished the paper I tossed it aside and spent a few minutes wondering if just possibly there could be some connection between Hank’s death and my black Sunday at the beach, but there didn’t seem to be much to go on. Certainly the police hadn’t tied them together. I gave up too, went up to the Top-o-the-Mark for an evening with legitimate whisky bottled in bond, and got thoroughly looped.

  Monday morning my closing paycheck arrived from L.A., and I was on the move again. To Reno, this time. It’s the best place this side of The Foreign Legion for a guy with troubles to forget. The first couple of days were uneventful. Then I met a chick who was taking the Reno cure for a marriage that hadn’t panned out and things picked up for both of us. We met in a bar and wound up in a motel. We’d been there three days—some cards, some drink, a lot of time in the hay, an occasional swim in the heated pool—and then she p
ulled the cork and washed the whole damn mess over me again.

  Purely coincidence, of course. We hadn’t labored each other with any long-winded discussions of our immediate past. She was Marie and I was Eddie and we were down to fundamentals. On Sunday morning we were lounging around the motel room, a total of three pieces of clothing for the two of us, and the Sunday paper scattered over the bed. I glanced through the sports section and wasn’t paying much attention to her chatter until the name Nola Norton jumped out at me.

  “How’s that again?” I asked quickly.

  “Not important, Eddie,” Marie said. She stood up and let the paper slip to the floor. “Just reading a Hollywood column and all I said was that the kind of luck Nola Norton has should happen to me. Just any old day at all, it should.”

  “Oh?”

  I said it casually, but my interest in the Los Angeles Dodgers had suddenly dwindled. I reached for the paper, turned to the movie section, and began to read the column as Marie disappeared into the bathroom.

  One of the neatest three-piece packages to be peddled in years went to Apex Pictures on Thursday. The book is Island Love. It will be scripted by Alex Coleman, but the principle prize in the bag is Nola Norton.

  An ex-lifeguard, Miss Norton is a natural for the feminine lead in Island Love, and if you have a Monday paper from two weeks ago (but who could forget) you’ll get a rough idea of how Miss Norton will look in a sarong. She’s a photographer’s dream. Joe Lamb is the agent who made the sale and reported price is an even two hundred thousand dollars.

  I tumbled off of the bed, crumpled the sheet of paper, and booted it into a corner. The dame writing that gossip column had missed one item. I’d run around with a script girl from MGM for a while before my hitch in the Navy and I knew a little about the movie industry. Enough to be damn sure that a bit player with only a couple of small credits can’t be the big attraction in a deal for two hundred grand. Three-fourths of that package was the value of the newspaper space Nola had got.

  They weren’t buying Nola Norton; they were buying all that juicy, front-page publicity she’d piled up! At least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth.

  And I helped make that publicity. Maybe by accident and maybe not, but either way I had a hand in this deal, and the quicker I got back to Los Angeles the better. I paced the floor, then stopped as Marie came out of the bathroom. She slipped into a blouse, some white sharkskin shorts, and her shoes, then picked up her purse.

  “I’m going down to the drugstore for a magazine. Bring you something, Eddie?”

  “Nothing,” I said, but as soon as she was out of the room I pulled on my clothes, went over to the office to settle the bill, brought the receipt back to the room, and threw my things into a bag. I scribbled a ridiculous note about being called away suddenly, clipped it to the receipt for the motel rent so they couldn’t collect from Marie too, and left it on the pillow. Then I tossed my bag into the Ford, swung out onto highway 395, and headed south. When the city limit sign fell behind I put a heavy foot on the gas and ran the speedometer needle up to the seventies.

  Somebody had made a big mistake, and somebody was going to have to pay.

  Because some of the pieces were falling into place now.

  Nola was a photographer’s dream, all right, and that was beginning to make sense too, now that I looked at it. A mighty cozy deal from the word go, but they should have included me in on the spoils. It was an oversight and I intended to see that the error was corrected.

  Not that this would be easy. If Hank Sawyer hadn’t gotten himself all tanked up on bathtub booze and cashed in his chips, I could shake a fist under his nose and get some facts. But even with him gone I still had a chance. There had to be a place to start, and if I could come up with anything solid I’d sure as hell lever a payoff from Miss Norton. They’d torn me apart and fed me to the press; the least they could do was pay the bill.

  Chapter 3

  IT was after seven when I hit Los Angeles. I drove out to the beach, found a small bachelor apartment in Santa Monica, paid sixty-two fifty for the first month’s rent, and hung my clothes in the closet. There was a miniature kitchen, a bath, a pull-down bed, and no lease; it just about filled the bill. The bed I could leave down; I wouldn’t be inviting any guests.

  An hour later I’d had a bite to eat and was draped over the only easy chair, my mind going over things I intended to do in the morning. A fast once-over at Hank Sawyer’s house seemed like a place to start. Nola was bound to have had some help in her little caper. She couldn’t possibly have risked it alone, and if she did have an assist, the logical man was Hank. He’d been damn fast at getting me into an ambulance and away from the beach, a rush job before I had time to get things straight and maybe demand a recount. And of course it might have been pure coincidence that Nola picked my particular lifeguard station, but it would be a whole lot more sensible to figure there was a reason. I was a new man on the force, and in a station manned by only one person. These things would help her, and she’d managed to pick the right spot. Then there was Hank himself. When did he ever neglect a chance to parade in front of a pair like Nola and her redheaded friend. Never! But on that particular day he’d merely called my attention to her, then climbed into the jeep and churned away.

  After Hank’s apartment, the next item on the agenda was a check of the newspapers. I wanted to read the accounts once more, just on the chance that something might look a little different to me now.

  Finally, I wanted to do something concrete about finding out exactly how Nola Norton managed to stay down so long and still stage a successful tussle with her would-be rescuer. An old surplus oxygen bottle from the war years, perhaps? Some other type of tank? It had to be something like that, because there was one point on which I had no doubt. Nola Norton was breathing down in that swirl of dark water. She had to be; there wasn’t any other answer. And if I didn’t turn up something in Hank’s garage I was sure going to take an early morning swim out around Playa Del Rey. Certainly Nola Norton couldn’t be seen fishing something like that out of the water—not after all that publicity. Hank might have, and then again it might even still be washing around right where Nola had used it. I was going to try to run it down one way or another.

  I lit another smoke and began to toy with the possibility that Hank Sawyer’s death wasn’t an accident at all. Part of that made sense too, but only a small part. If he was in on the staging of this opus, then Hank also might have tried to cash in and then Nola could have…

  But there the train of logic went off the rails. Sure this thing was big. It had a hell of a good cash surrender value all right, but it wasn’t motive for murder. I wasn’t about to believe that Nola had pushed Hank Sawyer into the great beyond because of what he might have known about a carefully rigged publicity stunt.

  Which brought me back to some of the things I was going to have to be able to prove before I could hope to lever any cash out of Nola. There was a lot of work ahead. I ground out the last butt, snapped off the light, and hit the sack.

  In the morning I drove to the garage apartment where Hank lived, and it took a while to locate the landlady. When I found her I held a thumb over most of my identification card for car insurance on the Ford, gave her a flash of the company’s name across the top, said I was making a final check on Sawyer’s passing, and asked her to open the shop.

  “Lord a’mighty, won’t they ever let a body rest?” she complained. She fumbled on the wall and came up with a small key tied to a bit of wood. “I went through all this with the police and now—”

  “Won’t take but a moment.” I assured her. She snapped the lock open and I lifted the door. She followed me in.

  “What was it your company is interested in?” she asked. I mumbled something vague about double indemnity clauses and began to walk through the clutter of tools and hits of materials. She whined along behind me, apologized for the fact that she hadn’t done any cleaning up, and complained that no one was likely to wa
nt to rent the place for a month or so anyway, what with poor Mr. Sawyer dying right there in the living room. I let her ramble on, my mind on other things. There were some large crates near the door; those hadn’t been here when I came to see Hank the morning after Nola pulled me out of the water. I moved toward the bench, tripped over an old bicycle tire with the valve cut out, and regained my balance. I remembered there had been a small propane torch, a hand job about a foot long hanging on the wall. Emptied, then filled with compressed air, it would have served nicely for an air supply. It was worth checking. It wasn’t on the nail now so I clawed through some of the junk scattered over the bench. When I found the torch I cracked the valve open. The sharp smell of propane gas filled the garage.

  A bad shot. Or perhaps good, because I’d eliminated one of the possibilities. This hadn’t been used by Nola for any underwater capers. I began to paw through a collection of scrap steel in a corner, but the landlady was making noises about how long I was taking. I went toward the door, glanced up toward where I’d seen Hank reach to get a house key, and then decided against trying to get it without the landlady seeing me. There wasn’t really much chance of anything interesting being upstairs anyway; the cops had gone over it, according to the papers.

  I stopped long enough for a fast look at the crates once more. They were from Sears Roebuck—a drill press and a long low job with a tag describing a Craftsman lathe. A pair of smaller cartons were nearby, the labels marking them as electric motors.

  “Just came. This morning, they did, and for the life of me I don’t know what to do with all this.”

  “You have no problem,” I said, escaping toward the door. “Just leave it; whoever gets the rest of his junk will probably claim this too.”