While I Disappear

by Edward Wright

  “As a matter of fact, it was.”

  “Why don’t you ask me about it? I was there.”

  He stared at her.

  “Why do you look so surprised? Even though we were having problems then, he did take me out like a proper husband from time to time, you know. If he’d left me at home to go traipsing off to some glittering New Year’s Eve party at a lovely house, I’d have killed him, and he knew it. And this particular one…well, it just may have been the most glamorous thing I ever attended. Naturally I’m going to remember it.”

  Horn exhaled loudly. “Evelyn, you’re amazing. All right, tell me. What do you remember about that night?”

  “Lots of gorgeous, well-dressed people,” she said almost in a sing-song voice. “With too much money, too much bootleg hooch, too much everything. It was probably the wildest party I’ve ever attended. You know, Dex and I are not typical Hollywood people. Although we drink, we’ve never touched drugs of any kind. Well, actually I smoked a reefer once, but it only made me sleepy.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “The lights went out a couple of times,” she said. “We knew people were sneaking off and making love in some of the bedrooms and behind the curtains on the stairway. It was all very naughty. I stood around taking dainty sips from a glass of forbidden champagne, feeling like Dorothy from Kansas. Only Oz turned out to be this depraved place, a place where I enjoyed visiting but couldn’t imagine living.”

  “Do you remember Rose being there?”

  “Of course. It was her party. I hated her, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that Dex had brought me and that she was going to see us together. At the same time I admired her for her talent, and I thought she was the most beautiful creature there that night. With the possible exception of Dolores Winter.”

  “Did you know Doll then?”

  “Not really. Just from a distance. Years later, of course, she became well known. But even then she had a touch of the outrageous. You couldn’t have missed her in that crowd—”

  “This is important,” he broke in. “Were you and Dex together all night?”

  “Let me think.” She paused. “No. There were times when I was in the ladies’ room, or he in the men’s room. There were the times when the lights were out—”

  “How long would you guess?”

  “The lights? Maybe ten minutes, fifteen. I don’t know. We could have gotten separated during those times.”

  “Did you ever see him with Rose?”

  “Just once, I think. She came over to him while I was standing nearby talking to someone else. Naturally I watched them. She spoke to him with a lot of urgency. Then she left.”

  “He didn’t go with her?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She looked at him curiously, then suspiciously. Her expression hardened. “Someone told you otherwise?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Whoever did is lying. Ask yourself why they would lie about that.”

  “All right.” He leaned over and kissed her. “Thanks, Evelyn.” She got out and walked toward her front door without looking back, her slippers making soft slapping sounds on the walkway.

  Dolores Winter had told a different story, and this new version may have been nothing more than a wife’s effort to shield her husband. It was likely that someone was lying, and not just about this. In trying to reconstruct the life and death of Rose Galen, he felt like a weaver trying to repair a damaged tapestry. Of the threads offered to him, some belonged there and some did not. If he wove with the proper threads, he would know everything. If not, the finished picture would be a lie.

  * * *

  It was eleven-thirty when he pulled up in front of the cabin. Once inside, the accumulated exhaustion of the past two days caught up with him, and he was asleep almost as soon as he lay down.

  He dreamed lazily, and once he saw Cassie’s cab drift by the cabin in slow motion. She drove with one arm hanging out the window, cap pushed back, a cigarette dangling from her lips. He called out to her, a gentle gibe about girl cabbies who try too hard to look the part, knowing she’d grin in response and come back with something even better. But she didn’t hear him, and moments later the cab had drifted by. He couldn’t see who rode in the back.

  He slept until long past daybreak, had a bath and a lazy breakfast. He was in the bathroom shaving when the phone rang. It was Luther Coby.

  “Something you need to know,” the detective said in a curiously pinched voice. Horn stood by the sofa holding the phone as Coby talked. Suddenly his legs felt strangely unsupportive, so he sat down, still listening, asking a few short questions. When they had hung up, he finished shaving and got dressed, taking care to put on a clean shirt and, for a change, a tie.

  He drove downtown. On the way there, he thought of driving straight to Mad Crow’s house, or at least stopping to call him. But he decided against either move. He feared what the Indian would do.

  It was best, Horn reasoned, if he went to look at Cassie first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When Horn asked the guard on duty at the Hall of Justice for Luther Coby, the detective appeared within a minute. He had a tentative air about him, and he greeted Horn in a low voice and guarded manner that did not fit him well.

  Neither man spoke as they took an elevator down to the basement, where a sign painted on the wall said: Office of the Los Angeles County Coroner, and below that the line County Morgue. Coby led him down a brightly lit corridor to a pair of swinging, glass-paneled doors. From beyond them came a heavy medical smell that Horn guessed was embalming fluid. Just this side of the doors stood three gurneys lined up alongside the wall on the right, each bearing a form covered by a sheet.

  Without hesitating, Coby went to the nearest gurney and, standing to the side, lifted the corner of the sheet.

  For an instant, Horn felt almost sick with relief. It was not Cassie. Dear God. A mistake.

  Then the full weight of it hit him. Of course it was Cassie, only a Cassie he had never seen. In death, she had become Rose. The same nightmarish bulge of the eyes, dark congestion of blood swelling the face, grotesque twist of the mouth with just the tip of the tongue visible between the teeth. Finally, in a needless confirmation, he noted the dark ponytail and the shiny black bow tie, torn slightly askew by the violence of the act that had left her this way.

  Horn stepped back, fixing his eyes on a chipped patch of plaster on the wall. “It’s her,” he said. “But you already know that.”

  “We’ll need….” Coby began, but Horn was walking away. He headed almost blindly down the corridor, finally finding a men’s room. It was empty. He shut himself in a stall.

  Tears did not come easily to him. They had not come after Rose’s death—that was a time of shock and numbness, followed by overwhelming sadness. But Cassie’s death was an even greater waste, and it touched him in a deeper way, leaving him overwhelmed. The tears arrived uninvited, like unwelcome strangers, and afterward he leaned over a wash basin and washed his face. Finally he rejoined Coby in the corridor.

  They went upstairs to the lobby, where they stood amid a swirl of people—lawyers and defendants and uniformed police and court employees, all seeming in a hurry, their steps echoing off the marble floor. “We’ll need a next of kin,” Coby said in a voice that in another man would have sounded polite. “Mad Crow, I imagine. Calling you was a courtesy. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I appreciate it,” Horn said. “Let me call Joseph. I’d rather be the one to tell him.”

  What a lie, he thought. The last thing on this earth I want to do. But I’ve got no choice.

  “I told you a lot of things last time I saw you,” Horn said, trying to keep the tension out of his voice. “Now you can tell me. What do you know about this?”

  “Not as much as I’d like,” Coby said, pulling a match out of a vest pocket—a kitchen match this time—and sticking the wooden end between his teeth. “I just happened to see an item on th
e ticker when I came in and recognized the name. A truck driver on his way up the coast pulled onto the shoulder to take a nap about three o’clock this morning, almost ran over a parked cab. Got out to take a look and found her dead in the front seat. Coroner will probably get to the autopsy this afternoon, but it’s pretty obvious she was strangled.”

  “The way Rose died.”

  Coby nodded. His expression grew glum and resigned, as if he knew what was coming next.

  “You thought Cassie did it,” Horn said. “You told me so.”

  “I thought she might have.”

  “You’re so fucking smart. What do you think now?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Coby said, but there was little threat in his tone. “All right. Looks like I was wrong. About that, anyway.”

  “You sure as hell were. Wrong about me, too, but you haven’t gotten around to finding that out yet. What else do you know?”

  “Her dispatcher said a man called yesterday afternoon and asked for her by name, said he wanted her to pick him up at the bus station at eight o’clock for a trip up to Santa Barbara. Gave the name Carson. That’s all they said. She told them she would probably overnight up there and come back today.”

  I know all that, Horn thought. She would have liked Santa Barbara.

  “Whoever did it must have had a car waiting, or expected somebody to come along and pick him up,” Coby went on. The detective was staring at him almost warily, as if he could see the fury slowly building up inside him. “One other thing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “He didn’t get away clean. She stuck him with that knife she wore. It was still in her hand when they found her. There was blood on the blade, and a little on the seat. And it wasn’t hers.”

  “Good,” Horn said. “I hope the son of a bitch bleeds to death. No, wait. I hope he doesn’t bleed to death. And I find him.”

  “All right,” Coby said. “That’s my job. Maybe you can call her uncle now. Before you do, have you found out anything else you want to tell me?”

  Horn thought for a moment. He saw no reason to go over the slow accumulation of details over the past few days, especially since they had yet to yield a definitive answer. But there was one thing he should mention, in fairness to Dex.

  “You’ve talked to Dexter Diggs,” he said.

  “The movie director? Yeah, Dolores Winter told me about him when I asked her about Rose Galen and the old days. She told me he and Rose had a thing back then. I asked him a few questions, and I’ll have more. Why?”

  “He’s an old friend of mine,” Horn said. “I didn’t like the idea, but for a while he was at the top of my own list. Now it looks like I was wrong, because I was with him last night at the time Cassie would have been driving up the coast.”

  Coby pondered that, his face motionless, the matchstick wiggling between his lips in a little tongue-propelled dance of its own. “He still could have killed Rose Galen. Could have gone after the actress and her husband too, for that matter.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. All three of those things are connected. They have to be.”

  “All right. I’ll just throw out one thing I know about Mister Diggs. My partner Stiles has been checking in every now and then with Jay Lombard, just to see what he’s up to. He has an expensive apartment at the Biltmore. The desk clerk there is good with faces, especially movie faces. According to him, your old friend Diggs went to see Lombard there two days ago. They had dinner in the dining room along with Lombard’s big friend, and then the three of them went up to Lombard’s rooms. Diggs left about an hour later.”

  “What?”

  “You look surprised.”

  “I am surprised. I didn’t know—”

  “They even knew each other? You wouldn’t expect them to, I guess. They don’t seem to have a lot in common, except for Rose Galen.”

  And a certain party, Horn thought. On a certain New Year’s Eve.

  “I hope you have a look at Willie Apples, for one,” Horn said. “Just to see if—”

  “He’s got any wounds? You mean besides the ones we already know about. Sounds like you’re trying to tell me my job again.”

  After the detective had boarded the elevator, Horn stood there in the lobby amid the swirl of people. Dex and Lombard. What could they have to talk about? Murder? Or just covering up a murder?

  He was full of an unfocused anger that was primed to fly in all directions, at all targets. Anger at Dex first of all, for not telling him he knew Jay Lombard. Dex had been at home while Cassie was driving her killer north along the coast highway. But could he still be connected to the two murders? If he knew Lombard and secretly met with him, the answer was yes.

  Anger at Luther Coby for not caring enough. At Dolores Winter and Evelyn Diggs, for telling contradictory stories about an important event. At Emory Quinn, for retreating into an alcoholic haze when he might be useful.

  And, of course, anger at himself. For having to find out key information from a lazy, uncommitted policeman rather than on his own. For being as far away as ever from finding Rose’s killer.

  And for his own cowardice over what he now had to do.

  Horn went to a phone booth in the lobby, pulled a nickel from his pocket, and dialed the Indian’s number.

  * * *

  When they stepped off the elevator that had brought them up from the basement, Mad Crow walked blindly across the crowded lobby and pushed through the glass doors. Horn followed him. The Indian covered the sidewalk in big strides. Every now and then, someone coming his way would catch sight of his expression and quickly step aside.

  As they reached the white Cadillac in the parking lot, Mad Crow stopped. He looked around, as if suddenly without purpose. A chill wind swept over Bunker Hill and down through the marble buildings of the civic center, while layers of clouds overhead stacked up in shades ranging from pearl to slate gray. One of the clouds spat a single drop of rain onto the Caddy’s windshield, then another on the front seat.

  “You need to get the top up,” Horn said.

  “Hmm?”

  “The top. It’s raining.”

  Mad Crow raised the top, and together they secured it with the twin handles over the sun visors. Then they sat inside, while the spitting grew to a dribble, then a drizzle, then a steady rain that thudded on the canvas with a sound that was almost comforting. The promised Pacific storm had arrived.

  Mad Crow punched in the cigarette lighter. He flipped a Lucky out of his pack, offered one to Horn, then lit both with the glowing end of the lighter.

  “She never got her tooth fixed,” he said slowly.

  “I didn’t know that.” Horn started to say he was sorry to hear it, but the tooth seemed such a small thing now.

  “You know who killed her?”

  “No. I wish I did.”

  “But you’ve got ideas.”

  “Lots of ideas. Too many, really.”

  For the next twenty minutes Horn talked. Occasionally he paused, looking for a thread, or backtracked when he remembered something important. When he got to the subject of his visit with Doll Winter at the studio, he held back the extent of their sudden involvement with each other. He wasn’t sure why. He didn’t know if Mad Crow would envy him or deride him for being so easily detoured. At any rate, he had no time for self-examination. He finished up with the conversation he had had with Coby a little over an hour earlier.

  Then he stopped, listening to the rain. He watched Mad Crow’s hands tighten and loosen on the steering wheel, the knuckles whitening and then regaining color with each motion. Mad Crow’s moods, he knew, ranged from near-placidity to explosiveness. He had no doubt of the direction his friend was moving now.

  “What about Dex?” Mad Crow asked.

  “Maybe,” Horn said. “We don’t know for sure yet.”

  “There’s also this guy Quinn. Something not quite right about him. But I think I’m partial to Lombard and his cuddly friend. The wrestler. He likes strangleho
lds, doesn’t he?”

  “He sure does. Used one on you and me both.”

  “If Rose had something on Lombard about the party, he could have decided to keep her quiet. And, being well connected, maybe he also could have—”

  “Found out how busy Cassie had been lately, how much she was beginning to find out,” Horn finished for him.

  “Then it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch for him to call Yellow Cab, ask for Cassie, and send Willie Apples to keep the appointment.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Got arrangements to make,” Mad Crow mumbled, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I need to call her mother. As soon as I get up the courage.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Are you going to do anything crazy?”

  “Do you mean am I going to saddle up and go wring somebody’s neck? No. Like you said, it’s too early for that. What I think I’ll do right this minute is find myself a cozy little hideaway, preferably with good music on the jukebox, and get quietly drunk. Any objection?”

  “’Course not.”

  “Thought I might head down to that place where we had our nice chat with Vitalis. Remember? The place where we saw Rose. Just a few blocks away, down on Broadway, right?”

  “The Green Light.”

  “That’s it.”

  “I’m not sure they’d be open yet.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Listen….” Horn felt an urgent need to keep Mad Crow out of public places. Reacting to Cassie’s death, he might indeed simply get quietly drunk. On the other hand, Los Angeles was littered with bars where Mad Crow, in his rowdier days, had begun getting quietly drunk and concluded things in quite another manner.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Horn said. “Follow me on out to my place. We’ll stock up on food and refreshments along the way, build a fire when we get there, settle in. I’ll even put Rose Maddox on the phonograph. What do you say?”

  “I don’t like leaving her in that fucking basement,” Mad Crow said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “There’s nothing we can do for her now. Come on.”