Collected Stories, page 51
"I met him in a speakeasy," she said with a sharp laugh. "A very handsome bootlegger, with thick curly hair and an Irish grin. So I married him. Out of boredom. As for him, the bootlegging business was even then uncertain--if there were no other attractions."
She waited for me to say there were, but not as if she cared a lot whether I came through. I just said: "You didn't see him leave on the day he disappeared?"
"No. I seldom saw him leave, or come back. It was like that." She drank some more of her drink.
"Huh," I grunted. "But, of course, you didn't quarrel." They never do.
"There are so many ways of quarreling, Mr. Carmady."
"Yeah. I like your saying that. Of course you knew about the girl."
"I'm glad I'm being properly frank to an old family detective. Yes, I knew about the girl." She curled a tendril of inky hair behind her ear.
"Did you know about her before he disappeared?" I asked politely.
"Certainly."
"How?"
"You're pretty direct, aren't you? Connections, as they say. I'm an old speak fancier. Or didn't you know that?"
"Did you know the bunch at the Dardanella?"
"I've been there." She didn't look startled, or even surprised. "In fact I practically lived there for a week. That's where I met Dudley O'Mara."
"Yeah. Your father married pretty late in life, didn't he?"
I watched color fade in her cheeks. I wanted her mad, but there was nothing doing. She smiled and the color came back and she rang a push bell on a cord down in the swan's-down cushions of the chaise longue.
"Very late," she said, "if it's any of your business."
"It's not," I said.
A coy-looking maid came in and mixed a couple of drinks at a side table. She gave one to Mrs. O'Mara, put one down beside me. She went away again, showing a nice pair of legs under a short skirt.
Mrs. O'Mara watched the door shut and then said: "The whole thing has got Father into a mood. I wish Dud would wire or write or something."
I said slowly: "He's an old, old man, crippled, half buried already. One thin thread of interest held him to life. The thread snapped and nobody gives a damn. He tries to act as if he didn't give a damn himself. I don't call that a mood. I call that a pretty swell display of intestinal fortitude."
"Gallant," she said, and her eyes were daggers. "But you haven't touched your drink."
"I have to go," I said. "Thanks all the same."
She held a slim, tinted hand out and I went over and touched it. The thunder burst suddenly behind the hills and she jumped. A gust of air shook the windows.
I went down a tiled staircase to the hallway and the butler appeared out of a shadow and opened the door for me.
I looked down a succession of terraces decorated with flower beds and imported trees. At the bottom a high metal railing with gilded spearheads and a six-foot hedge inside. A sunken driveway crawled down to the main gates and a lodge inside them.
Beyond the estate the hill sloped down to the city and the old oil wells of La Brea, now partly a park, partly a deserted stretch of fenced-in wild land. Some of the wooden derricks still stood. These had made the wealth of the Winslow family and then the family had run away from them up the hill, far enough to get away from the smell of the sumps, not too far for them to look out of the front windows and see what made them rich.
I walked down brick steps between the terraced lawns. On one of them a dark-haired, pale-faced kid of ten or eleven was throwing darts at a target hung on a tree. I went along near him.
"You young O'Mara?" I asked.
He leaned against a stone bench with four darts in his hand and looked at me with cold, slaty eyes, old eyes.
"I'm Dade Winslow Trevillyan," he said grimly.
"Oh, then Dudley O'Mara's not your dad."
"Of course not." His voice was full of scorn. "Who are you?"
"I'm a detective. I'm going to find your--I mean, Mr. O'Mara."
That didn't bring us any closer. Detectives were nothing to him. The thunder was tumbling about in the hills like a bunch of elephants playing tag. I had another idea.
"Bet you can't put four out of five into the gold at thirty feet."
He livened up sharply. "With these?"
"Uh-huh."
"How much you bet?" he snapped.
"Oh, a dollar."
He ran to the target and cleaned darts off it, came back and took a stance by the bench.
"That's not thirty feet," I said.
He gave me a sour look and went a few feet behind the bench. I grinned, then I stopped grinning.
His small hand darted so swiftly I could hardly follow it. Five darts hung in the gold center of the target in less than that made seconds. He stared at me triumphantly.
"Gosh, you're pretty good, Master Trevillyan," I grunted, and got my dollar out.
His small hand snapped at it like a trout taking the fly. He had it out of sight like a flash.
"That's nothing," he chuckled. "You ought to see me on our target range back of the garages. Want to go over there and bet some more?"
I looked back up the hill and saw part of a low white building backed up to a bank.
"Well, not today," I said. "Next time I visit here maybe. So Dud O'Mara is not your dad. If I find him anyway, will it be all right with you?"
He shrugged his thin, sharp shoulders in a maroon sweater. "Sure. But what can you do the police can't do?"
"It's a thought," I said, and left him.
I went on down the brick walk to the bottom of the lawns and along inside the hedge towards the gatehouse. I could see glimpses of the street through the hedge. When I was halfway to the lodge I saw the blue sedan outside. It was a small neat car, low-slung, very clean, lighter than a police car, but about the same size. Over beyond it I could see my roadster waiting under the pepper tree.
I stood looking at the sedan through the hedge. I could see the drift of somebody's cigarette smoke against the windshield inside the car. I turned my back to the lodge and looked up the hill. The Trevillyan kid had gone somewhere out of sight, to salt his dollar down maybe, though a dollar shouldn't have meant much to him.
I bent over and unsheathed the 7.65 Luger I was wearing that day and stuck it nose-down inside my left sock, inside my shoe. I could walk that way, if I didn't walk too fast. I went on to the gates.
They kept them locked and nobody got in without identification from the house. The lodge keeper, a big husky with a gun under his arm, came out and let me through a small postern at the side of the gates. I stood talking to him through the bars for a minute, watching the sedan.
It looked all right. There seemed to be two men in it. It was about a hundred feet along in the shadow of the high wall on the other side. It was a very narrow street, without sidewalks. I didn't have far to go to my roadster.
I walked a little stiffly across the dark pavement and got in, grabbed quickly down into a small compartment in the front part of the seat where I kept a spare gun. It was a police Colt. I slid it inside my under-arm holster and started the car.
I eased the brake off and pulled away. Suddenly the rain let go in big splashing drops and the sky was as black as Carrie Nation's bonnet. Not so black but that I saw the sedan wheel away from the curb behind me.
I started the windshield wiper and built up to forty miles an hour in a hurry. I had gone about eight blocks when they gave me the siren. That fooled me. It was a quiet street, deadly quiet. I slowed down and pulled over to the curb. The sedan slid up beside me and I was looking at the black snout of a submachine gun over the sill of the rear door.
Behind it a narrow face with reddened eyes, a fixed mouth. A voice above the sound of the rain and the windshield wiper and the noise of the two motors said: "Get in here with us. Be nice, if you know what I mean."
They were not cops. It didn't matter now. I shut off the ignition, dropped my car keys on the floor and got out on the running board. The man behind the wheel of the sedan didn't look at me. The one behind kicked a door open and slid away along the seat, holding the tommy gun nicely.
I got into the sedan.
"Okay, Louie. The frisk."
The driver came out from under his wheel and got behind me. He got the Colt from under my arm, tapped my hips and pockets, my belt line.
"Clean," he said, and got back into the front of the car.
The man with the tommy reached forward with his left hand and took my Colt from the driver, then lowered the tommy to the floor of the car and draped a brown rug over it. He leaned back in the corner again, smooth and relaxed, holding the Colt on his knee.
"Okay, Louie. Now let's ride."
5
We rode--idly, gently, the rain drumming on the roof and streaming down the windows on one side. We wound along curving hill streets, among estates that covered acres, whose houses were distant clusters of wet gables beyond blurred trees.
A tang of cigarette smoke floated under my nose and the red-eyed man said: "What did he tell you?"
"Little enough," I said. "That Mona blew town the night the papers got it. Old Winslow knew it already."
"He wouldn't have to dig very deep for that," Red-eyes said. "The buttons didn't. What else?"
"He said he'd been shot at. He wanted me to ride him out of town. At the last moment he ran off alone. I don't know why."
"Loosen up, peeper," Red-eyes said dryly. "It's your only way out."
"That's all there is," I said, and looked out of the window at the driving rain.
"You on the case for the old guy?"
"No. He's tight."
Red-eyes laughed. The gun in my shoe felt heavy and unsteady, and very far away. I said: "That might be all there is to know about O'Mara."
The man in the front seat turned his head a little and growled: "Where the hell did you say that street was?"
"Top of Beverly Glen, stupid. Mulholland Drive." "Oh, that. Jeeze, that ain't paved worth a damn." "We'll pave it with the peeper," Red-eyes said. The estates thinned out and scrub oak took possession of the hillsides.
"You ain't a bad guy," Red-eyes said. "You're just tight, like the old man. Don't you get the idea? We want to know everything he said, so we'll know whether we got to blot you or no."
"Go to hell," I said. "You wouldn't believe me anyway."
"Try us. This is just a job to us. We just do it and pass on."
"It must be nice work," I said. "While it lasts."
"You'll crack wise once too often, guy."
"I did--long ago, while you were still in Reform School. I'm still getting myself disliked."
Red-eyes laughed again. There seemed to be very little bluster about him.
"Far as we know you're clean with the law. Didn't make no cracks this morning. That right?"
"If I say yes, you can blot me right now. Okay."
"How about a grand pin money and forget the whole thing?"
"You wouldn't believe that either."
"Yeah, we would. Here's the idea. We do the job and pass on. We're an organization. But you live here, you got goodwill and a business. You'd play ball."
"Sure," I said. "I'd play ball."
"We don't," Red-eyes said softly, "never knock off a legit. Bad for the trade."
He leaned back in the corner, the gun on his right knee, and reached into an inner pocket. He spread a large tan wallet on his knee and fished two bills out of it, slid them folded along the seat. The wallet went back into his pocket.
"Yours," he said gravely. "You won't last twenty-four hours if you slip your cable."
I picked the bills up. Two five hundreds. I tucked them in my vest. "Right," I said. "I wouldn't be a legit any more then, would I?"
"Think that over, dick."
We grinned at each other, a couple of nice lads getting along in a harsh, unfriendly world. Then Red-eyes turned his head sharply.
"Okay, Louie, Forget the Mulholland stuff. Pull up."
The car was halfway up a long bleak twist of hill. The rain drove in gray curtains down the slope. There was no ceiling, no horizon. I could see a quarter of a mile and I could see nothing outside our car that lived.
The driver edged over to the side of the bank and shut his motor off. He lit a cigarette and draped an arm on the back seat.
He smiled at me. He had a nice smile--like an alligator. "We'll have a drink on it," Red-eyes said. "I wish I could make me a grand that easy. Just tyin' my nose to my chin."
"You ain't got no chin," Louie said, and went on smiling. Red-eyes put the Colt down on the seat and drew a flat half-pint out of his side pocket. It looked like good stuff, green stamp, bottled in bond. He unscrewed the top with his teeth, sniffed at the liquor and smacked his lips.
"No Crow McGee in this," he said. "This is the company spread. Tilt her."
He reached along the seat and gave me the bottle. I could have had his wrist, but there was Louie, and I was too far from my ankle.
I breathed shallowly from the top of my lungs and held the bottle near my lips, sniffed carefully. Behind the charred smell of the bourbon there was something else, very faint, a fruity odor that would have meant nothing to me in another place. Suddenly and for no reason at all I remembered something Larry Batzel had said, something like: "East of Realito, towards the mountains, near the old cyanide plant." Cyanide. That was the word.
There was a swift tightness in my temples as I put the bottle to my mouth. I could feel my skin crawling, and the air was suddenly cold on it. I held the bottle high up around the liquor level and took a long gurgling drag at it. Very hearty and relaxing. About half a teaspoonful went into my mouth and none of that stayed there.
I coughed sharply and lurched forward gagging. Red-eyes laughed.
"Don't say you're sick from just one drink, pal."
I dropped the bottle and sagged far down in the seat, gagging violently. My legs slid way to the left, the left one underneath. I sprawled down on top of them, my arms limp. I had the gun.
I shot him under my left arm, almost without looking. He never touched the Colt except to knock it off the seat. The one shot was enough. I heard him lurch. I snapped a shot upward towards where Louie would be.
Louie wasn't there. He was down behind the front seat. He was silent. The whole car, the whole landscape was silent. Even the rain seemed for a moment to be utterly silent rain.
I still didn't have time to look at Red-eyes, but he wasn't doing anything. I dropped the Luger and yanked the tommy gun out from under the rug, got my left hand on the front grip, got it set against my shoulder low down. Louie hadn't made a sound.
"Listen, Louie," I said softly, "I've got the stutter gun. How's about it?"
A shot came through the seat, a shot that Louie knew wasn't going to do any good. It starred a frame of unbreakable glass. There was more silence. Louie said thickly: "I got a pineapple here. Want it?"
"Pull the pin and hold it," I said. "It will take care of both of us."
"Hell!" Louie said violently. "Is he croaked? I ain't got no pineapple."
I looked at Red-eyes then. He looked very comfortable in the corner of the seat, leaning back. He seemed to have three eyes, one of them redder even than the other two. For under-arm shooting that was something to be almost bashful about. It was too good.
"Yeah, Louie, he's croaked," I said. "How do we get together?"
I could hear his hard breathing now, and the rain had stopped being silent. "Get out of the heap," he growled. "I'll blow."
"You get out, Louie. I'll blow."
"Jeeze, I can't walk home from here, pal."
"You won't have to, Louie. I'll send a car for you."
"Jeeze, I ain't done nothing. All I done was drive."
"Then reckless driving will be the charge, Louie. You can fix that--you and your organization. Get out before I uncork this popgun."
A door latch clicked and feet thumped on the running board, then on the roadway. I straightened up suddenly with the chopper. Louie was in the road in the rain, his hands empty and the alligator smile still on his face.
I got out past the dead man's neatly shod feet, got my Colt and the Luger off the floor, laid the heavy twelve-pound tommy gun back on the car floor. I got handcuffs off my hip, motioned to Louie. He turned around sulkily and put his hands behind him.
"You got nothing on me," he complained. "I got protection."
I clicked the cuffs on him and went over him for guns, much more carefully than he had gone over me. He had one besides the one he had left in the car.
I dragged Red-eyes out of the car and let him arrange himself on the wet roadway. He began to bleed again, but he was quite dead. Louie eyed him bitterly.
"He was a smart guy," he said. "Different. He liked tricks. Hello, smart guy."
I got my handcuff key out and unlocked one cuff, dragged it down and locked it to the dead man's lifted wrist.
Louie's eyes got round and horrified and at last his smile went away.
"Jeeze," he whined. "Holy----! Jeeze. You ain't going to leave me like this, pal?"
"Goodbye, Louie," I said. "That was a friend of mine you cut down this morning."
"Holy----!" Louie whined.
I got into the sedan and started it, drove on to a place where I could turn, drove back down the hill past him. He stood stiffly as a scorched tree, his face as white as snow, with the dead man at his feet, one linked hand reaching up to Louie's hand. There was the horror of a thousand nightmares in his eyes.
I left him there in the rain.
It was getting dark early. I left the sedan a couple of blocks from my own car and locked it up, put the keys in the oil strainer. I walked back to my roadster and drove downtown.
I called the homicide detail from a phone booth, asked for a man named Grinnell, told him quickly what had happened and where to find Louie and the sedan. I told him I thought they were the thugs that machine-gunned Larry Batzel. I didn't tell him anything about Dud O'Mara.
"Nice work," Grinnell said in a queer voice. "But you better come in fast. There's a tag out for you, account of what some milk driver phoned in an hour ago."
"I'm all in," I said. "I've got to eat. Keep me off the air and I'll come in after a while."
