The Hot Beat, page 4
But McKay’s drinking became worse. He was expending more and more of himself, first on the bandstand, then in bed. He needed the drinks to steady him. But his temper was not steady. He quarreled with customers, quarreled with his band, quarreled with Terry. After a while the Lafayette replaced him. He got a booking at a less flossy place. But now he was on the skids. He no longer talked about marriage. Some nights he just never came home. When he did, he was drunk.
Terry dismally watched her love affair turning to ashes in front of her eyes. For months she had given everything to McKay, neglected the furthering of her own career, spent every moment with him—and now it was all coming to nothing. The way down was fast.
One night he came home completely drunk and wanted to make love. He groped clumsily for her, but he smelled so badly of gin and sweat that he repulsed her. She was wearing nothing but a housecoat, and he pulled her to him, his hand diving past the lapel to grip her breasts, and he said thickly, “C’mon, baby, let’s make it. Get down on the bed and cooperate.”
She pushed him away, but he came back again, seizing the housecoat and ripping it off her, and she huddled with her arms across her breasts, ashamed of her nakedness in front of him for the first time, because tonight he was a stranger to her. He forced her down on the bed and she locked her ankles together, determined not to give in to him, hating him. He seized her thighs, bruising the tender flesh, but she resisted him, and in his drunkenness he could not separate her legs. Then he began to twist her feet, and the pain was unbearable. She drew one foot back and kicked him in the chest, pushing him away. He sat down hard on the floor, looking surprised. Then he rose, coming menacingly toward her. He slapped her face and gripped her breasts tightly and when she rolled into a defensive ball he slapped her side, her neck, her back. Suddenly the liquor became too much for him and he slipped to the floor, weeping and mouthing obscenities and threatening to rape her when he recovered control of his body.
That night she broke up with him. She threw him out into the street, and he lay there sobbing till morning, and then he went away.
The golden hours were over. Terry had his photo and her memories, and nothing else.
Regretfully she tried to pick up the pieces of her life as it had been before the McKay episode. She had given him her virginity, and when she stared at herself in the mirror she wondered if she looked any different now, looser, coarser.
She heard that McKay had been pitched out by the members of his band, that all his money was gone, that he was living like a vagabond. She felt pity for him, and above all a feeling of sadness for what might have been. But she never made any attempt to get in touch with him. That would reopen old wounds, she thought.
But at night as she fell asleep, she thought of him, and remembered his gentle hands tenderly caressing her.…
6
The blond, white-faced young man named Bob McKay lay sprawled out on the cell cot with his arms outstretched above his head and one foot dangling over the side so that his heel rested on the floor. His lips were parted, permitting the breath to come through his teeth with a low, hissing sound. His eyelids were not quite closed, and through the narrow slits the bloodshot corneas showed, giving him a ghastly, deathlike appearance.
At first he did not feel the Mexican’s hand on his arm, but gradually the pressure of the man’s grip and the force with which he shook him began to penetrate through his deadened consciousness.
“Huh? What?” McKay mumbled fuzzily.
The Mex said, “Hey, you don’t want no coffee? Come on, hombre, you look like you goin’ to die. Por dios, drink some coffee, yes?”
McKay looked up wearily from the cot at the brown face of the Mexican who stood over him with the tin cup in his hand. He turned his head slowly, surveying the cell and learning from slow impressions where he was. The other Mexican sitting on the cot near the opposite wall laughed loudly as he watched the growing bewilderment in McKay’s eyes.
“Boy,” he said happily. “You musta’ had some load on, man.”
“Yeah,” said the Mexican holding the cup. “He had a load on, all right. I guess he don’t feel so good now.” The Mex grinned down at McKay. “Here. Ya better drink this coffee.”
McKay raised himself on one elbow. His head throbbed wildly and shooting pains went through his chest. His nose and mouth felt numb.
“Here,” the Mex said gently.
He put the cup in McKay’s hand. The hand shook a little. McKay drank the hot, black liquid. It stung his mouth and throat, but it quickly made his numbed senses return to life.
“Thanks,” he said gratefully after he had taken several swallows.
The Mexican shrugged. “Por nada. It’s all right. Maybe you can do the same for me someday, huh?” He laughed loudly at his own feeble joke.
Drinking slowly but with growing appetite, McKay finished the rest of the coffee while the two Mexicans looked on in amusement. When he had finished, he turned and sat with both feet on the floor, cradling his aching head in his hands.
“You okay now?”
“Better,” McKay said thickly. He looked up. “This the downtown can?”
“Yeah,” the man who had given him the coffee said, grinning toothily. “It’s the finest in the city. How you like her, huh?”
McKay smiled faintly and nodded his head in understanding. He heard a heavy footfall outside and looked up through the bars. A big, jowly man in a spotted, untidy blue uniform looked through at them.
“Let’s go, you birds,” he said in a flat, tired-sounding voice.
The Mexicans rose. McKay remained where he was for a moment, but one of the Mexicans nudged his arm and whispered, “You’d better get up when he says he wants you to get up. Otherwise you get hurt.”
The cop put a key in the lock and opened the door, and McKay rose to his feet. The cop stood back to let the three prisoners pass in front of him.
McKay’s knees felt weak and unsteady. He stiffened his muscles to keep them under control and followed the two Mexicans. They came into a room where a number of other men were waiting. McKay quickly lost interest in his surroundings and gave himself over to foggy memories and a brooding analysis of his predicament. He did not know how long he stood there and he was only dimly aware of the occasional movement and activity in the room. A few things came back to his mind in the semblance of reality. For the rest he continued in a vain probing of his stupefied consciousness. Then a hand was on his arm and he walked where he was led. There were others behind him as he went through a door and walked into a circle of brilliant light that blinded him and stabbed at his eyes as if he were looking straight into a summer midday sun. He could see nothing because of the frightening glare and he closed his eyes to shut out the pain. After a while, by narrowing his eyes to slits, he could make out the platform on which he and the others stood and a group of men who stood in the darkness below like dim shadows.
Among these men whom he could not see, stood Detective Sergeant Brady and Police Captain Hendricks and between them stood a little, middle-aged Filipino, quaking with fear. The small, brown man looked up at the men who were coming out on the platform to stand squinting in the glare of the lights, and it frightened him to know that he was expected to point out one of these men as a murderer. Captain Hendricks’ words had a literal meaning for him and Captain Hendricks had said, “If you saw the guy, Ramirez, you ought to recognize him. If you don’t, I know you’re stalling because I’m not so sure you didn’t kill the broad yourself. If you’re stalling I’ll make it hot for you. We’re running every bum and rummy who comes in through the lineup. Sooner or later you’re gonna see him. When you do, tell us, do you understand?”
Not that Ramirez had entirely understood the Captain, but when he had told his friend, Santillo, what Hendricks had said, Santillo had shaken his head gravely. Santillo had been to school and understood many things that he, Ramirez, did not know about. “That is bad, Jose,” Santillo had said. “That is what I thought they would do all the time. It is a wonder to me that they did not take it for granted that you did it. After all the girl was murdered on the lot near your house and those police are always anxious to make trouble for us.”
“But how can they?” Ramirez had cried in distress. “If I had done it would I have gone to them with the story? Has anybody ever known me to go around with white girls? I am not a young man. It would be unbelievable.”
“That will not trouble them,” Santillo had said. “They will say you came to them to turn suspicion from yourself. They will say anything if they feel they cannot find the guilty one and must pin it on you to save face. You must do as he told you, Jose. You did have a glimpse of the man who strangled the girl on the lot. Of course you did not have a good look at his face but you know that he was a white man. When you see him in that lineup there may be something in his movements, in the way he carries himself, that will tell you he is the one.”
“But,” Ramirez had remonstrated, “if I do that, I might point out an innocent man.”
“You might,” Santillo had said with a sad smile. “But if he is innocent, perhaps he will be able to prove it. Certainly he will stand a better chance than you if they decide that you are guilty.”
Although Ramirez could not feel as cynical as his friend, he had feared for himself the more from the moment of that crystal clear presentation of his position. Now as he stood between Brady and the Captain, he was obsessed with a desire to remove forever any doubts of his innocence. Trembling, he scrutinized the faces of the men on the platform as they came on, stood still in the light and went out.
7
So far he had seen no one who even vaguely reminded him of the man whom he had seen from the window of his shack in the grayness before dawn, no one whose movement might be lithe and quick as were the movements of the man he had seen. He believed now with the Captain and Santillo that if he saw the man he would know him and in a quavering voice he answered the questions with which Hendricks reminded him from time to time of the task he had to perform.
“See him up there?” Hendricks would ask as a group of prisoners would come out and stand before them on the platform.
“No, no,” Ramirez would answer, pitiably afraid that he was offending the Captain by taking so long to find the wanted man.
And now a new batch of men had come out. Two of them were Mexicans. Ramirez paid them scant attention, then looked at the third who was tall and lean and even lithe and this time it was Brady who bent toward him and muttered in his rasping voice, “Is that the guy, Ramirez?”
Then Ramirez’ heart leaped as he transplanted the man at whom he was looking to the lot near his house and saw him drag the body of the girl from the front of the car and drop her on the ground. Ramirez began to feel dizzy as he saw the quick movement with which the man bent once over the body, then leaped back into the car to drive off. And then he was sure, for even the face, which until now he had been unable to remember, appeared before him and it was the face of the man on the platform. If those shoulders moved, if that back bent, Ramirez knew it would be with the sureness that he had seen in the early dawn of that terrifying morning.
“Is that him?” he heard Brady say again.
“Yes,” Ramirez said. His voice sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else. It was higher pitched than usual and he could not control its shakiness. “Yes,” he repeated, wondering whether he had been heard at all the first time and then to make it clear beyond doubt, he said, “Yes, that is the man.”
He saw Brady look at the Captain and then he knew that the Captain’s puffy eyes were studying him.
“O.K.,” Brady said. “Come on along now, Ramirez.”
Walking between Hendricks and Brady, Ramirez left the dark room behind him. They took him to another room, a small room with a hard, wooden bench and they told him to sit down and wait. He looked after them as they went out. When they were gone, doubts began to torture him. He could no longer remember what the man whom he had just pointed out as a murderer looked like. Why had he suddenly been so sure in that dark room?
Ramirez leaned forward on the bench, dropping his arms limply between his knees. His head began to ache violently. He propped his elbows on his knees and clutched his temples with his veined, calloused hands. What would they expect of him now, he wondered. With a tremendous effort he controlled himself sufficiently to look up at the door which the two policemen had closed behind them. Where had they gone? A picture of what they might be doing flashed through his mind, something Santillo had told him they did behind closed doors. Would they lead him, too, through that door? He stared at it, fascinated. Then he began to shiver as if he had a chill.
On the other side of the door which had become a symbol of horror to the Filipino, there was a short corridor. Then there was another door which led to a room, furnished with a wide wooden table and a number of unpainted chairs.
McKay sat in the center of this room and in a semi-circle before him stood Captain Hendricks, Brady, a plainclothesman named Harrison and a uniformed cop. McKay looked from one to the next trying hard from the expressions on their faces to learn what was about to happen to him and why. His head hurt from the previous night’s drinking and aware though he was that something serious was happening, a lethargy possessed him which made it impossible for him to feel fear or any other emotion. As a result, insolence rather than the curiosity he felt was what the policeman saw in his face.
Hendricks drew down the corners of his mouth, furrowing his forehead into a somber frown. He leaned slightly forward and peered at the other man coldly.
“You’re in a spot here, McKay,” he said meaningfully. “I suppose you know that.”
McKay shrugged. “It looks like a spot, all right,” McKay said slowly.
Hendricks thought he detected a contemptuous sneer in the reply. His face darkened even further. His eyes were cold with hatred.
“That’s right, McKay,” he said. “And it’s a damned tough one, too. The kind of spot that leads you into the gas chamber. Now suppose you tell us all about it, eh? That’ll make it a lot easier for all of us. A lot easier for you too, McKay.”
The insolent look in McKay’s bloodshot eyes seemed to deepen as his gaze roved from Hendricks to Brady and slowly back to Hendricks. Arms folded, Brady watched him impassively.
“All about what?” McKay asked.
Hendricks grunted disdainfully. Cracking his knuckles with elaborate precision, he said, “All right, McKay. You can stall if that’s what you like. But just remember what I told you. You’re only making it tougher on yourself. Did you know Doris Blair?” he asked, snapping the name out with sudden sharpness.
Understanding came to McKay with a shock. And then he was overwhelmed by a tremendous feeling that they could not possibly believe what they were leading up to. It was all some kind of joke, he thought. He laughed as if to share their good humor.
“Sure, I knew the poor kid,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“Just can the act, buster!” Hendricks barked angrily. “Poor kid, my left elbow! And you didn’t only know her, you batted around with her a lot—didn’t you, McKay? Answer me.”
“That’s a lie,” McKay said with deliberation.
Hendricks’ reaction was instantaneous. He slapped McKay’s cheek with his broad palm. McKay’s head snapped back sharply. His ears rang from the impact of the stinging blow.
Hendricks said levelly, “That’s just to show you that I’m particular about who calls me a liar, McKay. I don’t take crap from scum like you.”
McKay’s eyes filled with hatred.
“You’re nuts if you think you can mix me up in this,” he cried. “You’re just looking for somebody you can work off your stinking sadism on, that’s all. Whose idea was it to pick me up, anyway?”
Hendricks seemed about to slap him again. McKay tensed for the blow. Brady fidgeted as though slightly bored with the whole interrogation.
“It isn’t an idea, McKay,” Brady said tightly. “I was in Carrol’s last night and I heard you shooting your fool mouth off in there. There are a couple of things you’d better be able to explain.”
McKay moistened his lips nervously. Hendricks’ bluster had failed to frighten him, but there was something in the quiet, matter-of-fact manner in which Brady spoke that gave him a tight, knotty feeling in the pit of the stomach, something that told him he had cause for fear. Quiet menace was always more terrifying than noisy blustering. Memories of things he had heard, read, flashed through McKay’s mind.
“Well?” Hendricks said. “You going to cooperate with us, McKay?”
“If you want me to explain anything,” McKay said, “I’m going to want a lawyer, first.”
Hendricks snorted. “There. And a minute ago he was playing dumb.”
“You’ll get your lawyer,” Brady said. “And you’re going to need one bad, damn bad. But first you answer a few questions.”
“Why should I?”
“Don’t make me have to answer that, McKay,” Brady said. “Because if I have to explain reasons to you, I’m going to do it in a way you won’t like. Now just get that goddam chip off your shoulder and give me some straight answers. You knew Doris, you and she were pretty pally, weren’t you?”
“What of it?”
“Why’d you put her away? Were you just so tired of everything else that this was the only thing you could get a kick out of?”
“I tell you you’re crazy, all of you,” McKay yelled, his voice going shrill with anger and cracking at the top. “But listen, both of you. You can’t bulldoze me with a lot of ridiculous suggestions. Maybe I don’t have a fresh shave, but I’m not one of your wineheads that you can railroad right into the gas chamber without the guy even knowing what’s happening to him. I know I didn’t lay a finger on that girl. And you don’t have a reason in the world for suspecting me.”
“You talk like you won’t need a lawyer. But you still don’t talk good enough,” Hendricks said grimly. “What’s more, we got plenty of grounds.”
