The Three Roads Page 11

  “Look here,” the other man was saying. “We’re about the same size. You should be able to wear one of my suits. I’ll take your uniform to the tailor around the corner. You can get it back today.”

  “No, I can wear the uniform.”

  “Don’t be crazy. It’s a mess. Here, try this.” He tossed Bret a loose camel’s-hair sports coat. “I got a wardrobe I hate to see going to waste. These slacks ought to fit you. They’re a little too big for me. Go on, try ’em on.”

  Bret put them on out of sheer curiosity. He hadn’t had civilian clothes on for years, and he’d never at any time worn a camel’s-hair coat with a pair of light-tan gabardine slacks. “I feel like a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” he said.

  “Say, that’s pretty good.” Larry laughed again. Bret didn’t like his laugh any better than he liked his walk. There was something phony about all this pleasantness, and he didn’t like to be put under an obligation by it. Still, it couldn’t be helped unless he wanted to waste a lot more time.

  Larry handed him a knitted brown tie and watched him tie it. “You look sharp.” He went on talking as he dressed. “Pretty smooth coat, eh? It set me back eighty of them. Don’t you go and get yourself into another barroom brawl, now. You wouldn’t do that to me and my coat, now would you?”

  “I can’t wear your coat,” Bret said sharply.

  “Now don’t be like that, fellow. I was only kidding. I want you to wear my coat, I’m crazy for you to wear it. Hell, I trust you, Lieutenant. You got to learn to recognize a friendly crack.”

  You talk too much, Bret thought, and I don’t like your line of patter. What kind of cheap Hollywood character had he got tied up with? Still, this man had dragged him out of a bad situation and brought him home to sleep in his own bed. He couldn’t very well snub him because he walked too lightly or because his conversation was fast and tinny. “You’re the doctor,” he said a little heavy. “I’m very much obliged to you.”

  Larry picked up the blue uniform and folded it over his arm. “I’ll rush this over to the tailor’s before you change your mind. If you want that milk I promised you, the icebox is right through there.” He pointed through the open door of the living room. “Hey, wait a minute. I almost forgot your stuff in the pockets.” His fingers went through them rapidly, piling the things on the bed: handkerchief, comb, letters, address book, key case, wallet, some crumpled newspaper clippings.

  “Give me that.” Bret strode toward him and snatched the clippings from his hands, but not before Larry had seen what they were.

  “Sure, sure,” Larry said. The guy was beginning to get on his nerves, and he was even a little afraid of him for a minute. Taylor was supposed to be nuts after all, and you never could tell about a nut. Ordinary people, if you got in a jam with them, you could chop down and leave them lie, but there was something about a nut that drained the guts out of you. He was nuts himself to bring a nut like Taylor home to his apartment. What kind of a comic did he think he was, playing jokes on himself like that? The guy could have murdered him in his sleep.

  “Sure,” he repeated. “Don’t get the idea I was trying to interfere with your stuff.”

  “I guess I was abrupt,” Bret said. “It’s just that I’ve got some things marked in these papers. Food for thought,” he added clumsily.

  “Food for thought” is the word, Larry said to himself. His courage came flowing back and made him gay. Christ, the guy didn’t know a thing, not a damn thing! He, Larry, knew it all and he, Larry, was sitting on top of the situation, playing a sucker with his own dice for any stakes he wanted to name. The dope Taylor had nothing on him and never would; it was the other way round and he was going to remember that. He nearly felt sorry for the dope, but not quite. It never paid to feel sorry for anybody.

  He almost ran on his way to the tailor’s shop, he felt so light and gay. He didn’t know what irony was, but it was irony he was enjoying. Here he was, running errands for Taylor, of all people. Living with him, lending him clothes, sleeping in the same room. And all the time with a double century in his hip pocket for not laying eyes on the guy. If money really talked the way Paula West thought it did, he’d be in Nevada by now. But it was more interesting here and he had the money anyway, and plenty more where that came from. All he had to do was name it and he could have it.

  He felt quite disappointed and betrayed when he got back to his apartment and found that Taylor had left. There was a note under a full milk bottle on the kitchen table:

  Excuse me for running out, but I have some urgent business. Thank you again for everything, and please don’t worry about your suit.

  B. Taylor.

  Oh well, Taylor would be back, he could count on that. Taylor was the kind of guy that would have to come back to give him back his suit. He wasn’t like that himself, praise God, but he’d met the type once or twice before in his life: the type that was so honest it hurt.

  chapter 13

  It was after ten when Bret reached the Golden Sunset Café. The place was deserted except for a few early barflies. It was chilly and desolate in the morning, like a fever patient who began each day with a low temperature and rose to a peak of delirium in the hot evening. The long room was like an image of his own hangover, run-down and almost empty, containing like a corrupt memory the odors of rancid grease and stale whisky spillings.

  Fortunately neither of the bartenders who had witnessed the fight was on duty this morning. He had never seen the man behind the bar, a young man with thin round features like an emaciated infant’s, wearing pockets of gray flesh, puckered like chicken-skin, under his indeterminate pale eyes. Rollins?

  An excitement that gave him no strength took hold of the lower half of his body and shook him visibly. He sat down in the booth nearest to the door and reasoned with himself. He couldn’t expect Rollins to be able to tell him anything. The police had questioned him long ago and found out merely that Lorraine had left by herself that night. Even if Rollins knew something more he had no reason to suppose that he could get it out of him. Still, the excitement would not stay down. It rose to his head and made him dizzy, so that Rollins’s face, if it was Rollins, wavered behind the bar and the stagnant air in the room buzzed like an electric bell.

  “What’ll you have?” A waitress with a dark pitted face had come out of the kitchen at the back and was standing calmly over him like an attendant.

  He recalled that he hadn’t eaten since noon of the previous day. “Fried eggs with toast?”

  “Yeah. We got some bacon today if you want it.”

  “Good. And bring me a quart of milk right away.” His dehydrated palate still regretted the bottle of milk he had left unopened, as a sign of his independence, on Harry Milne’s kitchen table.

  “A quart of milk?” The waitress raised one heavy black eyebrow. “You want it spiked with anything?”

  “No, thanks. I’m a milk addict.”

  She stood and watched him drink it as if that were one for the book. Then she watched him eat his bacon and eggs.

  “You were hungry,” she said. They never tipped you in the morning, anyway—the jerks that came to this joint had to be boiled before you could peel a nickel off their palms—so you might as well act natural.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a food addict too.”

  She laughed even if he didn’t, and what do you know, he gave her a buck and told her to keep the change. Things were looking up in the joint, and for a moment she forgot her varicose veins and almost stopped wishing that one of these A-bombs would explode directly over the roof of the Golden Sunset Café and destroy several square miles of L.A. with her in it.

  “Is that James Rollins behind the bar?” Bret asked her.

  “Uh-huh. That’s Jimmie.”

  All but one of the barflies had drifted out. Rollins, who had just set up a boilermaker for the old man who remained, was manicuring himself with the blade of a pocketknife, scowling in bored concentration.

  “Tell him I’d like to talk
to him, will you? Over here.”

  “Sure thing,” the waitress said, and went to the bar.

  Rollins came through the little door at the front end and walked toward Bret with quick, jerky steps. “What can I do for you, my friend?”

  “Please sit down.”

  “Why not?” He sat down facing Bret across the table, his pale round forehead still furrowed by the blank scowl.

  Bret said slowly: “You were on duty here the night that Mrs. Lorraine Taylor was murdered.”

  A sneer of mental effort curled Rollins’s lips and left them tight. “Yeah. Yeah, I was. So what?”

  “I’d like you to tell me what you saw of her.”

  “You a cop?” he said in his quick monotone. “I already told my story to the cops.”

  Bret took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and folded it small. A rodent brightness glimmered faintly in the eyes across the table. “No, I’m not a cop. I’m interested in what happened to Mrs. Taylor.”

  “Jeez, bud, I don’t know any more than you do what happened to her. She walked out of here that night, and that was the last I saw of her.” Exerting a visible effort, he withdrew his attention from the twenty-dollar bill and looked into Bret’s eyes. His gaze was as transparent and innocent looking as gin.

  “Was she drunk?”

  Rollins’s wide mirthless grin showed a gold-capped wisdom tooth. “What do you think? You said you knew Lorrie. I never saw her sober, did you?”

  “I didn’t say I knew her.”

  “Oh, I caught you wrong. What’s your interest then? Say, you’re not writing one of these here true detectives?”

  “No.” The interview was hopeless anyway, and there was no use in being cautious or discreet. “My name’s Taylor. She was my wife.”

  “You her husband?” Rollins sat up straight, and conflicting emotions wrinkled his face like a sudden violent onset of old age. “I thought you was—” He regained control of his tongue.

  “No doubt you did, but I’m not interested in what you thought.” He unfolded the bill and smoothed it out on the table. “You’re absolutely sure that she left here alone?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I’m not the only witness either. You know that. I wouldn’t be holding out on a thing like that.”

  “You called her Lorrie—”

  “Did I? That must’ve slipped out. You know how it is.”

  “I don’t know. Tell me. Was she in the habit of coming here?”

  “Yeah, sure. She was in here every couple of nights.”

  “Alone?”

  “Of course alone,” Rollins said very glibly. “The kid was strictly on the up and up. She was a little bit of a lush, but you can’t hold that against her.”

  “I don’t hold anything against her,” Bret said, imposing a level tone on the violence of his feelings. “Was she a friend of yours?”

  “Not what you’d call a friend,” Rollins said uneasily. “Naturally I got to know her, with her coming in here all the time.”

  “Always alone?”

  “I told you she was alone, didn’t I? Look here, Mister, you got to excuse me, I got to get back to the bar. The boss’ll be coming in any time.” He cast a farewell glance at the twenty-dollar bill and rose to his feet.

  “Sit down again,” Bret said. “You’ve only got one customer, and he still has part of his drink.” He took a second twenty from his wallet and laid it crosswise on the first.

  Rollins resisted the magnetism of the bills, but it gradually drew him back to his seat. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” he said after an interval. “The kid was no floozie, if that’s what you’re trying to get at. I never had anything to do with her except for shoving her a drink across the bar. I never even knew her last name until I read it in the papers.”

  “You know very well what I’m trying to get at. My wife is dead. I’m trying to find out why.”

  “So why do you come to me? I’m not a prophet. I told the cops everything I know, and it wasn’t enough to do them any good.”

  “Didn’t she have any friends? You should be able to give me some kind of a lead if she was in here nearly every night.”

  “Sure. She knew a lot of the regulars. Everybody liked her. One guy or another used to buy her a drink, but there was nothing to it.”

  In his eagerness to convince her husband of Lorraine’s innocence, Rollins was overstating his case. Bret was encouraged to go on. “Who bought her a drink? Give me a name.”

  Rollins squirmed, but remained transfixed on the hope of a forty-dollar windfall. “I don’t keep no diary, Mr. Taylor,” he whined. “I got no list of names. I don’t keep track of the customers’ private life.”

  “One name. One man that knew her. One man that bought her a drink.”

  “I don’t want to get anybody into trouble, Mr. Taylor. It’s no crime to buy a girl a drink, and it’s not my business what people do as long as they don’t make trouble in this bar. For forty bucks it isn’t worth it to me to make trouble for a customer.”

  “I have a lot of twenties in my wallet. How much?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Taylor. It isn’t the money I care about—”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred?” Rollins whispered.

  “What can you give me for it?”

  Rollins leaned across the table and spoke quietly, his eyes glancing sideways at the kitchen and the front door. “There’s a guy that was interested in her. He tried to pick her up a couple of times, but she wasn’t having any.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, several times. He was in here the night she got killed. He wanted to take her home, but she gave him the old brush-off.”

  “Do you think that’s worth a hundred dollars?”

  “Wait a minute. I didn’t tell it all yet. But for God’s sake, Mr. Taylor, keep me out of this. I don’t want to get anybody into trouble,” he said, thinking of himself.

  “Is that why you didn’t tell the police?”

  The drain of color from Rollins’s face placed his pimples in relief. “You’re not going to tell the police about this? I got no reason to think the guy had anything to do with murdering her. I wasn’t going to throw him to the lions without a reason, was I?”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “No, not what you call a friend. If he was a friend I wouldn’t be selling you his name for a hundred bucks, would I?”

  Wouldn’t you, Bret thought. He said: “You haven’t told me his name.”

  “You haven’t slipped me the hundred.”

  “Here’s forty now.” He pushed the bills across the table. “You said there was more to tell.”

  Rollins’s hand moved like a quick white bird, and the bills were gone from the table. “You going to give me the rest?”

  “When you tell me the rest of your story, and if there’s anything to it.”

  “Yeah, but how do I know I can trust you?”

  “You can trust me. The question that’s bothering me is whether I can trust you.”

  “I’m telling you what I know. I can’t do better than that.”

  “You’re being slow about it. Go on.”

  “Well, this particular party tried to pick Lorrie—your wife—up like I said. She said she was going home alone, or something like that—I didn’t hear her exact words.”

  “This was the night she was killed?”

  “Yeah, a few minutes before she left. She went out by herself, just like I said, and this party got up and went out right after her. I didn’t give it a thought then, but it came back to me when the cops were here the next day. I knew the guy had a car parked outside, and he might have gone out after her to give it another try on the street.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “He’s a fellow that comes in here sometimes. He used to be just another cheap grifter, but he made a lot of money during the war, and now he’s opened his own cocktail lounge over in Glendale. He’s still a crook through. The dirty bastard promised me a
job over there, and then he turned around and gave the bar to Lefty Swift, a nance if I ever saw one.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re sure you’re not simply trying to make trouble for him?”

  “Honest to God, Mr. Taylor, trouble is the last thing I want. You asked me to tell you anything I knew, and that’s what I’m doing. For God’s sake, you won’t tell Garth I told you?”

  “Garth? Is that his name?”

  “Yeah, Burton Garth. But you got to promise you won’t tell him I told you. I don’t know whether he had anything to do with the murder or not, but if he did I don’t want any part of it.”

  “Unless it comes to court. Then you’ll have to be a witness.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he admitted reluctantly. “Do I get the other sixty?”

  “If this Garth is a real lead. Otherwise not.”

  Rollins snarled in frustrated rodent fury: “That’s not what you told me. You promised me a hundred.”

  “You’ll get the rest after I see Garth. I told you you can trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Rollins laughed hollowly. “You promised me a hundred and slip me a measly forty.”

  “Calm down, or I’ll take the forty away from you and hold it in trust for you.” He stood up, casting a wide shadow across Rollins’s side of the booth. “Where can I find Burton Garth?”

  “How do I know I’ll ever see you again?” Rollins muttered, half to himself.

  “I said be quiet about that. Where is Garth?”

  “He runs the Cockalorum over in Glendale. He’s probably there now. You could give me your address, couldn’t you?”

  “I have no address,” Bret said on his way out.

  chapter 14

  Normally he wouldn’t have considered himself able to afford a taxi to Glendale, but money was one of a number of things he no longer cared about. He had between four and five hundred dollars in his pocket, with another couple of thousand in the bank, and he was convinced it was enough to see him through to whatever end he was blindly aiming for. Time was the only currency he was afraid to spend, for he felt that he had very little of that.