Meet Me at the Morgue Read online

  There was a layer of books and papers at the bottom. One of the books was entitled “The Real Meaning of Your Dreams”; the cover illustration was a man’s head swelling with fantasies. The nature of Lemp’s fantasies was indicated by the other books, most of which were under-the-counter paperbacks with sadistic illustrations. On the flyleaf of one of them, someone had written a verse with an indelible pencil:

  Molly Molly it’d be jolly

  For you and I to have a frolic little girl

  You got a beautiful golden curl

  Blue eyes like heaven

  Take me up to heaven at eleven

  I love you little girl.

  REFRAIN:—Jolly little girl with the golden curl.

  The papers included a letter, written by an Assistant District Attorney of San Diego County in 1941, recommending Lemp’s employment as a company guard by a San Diego aircraft plant; a sepia snapshot print of a bald-headed young man who might have been Lemp holding a long-dressed baby under a leafless maple tree; and Lemp’s birth certificate. He had been born Arthur George Lempke in Pittsburgh, Pa., on June 14, 1892, to Arthur Lempke, laborer, and his wife Trinity, housewife. As if to bracket his life in a single document, Lemp had written in pencil on the dog-eared official envelope containing the birth certificate:

  Timetable—post letter Valley Vista Ranch, Ridgecrest Fri. p.m. not too late—Miner take boy to desert before mail (Sat.) delivered 9-9:30 a.m.—train pulls out station 11 a.m.—plane leaves Int. Airport 2:20 p.m.

  But Lemp had been taken up to heaven shortly after eleven, and missed the plane. I opened his bottle of bourbon and had a stiff drink. The room, the contents of the suitcase, the remnants of Lemp’s sixty years were infinitely dreary. I felt the shuddering lapse of all those years.

  “Stealing a dead man’s liquor. Pretty low.” Molly got up from her chair and took a few tentative steps towards me. “Mister, I could use a slug of that myself.”

  “You won’t get it from me.”

  “Why not?” She smiled coaxingly.

  “I never give liquor to minors or take candy from babies.”

  She struck a pose, shoulders back, chest out, stomach in. “I’m no baby. I’ve been drinking regular for several years.”

  It struck me with sudden harsh clarity, simultaneously with the crude whisky, that I was at the center of the evil maze. It contained a timetable for a kidnapping packed with a sentimental pair of baby boots, an old man writing a vapid love-poem on the flyleaf of a corrupt book, a young girl who had learned to accept corruption. Molly’s smile, as blank as the walls, as threadbare as the carpet, had somehow become the meaning of the room.

  “You’re a babe in the woods,” I said. “Cover yourself with leaves.”

  Memory came into her eyes like dark ink spreading in water. “You say the darnedest things. I used to do that all the time, cover myself with leaves. I loved to play in the leaves in the fall when I was a kid. We used to play house.”

  “Was that before the flood?”

  “Yeah, before the flood.”

  I squatted down and began to repack the suitcase. There was an angry core of heat in my body. It was, hard to hate evil without overdoing the hate and becoming evil. It wasn’t Molly I hated, or even Lemp. It was the shapes of their desires, the frantic waste of their flesh, the ugly zero waiting at the end.

  My hands were awkward. Folding the brown suit, they shook the alligator wallet onto the floor.

  Molly scrambled for it on hands and knees.

  “Give it to me,” I said. “It’s all evidence.”

  “But this belongs to Kerry. I gave it to him for his birthday last year. It was his thirtieth birthday, and I was in the chips for once.”

  “Are you sure it was his?”

  Her fingers were exploring its interior. “It’s got his initials in it. I had them put on at the leather shop when I bought it.”

  She showed me the tiny gold initials in one corner: K S. “I was right. He murdered Kerry and stole his car and his wallet.”

  “And his girl.”

  “It isn’t true. Kerry was the only one I loved. Except when he got nasty, Art Lemp was more like a father to me, a grandfather. All he wanted to do was look at me. I was always faithful to Kerry in my heart.”

  I took the wallet from her hand and finished packing the suitcase. She went to the mirror above the washbasin. After studying her reflection for some time, she said to herself, or to no one in particular:

  “I forget who I am sometimes. I can’t remember who I am sometimes.”

  She raised the window and looked out across the fire escape. Red and black were tangled in a skein blown over the rooftops. Distant cries and hootings rose from the city, gusts of sound like wind blowing here and there in an iron forest.

  CHAPTER 20: The hideous concrete façade of the courthouse, Moorish-arched and Byzantine-turreted, was lovely to my eyes. The lights in the embrasured windows of the sheriff’s wing shone like the lights of home. But Molly hung back: she saw the bars on the windows. I had to help her up the steps and through the door.

  I deposited her on a bench in the outer office, with Lemp’s suitcase beside her. There were three deputies on night duty instead of the usual one. Six eyes converged on Molly, swinging to me reluctantly when I spoke:

  “Any word of the Johnson boy?”

  “Not yet. Could be they’re not telling us everything. Who’s the cutie?”

  Molly thrust her shoulders back and posed for the deputies’ flashbulb admiration.

  “A witness I’m bringing in. Is Sam still on duty?”

  “In his office. He won’t go home.”

  “Forest?”

  “He set up temporary headquarters in the Clerk’s rooms,” the man at the telephone desk said. “You want to talk to him, I’ll see if I can get you a passport and visa. You ever consorted with Democrats?”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “That was a joke, son.”

  “Ho ho.”

  “What’s the matter, Howie, you losing your sense of humor?” He turned to the other deputies. “Mister Cross done hitched his wagon to a star.”

  I said: “If you want to do something, order me in some food. I haven’t eaten for several weeks.”

  “I leap to do your bidding, marster.” He swiveled back to the telephone.

  “Thanks. Make it ham and eggs and coffee. I’ll be in with Sam.”

  I tossed a dollar across the counter and took the suitcase and Molly down a tile-floored corridor to Sam Dressen’s cubicle. Sam was asleep, his gray head resting on his desk like a large granite paperweight. I shook him and he sat up, blinking and smiling:

  “Must have dozed off for a minute. That was a red-hot tip, Howie, that business card you gave me. We got one corpse identified already.”

  “Art Lemp?”

  The smile sagged disappointedly. “You know, eh? Where you been?”

  “To hell and back. This young lady knew Lemp, and the other one was her husband.”

  I nodded towards Molly. She was making herself small and flat against the door-frame. I wondered if she recognized the jail smell that sifted down inevitably from the second floor. Or perhaps it was the WANTED circulars that were the only pinups on Sam’s walls.

  “You wouldn’t kid an old man old enough to be your father, Howie?”

  “She’s his widow, common-law possibly, but his widow. His name was Kerry Snow.”

  “We were married in Las Vegas,” she cried. “On the fifteenth of January. It was legal!”

  “I believe you, Molly. Come in and sit down now, and tell us all about it.”

  A session of questioning followed, until my breakfast arrived. Molly gave us no additional information. Either her men had kept her completely in the dark about their illegal activities, or she was afraid of talking herself into jail. She looked afraid, and hungry.

  I shared my toast and coffee with her. Sam had eaten at midnight, he said. It was nearly two.

  I stood up, feelin
g the stiffness in the hinges of my knees. “Is Amy Miner still here?”

  “She’s in the special cell on the third floor. I’ll take you up.”

  “Who’s on duty?”

  “Stan Marsland.”

  “I can run the elevator. You’ve got work to do, Sam. This suitcase belonged to Lemp. It’s loaded with grist for your mill.”

  His lined face expressed a nice balance of anticipation and foreboding. “Fine,” he said doubtfully. “What do I do with the girl?”

  “Forest will want to talk to her. Perhaps you’d better turn the suitcase over to him, too. They’ve got their mobile laboratory down here, haven’t they?”

  “It’s in the garage courtyard.”

  “Good. You can go home then. Why not take Molly with you? She doesn’t want to spend the night in jail.”

  “I’ll say I don’t.”

  Sam regarded her dubiously. “I got a wife already.”

  “That’s the point. I haven’t.” I turned to her. “If Sheriff Dressen puts you up in his house, you won’t run away?”

  “Where would I run away to?”

  “Okay, Howie,” he said. “You did enough for me lately. One thing you didn’t do, though, you didn’t bring back my pictures.”

  “I will. Give me a few minutes more.”

  The automatic elevator was the only way to reach the jail floors at night. I rode it up. Stan Marsland was waiting at the top of the shaft with his hand on his holster.

  “Isn’t it kind of late for visiting-hours?”

  “Special circumstances, Stan. How often do we have a kidnapping?”

  “Often enough to suit me. What’s in the briefcase, food? I hope it’s food.”

  “Files and hacksaws.”

  “Don’t mention them there things.” The graveyard shift made everybody garrulous. “I was hoping maybe it contained a steak, onions, fried potatoes, and a glass of draft beer. All of which I could use.”

  “Is Mrs. Miner awake?”

  “I wouldn’t know. She probably is. They don’t sleep so good the first night. You want to see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Down here?”

  “In her cell will do. It will only take a minute.”

  He led me up a curved iron stair to an iron-railed gallery with a riveted floor. We passed a series of iron-sheathed doors with small wire-reinforced windows. There were shouts and howls and laughter behind one of them.

  “Drunk tank,” Marsland said. “It’s just like fiesta, on a Saturday night. But oh on Sunday morning!”

  At the end of the gallery he unlocked a door and turned me over to a sleepy matron. The women’s cells were open cages with barred doors. I could smell perfume among the animal and chemical odors. Amy Miner, alone in a corner cell, was standing at the bars as if she had known I was coming.

  “Mr. Cross! You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  “Quiet, Amy,” the matron said soothingly. “You’ll disturb the other girls.”

  “But I’ve got no right to be here. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  The matron wagged her head in my direction. Her hair was tied back in an old-fashioned bun that looked as hard and shiny as a doorknob. “Amy’s been quite a problem, Mr. Cross. Do you think they’ll be letting her out in the morning?” She added in a whisper: “I had to take her stockings off, she was talking about putting an end to herself.”

  “They have to let me out,” Amy was saying. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Your husband has, apparently.”

  “I don’t believe that, either.”

  “Until it’s settled, one way or the other, they’re going to have to hold you. I don’t like it. Nobody likes it. Still, it’s got to be done.”

  I moved up closer to the bars. A wire-netted light burned feebly in the ceiling. Amy’s eyes were puffed from crying. The lines in her face had deepened like erosion scars. Her mouth had set bitterly. Her hair straggled in grayish-brown ropes over her temples.

  “What have they done to Fred?”

  “Nothing’s been heard from him.”

  “They’ve killed him, haven’t they? They’ve killed him and stolen the boy and locked me up and thrown the key away.”

  I didn’t like the hysterical lilt in her voice. “Calm down now, Amy. Things could be worse. You’ll be out of here in a day or two.”

  Her hands came through the bars. “Do you promise?”

  I took her hands. They were as cold as the metal. “I think I can promise that. You’re being held as a witness, partly for your own good. When you’ve done your job as a witness, you’ll go free.”

  “But I didn’t witness anything.”

  “You must have. You were married to Fred a long time. How long, ten years?”

  “Just about. Long enough to know that Fred’s no criminal.”

  “Wives have been mistaken before.” I turned to the matron. “Can we have a little more light?”

  She strode to a bank of switches and turned the ceiling light up. For the fourth and last time, I brought the posthumous photographs out of the briefcase.

  “Did you ever see this man in your husband’s company?”

  I held a blown-up full-face to the bars.

  She made a sound in her throat: “Augh.” Her knuckles strained around the bars, and whitened. “Who is he?”

  “He served on the Eureka Bay. Your husband must have known him. Fred was aboard the ship from the time it was launched.”

  “Is it the Snow boy? Is that who it is?”

  “Yes. Kerry Snow.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He’s the one Fred ran down in February. These pictures were taken after his death.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Your husband killed him. Did they know each other well?”

  “I don’t think so. I hardly knew him at all. He came to our flat in Dago once or twice. Fred liked to be hospitable to the younger men. But that was way back in forty-five.”

  “Has Fred been seeing him since then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about Arthur Lemp?”

  She answered, after a pause: “I never heard of him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Why should I he? You told me if I tell what I know, I go free.”

  “One more question, Mrs. Miner. There’s a possibility that Fred took the boy into the desert. Where would he be likely to go in the desert?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. I’m sorry. Fred always hated the desert, it bothers his sinuses. When Mr. and Mrs. Johnson went to the desert, they always left Fred behind, after the first time.”

  “Is that what they did in February?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Johnson did the driving.”

  “Speaking of Mrs. Johnson, how well did Fred know her?”

  “She was a good friend of his, she always has been.”

  “Did they see much of each other before Fred went to work for her?”

  “Naturally they did. She was in charge of his ward in the Navy hospital. He was laid up with his back there for nearly a year.”

  “Did they meet outside the hospital?”

  “Not that I know of. Fred didn’t get out much, except for a few weekends towards the end.” She thrust her gray face forward between the bars. “I know what you’re hinting at. It isn’t true. Fred never messed with any other woman, let alone Mrs. Johnson. What are you trying to get at, anyway?”

  I said I didn’t know, and asked the matron to let me out of there.

  Forest was questioning Molly in Sam Dressen’s office. Their voices came low and monotonous through the closed door:

  “Can you prove that you were in bed all morning?”

  “There wasn’t anybody sitting there watching me.”

  “Sleeping in is hardly an alibi.”

  “It’s no crime.”

  “Stabbing a man to death with an icepick is.”

  “I don’t even own an icepick.”

  I knocked on the d
oor and handed Sam his photographs. Neither Forest nor Molly looked at me. They were absorbed in their question-and-answer game.

  I had seen and heard enough of the girl for one night. She was my responsibility, in a sense. In a deeper sense, there was nothing I could do for her. Her life was running swiftly by its own momentum, streaking across the midnight like a falling star.

  “Take good care of her, Sam,” I said out of a sense of inadequacy. Go and catch a falling star.

  “The wife will look after her.”

  “Tell Forest I’m waiting for him.”

  Someone had abandoned a local newspaper on the bench at the end of the corridor. It carried no story on the kidnapping or the murder. One of the front-page items interested me, however. My matron had succumbed to her kleptomania once again. Out on bail, she had walked into a department store and stolen two bathing-suits, size nine.

  I leaned my head back against the wall and lapsed into a coma approximating sleep. Forest’s quick footsteps aroused me. He sat down on the bench, looking as sharp and well groomed as he had that afternoon, but just a little white around the mouth.

  “You’ve been doing some nice work, Cross. I had my doubts about your wild-goosing off by yourself, but you seem to have an instinct.”

  “I know the local people. That always helps. Sam Dressen there, for example, is getting a little old and slow, but he’ll die trying.”

  “I told him to get some rest. How did you happen to turn up the girl?”

  “That story can wait. You talked to Bourke?”

  “I did. What’s your opinion of him?”

  “A sharp operator, but cautious.”

  “You don’t think he could be the mastermind behind all this?”

  “Not Bourke. He was too ready with his information, and it checked. I think Arthur Lemp plotted the kidnapping himself.” From my inside pocket, I produced the penciled envelope containing Lemp’s birth certificate. “This seems to be proof of it.”

  Forest read the “timetable” aloud, punctuating the reading with an exclamatory whistle. “Miner’s definitely in it then. What’s this about taking the boy to the desert?”

  “I can’t add anything to that. There’s a lot of desert in California.”