The Way Some People Die Read online

  “I think it’s time you told somebody the truth about that.”

  She flared up feebly, like a moist firecracker. “How could I tell him the truth? Henry was standing right beside me at the phone, listening to everything I said. I didn’t dare to say a word about my suspicions of him—”

  “You’d been having suspicions, then.”

  “I was suspicious of Henry from the very beginning, if I’d admitted it to myself. Only he made me feel so good, I couldn’t face up to the facts. I knew he hadn’t much money, and he knew I had. I knew I was foolish to marry again so quickly before I checked his background. But I wanted so hard to believe that he loved me for myself, I deliberately blinded myself and rushed right in. I’d never have given him the thirty thousand if I hadn’t wanted to blind myself. I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid, Mr. Archer.”

  “I doubt that you’re stupid at all,” I said. “You’re too darn emotional, is all. You probably made a mistake divorcing George, but a lot of women make the same mistake. Or else they make the mistake of not divorcing George.”

  “You’re an awful cynic, aren’t you? But what you say is perfectly true. I am too emotional. I’m a great emotional fool, and you’ve put your finger on my central weakness. It was my foolish emotions that made me give him the money. I trusted him because I wanted to so badly. I had to trust him to make the whole thing stay real for a little longer. I guess it was slipping already.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last Thursday, the day after we came here. We were in Santa Barbara at the Biltmore before that. Our week there was a perfect idyll. They have a lovely big pool, and Henry actually taught me how to swim. Henry’s a splendid athlete, and that’s one of the things that appealed to me so much. I love to see a man be able to do things. He told me when he was younger, before he got his wound, that he was a boxing champion in the army.” She noticed that she was softening towards Henry, and caught herself up short, the harsh disgusted note breaking out in her voice again: “I suppose that was a lie, like everything else.”

  “His wound?” I prompted her.

  “His war wound. He was a colonel in the war, until he was invalided out because of his wound. He was living on his disability pension.”

  “Did he ever show you a government check?”

  “No, but I know he wasn’t lying about that. I saw the wound.”

  “Where was he wounded?”

  “In Germany. He fought under General Patton.”

  “Not geographically. Physiologically.”

  “Oh.” She blushed. “He had a dreadful scar on his abdomen. It still wasn’t completely healed, after all these years.”

  “Too bad.”

  “That week in Santa Barbara he told me the whole story of his life. But even then I began to have my suspicions. There was this waiter at the Biltmore who knew him. The waiter called him by some other name: apparently he remembered Henry from when he worked at another hotel somewhere. Henry was quite put out. He explained to me that it was a nickname, but I knew waiters don’t address hotel guests by their nicknames, and I wondered about it afterwards.”

  “What was the name?”

  “It’s queer, I don’t remember. It’ll probably come back, though. Anyway, that was when I started to have my real suspicions of him. Then when we came out here he was always going away, on business he said, and he wouldn’t tell me where he went. On Sunday night we had a quarrel about it. He wanted to go out by himself and I wouldn’t give him the keys to the car, so he had to take a taxi. When the taxi-driver got back to his stand, I tipped him to tell me where he had taken Henry, and he said it was this Mr. Dalling’s house. I waited up for him, but he wouldn’t tell me what he was doing there. The same thing happened Monday night. He went out and I waited and waited, and finally I drove out to the house to look for him.”

  “And found me instead.”

  “And found you instead.” She smiled.

  “But you didn’t tell any of this to Lieutenant Gary.”

  “Not a smidgen. I couldn’t, with Henry right there.”

  “Are you going to, when you give your evidence?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “Definitely.”

  “I don’t know.” She pushed her chair back from the table, marched up and down the length of the Indian-patterned rug, her plump hips teetering at the top of her long straight legs. “I don’t know whether I will or whether I won’t. He might have really gone on a business trip, and be coming back tomorrow like he said. Henry’s a strange silent sort of man.”

  “He said that, did he, that he’s coming back tomorrow?”

  “Something like that. Do you think I should believe him? It would be terrible if this was all a mistake, and I had called the police in, and he really did come back.” She stood facing the door, with a funny look of expectant remorse, as if Henry was there to upbraid her for having disloyal thoughts. “What shall I do, Mr. Archer? It’s taken me a long time to get around to it, but that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “What do you want to do, get Henry back?”

  “No, I don’t think so, even if he would come. I don’t trust him any more, I’m afraid of him. It isn’t only his deception of me. I might be able to forgive that if he came back and proved that he loves me by turning over a new leaf. But I can’t help feeling that he’s mixed up in this terrible murder, that that’s why he rushed away so unexpectedly. You see, I don’t know who he is or what he is.” She sat down on the edge of the couch, suddenly and weakly, as if her legs had given way.

  “I have a good idea who and what he is. Did the waiter in Santa Barbara call him Speed?”

  Her head jerked up: “Speed! That was it. I knew it would come back to me. How did you guess? Do you know him?”

  “By reputation,” I said. “His reputation is bad. He didn’t get his abdominal wound in the war. He got it in a gang fight last fall.”

  “I knew it,” she cried, and shook her head from side to side so the bright dyed hair swung forward and brushed her cheeks. “I want to go back to Toledo, where people are nice. I always wanted to live in California but now that I’ve seen it, it’s a hellish place. I’ve fallen among thieves, that’s what I’ve done. Thieves and murderers and confidence men. I want to go back to George.”

  “It sounds like a very good plan.”

  “I can’t though, he’d never forgive me. I’d be a laughing-stock for the rest of my days. What could I tell him about the thirty thousand? It’s nearer forty when you count the car and all the money I’ve spent.” She kneaded her alligator bag with both clenched hands.

  “There’s a possibility you can get it back. You have no notion where Henry went, I don’t suppose.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything. He just went away. Now I know I’ll never see him again. But if I ever do, I’ll scratch his eyes out.” Her eyes glared from the ambush of her hair. I didn’t know whether to laugh at her or weep with her.

  I looked out the window onto the lawn, where spray from a sprinkling system danced in the sun. “No letters? No telephone calls? No telegrams? No visitors?”

  There was a long pause while I watched the dancing water.

  “He had a person-to-person call from San Francisco yesterday. I answered the phone myself, then he made me go into the bedroom and close the door. Does that mean anything?”

  “It may.” I stood up. “I’ll try it anyway. You got no hint of who was calling, no names given?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re positive it was a San Francisco call.”

  “Oh, yes. The operator said so.” She had pushed back her hair from her face and was looking less upset. There was an ice-chip hardness in her eyes I hadn’t noticed before.

  “I ought to tell you, Mrs. Fellows—”

  “Mrs. Barron,” she said stubbornly. “I was never really married to him.”

  “Mrs. Barron, then. You might get better results if you took your story to the police.�
�

  “I can’t. It would be in all the papers. I could never go home at all then. Don’t you see?”

  “If I recover your money, or any part of it, I’ll take a percentage, fifteen percent. That would be forty-five hundred out of thirty thousand.”

  “All right.”

  “Otherwise I’ll charge you for my expenses and nothing else. I usually work for a daily fee, but this case is different.”

  “Why is it so different?”

  “I have my own reasons for wanting to talk to Henry. And if I find him, I’ll do what I think best. I’m making you no promises.”

  CHAPTER 27: It was midnight when I parked my car under Union Square. A wet wind blew across the almost deserted square, blowing fogged breath from the sea on the dark pavements. Flashing neons on all four sides repudiated the night. I turned down a slanting street past a few late couples strolling and lingering on the sidewalk.

  The Den’s orange sign was one of a dozen bar signs in its block. I went down a dirty flight of stairs and looked into the place through a swinging glass door at the bottom. It was a large square room with rounded corners and a ceiling so low you could feel the weight of the city over it. A curved bar arched out from the left-hand wall, making space for a bartender and his array of bottles. The other walls were lined with booths and tables. In the cleared space in the middle of the room, a tired-looking man in a worn tuxedo was beating the life out of an exhausted grand piano. All the furniture, including the piano, was enameled a garish orange. A sequence of orange-haired nudes romped and languished along the walls under a glaze of grime. I went in.

  There were several customers at the bar: a couple well-dressed and young and looking out of place, and a pair of lone-wolfing sailors. A few others, all of them men, were propped like dummies at the tables, waiting for something wonderful to happen, a new life to begin, in more delightful places, under different names. Five or six revelers, all of them women, and hard cases by their looks, were standing around the piano in a chorybantic circle, moving various members in approximate time to the music. One of them, a streaked blonde in a green dress with a drooping hemline, raised what passed for her voice in a banshee sort of singing. The whole thing had the general effect of a wake.

  The pianist could have passed for a corpse in any mortuary if he had only stayed still, instead of tossing his fingers in bunches at the suffering keyboard. His batting average in hitting the notes was about .333, which would have been good enough for a Coast League ball-player. He was white and loaded to the gills, it was hard to tell with what. I sat down at a table near the piano and watched him until he turned his face in my direction. He had the sad bad centerless eyes I expected, wormholes in a withered apple with a dark rotten core.

  I ordered a beer from a sulky waitress in an orange apron. When I left her the change from a dollar, she hoisted a long-suffering smile from the depths of her despair and offered it to me: “Zizi’s as high as a kite. They ought to make him shut up when he’s so wild, instead of encouraging him.”

  “I’d like to buy him a drink.”

  “He doesn’t drink.” She corrected herself: “With the customers, I mean.”

  “Tell him I want to talk to him when he stops. If he can stop.”

  She gave me the twice-over then, and I tried to look as degenerate as hell. Maybe it came easier than I thought. I wanted to drink the beer, but I let it stand on the table, going flat, while Zizi battered his way through half a dozen requests. Moonlight and Roses, the girls wanted. Stardust and Blue Moon and other pieces that brought other times and places into the midnight basement at the bottom of the city. One of the sailors made up his mind and left the bar. Without preliminary, he attached himself to the blonde in the green dress and steered her out, lean-hipped and swaggering. The bartender’s face watched them over the bar like a dead white moon. Happy Days Are Here Again, and Stormy Weather. One of the women tried to sing it and burst loosely into tears. The others comforted her. The pianist struck a plangent discord and gave up. A lone drunk sitting against the wall behind me was talking in a monotone to his absent mother, explaining very reasonably, in great detail, why he was a no-good son-of-a-gun and a disgrace to the family.

  A stranger voice, husky and loose, wandering between the masculine and feminine registers, rustled like damp dead leaves in the corners of the room. It was Zizi announcing a break: “Excuse me folks my stint is done but I’ll be back when the clock strikes one to bring you more hot music and fun.” He pushed the mike away and rose unsteadily.

  The waitress elbowed through the group of women around him and whispered in his ear, gesturing in my direction. He crossed to my table, a tall middle-aged man who had once been handsome, fixed by that fact in the mannerisms of a boy. Leaning with one hand spread on the table in an attitude of precarious grace, he inclined towards me. His jaw dropped lackadaisically, showing discolored teeth.

  “You wanted to speak with me, boy friend? I am Zizi. You like my music?”

  “I’m tone deaf.”

  “You are fortunate.” He smiled sickly, revealing pale gums above the discolored teeth.

  “It isn’t music that’s on my mind.”

  “Yes?” He leaned closer, his long frail body half-collapsed against the edge of the table.

  I lowered my voice, and plucked at the sleeve of his greening tux in what I hoped was an appealing gesture. “I need a fix real bad,” I said. “I’m going off my stick.”

  His thin weeded eyebrows rose towards his thinning hairline. “Why do you come to me?”

  “I’ve been getting it from Ronnie in Pacific Point. He said you knew Mosquito.”

  He straightened slowly, swaying like a willow, and peered into my eyes. I let them glaze: “For God’s sake, Zizi, give me a break.”

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “Here’s my card, then.” I put a twenty on the table by his hand. “I got to have it. Where can I find Mosquito?”

  The hand crawled over the bill. I noticed that its nails were broken and bleeding. “Okay, boy friend. He lives in the Grandview Hotel. It’s just around the corner, a block above Market. Ask the night clerk for him.” The hand closed over the bill and dove into his pocket. “Remember I haven’t the faintest notion why you want to see him. Tee hee.”

  “Thank you,” I said emotionally.

  “Sweet dreams, boy friend.”

  The Grandview Hotel was an old four-story building of dirty brick squeezed between taller buildings. An electric sign over the entrance advertised SINGLE WITH BATH, $1.50. The brass fittings on the front door looked as if they went back to the earthquake. I pulled it open and entered the lobby, a deep narrow room poorly lit by a couple of ancient wall-fixtures on each side. Two women and three men were playing draw poker at a table under one of the lights. The women were bulldog-faced, and wore coats trimmed with the fur of extinct animals. Two of the men were fat and old, bald probably under their hats. The third was young and hatless. They were using kitchen matches instead of chips.

  I moved toward the lighted desk at the rear, and the hatless youth got up and followed me. “You want a room?” Apparently he was the curator. He suited the role. Bloodless and narrow, his face was set in a permanent sneer.

  “I want to see Mosquito.”

  “Does he know you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Somebody send you?”

  “Zizi.”

  “Wait a minute.” He leaned across the desk and lifted a house-phone from a niche at one end, plugging it in to the old-fashioned switchboard above it. He spoke softly into the mouthpiece and glanced at me, with the receiver to his ear. He hung up and unplugged the connection: “He says you can go up.”

  “What room?”

  He sneered at my ignorance of his mysteries. “307. Take the elevator if you want.” His feet were soundless on the decayed rubber matting as he padded back to the poker game.

  I piloted the ramshackle elevator cage to the third floor, and stepped out into a
n airless corridor. The brown numbered doors stood like upended coffins on each side, bathed in the static red flames of fire-exit bulbs that dotted the ceiling at intervals. 307 was halfway down the corridor to the left. Its door was open a crack, throwing a yellow ribbon of light across the threadbare carpeting of the hallway and up the opposite wall.

  Then the light was half obscured by someone watching me from the other side of the door. I raised my hand to knock. The door swung inward sharply before I touched it. A young man stood in the doorway with his back to the light. He was middle-sized, but the great black bush of hair on top of his head made him seem almost tall. “Zizi’s little friend, eh? Come on in.” His voice was adenoidal.

  One of his hands was on his hip, the other on the doorknob. I had to brush against him to enter the room. He wasn’t heavy-looking but his flesh was soft and tremulous like a woman’s. His movements seemed invertebrate as he closed the door and turned. He was wearing a soft green shirt, six-pleated high-rise trousers of dark green gabardine, a brilliant green and yellow tie held by a large gold clasp.

  His other hand moved to his other hip. He cocked his head on one side, his face small and pointed under the top-heavy hair. “Carrying iron, old man?”

  “I use it in my business.” I patted my heavy jacket pocket.

  “And what’s your business, old man?”

  “Whatever I can knock off. Do I need references?”

  “Long as you don’t try to knock off daddy.” He smiled at the ridiculousness of the idea. His teeth were small and fine like a child’s first set. “Where you from?”

  “Pacific Point.”

  “I never see you in the Point.”

  “I work the whole coast,” I said impatiently. “You want to know my history, send me a questionnaire.”

  “Hard up for it?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

  “All right, take it easy, I like to know who I’m dealing with, that’s natural, isn’t it? You want to use my needle or you snuff it?”