The Way Some People Die Page 3

After a while she called to him: “The gentleman asked something, Simmie.” All gentlemen were white; all whites were gentlemen.

  He dropped his arms and turned slowly. The taut muscles of his chest and stomach stood out in detailed relief like moulded iron sculpture. The head was narrow and long, with a slanting forehead, small eyes, broad nose, thick mouth. He breathed through the nose. “You want me?”

  “I wondered who runs this place.”

  “I’m the janitor. You want something?”

  “I’d like to talk to the boss. Is he around?”

  “Not today. Mr. Tarantine is out of town.”

  “What about Mr. Speed? Isn’t Herman Speed the boss around here?”

  “Not any more he isn’t. Mr. Tarantine been running things since the beginning of the year. Before that.”

  “What happened to Herman?” The surprise in my voice sounded hollow. “He leave town?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Speed left town.” He wasted no words.

  “He got shot,” the woman said. “Somebody riddled his guts. It broke his health. It was a crying shame, too, he was a fine big man.”

  “Shut up, Violet,” the boy said. “You don’t know nothing about it.”

  “Shut up yourself,” she answered in ready repartee.

  “Who shot him?” I asked her.

  “Nobody knows. Maybe he knows, but he wouldn’t tell the police, he was real tight-mouthed.”

  “I said shut up,” the boy repeated. “You’re wasting the gentleman’s time.”

  I said: “Where’s Tarantine?”

  “Nobody knows that either,” the woman said. “He left town last week and nobody seen him since. Looks as if they left young Simmie here to put on the shows all by himself.” She laughed throatily. “Maybe if you talked to Mrs. Tarantine, she might know where he is. She just lives down the road a few blocks from here.”

  The boy jumped for the fence on silent feet, but the woman was already out of his reach. “Stay on your own side, Simmie, I given you fair warning. Trim’s in his room.”

  “You’re trying to get me in trouble, been trying to get me in trouble all winter long. Ain’t you? Why don’t you get out of my sight and stay out of my sight?”

  She wiggled her heavy body disdainfully, and disappeared around the corner of the buildings: warped plyboard cubicles laid end to end like miniature ten-foot boxcars and fronting on another alley. There were dark faces at some of the windows in the row and after a while the woman appeared at one of them.

  The boy was talking by then. I’d broken through his reserve by praising his muscles and asking about his fights. He had beaten the local talent, he said, and was grooming himself for his professional debut. He called it that. Unfortunately they hadn’t had fights in Pacific Point since he started to get his growth. Mr. Tarantine was going to try and get him on a card at San Diego one of these weeks. I suggested that Mr. Tarantine was a pretty good friend of his, and he agreed.

  “I hear he married a beautiful wife.”

  “Mr. Tarantine got no wife.”

  “I thought Violet said something about a Mrs. Tarantine.”

  “That’s the old lady. Violet don’t know nothing.” He cast a wicked glance across the fence at the woman in the window.

  “What does she think about the trouble he’s in?”

  “There isn’t any trouble,” the boy said. “Mr. Tarantine is a smart man. He doesn’t get into trouble.”

  “I heard there was some trouble about the pinball collections.”

  “That’s crap. He doesn’t collect on the pinball machines anymore. That was last year, when Mr. Speed was here. Are you a policeman, mister?” His face had closed up hard.

  “I’m opening a place on the south side. I want a machine put in.”

  “Look it up in the phone book, mister. It’s under Western Variety.”

  I thanked him. The drumming of the bag began again before I was out of earshot. After a while he’d be a fighting machine hired out for twenty or twenty-five dollars to take it and dish it out. If he was really good, he might be airborne for ten years, sleeping with yellower flesh than Violet, eating thick steaks for breakfast, dishing it out. Then drop back onto a ghetto street-corner with the brains scrambled in his skull.

  CHAPTER 5: I stopped for gas at a service station near the arena and looked up Tarantine in the phone book attached to its pay phone. There was only one entry under the name, a Mrs. Sylvia Tarantine of 1401 Sanedres Street. I tried the number on the telephone and got no answer.

  Sanedres Street was the one I was on. It ran crosstown through the center of the Negro and Mexican district, a street of rundown cottages and crowded shacks interspersed with liquor stores and pawnshops, poolroom-bars and flyblown lunchrooms and storefront tabernacles. As the street approached the hills on the other side of the ball park, it gradually improved. The houses were larger and better kept. They had bigger yards, and the children playing in the yards were white under their dirt.

  The house I was looking for stood on a corner at the foot of the slope. It was a one-story frame cottage with a flat roof, almost hidden behind a tangle of untended laurel and cypress. The front door was paned with glass and opened directly into a dingy living-room. I knocked on the door and again I got no answer.

  There was a British racing motorcycle, almost new, under a tarpaulin at the side of the house. Moving over to look at it, I noticed a woman hanging sheets on a line in the yard next door. She took a couple of clothespins out of her mouth and called:

  “You looking for something?”

  “Mrs. Tarantine,” I said. “Does she live here?”

  “Sure thing, only she ain’t at home just now. She went to see her boy in the hospital.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “He got mugged down on the dock the other night. He was beat up something terrible. The doctor thought he might of fractured his skull.” She disposed of the sheets in her arms and pushed the graying hair back from her face.

  “What was Tarantine doing down at the dock at night?”

  “He lives there. I thought you knew him.”

  I said I didn’t know him.

  “Well, if you stick around she should be back before long. They don’t let visitors stay after four o’clock.”

  “I’ll try the hospital, thanks.” It was a quarter of four by my watch.

  At five to four I was back where I had begun. The nurse at the information desk told me that Mr. Tarantine was in room 204, straight up the stairs and down the hall to the right, and warned me that I only had a minute.

  The door of 204 was standing open. Inside the room a huge old woman in a black and red dotted dress stood with her back to me so that I couldn’t see the occupant of the bed. She was arguing in a heavy Italian accent:

  “No, you must not, Mario. You must stay in bed until the doctor says. Doctor knows best.”

  A grumbling masculine bass answered her: “To hell with the doctor.” He had an incongruous lisp.

  “Swear at your old mother if you want to, but you stay in bed now, Mario. Promise me.”

  “I’ll stay in bed today,” the man said. “I don’t promise for tomorrow.”

  “Well, tomorrow we see what the doctor says.” The woman leaned over the bed and made a loud smacking noise. “Addio, figlio mio. Ci vediamo domàni.”

  “Arivederci. Don’t worry, Mama.”

  I stepped aside as she came out, and became interested in a framed list of regulations on the wall. If her hips had been six inches wider she’d have had to take the door sideways. She gave me a black look of suspicion, and bore her huge flesh away on slow waddling legs. Varicose veins crawled like fat blue worms under her stockings.

  I went into the room and saw that it contained two beds. A sleeping man lay on the far one by the window, an ice-bag around his throat. On the near one the man I was looking for was sitting up against the raised end, with two pillows behind his head. Most of the head was hidden by a helmet of white bandage which came down under the c
hin. The visible part of it looked more like a smashed ripe eggplant than a face. It was swollen blue, with tints of green and yellow, and darker marks where the skin had been abraded. Someone who liked hurting people had used his face for a punching-bag or a football.

  The puffed mouth lisped: “What do you want, bud?”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I’ll tell you how it is,” he said laboriously. “The other day I took a damn good look at my face in the mirror. I didn’t like it. It didn’t suit me. So I picked up a ball-peen hammer and gave it a working over. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “The pinball merchants find you, Tarantine?”

  He watched me in silence for a moment. His dark eyes looked melancholy in their puffed blue sockets. He rubbed a black-haired hand across the heavy black beard that was sprouting on his chin. There were scabs on his knuckles where they had been skinned. “Get out of my room.”

  “You’ll wake up your friend.”

  “Beat it. If you’re working for him, you can tell him I said so. If you’re a friggin’ cop you can beat it anyway. I don’t have to talk, see.”

  “I’m not on anybody’s payroll. I’m a private detective, not a cop. I’m looking for Galley Lawrence. Her mother thinks something happened to her.”

  “Let’s see your license then.”

  I opened my wallet and showed him the photostat. “I heard you drove her away when she left her apartment in town.”

  “Me?” His surprise sounded genuine.

  “You drive a bronze-colored Packard roadster?”

  “Not me,” he said. “You’re looking for my brother. You’re not the only one. My name’s Mario. It’s Joe you want.”

  “Where is Joe?”

  “I wish I knew. He blew three days ago, the dirty bum. Left me holding—” The sentence was left unfinished. His mouth sagged open, showing broken teeth.

  “Was Galley Lawrence with him?”

  “Probably. They were shacked up. You want to find them, huh?”

  I acknowledged that I did.

  He sat up straight, clear of the pillows. Now that he was upright his face looked even worse. “I’ll make a deal with you. I know where they lived in L.A. You let me know if you find them, is it a deal?”

  “What do you want him for?”

  “I’ll tell Joe why I want him. When I tell him he won’t forget it.”

  “All right,” I said. “If I find him I pass you the word. Where does he live?”

  “Casa Loma. It’s a ritz joint off of Sunset in the Hills. You might be able to trace him from there.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “On my boat. It’s the Aztec Queen, moored down in the yacht basin.”

  “Who are the others that want him?”

  “Don’t ask me.” He lay back in the pillows again.

  A cool trained voice said behind me: “Visiting hours are over, sir. How are you feeling, Mr. Tarantine?”

  “Dandy,” he said. “How do I look?”

  “Why, you look cute in your bandage, Mr. Tarantine.” The nurse glanced at the other bed. “How’s our tonsillectomy?”

  “He feels dandy too, he thinks he’s dying.”

  “He’ll be up and around tomorrow.” She laughed professionally and turned away.

  I caught her up in the hall: “What happened to Mario’s face? He wouldn’t tell me.”

  She was a big-boned girl with a long earnest nose. “He wouldn’t tell us, either. A friend of mine was on emergency when he came in. He walked in all by himself, in the middle of the night. He was in terrible shape, his face streaming blood, and he’s got a slight concussion, you know. He said he fell down and hurt himself on his boat, but it was obvious that he’d taken a beating. She called the police, of course, but he wouldn’t talk to them, either. He’s very reticent, isn’t he?”

  “Very.”

  “Are you a friend of his?”

  “Just an acquaintance.”

  “Some of the girls said it was gang trouble, that he was in a gang and fell out with the other members. You think there’s anything in that?”

  I said that hospitals were full of rumors.

  CHAPTER 6: I ate dinner at Masso’s in Hollywood. While I was waiting for my steak, I phoned Joseph Tarantine’s apartment and got my nickel back. The steak came the way I liked it, medium rare, garnished with mushrooms, with a pile of fried onion rings on the side. I had a pint of Black Horse ale for dessert, and when I was finished I felt good. So far I was getting nowhere, but I felt good. I had the kind of excitement, more prophetic than tea-leaves, that lifts you when anything may happen and probably will.

  I switched on my headlights as I wheeled out of the parking lot. The gray dusk in the air was almost tangible. Under its film the city lay distinct but dimensionless, as transient as a cloud. The stores and theaters and office buildings had lost their daytime perspectives with the sun, and were waiting for night to give them bulk and meaning. The double stream of traffic into which I turned continued the theme of change. Half of the lemmings were rushing down to the sea and the other half had been there and decided not to get wet. The wild slopes of the mountains overshadowed the slanting streets to the northwest and reduced their neons and headlights to firefly sparks.

  The Casa Loma was on a side street a block from Sunset where the boulevard rose towards the hills. It was a four-story white frame building with cheerful lights shining from nearly half of the windows. Not quite the ritz, as Mario Tarantine thought, but it would do. The cars in the parking lot behind the building were nearly all new, and a Pontiac 8 was the cheapest one I saw. The people who lived there spent their money on front.

  No doorman, though, which suited me. No desk clerk or hall attendant. I crossed the small carpeted lobby to the brass mailboxes banked on the wall by the plate-glass inner door. Joseph Tarantine was the name on number 7. His card was handwritten in green ink, apparently by the girl who had left the harbor on the sea of life so wide. Most of the other cards were printed, and one or two were engraved. Number 8 was very beautifully engraved with the name of Keith Dalling, whoever he was. I pressed the electric-bell button under his name and got no answer.

  Number 12, a Mrs. Kingsley Soper, was more alert. Probably she was expecting company. When I heard her answering buzz I pushed the plate-glass door open and inserted a doubled-up matchbook in the crack. An ancient ruse, but it worked sometimes. I walked to the corner and back, and found my matchbook where I had left it.

  There were fifteen apartments in the building, so that number 7 was on the second floor. I went up in the halting automatic elevator and found it easily, a locked door at the end of a narrow corridor. I stood and looked at the grain of the wood for a minute, but there wasn’t much sense in that. I could break the door open, or I could go away. The door of number 8 was directly across the hall, but there was nobody in it. I took the heavy screwdriver from my car out of my inside breast pocket. Number 7 had a Yale-type spring lock, and they were easy.

  This one was very easy. The door fell open when I leaned my shoulder against it. Someone had got there before me. There were jimmy marks on the door-jamb, and the socket was loose. I put my screwdriver away and took out my gun instead. The room beyond the door was full of darkness, cut by a thin shaft of light from the hallway.

  Facing inward, I closed the door and found the wall switch beside it. Even in the dark there seemed to be something queer about the room. There was a faint light from the large window opposite me, enough to see the vague shapes of furniture which didn’t look right. I switched the light on, and saw that nothing was right. The four plaster walls and ceiling were there, but everything inside of them had been destroyed.

  The upholstered chairs and the davenport had been slashed and disemboweled. Their stuffing covered the floor in handfuls like dirty snow. The glass coffee-table had its legs unscrewed. Torn reproductions of paintings lay by their empty frames. The metal insides of the radio-phonograph had been ripped out and thr
own on the floor. Even the window drapes had been torn down, and the lampshades removed from the lamps. The pottery bases of two table-lamps had been shattered.

  The kitchen looked worse. Cans of food had been opened and dumped in the sink. The refrigerator had been literally torn apart, its insulating material scattered on the floor. The linoleum had been torn up in great jagged sheets. In the midst of this chaos, a half-eaten meal, steak and potatoes and asparagus tips, lay on the dinette table. It was the sort of thing you might expect to find in a house that had been struck by a natural disaster, cyclone or flood or earthquake.

  I entered the bedroom. The mattress and covered springs of the Hollywood bed lay in shreds, and even the skeleton of the bed had been taken apart. Men’s jackets and women’s dresses had been slashed and thrown in a heap on the closet floor. The rags of some white nurses’ uniforms lay among them. The dresser drawers had been pulled out and dropped, and the mirror taken out of its frame. There was hardly a whole object left in the room, and nothing personal at all. No letter, no address-book, not even a book of matches. A gray fuzz of duck down from a ripped comforter lay over everything like mold.

  The bathroom was off a tiny hallway between the bedroom and the living-room. I stood in the bathroom doorway for an instant, feeling the inside wall for the light. I pressed the switch but no light went on. A man’s voice spoke instead:

  “I got you lined up and you can’t see me. Drop the gun.”

  I strained my eyes into the dark bathroom. There was a glint of light on metal but it could have been the plumbing. Nothing moved. I let my revolver clatter on the floor.

  “That’s my boy,” the voice said. “Now back up against the wall and keep your hands up high.”

  I did as I was told. A tall man in a wide-brimmed black hat emerged from the dark room. He was as thin as death. His face had a coffin look, skin drawn over high sharp cheekbones, blue down-dragging mouth. His pale glistening eyes were on me, and so was his black gun.

  “What’s the pitch?” He had yellow teeth.

  “I should be asking you.”

  “Only you’re doing the answering.” The gun nodded in agreement.