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  APPOINTMENT WITH FEAR

  The Saturday Evening Post

  September 28, 1946

  NOW YOU SEE IT

  The Saturday Evening Post

  May 25, 1946

  DEATH AND THE “SKYLARK”

  Esquire, 1952

  APPOINTMENT WITH FEAR

  The crumpled body on the floor bore the marks of murder. As he stared down at it, Bailey tried to answer this appalling question: Had he himself done the killing?

  I WAS a stranger in town, but I didn’t think it was obvious. Almost everyone in Tucson is a stranger in one way or another. But the girl who had just come into the bar of the lush Desert Inn and slid up onto the stool beside me was making plans. She dropped her mink casually over the back of the seat, ordered a bourbon and ginger ale, and turned her head so that she could look at me without getting the tip of her nose in the way.

  I was grateful to her, in a way. It made the place seem more like home. It had none of the crowding, the ostentation, the tense raw urgency, of Hollywood’s bistros. And it was lighted. Not garishly, but when you picked up your drink you were sure it was yours and that you wouldn’t find somebody’s thumb in it. Bright earthy colors, hand-painted glass, Navajo rugs on the walls, deep-colored Moroccan ones on the tiled floor, a couple of Mexican guitarists singing almost to themselves.

  The bar keep brought the girl her drink. He was tall and thin, with drawn cheeks and a kind of fevered pinkness where the skin tightened across bone. It worried me. The girl tasted the drink and peeked at me again.

  I finished the rye and soda and looked at my watch. Only twenty minutes to go. No time for the brunette. The Mexicans sang a song about Maria Romero. The girl brought up a black bag and opened it on the bar. She brought out a cigarette case and put a cigarette between her lips.

  She turned her head toward me and said, “Do you have a match?”

  I looked at her then for the first time. I had expected the trenchant eye, the practiced smile, the wordless pact contained in some ancient gesture. But they weren’t there. There was a fleeting, antic smile playing on a tiny face with blue shadows in it just where shadows should be, and wide blue eyes that were neither knowing nor empty.

  I said, “No, but maybe I can find you one.”

  I turned her handbag toward me, reached in and drew out a packet of paper matches. I struck one and held it out for her. Red light from behind the bar danced in her eyes. She raised the cigarette to her mouth and put it against the flame. It glowed orange and I shook the match out. She looked down at her drink, blew smoke at it, and made circles with her glass on the dark tile of the bar.

  She said, “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “That just goes to show,” I whispered. “I thought you’d get a big bang out of it.”

  She suddenly wasn’t enjoying herself any more. Her full dark brows pulled together and there were lines of tension around her mouth. The whole thing had abruptly ceased to make sense.

  “I’m flattered like everything,” I said, “but I’ve got an appointment in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh.”

  I was beginning to feel like a man who reaches into his pocket and finds a hand there. There was something all wrong with the scene. After a while I said, “How did you get into this racket? And don’t tell me you guess you were just lucky.”

  She smiled then. It was bright and warm, almost painfully unaffected, slightly daffy, and wholly beautiful; the kind of unlabored loveliness you’re sure the possessor knows nothing about; and it had authority. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach.

  “I wasn’t,” she said brightly, “trying to pick you. up.”

  “That’s bitter news. For a minute there I thought you were.”

  “I wanted to find out if you could be picked up.”

  “Round-heels Bailey, they call me. But right now I have an appointment.”

  She looked mildly disappointed and said, “Yes, I know you have, Mr. Bailey. With me.”

  How was I to know? Two days before, in Los Angeles, I got a telegram signed “D.C. Halloran.” The telegram asked me to be at the bar of the Desert Inn, Tucson, Arizona, and named the date and the exact time—nine P.M.—reminding me that they have Mountain Time in Tucson. That hadn’t meant anything at all, but the same D.C. Halloran had also wired me five hundred dollars. That made it a nice trip.

  I drove, and I had twelve hours of sand, sheer rock, saguaro and loneliness, to imagine what D.C. Halloran might be like. In none of my imaginings was he a wide-eyed girl with an antic smile and a penchant for melodrama.

  I said, “What was the name again?”

  “Halloran.”

  “Do you live here at the hotel?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a nice place if you don’t mind sharing your secrets. Let’s go buy some privacy.”

  She nodded and pulled the mink coat around her. She took the long way out across the bar toward the tile stairs that led to the lobby. She was a little thing, her hair dark and long and hanging in loose ringlets about her shoulders.

  We were in the alcove between bar and lobby. She stopped suddenly and stiffened. She moved convulsively and pushed past me through glass doors that led to a dark empty patio. I followed, and she turned and pulled me into the shadow out of the moonlight. Her nails dug into my wrist frenziedly while she stared back into the inn at two people coming down the stairs from the lobby. The woman was in the lead, young, blond, walking with languid confidence. Sleek satin dress, an air of calm purpose, and a wide red-wat mouth. Behind her the man, baldish, high-hipped, and a face that was just a great round lacuna. The woman paused slightly and glanced sharply at the glass doors, and the girl beside me stiffened, and the fingers began to dig. The blonde gave her hair a pat and looked away. They went on by into the bar.

  The girl let go my wrist, slowly, a little reluctantly. and leaned against me, trembling. I could bear her voice, tiny and tight, saying, “I knew they were here . . . I knew it . . . I knew it! . . .”

  I supported her for a while, then whispered, “All right, they’re here. Now what’s bad about that.”

  And then it came. She pushed away from me slowly and lifted her head. Her eyes met mine and slanted oft, and she brought them back again slowly, as if by some terrible effort of will, bright and dark. Her teeth were clamped together as if she were holding onto life by them.

  She said, “I . . . don’t . . . know.”

  WE were getting into my car. We hadn’t gone into the inn, but had gone out past the fifty-dollar-a-day cottages and through a gate in the pink-stuccoed wall. I turned and drove up toward Campbell slowly, wailing for her to let the tensions unwind and to tell me about it in her own time. I turned left on Campbell toward town.

  I glanced at her. She was turned so that she could watch the night traffic coming up behind us through the rear window. She caught the glance and smiled weakly.

  “We’ll go to The Paddock.” she murmured, “It’s downtown, just off Congress. It’s a bar, but it’s very dark there. No one will see us there.” There was something in her tone that I didn’t like.

  I said, “What do the initials D.C. stand for?”

  “Dorothy Caroline. My daddy named me. He’s dead.”

  I got it then. There was something off-key in the tone. It didn’t go with what had happened or with what she said.

  I turned on Speedway, went down to Sixth Avenue and turned left again. We dipped through the underpass
and came into the midtown traffic. She still hadn’t told me anything.

  I said, “What’s it all about, Miss Halloran? What do I do to earn the five hundred dollars?”

  I—I don’t know. Sometimes I think they want to kill me.”

  I looked at her sharply. She was leaning back against the door. She looked exhausted, and she had sounded like a child caught in a terror all of her own making.

  I said, “Angel, you’re not going to turn out to be a screwball, are you?”

  “I’ll tell you about it, Mr. Bailey,” she whispered. “But not just yet. I——” Seeing them coming into the bar, as if they knew right where to look for me——” She stopped talking abruptly and stared past me at nothing. Then she laughed. It was really a nice little laugh, soft and unaffected, and as gay as a mourning veil. “I’ll try not to turn out to be a screwball. Turn left at the next street.”

  I turned. A block down, a neon jockey hung out over the street riding a horse that wasn’t there. Neon script spelled out The Paddock. I pulled into the curb a few feet down from the place, and Dorothy opened her door and got out.

  She suddenly froze, and then reared back into the car and whined, “Oh, God!”

  A long stalk of a man was leaning in the cold against the building, looking at something down the other side of Nogales. His face was thin and sharp, and his eyes were just deep clefts of darkness. A roll-your-own cigarette was cold and forgotten between his fingers. There was no one else on the street.

  “Please, please, drive away from here!”

  I drove away from there. “Who was he?” I asked.

  She was trembling again. “One of them,” she whispered. “One of them.” I turned north on Stone and drove slowly, going nowhere, letting it slide.

  I said, “A bar’s no place to talk business, Miss Halloran. Haven’t you got a home?”

  She glanced at me, chewing her lip, and said nothing.

  “Where do you live?”

  “On Cherry, up by the university.” I made a U-turn back toward Speedway.

  She said hastily, “They might be watching my place.”

  “We’ll scout it first and see. They don’t know my car.”

  “All right,” she said quietly. “We’ll go to my apartment.”

  I gripped the wheel and drove on. A screwball, a beautiful, phantomfaced dream of loveliness. And nuttier than a two-foot slab of peanut brittle.

  IT was a three-story, white-stucco building, fairly new, with the homey warmth of an all-night garage. I drove around it twice, didn’t see anything, and parked around the comer from the front entrance. There was no one in the dim-lit lobby, and there wasn’t an elevator. We walked up three flights and down a short hall to a door with the number 304 on it.

  The place didn’t go with the mink coat and the five-hundred-dollar retainer. It was just one room, with a closet, a bath, a two-by-four kitchen and a wall bed. It was clean, and it didn’t look as if anyone at all lived there.

  “No,” she apologized, “it isn’t nice. But you can’t find a place to live In Tucson. I was lucky, and besides . . . it had something I liked.” She gestured toward the phony paneling where the bed folded into the wall. “When the bed’s down, it comes across the door, and nobody can get in, even if they have a key.”

  I sat on the davenport and she sat down at the other end.

  “Why don’t you just start somewhere near the beginning now,” I said, “and tell it to me any way you like?”

  “I don’t know where to begin,” she murmured.

  “How long have you been in Tucson?”

  “About a month.”

  “But it didn’t begin here.”

  “No, In San Francisco.” She shuddered ever so slightly. “They followed me here.”

  “Why Tucson?”

  “I wasn’t well. They have good doctors here.”

  “What’s the matter with your health?”

  “I—I have dreadful headaches.”

  I wasn’t really surprised. It had been adding up to that all along, I said, “Have you told your doctor about these people who are after you?”

  “No.”

  I stood up and said, “I can’t help you. Miss Halloran. I’ll give back your five hundred—everything hut expenses.” I started to take out my wallet.

  She sat and looked at me, wide-eyed, unmoving.

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I went on. “You have a friend here that you don’t know about. Tomorrow I want you to go to your doctor. Tell him,” I dead-panned, “everything you’ve told me.”

  “But I haven’t told you——” She stopped abruptly and stood up. Her straight little brows pulled together and her jaw line sharpened. “You think I’m——” She brought up her fist and chewed on it and glared at me.

  “All right, angel. Sit down and tell me what I’m supposed to do. That’s all I ask. I love my work and it’s getting along toward midnight. I’d like to get started.”

  After a while she said, “It was seeing them . . . almost running into them like that. My mind froze up. I haven’t been able to think. I kept thinking that in a little while I’d be able to talk, but I can’t. I just can’t talk about it tonight, I just can’t!”

  There she sat. She had started and ended several coherent sentences. Her hair was lying softly on her shoulders. Someone had worked hard over it only recently. For that she had to have something akin to organization in her life. She had to call and make an appointment, and then keep that appointment. The dress was nice too. Not fussy, and fitted to her with an expert hand. She had had to buy it or have it made in some normal organized way. I put the wallet away.

  I said, “Okay, baby. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She looked up quickly. “Please. Stay here.”

  We were off again. I didn’t, say anything.

  “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “I’ll find one.”

  “Not now. You’ll never get a place tonight.”

  I turned toward the door. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “Please! Just tonight! After tonight, I know I’ll be all right. But if you leave here, I’m going with you. I just can’t stay alone tonight.”

  “Where would I sleep?”

  “In the bed.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She reddened suddenly and added, “I’d take the couch, of course.” She looked down at her hands.

  I was tired. Arizona gets cold at night. I decided to climb onto the broom handle and go along just for the ride. “All right,” I said. “I’ll stay. I’ll take the couch.”

  “Oh, thanks, thanks! I’ll be fine in the morning. I promise.”

  “You’d better get to bed.”

  She jumped up, got some things out of the closet and went into the bathroom. After a while, she opened the door and smiled at me. It was wide and happy, and only slightly off key. Maybe that was what made it beautiful.

  She said, “I forgot to put the bed down.”

  I eased the bed out of the wall. It came straight down, with a sound like an ancient drawbridge, blocking off all but about two inches of the door.

  “Is it down?”

  “Need you ask?”

  “Turn around.”

  I turned, heard a rustling sound, then a creaking of springs.

  “Here, you’ll need this.” She was under the covers, holding out a blue wool blanket to me.

  I took it and said, “If it’s all the same to you. I’ll sleep in my pants. I’ve got another suit in Los Angeles.” She laughed. It sounded almost happy.

  I took off my coat and tie and shoes, and unfolded the blanket. I turned off the light and went back to the davenport and sat down.

  Her voice was small and thin, whispering suddenly, “Mr. Bailey, will you kiss me?”

  I wasn’t surprised. Nothing could have surprised me that night. I stood up. And then, out of the nebulous fragments of things that I knew about her, I suddenly realized what she expected of me
. I stepped over to the bed and looked down at her. Her eyes were closed, and when I leaned over, she didn’t raise her chin. I had known she wouldn’t. I kissed her on the cheek. “Good night,” she whispered.

  “G’ night,” I growled.

  I went back to the davenport, but I couldn’t sleep. I had two ideas. I wanted to eliminate one. Then I could go to sleep. One of them went like this: She’s just what she appears to be. She’s terrified of something quite real, something I’ll be able to help her with. She’s young and maybe a little neurotic, but mostly just frightened. The other went like this: She’s a nut. She has delusions of persecution—paranoia I think they call it. She didn’t describe the thing she was afraid of because it didn’t exist. It was just “They,” the world—anyone she happened to pick on at the moment.

  I chased both ideas around for about an hour. Then I suddenly sat up and Blared into the darkness while I let myself realize that there was a third idea, chilling, uncomplicated, making the kind of sense I’d grown used to.

  I had come to Tucson because someone named D.C. Halloran needed help, I accepted the girl as Halloran because she said she was and because she called me by name. But I had told her my name. In our conversation at the bar I bad mentioned my name. Then she had used it, had got me out of the hotel, and was keeping me on ice overnight. I shook my head slowly and sat up. I found her bag in the bathroom. I closed the door, turned on the light and started through it. I found two bills from two different doctors. There was no recipient’s name on the bills. I put them in my pocket. There were seven one-hundred-dollar bills and several fifties, twenties and tens. At the bottom there was a membership card in a sorority. The name on the card was “Dorothy Dreves.” There wasn’t anything else. I put the things back, turned off the light, went into the kitchen and poured myself a stiff drink.

  I awoke to the close warm sounds of kids playing outside, vacuum cleaners sucking up dust and cars rolling by on Speedway. The sun was shining, but it was cold in the room. I rolled off the davenport, stood up and looked over at the bed.

  But she wasn’t in the bed. She was on the floor, hands spread in an alien gesture, a blanket twisted in her slender legs, her hair a tangle, revealing her slender neck. She didn’t seem to be breathing. I knelt beside her. I put my hand on her wrist. It was cold. I couldn’t find a pulse. I was leaning over to put my ear against her back when I saw them—bruise marks faint on the back of her neck. They were neatly spaced. They would fit a large hand.