77 Sunset Strip Page 6

  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, phantom-faced dream of loveliness. And nuttier than a two-foot slab of peanut brittle.

  ELEVEN

  It was a three-story, white-stucco building, fairly new, with all the homey warmth of an all-night garage. I drove around it twice, didn’t see anything, and parked around the corner 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 seven-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 seven hundred—everything but 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 deadpanned, “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 thought 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, “All right. 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 on 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.”

  “For you,” I smiled, “it ought to come down automatically.”

  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 stared 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 had 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 different 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.

  I stood up slowly, muttering an empty apology and swallowing past the thickness in my throat. And then it came—a hint, the merest touch of terror. The bed was still down. I looked at the window. It was locked. I walked a little stiffly into the kitchen. I looked for a garbage-disposal door, a dumb-wraiter. I didn’t find any. I kicked the walls under the sink and beside the range. I went back through the living room into the bathroom. I tapped the walls, tried to lift the tub. I went into the closet. I looked under the bed, behind the davenport. I stood in the center of the room while icy fingers played a roundelay on my back and something stabbed at my stomach. I stumbled over to the door and unlocked it and pushed on it to see if it would open outward. Silly, wasn’t it? But you’d have done it too. I pulled on it and it opened a little more than an inch and came up hard against the bed. I closed it and locked it again.

  “Tricky,” I said to no one at all. “But I didn’t kill her, so there’s a way in and a way out.” My hands were wet.

  Then someone with a bad breath leaned over my shoulder and whispered, Let’s face it, chum. How do you know what you did while you were asleep on that couch?

  I got out a handkerchief and wiped my hands, and then rubbed over the part of the bed I had touched when I put it down the night before; then I eased the bed into the wall and it screamed in agony.

  I went to the door and looked around. The rest of the fingerprints were okay. Then I remembered and went in and wiped her purse clean where I’d handled it. I went back to the door and listened. I unlocked the door and looked out to the right. No one there. I stepped out.

  Coming down from the left, where I couldn’t have seen her without putting my head out into the hall, was a short gray woman. She walked past me silently, taking me in with dull little eyes like bullets. She, walked on down the hall. I locked the door to apartment 304, put the key in my pocket and went out of there. The woman had seen me and time was running out. I had decided not to take my story to the police till I’d found a little more to go with it.

  I drove downtown and parked about two blocks from the Paddock, walked up Congress to the combined office of Tucson’s two papers and borrowed a city directory. I didn’t find any D. C. Halloran or any Halloran with first names that would fit D. C. Then I went on over to the Western Union office. There was a man in the place with blond eyelashes and all the time in the world. I waited awhile, then got an expression on my face like a man with foot trouble, gave him some fast talk with the word detective in it, and hung my L. A. deputy’s badge under his nose for one and a half seconds.

  It worked fine. Yes, he remembered a girl in a mink coat, a looker. Very sweet girl, seemed upset or something. Yes, she wired some money, to Los Angeles, if he recollected correctly. I told him that checked with our facts and walked out. I was feeling better; I had almost slipped out of character and thanked him.

  The Paddock’s red leather door was propped open and a husky Chinese boy was cleaning up behind the bar.

  I said, “Good morning, son’”

  “We’re not open for business, dad. I’m just airin’ the place out.”

  “Where can I find someone—anyone—who was here last evening?”

  “I was here till ten o’clock.”

  I said, “You wouldn’t have noticed a tall thin party hanging around out front? Wore a dark suit and tie, and rolled his own cigarettes.”

  “He also had a hernia and flat feet. That was Jim Shaftoe.”

  “Know where I’ll find him?”

  “Sorry. I don’ know where he lives.”

  I went across the street to a sidewalk magazine-stand. A tall man in a LaGuardia hat was in charge. Sure, he knew where Jim Shaftoe lived. The Congress Rooms, down on Meyer. He showed me how to get there. “I think Jim’s in the first room on the left.” He made Jim Shaftoe sound about as sinister as a jelly roll.

  The Congress Rooms looked like it might be the oldest building in Tucson. I went in and knocked on the first door on the left. A chair scraped bare boards inside and slow feet sounded. The door opened.

  It was the gaunt man. His eyes were deep and tired and without color. I said, “Mr. Shaftoe?”

  He made a sound in his throat.

  “I want to talk to you a minute.”

  “I never buy nuthin’.”

  “Maybe you’d like to sell something.”

  The eyes blinked a couple of times, and he stepped out into the corridor, closed his door and said “Whuz-zup?”

  “It’s about the Dorothy Halloran job—the brunette in the mink coat.”

  The eyes blinked again, and I thought they looked a little disappointed.

  “I saw you,” I went on, “outside the Paddock.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who put you there?”

  “Huh?”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Sellin’ papers.”

  “You can be funnier than that.”

  “That’s my comer. Been there seven years. Everybody knows me. Ask anybody about Jim Shaftoe. I don’t want no trouble.”

  I went away from there and walked up to my car. I drove off. I was on a street on the north side of the underpass. I saw a barber shop. I needed a shave. I could lie back with a hot towel on my face and think about finding some other line of work.

  It was a one-man shop, the man short and bald and blue-chinned. He wasn’t a talkative man and there was a small radio playing. The towel was over my face when the morning news came on.

  There were several local items, none of them about murder. Then there was more music, and suddenly the man with the bad breath was back, whispering at me. What are you doing here? Give yourself a break and get going. Jim Shaftoe. Everybody knows me. Get it, chum? She was a nut. Remember last night? Remember looking down at her and thinking she’d foxed you? That’s right, chum. You remember. What are you doing here?

  “What’d you say?” The barber was asking me that with a kind of wild look in his eye.

  I said, “Huh?”

  He said, “I thought you said something. It sounded like ‘I didn’t kill her’ or something.”

  “Yeah. Somebody poisoned our cat. My wife thinks I did it. It worries me.”

  The barber gave me a wry look and went on with the shave. When he was giving me my change, he winked at me and said, “I don’t like cats neither.”

  I winked back and went out and drove away. After a while I got the two doctor bills out of my pocket and looked at them. One was from Dr. G. E. Slocum, apparently not an M.D. The bill was for ten dollars. The other was from Arthu
r Blair, M.D., with an address downtown on Alameda. The charge was twenty dollars. I drove downtown.

  Arthur Blair, M.D., had a building all to himself. Not too large, very new, with a lot of glass brick and a sterile look to it. The entrance opened into a large waiting room equipped with flowers and a cheery young thing to sit there and wait with you. She smiled at me when I came in, and told me it was a nice morning. There wasn’t anyone waiting, so I told her I’d like to see Dr. Blair.

  “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

  “Nope. No appointment.”

  The smile went to half-mast. “Doctor only sees people by appointment.”

  “This is something of an emergency.”

  She had me there. “Doctor never,” she said brightly, “takes emergency cases.”

  “What kind of a doctor is he—a psychiatrist?”

  She was hanging onto the smile now by her little white teeth. “Ye-es,” she said.

  “Well, this is about one of his patients; I’m afraid she’s in no position to make an appointment.”

  She thought about that. She asked me for the name of the patient and for my name. I told her the patient’s name was Dreves, although maybe she had used Hal-loran, and that my name was Roark. She asked me to sit down.

  While I sat, she made passes at a pad on her desk with a silver pencil and studied me from under her left hand. It didn’t worry me. There hadn’t been anything on the air, and Tucson wouldn’t have an afternoon paper that hit the streets before noon. After a while the door behind the receptionist’s desk opened and a large bony woman came out. The receptionist showed her to the door, then went back and disappeared into the doctor’s office. When she came out she told me Dr. Blair would see me now.

  He was leaning back in his leather-upholstered swivel chair with his long legs crossed, staring out his east window with a distant lost look in his eyes. They were large dark eyes in a gray face.

  He glanced up and said, “Sit down, please, Mr. Roark.” The voice was gray, too, and distant.

  I sat in a deep leather chair beside his desk. There may have been more comfortable chairs in the world. I never sat in them. The sunlight was at my back, so that the hard glare was on him, not me. Doctor Blair was a man who liked to put his patients at ease.