1949 - You're Lonely When You Dead (14 page)

I
was back on the bed again. I didn’t remember how I got there, but I was there and Miss Bolus was standing over me, a glass of whisky in her hand. As I half-struggled up, she bent over me, holding the whisky to my lips, and as I drank I found myself looking down the front of her dress. I must have been pretty bad, because she hadn’t a brassiere on, and as soon as I saw she hadn’t a brassiere on, I closed my eyes.

That’s how bad I was.

I drank the whisky. There seemed a lot of it, but there was no bite to it, so it was easy to keep drinking until there was nothing more to drink. It must have been all right because as soon as Miss Bolus moved away I felt its effect. I felt it rushing around in my system like a sheep dog chasing up sheep, only it wasn’t sheep the whisky was chasing, it was my nerves, and I could feel it pulling them this way and that, tightening them, disciplining them, bringing them back to their tough everyday standard. And after a minute or so although my head hurt still, I was suddenly and miraculously well again.

Cool fingers took the glass from my hand. Miss Bolus smiled at me.

‘I’ve seen the shakes a good many times in my young life,’ she said, ‘but nothing to compare to yours.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, and sat up slowly. ‘Let it be a lesson to you. It’s cured me. From now on—’ I broke off to stare at Brandon who sat on the straight-backed chair at die foot of the bed; his snake’s eyes missing nothing. ‘Hey!’ I exclaimed. ‘But I am seeing things. I’m seeing coppers. Look!’ I pointed.

‘Can you see coppers?’

‘I can see one,’ Miss Bolus said. ‘And the Police Captain. I wouldn’t call him a copper. He mightn’t like it.’

‘Cut out the funny stuff, Malloy,’ Brandon said bleakly.

‘We want to talk to you.’

‘Give me another drink,’ I said to Miss Bolus, and as she went across the room for the bottle, I said, ‘Who asked you in here, Brandon?’

‘All right, you can cut that out too,’ he said, glaring. ‘What’s going on here? Who’s this woman? What’s she doing here?’

I discovered suddenly that the front of my dress shirt was soaked with whisky and that explained where the awful stink came from. I got unsteadily to my feet, ripped off my collar and dropped it on the floor with a grimace of disgust.

‘And get me some coffee,’ I said as Miss Bolus came over with the whisky. ‘Strong enough to lie on and plenty of it.’

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Brandon snarled, starting out of his chair.

‘Sure, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer,’ I said, sending Miss Bolus away with a wave of my hand. ‘You have no right here. What’s it to you who she is? What’s it to you what’s going on?’ While I was talking I stripped off my tuxedo and shirt. ‘I’m getting myself a shower. Stick around if you have to. I shan’t be long.’

It was only when I was opening the bathroom door that I wondered if the body was in there. I kept right on, shut the door and shot the bolt. No body. I reached out and pulled the shower curtain aside. Still no body. There was nowhere else to look, so I stripped off the rest of my clothes and got under the shower. Two minutes of hissing cold water cleared my head the way nothing else could have cleared it. I was beginning to get things under control. The electric clock on the wall told me it was twenty minutes past eleven. Anita Cerf had been shot at three forty-five a.m. I had been unconscious for nine hours. My fingers explored the back of my head. It was tender and felt a little soft, but so far as I could judge it was still all in one piece, and that was something to be thankful for.

The body was gone. That seemed pretty obvious. If it had been hidden anywhere in the cabin Brandon would have found it. Who had taken it, and why? I flicked the electric razor into life and began to shave. Why take the body away?

Why? Was the killer crazy? If he had left the body and the gun he could have been practically certain that Brandon would have nailed me for the murder. But maybe the gun could be traced. Was that it? Or maybe the killer hadn’t taken the body. Maybe someone else had. Miss Bolus? I couldn’t see Miss Bolus carrying away a body across her square young shoulders. She might have done. She had enough nerve, but I couldn’t quite sec her doing it. Who then? And who was the guy in the slouch hat who had sapped me? The killer?

That was as far as I got: not very far, but then I wasn’t in the condition for brilliant deductions. Brandon hammered on the door.

‘Come out of there, Malloy!’ he shouted.

I put down the razor, felt my chin and decided it was smooth enough, slipped on a bath robe and opened the door.

Brandon was standing just outside. He looked as amiable as a tiger and a lot more ferocious.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said violently. ‘You either talk here or you’ll come down to the station.’

‘I’ll talk here,’ I said, moving over to the table where Miss Bolus had put the coffee. ‘What is it?’

I could hear her humming in the kitchen. She wouldn’t hum like that, I thought, pouring coffee, if she had seen Anita Cerf, let alone handled her. It couldn’t have been her.

Who then?

Brandon said, ‘Where’s Benny?’

I wasn’t expecting that one. I wasn’t aware that he even knew Benny. I picked up the cup of coffee, held it a few inches below my nose and stared at him through the steam.

It was good strong coffee. The smell of it made my mouth water.

‘You mean Ed Benny?’

‘Yes. Where is he?’

‘He’s in San Francisco.’

‘What’s he doing there?’

‘What’s it to you?’ I asked, sitting on the bed.

‘The San Francisco Police Department are asking.’

‘They are? Well, why don’t they ask him? What’s the idea?’

For no reason at all I felt a cold chill run up my spine. I put the cup of coffee down on the bedside table.

‘It’s no use asking him,’ Brandon said harshly. ‘He’s dead.’

The cold chill spread right across my back.

‘Benny? Dead?’ The voice didn’t sound like mine.

‘Yeah. The harbour police fished him out of Indian Basin,’

Brandon said, his eyes glued to my face. ‘His hands and feet were tied with piano wire. They reckoned he died a
round nine o’clock last night.’

I
stood at the window and watched them go.

Brandon stamped down the path to the gate, the dead and chewed cigar pinched between clenched teeth and tight lips, an angry, frustrated look on his smooth, fat face. The uniformed cop who opened the car door for him, saluted, but even that didn’t seem to please him. He bundled himself into the car and glared back at the cabin as if he would like to set fire to it and kick the ashes into the sea.

Mifflin followed him into the car. Mifflin didn’t look angry, but he looked very thoughtful, and he was still apparently thinking when the car drove away.

I remained at the window, looking at the ocean without seeing it. Dana, Leadbetter, Anita and now Benny. The thing had suddenly gone mad: it wasn’t a murder case anymore. It was a massacre case.

I felt rather than heard Miss Bolus as she came to the door, and I could feel her watching me.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked without turning.

‘I called you around nine o’clock this morning,’ she said.

‘The operator said your receiver was off and no one was answering.’ She joined me at the window. ‘I hadn’t anything better to do so I came over. You were lying on the floor. The lights were on; the doors open. I got you on to the bed and was trying to bring you round when I heard them drive up. I poured whisky over you and told them you had been celebrating. I kept them away from you as long as I could. I didn’t want them to know you had been sapped. I didn’t think you would want them to know either. I don’t think they did, do you?’

‘No.’ I took a package of Camels from my pocket, shook out two, gave her one and lit up. ‘The whisky was a good idea. You didn’t see anyone else here when you came in?’

‘There wasn’t anyone else here. What happened?’

‘Someone was waiting for me. I walked in, and, Bingo! That’s all there was to it.’

She went over and began straightening the bed.

‘You make it sound pretty simple,’ she said.

‘Being hit on the head with a sock full of sand is simple. There’s nothing to it. You should try it some time.’

‘Don’t you have anyone to look after you?’

I had forgotten Tony, my Filipino boy, then I remembered it was Sunday. He didn’t come in on Sundays. That was a break. I wouldn’t have liked him to have walked in here and found me lying on the floor. He was a respectable boy. He would probably have quit.

‘Not on Sundays. On Sundays I have a beautiful redhead who comes in and does for me,’ I said, and went into the sitting room. I stood over the casting couch and stared at it.

If the yellow cushion had been there I should have been convinced that I had had a nightmare, but the yellow cushion wasn’t there.

It was a pity about the casting couch. I had grown fond of it, but I would have to get rid of it. It was lucky there were no bloodstains on it, but it did smell of death. At least it smelt of death to me. You don’t make love to a girl on a couch that smells of death. Even a Malloy has his finer feelings at times, and this was one of the times.

I wandered around the room. Nothing out of place. There was no sign that Anita Cerf had been here: no sign whatsoever. I examined the carpet where the Colt automatic had lain. There were no oil stains. I got down on hands and knees and put my nose on the carpet and sniffed. There seemed to be a faint smell of gunpowder, but I couldn’t be sure if I was imagining it.

Miss Bolus stood in the bedroom doorway and watched me. A troubled little frown wrinkled her brow.

‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked. ‘Or do you always act like this?’

I stood up and ran fingers down the back of my head.

‘Sure,’ I said absently. ‘You want to see the way I act when I’m not hit on the head.’

‘I don’t think you’re well. Hadn’t you better go back to bed?’

‘Didn’t you hear what Brandon said? I have to go to Frisco to identify Benny.’

‘Bosh,’ she said sharply. ‘You’re not fit to go. I can go or someone from the office.’

I went over to the cupboard where I kept the aspirin.

‘Yes,’ I said, not paying a great deal of attention to what she was saying. I took four aspirins from the bottle and flicked them one after the other into my mouth. I washed them down with lukewarm coffee, ‘But I’m going all the same. Benny was a friend of mine.’

‘You had better get a doctor to look at your head,’ Miss Bolus said. I could see she was worried. ‘You may have concussion.’

‘The Malloys are famous for their rock-like skulls,’ I said, wondering if I had taken enough aspirins. My head still ached. ‘Nothing short of a sledgehammer would give me concussion.’ I shot two more aspirins into my mouth to be on the safe side. I was wondering why Anita Cerf had come to my place, and how the murderer knew she was there. Then an unpleasant thought dropped into my mind. Perhaps he didn’t know, .and was waiting for me. That seemed much more likely. Maybe he thought I was getting too inquisitive and had come out here to silence me the way he had silenced Dana, and had knocked Anita off for practice. Well, not exactly practice . . . This needed a little thought. This needed one of those brain sessions for which I’m not particularly famous. I decided to put the problem in lavender until my head stopped aching.

‘I wish I knew what was going on in your mind,’ Miss Eolus said uneasily. ‘Has something happened? I mean apart from Benny?’

‘I’m glad to hear you call it a mind,’ I said. ‘You should hear what some people call it. No, nothing’s happened apart from Benny. Nothing at all.’ The two additional aspirins were on the job now. The pain in my head began to recede.

‘Why don’t you run along?’ I went on. ‘You must have things to do.’

She smoothed down her dress over her hips. She had nice hips: just the right shape and just the right weight. This wasn’t a new discovery. I had noticed them before.

‘Well, isn’t that fine?’ she said bitterly. ‘After all I’ve done for you. A brush-off. I don’t know why I bother with you. Can you tell me why I bother with you?’

‘Not right now,’ I said, not wishing to hurt her feelings, but wanting her to go very badly. ‘We’ll talk about that some other time. I’ll call you in a day or so. I must hurry up and change. You won’t mind if I say goodbye now, will you?’ and I went into the bedroom and closed the door.

After a couple of minutes I heard her car start up. I didn’t wave out of the window and I forgot her as soon as the sou
nd of the car engine died away.

T
he air taxi touched down on the long runway of the Portola airport, San Francisco, at twenty minutes past three. We came in on the tail of an air-liner full of movie stars, and when we reached the main gates of the airport there was a big crowd waiting to see the stars. A couple of excited bobby-soxers waved the-r handkerchiefs and screamed at us as we drove past, but we didn’t wave back. We weren’t in that kind of mood.

Kerman said, ‘You know it’s a funny thing, Vic, but a guy has to die before you get to know anything about him. I had no idea Ed had a wife and a couple of kids. He never mentioned them. He never told me his mother was living either. He never acted like a man with a wife and a couple of kids, did he? The way he used to horse around.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ I said. ‘What do we want to talk about his wife and kids for?’

Kerman took out his handkerchief and mopped his face.

‘I guess that’s right.’ And after a while he said, ‘I’ll be glad when it gets a bit cooler. March and a heat wave. It’s all wrong. Now, last night…’

‘And shut up about the weather too,’ I said.

‘Sure.’ Kerman said.

During the silence that followed, and while we drove along Market Street, I reconstructed the happenings of the morning. Paula had come over. Brandon had already been to see her about Benny. She had told the same tale as I had: that Benny had gone to San Francisco for the weekend. He hadn’t gone on business. He had gone up there on a sight-seeing trip. He did that sort of thing, Paula had said. I had said much the same thing. Brandon hadn’t believed us, but there was nothing he could do about it because Benny’s murder was out of his district.

While we talked Jack Kerman had arrived. Barclay’s alibi, he told us, after we had talked about Benny, was as water-tight as a submarine. He had been with Kitty Hitchens as he had said and hadn’t left her apartment until three-thirty of the afternoon following Dana’s murder. That put Barclay out of the running.

I then told them about Anita Cerf. By the way Paula and Kerman went over my rooms I could see they didn’t believe me. It was hard to believe, because there just wasn’t a trace of her ever having been in the cabin. But they both remembered the yellow cushion. The fact it wasn’t in the cabin finally convinced them I hadn’t imagined it: the cushion and the pulpy softness at the back of my head.

Paula didn’t want to go to San Francisco, but I said I was going. Around one o’clock I phoned through to the Orchid City airport and ordered an air taxi to take us out.

The trip in the aircraft didn’t do my head any good, and I kept thinking of Benny. I had known him for about four years. We had worked and played together. He was an irresponsible, crazy kind of guy, but I liked him. It gave me a sick feeling to think he was dead.

Kerman had said there was no proof to connect Ed’s death with the murder of Dana, Leadbetter and Am a. There wasn’t, but I was convinced that in some way or other there was a connection. Kerman’s theory was that Ed had got into a gambling game and had struck lucky and someone had taken his winnings and had thrown him into the harbour.

Kerman wasn’t sold on the theory, but he said Ed was a wild character and he could have got into that kind of trouble.

I said no. Ed was working. Maybe he was wild, but not when he had a job on, and he had a job on. He had arrived in San Francisco around four-thirty yesterday afternoon. At one o’clock in the morning the police had fished his body out of Indian Basin. The medical report showed he had been dead about four hours. If that was anything to go by he had been killed around nine o’clock: four and a half hours after arriving in San Francisco. Time enough to begin his inquiries into Anita Cerf’s private life, but not time enough to get into a gambling game: work first, play after. We all followed that rule, and Ed was no exception.

Had he been followed to Frisco? If he had been killed at nine o’clock there would have been time for the killer to hop a plane and get back to Orchid City and shoot Anita.

Kerman asked me if I wasn’t getting fancy ideas, and where was my proof. Maybe I was getting fancy ideas, but I didn’t think so. I had no proof that was the way it happened, but I had a hunch I was right, and I’d rather play a good hunch against proof when proof was as non-existent as it was now.

By this time the taxi had reached Third Street and pulled up outside Police Headquarters.

‘Leave the talking to me,’ I said to Kerman.

We climbed the worn stone steps, pushed open the double swing doors and asked a patrolman going off duty where we could find the Desk Lieutenant.

He was a nice civil cop, and although he was going off duty, he retraced his steps down the passage to show us the way.

As soon as I told the Desk Lieutenant who I was and what I had come about, he told the patrolman to take us to the Homicide Department. The patrolman led the way up a flight of stone stairs, along another passage to a small room furnished with four chairs, two desks, a window with bars and yellow walls and ceiling There was a smell of stale bodies, dirt and vomit in the room: the smell of most police stations.

We sat around, not saying anything and waited. About five minutes crawled by, and then the door opened and a couple of plain-clothes dicks came in.

One of them, a big, square-faced man with the usual hard eyes, set mouth, big feet’ that are more or less the standard uniform of a copper, waved us to a couple of straight-backed chairs, and waved the other dick to one of the desks.

‘I’m Dunnigan,’ he said, as if he wasn’t particularly proud of the fact. ‘Detective district commander. Are you relations of the deceased?’

It seemed odd to talk of Ed Benny as the deceased, and it gave me a cold, spooked feeling. I said we weren’t relations, but friends, and when I told him our names I saw his mouth tighten, and guessed Brandon had been telling him about us.

‘We’ll want you to identify him,’ he said. ‘Give this officer your names and addresses, and then I’ll take you along to the morgue.’

We helped the plain-clothes dick fill up a couple of forms, then followed Dunnigan from the room, down the corridor, down the stairs into a yard, across to a squat brick building.

There were three bodies under the sheets on the long marble slab facing us as we entered the morgue. The attendant in a long white overall rolled back the sheet covering the body in the middle.

Dunnigan said curtly, ‘Is that him?’

It was Benny all right.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

He looked over at Kerman, whose face had gone the colour of a fish’s belly.

‘You, too?’

Kerman nodded.

The attendant dropped the sheet back over Benny’s face.

‘Take it easy,’ Dunnigan said. ‘You don’t have to be sorry for him. It comes to us all, and it was quick. He was socked at the back of his head with a sandbag. He didn’t know anything about the water. Come on; let’s get out of here.’

As we went across the ya
rd my head began to ache again.