Honky-Tonk Girl (5 page)

“I'll have to leave,” he said, snapping on the light.

She came across the room at him like a furious cat, spitting and hammering at his chest with her balled fists. Then, spent, she pushed her hair back, her chest rising and falling breathlessly. She swore and stumbled into the bathroom. “I guess it wasn't important to you anyway,” she muttered. She didn't look back at him again.

Johnny pulled himself together rapidly and was about to leave when he noticed her red patent leather shoulder strap bag lying on the card table. He picked it up and opened the snap lock. Inside, there was the usual feminine confusion of bobby pins, powder, handkerchiefs, crumpled bills, paper book matches and keys. There was an address on one of the key tags. He memorized it, then dropped the key back into the purse and snapped the lock closed.

Going down the stairs, he slowed up enough to scribble the address on a piece of paper and stuck it in his pocket. Then he went down the steps two at a time and walked out into the night....

CHAPTER FIVE

TOWN BOSS

Wednesday Night, 10:00 P.M.

In another part of the city, Sheriff Fred Botello, a heavy man with the pugnacious, gloomy visage of an English bulldog, sat behind the steering wheel of his new Packard and scowled at a traffic light that was taking an eternity to change from red to green.

He was driving out to Sam Cowles' to talk to him about the latest development in the Miff Smith murder. It always took a lot of inner effort for Fred to get himself under way, especially when he had to face his brother-in-law, Sam Cowles. Sam had a contemptuous way of addressing Fred, as if he were talking to one of his hired help. Fred resented it. And he was a little afraid of Sam, too. He tried to keep out of Cowles way as much as possible, attending to things the way he knew Sam wanted them attended to.

He could visualize Sam hitting the ceiling over this latest development. Sam worshiped his daughter, Raye. She was his one vulnerable spot. Sam was going to get awfully mad and when Sam Cowles lost his temper Fred didn't relish being around.

Fred sighed heavily and let the automatic transmission surge into action as the light finally changed. He fumbled in his pocket for an ulcer pill and munched on it as he drove.

Until two nights ago, life had been comparatively simple and reasonably happy for Fred Botello. After twenty years of plodding a beat, he had recently found himself a successful candidate for sheriff. This, he readily admitted to himself, had come about not so much through any special political talent of his own as through the efforts of Sam Cowles, his wife's brother.

With the new position had come a degree of affluence that pleased Irma, his wife, to the point of tempering the acidity of her nagging. They had even bought a comfortable home on the better side of town, traded their 1941 Mercury for a shiny new Packard and had sent their daughter to an exclusive girl's finishing school. All in all, life had taken on a rosy aspect for Fred. He had a nice office where he could spend a good deal of time comfortably out of range of Irma's sharp tongue, and where he even took his shoes off when he felt like it. And the homicide department in a police force protecting a town this size wasn't overburdened with too many dramatic or complicated crimes.

The principal duty that went with Fred Botello's office was to keep his own and his department's nose out of Sam Cowles' enterprises. This he did, gladly.

So, until two nights ago, when the Honky-Tonk Street musician got himself killed, things had been remarkably placid and simple. But now there was trouble all the way around.

His lights flashed around the winding graveled drive leading to Sam Cowles mansion. Sam had purchased an old hillside home that had once belonged to a silent screen star, long since dead. And Cowles had fixed it up beautifully. At one time it had been a gloomy citadel overlooking the ocean. But Sam had hired an army of decorators, and landscape artists who'd swarmed over the place for months. Now the mansion was entirely renovated, replete with newly terraced lawns, winding gravel driveways, tennis courts, swimming pools and a driving range.

An electrified steel fence surrounded the two-story, twenty-room stone house. At the gate a guard came out and flashed a light in Botello's face. The sheriff swore at him. The guard recognized him and pulled open the heavy iron gates.

The Packard's big tires churned up gravel and crunched along the drive. In front of the house he came to a stop against a low hedge. Another car, a late model green convertible, was parked in the shadows at the side of the house. It looked familiar to him.

Sam Cowles' pretty new secretary opened the door for Fred. Sam always managed to keep a good-looking secretary on twenty-four hour duty around the place. They seemed to be changed regularly every few months. This one was a brunette and as well stacked as any Fred had ever seen there. He followed her down the corridor to Sam's study, watching the swing of her hips all the way.

Outside the study door, she punched an intercom system buzzer and told Cowles who wanted to see him. Sam's voice rattled back through the speaker, asking her to send Fred in.

The girl turned. The top button on her blouse was missing, Fred noted. She stood silently for a moment, watching Fred's eyes. Then she coolly began to unbutton the rest of the buttons, one by one, and asked him insolently, “Seen enough? Or would you care to stay for the matinee?”

Fred swore and his ears turned red. It always embarrassed him to be caught ogling a woman. He never did more than window shop anyway. He was too afraid of Irma, his wife. He'd never been unfaithful to her. Every time he got near another woman, he felt an uncomfortable boring in the back of his neck, as if Irma's gimlet eyes, by some supernatural telepathy, were gazing at him. He fumbled at the door, got it open, and plowed in across the deep carpet. Sam lived and worked mostly in this room. The walls were lined with expensive books and concealed filing drawers. The low, modern blond wood furnishings included a bed at one end of the huge room and a desk at the other. The entire south wall was glass, opening onto a flagstone patio with a tile fountain where changing colored lights made exquisite rainbows out of the splashing water.

Sam was in shirt sleeves. He was a tall, nervous man with thin sandy hair and a completely expressionless face. It might have been a mask except for the fires of energy constantly working in his eyes. His voice, like his movements, was abrupt, short and jerky. While he talked, his long, freckled fingers moved constantly over the desk, shuffling papers, straightening a pencil, moving the telephone.

“What's up, Fred? Late as hell. Something wrong?”

Fred shifted his weight to one foot and cleared his throat. He was holding his hat in his hands like a schoolboy in front of the principal's desk. It was one of Sam's irritating little ways of needling him. He never offered Fred a chair or took his hat. Fred's interviews were always like this.

He cleared his throat again and wished he were someplace else. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I guess you might say that, Sam. Somethin' is wrong, sorta. It's about Raye—”

“Shut up,” Cowles snapped at him abruptly, under his breath. His glance darted toward the closed bathroom door. He leaned back in his desk chair, perfectly still except for his fingers which were running along the edge of the highly polished desk like slender, white spotted mice.

The two men remained that way for a few long minutes, with Fred growing more uncomfortable at every passing second. Then the bathroom door opened and a young woman came out.

She had a half-empty whisky glass in one hand. A cigarette was dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her blonde hair was tied in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was dressed in a pair of nylon panties and nothing else.

She ignored Botello entirely, looking at Cowles with a strange, fascinated stare. Her eyes were red from crying.

Fred recognized her at once. Now he recalled the convertible in the driveway and remembered why it had looked familiar to him. The woman was Jane Forrester, the wife of Allan Forrester, a vice-president at a leading downtown bank. They had been married two or three years and had a little daughter, Fred knew.

Botello wasn't surprised at finding her here. He wouldn't be surprised at finding any woman in Sam's home. Cowles had an interesting reputation where women were concerned, especially when the women were the wives of the most influential men in town—not to mention an occasional debutante here and there, too. Sam moved in highly exclusive circles. It was considered very smart to know Sam Cowles—and even smarter to have an affair with him. After all, he ran the town.

* * * * * * *

“Beat it,” Sam said to the woman.

She swayed, blinking heavy eyelids at him. Her mouth worked. “But, Sam....”

“Go on. I got business. Come back tomorrow.”

She started to cry again, making no sound, just letting the tears trickle down her face. She moved closer to the desk. When she passed Fred he saw that her back was crisscrossed with red welts as if she'd been beaten with a strap. He looked the other way, embarrassed. He couldn't quite understand men like Sam who had to find their thrills in strange, twisted ways.

“Sam—”

“And put some clothes on!” he snapped. “Before you go out. You're drunk!”

She turned white and started to shake visibly. “You can't order me around, Sam. You can't. I'm not like the others—”

But she backed toward the door as she talked. And she picked up a loose pile of women's clothing and walked out. The door slammed.

“None of them's ever like any of the others,” Sam grunted viciously behind her.

Fred knew why Sam could order them around. In the files around this room he had damaging pictures and facts concerning nearly every man and woman of importance in the city. If they were ever published, half the town would go to jail and the other half would be killing itself off. Tonight too, somewhere behind the curtains, there had undoubtedly been a little camera and a tape recorder making a record of the visit of Allan Forrester's wife. It was a kind of hobby with Sam. Collecting such records gave him more of an actual sexual thrill than all of his romantic conquests put together.

“All right,” Sam snapped back. “Back to it. What about Raye?”

Fred wiped his sweating brow. “Monday night, about eleven o'clock, I got a call from down on Honky-Tonk Street. A musician, guy named Miff Smith, good-looking fella in his late thirties, had been knocked off in his apartment. It didn't look like anything special. He had a lot of girl friends—romancing everybody in town. Well, so one of 'em got peeved and took a shot at him.” He shrugged.

“Things like that happen alla time down on that street.”

Cowles' fingers drummed impatiently. “I know about it.”

“We hadda coupla ready-made suspects,” Fred plodded on. “Girl named Ruth Jordon for one, a senior in college. She was up at his apartment that night—neighbors saw her. We found her at her place after she called in. Her cheek was powder burned from a shot close up and she was hysterical. Okay, I says, she knocked him off, tried to kill herself, but missed and went outta her head. We got her in the hospital waitin' for her to come to her senses so's we can question her. I don't know if we can figure out a motive for her or not. But,” he continued, “another chick that might'a done it was a whore this Smith saw regularly. Lady downstairs seen her go in and outta the building that night. All we know about her is that she goes by the name of Jean and she hangs around Honky-Tonk Street at night. We got her description and I got some good men on the prowl for her. We oughta pick her up any time now.”

Fred stopped briefly to run a finger around his perspiration soaked collar, then went on.

“So, like I say, it don't look like nothin' special. I didn't think the newspaper'd run more'n a paragraph on the back page somewheres. Then this afternoon I get a phone call from the guy who runs the band that this Smith played with. Guy named Johnny Nickles. Cocky bastard. He seems to know something. He says we're not questioning all the suspects in this thing. He wants to know, “—Botello paused and swallowed painfully—”why we haven't brought your daughter Raye in for questioning. He says he knows she's been hangin' around with Miff Smith for the past month. Furthermore, he was one of the first to get into Smith's room after the murder. Lives right across the street. He was there with the usual crowd that gathers around somethin' like that. He claims he picked up a woman's pin. It's shaped like a flamingo and has real diamonds, he says, and he swears he can trace it to Raye. He's seen her wearin' it when she used to come down to where their band was playin' nights, when she was hangin' around to see Miff Smith. He says if we don't bring her in, he's gonna turn the pin over to George Swenninger down at the
Herald
....”

Botello took a crumpled newspaper out of his pocket. “Swenninger has already given this thing a big play. Look, here on the front page. It seems this Miff Smith guy wasn't just no ordinary two-bit Honky-Tonk Street musician. He was a nationally known jazz musician. Swenninger is howling that we should find out who knocked him off. If he gets that pin, he'll blast you and the department wide open, hatin' your guts like he does.”

For a long moment there was utter silence in the room. Cowles was sitting back in the shadows now and his face was no longer clearly visible to the sweating Fred Botello. His long fingers suddenly pulled the telephone to him. The dial whirred. His voice talked softly into the instrument. Fred's straining ears couldn't make out the words. Fred shifted his weight from one aching foot to another. He rubbed the pit of his burning stomach. Cowles replaced the telephone on the table. His face was gray. He moved forward, out of the shadows.

“It's Raye's pin,” he whispered. “She's been missing it ever since that night.” His long bony fingers slowly drew together in a knot, wadding up a ball of paper in their sinewy grasp. He got to his feet slowly and suddenly threw the paper in Fred's face.

“You stupid bastard!” he screamed. “You couldn't even go to the bathroom without having somebody help you! Why didn't you take Nickles in?”

Fred half-lifted the hat which he was holding in both hands, as if to protect himself from the abuse of Cowles' raging voice. “If I'd brought him in officially and booked him for withholdin' evidence,” he protested, “the paper would sure have gotten the story.”

“All right. Then get him unofficially!” Cowles paced from behind his desk, walking furiously and gripping the back of his neck with clenched fingers. “Raye would be in the clear if we could get that chippie.”

“How about this Jordon dame? Several witnesses knew she was with Smith when he was shot. We've already picked her up at her house. She's at the hospital now, out of her nut. I figure she did it.”