Shot on Location (21 page)

Authors: Helen Nielsen

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Obit Delayed

D
OWN AT THE EDGE
of Mexican town, where the pavement gave out and the yellow dust drifted ankle-deep over the hard-packed adobe, a radio was moaning a dreamy beat into the night. It was the kind of music that needs two people, but only one was listening—a long-legged blonde who kept time to the music with one foot while brushing her glistening hair. It was getting on toward midnight and the time-keeping was automatic now, tired and listless like the strokes of the brush. Usually it was different. Usually the blonde’s wide eyes sparkled back from the cheap dressing-table mirror and her white teeth gleamed with easy laughter; for Virginia Wales believed in laughter as she might have believed in God.

But sometimes the night grew cold even in this hell-baked valley, and sometimes the music, tuned at full volume, wasn’t enough to keep out the silence. Silence was the enemy. Silence let in the yesterdays and tomorrows until the face in the mirror dropped its mask and the years crept out of hiding to flaunt the awful evidence that youth can’t last forever.

There was a quick antidote for morbid thoughts. Virginia dropped the brush and reached for the tall glass that stood beside a gold-plated trophy on the dressing-table top—and then she hesitated, peering into the blackness of the room beyond. A cheap house was always full of noises—she’d be glad to be rid of this one. The faucets dripped, the floors squeaked, but lately there was something else, too. Lately there was fear. Fear was a new companion for this laughing blonde and she struggled with it. But there was no doubt about the sound.

“Frank?” She stood up and moved toward the doorway, the name still on her lips. And then she died—horribly.

It was going to be hot when that fireball in the east swung up over the valley, but the blonde wouldn’t feel it. The blonde was nice and cool now. She didn’t need the air cooler any more, and she didn’t need the drink all poured out and waiting on the cluttered dressing-table. The ice in the drink was a long time melted anyway. The whole setup was pretty sad.

At least that’s how it seemed to Mitch Gorman. Mitch had long since ceased to feel any awe or excitement for the dead, but he did think it was a little sad the way the blonde was draped over the bed with her head bent at a ridiculous angle and her mouth slightly open as if in surprise. Or she might have been yawning. Mitch yawned.

“What a way to start a day,” he said.

“What a way to finish a night!” remarked the fat man at his side. “She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, either.”

Ernie Talbot, who carried a police captain’s badge in one of the pockets of his baggy seersucker suit, wasn’t looking at the blonde’s face when he passed that judgment. What had happened to her face wasn’t in the nature of a beauty treatment, and it would take a lot of imagination to conjure up a vision of how she must have looked before death broke over her like a busted dam. In the next room was a full-face photograph complete with glistening teeth, carefully groomed waves, and all the little lines in the wrong places artfully removed by the retoucher’s hand; but that wasn’t important just now.

What was important was the ripped screen on a window so near the sidewalk that the street sounds walked right into the room. Also, the bloodstained hunk of gold-plated something that was still messing up the faded carpet. Mitch bent down and read the inscription on its base.

Grand Prize—Jitterbug Dancing
Merryland Ballroom
1937

That took imagination, too. Yes, with a little imagination a good newspaperman could work up quite a front page over this cold blonde on the rumpled bed, but Mitch didn’t feel a thing. This wasn’t the big town where an extra with a sordid headline would sell half a million copies. The people who bought the daily edition of Mitch Gorman’s cross and burden were a lot more interested in the market price of lettuce and the latest on the California-Arizona water fight than in what happened to a woman in a shack at the edge of Mexican town. Blondes who live in pasteboard houses shouldn’t undress in front of the windows, they’d say, and the customer was always right.

“Nineteen thirty-seven,” Mitch mused aloud.

“Keep your hands off that thing,” Talbot growled. “It may be crawling with fingerprints.”

Mitch had no intention of handling what would hereafter be known as the murder weapon. He was merely squatting on his heels and regarding the object with an expression of acute boredom. Actually, he was sleepy. The annual party at Papa Parsons’s desert estate hadn’t dissolved until the wee hours, and the drive back from Palm Springs was a lot longer and much less exhilarating than it had been five years ago. Five years. That was exactly how long Mitch had been the editor of Papa’s Valley City
Independent
, and it didn’t seem a day over a century.

One thing was for sure; his dinner jacket hadn’t been so tight five parties back. Mitch stood up again, briefly catching his reflection in the dressing-table mirror, and what he saw only added to that feather-duster taste in his mouth. All the tightness under his dinner jacket wasn’t muscle any more, and that college-boy crew cut looked a little silly sprinkled with gray. These changes hadn’t happened overnight, of course, but Papa’s party had.

With Talbot it was different. He was pink and flabby and didn’t care. With that badge in his pocket he could look as he pleased, act as he pleased, and didn’t have to stay up all night drinking the boss’s whisky, laughing at the boss’s unfunny jokes, and trying to explain why the paper wasn’t making more money. Talbot didn’t even have to explain how he lived so well on a captain’s pay, a thought that would never have troubled Mitch on any morning but this.

“Well, that’s it,” the officer said, drawing a sheet over the blonde’s body. “Now you know as much as I do. I just got here myself.”

“Who is— I mean, who was she?” Mitch asked.

Ernie Talbot forked a couple of fat fingers into his coat pocket and came up with a small notebook. He hadn’t wasted time in getting whatever information could be had on the spot. “Virginia Wales,” he read aloud. “Unmarried. Lived alone. Occupation — waitress at Pinky’s Quick Lunch.”

Mitch snapped his fingers. “Pinky’s!” he said.

“Know her?”

“I’ve seen her in the lunchroom.”

“Sure,” said Ernie, “that’s the trouble. The whole town’s seen her and she looked good. Too good.”

“Meaning the ripped screen.”

“Meaning the screen, the front door, the back door, or any of the windows. A small boy with a bent pin could break into this house. Look for yourself. Nothing but beaverboard walls put together with thumbtacks. Low-cost housing, the best investment money can buy.”

Ernie wasn’t preaching. He’d merely sized up the situation and delivered an honest opinion. Ernie Talbot was a practical man.

“Maybe she had company,” Mitch suggested.

“In her nightgown?”

“It happens.”

“And with cold cream on her face?”

Mitch hadn’t noticed the cold cream, but if Ernie said it was there it was there. The whole thing was very simple to figure. In time the police would pick up some fruit tramp with bloodstains on his clothes and no memory at all; meanwhile it would give the people a little something to talk about.

But the sheet pulled up over the body was a cue for Mitch to be on his way and let the authorities do the work they were paid to do, a novelty he was loath to discourage. And getting out of the bedroom wasn’t such a bad idea. Not that a little thing like murder was going to trouble his sleep, providing he managed to get any, but he’d seen a few places less depressing than the dead woman’s bedroom. It wasn’t death so much; it was all the refuse of living. The unfinished drink, the scattered clothing, a magazine or two, and the dressing-table clutter of jars and bottles that couldn’t preserve her beauty now. It was a morbid thought for a morbid morning after, and things weren’t much better in the tiny living-room.

“You remember Officer Hoyt,” Ernie said, giving Mitch a none too gentle shove through the doorway. Mitch remembered. “Naturally,” he answered. “I keep space open every day just in case he shoots another public enemy.”

This was no way to talk about a public servant and defender of the law, but Hoyt’s stomach was much too flat and his face was much too untroubled to solicit appreciation from Mitch Gorman. He was big and square in his uniform, and he was perched on the arm of a shabby divan stroking the head of a young mongrel pup.

“Eyewitness?” Mitch asked.

“Squealer,” Hoyt answered. “This little fellow was what brought me over here. I guess he got locked out and wanted his bed; anyhow, the old girl who owns this court called in and made a complaint. I answered the call and walked right in on this mess.”

“We need more men of your caliber,” Mitch observed gravely. “I’ll see that you get full credit.”

“With two l’s,” Hoyt prompted.

“How’s that again?”

“My first name—Kendall. It has two l’s. You only put one when I got Mickey Degan last month.”

Mitch didn’t have to be reminded. Mickey Degan, aged nineteen, cut down fleeing from a liquor store with a wailing burglar alarm. The kid hadn’t meant a thing to Mitch, but neither did this blond giant with the star on his shirt and the confidence in his face.

“I’ll run an apology,” Mitch muttered, making for the door. “The
Independent
believes in giving a man all the ‘l’ coming to him.”

That was it. That was the story Mitch took with him back to the ‘46 coupé he had pulled off the highway at the sight of a couple of police cars. (Everything Mitch owned was vintage of ‘46 except the dinner jacket. That was prewar only he couldn’t remember offhand just which war.) He was nosing back onto the highway when the ambulance rolled past, and it was considerate of the driver not to be waking up the town with his siren. The blonde wasn’t in a hurry anyway.

On the way downtown, only a matter of blocks now, he composed a rough outline of the story he would tap out on an office typewriter and leave on his desk. It was too early for anyone but the watchman to be about, and that was just fine. This way he could sneak in and out and maybe get a few hours’ sleep before press time. The paper would get out even if he never came in, that was for certain.

The market price of lettuce. The water fight. A dead blonde. That should be enough Monday news for anybody in Valley City who might still remember how to read. The Duchess would fill in with her regular column of local small talk, and young Peter Delafield would handle the rest. Pretty Peter would gladly handle everything, especially the knife he’d been sharpening up for Mitch Gorman’s back.

Mitch yawned again. Peculiar how unimportant it all seemed at five-thirty in the morning.

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