The Oxford Book of American Det (67 page)

“I mean I changed the lock on her door and dragged her trunk to the cellar and held it on account she was six weeks behind in her rent. Don’t ask me where she spent last night. I don’t know and I don’t care.”

My gullet felt tight all of a sudden. “What?”

“Hey, maw,” the adenoids whined. “The paper just come. I got it off the back step.

You wanna hear something?”

She ignored him. “Sure, dearie,” she told me. “Maizie hadn’t had no movie work in a long time. She was broke. She kept saying she had a job coming up with Paravox, a bit part on a one picture contract. She kept saying she’d have the rent money pretty soon now, when she got her first pay. I got tired waiting, though. I ain’t running no charity hall, am I? So last night I locked her out.”

I felt as if a mule had kicked me in the short ribs. Maizie Murdock had been broke for six weeks. Her Paravox job, the one that resulted in her decease, had been the first she’d had in a couple of months. This information knocked all my theories into a cocked hat.

She couldn’t have been the character who was blackmailing Vala DuValle!

No matter how you figured it, the answer came up that way. If Maizie had been the shakedown artist, she would have had cash enough to pay her rent; save herself from being locked out of her apartment. Since she didn’t have the dough, it stood to reason that she hadn’t been putting the bite on the brunette DuValle cupcake.

Therefore there was no motive for Bernie Ballantyne to have bumped her!

Of course he might have mistakenly thought Maizie was doing the blackmailing. I couldn’t quite see how he could jump at such a haywire conclusion, however, in view of the circumstances. All told, it began to look as if Bernie was in the clear and I would have to hunt around for a fresh suspect.

I considered the director, Roy Cromwell, who could fling a baseball hard enough to splinter woodwork—or a she-male skull. He’d been in a position to heave a lethal pellet at the Murdock filly; but for what motive?

“Listen,” I said to the apartment house hag. “Did Maizie ever have a gentleman friend named Cromwell, a tall, handsome guy dressed in loud tweeds?”

“She didn’t have no gentlemen friends, dearie.”

“You mean they weren’t gentlemen?”

“I mean she didn’t play that way. Not here, anyhow. She never had no men calling on her. I run a decent house for respectable people and she kept her nose clean. Otherwise I wouldn’t have let my junior take her out once in a while. Poor boy, he’s all busted up about what happened to her. He liked her. She was the only girl ever looked twice at him.”

I said: “But he didn’t like her well enough to keep you from putting her out of her apartment when she couldn’t pay her rent, hunh?”

“Junior don’t interfere with how I run my business. He better not, the little bum. I’d take a broomstick to him.”

I was up against a blank wall again. If Cromwell hadn’t been on social terms with Maizie, he wouldn’t have had any reason for cooling her off. This seemed to erase him from my list of possible suspects, along with Bernie Ballantyne.

From inside the manager’s flat, adenoids bleated again. “It says in the paper, maw—“

“Shut up, junior. How do you know what it says in the paper? You can’t read.”

“I can too read. Listen, maw, it says that private dick got picked up in his own apartment right here in Hollywood; the one that killed Maizie. You know; Turner is his name. A bull by the name of Donaldson nabbed him, but this Turner guy shot him, the paper says, and made a getaway. His picture is in the paper—I mean Turner’s picture.

Wanna see it, maw?”

“No,” the dame said.

Neither did I. The heat was on me again, I realised. Donaldson must have recovered from his swoon, phoned headquarters, and started the dragnet rolling. It was time for me to make myself scarce. I started to say goodbye to the frowsy Jane; but all of a sudden my luck ran out.

Junior came to the doorway with his newspaper. “Lookit, maw. Here’s the guy’s picture I was telling you.” He cast an absent-minded hinge at me, twitched and did a double-take. “Maw! That’s him! That’s Turner talking to you, maw!” I should have whirled and lammed while the lamming was good, but I couldn’t. My gams seemed paralysed. I was hanging the stupefied focus on junior’s pimply mush, while recognition slammed through me.

He was the pasty-faced jerk who had been Maizie Murdock’s escort in that dice joint, the night of the raid!

The next couple of minutes were pretty blurry. I finally got my brogans unlimbered and made a wild dive for the exit. Maw and junior blammed after me, bellowing like a pair of halfwits. They almost caught up with me as I gained the front door; or at least junior did. This cost him three front teeth.

He went down, squalling. His old lady stopped to inspect the damage to his kisser and I high-tailed out of there with my back pockets dipping sand and my right duke aching where I’d hung a haymaker on the little jerk.

My taxi was still waiting at the curb where I’d left it. The meter registered $3.25, which was felonious, but I was in no condition to argue. I told the hacker to pull the pin and get going. He did.

He also cast a knowing leer at me over his shoulder and said: “I been listenin’ to the radio.”

“That’s nice. Symphony or swing?”

“Newscast. They put out a swell description of you, pal.”

“So it’s that way,” I said.

“Don’t get jumpy, Mr. Turner,” he grinned at me in the rear-view mirror. “I don’t like cops, neither.”

“Meaning you don’t intend to blow the whistle?”

“Not me,” he said virtuously. “That’s for heels. Besides, I guess maybe you’re the kind that would treat a guy right if the guy levelled with you.”

“You’re talking about dough, of course,” I said.

He blipped past an amber light. “What else is there to talk about at a time like this?” I said: “You’re a man after my own heart. You’d probably be after my kidneys and liver, too, if they were valuable enough.” I fished two tens out of my wallet, handed them up to him. “How much loyalty will that buy?”

“I’ve maimed people for less. You wanna go somewhere in particular or just ride around?”

“I want to go somewhere in particular but I don’t know exactly where. First let’s find a phone.”

He pulled in before a cheap groggery, scouted the territory, and reported no coppers in sight. “There’s a booth at the end of the bar, chum. I’ll wait.” I barged into the gin-mill, located the telephone, dropped a jitney and dialled Pedro Criqui again. “Pedro?”

“I’ll see if he’s-a een. Holda wire, oui?”

“Let’s not repeat that routine. This is Turner.”

“Sucre nom de Dieu,
whatsa your always calleeng me op, hah? Ees bad enough you bumpa
mamselle
in Venice, but when you shooteeng policemans ees too moch.

Goodbye, please.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “I didn’t shoot Lieutenant Donaldson any more than I creamed Maizie Murdock. I’m in a jam and I need help.”

“I’m sayeeng!”

“Listen. The night of the raid, this Murdock doll was there in your drop. Maybe you remember her.”

“Maybe I’m do, maybe I’m don’t. Who ees caring?”

“She had a kid with her; a yuck with pimples on a face only his mother could love, which she doesn’t. Know the jerk I mean? Pasty complexion, skinny, talks with adenoids?”

“Ees sound like Joe Wilson.”

This checked with the monicker on the apartment house hag’s mailbox: Wilson.

“That’s the one,” I said. “He’s-a no good. A foul ball.”

“A regular patron of yours?”

Pedro laughed sourly. “Whatsa you think, hah? I got no time for cheap nickels and dimes guys. Thees Wilson keed, I don’t letting him in my place unless he’s-a got two tens to rub together. He come once, twice, ees all. He’s-a breeng blonde tomato weeth heem, he’s-a shoot craps, he losing his shirt and go home.”

“Never up in the bucks, eh?”

“Not while my place ees open. Since I am being raided I don’t knowing how much dough he’s-a got. Hell weeth heem.”

“Have you heard if he’s been going against any of the floating crap games around town since you got closed?”

“I hearing nothing. You so smart, you finding out for yourself, hah?
Au-revoir, adios
and do me a favour, hang op.” He cut me off like a bill collector.

Dark had settled when I went back out to my cabby. I handed him another ten-spot.

“How’s for finding me a couple of games?” I said.

“Dames?” he gave me an admiring look. “You can think of romance in a spot like yours?”

“Not dames. Games. Floating ones. Dice.”

“Oh, that. Yeah, sure.” He ferried me to a shoddy hotel off Vine Street and talked to a bellhop. Then he told me: “Room 212. Go right up. Want I should join you and hold your winnings?”

“No, thanks.” I went upstairs and had a brief conference in Room 212 with a furtive guy. Five minutes later I was down in my cab again. The hacker remarked that I must have thrown an awful jolt of snake-eyes to get through so quick. I said: “I certainly did. Find me another game.”

He found me one and I had another conference. Presently I returned to the taxi. “Any luck?” the cabby asked me.

“Not the kind I hoped for,” I said. “I’ve been checking on a dice player with adenoids.”

“How can anybody play dice with his adenoids?” the hacker sounded indignant.

I said: “That’s the point. He hasn’t been.” Which was true, according to what I had just learned. Joe Wilson, an inveterate crap shooter, had been hanging around the games for the past few weeks without rattling the bones at all. He was suffering the financial shorts.

This kicked another theory in the teeth. I’d thought perhaps the Wilson jerk was blackmailing Vala DuValle, on the basis of having tabbed her with Roy Cromwell coming downstairs from a private room that night in Pedro Criqui’s drop. In turn, Bernie Ballantyne might have erroneously figured Maizie Murdock as the extortionist and made the grave mistake of cooling her.

But the pasty-faced Wilson punk was broke. Therefore he wasn’t reaping any shakedown lettuce. He was as clean as Maizie had been—and I was up a stump again.

Riding along in the taxi’s tonneau, I flared a match; lit up a gasper. Bye and bye my cabby said: “You done yourself a dirty trick that time, pal.”

“How come I did?”

“A cop car went by just as you had that match up to your map. I think you been spotted.” He looked in his mirror. “I know damn’ well you been spotted. They’re turnin’ around with the red light on. Here they come.” I sneaked a swivel through the rear glass. He was right. You could pipe that crimson spotlight stabbing the dimout, and a siren started to growl.

They had me on the hook at last.

My hacker romped on his throttle. “Wanna race?”

“Will it do any good?” I said.

“Hang onto your upper plate and we’ll see,” he advised me. And then he started doing some of the fanciest driving this side of the Indianapolis Speedway. We took the next corner on squealing skins, whammed north, careened to the left at the following intersection, and went rocketing westward like a comet with turpentine on its tail. The speedometer needle crept around to the notch above sixty, hung there a while, and began climbing. Night wind screeched around our flapping fenders and the rear treads commenced to smoke.

The prowl car stayed with us.

“What time is it?” the cabby asked me.

I braced myself, tried to hang the focus on my strap watch. “Not quite nine o’clock.

Does it matter?”

“Yah,” he said, narrowly missing a pedestrian on a crosswalk. The pedestrian emitted an anguished wail, jumped like a kangaroo, and disappeared down an open manhole.

“Yah. There’s a street the water wagon always flushes around this time o’night. For another ten bucks I could maybe have a idea.”

“The ten’s yours,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll ever live to spend it, though.” He offered me odds of two to one, sent the cab catapulting around another corner and gripped his wheel hard. Dead ahead I lamped a block where the asphalt was black and shiny from a recent wetting. We barrelled onto this slippery stretch and made a sudden left turn into a narrow alley. Don’t ask me how we pulled a bull’s-eye; for the life of me I don’t know. I bounced on the back seat like a pea in a dry pod; felt the cab’s rear end slewing slaunchwise. Hitting the mouth of that alley was like a palsied man threading a darning needle with a hunk of two-inch rope; it just couldn’t be done.

We did it.

The prowl chariot blammed into the wet block and tried to make the same maneuver.

Goggling backward, I saw it skid out of control and spin like a pinwheel. It made three complete revolutions, while the cops inside it screamed their tonsils to tatters. Then there was a thundering crash, and a geyser of water fountained upward from a busted fireplug.

My cabby slackened speed as we emerged from the far end of the alley. “Them bulls probably needed a bath, anyhow,” he remarked. “Now where you wanna go, bud?”

“To a hospital,” I said weakly. “For a nervous breakdown.” He made clucking noises. “Doctors won’t do no good for what ails you, Hawkshaw.

What you need is a snifter.” He passed me a depleted pint. It was rotgut rye, but I drained it and it tasted like nectar. Presently my grey matter started functioning again. I was almost back to normal.

I started counting on my fingers adding up what I knew concerning the things that had happened since Maizie Murdock’s murder. Both Roy Cromwell and the little Ballantyne blister had attempted to frame me; and yet, as the score stood now, neither of them looked guilty of the actual kill.

Okay. Could it have been some unknown character in the mob of extras and technical crew? Some guy who’d had a personal beef against Maizie and saw a chance to knock her off? If so, I was sunk. Hunted by the law, how could I hope to ferret information regarding the hundred and fifty or more guys and wrens who had been on that amusement pier?

And besides, the cops weren’t the only ones gunning for me. There was that anonymous citizen who had fired a shot through the doorway of my stash, missing me and nicking Dave Donaldson; Until now, I’d almost forgotten this incident in the excitement of ensuing events. In fact, I’d paid very little attention to the matter from the outset—largely because of the spot it put me in.