Meet Me at the Morgue (6 page)

He took a deep breath. It wheezed in his throat and swelled his chest out like a pouter pigeon’s. “Okay, I said I’d co-operate, that’s my policy. Let’s see, he was about your size, maybe a little shorter. Definitely fatter. A pretty ugly puss, if you ask me, I should of known he was a hustler. Whisky eyes—you know what I mean?—a sort of pinky blue color. Bad complexion, kind of pockmarked around the nose. He was pretty well dressed, though, a sharp dresser. Brown slacks and light tan jacket, yellow sport shirt. I like good clothes myself. I notice clothes. He had these two-tone shoes, brown and doeskin or whatever they call it. Real sharp.”

“A young man?”

“Naw, I wouldn’t call him young. Middle-aged is more like it, maybe in his fifties. One thing I noticed about him. He had a hat on—brown snap-brim—but under it I think he was wearing a toupee. You know how they look at the back, sort of funny around the edges, like they didn’t belong to the neck?”

“You have eyes all right. What color?”

“Brown, sort of a dark reddish brown.”

“Over-all impression?”

“I tabbed him strictly from hunger, but putting on a front. You follow me? We see a lot of them: actors and pitchmen out of a job, ex-bookies peddling tips from the horse’s brother—that sort of stuff, with barely one nickel to rub against another, but keeping the old front up. When he slipped me folding money, you could have knocked me over with a bulldozer.”

“Did he pay you before or after?”

“One buck when he sent me, the other when I came
back. He was waiting on the veranda when I came back. What was in that suitcase? It didn’t feel heavy to me.”

“I’ll tell you when I find out. Where did he go with it?”

“He marched off down the street. I thought he was going to register—”

“You said that. Which way?”

“Across the railroad tracks.”

“Come out and show me.”

He followed me to the veranda steps, and pointed west towards the harbor:

“I didn’t wait to see where he went. He just started walking that way. He walked as if his feet hurt him.”

“Carrying the suitcase?”

“Yeah, sure. But now you mention it, he had a topcoat with him. He carried the suitcase under his arm, with the topcoat kind of slung over it.”

“Did he cross the street?”

“Not that I saw. He didn’t go back to the station, anyway.”

I thanked him and went west.

CHAPTER
7
:
      
The bellhop’s story, true or false
, had touched an internal valve that charged my blood with adrenalin. I walked quickly across the railroad tracks, with no definite idea of where I was going. All I had was a good description and a couple of fairly rickety assumptions.

One was that the quarry wouldn’t have gone far on the open street with the black suitcase under his arm. If he had stepped into a waiting car and left town immediately, there wasn’t much I could do by myself. As if to emphasize the point, a cruising prowl car passed me slowly. A plainclothesman
I didn’t recognize lifted his hand to the window.

The anomaly of my position, halfway between policeman and civilian, hit me hard. I felt a powerful impulse to break my word to Johnson, stop the car, set off an all-points alarm. The moment passed. The prowl car drove out of hearing, dragging the impulse with it. I had to act within the limits Johnson had imposed, or not act at all.

It was nearly two by my watch, almost three hours since the double play with the suitcase. But there was a chance that my man was still in town. Though I assumed as a matter of course that he came from out of town, he had probably spent the night here, since the ransom letter had been mailed the day before. If he had, he had probably stayed fairly close to the station. And there was a chance in a hundred, perhaps one in fifty, that he was holed up in one of the waterfront hotels, waiting for night.

The harbor area had once been advertised as the Juan-les-Pins of the West. The treacherous years and an unwise city council had given it over to penny arcades and saltwater-taffy booths, carrousels, open-front beer-joints, a grab-bag assortment of hostelries. The latter ranged from fishermen’s flops to fairly respectable motels. I had been in all of them at one time or another.

A Spanish-American chambermaid in the Delmar Motel, who believed her virtue to be under constant attack, had thrown ammonia in a guest’s face. Three years’ probation with psychiatric treatment. A seventeen-year-old boy, a junior in high school, who was on probation for grand theft automobile, rented a room in the Gloria in order to commit suicide. It took us eighteen hours to bring him out of barbiturate coma. Now he was due to be graduated from college in a month.

I shook the memories off and looked outward. Girls and
children in sunsuits, T-shirted men and boys, were strolling along the sea-wall and on the wharf. The white sand below the sea-wall was strewn with brightly costumed bathers. From the edge of the beach, a crew of oarsmen was launching a cedar shell. It slid out onto the water and began to walk on its oars like a waterbug, with eight crewcut heads nodding in unison.

I stepped into the narrow bamboo-furnished lobby of the Gloria Hotel. The desk clerk remembered me. He was a thin, ageless Italian who had always been there. I described my man. No, he hadn’t seen anyone of that description, today or yesterday. Sorry we can’t help you, Mr. Cross.

At the Delmar, the ammonia-tossing chambermaid had married the manager and risen to key-girl. Her large black eyes grew larger when I entered. She still had a year to go.

“Mr. Cross? You want to see me?”

“Relax, Secundina. Miss Devon tells me you’re doing fine.”

She came out through the swinging door beside the registration counter, a beautiful girl in a Spanish blouse, with ribbons in her hair. The management liked atmosphere.

“Miss Devon is a good woman,” she stated. “I am not afraid no more—any more.” She swung her arms in a free movement in order to demonstrate that she was not afraid. The ribbons fluttered.

I said: “I’m looking for a man.”

“What man? He is staying here?”

“You tell me, Secundina.” I described him.

“He is not one of our guests,” she said with certainty. “
Un momento
. Wait a minute. I theenk—I think I have seen him.”

“When was this?”

“This morning. I was sweeping the veranda. The sand
blows from the beach.” Her hands moved laterally, imitating the sand. “This big old man went by in the street, walking very queeckly.”

She began to walk, very queeckly, in a small circle of which I was the hub. Her expert mimicry included a sore-footed limp. It ended with a dancer’s heel-and-toe.

“Can you remember what time this morning?”

Her carmine mouth was weighted with thought. “Eleven o’clock? Five minutes after? Ten minutes? It was soon after eleven. I opened the office at eleven.”

“Did you notice, was he carrying anything?”

She considered the question, her finger twiddling a lower lip. “I am not sure. Perhaps a coat? I hardly looked at him.”

“You didn’t see where he went?”

“That way, in the direction of the Harbormaster’s office.” She pointed northward, parallel with the shoreline.

“And he was hurrying?”

“Ah, yes, very queeckly!”

She began to demonstrate the limping hustle again. I raised my hand in a traffic officer’s gesture. She smiled and desisted. I touched the lifted hand to the brim of my hat and started out. She called after me:

“Say hello to Miss Devon!”

The lift I had got from Secundina, the lift I always got when fear took a setback, faded rapidly on the pavement. There was nothing in the direction she had indicated but a dollar doss over a fried-fish place. F
RIED
F
ISH
. R
OOMS
O
NE
D
OLLAR
. T
RY
O
UR
S
MOKED
F
ISH
S
PECIAL
. J
UMBO
S
HRIMP
. The greasy counterman who doubled as room-clerk had never seen my man. His close mouth wouldn’t have opened if he had.

The Harbormaster’s Quonset and jetty lay in the corner of the cove where the Point curved out from the shore. The blank-walled bath-house in front of it was loud as a
monkeyhouse with teen-age whistles and hoots and ululations. Beyond it, across the base of the landspit, deep-sea breakers pounded a steep shore. The desolate beach, eaten at the edge by dangerous currents, was closed to swimmers. It pullulated with gulls. They rose like an inverted snowstorm, and veered seaward.

The asphalt road across the base of the point was sand-blown and salt-pitted and led nowhere. The dancing pavilion it had served had been smashed by a winter storm some years ago. Nothing remained of the pavilion but crumbling concrete bulkheads and a large, weathered billboard: D
INE AND
D
ANCE TO THE
M
USIC OF THE
W
AVES
.

A few cars were parked along the edge of the road, nosed into the sand-drifts on its seaward side. There were a couple of empty jalopies, a family eating picnic-lunch in their station wagon, an old truck piled with black and brown fishing-nets. A black and brown mongrel with a Doberman head barked violently from the rear of the truck as I passed, wagging his tail in self-congratulation.

“Be a hero,” I told him. His bark made the whole truck shake. The gulls coming in from sea flew out again, blown between blue layers of sea and sky.

Another car was parked near the truck, almost hidden behind the Dine and Dance billboard. The tracks it had made in the sand were blowing over but still visible. It was a prewar Chrysler sedan, painted blue, with a Los Angeles license number. I looked in through the open rear window. A new black suitcase lay open on the back seat, empty.

A man reclined on the front seat half covered by a brown topcoat. His head was jammed into the corner between the right-hand door and the back of the seat, his legs twisted under the steering wheel. When I opened the door a brown toupee detached itself from his skull and
draped itself across the toe of my shoe. From the side of his neck the red plastic handle of an icepick stood out like a terrible carbuncle.

The registration card had been ripped from its holder on the steering-post. The car keys hung from the ignition, but no identification was attached to them. I went through the pockets of the dead man’s mohair jacket and chocolate gabardine slacks. They contained a pocket comb in a leatherette case marked with the initials A.G.L., a handkerchief, an unopened packet of chlorophyll gum, and the yellow stub of a theater ticket. Nothing else.

Sand flies were gathering on the dead face. I covered it with the topcoat and closed the door gently. When I went back past the truck, the dog was still barking and wagging. The picnickers in the station wagon were laughing over Coke bottles. I turned away from them. Above the sea the gulls were wheeling, wings glinting in the sun, turning like slow electrons in blue eternity.

I phoned Helen Johnson from the Harbormaster’s office and told her why I had to call the police.

CHAPTER
8
:
      
I met her an hour later in what
passed for the local morgue. It was actually the back room of an undertaking establishment near the courthouse. The dead man had been brought there to wait for the deputy coroner, who had gone sailing. Cause of death was not in doubt, but there would have to be an autopsy.

Identity was in doubt. The Highway Patrol had given us rapid service on the license number, and were tracing the car itself. It had been licensed in Los Angeles to one
Kerry Smith, who gave his address as the Sunset Hotel, a transients’ hostel near Union Station. The Sunset Hotel reported that no Kerry Smith had been registered there, at least since the first of the year; and the name Kerry Smith did not agree with the initials A.G.L.

The anonymous man lay on a rubber-tired table against a coldly sweating concrete wall. Sandy the bellhop had looked down at his face, nodded in nervous recognition, and been booked as a material witness. A few minutes after Sandy was led away protesting, Helen Johnson came in out of the sunlight. She was dressed in high fashion, in hat and veil and gloves. The color of the suit she had chosen was black. In the fluorescent light her hair looked almost black, and her eyes black. Ann Devon was with her.

Death, which banishes the dead to unimaginable distances, brings the living closer together sometimes. The two women linked arms and formed a unit against the silent wind blowing from those distances. Behind them Cleat, lieutenant of detectives, gnawed impatiently on a remnant of cigar. Our eight eyes were drawn to the body against the wall, and wavered away from it.

“What does it mean, Howie?” Ann said. Still in her working dress and flat-heeled shoes, she was shorter and shabbier than the other woman, like a younger sister or a poor relation.

“I don’t know what it means. These are the facts. This man picked up the money at the station—the bellboy he sent for it identified both him and the suitcase. Then he walked the three blocks from the station to the beach, where he’d parked his car. Someone was waiting at the car, or followed him there, stabbed him with an icepick, and made off with the money. We don’t know whether that someone was an accomplice in the kidnapping or not. We
have no lead on who it was. Lieutenant Cleat’s men are canvassing the waterfront now, trying to turn up a witness.”

Mrs. Johnson reached out as if to grasp me, but her black-gloved hand stayed empty in the air. “There’s no sign of Jamie?”

“None. That doesn’t mean anything. We didn’t expect to find him here in town. This man was obviously detailed to collect the money. He couldn’t have handled both the money and the boy. There must be at least one other—”

“Fred Miner?”

“That’s our working hypothesis, ma’am,” Cleat said heavily. “Miner’s melted into thin air, along with the boy. It didn’t happen by accident.”