Noir(ish) (9781101610053) (4 page)

“Yeah. Hey, Bacall,” she yelled, “
Get your butt in here with my coffee!”
Then she hung up without saying good-bye.

Chapter 3

Tuesday, June 24th, 1947, 11:30 p.m.

It was too late to call Widmark or Robinson and there wasn't anything else I
could
do till morning, so I left Gloria a note to let her know I'd be in early—at nine—and why. Then I made one little security adjustment to Lizabeth Duryea's package and turned out the lights. I was beat, and I had the feeling tomorrow was going to be quite a day.

I walked the mile and a half home. It was still hot and the air was heavy, but it felt good after ten hours sitting at my desk. I took the direct route; it's not particularly scenic but it's pleasant enough—noisy and a little flashy, like an amateur burlesque show. Unless you're in Hollywood, Los Angeles at night, downtown at least, is like New York with a lot less glitter: a throng of office buildings and small honky-tonks, neighborhood gin joints and a few apartment buildings where the night owls play their radios too loud and dance and smoke things that aren't tobacco, but the neighbors don't mind because they're doing it, too. I'd stopped noticing most of it a long time ago. Usually, I just looked at whatever was straight ahead of me and thought about a glass of bourbon and my bed.

This time, I kept looking up, trying to find the Evening Star, but I didn't know what to look for. There were clouds everywhere, anyway. The moon kept slipping in and out between them, like Noyes's ghostly galleon. Wherever it was, I didn't find it.

My apartment was on the fifth floor of an old seven-story building. Almost half of its twenty-eight units were vacant, including the other three on my floor, and the number was increasing as leases expired. I was probably going to have to move fairly soon. Half-vacant buildings had a way of catching fire unexpectedly, according to Johnny Dollar, an insurance investigator I'd worked with on a few cases. I wanted to be out of there before the landlord started thinking seriously about the merits of making an insurance claim.

Even though the rent was cheap, with the housing boom nobody seemed interested in living in an ancient building in downtown L.A. Especially one whose wiring didn't get along with air conditioners. And whose elevator screeched like a tortured dinosaur, only louder. The handful of us who still lived there were used to its loud-enough-to-wake-the-dead shriek. First-time visitors frequently opened the folding grille on their floor looking like they'd been trapped in a tiny room with King Kong.

The elevator was as slow as it was loud, and it took its usual sweet, noisy time as it wheezed its way to five. I unlocked the door to 503 and flicked on the light. Greenstreet—orange, fat, furry, flatulent, and spoiled—casually got up from his half-shredded pillow, stretched, and greeted me with a yawn and a yowl. The radio was on; for once it was playing Something Else. I turned it off anyway and tossed my hat on the coffee table en route to the kitchen. Greenstreet followed, yowling for his dinner. His bowl, as usual, was empty: Greenstreet ate like FDR had presidented: It was his career.

I opened a can, spooned the contents into both sides of the bowl, and set it on the floor. The cat attacked; for the next few minutes, the only sounds from his direction were the machinations of his tongue and jaws.

I watched him eat. Cats are like women that way: Give 'em what they want, you don't hear anything from them. Don't, and you'll hear plenty.

I made myself a sandwich and took a cold bottle of Kingsbury out of the fridge, then turned the radio back on and listened to the news while I ate. There was nothing “new” on it, just a rehash of Bugsy Siegel. For “dessert,” I reheated a cup of leftover coffee—for some reason, caffeine helped me fall asleep, something I'd been having trouble doing for the last year—got ready for bed and turned the radio off. Usually, I left it on when I was gone: Greenstreet's companion. The cat is like me that way: He gets antsy when it's too quiet.

I got in my pajamas, and Greenstreet and I sat on the couch for a while and listened to a couple of Schubert impromptus on the record player. He curled up on my lap and purred in time to the music. I scratched him behind the ears and read the
Times
. I liked my apartment, and especially the lack of surrounding neighbors, which is why I still lived in it in spite of the wiring and the elevator. It was small and comfortable and quiet. When I wanted to relax, the radio next door wasn't going to interfere.

The living room faced east; there were two windows in it. One led to the fire escape. The furniture was nothing special but I liked it, too, especially the sofa. It was a big green chenille I could sprawl my six-foot-long body out on completely, with two matching chairs. There was a small bar where I kept the radio and the record player and a few record albums, mostly classical, plus a few of the new “jazz” records, and a couple versions of The Song I hadn't played since—well, for a long time.

And there was an old maple rocking chair that used to be my father's, from when we had the house in Indiana. Now he lived in an apartment building filled with other, mostly older, single folks and sent me a letter once a month. I didn't use the chair much.
She
liked it, which is probably why I didn't, but sometimes when I couldn't sleep I'd sit in it and read. I particularly like poetry, and Charles Dickens.
There
was a guy who knew what the dark side was all about.

I'd finished the paper and I was just about to climb into bed when the phone rang. I grumbled, “Nuts.” I didn't like getting late-night phone calls at home. I'd learned the later the hour, the worse the reason somebody was calling. I got plenty of bad news on the office phone. I didn't need more when I was trying to relax. I went back into the living room anyway and picked it up. “This is Grahame,” I said.

The voice on the other end was a rumbly whisper. “Stay out of the Scott case,” it said, “if you want to stay healthy. They got
him
, and they'll get you, too.”

It was almost one o'clock. I'd had four hours' sleep the night before, and I'd been awake since eight that morning. I was in no mood. “Thanks for the advice,” I snarled. “Who is this?”

“It's a matter of space, Mr. Grahame,” the caller said.

Huh?
“Space?”

“You want to stay out of it.” There was a click, then a dial tone.

I looked at the receiver a moment, then hung up the phone, went back to the bedroom, and set the alarm for seven. I
did
like sleeping in, but I wanted to get an early start on earning my five hundred bucks.

In the kitchen, Greenstreet yowled. He was still hungry.

I decided he could wait until morning. I went to bed.

Chapter 4

Wednesday, June 25th, 1947, 9:00 a.m.

I slept well for five and a half hours; it was more than I usually got. Most of the time, visions of something other than sugarplums danced in my head and kept me awake. The sheep I tried to count always turned into girls—
a
girl, dozens of times over.

I woke up when the alarm went off, did the usual morning things, fed Greenstreet, then left him in the company of KRAY's
Morning Serenade
and headed for the Hellinger Building, where I'd had my office since I'd gotten out of the service. It was a clear day—a little humid, which meant the smog would probably settle in later—but at eight fifteen in the morning it was a nice leisurely walk, even though there wasn't enough breeze to rustle the dandelions and the radio reported it was eighty degrees at eight.

Some PIs do their thinking in their cars. I concentrate too much on driving to do that. Walking is what helps me think; it's a habit I picked up from Spade, and I do it almost every morning: I get a hundred ideas between my apartment and the office. Most of them get discarded, but one or two usually amount to something. On the way in that morning, I ran through last night's encounter and the one o'clock phone call. I didn't reach any conclusions, but I did make a mental list of things to check out and people to check with.

Besides, I like the scenery. I took a different route in daylight than I did at night, through a part of L.A. where the houses had been built to last and people actually planted flowers and shrubs in their yards and gave them enough water that they made it through the summer on their regularly mowed lawns. There were trees in the lawns, too, and bordering the sidewalks—mostly palms but the occasional oak or elm. Kids played ball in schoolyards, and on the sidewalks, boys hunkered down riding bicycles they pretended were motorcycles and girls chanted rhymes while they skipped rope. Women hung wet clothes in their backyards and talked to each other over the fence, and milkmen whistled tunes I didn't know while they left milk bottles and cartons of cottage cheese and eggs on porches. I'd grown up in an Indianapolis neighborhood like this, in a house like these, and sometimes I thought I'd like to grow old in one. I'd actually thought for a while that was going to happen. Till a year ago next Thursday, anyway.

I reached the corner of Floyd Avenue and Thursby Street, where the Hellinger Building's red brick rises twelve floors on a block where twelve floors is as high as anything rises, about ten till nine. If Los Angeles had a left auricle, the Hellinger Building would be in the middle of it. Weekdays, there's plenty of traffic—in cars, streetcars, and buses, on foot and on bicycles—and plenty of noise to go with it: Everything's getting pushed into the city's bloodstream. I bought a paper from Stoker Thompson, the ex-middleweight challenger who'd taken one punch too many and now sold everything from
Time
and the
Times
to
True Detective
and chewing gum at his kiosk in front of the building. He smiled at me, like he did every day, and reported on his plan for his next fight, like he'd also done every day for the past couple of years. The plan never changed. I smiled back, wished him good luck, gave him a quarter for the paper and a package of peppermint Chiclets, and told him to keep the change to help cover his training expenses. He said “Thanks, Mr. Grahame” and “I'll make sure you got a ringside seat.” “Sure thing, Stoker,” I said, and went on in. I almost never chewed gum, but it was handy to have around just in case. There were three packs in my desk.

I wiped my face with my handkerchief—the thermometer on the bank sign down the block read “85”—and walked into the lobby at 8:57. Whit Sterling and his elevator were waiting. Whit worked the six a.m.–to–three p.m. shift and did the morning janitoring with the help of a kid named Orrin Quest who'd just moved to L.A. from Manhattan—Kansas. Mike Figlia was the afternoon janitor from two till three; then he ran the elevator till eleven. From eleven to six, you were on your own; there wasn't even a night watchman. The Hellinger Building was almost as old as my apartment building, and while the tenancy rate was higher, there were still too many vacancies to encourage management to operate the elevator twenty-four hours a day or make the building fashionable again.

Sterling greeted me with his usual “Good morning, Mr. Grahame” in a chipper, enthusiastic way. He was forty-something, and would have looked like Adolphe Menjou did twenty years ago if he'd had more hair and a fuller mustache. And weighed thirty pounds more. As it was, Whit could stand behind a six-foot stuffed boa constrictor and disappear in its shadow. He'd done some movie extra work—“atmosphere,” they called it—and still had dreams of seeing his name on the silver screen. A lot of people in L.A. had those dreams, including plenty who ended up having nightmares because of them. I read about them in the paper almost every day.

“Good morning, Whit,” I said. He whistled “Laura” on the way up. I asked him to whistle something else. He said okay and started in on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” mixing in a little lyric here and there. Whit's singing voice was as thin as he was. I liked Sinatra's version better.
She'd
liked Judy Garland's.

He was still whistling it when he opened the door on eight. He interrupted himself to say “Bye, Mr. Grahame,” and closed the door. My “Bye, Whit” got lost in the
thump clang
of its close.

The eighth floor was usually quiet weekday mornings. Usually, neither Jules Bezzerides, the numismatist and rare coin and currency seller, nor Nick Garcos, who did taxidermy, showed up before eleven or so. I went fishing anytime I had a long weekend with nothing to do. If I ever caught a fish that was big enough, I was gonna have Nick stuff it and hang it on a wall in my office, right over the Paris calendar. I could hear Dixon Steele, the accountant, in his office, clicking away on his adding machine, and Madge Rapf and Kathie Moffat, the little old ladies who sewed wedding dresses (and the occasional shroud), were chattering softly in theirs. Madge and Kathie had been working together, and sharing a one-bedroom house in Santa Monica, since Hector was a pup. They'd invited me to supper a couple of times. Madge was a terrific cook, and Kathie had a heart of gold. They had a pair of girl lovebirds named Jane and Agnes who took turns sitting on their fingers and sang—or chattered like their owners—constantly.

I liked them both. Their door was open, so I stuck in my head and said “Good morning, ladies.” Madge smiled back. Kathie, the more talkative of the two, smiled and said “Good morning, Robert” in a voice as smooth and sweet as the apple cider my mother had made.

I was most of the way down the hall to room 805 when I heard the last chords of The Song on the radio and Gloria singing along. Gloria liked to sing, too. Her voice made Whit sound like Dick Powell. What made it worse was she couldn't remember a lyric to save her soul. I looked at my watch. It was 8:59. I waited in the hall until the nine o'clock news began. Then I opened the door and went in.

Gloria was sitting at her desk, lost in listening to the news and typing the dictation, which she took cheerfully in her perfect, neat shorthand, with a winsome smile that showed off her large, perfect teeth. They looked like they could chew rusted steel and still stay white. I smiled and watched her.

“This is Nicholas Udo,” the radio was announcing boldly, “and here's today's news from KRAY! The killing of Bugsy Siegel continues to be the lead story in Los Angeles this morning. Yesterday Lieutenant Lauren Stanwyck of the LAPD released police photos of the murder scene, saying there was evidence that nine shots—yes, that's right,
nine
shots—were fired into the room where Siegel sat at around ten thirty Friday night, from what the Lieutenant called ‘something very powerful.' At least two of them passed completely through Siegel's body including one—”

Gloria frowned and shook her head. Then she pursed her lips and squalled “La, la, la, la-la.
La, la, la, la-la,
” trying to drown out the radio's continued description. Gloria did not like violence unless it was in one of the countless cowboy pictures she saw and loved.

“—that appears to have blown one of his eyes out of its socket and all the way across the parlor where he sat. Stay tuned! We'll keep you up to date on all the latest developments in the murder of Bugsy Siegel, as—they—happen!”

Nicholas Udo shuffled some papers on mike. I hung my hat on the coat tree next to the door and said, “Morning, Miss Mitchum.”

Gloria jumped. “Oh!” She giggled. “You gave me a
start
! Nice morning, Mr. Grahame!” she said brightly. Gloria Mitchum was nothing if not brightly spoken.

Gloria was somewhere around thirty—I'd never asked. I figured she was old enough to do the job and that was what mattered. She was a pretty girl in an odd sort of way. She favored thick, dark-colored blouses (and support brassieres underneath them) with long sleeves, laced cuffs, and Peter Pan collars, and severe gray and black business skirts that came down modestly to her ankles. The ankles were shapely and so was she: smooth, shiny pink skin that never seemed to sweat; blue eyes as bright as her speech; and a pert button nose like Stanwyck's. And she was bubbly as champagne. Her hair was blond, bobbed and marcelled, like women wore twenty, twenty-five years ago. It looked odd among the pageboys and big soft Veronica Lake waves that were all the rage now, but it looked good.

So far Gloria had proved me right. She was a paragon of efficiency. Every morning she got in early so I would arrive to find my coffee—with
exactly
the right amount of sugar, which was a little disconcerting—waiting on my desk. She also tidied, brought flowers and arranged them in the various vases she must have bought because I didn't, and thoroughly dusted the chairs, love seat, smoking stands, and magazine table in the waiting room. “Things need to look nice,” she'd told me. I didn't much care one way or the other—I had yet to have a client say he or she was hiring me because there were flowers in the waiting room, and “decor” is something I saw pictures of once in a
Better Homes and Gardens
—but it seemed to make her happy.

The radio announcer was saying, “In national news, a
second
incident involving curious aircraft in the skies over Washington has been reported. A man claims he saw a saucer-shaped object as he flew his private airplane yesterday afternoon near Mount Rainier. This follows the report of a huge ‘flying doughnut' seen in the sky over Puget Sound several days earlier, when forty-eight-year—” Gloria turned it off.

“Your coffee's on your desk,” she said with her perkiest smile.

“Thank you.” Gloria made good coffee, which was all the more amazing because she never drank it. I headed for my office.

“And that new file,” she continued energetically, “for that Miss . . . Duryea, I think it is—
it's
on your desk. With the receipt in it.”

I stopped. “Thank you, Miss Mitchum,” I said, and took another step office-ward.

“And I called the detectives in Seattle. Lieutenant Robinson is on vacation, but the other one—the sergeant?—he'll be at HQ at thirteen thirty. You can call him then.”

I stopped again, looked at her, and smiled. Two months in my employ and she knew the ropes as well as I did. And she pulled some of them better. “
Thank you
, Miss Mitchum.”

“You're welcome, Mr. Grahame,” she perked, her bob bouncing. “And you
can
call me Gloria, remember? Really, it's fine. An informal office is a congenial office, that's what I always say. Okeydokey?” She giggled, congenially. I remembered all right: She reminded me every morning. I'd avoided suggesting she call me Robert. It might encourage the aspirations she seemed to hold. I liked her, but she was my secretary. I planned to keep her my secretary. Just my secretary.

“Right,” I said. “Any appointments this morning, Gloria?”

She smiled even more brightly. “Nary a one!”

“Good.” I went to my desk, unlocked it, and dropped the
Times
on top. “I need you to go to the bank.”

She murmured an “oh” of pleasure, and came into my office. “A chance to be out in the glorious warm sunlight! Thank you!”

“I'm glad you think it's glorious,” I said. “Most of us think it's just too darn hot.”

Gloria fairly twinkled. “I
like
the heat.”

I laughed. “You may be the only one in L.A. who does. Besides the electric company. Here.” I handed her a deposit slip. “Fill that out and put this”—I gave her the envelope with Lizabeth Duryea's retainer—“in the office account. Oh—and take out your pay for this week before you do. And a five-dollar bonus. We'll worry about the taxes later.”

“But you pay me on Friday, Mr. Grahame,” she protested.

“Well, it'll be one less check I have to sign.”

“And a bonus! Why, I've haven't even been here two months, I'm so happy you think I'm doing a—”

“Let's just think of it as Christmas come early.”

“
Jangle Bulls, jangle Bulls, jangle all the way
,” she sang. She giggled again. “Oh!” she said. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome, Miss Mi— Gloria.” She smiled adoringly. I looked back with my lips together and tight.

“Now . . .” I pointed to the envelope and raised my eyebrows.

“Okeydokey!” She gathered her hat and purse.

I walked to the window and looked out. I like L.A.'s looks, both in the light and the dark. By day it looks like a normal place, especially if you can't see Hollywood or the huge sign in the hills that announces it. On clear days you can see all the life the city holds, both dark and light, its streets, buildings, people; the sky and the sun that was already brutally burnishing everything else I saw. It was like a familiar still life by some twentieth-century Hieronymus Bosch, creepy and fascinating.