Black Money

12

The Breakwater Hotel was only a few blocks from the place where Harry’s Cadillac was parked. It was possible, though hardly likely, that he’d left it there, for reasons of his own, and gone the rest of the way on foot.

The lobby of the hotel was the mouth of a tourist trap which had lost its bite. There were scuff-marks on the furniture, dust on the philodendrons. The bellhop wore an old blue uniform which looked as if he had fought through the Civil War in it.

There was no one at the desk, but the register was lying open on it. I found Harry Hendrick’s name on the previous page. He had room 27. I looked at the half-wall of pigeonholes behind the desk, and couldn’t see the key in 27.

“Is Mr. Hendricks in?” I asked the bellhop.

He stroked the growth of beard on his chin. It looked like moth-eaten gray plush, but it rasped like sandpaper. “I wouldn’t know about that. They come and go. I’m not paid to keep track.”

“Where’s the manager?”

“In there.”

He jerked a thumb toward a curtained doorway with an electric sign above it: Samoa Room. The name meant that it would have bamboo furniture and a fishnet ceiling: it had: and would serve rum drinks containing canned pineapple juice and floating fruit.

Three rather wilted-looking sharpies were rolling dice on the bar. The fat bartender watched them over his belly. A tired looking hostess offered me the temporary use of her smile. I told her that I wanted to ask the manager a question.

“Mr. Smythe is the assistant manager. Mr. Smythe!”

Mr. Smythe was the sharpest-looking of the sharpies. He tore himself away from the dice for a moment. If they were his dice, they were probably gaffed. His true-blue All-American look was warped like peeling veneer around the edges.

“You wish accommodations, sir?”

“Later, perhaps. I wanted to ask you if Mr. Hendricks is in.”

“Not unless he came in in the last few minutes. His wife is waiting in his room for him.”

“I didn’t know he was married.”

“He’s married all right. Very married. I’d give up the joys of bachelorhood myself if I could latch onto a dish like that.”

His hands made an hourglass figure in the smoky air.

“Maybe she can tell me where he is.”

“She doesn’t know. She asked me. I haven’t seen him since this afternoon. Is he in some kind of a jam?”

“Could be.”

“You a cop?”

“An investigator,” I answered vaguely. “What makes you think that Hendricks is in trouble?”

“He asked me where he could buy a cheap hand gun.”

“Today?”

“This aft, like I said. I told him to try the pawnshops. Did I do wrong? He didn’t shoot somebody?”

“Not that I know of.”

“That’s good.”

But he was subtly disappointed. “If you want to talk to Mrs. Hendricks, there’s a room phone beside the desk.”

I thanked him and he returned to the joys of bachelorhood. I didn’t bother with the phone, or with the elevator. I found the fire stairs at the back of the lobby and went up the red lit stairwell to the second floor.

Room 27 was at the end of the hall. I listened at the door. There was faint music behind it, a country blues. I knocked. The music was shut off abruptly.

“Who is it?” a woman said.

“Harry.”

“It’s about time!”

She unlatched the door and pulled it open. I walked in on her and took the doorknob out of her hand and swung the door shut behind me, in case the screaming expression on her face changed into sudden noise.

It didn’t. The fixed lopsided rigor of her face didn’t change. Her right fist rose of its own accord to the level of her eyes. She looked at me around it.

“Take it easy, Mrs. Hendricks. I won’t hurt you.”

“I hear you telling me.”

But she relaxed enough to unclench her fist and use it to smooth her red hair. Her lopsided mouth straightened itself. “Who are you?”

“A friend of Harry’s. I said I’d look him up here.”

She didn’t believe me. She looked like a woman who had stopped believing almost everything except the number on bills, the price tag on clothes and people. She was dressed in style, in a brown loose kind of half-sleeved something which showed her figure without overemphasizing it. Her forearms and legs were beautifully made and deeply tanned.

But her face was made up as if she had begun to doubt her looks, or wished to hide them. From under eyelids greener than her eyes, through eyelashes that groped like furred antennae in the air, she peered at me distrustfully.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then get out of my room.”

But she didn’t really expect me to. If she had any expectations left, they had to do with possible disasters.

“It isn’t your room. It’s Harry’s. He said he’d meet me.”

She looked around the room, at the worn carpet, the faded flowers in the wallpaper, the bedside lamp with its scorched paper shade, as if she was considering her relationship to it. Externally she didn’t belong here at all. She had the kind of style that could be bought, but not suddenly, at Bullocks and I. Magnin’s; the brown pouch on the bed with its gold tassels looked like Paris. But she belonged internally to the room, the way a prisoner belongs to his cell. She had done time in rooms like this, and it was setting in again.

“It’s my room too,” she said. To prove it, and to cheer things up a little, she went to the bedside table and turned up her portable radio. The country blues hadn’t ended yet. It had been a long two minutes.

“What–?”

Her voice screeked on the word. She was still so full of tension that she was hardly breathing. She tried to swallow the tension; I watched the marvelous mechanism of her throat. “What kind of business do you have with Harry?” she finally managed to say.

“We were going to compare notes on Francis Martel.”

She flapped her eyelashes. “Who?”

“Martel. The man you want a picture of.”

“You must be thinking of two other people.”

“Come on now, Mrs. Hendricks. I’ve just been talking to the photographer Malkovsky. You wanted him to take a picture of Martel. Your husband risked his neck trying to get one this morning.”

“Are you a cop?”

“Not exactly.”

“How do you know so much about me?”

“That’s all I know about you, unfortunately. Tell me more.”

Laboriously, with hands that jerked a little, she got a gold cigarette case out of her brown pouch, opened it, took out a cigarette, and put it between her lips. I lit it for her. She sat on the bed and leaned back on her arm, blowing smoke hard at the ceiling as if to conceal its dinginess.

“Don’t stand over me like that. You look as though you’re going to jump down my throat.”

“I was admiring your throat.”

I pulled up the only chair in the room and sat on it.

“Swingin’.” Her voice was sardonic. She covered her neck with the collar of her fingers, and studied me. “I can’t figure you out, unless you’re trying to soften me up with the sweet-and-sour treatment. Which will get you nowhere.”

“Are you really Harry’s wife?”

“Yes. I am.”

She sounded a little surprised herself. “I’d show you my marriage license but I don’t seem to have it with me at the moment.”

“How can he afford you?”

“He can’t. We haven’t been working at it lately. But we’re still friends.”

She added with a kind of rough nostalgia: “Harry wasn’t always on the skids. He used to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.”

“And you weren’t always in the chips.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody had to tell me.”

Your voice told me, doll, and the way you have to keep using your body in little conspicuous ways as if you were treading water. The way you looked at the room told me, and the way the room looked back.

“Are you from Vegas?” she said.

“People are supposed to smile when they say that.”

“Are you?”

“I’m from Hollywood.”

“What do you do for a living, Hollywood? If anything.”

“Private investigations.”

“And you’re doing a job on me?”

Her look was fearful again. At the same time she signaled for the ashtray from the bedside table and butted her cigarette in it while I held it. She shifted her position, leaning heavily sideways with half-deliberate clumsiness to show how helpless her fine big body was. It needed no help from me, though: it was perfectly at home on a hotel bed.

“You’ve got things twisted around,” I said. “I was hired to do a job on Martel.”

“Who by?”

She corrected herself: “By whom?”

“A local man. His identity doesn’t matter. Martel stole his girl.”

“It figures. He’s a thief.”

“What did he steal from you, Mrs. Hendricks?”

“That’s a good question. The real question, though, is whether he’s the guy I think he is. Have you seen him?”

“Several times.”

“Describe him for me, will you? We may be able to get together on this.”

“He a medium-sized man, about five foot nine, not heavy, but compactly built, and quick in his movements. Age about thirty. He has black hair, jet black, growing fairly low on his forehead. He wears it combed straight back. His complexion is dark, almost Indian dark. He has a long nose with noticeably flaring nostrils. He speaks with a French accent, uses a lot of French, and claims to be a French political refugee.”

She had been listening and nodding in confirmation, but my last sentence confused her.

“What was that?”

“He says he’s a Frenchman who can’t live in France because he doesn’t get along with de Gaulle.”

“Oh.” But she still didn’t understand.

“De Gaulle is the President of France.”

“I know that, stupid. You think I don’t listen to the news?”

She glanced at the radio, which was playing rock.

“Do you mind if I turn that thing off?” I said.

“You can turn it down a little, but leave it on. I hate the sound of the wind.”

I turned the music not too far down. Based on such minor co-operations an intimacy was growing between us, as if the room had provided us with built-in roles. But it was a chancy intimacy, whose rhythm was an alternating current of fear and doubt. She asked me sensible questions and seemed to believe my answers. But her eyes weren’t certain that I wouldn’t kill her.

“Do you know who he is?” I said.

“I think so, and he isn’t any Frenchman.”

“What is he?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said crisply, as if she had decided on her story. “I happened to be the confidential secretary to a very important businessman in the Southland. This man who calls himself Martel wormed his way into my employer’s good graces and wound up as his executive assistant.”

“Where does he come from?”

“I wouldn’t know that,” she said. “He’s some kind of South American, I think. My employer made the mistake of giving him the combination to the safe. I warned him not to. So what happens? Mr. so-called Martel takes off with a fortune in bearer bonds, which Harry and me – and I – are trying to get back.”

“Why not the police?”

She was ready with an answer. “My employer has a soft spot in his head for Mr. Martel. Also our business is highly confidential.”

“What is your business?”

“I’m not in a position to reveal that,” she said carefully. She shifted the position of her body, as if its substantiality and symmetry might divert my attention from the ferry-built flimsiness of her story. “My employer has sworn me to secrecy.”

“What’s his name?”

“You’d know his name if I could tell it to you. He’s a very important and well-heeled man in certain circles.”

“The lower circles of hell?”

“What?” But I think she heard me.

She pouted, and frowned a little with her thin painted-on eyebrows. She didn’t frown very hard because that gave girls wrinkles and besides I might kill her and she didn’t want to die with a frown on her lovely face.

“If you’d take me seriously and help to get the money back, etcetera, I’m sure my employer would reward you handsomely. I’d be grateful, too.”

“I’d have to know more about it,” such as what she meant by “etcetera.”

“Sure,” she said. “Naturally. Are you going to help me?”

“We’ll see. Have you given up on Harry?”

“I didn’t say that.”

But her green eyes were surprised. I think in her concentration on me and on her story – her late late movie story – she had forgotten Harry. The room provided roles for only two people. I guessed what mine would be if we stayed in it much longer. Her body was purring at me like a tiger, the proverbial kind of tiger which is dangerous to mount and even more dangerous to dismount.

“I’m worried about Harry,” I said. “Have you seen him today?”

She shook her head. Her hair flared out like fire. The wind, momentarily louder than the music, was whining at the window.

“He was talking about buying a gun this afternoon.”

“What for?”

Gun talk seemed to frighten her basically.

“To use on Martel, I think. Martel gave him a bad time today. He ran him off with a gun and smashed his camera.”

I produced the flattened camera from my pocket.

She brooded over it. “That camera cost me a hundred and fifty bucks. I ought to’ve known better than to trust Harry.”

“Maybe the picture bit wasn’t a good idea. Martel is allergic to cameras. What’s his real name, by the way?”

“I don’t know. He keeps using different names.”

She changed the subject back to Harry: “You think Harry got hurt or something?”

“It’s possible. His car is parked on the boulevard about half a mile from here, with the key in it.”

She jerked herself upright. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I just did.”

“Show it to me.”

She picked up her radio and bag, got her coat out of the closet, and put it on while we were waiting for the elevator. It may have been the noise of the elevator, or the radio, or some perpetual sign, which her body sent out, but when she crossed the lobby with me all three of the sharpies were watching from the curtained doorway of the Samoa Room.

We drove along the boulevard. The rising wind buffeted the car. Out to sea I could make out occasional whitecaps. Faintly phosphorescent, they rose up like ghosts which were quickly swept backward into darkness. The woman peered out along the empty beaches. She turned up the window on the ocean side.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Hendricks?”

“I’m okay, but please don’t call me that.”

She sounded younger and less sure of herself. “It makes me feel like a phony. Call me Kitty if you like.”

“You’re not Mrs. Hendricks?”

“Legally I am, but we haven’t been living together. Harry would have divorced me long ago, only he’s a practicing Catholic. And he has this crazy hope that I’ll come back to him.”

She leaned forward to peer out of my side. “We’ve gone a half a mile. Where is his car?”

I couldn’t find it. She began to get nervous. I turned my car and found the hole in the hedge and the fire behind it, which had burned down rapidly to a few breathing coals among the ashes. The three wine-drinkers had blown, leaving their empty jug and the smell of spilled wine.

Kitty Hendricks called to me: “What are you doing? Is Harry there?”

“No.”

She came through the hedge. She still had her bag and radio looped over the wrist, and the radio was singing like a semidetached personality. She looked around her, hugging her coat to her body. There was nothing to see but the dying fire, the railroad tracks gleaming dully in the starlight, the trampled unlovely earth.

“Holy Mother,” Kitty said, “It hasn’t changed in twenty years.”

“You know this place?”

“I ought to. I was born about two blocks from here. On the other side of the tracks.”

She added wryly: “Both sides of the tracks are the wrong side if you live close enough to them. The trains used to rattle the dishes in my mother’s kitchen.”

She peered across the dark railroad yard. “For all I know my mother is still living there.”

“We could go and see.”

“No! I don’t have enough left to put up a front for her, too. I mean, let bygones be bygones.”

She made a unsettled movement toward the cypress hedge, as if the place might betray her into further candor. She could handle the dangers of a hotel room, but not the demands of the wild outer night.

Her feeling turned against me. “Why did you bring me here?”

“It was your idea.”

“But you said that Harry’s car–”

“Apparently it’s been stolen.”

She backed away from me, stumbling on her heels, into the ragged black branches of the cypress. All I could see was the pale shape of her face and the glints of her eyes and mouth.

“There never was any car. What kind of a car was it?”

“A Cadillac.”

“Now I know you’re lying. Where would Harry get a Cadillac?”

“He probably took it off the lot. It’s an old one.”

She didn’t seem to be following me. I heard her breath coming more rapidly.

“There never was any car,” she whispered. “You’re from Vegas, aren’t you? And you brought me here to kill me.”

“That’s silly talk, Kitty.”

“Don’t you call me Kitty.”

Her voice was taking on more childish cadences. Perhaps her mind was tracking on something that had happened years ago, between the trains rattling her mother’s dishes. “You conned me into coming to this place, and now you won’t let me go.”

“Go ahead. Go. Go-go.”

She only backed deeper into the cypress, like a nocturnal animal. Her radio was trilling from the darkness. A gust of her perfume reached me, mixed with the smells of diesel oil and wine and fire.

I saw in a red flash of insight how two people and a set of circumstances might collaborate in an unpredictable murder. Almost, I thought, she wanted to be murdered. She huddled among the shadows, whimpering: “You stay away from me, I’ll tell my old man.”

“Get out of there, stupid.”

The scream for which she’d been tuning up came out. I reached for her blindly and got her by the waist and pulled her towards me. She gasped, and swung the radio at my head. It struck me a glancing blow and fell silent, as if the musical side of Kitty’s personality had died a violent death.

I let her go. She ran away gawkily on her high heels, across the multiple tracks, until she was no more than a scrambling shadow, a hurrying sound in the night.