Find a Victim

Chapter 10

Driving east on Yanonali Street, I remembered the evidence case in the back of my car. It contained several hundred marijuana cigarettes, done up in packs of five. I had taken them from a pusher in South Gate and was going to turn them over to the State Bureau in Sacramento. If five were missing, the Bureau would never know the difference.

The Negro boys had vanished from the corner. I parked in front of the Cortes Apartments, opened the rear trunk, and found the small key to the evidence case on my ring. I unlocked the steel case and took out one of the little packets wrapped in butcher’s paper.

The inner door of the lobby was locked. Cards bearing the tenants’ names were stuck in the tarnished brass mailboxes banked along the wall. There were eighteen of them, in rows of six. Only one card was printed. Only three of the eighteen were men. Miss Jo Summer, a large immature signature in green ink, was on number seven. I pushed her button and waited.

A low voice drifted through the grille of the speaking tube. “It that you, doll?”

“Uh-huh.”

The buzzer released the door-catch. I mounted the rubber-treaded stairs into the obscurity of the building. A wall-bracket at the head of the stairs was the only light in the second-floor hallway. Someone had written a message below it with lipstick: “Chas am at Floraines see you there.” My shadow climbed the wall and broke its neck on the ceiling.

Seven was the last door on the left. Its metal numeral rattled when I knocked. The door came ajar, letting out a seepage of purple light. I moved sideways out of it. The girl peered through the crack, blinking at me astigmatically. She said in her kittenish mew: “I wasn’t expecting you so soon. I was just going to take a bath.”

She moved toward me, her body silhouetted in a thin rayon wrapper. One of her hands insinuated itself between my arm and my side. “A kiss for baby, Donny?”

Her wet mouth brushed the angle of my jaw. I must have tasted strange. She let out a little groan of surprise and pushed herself away from me, stood with both hands flat against the wall. Her wrapper fell open. Her body gleamed like a fish in murky water.

“Who are you? You said you were him.”

“You got me wrong, Jo. Kerrigan sent me.”

“He didn’t say nothing to me about you.”

She looked down at her breasts and gathered the wrapper across them, folding her arms. Her scarlet-taloned fingers dug into her shoulders. The kitten in her throat was scared and hissing: “Where is he? Why didn’t he come himself?”

“He couldn’t get away.”

“Is she holding him up?”

“I wouldn’t know. You better let me come in. He gave me something for you.”

“What?”

“I’ll show you inside. You have neighbors.”

“Have I? I never noticed. R. K. O., come in.”

She backed into the purple-lighted room, a tiny girl no taller than my shoulder, with a sleek small head and a rich body. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. I wondered how she would look when she was forty, if she lived that long.

The room was like a segment of her future waiting for her fate to overtake it. A black iron standing lamp with a red silk shade lined with blue cast its unreal light on red drapes hung from twisted iron rods, a red mohair divan piled with cheap magazines, a rug whose color and design had been trampled into indistinguishable grime. The only decoration on the yellow plaster walls was a last year’s cheesecake calendar. A bored hand had given the blonde girl in the picture a mustache and goatee, and hair on her chest.

She came up to me like an eager child who had been promised a gift. “What did Donny send me?”

“This.” I closed the door behind me and gave her the packet wrapped in butcher’s paper.

Her fingers tore it open, scattered the brown cigarettes on the rug. She went down on her knees to retrieve them, snatching at them as if they were live worms that might wriggle away from her. She stood up with four in her hand and one in her mouth.

I flicked my lighter and lit it for her. I told myself that it was necessary, that she had the habit anyway, that police departments paid off informers with dope every day in the year. But I couldn’t shake off my feeling as I watched her that I had bought a small piece of her future.

She sucked on the brown weed like a starved baby on an empty bottle. Six of her deep shuddering drags ate half of it away. She looked at what was left with growing, brightening eyes, and dragged again. Her smoky mouth wreathed itself in changing smiles. In no time at all the butt was burning her fingers.

Pressing it out in an ashtray, she put it away in an empty cigarette-case, along with the four whole reefers. She did a few dance-steps around the room, stumbling a little in her pomponed mules. Then she sat down on the red divan with her fists clenched tightly between her legs. Her eyes were huge and terribly alive, but they were turned inward, lost in the blossoming jungle of her thoughts. Her smile kept changing: girlish and silly, queenly and triumphant, whorish, feline, evil and old, and gay again and girlish.

I sat beside her. “How are you feeling, Jo?”

“I feel wonderful.” Her voice came from far inside her head, barely moving her lips. “Jesus, I needed that. Thank Donny for me.”

“I will if I see him. Isn’t he leaving town?”

“That’s right, I almost forgot, we’re going away.”

“Where are you going?”

“Guatemala.” She said it like an incantation. “We’re going to build a new life together. A beautiful new life together, with no more trouble in it, no more nastiness, no more jerks. Just him and me.”

“What are you going to live on?”

“Ways and means,” she said dreamily. “Donny has ways and means.”

“I hope you make it.”

“Why shouldn’t we make it?” She gave me a black scowl. The drug had exaggerated all of her emotions, fear and hostility as well as hope.

“They’re looking in his direction.”

She sat up straight, pierced by anxiety. “Who? The cops?”

I nodded.

She leaned on me and took hold of my arm with both hands and shook it. “What’s the matter, isn’t the protection working?”

“It takes pretty solid protection to cover murder.”

Her lips curled, baring her teeth. Her eyes blazed black in mine. “Did you say murder?”

“You heard me. A friend of yours was shot.”

“What friend? I got no friends around this town.”

“Doesn’t Tony Aquista rate?”

Without shifting her eyes from my face, she edged away from me, crawling on hands and buttocks into the far corner of the divan. She said from her teeth: “Aquista? Should I know the name? How many A’s in Aquista?”

“Don’t try to kid me, Jo. He was one of your followers. You brought him home here Sunday night.”

“Who told you that? It’s a lie.” But she looked around the room as if it had betrayed her. Her voice was croupy with fear: “Did they kill Tony?”

“You ought to know. You set him up for the kill.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t true. I wouldn’t touch a thing like that. I’m clean.”

Her gaze had returned from the interior of her dream. She wasn’t as far out of focus as I’d thought. Suspicion flicked a bright double tongue from the black holes in the centers of her eyes. “Tony isn’t dead. You’re trying to con me.”

“Would you like to pay a visit to the morgue?”

“Don didn’t say anything. He would of told me if Tony got it. It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Why would he tell you what you already knew? You fingered Tony, didn’t you?”

“I did not. I didn’t even set eyes on him since last Sunday night. I’ve been home here all day today.” She rose and stood over me, her face drawn and jaundiced. “Is somebody trying to frame me? Who are you, anyway?”

“A friend of Don’s. I talked to him tonight.”

“Don wouldn’t do that to me. Is he arrested?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you sluff?”

“Oh sure,” I said. “That’s why I brought you those reefers.”

“Where did Don get them?” Her black gaze slanted down at me from under her broad low brow.

“From Bozey. Don couldn’t bring them himself, so he sent me.”

“Funny he never mentioned yon.”

“He doesn’t tell you everything.”

“No. I guess he doesn’t.”

She crossed the room to the venetian-blinded window and ran her fingers idly down the slats. She returned with dragging feet and made herself small in the corner of the divan, hugging her knees to her breast.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “You tell me Tony’s dead and Don’s been stringing me. Why should I listen to you?”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“Are you supposed to be in on the deal?”

“I thought I was. But it looks as if he’s been stringing both of us. The way he laid the blueprint out for me, you were the one that was going to finger Tony.”

“That was the original plan,” she said. “I was supposed to flag him down. No shooting, understand – I wouldn’t go for that. Just stop the truck on the road and let the others take over.”

“Don and Bozey?”

“Yeah. Only they changed the plan. Don didn’t want me sticking my neck out, see.” She stroked her round smooth neck, unconsciously. “And then something came up – something that Tony told me Sunday night. He was drunk when he told me, I didn’t believe it at the time. He was always full of blow-top tales about her. But Don believed it when I told him.”

“What did you tell him?”

“This tale about Anne Meyer.”

“Try it on me.”

She pinched the skin of her throat between thumb and forefinger and looked at me sideways. “You ask an awful lot of questions. How do I know you’re not a cop? How do I know those reefers weren’t a come-on?”

I stood up, feigning anger, and moved to the door. “Have it your way, sister. I can take so much, but when you call me sluff–”

She followed me. “Wait a sec. You don’t have to flip your lid. Okay, you’re a friend of Don’s, you’re in on the deal. What are you doing now?”

“I’m getting out. I don’t like the smell of it.”

“Do you have a car?”

“It’s outside.”

“Will you drive me some place?”

“If you say so. Where?”

“I don’t know where. But I’m not going to sit here and wait to be picked off.” She went to an inner door and turned with her hand on the knob. “I’ll shower and put some clothes on. It won’t take a minute.” Her smile went on and off like an electric sign.

I waited for fifteen minutes, lulled by the splattering rush of the shower behind the wall. I smoked an old-fashioned cigarette made of tobacco and leafed through the “romance” magazines on the divan. I Was a Love Decoy. My Lost Weekend. Do Men Have Forbidden Desires? I Was an Old Man’s Plaything. The cover girls all looked like Jo, in one way or another. She was legion.

It hit me finally that her shower-bath had lasted much too long. I walked into her bedroom without knocking. The bureau drawers were hanging open, empty except for a few soiled clothes. I opened the bathroom door. The shower was running full force into the bathtub, but there was no girl under it.

I went through the dark kitchen, out the back door, down a flight of wooden steps into a walled alley. A little light filtered down through the porous sky. It showed me a fat old Negro wedged in a sitting position between two garbage cans against the wall. With his head hanging sideways and his legs spraddled, he looked like a huge black baby left on the world’s doorstep. I shook him and smelled the rotgut and let him sleep.

I went toward the mouth of the alley, a high pale rectangle filled with diluted light from the corner streetlamp. A man’s figure entered its frame. Wide-shouldered and narrow-hipped in a leather windbreaker, he moved with a tomcat’s grace and silence. I caught a glimpse of his face. It was young and pale. Dark red hair hung down over his temples in lank wings. He pushed it back with one hand. His other hand was hidden under the windbreaker. The wall’s shadow fell across him.

“Did you happen to see a girl come out of here?”

“What girl?”

“A little brunette. She’s probably carrying a suitcase.”

“Yeah. I saw her.”

He moved along the wall toward me, so close that I could see his eyes and the frightened savage lostness in them.

“Which way did she go?”

“That depends on what you want from her. What do you want from her?”

His voice was quiet and calm, but I could sense the one-track fury behind it. He was one of the dangerous boys, born dry behind the ears and weaned on fury and grief.

“You wouldn’t be Bozey?”

He didn’t answer in words. His fist came out from under the windbreaker, wearing something bright, and smashed at the side of my head.

My legs forgot about me. I sat on the asphalt against the wall and looked up at his armed right fist, a shining steel hub on which the night revolved. His face leaned over me, stark and glazed with hatred.

“Bow down, God damn you, skiff. I’m Bozey all right. Bow down and kiss my feet.”

His bright fist drove downward at my face. I slipped the punch somehow and heard metal jar on stone. I tried to get to my feet. But my legs were made of old rope and worn-out rubber. The third blow found me, and the night revolved more quickly, like dirty water going down a drain.

When I came to, I was in my car, trying to turn the trunk key in the ignition. The street was deserted, and that was just as well. I drove like a drunk for a couple of blocks, weaving from curb to curb. Then my vision cleared and steadied.

Crossing the main street, I saw my bleeding face in the mirror over the windshield. It looked curiously lopsided. I glanced at my wristwatch to see what time it was. My wrist was bare. I shook myself down and found that my wallet was missing. But my .38 was still in the glove compartment. I transferred it to the side pocket of my jacket.