Find a Victim

Chapter 4

The Sheriff’s Mercury was gone, and the floodlit gravel was like a deserted arena. I wheeled my own car out onto the highway and joined the citybound traffic, not for long. An indefinable feeling of relationship pulled at me like a long elastic tying me to the Kerrigans and their trouble. Call it curiosity; but Mrs. Kerrigan’s oblique blonde beauty had a lot to do with it. I wanted to see her out of trouble, and her husband in deeper trouble.

The elastic reached the limit of its stretch and pulled my car to a stop on the shoulder. A break in the traffic let me make a U-turn. I drove back past the motor court, U-turned again a hundred yards beyond it, and parked in the deep shade of a roadside oak.

I smoked two cigarettes. Then the floodlights around the motor court were extinguished. The green and yellow sign was plunged into darkness. I turned on my ignition and pressed the starter.

The lobby windows went dark, and Kerrigan emerged. Taking noticeably short steps, he crossed the gravel to an alley that ran behind the row of cottages. A minute later his fire-engine-red convertible appeared at the mouth of the alley. He honked impatiently. Mrs. Kerrigan came out, holding her silver fox around her shoulders, and ran to the convertible.

It was an easy car to tail. I followed it into Las Graces and across the city to a hillside residential section. There Kerrigan dropped his wife in front of a big two-story house set on a terraced slope. I noted its location.

Kerrigan turned back toward the center of town, driving as if his car was an engine of destruction. He parked it eventually on a side street near Main. I found a space for my own car and went after him on foot.

We were in the lower reaches of the downtown section, an urban wasteland of cheap hotels, rummage and secondhand-furniture shops, Mexican and Chinese restaurants. Kerrigan paused under a café sign: Sammy’s Oriental Gardens, and started to look up and down the street. I stepped into the doorway of a hockshop. Its feebly lit interior lay behind barred windows like an insane memory of civilization.

When I stepped out onto the sidewalk, Kerrigan was gone. I double-timed to the front of the café and looked in through the fly-specked plate glass. He was walking toward the rear of the place, escorted by a Chinese waiter who beckoned him smilingly through a curtained archway. I waited until he was out of sight, and went in.

It was a big old-fashioned restaurant with a crowded bar along one side and wooden booths on the other, painted black and orange. Unlit paper lanterns hung dismally from the smoky pressed-iron ceiling. A languid ceiling fan stirred an atmosphere compounded of rancid grease and soy sauce, whisky-laden breath and human sweat. The people were from the lower echelons of valley life: oilfield roughnecks and their women, cowpokes in high-heeled riding boots, an old rum-dum sitting in a booth in alcoholic isolation, waiting for dreams to begin.

The Chinese waiter came forward from the rear and showed me his teeth and gums.

“You wish a booth, sir?” he said precisely.

“I’d prefer a private room.”

“Sorry, sir, it’s been taken. If you had come one minute earlier.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I sat down in one of the front booths so that I could watch the archway in the mirror behind the bar. The waiter called for a double rye on the rocks and carried it out through the archway. When he brought me my menu I said: “Those paper lanterns are a fire hazard, aren’t they? I’m a little nervous about fires. Does this building have a rear exit?”

“No, sir, but it’s perfectly safe. We’ve never had a fire. Do you wish to order now, sir?”

I remembered that I hadn’t eaten since noon, and ordered a bottle of beer and a New York cut. Fit for a King, the menu said, So Bring Your Queen. It lied.

I was washing down the last leathery shreds of the steak with beer when a girl sauntered in from the street. Her head was small and beautifully molded, capped with short black hair like glistening satin. She had flat black eyes, a mouth as sullen as sin. Her mink-dyed rabbit coat hung open, and her hips swayed as she walked to an obvious rhythm.

Every man at the bar, including the Filipino bartender, was simultaneously aware of her. She loitered near the entrance, soaking up their awareness as if it was a fuel or a food. Her soft tiny-waisted body seemed to swell and luxuriate, and her breasts rose against the pressure of eyes.

My eyes met hers. I couldn’t help smiling at her. She gave me a scornful look, and turned to the waiter: “Is he here?”

“He just came in, miss. He’s waiting for you in the back room.”

I watched her sway out after him, wondering if she could be Anne Meyer. She didn’t look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn’t quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn’t begun to sour.

I waited until the waiter had disappeared through the swinging door to the kitchen. Then I got up and moved to the curtained archway. The corridor beyond It was narrow and ill-lit, with doors marked Men and Ladies at the far end. A nearer doorway was hung with a thick green curtain, through which I could hear a muffled conversation. I leaned on the wall beside it The girl’s voice said: “Was that your wife on the phone? I never talked to her before. She’s got a very educated diction.”

“She’s educated, all right. Too damn educated.” Kerrigan let out a mirthless snort. “You shouldn’t have telephoned me at the court. She caught me packing my bags last night, I’m afraid she’s catching on.”

“To us, you mean?”

“To everything.”

“Does it matter? There’s nothing she can do to stop us.”

“You don’t know her,” he said. “She’s still stuck on me, in a way. And every little thing matters right now. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Of course I’m glad to see you. I just think we should have waited.”

“I waited all day, Donny. I didn’t hear from you, I didn’t have any weed, and my nerves were screaming. I had to see you. I had to know what happened.”

“Nothing happened. It worked. It’s all over.”

“Then we can go? Now?” She sounded young and eager.

“Not yet I have things to do. I have to contact Bozey–”

“Isn’t he gone?”

“He better not be. He still owes me money.”

“He’ll pay you. You can trust him, Bozey’s no con man. When do you see him?”

“Later. He isn’t the only one I’ve got to see.”

“When you see him, will you do something for me, Donny?” Her voice was a kittenish mew. “Ask him for a couple of reefers for me? I can get plenty in Mexico, only I need them now, tonight. I can’t stand this waiting.”

“You think I’m enjoying the strain?” Self-pity whined in his tone. “It’s tearing me apart. I can hardly sit still. If I wasn’t crazy I wouldn’t be here at all.”

“Don’t worry, honey. Nothing can happen here. Sammy knows about us.”

“Yeah. How many other people know about us? And how much do they know? There was a private detective snooping around the motor court–”

“Forget about it, Donny.” The kitten in her throat was purring now. “Come over here and tell me about the place. You know? How we’ll lie in the sun all day without any clothes and have fun and watch the birds and the clouds and have servants to wait on us. Tell me about that.”

I heard his feet on the floor and looked in through the narrow crack between the doorframe and the edge of the curtain. He was standing behind her chair with a doped expression on his face, a Band-aid cross on his chin. His hands moved downward from her neck.

She put her hands over his and lifted one of them to her mouth. It came away red-smeared. Kerrigan bent over her face, his fingers plucking at her clothes like a dying man at his sheets.

A sibilant voice said behind me: “Looking for something, sir?”

The Chinese waiter was in the archway, balancing a tray on which a pair of steaks sizzled.

“The men’s room?”

“At the end of the hall, sir.” His smile looked ready to bite me. “It’s plainly marked.”

“Thank you. I’m very shortsighted.”

“Don’t mention it, sir.”

I went to the men’s room and used it. When I came out, the private room was empty. The steaks sat untouched on the table with Kerrigan’s empty glass. I went out through the restaurant. The Chinese waiter was behind the bar.

“Where did they go?” I said.

He looked at me as if he had never seen me before, and answered in singsong Chinese.

Outside, the street was deserted. Kerrigan’s red convertible had left its parking place. I circled the block in my car, fruitlessly, and widened the circle to take in several blocks. Near the corner of Main and a street called Yanonali, I saw the girl walking in a westerly direction on Yanonali.

She was by herself, but her body swayed and swung as if she had an audience. I double-parked to let her get well ahead, then crawled along in second half a block behind her. The pavement and the buildings deteriorated as we left the downtown section. Dilapidated flats and boarding-houses whose windows gave fleeting glimpses of permanent depression were interspersed with dim little bars and sandwich counters. The people in the bars and on the streets, brown and black and dirty gray, had dim and dilapidated personalities to match the buildings. All but the girl I was following. She swaggered along through the lower depths of the city as if she was drunk with her own desirability.

Street lights were few and far between. On a corner under one of them a gang of Negro boys too young for the bars were horsing in the road, projecting their black identities against the black indifference of the night. They froze when the girl went by, looking at her from eyes like wet brown stones. She paid no attention to them.

In the middle of the next block she entered the lobby of an apartment building. I parked near the corner and surveyed the building from the other side of the street It was big for the street, three-storied, and had once been fairly pretentious. Tile facing surmounted its stucco cornice. Its second- and third-floor windows were masked with shallow wrought-iron balconies.

But the dark tides of Yanonali Street had lapped at its foundations and surrounded it with an atmosphere of hopelessness. A patched earthquake scar zigzagged across its face. Yellow rust-streaks ran down from the balconies like iron tears. The lights behind the blinded windows, the ill-lit lobby open on the street, gave an impression of furtive transiency.

I didn’t know the girl’s name, and she would be almost impossible to find in the warren of the building’s rooms and corridors. I went back to my car. The Negro boys were standing around it on the road in a broken semicircle.

“How fast will she go?” the smallest one said.

“I’ve hit the peg a couple of times. A hundred. Who was the girl that just went past, the one in the fur coat?”

They looked at each other blankly.

“We don’t pay no mind to girls,” the tallest one said.

“You want a girl? Trotter can get you a girl,” the smallest one said. “He got six sisters.” He performed a brief skinny-hipped hula.

The tall one kicked him sharply in the rear. “You silence yourself, my sisters is all working.”

The small one skipped out of his reach. “Sure. They working night and day.” He did a couple of bumps.

I said: “Where’s the Meyer truck line?”

“I thought he wanted a girl,” one of them said to the other. “Now he wants a truck. He can’t make up his mind.”

“Keep right on going west,” the tall one said. “You know where the big overpass is?”

“No.”

“Well, you’ll see it, off to the left. Meyer’s is on the other side of the highway.”

I thanked him and gave him a dollar. The others watched the transaction with the same bright stony look that they had given the girl. As I drove away, a tin can rattled on my turtleback. Their rattling laughter followed me down the street.