Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 19

The Neptune Hotel stood in the limbo of side streets between the neons of the business section and the dark waterfront. Its own sign, ROOM WITH BATH $1.50, flickered and went out and came to life again like a palsied lust. Flanking the hotel entrance was a bar where a few sailors and their fewer girls sat with midnight faces. The lobby was dimly lit and unpeopled. Its green-washed walls cast a pallor on Molly’s face and turned her blown hair to green gold. She looked around the lobby as if she had been in similar places before.

The night clerk stood up behind his desk He was a dark young man with an advanced haircut, short on top and long around the ears. He wore a luminescent scarlet shirt and illustrated suspenders.

“You want a double?” he said in a cynical tenor.

“No.”

“You take her up to a single, you pay the same as a double.”

“I’m a police officer.”

He ducked, ran his fingers through his short top-hair, and came up smiling. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“You have a man named Arthur Lemp staying here.”

He glanced at the brass-hooked key-rack behind him. “Lemp is out.”

“When did he leave?”

“I couldn’t tell you that. I haven’t seen him tonight, or last night either.”

“When did you see him?”

“Night before last, I guess. One night is like another.” He moved one hand palm-down across the flat surface of his nights.

“Who was he with?”

“I never saw him with nobody. He’s a loner.”

“No friends?”

“Not that I ever saw. He always come by himself. That’s the only time I saw him, when he come in for the night. It was generally pretty late, around this time.”

“Where did he spend his evenings?”

He inverted the eloquent hand. “How would I know? The bars. I’m not his cycloanalyst. But he’s got the flybar look.”

Molly snorted.

“He’s traded it in on the mortuary look,” I said.

The young man touched his mouth, and then the side of his nose. “Dead?”

I nodded.

Molly’s hand gripped my elbow. Her outraged whisper hissed in my ear: “You didn’t tell me he was dead. You been conning me. You brought me down here under false pretenses.”

I shook off her hand, and spoke to the clerk: “Lemp was murdered this morning, out of town. I want a look at his room.”

“You got a warrant?”

“I don’t need a warrant. This is a homicide case. The man is dead.”

Shrugging his thin shoulders, he took a tagged key from the rack and pushed it across the desk:

“I guess you know what you’re doing. It’s three seventeen. Okay if I don’t go up with you? I got no replacement here. You turn left from the elevator. It’s the last one at the back, by the fire escape.”

“Thanks,” I turned to Molly. “You’re coming up with me.”

“I don’t want to come up.”

“I’m not taking a chance on your running around loose and getting into more trouble.”

I took her arm and walked her to the elevator. Its protesting machinery lifted us to the third floor. We went to the left, following a series of small red lights to the end of the corridor. Molly’s footsteps dragged.

There were human sounds behind the walls and doors, sounds of unquiet slumber, alcoholic laughter, furtive love. I was tired enough to feel the weight of lives pressing from both sides on the narrow hallway. For a nightmare instant I felt infinitely tiny, a detached cell threading the veins of a giant, tormented body.

The key turned loosely in the lock and passed us into the room. A light switch inside the door controlled the ceiling fixture. A pair of forty-watt bulbs blinked weakly on an iron-framed single bed, a corner washbasin, a rickety bureau, a few square yards of worn carpet.

Across the half-blinded single window the fire escape slanted up, a black-iron Jacob’s ladder against the roiled light and darkness over the rooftops.

“So this is where he’s been staying,” Molly said contemptuously. “In this dump, and he was talking mink and convertibles on the phone. He always was a dirty lying old skunk.”

“You seem to be able to handle your grief.”

“Why not? You didn’t see what he did to me. Look at this.”

Shedding her coat abruptly, she reached for the zipper in the back of her dress and bared her shoulder blades. Downward from the base of her neck, the white flesh was crisscrossed with blue-black welts turning green and yellow.

“He did it to me with his Mexican belt the night that I broke with him. You know what he said? Why he did it? That he’d do anything for a little affection. He said he was old and loveless, so he beat me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I sorry, but not for him.” She closed the zipper. “A swell chance I got of landing any modeling assignments as long as those marks are on my back.”

“Sit down and be still now, Molly. I have work to do.”

She sat in the room’s only chair and looked at the wall. A curved decorator’s tool had marked the walls and ceiling with myriad small crescents, like hoofprints left by a revolving army of nightmares.

There was no closet, and nothing on the hooks behind the door. The bureau drawers were empty. I went to the bed, which had been freshly made up, and pulled off the sheets. There was nothing under them but the brown stains on the mattress. I raised the mattress and propped it against the wall. Lemp’s suitcase was under the bed.

It was made of tan canvas trimmed with brown leather. The leather was scuffed, and the lock had long since been sprung. It contained a paper parcel from a Chinese laundry, which I didn’t bother to open, a pint bottle of cheap bourbon wrapped in a moth-eaten coat sweater, a carefully folded brown suit, with a tarnished San Francisco Police Department badge in the inside breast-pocket, a .38-caliber revolver and a box of shells, a packet of licorice throat-lozenges, a heavy jackknife equipped with a fingernail-clipping device, a pair of black-leather boots with razor slits across the toes, half a ham sandwich moldering in wax paper, an empty, alligator wallet, a nearly empty bottle labeled Pote-N-Zee the Hormone Elixir, and a pair of small baby-shoes cast in bronze and tied together with a blue ribbon.

There was a layer of books and papers at the bottom. One of the books was entitled “The Real Meaning of Your Dreams”; the cover illustration was a man’s head swelling with fantasies. The nature of Lemp’s fantasies was indicated by the other books, most of which were under-the-counter paperbacks with sadistic illustrations. On the flyleaf of one of them, someone had written a verse with an indelible pencil:

Refrain:

The papers included a letter, written by an Assistant District Attorney of San Diego County in 1941, recommending Lemp’s employment as a company guard by a San Diego aircraft plant; a sepia snapshot print of a bald-headed young man who might have been Lemp holding a long-dressed baby under a leafless maple tree; and Lemp’s birth certificate. He had been born Arthur George Lempke in Pittsburgh, Pa., on June 14, 1892, to Arthur Lempke, laborer, and his wife Trinity, housewife. As if to bracket his life in a single document, Lemp had written in pencil on the dog-eared official envelope containing the birth certificate:

But Lemp had been taken up to heaven shortly after eleven, and missed the plane. I opened his bottle of bourbon and had a stiff drink. The room, the contents of the suitcase, the remnants of Lemp’s sixty years were infinitely dreary. I felt the shuddering lapse of all those years.

“Stealing a dead man’s liquor. Pretty low.” Molly got up from her chair and took a few tentative steps towards me. “Mister, I could use a slug of that myself.”

“You won’t get it from me.”

“Why not?” She smiled coaxingly.

“I never give liquor to minors or take candy from babies.”

She struck a pose, shoulders back, chest out, stomach in. “I’m no baby. I’ve been drinking regular for several years.”

It struck me with sudden harsh clarity, simultaneously with the crude whisky, that I was at the center of the evil maze. It contained a timetable for a kidnapping packed with a sentimental pair of baby boots, an old man writing a vapid love-poem on the flyleaf of a corrupt book, a young girl who had learned to accept corruption. Molly’s smile, as blank as the walls, as threadbare as the carpet, had somehow become the meaning of the room.

“You’re a babe in the woods,” I said. “Cover yourself with leaves.”

Memory came into her eyes like dark ink spreading in water. “You say the darnedest things. I used to do that all the time, cover myself with leaves. I loved to play in the leaves in the fall when I was a kid. We used to play house.”

“Was that before the flood?”

“Yeah, before the flood.”

I squatted down and began to repack the suitcase. There was an angry core of heat in my body. It was, hard to hate evil without overdoing the hate and becoming evil. It wasn’t Molly I hated, or even Lemp. It was the shapes of their desires, the frantic waste of their flesh, the ugly zero waiting at the end.

My hands were awkward. Folding the brown suit, they shook the alligator wallet onto the floor.

Molly scrambled for it on hands and knees.

“Give it to me,” I said. “It’s all evidence.”

“But this belongs to Kerry. I gave it to him for his birthday last year. It was his thirtieth birthday, and I was in the chips for once.”

“Are you sure it was his?”

Her fingers were exploring its interior. “It’s got his initials in it. I had them put on at the leather shop when I bought it.”

She showed me the tiny gold initials in one corner: K S. “I was right. He murdered Kerry and stole his car and his wallet.”

“And his girl.”

“It isn’t true. Kerry was the only one I loved. Except when he got nasty, Art Lemp was more like a father to me, a grandfather. All he wanted to do was look at me. I was always faithful to Kerry in my heart.”

I took the wallet from her hand and finished packing the suitcase. She went to the mirror above the washbasin. After studying her reflection for some time, she said to herself, or to no one in particular:

“I forget who I am sometimes. I can’t remember who I am sometimes.”

She raised the window and looked out across the fire escape. Red and black were tangled in a skein blown over the rooftops. Distant cries and hootings rose from the city, gusts of sound like wind blowing here and there in an iron forest.