Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 6

There was a witness, but he was blind. A small gray sign on the newsstand counter said: BLIND OPERATOR. The man behind the counter wore frosted glasses and spoke in the slow, clear accents of the sightless:

“What can I do for you, sir?”

I had just stepped into the shop, and hadn’t spoken. “How did you know I was a man?” I knew by experience that sightless people seldom resented a direct reference to their loss.

He smiled. “Your footsteps, naturally. I’m sensitive to sound. You’re a fairly big man, I’d guess. About six feet?”

“You hit it on the nose.”

“I usually do. I’m five foot nine myself, you’re about three inches taller. It’s not too hard to estimate the level of the mouth. Now your weight. About one sixty-five?”

“One eighty,” I said, “unfortunately.”

“You’re light on your feet for one eighty. Just a second, now. I’ll guess your age.”

“Aren’t you getting into the psychic department?”

“No, sir. Voices change with the years, just like faces do. I’d say you’re thirty-five, give or take a couple.”

“Close enough. I’m thirty-seven.”

“I’m practically never more than two years out. Bet a quarter you can’t guess my age, though.”

“Taken.” I looked at the unlined brow, the carefully brushed black hair, the serene smiling mouth. “About thirty?”

“Forty-one!” he announced with gusto. “I lead a quiet life.” He pushed a jar with a slotted lid across the counter. It was half full of quarters. “Drop your two bits in here. It goes to the Braille fund.” He nodded briskly when he heard the fall of the coin. “Now what can I do for you?”

“Someone left a suitcase outside here this morning. Behind your newspaper rack.”

He thought for a moment. “About eleven o’clock?”

“Exactly.”

“So that’s what it was. I thought I saw a suitcase.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“That’s just a manner of speaking,” he explained. “I see with my ears and touch and sense of smell. You’ve just been out in the country, haven’t you? I can smell country on you.”

“Right again.” I was beginning to hope that the kidnappers had outwitted themselves in choosing this blind man’s store for their money-drop. He made a point of noticing everything. “About the suitcase, it was left there shortly before eleven.”

“Did you leave it?”

“A friend of mine did.”

“He shouldn’t have left it out there. I’d have kept it behind the counter for him. Was it stolen?”

“I wouldn’t say it was stolen. It’s simply gone. I think it was gone a few minutes after eleven.”

He raised his sightless forehead. “Your friend doesn’t think I took it?”

“Certainly not. I’m trying to trace the suitcase. I thought perhaps you could help me.”

“You’re a policeman?”

“I’m County Probation Officer. Howard Cross.”

“Joe Trentino.” He held out his hand. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Cross, heard your talk on the radio last winter. The one on juvenile delinquency. Now let me think.”

His hand, when I had shaken it, returned to the jar of coins and twirled it on the glass counter-top as he concentrated:

“The ten fifty-five was in. It was standing there when I heard that suitcase plop down on the platform. It wasn’t a big one, was it? Then somebody walked away. Your friend a heavy, older man? I couldn’t see him too well, there was too much interference from the train.”

“You’re a wonder, Joe.”

“Quiet,” he said. “I’m listening. I had a couple of customers from the train, they wanted Racing Forms. They didn’t stop at the newspaper rack. I guess they already got their papers before they left L.A. Hold it a minute, I had another customer, right after the train pulled out. He brought in a paper from the rack, a News. Now which one was it?”

He tapped his forehead lightly with blunt fingertips. I watched him with a sense of strangeness growing on me. His awareness of the life around him seemed almost supernatural.

His tongue clicked. “It was one of the bellhops from down the street, they come in here all the time. I can tell them by the way they walk, the way they handle a coin. He flipped his dime on the counter. Now which one was it? I know it was one of the boys from Pacific Inn.”

Water started from the pores of his face. It was an arduous job, reconstructing reality from blowing wisps of sound.

“By golly!” he said. “He was carrying the suitcase. He picked it up before he came in. I heard it bump on the doorframe. I think it was Sandy, the one they call Sandy. He usually passes the time of day, but he didn’t say a word to me. I wondered why he didn’t speak. Was he stealing it?”

“No, probably he was just doing his job. Somebody sent him for it. I can’t tell you any more about it right now, Joe.” I caught myself up short. I had almost said: you’ll read it in the papers. “Thanks for your trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” he said, with the water running down his face. “Drop in any time, Mr. Cross.”

The Pacific Inn was a low, rambling building with sweeping tropical eaves and a deep veranda screened with split bamboo. Diagonally across from the railway station and in full sight of the newsstand, its various wings and bungalows occupied half a city block. As buildings went in Southern California, the Inn was an antique. Oldtimers at the courthouse remembered when it had been an international watering-resort, crowded in season with dubious European aristocrats and genuine movie stars. That was before the great earthquake of the twenties cracked its plaster, before the economic earthquake a few years later cut off its clientele.

Since then the prosperous center of town had shifted uphill, away from the harbor and the railroad tracks. The Inn hung on, sinking gradually from second-rate to disreputable. It became the scene of weekend parties from Long Beach and Los Angeles, haunt of race-track touts, brief resting-place for touring stock-companies and itinerant salesmen. My work had taken me to it more than once.

Its atmosphere of depression surrounded me as I climbed the steps. A couple of old men, permanent residents of the bungalows, were propped on cane chairs against the wall like living souvenirs of the past. Their tortoise gaze followed me across the veranda. The lobby inside was dark-beamed and dusty. It hadn’t changed in ten years. From one wall a grizzly’s head snarled through the murk at an elk’s head on the opposite wall. There were no humans.

I rang the handbell at the abandoned desk. From the dark bowels of the building, a little man in a faded blue uniform came trotting. His tight round stomach poked out gnomishly under the tunic.

“Desk-clerk’s gone to lunch. You want a room?” Under the pillbox hat, the hair was sparse and faded brown, the color of drought-killed grass.

“Your name Sandy?”

“That’s what they call me.”

He looked me over, trying to place me, and I returned the look. I guessed that he was a jockey grown too heavy to ride. He had the bantam cockiness, the knowing eyes, the sharp, strained youthfulness that had never dared to let itself mature. Money would talk to him. Probably nothing else would.

“What’s your business, mister? You got to talk to the manager if you’re selling. He’s not here.”

“I’m looking for a friend of mine. He carries a small black suitcase.”

Boredom glazed his eyes. “Lots of people carry small black suitcases. The woods is full of them.”

“This particular one was left at the station newsstand this morning. You picked it up about eleven o’clock.”

“I picked it up? Not me.” Leaning on the desk, he crossed his stubby legs and looked up at the ceiling.

“Joe Trentino recognized you.”

“He’s seeing better lately? Nuts.”

I didn’t have money to use on him. Fear would have to do. “Listen to me, Sandy. That suitcase was hot. The longer you won’t talk, the deeper you’re in.”

“Who you kidding?” But his gaze came down from the ceiling, met mine, and sank below it. “You a cop?”

“Close enough. That suitcase contained evidence of a felony. Right now you’re an accomplice after the fact.”

I watched fear grow in him like a sudden chill pinching his mouth and nostrils. “I handle a lot of suitcases. How do I know what’s in them? You can’t pin nothing on me.” His mouth stayed open, showing broken teeth.

“You’re either an accomplice or a witness.”

“You can’t bum-rap me,” his fear chattered.

“Nobody’s trying to, Sandy. I don’t want your blood. I want your information. Is my friend staying here?”

“No,” he said. “No, sir. You mean that one that sent me for the black suitcase?”

“That’s the one. Did he pay you to keep quiet about it?”

“No, sir. He overtipped me, that’s all. I figured there was something out of line. I don’t mean illegal, nothing like a felony. It’s just most of the customers nowadays you got to use a chisel to peel a nickel off their palms. He slipped me two bucks for walking across the street.”

“Tell me about him.”

“I thought he was going to register when he came in, that he was just off the train. No luggage, though. He told me he left his suitcase at the station, told me where it was.” He held out his hands, palms upward. “What should I do, tell him I was too ritzy to tote a bag? Could I know it was hot?”

“He also told you not to speak to Joe at the newsstand. Didn’t he?”

Sandy looked everywhere but at me. The dismal surroundings seemed to sadden him. “I don’t remember. If he did, I must have figured it was a gag of some kind. What did Joe say?”

“Just what he heard. You do the same. Except that you have eyes.”

“You want a description?”

“As full a one as you can give me.”

“Is this going into court? I wouldn’t make a good witness in court. I’m nervous.”

“Quit stalling, boy. You’re one step away from being booked yourself. He paid you more than two dollars, and you knew very well it wasn’t legit.”

“Honest to God, cross my heart.” His finger crossed and recrossed his faded blue breast. “Two bucks was all it was. Would I risk a felony rap for a lousy two bucks? Do I look gone in the upper story?”

“I won’t answer that one, Sandy. You are if you won’t talk.”

“I’ll talk, don’t worry. But you can’t make me say I knew. I didn’t. I still don’t. What was it, stolen goods? Marijuana?”

“You’re wasting time. Let’s have a complete description.”

He took a deep breath. It wheezed in his throat and swelled his chest out like a pouter pigeon’s. “Okay, I said I’d co-operate, that’s my policy. Let’s see, he was about your size, maybe a little shorter. Definitely fatter. A pretty ugly puss, if you ask me, I should of known he was a hustler. Whisky eyes – you know what I mean? – a sort of pinky blue color. Bad complexion, kind of pockmarked around the nose. He was pretty well dressed, though, a sharp dresser. Brown slacks and light tan jacket, yellow sport shirt. I like good clothes myself. I notice clothes. He had these two-tone shoes, brown and doeskin or whatever they call it. Real sharp.”

“A young man?”

“Naw, I wouldn’t call him young. Middle-aged is more like it, maybe in his fifties. One thing I noticed about him. He had a hat on – brown snap-brim – but under it I think he was wearing a toupee. You know how they look at the back, sort of funny around the edges, like they didn’t belong to the neck?”

“You have eyes all right. What color?”

“Brown, sort of a dark reddish brown.”

“Over-all impression?”

“I tabbed him strictly from hunger, but putting on a front. You follow me? We see a lot of them: actors and pitchmen out of a job, ex-bookies peddling tips from the horse’s brother – that sort of stuff, with barely one nickel to rub against another, but keeping the old front up. When he slipped me folding money, you could have knocked me over with a bulldozer.”

“Did he pay you before or after?”

“One buck when he sent me, the other when I came back. He was waiting on the veranda when I came back. What was in that suitcase? It didn’t feel heavy to me.”

“I’ll tell you when I find out. Where did he go with it?”

“He marched off down the street. I thought he was going to register–”

“You said that. Which way?”

“Across the railroad tracks.”

“Come out and show me.”

He followed me to the veranda steps, and pointed west towards the harbor:

“I didn’t wait to see where he went. He just started walking that way. He walked as if his feet hurt him.”

“Carrying the suitcase?”

“Yeah, sure. But now you mention it, he had a topcoat with him. He carried the suitcase under his arm, with the topcoat kind of slung over it.”

“Did he cross the street?”

“Not that I saw. He didn’t go back to the station, anyway.”

I thanked him and went west.