Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 7

The bellhop’s story, true or false, had touched an internal valve that charged my blood with adrenalin. I walked quickly across the railroad tracks, with no definite idea of where I was going. All I had was a good description and a couple of fairly rickety assumptions.

One was that the quarry wouldn’t have gone far on the open street with the black suitcase under his arm. If he had stepped into a waiting car and left town immediately, there wasn’t much I could do by myself. As if to emphasize the point, a cruising prowl car passed me slowly. A plainclothesman I didn’t recognize lifted his hand to the window.

The anomaly of my position, halfway between policeman and civilian, hit me hard. I felt a powerful impulse to break my word to Johnson, stop the car, set off an all-points alarm. The moment passed. The prowl car drove out of hearing, dragging the impulse with it. I had to act within the limits Johnson had imposed, or not act at all.

It was nearly two by my watch, almost three hours since the double play with the suitcase. But there was a chance that my man was still in town. Though I assumed as a matter of course that he came from out of town, he had probably spent the night here, since the ransom letter had been mailed the day before. If he had, he had probably stayed fairly close to the station. And there was a chance in a hundred, perhaps one in fifty, that he was holed up in one of the waterfront hotels, waiting for night.

The harbor area had once been advertised as the Juan-les-Pins of the West. The treacherous years and an unwise city council had given it over to penny arcades and saltwater-taffy booths, carrousels, open-front beer-joints, a grab-bag assortment of hostelries. The latter ranged from fishermen’s flops to fairly respectable motels. I had been in all of them at one time or another.

A Spanish-American chambermaid in the Delmar Motel, who believed her virtue to be under constant attack, had thrown ammonia in a guest’s face. Three years’ probation with psychiatric treatment. A seventeen-year-old boy, a junior in high school, who was on probation for grand theft automobile, rented a room in the Gloria in order to commit suicide. It took us eighteen hours to bring him out of barbiturate coma. Now he was due to be graduated from college in a month.

I shook the memories off and looked outward. Girls and children in sunsuits, T-shirted men and boys, were strolling along the sea-wall and on the wharf. The white sand below the sea-wall was strewn with brightly costumed bathers. From the edge of the beach, a crew of oarsmen was launching a cedar shell. It slid out onto the water and began to walk on its oars like a waterbug, with eight crewcut heads nodding in unison.

I stepped into the narrow bamboo-furnished lobby of the Gloria Hotel. The desk clerk remembered me. He was a thin, ageless Italian who had always been there. I described my man. No, he hadn’t seen anyone of that description, today or yesterday. Sorry we can’t help you, Mr. Cross.

At the Delmar, the ammonia-tossing chambermaid had married the manager and risen to key-girl. Her large black eyes grew larger when I entered. She still had a year to go.

“Mr. Cross? You want to see me?”

“Relax, Secundina. Miss Devon tells me you’re doing fine.”

She came out through the swinging door beside the registration counter, a beautiful girl in a Spanish blouse, with ribbons in her hair. The management liked atmosphere.

“Miss Devon is a good woman,” she stated. “I am not afraid no more – any more.” She swung her arms in a free movement in order to demonstrate that she was not afraid. The ribbons fluttered.

I said: “I’m looking for a man.”

“What man? He is staying here?”

“You tell me, Secundina.” I described him.

“He is not one of our guests,” she said with certainty. “Un momento. Wait a minute. I theenk – I think I have seen him.”

“When was this?”

“This morning. I was sweeping the veranda. The sand blows from the beach.” Her hands moved laterally, imitating the sand. “This big old man went by in the street, walking very queeckly.”

She began to walk, very queeckly, in a small circle of which I was the hub. Her expert mimicry included a sore-footed limp. It ended with a dancer’s heel-and-toe.

“Can you remember what time this morning?”

Her carmine mouth was weighted with thought. “Eleven o’clock? Five minutes after? Ten minutes? It was soon after eleven. I opened the office at eleven.”

“Did you notice, was he carrying anything?”

She considered the question, her finger twiddling a lower lip. “I am not sure. Perhaps a coat? I hardly looked at him.”

“You didn’t see where he went?”

“That way, in the direction of the Harbormaster’s office.” She pointed northward, parallel with the shoreline.

“And he was hurrying?”

“Ah, yes, very queeckly!”

She began to demonstrate the limping hustle again. I raised my hand in a traffic officer’s gesture. She smiled and desisted. I touched the lifted hand to the brim of my hat and started out. She called after me:

“Say hello to Miss Devon!”

The lift I had got from Secundina, the lift I always got when fear took a setback, faded rapidly on the pavement. There was nothing in the direction she had indicated but a dollar doss over a fried-fish place. FRIED FISH. ROOMS ONE DOLLAR. TRY OUR SMOKED FISH SPECIAL. JUMBO SHRIMP. The greasy counterman who doubled as room-clerk had never seen my man. His close mouth wouldn’t have opened if he had.

The Harbormaster’s Quonset and jetty lay in the corner of the cove where the Point curved out from the shore. The blank-walled bath-house in front of it was loud as a monkeyhouse with teen-age whistles and hoots and ululations. Beyond it, across the base of the landspit, deep-sea breakers pounded a steep shore. The desolate beach, eaten at the edge by dangerous currents, was closed to swimmers. It pullulated with gulls. They rose like an inverted snowstorm, and veered seaward.

The asphalt road across the base of the point was sand-blown and salt-pitted and led nowhere. The dancing pavilion it had served had been smashed by a winter storm some years ago. Nothing remained of the pavilion but crumbling concrete bulkheads and a large, weathered billboard: DINE AND DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF THE WAVES.

A few cars were parked along the edge of the road, nosed into the sand-drifts on its seaward side. There were a couple of empty jalopies, a family eating picnic-lunch in their station wagon, an old truck piled with black and brown fishing-nets. A black and brown mongrel with a Doberman head barked violently from the rear of the truck as I passed, wagging his tail in self-congratulation.

“Be a hero,” I told him. His bark made the whole truck shake. The gulls coming in from sea flew out again, blown between blue layers of sea and sky.

Another car was parked near the truck, almost hidden behind the Dine and Dance billboard. The tracks it had made in the sand were blowing over but still visible. It was a prewar Chrysler sedan, painted blue, with a Los Angeles license number. I looked in through the open rear window. A new black suitcase lay open on the back seat, empty.

A man reclined on the front seat half covered by a brown topcoat. His head was jammed into the corner between the right-hand door and the back of the seat, his legs twisted under the steering wheel. When I opened the door a brown toupee detached itself from his skull and draped itself across the toe of my shoe. From the side of his neck the red plastic handle of an icepick stood out like a terrible carbuncle.

The registration card had been ripped from its holder on the steering-post. The car keys hung from the ignition, but no identification was attached to them. I went through the pockets of the dead man’s mohair jacket and chocolate gabardine slacks. They contained a pocket comb in a leatherette case marked with the initials A.G.L., a handkerchief, an unopened packet of chlorophyll gum, and the yellow stub of a theater ticket. Nothing else.

Sand flies were gathering on the dead face. I covered it with the topcoat and closed the door gently. When I went back past the truck, the dog was still barking and wagging. The picnickers in the station wagon were laughing over Coke bottles. I turned away from them. Above the sea the gulls were wheeling, wings glinting in the sun, turning like slow electrons in blue eternity.

I phoned Helen Johnson from the Harbormaster’s office and told her why I had to call the police.