The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 26

THE DRY MARTINI was a small hotel on the edge of the older downtown gambling district. Two old ladies were playing Canasta for money in the boxlike knotty-pine lobby. The desk clerk was a fat man in a rayon jacket. His red face was set in the permanently jovial expression which people expect of fat men.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“I have an appointment with Miss Campbell.”

“I’m very much afraid Miss Campbell hasn’t come in yet.”

“What time did she go out?”

He clasped his hands across his belly and twiddled his thumbs. “Let’s see, I came on at midnight, she checked in about an hour after that, stayed long enough to change her dress, and away she went again. Couldn’t’ve been much later than one.”

“You notice things.”

“A sexburger like her I notice.” The tip of his tongue protruded between his teeth, which were a good grade of plastic.

“Was anybody with her, going or coming?”

“Hope. She cue and went by herself. You’re a friend of hers, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Know her husband? Big guy with light-reddish hair?”

“I know him.”

“What goes with him? He came in here in the middle of the night looking like the wrath of God. Big welts on his face, blood in his hair, yackety-yacking like a psycho. He had some idea in his head that his wife was in trouble and I was mixed up in it. Claimed I knew where she was. I had a hell of a time getting rid of him.”

I looked at my watch. “She could be in trouble, at that. She’s been gone eleven hours.”

“Think nothing of it. They stay on the town for twenty-four, thirty-six hours at a time, some of them. Maybe she hit a winning streak and’s riding it out. Or maybe she had a date. Somebody must’ve clobbered the husband. He is her husband, isn’t he?”

“He is, and several people clobbered him. He has a way of leading with his chin. Right now he’s in the hospital, and I’m trying to find her for him.”

“Private dick?”

I nodded. “Do you have any idea where she went?”

“I can find out, maybe, if it’s important.” He looked me over, estimating the value of my clothes and the contents of my wallet. “It’s going to cost me something.”

“How much?”

“Twenty.” It was a question.

“Hey, I’m not buying you outright.”

“All right, ten,” he said quickly. “It’s better than getting poked in the eye with a carrot.” .

He took the bill and waddled into a back room, where I heard him talking on the telephone to somebody named Rudy. He came back looking pleased with himself: “I called her a taxi last night, was just talking to the dispatcher. He’s sending over the driver that took the call.”

“How much is he going to cost me?”

“That’s between you and him.”

I waited inside the glass front door, watching the noon traffic. It came from every state in the Union, but most of the license plates belonged to Southern California. This carney town was actually Los Angeles’s most farflung suburb.

A shabby yellow cab detached itself from the westbound stream and pulled up at the curb. The driver got out and started across the sidewalk. He wasn’t old, but he had a drooping face and posture like a hound that had been fed too long on scraps. I stepped outside.

“You the gentleman interested in the blondie?”

“I’m the one.”

“We’re not supposed to give out information about our fares. Unless it’s official–”

“A sawbuck official enough?”

He stood at attention and parodied a salute. “What was it you wanted to know, bud?”

“You picked her up what time?”

“One fifteen. I checked it on my sheet.”

“And dropped her where?”

He gave me a yellow-toothed grin and pushed his peaked cap back. It hung almost vertically on the peaked rear of his skull. “Don’t rush me, bud. Let’s see the color of your money first.”

I paid him.

“I set her out on the street,” he said. “I didn’t like to do it that time of night, but I guess she knew what she was doing.”

“Where was this?”

“It’s out past the Strip a piece. I can show you if you want. It’s a two-dollar fare.”

He opened the back door of his cab, and I got in. According to his identification card, his name was Charles Meyer. He told me about his troubles as we drove out past the Disney-Modern fronts where Hollywood and Times Square names decoyed for anonymous millionaires. Charles Meyer had many troubles. Drink had been his downfall. Women had wrecked his life. Gambling had ruined him. He told me in his singsong insistent whine: “Three months I been hacking in this goddam burg trying to get together a stake to buy some clothes and a crate, get out of here. Last week I thought I had it made, two hundred and thirty bucks and all my debts paid off. So I went into the drugstore to get my insulin and they give me my change in silver, two dollars and a four-bits piece, and just for kicks I fed them in the machines and that was going to be that.” He clucked. “There went two thirty. It took me a little over three hours to drop it. I’m a fast worker.”

“You could buy a bus ticket.”

“No, sir. I’m sticking here until I get a car, a postwar like the one I lost, and a suit of decent clothes. I’m not dragging my tail back to Dago looking like a bum.”

We passed several buildings under construction, identified by signs as additional club-hotels with fancy names. One of them was Simon Graff’s Casbah. Their girders rose on the edge of the desert like armatures for people to build their glad bad dreams on.

The Strip degenerated into a long line of motels clinging to the fringes of glamour. Charles Meyer U-turned and stopped in front of one of them, the Fiesta Motor Court. He draped his hound face over the seat back: “This is where I set her off.”

“Did anybody meet her?”

“Not that I saw. She was all by herself on the street when I pulled away,”

“But there was traffic?”

“Sure, there’s always some traffic.”

“Did she seem to be looking for anybody?”

“How could I tell? She wasn’t making much sense, she was in a kind of a tizzy.”

“What kind of a tizzy?”

“You know. Upset. Hysterical-like. I didn’t like to leave her alone like that, but she says beat it. I beat it.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Red dress, dark cloth coat, no hat. One thing, she had on real high heels. I thought at the time, she wouldn’t walk far with them on.”

“Which way did she walk?”

“No way, she just stood there on the curb, long as I could see her. You want to go back to the Martini now?”

“Stick around for a few minutes.”

“Okay, but I keep my meter running.”

The proprietor of the Fiesta Motor Court was sitting at an umbrella table in the small patio beside his office. He was smoking a waterpipe and fanning himself with a frayed palm-leaf fan. He looked like a happy Macedonian or a disappointed Armenian. In the background several dark-eyed girls who could have been his daughters were pushing linen carts in and out of the tiny cottages.

No, he hadn’t seen the young lady in the red dress. He hadn’t seen anything after eleven thirty, got his NO VACANCY up at eleven twenty-five and went straight to bed. As I moved away he barked commands at one of the dark-eyed girls, as if to teach me by example how to keep my females out of trouble.

The Colonial Inn, next door, had a neat little office presided over by a neat little man with a clipped mustache and a north-by-northeast accent with asthmatic overtones. No, he certainly had not noticed the young lady in question, having better things to do with his time. He also had better things to do than answer questions about other people’s wives.

Moving toward town and the unlit neon silo of the Flamingo, I tried the Bar-X Tourist Ranch and the Welcome Traveller and the Oasis. I got three different answers, all negative. Charles Meyer trailed me in his taxi, with many grins and nods.

The Rancho Eldorado was a double row of pastel chicken coops festooned with neon tubing. There was no one in the office. I rang until I got an answer, because it was close to the street and on a corner. A woman opened the door and looked at me down her nose, which was long and pitted with ancient acne craters. Her eyes were black and small, and her hair was up in pincurls. She was so homely that I felt sorry for her. It was practically an insult to offer her a description of a beautiful blonde in a red dress.

“Yes,” she said. “I saw her.” Her black eyes glinted with malice. “She stood on the comer for ten or twelve minutes last night. I don’t set myself up as a judge of other people, but it made me mad to see her out there flaunting herself, deliberately trying to get herself picked up. I can tell when a girl’s trying to get herself picked up. But it didn’t work!” Her voice twanged triumphantly. “Men aren’t as easily taken in as they used to be, and nobody stopped for her.”

“What did she do to you?”

“Nothing, I just didn’t like the way she flaunted herself under the light on my corner. That sort of thing is bad for business. This is a family motel. So I finally stepped outside and told her to move along. I was perfectly nice about it. I simply told her in a quiet way to peddle her papers elsewhere.” Her mouth closed, lengthening in a horizontal line with right angles at the corners. “She’s a friend of yours, I suppose?”

“No. I’m a detective.”

Her face brightened. “I see. Well, I saw her go into the Dewdrop Inn, that’s the second place down from here. It’s about time somebody cleaned out that den of iniquity. Are you after her for some crime?”

“Third-degree pulchritude.”

She chewed on this like a camel, then shut the door in my face.

The Dewdrop Inn was a rundown stucco ell with sagging shutters and doors that needed paint. Its office door was opened by a woman who was holding a soiled bathrobe tight around her waist. She had frizzled red hair. Her skin had been seared by blowtorch suns, except where her careless breast gleamed white in the V of her robe. She caught and returned my dipping glance, letting the V and the door both open wider.

“I’m looking for a woman.”

“What a lucky coincidence. I’m looking for a man. It’s just a leetle early for me. I’m still a teensy bit drunky from last night.”

Yawning, she cocked one fist and stretched the other arm straight up over her head. Her breath was a blend of gin and fermenting womanhood. Her bare feet were dirty white.

“Come on in, I won’t bite you.”

I stepped up into the office. She held herself in the doorway so that I brushed against her from shoulder to knee. She wasn’t really interested, just keeping in practice. The room was dirty and disordered, with a couple of lipsticky glasses on the registration desk, confession magazines scattered on the floor.

“Big night last night?” I said.

“Oh, sure. Big night. Drink cocktails until four and wake up at six and you can’t get back to sleep. This divorce kick – well, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I braced myself for another life-story. Something about my face, maybe a gullible look, invited them. But she spared me: “Okay, Joe, we won’t beat around the bush. You want the girlie in the red dress.”

“You catch on very quick.”

“Yeah. Well, she isn’t here. I don’t know where she is. You a mobster or what?”

“That’s a funny question.”

“Yeah, sure, uproarious. You got a hand gun in your armpit, and you’re not Davy Crockett.”

“You shatter my illusions.”

She gave me a hard and murky look. Her eyes resembled mineral specimens, malachite or copper sulphate, which had been gathering dust on somebody’s back shelf. “Come on, now, what’s it all about? The kid said there was mobsters after her. You’re no mobster, are you?”

“I’m a private dick. Her husband hired me to find her.” I realized suddenly that I was back where I’d started, twenty-eight hours later and in another state. It felt more like twenty-eight days.

The woman was saying: “You find her for him, what’s he plan to do with her? Beat her up?”

“Look after her. She needs it.”

“That could be. Was it all malarkey about the mobsters? I mean, was she stringing me?”

“I don’t think so. Did she mention any names?”

She nodded. “One. Carl Stern.”

“You know that name?”

“Yeah. The Sun dug into his record and spread it on the front page last fall when he put in for a gambling license. He wouldn’t be her husband?”

“Her husband’s a nice boy from Toronto. George Wall. Some of Stem’s friends put him in the hospital. I want to get to his wife before they do it to her.”

“No kidding?”

“I mean it.”

“What did she do to Stem?”

“It’s a question I want to ask her. Where is she now?”

She gave me the mineral look again. “Let’s see your license. Not that a license means much. The guy that got me my divorce was a licensed private detective, and he was a prime stinker if I ever saw one.”

“I’m not,” I said with the necessary smile, and showed her my photostat.

She looked up sharply. “Your name is Archer?”

“Yes.”

“Is this a funny coincidence or what? She tried to phone you last night, person to person. Knocked on the door along towards two o’clock, looking pretty white and shaky, and asked to use my phone. I asked her what the trouble was. She broke down and told me that there were mobsters after her, or there soon would be. She wanted to call the airport, catch a plane out right away quick. I put in a call for her, but I couldn’t get her on a flight till morning. So then she tried to call you.”

“What for?”

“She didn’t tell me. If you’re a friend of hers, why didn’t you say so? Are you a friend of Rina Campbell’s?”

“Who?” I said.

“Rina Campbell. The girl we’re talking about.”

I made a not very smooth recovery. “I think I am. Is she still here?”

“I gave her a nembutal and put her to bed myself. I haven’t heard a peep out of her. She’s probably still sleeping, poor dearie.”

“I want to see her.”

“Yeah, you made that clear. Only, this is a free country, and if she don’t want to see you there’s no way you can make her.”

“I’m not planning to push her around.”

“You better not, brother. Try anything with the kid, and I’ll shoot you personally.”

“You like her, do you?”

“Why not? She’s a real good girl, as good as they come. I don’t care what she’s done.”

“You’re doing all right yourself.”

“Am I? That I doubt. I had it once, when I was Rina’s age. I tried to save a little of it for an emergency. If you can’t pass on a little loving-kindness in this world, you might as well be a gopher in a hole.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say. My name is Carol, Mrs. Carol Busch.” She offered me a red, unlovely hand. “Remember, if she changed her mind about wanting to see you, you amscray.”

She opened an inner door, and shut it firmly behind her. I went outside where I could watch the exits. Charles Meyer was waiting in his cab.

“Hiyah. Any luck?”

“No luck. I’m quitting. How much do I owe you?”

He leaned sideways to look at the meter. “Three seventy-five. Don’t you want a ride downtown? I’ll let you have it for half-price.”

“I’ll walk. I need the exercise.”

His look was sad and canine. He knew that I was lying, and he knew the reason: I didn’t trust him. Mrs. Carol Busch called me from the doorway of the unit adjoining the office. “Okay, she’s up, she wants to talk to you.”