The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 19

Somewhere in the upper reaches of the building a couple started fighting. A door slammed. The staccato of an angry man’s footsteps came down the flights of stairs, a woman’s bitter voice hurling invectives after him from the top floor.

I faded into the shadows beside the stairs. The man reached the foyer, thin as a blade in garish sport shirt and pegged pants. He dabbed at a scratch on his forehead below the line of black, curly hair. Cursing under his breath in Spanish, he vented his rage on the front door by kicking it open and disappearing outside.

Upstairs, the coarse voice of a male tenant told the raging dame to shut up. She told him where he could go. It seemed for a moment a cuss fight was starting, but the woman huffed into her apartment. The building quietened, letting the muffled beat of the juke box next door return to the walls like the pulse of a tired heart.

I slid from the shadows and padded up the stairs to the second floor. Number 212 fronted the street. The door was locked, and I took out my key ring. The old lock was not hard to pick.

I eased inside the apartment, closed and relocked the door. The air was stale and hot, a mingle of odors — the sweetish smell of powder and perfume overlaying the faint stench of old food and soured beer.

The old-fashioned roller blinds were half drawn, but enough light was admitted from the street for me to make out the shadows of furniture. With the pencil flash, I made a quick tour of the apartment.

It had been a dump to start with. She’d improved it none whatever. The lumpy living-room couch and chairs were littered with a few old newspapers and magazines. An ash tray had been spilled on the cracked linoleum, which was worn to the black asphalt base in spots. The kitchen was a mess, remains of old food on the table, dirty dishes piled in the sink, paper sacks holding empty beer cans and seeping garbage providing a popular rendezvous for the Florida variety of huge black roaches and swarming gnats.

There was a bed, dresser, and chest of drawers in the bedroom. The bed linens were soiled, mussed as if she had never made the bed. The dresser was dusty with spilled face powder, jumbled with an array of cosmetics. I glanced at the labels. She’d bought expensive beauty aids.

The closet was stuffed with clothing. All was in vulgar taste. The back corner of the closet was piled with soiled clothing.

I clicked off the flash, went to the kitchen, cracked a window.

I settled down inside for a wait, long or short.

About ten minutes later, a bell tinkled softly. Her telephone, which she’d had muffled. Twenty minutes after that, the discreet demand for her attention sounded again in the living room. I wondered if the caller were Cameron. He’d expected to find her here tonight. I had the feeling she’d come.

The juke box in the gin mill kept up its whispered invasion of the walls. It became a normal part of the night, an unnoticed thing.

It was the sibilant background for the grating of a key in a lock.

I was on my feet, beside the door opening from the kitchen to the bedroom.

I heard her close the door. She stumbled against a piece of furniture and said, “Oh, damn!”

There were no wall switches here. She found the naked bulb hanging from its overhead wire. Light from the living room splashed into the bedroom. The silhouette of her came into the bedroom. She stretched, reaching for the socket holding the fly-specked bulb.

In the bedroom light, she sat down at the dresser and looked at herself a moment. The real she and the one in the mirror exchanged a soft, secretive little laugh.

She patted a yawn, lighted a cigarette, and reached for something on the floor at the end of the dresser.

She lifted into view an oval-shaped, deep hatbox that my rapid search with the pencil flash had missed.

She set the box on the dresser, but she didn’t open it right away. She began working on her face, painting her lips as bright as fresh blood, touching the corners of her eyes with pencil, the lids with shadow. She made slight changes in the face, but the sum total of the change was great. The big change came from inside, as if the surface changes had wiped out the remaining curbs on her inner self.

The transformation from Rachie Cameron to Luisa Shaw was almost complete.

She opened the hatbox, lifted out the wooden form holding the blonde headpiece. It was perfectly made and must have cost her quite a penny.

Pushing back her short-cut dark hair, she slipped the blonde headpiece on, working it carefully into place. It was the final detail needed to achieve the effect she was after.

She tilted her head, turned it from side to side, satisfying herself.

My throat clotted with something deeper than anger as I thought of the perverse pleasure and amusement she must have received the night we’d made the rounds together searching for a blonde woman in Ichiro Yamashita’s life.

She let her fingertips caress the blonde hair, the headpiece that had shed a hair on the arm of Ichiro shortly before he died.

Dead and beautiful hair, like everything else about her.

I stepped inside the bedroom. Her upraised hand chilled in that position.

She was chilled all over for a moment. Then she turned to me slowly and said, “Hello, ugly man.”

She rose gracefully, with that strength that comes from pliant, streamlined muscles.

“Have you waited long, ugly man?”

“Not enough to try my patience.”

“I liked you,” she said, coming toward me. “I thought about bringing you here.”

“But you changed your mind.”

“You were mean to me.”

“That’s too bad.”

She slid her arms to my shoulders. “You went to a lot of trouble to find me.”

“Considerable,” I admitted. “It should have been easier. A long-dead blonde hair was found on Ichiro’s arm. It must have been shed on him shortly before he died, or it would have got brushed off or fallen off. The lack of a dead person to provide the hair indicated a wig. A wig indicated a masquerade, and a process of elimination indicated you as the person who’d delight in such a game. It wasn’t clear at first. There were too many other details obscuring the picture.”

“How much is clear now, ugly man?”

“Everything.”

“Then you know I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You triggered five deaths by triggering the first, Ichiro’s. You were the indirect, but major, cause behind a suffering, innocent man’s going to jail.”

“Oh, that. I’m not responsible for what other people do.”

I gripped her wrists so hard she winced with pain. “You’re very strong, ugly man,” she said softly. “You’re hurting me.”

I looked at the avid sickness in her eyes and face, and shoved her away. “You’re a sick little chick, Rachie. I wish there was some way to touch you once with real hurt. You deserve it.”

Her lower lip dropped angrily. “I don’t want any lectures! I don’t want to hear about those stupid people!”

“Including the man unlucky enough to love you? Loving you, I guess, would be worse than being on heroin or taking poison. That’s what you’d make it, Rachie. Torment, misery, poison.”

“You shut up!”

“He went out there that afternoon, didn’t he? To the Yamashita summerhouse. He found you and Ichiro together...”

“You stinker! I don’t have to listen—”

The breath went out of her as I cut off her attempt at flight by grabbing her, throwing her on the bed, and holding her with my knee in her midriff and my hands clutching her arms.

“And he couldn’t stand it,” I went on. “He grabbed up the nearest thing at hand, a metal lamp or book end or statuette. He clobbered Ichiro.

“I can imagine the quick way you played on his poisonous love for you. You got out of there. He was leaving, too, but the parents came home, into the house. They saw him. Now he was in the state of a jungle animal. It was kill or be killed for this man. He flattened Ichiro’s father in the house, caught up with the fleeing little old lady on the front porch and let her have it there.

“Then, with every nerve screaming, every muscle crackling, every cell of him exploding, he thought of that other cottage, the Martins’. Had they seen? Must he silence them, too, in order to live? He ran there, found Nick asleep on the living-room couch. Perhaps he turned and started to go. Then it came to him. Here was safety. Here was a way out. There hung the samurai sword. Beside the couch was the whisky bottle. On the couch lay the sleeping man who sometimes went back in time when alcohol had blotted out his pain. Who went back and thought he had to kill Japanese again.

“So the man takes the sword and goes back to the Yamashita house and does what he thinks he has to do. He had not wanted to kill at all. Now he believed he was safe from the results of that blind, insane moment when he’d caught you and a man he’d believed a friend—”

“You’ll pay for this,” she gasped, her head rolling against the dirty linens. “I’ll find a way — I’ll make you pay.”

“We’ll collect a few other debts first,” I said. “From the man. Remember him? The man who thought it was all over, until Sime Younkers stepped into the picture.

“If Sime had worked, instead of always looking for an easy buck, he’d have made a decent living. He had cunning. He had brains, twisted as they were. Delving into Ichiro’s activities, Sime discovered your double life. As efficient as a weasel, learning the truth about you since you were so much a part of Ichiro’s activities, Sime sniffed possibilities, opportunities. Gleaning a knowledge of you and your acquaintances, he suspected the truth about what happened to the Yamashitas. For enough boodle, he would not only keep quiet, he would insure the murderer’s safety for good by forcing Nick Martin into a jailhouse confession.

“Except, instead of paying Sime off with cash, the murderer made payment with something a lot more permanent.

“Safety was the thing our man wanted with all his tarnished soul. With Sime’s death, he must have thought once again, the bloody path started in a wild moment of passion had ended.

“Then, all of a sudden, he was safe no longer. Tillie Rollo learned your whereabouts. You just couldn’t stay away from it, could you? You contacted her. Tillie got the new phone number.

“At the outset, our man hadn’t figured on me. But as time moved on, I got in his hair more and more. Suddenly I, if given the knowledge Tillie possessed, was very dangerous. He decided to set me up at Tillie’s and get me off his neck once and for all. He was living from moment to moment, in desperation, trying to stamp out the fuses as his firecrackers got ready to explode.

“He got Tillie instead of me. It wasn’t as good, for he knew now that as long as I lived, I’d be after him. But it gave him a chance for a breather, to try and think of something else.”

Rachie-Luisa lay with the blonde hair framing her face. She was quiet now, staring at me.

“Do you know the man?”

“Yes. Prince Kuriacha.”

“The big cluck fell like a ton of bricks for me.”

“I’m sure you’ve enjoyed knowing that.”

One of those lightning changes came into her eyes. “I really had him way out and gone. So much power over him.”

“And through him over all of them. You deserve to die in a gutter, Rachie.”

She breathed a laugh. “He told me that once himself. He had tears in his eyes. He said loving me was torture, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He’s been after me to go away with him.”

“To a place of safety.”

“That’s right — but not without me.”

Footsteps intruded into the muffled heartbeat of the walls. Footsteps on the bare flooring of the hallway.

They came to the door of 212.

They stopped. Someone knocked. Either her shattered father — or Kuriacha.

I eased away from Rachie.

“You make one move,” I whispered, “and I’ll make you wish he’d killed you.”