The Way Some People Die

Chapter 11

It was nearly eight by my watch, and delivery trucks were honking their matins, when I got back to town. I was feeling accident-prone, and I drove within the speed limit. The twisted scrap of mind the night had left me was concentrated on Keith Dalling. He had escorted me gracefully into a very queer setup, and gracefully run out. I owed him an opportunity to explain. His yellow Buick was in the parking lot behind the Casa Loma. I eased my car in beside it and got out. The Buick was locked and empty.

An outside wooden staircase led up from the parking lot to a series of long porches across the rear wall of the building. Dalling’s back door, if he had one, would be on the second floor at the far right end. A milkman ran down the stairs, a metal basket full of empty bottles clanking in each hand. “Morning,” he cried. “Up early, eh?” He disappeared down the alley.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor and followed the veranda to the end. Dalling’s apartment had a back door, with a black 8 stenciled on it. The door was an inch ajar, and it opened wider when I knocked. An alarm clock chirped on the other side of the wall, uneager feet shuffled across a floor. Neither my knocking nor the neighbor’s alarm clock wakened Dalling.

I pushed the door wide open and entered his kitchen. It was a bachelor’s kitchen done by an expressionist scene-designer, probably a Russian. The sink was brimming with dirty water in which a half-submerged pagoda of dirty dishes stood precariously. There were more dirty dishes and a bottle half full of sour milk on the folding table attached to the wall in the breakfast corner. What I could see of the linoleum floor was glazed with grime. But most of it was covered with empty whisky bottles in staggered rows, a sad little monument to Dalling’s thirst. Many of the bottles were pints and some were half-pints, which meant that Dalling had sometimes had no more than a dollar between him and sobriety.

I picked my way across the floor to the open door of the living-room. Someone had smashed a bottle on the door frame. The jagged dried splash on the wall still smelled of bourbon, and the floor was littered with brown shards of glass which crunched under my feet.

The living-room was dim behind closed Venetian blinds. I jerked the cord to let the morning in, and looked around me. A scarred prewar radio-phonograph stood by the window, with piles of records on the floor beside it. There was a shallow fireplace in the inside wall, containing a cold gas heater unnecessarily protected by a brass fire-screen. On the wall above the fireplace Van Gogh’s much reproduced sunflowers burned in a bamboo frame. The mantel held some old copies of Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter, and a few books: cheap reprints of Thorne Smith, Erskine Caldwell, the poems of Joseph Moncure March, and The Lost Weekend. There was one handsome book, a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese bound in green tooled leather. Its flyleaf was inscribed: “If thou must love me, let if be for naught except for love’s sake only. – Jane.” Jane wrote a precise small hand.

The most conspicuous piece of furniture was a Murphy bed standing on its hind legs in a doorway across the room. I had to push it aside before I could get through the door. I did this with my elbow, instead of my fingerprint surfaces. I suppose I smelled the blood before I was conscious of it.

There was a great deal of blood in the little hallway on the other side of the door. It covered the floor from wall to wall, a dark pool filming over now and beginning to cake at the edges. Dalling lay in the middle of it, prone on his back and finished. His waxen profile caught the light that shone through the bathroom door. At first glance I couldn’t make out the hole through which the blood had wasted. Leaning over, I saw the puncture in the far slope of his neck and the powder burns on his collar. He was dressed as I had seen him in Palm Springs, and he made a handsome corpse. Any mortician would have been proud of Dalling.

A sheaf of envelopes and folded papers lay on the unbreathing chest halfway out of the jacket’s inside pocket. Hugging the door frame with one crooked elbow, I leaned further out over the red pool and got them. It wasn’t legal, but on the other hand paper seldom took usable fingerprints.

I went back to the window with the papers, and read through them quickly. A Third Street auto agency intended to repossess the Buick if Dalling didn’t pay overdue installments of one hundred and sixty-five dollars and fifty cents. A note on the letterhead of a talent agency, signed by one of its partners, stated that things were tough all over in show biz, if that was any comfort, but TV might make a few more jobs in the fall. An overdraft notice from a downtown bank hinted at a threat of legal proceedings. A Beverly Hills tailor was turning over his account to a collection agency.

I returned to the door of the hallway and took a second look for a gun. There was none in sight, and it wasn’t likely that Dalling had fallen on it in his position. Somebody else had done him the final favor.

There was only one personal letter, written on an interoffice memo form from a Hollywood radio station. It was handwritten in neat small calligraphy, and signed Jane:

Jane’s full name was written above the station call-letters that were printed on the envelope. It was Jane Starr Hammond. The envelope had been postmarked early in March.

I found her name again in the small red leather address-book that was the last of the items from Dalling’s breast pocket. There were a great many names in the book, nine out of ten of them female, and a great many telephone numbers. The only addresses and telephone numbers that interested me deeply were the ones on the last page: Mrs. Samuel Lawrence’s and my own. I tore out that last page, and put the book and the bills and the letters back where I had got them.

Dalling had no more use for Malibu telephone numbers or hundred-dollar loans. He’d keep no more whisky vigils in the Murphy bed, with desperation and a dying bottle for bedmates. No one would ever send him another book of poems with love written small and neat on the flyleaf.

There were two men starting their cars in the parking lot, but they didn’t pay any special attention to me. I got into my car and switched on the engine. The yellow Buick stood there waiting to be repossessed.