The Way Some People Die

Chapter 12

I called Jane Starr Hammond’s number from a short-order restaurant on the boulevard. If I reached her before the body was discovered and the police visited her, I might learn something that I otherwise wouldn’t. A maid with a Negro lilt in her voice answered the phone immediately. Miss Hammond had already left for the studio; she would be in her office there the rest of the morning. I went back to my seat at the counter and contemplated the ham and eggs I had ordered. The yolk of one of the eggs had leaked out onto the plate like a miniature pool of yellow blood. I had black coffee for breakfast.

Parking spaces in downtown Hollywood were as scarce as the cardinal virtues. I found a place on Cahuenga and walked back to the studio, which occupied the third and fourth floors of a stone-faced building on Sunset. When I asked for Miss Hammond’s office, the blue-uniformed elevator attendant let me off on the third floor and pointed down the corridor. Her name was on the translucent glass pane of a door, with PRIVATE printed underneath. I knocked lightly and waited, undergoing a rare attack of embarrassment. It passed.

“Come in,” a cool voice answered, “it isn’t locked.”

I stepped into a light and airy office and closed the door behind me. Its opposite wall was a giant studio window. A young woman sat with her back to the light, working at a bleached mahogany desk. She was as crisp and exact as the daffodils in the square white bowl at her elbow. She was shiny and trim in a navy blue faille suit and a flat blue sailor hat, too trim and shiny. She looked as if she was made of rustless alloys, synthetic rubber and dyes, powered by a chrome-plated engine clicking away inside her porcelain chest. She wore a fresh gardenia on her lapel.

She looked up from the typescript she was pencilling, and caught me regarding the hat. “Pay no attention to the flying saucer.” She showed her small even teeth in a practiced smile. “I have to interview a ladybird this morning. As a matter of fact, I thought you might be she.”

“I’m usually compared to insects like the cockroach.”

“I mean when you knocked. Don’t you know what a ladybird is? A ladybird is a bird who thinks she’s a lady. The hat helps me to dominate, you know? This particular ladybird has slain wild elephants with a wild elephant gun, so she’ll take some dominating. Now tell me you’re her husband.” She smiled expertly again. If her nose had been a trifle less sharp, her eyes a few degrees warmer, she would have been a very pretty woman. I couldn’t imagine her writing the inscription in the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

I said: “My name is Archer. You are Miss Hammond?”

“You surprise and distress me, Mr. Archer. My fair pan was on the cover of Radio Mirror last month.” I wondered if she worked this hard selling herself all day every day.

“What can I do for you?” she said. “I only have a minute.”

“I’m looking for a woman named Galley Lawrence. Mrs. Joseph Tarantine. Do you know her?”

A shadow crossed her face. Her hardening blue gaze reminded me that I hadn’t shaved or changed my shirt for over twenty-four hours. “I think I’ve heard the name. Are you a detective?”

I admitted that I was.

“You should shave more often; it puts people off. What has this Mrs. Tarantine been up to?”

“I’m trying to find out. What did she used to be up to?”

“I really don’t know Mrs. Tarantine. She lives in the same apartment building as a friend of mine. I’ve seen her once or twice, I think, that’s all.”

“Under what conditions?”

“Normal conditions. She dropped into my friend’s apartment for a cocktail one afternoon when I was there. I didn’t like her, if that’s what you mean. Her appeal is to the opposite sex. Frank sexuality is her forte. If I wanted to be catty I’d call it blatant.” Her forte was the cutting word.

“Do you know her husband?”

“He was there, too. I didn’t like him either. He was sleek and crawling with charm, like a tomcat, you know? They made a well-suited couple. Keith – my friend implied that Tarantine was some sort of gangster, if that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for.” She took a cigarette from a silver box on the desk and broke it clean in half between her carmine-tipped fingers. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

I didn’t know myself. “Just information. Is this friend of yours Keith Dalling?”

“Yes. Have you talked to Keith – Mr. Dalling?” She managed to get the second cigarette between her lips.

I leaned across the desk and held my lighter to it. “I’d like to. He doesn’t answer his phone.”

She puffed hungrily on the cigarette. “What did she do? I’ve always considered her capable of anything. I named her Ignoble Savage.”

“Her husband seems to have committed a theft.”

“From whom?”

“I daren’t say.”

“And you want to question Keith?”

“Yes.”

“He isn’t involved in it, is he?” Now she was really worried. And that was just as well, if she loved Dalling or ever had.

“He may be. If he’s mixed up with Mrs. Tarantine.”

“Oh no.” She’d come close to the edge of candor but I had pushed her too fast. She drew away from it, her personality almost visibly receding. “They’re just the merest acquaintances, apartment-house neighbors.”

“You said they were friends.”

“I certainly did not, because they aren’t.” The clicking machine was back in place, everything under control. “I’m afraid we’ve run out of time, Mr. Archer. Good morning and good luck.” She crushed out her cigarette in a silver ashtray, and the last smoke puffed from her nostrils like a tiny exhaust.

“Something I almost forgot,” I said. “There’s a radio producer, a friend of Dalling’s, who does a crime show based on police work. He wouldn’t work for this station?”

“You are checking up on Mr. Dalling, then. Is he in some kind of trouble?” Her voice was tense, though she had regained her composure.

“I hope not.”

“Of course you wouldn’t tell me if he was. You probably mean Joshua Severn. Mr. Dalling used to work for him. He doesn’t work for the studio, he owns his own show, but he has an office down the hall. Sometime’s he’s even in it.”

“Thank you, Miss Hammond.”

“Don’t mention it, Mr. Archer.”

There was a telephone booth in the first-floor lobby of the building next door. The man behind the news counter wore the frosted glasses of the blind. I called police headquarters from the booth, and told the sergeant on duty that I was worried about a friend of mine. His name was Keith Dulling and he lived in the Casa Loma, Apartment 8. He didn’t answer when I phoned or when I knocked on the door – “And what is your name, sir?” he cut in sharply.

I deliberately misunderstood the question: “Keith Dalling. He lives at the Casa Loma.”

“Just one minute, sir.” His voice was soothing.

There was a buzzing silence on the line, terminated by a double click. It probably meant that the body had been found and they were tracing my call.

I hung up. I went back to the studio building and up in the elevator again to the third floor. I found the name Joshua Severn on a door at the rear of the building. It was standing slightly ajar; a continuous low murmur came from the other side. I knocked and was told to come in.

It was a working room, containing two desks piled with papers, a pair of metal filing-cabinets, a blackboard on one wall. At the moment the blackboard showed the odds on a half-dozen Derby candidates quoted from the winter book. A heavy middle-aged man switched off the dictating machine on the table beside him and straightened up in his chair.

“Mr. Severn?”

“That’s what it says on the door.” He said it cheerfully. He had a broad cheerful face surmounted by a brush of erect gray hair, like iron filings tempted by a magnet.

“My name is Archer.”

“Wait a minute. Not Lew Archer?” He stood up and offered me a stubby hand. “I’m glad to meet you, Archer. Have a seat.”

I said that I was glad to meet him, too, and sat in the chair he pushed up beside his desk. I added I hadn’t been aware that my name was a byword in the upper echelons of the radio industry.

He grinned. Most of his features, nose and ears and chin, were a little larger than life-size and slightly squashed-looking, as if they’d outgrown their mold. “It’s a darn funny thing, Archer. It happens to me all the time. The extrasensory boys, the parapyschologists, have got me half convinced. I start thinking about somebody I haven’t seen or heard of for maybe two years. Within twenty-four hours after I get the flash, I meet the guy on the street or he marches into my office, just like you.” He glanced at the yachtsman’s chronometer on his wrist. “It took you thirty-six.”

“I’m always a little slow. I take it you were thinking about me around nine thirty Sunday night. Why?”

“A fellow I know called in from Palm Springs. He wanted the name of a good private detective, one who works alone. I gave him yours. I have a beach house in Santa Teresa, and Miranda Sampson was singing your praises last year. Okay?”

“Miranda’s a nice girl,” I said. “Who was the fellow that called you Sunday night?”

“Keith Dalling. Did he get in touch with you?”

I made a quick adjustment. “Yes, he did. I talked to him on the phone, but I haven’t see him yet.”

“Funny, he sounded in a hurry. What sort of job does he want you for, anyway?”

“He asked me to keep it confidential. I have my doubts about it. That’s why I’m here.”

“Hell, there goes my extra-sensory perception. Dalling mentioned me to you, eh?” He took a long black Havana out of a box on the desk and bit its end off. “Have a cigar.”

“Not in the morning, thanks. Yes, Dalling mentioned you. He said you told him a little story about a man called Dowser.”

“The mobster?” Unconsciously he began to eat the unlit cigar. “Dowser’s name never came up between us.”

“You didn’t give him any information about Dowser?”

“I don’t know anything about Dowser. I’ve heard he was in the dope racket but they’re saying that about them all these days. You were the only name I mentioned. What kind of a line has Keith been feeding you?”

“Grade B movie stuff,” I said. “Is he a pathological liar?”

“Not when he’s sober. You’ve got to watch him when he’s drunk, and it’s hard to tell when he is. He’s a terrible alcoholic.” Severn removed the cigar from his mouth and looked at the wet mashed end without seeing it. “I hope our Keith hasn’t got himself mixed up with a crew of thugs. I warned him about the girl he was running with.”

“Galley Tarantine?”

His eyebrows moved. “She comes into the picture, too, eh? Did Dalling tell you who her husband is? I don’t know Tarantine, but he had a bad name with the police. I told Keith he better lay off her or he’d end up with a knife stuck under his ribs. Is he in trouble with Tarantine?”

“He may be. He didn’t say very much. If you can fill me in on his background, it might help.” I tried to sound as diffident as possible. Severn looked sharp. Very sharp. The blue eyes under his heavy black brows were hard and bright as diamonds. “Are you working for Keith or against him? You’re not very communicative yourself.”

“I’m for him a hundred per cent.” Which was true. I was a sucker for underdogs, and dead men were at the bottom of the heap.

“Good enough. I’ll take Miranda’s word for your honesty. I like the boy, you see, I’ve known him since he was a kid. He used to crew for me before the war when I had my Star boat, and we won the cup at Santa Monica one year. I didn’t fire him until I was forced to; the sponsor was raising Cain.”

“He worked for you?”

“He worked on a lot of shows, he’s a good actor. Trouble was, he couldn’t lay off the liquor and they canned him one by one and finally blacklisted him. I was the last one that kept him on; he played my detective-lieutenant for over two years. It got pretty rough. He fluffed so many lines I was scissoring the tape every bloody week. One day he passed out in the middle of a show and I had to go out on the streets for an actor. I cut him off, though it broke my heart to do it. It played hell with his life, I guess. He was going to get married, and he was building himself a house. I guess he lost the house. I know he lost the girl.”

“Jane Hammond?”

“Yeah. I feel kind of sorry for Jane. She works here, you know. A lot of women have carried the torch for Keith – that’s probably what ruined him – only Jane is different. He was the one big love in her life, but she was too successful for him. When I fired him, he ran out on her. I was afraid for a while she’d go crazy, though she keeps a stiff upper lip.”

“When was this?”

“Around the first of the year. I fired him the day after Christmas.” He made a sour face, champing savagely on the cigar. “Nice timing, eh? Soon after that he started with Tarantine’s wife. I see them in night spots now and then. As a matter of fact, I slip him a few lakhs of rupees when I can.” He glanced at the dictating machine in polite impatience. “Will that do? The things I know about Keith would take all day.”

I rose and thanked him. He followed me to the door, massive and quick-moving: “I’ve let down the old back hair, Dalling’s anyway. Do you care to tell me what it’s all about?”

“He’ll have to tell you himself.”

He shrugged his shoulders, easily, as if his weight of integrity was no burden. “Okay, Archer.”

“Give my love to Miranda.”

“I never see her. She moved to Hawaii. See you around.”

I had to pass Jane Hammond’s door to get to the elevator. The door was standing open. She was still behind her desk, sitting erect and trim with a telephone receiver in her left hand. Her right hand gripped her right breast, its carmine nails digging into the soft flesh. Her eyes were dark and deep in her head. They looked straight at me and failed to recognize me.

The police had found her name in the red leather address-book.