The Way Some People Die

Chapter 15

After the sunswept patio, the room was very dim behind three-quarters-drawn drapes. A thin partition of light fell through it from the uncovered strip of window, dividing it into two unequal sections. The section to my right held a dressing-table and a long chair upholstered in dark red satin. I saw myself in the mirror above the dressing-table. I looked disheveled enough without even trying. The heavy door slammed shut and a key turned in the lock.

In the section to my left there were more chairs, a wide bed with a red silk padded head, a portable cellarette beside the bed in lieu of a bedside table. Galley Tarantine crouched on the bed like a living piece of the dimness and the stillness. Only the amber discs of her eyes showed life. Then the point of her tongue made a slow circuit of her lips at the pace of a second hand: “This is an unexpected pleasure. I didn’t know I was going to have a cellmate. The right sex, too.” There was some irony there. Her voice, low and intense, was well adapted to it.

“You’re very observant.” I went to the window and found that it was a casement, but bolted top and bottom on the outside.

“It isn’t much use,” she said. “Even if you smashed it, the place is too well guarded to get away from. Dowser plays with gunmen the way other spoiled little boys play with lead soldiers. He thinks he’s Napoleon Bonaparte and he probably suffers from the same anatomical deficiency. I wouldn’t know myself. I wouldn’t let him touch me with a ten-foot pole.” She spoke quietly but clearly, apparently taking pleasure in the sound of her own voice, though it had growling overtones. I hoped that Dowser was hearing all of this, and wondered where the mike was. Perhaps in the cellarette. I turned from the window to look at it, and the light fell on my face. The woman sat up higher on her heels and let out a little gasp of recognition. “You’re Archer! How did you get here?”

“It all goes back about thirty-seven years ago.” She was too bright for a Lochinvar approach. “A few months before I was born, my mother was frightened by a tall dark stranger with a sandbag. It had a queer effect on my infant brain. Whenever anybody hits me with a sandbag, I fall down and get up angry.”

“You touch me deeply,” she said. “How did you know it was a sandbag?”

“I’ve been sandbagged before.” I sat down on the foot of the bed and fingered the back of my head. The swelling there was as sore as a boil.

“I’m sorry. I tried to stop it, but Joe was too fast. He sneaked out the back of the house and around the porch in his stocking feet. You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you.” She shuffled towards me on her knees, her hips rotating with a clumsy kind of grace. “Let me look at it.”

I bent my head. Her fingers moved cool and gentle on the swelling. “It doesn’t look too bad. I don’t think there’s any concussion, not much anyway.” Her fingers slid down the nape of my neck.

I looked up into the narrow face poised over me. The full red lips were parted and the black eyes dreamed downward heavily. Her hair was uncombed. She had sleepless hollows under her eyes, a dark bruise on her temple. She still was the fieriest thing I’d seen up close for years.

“Thanks, nurse.”

“Don’t mention it.” The dark hawk face came down and kissed my mouth. For an instant her breast came hard against my shoulder, then she withdrew to the other end of the bed.

It made the blood run round in my veins too fast. But she was calm and cool, as if it were a thing she did for all her patients.

“What did Joe do after that?” I said.

“You haven’t told me how you got here. Have you a comb?”

I tossed her my pocket comb. Her hair crackled and ran smooth like black water through her hands. I looked around the room for Dowser’s one-way window. There was a double band of black glass along the edge of the panel heater near the door.

“You wouldn’t be one of Dowser’s lead soldiers, would you?” She was still combing her hair, her bosom rising and falling with the movement of her arms.

“That bum? I wouldn’t be here if I was. I told you your mother hired me.”

“Ah yes, you’re Mother’s helper. Did you see her?”

“No more than an hour ago. Stop combing your hair, it disturbs me.”

A white grin lit her face. “Poor mans, did I excite hims?”

“That was the idea, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?” The tossed comb would have hit me in the face if I hadn’t palmed it. “What did Mother say?”

“She said she’d give whatever she has if I could bring you back.”

“Really?” For the first time she sounded and looked dead serious. “Did she mean it?”

“She meant it all right. I said I’d do what I can.”

“So you came up here and got yourself locked up. It took you less than an hour. You move fast, Archer.”

I assumed an angry tone which turned out to be half real: “If I had my gun, it wouldn’t have happened. Your husband took my gun last night.”

“He took mine, too,” she said.

“Where did he go?”

“You’ll never catch him now.”

“You know where he is, then?”

“I can guess. He didn’t tell me anything himself. He never did.”

“Don’t kid me.”

“I wouldn’t if I could,” she said. “It’s true. When I went to Las Vegas with him – we were married at Gretna Green – I thought he was a wrestling promoter. I knew he worked as a pinball machine collector before that, but that seemed fairly innocent. He didn’t tell me different.”

“How did you meet him?”

“In the line of duty, I suppose you’d call it. I had a patient by the name of Speed who used to be Joe’s boss. Joe came to see this Speed in the hospital. Joe is a good-looking man, and I guess I fell.” She was leaning against the padded headboard with her knees turned sideways under her. On the other side of the red chenille desert that lay between us, her thighs rose under the blue skirt like the slopes of blue mountain foothills.

“This Speed,” I said. “What was the matter with him?”

“You probably know, or you wouldn’t ask.” The reclining slopes of her body shifted, and my nerves recorded the seismic vibrations. “Mr. Speed had a bullet wound in the stomach.”

“But that didn’t give you any ideas about Mr. Speed’s employee?”

“I hate to admit I must have been naive. Mr. Speed said it was an accident. He shot himself cleaning a gun, at least that was his story.”

“So you married Joe, who probably shot Speed himself.” I made the suggestion at random, fishing for facts.

Her eyes widened, black and depth-less beneath their amber surfaces. “Oh. Joe and Herman Speed were always good friends. When Joe took over, Mr. Speed gave him pointers about the business–”

“What business?”

“The pinball machines and the wrestling contracts and various other things.”

“All Dowser’s things?”

“I guess so. I didn’t know Joe’s business. He kept me up here in L. A., you see, and Joe and I weren’t very good friends after the first week. Joe had a pleasant trick of slapping people. That’s why I bought my gun. It cooled him off but I was still afraid of him, and he knew it. It didn’t make for marital confidences.”

“But you know what Dowser wants him for?”

“I have a rough idea. He absconded with something valuable of Dowser’s. But Dowser won’t catch him either.” She looked at the watch on her slim brown wrist. “He’s probably in Mexico by now. Over the hills and far away.”

“You think he went to Mexico?”

“That’s what it looks like to me. I’ll never see him again,” she added bitterly.

“Is that going to ruin your life?”

She sat up straight, her face set in angry planes. “Look what he did. Married me under false pretences, took me for a ride, and now he’s stood me up. Left me to take a beating from Dowser and his dirty rotten crew. The dirty rotten coward.”

“Tell me where he went last night?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want to have the pleasure of hitting him over the head with a blackjack. If I bring him in, that will clear you with Dowser, won’t it?”

“It will if you’re man enough to do it. You weren’t last night.”

There was no answer to that. “Tell me about last night. I’d like to get it straight. I met your boy friend Dalling in a bar – I think he was expecting me – and he drove me out to Oasis–”

“Dalling is not my boyfriend.”

“All right, he likes you, though.” I was careful about the tense. “He was worried about you.”

“Keith is a terrible worrier. What next?”

“He parked down the road and stayed in his car. Joe slipped out of the house while I was talking to you at the door, and sapped me. Now it’s your turn.”

“To sap you?”

“To say what happened after that. Did he see Dalling’s car?”

“Yes. He went after it, but Keith got away. Joe came back in a rage and told me to pack, we were leaving. We were off in fifteen minutes. You were still unconscious, and I think that saved your life. He made me drive him into Los Angeles though I didn’t want to do it. I suspected he was after Keith for giving away his hideout. I could tell he blamed me for it, because Keith was my friend. Not my boy friend.

“He was so blind mad he went back to the Casa Loma, that’s where we had our apartment. I told him Dowser’s men would be watching it, but he shut me up. Keith’s car was in the parking lot. Joe told me to stay down there and he went up the back way himself.”

“What time was this?”

“Around three, I think?”

“You got there in a hurry.”

“Yes, I was hitting ninety and ninety-five. I kind of hoped we’d have a blowout and put an end to the business, but no such luck.” She stroked the side of her face with one hand, her eyes unfocused. “Anyway, Joe came down in a couple of minutes and said Keith wasn’t at home. He made me drive him to Pacific Point and let him out near the yacht basin. That was the last I saw of him. He didn’t even say good-bye to me.” She smiled narrowly. “It might have been smart of him to say good-bye.”

“Why don’t you tell Dowser about all this? He’ll turn you loose.”

“I’ll tell you why: Dowser let his gorilla put his paws on me. I wouldn’t tell him which direction was up.”

I sat and looked at her, waiting for the key to turn in the lock. The more I looked at her proud body and head, the more I liked her, the more I felt like a heel.

I had to remind myself that a man was dead, that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that anything was fair in love and war and murder. I leaned sideways on one elbow, and sleep came over my head like a gunny sack. Just before I dozed off, I heard a car engine start with a roar somewhere outside the house.