The Way Some People Die

Chapter 32

An inner door opened, and a plump coatless man in a striped shirt appeared in the opening. “Telephone for you,” he said to Callahan. “It’s your office calling.” He had an undertaker’s soft omniscient smile.

“Thanks,” Callahan said as he passed him in the doorway.

The man in the striped shirt moved like a wingless moth toward the lighted table. His bright black boots hissed on the concrete floor.

“Well,” he said to the dead man, “you aren’t as pretty as you might be, are you? When doctor’s through with you, you won’t be pretty in the least. However, we’ll fix you up, I give you my word.” His voice dripped in the stillness like syrup made from highly refined sugar.

I stepped outside and closed the door and lit a cigarette. It was half burned down when Callahan reappeared. He was bright-eyed, and his cheeks had a rosy shine.

“What have you been doing, drinking embalming fluid?”

“Teletype from Los Angeles. Keep it to yourself, and I’ll let you in on it.” I couldn’t have prevented him from telling me. “They raided the Dowser mob – Treasury agents and D. A.’s men. Caught them with enough heroin to give the whole city a jag.”

“Any casualties?” I was thinking of Colton.

“Not a one. They came in quiet as lambs. And get this: Tarantine worked for the corporation, he fronted for Dowser down at the Arena right here in town. You were looking for an angle, weren’t you? There it is.”

“Fascinating,” I said.

A car came up the driveway, turned the corner of the building and parked beyond the canopy. A slope-shouldered man with a medical bag climbed out.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he said to Callahan. “It was a slow delivery, and then I snatched some supper.”

“The customer’s still waiting.” He turned to me. “This is Dr. McCutcheon. Mr. Archer.”

“How long will it take?” I asked the doctor.

“For what?”

“To determine the cause of death.”

“An hour or two. Depends on the indications.” He glanced inquiringly at Callahan: “I understand he was drowned.”

“Yah, we thought so. Could be a gang murder, though,” Callahan added knowingly. “He ran with the Dowser gang.”

“Take a good look for anything else that might have caused his death,” I said. “If you don’t mind my shoving an oar in.”

He shook his tousled gray head impatiently. “Such as?”

“I wouldn’t know. Blunt instrument, hypo, even a bullet wound.”

“I always make a thorough examination,” McCutcheon stated. Hint ended the conversation.

I left my car parked in front of (he mortuary and walked the two blocks to the main street. I was hungry in spite of the odors that seemed to have soaked into my clothes, of fish and kelp and disinfected death. In spite of the questions asking themselves like a quiz program tuned in to my back fillings, with personal comments on the side.

Callahan had recommended a place called George’s Cafe. It turned out to be a restaurant-bar, lower-middle-class and middle-aged. A bar ran down one side, with a white-capped short-order cook at a gas grill that crowded the front window. There were booths along the other side, and a row of tables covered with red-checked tablecloths down the center. Three or four ceiling fans turned languidly, mixing the smoky air into a uniform blue-gray blur. Everything in the place, including the customers phalanxed at the bar, had the air of having been there for a long time.

As soon as I sat down in one of the empty booths, I felt that way myself. The place had a cozy subterranean quality, like a time capsule buried deep beyond the reach of change and violence. The fairly white-coated waiters, old and young, had a quick slack economy of movement surviving from a dead regretted decade. The potato chips that came with my sizzling steak tasted exactly the same as the chips I ate out of greasy newspaper wrappings when I was in grade school in Oakland in 1920. The scenic photographs that decorated the walls – Route of the Union Pacific – reminded me of a stereopticon I had found in my mother’s great-aunt’s attic. The rush and whirl of bar conversation sounded like history.

I was finishing my second bottle of beer when I caught sight of Galley through the foam-etched side of the glass. She was standing just inside the door, poised on high heels. She had on a black coat, a black hat, black gloves. For an instant she looked unreal, a ghost from the present. Then she saw me and moved toward me, and it was everything else that seemed unreal. Her vitality blew her along like a strong wind. Yet her face was haggard, as if her vitality was something separate from her, feeding on her body.

“Archer!” The ghastly face smiled at me, and the smile came off. “I’m so glad I found you.”

I pulled a chair out for her. “How did you?”

“The deputy sheriff said you were here. Callahan?”

“You’ve seen the body, then.”

“Yes. I saw – him.” Her eyes were as dark as a night without stars. “The doctor was cutting him up.”

“They shouldn’t have let you in.”

“Oh, I wanted to. I had to know. But it’s queer to see a man in pieces after you’ve lived with him. Even if I am a nurse.”

“Have a drink.”

“I will. Thanks. Straight whisky.” She was breathing quickly and shallowly, like a dog on a warm day.

I let her down the drink before I asked her: “What did the doctor say?”

“He thinks it’s drowning.”

“He does, eh?”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m just a floating question-mark, waiting for an answer to hook onto me. Have another drink.”

“I guess I will. They got Dowser, did you hear? Mr. Callahan told me.”

“That’s fine.” I didn’t feel like bragging about my part in it. Dowser had friends, and the friends had guns. “Tell me, Galley.”

“Yes?” There were stars in her eyes again, and no whisky in her shot-glass.

“I’d like a better picture of that weekend you spent with Joe in the desert.”

“It was a lost one, believe me. Joe was wild. It was like being shut up in four rooms with a sick mountain-lion. I was pretty wild myself. He wouldn’t tell me what it was all about, and it drove me crazy.”

“Facts, please. A few objective facts.”

“Those are facts.”

“Not the kind that help much. I want details. What was he wearing, for example?”

“Joe was in his underwear most of the time. Is that important? It was hot out there, in spite of the air-conditioning–”

“Didn’t he have any clothes with him?”

“Of course.”

“Where are they now?”

“I wouldn’t know. He had them in a club-bag when I drove him down here.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Blue work clothes.”

“The same as he has on now?”

“He hadn’t anything on when I saw him. I suppose they’re the same. Why?”

“His brother said he was wearing those clothes Friday night. Was he?”

Her curved brows knitted in concentration. “Yes. He didn’t change when he got home Friday night.”

“And he wore them, when he wasn’t in his underwear, right through to Tuesday morning. It doesn’t fit in with what I’ve heard about Joe.”

“I know. He wasn’t himself. He was in a sort of frenzy. I had dinner waiting for him when he got home – he phoned that he was coming – but he wouldn’t even stop to eat it. I barely had time to pack anything, he was in such a hurry. We rushed out to Oasis, and then we sat and looked at each other for three days.”

“No explanations?”

“He said he was getting out, that we were waiting for money. I thought he had broken with the gang, as I’d been urging him to. I knew he was afraid, and I thought they were hunting him. If I hadn’t believed that, I wouldn’t have gone with him, or stayed. Then when he did go, he went by himself.”

“You wouldn’t want to have gone along, not where he’s gone.”

“Maybe I would at that.” She raised the empty shot-glass in her fist and stared down into its thick bottom like a crystal-gazer rapt in tragic visions.

The waiter, a fat old Greek who moved on casters, appeared beside our booth. “Another drink?”

Galley came out of her trance. “I think I should eat something. I don’t know whether I can.”

“A steak like the gentleman’s?” The waiter molded an imaginary steak with his hands. She nodded absently.

“A beer for me.” When he had gone: “Another detail, Galley.” Her head came up. “You didn’t say a word about Herman Speed.”

“Speed?” Her fine white teeth closed over her lower lip. “I told you I nursed him.”

“That’s the point. You must have recognized him.”

“I don’t know what you mean. When should I have recognized him?”

“Sunday night, when he came to your house in Oasis. You must have known he bought the heroin from Joe.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Didn’t you see him?”

“I wasn’t there Sunday night. I haven’t seen Mr. Speed since he got out of the hospital. I heard he left the country.”

“You heard wrong. Where were you?”

“Sunday? About eight o’clock, Joe told me to get out, not to come back for a couple of hours. He let me take the car. How do you know Speed was there?”

“It’s beside the point. He was there, and he did buy the heroin–”

“This heroin you’ve been talking about, did Joe steal it from Dowser?” Her face was intent on mine.

“Apparently.”

“And sold it to Speed?”

“For thirty thousand dollars.”

“Thirty thousand dollars,” she repeated slowly. “Where is it now?”

“It could be in Joe’s club-bag at the bottom of the sea, or making a fat roll in somebody’s pocket.”

“Whose?”

“Possibly Speed’s.” It seemed in retrospect that he’d handed over the heroin to me much too easily. “He might have known Joe’s plans, and been waiting for him on the boat Tuesday morning. He had a motive, in addition to the money. Your sainted husband fingered him for the mob last fall.”

Her eyes dilated. “I thought they were friends.”

“Speed thought so, too. Perhaps he found out different, and decided to do something about it. I say perhaps. There’s another possibility I like better.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Keith Dalling.”

“You’re a quick girl.”

“Not really.” Her smile was one-sided. “I’ve been thinking about him for days, trying to understand why he acted as he did, and why he was killed. He was spying on us in Oasis, you know. I thought he was carrying a torch for me. I didn’t suspect it was money he was after, though God knows he needed it.”

“You saw him Sunday night, I believe.”

“Yes. Did he tell you? He was waiting up the road when I left the house. He pretended to be worried about me. We went to a little place in Palm Springs, and he drank too much and tried to persuade me to run away with him.”

“Did he know what Joe was carrying?”

“If he did, he didn’t tell me. Frankly, I thought he was naive, quite a bit of a fool. A nice fool, even.”

“So did I. But it’s pretty clear that he was on the boat, Tuesday morning. He was seen swimming ashore.”

“No!” She leaned forward across the red-checked tablecloth. “That would seem to make it definite, wouldn’t it?”

“Except for a couple of things that bother me. One is the fact that he was shot himself within an hour or two.”

“With your gun.”

“With my gun. It would be a nice irony if Dowser’s men shot him because they thought he was Joe’s partner. But how would they get hold of my gun? You said Joe took it. Are you sure of that?”

“I saw him. He put it in the club-bag along with his own.”

“There is a way it could have happened,” I said. “If Dalling took my gun when he took the money and brought it ashore with him, then Dowser’s men took it away from him in his apartment. It’s an old gang trick, shooting a man with his own iron.”

“Is it? I wouldn’t know.” Her head was sagging again, under the weight of too much information at once.

“It would be a nice irony,” I said, “but a little too neat for real life. And it doesn’t begin to cover the second thing that bothers me. Why did Dalling go to the trouble of talking your mother into hiring me? It doesn’t make sense. Unless he was really schizo?”

“No. I think I know the answer to that one. One possible answer, anyway.”

“If you can figure it out, I’ll give you a job.”

“I could use one. The point is that Keith was deathly afraid of Joe. He wanted you to come out there and make trouble, the worse the better. If both of you got killed, that would be perfect. I’d be there in his house, unencumbered, complete with dowry. He wouldn’t even have to carry me across the threshold. Does it make sense? He’d be afraid to hire you personally for a job like that – too many things to go wrong.”

The waiter set a steak in front of her, and poured beer for me.

“The job is yours,” I said. “The steak is an advance on your first week’s salary.”

She paid no attention to the food, or to me. “It didn’t work out the way Keith wanted it to. Joe survived, and so did you. What did happen was, Joe thought that the gang was closing in, and he had to run for it. Maybe that’s all Keith counted on. Anyway, he was there at the dock, or on the boat, when Joe got there. And he did his own dirty work after all.”

“Very fine,” I said. “But how did he know where Joe was heading? You didn’t tell him?”

“I didn’t know. He might have followed us down here.”

“He might have. Or he might have had an accomplice.”

“Who?” Her eyes burned black.

“We’ll discuss that later. Eat your steak now, before it gets cold. I’ll be back shortly.” I slid out of my seat.

“Where are you going?”

“I want to catch the doctor before he leaves. Guard my beer, will you?”

“With my life.”