The Way Some People Die

Chapter 5

I stopped for gas at a service station near the arena and looked up Tarantine in the phone book attached to its pay phone. There was only one entry under the name, a Mrs. Sylvia Tarantine of 1401 Sanedres Street. I tried the number on the telephone and got no answer.

Sanedres Street was the one I was on. It ran cross-town through the center of the Negro and Mexican district, a street of rundown cottages and crowded shacks interspersed with liquor stores and pawnshops, poolroom-bars and flyblown lunchrooms and storefront tabernacles. As the street approached the hills on the other side of the ball park, it gradually improved. The houses were larger and better kept. They had bigger yards, and the children playing in the yards were white under their dirt.

The house I was looking for stood on a corner at the foot of the slope. It was a one-story frame cottage with a flat roof, almost hidden behind a tangle of untended laurel and cypress. The front door was paned with glass and opened directly into a dingy living-room. I knocked on the door and again I got no answer.

There was a British racing motorcycle, almost new, under a tarpaulin at the side of the house. Moving over to look at it, I noticed a woman hanging sheets on a line in the yard next door. She took a couple of clothespins out of her mouth and called: “You looking for something?”

“Mrs. Tarantine,” I said. “Does she live here?”

“Sure thing, only she ain’t at home just now. She went to see her boy in the hospital.”

“Is he sick?”

“He got mugged down on the dock the other night. He was beat up something terrible. The doctor thought he might of fractured his skull.” She disposed of the sheets in her arms and pushed the graying hair back from her face.

“What was Tarantine doing down at the dock at night?”

“He lives there. I thought you knew him.”

I said I didn’t know him.

“Well, if you stick around she should be back before long. They don’t let visitors stay after four o’clock.”

“I’ll try the hospital, thanks.” It was a quarter of four by my watch.

At five to four I was back where I had begun. The nurse at the information desk told me that Mr. Tarantine was in room 204, straight up the stairs and down the hall to the right, and warned me that I only had a minute.

The door of 204 was standing open. Inside the room a huge old woman in a black and red dotted dress stood with her back to me so that I couldn’t see the occupant of the bed. She was arguing in a heavy Italian accent: “No, you must not, Mario. You must stay in bed until the doctor says. Doctor knows best.”

A grumbling masculine bass answered her: “To hell with the doctor.” He had an incongruous lisp.

“Swear at your old mother if you want to, but you stay in bed now, Mario. Promise me.”

“I’ll stay in bed today,” the man said. “I don’t promise for tomorrow.”

“Well, tomorrow we see what the doctor says.” The woman leaned over the bed and made a loud smacking noise. “Addio, figlio mio. Ci vediamo domani.”

“Arrivederci. Don’t worry, Mama.” I stepped aside as she came out, and became interested in a framed list of regulations on the wall. If her hips had been six inches wider she’d have had to take the door sideways. She gave me a black look of suspicion, and bore her huge flesh away on slow waddling legs. Varicose veins crawled like fat blue worms under her stockings.

I went into the room and saw that it contained two beds. A sleeping man lay on the far one by the window, an ice-bag around his throat. On the near one the man I was looking for was sitting up against the raised end, with two pillows behind his head. Most of the head was hidden by a helmet of white bandage which came down under the chin. The visible part of it looked more like a smashed ripe eggplant than a face. It was swollen blue, with tints of green and yellow, and darker marks where the skin had been abraded. Someone who liked hurting people had used his face for a punching-bag or a football.

The puffed mouth lisped: “What do you want, bud?”

“What happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you how it is,” he said laboriously. “The other day I took a damn good look at my face in the mirror. I didn’t like it. It didn’t suit me. So I picked up a ball-peen hammer and gave it a working over. Is there anything else you want to know?”

“The pinball merchants find you, Tarantine?”

He watched me in silence for a moment. His dark eyes looked melancholy in their puffed blue sockets. He rubbed a black-haired hand across the heavy black beard that was sprouting on his chin. There were scabs on his knuckles where they had been skinned. “Get out of my room.”

“You’ll wake up your friend.”

“Beat it. If you’re working for him, you can tell him I said so. If you’re a friggin’ cop you can beat it anyway. I don’t have to talk, see.”

“I’m not on anybody’s payroll. I’m a private detective, not a cop. I’m looking for Galley Lawrence. Her mother thinks something happened to her.”

“Let’s see your license then.”

I opened my wallet and showed him the photostat. “I heard you drove her away when she left her apartment in town.”

“Me?” His surprise sounded genuine.

“You drive a bronze-colored Packard roadster?”

“Not me,” he said. “You’re looking for my brother. You’re not the only one. My name’s Mario. It’s Joe you want.”

“Where’s Joe?”

“I wish I knew. He blew three days ago, the dirty bum. Left me holding–” The sentence was left unfinished. His mouth sagged open, showing broken teeth.

“Was Galley Lawrence with him?”

“Probably. They were shacked up. You want to find them, huh?”

I acknowledged that I did.

He sat up straight, clear of the pillows. Now that he was upright his face looked even worse. “I’ll make a deal with you. I know where they lived in L. A. You let me know if you find them, is it a deal?”

“What do you want him for?”

“I’ll tell Joe why I want him. When I tell him he won’t forget it.”

“All right,” I said. “If I find him I pass you the word. Where does he live?”

“Casa Loma. It’s a ritz joint off of Sunset in the Hills. You might be able to trace him from there.”

“Where do you live?”

“On my boat. It’s the Aztec Queen, moored down in the yacht basin.”

“Who are the others that want him?”

“Don’t ask me.” He lay back in the pillows again.

A cool trained voice said behind me: “Visiting hours are over, sir. How are you feeling, Mr. Tarantine?”

“Dandy,” he said. “How do I look?”

“Why, you look cute in your bandage, Mr. Tarantine.” The nurse glanced at the other bed. “How’s our tonsillectomy?”

“He feels dandy too, he thinks he’s dying.”

“He’ll be up and around tomorrow.” She laughed professionally and turned away.

I caught her up in the hall: “What happened to Mario’s face? He wouldn’t tell me.”

She was a big-boned girl with a long earnest nose. “He wouldn’t tell us, either. A friend of mine was on emergency when he came in. He walked in all by himself, in the middle of the night. He was in terrible shape, his face streaming blood, and he’s got a slight concussion, you know. He said he fell down and hurt himself on his boat, but it was obvious that he’d taken a beating. She called the police, of course, but he wouldn’t talk to them, either. He’s very reticent, isn’t he?”

“Very.”

“Are you a friend of his?”

“Just an acquaintance.”

“Some of the girls said it was gang trouble, that he was in a gang and fell out with the other members. You think there’s anything in that?”

I said the hospitals were full of rumors.