The Way Some People Die

Chapter 6

I ate dinner at Musso’s in Hollywood. While I was waiting for my steak, I phoned Joseph Tarantine’s apartment and got my nickel back. The steak came the way I liked it, medium rare, garnished with mushrooms, with a pile of fried onion rings on the side. I had a pint of Black Horse ale for dessert, and when I was finished I felt good. So far I was getting nowhere, but I felt good. I had the kind of excitement, more prophetic than tea-leaves, that lifts you when anything may happen and probably will.

I switched on my headlights as I wheeled out of the parking lot. The gray dusk in the air was almost tangible. Under its film the city lay distinct but dimensionless, as transient as a cloud. The stores and theaters and office buildings had lost their daytime perspectives with the sun, and were waiting for night to give them bulk and meaning. The double stream of traffic into which I turned continued the theme of change. Half of the lemmings were rushing down to the sea and the other half had been there and decided not to get wet. The wild slopes of the mountains overshadowed the slanting streets to the northwest and reduced their neons and headlights to firefly sparks.

The Casa Loma was on a side street a block from Sunset where the boulevard rose towards the hills. It was a four-story white frame building with cheerful lights shining from nearly half of the windows. Not quite the ritz, as Mario Tarantine thought, but it would do. The cars in the parking lot behind the building were nearly all new, and a Pontiac 8 was the cheapest one I saw. The people who lived there spent their money on front.

No doorman, though, which suited me. No desk clerk or hall attendant. I crossed the small carpeted lobby to the brass mailboxes banked on the wall by the plate-glass inner door, Joseph Tarantine was the name on number 7. His card was handwritten in green ink, apparently by the girl who had left the harbor on the sea of life so wide. Most of the other cards were printed, and one or two were engraved. Number 8 was very beautifully engraved with the name of Keith Dalling, whoever he was. I pressed the electric-bell button under his name and got no answer.

Number 12, a Mrs. Kingsley Soper, was more alert. Probably she was expecting company. When I heard her answering buzz I pushed the plate-glass door open and inserted a doubled-up matchbook in the crack. An ancient ruse, but it worked sometimes. I walked to the corner and back, and found my matchbook where I had left it.

There were fifteen apartments in the building, so that number 7 was on the second floor. I went up in the halting automatic elevator and found it easily, a locked door at the end of a narrow corridor. I stood and looked at the grain of the wood for a minute, but there wasn’t much sense in that. I could break the door open, or I could go away. The door of number 8 was directly across the hall, but there was nobody in it. I took the heavy screwdriver from my car out of my inside breast pocket. Number 7 had a Yale-type spring lock, and they were easy.

This one was very easy. The door fell open when I leaned my shoulder against it. Someone had got there before me. There were jimmy marks on the door-jamb, and the socket was loose. I put my screwdriver away and took out my gun instead. The room beyond the door was full of darkness, cut by a thin shaft of light from the hallway.

Facing inward, I closed the door and found the wall switch beside it. Even in the dark there seemed to be something queer about the room. There was a faint light from the large window opposite me, enough to see the vague shapes of furniture which didn’t look right. I switched the light on, and saw that nothing was right. The four plaster walls and ceiling were there, but everything inside of them had been destroyed.

The upholstered chairs and the davenport had been slashed and disemboweled. Their stuffing covered the floor in handfuls like dirty snow. The glass coffee-table had its legs unscrewed. Torn reproductions of paintings lay by their empty frames. The metal insides of the radio-phonograph had been ripped out and thrown on the floor. Even the window drapes had been torn down, and the lampshades removed from the lamps. The pottery bases of two table-lamps had been shattered.

The kitchen looked worse. Cans of food had been opened and dumped in the sink. The refrigerator had been literally torn apart, its insulating material scattered on the floor. The linoleum had been torn up in great jagged sheets. In the midst of this chaos, a half-eaten meal, steak and potatoes and asparagus tips, lay on the dinette table. It was the sort of thing you might expect to find in a house that had been struck by a natural disaster, cyclone or flood or earthquake.

I entered the bedroom. The mattress and covered springs of the Hollywood bed lay in shreds, and even the skeleton of the bed had been taken apart. Men’s jackets and women’s dresses had been slashed and thrown in a heap on the closet floor. The rags of some white nurses’ uniforms lay among them. The dresser drawers had been pulled out and dropped, and the mirror taken out of its frame. There was hardly a whole object left in the room, and nothing personal at all. No letter, no address-book, not even a book of matches. A gray fuzz of duck down from a ripped comforter lay over everything like mold.

The bathroom was off a tiny hallway between the bedroom and the living-room. I stood in the bathroom doorway for an instant, feeling the inside wall for the light. I pressed the switch but no light went on. A man’s voice spoke instead: “I got you lined up and you can’t see me. Drop the gun.”

I strained my eyes into the dark bathroom. There was glint of light on metal but it could have been the plumbing. Nothing moved. I let my revolver clatter on the floor.

“That’s my boy,” the voice said. “Now back up against the wall and keep your hands up high.”

I did as I was told. A tall man in a wide-brimmed black hat emerged from the dark room. He was as thin as death. His face had a coffin look, skin drawn over his sharp cheekbones, blue down-dragging mouth. His pale glistening eyes were on me, and so was his black gun.

“What’s the pitch?” He had yellow teeth.

“I should be asking you.”

“Only you’re doing the answering.” The gun nodded in agreement.

“Joe asked me up for a drink. When I knocked on the door it flew open. Where is Joe, anyway?”

“Come on, boy, you can do better than that. Joe never asked anybody up for a drink. Joe’s been gone three days. And you don’t drop into a friend’s place with iron showing.” He kicked my gun towards me. “Don’t pick it up.”

“All right,” I said in tones of boyish candor. “Tarantine ran out on me. He owes me money.”

Interest flickered wanly in the pale eyes. “That’s better. What kind of money?”

“I manage a young fighter in Pacific Point. Tarantine bought a piece of him. He didn’t pay up.”

“You’re doing better, eh? But you’ll have to do better yet. You come along with me.”

To the land of shades, I thought, the other side of the river. “Where do you stay, the morgue?” His temples were clean and hollowed like a death’s-head under the black hat. The paper-thin wings of his nose were snowbird white.

“Be still if you want to walk. I can have you carried.” He stooped quickly, scooped up my gun and dropped it in his pocket. I had no chance to move on him.

He made me walk ahead through the living-room. “You did a nice thorough shakedown on it,” I said. “You should apply for a job in an asylum tearing hemp.”

“I’ve seen it done to people,” he told me dryly. “People that talked too much.” And he jabbed his automatic hard in my kidneys.

We went down in the upended casket of an elevator, as close as Siamese twins, across the deserted lobby, into the street. The buildings had grown thick into nightmare shapes, and the lights had lost their hominess. The man at my side and one pace to my rear had a car with a driver waiting halfway down the block.