The Way Some People Die

Chapter 8

By ten I was in Palm Springs, making the rounds of the bars. I worked up one side of the main street, a miniature Wilshire with horsy trimmings, and down the other side. Old or young, fat or thin, the bartenders gave me the same cool pitying smile. They looked at me and down at the photograph and back at me again. – Nice little beast, eh, nope I never see her. – What’s the matter bud your wife run out on you? – If she was here last night I’d know it but she wasn’t. – She wouldn’t be your daughter would she? That was the most unkindest cut of all.

I had spent about six dollars on drinks that I left untouched or anyway unfinished, when I finally got my lead. It was in a little side-street place called the Lariat. A knotty-pine box of a place with longhorns over the bar, seats and stools upholstered with riveted saddle-leather, a color-retouched photomural of Palm Springs in the days when it was a desert outpost, which weren’t so long ago that I couldn’t remember them. A great deal had been done to fill the Lariat with old western tradition, but it was so contemporary that it barely existed yet. A pair of fugitives from a Los Angeles wolf-pack were playing shuffleboard in the rear. The bartender, who was watching the game, came forward when I took a seat at the bar. He was a youngish man in a Hopalong Cassidy shirt and a wide carved cowhide belt.

I asked for a Scotch and soda. When he brought it, I showed him the photograph and made my little speech. He looked at me and down at the photograph and back at me again, but without the pitying smile. His eyes were large and brown, and they slanted downward from the middle of his face, so that he looked like a cocker spaniel. They had the earnest look of one who sincerely wished to help.

“Yeah, I know the face,” he said. “She was in here last night. The joint was jumping last night, you wouldn’t believe it. It always slows down on Mondays, after the week-end and all.”

“What was her name?” It seemed to have come too easily, or maybe too much bar Scotch was making me uneasy.

“I didn’t catch the name. They weren’t at the bar, they sat down in the back booth there, by the shuffleboard. I just took them their drinks. Daiquiries, they were drinking.”

“Who was the other half of the they?”

“Some guy,” he told me cautiously after a while.

“You know him?”

“I wouldn’t say I know him. He’s been in here a few times, off and on.”

“Maybe you know his name.”

“I should. I thought I did. I guess it slipped my mind, though.” He lit a cigarette and tried to look inscrutable and failed.

My change from a ten-dollar bill was on the bar between us. I pushed it towards him. “You can tell me what he looks like.”

“Maybe I can and maybe I can’t.” He squirmed in his cowboy shirt, eying the money wistfully. “I don’t know what the setup is, mister. If this is a divorce rap or something like that, I wouldn’t want to shoot my mouth off too free.”

“If divorce comes into it, it’s news to me.” I told him it was a prodigal daughter case. But with Dowser and Tarantine in it, it was growing much bigger than that. I left them out, and tried to forget them myself.

The bartender was still worried. The bills and silver lay untouched on the black Lucite, nearer him than me. “I got to think about it,” he said in pain. “I mean I’ll try and remember his name for you.”

With a great appearance of casualness he went to the other end of the bar and took a telephone out from under it. Leaning over the bar and hunching his shoulders around the instrument so I couldn’t see him dial, he made a call. It took him a long time to get his party. When he finally did, he spoke low and close into the mouthpiece.

He came back briskly and took my empty glass. “Something more to drink, sir?”

I looked at my wrist watch, nearly midnight. “All right.”

He set the second glass on the bar beside the money. “Do I take it out of this, sir?”

“It’s up to you. It’s eating into your profits, isn’t it?”

“I don’t get you,” he said. But he waited for me to produce another bill.

I handed him a single from my wallet. “What did your friend tell you on the phone?”

“My girl friend, you mean?” he asked brightly. “She’s coming over to meet me when I close.”

“What time do you close?”

“Two o’clock.”

“I guess I’ll stick around.”

He seemed relieved. He flicked a dish towel out from under the bar and began to polish a row of cocktail glasses, humming Red River Valley to himself. I moved to the back booth. I sat and wondered if that was as close as I’d get to Galley Lawrence, and watched the coatless boys at the shuffleboard. Red beat blue, which meant that blue paid for the drinks. They were drinking vodka, and they were all of eighteen.

Shortly after midnight a pair of short fat men came in, ridiculous in ten-gallon hats and jeans. They were very very particular about their drinks, and filled the room with name-dropping accounts of their recent social triumphs, related in high loud tenors. They didn’t interest me.

A few minutes later a man came in who did. He was tall and graceful in a light flannel suit and an off-white snap-brim hat. His face was incredible. A Greek sculptor could have used him as a model for a Hermes or Apollo. Standing at the door with one hand on the knob, he exchanged a quick glance with the bartender, and looked at me. The tenors at the bar gave him a long slow once-over.

He ordered a bottle of beer and carried it to my booth. “Mind if I sit down? I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” His voice was beautiful, too, rich and soft and full with deep manly overtones.

“I don’t place you. But sit down.”

He removed his hat and exhibited the wavy auburn hair that went with the long dark eyelashes. Everything was so perfect, it made me a little sick. He slid into the leather seat across the table from me.

“On second thoughts, maybe I do,” I said. “Haven’t I seen you in pictures?”

“Not unless you get to look at screen tests. I never got past them.”

“Why?”

“Women don’t do the hiring. Men don’t like me. Even the pansies hate me because I won’t give them a tumble. You don’t like me, do you?”

“Not very much. Handsome is as handsome does, I always say. Does it matter if I like you?”

He came to the point then, though it cost him an effort. His purple eyes were shadowed by anxiety. “You could be working for Dowser.”

“I could be, but I’m not. Whoever Dowser is.”

He waited for me to say more, leaning gracefully in the corner of the booth with one arm on the table. He was tense, though. There were wet dark blotches under both arms of the flannel jacket.

I said: “You’re scared stiff, aren’t you?”

He tried to smile. The effect reminded me of a device I read about once for making insane people feel happy. It consisted of a couple of hooks that raised the corners of the mouth into smiling position. Its beneficaries were forced to smile, and this made them feel like smiling, at least that was the theory.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m scared stiff.”

“You want to tell me about it? I’m wearing my hearing aid tonight.”

“That won’t be necessary,” with the forced wry smile again. “You might explain how you come into the picture, Mr.–?”

“Archer. Lew Archer.”

“My name’s Keith Dalling.”

“I’m a private detective,” I said. “A Mrs. Lawrence employed me to look for her daughter.” I was getting pretty tired of that pitch. It sounded too simple and corny to be true, especially in the Palm Springs atmosphere.

“Why?”

“Maternal anxiety, I guess. She hadn’t heard from her for a couple of months. Nothing to be afraid of, Mr. Dalling.”

“If I could be sure of that.” There was a beaded row of sweat along his peaked hairline. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “I heard from a friend in L. A. that Dowser was looking for Galley. It puts me in a spot –”

“Who’s he?”

“You must have heard of Dowser.” He watched me carefully. “He isn’t the kind of person you want on your trail.”

“You were saying, it puts you in a spot.”

Once he had begun, he was eager to talk. Dalling was big and strong-looking but he wasn’t built for strain. He had bad nerves, and admitted it. He hadn’t slept the night before, and he was the kind of fellow who needed his sleep.

“What happened last night?”

“I’ll tell you from the beginning.” He took out a briar pipe and filled it, as he talked, with English-cut tobacco. He was such a perfect artistic example of his type that I began to like him, almost as if he were a creature of my own imagination. “I own this little place in the desert, you see. The place was standing empty, and I had a chance to rent it to Joe Tarantine. He approached me about it week before last, and his offer was good so I took it.”

“How do you happen to know him?”

“He’s a neighbor of mine. We live across the hall from each other in the Casa Loma apartments.” I remembered the engraved card on the mailbox, with his name on it. “I’d told him about the house, and he knew I wasn’t planning to use it myself. He said he and his wife wanted to get away for a while, someplace where the pressure would be off.”

“Galley is married to him, then.”

“So far as I know. They’ve been living in that apartment as man and wife since the first of the year. I think he mentioned they were married in Las Vegas.”

“What does he do?”

He lit his pipe with a wooden match and puffed out a cloud of smoke. “I didn’t know until yesterday, when this friend of mine phoned me. Tarantine is a mobster, or something pretty close to it. He handles Dowser’s interests in Pacific Point. Dowser has half a dozen towns on the coast sewed up, from Long Beach on down. But that’s not the worst of it. Tarantine has stolen something of Dowser’s and skipped out. Apparently he planned it ahead of time, and he’s using my place as a hideout. I wondered why he asked me not to tell anyone. He said if it leaked out the deal was off.”

“This friend of yours,” I said, “how does he know all this?”

“I don’t exactly know. He’s a radio producer and he does a crime show based on police files. I suppose he hears inside information.”

“But he didn’t hear what Tarantine lifted from Dowser?”

“No. Money, perhaps. He seems to have plenty of it. I rented my house to him in all innocence, and now it’s made me look as if I’m an accomplice.” He gulped the beer that had been growing stale in his glass.

I signaled for more drinks, but he refused another. “I’ve got to keep my wits about me.”

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” I said. “If you’re afraid of Dowser, why don’t you go and talk to him?”

“I daren’t show myself. Besides, if I talked to Dowser, I’d have Tarantine to worry about.”

“Not for long.”

“I can’t be sure of that, either. Frankly, I’m in a mess. I phoned up Galley, Mrs. Tarantine, yesterday after I talked to my friend. She agreed to meet me here. She didn’t realize what a chance she was taking, until I told her about her husband. She was shocked. She said she was practically a prisoner out there. She had to slip away last night while he was sleeping, and God knows what he did to her when she got back.”

“You like her pretty well.”

“Frankly, I do. She’s a lovely kid, and she’s got herself mixed up with an awfully nasty crew.” Not all of his anxiety was for himself.

“I’d like to meet her,” I said. “I never have.”

He stood up suddenly. “I was hoping you’d say that. I have a normal amount of physical courage, I think, but I’m not up to dealing with gangsters, all by myself, I mean.”

I said that that was natural enough.