Warrant for an Old Flame

Chapter One Greetings from Uncle Sam

I had one small picture of him, and not a very good one. Schaegan had always been camera shy. But I had six nice ones of her. Two of them were publicity shots, taken when she was doing that routine with the fan and the thimbleful of glass beads at the Grace Bar in Chicago. Those two were full-length shots, with the baby spot reflecting tiny highlights off the instruments in the brass section behind her.

Leg work is a tiresome nuisance. And Mexico City is one big town. I grew more than weary of the soft whistle from the desk clerks when I shoved the picture of her across the reception desks.

My strike came on the second day. A nice hotel, not large, out in the Chapultepec section. The desk clerk had pretty good English.

“Ah, yes. I remember. That was, let me check the exact date, eleven days ago. Mr. and Mrs. William Sandler. Suite eight.” William Sandler, Walter Schaegan. The initials would match, probably to fit initials on his luggage.

“When did they leave?”

Some of the harsh excitement had crept into my tone. He tilted his head on one side. “You are a friend?”

“A dear old friend.”

“But you did not know their name, sir.”

I winked at him. “Very important people. Taking a rest from the newspaper reporters.”

He pursed his lips. “They left seven days ago. The man who inquired about them the day before yesterday was a reporter, you think?”

I stopped breathing for a few seconds. I said carelessly, “Another friend, I guess. What did he look like?”

The clerk shrugged. “Like an American. He also had a picture of her.”

I pushed a ten-peso note across the desk to him. He didn’t snatch. He picked it up slowly and said, “Thank you very much.”

“How did the Sandlers act while they were here? Did they see the sights?”

“They spent most of the four days in their suite. The wife went out alone twice. They sent out for liquor and had their meals served in the suite. Probably afraid they would be recognized.”

I gave a tiny start, then said, “Oh, yes. By the reporters.”

“By the reporters,” he said with a hint of dryness in his tone.

“Where did you go from here?”

“I haven’t any idea, sir.”

“But you could guess?”

The clerk was smart. He said, “Mr. Sandler wore a heavy sweater under his suit coat. His wife carried a fur coat over her arm. I would imagine they planned an air trip, sir.”

And that was worth the second ten-peso note.

At the airport I spent an hour locating the porter who had carried their luggage from the taxi to the loading truck. He had dark liquid eyes and not much English, but he whistled nicely at the picture of Beth Albany Schaegan and nodded his head violently.

“Si, señor. Las’ week een Acapulco airsheep. Si, si.”

He got a five-peso note which he snatched.

Mexico City to Acapulco is a few hundred miles from the clear high climate of the mountains to the dense tropical heat of a resort on the Pacific. The planes shuttle back and forth frequently in February. I bought a round-trip ticket for a hundred and forty pesos, and went through the old routine of holding my breath to help the skipper get the ship off the runway.

Below were the sere burned flanks of the mountains, the white jumbled mass of Mexico City tilting and sliding off astern. The passengers were half tourists and half well-to-do Mexicans heading for the white sand and blue water.

With the plane aloft, I didn’t have to help the pilot any more. I unsnapped the wide strap and leaned back in the seat. Walter and Beth Schaegan. We would renew an old acquaintanceship.

Once upon a time, with Beth, it had threatened to become more. That was when she was a fresh, new, awkward kid; a hoofer in a floor show at Zarro’s. But that was ten years ago.

She must have been eighteen then. Her two commercial assets were a lovely body and a delicately beautiful face that had an odd, earthy quality due to the wideness of her mouth, an uptilted nose and a faint tip-slant to her wide gray eyes. But she couldn’t sing and she couldn’t dance.

It took her a long time to find out that she had no talent, except that which nature had given her. At that point she could have gone back to the little town in Mississippi, and married the white-trash son of the mayor. Instead, when Zarro changed his show, she stayed on. He gave her a solo spot. I was sucker enough to try to talk her out of it.

She said, “Burnsie, I won’t clerk in a store, get fallen arches in a restaurant, or bring up yours or any one else’s brats. Catch my first show, Burnsie.”

I did. She had designed her own act and written her own song. The act and the song were terrible. She came out in a baby pink dress, lousy with ruffles, and she carried the fan.

The song title was “Good Little Bad Girl.” It had numberless verses which didn’t scan too well, and she sang every word in a harsh, husky monotone. But the dress, which looked like a high-school girl’s first formal, had the usual cleverly concealed hooks and eyes and snaps.

It was the first time in my life that I ever saw two men fall off two adjoining bar stools at exactly the same moment.

After that success, I had to write her off. Success did something bitter and hard and scornful to her. By that time I was one of the bright young men in the District Attorney’s Office. I think I walked five hundred miles in the streets at night before I could consider myself cured.

Zarro’s, of course, was too small to hold her. She moved up through the clubs, with a featured spot in each, and a long run in each. She made new songs and designed new dresses, but the success of the act didn’t change.

She was picked up often by the police, but the publicity raised her income and the holes in the local statutes were plenty wide for the legal talent she employed. You probably read about the demonstration of her act that was pulled in court. It got national coverage.

She saved her pennies and, in 1944, she opened her own club, though it was rumored that someone else held the fifty-one percent interest. Her club was well outside of town, located where the officials weren’t so greedy about the amount of grease required for laying off.

All this I learned from the department records, as I was sitting in an overseas naval supply depot at the time she bought the club.

I went with the FBI after the war. It is policy to help other Federal agencies by loaning operatives. I was on loan to the Internal Revenue Department.

As we droned south I worried about the other character on the trail of Walter and Beth Schaegan. It would be a very definite shame to arrive in time to order flowers. I would get the cool eye on my return.

We lost altitude, down through the layers of increasing heat. The wide sea sparkled and the surf against the white beaches was tiny and distant and unreal. The airport is ten miles from Acapulco. After we settled down, taxied over to the open-sided administration building, I peeled off my coat, walked in my shirtsleeves to a taxi. The sun stuck my shirt to my back almost immediately.

Once again it was necessary to make the rounds of the hotels — but not as difficult as there were fewer hotels. I combined two functions by asking for a room in each place.

The third hotel I tried was the Hotel de los Papagayos, set on a high hill over the harbor. They didn’t have a room for me, but the cute little dark-haired girl behind the big long desk glanced at the picture of Beth and said:

“Si, señor. The lady is here. She and her ’usban’ are in cottage eighteen.”

I gave her my very best smile. I said, “I’d hoped to stay in the same place. If you don’t have a room, maybe you have a cottage for me.”

She shook her head sadly. “I am so sorry, senor.”

The folded twenty-peso note made a tiny whispering sound as I rubbed it back and forth on the edge of the counter.

She tilted her pretty head to one side. “There is a honeymoon couple and they leave today by car. They are in a cottage. If you wish to wait for two, three hours...”

“I wish to, thank you. Can you take care of this?” I picked up my bag, hoisted it over the counter, shoving both it and the peso note toward her.

She swung the bag down with ease for such a tiny girl. “You will have cottage twenty-one, señor. A boy can show you where it is if you wish.”

“I’ll find it, thanks.”

I registered and took a walk around the grounds. The palms were thick on either side of the curving paths. The flowers were vivid and a few brilliant parrots, who looked as though they’d flown through a paint shop, scolded and squawked in the trees.

The huge swimming pool was occupied by about four swimmers, but there were a good score more lounging around the apron of the pool in the sun and sitting with drinks in the clusters of chairs in the shade. A tiny marimba band made the appropriate gourd noises inside the open shed-like affair that housed the bar. All very plush.

In my dark Mexico City suit, even with my coat over my arm, I felt like a very sombre blackbird among these gayly colored vacationers. A few people looked at me with idle curiosity and I could see them mentally labeling me as a recent arrival.

I stood at the end of the path and looked across the pool. Various characters of both sexes were trying to achieve the shade of whole wheat toast. A few had succeeded. One of them was a woman in a white bathing suit, stretched out on a narrow mattress on her back. Her hair was in a bandanna and she wore sun glasses with enormous white rims, startling against the tan of her face.

Circling the pool I walked up to her, stood looking down at her. I cast a shadow across her face.

Her mouth didn’t change. I couldn’t see her eyes. But the relaxed fingers of her right hand slowly curled into a white-knuckled fist, and then as slowly uncurled.

“Hello, Burnsie,” she said in the flat, harsh voice I remembered so well. Six years since we had seen each other.

She had oiled herself with some sort of lotion. The sun had turned it into tiny beads against her brown, firm skin. I eased myself down onto the concrete, feeling the oven heat of it through my pants.

She reached for the offered cigarette. She did not raise her head as I lit it. She sucked smoke deep into her lungs and, leaving the cigarette between her lips, exhaled slowly.

“You’re better looking, Burnsie. I like the lines at the corners of your eyes and around your mouth. You don’t look like the boy reformer any more.”

“Thanks.”

“Something smartened you up, Burnsie.”

“You, and a few other things. I had a bad time getting over you, Beth.”

She took another drag and rubbed the cigarette out against the tiles. She propped herself up on one elbow. “You think you did get over me, Burnsie?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“This isn’t any accident, meeting like this, is it, Burnsie?”

She’d be too smart to fool that way. I said, “No, it isn’t any accident.”

“I didn’t think it was.” She stood up with one quick, easy motion, stood looking down at me. She was good to look at. I felt the faint twist of an old knife in a wound I thought long healed. “Get a table for two in the shade, Burnsie. I’ll go scrub off this grease.”

She was back in twenty minutes. As I watched her walk toward the table, I remembered the funny awkwardness she had had the first time I had seen her in the show at Zarro’s. She still had that awkwardness, but a proud way of carrying herself.

She wore one of those white lace Mexican blouses with elastic in the neckline so that it can be pulled down over bare shoulders. Her hand-painted skirt was very full and quite long.

I stood up. There was amusement and irony in the gray-eyed look she gave me, along with the gamin smile.

“Burnsie, as I was dressing, I remembered the time you told me that my hair was like old silver coins in the moonlight. Remember that?”

I flushed as I sat opposite her. “I remember it, Beth. It was and it is.”

There was no point in antagonizing her. And her hair was just as it had been when I first met her. Yet the planes and lines of her face had suffered a subtle thickening, a coarsening. Her nose had spread a bit, it seemed, and her brows were thicker, her cheek bones more solid, the mouth wider, heavier. She was no longer beautiful. Yet she was extraordinarily attractive. Sitting at the table with her was like trying to look at an oil painting from too close. There was an aliveness and vitality and color about her.

She wanted a planters’ punch, and so I ordered two. We were sparring, avoiding the subject, mentally circling each other with guard held high.

“Wally is out impressing his personality on the sailfish today,” she said. “He’ll be back in two hours. Five o’clock.”

“Do you think he’ll be difficult?” I asked.

She shrugged her bare brown shoulders in a gesture I remembered from a long time back. “He’s smart. He knows there’s no case without a complaint.”

“But shouldn’t he be afraid of my mentioning his whereabouts to the wrong people? The people on his side of the fence?”

She smiled, almost with pity. “Poor old Burnsie! By the time you could say Acapulco to the wrong people, we’d be in Guatemala or Peru or the South of France. Our papers are in order, you know.”

“But you haven’t been too smart. I followed you and traced you here.”

“You’re smarter than they are, Burnsie.”

“Not quite. There’s somebody else on the trail, too.”

She sat very still. One hand slid up to the slender brown column of her throat. With that hand she reached for her glass. “Don’t kid me, Burnsie.”

“I’m not.” I looked into her eyes as I said that, and I saw her doubt change to belief and to fear.

She said, “I heard you went to work after the war for Uncle Sam.”

“And so you can guess why I want to see Schaegan.”

“I can guess.”