Find a Victim (7 page)

It was impossible to tell if anything was missing, but there were gaps in the shoe-stand. The bed was carelessly made, and there was a rumpled depression on one side where someone had sat. A white-gold wristwatch studded with small diamonds lay on the bedside table.

There was nothing under the bed; nothing of special interest in the chest of drawers, except to underwear fetishists. Anne Meyer had spend a lot of money on underwear.

I entered the bathroom, closed the Venetian blind over the little high window, and switched on the light. Nylons were strung on the towel racks over the tub. I opened the medicine cabinet above the sink. It contained the usual clutter of bottles and boxes. One cardboard box half full of blue-banded capsules was prescribed: “To be taken when needed for rest and sleep.”

Shutting the mirrored door, I saw my face through the tiny snowstorm of toothpaste specks on the glass. My face was pale, my eyes narrow and hard with curiosity. I thought of the palm rat running in his shadow on the sidewalk. He lived by his wits in darkness, gnawed human leavings, listened behind walls for the sounds of danger. I liked the palm rat better when I thought of him, and myself less.

Radio music from the next cottage came loud and insistent through the closed and blinded window.
Baby, won’t you please come home?
There was no toothbrush in the holder beside the sink. I went back to the vanity in the bedroom. Certain things were missing that probably should have been there: lipstick, powder, face cream, eyebrow pencil. But there were tweezers and a razor.

I returned to the front room and went through the drawers of the secretary. There was nothing personal left in them,
though bills and business letters were undisturbed. A half-used checkbook showed a balance of over nineteen hundred dollars. The last stub recorded a payment of one hundred and forty-three dollars and thirty cents to Mademoiselle Finery, on October 7, eight days ago.

The pigeonholes were stuffed with receipted bills, most of them for clothes and furniture. Again nothing personal. I was ready to give up when I found a folded envelope jammed into the back of one of the pigeonholes. It had been postmarked in San Diego nearly a year before. It contained a letter written in indelible pencil on both sides of a sheet of cheap hotel stationery. The letter was signed “Tony.”

I shut myself into the lighted bathroom to read it:

I read the letter twice, straining my eyes on its small illiterate scrawl. It was like looking through a dead man’s eyes, deciphering the smudged records of his memory.

When I opened the bathroom door, there had been a change in the cottage. A subtler sense than hearing felt something in the living-room, a breathing bulk solider than the darkness. I was vulnerable with the light at my back. The little hall and the doorless arch were like a shooting-gallery, with me the fixed target at the end of it.

I switched off the light and moved sideways toward the
bedroom door, feeling for the doorframe with one spread hand. My other hand held the flash, ready to use as a light or as a club. I heard the rustling of the curtain in the arch six feet from me. Then the ceiling light in the hall went on with a click.

A gun was thrust past the gathered curtain at the side of the arch. It was a .45, but it was small in the hand that was holding it.

“Come out of there.”

I froze in the doorway, half of my body exposed. I could feel the line between safety and danger bisecting my center.

“Out of there with your hands up.” It was the sheriff’s voice. “I’ll give you a count of three before I fire.” He began to count.

I dropped the flash in my pocket and raised my hands, stepping out of the friendly shadow. Church came through the arch. The crown of his Stetson brushed the curtain rod. He looked about seven feet tall.

“You.” He came up close, pressing the muzzle of his gun into my solar plexus. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“My job.”

“What job is that?”

“Meyer hired me to look for his truck.”

“And you thought it was concealed here, in Miss Meyer’s bathroom?”

“He also hired me to look for his daughter.”

He pushed the gun deeper into the hollow below my ribs, and leaned on it. “Where is she, Archer?”

I tensed myself against the gun’s sharp pressure, against the sharper pressure of panic. Church’s eyes were wide and blank. The muscles were ridged and dimpling around his mouth. He looked ready to kill.

“I wouldn’t know where she is,” I said. “I suggest you ask Kerrigan.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’ll drop the tough-cop kick I’ll tell you what I mean. Iron isn’t good for my stomach. Neither is lead.”

He pulled the gun away, looking down at it as if it was a separate entity that resisted his control. But he didn’t return it to its holster.

“What about Kerrigan?”

“He crops up all over the place. When Aquista was shot, Kerrigan was the nearest citizen. The truck was loaded with Kerrigan’s whisky. Now your sister-in-law turns up missing. She was Kerrigan’s employee, very likely his mistress. And that’s only the beginning.” I was tempted to go on and tell him about the conversation I’d eavesdropped on in Sammy’s Oriental Gardens. But I decided not to. It belonged to me.

Church pushed his hat back as if it constricted his thoughts. His hand stayed up, rubbing a spot on his temple: a grooved bluish-white scar, which might have been left there by a bullet-welt. He looked like a different man with his high forehead uncovered—a puzzled, sensitive man who wore the Western hat and the hard-nosed front as protective coloration. Or a man so deeply split that he didn’t know himself. The gun hung down forgotten in his other hand.

When he spoke, it was in an altered voice, shallow and flat: “I’ve already questioned Kerrigan. He has an alibi for the shooting.”

“His wife?”

“Her word is good enough for me. I’ve known Kate Kerrigan for a long time. I knew her father, the Judge. She’s a woman I trust completely.”

“A woman like that would lie for her husband.”

“Maybe. She isn’t lying. In any case, Kerrigan doesn’t need an alibi. He’s a respectable businessman.”

“How respectable?”

“I’m not talking about his private life. When you’ve got as much to lose as Kerrigan has, you don’t shoot truck-drivers on the public highway.”

“Not even for seventy grand? That’s a tremendous order of whisky, by the way. What does he do, take baths in it?”

“He sells it.”

“In his motor court?”

“Not if I can help it. He owns a bar on the other side of town. The Golden Slipper Supper Club, he calls it.”

“On Yanonali Street?”

“You get around.”

“What else has he got that I don’t know about—political pull?”

“I guess he has some, through his wife’s connections.”

I pressed the needle in a little further: “That wouldn’t be influencing you on the subject of Kerrigan?”

This time it struck a nerve. A pulse jerked under the reddening scar on his temple. “You’re kind of free with your questions.”

“I have to take my answers where I can find them.”

“Don’t forget who you’re talking to.”

“You keep it in the forefront of my thoughts.”

“You don’t quite grasp the situation,” he said. “I’m leaning over backwards. I can’t promise it will last. If you want trouble, I can lock you up for breaking in the front door.”

“I do a neater job than that. It was broken when I got here.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. The place was burglarized, but not by an ordinary burglar. There’s an expensive wristwatch on the bedroom table. A burglar would have taken it. He wouldn’t have taken the other things that are missing.”

“What other things?”

“Personal stuff, toothbrush and so on. I think Anne Meyer went away for the weekend and didn’t come back when
she expected to. Then somebody else broke in here and pried open her desk and removed various things, traces of her personal life: letters, address-book, telephone numbers—”

“You had no right to barge in here,” he said. “Even if you didn’t jimmy the door yourself, you’re breaking the law.”

“Your wife gave me permission to search the apartment.”

“What has she got to do with it?”

“Her sister is missing, she’s next of kin—”

“Where did you see her?”

“I drove her home from Meyer’s less than an hour ago.”

“Stay away from her, do you hear me?” he said in a rising voice. “Stay away from my house and my wife.”

“Maybe you better instruct your wife to stay away from me.”

I shouldn’t have said it. Anger shook and wrenched him. His gun swung up, and the barrel clipped my chin. My head snapped back against the wall. I heard plaster dropping down behind it. His tall figure blurred and swung sideways like a tree falling. My arm and shoulder struck the floor.

I got back onto my feet and wiped the blood from my chin with the back of my hand.

“You’ll probably regret this, sheriff.”

“Get out of here before I do something I’ll really regret.”

His long face slanting forward over the gun was like tortured bronze. His eyes were blind and empty.

I walked on remote legs to the open door. The radio music in the next cottage had been replaced by a manic voice asserting loudly that loneliness, fear, and unpopularity were things of the past, abolished by chlorophyll.

CHAPTER
9
:
Yanonali Street bent north at the city
limits to join a state highway. A pair of two-story stucco buildings stood in the angle of the roads. One was the El Recreo Pool and Shuffleboard Arcade. Men and boys brandishing cues moved in its smoky green light like heavy-footed spear-fishers walking on the floor of the sea. On the roof of the other building, a high-heeled slipper outlined in yellow bulbs hinted broadly at women and champagne gaiety. Some of the bulbs were missing.

The champagne was domestic and flat. Three girls, two weary blondes and a blue brunette, were waiting on the three end stools at the bar. Their drooping bodies straightened when I entered. They inflated their chests and opened their paint-heavy mouths in welcoming smiles. Assuming a high-minded expression, I passed them and went to the far end of the bar.

The room was shaped like a flat bottle with the narrow end in front. At the rear, beyond an empty dancing space, a deserted bandstand supported a silver-painted piano and a few music-racks like leafless metal trees. A big neurotic jukebox voice was crying out loud in an echo-chamber for love that it didn’t deserve, except from tone-deaf women.

Four youths in Hawaiian-print shirts were sucking on beer bottles in one of the rear booths. Each of the four had white peroxided forelocks, as if the same lightning had blasted them all at once. They looked at me with disdain. I had ordinary hair. I wasn’t atomic.

The man behind the bar wasn’t atomic, either. His face resembled a tired bullfrog’s. His jacket had once been white. His nostrils sighed at me when I ordered beer.

“How’s business?” I said politely.

He decapitated my bottle, savagely, and set it on the
scarred formica between us. “If business improved five hundred per cent it wouldn’t even be lousy. Beer is the only order I get any more. You on the road?”

I said I was.

“There’s the life. I’d get out of here myself if I could. Wife and family, they hold a man down.” He let his shoulders slump and his jaw sag by way of illustration. “The last year, since the big shock, this place is as dead as King Tut.”

“The big shock?”

“The earthquake we had last summer. We took a beating from it, more ways than one. It scared the whole town crapless. I guess it did some people a lot of good. This was one wild town, brother. It ain’t so wild any more, since the big shock. A lot of leading citizens went on the wagon. I guess they thought it was a judgment on ’em. Some of them even started laying off of other people’s wives. It took an earthquake to do it. But oh what it did to this business. I must of been off my rocker when I bought it.”

“You own this place?”