Home is the Sailor (18 page)

Lewis laughed again. “I tell you, it was rich, Officer. The girl don’t want to, see. She’s lying on the bed crying like her heart is broken. But he keeps pestering her, feeling this and that. And, well, finally she just lets him have it. Like it don’t mean a damn to her one way or another. And all the time he’s doing it, she goes right on crying.”

Mrs. Lewis said primly, “There’s no need for you to be so graphic, Joe.”

“What happened then?” I asked. “I mean, what did you folks do?”

Lewis said, “Well, by that time Eve was tugging at my shirttail. She said, “This is no place for us. So we walked back to the car and I was about to drive on when a little guy in blue dungarees came out of the bar and said he was the manager and did we want a cottage. And so help me, by then I was so beat I didn’t care what kind of a joint it was.”

“You told him what you’d seen?”

Mrs. Lewis said, “Certainly not. I don’t know about California, but back in Carbondale we don’t discuss such things. We merely told him we wanted to rent a unit. And we did. Although if Joe hadn’t been so tired, I certainly would have insisted on driving on until we found another court with a vacancy.”

Lewis added, “Shortly after that, maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, the cottage in which we’d seen the girl went dark and someone came out and drove away. We couldn’t tell if it was the girl or the man. Then today we heard that the girl who owns these cottages was killed last night and that she lived in Cottage Number One. So Eve thought we ought to tell you fellows what we’d seen.”

I said, “I’m glad you did.”

He asked, “Who killed her? Her husband?”

I said, “That’s the supposition. Was the girl a blonde or a brunette?”

“She was a blonde.”

“Natural?”

“Decidedly.”

“Pretty?”

“Very.”

“And it was what time when you saw her?”

“After midnight. Say between fifteen after and half past.” Lewis shifted his cigarette to his other band. “Does the information help you any?”

“Yes,” I said. “It helps a lot. Thanks for telling me.”

Mrs. Lewis was tardily suspicious. “What’s your name, Officer?”

I walked off the porch without answering her and waded the wet grass to the office cottage. The door was shut. The Venetian blinds were closed. Mamie was crying. I stood straddling a wedge of light leaking out from under a blind, listening to Meek lay down the law.

He said, “I haven’t told you anything. I’m not going to. What you don’t know you can’t tell. If the deal levels off the way I hope it will, it means a nice piece of change for me. And God knows I can use it. You think I
like
to mess around dirt?”

Mamie sobbed, “But if Swede—”

“Swede, Swede, Swede,” Meek mimicked her. “That’s all you’ve been able to think about since the big squarehead first showed up.” Liquid gurgled as someone drank from a bottle.

Mamie cried even harder.

Meek sounded as if he was pacing the floor. “You’d have wised off again this afternoon and maybe queered the whole thing if I hadn’t passed you out. Next time I’ll give you so many pills you won’t come out of it.”

“I don’t care what you do,” Mamie sobbed.

I walked around to the front of the cottage. The screen on the porch was unhooked. The inside door was locked. I turned the knob and put my shoulder to it. The door opened with a rasp of metal being torn out of wood.

Mamie was sitting on the rumpled bed. Her hair was disordered. Her make-up was streaked with tears. Her eyes were puffed with seconal. When she saw me she sat straight on the bed and her breasts thrust upward against the thin silk of her only garment. The back of one small white hand brushed hair and tears from her eyes. Her lips parted. She screamed:

“Swede!”

Meek dropped the pint of whisky he was holding and tried to climb the wall. His scrawny chest labored. His eyes darted from side to side like a trapped rat trying to find a taut hawser he could use to desert a sinking ship.

Mamie screamed again. “Swede!”

Between the noise I’d made breaking down the door and Mamie’s screams, lights were springing on in the dark units around the court. Lewis and his wife walked out on their porch. I heard him say, “What the hell?”

Meek was still trying to climb the wall. “Get out of here,” he squealed. “Get out of here, you dirty killer.”

I took another step toward him. He stopped trying to climb the wall and flicked open a four-inch switch blade, holding it with his knuckles up and the handle pressed against his belly.

I could hear voices on the drive now. In the distance a siren began to undulate. There’d been a roadblock in Palm Grove. The former merchant marine who had picked me up had talked.

Meek’s lips were flecked with fear froth. “Don’t you dare touch me. If you do I’ll tell Sheriff Cooper you killed Jerry Wolkowysk and drove his car over that cliff.”

He jabbed at me with the knife. I slapped him away from the wall and up against the dresser. “I’m not interested in Wolkowysk. I know where he is. Where’s Sophia?”

Mamie got to her feet.

“What did you say?” Meek gasped.

I repeated. “I asked you where Sophia was. You know. Sophia Palanka. My wife.”

The Mission Hotel was well named. Most of the couples who checked in were looking for something. It was on the fringe of the Mexican district, not far from San Diego’s version of Skid Row.

I parked the Chrysler with Illinois plates in front of a bar across the street and looked at the hotel for a moment. The sidewalk in front of it was crowded with sailors and their girls and sailors who wished they had girls. As I watched, an alert shore patrol walked by.

I glanced in the rear-vision mirror of my borrowed car. Outside of the blood on my right coat sleeve and the general pummeling I’d taken, I didn’t look too bad. I looked like the first mate of a freighter who had been on a hell of a binge.

The bar in front of which I was parked was crowded with sailors. I walked in and bought a drink and a package of cigarettes with the tuck-away twenty I always keep folded in my watch pocket.

The barman was used to sailors. “Been in a fight, mate?” he asked.

I nodded over the rum.

The barman looked at my sleeve. “Her husband came home too soon, huh? Looks like he used a knife on you.”

I finished the drink and set the glass back on the wood. “Yeah. But you ought to see him.”

He laughed as he mopped at a puddle of spilled beer. I tore the package of cigarettes open with my teeth and lighted one.

The San Diego police were on the job. As I walked from the bar a radio prowl car parked in front of the green Chrysler, at an angle, effectively blocking it. A young officer got out of the police car with a clip board in one hand.

He looked at the plates on the Chrysler, then grinned at his partner. “Talk about service. This is the one that just came on the air. The green Chrysler with Illinois plates that guy Nelson borrowed at the Purple Parrot. Call in and tell Paddy we’ve found it.”

The usual curious crowd began to form. I walked across the street and into the lobby of the Mission Hotel.

A young desk clerk was checking the entries at Santa Anita. He put his Racing Form aside. “Yes, sir?”

I laid down one of the fives the barman had given me in change. “I’d like a room. With or without bath. It doesn’t matter. But preferably on the fifth floor.”

The clerk pushed a registration card at me. “Yes, sir.” He laid a key on the counter. “That will be three-fifty.” He gave me my change. “Had a little trouble, eh, mate?”

“Yeah. A little,” I admitted. I kept my right hand in my pocket. “Sign the card for me, will you, fellow? Swen Nelson. Simmons Line. San Pedro.”

“Sure thing, mate.” He wrote the information on the card. “But that arm looks bad to me. Maybe you ought to see a doctor about it.”

I said, “I intend to. Later.”

I picked up my change and the key. In the elevator I looked at the key for the first time. The tag on it read 519. I asked the pretty Mexican girl running the cage if Room 519 was in the front or the back of the hotel.

She stopped the cage on the fifth floor and graciously pointed down the hall. “Five-nineteen is at the end of the hall,
señor.
In the back. You cannot possibly miss it.”

I thanked her and walked down the hall in the direction she’d pointed until she’d closed the cage door. Then I stopped and looked at the numbers. The room I wanted was in the front of the hotel.

I leaned against the wall and lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one that was burning my fingers. Most of the transoms along the hall were lighted and open. The voices I could hear were young. Listening to them gave me a funny feeling. Behind the closed doors couples were loving, quarreling, making up, worrying about money, his job, her health, happy to be together. Living.

The hall smelled like all cheap hotel hallways. I tried to take my right hand out of my pocket. I couldn’t. Meek had done a good job with his knife.

I pushed my back away from the wall and walked down the faded runner toward the window I could see in the front of the hotel. The window was open. There was a red light over it. I looked out and down. The fire-escape platform was square with a hole in it next to the wall and a rusted iron ladder running down through the hole to the next square landing.

For a man with two hands it was an easy swing from the fire-escape platform to the sill of the front window with the drawn shade. With one hand I didn’t dare chance it. It was five floors down to the sidewalk.

There was a light in 501, but the shade was drawn and the transom was closed. I could hear a splashing of water back of the shade.

I looked across the street at the green Chrysler I’d borrowed. Without the owner’s permission. From Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lewis of Carbondale, Illinois. There was an even bigger crowd around it now. The two prowl-car cops, augmented by two plain-clothes men, were fanning through the crowd asking questions. When he next put his feet under the poker table in the back room of the Elks Club in Carbondale, Lewis would have quite a story to toss in the pot with his ante.

I heard a faint
snick
behind me. As if someone had closed a door, trying to be quiet about it. I swung around and sat on the sill, breathing hard. All the closed doors in the hall looked the same.

I stood up and rapped on the door of Room 501.

The faint sound of running water stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then Wally asked, “Who is it?”

I tossed my cigarette out the open window. “It isn’t Western Union.”

A key turned in the lock. The door opened. Wally thrust a gun into my stomach. “Come in.”

I walked into the room and closed the door.

Wally leaned even harder on the gun. “How did you get away from the cops? How did you know we were here?”

I said, “Meek told me. Under protest. In fact, we had quite a go-around about it, during which Mamie took a knife thrust that was intended for me. I just left her in the emergency room at the hospital with two nurses and an intern. She may live. She may not.”

I looked past Wally at Corliss. She was standing in front of the washbasin in the bathroom holding a glass of brown dye over a mop of wet brown hair. Her mouth was open but no sound was coming out. All she had on was a sheer slip liberally splattered with dye. She was even prettier as a brunette than she had been blonde.

“You can’t dye it all, honey,” I told her. “In your line of business the dye will wear off where it matters. But I’ll bet you looked cute as hell with red hair.”

She dropped the glass. “You know.”

I leaned against the door. “That you’re Sophia Palanka?” I nodded. “Yes. That probably was Yugoslav the lad in the bar in Tijuana was spitting at you. Who was he? An old admirer?”

Corliss came to the door of the bathroom. “He’d seen me dance.”

“That’s a new name for it,” Wally said.

Corliss looked at him, then back at me. “Who knows you’re here, Swede?”

“You and me, baby,” I told her. “What’s the matter? You don’t seem very glad to see me.”

She chewed at her underlip. “I’m not.”

“What you keeping your hand in your pocket for? Wally asked. “You got a gun in there?”

I pointed the handcuff at him. “What do you think?”

The big barman began to sweat. As I’d sweated for four days. “I knew you were up to something when you confessed to the cops and offered to lead them to Corliss’ body. I figured you were going to try a break. But I didn’t think you’d be dumb enough to double back.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “What did you expect me to do? Go up to San Quentin, take three deep breaths, and say, ‘Good morning, Warden. My name is Swen Nelson. I’m a seaman. That is, I used to be a seaman. I’d been at sea, off and on, for eighteen years when I decided I’d wasted enough of my life. So I started for Hibbing, Minnesota, to buy a farm and get married and settle down. Maybe even have a half-dozen kids. But I went on a binge instead. During it I met a girl. The girl I’d been looking for all my life.’ž” I looked at Corliss. “ž‘I loved her on sight. I — still love her. I’ll always love her. Even if she didn’t turn out to be all I thought she was.’ž”

Corliss began to cry.

“Don’t listen to him,” Wally said. “He’s just trying to make trouble between us.”

Still looking at Corliss, I asked, “Has Connors been in on this from the start?”

Corliss stopped crying. Her lower lip thrust out in its familiar pout. “No,” she said coldly. “Oh, he and Meek have known for some time I wasn’t all I pretended to be. They’ve been chiseling pennies from me for a year. But all they were doing was guessing until Palmer’s body was found and Mr. Green came to the court with the information that Jerry Wolkowysk was really Lippy Saltz. Then they both cut themselves in.” Corliss made a gesture of distaste. “Wally all the way last night.” Her voice was small. She refused to meet my eyes. “Because he knew no matter how badly I felt about you, I didn’t dare refuse him.” She squeezed her wet hair to the back of her head and held it there. Her voice was barely audible. “Because I’d been living a lie. Because I wasn’t Corliss Mason. Because I was Sophia Palanka and the F.B.I. wants me — for murder.”