The Chill (23 page)

We left the Negro district and came to a district of very old three-storied frame houses converted into rooming houses and business buildings. A few newer apartment buildings stood among them, and Hoffman’s destination was one of these.

It was a six-story concrete structure with a slightly rundown aspect: cracked and yellowing blinds in the rows of windows, brown watermarks below them. Hoffman went in the front entrance. I could see the inscription in the concrete arch above it: Deloney Apartments, 1928. I parked my car and followed Hoffman into the building.

He had evidently taken the elevator up. The tarnished brass arrow above the elevator door slowly turned clockwise to seven and stuck there. I gave up pushing the button after a while—Hoffman had probably left the door ajar—and found the fire stairs. I was breathing hard by the time I reached the metal door that let out onto the roof.

I opened the door a crack. Except for some pigeons coo-hooing on a neighboring rooftop, everything outside seemed very quiet. A few potted shrubs and a green plexiglass windscreen jutting out at right angles from the wall of the penthouse had converted a corner of the roof into a terrace.

A man and a woman were sunning themselves there. She was lying face down on an air mattress with the brassière of her Bikini unfastened. She was blonde and nicely made. He sat in a deck chair, with a half-empty cola bottle on the table beside him. He was broad and dark, with coarse black hair matting his chest and shoulders. He wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand, and had a faint Greek accent.

“So you think the restaurant business is low class? When you say that you’re biting the hand that feeds you. The restaurant business put mink on your back.”

“I didn’t say it. What I said, the insurance business is a nice clean business for a man.”

“And restaurants are dirty? Not my restaurants. I even got violet rays in the toilets—”

“Don’t talk filthy,” she said.

“Toilet is not a filthy word.”

“It is in my family.”

“I’m sick of hearing about your family. I’m sick of hearing about your good-for-nothing brother Theo.”

“Good-for-nothing?” She sat up, exposing a pearly flash of breast before she fastened its moorings. “Theo made the Million Dollar Magic Circle last year.”

“Who bought the policy that put him over the top? I did. Who set him up in the insurance agency in the first place? I did.”

“Mr. God.” Her face was a beautiful blank mask. It didn’t change when she said: “Who’s that moving around in the house? I sent Rosie home after breakfast.”

“She came back maybe.”

“It doesn’t sound like Rosie. It sounds like a man.”

“Could be Theo coming to sell me this year’s Magic Circle policy.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“I think it’s very funny.”

He laughed to prove it. He stopped laughing when Earl Hoffman came out from behind the plexiglass windscreen. Every mark on his face was distinct in the sunlight. His orange pajamas were down over his shoes.

The dark man got out of his deck chair and pushed air toward Hoffman with his hands. “Beat it. This is a private roof.”

“I can’t do that,” Hoffman said reasonably. “We got a report of a dead body. Where is it?”

“Down in the basement. You’ll find it there.” The man winked at the woman.

“The basement? They said the penthouse.” Hoffman’s damaged mouth opened and shut mechanically, like a dummy’s, as if the past was ventriloquizing through him. “You moved it, eh? It’s against the law to move it.”

“
You
move yourself out of here.” The man turned to the woman, who had covered herself with a yellow terrycloth robe: “Go in and phone the you-know-who.”

“I am the you-know-who,” Hoffman said. “And the woman stays. I have some questions to ask her. What’s your name?”

“None of your business,” she said.

“Everything’s my business.” Hoffman flung one arm out and almost lost his balance. “I’m detective inves’gating murder.”

“Let’s see your badge, detective.”

The man held out his hand, but he didn’t move toward Hoffman. Neither of them had moved. The woman was on her knees, with her beautiful scared face slanting up at Hoffman.

He fumbled in his clothes, produced a fifty-cent piece, looked at it in a frustrated way, and flung it spinning over the parapet. Faintly, I heard it ring on the pavement six stories down.

“Must of left it home,” he said mildly.

The woman gathered herself together and made a dash for the penthouse. Moving clumsily and swiftly, Hoffman caught her around the waist. She didn’t struggle, but stood stiff and white-faced in the circle of his arm.

“Not so fast now, baby. Got some questions to ask you. You the broad that’s been sleeping with Deloney?”

She said to the man: “Are you going to let him talk to me this way? Tell him to take his hands off me.”

“Take your hands off my wife,” the man said without force.

“Then tell her to sit down and cooperate.”

“Sit down and cooperate,” the man said.

“Are you crazy? He smells like a still. He’s crazy drunk.”

“I know that.”

“Then
do
something.”

“I am doing something. You got to humor them.”

Hoffman smiled at him like a public servant who was used to weathering unjust criticism. His hurt mouth and mind made the smile grotesque. The woman tried to pull away from him. He only held her closer, his belly nudging her flank.

“You look a little bit like my dau’er Helen. You know my dau’er Helen?”

The woman shook her head frantically. Her hair fluffed out.

“She says there was a witness to the killing. Were you there when it happened, baby?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Luke Deloney. Somebody drilled him in the eye and tried to make it look like suicide.”

“I remember Deloney,” the man said. “I waited on him in my father’s hamburg joint once or twice. He died before the war.

“Before the war?”

“That’s what I said. Where you been the last twenty years, detective?”

Hoffman didn’t know. He looked around at the rooftops of his city as if it was a strange place. The woman cried out:

“Let me go, fatso.”

He seemed to hear her from a long way off. “You speak with some respect to your old man.”

“If you were my old man I’d kill myself.”

“Don’t give me no more of your lip. I’ve had as much of your lip as I’m going to take. You hear me?”

“Yes I hear you. You’re a crazy old man and take your filthy paws off me.”

Her hooked fingers raked at his face, leaving three bright parallel tracks. He slapped her. She sat down on the gravel roof. The man picked up the half-empty cola bottle. Its brown
contents gushed down his arm as he raised it, advancing on Hoffman.

Hoffman reached under the back of his coat and took a revolver out of his belt. He fired it over the man’s head. The pigeons flew up from the neighboring rooftop, whirling in great spirals. The man dropped the bottle and stood still with his hands raised. The woman, who had been whimpering, fell silent.

Hoffman glared at the glaring sky. The pigeons diminished into it. He looked at the revolver in his hand. With my eyes focused on the same object, I stepped out into the sunlight.

“You need any help with these witnesses, Earl?”

“Naw, I can handle ’em. Everythin’s under control.” He squinted at me. “What was the name again? Arthur?”

“Archer.” I walked toward him, pushing my squat shadow ahead of me across the uneven surface of the gravel. “You’ll get some nice publicity out of this, Earl. Solving the Deloney killing singlehanded.”

“Yeah. Sure.” His eyes were deeply puzzled. He knew I was talking nonsense, as he knew he had been acting nonsense out, but he couldn’t admit it, even to himself. “They hid the body in the basement.”

“That means we’ll probably have to dig.”

“Is everybody crazy?” the man said between his upraised arms.

“Keep quiet, you,” I said. “You better call for reinforcements, Earl. I’ll hold the gun on these characters.”

He hesitated for a stretching moment. Then he handed me the revolver and went into the penthouse, bumping the doorframe heavily with his shoulder.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“I’m his keeper. Relax.”

“Did he escape from the insane asylum?”

“Not yet.”

The man’s eyes were like raisins thumbed deep into dough.
He helped his wife to her feet, awkwardly brushing off the seat of her robe. Suddenly she was crying in his arms and he was patting her back with his diamonded hand and saying something emotional in Greek.

Through the open door I could hear Hoffman talking on the phone: “Six men with shovels an a drill for concrete. Her body’s under the basement floor. Want ’em here in ten minutes or somebody gets reamed!”

The receiver crashed down, but he went on talking. His voice rose and fell like a wind, taking up scattered fragments of the past and blowing them together in a whirl. “He never touched her. Wouldn’t do that to the daughter of a friend. She was a good girl, too, a clean little daddy’s girl. ’Member when she was a little baby, I used to give her her bath. She was soft as a rabbit. I held her in my arms, she called me da.” His voice broke. “What happened?”

He was silent. Then he screamed. I heard him fall to the floor with a thud that shook the penthouse. I went inside. He was sitting with his back against the kitchen stove, trying to remove his trousers. He waved me back.

“Keep away from me. There’s spiders on me.”

“I don’t see any spiders.”

“They’re under my clothes. Black widows. The killer’s trying to poison me with spiders.”

“Who is the killer, Earl?”

His face worked. “Never found out who put the chill on Deloney. Word came down from the top, close off the case. What can a man—?” Another scream issued from his throat. “My God, there’s hundreds of ’em crawling on me.”

He tore at his clothes. They were in blue and orange rags when the police arrived, and his old wrestler’s body was naked and writhing on the linoleum.

The two patrolmen knew Earl Hoffman. I didn’t even have to explain.

T
HE RED SUN
sank abruptly when the plane came down into the shadow of the mountains. I had wired my ETA to the Walters agency, and Phyllis was waiting for me at the airport.

She took my hand and offered me her cheek. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion, a little the worse for sun, and opaque smiling eyes the color of Indian enamel.

“You look tired, Lew. But you do exist.”

“Don’t tell me. It makes me feel tireder. You look wonderful.”

“It gets more difficult as I get older. But then some other things get easier.” She didn’t say what things. We walked toward her car in the sudden evening. “What were you doing in Illinois, anyway? I thought you were working on a case in Pacific Point.”

“It’s in both places. I found an old prewar murder in Illinois which seems to be closely tied in with the current ones. Don’t ask me how. It would take all night to explain, and we have more important things to do.”

“You do, anyway. You have a dinner date at eight-thirty with Mrs. Sally Burke. You’re an old friend of mine from Los Angeles, business unspecified. You take it from there.”

“How did you fix it?”

“It wasn’t hard. Sally dotes on free dinners and unattached men. She wants to get married again.”

“But how did you get to know her?”

“I sort of happened into her at the bar where she hangs out and we got drunk together last night. One of us got drunk,
anyway. She did some talking about her brother Judson, who may be the man you want.”

“He is. Where does he live?”

“Somewhere on the South Shore. It’s a hard place to find people, as you know. Arnie’s out there looking for him now.”

“Lead me to the sister.”

“You sound like a lamb asking to be led to the slaughter. Actually she’s a pretty nice gal,” she said with female solidarity. “Not bright, but she has her heart in the right place. She’s very fond of her brother.”

“So was Lucrezia Borgia.”

Phyllis slammed the car door. We drove toward Reno, a city where nothing good had ever happened to me, but I kept hoping.

Mrs. Sally Burke lived close in on Riley Street, in the upper flat of an old two-story house. Phyllis dropped me off in front of it at eight-twenty-nine, having extracted my promise to come back and spend the night with Arnie and her. Mrs. Burke was waiting in full panoply on the upper landing: tight black sheath with foxes, pearls and earrings, four-inch heels. Her hair was mingled brown and blonde, as if to express the complexity of her personality. Her brown eyes appraised me, as I came up to her level, the way an antebellum plantation owner might look over an able-bodied slave on the auction block.

She smelled nice, anyway, and she had a pleasant friendly anxious smile. We exchanged greetings and names. I was to call her Sally right away.

“I’m afraid I can’t ask you in, the place is a mess. I never seem to get anything done on Sunday. You know the old song, ‘Gloomy Sunday’? That is, since my divorce. Phyllis says you’re divorced.”

“Phyllis is right.”

“It’s different for a man,” she said with some faint resentment. “But I can see you could use a woman to look after you.”

She was one of the fastest and least efficient workers I’d ever met. My heart went down toward my boots. She was looking at my boots, and at the clothes I had slept in on the plane. On the other hand I was able-bodied. I had climbed the stairs unaided.

“Where shall we eat?” she said. “The Riverside is nice.”

It was nice and expensive. After a couple of drinks I ceased to care about spending Alex’s money. I began to be fascinated, in a way, by Sally Burke’s conversation. Her ex-husband, if I could believe her, was a combination of Dracula, Hitler, and Uriah Heep. He made at least twenty-five thousand a year as a salesman in the Northwest, but more than once she had to attach his salary to collect her measly six hundred a month alimony. She was having a rough time making ends meet, especially now that her little brother had lost his job at the club.