The Way Some People Die (2 page)

“That doesn’t prove a thing. You can fly to New York or Hawaii in a day.” I took a cigarette from a pack in my pocket and automatically asked her: “Mind if I smoke?”

Her face froze, as if I had suggested an obscenity. “Smoke if you must, sir. I know what a hold the nicotine habit has on its victims. Dr. Lawrence was a smoker for years, until he finally broke free, with God’s help.”

I replaced the cigarette in my pocket and stood up to leave. Even with a million dollars, she wouldn’t have been the kind of woman I wanted to work for. And she probably didn’t have two nickels to rub against each other. As for the daughter, ten to one she’d simply decided to have a life of her own.

I put it less bluntly to her: “I think you should take it to Missing Persons, Mrs. Lawrence. I don’t think you have anything to worry about, but it you have, they can do more for you than I can. It would be a waste of money to hire me. I charge fifty a day and expenses. The police do everything free.”

Her answer surprised me: “I expected to pay you well. And I am not going to go to the police.”

“Why not? Missing daughters are their specialty. They’ve got a national system set up to find them.”

Grim bony lines came out in her face, and her eyes weren’t vague any more. “If Galley is living in sin with some man, it’s nobody’s business but my own.”

“Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?”

“I tell you you don’t know Galley. Men have been after her since high school, like flies to honey. She’s a good girl, Mr. Archer, I know how good. But I was a handsome girl myself when I was young, and I’ve seen the pitfalls of the flesh. I want to know what has happened to my daughter.”

I stood by the table and lit my cigarette and dropped the match on the tea tray. She didn’t say a word. After a stretching moment of silence, she reached from her chair and took a framed photograph from the top of the bookcase. “Look at her, you’ll understand what I mean.”

I took the picture from her hand. There was something slightly shady about the transaction, a faint implication that she was offering her daughter’s beauty as part payment on my services. Or maybe I was having impressions. I had one when I looked at the girl’s face. It was passionate and bold like her handwriting. Even in a white nurse’s cap and a high chaste collar she was a girl you saw once and never forgot.

“It was her graduation picture, taken three years ago, but she still looks exactly the same. Isn’t she pretty?”

Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets.

“If you want to spend fifty dollars,” I said, “I’ll go down to Pacific Point today and see what I can find out. Write down her last address and the name of whoever you talked to at the hospital.”

With the caution of a pheasant hen returning to her nest, she went to an old-fashioned sewing machine by the window, lifted the closed top and removed a worn black purse from its hiding place. Opening the tarnished clasp, she rummaged in the purse and counted five reluctant tens onto the table.

Dropping my ashes in my empty teacup, I noticed the arrangement of the leaves. My grandmother would have said it meant money and a dark stranger. The stranger could have been male or female, vertical or horizontal, depending on how you looked at the bottom of the cup.

CHAPTER
2
:     
I drove south through Long Beach
to Pacific Point. Crossing the mesa that flanked it to the northwest, you could see the town spread out, from the natural harbor half-enclosed by the curving finger of land that gave the place its name, to the houses on the ridge above the fogline. It rose from sea level in a gentle slope, divided neatly into social tiers, like something a sociologist had built to prove a theory. Tourists and transients lived in hotels and motels along the waterfront. Behind them a belt of slums lay ten blocks deep, where the darker half of the population lived and died. On the other side of the tracks—the
tracks were there—the business section wore its old Spanish façades like icing on a stale cake. The people who worked in the stores and offices inhabited the grid of fifty-foot lots that covered the next ten blocks. On the slopes above them the owners and managers enjoyed their patios and barbecue pits. And along the top of the ridge lived the really wealthy, who had bought their
pieds-à-terre
in Pacific Point because it reminded them of Juan-les-Pins.

The wife of a client of mine had taken an overdose of sleeping pills in a Pacific Point hotel, so I knew where the hospital was. I made a left turn off the highway and drove through empty afternoon streets to the hospital building. It was a rambling place of bilious yellow plaster, and the sight of it depressed me. My client’s wife had died of the sleeping pills. All that he really wanted was a divorce.

After a good deal of palaver I found myself in the basement waiting-room of the hospital’s X-ray department, talking to a plump young thing in white nylon. Her arms and shoulders glowed a pleasant pink through this progressive fabric, and her straw-blond hair was cut sleek and short. Her name was Audrey Graham, and she didn’t mind talking at all. I told her the truth—that I was a detective looking for Galley Lawrence because her mother was worried—which was a refreshing change from my usual approach.

“I never did know Galley really well,” she said. “Sure, we were in the same class at Los Angeles General and graduated together and all. But you know how some girls are, introverted like. I’m more of an extrovert myself. I like meeting people, in a nice way, you know what I mean. Are you really a detective? I never met a
private
detective before.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The introverted kind. Mrs. Lawrence said you were Galley’s roommate.”

“Just for a while, last year. She got a chance at this
apartment and I went in on the rent, but after a couple of months I found a place of my own. We agreed to disagree, you know what I mean.”

“Not exactly.”

She perched on the edge of the receptionist’s desk and swung one round silk leg. “Well, I mean we got along all right but we didn’t live the same. She ran around a lot and came in all hours of the day and night and it wasn’t so happy-making, me with a regular job, I mean, and a steady boy friend. When Galley was on a case she was spit-and-polish but in between she liked to break loose a bit, and she was crazy for men—I’ve never been myself. I mean, a girl has a right to her own life and she can do what she pleases as far as I’m concerned, only she shouldn’t try to attract a boy that’s going with somebody else.”

She colored slowly, aware that she’d given herself away. The round eyes in the rosy face were ice-blue, cold with memory. If Audrey Graham was Galley’s best friend, Galley had no friends.

“Where did you live with her, and when?”

“August and September, I guess it was—I had my vacation in July. Galley found this little place in Acacia Court, one bedroom. It had twin beds, but that didn’t work out either.” She’d embarrassed herself again, and the flush rose higher, to the roots of the straw-colored hair.

“What kind of men did she run around with?”

“All kinds. She had no discrimination, you know what I mean.” The refrain was getting on my nerves. “My boy friend is going to college under the G.I. and you’d think a girl who thinks she’s something special because her father was a doctor, or so she claimed—you’d think she’d watch out who she went out with. Of course she had a couple of doctors on the string but that was married stuff and I never
could see it myself. She had boys from the Safeway, a law clerk, a fellow that said he was a writer but I never heard of him, even one that looked like a Mexican once. Italian, anyway.”

“Know any of their names?”

“I mostly knew them by their first names, when I knew them. I wouldn’t want to tell you the doctors’ names. If you want my honest opinion, Galley just got sick of this town and ran off with one of her men. Las Vegas or someplace. She was always talking about seeing the world. She set a high opinion on herself. She blew her money on clothes she couldn’t afford and half the time she was eating off of me.”

There were footsteps in the hall, and the girl slid off the desk. A tall man in a white tunic looked in at the door. His eyes were masked by wide red spectacles. ‘The pyelogram’s on the table, Audrey, be ready in five minutes.” He turned to me. “Are you the barium enema for tomorrow?” I told him that I wasn’t, and he went away.

“You can be glad you’re not,” the girl said. “I’m afraid I have to go now.”

“He said five minutes. What about this man Speed, the bullet in the stomach Galley nursed?”

“Oh, that was Herman Speed. He had peritonitis from lead poisoning or something, she didn’t go out with him. He was on Ward C for three weeks last December, and then he left town. I heard he was run out of town. He promoted the wrestling down at the Arena and there was an editorial in the paper about how he was shot in a gang war or something. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t read it myself, one of the doctors told me.”

“She didn’t leave town with him?”

“No, she was still in town after he left. I saw her one night with this Mexican-looking guy, I forget his name. Turpentine or something. I think he worked for Speed. He came
to see him a couple of times when he was on Ward C. Tarantula, or something?”

“That’s a kind of spider.”

“Yeah. Well, Galley was no fly. Anybody she went with, she had a darn good reason. I’ll say one thing for her, she knew how to have a good time. But what she saw in this guy that worked for Speed—I wouldn’t trust a Mexican or Italian, they have no respect for women.”

I was getting a little tired of her opinions, and she was repeating herself. I got out of my chair and stood up. “Thanks very much, Miss Graham.”

“Don’t mention it. If you need any more information, I get off here at half past four.”

“I may see you then. By the way, did you tell Mrs. Lawrence what you told me?”

“No, of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t ruin a girl’s reputation with her own mother. I don’t mean that Galley had a
really
bad reputation or I wouldn’t of lived with her. But you know what I mean.”

CHAPTER
3
:     
Acacia Court was within easy walking
distance of the hospital, on a quiet middle-class street across from a school-ground. It probably wasn’t so quiet when school was out. The court consisted of ten small stucco bungalows ranged five on each side of a gravel driveway that led to the garages at the rear. The first bungalow had a wooden office sign over the door, with a cardboard
NO VACANCY
sign attached to it. There were two acacia trees in the front yard, blanketed with yellow chenille-like blossoms.

When I got out of my car a mockingbird swooped from
one of the trees and dived for my head. I gave him a hard look and he flew up to a telephone wire and sat there swinging back and forth and laughing at me. The laughter actually came from a red-faced man in dungarees who was sitting in a deck-chair under the tree. His mirth brought on some sort of an attack, probably asthmatic. He coughed and choked and wheezed, and the chair creaked under his weight and his face got redder. When it was over he removed a dirty straw hat and wiped his bare red pate with a handkerchief.

“Excuse me. The little devil does it all the time. He’s my aerial defense. I think it’s your hair they want, to build a nest. He drives the nurses crazy.”

I stepped in under the shade of the tree. “Are you Mr. Raisch?”

“That’s my name. I told them they better wear hats but they never do. Back where I was brought up, in Little Egypt, a lady never went out without a hat, and some of these girls don’t even own one. You wanted to see me? I got no vacancy.” He jerked a large gray thumb at the sign over the door. “Anyway I just take mostly girls from the hospital and a few married couples.”

I told him I wasn’t a prospective tenant, but that was all I had a chance to tell him.

“I can afford to pick and choose,” he said. “My place doesn’t look like much from the outside, maybe, but she’s in absolutely tiptop shape. Redecorated the whole thing with my own two hands last year, put in new linoleum, fixed up the plumbing. And I didn’t raise the rents a red cent. No wonder they come to me. What did you want to see me about? I don’t need a thing if you’re selling.”

“I’m looking for Galley Lawrence. Remember her?”

“I should say I do.” His blue eyes had narrowed and were appraising me. “I’m not so old and dried up that
I’d forget a pretty girl like that one. Even if she had a hump on her back and one glass eye I wouldn’t disremember her. I don’t get the chance; seems that every few days somebody comes around asking after Galley. What do you want with her?”

“I want to talk with her. What did the others want?”

“Well, her mother was here a couple of times. You’d think I was in the white-slave traffic the way that biddy talked to me, and all I did was rent her daughter a home. Then there was all her young men calling up—I practically had to have my phone disconnected back around the first of the year. You one of her young men?”

“No.” But I was grateful for the adjective.

“Let’s see, you’re from L.A., ain’t you?” The eyes were still appraising me. “You got an L.A. license on your car. These other customers were from L.A., the ones from the pinball company. You work for the pinball company?”

“Not me.”

“You’re carrying a gun. Or maybe you got a tumor under your armpit.”

I told him I was a private detective, and why I was looking for Galley. “Do you carry a gun if you work for the pinball company?”

“These customers did, the thin one anyway. He let me know he had a gun, he thought he’d throw a scare into me. I didn’t tell him I was handling firearms before his dam dropped him on the curb and kicked him into the gutter. He wanted to think he was smooth and sharp and I let him go on thinking it.”

“You’re fairly sharp yourself.”

The flattery pleased him, and his big red face relaxed into smiles again. He felt the need to express himself some more. “I didn’t get where I am by sitting on my rump waiting for the cash to grow on trees. No sir, I been in
every one of the forty-eight states and I watered every one of them with my good sweat. I lost a fortune in Florida and that’s the last time anybody put anything over on me.”