Built for Trouble (15 page)

I FOUND AN APARTMENT in Venice and as soon as I tossed my suitcase into a corner, I took off for Long Beach. I wanted a gun. A smaller one this time, and within an hour I turned up a short-barreled .38 in a pawn shop on the strand. I counted out the cash, signed the papers as Charles A. Edwards, and listened to the pitch about waiting periods and registration. Neither would worry me; I wasn’t in any hurry and you aren’t fingerprinted when you register a gun. I drove home.

In the morning I checked the papers but there was nothing on Joe Lamb except a small item tucked away in the middle sheets, a statement about burial and that police were still looking for the hitch-hiker murderer, but no progress was reported. On the following day I phoned the office of Lamb and Taylor, but drew a blank. I looked through the Taylors in the phone book, found the one that matched the address I’d written to twice from Ojai, and dialed her number. An elderly lady answered, then called Carol to the phone.

“Eddie Baker,” I said. “I’ve been wondering how you are these days.”

“All right, I guess. Considering.” She sounded tired.

“You—haven’t heard from Nola?”

“No, but I saw her yesterday at Joe’s—at the services. She was with a friend and we didn’t speak.”

“Oh?” I’d gone about as far as I could over the phone, and yet I wanted to talk more. “Look,” I said, “you’re on edge and depressed and it’s entirely understandable, but this wasn’t—well, wasn’t anything you could help. So how about us taking a drive this afternoon and we’ll see if you can’t get it off of your mind?”

“A drive? Where would we go?”

“No place special. But it will get you out of the house.”

“All right. When will you come by?”

“In an hour.”

I made some other phone calls and drove up to Carol’s address. Her mother let me in. She was red-haired and still slim, only the wrinkles along the corners of the eyes giving away her years, and she smiled warmly as she indicated a chair.

“Carol will be down in a moment. I don’t believe I’ve seen you around, Mr. Baker.”

“That’s right.” I couldn’t say much; there was no way of knowing what Carol had told her mother about Eddie Baker.

“What have you been doing since your accident, Mr. Baker?”

“A little of this and some of that. Uranium prospecting this last couple of weeks. How’s the weather been here in L.A.?”

“Fine.” She didn’t pursue the subject of my whereabouts. Instead, she lowered her voice and glanced toward the stairs. “Carol has been awfully upset these last few days. Even before Mr. Lamb’s death, I think, and I’m worried about her. It’s very nice of you to help her get her mind off of her troubles.”

I mumbled something unimportant and she leaned closer. “Please see if you can’t cheer her up a little. Carol’s usually so gay and—” She stopped as high heels clicked down the white Diato stairway, and I got to my feet.

“You look lovely,” I said, and held her coat.

“Well, thank you, sir,” Carol said, “even if it is a lie.” She kissed her mother lightly on the cheek, then linked her arm through mine. A few minutes later we were in my car and heading west.

“It’s been rough, I guess.”

“Yes, but you said the questions would be pretty much routine, and they were. I doubt if they even checked with the hotel at Ojai to see how long I was there or when I left.”

“Maybe yes; maybe no. Did you look up the word on Hank Sawyer?”

“Yes. Mom has several feet of paper waiting for the Boy Scout paper drive to come along and I found the editions covering him. And you were right, Eddie. If this mess broke, if you hadn’t—hadn’t taken care of Joe—I would have been in up to my neck.”

“I think you probably would have.”

“I’m sure of it. They’d have started with my helping Nola and Joe stage the fake rescue and there wouldn’t have been any way to prove I had no part in Hank’s death.” Carol moved a little closer, and one hand covered mine on the wheel. “You were pretty cool when it counted most, Eddie.”

I grinned at her and tooled the Ford through late afternoon traffic along the boulevard. When we hit the coast highway, I wheeled right and later we wound up into Malibu Hills, found a parking area overlooking the Pacific, and stopped. I turned on the radio and dialed in some soft music. Carol looked toward the expanse of ocean below us.

“And where do we go from here?” she asked softly.

“Well, we can’t stay in sack cloth and ashes forever. I thought we might drive north a ways, have a nice dinner along about—”

“I don’t mean that, Eddie. What will you do?”

“I want my dough.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to take what you already have and keep clear of Nola?”

“It would be easier. But it would leave a taste in my mouth. I’m not forgetting that little Nola set me up to be knocked off—courtesy of Joe Lamb. I’m damned if I’ll hold still for it!”

“You’re going to Catalina to see her?”

“If she’s not home, I’ll go to Catalina. She’s going to have to pay the bill; I can’t see it any other way. Now what about you?”

“I’m selling the agency.”

“Any special reason?”

“A lot of reasons. For one thing, I want off the Hollywood merry-go-round. I know I sound like a bad song, but I would like to find some happiness.”

“So what will make you happy?”

“What will make any girl happy?”

“I hear they’re all different.”

“Only on the surface.”

“I don’t think you’re right. Take Nola, for example. She knows exactly what she wants and it isn’t a husband and three kids. She’ll get it too, but not unless she pays Eddie Baker’s bill.”

“Nola? She’s different, I guess. And smart as they come. Actually, very little of the planning was done by Joe. Nola—well, all right, she’s an exception to the rule.” Carol looked out toward the water and asked, “If you get all that money, Eddie, what then?”

“A swim school,” I said. “You’ve seen a dozen of them spring up in and around L.A. recently, and they’re a good thing. The one I want will cost an even thirty thousand to build and the lot will cost another ten. Put it at forty G’s all together. And it’ll be work I can loaf at. Make a living in your bathing trunks—you can’t beat it.”

“You could buy it now. With the money you’ve already taken from Nola, you could make a down payment and get a construction loan. Then—”

“Nothing doing,” I said. “When I build it, I’ll own it.”

“Or you’ll wind up like Sawyer. Can’t you see by now how dangerous she is?”

I started the car. “Who should know better?” I said. “But to hell with it for now. Let’s take a nice relaxing drive up to about Santa Barbara, have a dinner at some good restaurant, and come home in the moonlight.”

It was late when we got back to the house. A light burned in the living room window. I walked Carol up to the porch and we stood in the shadow cast by an acacia tree. Memories of a night in Ojai went through me, and I slipped my arms around her, but the heat wouldn’t build. Not on her side of the fence.

“I’m worried about you, Eddie,” she whispered.

“Forget it. I know what I’m doing. Relax.” I kissed her, but somehow it didn’t come off right.

“Please, Eddie. Couldn’t we talk about—about what you’re going to do next? Isn’t it even open to discussion?”

“No. Not if you mean what I think you do. It’s all settled; we’ll have to go on from there.”

“I don’t think I want to go on from there. But if you’d be reasonable and talk it over and—”

“Are you trying to bargain with me?” I asked softly.

She turned her head away. “I guess I am.”

“It’s been a nice evening,” I said, “but there’s work to be done tomorrow. I’ll be seeing you around.” And then I went down the walk and out to my car and drove away.

The lights were out in Nola’s apartment when I walked past the door. I loafed around the swimming pool inside the enclosed patio of the big apartment building for a while, but she didn’t show. I went back to my own place in Venice, kicked away a little time, and phoned her. Nothing doing. I stalled away a couple of hours in a corner bar and dialed Nola again. Still no answer, so I hit the sack.

In the morning I called once more, and when she didn’t answer I decided that the lover boy with a boat was doing all right and that she was probably playing out the few days before shooting on his scow in Catalina waters. I drove down to the pawn shop, picked up my .38, and registered it.

“Just a house gun,” I told the sergeant at the desk, “protection for the home.”

He gave me a short lecture about how I couldn’t carry it concealed and all the rest, but ten minutes after I left the station I stopped off at a hardware store, picked up some shells, loaded the gun, shoved it into my belt inside my shirt, and drove over to the Wilmington Docks. I bought a ticket on the steamer, and when she slipped her moorings and nosed into the twenty-four miles of channel water, I was aboard.

It was a gay crossing, smooth, with flying fishes skipping out of the water as we neared the island. But I wasn’t exactly on a vacation tour, and when the steamer began to ease into her mooring space beside the dock at Avalon, I went to an upper deck and looked over the collection of small craft anchored around the bay.
Sirocco
was the name of his boat, I’d read, but it wasn’t here.

A small band played
Avalon
as the gangplank went over and eager vacationers swept ashore for their day on the island wonderland. I touched my shirt-front lightly, felt the encouraging outline of the short-nosed .38, and went across the street to a taxi stand.

“How much to the Isthmus?” I asked. He glanced up, gave me the charge, and I got into his cab.

An hour later I strolled along the wooden pier and looked over the boats out in the bay.
Sirocco
rode on the gentle swells, moored to a floating barrel not too far to the left of the pier. She was a trim boat, all right, and rigged with fishing gear. Her hull was white, the deck natural wood that looked clean and bleached in the morning sunlight. A fifty-footer, I guessed. The newly painted black anchor peeked out of a small hawse pipe at the bow, and behind it a bright, black chain stretched tautly across two feet of deck, circled a small windlass, and disappeared through the deck. She carried a short dinghy slung from miniature davits. Her bright-work was newly polished and glittered invitingly.

I was still admiring her lines when a head poked out of the cabin, and then the boss came on deck. It had to be him, short-cropped mustache, a weatherbeaten dark blue yachting cap pulled over one side of his head, a mug of coffee in his hand. Conrad somebody. Conrad Masters, if I remembered the gossip column right from that day his picture had appeared with Nola and the
Sirocco.
And while the boat was exactly the same, there was a slight difference in her owner. He’d sucked in a lot of tummy when they made that shot. He was tan of face and his dungarees were strictly from salt, and now, as he leaned on the cabin roof and looked around, he saw me standing on the end of the pier.

There was no recognition in his face, naturally, though we weren’t much over a hundred feet apart, and soon he turned away and went back below. I sat down on a piling end to wait. It was another hour before Nola Norton came on deck, and by then there were several other people on the dock. Some of them were men and they were all looking in the same direction—toward Nola. She looked like something out of a Little Abner comic strip. Her shorts were brief and frayed at the bottoms; they’d probably been cut from an old pair of dungarees, but the effect was better than most dames can get from ten bucks’ worth of nylon. She wore a tight blue-striped sweater—doing what came naturally—and her wedgies clacked across the deck as she went past the cabin and sat down on a deck chair forward. She glanced casually at the line-up along the pier and then her eyes flashed back to me. She put up a hand to shade her face, and I stood up, took off the dark glasses, polished them a little, and smiled at her.

She bounced out of the chair and hurried aft, then swung down the companionway into the cabin. A few seconds later I saw binoculars pressed against the plate glass window. I nodded significantly, turned, and went slowly along the pier. At the end I turned off, wandered along the beach, and sat down.

Nola took her time. It was almost half an hour before she came on deck once more, and this time she wore a red bathing suit. Salty came out too and lowered the dinghy for her, and when she pulled away he found a cloth and went to work on the brass. Nola handled the oars well. She skirted the pier on the side away from the
Sirocco,
then made for the landing. When her tiny skiff was tied up, she walked briskly off the pier and then slowed her step, her eyes going toward me. I got up and followed at a distance. She moved around the corner of a building and when I rounded that corner she was waiting for me. We fell into step.

“I’m a little surprised to see you,” she said, her voice low.

“You shouldn’t be. When you owe a guy dough he usually comes around to collect. It’s standard business procedure.”

“But we aren’t in business any more.”

“Since when?”

“Since you killed Joe Lamb,” she said harshly. “Joe’s death made you and me even at one each. And I’m not paying off. Not a cent!”

“You’ll cough up every damn dime. Or else!”

“Or else what? You’ll go to the police? I don’t think so. Let’s start by agreeing that, although the police have marked Hank Sawyer’s passing as an accident, the evidence you have would lead them directly to me. To save argument, let’s admit that it would make a sure case and I’d have little chance to beat it. Very well, the same things apply to Joe Lamb. As of now, he was killed by a hitchhiker who is still at large. But as soon as the police learn that Lamb went to see you at Ojai and add in your shake-down project and put all this with the facts they already have—such as that Joe was hauled a considerable distance after he died—they’re going to come up with the name of that hitch-hiker in a hurry. Eddie Baker! Then they’ll begin a search for the gun and probably find the place where you shot Joe and…”

As she talked, I began to do some overdue thinking of my own. Sure I didn’t kill Lamb, but saying so would only throw Carol into the fire. I didn’t have to weigh that very long. She was still piling on the dark clouds and saying how bad things looked for me, so I let her finish, then lit two smokes and handed one to her.