Darkest Hour (4 page)

• • •

When the limousine deposited Simon and Hannah at the Seville Inn, the great lobby was bereft of guests. The bar had closed at
2
A.M
., the breakfast room wouldn’t open until seven, and the only signs of life were the waiters emerging from the kitchen with trays for the hardy variety of early-rising patrons and a grim, officious-looking man in a gray tweed suit who was in earnest conversation with the night manager. Simon approached the reservation desk and tried to get the attention of a very young, very blonde female who looked as if she had just donated too much blood to the Red Cross. She would recover, but not while the tweed-suit man impaled her with an inquisitive stare.

“I suppose I’m the last person to see him alive,” she was saying. “I was on duty when he came in—”

“The second time?” Tweed Suit demanded.

“The second time—yes. I came on duty at twelve midnight. It was a couple of hours later—almost two—when he came back. Now that I think about it, he did look drunk—or sick.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yes. He said I wasn’t to ring him or send anyone up to his room. ‘I’m beat,’ he said. He looked it.”

“And then he went up to his room alone? I mean, a bellhop or a porter didn’t go up with him?”

Tweed Suit spoke sentences which came out questions, and the blonde answered accordingly.

“Nobody went with him. He went alone. Gee, I wish I’d sent Sammy up with him, but I didn’t realize—”

It was then that the service doors opened and two husky young men in white suits started to roll a stretcher into the lobby. Tweed Suit turned toward them angrily.

“Not in here!” he yelled. “Go to the Orange Street Arcade. The manager doesn’t want a stretcher rolled through the main lobby!”

When the huskies hesitated, Tweed Suit broke off his interrogation and went to show them the way. Simon took advantage of the moment to catch the attention of the blonde and remind her of Hannah’s reservation. The girl, whose desk name plate identified her as Miss Hawks, tried to make an easy transition back to her normal work, but certain things had been overheard and both Simon and Hannah looked puzzled.

Miss Hawks smiled wanly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice when you came in. There’s been an accident.”

“Fatal?” Simon asked.

A direct question couldn’t be evaded.

“Yes,” she answered. “It’s pretty awful but we don’t want to alarm the clientele. One of the guests got drunk last night and fell down the stair well from the fourth floor. His body was found just a few minutes ago when one of the businessmen in the arcade came to unlock his shop. I get the shivers when I think how he might have been lying there all night. The arcade’s locked off by steel gates at 6
P.M
. and nobody uses the stairs—”

Miss Hawks broke off abruptly. “I shouldn’t be telling you all these things,” she apologized. “It’s just that I’ve got so much bottled up inside. Poor Mr. Montgomery—”

“Montgomery?” Hannah echoed. “Was that his name?”

Miss Hawks rebottled immediately. “Did you know him?” she asked.

“No,” Simon said quickly. “She’s just curious, and this is the wrong time for it.”

He registered and got the key from Miss Hawks before Hannah could get any more deeply involved, and then he took Hannah to her room where the walls were thick and the doors solid.

“You’re to stay here,” he ordered. “I know you’re dying to see what’s being scooped up from the arcade floor, but this could get messy. Take a sleeping powder. Forget everything. I’ll do the investigating.”

Luckily, Hannah was too weary to protest. But she wasn’t too weary to think.

“Simon,” she said, as he moved toward the door, “if Montgomery
is
Monte Monterey, and he is dead, I can identify that expression I saw on his face last night. It was panic, Simon. It was pure panic.”

Simon left Hannah locked securely in her second-floor room and took the automatic elevator down to the lobby. There was still no indication of tragedy to mar the stately opulence of that area. Affluence has a genius for tidiness. He crossed the thickly carpeted floors to the patio exit and hurried toward Orange Street. There, backed up to the shopping arcade entrance, stood an ambulance—doors open to receive the inert passenger being carried toward it on a blanketed stretcher. Simon sprinted to the scene as the tweedy man approached the ambulance. Seeing Simon, he stepped between him and the stretcher. From his jacket he took a badge and I.D. card. He was Police Lieutenant Job Rickey, stocky, sandy-haired and terse.

“If you’re from the newspaper,” he said, “get your story at the General Hospital.”

“How about the city morgue?” Simon suggested.

Rickey sighed and returned the credentials to his pocket. “Now I remember—you were at the registration desk. All right, so you know he’s dead.”

“Can I look at the body?”

“Why?”

“I may be able to make an identification.”

“Don’t need one. The dead man is a Mr. Montgomery—a registered guest of the hotel.”

“The same Montgomery the traffic department is looking for on a hit and run?” Simon asked. This was news to Rickey. Simon took advantage of the reaction to drive home his point. “You people at the courthouse should maintain better communication between departments,” he said. “My name is Simon Drake and I’m a lawyer. I represent Miss Hannah Lee, whose automobile was struck by a man named Montgomery in the parking lot of the Gateway Bar late last night. She’s been released to my custody pending a formal hearing, so, you see, I do have a legitimate interest in the dead man under that blanket.”

“Do you know Montgomery?” Rickey demanded.

“No, but I have a detailed description.”

The sun was getting higher in the sky. Within the hour all of those picturesque little shops in the arcade would be open and the ever-mobile species
tourista Americana
would be promenading to the recorded rhythm that still played gaily from the speakers on the mall. Rickey wanted to get the ugly work of the night out of the way before business hours, but he was as eager as Simon to identify the corpse. He stepped aside and pulled back the top of the blanket. Simon was startled. Death had drained the man’s face of natural color, and the sun-lamp tan looked muddy in the early light. But it wasn’t the coloration that shocked him; it was the sense of time regression. The side of the dead man’s face that was closer to him had escaped injury, and it was the face of a man of twenty-five or thirty—the nose profile perfect, the ears laid close to the expensive hair style, the eyebrows trained to provocative arches. Every feature was familiar and doors opened into the past when Monte Monterey, larger than life, rode into two score sunsets while the theme music swelled to a triumphant finale. Hannah couldn’t have been mistaken. This was the Monterey she remembered. Only when Simon leaned closer did he see the telltale scars of surgery.

But the opposite side of Monterey’s face resembled something that had collided with a meat grinder and a well-aimed mallet.

Rickey cleared his throat and drew the blanket back over the dead man’s face. “Well?” he asked.

“It’s the same Montgomery,” Simon said. “How do you make the death—accident or suicide?”

Rickey signaled and the attendants lifted the stretcher into the ambulance. “Ask the coroner,” he said. “I only make pickups and deliveries.”

The ambulance doors closed. Moments later, sans sirens, the vehicle moved off down Orange Street. Clean. Tidy. Silent. No distracting evidence to disturb the trade. In a window of the arcade florist shop a slim-hipped young man in white jeans and T shirt was arranging a display of gladioli, and up and down the mall echoed a sprightly madrigal for electric guitars and vibraharps. Sunrise, Simon mused, was as good a thing to ride into as sunset.

He wanted to get back to Hannah with the verification of her identity of the dead man, but Lieutenant Rickey was still at his elbow and a black-and-white police car was sidling to the curb.

“Mr. Drake,” Rickey said, “I think you’ll need a ride to the courthouse.”

• • •

Simon’s reentry into the La Verde courthouse was less impressive than the initial performance. Hannah always added color to any scene, but Hannah was resting at the Seville Inn and a great many people who were blandly indifferent to Monte Monterey’s battered half profile made up the
dramatis personae
of the second show. Lieutenant Rickey wasted no time contacting Officer Quentin, and when the wallet taken from the dead man’s body disclosed a receipt for rental of the black Ford, and an international driver’s license issued to Martin Montgomery, the hit-and-run charge involving Hannah and a battered Rolls reached an abrupt termination.

The La Verde courthouse wasn’t the Pentagon. Nobody seemed interested when Simon walked boldly into the anteroom to the morgue and watched the conscientious clerk list the personal effects that had been taken from Monterey’s body. One wafer-thin wrist watch (worth at least $1000, Simon reckoned). One gold-plated cigarillo case inscribed:
O Amoroso
. One black leather wallet containing $1821 and a matching coin purse containing nearly $3 in United States coin, five Mexican centavos and a Brazilian 100-cruzeiro note. One ebony cuff link. One silver St. Christopher’s medal attached to a key chain. One house key from the Seville Inn, room 464. One plain gold man’s wedding ring inscribed: JO to JM—10-24-41.

Simon studied the ring thoughtfully and replaced it on the desk. No identification except the international driver’s license and the receipt from Able Rentals, the agency in Santa Monica. The clerk had emptied the pockets of the dead man’s suit and found nothing that could establish his correct identity. He now took the key chain and unlocked the smart black traveling case that had been sent over from the Seville Inn. It contained the usual items: brushes, men’s cosmetics (an expensive brand), underwear, socks, four white dress shirts, two Italian sweaters, a pair of white swimming trunks, half a dozen narrow silk ties and a small black leather case containing a pair of diamond cuff links that were at least a half karat each. Nothing about Monterey’s possessions bore out Hannah’s description of him as a deadbeat. The suit was hand-tailored but carried no label. The raincoat, to which the clerk now turned his attention, came from an exclusive shop in San Diego. The pockets of the coat yielded a gold lighter—a mate to the cigar case. It was not inscribed. Also a small box containing a pair of undamaged contact lenses, and a pair of dark driving glasses with one lens shattered and the frame twisted out of shape. The coat itself was undamaged and spotless. The suit coat bore extensive bloodstains and reeked of whisky.

“There was a crushed half pint in the left pocket,” the clerk explained. “Don’t touch. The fabric’s full of splintered glass.”

“Scotch or bourbon?” Simon asked.

“Funny man!” the clerk said. His hands ran along the inside of the coat and removed from the inner pocket a small black notebook containing what, at the glance Simon had, appeared to be telephone numbers. The final item listed was a pair of custom-made black suede shoes with lifts on the heels and very oily soles.

Simon had seen as much as he was going to be allowed to see, and there was something more to be done while waiting for the release of the pathologist’s report. For whatever reason, drunk or sober, the man identified as Montgomery had rammed his car into Hannah’s Rolls, and that meant there were damages to be repaired.

The police garage was only steps away from the jail wing of the old courthouse. Both the Rolls and the rented Ford had been impounded, and the Ford had sustained much the worse damage. The front bumper was rammed back into the hood. The radiator was collapsed, and the cylinder head cracked. A wide pool of oil darkened the garage floor under the machine, and Simon remembered the stains on Monterey’s shoes and checked out another detail. The interior of the car was clean except for an edge of paper showing between the cushion and the back of the seat. He opened the door and retrieved a folded highway map: one item the police had missed. The front cover carried a bank’s advertising blurb and a rubber-stamped notation: “Courtesy of The Palms Hotel, Santa Monica.” Simon slipped it into his coat pocket and turned his attention to the Rolls.

The Rolls had an ugly dent in the left front fender and one cracked headlamp lens. But the motor responded at the turn of the key, and Simon decided to drive the car back to Marina Beach himself. He would send Hannah home in the limousine. The sooner the better. It was only a matter of time until some evidence would establish the dead man’s true identity, and he didn’t want Hannah involved in the ensuing publicity. Whatever motivated Monterey’s plunge to the bottom of the stair well, it wasn’t a nice way to go.

But to move the Rolls required authorization, and that meant returning to Lieutenant Rickey’s office to await the arrival of the full set of accident photos required before anything could be released. It wasn’t a long wait. The police photographer’s name was Dirk Holman. He was good at his job and he knew it. He produced a set of glossies complete enough to satisfy even Rickey’s exacting demands and then, with a touch of macabre delight, added to the stack on the desk a set of shots he had made of the dead man. The top photo was a close-up of the mutilated side of his face.

Only the unexpected could shock an old pro like Rickey. Holman watched for the reaction and chuckled when it came.

“Not so pretty, is he?” he taunted. “Now look at the next one.”

Holman peeled off the top photo. The contrast with this shot—the right side of the face that was unscarred and un-bruised—was even more startling than viewing the dead man on the stretcher.

Holman leaned forward, his hands braced against the desk. “Well, what do you see?” he demanded brightly.

Rickey frowned. “This guy looks familiar.”

“You bet he does! That’s the Latin Lothario, the Prince of Peons, the Citrus Belt Caballero. That’s Monte Monterey, pride of La Verde Public High School, 1925. That’s the year he enrolled. He graduated on Gower Gulch in Hollywood.”

A good listener could pick up things all the time. “Monterey was a native son of La Verde?” Simon asked.

Holman liked taking the play from Lieutenant Rickey.

“That’s what it says in the newspaper morgue. I’ve got a photographic memory for faces. The instant I trained my camera on this one, I knew it was familiar. Yes, sir. Monte Monterey was born on a citrus ranch just beyond what used to be the city limits. His father was an orange picker named Morales. Our hero, Monte, was christened Manuel Morales and was one of six Mex kids—”

“Okay, save the information to impress your girlfriend,” Rickey growled.

“Girl
friends
,” Holman corrected. “I just thought you’d like to know who it really is on that slab in the morgue.”

It was important for Simon to get Hannah out of La Verde before the story broke and somebody, perhaps Dirk Holman, realized she was Monterey’s contemporary and might well have recognized him. It could be embarrassing trying to explain why her attorney hadn’t correctly identified the body.

The chimes in the old chapel at the Seville Inn were tolling eleven when Simon returned to the hotel lobby. There was more activity now. The restaurant was open. A few late risers were breakfasting, a few early risers were preparing for lunch, and in the sunny courtyard the first group of tourists was being assembled for the guided tour. It was peaceful and serene: a world of beautiful people doing beautiful things just like in the travel folders.

A new girl had taken over at the reception desk: bright-eyed, auburn-haired, green-eyed daughter of the light touch. Simon looked at her and felt ten years younger.

The name plate read:
MISS PENNY.

“Miss Copper Penny?” Simon mused aloud. “Miss Pennies-from-Heaven?”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” she remarked.

“Beautiful! How do I go about saving you?”

Her eyes stopped laughing. She donned a pair of black-rimmed half lenses and peered at him more closely. She was even prettier with glasses.

“Now you look like a schoolteacher,” he said. “Chemistry is my favorite subject. What’s yours?”

“History—personal,” she said. “Do you wish to register for a room?”

“I already have a room—two-eleven.” He dangled the key before her eyes. “And don’t tell me that I should have left it at the desk because I know that. What are your hours?”

“Too long,” Miss Penny said, “and I always go straight home—”

“I don’t mean today. I mean last night.”

Miss Penny had the registration file before her. She rifled through it as Simon spoke. He saw her tense a bit and go on the alert. “Two-eleven,” she repeated. And then she removed the glasses and stared directly into his eyes. It was like receiving a high-voltage shock. “You aren’t local,” she said. “What are you? L.A. press?”

“No,” Simon said, “a friend of the court. Don’t crack your brain over that one; it’s not worth it. I’m just curious to know how drunk Martin Montgomery was when he checked in last night.”

“But he wasn’t—”

“Then you were on duty?”

“Yes. My regular shift is four
P.M
. to midnight. I’m only here now because the morning gal is sick. But Mr. Montgomery wasn’t drunk at all when I talked to him. He was just tired.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Yes. As soon as he got up to his room, he called down and asked me to ring him at eleven-thirty. It was nine-thirty then and I asked if he meant
P.M
. or
A.M
. He said
P.M
. because he had an appointment.”

“Did you see him go out at eleven-thirty?”

“Well, thereabouts. Give or take a few minutes, Mr. Drake. Shall I ring two-eleven and say that you’re coming up?”

Simon distinctly remembered signing the registration card: “Hannah Lee.” He wondered if Lieutenant Rickey had been name dropping, or if the bright Miss Penny was a courtroom and crime fan. He decided not to ask.