Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (7 page)

Reavis let us through the high gate, having left his submachine gun inside the house out of respect to the ladies. This was my first look at him by daylight, and there wasn’t much to see. Medium height and heavy in the chest, but in time the flesh would sag. He was a younger Rudy Mask.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” Diane said. “I hope we don’t have to waste all of it in the doctor’s office.”

“What’s Aimee going for?”

“Shots.” Aimee almost flinched, her face troubled. Diane put an arm around her. “There’s nothing to it, baby. Diane’s going to get a couple herself.”

“Then can we go to the show?” Aimee said insistently, as if she had been asking since waking up that morning.

“Maybe we’ll have time. We have to eat lunch and see about your playsuits, too.”

“And a bicycle.”

Diane sighed. “I don’t know where you’re going to ride a bicycle around—”

“But Daddy said—”

“I know he did. I was just trying to be practical. We’ll see about the bicycle, too.”

“I want to see a Bob Hope picture.”

“Sounds good to me,” Diane said cheerfully. She smiled at me. “See how busy we’ll be today. You should come with us.”

“I can’t take those shots. Pass out every time.”

Aimee lapsed into stricken silence and Diane scowled at me, her eyes rolling in Aimee’s direction. She fussed with the child’s hair. Aimee began singing something to herself.

“Are you working today?” Diane said.

I nodded.

“What will you try first? I just don’t see how you could track down someone like this. I’ve heard Macy talk about the newspaper clippings. They’ve been mailed from everywhere.”

“I have to give it a try. There’s always a place to start.”

“Where will you start?”

I just smiled.

Diane pouted. “Trusting, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“What clippings, Diane?”

“Hush.” She turned her face and I could see it out of
the corner of my eye — a very rare thing, fine bones and full, curved cheeks and clear creamy skin. No bumps, no marks. Small white teeth. “Well,” she said, “if I was going to be the detective I know where I’d go first.”

“Oh, you do?” Her good spirits were beginning to warm me.

She smiled smugly. “Yes. First of all I’d want to know about the child who didn’t die. Then I’d want to find... relatives, friends. Persons like that. Maybe one of them has carried a grudge all these years.”

“It’s possible.”

She hit me sharply on the leg. “You’re hopeless.”

“How has Macy felt about these newspaper stories?”

“Diane,
what
stories?”

“Now, we’re talking about something — grown-up. Very stuffy.”

Aimee bounced once on the rich leather seat cover and was still. We passed a parrot jungle and her eyes were large as she turned her head, catching glimpses of the bright-feathered birds. I slowed down so she could look.

“Can we go there sometime?” She bounced on the seat again.

“Sometime,” Diane said. To me she said, “He’s sort of acted like it was a joke. You know, the kind of joke somebody thinks is funny to make again and again but really isn’t, only you laugh so people won’t know you’re irritated by it. He doesn’t think anything can happen to him.”

She looked away, not liking the questioning to be reversed. Her fingers reached out to the radio and she turned it on.

“Do you think you’ll find this killer, Pete?” she asked, then, when Aimee looked curiously at her, apparently wished she hadn’t said killer.

“I don’t know.” I slowed down, looked down the road, sped past a wobbly truck smoking like a clogged fireplace. “Maybe.”

“You must be pretty good,” Diane said. “I’ve heard Macy talk about you. He doesn’t understand you, but he likes you. Maybe for the same reason I like you. Because you’re not so easy to understand. You’ve a hard shiny surface around something that might be very good to know.”

A guitar whanged furiously from the radio. An astonishing voice cried:
“... Down at the end of Lonely Street, that’s — Heartbreak Hotel.”
Diane made a face and changed stations.

“Easy, lady,” I said, half-kidding, half-warning. I remembered the beach scene the night before, the long lush body, the touch of her fingertips.

She dug in her purse for cigarettes, found one and lit it. She offered a drag to me and I took it, passed the cigarette back.

“You married, Pete?”

“No. Engaged.”

She smoked for a while, silently. Breeze from the rolled-down windows lifted her hair away from her neck. She smoothed it absently. “Why did you leave her to come back?”

“That’s kind of a stupid question, coming from you. It wasn’t because I wanted to.”

“Let up on me, mister. The tone hurts.”

“Sorry. I’m hurting, too.” I wished she hadn’t spoken.
Thinking about Elaine wasn’t so good. It took my thoughts away from the job I had to do, so Macy could go on living. I wondered how Elaine would explain to her parents why I wasn’t around, why I had to leave so suddenly for Castile. For a moment I regretted I hadn’t told her everything. But it would only have caused her to worry more. My fingers ached from the tightness of my grip on the wheel. I knew now how others had felt when Macy’s kind of pressure was applied. Like the city official who committed suicide. I could hate Macy now, where once there was only dislike.

“What has he got on you, Pete?” Diane asked.

“You know everything else,” I said. “You should know that.”

“That’s not fair,” she murmured, and turned from me to look out the window.

I wondered about her. By her own admission she wasn’t normal. But nothing she had said or done in the brief time I had known her indicated any irrationality. She seemed shrewd and well-bred, with a spark of fun in her. From a purely physical standpoint, she was breathtaking. She could have been twenty-five or thirty. She was something of a mystery herself, and there were questions I wanted to ask her, and would, at a better time. I wanted to know why she was with Macy, why she had let herself be handed around like a piece of furniture.

Diane was very quiet now, and her face had a way of becoming smooth and still, without a flicker of animation, until it was like something painted with the greatest delicacy and closest attention to detail, but painted still. I knew that when the time would be right for the questions
I would find her protective coating as hard to crack as she claimed mine to be. I wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to hold the remarkable body captive, feel all its strength and softness and fire. I squelched the thought harshly. I recalled what Macy had said about her that morning. He had done nothing with her. But maybe she was a woman who chose her men as carefully as she chose fine clothes.

Yet Stan Maxine had had her for a while. When I had known him he was a young, ruthless hood with a dark unsavory look that many women had been dumbly, helplessly attracted to. I wondered how Diane had treated Stan, a greedy and avaricious lover.

“You worked for Stan Maxine a while, didn’t you?” I asked her.

I thought for a moment she would ignore me. Then she said, “Yes. I was a cashier in his restaurant for a few months. Stan’s restaurant is one of the favorites in Castile. Then I worked in the supply house for a while. Stan owns a firm that supplies linen to hotels and restaurants and bars.”

It sounded like a nice front, and undoubtedly was a financially sound enterprise. I wondered how much rough work was necessary before hotel owners saw the advantages of Stan’s service.

“Did you ever know Stan?”

“I knew him. A long time ago.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t get along,” she said.

“How did you get along with him?”

She finished the cigarette and tucked it into the dashboard ashtray. “I liked him,” she said simply. “I still like him.”

Castile’s southernmost suburbs began to cluster beside the wide highway and traffic slowed. At Balmar I cut across town to the Mulloy Freeway and went into the city by way of the airport. Diane gave me the address of a clinic on Shrader Boulevard. I left her and Aimee there, and drove downtown to the
Sun-Express
building.

In the file room of the
Sun-Express
I found follow-up stories on the fire. One of them told me the lone survivor was a six-year-old named Carla Kennedy. She was the oldest of the three children. No mention was made of how she escaped the fire. The little girl had been badly burned and was recovering in Good Shepherd Hospital. None of the stories mentioned any relatives of the Kennedys.

The four clippings about the fire that Macy had received had been taken from the noon edition of the Castile
Sun,
dated May 19, 1932. The issues of the newspaper were preserved on microfilm.

At Good Shepherd Hospital I spent three quarters of an hour looking through boxes of old ledgers and records before I found out that Carla Kennedy had been discharged from the hospital thirty-one days after the fire in the care of an uncle, Victor Clare. There was an address, so faded it couldn’t be read. The child’s medical record was stored somewhere else, so I didn’t bother looking for it. Next stop: Southern Bell.

There were three Clares in the ’32 telephone directory. V. E. Clare lived at 6906 Monessen. I looked up the street on a city map.

On my way to Victor Clare’s address I went by the block where the tailor Kennedy had been burned out. Most of an old neighborhood shopping center had been razed in favor of modern apartments. There was a drive-in
near the former location of the shop, half a block of asphalt chopped up into rectangles by yellow guide lines for parking, with a circular barbecue shack in the center. On a hot night you could probably smell the place half a mile downwind. Girl carhops in sandals, chartreuse Bermudas and perky little overseas caps leaned into the shade afforded by a tired awning and lifted one foot and then the other away from the slow sizzle of the asphalt. So that was progress. I drove on.

The Monessen address was a narrow pink stucco apartment house with two stories of screened porches across the front supported by flaked white columns. The place looked like last year’s birthday cake. I parked in front and went up to the door. There was a small bicycle parked in the middle of the yellow lawn and a ’49 Ford halfway down the drive that ended in a sagging garage at the rear of the place. I went inside. There was a door to the left in the small foyer and a flight of stairs with worn rubber matting that led steeply to the second floor. Two mailboxes gave me the names Matlock and Torrance. No Clare.

I looked up the steps and sighed. Halfway up there was a shallow depression in the plaster, as if the upstairs tenant paused in his journey up the steps each evening to beat his head against the wall. I reached out and touched the doorbell button of the downstairs apartment.

The door was opened presently by a girl about five feet tall wearing pale blue jeans and a man’s handkerchief tied around her forehead. She held an infant in one small arm. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

She smiled up at me. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Matlock?”

“Ye-es.” She sort of blushed at the thought that she was Mrs. Matlock.

“I’m trying to find out about a man who used to live here. A Mr. Clare. It was about twenty-five years ago.”

Mrs. Matlock frowned slightly. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help. I wasn’t even born then.”

“Have you lived here long?”

“Oh, no. About a year.”

“Do you remember who had the apartment before you?”

“Some people named Gruen. Like the watch. They lived here since before the Second World War.”

“I see. Uh — the people upstairs. Torrance? Do you know how long they’ve—”

The baby gurgled comfortably. Mrs. Matlock stood patiently, holding the weight of him on one hip. “They’ve only lived here about four months. Before then Frank’s — Mr. Matlock’s — grandmother lived alone upstairs. She lived here for a long time.”

“Do you know where I might get in touch with Mrs. Matlock?”

“Oh, you couldn’t. I mean, she died. About six months ago. Ye gads, the phone. I’ll get rid of whoever it is.” She thrust the baby at me. “Here, you hold — do you know how to hold?”

I took the baby and showed her I knew how to hold. She scampered off to the phone. She was back in a minute. “Thanks, I’ll take him. C’mon, Stevie.” She heaved him gently to her shoulder. “Woof, he’s getting heavy,” she said. “You see, Frank and I own the apartment. His grandmother gave it to us when we got married. Said we’d need a place, we were just starting out, and she just
wanted a roof over her head. A place to sit until she died, she used to say. She was kind of funny. Then she did die. After that we let the Torrances move in. They’re about our age. We play bridge every Wednesday.” She looked at me expectantly.

“I — thank you for giving me so much of your time, Mrs. Matlock.”

“That’s all right. You didn’t tell me your name.”

“Mallory. Pete Mallory.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Mr. Mallory.”

I said goodbye and helped her shut the door. Outside I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. The rest of the block consisted of small houses, except for a used-furniture store toward the Kelvin Boulevard intersection and a drugstore across the street from that.

I tried the house next door on the right. On the porch two small boys were drawing on the floor with chalk. A dog bared his teeth at me and backed under a chair at the same time. A plump white-haired woman was using a vacuum cleaner in the living room. Without turning off the vacuum or stopping work, she put across to me that she had never heard of Victor Clare.

Across the street a thin tired-looking man sat on the porch, his long brown hair waving in the stream of air from a fan about a foot from his face. He was reading a racing sheet and making marks in some kind of personal code on a pad of scratch paper. He gave me the time it took him to light a fresh cigarette. He managed to light it and keep a hand over the scratch pad at the same time. It was quite a feat.

He didn’t know Victor Clare. His wife didn’t know Victor Clare. They had lived in the house about ten years.
He didn’t remember the name of the man they had bought the house from. I wouldn’t want him to look it up, would I? I told him not to bother.