The Way Some People Die (8 page)

“I know several thousand people, several dozen colonels. I don’t know a Henry Fellows.”

“Then it couldn’t have been Henry who struck you and knocked you unconscious?”

I felt out of touch with reality, wherever it was. The big car rolling across the star-blanched desert might have been a spaceship just landed on the moon. “Where did you get that idea?”

“I just wondered.”

“Did you see him?”

“No, I didn’t.” She sounded uncomfortable. “It was a silly idea. I shouldn’t have put it into words.”

“What does he look like?”

She answered reluctantly, then warmed to her work: “He’s a large man, in his forties—a great tall powerful creature. I need a big man to set me off, you know. Henry’s quite distinguished looking with his nice brown wavy hair, and the gray at his temples.” A sharper note entered her voice: “He’s very attractive to women.”

I tried to dredge up an image of the man who had knocked me out, but nothing came. I had had no time to turn and look at him. Perhaps I had seen his shadow on the veranda floor. I couldn’t even be sure of that.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Henry,” I said. “You don’t have any reason to think it was?”

“No. I shouldn’t have said it.”

“How do you spell the last name?”

She spelled it out for me. “I’m Marjorie Fellows. But if he thinks he can carry on like this, even before our honeymoon is over—I shan’t be Marjorie Fellows for long!” Her mind was helplessly hung up between love for Henry and resentment of him. New tears glittered like rhinestones on her lashes.

I felt sorry for the big soft woman, driving her car along unpeopled streets in early-morning darkness—a poor sort of way to pass a honeymoon. She seemed out of place on the California desert.

“Where did you meet Colonel Fellows?”

“In Reno.” But she had remembered her pride, and it stiffened her voice: “I don’t care to discuss it. Please forget what I said.”

At the next corner, she jerked the steering-wheel viciously, cutting the wheels so the tires ground in the
stones. There was a little settlement of lights ahead, which became a scattering of buildings behind an adobe wall. A score of cars were parked with their noses to the wall, a single taxi at the end of the line. A blue neon sign,
OASIS INN
, hung over the entrance of the largest building, which fronted on the road.

She turned her car into an empty space between two others, switched off the engine and headlights. We got out together.

As we walked down the line of cars towards the entrance, a man emerged from the shadows under the stucco portico. He strode towards us, literally shouting: “Marjorie! Where have you been?”

She stood still, frightened stiff, unable to answer him. He stepped up close to her, tall and wide and angry. “Where have you been?”

I said: “Fortunately for me, your wife decided to go for a midnight drive. I was lost in the desert, my car broke down, and she gave me a lift to civilization.” This was civilization. And I was back on the little-boy-lost routine again.

“What made you do that, Marjorie?” One of his hands closed over one of her arms. The flesh bulged out on either side of it, and she winced.

I thought of hitting him. He was big enough to make it worth while, a powerful-looking heavyweight with a nose like a battering ram. It would give me a good deal of satisfaction, but on the other hand it woudn’t help Marjorie. Henry would have the rest of their life together to take it out on her, and he looked like the man to do just that.

“Why shouldn’t I go for a ride by myself?” She jerked her arm free. “What do you care? You go away and neglect me all the time.”

“Now, darling, that’s not fair. You had me worried sick when you didn’t come home.”

“Were you really worried, Henry?”

“You know I was. I can’t have my sweet girl wandering around in the desert at all hours of the night.” His pale eyes glared in my direction, as if I had kidnapped his bride.

Marjorie was doing fine, it seemed. I thanked her and said good night. She fluttered a hand at me, then tucked it possessively under the big man’s arm.

CHAPTER
11
    
It was nearly eight by my watch
, and delivery trucks were honking their matins, when I got back to town. I was feeling accident-prone, and I drove within the speed limit. The twisted scrap of mind the night had left me was concentrated on Keith Dalling. He had escorted me gracefully into a very queer setup, and gracefully run out. I owed him an opportunity to explain. His yellow Buick was in the parking lot behind the Casa Loma. I eased my car in beside it and got out. The Buick was locked and empty.

An outside wooden staircase led up from the parking lot to a series of long porches across the rear wall of the building. Dalling’s back door, if he had one, would be on the second floor at the far right end. A milkman ran down the stairs, a metal basket full of empty bottles clanking in each hand. “Morning,” he cried. “Up early, eh?” He disappeared down the alley.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor and followed the veranda to the end. Dalling’s apartment had a back door, with a black 8 stenciled on it. The door was an inch ajar, and it opened wider when I knocked. An alarm clock chirped on the other side of the wall, uneager feet shuffled across
a floor. Neither my knocking nor the neighbor’s alarm clock wakened Dalling.

I pushed the door wide open and entered his kitchen. It was a bachelor’s kitchen done by an expressionist scene-designer, probably a Russian. The sink was brimming with dirty water in which a half-submerged pagoda of dirty dishes stood precariously. There were more dirty dishes and a bottle half full of sour milk on the folding table attached to the wall in the breakfast corner. What I could see of the linoleum floor was glazed with grime. But most of it was covered with empty whisky bottles in staggered rows, a sad little monument to Dalling’s thirst. Many of the bottles were pints and some were half-pints, which meant that Dalling had sometimes had no more than a dollar between him and sobriety.

I picked my way across the floor to the open door of the living-room. Someone had smashed a bottle on the door frame. The jagged dried splash on the wall still smelled of bourbon, and the floor was littered with brown shards of glass which crunched under my feet.

The living-room was dim behind closed Venetian blinds. I jerked the cord to let the morning in, and looked around me. A scarred prewar radio-phonograph stood by the window, with piles of records on the floor beside it. There was a shallow fireplace in the inside wall, containing a cold gas heater unnecessarily protected by a brass fire-screen. On the wall above the fireplace Van Gogh’s much reproduced sunflowers burned in a bamboo frame. The mantel held some old copies of
Daily Variety
and
Hollywood Reporter
, and a few books: cheap reprints of Thorne Smith, Erskine Caldwell, the poems of Joseph Moncure March, and
The Lost Weekend
. There was one handsome book, a copy of
Sonnets from the Portuguese
bound in green tooled leather. Its flyleaf was inscribed: “If thou must love me, let it be
for naught except for love’s sake only.—Jane.” Jane wrote a precise small hand.

The most conspicuous piece of furniture was a Murphy bed standing on its hind legs in a doorway across the room. I had to push it aside before I could get through the door. I did this with my elbow, instead of my fingerprint surfaces. I suppose I smelled the blood before I was conscious of it.

There was a great deal of blood in the little hallway on the other side of the door. It covered the floor from wall to wall, a dark pool filming over now and beginning to cake at the edges. Dalling lay in the middle of it, prone on his back and finished. His waxen profile caught the light that shone through the bathroom door. At first glance I couldn’t make out the hole through which the blood had wasted. Leaning over, I saw the puncture in the far slope of his neck and the powder burns on his collar. He was dressed as I had seen him in Palm Springs, and he made a handsome corpse. Any mortician would have been proud of Dalling.

A sheaf of envelopes and folded papers lay on the un-breathing chest halfway out of the jacket’s inside pocket. Hugging the door frame with one crooked elbow, I leaned further out over the red pool and got them. It wasn’t legal, but on the other hand paper seldom took usable fingerprints.

I went back to the window with the papers, and read through them quickly. A Third Street auto agency intended to repossess the Buick if Dalling didn’t pay overdue installments of one hundred and sixty-five dollars and fifty cents. A note on the letterhead of a talent agency, signed by one of its partners, stated that things were tough all over in show biz, if that was any comfort, but TV might make a few more jobs in the fall. An overdraft notice from a
downtown bank hinted at a threat of legal proceedings. A Beverly Hills tailor was turning over his account to a collection agency.

I returned to the door of the hallway and took a second look for a gun. There was none in sight, and it wasn’t likely that Dalling had fallen on it in his position. Somebody else had done him the final favor.

There was only one personal letter, written on an interoffice memo form from a Hollywood radio station. It was handwritten in neat small calligraphy, and signed Jane:

Dear Keith, It may be difficult for you to believe, under the circumstances, that I was glad to hear from you, but, even under the circumstances, I truly was. I shall always be glad to hear from you, whatever the reason. I don’t think, however, that it would be good for either of us to try to renew our relationship, as you suggest. What’s past is past, though I think of you often and bear you no ill feeling. I do hope, Keith, that you are taking better care of yourself now. I enclose my personal check for one hundred dollars, and trust it will tide you over your current embarrassment
.

Yours sincerely
,    
Jane
            

Jane’s full name was written above the station call-letters that were printed on the envelope. It was Jane Starr Hammond. The envelope had been postmarked early in March.

I found her name again in the small red leather address-book that was the last of the items from Dalling’s breast pocket. There were a great many names in the book, nine out of ten of them female, and a great many telephone numbers. The only addresses and telephone numbers that interested me deeply were the ones on the last page: Mrs.
Samuel Lawrence’s and my own. I tore out that last page, and put the book and the bills and the letters back where I had got them.

Dalling had no more use for Malibu telephone numbers or hundred-dollar loans. He’d keep no more whisky vigils in the Murphy bed, with desperation and a dying bottle for bedmates. No one would ever send him another book of poems with love written small and neat on the flyleaf.

There were two men starting their cars in the parking lot, but they didn’t pay any special attention to me. I got into my car and switched on the engine. The yellow Buick stood there waiting to be repossessed.

CHAPTER
12
:     
I called Jane Starr Hammond’s
number from a short-order restaurant on the boulevard. If I reached her before the body was discovered and the police visited her, I might learn something that I otherwise wouldn’t. A maid with a Negro lilt in her voice answered the phone immediately. Miss Hammond had already left for the studio; she would be in her office there the rest of the morning. I went back to my seat at the counter and contemplated the ham and eggs I had ordered. The yolk of one of the eggs had leaked out onto the plate like a miniature pool of yellow blood. I had black coffee for breakfast.

Parking spaces in downtown Hollywood were as scarce as the cardinal virtues. I found a place on Cahuenga and walked back to the studio, which occupied the third and fourth floors of a stone-faced building on Sunset. When I asked for Miss Hammond’s office, the blue-uniformed elevator attendant let me off on the third floor and pointed
down the corridor. Her name was on the translucent glass pane of a door, with
PRIVATE
printed underneath. I knocked lightly and waited, undergoing a rare attack of embarrassment. It passed.

“Come in,” a cool voice answered, “it isn’t locked.”

I stepped into a light and airy office and closed the door behind me. Its opposite wall was a giant studio window. A young woman sat with her back to the light, working at a bleached mahogany desk. She was as crisp and exact as the daffodils in the square white bowl at her elbow. She was shiny and trim in a navy blue faille suit and a flat blue sailor hat, too trim and shiny. She looked as if she was made of rustless alloys, synthetic rubber and dyes, powered by a chrome-plated engine clicking away inside her porcelain chest. She wore a fresh gardenia on her lapel.

She looked up from the typescript she was penciling, and caught me regarding the hat. “Pay no attention to the flying saucer.” She showed her small even teeth in a practiced smile. “I have to interview a ladybird this morning. As a matter of fact, I thought you might be she.”

“I’m usually compared to insects like the cockroach.”

“I mean when you knocked. Don’t you know what a ladybird is? A ladybird is a bird who thinks she’s a lady. The hat helps me to dominate, you know? This particular ladybird has slain wild elephants with a wild elephant gun, so she’ll take some dominating. Now tell me you’re her husband.” She smiled expertly again. If her nose had been a trifle less sharp, her eyes a few degrees warmer, she would have been a very pretty woman. I couldn’t imagine her writing the inscription in the
Sonnets from the Portuguese
.

I said: “My name is Archer. You
are
Miss Hammond?”

“You surprise and distress me, Mr. Archer. My fair pan was on the cover of
Radio Mirror
last month.” I wondered
if she worked this hard selling herself all day every day.

“What can I do for you?” she said. “I only have a minute.”

“I’m looking for a woman named Galley Lawrence. Mrs. Joseph Tarantine. Do you know her?”