Читать книгу Mambo to Murder - Ronal Kayser - Страница 4

“YOU’RE through, Moran. And you can thank me for that.” It made my guts squirm to listen to this creepy cop, this Lieutenant Elmer Hoke.

He was telling me my fortune . . . no future at all! Three years ago I’d come out to the West Coast, had spent all that time and all my dough trying to make a go of the Joe Moran Agency, and now Hoke was running me out of California.

That’s what he thought. The future had its own ideas: a dancing girl playing post office with crime, a redheaded kid dreaming about Three Bears, an ex-carnie hardshot cracking a bullwhip, a deafie reading lips in a night-club, a Mr. Murder spinning the Hot and Cold valves . . .

Let me tell you about the last, dying hours of Friday, March 19.

Hoke’s a lanky, big-boned cop with a sour look on his hatchet face. As he talked now he waved his sap at me. How that man loved his billy. He was always hauling it out of his hip pocket, limbering it up, testing his skill by swatting flies off the walls of San Diego Headquarters without denting the plaster. A while back, before the Eleredge mess made enemies of us, he’d explained to me the special construction of his sap. Besides the usual load of buckshot, the leather tube was sewn around an eight-inch coiled steel spring. The spring was the secret of Hoke’s touch. With a flick of the wrist he could knock you cold, with just a little extra wrist snap could crack your brain pan.

This Friday Hoke had been up in Sacramento testifying to the State Board that the Eleredge dame swiped her own jewels for the insurance, and that he figured I was in on it. He’d flown back to San Diego on a plane which dropped onto Lindbergh Field around eleven P.M. Cabbing up Broadway, he’d seen the light burning in my office, and naturally he couldn’t resist the first chance of rubbing my face into his dirt.

What he didn’t know was that in the middle of the afternoon the attorney representing me in Sacramento had phoned long-distance . . . and I was waiting for Hoke, laying for him . . . going to clobber the very be-Jesus out of him.

He walked across the office to where my license hung behind the glass of its blondewood frame. “You won’t be needing this any more. I’m gonna take it with me, gonna plaster it on my wall at Headquarters.”

A flirt of his billy wiped the glass clean out of the frame. The fingers of his left hand reached up and peeled out the license paper. He looked at me. I looked back at him, and I didn’t say a word. Losing the license hurt me where it’d hurt Marciano if they sawed his right arm off at the elbow.

“It’s my trophy now, Moran,” Hoke smirked. “Like when a man shoots a moose. He’s sure as hell entitled to hang up the stuffed head and horns. Ain’t he?”

Still I said nothing, just thought to myself how much fun I could have toasting Elmer Hoke’s eyeballs on kabob sticks. My silence annoyed the cop. The sap in his fist started a weaving motion, same as the head of a striking rattler.

“Another thing,” he gibed out of a twisted, seamy lip sneer. “Now you’re out of business, you don’t qualify for a gun permit. You hand that over, and I’ll pin it up with the rest of my souvenirs.”

Actually I could have given him an argument there, since I’d got the permit through the sheriff’s office, not the police department. I didn’t argue. A California firearms permit is an outsize deal that has to be folded to go into a wallet. I opened my wallet, shucked out the permit onto my desk top.

Hoke stepped up to the desk, and to do that he planted his foot on the floor throw rug. I snatched the desk lamp, jerked it, and the cord from the lamp that ran on down under the rug’s edge came up behind Hoke’s ankle. He gave a surprised jump and looked comically to see what had him by the hind leg.

I grabbed his right arm in both my hands, lifted it, brought it down across the desk edge as you’d snap a kindling stick over your knee.

Elmer Hoke squealed like a stockyards pig. . . . I had to laugh when I thought of the recorder hooked up in the next office, of the tape I could play over for the rest of my life, and in my ears it’d be sweeter than love’s old sweet song.

The sap spilled out of Hoke’s numb paw. I grabbed it . . . and leaned the weight of my other hand onto the cop’s throat, twisted and pinned him across the desk. He had a gun, sure . . . but he wore it in a fanny holster so he’d no chance of making a draw.

Keeping him pinned, I started tickling his face with the sap. I tapped him teasingly at first, then harder and harder, while his puss bounced like crazy.

“You lying bastard! Framing me! Crucifying me!”

After a while, I caught on I was talking to myself. Hoke hadn’t any bounce left in him . . . tell the truth, my emotions had gotten the best of me! My eardrums were roaring with delirious pressure, and my glands were squeezing out saliva that drooled down my chin. I stepped back, and looked at Hoke sprawled in front of me with his face and the desk top all one gorgeous lather of blood.

What the hell! I’d known all along it’d be like this . . . once I got started, I maybe wouldn’t have sense enough to stop . . . and I’d fixed things for a fast get-away.

I had my suitcases all packed into my green Chevvie outside and the tank loaded for an all-night run. I’d hung Arizona plates on my car, plastered a Vote for Water Bonds sticker across the rear bumper, put a squirrel tail on the radio mast and a big red plastic wind divider in front. So it wasn’t a green Chevrolet the highway patrol would be apt to stop if they had a description of my machine.

And I was damned glad I’d taken care of these details in advance, because maybe I’d killed Hoke. He was alive, though, and he blew a blood bubble to prove it. So I took his gun, racked the slugs from it, then walked to the window. I raised the sash, tossed the cartridges into Broadway below.

As I stood there at the window, I kind of half-noticed a Yellow Cab drawn up in front of the Sheldon Dance Studio across the drag, under the neon dancing-girl sign inviting guys to Be Popular, Learn to Dance in 10 Easy Lessons. By the time I pulled down the sash, a dame had unloaded onto the sidewalk . . . her dress, what there was of it, being about the same yellow as the cab. The two yellows made a dim impression on me, then were forgotten as I walked back and hung the empty rod onto Elmer Hoke’s tail.

He stirred, wheezed out some lispy words. “Goddam yuh, Moran . . . arresh yuh . . . reshishing an offisher!”

His voice sounded all screwed up because I’d busted the plate that anchored a pair of his front teeth.

I said, “Yeah. Let’s tear-ass down to Market Street and put it on the blotter how I beat the crap out of you. Only don’t kid yourself you can make any charges stick.”

Feeling swell, I hauled out the desk drawer and gave him a peek at the recorder “bug.” Way that worked was, I had a phone jack installed and an extension wire fixed so when I was out Jean Orlando next door could take my phone calls in her public stenographer’s office. I’d the bug hooked into this set-up, and the recorder in Jean’s desk was swallowing every word.

“Got it on tape I wasn’t resisting you in any official capacity,” I enlightened the cop, “seeing you said yourself you were paying me a strictly personal, souvenir-chasing call.”

Hoke wheezed out a short breath blew a spray of blood that rained mostly on his own shirt front. He knew he’d get nowhere with a jury trial while such a recording existed, and he turned around heading for the door.

Well, ha-ha! His ankle was still circled by the light cord. He did a belly flop, cursed, waved and kicked his feet free.

“Drop in and see me again, Elmer. This is something we must do more often.”

He got up, reached the door and held onto the knob to steady himself. The belly flop had finished wrecking his plate. The teeth flanged out of his bleeding mouth. They looked like tusks, and Hoke looked like a wounded wild boar sticking its wet red snoot out of the bushes.

“I’ll be back, Moran. This time I got your license, next fast one you pull I’m gonna put you behind bars.”

His threat didn’t worry me one damned bit, then. I’d be out of the state just as fast as I could kick the Chevvie across the Valley and over the bridge at Yuma.

The instant Hoke pulled his freight, I beat it next door, yanked the tape out of the recorder, fed it into an envelope I had already stamped and addressed to J. Moran, General Delivery, Yuma, Arizona. I put in a fresh tape, left the recording rig there . . . kind of a going-away present for Jean Orlando.

I went down the hall, dropped the envelope in the mail chute; then I scuttled back into my office, remembering something. I’d pitched Hoke’s sap behind the desk when I’d needed both hands unloading his gun. With a grin I scooped it up . . . kind of a souvenir of Elmer Hoke to hang on my next wall!

I pocketed the sap, and just as I arrived at the door on my way out the dame in the yellow dress arrived on her way in.

“You in charge here?” she asked.

I looked at her. She was worth looking at. Not her face so much . . . anyway, not right now, her mop of brunette hair being disheveled, and nothing but streaks of lipstick left. What caught my eyes was below the scanty fur cape she wore slung over her shoulders which fell inches short of meeting the low scooped bodice of the yellow dress that was cut down to where it revealed her half naked. The yellow cloth fitted the undercurves of her breasts glove-tight, hugged what I guessed to be a 21-inch waist, then traced the shape of her hips. The whole effect was the same as a silk nightie in a high wind.

“Yeah, I’m in charge.” My mouth suddenly tasted shriveled and itchy.

“I need some help, trying to locate a missing man.”

“Sorry, I’m closing up here.”

I could go to the pen for taking on a new case since Hoke had my license revoked! I knew it, and still my voice couldn’t have sounded too firm about closing up. Anyway, the girl had her gold mesh purse ready and jawed open. She pulled out two twenties and a ten that she shoved at me.

“I want you to try and find him tonight if possible, and if it takes longer I can raise some more money.”

For ten times her fifty bucks I wouldn’t have risked it . . . but the brunette’s curves floating up out of her dress-top gave me the damndest, wild, crazy feeling. Half an hour ago, I’d been so low I could have cared less. The pasting I’d handed Elmer Hoke, though, left me all worked up and really sensitized to a woman.

“Well-l . . .” I pulled the door shut behind me. I couldn’t let her inside the place with all that blood over everything. And now we were standing so close that I breathed in her smell of mingled perfume and perspiration. There was something so physical about that, it tied me in knots. “Put away your money . . . but, look. I’ll take you out, buy you a drink, listen while you tell me all about it.”

We went downstairs, around to the parking lot. I turned the Chev up Fifth, switching on the rheostat control to get the maximum amount of power from the green dash panel lights. I liked the effect of the deep shadow it painted between her breasts, bringing out their rounded depth and fullness. I kept looking at her, nodding, tossing in a question now and then while she talked.

She told me her name, Shona Pell, and said she worked as an instructress at the Sheldon Studio . . . and that much of her story I could believe. It explained the clothes she wore, the smell of perspiration which excited me. I already knew that on Friday nights the studio threw its weekly social dance for its pupils.

She said, “Working practically next door, right across the street from your detective agency, naturally I thought of you when Mr. Westburne disappeared.”

“Westburne.” I had her give me the missing guy’s full handle, Alan J. Westburne. Had her spell it out. “What is he, a relative or your boy-friend?”

“Oh, no, there’s nothing personal between us in any way. He’s one of my students at Sheldon’s. Wednesday and Saturday are his regular nights for the private lessons, and last Wednesday for the first time he didn’t show up. Then tonight he missed a Friday night dance. I’ve an awful hunch something’s wrong, and I’m trying to find out what could have happened to him.”

If I’d had a beard, by this time I’d have been laughing behind it. “What are you handing me?”

“Handing?”

“A dance-mill teacher willing to spend fifty bucks because some jerk skips a couple of his ten easy lessons . . . think I’ll swallow that story?”

Shona Pell fired back, “You never took any dance instruction yourself, did you?”

“No, I just get out on the floor and let nature take its course.”

“You would, you’re the confident type. But if you’d ever signed up, you’d find twenty-five dollars for the ten easy lessons is just the beginning. You’d learn a waltz turn and a few uncomplicated steps. We girls at Sheldon’s can’t afford to teach any more than that. We’re paid one dollar a lesson, and out of that we have to pay for our nylons and shoe leather and dry-cleaning and even our records.”

“Records?”

“Phonograph records, the music to dance to. You know, the lessons are in little private rooms, just the girl and the student and the phonograph in there.”

I grinned. “Sounds like a tit-for-two proposition, one I could really go for.”

“No, I’m not in the business of peddling sex. . . . First thing I’m selling is the advanced rumba course. It costs a hundred dollars, and I’m paid a fifty percent commission.”

“A lot of chumps fall for it?”

“A lot of them go on from there and buy the annual membership. That’s fifty-two private lessons and fifty-two social dances, priced at three hundred and the commission is a third.”

“Maybe I’m in the wrong racket. I should hire a hall, employ some fast-talking girls on a commission basis.”

Shona gave her brunette hair-do a toss: “It’s not what you think, Mr. Moran. This isn’t a racket. It’s legitimate.”

“No law against it, huh?”

“Men spend three hundred and more a year on golf club memberships, don’t they? And buy lessons from the pro, besides the balls and caddy fees and tips. They do it because golf is fun and an asset to a man professionally and socially. Well, so is dancing fun and a professional and social asset.”

“Uh . . . put it that way . . .”

“I’m no cheap little sex tramp. When I go into that private room with a student, I’m a professional woman selling a commodity that has value. A lot of my students are mature men having business contacts with women, and you’d be surprised how dancing helps. I don’t mean just getting by in the crowd, as the average man does when he barely manages to stay off his partner’s feet. I’m speaking of the man who can lead a woman out into the ballroom, instantly adapt himself to her degree of skill, then take command of the situation with so sure a touch that she unhesitatingly surrenders herself to his direction.”

Of course I knew it was what she told all the boys, her sales talk, but even at that Shona’s silky voice did things to my skin.

“What was Westburne taking?” I asked. “The ten easy lessons, the advanced rumba deal, or the king-sized annual course?”

“There’s still another one. Just as golf clubs sell life memberships, Sheldon’s will enroll a student permanently. The life member is always in practice, always the first to know the latest steps, is always welcome in any Sheldon’s studio in any major city of the U.S.A.”

“What’s that cost?”

“Three thousand dollars, and my cut is twenty-five percent.”

“Seven hundred and fifty bucks,” I already reckoned.

Shona nodded. “That’s it, and I had him all lined up. He’d promised to sign on the dotted line. He was going to bring his check last Wednesday night.”

“Other words, you’re willing to spend fifty bucks locating the buy because he’s worth seven hundred and fifty to you?”

“That’s it, Mr. Moran.”