Читать книгу Mambo to Murder - Ronal Kayser - Страница 5

I STEERED over onto Fourth, past the Poinsetta Apartments. Should have been P-o-i-n-s-e-t-t-i-a but the landlady couldn’t spell. I’d lived there for the last three years and still had the apartment key on my chain.

So in the next block I nosed the Chev into the Tiki-Tiki Club parking lot. Shutting off the motor, I twisted in the seat so’s to face Shona. Sure, she’d told a cold-boiled, business tale. But she’d a hot sexiness, too, and it made me feel as if I’d swallowed a corkscrew that stayed stuck in my throat.

I asked, “Did Westburne make a verbal contract with you in front of witnesses?”

“No, we talked in the practice room.”

“Then all you’ve got is your word against his. He’s probably changed his mind and ducked out. You can’t hold him. Might as well hang onto your fifty bucks.”

Her voice went husky. It slurred, “You find him, Mr. Moran. I’ll handle him from there on.”

“What makes you so sure? . . . Never mind answering that yet. Tell me while we catch a drink here.”

“Wait’ll I fix my face.”

She dug into her mesh purse. I switched up the dome light, watched while she mended her lipstick. Her mouth was a bit too big for prettiness, but in my experience that’s a sign of a passionate nature. Her hair was chestnut colored, so thick she struggled to drag a comb through it.

The corkscrew turned against my tonsils. Maybe I’d have to take the insane risk of sticking around ’Diego long enough to locate Westburne, if that’s what I had to do to make the grade with Shona.

We went in through the Tiki-Tiki’s side entrance, into the Hawaiian Room. The place makes a play for Navy brass. Officers on shore duty come in there and soak up the tropic atmosphere of fishnets, palm fronds, an electric waterfall behind the bar. Then a nice feature of the place is Babe, the well-stacked “Polynesian” hostess from Lemon Grove that I used to romance before she married the club bouncer, Nick Alession.

Babe guided us to the quiet corner booth, and over by the bar stood Nick bugging his eyes out approvingly at Shona . . . slitting them when he saw me. On her wedding night Babe must have confessed her past to the guy. No other reason why he’d suddenly taken to hating me.

Nuts to Nick. I’d picked here because if a few drinks made Shona playful, it was only a lurch and a stagger to my apartment. I watched her settle into the booth, and when she dropped the fur cape off her shoulders my appreciation went up ten points. Sm-o-o-th. The bald commander at the table nearest our corner thought so, too. He stared until Shona gave him the eye right back, and a smile to go with it.

It doubled me up how the commander got gray to his gills, swinging his attention fast to the middle-aged dame across the table who was probably his wife. We ordered gin-and-quinines from the grass-skirted waitress.

I said, “The more you tell me about this Westburne bird, the faster results you’ll get. No sense wasting my time and your dough digging up stuff you already know about . . . so, shoot.”

“He filled this in at the front desk,” She opened the purse and slid a pale blue card across the booth.

It said: SHELDON SCHOOL OF THE DANCE. . . . Enrollment application. There were a lot of spaces below that, most of them blank. The filled-in part told me that Alan J. Westburne was a white American male, 51, residing at No. 21, 2814 Los Gatos Street.

He hadn’t committed himself on the angles that’d really help me . . . nothing here about his occupation, employment, references. “Shutmouth bastard, huh?”

“He paid cash,” Shona explained. “That on the card is for credit references.”

“People dance on tick? What’s the country coming to?”

“Well, parents that bring in kids for tap and ballet lessons pay a little down and the rest on time. Mr. Westburne wasn’t so closemouthed. He told me a lot about himself.”

We had time out while Grass Skirt served the drinks.

“Card here’s dated February 12,” I noticed.

“Uh, huh. Lincoln’s birthday, a Friday night. The advantage of Friday night is a new student gets to meet all the instructresses, pick out the one he likes, and Westburne picked me.”

“I could put my finger on a couple of reasons.”

She said, “The other girls have those, too . . . I was a little extra nice to him. I just came out here from Minneapolis because I didn’t want to take another of those winters. Being new here, I had to build up my own following. And, well, it’s supposed to be a half-hour lesson, but a man Mr. Westburne’s age isn’t in shape to take a solid thirty-minute workout. We rested and talked and I asked him the usual questions. In a diplomatic way.”

“What way is that?”

“Why, instead of asking where he worked, I’d wonder if he had a hard day at the office. Instead of asking if he was married I put it, did Mrs. Westburne enjoy dancing.”

Shona toyed with her glass.

“Westburne just recently came out here from Chicago. He had a furniture business there. He and his partner disagreed, and finally he sold out to the partner. He and Mrs. Westburne had the idea of buying a trailer and knocking around seeing the country, then suddenly she died. Her name was Frieda. They never had any children. He was all by his lonesome, out here thinking of buying a small retirement business, and he was looking around too at back-country ranches. And he told me a lot of other little stuff that I’ve got written up in my diary.”

“How come he rated space in your diary?”

“I make notes about all my students,” Shona said. “That way I can refresh my memory, and I don’t make the mistake of trying to discuss the furniture business, for instance, with some man who’s really a paving contractor.”

I could see how they might all look pretty much alike to her, and certainly Westburne sounded average as hell. Only one detail in the picture seemed phony.

“Age 51’s pretty young to be retiring,” I said.

“He may have shaded that a little, been a few years older,” she admitted. “Anyway, he’s a nice guy, a successful man with plenty of money, but at the same time a shy, lonely kind of sad man. He reminded me of a stray pup I picked up once when I was a kid . . . you know the wistful look a lost dog has? It’s pretty rough on a man over fifty when his fife busts up . . . his marriage, his business. I think through dancing Westburne hoped to overcome his shyness and make some new social contacts. I think that’s really why he was willing to sign up for the life membership, and it wasn’t so dumb, because sometimes it really works out that way.”

I studied Shona as she talked, decided there was a lot of maternal instinct in her make-up.

“Something’s happened to him,” she worried. “When he missed last Wednesday night, well, I thought he had a cold or the flu or something. I kept expecting he’d phone, but he didn’t. Tonight when he didn’t appear again, I took a cab out to 2814 Los Gatos.”

Natch, I knew she’d done that. Nobody spends fifty smackers on a detective without first doing a little checking up on anything as elementary as a street address. Shona’s voice slowed. She spaced her words thoughtfully.

“2814 Los Gatos is a trailer court. The number twenty-one trailer space was rented to Westburne. He owned a trailer with a State of Washington tag, and Westburne put it on the court register that he hailed from Seattle. The last the court manager saw of him was Saturday. About four in the afternoon he pulled the trailer out of there. . . . What do you make of all that?”

I shrugged. Why should I be surprised?

“Guy fed you a line,” I said. “Guy changed his mind and moved on.”

Shona said in the same slow, spaced-out tones, “But he came to Sheldon’s that Saturday night as usual. He didn’t say anything then about leaving. In fact, he told me he’d made all the arrangements to buy an antique store out in La Jolla.”

“Guy changes his mind, he leaves a lot of people in the lurch.”

“Oh, but Mr. Westburne wouldn’t deliberately . . . go off without a word.” The brunette threw in a nervous gulp of the gin and quinine. “He might have taken the trailer somewhere on a day trip. He’s just the kind of lonesome, unsuspecting man who might pick up the wrong hitchhiker, and be murdered.”

“Well, what’d he look like? You got a photo of him?”

“No-o, but he’d be about my height. Five-five, he’d weigh a hundred forty to fifty, gray hair and blue eyes. He wears quite thick glasses and smokes a pipe.”

“How many men do you think that description would fit . . . ?”

I broke off, being distracted by Felix Perry teetering up to lean against our booth.

Felix wasn’t staggering drunk, he normally teetered from the effort of balancing a 48-inch belly on top of his stork legs. Out of a gloomy horse face, circles under his eyes the size of feedbags, he cracked:

“Hiya, Moran. I heard the Board took action on Lieutenant Hoke’s beef. You care to make a comment for the press?”

I gagged.

The “press” he represented was a scandal rag called the Low-Down. It came out once a week, printed on salmon pink paper, loaded with sex crime news and pub ads. Felix was the editor, besides writing a column of nightclub gossip . . . the Perryscope. He took his pay mostly in advertising duebills that he drank up around the joints.

I couldn’t decide, though, whether this frustrated Winchell was leaning into our booth to needle me or to look down inside Shona’s dress.

“Moran,” he wheedled, “you should place a quarter-page ad with us. Remember, the Colonel always gives our advertisers a fair shake in the news columns.”

The son of a bitch was trying to shake me down!

“Why don’t you beat it,” I jeered, “before you get knocked on your can?”

“You’re in no position to insult me so easy. The Low-Down packs plenty of political punch. Buy the ad, and I’ll see the Colonel goes to bat for your agency and makes it hot for Hoke.”

I jumped up . . . not so much insulted as afraid with his yak-yak he’d tip off Shona that I’d been disbarred from private investigation.

I said, “Scram, you smut-sheet phony, before I kick your ass so hard the Colonel’s back teeth rattle, too.”

Damned if he didn’t swing on me!

A punch that felt like a bee sting bopped my kisser landed by the sheer surprise of such a screwball turning pugilist. He’d asked for it, so I shifted and drove him a straight left that sank half a foot into his gut tub.

Perry pinwheeled end over end, rolled in among the legs of the commander and his wife. He lay there, waved his legs like a spider. It was a laugh, but he was belching dirty words at the top of his voice, and by grabbing the tablecloth he brought all the glasses, ice and booze into the lap of the commander’s lady. She hopped up screaming, and the commander proved he knew some dirty words.

Result was Nick Alession bull-charging across the Hawaiian Room.

“I warned you, Moran. Told you what you’d get the next time you started anything in here.”

It was no use to try and explain to Nick that I hadn’t started this shindy. He sailed a drop kick in my direction with all his two-hundred twenty pounds of ex-pro football guard behind it.

Good job I knew his style. I’d seen him bust groins before when he had a rough customer to manhandle. I jumped to one side, hammered my fist against his jowl.

He floundered backwards, might have gone down but Babe came running up in time to catch him.

“Cut it out, honey,” she pleaded. “I know how to handle Joe Moran and . . .”

“You handle him?” That idea fired Nick off again, as if Babe’s words had lighted a rocket in the seat of his pants.

I met him by grabbing his lapels, pulling the shoulders of his coat down as far as his elbows. With his arms pinned down, he couldn’t swing, and now I proceeded to cure him of dropkicking, too.

I drew back, cocked my fist, and gave him first a right smash, and then a left, and then the right again. I pegged him hard. It was deliberate work, no more hurry than a batter knocking fungoes to the outfield. I didn’t see Babe snatch a water carafe off a busboy’s stand and whirl it against the back of my head. The ceiling caved in . . . and when I woke up, it was a different ceiling. I came to my senses stretched on the divan of my apartment in the Poinsetta, with Shona making cold wet towel passes over my face and giving out pitying croons.

“Your poor mouth,” she babbled.

“It’s the back of my coco that hurts . . . what happened?”

I was feeling lower than a snake’s belly, not so much from the aching noggin, for my memory stopped with swinging on Nick Alession. I had the idea the bouncer must have nailed me with a surprise sneak punch or kick, and the last thing I wanted to take away from ’Diego was the knowledge I’d been polished off by that musclebound jerk.

Shona told me about Babe and the carafe, and I felt better. Not so quick, and not so damned much better, but good enough after a while to sit up on the divan. I didn’t hold it against Babe, I’d so many other recollections of Babe that I could stand to live with this one. Especially when Shona added that Nick was in worse shape than I was. He’d been laid out cold waiting for the ambulance when Babe sent me home propped between a pair of busboys. It seemed I’d been out on my feet, glassy-eyed but able to stagger, and hadn’t actually collapsed until I landed on the divan.

“I guess I’m a better man than I realized.”

“Don’t talk . . . your mouth’s starting to bleed all over again. A piece of flying glass must have struck you there.”

“No, that’s where Perry landed.” I put up my hand and sure enough, the bee-stung spot was leaking blood It puzzled me. I hadn’t thought Felix Perry was capable of mangling a mouse, bareknuckled.

“Mr. Moran, really, you ought to see a doctor. That could leave a lasting scar.”

“Face like mine, who could tell the difference? Stick on a Band-Aid, forget it,”

“I’ll see if I can find one.”

She’d already located the bathroom, and she carried the wet towel back in there. I fingered the swollen spot on the corner of my mouth, tongued the inside of it, and there seemed to be a hole all the way through.

It occurred to me that maybe the scum-sheet scribbler had been clutching a penknife or a nail file in his fist. To make sure of it, I got up and walked into the bathroom.

All I’d intended was to have a look-see in the mirror. But the medicine cabinet mirror door was hanging open with Shona in front of it. She stood on tiptoe, leaning across the lavatory basin and searching the upper shelves for a Band-Aid.

For a second or so, I was riveted . . . stunned by the form of her hips, the taut dancer’s shape that I sensed could kindle into atomic passion. I kindled, blazed with a fire that burned the headache clean out of me. I stepped across the tiled floor, pressed myself hard against the curves inside the yellow dress, and reached my hands around to the other curves in front of her.

She stood completely still, kind of paralyzed. In a ragged whisper she breathed out, “Mr. Moran.”

“Call me Joe.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Didn’t a man ever make a pass at you before?”

“Not like this!”

“What’s wrong with this? Don’t you know real lovemaking begins where the movies leave off? No reason we should waste time on a routine of photogenic poses. We’re two human beings got to find out fast how much we could mean to each other.”

She stopped standing on tiptoe, even seemed to allow herself a slight wiggle on the way down.

“See, Shona. We’re a swell fit, huh?”

“Wait. What do you mean, we have to find out fast?”

“You didn’t notice any razor, shave cream, talc, or toothbrush up there in the medicine cabinet. Reason is, all that stuff’s packed. . . . I’m blowing this town . . . and it’s going to keep something a lot more emotionally satisfying than fifty bucks cash to change my plans.”

Shona straightened. She’d a queer, benumbed feeling inside my arms now.

“Didn’t I make myself clear, Joe? I’m not peddling sex.”

“Okay by me! Question is, do I stand a chance, or have you got a romantic interest in this retired lonely-heart from Chicago or Seattle or where the hell?”

“Me—in love with Mr. Westburne?” she gasped.

“Yeah. Damned if I’ll stick my neck in a noose to find that guy so you can fall into his arms.”

“Joe, I swear . . .” but I couldn’t hear what she was swearing because right then a knocking started that threatened to lift the apartment door off its hinges.

“Wait, hold it.”

I stepped that way, opened the door, and was face-to-face with a pair of uniformed squad-car bulls.

One of them rolled out in a bass-drum voice:

“Moran, you’re under arrest.”

It was no use trying to slam the door in their faces. They’d bust in, anyway, really take the place apart if I tried that.

From the tail of my eye I saw Shona framed in the bathroom doorway, quivering like a scared rabbit.

I whipped my hand into my pocket and fished out Elmer Hoke’s sap. A billy’s a concealed deadly weapon, same as a gun, that’d earn me at least time in the road camp if I got picked up toting it. I flipped the wicked little baton to Shona . . . saw her catch it and whirl out of sight behind the closing bathroom door. I stepped out into the hall to give myself up to the cops.