Читать книгу Double Take - Roy Huggins - Страница 10

WHAT I did for the next four days I could have hired a high-grade moron for; but I didn’t have anything else to do, and besides, all the high-grade morons were working. I tramped around to agencies, burlesque houses, the two clubs in Long Beach and San Pedro, and made more phone calls than a Crossley inquirer. Ma Schaeffer, employment manager and house-mother-at-large for the Revues, remembered Gloria Day vaguely, but then she wouldn’t have told me anything anyway, I smelled like a cop. A throaty blonde of uncertain years and talents located at the San Pedro address remembered a bubble dancer named Gloria something-or-other. The name was in the records of a couple of theatrical agents, but nothing later than March of 1939. And at all the places I asked the same question: Had anyone else ever been around asking for her? The answer was always the same: No.

I was sitting at my desk gloomily mumbling puns on the theme of sic transit Gloria and not getting any fun out of it. It was a gray morning with a heavy wetness in the air, and I was all through. I had planted forty acres of cards in the best green room soil. Now I was letting the earth turn and awaiting the doubtful harvest.

I heard Hazel say: “Yes, he is. One moment.”

I looked up and she said: “For you” with her lips.

I picked up the phone. A voice said, “Hi ya, Sherlock.”

I gripped the receiver a little tighter. The voice was Buffin’s. “Who’s talking?”

“Me? Why, your old pal. From the old home town. Buster Buffin.”

“Just call me Watson. How’d you find me?”

“Easy.… I got somepin for you, Watson.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

“It gives for cash. And I’m afraid fifty bucks won’t even buy you a seat.”

“What kind of figures do you think I’ll talk in?”

“For what I have—plenty, brother, plenty!”

“I’ll save you some trouble, Buster. If you’re going to tell me where I’ll find Peg Bleeker, you’re wasting your time.”

He laughed. Not a nasty laugh; there was merriment in it, and a thin edge of hysteria.

He said: “Where she is I don’t know, and I care less. If you’re smart you’ll come down here. And be ready to talk cold turkey.”

I tried to sound casual, like a man going out to look at an orange grove. “Where’ll I find you in case I decide to listen?”

“You’ll listen. You’ll find me right where you left me: Buffin’s Buffet.” He hung up. I could hear his thin laughter before the little click came and left me sitting there alone.

I TOOK Santa Monica Boulevard down to the beach and kept one eye on the rear-view mirror all the way. Nobody followed me down there. I parked in the Paragon Ballroom’s lot across from Buffin’s.

There was a sign on the door that said the place was closed and would open at 11:30 A.M. I tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

There was nobody inside. No customers, no little man with cold turkey to sell. I looked around in the kitchen. It was dirty, with a cold odor of rancid fat. There was no one there.

I sat down on one of the counter stools and waited. Hard waves were pummeling the breakwater with a distant roar that made the silence of the little shack palpable and menacing. I got up and walked around. I yelled, “Oh, Buster!” and the echoes joined and jarred against me. And then the silence settled down again like a cold wet sheet. It was broken abruptly, sharply by a tight clap of sound from overhead, followed by another, and then again. I was half way up the stairs when the third shot sounded and something hit the floor, hard.