Читать книгу Dead Extra - Sean Carswell - Страница 8

JACK, 1946

JACK SAT on a low wall in front of a rooming house on Newland Street. Wilma’s second-to-last moments were spent on the street in front of him. He unfolded Gertie’s account of Wilma’s death and let his eyes graze over the words again.

A cowbell echoed through the bungalow. Someone had sprung the front door lock and forced himself inside. Wilma grabbed the edges of the tub. Panic poured in. What do I do? Hide or run? Hide or run? What do I do?

For the past year, she’d been telling herself to move into a place with a back door. She hadn’t done it. The only way to walk out of this bungalow was through the front. She looked up at the bathroom window. It was too small for a full-grown human to crawl out. There was nothing in here to hide behind or under.

Heavy heels clomped across the hardwood floor. One man. Letting himself in. Letting himself be known.

The door to the bathroom led into the living room, in full view of whoever thumped his brogues on the floorboards. She could walk out and face him or stay in the tub and wait for him. She stood. Water rolled off her bare skin. The cool evening air pushed aside the residual warmth. Soap bubbles clung to goose bumps. She stepped out of the tub, letting the dripping water puddle underneath. She wrapped her wet hair into a towel and slid on a terry-cloth robe and scanned the bathroom again. Nothing to use as a weapon but a hairbrush. It was hardly worth wielding that.

In a gamble, she left the robe untied.

The heels clomped closer. Wilma turned off the bathroom light, gave her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness, and stepped through the doorway.

He stopped walking when he saw her and stood next to the loveseat. His hands were buried deep in his jacket pockets; his Homburg brim dipped low like it was shielding his eyes from a sun that had set an hour ago. With two quick steps and a dive, he could tackle her. Too close. Inside the bungalow was too close for him to be. But this ten-foot gap: way too close.

Wilma slapped a half-smile on her face and twirled the loose, dripping end of a curly red lock. “Well,” with nothing else coming to her mind, she said, “this is a surprise.”

He said nothing. His eyes presumably stayed locked on her. She couldn’t see them to say for sure. A little bit of the whites glistened in the moonlight that crept into the bungalow, but that was it. And, truth be told, Wilma wasn’t surprised. This wasn’t a surprise. It was inevitable he’d show up, sooner or later.

Wasn’t it?

It was.

Wilma took a couple of slow steps away from the bathroom. This put the loveseat between her and the man. She needed time, an excuse, something to stall him until she could make a run for it. The only thing in front of her, the only thing she could be walking toward if she were acting casual, was the Victrola. She patted her towel turban and glanced over at the man. “I’ll play some music,” she said. The low brim of his Homburg swiveled to follow her steps. Something about this made her even more aware of the open front of her robe, of the white skin that caught glimmers of moonlight.

As luck would have it, Wilma had been listening to her Chester Ellis record that morning. She didn’t want to bend down with her back to the man and seek out another side, so she stuck with the one she had. A risky move, playing Chester Ellis in a scene like this, but Wilma took it. She cranked the arm of the little Victrola, dropped the needle on the record, clicked off the latch, and let it play. Chester’s piano filled the room. The man didn’t flinch.

He was screwing up his courage to kill her. She knew it. She could taste it like a stink drifting off him. It was too dark to tell if he had a gun in those jacket pockets or a sap or was just wearing a pair of gloves to keep from doing it with his bare hands. But it was there: the murderous vibe tangling with the notes of the Chester Ellis record.

Wilma looped around a dusty chintz armchair, walking this time toward the man. He’d left the front door open. Wilma was slightly closer to it than he was. She eyed the kitchen behind the man. “You must want a drink. I have a new bottle of Vat 69 behind you there. I haven’t even cracked the seal.” She pointed at a cabinet directly behind the man. He turned to look. This felt like Wilma’s only chance. She raced out the front door.

He took off after her.

Her bare feet hit the gravel drive in front of her bungalow. Small rocks dug into her soft soles. With one hand, she gathered the lapels of her bathrobe and pulled them tight. Her other arm flopped as she ran. The towel on her head unraveled and fell at the end of the drive. Wilma turned right onto Newland Street and crossed maybe half the block before realizing that she had no idea where she was running to and nowhere to go.

The man turned right at the end of the drive, also. He picked up the towel and twisted it into a rope.

The wet night collapsed on the pair. Thick fog blurred the moon into a vague glow above them. A red interurban car rumbled past the nearby intersection of York and Figueroa.

Wilma assessed her options again. This night just wasn’t getting any better. She needed a car or a friend or a gun or something. She needed shoes because her feet were already torn up and bloody. She needed clothes. She needed help. She needed Jack but he’d gone and got himself shot down in Germany a year ago. That was where the trouble started. If he just hadn’t gone to war. If he just hadn’t died there. If he had just come back like he was supposed to and lent her a hand now and then. Goddamn it.

With no better ideas, she started screaming, “Jack,” again and again, ripping apart her vocal chords doing it. The screams bounced down the street and vibrated off stucco walls and got absorbed into nearby porches and potted plants. A small dog joined in, yapping as hard and loud as Wilma. This stopped the man. He and Wilma faced each other on the street, no more than twenty feet apart, Wilma screaming, “Help,” now instead of “Jack,” the man’s eyes darting from door to door, waiting for someone to intervene.

The neighbors stayed inside, letting it all wash underneath the sounds of the Gas Company Evening Concert or the new episode of Boston Blackie. No one came outside to check.

The man walked toward Wilma, twirling her towel. Water dripped from her hair onto her bathrobe. She gave the screams a rest and waited. When he got an arm’s length away, she feinted left. He lunged. She danced around him and sprinted another fifty yards down the street. The soles of her feet left small red drops with every step.

When her breath would allow it, she screamed again. One neighbor slammed his window shut. Another screamed, “Pipe down out there.” The dog kept yapping.

The man picked himself off the tar and turned back for Wilma. He made his dash. She made her fake. He fell and she sprinted. They paused for breath. He pounced again. She fled again. Maybe it all looked like something from a burlesque stage, Wilma the flaming-haired Gypsy Rose Lee, the man one of her rotating casts of comedians, only instead of witty repartee with each pause, Wilma screamed. Instead of an audience at the Old Opera, the neighborhood tuned out.

On one sprint, the man threw down the towel. Wilma tripped on it. She flung her hands out too late. Her nose hit the street, broken for sure. She squirmed up before he could drop on top of her. She ran with blood and snot racing down her chin and soaking into the wet collar of her white bathrobe. When she hit the drive this time, she decided to try her bungalow again. Maybe the lock would hold. Maybe the man would give up and leave. Maybe she could telephone somebody. Maybe Gertie.

Her feet ripped across the gravel driveway. She launched into the bungalow and swung to slam the door shut behind her. The man’s brogue wedged in the frame. Wilma pushed. The man pushed harder. He forced his way in and shut the door behind him. The screams stopped right about then.

Jack had read this story enough times to get through it without crying. Enough times to have it memorized and almost enough times to believe it. He folded it once again and stuffed it back in his jacket.

He climbed the concrete steps of 243 Newland Street and paused on the porch. A poinsettia plant in a glazed black pot bloomed its flaming red flowers. Two rockers sat next to the front door. One was painted yellow, the other blue. The sun had paled them both. The yellow rocker’s seat had been worn down to the original wood. Jack knelt to inspect the knitting bag between the rockers. He found a handful of cream-colored doilies. The name on the mailbox read “Van Meter.” He had to start somewhere, so he started here, by knocking on the door.

It took some shuffling and mumbling, but eventually a woman opened the door. She was too young to be called old, but too old to stick with that platinum dye job. Jack said, “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for either a Mr. or Mrs. Philip Van Meter. Would I be right in assuming you’re Mrs. Van Meter?”

The woman jutted her hip to the left and planted a hand on it. “What are you selling, honey?”

Jack pulled his father’s badge and license from his back hip pocket. He showed it to her. “Mrs. Van Meter, I’m an investigator.” He flipped his wallet closed and replaced it. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about an incident that occurred in your backyard about two years ago.”

“You’re either talking about the orange tree I planted there or the whore who took a face plant in my bathtub.”

A wave of heat raced through Jack’s veins. The nerve endings on his face tingled. He tucked it away under a polite tone of voice. “I’m speaking of Mrs. Chesley. Wilma.”

“Her name was Wilma all right, but you got the wrong last name. She was no Missus.”

“She was widowed. Maybe she used her maiden name with you. Greene.”

“Sounds right.” Mrs. Van Meter blew a wayward bang off her eyebrow. The bang fell right back where it had strayed to begin with. “Anyway, there’s not much to tell. She got drunk, fell in the tub. What’s to investigate?”

Jack pointed at the rockers. “Perhaps we could sit and chat for just a couple of minutes.”

Mrs. Van Meter nodded. She walked around Jack and took up residence in the yellow rocker. Jack settled into the blue one. Mrs. Van Meter said, “Tell me your story before I tell you mine. What are you after?”

“Mrs. Van Meter, I do freelance work for an insurance company. I’ve been asked to determine just how accidental Miss Greene’s death was.”

“What for?”

“They don’t tell me, exactly. My guess is someone took out a life insurance policy on her and now he wants to get paid.”

“Who would insure that tramp?”

Jack dug out a bag of tobacco and set to rolling a cigarette. “Like I said, they don’t tell me.”

Mrs. Van Meter snapped her fingers. “I bet it was her husband. I bet she wasn’t a widow like she said. I bet she was a grass widow. Now that husband wants to collect. But, hell, maybe he did it.”

Jack offered Mrs. Van Meter the cigarette. She accepted. He lit it for her, amazed at how steady his hand was. He hoped his voice and face were staying as steady and his anger was still well below the surface. He started rolling another smoke for himself. “Perhaps you should be the investigator.”

“I could find more than the police did, that’s for sure.”

Jack stopped rolling. “They didn’t find much?”

“They didn’t care. They picked up the body and left. Didn’t ask no questions or nothing. All they did was tell me to stay clear of the bungalow. Said they’d clean it themselves.”

“Did they?”

“They had a woman do it. A little fat Mex. Left the place spotless. I was showing it to renters that afternoon.”

Jack twisted the ends of his cigarette, lit it. He inhaled and glanced at the rooming house across the street. “Why do you think her husband may have done it?”

Mrs. Van Meter leaned on the arm of the rocker and tilted her head toward Jack. Passersby could’ve immediately recognized the gossip pose, had there been any passersby. The block was empty of all living things except a mackerel tabby and the house finch he had his eyes on. Mrs. Van Meter said, “Well, Miss Greene came home that evening drunk as a skunk. The sun had barely set. It was maybe eight thirty, nine o’clock. About twenty minutes later, a car comes rolling down the drive. A Packard so old it looked taped together. The fellow must have known her pretty well because he didn’t knock on her door or anything. Just walked right in like he was the one paying me rent. Next thing you know, they’re screaming at each other just like a married couple. She comes running out wearing nothing but a bathrobe. It was indecent, I tell you. I looked out the window right over there and saw one of her breasts flopping like mad outside the robe. Bouncing like it wanted to play in the breeze.”

“How embarrassing,” Jack said.

“Well, she tucked it away soon enough.” Mrs. Van Meter tapped her ash onto the porch. She rubbed her house slipper over it until it ground into the concrete. “Anyway, she runs into the street here, and the fellow comes out chasing her. She’s screaming bloody murder. He’s diving for her left and right. It was a mess.”

“Sounds bad.”

“Well, she was a drunk. We’d hear her all the time, blasting her phonograph, having little parties, laughing like she wanted the whole world to know something was funny.”

“And she screamed a lot?”

Mrs. Van Meter placed a thumb and forefinger on opposite sides of her mouth and rubbed them just below her bottom lip until they met in the middle. If any lipstick had drifted down, this move would’ve put it back in place. Her makeup hadn’t drifted or moved. It was immaculate. She’d put on her face before putting on shoes this morning. “No,” she said. “Except for that night I never heard her scream.”

“And you said ‘we.’ You said, ‘We’d hear her all the time.’ Do you mean you and Mr. Van Meter?”

“Of course. Who else?”

“And Mr. Van Meter was with you on the night in question?”

“I don’t like what you’re insinuating. Where else would my husband be after the sun sets other than right here with me?”

Jack smiled a gentle grin he’d learned during his early days on the force, when he’d partnered with a cagey veteran named Dave Hammond. Hammond had the best poker face Jack had ever seen. He taught Jack a trick or two. Jack said, “I apologize, Mrs. Van Meter. My assumption was that he was home. I’m just double-checking everything.”

Mrs. Van Meter leaned back in the rocker and crossed her arms. “And what else do you assume?”

“These are just guesses on my part, Mrs. Van Meter. Please understand that. But I guess that Mr. Van Meter is either elderly or was in some way incapacitated on the night of July 14, 1944.”

Mrs. Van Meter gasped. Her eyes opened wide. She exhaled slowly. “I’ll have you know my husband is not elderly in the least. He is my age, and he’s healthy as an ox.”

“And he sat in his living room while a woman who never screamed was screaming bloody murder in front of his house? He did nothing?”

Mrs. Van Meter tossed her cigarette butt in the weedy lawn. She stood and opened her front door. With one foot inside her house, she turned back to Jack. “Write this down, Mr. Investigator,” she said. “Wilma Greene was a drunk and a whore. Whatever she got, she had it coming.”

Mrs. Van Meter slammed the door behind her.

Jack left the porch, struggling to banish the thoughts of committing the second murder at this address.

He spent the rest of the morning combing the neighborhood. He started referring to Wilma as Miss Greene, which allowed him to use his father’s license more freely, let the neighbors really examine his credentials. The other neighbors were housewives like Mrs. Van Meter, but they were friendlier. They invited Jack inside, offered him coffee or tea, filled him in on local gossip, and talked about each other. And they all had the same story that Mrs. Van Meter had. Wilma had fled into the street screaming. No one came out to help her. A few minutes later, she was dead. The police never investigated.

For a few months after the incident, the neighbors had talked among themselves. This was how they all came to tell the same story, more or less. They were suspicious. It was too coincidental that someone would slip in a bathtub on the same night she ran into the street screaming. But she was a drunk. They all agreed. And she was a whore. There was no doubt about that. That whole “widow” business was just something she told them for sympathy. Quietly, tacitly, they all seemed to get together and agree that, murder or not, it didn’t matter and she didn’t matter. They didn’t say much to anyone and no one came asking until Jack did.

Jack heard this story enough times to keep his hackles down when he heard them call Wilma a whore. He heard it enough to know the rage was coming and hold it back before it could show on his face. Since she appeared to be doing fifty-yard dashes from one side of her bungalow to the other, Jack hit every house on Newland within a hundred yards.

He spoke to his first man at the last house he visited. A fellow who introduced himself as Mr. Lemus. He bypassed the kitchen table and the living room couch and led Jack into a sunny back room. Three or four easels were scattered about the room, all with canvases starting to soak up paint but nowhere close to resembling anything anyone would consider done. The canvases leaning against the walls had enough paint on them to be called finished, but Jack had no idea whether or not they were good. The colors seemed too dull and metallic to him. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the shapes or what they were supposed to be a picture of. Sometimes, if he used his imagination, he could see something that might be an arm or a carburetor or a fighting cock. Mostly, they were just blocks and triangles and curves, pictographs in a language he hadn’t learned. He raised his eyebrows and nodded with each painting in a mimicry of a man impressed. He asked questions and filled in space with a number of noncommittal wows and isn’t-that-somethings.

After several minutes of this, Jack steered Lemus toward the business at hand: the night of July 14, 1944. Lemus laid out the neighborhood version of events. Jack listened and jotted notes like he hadn’t heard it a dozen times already that day. When Lemus finished, Jack said, “This Miss Greene must have been a horrible person.”

Lemus ran his fingers through the hair on his temples. He’d clearly used henna in it to hide the gray, but the henna was fading and the gray was resurfacing. “Not horrible, no.”

“But she was prostituting herself in this, what looks to be a nice, family neighborhood.”

“Well.” Lemus used his thumbnail to clean the paint from underneath his forefingernail. He looked down at his hands as he spoke. “She wasn’t a prostitute. She just had a lot of men over to her place.”

“And she had loud sex with them? Could you hear it throughout the neighborhood?”

“No.”

“Could you hear it at all?”

“No.”

“But it must have been every night, then?”

Lemus raised his eyes into a stare directed out his back windows. Jack gazed back there, also, caught sight of a jacaranda in full, purple bloom. He turned back to Lemus. Lemus took a few seconds to put his thoughts together. “Now that you mention it, I hadn’t seen men coming or going for several months before her death. Maybe six, seven months.” He picked at dry paint on his pants. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that she only had men over a lot when she first moved in. There was a month or two there when she really cut loose. And after that, it would come in waves. She’d have a wild weekend, going nonstop, then nothing for weeks or months.”

“Do you remember when that was? When she first moved in?”

“It was right around the time I had a show over at El Alisal Gallery. I guess that would be sometime around February or March of ’43. Does that sound right?”

It sounded right. It would’ve been just about the time the Air Force had declared Jack dead. Right when Wilma was widowed. Jack flipped through his notes as if that information needed to be written down. “I think so,” he said.

Lemus kept staring at the jacaranda blooms, kept digging at paint. He was clearly working toward something in his mind. Jack gave him the time to think. This was something Jack’s father had never done during investigations. The old man would charge in, looking to bust heads. Manners and patience were never part of his game. You’d tell him what he wanted to hear or he’d crack you in the jaw. The problem with that, Jack realized as a young man and saw again and again when he worked with cops like that on the force, is that people only tell you what they think you want to hear. Jack could tell himself what he wanted to hear. He was investigating this business to learn what he needed to hear. So he let Lemus gaze and think.

Finally, Lemus came out with it. “I know I should have done something that night. I should have gone into the street and seen what the screaming was about. I should have tried to help.” Lemus squeezed his eyes tight and constricted his face, building a dam against whatever emotions were trying to flood his face. He held this for a few seconds. He took a deep breath.

Jack dug a handkerchief from his back pocket—a plain white cotton number—and passed it to Lemus. Lemus waved it off.

“You know she had a twin?” he asked.

“Yeah?” Jack stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket.

“Birdy or something. I met her at one or two of Wilma’s parties. Sharp kid. Looked just like Wilma. She came around after Wilma died. Haunted the neighborhood for a week or two, asking questions, knocking on doors just like you’re doing. No one would talk to her.”

Jack scooted forward in his seat. This was new. None of the other neighbors mentioned Gertie. “Why not?” he asked.

“Best not to get involved, especially when people are getting killed.”

Jack shrugged. Part of him understood. If only he’d felt that way three years ago.… He tucked it away. “Why are you telling me about the twin now?”

“Just to let you know someone put a bullet in her for asking too many questions.”

“What?”

“I heard the bullet hit her cigarette tin, get deflected up, and then lodge in her collarbone. Who knows? I got the story from the local knitting circle. They’ve been known to stretch the truth.” Lemus stood and motioned back toward the front door. “Anyway, it doesn’t take a whole lot of gunshots before people start to learn what to say and what not to say.”

Jack nodded. As he shifted his weight to stand, he realized that his hand was inside his jacket and his fingers were grazing the grip of the Springfield again.