He grinned. His teeth had a freckled look. «Was the killer drunk really?»
«With that shooting? No.»
«Me too. Well, it’s a simple job. The guy will have a record and he’s left plenty prints. Even if we don’t have his mug here we’ll make him in hours. He had something on Waldo, but he wasn’t meeting Waldo tonight. Waldo just dropped in to ask about a dame he had a date with and had missed connections on. It’s a hot night and this wind would kill a girl’s face. She’d be apt to drop in somewhere to wait. So the killer feeds Waldo two in the right place and scrams and don’t worry about you boys at all. It’s that simple.»
«Yeah,» I said.
«It’s so simple it stinks,» Copernik said.
He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair — he looked worse with it combed — and put his hat back on.
«I was just thinking,» I said.
«Yeah? What?»
«This Waldo knew just how the girl was dressed. So he must already have been with her tonight.»
«So, what? Maybe he had to go to the can. And when he came back she’s gone. Maybe she changed her mind about him.»
«That’s right,» I said.
But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Waldo had described the girl’s clothes in a way the ordinary man wouldn’t know how to describe them. Printed bolero jacket over blue crêpe silk dress. I didn’t even know what a bolero jacket was, And I might have said blue dress or even blue silk dress, but never blue crêpe silk dress.
After a while two men came with a basket. Lew Petrolle was still polishing his glass and talking to the short dark dick.
We all went down to Headquarters.
Lew Petrolle was all right when they checked on him. His father had a grape ranch near Antioch in Contra Costa County. He had given Lew a thousand dollars to go into business and Lew had opened the cocktail bar, neon sign and all, on eight hundred flat.
They let him go and told him to keep the bar closed until they were sure they didn’t want to do any more printing. He shook hands all around and grinned and said he guessed the killing would be good for business after all, because nobody believed a newspaper account of anything and people would come to him for the story and buy drinks while he was telling it.
«There’s a guy won’t ever do any worrying,» Copernik said, when he was gone. «Over anybody else.»
«Poor Waldo,» I said. «The prints any good?»
«Kind of smudged,» Copernik said sourly. «But we’ll get a classification and teletype it to Washington some time tonight. If it don’t click, you’ll be in for a day on the steel picture racks downstairs.»
I shook hands with him and his partner, whose name was Ybarra, and left. They didn’t know who Waldo was yet either. Nothing in his pockets told.
TWO
I got back to my street about 9 P.M. I looked up and down the block before I went into the Berglund. The cocktail bar was farther down on the other side, dark, with a nose or two against the glass, but no real crowd. People had seen the law and the morgue wagon, but they didn’t know what had happened. Except the boys playing pinball games in the drugstore on the corner. They know everything, except how to hold a job.
The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.
I went into the lobby of the apartment house and rode the automatic elevator up to the fourth floor. I unwound the doors and stepped out and there was a tall girl standing there waiting for the car.
She had brown wavy hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat with a velvet band and loose bow. She had wide blue eyes and eyelashes that didn’t quite reach her chin. She wore a blue dress that might have been crêpe silk, simple in lines but not missing any curves. Over it she wore what might have been a print bolero jacket.
I said: «Is that a bolero jacket?»
She gave me a distant glance and made a motion as if to brush a cobweb out of the way.
«Yes. Would you mind — I’m rather in a hurry. I’d like —»
I didn’t move. I blocked her off from the elevator. We stared at each other and she flushed very slowly.
«Better not go out on the street in those clothes,» I said.
«Why, how dare you —»
The elevator clanked and started down again. I didn’t know what she was going to say. Her voice lacked the edgy twang of a beer-parlor frill. It had a soft light sound, like spring rain.
«It’s not a make,» I said. «You’re in trouble. If they come to this floor in the elevator, you have just that much time to get off the hall. First take off the hat and jacket — and snap it up!»
She didn’t move. Her face seemed to whiten a little behind the not-too-heavy make-up.
«Cops,» I said, «are looking for you. In those clothes. Give me the chance and I’ll tell you why.»
She turned her head swiftly and looked back along the corridor. With her looks I didn’t blame her for trying one more bluff.
«You’re impertinent, whoever you are. I’m Mrs. Leroy in Apartment Thirty-one. I can assure —»
«That you’re on the wrong floor,» I said. «This is the fourth.» The elevator had stopped down below. The sound of doors being wrenched open came up the shaft.
«Off!» I rapped. «Now!»
She switched her hat off and slipped out of the bolero jacket, fast. I grabbed them and wadded them into a mess under my arm. I took her elbow and turned her and we were going down the hall.
«I live in Forty-two. The front one across from yours, just a floor up. Take your choice. Once again — I’m not on the make.»
She smoothed her hair with that quick gesture, like a bird preening itself. Ten thousand years of practice behind it.
«Mine,» she said, and tucked her bag under her arm and strode down the hall fast. The elevator stopped at the floor below. She stopped when it stopped. She turned and faced me.
«The stairs are back by the elevator shaft,» I said gently.
«I don’t have an apartment,» she said.
«I didn’t think you had.»
«Are they searching for me?»
«Yes, but they won’t start gouging the block stone by stone before tomorrow. And then only if they don’t make Waldo.»
She stared at me. «Waldo?»
«Oh, you don’t know Waldo,» I said.
She shook her head slowly. The elevator started down in the shaft again. Panic flicked in her blue eyes like a ripple on water.
«No,» she said breathlessly, «but take me out of this hall.»
We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air, very faint.
I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn’t solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her.
«So you’re a chess player,» she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had.
We both stood still then and listened to the distant clang of elevator doors and then steps — going the other way.
I grinned, but with strain, not pleasure, went out into the kitchenette and started to fumble with a couple of glasses and then realized I still had her hat and bolero jacket under my arm. I went into the dressing room behind the wall bed and stuffed them into a drawer, went back out to the kitchenette, dug out some extra-fine Scotch and made a couple of highballs.