Myrtle’s voice was musical as she said, “Look what I’ve got, Paul...”
I figured that gun wasn’t behind her back, now.
“Put that down, Red. You don’t...”
That was when I came in and grabbed her from behind, bear-hugging her, pinning her arms, flattening her fine breasts with my forearms, but she managed to fire the gun anyway, shattering the bedstand lamp even as Mantz dove out of bed, just under the bullet’s trajectory. The room was dark now, though some light filtered in from the hallway.
“Let me go!” she squealed, not knowing who had hold of her.
And Mantz came scrambling forward, his face tight with rage, and he belted her in the jaw with a fist, and she went limp, the gun clattering to the hardwood floor, where we were lucky it didn’t go off again.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I spat at him, easing the unconscious woman over to the bed, laying her out gently, there. I hadn’t been holding her like that so he could fucking slug her! Blood trailed from the corner of her mouth; even in this state, she was a lovely thing. Too bad when she got jealous she went around with a gun.
“She tried to shoot me!” Mantz said, understandably worked up, hopping around like a mustached monkey in his bare chest. “She’s lucky I didn’t knock her block off!... Where’s Amelia?”
“I got her and her pal out the back door,” I said, switching on the overhead light. “Your wife never saw them, or me. So we were never here, remember? In about two seconds, I’m slipping out, myself.”
“What should I do?”
“Call the cops.”
He frowned, calming down a little. “Do I have to?”
“Your neighbors probably already have. If you don’t, it’ll look bad.”
He smirked. “Doesn’t it look bad enough?”
“I don’t think so. Take it from somebody who’s done his share of divorce work, this marriage isn’t working out... and in the settlement, Myrtle coming after you with a .32 is going to speak better for you than her.”
He was mulling that over, looking at his out-cold, incredibly beautiful, crazy-as-a-bedbug wife, when I got the hell out, before it occurred to him to ask me what I was doing there.
Chapter 6
Stained ivory in the moonlight, the foothills of the green Verdugo Mountains provided a majestic backdrop for the humble skyline of the pink adobe cabins of Lowman’s Motor Court. Exotic as this vista may have been, I had begun to long for the simple pleasures of Chicago, Illinois. In the red blush of the motel’s nearby hovering neon sign, I pulled the Terraplane into the stall at Cabin 2, put the buggy’s top up in case the forecast of rain was correct, and trudged inside, where I began to pack.
I had decided to quit. The women on this job were either sleeping with each other or waving guns around, and that was enough to send this Midwestern lad back to where girls were girls and boys were boys and guns were carried chiefly by cops and crooks, if you’ll pardon the redundancy. Furthermore, I wanted work that did not involve a client who very likely sent his wife death threats before hiring me to protect her, and/or work which also did not require me to fly with a pilot who considered crashing her plane an interesting variation on landing.
True, this job paid well, but I had been on it long enough to rack myself up a pretty little pile of money, which I was now prepared to gather up and take home with me. On the train. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the small square room, I used the nightstand phone to make a reservation; I could get a Union Pacific sleeper at two-forty-five tomorrow afternoon.
With the exception of my clothes for tomorrow, toothbrush and powder, hairbrush and oil, and the white boxers I had on for sleeping, my bag was packed. It lay open like a clamshell on the luggage stand at the foot of the bed, the Speed Graphic nestled among the clothing like a pearl; my nine-millimeter was similarly buried.
Bare-chested like Gable in It Happened One Night (and Mantz in what happened tonight), I lay atop the nubby pink bedspread, reading Film Fun magazine, which was mostly jokes and pictures of pretty girls; I never claimed to go in for Proust. The cabin was sparsely furnished in ranch style, its pink plaster walls broken up occasionally by a framed print of a cactus or burro; but one amenity, at least, was a table model radio by the bed. I had it going fairly loud, in hopes of drowning out my thoughts, the Dorsey Brothers playing their theme song, “Lost in a Fog,” live from the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room, when the knock came at the door.
I didn’t put my robe on, because I didn’t have one. And I didn’t bother putting my pants on, either, because I figured this was probably the manager asking me to turn my radio down. The windows were open, after all, wind whispering in, fluffing the green-and-yellow cotton curtains with their geometric Indian-blanket design. Clicking the radio off as I climbed from the bed, I figured my problem was already solved.
As Proust would say, little did I know.
“What?” I asked my closed door.
“It’s me.”
Amy’s voice.
I cracked the door and looked into her lovely, weathered, somewhat puffy face, expressionless as a bisque baby’s, though the blue-gray eyes were filigreed red. Her mop of dark blonde curls looked even more tousled than usual.
I asked her, “What are you doing here?”
“Let me in,” she said.
“I’m not dressed.”
“Neither am I.”
I opened the door a little wider and saw that she wasn’t, at least not properly: she still wore Mantz’s maroon-striped pajama top and a pair of dungarees that were parachute-baggy but short, her ankles showing.
And her feet were in moccasin-type slippers.
Bewildered, I let her in, shut the door, asked, “How’d you get here?”
“Toni loaned me her car. What happened at Paul’s? Is he all right?”
I climbed into my pants as I told her.
“I hope he called the cops, like I advised him,” I concluded. “If so, I’m sure he’ll leave you out of it.”
“I can’t believe she actually shot at him.” Amy was sitting on the room’s only chair, in the corner between the windows and the dresser, shaking her head; her hands were folded in her lap and she had the aspect of a repentant naughty child.
I sat on the edge of the bed and said, “I don’t know that she shot at him... The gun just kind of went off, when I grabbed her.”
Amy gave me a sharp look. “Did she see you?”
“No. Myrtle probably thinks you grabbed her... but she didn’t see either one of us in the house... or your friend Miss Lake, either.”
She sighed deeply. “I suppose I’m lucky you were there...”
“If you came here to thank me, it’s not necessary.”
“Thank you?” She stood; her arms were straight at her sides, her hands were fists — she looked a little comical in the pajama top and short baggy jeans (on loan from Toni Lake, I’d wager) but I didn’t feel like smiling. “Thank you?”
She walked to my open suitcase and plucked the Speed Graphic from amidst my underthings. Then she strode over to where I sat on the edge of the bed, planting herself before me, holding the camera in my face as if I were on the witness stand, she were the prosecuting attorney and the camera Exhibit A.
“What’s this?” she asked, the second word hissing through the space between her teeth. “A party favor?”
“You know what it is.”
Her lip curled in a tiny sneer. “I knew what it was when I noticed it on the kitchen table, at Paul’s, too.”