«Not afraid of things are you, Miss Pride? Or would it be Mrs.?»
«No, it wouldn’t This neighborhood isn’t dangerous. People don’t even lock their doors around here. I guess some bad men just happened to get wise how lonely it is.»
I turned the little gun around and held it out. «Here. It’s not my night to be clever. Now if you’ll be good enough to ride me down to Castellamare, I’ll take my car there and go find some law.»
«Shouldn’t somebody stay with him?»
I looked at the radiolite dial of my wrist watch. «It’s a quarter to one,» I said. «We’ll leave him with the crickets and the stars. Let’s go.»
She tucked the gun in her bag and we went back down the slope and got into her car. She jockeyed it around without lights and drove it back up the slope. The big black car looked like a monument standing there behind us.
At the top of the rise I got out and dragged the section of white barricade back into position across the road. He was safe for the night now, and likely enough for many nights.
The girl didn’t speak until we had come near the first house. Then she put the lights on and said quietly: «There’s blood on your face, Mr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is, and I never saw a man who needed a drink worse. Why not go back to my house and phone West Los Angeles from there? There’s nothing but a fire station in this neighborhood.»
«John Dalmas is the name,» I said. «I like the blood on my face. You wouldn’t want to be mixed up in a mess like this. I won’t even mention you.»
She said: «I’m an orphan and live all alone. It wouldn’t matter in the slightest.»
«Just keep going down to the beach,» I said. «I’ll play it solo after that.»
But we had to stop once before we got to Castellamare, The movement of the car made me go off into the weeds and be sick again.
When we came to the place where my car was parked and the steps started up the hill I said good night to her and sat in the Chrysler until I couldn’t see her taillights any more.
The sidewalk café was still open. I could have gone in there and had a drink and phoned. But it seemed smarter to do what I did half an hour later — walk into the West Los Angeles Police Station cold sober and green, with the blood still on my face.
Cops are just people. And their whisky is just as good as what they push across bars at you.
THREE
LOU LID
I didn’t tell it well. It tasted worse all the time. Reavis, the man who came out from the downtown homicide bureau, listened to me with his eyes on the floor, and two plainclothes men lounged behind him like a bodyguard. A prowl-car unit had gone out long before to guard the body.
Reavis was a thin, narrow-faced, quiet man about fifty, with smooth gray skin and immaculate clothes. His trousers had a knife-edge crease and he pulled them up carefully after he sat down. His shirt and tie looked as if he had put them on new ten minutes ago and his hat looked as if he had bought it on the way over.
We were in the day captain’s room at the West Los Angeles Police Station, just off Santa Monica Boulevard, near Sawtelle. There were just the four of us in it. Some drunk in a cell, waiting to go down to the city drunk tank for sunrise court, kept giving the Australian bush call all the time we were talking.
«So I was his bodyguard for the evening,» I said at the end. «And a sweet job I made of it.»
«I wouldn’t give any thought to that,» Reavis said carelessly. «It could happen to anybody. Seems to me they took you for this Lindley Paul, slugged you to save argument and to get plenty of time, perhaps didn’t have the stuff with them at all and didn’t mean to give it up so cheap. When they found you were not Paul they got sore and took it out on him.»
«He had a gun,» I said. «A swell Luger, but two shotguns staring at you don’t make you warlike.»
«About this darktown brother,» Reavis said. He reached for a phone on the desk.
«Just a voice in the dark. I couldn’t be sure.»
«Yeah, but we’ll find what he was doing about that time. Lou Lid. A name that would linger.»
He lifted the phone off its cradle and told the PBX man: «Desk at headquarters, Joe… This is Reavis out in West L.A. on that stick-up murder. I want a Negro or half-Negro gunman name of Lou Lid. About twenty-two to twenty-four, a lightish brown, neat-appearing, small, say one hundred thirty, cast in one eye, I forget which. There’s something on him, but not much, and he’s been in and out plenty times. The boys at Seventy-seventh will know him. I want to check his movements for this evening. Give the colored squad an hour, then put him on the air.»
He cradled the phone and winked at me. «We got the best shine dicks west of Chicago. If he’s in town, they’ll pick him off without even looking. Will we move out there now?»
We went downstairs and got into a squad car and went back through Santa Monica to the Palisades.
Hours later, in the cold gray dawn, I got home. I was guzzling aspirin and whisky and bathing the back of my head with very hot water when my phone jangled. It was Reavis.
«Well, we got Lou Lid,» he said. «Pasadena got him and a Mex named Fuente. Picked them up on Arroyo Seco Boulevard — not exactly with shovels, but kind of careful.»
«Go on,» I said, holding the phone tight enough to crack it, «give me the punch line.»
«You guessed it already. They found them under the Colorado Street Bridge. Gagged, trussed fore and aft with old wire. And smashed like ripe oranges. Like it?»
I breathed hard. «It’s just what I needed to make me sleep like a baby,» I said.
The hard concrete pavement of Arroyo Seco Boulevard is some seventy-five feet directly below Colorado Street Bridge — sometimes also known as Suicide Bridge.
«Well,» Reavis said after a pause, «it looks like you bit into something rotten. What do you say now?»
«Just for a quick guess I’d say an attempted hijack of the pay-off money by a couple of smart-alecks that got a lead to it somehow, picked their own spot and got smeared with the cash.»
«That would riced inside help,» Reavis said. «You mean guys that knew the beads were taken, but didn’t have them. I like better that they tried to leave town with the whole take instead of passing it to the boss. Or even that the boss thought he had too many mouths to feed.»
He said good night and wished me pleasant dreams. I drank enough whisky to kill the pain in my head, Which was more than was good for me.
I got down to the office late enough to be elegant, but not feeling that way. Two stitches in the back of my scalp had begun to draw and the tape over the shaved place felt as hot as a bartender’s bunion.
My office was two rooms hard by the coffee-shop smell of the Mansion House Hotel. The little one was a reception room I always left unlocked for a client to go in and wait, in case I had a client and he wanted to wait.
Carol Pride was in there, sniffing at the faded red davenport, the two odd chairs, the small square of carpet and the boy’ssize library table with the pre-Repeal magazines on it.
She wore brownish speckled tweeds with wide lapels and a mannish shirt and tie, nice shoes, a black hat that might have cost twenty dollars for all I knew, and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of an old desk blotter.
«Well, you do get up,» she said. «That’s nice to know. I was beginning to think perhaps you did all your work in bed.»
«Tut, tut,» I said. «Come into my boudoir.»
I unlocked the communicating door, which looked better than just kicking the lock lightly — which had the same effect — and we went into the rest of the suite, which was a rust-red carpet with plenty of ink on it, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Dionne quintuplets rolling around on a sky-blue floor, a few near walnut chairs, and the usual desk with the usual heel marks on it and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it. I sat down in that and put my hat on the telephone.