«And while I’m still healthy,» Dolly Kincaid said, «you might as well know that Doe Austrian’s office nurse used to be Matson’s wife. She’s a redheaded man-eater with no looks but a lot of outside curve.»
«I like a well-crowded stocking myself,» I said. «Get out of that door and in the back of the car and lie down and make it fast.»
«Geez —»
«Do what I say!» I snapped. «Fast!»
The door on the right clicked open and the little man slid out like a wisp of smoke. The door clicked shut. I heard the rear door open and sneaked a look back and saw a dark shape haunched on the floor of the car. I slid over to the right side myself and opened the door again and stepped out on the narrow sidewalk that ran along the rim of the bluff.
The other car was close now. Its lights flared up again and I ducked. The lights swerved so that they swept my car, then swerved back and the car stopped opposite and went quietly dark. It was a small black coupé. Nothing happened for a minute, then its left door opened and a chunky man stepped out and started to stroll over towards my side of the side-paved street. I took my gun from under my arm and tucked it in my belt and buttoned the bottom button of my coat. Then I walked around the rear end of my car to meet him.
He stopped dead when he saw me. His hands hung empty at his sides. There was a cigar in his mouth. «Police,» he said briefly. His right hand shaded back slowly towards his right hip. «Nice night ain’t it?»
«Swell,» I said. «A little foggy, but I like fog. It softens the air up and —»
He cut in on me sharply: «Where’s the other guy?»
«Huh?»
«Don’t kid me, stranger. I saw a cigarette on the right side of your car.»
«That was me,» I said. «I didn’t know it was against the law to smoke on the right side of a car.»
«Oh, a smart monkey. Who are you and what’s your business here?» His heavy, greasy face reflected the sifted light in the soft misty air.
«The name’s O’Brien,» I said. «Just down from San Mateo on a little pleasure trip.»
His hand was very close to his hip now. «I’ll look at your driver’s licence,» he said. He came close enough to reach it, if we both stretched out our arms to each other.
«I’ll look at what gives you the right to look at it,» I said.
His right hand made an abrupt movement. Mine flicked the gun out of my belt and pointed it at his stomach. His hand stopped as though it had been frozen in a block of ice.
«Maybe you’re a stick-up,» I said. «It’s still being done with nickel badges.»
He stood there, paralyzed, hardly breathing. He said thickly: «Got a licence for that heater?»
«Every day in the week,» I said. «Let’s see your badge and I’ll put it away. You don’t wear the buzzer where you sit down, do you?»
He stood for another frozen minute. Then he looked along the block as if he hoped another car might arrive. Behind me, in the back of my car, there was a soft, sibilant breathing. I didn’t know whether the chunky man heard it or not. His own breathing was heavy enough to iron a shirt with.
«Aw, quit your kiddin’,» he snarled out with sudden ferocity. «You’re nothin’ but a lousy two-bit shamus from L.A.»
«I upped the rate,» I said. «I get thirty cents now.»
«Go to hell. We don’t want you nosin’ around here, see. This time I’m just tellin’ you.»
He turned on his heel and walked back to his coupé and put a foot on the running board. His thick neck turned slowly and his greasy skin showed again. «Go to hell,» he said, «before we send you there in a basket.»
«So long, Greasy-Puss,» I said. «Nice to have met you with your pants down.»
He slammed into his car, started it with a jerk and lurched it around. He was gone down the block in a flash.
I jumped into mine and was only a block behind him when he made the stop for Arguello Boulevard. He turned right. I turned left. Dolly Kincaid came up and put his chin on the back of the seat beside my shoulder.
«Know who that was?» he croaked. «That was Trigger Weems, the chief’s right bower. He might have shot you.»
«Fanny Brice might have had a pug nose,» I said. «It was that close.»
I rode around a few blocks and stopped to let him get in beside me. «Where’s your car?» I said.
He took his crumpled reporter’s hat off and smacked it on his knee and put it back on again. «Why, down at the city hall. In the police yard.»
«Too bad,» I said. «You’ll have to take the bus to L.A. You ought to spend a night with your sister once in a while. Especially tonight.»
FOUR
REDHEADED WOMAN
The road twisted, dipped, soared along the flank of the foothills, a scatter of lights to the northwest and a carpet of them to the south. The three piers seemed remote from this point, thin pencils of light laid out on a pad of black velvet. There was fog in the canyons and a smell of wild growth, but no fog on the high ground between the canyons.
I swung past a small, dim service station, closed up for the night, down into another wide canyon, up past half a mile of expensive wire fence walling in some invisible estate. Then the scattered houses got still more scattered along the hills and the air smelled strongly of the sea. I turned left past a house with a round white turret and drove out between the only electroliers in miles to a big stucco building on a point above the coast highway. Light leaked from draped windows and along an arched stucco colonnade, and shone dimly on a thick cluster of cars parked in diagonal slots around an oval lawn.
This was the Club Conried. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do there, but it seemed to be one of the places where I had to go. Dr. Austrian was still wandering in unknown parts of the town visiting unnamed patients. The Physicians’ Exchange said he usually called in about eleven. It was now about ten-fifteen.
I parked in a vacant slot and walked along the arched colonnade. A six-foot-six Negro, in the uniform of a comic-opera South American field marshal, opened one half of a wide grilled door from the inside and said: «Card, please, suh.»
I tucked a dollar’s worth of folding money into his lilac-colored palm. Enormous ebony knuckles closed over it like a dragline over a bucketful of gravel. His other hand picked a piece of lint off my left shoulder and left a metal tag down behind my show handkerchief in the outside breast pocket of my jacket.
«New floor boss kinda tough,» he whispered. «I thank you, suh.»
«You mean sucker,» I said, and went in past him.
The lobby — they called it a foyer — looked like an MGM set for a night club in the Broadway Melody of 1980. Under the artificial light, it looked as if it had cost about a million dollars and took up enough space for a polo field. The carpet didn’t quite tickle my ankles. At the back there was a chromium gangway like a ship’s gangway going up to the dining-room entrance, and at the top of this a chubby Italian captain of waiters stood with a set smile and a two-inch satin stripe on his pants and a bunch of gold-plated menus under his arm.
There was a free-arched stairway with banisters like whiteenameled sleigh rails. This would go up to the second-floor gambling rooms. The ceiling had stars in it and they twinkled. Beside the bar entrance, which was dark and vaguely purple, like a half-remembered nightmare, there was a huge round mirror set back in a white tunnel with an Egyptian headdress over the top of it. In front of this a lady in green was preening her metallic blond hair. Her evening gown was cut so low at the back that she was wearing a black beauty patch on her lumbar muscle, about an inch below where her pants would have been, if she had been wearing any pants.