“What’re you doing?”
He still sounded scared.
“You won the store lottery.”
“What say?”
“You won the fucking lottery,” I said.
He looked confused.
“Just take the ten and go up front and pay for this stuff, old man.”
“Huh? I never heard of no store lottery.”
“Sure. Now hurry along, okay?”
“Goddamnedest thing ever happened to me.”
I would have just given him the ham, but all security people have to take lie-detector tests and my largess at the store’s expense would have shown up.
I pushed him along, walking behind him to the aisle split, which took me back to the phone and C. Travers. Nothing.
The apartment I live in smelled of steam heat. In bed I ate an apple and read through a script I would be auditioning for the next day, this one having me as a garage mechanic dedicated to only one thing, your gosh-darn satisfaction. You betcha.
I slept very well, awoke around dawn, luxuriating in the feel of my body against the sheets, which were warm in some places, cold in others. I lay there for a time and thought of crazy Donna Harris. She made me feel good — her innocent and somewhat misplaced aggressiveness.
After a shave and a shower I got in my Datsun and drove over to Carla Travers’s place.
She lived in one of those new condominiums along the river, steep and secret in firs and pines.
A few sleepy-eyed people were escaping from her section. They looked at me — even though I wore a new tweed jacket, button-down shirt, and pressed chino pants — as if I had been dropped off here by a muggers’ touring bus.
In the lobby I found her name, pressed her button, and went up before she could say anything into the speaker. There wasn’t a security door in the place.
Her hallway was golden with sunlight patterned through the firs. This was going to be a beautiful morning, not the kind you expected in gray November.
I put a hand on her doorknob and knocked at the same time.
The knob turned easily in my hand.
Three minutes later, after no response, I knocked again.
After a total of ten minutes I twisted the knob to the right and went inside.
The apartment was wide and expensive and nicely furnished with contemporary furniture and colorful graphics on the wall, but, curiously, it lacked a personality.
I said, “Hello,” but I realized it was only a formality.
I closed the door behind me and went in.
Three rooms later I learned that she liked to cook in a wok — she had three of them — had expensive and florid taste in clothes, was sentimental about huge stuffed animals, and had a record collection that ran Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow.
The final room I checked seemed to be a kind of den, a small room that a family would have used as a bedroom. In it she’d put a single bookcase and filled it with a lot of pop-psych and you-can-win type books, a small desk with air bubbles in the varnish that indicated she’d probably finished it herself, a straight-backed chair, and a file cabinet that promised to be the most interesting thing in her entire apartment, especially considering that on top of the cabinet was a framed photograph of herself and Stephen Elliot, arm in arm, at what appeared to be a resort.
For the first time since Jane’s arrest I had a feeling that I might actually be making some progress.
I knelt down, my knees cracking as I did so, and started to pull the top drawer from the cabinet, when I heard something behind me creak.
Whoever it was moved accurately, crossing the distance between the closet where he or she had been concealed and bringing whatever it was right across the back of my head.
Before I slipped into darkness I had time to realize that my instructor at the police academy would be very ashamed of me for being so careless.
8
When I came to the first thing I did was open my eyes slowly and begin to feel the back of my head. The pain was a steady throb, which, if I remembered my first aid right, was a good sign.
By the time I started to roll over on my side and to think about getting to my feet a female voice, part nicotine and part liquor, said, “I didn’t mean to hit you so hard, but you probably had it coming anyway.”
She had pulled out the straight-backed desk chair and sat on it rather mannishly, a peroxide blonde with a Kewpie-doll face made even cheekier by bad drinking habits. She had long ago sailed past forty and a lot of makeup and garish clothes were trying to deny the reality of her fifties.
“You tried to get in last night, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Don’t bullshit me, friend.”
“I didn’t. You can believe it or not.” I held the back of my head and prepared myself to stand up. It was going to hurt.
“Don’t move. Not till I tell you.”
I sighed. Laid my head back down. Carefully. Maybe she was doing me a favor after all.
“You know about me, don’t you?”
“I assume you’re Carla Travers, if that’s what you mean.”
“Boy, you’re a regular goddamn comedian, aren’t you? You trying to say you don’t know about Stephen Elliot and me?” The heat and slur of her words told me she was drunk.
“That you were lovers, you mean?”
“Yeah, lovers, that’s it,” she said sarcastically. “Lovers.”
“I know two things about you and Elliot. One being that you had your picture taken together at some resort and the other that one time he spit in your face.”
“That wasn’t the only time, you can bet your buns on that.” Then she paused. “Say, you really don’t know anything about us, do you?”
“No, I don’t, as a matter of fact.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to talk to you.”
“Right. You tried to bust in here last night.”
“Can I stand up?”
“Yeah. But move very slowly and no funny stuff.”
When I finally got to my feet, when I finally got a look at her, I saw a woman trapped in the high comic style of the local beauty parlor. There was enough brass in her demeanor to bounce quarters off. “She sent you, didn’t she?”
“She?”
“Jesus, how long you going to keep this up?”
I could see what Bryce Hammond had meant about media reps. Real charmers. Here was a bowling queen and stevedore rolled into one, and got up in a kind of sexy pink grandmother slacks-and-blouse set.
For the first time I saw that she had a silver-plated pistol in her hand. Probably it was more decoration than anything else, but in a room this small it would do the trick.
“So you didn’t break in here last night, and you don’t know about me and Stephen, and you claim that she didn’t send you.”
She was making my head hurt even worse, handing me three different mysteries to solve, not one of which I could even guess at.
I started getting wobbly and worked my way over to the couch and sat down. Gently.
“I’m a private detective,” I said.
She frowned. “For real?”
“For real.”
“You gotta be working for her then.”
“Who’s ‘her’?”
She chose not to answer my question. “You tell me who hired you.”
“Nobody hired me. I volunteered.”
“Wait a minute, your name wouldn’t be Dwyer, would it?”
“Yes.”
“You’re Jane Branigan’s old boyfriend.”
I nodded.
“That bitch.” A look of real misery came into the doll-blue eyes. “She killed Stephen. That bitch.”
“I don’t think she did.”
She started to talk, but a cigarette hack got her halfway through the first syllable. Clutching her gun, her fleshy body began doing a grotesque kind of cancer dance right there on the chair as the cough got worse.