ELEVEN
It was twelve minutes past one by the stamping clock on the end of the desk in the lobby of the Casa de Oro. The lobby was antique Spanish, with black and red Indian rugs, nail-studded chairs with leather cushions and leather tassels on the corners of the cushions; the gray-green olive-wood doors were fitted with clumsy wrought-iron strap hinges.
A thin, dapper clerk with a waxed blond mustache and a blond pompadour leaned on the desk and looked at the clock and yawned, tapping his teeth with the backs of his bright fingernails.
The door opened from the street and De Ruse came in. He took off his hat and shook it, put it on again and yanked the brim down. His eyes looked slowly around the deserted lobby and he went to the desk, slapped a gloved palm on it.
«What’s the number of the Hugo Candless bungalow?» he asked.
The clerk looked annoyed. He glanced at the clock, at De Ruse’s face, back at the clock. He smiled superciliously, spoke a slight accent.
«Twelve C. Do you wish to be announced — at this hour?»
De Ruse said: «No.»
He turned away from the desk and went towards a large door with a diamond of glass in it. It looked like the door of a very high-class privy.
As he put his hand out to the door a bell rang sharply behind him.
De Ruse looked back over his shoulder, turned and went back to the desk. The clerk took his hand away from the bell, rather quickly.
His voice was cold, sarcastic, insolent, saying: «It’s not that kind of apartment house, if you please.»
Two patches above De Ruse’s cheekbones got a dusky red. He leaned across the counter and took hold of the braided lapel of the clerk’s jacket, pulled the man’s chest against the edge of the desk.
«What was that crack, nance?»
The clerk paled but managed to bang his bell again with a flailing hand.
A pudgy man in a baggy suit and a seal-brown toupee came around the corner of the desk, put out a plump finger and said: «Hey.»
De Ruse let the clerk go. He looked expressionlessly at cigar ash on the front of the pudgy man’s coat.
The pudgy man said: «I’m the house man. You gotta see me if you want to get tough.»
De Ruse said: «You speak my language. Come over in the corner.»
They went over in the corner and sat down beside a palm. The pudgy man yawned amiably and lifted the edge of his toupee and scratched under it.
«I’m Kuvalick,» he said. «Times I could bop that Swiss myself. What’s the beef?»
De Ruse said: «Are you a guy that can stay clammed?»
«No. I like to talk. It’s all the fun I get around this dude ranch.» Kuvalick got half of a cigar out of a pocket and burned his nose lighting it.
De Ruse said: «This is one time you stay clammed.»
He reached inside his coat, got his wallet out, took out two tens. He rolled them around his forefinger, then slipped them off in a tube and tucked the tube into the outside pocket of the pudgy man’s coat.
Kuvalick blinked, but didn’t say anything.
De Ruse said: «There’s a man in the Candless apartment named George Dial. His car’s outside, and that’s where he would be. I want to see him and I don’t want to send a name in. You can take me in and stay with me.»
The pudgy man said cautiously: «It’s kind of late. Maybe he’s in bed.»
«If he is, he’s in the wrong bed,» De Ruse said. «He ought to get up.»
The pudgy man stood up. «I don’t like what I’m thinkin’, but I like your tens,» he said. «I’ll go in and see if they’re up. You stay put.»
De Ruse nodded. Kuvalick went along the wall and slipped through a door in the corner. The clumsy square butt of a hip holster showed under the back of his coat as he walked. The clerk looked after him, then looked contemptuously towards De Ruse and got out a nail file.
Ten minutes went by, fifteen. Kuvalick didn’t come back. De Ruse stood up suddenly, scowled and marched towards the door in the corner. The clerk at the desk stiffened, and his eyes went to the telephone on the desk, but he didn’t touch it.
De Ruse went through the door and found himself under a roofed gallery. Rain dripped softly off the slanting tiles of the roof. He went along a patio the middle of which was an oblong pool framed in a mosaic of gaily colored tiles. At the end of that, other patios branched off. There was a window light at the far end of the one to the left. He went towards it, at a venture, and when he came close to it made out the number 12C on the door.
He went up two flat steps and punched a bell that rang in the distance. Nothing happened. In a little while he rang again, then tried the door. It was locked. Somewhere inside he thought he heard a faint muffled thumping sound.
He stood in the rain a moment, then went around the corner of the bungalow, down a narrow, very wet passage to the back. He tried the service door; locked also. De Ruse swore, took his gun out from under his arm, held his hat against the glass panel of the service door and smashed the pane with the butt of the gun. Glass fell tinkling lightly inside.
He put the gun away, straightened his hat on his head and reached in through the broken pane to unlock the door.
The kitchen was large and bright with black and yellow tiling, looked as if it was used mostly for mixing drinks. Two bottles of Haig and Haig, a bottle of Hennessy, three or four kinds of fancy cordial bottles stood on the tiled drainboard. A short hall with a closed door led to the living room. There was a grand piano in the corner with a lamp lit beside it. Another lamp on a low table with drinks and glasses. A wood fire was dying on the hearth.
The thumping noise got louder.
De Ruse went across the living room and through a door framed in a valance into another hallway, thence into a beautifully paneled bedroom. The thumping noise came from a closet. De Ruse opened the door of the closet and saw a man.
He was sitting on the floor with his back in a forest of dresses on hangers. A towel was tied around his face. Another held his ankles together. His wrists were tied behind him. He was a very bald man, as bald as the croupier at the Club Egypt.
De Ruse stared down at him harshly, then suddenly grinned, bent and cut him loose.
The man spit a washcloth out of his mouth, swore hoarsely and dived into the clothes at the back of the closet. He came up with something furry clutched in his hand, straightened it out, and put it on his hairless head.
That made him Kuvalick, the house dick.
He got up still swearing and backed away from De Ruse, with a stiff alert grin on his fat face. His right hand shot to his hip holster.
De Ruse spread his hands, said: «Tell it,» and sat down in a small chintz-covered slipper chair.
Kuvalick stared at him quietly for a moment, then took his hand away from his gun.
«There’s lights,» he said, «So I push the buzzer. A tall dark guy opens. I seen him around here a lot. That’s Dial. I say to him there’s a guy outside in the lobby wants to see him hushhush, won’t give a name.»
«That made you a sap,» De Ruse commented dryly.
«Not yet, but soon,» Kuvalick grinned, and spit a shred of cloth out of his mouth. «I describe you. That makes me a sap. He smiled kind of funny and asks me to come in a minute. I go in past him and he shuts the door and sticks a gun in my kidney. He says: ‘Did you say he wore all dark clothes?’ I say: ‘Yes. And what’s that gat for?’ He says: ‘Does he have gray eyes and sort of crinkly black hair and is he hard around the teeth?’ I say: ‘Yes, you bastard and what’s the gat for?’
«He says: ‘For this,’ and lets me have it on the back of the head. I go down, groggy, but not out. Then the Candless broad comes out from a doorway and they tie me up and shove me in the closet and that’s that. I hear them fussin’ around for a little while and then I hear silence. That’s all until you ring the bell.»