Upstairs, on my floor, feet hit the carpet and somebody went into a bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. I went into the bathroom of Apartment 31. A little rubbish, nothing, no place to hide anything. The kitchenette was a longer job, but I only half searched. I knew there were no pearls in that apartment. I knew Waldo had been on his way out and that he was in a hurry and that something was riding him when he turned and took two bullets from an old friend.
I went back to the living room and swung the wall bed and looked past its mirror side into the dressing room for signs of still current occupancy. Swinging the bed farther I was no longer looking for pearls. I was looking at a man.
He was small, middle-aged, iron-gray at the temples, with a very dark skin, dressed in a fawn-colored suit with a winecolored tie. His neat little brown hands hung limply by his sides. His small feet, in pointed polished shoes, pointed almost at the floor.
He was hanging by a belt around his neck from the metal top of the bed. His tongue stuck out farther than I thought it possible for a tongue to stick out.
He swung a little and I didn’t like that, so I pulled the bed shut and he nestled quietly between the two clamped pillows. I didn’t touch him yet. I didn’t have to touch him to know that he would be cold as ice.
I went around him into the dressing room and used my handkerchief on drawer knobs. The place was stripped clean except for the light litter of a man living alone.
I came out of there and began on the man. No wallet. Waldo would have taken that and ditched it. A flat box of cigarettes, half full, stamped in gold: «Louis Tapia y Cia, Calle de Paysandü, 19, Montevideo.» Matches from the Spezia Club. An under-arm holster of dark-grained leather and in it a 9-millimeter Mauser.
The Mauser made him a professional, so I didn’t feel so badly. But not a very good professional, or bare hands would not have finished him, with the Mauser — a gun you can blast through a wall with — undrawn in his shoulder holster.
I made a little sense of it, not much. Four of the brown cigarettes had been smoked, so there had been either waiting or discussion. Somewhere along the line Waldo had got the little man by the throat and held him in just the right way to make him pass out in a matter of seconds. The Mauser had been less useful to him than a toothpick. Then Waldo had hung him up by the strap, probably dead already. That would account for haste, cleaning out the apartment, for Waldo’s anxiety about the girl. It would account for the car left unlocked outside the cocktail bar.
That is, it would account for these things if Waldo had killed him, if this was really Waldo’s apartment — if I wasn’t just being kidded.
I examined some more pockets. In the left trouser one I found a gold penknife, some silver. In the left hip pocket a handkerchief, folded, scented. On the right hip another, unfolded but clean. In the right leg pocket four or five tissue handkerchiefs. A clean little guy. He didn’t like to blow his nose on his handkerchief. Under these there was a small new keytainer holding four new keys — car keys. Stamped in gold on the keytainer was: Compliments of R. K. Vogelsang, Inc. «The Packard House.»
I put everything as I had found it, swung the bed back, used my handkerchief on knobs and other projections, and flat surfaces, killed the light and poked my nose out the door. The hall was empty. I went down to the street and around the corner to Kingsley Drive. The Cadillac hadn’t moved.
I opened the car door and leaned on it. She didn’t seem to have moved, either. It was hard to see any expression on her face. Hard to see anything but her eyes and chin, but not hard to smell the sandalwood.
«That perfume,» I said, «would drive a deacon nuts… no pearls.»
«Well, thanks for trying,» she said in a low, soft vibrant voice. «I guess I can stand it. Shall I… Do we… Or… ?»
«You go on home now,» I said. «And whatever happens you never saw me before. Whatever happens. Just as you may never see me again.»
«I’d hate that.»
«Good luck, Lola.» I shut the car door and stepped back.
The lights blazed on, the motor turned over. Against the wind at the corner the big coupe made a slow contemptuous turn and was gone. I stood there by the vacant space at the curb where it had been.
It was quite dark there now. Windows, had become blanks in the apartment where the radio sounded. I stood looking at the back of a Packard cabriolet which seemed to be brand new. I had seen it before — before I went upstairs, in the same place, in front of Lola’s car. Parked, dark, silent, with a blue sticker pasted to the right-hand corner of the shiny windshield.
And in my. mind I was looking at something else, a set of brand-new car keys in a keytainer stamped: «The Packard House,» upstairs, in a dead man’s pocket.
I went up to the front of the cabriolet and put a small pocket flash on the blue slip. It was the same dealer all right. Written in ink below his name and slogan was a name and address — Eugenie Kolchenko, 5315 Arvieda Street, West Los Angeles.
It was crazy. I went back up to Apartment 31, jimmied the door as I had done before, stepped in behind the wall bed and took the keytainer from the trousers pocket of the neat brown dangling corpse. I was back down on the street beside the cabriolet in five minutes. The keys fitted.
FIVE
It was a small house, near a canyon rim out beyond Sawtelle, with a circle of writhing eucalyptus trees in front of it. Beyond that, on the other side of the street, one of those parties was going on where they come out and smash bottles on the sidewalk with a whoop like Yale making a touchdown against Princeton.
There was a wire fence at my number and some rose trees, and a flagged walk and a garage that was wide open and had no car in it. There was no car in front of the house either. I rang the bell. There was a long wait, then the door opened rather suddenly.
I wasn’t the man she had been expecting. I could see it in her glittering kohl-rimmed eyes. Then I couldn’t see anything in them. She just stood and looked at me, a long, lean, hungry brunette, with rouged cheekbones, thick black hair parted in the middle, a mouth made for three-decker sandwiches, coraland-gold pajamas, sandals — and gilded toenails. Under her ear lobes a couple of miniature temple bells gonged lightly in the breeze. She made a slow disdainful motion with a cigarette in a holder as long as a baseball bat.
«We-el, what ees it, little man? You want sometheeng? You are lost from the bee-ootiful party across the street, hem?»
«Ha-ha,» I said. «Quite a party, isn’t it? No, I just brought your car home. Lost it, didn’t you?»
Across the street somebody had delirium tremens in the front yard and a mixed quartet tore what was left of the night into small strips and did what they could to make the strips miserable. While this was going on the exotic brunette didn’t move more than one eyelash.
She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.
«You have said what?» she got out, at last, in a voice as silky as a burnt crust of toast.
«Your car.» I pointed over my shoulder and kept my eyes on her. She was the type that uses a knife.
The long cigarette holder dropped very slowly to her side and the cigarette fell out of it. I stamped it out, and that put me in the hall. She backed away from me and I shut the door.
The hall was like the long hall of a railroad flat. Lamps glowed pinkly in iron brackets. There was a bead curtain at the end, a tiger skin on the floor. The place went with her.
«You’re Miss Kolchenko?» I asked, not getting any more action.
«Ye-es. I am Mees Kolchenko. What the ’ell you want?»
She was looking at me now as if I had come to wash the windows, but at an inconvenient time.