«Hugo Candless inside?» he asked, not looking at Sam.
Sam clicked his teeth disapprovingly. «He ain’t.»
«Been in?»
«Ask at the desk’side, please, mistah.»
De Ruse took gloved hands out of his pocket and began to roll a five-dollar bill around his left forefinger.
«What do they know that you don’t know?»
Sam grinned slowly, watched the bill being wound tightly around the gloved finger.
«That’s a fac’, boss. Yeah — he was in. Comes most every day.»
«What time he leave?»
«He leave ’bout six-thirty, Ah reckon.»
«Drive his blue Lincoln limousine?»
«Shuah. Only he don’t drive it hisself. What for you ask?»
«It was raining then,» De Ruse said calmly. «Raining pretty hard. Maybe it wasn’t the Lincoln.»
«’Twas, too, the Lincoln,» Sam protested. «Ain’t I tucked him in? He never rides nothin’ else.»
«License 5A6?» De Ruse bored on relentlessly.
«That’s it,» Sam chortled. «Just like a councilman’s number that number is.»
«Know the driver?»
«Shuah —» Sam began, and then stopped cold. He raked a black jaw with a white finger the size of a banana. «Well, Ah’ll be a big black slob if he ain’t got hisself a new driver again. I ain’t know that man, sure’nough.»
De Ruse poked the rolled bill into Sam’s big white paw. Sam grabbed it but his large eyes suddenly got suspicious.
«Say, for what you ask all of them questions, mistah man?»
De Ruse said: «I paid my way, didn’t I?»
He went back around the corner to Hudson and got into his black Packard sedan. He drove it out on to Sunset, then west on Sunset almost to Beverly Hills, then turned towards the foothills and began to peer at the signs on street corners. Clearwater Street ran along the flank of a hill and had a view of the entire city. The Casa de Oro, at the corner of Parkinson, was a tricky block of high-class bungalow apartments surrounded by an adobe wall with red tiles on top. It had a lobby in a separate building, a big private garage on Parkinson, opposite one length of the wall.
De Ruse parked across the street from the garage and sat looking through the wide window into a glassed-in office where an attendant in spotless white coveralls sat with his feet on the desk, reading a magazine and spit over his shoulder at an invisible cuspidor.
De Ruse got out of the Packard, crossed the street farther up, came back and slipped into the garage without the attendant seeing him.
The cars were in four rows. Two rows backed against the white walls, two against each other in the middle. There were plenty of vacant stalls, but plenty of cars had gone to bed also. They were mostly big, expensive closed models, with two or three flashy open jobs.
There was only one limousine. It had License No. 5A6.
It was a well-kept car, bright and shiny; royal blue with a buff trimming. De Ruse took a glove off and rested his hand on the radiator shell. Quite cold. He felt the tires, looked at his fingers. A little fine dry dust adhered to the skin. There was no mud in the treads, just bone-dry dust.
He went back along the row of dark car bodies and leaned in the open door of the little office. After a moment the attendant looked up, almost with a start.
«Seen the Candless chauffeur around?» De Ruse asked him.
The man shook his head and spat deftly into a copper spittoon.
«Not since I came on — three o’clock.»
«Didn’t he go down to the club for the old man?»
«Nope. I guess not. The big hack ain’t been out. He always takes that.»
«Where does he hang his hat?»
«Who? Mattick? They got servants’ quarters in back of the jungle. But I think I heard him say he parks at some hotel. Let’s see —» A brow got furrowed.
«The Metropole?» De Ruse suggested.
The garage man thought it over while De Ruse stared at the point of his chin.
«Yeah. I think that’s it. I ain’t just positive though. Mattick don’t open up much.»
De Ruse thanked him and crossed the street and got into the Packard again. He drove downtown.
It was twenty-five minutes past nine when he got to the corner of Seventh and Spring, where the Metropole was.
It was an old hotel that had once been exclusive and was now steering a shaky course between a receivership and a bad name at Headquarters. It had too much oily dark wood paneling, too many chipped gilt mirrors. Too much smoke hung below its low beamed lobby ceiling and too many grifters bummed around in its worn leather rockers.
The blonde who looked after the big horseshoe cigar counter wasn’t young any more and her eyes were cynical from standing off cheap dates. De Ruse leaned on the glass and pushed his hat back on his crisp black hair.
«Camels, honey,» he said in his low-pitched gambler’s voice.
The girl smacked the pack in front of him, rang up fifteen cents and slipped the dime change under his elbow, with a faint smile. Her eyes said they liked him. She leaned opposite him and put her head near enough so that he could smell the perfume in her hair.
«Tell me something,» De Ruse said.
«What?» she asked softly.
«Find out who lives in eight-o-nine, without telling any answers to the clerk.»
The blonde looked disappointed. «Why don’t you ask him yourself, mister?»
«I’m too shy,» De Ruse said.
«Yes you are!»
She went to her telephone and talked into it with languid grace, came back to De Ruse.
«Name of Mattick. Mean anything?»
«Guess not,» De Ruse said. «Thanks a lot. How do you like it in this nice hotel?»
«Who said it was a nice hotel?»
De Ruse smiled, touched his hat, strolled away. Her eyes looked after him sadly. She leaned her sharp elbows on the counter and cupped her chin in her hands to stare after him.
De Ruse crossed the lobby and went up three steps and got into an open-cage elevator that started with a lurch.
«Eight,» he said, and leaned against the cage with his hands in his pockets.
Eight was as high as the Metropole went. De Ruse followed a long corridor that smelled of varnish. A turn at the end brought him face to face with 809. He knocked on the dark wood panel. Nobody answered. He bent over, looked through an empty keyhole, knocked again.
Then he took the tabbed key out of his pocket and unlocked the door and went in.
Windows were shut in two walls. The air reeked of whiskey. Lights were on in the ceiling. There was a wide brass bed, a dark bureau, a couple of brown leather rockers, a stiff-looking desk with a flat brown quart of Four Roses on it, nearly empty, without a cap. De Ruse sniffed it and set his hips against the edge of the desk, let his eyes prowl the room.
His glance traversed from the dark bureau across the bed and the wall with the door in it to another door behind which light showed. He crossed to that and opened it.
The man lay on his face, on the yellowish brown woodstone floor of the bathroom. Blood on the floor looked sticky and black. Two soggy patches on the back of the man’s head were the points from which rivulets of dark red had run down the side of his neck to the floor. The blood had stopped flowing a long time ago.
De Ruse slipped a glove off and stooped to hold two fingers against the place where an artery would beat. He shook his head and put his hand back into his glove.
He left the bathroom, shut the door and went to open one of the windows. He leaned out, breathing clean rain-wet air, looking down along slants of thin rain into the dark slit of an alley.
After a little while he shut the window again, switched off the light in the bathroom, took a «Do Not Disturb» sign out of the top bureau drawer, doused the ceiling lights, and went out.