«Take it away, baby.»
Francine Ley slid along the seat under the steering wheel of the Packard and pushed the starter. The motor caught with a soft whirr.
«So long, baby,» De Ruse said gently. «Get my slippers warmed for me. And do me a big favor, honey. Don’t phone anyone.»
The Packard went off along the dark street, under the big pepper trees. De Ruse watched it turn a corner. He prodded Zapparty with his elbow.
«Let’s go. You’re going to ride in the back of your gas car. We can’t feed you much gas on account of the hole in the glass, but you’ll like the smell of it. We’ll go off in the country somewhere. We’ve got all night to play with you.»
«I guess you know this is a snatch,» Zapparty said harshly.
«Don’t I love to think it,» De Ruse purred.
They went across the street, three men walking together without haste. Nicky opened the good rear door of the Lincoln. Zapparty got into it. Nicky banged the door shut, got under the wheel and fitted the ignition key in the lock. De Ruse got in beside him and sat with his legs straddling the tank of gas.
The whole car still smelled of the gas.
Nicky started the car, turned it in the middle of the block and drove north to Franklin, back over Los Feliz towards Glendale. After a little while Zapparty leaned forward and banged on the glass. De Ruse put his ear to the hole in the glass behind Nicky’s head.
Zapparty’s harsh voice said: «Stone house — Castle Road — in the La Crescenta flood area.»
«Jeeze, but he’s a softy,» Nicky grunted, his eyes on the road ahead.
De Ruse nodded, said thoughtfully: «There’s more to it than that. With Parisi dead he’d clam up unless he figured he had an out.»
Nicky said: «Me, I’d rather take a beating and keep my chin buttoned. Light me a pill, Johnny.»
De Ruse lit two cigarettes and passed one to the blond man. He glanced back at Zapparty’s long body in the corner of the car. Passing light touched up his taut face, made the shadows on it look very deep.
The big car slid noiselessly through Glendale and up the grade towards Montrose. From Montrose over to the Sunland highway and across that into the almost deserted flood area of La Crescenta.
They found Castle Road and followed it towards the mountains. In a few minutes they came to the stone house.
It stood back from the road, across a wide space which might once have been lawn but which was now packed sand, small stones and a few large boulders. The road made a square turn just before they came to it. Beyond it the road ended in a clean edge of concrete chewed off by the flood of New Year’s Day, 1934.
Beyond this edge was the main wash of the flood. Bushes grew in it and there were many huge stones. On the very edge a tree grew with half its roots in the air eight feet above the bed of the wash.
Nicky stopped the car and turned off the lights and took a big nickeled flash out of the car pocket. He handed it to De Ruse.
De Ruse got out of the car and stood for a moment with his hand on the open door, holding the flash. He took a gun out of his overcoat pocket and held it down at his side.
«Looks like a stall,» he said. «I don’t think there’s anything stirring here.»
He glanced in at Zapparty, smiled sharply and walked off across the ridges of sand, towards the house. The front door stood half open, wedged that way by sand. De Ruse went towards the corner of the house, keeping out of line with the door as well as he could. He went along the side wall, looking at boarded-up windows behind which there was no trace of light.
At the back of the house was what had been a chicken house. A piece of rusted junk in a squashed garage was all that remained of the family sedan. The back door was nailed up like the windows. De Ruse stood silent in the rain, wondering why the front door was open. Then he remembered that there had been another flood a few months before, not such a bad one. There might have been enough water to break open the door on the side towards the mountains.
Two stucco houses, both abandoned, loomed on the adjoining lots. Farther away from the wash, on a bit of higher ground, there was a lighted window. It was the only light anywhere in the range of De Ruse’s vision.
He went back to the front of the house and slipped through the open door, stood inside it and listened. After quite a long time he snapped the flash on.
The house didn’t smell like a house. It smelled like out of doors. There was nothing in the front room but sand, a few pieces of smashed furniture, some marks on the walls, above the dark line of the flood water, where pictures had hung.
De Ruse went through a short hall into a kitchen that had a hole in the floor where the sink had been and a rusty gas stove stuck in the hole. From the kitchen he went into a bedroom. He had not heard any whisper of sound in the house so far.
The bedroom was square and dark. A carpet stiff with old mud was plastered to the floor. There was a metal bed with a rusted spring, and a water-stained mattress over part of the spring.
Feet stuck out from under the bed.
They were large feet in walnut brown brogues, with purple socks above them. The socks had gray clocks down the sides. Above the socks were trousers of black and white check.
De Ruse stood very still and played the flash down on the feet. He made a soft sucking sound with his lips. He stood like that for a couple of minutes, without moving at all. Then he stood the flash on the floor, on its end, so that the light it shot against the ceiling was reflected down to make dim light all over the room.
He took hold of the mattress and pulled it off the bed. He reached down and touched one of the hands of the man who was under the bed. The hand was ice cold. He took hold of the ankles and pulled, but the man was large and heavy.
It was easier to move the bed from over him.
TEN
Zapparty leaned his head back against the upholstery and shut his eyes and turned his head away a little. His eyes were shut very tight and he tried to turn his head far enough so that the light from the big flash wouldn’t shine through his eyelids.
Nicky held the flash close to his face and snapped it on, off again, on, off again, monotonously, in a kind of rhythm.
De Ruse stood with one foot on the running board by the open door and looked off through the rain. On the edge of the murky horizon an airplane beacon flashed weakly.
Nicky said carelessly: «You never know what’ll get a guy. I saw one break once because a cop held his fingernail against the dimple in his chin.»
De Ruse laughed under his breath. «This one is tough,» he said. «You’ll have to think of something better than a flashlight.»
Nicky snapped the flash on, off, on, off. «I could,» he said, «But I don’t want to get my hands dirty.»
After a little while Zapparty raised his hands in front of him and let them fall slowly and began to talk. He talked in a low monotonous voice, keeping his eyes shut against the flash.
«Parisi worked the snatch. I didn’t know anything about it until it was done. Parisi muscled in on me about a month ago, with a couple of tough boys to back him up. He had found out somehow that Candless beat me out of twenty-five grand to defend my half-brother on a murder rap, then sold the kid out. I didn’t tell Parisi that. I didn’t know he knew until tonight.
«He came into the club about seven or a little after and said: ‘We’ve got a friend of yours, Hugo Candless. It’s a hundred-grand job, a quick turnover. All you have to do is help spread the pay-off across the tables here, get it mixed up with a bunch of other money. You have to do that because we give you a cut — and because the caper is right up your alley, if anything goes sour.’ That’s about all. Parisi sat around then and chewed his fingers and waited for his boys. He got pretty jumpy when they didn’t show. He went out once to make a phone call from a beer parlor.»