“Keep away from me. There’s spiders on me.”
“I don’t see any spiders.”
“They’re under my clothes. Black widows. The killer’s trying to poison me with spiders.”
“Who is the killer, Earl?”
His face worked. “Never found out who put the chill on Deloney. Word came down from the top, close off the case. What can a man–?” Another scream issued from his throat. “My God, there’s hundreds of ’em crawling on me.”
He tore at his clothes. They were in blue and orange rags when the police arrived, and his old wrestler’s body was naked and writhing on the linoleum.
The two patrolmen knew Earl Hoffman. I didn’t even have to explain.
Chapter 23
The red sun sank abruptly when the plane came down into the shadow of the mountains. I had wired my ETA to the Walters agency, and Phyllis was waiting for me at the airport.
She took my hand and offered me her cheek. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion, a little the worse for sun, and opaque smiling eyes the color of Indian enamel.
“You look tired, Lew. But you do exist.”
“Don’t tell me. It makes me feel tireder. You look wonderful.”
“It gets more difficult as I get older. But then some other things get easier.” She didn’t say what things. We walked toward her car in the sudden evening. “What were you doing in Illinois, anyway? I thought you were working on a case in Pacific Point.”
“It’s in both places. I found an old pre-war murder in Illinois which seems to be closely tied in with the current ones. Don’t ask me how. It would take all night to explain, and we have more important things to do.”
“You do, anyway. You have a dinner date at eight-thirty with Mrs. Sally Burke. You’re an old friend of mine from Los Angeles, business unspecified. You take it from there.”
“How did you fix it?”
“It wasn’t hard. Sally dotes on free dinners and unattached men. She wants to get married again.”
“But how did you get to know her?”
“I sort of happened into her at the bar where she hangs out and we got drunk together last night. One of us got drunk, anyway. She did some talking about her brother Judson, who may be the man you want.”
“He is. Where does he live?”
“Somewhere on the South Shore. It’s a hard place to find people, as you know. Arnie’s out there looking for him now.”
“Lead me to the sister.”
“You sound like a lamb asking to be led to the slaughter. Actually she’s a pretty nice gal,” she said with female solidarity. “Not bright, but she has her heart in the right place. She’s very fond of her brother.”
“So was Lucrezia Borgia.”
Phyllis slammed the car door. We drove toward Reno, a city where nothing good had ever happened to me, but I kept hoping.
Mrs. Sally Burke lived close in on Riley Street, in the upper flat of an old two-story house. Phyllis dropped me off in front of it at eight-twenty-nine, having extracted my promise to come back and spend the night with Arnie and her. Mrs. Burke was waiting in full panoply on the upper landing: tight black sheath with foxes, pearls and earrings, four-inch heels. Her hair was mingled brown and blonde, as if to express the complexity of her personality. Her brown eyes appraised me, as I came up to her level, the way an antebellum plantation owner might look over an able-bodied slave on the auction block.
She smelled nice, anyway, and she had a pleasant friendly anxious smile. We exchanged greetings and names. I was to call her Sally right away.
“I’m afraid I can’t ask you in, the place is a mess. I never seem to get anything done on Sunday. You know the old song, ‘Gloomy Sunday’? That is, since my divorce. Phyllis says you’re divorced.”
“Phyllis is right.”
“It’s different for a man,” she said with some faint resentment. “But I can see you could use a woman to look after you.”
She was one of the fastest and least efficient workers I’d ever met. My heart went down toward my boots. She was looking at my boots, and at the clothes I had slept in on the plane. On the other hand I was able-bodied. I had climbed the stairs unaided.
“Where shall we eat?” she said. “The Riverside is nice.”
It was nice and expensive. After a couple of drinks I ceased to care about spending Alex’s money. I began to be fascinated, in a way, by Sally Burke’s conversation. Her ex-husband, if I could believe her, was a combination of Dracula, Hitler, and Uriah Heep. He made at least twenty-five thousand a year as a salesman in the Northwest, but more than once she had to attach his salary to collect her measly six hundred a month alimony. She was having a rough time making ends meet, especially now that her little brother had lost his job at the club.
I ordered her another drink and indicated mild sympathy.
“Jud’s a good boy,” she said, as if somebody had just denied it. “He played football at Washington State and led the team in rushing. A lot of people in Spokane thought he would have made All-American if he’d played for a better-known school. But he never got due recognition, he never has. He lost his coaching job out of sheer politics pure and simple. The charges they made were a lot of poppycock, he told me so himself.”
“What charges?”
“Nothing. They were a lot of poppycock, I mean it.” She finished her fourth martini and regarded me with simple cunning over the empty glass. “I don’t believe you told me what kind of business that you’re in. Lew?”
“I don’t believe I did. I run a small agency in Hollywood.”
“Isn’t that interesting? Jud has always been interested in acting. He hasn’t done any, actually, but he’s said to be a very handsome boy. Jud was down in Hollywood last week.”
“Looking for an acting job?”
“Anything,” she said. “He’s a willing worker, but the trouble is he isn’t trained for anything, I mean after he lost his teaching credentials, and then the dance studio folded. Do you think you could get him something to do in Hollywood?”
“I’d certainly like to talk to him,” I said truthfully.
She was tipsy and hopeful, and she wasn’t surprised by my interest in her brother.
“That can be arranged,” she said. “As a matter of fact he’s at my apartment right now. I could call him and tell him to come over here.”
“Let’s have dinner first.”
“I don’t mind paying for Jud’s dinner.” She realized she had made a tactical error, and quickly back-tracked: “But I guess three’s company, eh? I mean two.”
She talked so much about her brother at dinner that it was almost like having him there. She recited his old football statistics. She told me, with a kind of vicarious enthusiasm, all about his prowess with the ladies. She explained about the brilliant ideas Jud was always hatching. The one I liked best was a plan for a condensed version of the Bible, with all the offensive passages removed, for family reading.
Sally couldn’t drink. She was coming apart by the time we finished eating. She wanted to pick up her brother and go and hell around in the clubs, but my heart wasn’t in it. I took her home. In the cab she went to sleep on my shoulder. This I didn’t mind.
I woke her up on Riley Street and got her into the house and up the stairs. She seemed very large and loosely put together, and the foxes kept slipping. I felt as if I’d been nursing drunks all weekend.
A man in shirtsleeves and form-fitting trousers opened the door of her flat. With Sally leaning on me, I got a quick impression of him: a man of half-qualities who lived in a halfworld: he was half-handsome, half-lost, half-spoiled, half-smart, half-dangerous. His pointed Italian shoes were scuffed at the toes.