“And the man?”
He studied me with noncommittal eyes. “Florida is in trouble? You are from the police?”
I showed him my photostat and listened to him spell it out. “I thought it was trouble,” he said quietly.
“Was the man young and good-looking?”
“He was a man of middle age. He didn’t leave the automobile, even when Florida carried out her bags. No manners! I didn’t like his looks.”
“Can you describe him?”
“I didn’t see him too well.”
“I have a man in mind,” I said. “Short brown hair, fattish, shifty-looking, wino eyes, panama hat, light tan jacket. Calls himself Julian Desmond.”
He snapped his fingers. “That is the man. Florida called him Julian. Is he truly her brother-in-law?”
“No. You were right about him. I guess you know this town pretty well, Mr. Martinez.”
The suggestion seemed to exhilarate him. “For sixty-three years! My father was born here.”
“Here’s a question you should be able to answer. If you were Julian, and you wanted to take Florida to a hotel for the night, which one would you go to?”
“Any of them in the lower town, I guess.”
“Name the most likely ones, will you?” I took out my notebook.
He regarded it unhappily, disturbed by the notion of having anything he said committed to writing. “This trouble, is it serious?”
“Not for her. She’s needed as a witness.”
“A witness? Is that all? What kind of a witness?”
“The Buick she left in was involved in an accident this morning. I’m trying to identify the driver.”
The old man sighed with relief. “I will be glad to help.”
When I left him, I had the addresses of several hotels: the Rancheria, the Bella, the Oklahoma, the California, the Great West, the Pacific, and the Riviera. I was lucky on my third try, which happened to be the Great West.
Chapter 24
It was an old railroad hotel on Main Street between the tracks and the highway. Its narrow-windowed brick face was lugubrious, as if the big trucks going by for years had broken its steam-age spirit. There were battered brass spittoons on the floor of the lobby, old Union Pacific photogravures on the walls. Four men were playing contract at a card table near the front window. They had the still faces and satisfied hands of veteran railroaders growing old on schedule.
The clerk was a skinny old man in a green eyeshade and a black alpaca coat. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Desmond were registered: 310, on the third floor. No phone, I could just go up. The bell-hop was off on Sundays, he added whiningly.
I started for the elevator. The clerk called me back: “Wait a minute, young fellow, since you’re going up anyways. This wire came in for Mr. Desmond this morning. I didn’t like to disturb him.” The eyeshade suffused his face with a green cadaverous flush.
I took the sealed yellow envelope. “I’ll give it to Mr. Desmond.”
“The elevator isn’t working,” he whined. “You’ll have to use the stairs.”
The second floor was hotter than the first. The third floor was stifling. At the end of a windowless corridor lit by twenty-watt bulbs I found the door I was looking for. A cardboard DO NOT DISTURB sign dangled from the knob.
I knocked. Bedsprings groaned. A woman called out drowsily: “Who is it? Julian?”
I said: “Florie?”
Unsteady footsteps approached the door. She fumbled at the lock. “Just a minute. I’m blind this morning.”
I slipped the telegram into the breast pocket of my jacket. The door opened inward and I went in with it. Florie looked at me dumbly for five or six long seconds. Her black hair was matted and frizzled. Her eyes hung heavy and dark under heavy lids. In the frightened attitude her body had assumed, her hips and breasts seemed strangely irrelevant. The rouge-stained mouth in her sallow face was like a wilted red rose stuck in plasticine.
She made an erratic rush for the bed, and covered herself with a sheet. Her mouth fell open. I could see her pale lower gums. She brought it closed with an effort. “What do you want?”
“Not you, Florie. Don’t be scared.”
The air in the room was stale, spiked with cheap alcohol and perfume. A half-empty half-gallon jug of muscatel stood on the floor by her bed. Her clothes were scattered on the floor and chair and dresser. I guessed she had taken them off in a staggering fury before she passed out.
“Who are you? Did Julian send you?”
“I was hired by the hotel association to check on false registrations.” I didn’t mention that my work in that field had ended ten years ago.
She chattered over the taut edge of the sheet: “I didn’t register. He did. It was all his fault. Besides, we didn’t do nothing. He brought me up here last night and parked me with a jar of muscadoodle. Then he went away and I haven’t seen him since. I waited up for him half the night. He never did come back. So how do you have anything on me?”
“I’ll make a bargain with you. No charges if you co-operate.”
Suspicion darkened her face. “How do you mean, co-operate?” Her body wriggled uneasily under the sheet.
“Just answer my questions. Desmond’s the one I want. It looks as if he ran out on you.”
“What time is it?”
“One thirty.”
“Sunday afternoon?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He did run out! He promised to take me on a trip.” She sat up on the bed, holding the sheet across her excessive bosom.
“How did you meet him?”
“I didn’t meet him. He come to the office one night last week, Thursday night it was. I was just finishing up my cleaning. The doctor was out already, over at the library or someplace, and I was all alone in the office.”
“Where was Mrs. Benning?”
“She was upstairs, I guess. Yeah, she was upstairs with that colored girl friend of hers.”
“Lucy Champion?”
“That’s the one. Some people have funny friends. This Lucy woman come to visit her and they went upstairs to talk. Julian Desmond said it was me he wanted to see. He fed me a line how he was recruiting nurse’s aides for Hawaii at four hundred dollars a month! I was a sucker, I guess. I let him pump me about who I worked for and he took me out that night and got me plastered and asked me a bunch of questions about Mrs. Benning and that Lucy. I told him I didn’t know Lucy from a hole in the ground, or Mrs. Benning either for that matter. He wanted to know when she came back to her husband, and if her hair was dyed and if they were really married, stuff like that.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him how she came back over the weekend, two weeks ago it was. When I walked in on Monday morning there she was. Doctor says: ‘Meet my wife. She’s been in a sanitarium.’ She didn’t look like san stuff to me–” Florie broke off suddenly. Her mouth clamped shut. “That was all I said. I caught on what he was up to, and you don’t catch me playing blackmailers’ games.”
“I can see that. What else was there to tell?”
“Nothing else, not a thing. I don’t know nothing about Mrs. Benning. She’s a mystery woman to me.”
I changed the direction of my approach: “Why did she fire you last night?”
“She didn’t fire me.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I didn’t want to work for her any more.”
“You worked for her yesterday, though.”
“Yeah, sure, that was before she fired – I mean I left.”
“Were you in the house all Saturday afternoon?”
“I was until six. I get off at six unless there’s extra cleaning. I mean I did.”
“Was Mrs. Benning there all afternoon?”
“Most of it. She went out in the late afternoon, said she was going to shop for Sunday.”