The fact that I’d disappeared from my room in that block? That would mean nothing. Tomorrow a week’s rent was due; the landlord would come to collect it, find me and my few possessions gone, and rent it again. He’d think nothing of it. Why should he?
No, now that I’d taken the few precautions Billie had suggested, I was safe enough as long as I stayed away from her building.
Why was I hiding here now, then?
The wine was gone and I wanted more. But I knew what shape I’d be in by eight o’clock if I kept on drinking it, starting at this hour of the morning.
But I’d go nuts if I stayed here, doing nothing. I picked up the papers, read the funny sheets, a few other things. Back in the middle of one of them a headline over a short item caught my eye, I don’t know for what reason. Victim in Alley Slaying Identified.
Maybe my eye had first caught the name down in the body of the story, Jesus Gonzales. And Mame’s jittery guest of the night before her death had been named Jesus Gonzales.
I read the story. Yesterday morning at dawn the body of a man had been found in an areaway off Winston Street near San Pedro Street. He had been killed with a blunt instrument, probably a blackjack. As he had been robbed of everything he was carrying, no identification had been made at first. Now he had been identified as Jesus Gonzales, 41, of Mexico City, DF. He had arrived in Los Angeles the day before on the SS Guadalajara, out of Tokyo. His passport, which had been left in his room at the Berengia Hotel, and other papers left with it, showed that he had been in the Orient on a buying trip for a Mexico City art object importing firm in which he was a partner, and that he was stopping in Los Angeles for a brief vacation on his return trip.
Mame’s Jesus Gonzales? It certainly looked that way. The place and time fitted; less than two blocks from her room. So did the time, the morning after he’d been frightened by that knock at the door and had left unceremoniously via the fire escape.
But why would he have hooked up with Mame? The Berengia is a swank hotel, only people with well-lined pockets stay there. Mame was no prize; at the Berengia he could have done better through his own bellhop.
Or could it be a factor that Mame was a junkie and, stopping in at The Best Chance, he’d recognized her as one and picked her for that reason? He could have been a hype himself, in need of a jolt and in a city where he had no contacts, or – and this seemed even more likely because of his just having landed from Tokyo – he’d smuggled some dope in with him and was looking for a dealer to sell it. The simplest and safest way to find a dealer would be through an addict.
It was just a wild guess, of course, but it wasn’t too wild to be possible. And damn it, Mame’s Jesus Gonzales had acted suspiciously and he had been afraid of something. Maybe he’d thought somebody was following him, following him and Mame home from The Best Chance. If he was the same Jesus Gonzales who’d just been killed and robbed only two blocks from her place, then he’d been dead right in being careful. He’d made his mistake in assuming that the knocker on Mame’s door was the man who’d followed him and in going down the fire escape. Maybe his Nemesis had still been outside the building, probably watching from across the street, and had seen him leave. And on Winston Street Nemesis had caught up with him.
Nice going, B.A.S., old boy, I thought. You’re doing fine. It isn’t every Skid-Row pearl-diver who can reconstruct a crime out of nothing. Sheer genius, B.A.S., sheer genius.
But it was something to pass the time, a lot better than staring at the wall and wishing I’d never left Chicago. Better than brooding.
All right, suppose it figured so far – then how did Mame’s death tie in with it? I didn’t see how. I made myself pace and concentrate, trying to work out an answer.
I felt sure Mame had been telling me the truth about Gonzales as far as she knew it, or else she would have had no reason for mentioning it at all. Whatever his ulterior motive in picking her up, whether to buy dope or to find a contact for selling it, he hadn’t yet leveled with Mame before that knock came. Otherwise she wouldn’t have told it casually, as she had, as something amusing.
But the killer wouldn’t have known that. He couldn’t have known that Mame was not an accomplice. If what he was looking for hadn’t been on the person of the man he’d killed he could have figured that it had already changed hands. Why hadn’t he gone back to Mame’s the same night? I didn’t know, but there could have been a reason. Perhaps he had and she’d gone out, locking the door and the fire-escape window. Or maybe by that time she had other company; if he had knocked she might have opened the door on the chain – and I remembered now that there was a chain on her door – and told him so. I couldn’t ask Mame now what she’d done the rest of the night after her jittery caller had left.
But if Gonzales was a stranger in town, just off the boat, how would the killer have known he had brought in heroin? – or opium or cocaine; it could have been any drug worth smuggling. And the killer must have known something; if it had been just a robbery kill, for whatever money Gonzales was carrying, then he wouldn’t have gone back and killed Mame, searched her room. He’d have done that only if he’d known something about Gonzales that made him think Mame was his accomplice.
I killed a few more minutes worrying about that and I had the answer. Maybe not the answer, but at least an answer that made sense. Maybe I was just mildly cockeyed, but this off-the-cuff figuring I’d been doing did seem to be getting somewhere.
It was possible, I reasoned, that Mame hadn’t been the first person through whom Gonzales had tried to make a contact. He could have approached another junkie on the same deal, but one who refused to tell him her contact. Her? It didn’t have to be a woman, but Mame had been a woman and that made me think he’d been working that way. Say that he’d wandered around B-joints until he spotted a B-girl as an addict; he could get her in a booth and try to get information from her. She could have stalled him or turned him down. Stalled him, most likely, making a phone call or two to see if she could get hold of a dealer for him, but tipping off her boyfriend instead. Killing time enough for her boyfriend to be ready outside, then telling Gonzales she couldn’t make a contact for him.
And if any of that had sounded suspicious to Gonzales he would have been more careful the second try, with Mame. He’d get her to her room on the obvious pretext, make sure they were alone and hadn’t been followed before he opened up. Only, between The Best Chance and Mame’s room, he must have discovered that they were being followed.
Sure, it all fitted. But what good did it do me?
Sure, it was logical. It made a complete and perfect picture, but it was all guesswork, nothing to go to the cops with. Even if they believed me eventually and could verify my guesses in the long run, I’d be getting myself and Billie the Kid into plenty of trouble in the short run. And like as not enough bad publicity – my relations with Billie would surely come out, and Billie’s occupation – to have my father’s clients in Chicago decide I wasn’t fit to handle their business.
Well, was I? Worry about the fact that you want a drink so damned bad, I told myself, that soon you’re going to weaken and go down and get another bottle. Well, why not? As long as I rationed it to myself so I would be drinking just enough to hold my own and not get drunk, not until after eight o’clock anyway . . .