He ordered a bottle of beer and carried it to my booth. “Mind if I sit down? I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” His voice was beautiful, too, rich and soft and full with deep manly overtones.
“I don’t place you. But sit down.”
He removed his hat and exhibited the wavy auburn hair that went with the long dark eyelashes. Everything was so perfect, it made me a little sick. He slid into the leather seat across the table from me.
“On second thoughts, maybe I do,” I said. “Haven’t I seen you in pictures?”
“Not unless you get to look at screen tests. I never got past them.”
“Why?”
“Women don’t do the hiring. Men don’t like me. Even the pansies hate me because I won’t give them a tumble. You don’t like me, do you?”
“Not very much. Handsome is as handsome does, I always say. Does it matter if I like you?”
He came to the point then, though it cost him an effort. His purple eyes were shadowed by anxiety. “You could be working for Dowser.”
“I could be, but I’m not. Whoever Dowser is.”
He waited for me to say more, leaning gracefully in the corner of the booth with one arm on the table. He was tense, though. There were wet dark blotches under both arms of the flannel jacket.
I said: “You’re scared stiff, aren’t you?”
He tried to smile. The effect reminded me of a device I read about once for making insane people feel happy. It consisted of a couple of hooks that raised the corners of the mouth into smiling position. Its beneficaries were forced to smile, and this made them feel like smiling, at least that was the theory.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m scared stiff.”
“You want to tell me about it? I’m wearing my hearing aid tonight.”
“That won’t be necessary,” with the forced wry smile again. “You might explain how you come into the picture, Mr.–?”
“Archer. Lew Archer.”
“My name’s Keith Dalling.”
“I’m a private detective,” I said. “A Mrs. Lawrence employed me to look for her daughter.” I was getting pretty tired of that pitch. It sounded too simple and corny to be true, especially in the Palm Springs atmosphere.
“Why?”
“Maternal anxiety, I guess. She hadn’t heard from her for a couple of months. Nothing to be afraid of, Mr. Dalling.”
“If I could be sure of that.” There was a beaded row of sweat along his peaked hairline. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “I heard from a friend in L. A. that Dowser was looking for Galley. It puts me in a spot –”
“Who’s he?”
“You must have heard of Dowser.” He watched me carefully. “He isn’t the kind of person you want on your trail.”
“You were saying, it puts you in a spot.”
Once he had begun, he was eager to talk. Dalling was big and strong-looking but he wasn’t built for strain. He had bad nerves, and admitted it. He hadn’t slept the night before, and he was the kind of fellow who needed his sleep.
“What happened last night?”
“I’ll tell you from the beginning.” He took out a briar pipe and filled it, as he talked, with English-cut tobacco. He was such a perfect artistic example of his type that I began to like him, almost as if he were a creature of my own imagination. “I own this little place in the desert, you see. The place was standing empty, and I had a chance to rent it to Joe Tarantine. He approached me about it week before last, and his offer was good so I took it.”
“How do you happen to know him?”
“He’s a neighbor of mine. We live across the hall from each other in the Casa Loma apartments.” I remembered the engraved card on the mailbox, with his name on it. “I’d told him about the house, and he knew I wasn’t planning to use it myself. He said he and his wife wanted to get away for a while, someplace where the pressure would be off.”
“Galley is married to him, then.”
“So far as I know. They’ve been living in that apartment as man and wife since the first of the year. I think he mentioned they were married in Las Vegas.”
“What does he do?”
He lit his pipe with a wooden match and puffed out a cloud of smoke. “I didn’t know until yesterday, when this friend of mine phoned me. Tarantine is a mobster, or something pretty close to it. He handles Dowser’s interests in Pacific Point. Dowser has half a dozen towns on the coast sewed up, from Long Beach on down. But that’s not the worst of it. Tarantine has stolen something of Dowser’s and skipped out. Apparently he planned it ahead of time, and he’s using my place as a hideout. I wondered why he asked me not to tell anyone. He said if it leaked out the deal was off.”
“This friend of yours,” I said, “how does he know all this?”
“I don’t exactly know. He’s a radio producer and he does a crime show based on police files. I suppose he hears inside information.”
“But he didn’t hear what Tarantine lifted from Dowser?”
“No. Money, perhaps. He seems to have plenty of it. I rented my house to him in all innocence, and now it’s made me look as if I’m an accomplice.” He gulped the beer that had been growing stale in his glass.
I signaled for more drinks, but he refused another. “I’ve got to keep my wits about me.”
“I don’t think it’s so bad,” I said. “If you’re afraid of Dowser, why don’t you go and talk to him?”
“I daren’t show myself. Besides, if I talked to Dowser, I’d have Tarantine to worry about.”
“Not for long.”
“I can’t be sure of that, either. Frankly, I’m in a mess. I phoned up Galley, Mrs. Tarantine, yesterday after I talked to my friend. She agreed to meet me here. She didn’t realize what a chance she was taking, until I told her about her husband. She was shocked. She said she was practically a prisoner out there. She had to slip away last night while he was sleeping, and God knows what he did to her when she got back.”
“You like her pretty well.”
“Frankly, I do. She’s a lovely kid, and she’s got herself mixed up with an awfully nasty crew.” Not all of his anxiety was for himself.
“I’d like to meet her,” I said. “I never have.”
He stood up suddenly. “I was hoping you’d say that. I have a normal amount of physical courage, I think, but I’m not up to dealing with gangsters, all by myself, I mean.”
I said that that was natural enough.
Chapter 9
My car was parked six blocks away, where I had begun my rounds. Dalling’s was waiting at the curb. If I had been asked to guess what kind of car he had, I would have said a red or yellow convertible, Chrysler or Buick or De Soto. It was a yellow Buick with red leather seats.
As we drove out of town, slowing down occasionally for a stop sign, I asked him what he did. He had been and done a number of things, he said, chorus boy in musicals before he grew too big, photographic model for advertising agencies, car and yacht salesman, navigator on a PBY during the war. He was proud of that. After the war he had married a rich wife, but it hadn’t lasted. More recently he had been a radio actor but that hadn’t lasted either because he drank too much. Dalling was frank almost to the point of fruitiness. Starting with the assumption that no man could like him in any case, he said, he figured he might just as well be himself. He had nothing to lose.
When we got on the highway he accelerated to eighty or so and concentrated on his driving, which interrupted our onesided conversation. After a while I asked him where we were going. “At this rate we’ll be in Mexico before long.”