“You can’t make twenty thousand a year working for yourself.”
“I do all right. Besides, I have a future.”
I had touched a sore spot. “What do you mean by that?” His eyes seemed to swell like leeches sucking blood from his face.
“You don’t last so long in the rackets. If you’re lucky, you last as long as a pitcher or a fighter–”
“I run a legitimate business,” he said with intensity. “I used to handle bets, sure, but that’s over and done. I hardly ever break a law any more.”
“Not even the murder laws?” I was getting very impatient, and it made me indiscreet.
But the question appealed to his vanity in some way. “I never even been indicted,” he said.
“How many men have you lost in the last five years?”
“How the hell should I know? I got a rapid turnover, sure, it’s the nature of the business. I got to protect myself from competition, I got to protect my friends.” He slid off his stool and began to pace the floor: “I’ll tell you one thing, Archer, I’m going to live a long time. I come from a long-lived family. My grandfather’s still living, believe it or not, he’s over ninety years old. I keep myself in shape, by God, and I’m going to live to be a hundred. What do you think of that?” He punched himself in the stomach, easily.
I thought that Dowser was afraid to die, and I realized why he couldn’t bear to be left alone. I didn’t answer him.
“I’m going to live to be a hundred,” he repeated, like a man talking in his sleep.
I heard the front door open and close. Blaney appeared in the hallway.
“Did you take her home?” Dowser asked him.
“I dropped her off at the corner. There was a patrol car in front of the house.”
“Cops? What do cops want with her?”
“A man named Dalling was killed this morning,” I said, looking from one to the other.
Apparently the name meant nothing to Dowser. “Who’s he?”
“A friend of Galley’s. The cops will be asking her a lot of questions.”
“She better not answer too many.” He sounded unworried. “What happened to the guy?”
“I wouldn’t know. Good-bye.”
“Gimme a rumble if you hear anything.” And he gave me his private number.
Now that Blaney was back, Dowser lost interest in me. I walked to the door unescorted and let myself out. But I didn’t entirely relax until I was back on the highway.
Chapter 17
I had questions I wanted to ask Galley Lawrence in private, but the police had got to her first. I always believed in giving the police an official priority, when they got there first. So I stayed on the highway and drove south through Santa Monica.
It was after four o’clock when I reached the Pacific Point Hospital. I passed up the information desk and went straight upstairs to Room 204. Mario Tarantine’s bed was empty. The other bed in the room was occupied by a small boy reading a comic book.
I checked on the room number again, and went down the corridor to the nurses’ station. A gimlet-eyed head nurse looked up from a chart: “Visiting hours are over. We can’t run a hospital if visitors don’t obey regulations.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “Did Mr. Tarantine go home?”
“Mr. who?”
“Tarantine, in 204. Where is he?”
Her sharp little angled face expressed stern disapproval. “Yes, he did go home. Against his doctor’s orders and his own best interests, he put on his clothes last night and walked out of the hospital. I suppose you’re a friend of his?”
“I know him.”
“Well, you can tell him that if he has a relapse, on his own head be it. We can’t run a hospital if patients won’t cooperate.” The waspish buzzing followed me down the corridor.
I drove across town to the end of Sanedres Street, and parked in front of Mrs. Tarantine’s cottage. The late afternoon sun shining through the laurels in the front yard made gold filigree patterns on the worn lawn. I tapped on the glass door and a man’s voice called: “Come in.”
I turned the knob and stepped directly into a small dim living-room. The air in the room smelled of spices and scrubbed floors and rotting flowers. The plaster wall opposite the door was almost covered with a crude painting of a four-masted schooner in full sail. Above the warped mantelpiece a tarnished gold Christ writhed on a dark wood cross.
In front of the dead fireplace, Mario Tarantine was sitting with his legs up on a time-eaten mohair davenport, a white pillow behind his bandaged head. “You again,” was all he said when he saw me.
“Me again. I tried the hospital first. Are you all right?”
“Now that I’m getting some decent food I’m all right. You know what they tried to feed me in that hospital? Chicken broth. Fruit salad. Cottage cheese.” His swollen mouth spat out the words as if he could taste their flavour. “How can I get my strength back on cottage cheese? I just sent Mama down to the butcher shop for the biggest steak she can find.” He smiled painfully, showing his broken front teeth. “What’s the word?”
“About your brother? He’s been getting around. Your boat is gone, but I suppose you know that.”
“The Aztec Queen?” He leaned toward me, heavy-shouldered, the old davenport creaking under his weight. “Gone where?”
“To Mexico, perhaps. Wherever Joe’s gone.”
“For Christ’s sake!” His dark eyes, peering distracted from the ruined face, glanced around the room. His gaze rested on the gilt Christ above the mantel, and dropped. He stood up and moved towards me. “How long has the boat been gone? How do you know Joe took it?”
“I talked to Galley. She dropped him near the yacht basin early this morning, four or five o’clock. Does Joe have a key to the boat?”
“The bastard has my keys. You got a car with you? I got to get down there.”
“I’ll drive you if you’re feeling up to it.”
“I’m feeling up to it. Wait, I’ll get my shoes on.” He shuffled out of the room in stocking feet, and stamped back wearing boots and a leather jacket. “Let’s go.”
He noticed that I was looking at the painted schooner on the wall. It wasn’t a lithograph, as I’d thought at first glance, but a mural painted directly on the plaster, with a black frame painted around it. The colors were garish, made worse by an impossible sunset raying the stiff water, and the draftsmanship was wobbly. Still, the leaning ship looked as if it was moving, and that was something.
“How do you like the picture?” Mario said from the open door. “Joe did it when he was a kid. He wanted to be an artist. Too bad he had to grow up into an all-round heel.”
I saw then that the painting had a signature, carefully painted in script: Joseph Tarantine, 1934. It had a title, too, probably copied from a calendar: When My Ship Comes In.
I drove downhill to the palm-lined boulevard that skirted the seashore, and along it to the dock. Mario directed me to a lot at the base of the breakwater, where I parked beside a weatherbeaten Star boat perched on a trailer. A brisk offshore wind was blowing the sand, and tossing puffs of spray across the concrete breakwater. In its lee a hundred boats lay at their moorings, ranging from waterlogged skiffs to seventy-foot sailing yachts with masts like telephone poles.
Mario looked across the bright water of the basin and groaned out loud. “It’s gone all right. He took my boat.” He sounded ready to cry.