“You can’t buy me,” I repeated. “Hand it over.”
“If I do, what happens to me?”
“It’s up to you. Climb into your car and drive as fast as you can as far as you can. Or walk due west until you hit the ocean and keep on walking.”
He raised his eyes to mine. His face was old and sick. “I should have shot you when I had the chance.”
“You should have, but you didn’t. You’re washed up, as I said.”
“Yes,” he said to himself. “I am washed up.” His voice was almost cheerful, in a wry thin way. I got the impression that he had never really expected to succeed, and was taking a bitter satisfaction from his own foresight.
“You’re wasting my time. Where is it?”
“I’ll give you a straight answer to that if you’ll give me a straight answer to this. Who tipped my hand to you? I don’t expect to do anything about it. I’d simply like to know.”
“Nobody did.”
“Nobody?”
“I put together a couple of hunches and a lot of legwork, and worked it out for myself. You won’t believe that, naturally.”
“Oh, I believe it. Anyway, what difference does it make?” He shook his head fretfully, bored by the answer to his own question. “The lousy stuff is in a tobacco can in the kitchen cupboard.”
I found it there.
Chapter 29
I had made up my mind about Ruth before I got back to the Grandview Hotel. I knew if I didn’t go back for her I wouldn’t be able to forget her. A teen-aged girl with heroin in her veins was the stuff bad dreams were made of.
The lobby was dark and deserted except where the night clerk sat behind his desk with a science-fiction magazine propped in front of him. He descended from inter-galactic space to give me a quick once-over. Neither of us spoke. I went up in the elevator and down the red-lit corridor again to 307.
The girl was sleeping as I had left her, on her side, her knees bent double and her long thighs clasped to her breast. She stirred and sighed when I closed the door and crossed the room to look at her. The short gold hair fallen across her face moved in and out with her breathing. I pushed it back and tucked it behind her ear. She raised her free arm as if to protect her head from attack, but she slept on. She was sunk deep in sleep, maybe beyond my reach.
I filled the bathroom glass with cold water again, straightened her out on the bed, and poured the water over her face. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she swore.
“Rise and shine, Ruth.”
“Go away, you’re rocking my dream-boat.” She flipped over onto her stomach, and buried her wet face in the soaking pillow.
I flipped her back. “Hey, kid! You’ve got to get up.”
“No. Please,” she whined, her eyes tight shut again.
I refilled the glass and brought it back from the bathroom. “More water?”
“No!” She sat up, calling me names.
“Get dressed. You’re coming with me. You don’t want to stay with Mosquito, do you?”
Her head lolled on her neck, to one side and then the other. “No. He’s nasty.” She spoke with childish earnestness, casting an orphaned look around the barren walls. “Where is Mosquito?”
“He’s on his way. You’ve got to get out of here.”
“Yes.” She repeated after me like a lesson she had learned: “I’ve got to get out of here.”
I gathered up her clothes from the bathroom floor and tossed them to her: sweater and skirt, shoes and stockings. But she was still far gone, unequal to the task of putting them on. I had to strip off the pajamas and dress her. Her entire body was cold to the touch. It was like dressing a doll.
Her polo coat was hanging on the bathroom door. I wrapped it around her and pulled her to her feet. She couldn’t stand alone, or didn’t choose to. Ruth had flown back to her island, leaving her vacant body for me to deal with. In one way and another I got her to the elevator and propped her in a corner while I ran it down to the lobby. I pushed back the metal door and lifted her in my arms. She was light enough.
The night clerk looked up as I passed the desk. He didn’t say a word. No doubt he had seen more remarkable couples step out of that elevator.
My car was parked at the yellow curb in front of the hotel. I unlocked the door and deposited her on the seat with her head propped in the corner against a baseball cushion. She stayed in that position for the next six hours, though she had a tendency to slide toward the floor. Every hour or so, I had to stop the car in order to lift her back into her corner. Most of the rest of the time I kept the speedometer needle between seventy-five and eighty. She slept like the dead while I drove from foggy night to dawn and through the long bright morning, heading south.
She woke up finally when I braked for the stoplight at the Santa Barbara way. The light changed suddenly, taking me by surprise, and I had to burn rubber.
Ruth was flung from her seat. I held her back from the windshield with my right arm. She opened her eyes then, and looked around and wondered where she was.
“Santa Barbara.” The light changed back to green, and I shifted gears.
She stretched and sat up straight, staring at the combed green lemon groves and the blue mountains in the near distance. “Where are we going?” she asked me, her voice still thickened by sleep.
“To see a friend of mine.”
“In San Francisco?”
“Not in San Francisco.”
“That’s good.” She yawned and stretched some more. “I don’t really want to go there after all. I had an awful dream about San Francisco. An awful little man with bushy hair took me up to his room and made me do terrible things. I don’t exactly remember what they were, though. God, I feel lousy. Was I on a jag last night?”
“A kind of one. Go to sleep again if you want to. Or how about something to eat?”
“I don’t know if I can scarf anything, but maybe I better try. God knows how long since I have.”
We were approaching the freeway, and there was a truck-stop restaurant ahead. I pulled into the service station beside it and helped her out of the car. We were a very sorry couple. She still moved like a sleepwalker, and her pallor was ghastly under the noon sun. I had three hundred and forty brand-new miles on my gauge, and I felt as if I had walked them. I needed food, sleep, shave, and shower. Most of all I needed a talk with or even a look at somebody who was happy, prosperous, and virtuous, or any one of the three.
A steak and a pint of coffee did a lot for me. The girl nibbled halfheartedly at a piece of toast that she dipped in the yolk of one of her eggs. Heroin was her food and drink and sleep. It was going to be her death if she stayed with the kick to the end. The idea bothered me.
I said that to her, in slightly different words, when we were back in the car: “I’ve known weed- and opium-smokers, coke-sniffers, hemp-chewers, laudanum drinkers, plain and fancy drunks. Guys and girls who lived on canned heat and rubbing alcohol. There are even people in the world who can’t leave arsenic alone, and other people who would sell themselves into slavery for a long cool drink of ether. But your habit is the worst habit there is.”
“A lecture,” she said, with adolescent boredom. I might have been a high-school teacher objecting to bubble-gum. “What do you know about my habits, Mr. Drag?”
“Plenty.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a private detective. I told you that before, but you’ve forgotten it.”
“Yeah, I suppose I did. Was I in San Francisco last night? I think I remember, I rode up there on a bus.”
“You were there. I don’t know how you got there.”
“What happened to my shoulder? I noticed in the rest room, it looks like somebody bit me.”