“Loan? Is that what they’re calling it now?” I said without heat. “I think you better turn around. The back is about the right place.”
He didn’t. He got out two words after the first shot. Two husky breaths that didn’t touch his larynx walls at all. “What — for?”
“For Jean Hunter... Here’s your code back again,” I said above the noise, while I kept punching the trigger in and out. “Five times, then quit, then call back again.”
He was down long before the last one, so I gave it to him on the floor. I took the ring back, but I threw the gun down beside him in exchange.
There was evidently no one there with him, and the place must have been soundproofed. No one seemed to have heard it outside in the hall when I went out there. On the way down I was going to tell the elevator operator, “I just shot that Franklin guy up there.” But then I thought, “Aw, let them come over to my place after me, if they want me!” I went home.
The door was still closed, where she’d gone in that afternoon and never come out again.
“It’s taken care of, Jean,” I said quietly, as if she were still in there. “He won’t be calling you up any—”
Just then it started to ring. Brring! — one. Brring! — two. Brring! — three. Brring! — four. Brring — five. Then it stopped for a minute.
Then it started in again.
90
The Peppermint-Striped Goodby
Ron Goulart
1
The drive-in, all harsh glass and stiff redwood and brittle aluminum and sharp No. 7 nails, stood on the oceanside of the bright road like some undecided suicide. My carhop had a look of frozen hopefulness and the flawed walk of a windup doll with a faulty gudgeon pin. Shifting in the seat of my late-model car, I eased the barrel of my stiff black .38 Police special so that it stopped cutting off the circulation in my left leg.
“Where’s the town of San Mineo?” I asked the girl, my voice an echo of all the lost hopes of all of us.
“Back that way about twenty miles,” she said.
I’d thought so. Sometimes the intricate labyrinth that is Southern California gets one up on me. But there is, as my once-wife used to point out, an intense, harsh, sun-dried stubbornness about Ross Pewter. She often talked like that.
It was stubborn of me to drive my late-model car, gunning it too much on the sharp death-edged curves of the road that wound by the sea, twenty miles in the wrong direction. I was thirty-six now and sometimes the harsh sun-dried motor trips through the fever-heat madness that is Southern California made me feel that time’s winged chariot was behind me. Other times it was a lettuce truck. Nobody passed Ross Pewter on the road.
“Do you wish to see a menu?” the carhop asked. Her voice had the ring of too much laughter deferred in it.
“No,” I told her. I backed out of the place, afraid of the already ghost-town look of it, and cannoned back toward San Mineo and my client.
“Pewter,” I said aloud as my late-model car flashed like a dazed locust down the mirage of the state highway, “Pewter, some of these encounters you get into in the pursuit of a case seem to be without meaning.”
I would have answered myself that life itself is at times, most times, meaningless. But a Highway Patrol cycle, its motor like the throaty cough of an old man who has come to Los Angeles from Ohio and found that his Social Security checks are being sent still to his Ohio address, started up behind me. The pursuit began and I had to ride the car hard to elude it.
2
The pillars that held up the porch of the big house reminded me of the detail of the capital and entablature of the Ionic temple at Fortuna Virilis at Rome. The entablature, cornice, and architrave were encrusted with carved ornament, a motif of formalized acanthus leaf enriching the design, and the scrolls terminated in rosettes.
I almost wished this were the house I was going to visit.
Sighing, and dislodging the barrel of my pistol from a tender part of my thigh, I crossed the rich moneyed street and approached the home of old Tro Bultitude. Decay seemed to drift all around, carried like pollen on the hot red wind of this late Southern California afternoon. Even the pilasters, the balustrades, and the cornices of the sprawling Bultitude mansion seemed decayed. It sat like the waiting wedding cake in that book by Charles Dickens.
The thought of it all filled me with a sadness and the actual pollen in the air started my hay fever going again.
The butler was a heavy-set man, all thick hair and musty black clothes, and there was about him the faint smell of Saturday matinees in small Midwestern movie theaters now renovated and made into supermarkets and coin laundries.
“Blow off, Jack,” he said.
“The name is Pewter,” I said. “Tell your boss I’m here to see him.”
“Scram, Jacko. We got illness in the family. All the Colonel’s unmarried daughters are down with nymphomania.”
I didn’t speak. I just showed him the barrel of my .38.
“What’s that hanging on the end of it?” he asked.
I looked. “Some elastic from my shorts, it seems. Want to make a quip about it?”
“I’ll quip you,” said the butler, snarling. “You remind me of all the lonely self-abusing one-suited bill collectors that haunted the time-troubled corridors of my long-ago youth.”
“I’ll do the metaphors around here,” I said and went for him. I got two nice chops at his jaw and he tumbled back like a condemned building that has just been hit by a runaway truck.
“Let’s not waste any more time,” called an old life-worn voice from inside.
I vaulted the fallen butler and found myself not in a hallway but at once in a giant white-walled room. As I looked on, steam began to come from jets low in the wall.
“The name is Pewter,” I said to the crumbled old man who sat in a sunchair, wrapped in a towel as white as the flash of a .38 like mine.
“You’ve got a problem?”
“Vachel Geesewand said you’d cleared up that business in Santa Monica,” said Bultitude.
“I cleared up the whole damn town before I quit.”
“Good. My problem,” said the old man, “is simply this. About twenty-two years ago in Connecticut — the name of the town doesn’t matter — a young man named Earl K. M. Hoseblender was riding a bicycle down East Thirty-fourth Street, heading for a hardware store.”
“Go on,” I said, interested now.
“My mind wanders,” he admitted. “That isn’t the right problem. That one the police will handle. What I want you to do is find my daughter, Alicia.”
“I can do that.”
“Alicia is a strange girl,” said the old man. “For a long time she wore a false beard and hung out with the surfers at Zuma Beach. They drove around in an old ice-cream wagon they’d painted with peppermint stripes.”
“Red and white stripes?”
“You’ve guessed it,” said Tro Bultitude. “Then about a year ago there was an accident.”
“What kind of an accident?”
“Alicia never told me. I do know that the bell fell off the ice-cream wagon; she’s talked about that often. And a boy named Kip may have broken his left ankle. It was all a year ago, a long time ago for a twenty-year-old like Alicia.
“You see, Mr. Pewter, Alicia has not had an untroubled childhood. When she was four my first wife — the former Hazel Wadlow Whitney — fell unaccountably from the top of a Christmas tree and succumbed. Alicia was the only witness.” He sighed a dry dead sigh, like leaves being swept up by a slipshod gardener. “At fourteen she was unavoidably involved in a bank robbery in Connecticut. The town will be nameless.”