And even then I nearly missed her. I watched her go up to the box, open it, take out the letter, glance at it, and start to leave. I’d been waiting for a small girl, with dark hair and brown eyes. This girl was a large blonde with the face of a beautiful cow. She was outside again before I realized it was my playmate of yesterday.
I got a lot of satisfaction out of following her this time. I was better at it, too. She took a couple of glances behind, as if to make sure no one was on her tail, but I made sure she didn’t see me. I hung on behind like she was towing me, until she turned into an apartment house near Hollywood High School.
With my hat down over my eyes, I pulled up close enough to see what apartment she entered. Then I gave her five minutes to read the letter. When she answered my knock, I said: “Well, here I am again!”
I got the feeling she wasn’t glad to see me; only fast footwork kept the door from being slammed in my face. And what that did to the new shine on my thirty-dollar shoes made me wince. She was a pretty husky gal but I outweighed her by fifty pounds. When I put my shoulder into it, the door came open. “What do you want?” she demanded indignantly. “Leave here immediately or I’ll call the manager. Who do you think you are, breaking into people’s apartments!”
“Turn it off, sister,” I told her. “I followed you here from the post office.”
She cringed away at that, eyes big, the back of one hand pressing against her mouth. Every gesture right out of the book, and not very good. Summer stock in a barn theater, I thought. I might have developed that line into something sharp, but she didn’t give me a chance.
All at once she stopped retreating, took two steps toward me, and flung herself into my arms. I think she was portraying passion and abandonment, and with a good leading man, it might have been effective. But I wasn’t quite expecting it, and she damned near knocked me down. She was too big for that sort of stuff.
Back on my heels, all I could do was grab her and that really put us in a clinch. Her full lips mashed themselves against mine and like it or not, I got well kissed. I liked it all right. She had on enough lipstick to paint the side of a barn, and she was pretty awkward getting in close but after that she did all right. No complaints.
When I got my wind back, I said: “I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but we’ve got to talk about it sooner or later. If you’ve got any more tricks for stalling, we’ll rush through them and then get down to business.”
“Won’t you just go away,” she pleaded. “Don’t ask any questions, just go.” Even her dramatics didn’t hide the fact she was scared. I would have felt sorry for her, if I didn’t have Laurie to worry about. And I was worried. I’d liked her old man’s voice on the phone and he was worried, so I was too.
“There’re questions that have to be asked,” I told the blonde. “Either by me or the police, and I’m easier to get along with.”
Chapter Three
The Golden Dome
She let go of a long breath. I was better than the cops. “What do you want to know?”
“Where’s Laurie Bressette?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you last see her?”
“Three months ago.” She got out a compact and a piece of tissue and wiped some of the lipstick off her face. It had gotten pretty well smeared around. “Three months and a week.”
“Did you know her well?” I asked.
She nodded, reaching for a cigarette. “We shared this apartment.”
“Tell me the story,” I said.
Without any more dramatics, she smoked and talked, and this was the gist of it: Her name was Eva Vaughn, and she was a singer in a little night club on Melrose while waiting for the movies to discover her, just like Laurie Bressette. Laurie had been under contract to some producer for a while — DeCoudre obviously — but it had lapsed. Then she’d taken a job as a clerk in a film rental library — Anselmo’s. She had a boy friend named Danny Lawson, a sometime radio actor. That was the background, and that was all.
Three months and one week ago, she hadn’t come home. One small suitcase was gone. Eva hadn’t seen her nor heard from her since.
“Her family in East Peoria have been hearing from her,” I said.
Eva flushed and stared down at her cigarette. “I wrote those letters. I typed them on a machine in a typing class at Hollywood Evening High School and signed Laurie’s name.”
“Why?” I asked, not being very bright today.
She handed me the letter she’d taken from Box 4972 a few minutes ago. There were a couple of sheets from Laurie’s mother, which I didn’t read. From her father was a check for a hundred and fifty dollars.
“There’s been one of these every month,” she said. “I wasn’t stealing the money. I was just borrowing. When the first one came I was out of a job and I couldn’t meet the rent. I knew Laurie wouldn’t want me to lose the apartment, no matter what. So... I endorsed the check and cashed it. After that, the checks always seemed to come just when I needed money...”
“But what about Laurie?” I demanded. “Didn’t you wonder where she was, or if she was all right?”
“Not at first. It wasn’t the first time she’d been away for a few days. I thought she was with Danny Lawson, her boyfriend. I’d cashed the first of the checks before I saw Danny.”
A sick feeling was settling in my stomach. “What did he say?”
“He didn’t know a thing. They’d had a fight and he hadn’t come around for a couple of weeks, so he didn’t know she’d gone.”
“How about Lawson — could he have done something to her?”
She shook her head emphatically at that. “Danny is nuts about her and he’s been worried silly ever since.”
“But that’s been three months!” I yelled. “Good Lord, didn’t he do anything?”
“What could he do?” Eva shrugged her shoulders. “He thought she’d gone home to her family in Peoria. And he didn’t have their address, so he couldn’t write to them.”
And as long as those checks were coming in Eva wasn’t telling him. I made myself calm down. “Have you got Doctor Bressette’s letters to Laurie?”
“Yes.” She got them out of a drawer.. “Look, Mr. Carmody, don’t think I haven’t been worried silly about Laurie. She’s kinda wild, but a sweet kid. But look at the position I was in — I could be arrested over those checks. I’ve been waiting until I could save up enough money to pay it back before I did anything. You see that, can’t you?”
“Oh, sure!” I said. “I suppose Bressette mentioned me in one of his letters?”
She nodded. “I knew then I was in for trouble, so I thought if I went to you and talked it over, you’d give me a break. But... I lost my nerve every time and just followed you around. Then you caught me yesterday, and I was so scared I couldn’t tell you.”
She came up close and I braced myself in case she tried throwing herself again. I was relieved when she didn’t. By this time I didn’t like her very well. God knows where Laurie Bressette was now — probably dead in a ditch somewhere, taking the Voice’s warning at face value — and all the blonde thought of was those monthly checks.
“What are you going to do, Mr. Carmody? Are you going to arrest me?”
“Not me.” I said. “I’m going to find Laurie, if I can. What she might want to do, or her father, I wouldn’t know.” I took Bressette’s letters and walked to the door. “Where can I find Danny Lawson?”
“I don’t know where he lives,” she said, in a subdued voice. “Maybe they’ll know at the Golden Dome. That’s a bar they hung around a lot.”