He got up, and I swear, he looked at least three years more grown up. “If you need any help satisfying Doc Bressette, let me know.”
He left then. I watched him from the window as he came out on the street. He headed directly for a street car going downtown. That’s where the Sixth Street Terminal was, where he’d catch a train back to Long Beach. I wondered what his baby-faced blonde pick-up would think at being deserted.
I didn’t lose weight worrying.
The Anselmo Film Library looked just the same. The windows were still fogged over and the door locked as tight as ever. I rattled the knob, but nobody answered. I smoked a cigarette while waiting out the hour. Before it was up, I spotted a shine stand half a block down and across on the other side of the street. Now seemed a good chance to repair the damage done by Eva Vaughn’s door. And I could keep an eye on Anselmo’s door from there.
The chocolate-colored boy with a magnificent smile and spring fever in his bones was just starting on my second shoe when a tall figure turned into Anselmo’s doorway. I could only see his general outline but he looked well over six feet and, like six o’clock, straight up and down. He wore a long top coat without any drape to it, so that his length and thinness was emphasized. Under a dark hat, his head looked small. His jaw was square jutting with no suggestion of a double chin. The late sun was behind him, and the shadow he laid down was twenty-feet long and drawn with ruler-straight lines.
I told the boy to shake it up.
Anselmo emerged from the doorway, looked both ways, hesitating a moment. Then he shrugged narrow, square-shoulders and started up the street toward me. I thought I could get my shine and still intercept him at the corner. He wasn’t hard to keep in sight, towering above the other people on the street.
When he was almost to the corner, he came clear of the crowd for a moment and immediately pulled up short, as if he just remembered something. The thing I noticed most was the way the rigid, ruler-drawn lines of his figure held their form for so long. Then, looking for all the world like one of those tall thin smoke stacks you see being dynamited in news reels, he started to come down.
You’ve seen those shots, the base crumples out, and the whole thing settles down for an instant, still straight and precise. Then even as it crumples, it goes over sideways, majestically, maintaining its shape and form till the last final round...
Anselmo was a crumpled heap on the pavement before somebody screamed high over the rumble of the traffic. Belatedly, I picked the crack of a gun-shot off the sound-screen of my unconscious. The shot and Anselmo’s crumbling had seemed so unrelated I didn’t for a second pay enough attention to realize I’d heard it.
I was down off the shine stand and unaware of it. I started to run, out into the flowing traffic, which had slowed enough to let me get across. The scream had done that.
I’d moved fast, but even so a crowd had formed a tight ring around the man on the street. Out of the babble of voices as I elbowed through I caught the insistent theme: Nobody had seen where the shot had come from! A passing car, a gun in somebody’s pocket on the street, from a window. Nobody knew. I broke through to the front row then, and saw what was left of Anselmo.
Lying face down, he looked seven feet long, and just as thin and straight as I’d thought. One arm was under his forehead. The other was bent at the elbow, with the fingers digging into the concrete as if he were trying to pull himself along. In the V below his arm-pit, a tiny, red river was snaking a course through the dust on the sidewalk. It seemed to be racing for the curb, like something alive trying to get into the gutter and out of sight, shunning the clean light of day.
A cop came pushing through behind me, in the fastest time, I thought, that a cop had ever arrived, when he was needed. Don’t be so cynical, my mind told me. Always criticizing the police department. They do a good job, considering.
And they were something substantial and reliable. They performed certain prescribed acts that had to be done. While other people just stood around and stared, the police proceeded with a time-honored routine. In a moment the cop would tell us to break it up.
“Awright, break it up,” the cop said.
I looked at him with an idiotic grate fulness. I’d been waiting for him to say it, and he’d said it. Everything was going to be all right now. Except that Anselmo was dead. Stone cold dead, I thought. All seven feet of him.
“You, too, buddy,” the cop said, giving me a shove.
It felt good. I beamed at him. I started walking away. I was all the way to Hollywood Boulevard before I knew it. There a nice motherly-looking woman was giving away religious tracts. She gave me one. It said, in neat blue print: Ye Must Be Born Again.
“I don’t think he can manage it,” I said seriously. “Not with a bullet hole in him.”
I was not being smart or sacrilegous. I was just numb. I’d never seen a man get shot down in the street before. It wasn’t good to see. I kept thinking of all the things Anselmo might have had to do before he died, the appointments he had to keep, the people he had to see. Now it was too late; he’d never do anything. He’d never tell me where Laurie Bressette was.
The motherly woman was staring at me as if I were crazy. Probably I was. Or maybe she thought I was kidding her about the tract, and I wasn’t. I was worried about that. I took out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her.
“A donation,” I said earnestly. “For a good cause... But I just don’t think Anselmo will ever make it. He was murdered.”
Shot, I thought. Shot down a block off Hollywood Boulevard and nobody saw who did it.
O’Leary didn’t know anything about Anselmo’s shooting till she came to my office the next day at noon. I saved her a nickel for a newspaper by giving her an eye-witness account.
“And that,” I said wearily, “is one of my two leads gone. The Voice is the other one. What did you do about the picture?”
O’Leary looked troubled. She made a couple of meaningless gestures. “I went down there this morning and gave them the coupon. I got the picture, all right... Do you think he shot Anselmo?”
“Who else?” I said impatiently. “Let’s see it.”
She tossed it on the desk. “Have a look.”
It didn’t take long to see why she’d been so unenthusiastic. Just as the picture was snapped, the Voice had put his hand up so that the lower half of his face was concealed. It was strictly an accident because he wasn’t looking at the camera, apparently didn’t know he was being photographed. I could see a pair of eyes under the brim of his hat and that was all. I’d stand a better chance of recognizing him from a rear view. At least I had seen the back of his neck.
I said: “Well, that’s that. Now I haven’t got anything to go on! Maybe I’d better just hand it over to the cops and be done with it. They—”
The phone started to ring and I waved at O’Leary to take it. “If that’s the police, I was just kidding.”
“Hello... well, hello, Lieutenant Kissinger!”
I thought she was kidding but she wasn’t. It was Lieutenant Kissinger all right, from Homicide. He wanted to talk to me.
“He isn’t in right this minute, Lieutenant,” O’Leary said, holding up two crossed fingers for me to witness. “Shall I have him call you... Why, Lieutenant, what a thing to say! Of course, he isn’t right here. That rather hurts me, Lieutenant.”
She could have been an actress. She sounded so wounded, Kissinger apologized all over the place. He always did like O’Leary — in a fatherly way. He didn’t care for me in any way. I think he wanted to, for Maggie’s sake, but there were so many things about me he just couldn’t take.