“Oke, kid. Just as soon as I’m free.”
He shut the door on his worried look and Deke Hanna let go of O’Hara’s arm.
“Sorry, Deke,” O’Hara said, not looking particularly apologetic. “I should have known your boss was in there.”
“Yeah,” Hanna said expressionlessly. He stood aside and let O’Hara precede him back to the bar.
There Hanna went back to his beer which seemed never appreciably to lower in the glass. O’Hara ordered another Scotch and soda and made that last, too.
It was twenty minutes before Mat Wyman showed up. When he came out of the corridor into the cocketail room, he was alone and he still looked unhappy, darkly disturbed. He stopped by Deke Hanna and said, jerking his thumb toward his office, “He wants to see you, Deke.”
Hanna thriftily finished his beer and disappeared. Mat came down the bar and stood by O’Hara. “What’s on your mind, pal?”
“You recall my blond boy friend?”
Wyman rubbed the pouches under his eyes with tentative forefingers, squinted at himself in the glass behind the bar. His gaze was abstracted, vacant. He said as though he was thinking about some-think else, “Who?”
“The kid that raised all the stink here last night.”
Wyman brought himself back from wherever he was, said to a passing bartender, “Double brandy, Chet.” To O’Hara he said, “Yeah, I remember that kid. They said he was back here tonight raising hell so they had to throw him out. Why the hell can’t he pick on some other spot for a while? I’ve got enough trouble.”
“Harry Atkins?”
Wyman downed the brandy without any preliminary sniffing. He stared morosely at O’Hara, said. “Hell, all I want to do is run a nice, quiet food spot, and what do I have to do but stick in tables and a wheel because Atkins tells me to.”
Deke Hanna came out of the corridor and back to the bar and Wyman, after one glance at the raw-boned man, lowered his voicee. It still had the note of injury to it. “And after I do that for Atkins, I get cursed and growled at because the place happens to attract gamblers.”
“I don’t get it,” O’Hara said.
“That guy last night.”
“Vic Philippi?”
Wyman nodded. “He’s been giving the Bolero some play but I didn’t know who he was. As a matter of fact, I don’t give the upstairs much attention but when you made that crack last night, I asked around.”
O’Hara said dryly, “And Philippi has Atkins worried.”
“Plenty. Atkins has had things his way in this town for so long he’s gone soft. He’s afraid Philippi is going to take his candy away from him and seems to think that because Philippi has been here a few times, I’m playing with him. So I get shoved around for it. Cripes, if I could get my dough out of this joint, I’d quit and run a hamburger stand.”
“Is Atkins going to do anything about it?”
“I doubt it. He’s lost his old-time guts. But if he was driven into a corner, I don’t know.” Wyman shrugged dispiritedly.
“Have Atkins and Hanna been out here long this evening?”
“They had dinner here. Why?”
“They didn’t give you any idea trouble had already started?”
Wyman shook his head. “Not a peep. The last trouble I’ve had or heard about was the uproar your pal started last night.” He stopped and his pouched eyes widened. “Listen, kid, that blond guy tying into Philippi last night didn’t have anything to do with angles, did it? Because I don’t want my place mixed up.”
“No. That was just a friendly barroom fracas.”
Hanna, carrying another small beer, ambled by toward a table.
Wyman asked him, “Is Harry still back there, Dike?”
Hanna flicked a pale-eyed glance at Wyman, at O’Hara, and said, “He left by the back way and went home.” He went on.
“That mug,” Wyman said, “sets my teeth on edge. I wish to God all I owned was a hot-dog stand.”
O’Hara finished his highball. He said, “What I really wanted to ask, Mat, is for you to keep an eye out for my pal. If he shows here again, let him in and feed him a mickey. Then hold until called for. I’ll give you a ring from time to time.”
“Anything to oblige,” Wyman grinned. “I’ll even slip him an extra mickey on my own account.”
Out on Sunset again, O’Hara turned toward where he had left the cab and Tony Ames. When he reached the spot there wasn’t any cab nor was there any cab in sight along the Strip. There wasn’t any Tony, either. He went back to the Bolero parking lot and looked but none of the three cabs squatting on the gravel was the one he had left his girl in.
He said, “Hell’s fire,” and stood irresolutely on the sidewalk up from the Bolero. He was still there a couple of minutes later when a cab swerved out of a side street into the boulevard, cut in toward the curb and suddenly changed course to head for where O’Hara stood under a street lamp. It pulled up beside him and Tony Ames stuck her face at the window.
She said, “Hello, everybody.”
“And I suppose you just went for a ride through the park?”
She opened the door, said, “Climb in, crosspatch.”
O’Hara got in and Tony said to the driver, “Same route, Oscar.”
The cab went down a block and shot away from Sunset to the north.
“He got away again,” Tony said. “Eddie?”
“Eddie. If he’s as slippery on a gridiron as he is in a taxi, they ought to put him on the All-American. While I was waiting for you, I saw a cab pull out from down the street. Eddie was in it, leaning forward and talking to the driver. By the time Oscar got his hack turned around, Eddie’s cab had turned down here and then onto Franklin and toward Hollywood. They gave us a run but we managed to get within half a block of them at Franklin and La Brea. Then a kid in a cut-down Ford snaked in front of us and we went lickety-slam up on somebody’s lawn. When we got out of that, the other cab was out of sight. I had Oscar roam around for fifteen minutes up in that section but there wasn’t any further sign of Eddie. What’s the idiot up to, anyway?”
“Kitten,” said O’Hara, “I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care. All I’m asking is that when we catch up with him. I have a monkey wrench handy.”
“A monkey wrench?”
“A bung starter would do just as well. Because I’m going to tap him to sleep, and start him back east before he comes to.”
“But if the cops find out he shot that man and you helped him get away, Ken, they could be nasty.”
“I can take it from the cops. But Eddie defeats me.”
“Here’s where we lost him,” Tony said.
The driver slid open the panel behind his head and said, “Up and down again, lady?”
“Up and down.”
The cab went a block east, dawdled down El Cerrito to Hollywood Boulevard, went another block east and turned up Sycamore to Franklin again. In that fashion they dissected virtually all that part of Hollywood that lay above the boulevard. In all the length and breadth of the streets there was no sign of Eddie.
O’Hara said, “Back to the Bolero, Oscar.” To Tony Ames, he said, “It’s our best chance. The joint seems to have a fascination for our blond pal. And if he gets away next time, he’ll be good.”
They turned west on Franklin, hummed up over the hill to cross Vine. They went a block beyond and O’Hara, scowling glumly out of the window at his side, saw a doorman in an elegant uniform, standing under the awning before a tall apartment house. There wasn’t anything unusual about that but about the doorman there was something distinctly out of the ordinary. Blood had dripped down over the gaudy front of his uniform coat and one eye was nearly closed and his nose and lips looked too big to belong to his face.
O’Hara said, “Ha!” suddenly and when Tony Ames and Oscar looked around at him, he said, “Set her down, Oscar.”