My hunch was right, but for the wrong reason.
Monday morning, sunny but cool if no longer cold, I pulled into one of the parking places alongside the Sidewalk Cafe; it was around ten thirty and mine was the only car. The big front door was locked. I knocked until the Spanish cleaning woman let me in. She said she hadn’t seen Miss Todd yet this morning. I went up the private stairway off the kitchen that led up to the two apartments. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked; beyond it were the two facing apartment doors. I knocked on hers.
“Miss Todd?”
No answer.
I tried for a while, then went and found the cleaning woman again. “Maria, do you have any idea where Miss Todd might be? She doesn’t seem to be in her room.”
“She might be stay up at Meester Eastmon’s.”
I nodded, started to walk away, then looked back and added as an afterthought, “Did you see her yesterday?”
“I no work Sunday.”
I guess Maria, like God, Heller and Thelma Todd, rested on Sunday. Couldn’t blame her.
I thought about taking the car up and around, then said to hell with it and began climbing the concrete steps beyond the pedestrian bridge that arched over the highway just past the Cafe. These steps, all two-hundred and eighty of them, straight up the steep hill, were the only direct access from the coast road to the bungalow on Cabrillo Street. Windblown sand had drifted over the steps and the galvanized handrail was as cold and wet as a liar’s handshake.
I grunted my way to the top. I’d started out as a young man, had reached middle age by step one hundred and was now ready for the retirement home. I sat on the cold damp top step and poured sand out of my scuffed-up Florsheims, glad I hadn’t bothered with a shine in the last few weeks. Then I stood and looked past the claustrophobic drop of the steps, to where the sun was reflecting off the sand and sea. The beach was blinding, the ocean dazzling. It was beautiful, but it hurt to look at. A seagull was flailing with awkward grace against the breeze like a fighter losing the last round. Suddenly Lake Michigan seemed like a pond.
Soon I was knocking on Eastman’s front door. No answer. Went to check to see if my client’s car was there, swinging up the black-studded blue garage door. The car was there, all right, the red Packard convertible, next to Eastman’s Lincoln sedan.
My client was there, too.
She was slumped in front, sprawled across the steering wheel. She was still in the mink, the mauve-and-silver gown, and the diamond necklace she’d worn to the Troc Satury night. But her clothes were rumpled, in disarray, like an unmade bed; and there was blood on the front of the gown, coagulated rubies beneath the diamonds. There was blood on her face, on her white, white face.
She’d always had pale creamy skin, but now it was as white as a wedding dress. There was no pulse in her throat. She was cold. She’d been dead a while.
I stood and looked at her and maybe I cried. That’s my business, isn’t it? Then I went out and up the side steps to the loft above the garage and roused the elderly fellow named Jones who lived there; he was the bookkeeper for the Sidewalk Cafe. I asked him if he had a phone, and he did, and I used it.
I had told my story to the uniformed men four times before the men from Central Homicide showed. The detective in charge was Lieutenant Rondell, a thin, somber, detached man in his mid-forties with smooth creamy gray hair and icy eyes. His brown gabardine suit wasn’t expensive but it was well-pressed. His green pork-pie lightweight felt hat was in his hand, in deference to the deceased. Out of deference to me, he listened to my story as I told it for the fifth time. He didn’t seem to think much of it.
“You’re telling me this woman was murdered,” he said.
“I’m telling you the gambling syndicate boys were pressuring her, and she wasn’t caving in.”
“And you were her bodyguard,” Rondell said.
“Some bodyguard,” said the other man from homicide, Rondell’s brutish shadow, and cracked his knuckles and laughed. We were in the garage and the laughter made hollow echoes off the cement, like a basketball bouncing in an empty stadium.
“I was her bodyguard,” I told Rondell tightly. “But I didn’t work Sundays.”
“And she had to go to Chicago to hire a bodyguard?”
I explained my association with Fred Rubinski, and Rondell nodded several times, seemingly accepting it.
Then Rondell walked over and looked at the corpse in the convertible. A photographer from Homicide was snapping photos; pops and flashes of light accompanied the detective’s trip around the car as if he were a star at a Hollywood opening.
I went outside. The smell of death is bad enough when it’s impersonal; when somebody you know has died, it’s like having asthma in a steam room.
Rondell found me leaning against the side of the stucco garage.
“It looks like suicide,” he said.
“Sure. It’s supposed to.”
He lifted an eyebrow and a shoulder. “The ignition switch is turned on. Carbon monoxide.”
“Car wasn’t running when I got here.”
“Long since ran out of gas, most likely. If what you say is true, she’s been there since Saturday night…that is, early Sunday morning.”
I shrugged. “She’s wearing the same clothes, at least.”
“When we fix time of death, it’ll all come clear.”
“Oh, yeah? See what the coroner has to say about that.”
Rondell’s icy eyes froze further. “Why?”
“This cold snap we’ve had, last three days. It’s warmer this morning, but Sunday night, Jesus. That sea breeze was murder-if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Rondell nodded. “Perhaps cold enough to retard decomposition, you mean.”
“Perhaps.”
He pushed the pork pie back on his head. “We need to talk to this bird Eastman.”
“I’ll say. He’s probably at his studio. Paramount. When he’s on a picture, they pick him up by limo every morning before dawn.”
Rondell went to use the phone in old man Jones’ loft flat. Rondell’s brutish sidekick exited the garage and slid his arm around the shoulder of a young uniformed cop, who seemed uneasy about the attention.
“Ice cream blonde, huh?” the big flatfoot said. “I woulda liked a coupla of scoops of that myself.”
I tapped the brute on the shoulder and he turned to me and said, “Huh?”, stupidly, and I cold-cocked him. He went down like a building.
But not out, though. “You’re gonna pay for that, you bastard,” he said, sounding like the school-yard bully he was. He touched the blood in the corner of his mouth, hauled himself up off the cement. “In this, town, you go to goddamn jail when you hit a goddamn cop!”
“You’d need a witness, first,” I said.
“I got one,” he said, but when he turned to look, the young uniformed cop was gone.
I walked up to him and stood damn near belt buckle to belt buckle and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with smiling. “Want to go another round, see if a witness shows?”
He tasted blood and fluttered his eyes like a girl and said something unintelligible and disappeared back inside the garage.
Rondell came clopping down the wooden steps and stood before me and smiled firmly. “I just spoke with Eastman. We’ll interview him more formally, of course, but the preliminary interrogation indicates a possible explanation.” “Oh?”
He was nodding. “Yeah. Apparently Saturday night he bolted the stairwell door around midnight. It’s a door that leads to both apartments up top the Sidewalk Cafe. Said he thought Miss Todd had mentioned she was going to sleep over at her mother’s that night.”
“You mean, she couldn’t get in?”
“Right.”
“Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”
“Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”