She pressed her starter button and jammed her gears in and was gone in a swirl of dust.
I watched her go. When she was gone I looked across the street. The man from the panel truck that said Bay City Infant Service came out of the side door of the house dressed in a uniform so white and stiff and gleaming that it made me feel clean just to look at it. He was carrying a carton of some sort. He got into his panel truck and drove away.
I figured he had just changed a diaper.
I got into my own car and looked at my watch before starting up. It was almost five.
The Scotch, as good enough Scotch will, stayed with me all the way back to Hollywood. I took the red lights as they came.
Theres a nice little girl, I told myself out loud, in the car, for a guy thats interested in a nice little girl. Nobody said anything. But Im not, I said. Nobody said anything to that either. Ten oclock at the Belvedere Club, I said. Somebody said: Phooey.
It sounded like my voice.
It was a quarter to six when I reached my office again. The building was very quiet. The typewriter beyond the party wall was still. I lit a pipe and sat down to wait.
20
The Indian smelled. He smelled clear across the little reception room when the buzzer sounded and I opened the door between to see who it was. Ho stood just inside the corridor door looking as if he had been cast in bronze. He was a big man from the waist up and he had a big chest. He looked like a bum.
He wore a brown suit of which the coat was too small for his shoulders and his trousers were probably a little tight at the waist. His hat was at least two sizes too small and had been perspired in freely by somebody it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a wind vane. His collar had the snug fit of a horse-collar and was of about the same shade of dirty brown. A tie dangled outside his buttoned jacket, a black tie which had been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. Around his bare and magnificent throat, above the dirty collar, he wore a wide piece of black ribbon, like an old woman trying to freshen up her neck.
He had a big flat face and a highbridged fleshy nose that looked as hard as the prow of a cruiser. He had lidless eyes, drooping jowls, the shoulders of a blacksmith and the short and apparent awkward legs of a chimpanzee. I found out later that they were only short.
If he had been cleaned up a little and dressed in a white nightgown, he would have looked like a very wicked Roman senator.
His smell was the earthy smell of primitive man, and not the slimy dirt of cities.
Huh, he said. Come quick. Come now.
I backed into my office and wiggled my finger at him and he followed me making as much noise as a fly makes walking on the wall. I sat down behind my desk and squeaked my swivel chair professionally and pointed to the customers chair on the other side. He didnt sit down. His small black eyes were hostile.
Come where? I said.
Huh. Me Second Planting. Me Hollywood Indian.
Have a chair, Mr. Planting.
He snorted and his nostrils got very wide. They had been wide enough for mouseholes to start with.
Name Second Planting. Name no Mister Planting.
What can I do for you?
He lifted his voice and began to intone in a deep-chested sonorous boom. He say come quick. Great white father say come quick. He say me bring you in fiery chariot. He say
Yeah. Cut out the pig Latin, I said. Im no schoolmarm at the snake dances.
Nuts, the Indian said.
We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did. Then he removed his hat with massive disgust and turned it upside down. He rolled a finger around under the sweatband. That turned the sweatband up into view, and it had not been misnamed. He removed a paper clip from the edge and threw a fold of tissue paper on the desk. He pointed at it angrily, with a well-chewed fingernail. His lank hair had a shelf around it, high up, from the too-tight hat.
I unfolded the piece of tissue paper and found a card inside. The card was no news to me. There had been three exactly like it in the mouth-pieces of three Russian-appearing cigarettes.
I played with my pipe, stared at the Indian and tried to ride him with my stare. He looked as nervous as a brick wall.
Okey, what does he want?
He want you come quick. Come now. Come in fiery
Nuts, I said.
The Indian liked that. He closed his mouth slowly and winked an eye solemnly and then almost grinned.
Also it will cost him a hundred bucks as a retainer, I added, trying to look as if that was a nickel.
Huh? Suspicious again. Stick to basic English.
Hundred dollars, I said. Iron men. Fish. Bucks to the number of one hundred. Me no money, me no come. Savvy? I began to count a hundred with both hands.
Huh. Big shot, the Indian sneered.
He worked under his greasy hatband and threw another fold of tissue paper on the desk. I took it and unwound it. It contained a brand new hundred dollar bill.
The Indian put his hat back on his head without bothering to tuck the hatband back in place. It looked only slightly more comic that way. I sat staring at the hundred dollar bill, with my mouth open.
Psychic is right, I said at last. A guy that smart Im afraid of.
Not got all day, the Indian remarked, conversationally. I opened my desk and took out a Colt .38 automatic of the type known as Super Match. I hadnt worn it to visit Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. I stripped my coat off and strapped the leather harness on and tucked the automatic down inside it and strapped the lower strap and put my coat back on again.
This meant as much to the Indian as if I had scratched my neck.
Gottum car, he said. Big car.
I dont like big cars any more, I said. I gottum own car.
You come my car, the Indian said threateningly.
I come your car, I said.
I locked the desk and office up, switched the buzzer off and went out, leaving the reception room door unlocked as usual.
We went along the hall and down in the elevator. The Indian smelled. Even the elevator operator noticed it.
21
The car was a dark blue seven-passenger sedan, a Packard of the latest model, custom-built. It was the kind of car you wear your rope pearls in. It was parked by a firehydrant and a dark foreign-looking chauffeur with a face of carved wood was behind the wheel. The interior was upholstered in quilted gray chenille. The Indian put me in the back. Sitting there alone I felt like a high-class corpse, laid out by an undertaker with a lot of good taste.
The Indian got in beside the chauffeur and the car turned in the middle of the block and a cop across the street said: Hey, weakly, as if he didnt mean it, and then bent down quickly to tie his shoe.
We went west, dropped over to Sunset and slid fast and noiselessly along that. The Indian sat motionless beside the chauffeur. An occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me. The driver looked as if he was half asleep but he passed the fast boys in the convertible sedans as though they were being towed. They turned on all the green lights for him. Some drivers are like that. He never missed one.
We curved through the bright mile or two of the Strip, past the antique shops with famous screen names on them, past the windows full of point lace and ancient pewter, past the gleaming new nightclubs with famous chefs and equally famous gambling rooms, run by polished graduates of the Purple Gang, past the Georgian-Colonial vogue, now old hat, past the handsome modernistic buildings in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers never stop talking money, past a drive-in lunch which somehow didnt belong, even though the girls wore white silk blouses and drum majorettes shakos and nothing below the hips but glazed kid Hessian boots. Past all this and down a wide smooth curve to the bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear in an evening without fog, past the shadowed mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of wind from the sea.