“Yeah. How many other people know about us? And how much do they know? There was a private detective snooping around the motor court–”
“Forget about it, Donny.” The kitten in her throat was purring now. “Come over here and tell me about the place. You know? How we’ll lie in the sun all day without any clothes and have fun and watch the birds and the clouds and have servants to wait on us. Tell me about that.”
I heard his feet on the floor and looked in through the narrow crack between the doorframe and the edge of the curtain. He was standing behind her chair with a doped expression on his face, a Band-aid cross on his chin. His hands moved downward from her neck.
She put her hands over his and lifted one of them to her mouth. It came away red-smeared. Kerrigan bent over her face, his fingers plucking at her clothes like a dying man at his sheets.
A sibilant voice said behind me: “Looking for something, sir?”
The Chinese waiter was in the archway, balancing a tray on which a pair of steaks sizzled.
“The men’s room?”
“At the end of the hall, sir.” His smile looked ready to bite me. “It’s plainly marked.”
“Thank you. I’m very shortsighted.”
“Don’t mention it, sir.”
I went to the men’s room and used it. When I came out, the private room was empty. The steaks sat untouched on the table with Kerrigan’s empty glass. I went out through the restaurant. The Chinese waiter was behind the bar.
“Where did they go?” I said.
He looked at me as if he had never seen me before, and answered in singsong Chinese.
Outside, the street was deserted. Kerrigan’s red convertible had left its parking place. I circled the block in my car, fruitlessly, and widened the circle to take in several blocks. Near the corner of Main and a street called Yanonali, I saw the girl walking in a westerly direction on Yanonali.
She was by herself, but her body swayed and swung as if she had an audience. I double-parked to let her get well ahead, then crawled along in second half a block behind her. The pavement and the buildings deteriorated as we left the downtown section. Dilapidated flats and boarding-houses whose windows gave fleeting glimpses of permanent depression were interspersed with dim little bars and sandwich counters. The people in the bars and on the streets, brown and black and dirty gray, had dim and dilapidated personalities to match the buildings. All but the girl I was following. She swaggered along through the lower depths of the city as if she was drunk with her own desirability.
Street lights were few and far between. On a corner under one of them a gang of Negro boys too young for the bars were horsing in the road, projecting their black identities against the black indifference of the night. They froze when the girl went by, looking at her from eyes like wet brown stones. She paid no attention to them.
In the middle of the next block she entered the lobby of an apartment building. I parked near the corner and surveyed the building from the other side of the street It was big for the street, three-storied, and had once been fairly pretentious. Tile facing surmounted its stucco cornice. Its second- and third-floor windows were masked with shallow wrought-iron balconies.
But the dark tides of Yanonali Street had lapped at its foundations and surrounded it with an atmosphere of hopelessness. A patched earthquake scar zigzagged across its face. Yellow rust-streaks ran down from the balconies like iron tears. The lights behind the blinded windows, the ill-lit lobby open on the street, gave an impression of furtive transiency.
I didn’t know the girl’s name, and she would be almost impossible to find in the warren of the building’s rooms and corridors. I went back to my car. The Negro boys were standing around it on the road in a broken semicircle.
“How fast will she go?” the smallest one said.
“I’ve hit the peg a couple of times. A hundred. Who was the girl that just went past, the one in the fur coat?”
They looked at each other blankly.
“We don’t pay no mind to girls,” the tallest one said.
“You want a girl? Trotter can get you a girl,” the smallest one said. “He got six sisters.” He performed a brief skinny-hipped hula.
The tall one kicked him sharply in the rear. “You silence yourself, my sisters is all working.”
The small one skipped out of his reach. “Sure. They working night and day.” He did a couple of bumps.
I said: “Where’s the Meyer truck line?”
“I thought he wanted a girl,” one of them said to the other. “Now he wants a truck. He can’t make up his mind.”
“Keep right on going west,” the tall one said. “You know where the big overpass is?”
“No.”
“Well, you’ll see it, off to the left. Meyer’s is on the other side of the highway.”
I thanked him and gave him a dollar. The others watched the transaction with the same bright stony look that they had given the girl. As I drove away, a tin can rattled on my turtleback. Their rattling laughter followed me down the street.
Chapter 5
The road bumped over railroad tracks, twisted through pine-smelling lumberyards, ducked under the overpass that carried the highway. Night-running trucks went over my head like thunder. The Meyer yard was almost in the shadow of the overpass, a black-top square hemmed in by high wire fence and flanked by a storage building. A truck was backed in to the loading dock, another stood under an open-sided shelter supported on concrete columns, and two others were parked inside the gate. The gate was open. I drove through and pulled up at the platform.
A bald man in an oil-stained T-shirt was sitting on a packing case at the back of the platform. A thousand-watt bulb over the door of the warehouse held him in pitiless light. He was freckled and blotched all over, head and neck and arms, as if his maker had flicked a paintbrush at him. His scarred brown hands were rolling a Bull Durham cigarette. When I got out of the car, his pinkish lashless eyes moved in my direction.
“What can I do for you, bud?”
“I’d like to see Mr. Meyer.”
“Meyer ain’t here. He went off with his son-in-law.”
“His son-in-law?”
“Brand Church. The sheriff. Maybe you can catch him at home. Is it business?”
“More or less. I hear you lost a rig.”
“That’s right.” He licked the edge of his tan cigarette paper and pressed it into place. “And a driver.”
“What kind of a rig?”
“Twenty-ton semi-trailer.” He lit a kitchen match with his thumbnail and held it to his cigarette. “Cost the old man forty grand last year.”
“What was it carrying?”
He came to the edge of the platform, blinking down at me suspiciously. “I wouldn’t know. The old man told me not to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“He’s sore as a boil. The rig and the payload was both insured, but when a firm loses a truck, shippers start getting leery.” He glanced at the license number on the front of my car. “You from a newspaper?”
“Not me.”
“The bonding company?”
“Guess again.” I climbed up the concrete steps to the platform. “What was the payload?”
Turning quickly, he stepped inside the open back of the truck and came out with a long curved piece of steel like a blunt saber. He swung the tire-iron idly in his hand. “I don’t know you. Now what’s your interest?”
“Take it easy–”
“The hell. A chum of mine gets shot like a dog in the road and you tell me to take it easy. What’s your interest?”
His voice was a fox-terrier yap, a high bark that sounded strange coming from a body like a flayed bear’s. The tire-iron swung faster, moving in a tight circle beside his leg. The muscles in his arm knotted and swelled like angry speckled snakes.