I stepped over the hollow place where a step would have been and knocked on the door. There was no bell push. Nobody answered. I tried the knob. Nobody had locked the door. I pushed it open and went in. I had that feeling. I was going to find something nasty inside.
A bulb burned in a frayed lamp crooked on its base, the paper shade split. There was a couch with a dirty blanket on it. There was an old cane chair, a Boston rocker, a table covered with a smeared oilcloth. On the table spread out beside a coffee cup was a copy of El Diario, a Spanish language newspaper, also a saucer with cigarette stubs, a dirty plate, a tiny radio which emitted music. The music stopped and a man began to rattle off a commercial in Spanish. I turned it off. The silence fell like a bag of feathers. Then the clicking of an alarm clock from beyond a half open door. Then the clank of a small chain, a fluttering sound and a cracked voice said rapidly: “Quién es? Quién es? Quien es?” This was followed by the angry chattering of monkeys.
Then silence again.
From a big cage over in the corner the round angry eye of a parrot looked at me. He sidled along the perch as far as he could go.
“Amigo,” I said.
The parrot let out a screech of insane laughter.
“Watch your language, brother,” I said.
The parrot crab walked to the other end of the perch and pecked into a white cup and shook oatmeal from his beak contemptuously. In another cup there was water. It was messy with oatmeal.
“I bet you’re not even housebroken,” I said.
The parrot stared at me and shuffled. He turned his head and stared at me with his other eye. Then he leaned forward and fluttered his tail feathers and proved me right.
“Necio!” he screamed. “Fuera!”
Somewhere water dripped from a leaky faucet. The clock ticked.
The parrot imitated the ticking amplified.
I said: “Pretty Polly.”
“Hijo de la chingada,” the parrot said.
I sneered at him and pushed the half-open door into what there was of a kitchen. The linoleum on the floor was worn through to the boards in front of the sink. There was a rusty three-burner gas stove, an open shelf with some dishes and the alarm clock, a riveted hot water tank on a support in the corner, the antique kind that blows up because it has no safety valve. There was a narrow rear door, closed, with a key in the lock, and a single window, locked. There was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling above it was cracked and stained from roof leaks. Behind me the parrot shuffled aimlessly on his perch and once in a while let out a bored croak.
On the zinc drain board lay a short length of black rubber tubing, and beside that a glass hypodermic syringe with the plunger pushed home. In the sink were three long thin empty tubes of glass with tiny corks near them. I had seen such tubes before.
I opened the back door, stepped to the ground and walked to the converted privy. It had a sloping roof, about eight feet high in front, less than six at the back. It opened outward, being too small to open any other way. It was locked but the lock was old. It did not resist me much.
The man’s scuffed toes almost touched the floor. His head was up in the darkness inches from the two by four that held up the roof. He was hanging by a black wire, probably a piece of electric light wire. The toes of his feet were pointed down as if they reached to stand on tiptoe. The worn cuffs of his khaki denim pants hung below his heels. I touched him enough to know that he was cold enough so that there was no point in cutting him down.
He had made very sure of that. He had stood by the sink in his kitchen and knotted the rubber tube around his arm, then clenched his fist to make the vein stand out, then shot a syringe full of morphine sulphate into his blood stream. Since all three of the tubes were empty, it was a fair guess that one of them had been full. He could not have taken in less than enough. Then he had laid the syringe down and released the knotted tube. It wouldn’t be long, not a shot directly into the blood stream. Then he had gone out to his privy and stood on the seat and knotted the wire around his throat. By that time he would be dizzy. He could stand there and wait until his knees went slack and the weight of his body took care of the rest. He would know nothing. He would already be asleep.
I closed the door on him. I didn’t go back into the house. As I went along the side towards Polton’s Lane, that handsome residential street, the parrot inside the shack heard me and screeched: “Quién es? Quién es? Quien es?”
Who is it? Nobody, friend. Just a footfall in the night.
I walked softly, going away.
19
I walked softly, in no particular direction, but I knew where I would end up. I always did. At the Casa del Poniente. I climbed back into my car on Grand and circled a few blocks aimlessly, and then I was parked as usual in a slot near the bar entrance. As I got out I looked at the car beside mine. It was Goble’s shabby dark little jalopy. He was as adhesive as a band-aid.
At another time I would have been racking my brains for some idea of what he was up to, but now I had a worse problem. I had to go to the police and report the hanging man. But I had no notion what to tell them. Why did I go to his house? Because, if he was telling the truth, he had seen Mitchell leave early in the morning. Why was that of significance? Because I was looking for Mitchell myself. I wanted to have a heart to heart talk with him. About what? And from there on I had no answers that would not lead to Betty Mayfield, who she was, where she came from, why she changed her name, what had happened back in Washington, or Virginia or wherever it was, that made her run away.
I had $5000 of her money in traveler’s checks in my pocket, and she wasn’t even formally my client. I was stuck, but good.
I walked over to the edge of the cliff and listened to the sound of the surf. I couldn’t see anything but the occasional gleam of a wave breaking out beyond the cove. In the cove the waves don’t break, they slide in politely, like floorwalkers. There would be a bright moon later, but it hadn’t checked in yet.
Someone was standing not far away, doing what I was doing. A woman. I waited for her to move. When she moved I would know whether I knew her. No two people move in just the same way, just as no two sets of fingerprints match exactly.
I lit a cigarette and let the lighter flare in my face, and she was beside me.
“Isn’t it about time you stopped following me around?”
“You’re my client. I’m trying to protect you. Maybe on my seventieth birthday someone will tell me why.”
“I didn’t ask you to protect me. I’m not your client. Why don’t you go home—if you have a home—and stop annoying people?”
“You’re my client—five thousand dollars worth. I have to do something for it—even if it’s no more than growing a mustache.”
“You’re impossible. I gave you the money to let me alone. You’re the most impossible man I ever met. And I’ve met some dillies.”
“What happened to that tall exclusive apartment house in Rio? Where I was going to lounge in silk pajamas and play with your long lascivious hair, while the butler set out the Wedgwood and the Georgian silver with that faint dishonest smile and those delicate gestures, like a pansy hair stylist fluttering around a screen star?”