She came back in a few minutes. “It was just coming in over the wire when you came in.”
“All right, I’ll pick it up here and save you the trouble of taking it to the hotel.”
She looked at me for a moment, then asked, “Do you have one of your cards with you?”
I gave her one of the agency cards.
She looked at it, opened a drawer, dropped it in, handed me the telegram. It was from Elsie Brand and said:
Sidney Jannix material being sent air mail. Married Elva Picard December fourteenth nineteen thirty-three. No record of any divorce. Find someone else has been looking up record. Believed to be detective representing some agency and interested in Elva Picard. Dietary complex may be due biological urge. Don’t let her fall too hard she might not bounce.
I put the telegram in my pocket and walked over to the Cactus Patch to wait.
The floor man came up to me and tried to get me to take a stack of chips with the compliments of the house. He said Breckenridge would appreciate it a lot if I’d “make myself ‘right at home.’ ”
I told him I appreciated the offer, but I was waiting for Louie Hazen to come in, and that I’d prefer just to stick around and watch the people.
He tried to get me to accept a drink, and seemed disappointed that I wouldn’t let the house do something for me. Also, he couldn’t seem to understand my attitude. After a while, he went away.
I’d been there about fifteen minutes when Louie Hazen came in.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“It depends upon what you mean, okay. The bulls are nuts. Know what they’re tryin’ to do? The first rattle out of the box, they want to pin it on me.”
“Pin what on you?”
“Killing Sid Jannix.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“No, they are.”
“How do they get that way?”
“Well, it’s Jannix all right, see? I identified him, and they wanted to know how I knew. Seemed to ‘think that just because I’d seen a man once in the ring I couldn’t identify him when I saw him on a slab. So I told ’em I couldn’t have picked him out if I’d just seen him stretched out stiff, but that I’d seen him and talked with him the night before, that I’d seen him in action. When you fight for a living, you learn how to look for little peculiarities in a man’s fighting style, and once you’ve seen ’em, you remember ’em as long as you live. Well then, the bulls wanted to know all about where I saw him in action, and as soon as I told ’em, they started jumpin’ on me, said that I had a grudge against him, that he’d been too good for me, and had got me in bad on my job, and that I’d sworn was goin’ to get even. They called up Breckenridge and asked him all about it, and asked him if I hadn’t said something about getting even.”
“What did Breckenridge say?”
“He told ’em I’d made some crack, but that they wasn’t to pay any attention to me because I was slap-happy. Can you feature that? Louie Hazen, slap-happy! That’s a joke!”
“Then what?”
“Well, they really went to town, gave me the works, yellin’ at me that I knew I’d killed him and all that sort of stuff. Well, after a while I guess I convinced them that I didn’t know anything about it, and they told me I could go. Gripes, I was working all the time the murder was being committed. I tell you they’re nuts.”
I said, “I’ve got a little dough saved up, Louie. Breckenridge says he’ll give you a thirty-day layoff. How about really putting me in condition?”
“You mean for a fighter?”
I nodded.
His eyes lit up. “That’s the talk! We could really do something with you. You’ve got what it takes. You willing to go in the ring?”
“No. I just wanted to learn something about fighting.”
“That’s swell — but—”
“I’ve got this dough saved up, Louie. I’ll pay you just what you’re getting here. You won’t be out anything, and your job will be here when you get back.”
He said, “I could take you on right here. We could fix up a place down in the basement, and I could give you a little instruction every day, and—”
“No. I’m run down. I want to get out where I can be completely away from everyone. We’ll go somewhere and put up a little training camp — some place up around Reno, perhaps. There’d be a girl with us.”
“A girl!”
“Uh huh.”
He blinked at me for a minute, then grinned in snaggle-toothed appreciation. “When do we start?”
“Right away,” I said. “I’m going to pick up a secondhand car that will hold the outfit. We’ll camp along the road, and take it easy. It won’t cost us much.”
“Say,” he said, “I’m a swell camper. That’s one of the things I’m good at, camp cooking.”
I said, “Get your things together. We’ve got to get started in a hurry. I have an idea the cops may try to stop us if we don’t get the jump on them.”
For a moment, there was a flicker of fear in his eyes, then he said, “You can’t get started too quick to suit me, buddy. I got some gloves, but they’re pretty light. We’ll want to get a heavier set for training. And we’re goin’ to need a punchin’-bag. I sold mine when I left Los Angeles, but we can get a good one for—”
“We’ll pick it up in Reno,” I told him.
Chapter Thirteen
I knew Bertha would be laying for me at the hotel. So I never went back. What money I had saved up was in the form of traveler’s checks, and I bought an ancient jalopy, picked up a heavy woolen shirt, some overalls, and a leather coat at one of the stores, purchased some bedding, a gasoline stove, cooking-pots, threw in a few canned goods, and was ready to leave by three-thirty that afternoon.
We looked like a typical bunch of dust-bowl refugees as we went rattling out of town. No one tried to stop us. We passed a carload of cops who looked us over and let us go on by.
We rattled out on the Beatty road, the car turning out a consistent thirty-seven miles an hour.
Along in the late afternoon, I pulled off on a crossroad which ran out into the desert, a pair of twisting ruts cut into the sand. After we were a couple of hundred yards from the main highway, I pulled out, picked my way through clumps of sagebrush, and stopped on a bare stretch of wind-blown desert.
“How about it?” I asked Louie Hazen.
“It’s a swell place, buddy.”
Helen Framley got out without a word, started lifting things out of the car.
“You got enough blankets,” she said to me.
“We’ll need them.”
Her eyes met mine. “Two beds or three?”
“Three.”
“Okay.”
She spread the blankets down on the desert. Louie lifted the gasoline stove out of the carton in which it had come, set it up on the running-board, filled the fuel tank, and in a few minutes had a hissing blue flame under a coffeepot.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Nothin’,” he said. “Just stick around. You’re the man of the family, the big boss. Ain’t that right?” he asked, looking over at Helen Framley.
“That’s right.”
“What do I call you when it’s time to come to meals?” he asked, giving her that snaggle-toothed grin.
“Helen.”
“Okay. I’m. Louie. There ain’t no hard feelin’s because of that slot-machine business?”
“Not a bit,” she said, and pushed out her hand.
He folded his battered fist around her slim fingers, grinned once more, and said, “We’re gonna get along.”
He started moving around, picking out pots and pans, reaching, into the grub box. There wasn’t so much as a wasted motion. He didn’t seem to be particularly in a hurry, but he accomplished things in an incredibly short time.
Helen and I tried once or twice to help, but he brushed us aside impatiently. “This ain’t goin’ to be no feast,” he said. “We ain’t goin’ to set no table or have no style. We ain’t got enough water to do a lot of dishwashin’, and there ain’t goin’ to be many dishes, but the grub’s goin’ to stick to your ribs.”