I could have snapped off a shot, but it probably wouldn't have stopped him and I didn't want to attract a crowd. I padded back to my room, asking myself the obvious question. How had the would-be killer known where to find me?
I checked out of the motel after breakfast and drove across town to the house where I'd met Trudy.
A burly Chinese greeted me at the door. I hadn't seen him on my first visit and I didn't regret it. He was built like a tractor and he didn't look friendly.
"What do you want this time of day?" he asked, glowering.
"Too early for business?"
"Unless you've got an appointment. Which you haven't."
I leaned my shoulder against the door as he tried to close it in my face. I smiled at him. "Tell Trudy a friend is here to see her."
"Trudy isn't seeing anybody today."
"You're wrong about that," I told him. "She's seeing me."
"Mister, don't try the tough act with me. I could throw you into the next block."
"Maybe you could. But when I got back there would be hell to pay."
He threw back his head and burst into laughter that sounded like the roar of an outboard motor. "I used to be a professional wrestler. The Mighty Shang, Terror of the Orient, even though I was born right here in L.A. You ever watch wrestling on television?"
"I try not to."
"Look, tough guy, I only work here. But I'll deliver your message, if you want to wait."
"Thanks."
"It's all right. You amuse me."
He let me inside and moved away, still chuckling. He went into a back room on the ground floor, closing the door behind him. I heard voices, one a woman's. As I waited, I wondered why a girl who had been so available yesterday was so hard to see today.
A blonde appeared at the head of the stairway Trudy had led me up the day before. She looked a great deal like Trudy except that she was younger and heavier in the hips. She was wearing a negligee that concealed hardly enough to matter.
Yawning and stretching, she called down to me, "What do you need, sugar?" Her tone of voice indicated that whatever it was, she knew where I could get it.
The Terror of the Orient came back and interrupted. "Get lost," he snarled at the girL Apparently he was no longer amused. He jerked a thumb at me. "Come on, tough guy."
I entered a room in which the blinds were drawn tight against the sun. Cheap incense fouled the air and the furniture was a mixture of teak and Hollywood grotesque. The big Chinese closed the door behind me and I heard the lock click.
The woman waiting for me looked nothing like Trudy. She was in her thirties and must have had an Oriental somewhere in her ancestry. Her eyes were slightly slanted and her skin had a sallow hue. Her black hair had been cut close to her head. A glittering mandarin robe clung to her slender body and her long fingernails were painted silver. In the shadowy room her eyes shone like those of the Siamese cat curled in her lap.
"Is this him, Alida?" asked Shang.
"Of course it's him."
"You're no friend of Trudy's, mister." He seized my sleeve, gathering a handful of it in his thick fingers. "I may break your neck."
The cat in the woman's lap raised his head as though he'd heard the threat. His tiny tongue flicked around his chops.
"Just wait a minute," I said. "What's the reason for the hostility?"
The woman stroked the cat and studied me with malevolent eyes. "I run this house. You came here yesterday under false pretenses. You brought us trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"The worst kind. Trudy made a mistake when she didn't tell me about you to start with. I won't permit you to see her again. This business you are involved in is none of her affair."
The Chinese dropped his other hand heavily on my shoulder. "Is he mine now?"
"Not yet," Alida told him. She pointed a long fingernail at me. "You got to the girl with your talk of Moose beating a woman to death. Maybe you lied. Maybe you have other reasons for looking for him."
"What would they be?"
"Two hundred thousand dollars, for example."
It was just a matter of time until she turned Shang loose on me, and I had no intention of leaving without talking to Trudy. So with a savage backward motion, I slammed my elbow into Shang's hard belly. He grunted with pain and surprise.
Pivoting, I spiked him with my knee. His face was anything but inscrutable. Lines of pain rippled up toward his eyes and he sank into a stoop like a pigeon-toed man trying to hold a walnut between his knees.
As he reached for me, I feinted, then hit him with the edge of my right hand. The blow, which would have split a plank, caught him on the side of his thick neck. His eyes protruded and his breath whistled between his teeth. Catching him by the coat, I yanked him off balance and hurled him over my hip. He hit the floor like a piano falling two stories.
I pulled the Luger. "Now, where's Trudy?"
Alida stood up and pitched the cat at my face. I dodged and the Siamese sailed past, a ball of spitting fury. He landed on Shang's back and clawed his way up. The Chinese tried to buck him off and the cat sank his claws into the man's head.
Poor Shang screamed loud enough to shatter glass.
I rapped the cat lightly on the spine with the Luger. He meowed and sprang to a nearby table.
"You all right?" I asked Shang, but he wasn't listening. I turned on Alida and she was pulling open the drawer of a table. I had an idea the lady wasn't looking for a guest book for me to sign. I grabbed her by the back of the tight gown and it tore as she writhed away. When she wheeled, she had a .38 Beretta in her hand.
She called me a name she hadn't learned from her Chinese ancestors. It was 100 per cent back alley American. Before she could pull the trigger, I slapped her wrist with the heavy Luger and the Beretta spun out of her fingers and struck the wall.
I put the point of the Luger right between her hate-filled eyes. "The question was, where's Trudy?"
Alida took me upstairs. The girl was sitting on a bed playing solitaire. She gave me a sullen glance. "Look who's here. My lucky charm."
"I tried to keep him away from you. Take my advice and tell him nothing," Alida said.
Trudy had a day-old shiner. I walked over to her and tilted her chin. "Who did the job on you?"
"A guy named Oscar. Oscar Snodgrass."
"I don't think that was his name."
"The word is out that a Mafia capo got hit and a piece of the Mob's cash heisted. Moose is wild enough to pull a caper like that. And you come looking for Moose. Alicia says that's an odd coincidence."
"I'm not interested in the money. I told you the reason I wanted Moose."
The girl looked at Alida. "What am I going to do? I believe him."
"I went to see Haskell. He didn't tell me anything I needed to know. But someone has tried to kill me and now I find you and the sweet-tempered madam here up-tight. What's the story, Trudy?"
She swept the cards together into a pile on the bed. "Alida, I'm going to tell him."
Then hurry up. I want him out of here. I don't want any more trouble with the Mob."
"Two men came here last night," Trudy said. "I can't tell you their names, but I can tell you who they work for."
"The Mafia."
"That's who. They knew you had been to see me. They wanted to know what you were after. The short ugly one hit me and I got scared. I told him you were looking for Moose."
They had been following me, I thought. I'd led them here like I'd led them to Idaho. They were patient and they were tenacious and now they knew what they hadn't known before, that Moose was their heist man.
"They'll burn you," Alida said. "I hope they burn you good."
I went down the stairs. The Mighty Shang was hanging on to the arms of a chair and grimacing as the blonde in the negligee dabbed iodine in his hair. The Siamese cat sat licking his paw and eyed me balefully as I walked past. "Nice kitty," I said. He was the real terror of the Orient.