The crowd of trailer people, men and women and children, blocked his path. One of the men spoke up: “The boy get away from you, captain?”
“We’ll get him back. Incidentally, I want all you people to stay home tonight. We’ll talk to you later.”
“Is it murder?” The question fell into a hush, which was broken by a sparrowlike twittering from women and children.
“I’ll guarantee this:” Brake said, “she didn’t cut herself shaving. Now break it up. You people go back to your houses.”
The crowd drew back muttering. Advised by his glance to come along, I followed Brake to the door of number seven. Inside, the identification officer was taking measurements and photographs. Lucy lay under his ministrations with the bored expression of a hostess whose guests’ antics were getting out of hand.
“Come in,” Brake said. “Shut the door.”
One of the suitcases was open on the bed, and he returned to his examination of it. I stayed by the door, watching his large practiced hands go through the white uniforms.
“Trained nurse, apparently.” He added very casually: “How did you happen to find her?”
“I knocked on the door and she didn’t answer. The door wasn’t locked. I looked in.”
“Why do that?”
“I’m in the room next door.”
His narrow gray gaze came up to my face. “You know her?”
“Never met her.”
“Hear any noise? See anybody?”
“No.” I made a quick decision. “I’m a private detective from Los Angeles. I’ve been tailing her since noon.”
“Well.” The gray eyes clouded. “That makes it interesting. Why were you doing that?”
The identification man, who was dusting the second suitcase for fingerprints, turned his head to give me a sharp-faced look.
“I was hired to.”
Brake straightened up and faced me. “I didn’t think you were doing it for fun. Let’s see your identification.”
I showed him my photostat.
“Who hired you?”
“I don’t have to answer that.”
“You weren’t hired to kill her, by any chance?”
“You’ll have to do better than that, if you want any co-operation from me.”
“Who said I wanted any co-operation from you? Who hired you?”
“You get tough very quickly, lieutenant. I could have blown when I found her, instead of sticking around to give you the benefit of my experience.”
“Can the spiel.” He didn’t needle easily. “Who hired you? And for God’s sake don’t give me the one about you got your client’s interests to protect. I got a whole city to protect.”
We faced each other across the drying moat of blood. He was a rough small-city cop, neither suave nor persuasive, with an ego encysted in scar-tissue. I was tempted to needle him again, to demonstrate to these country cousins how a boy from the big city could be hard in a polished way. But my heart wasn’t in the work. I felt less loyalty to my client than to the dead girl on the floor, and I compromised: “A woman who gave her name as Una Larkin came to my office this morning. She hired me to tail this girl, and told me where to find her at lunchtime. Tom’s Café on Main Street. I picked her up there and followed her home to Alex Norris’s house, where she was a roomer–”
“Save the details for your statement,” Brake said. “What was that about the client’s name? You think it was a phony?”
“Yes. Am I going to make a statement?”
“We’ll go downtown soon’s we finish up here. Right now I want to know what she hired you for.”
“She said Lucy worked for her, and left a couple of weeks ago with some of her jewelry – ruby earrings and a gold necklace.”
Brake glanced at the identification man, who wagged his head negatively. He said to me: “You’ll have to take it up with the County Administrator. Or is that story phony, too?”
“I think so.”
“The woman live in town here?”
“I doubt it. She was very cagy about who she was and where she came from.”
“You giving it straight, or suppressing information?”
“Straight.” Una had bought that much with the hundred that was lonely in my wallet.
“It better be. Did you call us as soon as you found her?”
“There was a few minutes’ time-lag. On my way across the court to the office, young Norris attacked me.”
“Was he going or coming?”
“Neither. He was waiting.”
“How do you know?”
“I held him and questioned him a little. He said he’d been waiting for Lucy to get her things since five o’clock. They were going away to be married. He didn’t know she was dead until I told him.”
“You read minds, huh?” Brake’s face slanted, chin out, towards me, cracked and red like Bella Valley earth above the irrigation level. “What else do you do, Mister Experience?”
“When I make a statement, I try to keep the record straight. The physical facts are against Norris. It looks like consciousness of guilt, running out like that–”
“You don’t tell me,” Brake said heavily, and his assistant snickered. “I never would have thought of that by myself.”
“He ran because he was scared. He thought he was going to be railroaded, and maybe he was right. I’ve seen it happen to black boys, also to white boys.”
“Oh sure, you’ve been around. You’ve had a lot of experience. Only I don’t want the goddam benefit of your goddam experience. I want your facts.”
“You’re getting them. Maybe I’m going too fast for your powers of assimilation.”
Brake’s small eyes crossed slightly. His large face became congested with dark blood. The developing situation was interrupted by someone opening the door behind me, and singing out: “Break it up, boys. I have a date with a lady. Where’s the lady?”
It was the deputy coroner, a plump young medical man bubbling with the excessive cheerfulness of those who handled death as a regular chore. He was accompanied by a white-coated ambulance driver and a black-coated undertaker who strove to outdo him in gaiety. Brake lost interest in me and my selection of facts.
Samples of blood were taken from the floor. The stained bolo knife and Lucy’s smaller belongings were packed in evidence cases. Its position having been outlined with chalk, the body was lifted onto a stretcher and covered with canvas. The undertaker and the ambulance driver carried it out. Brake sealed the door.
It was twilight, and the courtyard was almost empty. Around a pole in its center, a group of women stood in the spill of light from a single arc-lamp. They were talking in loud self-righteous tones about murders they had seen or read or heard about or imagined. Their voices sank to an uneasy protesting murmur as Lucy’s cortege went by them. Their eyes, bright-dark in faces splashed with white by the lamp on the pole, followed the covered stretcher to the back door of the waiting hearse. The sky was a dingy yellow ceiling.
Chapter 8
The Mission Hotel was the most impressive building on Main Street. It was a concrete cube pierced with four rows of windows and surmounted by a broadcasting mast that thrust a winking red light towards the stars. Its flat white facade was stained red by a vertical neon sign over the entrance.
The lobby was deep and gloomy, furnished with dark wrinkled-leather chairs. Those near the half-curtained windows at the front were occupied by old men sitting in stiff impromptu positions, as if a flood had lodged them there years ago and then receded forever. On the wall above their heads, an obscure mural depicted U.S. cavalrymen riding strange horses with human knees in pursuit of still stranger Indians.
The desk-clerk was a mouse-colored little man who was striving against heavy odds to confer distinction on himself and his surroundings. With hair and eyebrow-moustache scrupulously brushed, a cornflower in his buttonhole matching the delicate pin-stripe in his flannels, and at his languid elbow a vase of cornflowers to underline his point, he might have inspired a tone poem by Debussy. He answered my question in tones of careful elegance, implying that he hadn’t always manned an outpost in the wilderness: “I believe Mrs. Larkin is in her suite. I haven’t seen her go out, sir. Whom shall I say is calling?”