“Magnificently proportioned,” I said. “If I had a classical education I’d call her Junoesque.”
“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”
“A little.”
“I thought so. Personally I don’t mind a little kidding. What did she say about me?”
“Nothing but good. As a matter of fact, I was complimenting her on her – er – garments.”
“I see.” She was long past blushing. “We had a customer last fall some time, by the name of Fern. Fern Dee. She had some kind of a job at the Joshua Club, I think. But she doesn’t fit the description at all. This one was a brunette, a middle-sized brunette, quite young. I remember the name Fern because she wanted it embroidered on all the things she bought. A corny idea if you ask me, but that was her girlish desire and who am I to argue with girlish desires.”
“Is she still in town?”
“I haven’t see her lately, not for months. But it couldn’t be the woman you’re looking for. Or could it?”
“How long ago was she in here?”
She pondered. “Early last fall, around the start of the season. She only came in that once, and made a big purchase, stockings and nightwear and underthings. The works. I remember thinking at the time, here was a girlie who suddenly hit the chips but heavily.”
“She might have put on weight since then, and dyed her hair. Strange things can happen to the female form.”
“You’re telling me,” she said. “How old was – your friend?”
“About forty, I’d say, give or take a little.”
“It couldn’t be the same one then. The girl I’m talking about was twenty-five at the outside, and I don’t make mistakes about women’s ages. I’ve seen too many of them in all stages, from Quentin quail to hags, and I certainly do mean hags.”
“I bet you have.”
She studied me with eyes shadowed by mascara and experience. “You a policeman?”
“I have been.”
“You want to tell mother what it’s all about?”
“Another time. Where’s the Joshua Club?”
“It won’t be open yet.”
“I’ll try it anyway.”
She shrugged her thin shoulders and gave me directions. I thanked her.
It occupied a plain-faced one-story building half a block off the main street. The padded leather door swung inward when I pushed it. I passed through a lobby with a retractable roof, which contained a jungle growth of banana trees. The big main room was decorated with tinted desert photomurals. Behind a rattan bar with a fishnet canopy, a white-coated Caribbean type was drying shot-glasses with a dirty towel. His face looked uncommunicative.
On the orchestra dais beyond the piled chairs in the dining area, a young man in shirt sleeves was playing bop piano. His fingers shadowed the tune, ran circles around it, played leapfrog with it, and managed never to hit it on the nose. I stood beside him for a while and listened to him work. He looked up finally, still strumming with his left hand in the bass. He had soft-centered eyes and frozen-looking nostrils and a whistling mouth.
“Nice piano,” I said.
“I think so.”
“Fifty-second Street?”
“It’s the street with the beat and I’m not effete.” His left hand struck the same chord three times and dropped away from the keys. “Looking for somebody, friend?”
“Fern Dee. She asked me to drop by some time.”
“Too bad. Another wasted trip. She left here end of last year, the dear. She wasn’t a bad little nightingale but she was no pro, Joe, you know? She had it but she couldn’t project it. When she warbled the evening died, no matter how hard she tried, I don’t wanna be snide.”
“Where did she lam, Sam, or don’t you give a damn?”
He smiled like a corpse in a deft mortician’s hands. “I heard the boss retired her to private life. Took her home to live with him. That is what I heard. But I don’t mix with the big boy socially, so I couldn’t say for sure that she’s impure. Is it anything to you?”
“Something, but she’s over twenty-one.”
“Not more than a couple of years over twenty-one.” His eyes darkened, and his thin mouth twisted sideways angrily. “I hate to see it happen to a pretty little twist like Fern. Not that I yearn–”
I broke in on his nonsense rhymes: “Who’s the big boss you mentioned, the one Fern went to live with?”
“Angel. Who else?”
“What heaven does he inhabit?”
“You must be new in these parts–” His eyes swiveled and focused on something over my shoulder. His mouth opened and closed.
A grating tenor said behind me: “Got a question you want answered, bud?”
The pianist went back to the piano as if the ugly tenor had wiped me out, annulled my very existence. I turned to its source. He was standing in a narrow doorway behind the drums, a man in his thirties with thick black curly hair and a heavy jaw blue-shadowed by closely shaven beard. He was almost the living image of the dead man in the Cadillac. The likeness gave me a jolt. The heavy black gun in his hand gave me another.
He came around the drums and approached me, bull-shouldered in a fuzzy tweed jacket, holding the gun in front of him like a dangerous gift. The pianist was doing wry things in quickened tempo with the dead march from Saul. A wit.
The dead man’s almost-double waved his cruel chin and the crueler gun in unison. “Come inside, unless you’re a government man. If you are, I’ll have a look at your credentials.”
“I’m a freelance.”
“Inside then.”
The muzzle of the automatic came into my solar plexus like a pointing iron finger. Obeying its injunction, I made my way between empty music stands and through the narrow door behind the drums. The iron finger, probing my back, directed me down a lightless corridor to a small square office containing a metal desk, a safe, a filing cabinet. It was windowless, lit by fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Under their pitiless glare, the face above the gun looked more than ever like the dead man’s face. I wondered if I had been mistaken about his deadness, or if the desert heat had addled my brain.
“I’m the manager here,” he said, standing so close that I could smell the piney stuff he used on his crisp dark hair. “You got anything to ask about the members of the staff, you ask me.”
“Will I get an answer?”
“Try me, bud.”
“The name is Archer,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”
“Working for who?”
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“I am, though, very much interested.” The gun hopped forward like a toad into my stomach again, with the weight of his shoulder behind it. “Working for who did you say?”
I swallowed anger and nausea, estimating my chances of knocking the gun to one side and taking him bare-handed. The chances seemed pretty slim. He was heavier than I was, and he held the automatic as if it had grown out of the end of his arm. You’ve seen too many movies, I told myself. I told him: “A motel owner on the coast. A man was shot in one of his rooms last night. I happened to check in there a few minutes later. The old boy hired me to look into the shooting.”
“Who was it got himself ventilated?”
“He could be your brother,” I said. “Do you have a brother?”
He lost his color. The center of his attention shifted from the gun to my face. The gun nodded. I knocked it up and sideways with a hard left uppercut. Its discharge burned the side of my face and drilled a hole in the wall. My right sank into his neck. The gun thumped the cork floor.
He went down but not out, his spread hand scrabbling for the gun, then closing on it. I kicked his wrist. He grunted but wouldn’t let go of it. I threw a punch at the short hairs on the back of his neck. He took it and came up under it with the gun, shaking his head from side to side.