‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Take it back.’ I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped it on the bed. ‘Take that too, and keep your mouth shut. Okay?’
He picked up the note and the bag.
‘Is that all I can do for you?’ he asked, suddenly reluctant to leave us.
I turned Anita’s photograph over and flicked it towards him.
‘Ever seen this dame before?’
He put the bill in his pocket, set the bag on the floor and picked up the photograph. He held it at arm’s length, squinting at it.
‘Looks like Anita Gay to me,’ he said, and shot me an inquiring look. ‘It’s her, ain’t it? Jeepers! The times I’ve seen her. Sure, it’s Anita Gay.’
‘Don’t act coy,’ I said. ‘Who’s Anita Gay? What does she do? Where can I find her?’
‘I don’t know where you’ll find her,’ he said regretfully, and laid the photograph on the bed. ‘I haven’t seen her for months. She used to do a turn at the Brass Rail. And, boy, was she a sensation! That fur glove routine of hers certainly packed them in.’
‘What’s the Brass Rail?’
‘You don’t know the Brass Rail?’ He looked astonished. ‘Why, it’s a big beer-dill-pickle hippodrome on Bayshore Boulevard. It hasn’t had my custom since Anita quit. She wouldn’t be coming back, would she?’
I thought of the face framed in blood with the hole in the forehead big enough to poke my finger in.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She won’t be coming back.’
Chapter Seven
I
I left the hotel the next morning around eleven o’clock. It has been a hot night, and I hadn’t slept well, and when I finally bludgeoned myself to sleep with aspirin and whisky I didn’t wake until it was nearly ten.
Kerman let me sleep. He said there was nothing like rest after a sock on the head. But as my head still ached and I still felt lousy when I woke I didn’t believe him. After a lot of strong black coffee and a couple more aspirins and a tepid shower I did manage to feel well enough to start the day’s work.
I decided against calling on the photographer’s shop right away. I thought it would be better, if I could, to get a little information about Anita from the Brass Rail before I tackled Comrade Louis, so I decided to go there first.
Kerman asked me if I was windy about calling on Louis. I said no. I just wanted to get as much information as I could before someone tossed me into the Indian Basin, and I felt the danger zone was the photographer’s shop, I said I was working on a hunch. Kerman had a great respect for my hunches, especially when I played the horses, so he agreed we should go to the Brass Rail first.
He left the hotel before I did. I wasn’t worried that he would lose me. He was very good at shadowing people, and I wasn’t going to make it hard for him.
When I got on to the street I asked a patrolman where I could find the Brass Rail. He said it was on the corner of Bayshore and Third, about ten minutes’ walk from the hotel. While he was explaining how to get there I glanced across the street at the photographer’s shop. There was a light showing in the fanlight, but there was nothing else to see except hundreds of glossy prints mounted on boards set flush against the shop window and the door.
I thanked the patrolman, thinking the San Francisco police had much better manners than the Orchid City police. If you asked an Orchid City cop the way he was likely to run you in for insulting behaviour, or at best send you in the wrong direction to teach you not to bother him in the future.
The Brass Rail was a typical down-at-the-heel dump you’re likely to come upon in any big town that has a large population, not too choosey about their entertainment. It could have done with a coat of paint and a lot of elbow grease on the brass work. There were three double swing doors, an island ticket office out front, and a lot of glossy photographs in frames that covered every spare inch of wall space.
Along the outside edge of the usual projection that over-hung the ticket office were four-foot letters made of tarnished chromium that spelt out:
At night there would be lights behind the lettering, and the setup would look a lot smarter than it did now because the darkness would hide the tarnish. Another sign in lights, below the four-foot letters read:
I went and browsed over the photographs, and came to the conclusion that there would be nothing original about the show; nor would it ever set this town nor any other town on fire. There were the usual hard-faced, bright-eyed comics in loud suits. You knew by looking at them the kind of joke they’d crack. The girls didn’t look much either. They didn’t attempt to hide what charms they had. Most of them wore a G-string and a vacant smile. One of them did wear a hat, but she looked overdressed. The fifty tall tanned, terrific gals were tall and tanned, but tarnished would have been more truthful than terrific.
While I was browsing, one of the swing doors opened and a little guy with a face like a ferret came out into the sunshine. He wore a grubby camel-hair coat, a slouch hat that rested over his right eye and imitation shark-skin shoes that hadn’t been cleaned since he had bought them: a long time, ago to judge by the cracks in them.
‘Who’s in control here?’ I asked him. ‘Who runs the joint?’
He eyed me over, cleared his throat and spat accurately into the street.
‘Stranger around here?’ he asked in a voice made hoarse by trying to put over ancient jokes.
I said I was a stranger around here, and repeated my question.
His sharp-featured face darkened.
‘Nick Nedick,’ he said, and then followed a stream of obscenities that ran out of his mouth like sludge from a drain. He didn’t seem to think much of Nedick for some reason or other. ‘Up the stairs,’ he went on after he had exhausted his vocabulary. ‘Second door on right past the circle entrance. Spit up his cuff if you see him,’ and he went away down the street, flat footed, his head bent forward as if he wanted you to think the weight of his brain was a little too much for him.
I looked after him, wondering what was burning him up. In the middle distance I saw Kerman leaning against a lamp post leading a newspaper. He melted into the scene very well. When he had to look like a loafer he looked like one. It is not easy to stand about on the sidewalk and not look conspicuous, but Kerman could do it by the hour.
I pushed open the double swing doors and crossed the lobby to the stairs. An elderly negro in shirtsleeves and a sack round his middle was rubbing the brass banister rail. lie was rubbing as if he had very tender hands, and his large, bloodshot eyes stared vacantly into space. I might have been the invisible man for all the attention he paid me.
At the top of the stairs were more double swing doors that led to another lobby. As Ferret-face had said, there was a door marked Office to the right of the circle entrance.
I rapped on it, pushed it open and entered. The office was small, stuffy and hot. There was a desk, two metal filing cabinets, a lot of glossy photographs on the walls similar to those decorating the front of the house. A man in shirtsleeves sat at the desk, pounding a typewriter. He typed with two fingers, but very fast. He had a lot of black crinkly hair, a five o’clock shadow and a complexion like a toad’s under-belly.