Red Wind (12 page)

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THE uniformed officer behind the typewriter desk talked into a
dictaphone
, then looked at Mallory and jerked his thumb towards a glass-paneled door that said: “Captain of Detectives. Private.”

Mallory got up stiffly from a hard chair and went across the room, leaned against the wall to open the glass-paneled door, went on in.

The room he went into was paved with dirty brown linoleum, furnished with the peculiar sordid hideousness only municipalities can achieve. Cathcart, the captain of detectives, sat in the middle of it alone, between a littered roll-top desk that was not less than twenty years old and a flat oak table large enough to play ping-pong on.

Cathcart was a big shabby Irishman with a sweaty face and a loose-lipped grin. His white mustache was stained in the middle by nicotine. His hands had a lot of warts on them.

Mallory went towards him slowly, leaning on a heavy cane with a rubber tip. His right leg felt large and hot. His left arm was in a sling made from a black silk scarf. He was freshly shaved. His face was pale and his eyes were as dark as slate.

He sat down across the table from the captain of detectives, put his cane on the table, tapped a cigarette and lit it. Then he said casually:

“What’s the verdict, chief?”

Cathcart grinned. “How you feel, kid? You look kinda pulled down.”

“Not bad.
A bit stiff.”

Cathcart nodded, cleared his throat, fumbled unnecessarily with some papers that were in front of him. He said:

“You’re clear. It’s a lulu, but you’re clear. Chicago gives you a clean sheet—damn’ clean. Your Luger got Mike Corliss, a two-time loser. I’m keepin’ the Luger for a souvenir.
Okey?”

Mallory nodded, said: “Okey. I’m getting me a .25 with copper slugs.
A sharpshooter’s gun.
No shock effect, but it goes better with evening clothes.”

Cathcart looked at him closely for a minute,
then
went on: “Mike’s prints are on the shotgun. The shotgun got Mardonne. Nobody’s cryin’ about that much. The blond kid ain’t hurt bad. That automatic we found on the floor had his prints and that will take care of him for a while.”

Mallory rubbed his chin slowly, wearily.
“How about the others?”

The captain raised tangled eyebrows, and his eyes looked absent. He said: “I don’t know of nothin’ to connect you there. Do you?”

“Not a thing,” Mallory said apologetically. “I was just wondering.”

The captain said firmly: “Don’t wonder. And don’t get to guessin’, if anybody should ask you… Take that Baldwin Hills thing. The way we figure it Macdonald got killed in the line of duty, takin’ with him a dope-peddler named Slippy Morgan. We have a tag out for Slippy’s wife, but I don’t guess we’ll make her. Mac wasn’t on the narcotic detail, but it was his night off and he was a great guy to gumshoe around on his night off. Mac loved his work.”

Mallory smiled faintly, said politely: “Is that so?”

“Yeah,” the captain said. “In the other one it seems this Landrey, a known gambler—he was Mardonne’s partner too. That’s kind of a funny coincidence—went down to Westwood to collect dough from a guy called Costello that ran a book on the Eastern tracks. Jim Ralston, one of our boys, went with him.
Hadn’t ought
to, but he knew Landrey pretty well. There was a little trouble about the money. Jim got beaned with a blackjack and Landrey and some little hood fogged each other. There was another guy there we don’t trace. We got Costello, but he won’t talk and we don’t like to beat up an old guy. He’s got a rap comin’ on account of the blackjack. He’ll plead, I guess.”

Mallory slumped down in his chair until the back of his neck rested on top of it. He blew smoke straight up towards the stained ceiling. He said:

“How about night before last?
Or was that the time the roulette wheel backfired and the trick cigar blew a hole in the garage floor?”

The captain of detectives rubbed both his moist cheeks briskly, then hauled out a very large handkerchief and snorted into it.

“Oh that,” he said negligently, “that wasn’t nothin’. The blond kid—Henry Anson or something like that—says it was
all his
fault. He was Mardonne’s bodyguard, but that didn’t mean he could go shootin’ anyone he might want to. That takes care of him, but we let him down easy for tellin’ a straight story.”

The captain stopped short and stared at Mallory hard-eyed. Mallory was grinning. “Of course if you don’t
like
his story…” the captain went on coldly.

Mallory said: “I haven’t heard it yet. I’m sure I’ll like it fine.”

“Okey,” Cathcart rumbled, mollified. “Well, this Anson says Mardonne buzzed him in where you and the boss were talkin’. You
was
makin’ a kick about something, maybe a crooked wheel downstairs. There was some money on the desk and Anson got the idea it was a shake. You looked pretty fast to him, and not knowing you was a dick he gets kinda nervous. His gun went off. You didn’t shoot right away, but the poor sap lets off another round and plugs you. Then, by — you drilled him in the shoulder, as who wouldn’t, only if it had been me, I’d of pumped his guts. Then the shotgun boy comes bargin’ in,
lets
go without asking any questions, fogs Mardonne and stops one from you. We kinda thought at first the guy might
of
got Mardonne on purpose, but the kid says no, he tripped in the door comin’ in… Hell, we don’t like for you to do all that shooting, you being a stranger and all that, but a man ought to have a right to protect himself against illegal weapons.”

Mallory said gently: “There’s the D.A. and the coroner. How about them? I’d kind of like to go back as clean as I came away.”

Cathcart frowned down at the dirty linoleum and bit his thumb as if he liked hurting himself.

“The
coroner don’t
give a damn about that trash. If the D.A. wants to get funny, I can tell him about a few cases his office didn’t clean up so
good
.”

Mallory lifted his cane off the table, pushed his chair back, put weight on the cane and stood up. “You have a swell police department here,” he said. “I shouldn’t think you’d have any crime at all.”

He moved across towards the outer door. The captain said to his back:

“Goin’ on to Chicago?”

Mallory shrugged carefully with his right shoulder, the good one. “I might stick around,” he said. “One of the studios made me a proposition.
Private extortion detail.
Blackmail and so on.”

The captain grinned heartily. “Swell,” he said. “Eclipse Films is a swell outfit. They
always been
swell to me… Nice easy work, blackmail.
Oughtn’t to run into any rough stuff.”

Mallory nodded solemnly.
“Just light work, Chief.
Almost effeminate, if you know what I mean.”

He went on out, down the hall to the elevator, down to the street. He got into a taxi. It was hot in the taxi. He felt faint and dizzy going back to his hotel.

AT ONE o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.

Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned. That should be his radio room after one A.M.
Nobody
should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.

The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, molded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends.
Handsome fingers.
Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-gray eyes.

The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing imperfectly perceived, an error of vision…

He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.

She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-colored knee. She was wearing lounging pajamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.

“You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Tony Reseck asked.

The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.

She said nothing.

Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” he repeated gently.

“Not to cry over,” the girl said tonelessly.

Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes.
Large, deep, empty eyes.
Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

“Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.

“Go on, kid me,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”

“I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.

“Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.

“It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”

She gave him another long lucid glance. “Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?” She laughed a little, almost under her breath. “What did I do wrong?”

Tony smiled his toy smile.
“Nothing, Miss Cressy.
Nothing at all.
But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.”

She laughed again. “Make me a story about it. I’m bored.”

“There was a girl here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She
didn’t speak to anybody hardly
. What do you think she did then?”

The girl eyed him gravely. “She jumped her bill.”

He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking.
“Unh-uh.
She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.”

The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-colored knee. “What did you say your name was?”

“Tony Reseck.”

“Sounds like a hunky.”

“Yeah,” Tony said.
“Polish.”

“Go on, Tony.”

“All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen stories above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.” He dropped his hand with a final gesture, a farewell gesture. “Nobody saw her jump. But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.”

“You’re making it up, Tony.” Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.

He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. “Eve Cressy,” he said musingly. “A name waiting for lights to be in.”

“Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony.
You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like the little polished bones. “I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place—without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.”

He leaned over softly and turned the knob on the radio. A waltz formed itself dimly on the warm air.
A tinsel waltz, but a waltz.
He turned the volume up. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed.

The girl put her hand on one side and hummed three or four bars and stopped with a sudden tightening of her mouth.

“Eve Cressy,” she said. “It was in lights once.
At a bum night club.
A dive.
They raided it and the lights went out.”

He smiled at her almost mockingly. “It was no dive while you were there, Miss Cressy… That’s the waltz the orchestra always played when the old porter walked up and down in front of the hotel entrance, all swelled up with his medals on his chest.
The Last Laugh.
Emil Jannings. You wouldn’t remember that one, Miss Cressy.”

“
‘Spring
, Beautiful Spring,’” she said. “No, I never saw it.”

He walked three steps away from her and turned. “I have to go upstairs and palm doorknobs. I hope I didn’t bother you. You ought to go to bed now. It’s pretty late.”

The tinsel waltz stopped and a voice began to talk. The girl spoke through the voice. “You really thought something like that—about the balcony?”

He nodded. “I might have, “he said softly. “I don’t any more.”

“No chance, Tony.” Her smile was a dim lost leaf. “Come and talk to me some more. Redheads don’t jump, Tony. They hang on—and wither.”

He looked at her gravely for a moment and then moved away over the carpet. The porter was standing in the archway that led to the main lobby. Tony hadn’t looked that way yet, but he knew somebody was there. He always knew if anybody was close to him. He could hear the grass grow, like the donkey in
The Blue Bird.

The porter jerked his chin at him urgently. His broad face above the uniform collar looked sweaty and excited. Tony stepped up close to him and they went together through the arch and out to the middle of the dim lobby.

“Trouble?”
Tony asked wearily.

“There’s a guy outside to see you, Tony. He won’t come in. I’m doing a wipe-off on the plate glass of the doors and he comes up beside me, a tall guy. ‘Get Tony,’ he says, out of the side of his mouth.”

Tony said: “Uh-huh,” and looked at the porter’s pale blue eyes. “Who was it?”

“Al, he said to say he was.”

Tony’s face became as expressionless as dough.
“Okey.”
He started to move off.

The porter caught his sleeve. “Listen, Tony. You got any enemies?”

Tony laughed politely, his face still like dough.

“Listen, Tony.” The porter held his sleeve tightly. “There’s a big black car down the block, the other way from the hacks. There’s a guy standing beside it with his foot on the running board. This guy that spoke to me, he wears a dark-colored, wrap-around overcoat with a high collar turned up against his ears. His hat’s way low. You
can’t hardly
see his face. He says, ‘Get Tony,’ out of the side of his mouth. You ain’t got any enemies, have you, Tony?”

“Only the finance company,” Tony said. “Beat it.”

He walked slowly and a little stiffly across the blue carpet, up the three shallow steps to the entrance lobby with the three elevators on one side and the desk on the other. Only one elevator was working. Beside the open doors, his arms folded, the night operator stood silent in a neat blue uniform with silver facings. A lean, dark Mexican named Gomez.
A new boy, breaking in on the night shift.

The other side was the desk, rose marble, with the night clerk leaning on it delicately. A small neat man with a wispy reddish mustache and cheeks so rosy they looked rouged. He stared at Tony and poked a nail at his mustache.

Tony pointed a stiff index finger at him, folded the other three fingers tight to his palm, and flicked his thumb up and down on the stiff finger. The clerk touched the other side of his mustache and looked bored.

Tony went on past the closed and darkened newsstand and the side entrance to the drugstore, out to the brassbound plate-glass doors. He stopped just inside them and took a deep, hard breath. He squared his shoulders, pushed the doors open and stepped out into the cold damp night air.

The street was dark, silent. The rumble of traffic on Wilshire, two blocks away, had no body, no meaning. To the left were two taxis. Their drivers leaned against a fender, side by side, smoking. Tony walked the other way. The big dark car was a third of a block from the hotel entrance. Its lights were dimmed and it was only when he was almost up to it that he heard the gentle sound of its engine turning over.

A tall figure detached itself from the body of the car and strolled toward him, both hands in the pockets of the dark overcoat with the high collar. From the man’s mouth a cigarette tip glowed faintly, a rusty pearl.

They stopped two feet from each other.

The tall man said, “Hi, Tony. Long time no see.”

“Hello, Al. How’s it going?”

“Can’t complain.”
The tall man started to take his right hand out of his overcoat pocket, then stopped and laughed quietly. “I forgot. Guess you don’t want to shake hands.”

“That don’t mean anything,” Tony said.
“Shaking hands.
Monkeys can shake hands. What’s on your mind, Al?”

“Still the funny little fat guy, eh, Tony?”

“I guess.” Tony winked his eyes tight. His throat felt tight.

“You like your job back there?”

“It’s a job.”

Al laughed his quiet laugh again. “You take it slow, Tony. I’ll take it fast. So it’s a job and you want to hold it.
Okey.
There’s a girl named Eve Cressy flopping in your quiet hotel. Get her out.
Fast and right now.”

“What’s the trouble?”

The tall man looked up and down the street. A man behind in the car coughed lightly. “She’s hooked with a wrong number. Nothing against her personal, but she’ll lead trouble to you. Get her out, Tony. You got maybe an hour.”

“Sure,” Tony said aimlessly, without meaning.

Al took his hand out of his pocket and stretched it against Tony’s chest. He gave him a light lazy push. “I wouldn’t be telling you just for the hell of it, little fat brother. Get her out of there.”

“Okey,” Tony said, without any tone in his voice.

The tall man took back his hand and reached for the car door. He opened it and started to slip in like a lean black shadow.

Then he stopped and said something to the men in the car and got out again. He came back to where Tony stood silent, his pale eyes catching a little dim light from the street.

“Listen, Tony. You always kept your nose clean. You’re a good brother, Tony.”

Tony didn’t speak.

Al leaned toward him, a long urgent shadow,
the
high collar almost touching his ears. “It’s trouble business, Tony. The boys won’t like it, but I’m telling you just the same. This Cressy was married to a lad named Johnny Rails.
Rails is
out of Quentin two, three days, or a week. He did a three-spot for manslaughter. The girl put him there. He ran down an old man one night when he was drunk, and she was with him. He wouldn’t stop. She told him to go in and tell it, or else. He didn’t go in. So the Johns come for him.”

Tony said, “That’s too bad.”

“It’s kosher, kid. It’s my business to know. This Rails flapped his mouth in stir about how the girl would be waiting for him when he got out, all set to forgive and forget, and he was going straight to her.”

Tony said, “What’s he to you?” His voice had a dry, stiff crackle, like thick paper.

Al laughed. “The trouble boys want to see him. He ran a table at a spot on the Strip and figured out a scheme. He and another guy took the house for fifty grand. The other lad coughed up, but we still need Johnny’s twenty-five. The trouble boys don’t get paid to forget.”

Tony looked up and down the dark street. One of the taxi drivers flicked a cigarette stub in a long arc over the top of one of the cabs. Tony watched it fall and spark on the pavement. He listened to the quiet sound of the big car’s motor.

“I don’t want any part of it,” he said. “I’ll get her out.”