Strip for Murder (8 page)

I saw white-bearded men sprawled in doorways, wrapped in the sweet smell of wine; a young, empty-eyed man sitting on wooden steps at a dingy hotel entrance, his fly unzipped, something crusted on his chin and shirt front. I talked to an amazingly thin middle-aged woman with bones showing everywhere and a face like a skull with skin stretched over it, her voice mumbling as she stared at me fixedly from dark, burning eyes. But I didn't get a single slice of useful information. It's funny, but among the derelicts and hoodlums and alcoholics around me, there were probably the answers to a thousand crimes. There's an “underworld wireless” that they all seem to have an ear on. Often a torpedo can get knocked off at noon in Miami and the whispers will be going around among the stumblebums and small-time hoods in L.A. before the sun goes down. So I kept walking, talking, buying beers, and spending quarters. For two bits a man can buy a bottle of port. But I didn't get anything solid until almost four-thirty P. M. And even then I wasn't sure.

About that time a small-time grifter named Iggy the Wig, a bald-headed hoodlum who wore a rug to keep him glamorous, caught up with me in Jerry's, a beer joint on Main. He was one of the guys I'd phoned earlier. We sat at the bar and I bought two beers and gave one to him.

Iggy poured down half of his and said, “About Yates. Yeah, I heard a word. Not big, but I know who can tell you. Lemme think a sec.” He pulled at his beer. “What's it worth—if I can think of it?”

“A fin.”

“A sawbuck?”

“A fin, Iggy. Give, or burp up that free beer.”

“Scott, a saw ain't much. This guy, he's gonna want a C. That's what he said.”

I almost fell off my stool. “He going to Europe? For that kind of dough he must have pooped Yates himself.”

“Nah. OK?”

I nodded.

“Three Eyes,” he said. “You know him?”

“Yeah, I know him.” He was a middle-aged character with one good eye, one glass one. I never did understand how that made him Three Eyes. He was so spindly and white and frail that he always looked as if he'd just come from donating blood and they'd forgotten to turn him off. He'd been in the money on several occasions, sometimes in the big dough, but he always wound up with empty pockets and an empty bottle.

I said, “Hangs out around Third and Main, doesn't he?”

“Not any more, he don't. He's scared about somep'n. Got hisself a room. I know where I can get him, bring him here. For a double saw.”

“What's he scared about?”

“I dunno. Not for sure. There's a rumble about that Poupelle, too, and some kind of push. Three Eyes was runnin' off at the mouth about it. Maybe he can tell you. He must have somep'n. Deal?”

I sighed. This Iggy was a grifter, all right. He started out asking for five bucks, got a hunch I might pay a hundred to Three Eyes, and tapped me for twenty. “All right. Get with it.” I gave him two tens and he slid off the stool.

“Take a while,” he said. “I gotta go there. How about cab fare?”

“Get going, Iggy.”

“Make it here, OK? Say six.”

“Six.”

He left. I finished my beer, thinking. The Afrodite was only three blocks away, so I started walking again. I tried to recall the girl's name, the entertainer Carlos had mentioned. I needn't have bothered. It was plastered all over the outside of the club: JUANITA. Juanita with the Cubaneros. Juanita singing, dancing, entertaining. Everything but pictures of her.

The Afrodite was a cellar club on Sixth, down a short flight of cement steps to a pair of thick wooden doors. The doors were locked, so I pounded on one of them. I could hear a mumble of voices inside, but nobody let me in.

I kicked the door a couple of times. The voices stopped, footsteps thumped toward me, and I heard a bolt slide back inside. A white-jacketed man, the bartender, I supposed, cracked one of the doors and squinted out at me. “Yeah?”

“Place open?”

“Nah.” He shut the door on my shoe, looked down. “The foot,” he said. “Move the foot.”

“I want to talk to you a minute, friend.”

“The foot. Move—”

He was cut off by a deep voice from inside. “What's the trouble, Joe?”

“Some big ape got his foot stuck in the door. Wants to talk or something.”

The deep voice said, “Ask him who it is.”

“Who is it?” Joe said. “I mean, what's your name?”

“Shell Scott.”

He relayed the info. There was near silence, broken by undistinguishable conversation for almost a minute. Then: “Let him in, Joe.”

Chapter Eight

Joe shook his head, then stepped back and opened the door wide. “You heard the man,” he said.

I was getting a funny feeling about the Afrodite. I hadn't ever been inside the place, and already I was less than crazy about it. But I walked in. There was practically no light, or so it seemed until my eyes got accustomed to the change from the brightness out on Sixth. Then I almost wished it were darker. I'd walked in on two of the toughest hoods in town—the two I recognized; and the other two men with them looked at least as ugly. There was a woman there too; I'd seen her around with some of the racket boys. All five of them sat at a table close by on my left.

The guy with the deep voice said, “Be damned if it isn't Scott. What an honor for all us fellows.”

He was Chinese, a young, completely bald guy in his early twenties, maybe two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than I. He'd been a star center in college, and once, while he'd been carrying a big rally sign that said “Football,” the sign had got torn and he'd run around carrying the part that said “Foo.” He'd carried that name into his postcollege and extralegal activities, and because he was a youthful Chinese egg and bald, and because hoods are hoods, his moniker had become, almost inevitably, Young Egg Foo.

Foo had played center on that team so long that something had happened to his brain. Besides which, he had become suspicious of everybody. And he had no sense of humor, no graciousness. Ask him what time it was and he'd hit you over the head with the clock. That kind of guy.

With him at the table was a lop-eared gunman named Strikes. I remembered the gal as an ex-queen of the burlesque circuit. Five years ago she'd been in the big time, right at the top, known as Bebe Le Doux. But now she was Babe Le Toot, and in her set there were lots of gags like “Hey, boys, let's go on a Toot,” and “I got a Tootache,” and so on. The two other hard-looking men sat on either side of Babe.

“Hi, Foo,” I said finally.

There was no reply, no more conversation, so I walked to the bar. In the wall behind me, beyond a pane of thick glass, soft lights illuminated a bunch of fake trees and vines, and a couple of dozen odd-looking tropical birds with brilliant plumage. A small dance floor was a little to my left and behind me as I climbed onto a stool.

The white-jacketed guy went behind the bar and I said, “Got a beer?”

“Place don't open till seven. What you want to talk about?”

Foo said from the table, “Give him a beer, Joe. It's on us, Scott.”

I said thanks without turning around.

The bartender opened a bottle of Acme and slid it over the bar. “You don't use a glass, do you?”

“Not here. Tell me, Joe, did you get to know Paul Yates very well when he was hanging around here?”

He was wiping the bar top with a limp rag, and when I said “Paul Yates” he paused for a fraction of a second, then went on wiping. The soft buzz of conversation behind me stopped at the same time.

“Don't think I know the man,” Joe said.

“You must know him. I understand he was around here quite a lot. Here last Saturday night. A soft heel.”

“Like you?”

“Not quite. He's dead.”

The buzz of conversation behind me hummed again. A wall mirror ran left and right behind the bar; in the dimness I could see the five of them. Just so there were five of them.

“Still don't know the man,” Joe said.

“Try these. Andon Poupelle.” No reaction. “Garlic.” He kept on wiping the bar. I said, “Juanita. Ever hear of anybody named Juanita?”

He grinned. “Can't say I have. Don't know anybody you mention. I'm never gonna know anybody you mention, chump.”

I took a long pull at the beer, set the empty bottle on the bar, and said, “Joe, I'll bet you don't even know what day this is.”

He looked puzzled.

“This is the day you got hurt,” I said. “You cracked so wise you threw your whole face out of joint.” I grinned at him and looked at my watch. It was almost five P.M. “At five o'clock it happened,” I said. “Just a couple of minutes from now. So let me ask you again about Yates.”

There was movement in the mirror. While Joe stood there licking his lips as if they had molasses on them, I watched the mirror. There wasn't any sound of chairs being pushed back, but three figures stood up around the table. Behind the glass wall, a couple of birds flapped around. Two of the guys walked toward the bar. The other one went to the front door and stood there with his back, to it.

Young Egg Foo sat down on the stool to my right. The other guy was one of the two I didn't know. He took the stool to my left and slammed a beer can noisily on the bar. He was short, very chunky, wearing a white T-shirt so his big biceps and knotted forearms would show.

Nobody said a word. I eased my stool back a bit from the bar, mainly to see if it would move. It moved. Muscles, on my left, put the beer can between the palms of his thick hands and squeezed it together without apparent strain.

“My name's Kid,” he said to me. “Just Kid. Be pleased to meet me. How you like that?” He held the squashed can between two fingers.

“You cheated,” I said. “You used both hands.”

His upper lip lifted slightly while he rolled that around in his head. But I was paying more attention to the bartender than to Kid. Joe wasn't looking at me, but at Foo, out of sight on my right. When Joe winced a little, I pushed with my hands on the bar, shoved backward, and let my feet hit the floor, then bent down in the same motion and grabbed the bar stool at its base—just as Foo's fist whistled by where my head had been.

That big fist was even bigger because of what looked like two pounds of metal wrapped around his fingers and resting against his palm. If he'd hit me with those knucks he'd probably have split my skull, but he missed and by that time I was coming up swinging the stool.

Foo was forward, pulled off balance by all that weight on his right hand, and he was all spread out when I hit him. But it was nothing to the way he spread out after I hit him. The metal of the stool's top bounced off his bald pate with a heartwarming clunk and he reeled back against the bar, his arms splayed out. Kid grunted and I spun back toward him, straightening my legs under me as I moved.

His fist smashed into my chest and threw me back a step, but I caught my balance as he jumped toward me. I was still holding the stool about head-high, arms stretched to my right, so I drove all four legs at him as hard as I could. One of the legs caught him on his left cheekbone. The metal was covered by a rubber cap, but it got him solidly and snapped his head to the side.

A chair crashed over at the table, but I couldn't look around. Kid was dazed just enough and I wasn't going to let him clear his head at this point. I swung the stool around in a circle and slammed it against his skull. Kid might never again clear his head. He went down like a poleaxed ox.

I started to swing around, but didn't make it. A fist bounced off the side of my neck and somebody crashed into me. I got tangled in the bar stool and went down, the guy on top of me. His hands jabbed at my throat as I rolled away from the bar and across the floor, but he hung on. I got my knees under me, squeezed my hands together, and brought them up hard inside his wrists.

His arms flew apart and I drove my right fist at his gut, knuckles stuck out from my palm, but they hit high on his chest. I didn't knock him out but I sent him sprawling backward. Feet clumped on the floor behind me. I started up, but a shoe caught me in the ribs. Pain sliced up my side.

I got turned around, on my feet, just in time to see Strikes with his right hand drawn back and in it a leather-covered sap. His teeth were bared. I let him swing and ducked aside, the sap grazing my hair. Then I grabbed his arm in both hands, swung my body around, and bent him over my hip.

I bent him hard. I put all I had into it, pain and anger jumping in me, and I threw that bastard over me and six feet through the air. He smashed into the glass wall with a horrible crunch.

The guy on the floor was coming up as I swung my foot at his chin. One of us timed it just right. My shoe jarred into the side of his face and his jaw snapped out like part of a rubber mask. He made a little sighing sound and collapsed. His jaw stayed out, oddly twisted. So did he.

I swung around. Nobody else was coming at me. Hell, there wasn't anybody left except Babe Le Toot.

For a while I didn't know what the shrill squawking sound was. Then I realized it was birds. Birds cackling neurotically and flying out through the busted glass, flapping around the room. A couple of feathers floated gently down to give the room a nice nightmarish touch.

I didn't see Kid, though. I thought I'd addled his brains for him, but he wasn't on the floor. A door in back stood open. Foo was hanging on the bar, halfway up it again. Christ, he was tough. I jumped toward him, but he didn't seem to notice me. The bartender stood rooted to the floor.

“Joe,” I said, “give me a bottle of whisky. A full bottle.”

He uprooted himself.

I took the bottle by the neck and banged it on Foo's head. He slithered all the way down. “Call the cops, Joe,” I said.

There was a sound like gargling over where the birds had been. I walked over and looked inside the shattered glass. Strikes lay on his back, all over blood. His face was red and wet; a big flap of skin hung down from his neck. He was breathing, and I saw little bubbles dance in the redness.