James Chase: Lay Her Among the Lilies

“That’s all right, Mr. Malloy.”

“Another thing: who’s Dr. John Bewley, and where does he live?”

“He has a little place on Skyline Avenue,” the clerk told me. “Don’t go to him if you want a good doctor.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

The clerk lifted tired shoulders.

“Just old. Fifty years ago he might have been all right. A horse-and-buggy doctor. I guess he thinks trepanning is something to do with opening a can of beans.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

The clerk laughed.

“Depends on whose head we’re talking about.”

“Yeah. So he’s just an old washed-up croaker, huh?”

“That describes him. Still, he’s not doing any harm. I don’t suppose he has more than a dozen patients now.” He scratched the side of his ear and looked owlishly at me. “Working on something?”

“I never work,” I said. “See you some time. So long.”

I went down the steps into the hard sunlight, slowly and thoughtfully. A girl worth a million dies suddenly and they call in an old horse-and-buggy man. Not quite the millionaire touch. One would have expected a fleet of the most expensive medicine men in town to have been in on a kill as important as hers.

I crawled into the Buick and trod on the starter. Parked against the traffic, across the way, was an olive-green Dodge limousine. Seated behind the wheel was a man in a fawn-coloured hat, around which was a plaited cord. He was reading a newspaper. I wouldn’t have noticed him or the car if he hadn’t looked up suddenly and, seeing me, hastily tossed the newspaper on to the back seat and started his engine. Then I did look at him, wondering why he had so suddenly lost interest in his paper. He seemed a big man with shoulders about as wide as a barn door. His head sat squarely on his shoulders without any sign of a neck. He wore a pencil-lined black moustache and his eyes were hooded. His nose and one ear had been hit very hard at one time and had never fully recovered. He looked the kind of tough you see so often in a Warner Brothers’ tough movie: the kind who make a drop-cloth for Humphrey Bogart.

I steered the Buick into the stream of traffic and drove East, up Centre Avenue, not hurrying, and keeping one eye on the driving-mirror.

The Dodge forced itself against the West-going traffic, did a U-turn while horns honked and drivers cursed and came after me. I wouldn’t have believed it possible for anyone to have done that on Centre Avenue and get away with it, but apparently the cops were either asleep or it was too hot to bother.

At Westwood Avenue intersection I again looked into the mirror. The Dodge was right there on my tail. I could see the driver lounging behind the wheel, a cheroot gripped between his teeth, one elbow and arm on the rolled-down window. I pulled ahead so I could read his registration number, and committed it to memory. If he was tailing me he was making a very bad job of it. I put on speed on Hollywood Avenue and went to the top at sixty-five. The Dodge, after a moment’s hesitation, jumped forward and roared behind me. At Foothills Boulevard I swung to the kerb and pulled up sharply. The Dodge went by. The driver didn’t look in my direction. He went on towards the Los Angeles and San Francisco Highway.

I wrote down the registration on the old envelope along with Doc Bewley’s name and stowed it carefully away in my hip pocket. Then I started the Buick rolling again and drove down Skyline Avenue. Halfway down I spotted a brass plate glittering in the sun. It was attached to a low, wooden gate which guarded a small garden and a double-fronted bungalow of Canadian pine wood. A modest, quiet little place; almost a slum beside the other ultramodern houses on either side of it.

I pulled up and leaned out of the window. But, at that distance it was impossible to read the worn engraving on the plate. I got out of the car and had a closer look. Even then it wasn’t easy to decipher, but I made out enough to tell me this was Dr. John Bewley’s residence.

As I groped for the latch of the gate, the olive-green Dodge came sneaking down the road and went past. The driver didn’t appear to look my way, but I knew he had seen me and where I was going. I paused to look after the car. It went down the road fast and I lost sight of it when it swung into Westwood Avenue.

I pushed my hat to the back of my head, took out a packet of Lucky Strike, lit up and stowed the package away. Then I lifted the latch of the gate and walked down the gravel path towards the bungalow.

The garden was small and compact, and as neat and as orderly as a barrack-room on inspection day. Yellow sunblinds, faded and past their prime, screened the windows. The front door could have done with a lick of paint. That went for the whole of the bungalow, too.

I dug my thumb into the bell-push and waited. After a while I became aware that someone was peeping at me though the sunblinds. There was nothing I could do about that except put on a pleasant expression and wait. I put on a pleasant expression and waited.

Just when I thought I would have to ring again I heard the kind of noise a mouse makes in the wainscotting, and the front door opened.

The woman who looked at me was thin and small and bird-like. She had on a black silk dress that might have been fashionable about fifty years ago if you lived in isolation and no one ever sent you Vogue. Her thin old face was tired and defeated, her eyes told me life wasn’t much fun.

“Is the doctor in?” I asked, raising my hat, knowing if anyone would appreciate courtesy she would.

“Why, yes.” The voice sounded defeated, too. “He’s in the garden at the back. I’ll call him.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. I’d as soon go around and see him there. I’m not a patient. I just wanted to ask him a question.”

“Yes.” The look of hope which had begun to climb into her eyes faded away. Not a patient. No fee. Just a healthy young husky with a question. “You won’t keep him long, will you? He doesn’t like being disturbed.”

“I won’t keep him long.”

I raised my hat, bowed the way I hoped in her better days men had bowed to her, and retreated back to the garden path again. She closed the front door. A moment later I spotted her shadow as she peered at me through the front window blinds.

I followed the path around the bungalow to the garden at the back. Doc Bewley might not have been a ball of fire as a healer, but he was right on the beam as a gardener I would have liked to have brought those three Crosby gardeners to look at this garden. It might have shaken up their ideas.

At the bottom of the garden, standing over a giant dahlia was a tall old man in a white alpaca coat, a yellow panama, yellowish-white trousers and elastic side-boots. He was looking at the dahlia the way a doctor looks down your throat when you say ‘ Ah-aa’, and was probably finding it a lot more interesting.

He looked up sharply when I was within a few feet of him. His face was lined and shrivelled, not unlike the skin of a prune, and he had a crop of coarse white hair sprouting out of his cars. Not a noble or clever face, but the face of a very old man who is satisfied with himself, whose standards aren’t very high, who has got beyond caring, is obstinate, dull-witted, but undefeated.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Surgery hours are from five to seven, young man,” he said in a voice so low I could scarcely hear him. “I can’t see you now.”

“This isn’t a professional call,” I said, peering over his shoulder at the dahlia. It was a lovely thing: eight inches across if it was an inch, and flawless. “My name’s Malloy. I’m an old friend of Janet Crosby.”

He touched the dahlia gently with thick-jointed fingers.