James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

It was Nora Kemper, all right. She was standing in front of the door to 205 and digging into her bag for the key. I had a picture of her getting inside and closing the door and refusing to let me in.

I said, “Hold it a minute, Miss Kemper.”

She jerked her head up and around, startled. I moved toward her slowly. When the light reached my face, she gasped and made a frantic jab into the bag, yanked out her keys, and tried hurriedly to get one of them into the lock.

I couldn’t afford to have that door between us. I brought the gun out and said sharply, “Stay right there. I want to talk to you.”

The hand holding the keys dropped limply to her side. She began to hack away, retreating toward the dead end of the corridor. Her face gleamed whitely, set in a frozen mask of fear.

She stopped only when she could go no farther. Her back pressed hard against the wall next to the window, her eyes rolled, showing the whites.

Her voice came out in a ragged whisper. “Wha-what do you want?”

I said, “You know me, Miss Kemper. You know who I am. What are you afraid of?”

Her eyes wavered, dropped to the .38 in my hand. “The gun. I —”

“Hunh-uh,” I said. “You were scared stiff before I brought it out. Recognizing me is what scared you. Why?”

Her lips shook. Against the pallor of her skin they looked almost black. “I don’t know what…Don’t stand …Please. Let me go.”

She tried to squeeze past me. I reached out and grabbed her by one arm. She gasped and jerked away—and her open handbag fell to the floor, spilling the contents.

She started after them, but I was there ahead of her. I had seen something— something that shook me like a solid right to the jaw.

Three of them, close together on the carpet. I scooped them up and straightened and jerked Nora Kemper around to face me. I shoved my open hand in front of her eyes, letting her see what was in it.

“Keys!” I said hoarsely. “Take a good look, lady! They came out of your purse. The keys to my apartment, my mailbox. My wife’s keys!”

A small breeze would have knocked her down. I took a long look at her stricken expression, then I put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her ahead of me down the hall. I didn’t have to tell her what I wanted: she unlocked the door and we went in.

When the lights were on, she sank down on the couch. I stood over her, still holding the gun. My face must have told her what was going on behind it, for she began to shake uncontrollably.

I said, “I’m a man in the dark, Miss Kemper. I’m scared, and when I get scared I get mad. If you don’t want a mouth full of busted teeth, tell me one thing: where is my wife?”

She had sense enough to believe me. She gasped and drew back. “He didn’t tell me,” she wailed. “I only did what he told me to do, Mr. Kane.”

“What who told you?”

“David. Mr. Wainhope.”

I breathed in and out. “You wrote that letter?”

“…Yes.”

“Did you see my wife sign it?”

She wet her lips. “She wasn’t there. David signed it. There are samples of her signature at the office. He copied from one of them.”

I hadn’t thought of that. “What’s behind all this?”

“I — I don’t know.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the gun. “Really I don’t, Mr. Kane.”

“You know a hell of a lot more than I do,” I growled. “Start at the beginning and give it to me. All of it.”

She pushed a wick of black hair off her forehead. Some of the color was beginning to seep back into her cheeks, but her eyes were still clouded with fear.

“When I got back to the office from lunch this afternoon,” she said, “David was out. He called me a little after three and told me to meet him at the corner of Fountain and Courtney. I was to take the Hollywood streetcar instead of a cab and wait for him there.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. He sounded nervous, upset. I was there within fifteen minutes, but he didn’t show up until almost a quarter to four.”

“Go on,” I said when she hesitated.

“Well, we went into an apartment building on Fountain. Dave took out some keys and used one of them to take mail out of a box with your name on it. Then he unlocked the inner door and we went up to your apartment. He had the key to it, too. He gave me the keys and we went into the bedroom. He told me to call you and what to say. Before that, though, he hunted up the vacuum cleaner and started it going. Then I talked to you on the phone.”

I stared at her. “You did fine. The cleaner kept me from realizing it wasn’t Donna’s voice, and I suppose at one time or another Helen must’ve found out Donna called me ‘Poopsie’ and told Dave about it. Big laugh! What happened after that?”

Her hands were clenched in her lap, whitening the knuckles. Her small breasts rose and fell under quick shallow breathing. Fear had taken most of the beauty out of her face.

“Dave opened one of the letters he had brought upstairs,” she said tonelessly, “and left it next to the phone. We went back downstairs and drove back to the office. On the way Dave stopped off and bought some cheap stationery. I used some of it to write that letter. He told me to mail at at the post office right away, then he walked out. I haven’t seen him since.”

“Secretaries like you,” I said sourly, “must take some finding. Whatever the boss says goes. You don’t find ‘em like that around the broadcasting studios.”

Her head swung up sharply. “I happen to love Dave…and he loves me. We’re going to be married — now that he’s free.”

My face ached from keeping my expression unchanged. “How nice for both of you. Only he’s got a wife, remember?”

She looked at me soberly. “Didn’t you know about that?”

“About what?”

“Helen Wainhope. She was killed in an automobile accident this afternoon.”

“When did you hear that?”

“David told me when he called in around three o’clock.”

I let my eyes drift to the gun in my hand. There was no point in flashing it around any longer. I slid it into one of my coat pockets and fished a cigarette out and used a green and gold table lighter to get it going. I said, “And all this hocus-pocus about signing my wife’s name to a phony letter, calling me on the phone and pretending to be her — all this on the same day Dave Wainhope’s wife dies — and you don’t even work up a healthy curiosity? I find that hard to believe, Miss Kemper. You must have known he was into something way over his head.”

“I love David,” she said simply.

I blew out some smoke. “Love isn’t good for a girl like you. Leave it alone. It makes you stupid. Good night, Miss Kemper.”

She didn’t move. A tear began to trace a jagged curve along her left cheek. I left her sitting there and went over to the door and out, closing it softly behind me.

At eleven o’clock at night there’s not much traffic on Sunset, especially when you get out past the bright two-mile stretch of the Strip with its Technicolor neons, its plush nightclubs crowded with columnists and casting-couch starlets and vacationing Iowans, its modernistic stucco buildings with agents’ names in stylized lettering across the fronts. I drove by them and dropped on down into Beverly Hills, where most of the homes were dark at this hour, through Brentwood, where a lot of stars hide out in big estates behind hedges and burglar alarms, and finally all that was behind me and I turned off Sunset onto Beverly Glen Boulevard and followed the climbing curves up into the foothills to the north.

The pattern was beginning to form. Dave Wainhope had known his wife was dead long before Sheriff Martell drove out to break the news to him. I saw that as meaning one thing: he must have had a hand in that “accident” on Stone Canyon Road. He could have driven out there with Helen, then let the car roll over the lip of the canyon with her in it. The motive was an old, old one: in love with another woman and his wife in the way.