Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 6, June, 1953

Three of the jobs had been in the section between Wilshire Boulevard and Pico, the area in which Diane Borden lived, and there was a fair chance that Diane’s pretties had been number five. The m.o. seemed the same in every particular.

I took my feet off the desk and made half a dozen more phone calls, then left the office and talked to a shoe-shine boy, two cab drivers, a bookie’s runner, a bartender, and a barber. With several lines out I went back to the office and waited for a bite.

A lot of any private detective’s time is spent in waiting, and more cases are broken with phones than with guns. At the core of any investigator’s success, whether he’s police or private, are his “sources of information,” the informants, informers, stoolies, canaries. That’s the unofficial staff. Over the years in Los Angeles I’d built up a long list of them and many of them were now, I hoped, out working for me — or night, already, know something that would help. I’d dropped several words in several places, and sent out a thumbnail description of some of the most distinctive items I was interested in.

At three o’clock I got a nibble and, though I didn’t know it then I landed a whale. The call was from an alcoholic hoodlum with the unlikely name of Joseph Raspberry, and he wanted me to meet him in the back booth of Manny’s bar on Sixth. He also wanted me to bring him a sawbuck. I told him to order a shot on me, that I’d be there in ten minutes. On my way over I wondered if he had anything. Joseph Raspberry was a two-time loser who, when sober, was a good thief. I’d picked him up a year ago and found him carrying a gun, which isn’t encouraged by parole boards — and he was on parole at the time. I gave him a break, which was illegal from the strictest point of view, but which if enforced strictly would put all the cops and private detectives in the clink. Since then Joe had stayed out of stir and passed along a dozen tips to me, about half of which paid off, and one of which helped me break a murder case. The other half-dozen tips were fakes, pure and simple, and he dreamed them up because he wanted money for his sweetheart, Old Crow and Coca Cola. I always gave him a ten or so, because there was always another time, another tip. Then, too, when he wasn’t hitting the pot he was a likable character. I didn’t know much about him, and even the odd name might have been a fake or a monicker. Anyway, I usually got a charge out of him, kind of liked the guy for no good reason.

But this looked like one of the days when Joe needed money for his sweetheart. He was huddled in the gloom of a booth at the rear of Manny’s, his thin face pinched, hands shaking, lips twitching once in a while. I sat down opposite him and he said, “Scott, Manny wouldn’t gimme a drink. An’ I ain’t got a bean.”

“You had any breakfast, Joe?”

“Sure. Alka Seltzer and alcohol. Tell him it's O.K., huh?”

I waved at Manny and he waddled over, wiping his hands on a reasonably white apron. “A beer for me, Manny,” I said. “And a couple shots for Joe.”

I always felt funny about buying a drink for Joe — or any of the others like him. But if he didn’t get it from me he’d get it from somebody else, somehow. He was sick, but it wasn’t my job to try healing all the sick people. When the shots arrived Joe started to lift one of them but his hand was shaking so much he knew he’d spill it. He put his fingers around the jigger, pressing his hand against the table, then bent forward and got his lips on the rim of the glass and sucked. He lifted the jigger then and tossed the whiskey down. He didn’t spill a drop.

I sipped my beer and waited. Finally he shuddered, pulled the other shot over in front of him and, looking at it, said, “I got something for you.”

I put a ten-dollar bill in front of him. He licked his lips and said, “Gimme a pencil.” I found a pencil stub in my pocket and gave it to him. He started drawing on a napkin. It took him three minutes, but he didn’t touch the other shot till he’d finished. Then he lifted the glass, his hand not shaking so much this time, and tossed the drink off.

He pointed at the napkin. “Lupo seen me and says you been askin’ for somethin’ like that. If it’s right, it’s worth more’n a saw, ain’t it?”

The drawing was crude: a bracelet with a lot of diamonds, and curving off from it a snake’s head with the tongue licking out and two oversized eyes in its head. It could have been something to get excited about, because crude as it was it looked like the bracelet Diane had been wearing in the nightclub photo. I had the picture in my pocket, but I didn’t take it out yet. Joe just might have made his drawing from the description I’d sent around.

I said, “Could be,” took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and wrapped it around my finger. He reached for it, but I said, “The story first, Joe. The ice looks right, maybe, but give me what you’ve got. And don’t make any of it up, even if you haven’t got much.”

“Sure. I’ll level with you, Scott.” He hesitated. “I give you some bum ones, but this one’s the McCoy. I # seen it. Yesterday it was. It was on Wilcox, that’s all I know for sure. I was... wasn’t feelin’ good.”

That meant he’d been drunk. He licked his lips and looked at the empty shot glasses. I waved at Manny. And a minute later, over the filled glasses, with Joe’s sharp whiskey breath in my nostrils, I got fragments of a story from him, the rest of it still lost somewhere in his drunkard’s brain. There wasn’t any sound in the quiet of Manny’s except Joe’s voice, and as he talked I could almost see what had happened through Joe’s eyes, everything out of shape, part of a different world with darker shadows and brighter sun, a strange and unreal and exaggerated world that Joe often lived in.

I could see him on the street, his throat aching for a drink, his body hungry for it. He stumbled in off the street into a bar and there was this guy. “He was a tall guy,” Joe said, “Jesus, he was clear up to the ceiling, ten feet tall he was and he was stooped over by this booth thing, a kind of funny little booth thing there that had a doll in it. He give her the hoop and she put it on. I was right inside the door a little, next to the dumb thing she was in, and I seen it good. The eyes was red like the snake was alive on it, just like it was alive there.” He talked in a monotone, slowly twirling the shot glass. “She took it and put it on and the big guy took it off of her, squeezin’ her a little, and stuck it in her purse there. I was right up alongside them then, I thought she was at a bar but it wasn’t no bar, and then the big guy seen me. He gimme a shove, for nothin’, just shoved me back up on the wall and the whole place was goin’ around. I tried to tell him I just wanted a drink and he picked me up and pushed me out. Like to ripped my head off.”

“This guy, Joe. How big you say he was?”

“He was ten feet tall. Don’t laugh, I’m not lyin’. He was at least twice as big as me, ten feet tall, clear up to the ceiling he was.”

If it hadn’t been for the crude drawing Joe had made I might have left then; if there was any truth in the story it seemed so distorted that it wouldn’t help me. But I asked him, “What about the girl? What did she look like?”

“I dunno. But I seen her leave and I followed her.”

“Why?”

He blinked at me and didn’t answer for almost a minute. “I seen where she lived,” he said finally.

That was enough, and it made sense to me. Joe was a good thief between cures, but when he needed a shot he’d steal anything. From a baby carriage — to a diamond bracelet. He went on, “I don’t ’member what she looked like, but she had a walk like nothing I ever seen. It was a circus, Scott.”