Джеймс Чейз - You’re Lonely When You’re Dead

‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked. ‘Or do you always act like this?’

I stood up and ran fingers down the back of my head.

‘Sure,’ I said absently. ‘You want to see the way I act when I’m not hit on the head.’

‘I don’t think you’re well. Hadn’t you better go back to bed?’

‘Didn’t you hear what Brandon said? I have to go to Frisco to identify Benny.’

‘Bosh,’ she said sharply. ‘You’re not fit to go. I can go or someone from the office.’

I went over to the cupboard where I kept the aspirin.

‘Yes,’ I said, not paying a great deal of attention to what she was saying. I took four aspirins from the bottle and flicked them one after the other into my mouth. I washed them down with lukewarm coffee, ‘But I’m going all the same. Benny was a friend of mine.’

‘You had better get a doctor to look at your head,’ Miss Bolus said. I could see she was worried. ‘You may have concussion.’

‘The Malloys are famous for their rock-like skulls,’ I said, wondering if I had taken enough aspirins. My head still ached. ‘Nothing short of a sledgehammer would give me concussion.’ I shot two more aspirins into my mouth to be on the safe side. I was wondering why Anita Cerf had come to my place, and how the murderer knew she was there. Then an unpleasant thought dropped into my mind. Perhaps he didn’t know, and was waiting for me. That seemed much more likely. Maybe he thought I was getting too inquisitive and had come out here to silence me the way he had silenced Dana, and had knocked Anita off for practice. Well, not exactly practice... This needed a little thought. This needed one of those brain sessions for which I’m not particularly famous. I decided to put the problem in lavender until my head stopped aching.

‘I wish I knew what was going on in your mind,’ Miss Eolus said uneasily. ‘Has something happened? I mean apart from Benny?’

‘I’m glad to hear you call it a mind,’ I said. ‘You should hear what some people call it. No, nothing’s happened apart from Benny. Nothing at all.’ The two additional aspirins were on the job now. The pain in my head began to recede. ‘Why don’t you run along?’ I went on. ‘You must have things to do.’

She smoothed down her dress over her hips. She had nice hips: just the right shape and just the right weight. This wasn’t a new discovery. I had noticed them before.

‘Well, isn’t that fine?’ she said bitterly. ‘After all I’ve done for you. A brush-off. I don’t know why I bother with you. Can you tell me why I bother with you?’

‘Not right now,’ I said, not wishing to hurt her feelings, but wanting her to go very badly. ‘We’ll talk about that some other time. I’ll call you in a day or so. I must hurry up and change. You won’t mind if I say goodbye now, will you?’ and I went into the bedroom and closed the door.

After a couple of minutes I heard her car start up. I didn’t wave out of the window and I forgot her as soon as the sound of the car engine died away.

The air taxi touched down on the long runway of the Portola airport, San Francisco, at twenty minutes past three. We came in on the tail of an air-liner full of movie stars, and when we reached the main gates of the airport there was a big crowd waiting to see the stars. A couple of excited bobby-soxers waved their handkerchiefs and screamed at us as we drove past, but we didn’t wave back. We weren’t in that kind of mood.

Kerman said, ‘You know it’s a funny thing, Vic, but a guy has to die before you get to know anything about him. I had no idea Ed had a wife and a couple of kids. He never mentioned them. He never told me his mother was living either. He never acted like a man with a wife and a couple of kids, did he? The way he used to horse around.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ I said. ‘What do we want to talk about his wife and kids for?’

Kerman took out his handkerchief and mopped his face.

‘I guess that’s right.’ And after a while he said, ‘I’ll be glad when it gets a bit cooler. March and a heat wave. It’s all wrong. Now, last night...’

‘And shut up about the weather too,’ I said.

‘Sure.’ Kerman said.

During the silence that followed, and while we drove along Market Street, I reconstructed the happenings of the morning. Paula had come over. Brandon had already been to see her about Benny. She had told the same tale as I had: that Benny had gone to San Francisco for the weekend. He hadn’t gone on business. He had gone up there on a sight-seeing trip. He did that sort of thing, Paula had said. I had said much the same thing. Brandon hadn’t believed us, but there was nothing he could do about it because Benny’s murder was out of his district.

While we talked Jack Kerman had arrived. Barclay’s alibi, he told us, after we had talked about Benny, was as water-tight as a submarine. He had been with Kitty Hitchens as he had said and hadn’t left her apartment until three-thirty of the afternoon following Dana’s murder. That put Barclay out of the running.

I then told them about Anita Cerf. By the way Paula and Kerman went over my rooms I could see they didn’t believe me. It was hard to believe, because there just wasn’t a trace of her ever having been in the cabin. But they both remembered the yellow cushion. The fact it wasn’t in the cabin finally convinced them I hadn’t imagined it: the cushion and the pulpy softness at the back of my head.

Paula didn’t want to go to San Francisco, but I said I was going. Around one o’clock I phoned through to the Orchid City airport and ordered an air taxi to take us out.

The trip in the aircraft didn’t do my head any good, and I kept thinking of Benny. I had known him for about four years. We had worked and played together. He was an irresponsible, crazy kind of guy, but I liked him. It gave me a sick feeling to think he was dead.

Kerman had said there was no proof to connect Ed’s death with the murder of Dana, Leadbetter and Anita. There wasn’t, but I was convinced that in some way or other there was a connection. Kerman’s theory was that Ed had got into a gambling game and had struck lucky and someone had taken his winnings and had thrown him into the harbour. Kerman wasn’t sold on the theory, but he said Ed was a wild character and he could have got into that kind of trouble.

I said no. Ed was working. Maybe he was wild, but not when he had a job on, and he had a job on. He had arrived in San Francisco around four-thirty yesterday afternoon. At one o’clock in the morning the police had fished his body out of Indian Basin. The medical report showed he had been dead about four hours. If that was anything to go by he had been killed around nine o’clock: four and a half hours after arriving in San Francisco. Time enough to begin his inquiries into Anita Cerf’s private life, but not time enough to get into a gambling game: work first, play after. We all followed that rule, and Ed was no exception.

Had he been followed to Frisco? If he had been killed at nine o’clock there would have been time for the killer to hop a plane and get back to Orchid City and shoot Anita.

Kerman asked me if I wasn’t getting fancy ideas, and where was my proof. Maybe I was getting fancy ideas, but I didn’t think so. I had no proof that was the way it happened, but I had a hunch I was right, and I’d rather play a good hunch against proof when proof was as non-existent as it was now.

By this time the taxi had reached Third Street and pulled up outside Police Headquarters.

‘Leave the talking to me,’ I said to Kerman.

We climbed the worn stone steps, pushed open the double swing doors and asked a patrolman going off duty where we could find the Desk Lieutenant.