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

He was a nice civil cop, and although he was going off duty, he retraced his steps down the passage to show us the way.

As soon as I told the Desk Lieutenant who I was and what I had come about, he told the patrolman to take us to the Homicide Department. The patrolman led the way up a flight of stone stairs, along another passage to a small room furnished with four chairs, two desks, a window with bars and yellow walls and ceiling There was a smell of stale bodies, dirt and vomit in the room: the smell of most police stations.

We sat around, not saying anything and waited. About five minutes crawled by, and then the door opened and a couple of plain-clothes dicks came in.

One of them, a big, square-faced man with the usual hard eyes, set mouth, big feet’ that are more or less the standard uniform of a copper, waved us to a couple of straight-backed chairs, and waved the other dick to one of the desks.

‘I’m Dunnigan,’ he said, as if he wasn’t particularly proud of the fact. ‘Detective district commander. Are you relations of the deceased?’

It seemed odd to talk of Ed Benny as the deceased, and it gave me a cold, spooked feeling. I said we weren’t relations, but friends, and when I told him our names I saw his mouth tighten, and guessed Brandon had been telling him about us.

‘We’ll want you to identify him,’ he said. ‘Give this officer your names and addresses, and then I’ll take you along to the morgue.’

We helped the plain-clothes dick fill up a couple of forms, then followed Dunnigan from the room, down the corridor, down the stairs into a yard, across to a squat brick building.

There were three bodies under the sheets on the long marble slab facing us as we entered the morgue. The attendant in a long white overall rolled back the sheet covering the body in the middle.

Dunnigan said curtly, ‘Is that him?’

It was Benny all right.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

He looked over at Kerman, whose face had gone the colour of a fish’s belly.

‘You, too?’

Kerman nodded.

The attendant dropped the sheet back over Benny’s face.

‘Take it easy,’ Dunnigan said. ‘You don’t have to be sorry for him. It comes to us all, and it was quick. He was socked at the back of his head with a sandbag. He didn’t know anything about the water. Come on; let’s get out of here.’

As we went across the yard my head began to ache again.

The bellhop was lean and grey-faced and about thirty-three, and his uniform was too tight for him. He took us up the stairs and along a dim corridor. He had a kind of dancing walk, and his behind stuck out either because his trousers were so tight or because that was the way he was made. I couldn’t make up my mind about this; not that it mattered.

The rattled a key in the lock, opened the door and sneered at the room beyond. Kerman and I sneered at it too. There were two beds, a bamboo table, an armchair that looked as if an elephant had once sat in it, a carpet that once had some pile, but had long since lost its self-respect. In places it showed its canvas backing: by the bed, by the window and by the armchair; the three places where people used their feet the most. Over one of the beds there was a coloured print of a pretty girl on a ladder. There was a dog at the foot of the ladder and it was looking up at the girl and it had a leer in its eyes. The girl was pretending to look embarrassed, but she wasn’t making much of a job of it. Over the other bed there was another print of the same girl. This time she was standing on a chair, holding her dress up round her neck, and it was a mouse and not a dog that was leering at her.

‘Shower cabinet in there,’ the bellhop said, jerking his thumb. He crossed to the window, pulled down the blind and let it snap up with a bang. ‘Everything works if you handle it right,’ he said. ‘Careful how you use the shower. The system’s a mite old, and it’s got to be handled right.’

He ran his rat’s eyes along the ceiling, down the wall on to our feet and up to our faces.

‘Got all you want?’ he went on, hopefully expectant.

‘What else have you got?’ Kerman asked, edging his way into the room.

‘Liquor or women or dope,’ the bellhop said, eyeing us speculatively. ‘So long as you can pay for it I can fix it. I know a blonde who can be over here in three minutes.’

We settled for liquor.

When he had gone, Kerman said, ‘Do we have to get fixed up in a joint like this? Couldn’t our expense sheet run to something a little less murky?’

I went over to the window and beckoned. When he joined me I pointed to a building across the street, exactly opposite the hotel. The first floors were dingy-looking dwelling apartments. The ground floor was a photographer’s shop. The word LOUIS was spelt out across the facia in black letters against a yellow background.

‘See that,’ I said. ‘That’s where Ed started his investigation. Wait a minute. Let me show you.’ I opened my suitcase, produced from the bottom of it the photograph of Anita Cerf I had found in Barclay’s bedroom. ‘You haven’t caught up with this yet,’ I said, and told him how I had got it. ‘The first thing Ed said he would do when he got here was to check on the photo. I had a copy made for him before he caught the plane.’ I turned the photograph over and showed Kerman the rubber-stamped name and address on the back. ‘That’s why we’re here.’ I jerked my head to the shop across the way. ‘That’s it.’

‘Not much of a joint,’ Kerman said, studying it.

I put the photograph back in the suitcase and sat on the bed. My head was aching badly now, and I wanted a drink. I hoped the bellhop wouldn’t take all night.

D.D.C. Dunnigan had asked a lot of questions, but our story was that Ed had come up here for a weekend of sight-seeing and we had no idea why he should have landed up in Indian Basin, and we stuck to it.

I felt sorry for Dunnigan. He obviously wanted to find the killer. But we couldn’t help him without giving Cerf away, so we had to sit around in the yellow-walled room and lie ourselves black in the face. He told us he was checking all the hotels, and that worried me. Sooner or later he would find out Ed stayed in this joint, and that might lead him to the photographer’s shop across the way. It might, but I doubted it, although some coppers get a break, and he might be one of them.

‘What are we going to do?’ Kerman asked. He lowered himself carefully into the armchair. It held him, but only just.

‘There’s nothing we can do tonight,’ I said. ‘The shops shut; everything’s shut, but first thing tomorrow we’ll get going. We have no more to work on than Ed had. Somewhere along the line he stepped out of turn and tipped his hand. That’s something we have to watch. The quickest way to work this, Jack, is for me to go to work exactly the way Ed did, and for you to lurk in the background. Tomorrow morning I’ll go over to that shop and show this guy Louis the photo. I don’t know what will happen, but you can bet something will happen. Your job is to stick to me like glue without being seen. If I run into trouble, you’ll be on the spot to get me out of it. I’m going straight ahead as if Ed had never been here. Maybe I’ll end up in the Basin too, only this time you’ll be around to fish me out. Do you get it?’

Kerman stroked his dapper moustache and said he did. He said, ‘I’d just as soon do the job and you did the body-guard business, but if that’s the way you want to play it, okay.’

A tap sounded on the door at this moment, and the bellhop slid into the room. He brought with him two bottles of whisky, some ginger-ale and glasses. These he set down on the bamboo table.

Kerman looked the assignment over and asked, ‘What’s the third glass for?’