Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

I opened the door and looked into his face. It was paper white. The dark brown eyes were sightless. The body was unclothed except for the thick fur matted on the chest, and a clumsy bandage tied around the waist. The bandage was composed of several bloodstained towels, held in place by a knotted piece of nylon fabric whose nature I didn’t recognise immediately. Examining it more closely, I saw that it was a woman’s slip. The left breast of the garment was embroidered in purple with a heart, containing the name ‘Fern’, in slanting script. I wondered who Fern was.

The man who was wearing her purple heart had dark curly hair, heavy black eyebrows, a heavy chin sprouting black beard. He was rough-looking in spite of his anaemia and the lipstick smudged on his mouth.

There was no registration on the steering-post, and nothing in the glove compartment but a half-empty box of shells for a .38 automatic. The ignition was still turned on. So were the dash and headlights, but they were dim. The gas gauge registered empty. Curlyhead must have pulled off the highway soon after he passed me, and driven all the rest of the night in one place.

I untied the slip, which didn’t look as if it would take fingerprints, and went over it for a label. It had one: Gretchen, Palm Springs. It occurred to me that it was Saturday morning and that I’d gone all winter without a weekend in the desert. I retied the slip the way I’d found it, and drove back to the Siesta Motel.

Ella’s welcome was a few degrees colder than absolute zero. ‘Well!’ She glared down her pretty rabbit nose at me. ‘I thought we were rid of you.’

‘So did I. But I just couldn’t tear myself away.’

She gave me a peculiar look, neither hard nor soft, but mixed. Her hand went to her hair, then reached for a registration card. ‘I suppose if you want to rent a room, I can’t stop you. Only please don’t imagine you’re making an impression on me. You leave me cold, mister.’

‘Archer,’ I said. ‘Lew Archer. Don’t bother with the card. I came back to use your phone.’

‘Aren’t there any other phones?’ She pushed the telephone across the desk. ‘I guess it’s all right, long as it isn’t a toll call.’

‘I’m calling the Highway Patrol. Do you know their local number?’

‘I don’t remember.’ She handed me the telephone directory.

‘There’s been an accident,’ I said as I dialled.

‘A highway accident? Where did it happen?’

‘Right here, sister. Right here in room thirteen.’

But I didn’t tell that to the Highway Patrol. I told them I had found a dead man in a car on the parking lot above the county beach. The girl listened with widening eyes and nostrils. Before I finished she rose in a flurry and left the office by the rear door.

She came back with the proprietor. His eyes were black and bright like nailheads in leather, and the scampering dance of his feet was almost frenzied, ‘What is this?’

‘I came across a dead man up the road a piece.’

‘So why do you come back here to telephone?’ His head was in butting position, his hands outspread and gripping the corners of the desk. ‘Has it got anything to do with us?’

‘He’s wearing a couple of your towels.’

‘What?’

‘And he was bleeding heavily before he died. I think somebody shot him in the stomach. Maybe you did.’

‘You’re loco,’ he said, but not very emphatically. ‘Crazy accusations like that, they will get you into trouble. What is your business?’

‘I’m a private detective.’

‘You followed him here, is that it? You were going to arrest him, so he shot himself?’

‘Wrong on both counts,’ I said. ‘I came here to sleep. And they don’t shoot themselves in the stomach. It’s too uncertain, and slow. No suicide wants to die of peritonitis.’

‘So what are you doing now, trying to make scandal for my business?’

‘If your business includes trying to cover for murder.’

‘He shot himself,’ the little man insisted.

‘How do you know?’

‘Donny. I spoke to him just now.’

‘And how does Donny know?’

‘The man told him.’

‘Is Donny your night keyboy?’

‘He was. I think I will fire him, for stupidity. He didn’t even tell me about this mess. I had to find it out for myself. The hard way.’

‘Donny means well,’ the girl said at his shoulder. ‘I’m sure he didn’t realise what happened.’

‘Who does?’ I said. ‘I want to talk to Donny. But first let’s have a look at the register.’

He took a pile of cards from a drawer and riffled through them. His large hands, hairy-backed, were calm and expert, like animals that lived a serene life of their own, independent of their emotional owner. They dealt me one of the cards across the desk. It was inscribed in block capitals: Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.

I said: ‘There was a woman with him.’

‘Impossible.’

‘Or he was a transvestite.’

He surveyed me blankly, thinking of something else. ‘The HP, did you tell them to come here? They know it happened here?’

‘Not yet. But they’ll find your towels. He used them for a bandage.’

‘I see. Yes. Of course.’ He struck himself with a clenched fist on the temple. It made a noise like someone maltreating a pumpkin. ‘You are a private detective, you say. Now if you informed the police that you were on the trail of a fugitive, a fugitive from justice. He shot himself rather than face arrest. For five hundred dollars?’

‘I’m not that private,’ I said. ‘I have some public responsibility. Besides, the cops would do a little checking and catch me out.’

‘Not necessarily. He was a fugitive from justice, you know.’

‘I hear you telling me.’

‘Give me a little time, and I can even present you with his record.’

The girl was leaning back away from her father, her eyes starred with broken illusions. ‘Daddy,’ she said weakly.

He didn’t hear her. All of his bright black attention was fixed on me. ‘Seven hundred dollars?’

‘No sale. The higher you raise it, the guiltier you look. Were you here last night?’

‘You are being absurd,’ he said. ‘I spent the entire evening with my wife. We drove up to Los Angeles to attend the ballet.’ By way of supporting evidence, he hummed a couple of bars from Tchaikovsky. ‘We didn’t arrive back here in Emerald Bay until nearly two o’clock.’

‘Alibis can be fixed.’

‘By criminals, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m not a criminal.’

The girl put a hand on his shoulder. He cringed away, his face creased by monkey fury, but his face was hidden from her.

‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘Was he murdered, do you think?’

‘How do I know?’ His voice was wild and high, as if she had touched the spring of his emotion. ‘I wasn’t here. I only know what Donny told me.’

The girl was examining me with narrowed eyes, as if I was a new kind of animal she had discovered and was trying to think of a use for.

‘This gentleman is a detective,’ she said, ‘or claims to be.’

I pulled out my photostat and, slapped it down on the desk. The little man picked it up and looked from it to my face. ‘Will you go to work for me?’

‘Doing what, telling little white lies?’

The girl answered for him: ‘See what you can find out about this... this death. On my word of honour, Father had nothing to do with it.’

I made a snap decision, the kind you live to regret. ‘All right. I’ll take a fifty-dollar advance. Which is a good deal less than five hundred. My first advice to you is to tell the police everything you know. Provided that you’re innocent.’

‘You insult me,’ he said.

But he flicked a fifty-dollar bill from the cash drawer and pressed it into my hand fervently, like a love token. I had a queasy feeling that I had been conned into taking his money, not much of it but enough. The feeling deepened when he still refused to talk. I had to use all the arts of persuasion even to get Donny’s address out of him.