Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

The keyboy lived in a shack on the edge of a desolate stretch of dunes. I guessed that it had once been somebody’s beach house, before sand had drifted like unthawing snow in the angles of the walls and winter storms had broken the tiles and cracked the concrete foundations. Huge chunks of concrete were piled haphazardly on what had been a terrace overlooking the sea.

On one of the tilted slabs, Donny was stretched like a long albino lizard in the sun. The onshore wind carried the sound of my motor to his ears. He sat up blinking, recognised me when I stopped the car, and ran into the house.

I descended flagstone steps and knocked on the warped door. ‘Open up, Donny.’

‘Go away,’ he answered huskily. His eyes gleamed like a snail through a crack in the wood.

‘I’m working for Mr Salanda. He wants us to have a talk.’

‘You both can go and take a running jump.’

‘Open it or I’ll break it down.’

I waited for a while. He shot back the bolt. The door creaked reluctantly open. He leaned against the doorpost, searching my face with his eyes, his hairless body shivering from an internal chill. I pushed past him, through a kitchenette that was indescribably filthy, littered with the remnants of old meals, and gaseous with their odours. He followed me silently on bare soles into a larger room whose sprung floorboards undulated under my feet. The picture window had been broken and patched with cardboard. The stone fireplace was choked with garbage. The only furniture was an army cot in one corner where Donny apparently slept.

‘Nice homey place you have here. It has that lived-in quality.’

He seemed to take it as a compliment, and I wondered if I was dealing with a moron. ‘It suits me. I never was much of a one for fancy quarters. I like it here, where I can hear the ocean at night.’

‘What else do you hear at night, Donny?’

He missed the point of the question, or pretended to. ‘All different things. Big trucks going past on the highway. I like to hear those night sounds. Now I guess I can’t go on living here. Mr Salanda owns it, he lets me live here for nothing. Now he’ll be kicking me out of here, I guess.’

‘On account of what happened last night?’

‘Uh-huh.’ He subsided onto the cot, his doleful head supported by his hands.

I stood over him. ‘Just what did happen last night, Donny?’

‘A bad thing,’ he said. ‘This fella checked in about ten o’clock—’

‘The man with the dark curly hair?’

‘That’s the one. He checked in about ten, and I gave him room thirteen. Around about midnight I thought I heard a gun go off from there. It took me a little while to get my nerve up, then I went back to see what was going on. This fella came out of the room, without no clothes on. Just some kind of bandage around his waist. He looked like some kind of crazy Indian or something. He had a gun in his hand, and he was staggering, and I could see that he was bleeding some. He come right up to me and pushed the gun in my gut and told me to keep my trap shut. He said I wasn’t to tell anybody I saw him, now or later. He said if I opened my mouth about it to anybody, that he would come back and kill me. But now he’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘He’s dead.’

I could smell the fear on Donny: there’s an unexplained trace of canine in my chromosomes. The hairs were prickling on the back of my neck, and I wondered if Donny’s fear was of the past or for the future. The pimples stood out in bas-relief against his pale lugubrious face.

‘I think he was murdered, Donny. You’re lying, aren’t you?’

‘Me lying?’ But his reaction was slow and feeble.

‘The dead man didn’t check in alone. He had a woman with him.’

‘What woman?’ he said in elaborate surprise.

‘You tell me. Her name was Fern. I think she did the shooting, and you caught her red-handed. The wounded man got out of the room and into his car and away. The woman stayed behind to talk to you. She probably paid you to dispose of his clothes and fake a new registration card for the room. But you both overlooked the blood on the floor of the bathroom. Am I right?’

‘You couldn’t be wronger, mister. Are you a cop?’

‘A private detective. You’re in deep trouble, Donny. You’d better talk yourself out of it if you can, before the cops start on you.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’ His voice broke like a boy’s. It went strangely with the glints of grey in his hair.

‘Faking the register is a serious rap, even if they don’t hang accessory to murder on you.’

He began to expostulate in formless sentences that ran together. At the same time his hand was moving across the dirty grey blanket. It burrowed under the pillow and came out holding a crumpled card. He tried to stuff it into his mouth and chew it. I tore it away from between his discoloured teeth.

It was a registration card from the motel, signed in a boyish scrawl: Mr and Mrs Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.

Donny was trembling violently. Below his cheap cotton shorts, his bony knees vibrated like tuning forks. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he cried. ‘She held a gun on me.’

‘What did you do with the man’s clothes?’

‘Nothing. She didn’t even let me into the room. She bundled them up and took them away herself.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘Down the highway towards town. She walked away on the shoulder of the road and that was the last I saw of her.’

‘How much did she pay you, Donny?’

‘Nothing, not a cent. I already told you, she held a gun on me.’

‘And you were so scared you kept quiet until this morning?’

‘That’s right. I was scared. Who wouldn’t be scared?’

‘She’s gone now,’ I said. ‘You can give me a description of her.’

‘Yeah.’ He made a visible effort to pull his vague thoughts together. One of his eyes was a little off centre, lending his face a stunned, amorphous appearance. ‘She was a big tall dame with blondey hair.’

‘Dyed?’

‘I guess so, I dunno. She wore it in a braid like, on top of her head. She was kind of fat, built like a lady wrestler, great big watermelons on her. Big legs.’

‘How was she dressed?’

‘I didn’t hardly notice, I was so scared. I think she had some kind of purple coat on, with black fur around the neck. Plenty of rings on her fingers and stuff.’

‘How old?’

‘Pretty old, I’d say. Older than me, and I’m going on thirty-nine.’

‘And she did the shooting?’

‘I guess so. She told me to say if anybody asked me, I was to say that Mr Rowe shot himself.’

‘You’re very suggestible, aren’t you, Donny? It’s a dangerous way to be, with people pushing each other around the way they do.’

‘I didn’t get that, mister. Come again.’ He batted his pale blue eyes at me, smiling expectantly.

‘Skip it,’ I said and left him.

A few hundred yards up the highway I passed an HP car with two uniformed men in the front seat looking grim. Donny was in for it now. I pushed him out of my mind and drove across country to Palm Springs.

Palm Springs is still a one-horse town, but the horse is a Palomino with silver trappings. Most of the girls were Palomino, too. The main street was a cross-section of Hollywood and Vine transported across the desert by some unnatural force and disguised in western costumes which fooled nobody. Not even me.

I found Gretchen’s lingerie shop in an expensive-looking arcade built around an imitation flagstone patio. In the patio’s centre a little fountain gurgled pleasantly, flinging small lariats of spray against the heat. It was late in March, and the season was ending. Most of the shops, including the one I entered, were deserted except for the hired help.