Росс Макдональд - Find a Victim

“I won’t know until I talk to her. Maybe I won’t know then. Let’s see, she lives in an apartment house on Yanonali Street?”

“That’s right, the Cortes Apartments. If she’s still there.”

I got up and thanked her.

“Don’t mention it. I need the money, how I need the money. But you had me worried there for a while. I thought I was losing it all. Which maybe I am at that.” Her smile was bright and desolate. “Good night, Information. It’s been the most to say the least.”

“Or the least to say the most. Good night, Jerry Mae.”

Driving east on Yanonali Street, I remembered the evidence case in the back of my car. It contained several hundred marijuana cigarettes, done up in packs of five. I had taken them from a pusher in South Gate and was going to turn them over to the State Bureau in Sacramento. If five were missing, the Bureau would never know the difference.

The Negro boys had vanished from the corner. I parked in front of the Cortes Apartments, opened the rear trunk, and found the small key to the evidence case on my ring. I unlocked the steel case and took out one of the little packets wrapped in butcher’s paper.

The inner door of the lobby was locked. Cards bearing the tenants’ names were stuck in the tarnished brass mailboxes banked along the wall. There were eighteen of them, in rows of six. Only one card was printed. Only three of the eighteen were men. Miss Jo Summer, a large immature signature in green ink, was on number seven. I pushed her button and waited.

A low voice drifted through the grille of the speaking tube. “It that you, doll?”

“Uh-huh.”

The buzzer released the door-catch. I mounted the rubber-treaded stairs into the obscurity of the building. A wall-bracket at the head of the stairs was the only light in the second-floor hallway. Someone had written a message below it with lipstick: “Chas am at Floraines see you there.” My shadow climbed the wall and broke its neck on the ceiling.

Seven was the last door on the left. Its metal numeral rattled when I knocked. The door came ajar, letting out a seepage of purple light. I moved sideways out of it. The girl peered through the crack, blinking at me astigmatically. She said in her kittenish mew: “I wasn’t expecting you so soon. I was just going to take a bath.”

She moved toward me, her body silhouetted in a thin rayon wrapper. One of her hands insinuated itself between my arm and my side. “A kiss for baby, Donny?”

Her wet mouth brushed the angle of my jaw. I must have tasted strange. She let out a little groan of surprise and pushed herself away from me, stood with both hands flat against the wall. Her wrapper fell open. Her body gleamed like a fish in murky water.

“Who are you? You said you were him.”

“You got me wrong, Jo. Kerrigan sent me.”

“He didn’t say nothing to me about you.”

She looked down at her breasts and gathered the wrapper across them, folding her arms. Her scarlet-taloned fingers dug into her shoulders. The kitten in her throat was scared and hissing: “Where is he? Why didn’t he come himself?”

“He couldn’t get away.”

“Is she holding him up?”

“I wouldn’t know. You better let me come in. He gave me something for you.”

“What?”

“I’ll show you inside. You have neighbors.”

“Have I? I never noticed. R. K. O., come in.”

She backed into the purple-lighted room, a tiny girl no taller than my shoulder, with a sleek small head and a rich body. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. I wondered how she would look when she was forty, if she lived that long.

The room was like a segment of her future waiting for her fate to overtake it. A black iron standing lamp with a red silk shade lined with blue cast its unreal light on red drapes hung from twisted iron rods, a red mohair divan piled with cheap magazines, a rug whose color and design had been trampled into indistinguishable grime. The only decoration on the yellow plaster walls was a last year’s cheesecake calendar. A bored hand had given the blonde girl in the picture a mustache and goatee, and hair on her chest.

She came up to me like an eager child who had been promised a gift. “What did Donny send me?”

“This.” I closed the door behind me and gave her the packet wrapped in butcher’s paper.

Her fingers tore it open, scattered the brown cigarettes on the rug. She went down on her knees to retrieve them, snatching at them as if they were live worms that might wriggle away from her. She stood up with four in her hand and one in her mouth.

I flicked my lighter and lit it for her. I told myself that it was necessary, that she had the habit anyway, that police departments paid off informers with dope every day in the year. But I couldn’t shake off my feeling as I watched her that I had bought a small piece of her future.

She sucked on the brown weed like a starved baby on an empty bottle. Six of her deep shuddering drags ate half of it away. She looked at what was left with growing, brightening eyes, and dragged again. Her smoky mouth wreathed itself in changing smiles. In no time at all the butt was burning her fingers.

Pressing it out in an ashtray, she put it away in an empty cigarette-case, along with the four whole reefers. She did a few dance-steps around the room, stumbling a little in her pomponed mules. Then she sat down on the red divan with her fists clenched tightly between her legs. Her eyes were huge and terribly alive, but they were turned inward, lost in the blossoming jungle of her thoughts. Her smile kept changing: girlish and silly, queenly and triumphant, whorish, feline, evil and old, and gay again and girlish.

I sat beside her. “How are you feeling, Jo?”

“I feel wonderful.” Her voice came from far inside her head, barely moving her lips. “Jesus, I needed that. Thank Donny for me.”

“I will if I see him. Isn’t he leaving town?”

“That’s right, I almost forgot, we’re going away.”

“Where are you going?”

“Guatemala.” She said it like an incantation. “We’re going to build a new life together. A beautiful new life together, with no more trouble in it, no more nastiness, no more jerks. Just him and me.”

“What are you going to live on?”

“Ways and means,” she said dreamily. “Donny has ways and means.”

“I hope you make it.”

“Why shouldn’t we make it?” She gave me a black scowl. The drug had exaggerated all of her emotions, fear and hostility as well as hope.

“They’re looking in his direction.”

She sat up straight, pierced by anxiety. “Who? The cops?”

I nodded.

She leaned on me and took hold of my arm with both hands and shook it. “What’s the matter, isn’t the protection working?”

“It takes pretty solid protection to cover murder.”

Her lips curled, baring her teeth. Her eyes blazed black in mine. “Did you say murder?”

“You heard me. A friend of yours was shot.”

“What friend? I got no friends around this town.”

“Doesn’t Tony Aquista rate?”

Without shifting her eyes from my face, she edged away from me, crawling on hands and buttocks into the far corner of the divan. She said from her teeth: “Aquista? Should I know the name? How many A’s in Aquista?”

“Don’t try to kid me, Jo. He was one of your followers. You brought him home here Sunday night.”

“Who told you that? It’s a lie.” But she looked around the room as if it had betrayed her. Her voice was croupy with fear: “Did they kill Tony?”

“You ought to know. You set him up for the kill.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t true. I wouldn’t touch a thing like that. I’m clean.”