Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  Even with the wind shriveling my face I could still smell the sandalwood in her hair. And feel her lips.

  I unlocked the Berglund door, walked through the silent lobby to the elevator, and rode up to 3. Then I soft-footed along the silent corridor and peered down at the sill of Apartment 31. No light. I rapped—the old light, confidential tattoo of the bootlegger with the big smile and the extra-deep hip pockets. No answer. I took the piece of thick hard celluloid that pretended to be a window over the driver’s license in my wallet, and eased it between the lock and the jamb, leaning hard on the knob, pushing it toward the hinges. The edge of the celluloid caught the slope of the spring lock and snapped it back with a small brittle sound, like an icicle breaking. The door yielded and I went into near darkness. Street light filtered in and touched a high spot here and there.

  I shut the door and snapped the light on and just stood. There was a queer smell in the air. I made it in a moment—the smell of dark-cured tobacco. I prowled over to a smoking-stand by the window and looked down at four brown butts—Mexican or South American cigarettes.

  Upstairs, on my floor, feet hit the carpet and somebody went into a bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. I went into the bathroom of Apartment 31. A little rubbish, nothing, no place to hide anything. The kitchenette was a longer job, but I only half searched. I knew there were no pearls in that apartment. I knew Waldo had been on his way out and that he was in a hurry and that something was riding him when he turned and took two bullets from an old friend.

  I went back to the living-room and swung the wall bed and looked past its mirror side into the dressing-room for signs of still current occupancy. Swinging the bed farther I was no longer looking for pearls. I was looking at a man.

  He was small, middle-aged, iron-gray at the temples, with a very dark skin, dressed in a fawn-colored suit with a wine-colored tie. His neat little brown hands hung limply by his sides. His small feet, in pointed polished shoes, pointed almost at the floor.

  He was hanging by a belt around his neck from the metal top of the bed. His tongue stuck out farther than I thought it possible for a tongue to stick out.

  He swung a little and I didn’t like that, so I pulled the bed down and he nestled quietly between the two clamped pillows. I didn’t touch him yet. I didn’t have to touch him to know that he would be cold as ice.

  I went around him into the dressing-room and used my handkerchief on drawer-knobs. The place was stripped clean except for the light litter of a man living alone.

  I came out of there and began on the man. No wallet. Waldo would have taken that and ditched it. A flat box of cigarettes, half full, stamped in gold: “Louis Tapia y Cia, Galle de Paysand, 19, Montevideo.” Matches from the Spezzia Club. An under-arm holster of dark grained leather and in it a 9 millimeter Mauser.

  The Mauser made him a professional, so I didn’t feel so badly. But not a very good professional, or bare hands would not have finished him, with the Mauser—a gun you can blast through a wall with—undrawn in his shoulder holster.

  I made a little sense of it, not much. Four of the brown cigarettes had been smoked, so there had been either waiting or discussion. Somewhere along the line Waldo had got the little man by the throat and held him in just the right way to make him pass out in a matter of seconds. The Mauser had been less useful to him than a toothpick. Then Waldo had hung him up by the strap, probably dead already. That would account for haste, for cleaning out the apartment, for Waldo’s anxiety about the girl. It would account for the car left unlocked outside the cocktail bar.

  That is, it would account for these things if Waldo had killed him, if this was really Waldo’s apartment—if I wasn’t just being kidded.

  I examined some more pockets. In the left trouser one I found a gold penknife, some silver. In the left hip pocket a handkerchief, folded, scented. On the right hip another, unfolded but clean. In the right leg pocket four or five tissue handkerchiefs. A clean little guy. He didn’t like to blow his nose on his handkerchief. Under these there was a small new keytainer holding four new keys—car keys. Stamped in gold on the keytainer was: Compliments of R. K. Vogelsang, Inc. “The Packard House.”

  I put everything as I had found it, swung the bed back, used my handkerchief on knobs and other projections, and flat surfaces, killed the light and poked my nose out the door. The hall was empty. I went down to the street and around the corner to Kingsley Drive. The Cadillac hadn’t moved.

  I opened the car door and leaned on it. She didn’t seem to have moved, either. It was hard to see any expression on her face. Hard to see anything but her eyes and chin, but not hard to smell the sandalwood.

  “That perfume,” I said, “would drive a deacon nuts… no pearls.”

  “Well—thanks for trying,” she said in a low, soft, vibrant voice. “I guess I can stand it. Shall I… Do we… Or… ?”

  “You go on home now,” I said. “And whatever happens you never saw me before. Whatever happens. Just as you may never see me again.”

  “I’d hate—”

  “Good luck, Lola.” I shut the car door and stepped back.

  The lights blazed on, the motor turned over. Against the wind at the corner the big coupé made a slow contemptuous turn and was gone. I stood there by the vacant space at the curb where it had been.

  It was quite dark there now. Windows had become blanks in the apartment where the radio sounded. I stood looking at the back of a Packard cabriolet which seemed to be brand new. I had seen it before—before I went upstairs, in the same place, in front of Lola’s car. Parked, dark, silent, with a blue sticker pasted to the right-hand corner of the shiny windshield.

  And in my mind I was looking at something else, a set of brand-new car keys in a keytainer stamped, “The Packard House,” upstairs, in a dead man’s pocket.

  I went up to the front of the cabriolet and put a small pocket flash on the blue slip. It was the same dealer all right. Written in ink below his name and slogan was a name and address—Eugenie Kolchenko, 5315 Arvieda Street, West Los Angeles.

  It was crazy. I went back up to Apartment 31, jimmied the door as I had done before, stepped in behind the wall bed and took the keytainer from the trousers pocket of the neat brown dangling corpse. I was back down on the street beside the cabriolet in five minutes. The keys fitted.

  V

  IT WAS a small house, near a canyon rim out beyond Sawtelle, with a circle of writhing eucalyptus trees in front of it. Beyond that, on the other side of the street, one of those parties was going on where they come out and smash bottles on the sidewalk with a whoop like Yale making a touchdown against Princeton.

  There was a wire fence at my number and some rose-trees, and a flagged walk and a garage that was wide open and had no car in it. There was no car in front of the house either. I rang the bell. There was a long wait, then the door opened rather suddenly.

  I wasn’t the man she had been expecting. I could see it in her glittering kohl-rimmed eyes. Then I couldn’t see anything in them. She just stood and looked at me, a long, lean, hungry brunette, with rouged cheekbones, thick black hair parted in the middle, a mouth made for three-decker sandwiches, coral-and-gold pajamas, sandals—and gilded toenails. Under her ear lobes a couple of miniature temple bells gonged lightly in the breeze. She made a slow disdainful motion with a cigarette in a holder as long as a baseball bat.

  “We-el, what ees it, little man? You want sometheeng? You are lost from the bee-ootiful party across the street, hein?”

  “Ha, ha,” I said. “Quite a party, isn’t it? No. I just brought your car home. Lost it, didn’t you?”

  Across the street somebody had delirium tremens in the front yard and a mixed quartet tore what was left of the night into small strips and did what they could to make the strips miserable. While this was going on the exotic brunette didn’t move more than one eyelash.

  She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.

  “You
have said what?” she got out, at last, in a voice as silky as a burnt crust of toast.

  “Your car.” I pointed over my shoulder and kept my eyes on her. She was the type that uses a knife.

  The long cigarette holder dropped very slowly to her side and the cigarette fell out of it. I stamped it out, and that put me in the hall. She backed away from me and I shut the door.

  The hall was like the long hall of a railroad flat. Lamps glowed pinkly in iron brackets. There was a bead curtain at the end, a tiger skin on the floor. The place went with her.

  “You’re Miss Kolchenko?” I asked, not getting any more action.

  “Ye-es. I am Mees Kolchenko. What thee ’ell you want?”

  She was looking at me now as if I had come to wash the windows, but at an inconvenient time.

  I got a card out with my left hand, held it out to her. She read it in my hand, moving her head just enough. “A detective?” she breathed.

  “Yeah.”

  She said something in a spitting language. Then in English: “Come in! Thees damn wind dry up my skeen like so much teessue paper.”

  “We’re in,” I said. “I just shut the door. Snap out of it, Nazimova. Who was he? The little guy?”

  Beyond the bead curtain a man coughed. She jumped as if she had been stuck with an oyster fork. Then she tried to smile. It wasn’t very successful.

  “A reward,” she said softly. “You weel wait ’ere? Ten dollars it is fair to pay, no?”

  “No,” I said.

  I reached a finger towards her slowly and added: “He’s dead.”

  She jumped about three feet and let out a yell.

  A chair creaked harshly. Feet pounded beyond the bead curtain, a large hand plunged into view and snatched it aside, and a big hard-looking blond man was with us. He had a purple robe over his pajamas His right hand held something in his robe pocket. He stood quite still as soon as he was through the curtain, his feet planted solidly, his jaw out, his colorless eyes like gray ice. He looked like a man who would be hard to take out on an off-tackle play.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” He had a solid, burring voice, with just the right sappy tone to belong to a guy who would go for a woman with gilded toenails.

  “I came about Miss Kolchenko’s car,” I said.

  “Well, you could take your hat off,” he said. “Just for a light workout.”

  I took it off and apologized.

  “O.K.,” he said, and kept his right hand shoved down hard in the purple pocket. “So you came about Miss Kolchenko’s car. Take it from there.”

  I pushed past the woman and went closer to him. She shrank back against the wall and flattened her palms against it. Camille in a high-school play. The long holder lay empty at her toes.

  When I was six feet from the big man he said easily: “I can hear you from there. Just take it easy. I’ve got a gun in this pocket and I’ve had to learn to use one. Now about the car?”

  “The man who borrowed it couldn’t bring it,” I said, and pushed the card I was still holding towards his face. He barely glanced at it. He looked back at me.

  “So what?” he said.

  “Are you always this tough?” I asked, “or only when you have your pajamas on?”

  “So why couldn’t he bring it himself?” he asked. “And skip the mushy talk.”

  The dark woman made a stuffed sound at my elbow.

  “It’s all right, honeybunch,” the man said. “I’ll handle this. Go on in.”

  She slid past both of us and flicked through the bead curtain.

  I waited a little while. The big man didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t look any more bothered than a toad in the sun.

  “He couldn’t bring it because somebody bumped him off,” I said. “Let’s see you handle that.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “Did you bring him with you to prove it?”

  “No,” I said. “But if you put your tie and crush hat on, I’ll take you down and show you.”

  “Who the hell did you say you were, now?”

  “I didn’t say. I thought maybe you could read.” I held the card at him some more.

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “John Dalmas, Private Investigator. Well, well. So I should go with you to look at who, why?”

  “Maybe he stole the car,” I said.

  The big man nodded. “That’s a thought. Maybe he did. Who?”

  “The little brown guy who had the keys to it in his pocket, and had it parked around the corner from the Berglund Apartments.”

  He thought that over, without any apparent embarrassment. “You’ve got something there,” he said, “Not much. But a little. I guess this must be the night of the Police Smoker. So you’re doing all their work for them.”

  “Huh?”

  “The card says private detective to me,” he said. “Have you got some cops outside that were too shy to come in?”

  “No, I’m alone.”

  He grinned. The grin showed white ridges in his tanned skin. “So you find somebody dead and take some keys and find a car and come riding out here—all alone. No cops. Am I right?”

  “Correct.”

  He sighed. “Let’s go inside,” he said. He yanked the bead curtain aside and made an opening for me to go through. “It might be you have an idea I ought to hear.”

  I went past him and he turned, keeping his heavy pocket towards me. I hadn’t noticed until I got quite close that there were beads of sweat on his face. It might have been the hot wind, but I didn’t think so.

  We were in the living-room of the house.

  We sat down and looked at each other across a dark floor, on which a few Navajo rugs and a few dark Turkish rugs made a decorating combination with some well-used overstuffed furniture. There was a fireplace, a small baby grand, a Chinese screen, a tall Chinese lantern on a teakwood pedestal, and gold net curtains against lattice windows. The windows to the south were open. A fruit tree with a whitewashed trunk whipped about outside the screen, adding its bit to the noise from across the street.

  The big man eased back into a brocaded chair and put his slippered feet on a footstool. He kept his right hand where it had been since I met him—on his gun.

  The brunette hung around in the shadows and a bottle gurgled and her temple bells gonged in her ears.

  “It’s all right, honeybunch,” the man said. “It’s all under control. Somebody bumped somebody off and this lad thinks we’re interested. Just sit down and relax.”

  The girl tilted her head and poured half a tumbler of whisky down her throat. She sighed, said, “Goddam,” in a casual voice, and curled up on a davenport. It took all of the davenport. She had plenty of legs. Her gilded toenails winked at me from the shadowy corner where she kept her self quiet from then on.

  I got a cigarette out without being shot at, lit it and went into my story. It wasn’t all true, but some of it was. I told them about the Berglund Apartments and that I had lived there and that Waldo was living there in Apartment 31 on the floor below mine and that I had been keeping an eye on him for business reasons.

  “Waldo what?” the blond man put in. “And what business reasons?”

  “Mister,” I said, “have you no secrets?” He reddened slightly.

  I told him about the cocktail lounge across the street from the Berglund and what had happened there. I didn’t tell him about the printed bolero jacket or the girl who had worn it. I left her out of the story altogether.

  “It was an undercover job—from my angle,” I said. “If you know what I mean.” He reddened again, bit his teeth. I went on: “I got back from the city hall without telling anybody I knew Waldo. In due time, when I decided they couldn’t find out where he lived that night, I took the liberty of examining his apartment.”

  “Looking for what?” the big man said thickly.

  “For some letters. I might mention in passing there was nothing there at all—except a dead man. Strangled and hanging by a belt to the top of the wall bed—well out of sight. A
small man, about forty-five, Mexican or South American, well-dressed in a fawn-colored—”

  “That’s enough,” the big man said. “I’ll bite, Dalmas. Was it a blackmail job you were on?”

  “Yeah. The funny part was this little brown man had plenty of gun under his arm.”

  “He wouldn’t have five hundred bucks in twenties in his pocket, of course? Or are you saying?”

  “He wouldn’t. But Waldo had over seven hundred in currency when he was killed in the cocktail bar.”

  “Looks like I underrated this Waldo,” the big man said calmly. “He took my guy and his payoff money, gun and all. Waldo have a gun?”

  “Not on him.”

  “Get us a drink, honeybunch,” the big man said. “Yes, I certainly did sell this Waldo person shorter than a bargain-counter shirt.”

  The brunette unwound her legs and made two drinks with soda and ice. She took herself another gill without trimmings, wound herself back on the davenport. Her big glittering black eyes watched me solemnly.

  “Well, here’s how,” the big man said, lifting his glass in salute. “I haven’t murdered anybody, but I’ve got a divorce suit on my hands from now on. You haven’t murdered anybody, the way you tell it, but you laid an egg down at police headquarters. What the hell! Life’s a lot of trouble, anyway you look at it. I’ve still got honeybunch, here. She’s a white Russian I met in Shanghai. She’s safe as a vault and she looks as if she would cut your throat for a nickel. That’s what I like about her. You get the glamor without the risk.”

  “You talk damn foolish,” the girl spat at him.

  “You look O.K. to me,” the big man went on ignoring her. “That is, for a keyhole peeper. Is there an out?”

  “Yeah. But it will cost a little money.”

  “I expected that. How much?”

  “Say another five hundred.”

  “Goddam, thees hot wind make me dry like the ashes of love,” the Russian girl said bitterly.