Playback Page 4

  “She just paid up and left, sir. Quite suddenly. No forwarding address at all.”

  “With Mitchell?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t see anyone with her.”

  “You must have seen something. How did she leave?”

  “In a taxi. I’m afraid—”

  “All right. Thank you.” I went back to my apartment. The middle-sized fat man was sitting comfortably in a chair with his knees crossed.

  “Nice of you to drop in,” I said. “Anything in particular I could do for you?”

  “You could tell me where Larry Mitchell is.”

  “Larry Mitchell?” I thought it over carefully. “Do I know him?”

  He opened a wallet and extracted a card. He struggled to his feet and handed it to me. The card read: Goble and Green, Investigators, 310 Prudence Building, Kansas City, Missouri.

  “Must be interesting work, Mr. Goble.”

  “Don’t get funny with me, buster. I get annoyed rather easy.”

  “Fine. Let’s watch you get annoyed. What do you do—bite your mustache?”

  “I ain’t got no mustache, stupid.”

  “You could grow one. I can wait.”

  He got up on his feet much more rapidly this time. He looked down at his fist. Suddenly a gun appeared in his hand. “You ever get pistol-whipped, stupid?”

  “Breeze off. You bore me. Mudheads always bore me.”

  His hand shook and his face turned red. Then he put the gun back in the shoulder holster and wobbled towards the door “You ain’t through with me,” he snarled over his shoulder.

  I let him have that one. It wasn’t worth topping.

  SEVEN

  After a while I went down to the office.

  “Well, it didn’t work,” I said. “Does either one of you happen to have noticed the cabdriver who took her away?”

  “Joe Harms,” the girl said promptly. “You ought to maybe find him at the stand halfway up Grand. Or you could call the office. A pretty nice guy. He made a pass at me once.”

  “And missed by from here to Paso Robles,” the clerk sneered.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You didn’t seem to be there.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “You work twenty hours a day trying to put enough together to buy a home. And by the time you have, fifteen other guys have been smooching your girl.”

  “Not this one,” I said. “She’s just teasing you. She glows every time she looks at you.”

  I went out and left them smiling at each other.

  Like most small towns, Esmeralda had one main street from which in both directions its commercial establishments flowed gently for a short block or so and then with hardly a change of mood became streets with houses where people lived. But unlike most small California towns it had no false fronts, no cheesy billboards, no drive-in hamburger joints, no cigar counters or pool-rooms, and no street corner toughs to hang around in front of them. The stores on Grand Street were either old and narrow but not tawdry or else well modernized with plate glass and stainless steel fronts and neon lighting in clear crisp colors. Not everybody in Esmeralda was prosperous, not everybody was happy, not everybody drove a Cadillac, a Jaguar or a Riley, but the percentage of obviously prosperous living was very high, and the stores that sold luxury goods were as neat and expensive-looking as those in Beverly Hills and far less flashy. There was another small difference too. In Esmeralda what was old was also clean and sometimes quaint. In other small towns what is old is just shabby.

  I parked midway of the block and the telephone office was right in front of me. It was closed of course, but the entrance was set back and in the alcove which deliberately sacrificed money space to style were two dark green phone booths, like sentry boxes. Across the way was a pale buff taxi, parked diagonally to the curb in slots painted red. A gray-haired man sat in it reading the paper. I crossed to him.

  “You Joe Harms?”

  He shook his head. “He’ll be back after a while. You want a cab?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I walked away from him and looked in at a store window. There was a checked brown and beige sport shirt in the window which reminded me of Larry Mitchell. Walnut brogues, imported tweeds, ties, two or three, and matching shirts for them set out with plenty of room to breathe. Over the store the name of a man who was once a famous athlete. The name was in script, carved and painted in relief against a redwood background.

  A telephone jangled and the cabdriver got out of the taxi and went across the sidewalk to answer it. He talked, hung up, got in his cab and backed out of the slot. When he was gone, the street was utterly empty for a minute. Then a couple of cars went by, then a good-looking well dressed colored boy and his prettied up cutie came strolling the block looking in at the windows and chattering. A Mexican in a green bellhop’s uniform drove up in somebody’s Chrysler New Yorker—it could be his for all I knew—went into the drugstore and came out with a carton of cigarettes. He drove back towards the hotel.

  Another beige cab with the name Esmeralda Cab Company tooled around the corner and drifted into the red slot. A big bruiser with thick glasses got out and checked on the wall phone, then got back into his cab and pulled a magazine out from behind his rear-view mirror.

  I strolled over to him and he was it. He was coatless and had his sleeves rolled up past the elbows, although this was no Bikini suit weather.

  “Yeah. I’m Joe Harms.” He stuck a pill in his kisser and lit it with a Ronson.

  “Lucille down at the Rancho Descansado thought maybe you’d give me a little information.” I leaned against his cab and gave him my big warm smile. I might as well have kicked the curbing.

  “Information about what?”

  “You picked up a fare this evening from one of their cottages. Number 12C. A tallish girl with reddish hair and a nice shape. Her name’s Betty Mayfield but she probably didn’t tell you that.”

  “Mostly they just tell me where they want to go. Quaint, isn’t it?” He blew a lungful of smoke at his windshield and watched it flatten out and float around in the cab. “What’s the pitch?”

  “Girl friend walked out on me. We had a little argument. All my fault. I’d like to tell her I’m sorry.”

  “Girl friend got a home somewhere?”

  “A long way from here.”

  He knocked ash from his cigarette by flicking his little finger at it still in his mouth.

  “Could be she planned it that way. Could be she don’t want you to know where she went. Could be you were lucky at that. They can drop the arm on you for shacking up in a hotel in this town. I’ll admit it has to be pretty flagrant.”

  “Could be I’m a liar,” I said, and got a business card out of my wallet. He read it and handed it back.

  “Better,” he said. “Some better. But it’s against the company rules. I’m not driving this hack just to build muscle.”

  “A five interest you? Or is that against the rules too?”

  “My old man owns the company. He’d be pretty sore if I was on the chisel. Not that I don’t like money.”

  The phone on the wall jangled. He slid out of the cab and went over to it in about three long strides. I just stood planted, gnawing my lip. He talked and came back and stepped into the cab and was sitting behind the wheel all in one motion.

  “Have to blow,” he said. “Sorry. I’m kind of behind schedule. Just got back from Del Mar, the seven forty-seven to L.A. makes a flag stop there. Most people from here go that way.”

  He started his motor and leaned out of the cab to drop his cigarette in the street.

  I said, “Thanks.”

  “For what?” He backed out and was gone.

  I looked at my watch again. Time and distance checked. It was all of twelve miles to Del Mar. It would take almost an hour to ferry someone to Del Mar and drop him or her off at the railroad station and turn around and come back. He had told me in his own way. There was no point in telling me at all unless it meant something.

  I w
atched him out of sight and then crossed the street to the booths outside the telephone company’s office. I left the booth door open and dropped my dime and dialed the big OShe stopped and frowned.

  “I’d like to make a collect call to West Los Angeles, please.” I gave her a Bradshaw number. “Person to person, Mr. Clyde Umney. My name is Marlowe and I’m calling from Esmeralda 4-2673, a pay phone.”

  She got him a lot quicker than it took me to tell her all that. He came on sharp and quick.

  “Marlowe? It’s about time you reported in. Well—let’s have it.”

  “I’m in San Diego. I’ve lost her. She slipped away while I was taking a nap.”

  “I just knew I’d picked a smart cookie,” he said unpleasantly.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds, Mr. Umney. I have a rough idea where she went.”

  “Rough ideas are not good enough for me. When I hire a man I expect him to deliver exactly what I order. And just what do you mean by a rough idea?”

  “Would it be possible for you to give me some notion of what this is all about, Mr. Umney? I grabbed it off kind of quick on account of meeting the train. Your secretary gave me a lot of personality but very little information. You want me to be happy in my work, don’t you, Mr. Umney?”

  “I gathered that Miss Vermilyea told you all there is to know,” he grumbled. “I am acting at the request of an important law firm in Washington. Their client desires to remain anonymous for the present. All you have to do is trace this party to a stopping place, and by stopping place I do not mean a rest room or a hamburger stand. I mean a hotel, apartment house, or perhaps the home of someone she knows. That’s all. How much simpler do you want it?”

  “I’m not asking for simplicity, Mr. Umney. I’m asking for background material. Who the girl is, where she came from, what she’s supposed to have done to make this job necessary.”

  “Necessary?” he yapped at me. “Who the hell are you to decide what is necessary? Find that girl, pin her down, and phone me her address. And if you expect to be paid, you better do it damn quick. I’ll give you until ten o’clock tomorrow morning. After that I’ll make other arrangements.”

  “Okay, Mr. Umney.”

  “Where are you exactly and what is your telephone number?”

  “I’m just kind of wandering around. I got hit on the head with a whiskey bottle.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” he said acidly. “I presume you had already emptied the bottle.”

  “Oh it might have been worse, Mr. Umney. It might have been your head. I’ll call you around ten A.M. at your office. Don’t worry about anybody losing anybody. There’s two other guys working the same side of the street. One’s a local boy named Mitchell and the other is a Kansas City shamus name of Goble. He carries a gun. Well, good night, Mr. Umney.”

  “Hold it!” he roared. “Wait a minute! What does that mean—two other operatives?”

  “You asking me what it means? I’m the guy that asked you. Looks like you only got a piece of the job.”

  “Hold it! Hold it right there!” There was a silence. Then in a steady voice that didn’t bluster any more: “I’ll call Washington the first thing in the morning, Marlowe. Excuse me if I sounded off. It begins to look as though I am entitled to a little more information about this project.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you make contact again, call me here. At any hour. Any hour at all.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good night, then.” He hung up.

  I put the phone back on the hook and took a deep breath. My head still ached but the dizziness was gone. I breathed in the cool night air laced with sea fog. I pushed out of the booth and looked across the street. The old guy who had been in the taxi slot when I arrived was back again. I strolled across and asked him how to get to The Glass Room, which was where Mitchell had promised to take Miss Betty Mayfield to dinner—whether she liked it or not. He told me, I thanked him, recrossed the empty street and climbed into my rented car, and started back the way I had come.

  It was still possible that Miss Mayfield had grabbed the 7:47 for Los Angeles or some way station. It was a lot more likely that she had not. A cabdriver taking a fare to the station doesn’t stick around to watch the fare get on the train. Larry Mitchell wouldn’t be that easy to shake. If he had enough on her to make her come to Esmeralda, he had enough on her to keep her there. He knew who I was and what I was doing. He didn’t know why, because I didn’t know myself. If he had half a brain, and I gave him credit for a good deal more, he would have to assume I could trace her movements as far as a taxi took her. The first guess I was working on was that he would have driven to Del Mar, parked his big Buick somewhere in the shadows, and waited for her taxi to drive up and unload. When it turned around and started back, he would pick her up and drive her back to Esmeralda. The second guess I was working on was that she wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. I was a Los Angeles private eye, unknown parties had hired me to follow her, I had done so and then made the mistake of trying to get too close. That would bother him because it suggested he didn’t have the field to himself. But if his information, whatever it was, came from a press clipping, he could hardly expect to have it to himself forever. Anybody with enough interest and enough patience could turn it up in time. Anybody with enough reason to hire a private dick probably knew it already. And that in turn meant that whatever kind of bite he planned to put on Betty Mayfield, financial or amatory or both, would have to be put on fast.

  A third of a mile down the canyon a small illuminated sign with an arrow pointing seaward said in script The Glass Room. The road wound down between cliffside houses with warm lights in the windows, manicured gardens, stucco walls and one or two of fieldstone or brick inset with tiles in the Mexican tradition.

  I drove down the last curve of the last hill and the smell of raw seaweed filled my nostrils and the fog-veiled lights of The Glass Room swelled to amber brightness and the sound of dance music drifted across the paved parking lot. I parked with the sea growling out of sight almost at my feet. There was no attendant. You just locked your car and went in.

  A couple of dozen cars, no more. I looked them over. One hunch at least had paid off. The Buick Roadmaster solid top bore a license number I had in my pocket. It was parked almost at the entrance and next to it in the very last space near the entrance was a pale green and ivory Cadillac convertible with oyster-white leather seats, a plaid traveling rug thrown over the front seat to keep it dry, and all the gadgets a dealer could think of, including two enormous spotlights with mirrors on them, a radio aerial almost long enough for a tuna boat, a folding chromium luggage rack to help out the boot if you wanted to travel far and in style, a sun visor, a prism reflector to pick up traffic lights obscured by the visor, a radio with enough knobs on it for a control panel, a cigarette lighter into which you dropped your cigarette and it smoked it for you, and various other trifles which made me wonder how long it would be before they installed radar, sound-recording equipment, a bar, and an anti-aircraft battery.

  All this I saw by the light of a clip-on flash. I moved it to the license holder and the name was Clark Brandon, Hotel Casa del Poniente, Esmeralda, California.

  EIGHT

  The entrance lobby was on a balcony which looked down over the bar and a dining room on two levels. A curving carpeted staircase led down to the bar. Nobody was upstairs but the hat-check girl and an elderly party in a phone booth whose expression suggested that nobody better fool with him.

  I went down the stairs to the bar and tucked myself in a small curved space that commanded a view of the dance floor. One side of the building was an enormous glass window. Outside of it was nothing but fog, but on a clear night with a moon low over the water it would have been sensational. A three-piece Mexican band was making the kind of music a Mexican band always makes. Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They always sing the same song, and it always has nice open vowels and a drawn out sugary lilt, and the g
uy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi corazón, a lady who is “linda” but very hard to convince, and he always has too long and too oily hair and when he isn’t making with the love stuff he looks as if his knife work in an alley would be efficient and economical.

  On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis. Most of them were dancing cheek to cheek, if dancing is the word. The men wore white tuxedos and the girls wore bright eyes, ruby lips, and tennis or golf muscles. One couple was not dancing cheek to cheek. The guy was too drunk to keep time and the girl was too busy not getting her pumps walked on to think of anything else. I needn’t have worried about losing Miss Betty Mayfield. She was there and with Mitchell, but far from happy. Mitchell’s mouth was open, he was grinning, his face was red and shiny, and his eyes had that glazed look. Betty was holding her head as far as she could get away from him without breaking her neck. It was very obvious that she had had about all of Mr. Larry Mitchell that she could take.

  A Mexican waiter in a short green jacket and white pants with a green stripe down the side came up and I ordered a double Gibson and asked if I could have a club sandwich where I was. He said, “Muy bien, senor,” smiled brightly, and disappeared.

  The music stopped, there was desultory clapping. The orchestra was deeply moved, and played another number. A dark-haired headwaiter who looked like a road company Herbert Marshall circulated among the tables offering his intimate smile and stopping here and there to polish an apple. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down opposite a big handsome Irish type character with gray in his hair and just enough of it. He seemed to be alone. He wore a dark dinner jacket with a maroon carnation in the lapel. He looked like a nice guy if you didn’t crowd him. At that distance and in that light I couldn’t tell much more, except that if you did crowd him, you had better be big, fast, tough and in top condition.

  The headwaiter leaned forward and said something and they both looked towards Mitchell and the Mayfield girl. The captain seemed concerned, the big guy didn’t seem to care much one way or another. The headwaiter got up and left. The big guy fitted a cigarette into a holder and a waiter popped a lighter at him as if be had been waiting all evening for the opportunity. The big guy thanked him without looking up.