“It’s a little off my beat, isn’t it?”
“You be the judge of that.” His shoulders rose and fell in a muscular slow-motion shrug. “It seems to me there’s a certain responsibility—?”
“Maybe so. Can you get me a lift into town?
“Sure.” He turned to the photographer, who was kneeling by the body. “Just about finished, Winowsky?”
“Yeah.” He threw back the blanket. “A couple more shots of the stiff. I want to do her justice, my professional honor demands it.”
“You take Mr. Archer into town with you.”
“Yeah.”
He stood over the body in a crouching position and flashed the bulb attached to the top of his camera. The white magnesium light drew the dead face from the shadows and projected it against the night. The freckles grew like acne on the lime-white skin. Bulbous and white, like deepsea life, the foam bulged from the nostrils and gaping mouth. The open green eyes gazed up in blank amazement at the dark sky moving between the darker mountains.
“Once more,” the photographer said, and stepped across the body. “Now watch the birdie.”
The white light flashed again on the unmoving face.
Chapter 9
The building was pink stucco, big and new and ugly. It had a side entrance with “Romp Room” lettered above it in red neon. The wall was blind except for the door and a couple of round screened ventilators. I could hear the noise of the romping from the outside: the double-time beat of a band, the shuffling of many feet. When I pulled the heavy door open, the noise blasted my ears.
Most of it came from the platform at the rear end of the room, where a group of young men in white flannels were maltreating a piano, a guitar, a trombone, a trumpet, drums. The piano tinkled and boomed, the trombone brayed, the trumpet squawked and screeched. The guitar bit chunks from the chromatic scale and spat them out in rapid fire without chewing them. The drummer hit everything he had, drums, traps, cymbals, stamped on the floor, beat the rungs of his chair, banged the chrome rod that supported the microphone. The Furious Five, it said on his biggest drum.
The rest of the noise came from the booths that lined three walls of the room, and from the dance-floor in the middle where twenty or thirty couples whirled in the smoke. The high titter of drunk and flattered women, the animal sounds of drunk and eager men. Babel with a wild jazz obbligato.
A big henna redhead in a shotsilk blouse was making drinks at a service bar near the door. Her torso jiggled in the blouse like a giant soft-boiled egg with the shell removed. The waitresses came and went in an antlike steam, and all the whiskies came from the same bottle. In an interval between waitresses, I went up to the bar. The big woman smashed an empty bottle under it and straightened up, breathing hard.
“I’m Helen,” she said with a rubber-lipped public smile. “You want a drink, you find a seat and I send a waitress to you.”
“Thanks, I’m looking for Pat.”
“Pat who? Does she work here?”
“He’s a man. Young, big, with curly dark hair.”
“Friend, I got troubles of my own. Don’t you go away mad, though. Try the waitresses if you want.” She took a deep breath when she finished, and the egg swelled up almost to her chin.
“Two bombs, beer chasers,” a waitress said behind me.
I asked her: “Is Gretchen here?”
“Gretchen Keck, you mean? The waitress jerked a flat thumb at a tall girl on the dance floor. “That’s her, the blonde in the blue dress.”
I waited till the music stopped, and crossed to an empty booth. Some of the couples stayed where they were in the center of the room, arms locked, face to face. A Mexican boy in blue jeans and a white shirt stood with the tall blonde. Gretchen was as light as the boy was dark, with a fair skin and a pull-taffy pompadour that made her taller than he was. They couldn’t stand still. Their hips, pressed flat together, moved in a slow weaving round and round until the music started and quickened their beat.
While she danced on a dime by herself, he moved in a circle about her, turkey strutting, flapping his arms like a rooster, leaping and stamping. He moved his head and neck in the horizontal plane, Balinese fashion, danced squatting on his heels like a Cossack, invented new gyrations of the hips, body and feet jerked by separate rhythms. She stood where she was, her movements slightly mimicking his, and his circle tightened about her. They came together again, their bodies shaken and snaked through their length by an impossible shimmy. Then she was still on his arched breast, and her arms fell loose. He held her, and the music went on without them.
In the booth behind me, a woman called in
Slouching and woebegone, without a backward look, he went to the woman and tried awkwardly to help her rise. She spat out words in Spanish that sounded like a string of cheap firecrackers. Her worn black satin dress was coated with dust. Half of her sallow pitted face was grimy. She began to weep. He put his arms around her and said, “Please, I am sorry.” They went out together. The music stopped.
A heavy middle-aged man in a fake policeman’s uniform appeared from nowhere. He picked up the knife, broke it across his knee, and dropped the blade and handle in the pocket of his blue coat. He came to my booth, stepping lightly as if he was walking on eggs. His shoes were slit and mis-shapen across the base of the toes.
“Nice work, son,” he said. “They flare up so fast sometimes I can’t keep track of ’em.”
“Knife-play disturbs my drinking.”
His red-rimmed eyes peered from a face that was gullied by time. “New in these parts, ain’t you?”
“Yeah,” I answered, though I felt as if I’d been in Nopal Valley for days. “Speaking of my drinking, I haven’t been doing any.”
He signaled to a waitress. “We’ll fix that.” She set down a trayful of empty glasses grained with the leavings of foam. “What’ll it be?”
“A bottle of beer.” I disturbed the bar whisky. “Ask Gretchen what she’s drinking, and if she’ll have one with me.”
The drink and Gretchen arrived simultaneously. “Helen says no charge,” the waitress said. “Your drinks are on the house. Or anything.”
“Food?”
“Not this late. The kitchen’s closed.”
“What, then?”
The waitress set my beer down hard so that it foamed, and went away without answering.
Gretchen giggled, not unpleasantly, as she slid into the seat across from me. “Helen’s got rooms upstairs. She says there’s too many men in this burg, and somebody has to do something to take the pressure off.” She sipped her drink, rum coke, and winked grotesquely over the rim of the glass. Her eyes were naive and clear, the color of cornflowers. Not even the lascivious red mouth constructed with lipstick over her own could spoil her freshness.
“I’m a very low-pressure type myself.”
She looked me over carefully, did everything but feel the texture of the material my coat was made of. “Maybe. You don’t have the upstairs look, I admit. You can move, though, brother.”
“Forget it.”
“I wish I could. I never get scared when something happens, it always come over me later. I wake up in the
