“No. I was kind of afraid that he might come—I hate emotional scenes—but he didn’t.” Her finger described a cross on her silken breast. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” She giggled in sudden strained mirth: “What a ghastly thing to say: ‘hope to die’.”
I said: “Goodnight, Cathy.”
Number 467 Tanner Terrace was white frame bungalow in one of the cheaper suburbs, standing among a dozen houses like it. They all had slanting roofs, useless green shutters on the two front windows, and the rootless temporary air of a row of trailers in a vacant lot. You told them apart by the numbers stenciled on the curb. Also, Sergeant Franks’s house contained light. It leaked around the edges of the closed Venetian blinds in the front windows and sprinkled the struggling lawn.
I drove on past, U-turned at the first intersection and parked a hundred feet short of the house. Franks was a policeman. In his own territory he could make trouble for me. I wasn’t the one I wanted trouble to be made for. I turned off engine and lights, slid down in the seat, dozed off with my consciousness slightly ajar. The sound of a nearing motor woke me a moment before bright headlights swept the street.
They straightened out and came to rest in front of Franks’s bungalow. There were three blue taxi-lights above the windshield. A man climbed awkwardly out of the back seat and started up the walk. His gait was a little lopsided; in the dim light I thought he was a cripple. The front door opened before he reached the low concrete stoop. He moved forward into the light, a short thick man in a brown horsehide windbreaker. Its right side bulged, and its right sleeve dangled empty. The front door closed on him.
The taxi turned in a driveway and rolled back to the curb in front of the house. Its lights winked out. I waited for a minute or two and left my car without slamming the door. The taxi-driver was stretched out in his seat, waiting for sleep.
I asked him: “Are you busy?”
He answered me with his eyes half-closed: “Sorry. I’m on a return trip.”
“To where?”
“Quinto.”
“That’s where I’m going.”
“Sorry, mister. This is a Quinto cab. I can’t take Nopal fares.”
“You can if you don’t charge me.”
“Then what’s the percentage?” He sat up straight, and his eyes snapped all the way open. They were blue and bulging in a hollow face. “Listen, what goes on?”
I showed him a ten-dollar bill. “Your percentage.” I said.
The bill crackled in my fingers, as if it was taking fire under the intensity of his gaze. “Okay, I guess it’s okay, if the other guy don’t object.” He leaned back to open the door for me.
I got in. “He shouldn’t object. Where is he going in Quinto?”
“I don’t know, where I picked him up, I guess. Down by the boardwalk.”
“Ever see him before?”
It was one question too many. He turned in his seat and looked me over. “You’re a cop?”
“It didn’t used to show.”
“Look’it here, I didn’t take your money. I didn’t say for sure I would take your money. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t touch your money. So how about just getting out and leaving me be. I’m trying to make an honest living, for gosh sakes.”
“All right. I’ll get out, and you beat it back to Quinto.”
“For gosh sakes, have a heart. This is a seven-dollar run.”
“Take it out of this.” I held out the ten-dollar bill.
He shied from it wall-eyed. “Uh-uh. No thanks.”
“Then beat it fast. There’s going to be trouble here, and you don’t want to wait for it.”
Before I got out, I tucked the bill between the cushions and the back of the seat, where taxi-drivers had a habit of looking. The forward motion of the cab closed the door. I went back to my car and waited. The man with the bulky right side and the empty sleeve came out almost immediately. He said goodnight to someone and turned toward the street. He was on the sidewalk before he noticed that the cab was gone.
He looked up and down the road, and I slid lower in my seat. His left hand pantomimed disgust in an outward-pushing gesture. His voice announced clearly that he would be fornicated with. I recognized his voice. When he turned to look at the house, the lights were gone. Shrugging lopsidedly, he started to walk in the direction of the highway. I let him walk a block before I started my motor, and pulled even with him as he reached the second corner. My gun was on the seat beside me.
“You want a lift?” I blurred my voice.
“I sure could use one, Jack.” He stepped off the curb into the road, within the circle of light from the streetlamp overhead. An oil-stained fedora cast a shadow over his dark broad face, from which the eye-whites gleamed.
“Quinto?”
“This is my lucky—” He recognized me or my car, and the sentence was never finished. His left hand dropped to the leather-flapped pocket of his windbreaker.
I swung the door wide open and waved my gun. His fingers were twisting at the leather button that held the flap over the pocket.
“Get in,” I said. “You don’t want it happen to the other arm? I have a passion for symmetry.”
He got in. I drove left-handed in low to a dark lacuna between streetlights, and parked at the curb. I shifted the gun to my left hand and held it low to his body. The gun I took from his pocket was a heavy revolver which smelt of fresh oil. I added it to the arsenal in my glove compartment and said: “Well.”
The man beside me was breathing like a bull. “You won’t get far with this, Archer. Better get back to your hunting-grounds before it happens to you.”
I told him I liked it where I was. My right hand found the wallet in his left hip-pocket, flipped it open under the dashlights. His driver’s license bore the name Oscar Ferdinand Schmidt.
I said: “Oscar Ferdinand Schmidt is a very euphonious name. It will go well in a murder indictment.”
He advised me to commit sodomy. I held my impulse to hurt him. Next to the driver’s license, and envelope of transparent celluloid held a small blue card which identified Oscar F. Schmidt as a Special Officer of the Company Police of the Pacific Refining Company. There were bills in the folding-money compartment, but nothing bigger than a twenty. I tucked the bills in his pocket, and the wallet in mine.
“I want my wallet back,” he said, “or I slap a charge on you.”
“You’re going to be busy fighting one of your own. The sheriff is going to find your wallet in the brush by the Notch Trail.”
He was silent for a minute, except that the horsehide jacket creaked like a bellows with his breathing. “The sheriff will give it back to me, without no questions asked. How do you think the sheriff gets elected?”
“I know now, Oscar. But it happens the FBI is interested in lynchings. Do you have an in with the Justice Department, too?”
His husky voice had changed when he answered. It had sick and frightened overtones. “You’re crazy if you try to buck us, Archer.”
I prodded him hard with the gun, so that he grunted. “You’ll sit in the cyanide room before I reserve a bed at Camarillo. Meanwhile I want you to talk. How much did you give Franks for the information, and who gave you the money?”
His brain worked cumbrously. I could almost hear it turn over and stall, turn over slowly again. “You let me go if I tell you?”
“For the present. I couldn’t be bothered with you.”
“And give me back the wallet?”
“I keep the wallet, and the gun.”
“I never fired the gun.”
“You never will.”
His brain turned over again. He was sweating, and starting to smell. I wanted him out of the car.
“Kilbourne gave me the money,” he said finally. “Five C’s, I think it was. You’re crazy if you buck him.”
I said: “Get out of my car.”
