`Tom Hillman's for one. Possibly others, including mine.'
She touched the front of my jacket. `You're wearing a shoulder holster. Is Otto Sipe one of the kidnappers?'
I countered with a question: `Was he a man in your life?'
She was offended. `Of course not. Go away now.'
She pushed me out. `Take care.'
The night air was chilly on my face.
19
TRAFFIC WAS SPARSE on the coastal highway. Occasional night-crawling trucks went by, blazing with red and yellow lights. This stretch of highway was an ugly oil-stained place, fouled by petroleum fumes and rubbed barren by tires. Even the sea below it had a used-dishwater odor.
Ben Daly's service station was dark, except for an inside bulb left on to discourage burglars. I left my car in his lot, beside an outside telephone booth, and crossed the highway to the Barcelona Hotel.
It was as dead as Nineveh. In the gardens behind the main building a mockingbird tried a few throbbing notes, like a tiny heart of sound attempting to beat, and then subsided. The intermittent mechanical movement of the highway was the only life in the inert black night.
I went up to the front door where the bankruptcy notice was posted and knocked on the glass with my flashlight. I knocked repeatedly, and got no answer. I was about to punch out a pane of glass and let myself in. Then I noticed that the door was unlocked. It opened under my hand.
I entered the lobby, jostling a couple of ghosts. They were Susanna, twenty years old, and a man without a face. I told them to get the hell out of my way.
I went down the corridor where Mr. Sipe had first appeared with his light, past the closed, numbered doors, to a door at the end which was standing slightly ajar. I could hear breathing inside the dark room, the heavy sighing breathing of a man in sleep or stupor. The odor of whisky was strong.
I reached inside the door and found the light switch with my right hand. I turned it on and shifted my hand to my gun butt. There was no need. Sipe was lying on the bed, fully clothed, with his ugly nostrils glaring and his loose mouth sighing at the ceiling. He was alone.
There was hardly space for anyone else. The room had never been large, and it was jammed with stuff which looked as if it had been accumulating for decades. Cartons and packing cases, piles of rugs, magazines and newspapers, suitcases and footlockers, were heaped at the back of the room almost to the ceiling. On the visible parts of the walls were pictures of young men in boxing stance, interspersed with a few girlie pictures.
Empty whisky bottles were ranged along the wall beside the door. A half-full bottle stood by the bed where Sipe was lying. I turned the key that was in the lock of the door and took a closer look at the sleeping man.
He wasn't just sleeping. He was out, far out and possibly far gone. If I had put a match to his lips, his breath would have ignited like an alcohol burner. Even the front of his shirt seemed to be saturated with whisky, as though he'd poured it over himself in one last wild libation before he passed out.
His gun was stuck in the greasy waistband of his trousers. I transferred it to my jacket pocket before I tried to rouse him. He wouldn't wake up. I shook him. He was inert as a side of beef, and his big head rolled loosely on the pillow. I slapped his pitted red cheeks. He didn't even groan.
I went into the adjoining bathroom-it was also a kind of kitchen fitted out with an electric plate and a percolator that smelled of burned coffee, and filled the percolator with cold water from the bathtub faucet. This I poured over Sipe's head and face, being careful not to drown him. He didn't wake up.
I was getting a little worried, not so much about Sipe as about the possibility that he might never be able to give me his story. There was no way of telling how many of the bottles in the room had been emptied recently. I felt his pulse: laboriously slow. I lifted one of his eyelids. It was like looking down into a red oyster.
I had noticed that the bathroom was one of those with two doors, serving two rooms, that you find in older hotels. I went through it into the adjoining bedroom and shone my light around. It was a room similar in shape and size to the other, but almost bare. A brass double bed with a single blanket covering the mattress was just about the only furniture. The blanket lay in the tumbled folds that a man, or a boy, leaves behind when he gets up.
Hung over the head of the bed, like a limp truncated shadow of a boy, was a black sweater. It was a knitted sweater, and it had a raveled sleeve. Where the yarn was snarled and broken I could see traces of light-colored grease, the kind they use on the locks of automobile trunks. In the wastebasket I found several cardboard baskets containing the remains of hamburgers and french frieds.
My heart was beating in my ears. The sweater was pretty good physical evidence that Stella had not been conned. Tom was alive.
I found Sipe's keys and locked him in his room and went through every other room in the building. There were nearly a hundred guest and service rooms, and it took a long time. I felt like an archaeologist exploring the interior of a pyramid. The Barcelona's palmy days seemed that long ago.
All I got for my efforts was a noseful of dust. If Tom was in the building, he was hiding. I had a feeling that he wasn't there, that he had left the Barcelona for good. Anybody would if he had the chance.
I went back across the highway to Daly's station. My flashlight found a notice pasted to the lower right-hand corner of the front door. `In case of emergency call owner,' with Daly's home number. I called it from the outside booth, and after a while got an answer: 'Daly here.'
'Lew Archer. I'm the detective who was looking for Harold Harley.'
`This is a heck of a time to be looking for anybody.'
`I found Harley, thanks to you. Now I need your help in some more important business.'
`What's the business?'
`I'll tell you when you get here. I'm at your station.'
