Only she hadn’t.
Myrtle Mantz was in Toluca Lake, driving the Dusenberg.
With the lights out.
She parked, got quietly out of the car. She was wearing a lime blouse and hunter-green slacks, her long red hair pinned up, and looked very pale in the ivory moonlight; she seemed to have no makeup on and her pretty face was immobile, her eyes glazed. She stood on the sidewalk and gazed at her house as if she were a ghost that had returned to haunt it.
She had something in her right hand that I couldn’t make out too well, but it might have been a gun….
I scurried to the back door, ready to shoulder it open but found it blessedly unlocked; I moved through the dark kitchen where the Frigidaire was purring, left my Speed Graphic on the table where the charts and maps were still spread out, and slipped through the hall and into the guest bedroom where the bedstand lamp was still on and Amy was in bed, pillows propped behind her, while Toni Lake was off to one side of the room, where she’d been getting dressed, in fact was pretty well back into her white blouse and brown jodhpurs.
Lake scowled at me, not appreciating this invasion one little bit, and Amy’s eyes were wide with surprise and the beginnings of indignation, but I didn’t let her say a word.
Instead I whispered, “Myrtle’s coming up the front walk with a gun. Go out the back way. Now!”
Amy scurried out of bed, grabbing her bathrobe, and Lake followed us out into the hall and through the kitchen, Amy getting into and belting the bathrobe as she went; I could hear the front door opening—Myrtle had opened it quietly, but I was listening for it, whereas Mantz wouldn’t be.
“You got a car?” I whispered to Lake.
She nodded.
“Get yourselves the hell away from here,” I said to them both, opening the back door for them. “Sleep somewhere else tonight.”
Amy frowned at me, as if she didn’t know whether she loved me or hated me, although now that I knew what I did about her, what was the difference?
Then they were gone, and I went over and stood hugging the Frigidaire and peeked past it down the hall, where Myrtle was going into Mantz’s bedroom.
And I got a good look this time: it was a gun all right, a .32 revolver, a Smith and Wesson maybe, just a little bitty thing that could fit in a handbag, but you still wouldn’t want to get shot in the eye with it.
I didn’t have a gun with me. My nine-millimeter was in my suitcase at Lowman’s Motor Court; I was not licensed to carry a firearm in the state of California and, besides, this was the kind of assignment where you packed a camera, not a pistol.
So armed only with my wits—no remarks, please—I sneaked down the uncarpeted hallway, which was empty now; she was in Mantz’s bedroom—actually, it was her bedroom, too, wasn’t it?
And from the hallway as I crept along, I could hear her saying, with a Southwestern lilt, “Where’s your angel, Paul?”
“What are you doing here?” His response registered surprise, but not fear; maybe she had the gun behind her back. “She’s in the guest bedroom, where do you think she is?”
Myrtle’s voice was musical as she said, “Look what I’ve got, Paul….”
I figured that gun wasn’t behind her back, now.
“Put that down, Red. You don’t…”
That was when I came in and grabbed her from behind, bear-hugging her, pinning her arms, flattening her fine breasts with my forearms, but she managed to fire the gun anyway, shattering the bedstand lamp even as Mantz dove out of bed, just under the bullet’s trajectory. The room was dark now, though some light filtered in from the hallway.
“Let me go!” she squealed, not knowing who had hold of her.
And Mantz came scrambling forward, his face tight with rage, and he belted her in the jaw with a fist, and she went limp, the gun clattering to the hardwood floor, where we were lucky it didn’t go off again.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I spat at him, easing the unconscious woman over to the bed, laying her out gently, there. I hadn’t been holding her like that so he could fucking slug her! Blood trailed from the corner of her mouth; even in this state, she was a lovely thing. Too bad when she got jealous she went around with a gun.
“She tried to shoot me!” Mantz said, understandably worked up, hopping around like a mustached monkey in his bare chest. “She’s lucky I didn’t knock her block off!…Where’s Amelia?”
“I got her and her pal out the back door,” I said, switching on the overhead light. “Your wife never saw them, or me. So we were never here, remember? In about two seconds, I’m slipping out, myself.”
“What should I do?”
“Call the cops.”
He frowned, calming down a little. “Do I have to?”
“Your neighbors probably already have. If you don’t, it’ll look bad.”
He smirked. “Doesn’t it look bad enough?”
“I don’t think so. Take it from somebody who’s done his share of divorce work, this marriage isn’t working out…and in the settlement, Myrtle coming after you with a .32 is going to speak better for you than her.”
He was mulling that over, looking at his out-cold, incredibly beautiful, crazy-as-a-bedbug wife, when I got the hell out, before it occurred to him to ask me what I was doing there.
6
