“She say where to?”
“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.
7
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.
