“Up to a point.”
“You’re honest at least. What happens if we don’t get away with it? If somebody reported a shot, if he has been found, if we walk in on that and the place is full of policemen?”
I just stood there with my eyes on her face and didn’t answer her.
“Just let me guess,” she said very softly and slowly. “You’ll sell me out fast. And you won’t have any five thousand dollars. Those checks will be old newspaper. You won’t dare cash a single one of them.”
I still didn’t say anything.
“You son of a bitch.” She didn’t raise her voice even a semitone. “Why did I ever come to you?”
I took her face between my hands and kissed her on the lips.
She pulled away.
“Not for that,” she said. “Certainly not for that. And one more small point. It’s terribly small and unimportant, I know. I’ve had to learn that. From expert teachers. Long hard painful lessons and a lot of them. It just happens that I really didn’t kill him.”
“Maybe I believe you.”
“Don’t bother to try,” she said. “Nobody else will.” She turned and slid along the porch and down the steps. She flitted off through the trees. In thirty feet the fog hid her.
I locked up and got into the rent car and drove it down the silent driveway past the closed office with the light over the night bell. The whole place was hard asleep, but trucks were rumbling up through the canyon with building materials and oil and the big closed up jobs with and without trailers, full of anything and everything that a town needs to live on. The fog lights were on and the trucks were slow and heavy up the hill.
Fifty yards beyond the gate she stepped out of the shadows at the end of the fence and climbed in. I switched on my headlights. Somewhere out on the water a foghorn was moaning. Upstairs in the clear reaches of the sky a formation of jets from North Island went over with a whine and a whoosh and a bang of the shock wave and were gone in less time than it took me to pull the lighter out of the dash and light a cigarette.
The girl sat motionless beside me, looking straight ahead and not speaking. She wasn’t seeing the fog or the back of a truck we were coming up behind. She wasn’t seeing anything. She was just sitting there frozen in one position, stony with despair, like somebody on the way to be hanged.
Either that or she was the best little scene stealer I had come across in a long long time.
10
The Casa del Poniente was set on the edge of the cliffs in about seven acres of lawn and flower beds, with a central patio on the sheltered side, tables set out behind a glass screen, and a trellised walk leading through the middle of it to an entrance. There was a bar on one side, a coffee shop on the other, and at each end of the building blacktop parking lots partly hidden behind six-foot hedges of flowering shrubs. The parking lots had cars in them. Not everyone bothered to use the basement garage, although the damp salt air down there is hard on chromium.
I parked in a slot near the garage ramp and the sound of the ocean was very close and you could feel the drifting spray and smell it and taste it. We got out and moved over to the garage entrance. A narrow raised walk edged the ramp. A sign hung midway of the entrance said: Descend in Low Gear. Sound Horn. The girl grabbed me by the arm and stopped me.
“I’m going in by the lobby. I’m too tired to climb the stairs.”
“Okay. No law against it. What’s the room number?”
“Twelve twenty-four. What do we get if we’re caught?”
“Caught doing what?”
“You know what. Putting—putting it over the balcony wall. Or somewhere.”
“I’d get staked out on an anthill. I don’t know about you. Depends what else they have on you.”
“How can you talk like that before breakfast?”
She turned and walked away quickly. I started down the ramp. It curved as they all do and then I could see a glassed-in cubbyhole of an office with a hanging light in it. A little farther down and I could see that it was empty. I listened for sounds of somebody doing a little work on a car, water in a wash rack, steps, whistling, any little noise to indicate where the night man was and what he was doing. In a basement garage you can hear a very small noise indeed. I heard nothing.
I went on down and was almost level with the upper end of the office. Now by stooping I could see the shallow steps up into the basement elevator lobby. There was a door marked: To Elevator. It had glass panels and I could see light beyond it, but little else.
I took three more steps and froze. The night man was looking right at me. He was in a big Packard sedan in the back seat. The light shone on his face and he wore glasses and the light shone hard on the glasses. He was leaning back comfortably in the corner of the car. I stood there and waited for him to move. He didn’t move. His head was against the car cushions. His mouth was open. I had to know why he didn’t move. He might be just pretending to be asleep until I got out of sight. When that happened he would beat it across to the phone and call the office.
Then I thought that was silly. He wouldn’t have come on the job until evening and he couldn’t know all the guests by sight. The sidewalk that bordered the ramp was there to walk on. It was almost 4 A.M. In an hour or so it would begin to get light. No hotel prowler would come around that late.
I walked straight over to the Packard and looked in on him. The car was shut up tight, all windows. The man didn’t move. I reached for the door handle and tried to open the door without noise. He still didn’t move. He looked like a very light colored man. He also looked asleep and I could hear him snoring even before I got the door open. Then I got it full in the face—the honeyed reek of well-cured marijuana. The guy was out of circulation, he was in the valley of peace, where time is slowed to a standstill, where the world is all colors and music. And in a couple of hours from now he wouldn’t have a job, even if the cops didn’t grab him and toss him into the deep freeze.
