The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

Eight

The morgue was at the end of a long and bright and silent corridor that branched off from behind the main lobby of the County Building. The corridor ended in two doors and a blank wall faced with marble. One door had “Inquest Room” lettered on the glass panel behind which there was no light. The other opened into a small, cheerful office.

A man with gander-blue eyes and rust-colored hair parted in the exact center of his head was pawing over some printed forms at a table. He looked up, looked me over, and then suddenly smiled.

I said: “Hello, Landon... Remember the Shelby case?”

The bright blue eyes twinkled. He got up and came around the table with his hand out. “Sure. What can we do—” He broke off suddenly and snapped his fingers. “Hell! You’re the guy that put the bee on that hot rod.”

I tossed a butt through the open door into the corridor. “That’s not why I’m here,” I said. “Anyhow not this time. There’s a fellow named Louis Harger... picked up shot last night or this morning, in West Cimarron, as I get it. Could I take a look-see?”

“They can’t stop you,” Landon said.

He led the way through the door on the far side of his office into a place that was all white paint and white enamel and glass and bright light. Against one wall was a double tier of large bins with glass windows in them. Through the peepholes showed bundles in white sheeting, and, further back, frosted pipes.

A body covered with a sheet lay on a table that was high at the head and sloped down to the foot. Landon pulled the sheet down casually from a man’s dead, placid, yellowish face. Long black hair lay loosely on a small pillow, with the dank-ness of water still in it. The eyes were half open and stared incuriously at the ceiling.

I stepped close, looked at the face, Landon pulled the sheet on down and rapped his knuckles on a chest that rang hollowly, like a board. There was a bullet hole over the heart.

“Nice clean shot,” he said.

I turned away quickly, got a cigarette out and rolled it around in my fingers. I stared at the floor.

“Who identified him?”

“Stuff in his pockets,” Landon said. “We’re checking his prints, of course. You know him?”

I said: “Yes.”

Landon scratched the base of his chin softly with his thumbnail. We walked back into the office and Landon went behind his table and sat down.

He thumbed over some papers, separated one from the pile and studied it for a moment.

He said: “A sheriff’s radio car found him at twelve thirty-five a.m., on the side of the old road out of West Cimarron, a quarter of a mile from where the cutoff starts. That isn’t traveled much, but the prowl car takes a slant down it now and then looking for petting parties.”

I said: “Can you say how long he had been dead?”

“Not very long. He was still warm, and the nights are cool along there.”

I put my unlighted cigarette in my mouth and moved it up and down with my lips. “And I bet you took a long thirty-eight out of him,” I said.

“How did you know that?” Landon asked quickly.

“I just guess. It’s that sort of hole.”

He stared at me with bright, interested eyes. I thanked him, said I’d be seeing him, went through the door and lit my cigarette in the corridor. I walked back to the elevators and got into one, rode to the seventh floor, then went along another corridor exactly like the one below except that it didn’t lead to the morgue. It led to some small, bare offices that were used by the District Attorney’s investigators. Halfway along I opened a door and went into one of them.

Bernie Ohls was sitting humped loosely at a desk placed against the wall. He was the chief investigator Fenweather had told me to see, if I got into any kind of a jam. He was a medium-sized bland man with white eyebrows and an out-thrust, very deeply cleft chin. There was another desk against the other wall, a couple of hard chairs, a brass spittoon on a rubber mat and very little else.

Ohls nodded casually at me, got out of his chair and fixed the door latch. Then he got a flat tin of little cigars out of his desk, lit one of them, pushed the tin along the desk and stared at me along his nose. I sat down in one of the straight chairs and tilted it back.

Ohls said: “Well?”

“It’s Lou Harger,” I said. “I thought maybe it wasn’t.”

“The hell you did. I could have told you it was Harger.”

Somebody tried the handle of the door, then knocked. Ohls paid no attention. Whoever it was went away.