Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 30, No. 2 — July 1947)
- Автор: Голт Уильям Кэмпбелл, Rischer Bruno
- Год: 1947
- Язык: английский
- Год: Fictioneers / Popular Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 30, No. 2 — July 1947)». Краткое содержание книги:
Costain’s movements, up until about seven o’clock of the previous evening but not after, had been traced. His whereabouts for the next nine hours seemed to be something of a mystery.
He had left his offices in the Los Angeles Counselors’ Building on Hill Street near Fifth at three in the afternoon. According to his Filipino house-boy, he had reached his home in Brentwood Heights about four, dressed for the evening and had gone out again. Later he had been seen drinking alone at the bar of the Club Borracha on the Sunset Strip. Witnesses, names withheld, thought that he seemed slightly intoxicated and a bit surly when he left the Club Borracha around seven.
That seemed to be about all that the police knew at the moment — or were dishing out. There was no mention of Gail Tremaine anywhere in the story. It included a few other names, however, and told something about Costain’s past personal history. I chewed over the names. Some I knew and some I didn’t. They fell into three categories. Crook names. Rich names. Movie names. So far as I could tell, Costain had gotten them all off with verdicts of not guilty. The last of these trials was almost two years old. I skimmed rapidly through the stuff about his early life. Among the details were the facts that he was a Harvard man and a bachelor.
I folded the newspaper and dropped it into the wastebasket. I had a short quick drink out of the office bottle, to take the knots out of my neck, and lit a cigarette and settled down to do some serious thinking. At the end of an hour, I gave that up as a bad job, strapped on my spare gun — a thirty-eight automatic and mate to the one I was missing — and left the office.
The desk nurse at the emergency hospital was a hatchet-faced old battle axe who told me that she was only on duty days and knew nothing about anyone named Miss Gail Tremaine. Furthermore, I was holding up a stretcher case that was just then coming along the corridor. I slunk out of there with my hat in my hand.
It was a nice day, if you happen to care for cool bright sunny days, and the hills above Hollywood had that clear green look that comes after a heavy rain. A mud-spattered taxicab was parked in front of a cab zone sign, just beyond the ambulance driveway. Its driver snoozed peacefully behind its wheel.
I opened the rear door of the cab, shut it, then leaned against the outside of the front door on the passenger’s side. The window was down.
The cabby snorted, shook himself awake, swiveled his head to look at the back seat, eyed me suspiciously. “Take you somewhere, bud?” he asked, gruffly.
“That depends,” I said. “I got a phone call from a friend that she was in a slight accident and was here in the emergency hospital. I got delayed on the way over. Now it seems she has already been discharged.”
“A sad story, bud,” he said, not impolitely. “I feel for you.”
“She didn’t have her own car. I was thinking, she might have left in a cab.”
He yawned enormously and massaged his right shoulder with the thick dirty-nailed fingers of his left hand. He didn’t say anything. I dug out my billfold and extracted a five dollar bill and tucked the billfold away again. He looked at the bill and his eyes brightened.
“Could you change this?” I asked.
The brightness faded from his eyes. After a long moment, he fished some bills out of the pocket of his leather jacket, handed me five ones for the five, put his money away again. I fanned the ones out and held them like a poker hand.
“How long have you been at this stand?” I asked.
“Ever since I got out of the Army,” he said, in a flat voice. “When I learn to quit driving this tub like a tank, they’re gonna gimme a better one.”
“I mean today, this shift,” I said evenly.
“Since six A.M. That’ll be a buck.”
“Not so fast. You the only cab here?”
“Only one regular. I made a dozen trips between six and eight. That’s when they discharge the drunks and wild party champs. Describe your friend.”
“Dark hair, slender, light-colored dress.”
“Would you call her a looker?”
I nodded and dropped one of the bills on the cab seat. He looked at it without touching it, grimaced, as if remembering anything for longer than five minutes gave him a headache. I dropped another bill.
“Was she wearing a kind of fur jacket? Looked like it had been washed in a mud hole and not ironed afterwards?”
“That might be,” I said, shortly. “I told you she was in an accident last night, or early this moaning.”
“O.K., bud, don’t get sore. Most of the business I get here looks kind of bunged up. I just wanna be sure I had the right party.” He covered the bills with his hand. “She gimme a Yucca Street address, the Villa Morocco Apartments, near Wilcox. About six-fifteen I’d say that was, just after I come on the job.”
“Thanks,” I said, and turned abruptly and walked back along the street to my car.
Chapter Three
Policemen Are Funny
The Villa Morocco was one of those Monterey type buildings with a cool green private jungle in the inner court. All of the apartments opened on the court and there was a dark wood balcony jutting out from white stucco walls for the upstairs tenants. In the heart of the jungle, water gurgled pleasantly in a tile-trimmed fountain.
It had a small intimate lobby off the entrance tunnel with a bare tessellated floor, rough antiqued plaster walls, majolica sand jars here and there and potted palms for the tourist trade. Heavy wormy-walnut chairs and settees gave it that final touch.
A pale-eyed desk clerk with a mascara darkened mustache patted at his breast pocket handkerchief rather self-consciously and said: “Your name, please, and whom did you wish to see?”
“Miss Gail Tremaine is whom,” I said. “Tell her it’s her cousin.”
He almost looked at me then. He said: “I’ll see if she is in, if you’d care to be seated.”
“What’s being seated got to do with it?” I asked him.
His small rosebud of a mouth twitched. He grabbed out the pocket handkerchief, coughed into it, very delicately, tore his eyes off my necktie, stared intently at my hat, as if trying desperately to recall what it was he had to do.
“You could give me her apartment number,” I suggested. “I could find it by myself — and kind of surprise her.”
“Oh, no,” he breathed, in a shocked voice. “That would not do at all. No one is allowed unannounced in here. After all, the guests pay for privacy.”
“And time for any strays to slip down the back stairs,” I grinned, archly. “That’s O.K., chum, but hurry it up.”
“I’m afraid I must have your name,” he insisted coldly.
“She might not recognize it,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
If he touched any kind of a buzzer button, it was with his foot, because I didn’t see him move. A paneled door to the left of the PBX switchboard opened. The man who lounged out of the room behind the door had thick black eyebrows and a broad flat nose in the middle of a face that was as round as, and battered copper kettle. He weighed around two-fifty, with most of the weight at his belt line, and wore dark clothes. Dark blue suit, dark brown shirt, dark necktie. He didn’t look at me. “The dame in fourteen-B snuck her pooch in again,” he said to the deskman.
“Heavens,” the clerk groaned. “Not again.”
“Yeah. So I warned her for the last time. So she slipped me ten. So I give her a couple of hours to feed it and take it back to the farm. That’s five I owe you.”