Ed Lacy - Strip For Violence

“Look, go home and sleep it off. I'm going back to the office for a moment. See you in the morning.”

“Hal...” Bobo hesitated. “I... eh...”

I took out my wallet, still had seventy bucks of Will's money. I gave Bobo two tens, walked him to the subway.

The phone was ringing as I unlocked the office door. I didn't make it. I sat down and banged away at the rubber pad, but it was hard to think. In a vague way things were starting to take shape but I was a long way from putting the pieces together—or from having all the pieces. The phone rang again. Curly Cox asked, “Hello? Boss? Me and the other guys ain't got no more cards to stick in the doors tonight. Called you earlier but no answer. Told Anita about it yesterday and... What's with this Anita?”

I told him I'd ordered some and would pick them up from the printers, and that he and the others should drop in around midnight to get them.

I had to hustle down to the printer before he closed at five, then, having nothing to do, I dropped in on Saltz, to see what he knew. He greeted me with, “Deadeye Dick, the famous two-bit private investigator. Suppose you got the case solved?”

“Have you?” He sure irritated the hell out of me.

“Been talking to a couple of stoolies. They claim the word is Anita was shaking down somebody—somebody important.”

“That's a crock of slop; Anita never knew anybody important. And she wasn't a shakedown artist. She was a kid.”

“Is that why she's a dead kid, because she never knew nobody important?”

I said, “You're crazy if you take a stoolie's word that she was shaking down any...”

Saltz laughed in my face. “Darling, you're not even a two-bit detective. How the hell do you think the police work? Let me give you a little course in scientific detection —more cases have been solved by tips from stoolies than by all the laboratory methods ever invented. Maybe in the movies they look through a microscope and come up with the answers, but in real life—a dick is only as good as his list of stoolies. Sure, a stoolie is the worst kind of a rat, but if you squeeze him, all the grapevine gossip comes out, and that's what you work on. But, of course, you wouldn't know that.”

I shrugged, kept my trap shut. I wouldn't touch a stoolie with a fifty-foot pole.

Saltz brushed his hair with his hand. “Here's something else, I'm going to fool around one more day, then I'm cracking down. Somebody isn't talking enough!”

“Meaning me?”

“Could be. I've talked to her folks, former schoolmates, and always end up with the same stupid spiel—'Anita was just a kid.' You don't have to be over twenty-one to be a crook. And no matter how they do it in Hollywood or in books, in life nobody murders without a damn good reason. I'm going to find that motive!”

“I'm all for it. Did you trace the cab that picked her up?”

Saltz nodded. “Nothing there. Driver claims she only took the cab far as 59th Street. Probably took the bus across town. What you been doing all day, bird-brain?”

“Nothing much,” I said, weighing my words. “My office was ransacked early this morning; nothing missing or...”

“Why didn't you tell me that?” Saltz roared.

“Don't crowd me, that's what I'm doing—now. Rest of the day I spent on another case,” I lied. “By the by, the police ever have anything on a Marion Lodge, also known as Mary Long? She was a call-girl a year or two ago. Dead uncle's estate is looking for her, she came into some property.”

Saltz grunted a few words into his desk phone, then took out a package of mints, tossed one at me. “You stink like a saloon. Looking for the killers in a bottle?”

“Never tell where they might be?” I said, chewing on the candy. We didn't speak for a few minutes, Saltz staring at me as though I wasn't there, then he said, “Darling, I find out you're holding out on me, I'll give you a chance to try your judo against a couple guys with rubber hoses. Remember that.”

His heavy neck would be almost perfect to try out my new hold. I didn't know why I disliked the jerk, but I sure did. I said, “Have to ask the professor what to do in a case like that.”

His phone rang. He listened for a moment, then hung up. “A Marion Lodge was arrested for hustling in 1950. Released on a thousand-dollar bail. Case dismissed without coming to trial.”

“Why?”

“Usual reasons—witnesses changed their minds, refused to talk.”

“What was her home address?”

Saltz shook his head. “Knock off. That was two years ago or over, she wouldn't be there any more.”

I got up. Saltz said, “Keep in touch with me.”

I said I would and at the door he said, “This might interest you, couple thugs tried to burglarize Anita's folks' home this afternoon. Old man scared them off with a shotgun blast. Interesting?”

“Another piece for the jig-saw. Interesting to you?”

“Saltz and Darling, the TV quiz kids! Get out of here.”

9

Outside I called Thelma Johnson and she still hadn't heard from Will. I stopped for gas, drove out to Queens, getting hooked in the late traffic. I'd seen the Rogers once or twice when Anita had worked late and I'd driven her home. Mrs. Rogers was a heavy woman in her late forties who worked in a local bakery. Rogers worked in a gas station, was thin, the quiet type: spoke with stilted words as though his choppers were false and he was afraid they'd . drop out if he opened his mouth too wide.

They lived in one of the cheap-looking bungalows that mushroomed up all over Queens and Long Island immediately after the last war, and sold for about three times what they were worth. When I rang the bell he opened the door, dressed in a faded pair of coveralls. We shook hands and he said, “Glad you came out, Hal.”

He led me to the kitchen where he was boiling hot dogs, had a bottle of beer working. “Emma is staying at her brother's. Upset, of course, and then today this robbery.... Eat supper with me.”

I speared a frank, wrapped a slice of bread around it, poured myself some beer, asked about the robbery. The old man had taken the day off, to be around Mrs. Rogers, and shortly after eleven in the morning he'd heard a noise at the rear porch door, saw two men trying to jimmy the door. He couldn't describe them except that they looked “rough.” He'd taken down a shotgun from the wall, slipped in a shell... they took off when he fired. He showed me where most of the porch door was ripped away. “Aimed high. I know, at fifteen feet I could have splattered them with a shotgun, but... after what happened to Anita, I didn't want to hurt nobody. Too much hurting and killing in this world.”

We finished the franks and a few more bottles of beer as I asked about Anita's boyfriends... could be I was going off half-cocked about the importance of the sliver of rock in all this. Rogers said, “Hal, Emma and I made a mistake, although I suppose it wasn't our fault—we had Anita late in life. As a result, when she grew up we were both too old to give her much companionship, and maybe she wasn't too happy at home, that's why her drive to... Well, now that she's gone I feel like my own life is done, empty.”

“One thing you can be sure of—I'll get her killer or killers if I don't do another thing in life.”

He gave me a tight smile. “Revenge—what does it mean? Won't bring our Anita back. Hal, you asked about boys.... Well, it was hard for Emma and me to understand Anita, we weren't one generation apart, we were several. She was a little wild, excitement seemed to be in her blood like a drug. She was too eager, intense, to have any boyfriends, or any friends, her own age. Guess she sort of frightened them off. I don't mean she was a wanton but... you spent eight hours a day with her, know what I mean.”

“Let's say now and then she was silly.”

He nodded his head slowly, kept nodding for a few seconds. “Hal, I want to ask you something, frankly and honestly. Seem like an odd question for a father to be asking... but... she was mad about you and knowing how impulsive she was, did you... two... ever... sleep together?”

His eyes were hard on me and I wondered where that shotgun was at the moment. “No, sir, Mr. Rogers, we never did. Frankly, I was afraid of Anita. That's the truth.”

He sighed. “That's too bad.”

“Too bad?”

“Hal, when a loved one dies you sit back and take stock of her life. Anita never had much and I hoped she had at least known and enjoyed the thing she wanted most—love.”

The old man amazed me, but I knew I was talking to a hell of an honest man, even if he thought sex was “love.”

He said, “That must sound like an awful thing for a father to say.”

“I understand what you mean. Anita would have made any man a fine wife.”

He stared at the kitchen linoleum, his head nodding again, and began to quietly weep. It gives me the creeps to see a human cry. I stood up. “Mind if I look around her room?”

He pointed to a door on the other side of the kitchen.

Poor Anita—instead of pictures of movie stars, school pennants on the wall, she had reward circulars taken from the office. There was also a proudly framed diploma from a correspondence course the kid had taken in “detection.”

I nosed around: there wasn't much, piles of old detective magazines, newspaper clippings about various stick-ups, swindles... a closet with a few worn dresses, shoes and stuff.

Mr. Rogers came in, said, “We live in a crazy age: your child dies and all you have left are your memories, a few snapshots, dresses... and pictures of criminals.”

“Anita come home yesterday afternoon?”

“Yes, while we were both working she came home, changed her dress.”

“Where's the dress she changed from?” He took it out of the closet. “The police were here this morning, went over the room.”

I said I knew... and didn't say they wouldn't be looking for the same thing I was. The dress had one pocket— it was empty. I went through her dressing-table, poked my finger in the powder-box. She had a pile of cheap costume jewelry in her drawer, some hairpins... and then I saw it! Either carelessly or wisely, Anita had tossed the sliver among the hairpins. Palming it, I slipped it into my pocket. It was almost a letdown finding it... knocked my ideas about “Cat” Franklin into a cocked hat—which I could pull over my head and call it curls.

I went through the motions of looking through the rest of her stuff, said, “Nothing here. I'll be getting on...”

Stay for a while. It's lonely here. Come on, we'll look at TV.”

We went to the living-room and he dialed in some corny dance act, opened more beer. The TV made me sleepy... I'd only had a few hours of shut-eye in the last twenty-four hours. I dozed off.

I slept hard and when I opened my eyes again, I had trouble getting the old man into focus. I yawned, said, “Sorry I dropped off. What time is it?”

“After ten. You.... What's the matter?”

I was staring at the TV screen. It was Margrita's show and she was clowning with a guest—Will Johnson looking fat and sloppy in his mailman's uniform! Margrita had on a pair of shorts that showed off her fine legs and a sort of halter that didn't hide much of the rest of her. The scene was a beach and she had Will down in the sand, was trying to kiss him. I guess it was funny—the studio audience sounded hysterical. Willie was merely acting himself—the embarrassed oaf—and she finally got his shoulders on the sand and a cop suddenly ran into the scene, made like he was a wrestling referee and slapped Margrita on the shoulders—as though she'd won the bout.