Chapter 6

Wednesday, June 25th, 1947, 10:30 p.m.

Brown Hat had been waiting. He was standing and smoking a cigar a dozen feet from The Pickup’s entrance, hidden in the shadows beneath the awning of a pawnshop whose three bronze balls were just visible through the smog that had begun to smatter the streets. The tip of the cigar glowed in the dark, a little red beacon. Even if it hadn’t, I would have known he was there: I could have smelled the cheap cheroot twice that far away. I felt sorry for him, standing all this time in the heat. I figured he had to be thirsty and he probably had to pee unless he’d ducked into an alley and risked my sudden exit. Well, that was his problem. Mine was Lizabeth Duryea.

It had been nice and cool in The Pickup, but on the streets it was still eighty-something and damp as a locker room after a tag-team wrestling match. And the air smelled just as musty. In Indianapolis, hot summer nights smelled like carnivals and new-mown grass. In San Francisco, the fragrance was fish. In Los Angeles, the scent was more like moldering dreams.

I felt sweat trickling thirty seconds after I set foot on the cement. I looked for a taxi; there wasn’t one to be found, so I walked. In the first two minutes I’d sweated out whatever alcohol Scott hadn’t shocked out of me. Halfway to the Criss Cross I was reminded about the something in my shoe; I didn’t feel like stopping to shake it out, even though I was sure Brown Hat and his metal heels would keep their distance.

It took almost twenty-five minutes on foot. Brown Hat stayed a dozen paces behind me, and I continued to ignore him. The trickle had turned to a rushing stream by ten thirty, the time I got to the Criss Cross. The place was empty except for Lizabeth Duryea. I saw her through the window, huddled, knees up like a little girl who’d lost her favorite doll, against the wall of a three-sided red plastic booth toward the rear of the place, stirring a cup of what I supposed was coffee and holding a Sobranie. The tip of its black tube oozed gray smoke.

Like most places in L.A., the diner was air-conditioned. Restaurant and club owners thought air-conditioning was the greatest invention since the cash register. At times like this, so did I. Lizabeth didn’t: She was wearing her gloves and coat and, I imagined, another ankle-length dress underneath its buttoned wool. What was underneath the dress . . . well, I was curious, which was curious in itself: It would be a year, next Thursday, since I’d had that sort of curiosity.

When I opened the door, Ed, the counterman, was placing a full sugar bottle on Lizabeth’s table. The first thing I heard was the radio: Johnnie Johnston singing “Laura.”

Lizabeth blew on her cup, then set it quietly back on the saucer. “Thank you,” she said.

“Anything else?” Ed ventured in his lanky, friendly manner. Ed’s a good guy. He’s been working the night shift at the Criss Cross since before the Crash, eight p.m. till eight in the morning, and he’s either friends with everybody who walks through the door or he makes friends with them the first time they do. He’s the kind of guy you always wonder about, though: There’s a sadness that hides behind his eyes. I suppose it’s the kind of sadness you get from doing the same thing for twenty years and going home to nothing but your cat.

I had four years to go. I hoped I wouldn’t make it.

* * *

“We got some good pie,” he said. “Homemade ice cream, made fresh this morning.”

“No, thank you,” said Lizabeth, staring into the black liquid.

“Well, lemme know if y’ change your mind,” Ed said cheerfully. “Name tag”—he pointed at it—“says ‘Mr. Hopper,’ but y’ can call me Ed. Ev’rybody does. Oh, evenin’, Mr. Grahame. Coffee?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Ed.” I pointed toward the radio. “Change the station, okay?”

“Sure thing,” Ed said. “Comin’ right up.” He turned the dial. Stations crackled as he scanned. The weather was interfering with the reception. Hopper finally stopped at something static-free: the middle of Coleman Hawkins’s version of “Laura.” I had that record. I shook my head.

Lizabeth lowered her feet to the floor, hugged her coat closer, and looked at me. She looked as worried as she’d sounded on the phone. “I was afrai’ you woul’n’t come,” she said.

“I was delayed. No cabs.”

She nodded. “Thank you for coming.”

The lingering smoke still smelled good to me. I waved it away. She put the cigarette out. “Thanks,” I said, and sat to her right, facing the front window. “Hot enough for you out there?”

“It’s . . . comfortable. It’s very chilly in here.”

“For you. I like it.” The skin below her eyes was red: Apparently she had been crying. “What’s going on?”

She stirred the coffee without drinking it. “I’m . . . fearful, Mr. Grahame.”

“Of your ‘brother.’”

Lizabeth withdrew the spoon and clinked it once on the saucer. “Yes. He . . .he has a terrible . . . tamper. The package you gave him? Was it, I mean, the contents . . . ?”

“It wasn’t a four-carat diamond, if that’s what you mean.”

Her eyes panicked. “What was in it?”

“One of these.” I reached into a jacket pocket and took out a tiny metal six-gun, a perfect miniature of the Colt .45s Johnny Mack Brown and Tex Haines used, with a small loop extending from the hammer. “You get a prize like this free inside boxes of Cracker Jack. The box I bought had two of these. My lucky day.”

If the information relieved her, it didn’t show. “I— What—happen’ to . . . ?”

“Oh, nothing very complicated. I just wrapped the other one up the same way your package was wrapped and gave that to him instead.” I handed her the charm. “Here, you like guns. Won’t keep you safe like the one you had last night, but it might come in handy sometime.”

She sniffed it. Then she licked it. “It’s lea’,” she said.

I shrugged. She didn’t have much in the way of table manners, but she clearly had a keen sense of smell. And taste. “Maybe you can melt it down and make a bullet.” She let it lie in her hand a moment—the things that fascinate some people; then she put it carefully into her purse.

Ed headed toward our booth, coffee cup in hand. He wasn’t as alluring as Vivian had been performing the same task, but I was a lot more comfortable with Ed’s version. “Here y’ are,” he said. “You let me know, y’ want anything else.”

“Thanks, Ed.” I added a half-teaspoon of sugar, sipped, and winced. “I forgot,” I replied to Lizabeth’s curious glance. “Speaking of lead: The coffee here tastes like it.” As often as I came to the Criss Cross, I never remembered that. Now and then I managed to finish a whole cup, but I couldn’t remember ever asking for a refill. Thank God the place had good food. Ed made the best ice cream sundaes—“sundees,” he called them—in L.A., and they were cheap.

“Really?” Lizabeth took a sip and smiled. “Yes,” she said, “it does.” She took a larger swallow, set the cup down, looked at me with those worried eyes, and added: “Mr. Grahame: Where is the package I gave you?”

“You saw where I put it. What is in it, Miss Duryea? And don’t tell me it’s your birthday present.”

She looked down again. “I tol’ you, I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” I said, a little more harshly than I intended maybe, but darn it, I was getting tired of half-answered questions and vague suggestions. She was paying me good money. Scott had paid me very good money. He’d had no idea he wasn’t getting his money’s worth, and he’d probably let me know that in some very unpleasant way, but at this rate I’d be a rich man before the case was over. I wasn’t complaining, but I like earning my dough. It makes me feel like a grown-up. “And you told me you and Dan were twins, too,” I went on. My steam was rising, and I didn’t much care if she got scalded. “But either you got a picture in your upstairs closet or he hasn’t aged very well.”

She put her face into her gloved hands and sobbed. “I’m . . . sorry.”

Well, she could sob all she wanted. A sob and a nickel got you a streetcar ride anywhere you wanted to go in Los Angeles, but a sob and five hundred bucks got you nowhere with me. “Yeah,” I said angrily. “Me too. I was just beginning to think you really might be in hot water.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Grahame!” she said, horrified. “I am in col’ water.” She looked up, wide-eyed. The blue and the gold spun together like those gleaming two-sided coins hypnotists use. I had no idea what being “in col’ water” meant, but at the moment, I didn’t care.

“He— It’s . . . He tol’ me to tell you what I sai’ last night,” she said sadly.

That made some sense. I backed off. She was a kid, and like Scott had said, she’d had a hard time, if half of what he’d said was true. And if the other half wasn’t, it was probably worse; I imagined Scott could frighten anyone he made up his mind to frighten, and Lizabeth Duryea seemed to scare pretty easily. All right: I’d cut her some slack. If . . . “Okay.” I sipped my coffee again and added more sugar. “So now you can tell me the real story.”

“It’s— He’s . . .” She took another swallow of hers, a long one that almost emptied the cup, and set it down. “Can I trust you, Mr. Grahame? I mean, really trust you?”

“Depends,” I said.

“On what?”

“On whether I believe you.” I tasted my coffee again. It was still awful. “Up to this point, I’ve been believin’ your five hundred dollars.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them, glanced toward the front window nervously, then looked straight into mine. “All right,” she began. “I’m . . . not from Los Angeles, Mr. Grahame. You may have notice’: Sometimes my speech is not correct. Or in the correct form.”

“Go on,” I said.

She looked away. “He brought me here,” she stammered. “From another pla— . . . ce. ‘You are very young an’ very pretty,’ he tol’ me . . .”

* * *

This time, I took mental notes.

They were in his living room, she recited vacantly, one evening last week, before he left.

Dan said, “Men’ll like you, Lizabeth. They’ll give you things. And they’ll do favors for me. Important favors. All you gotta do is be nice to them.”

“You mean do . . . things with them.”

He kept smiling at her. “What-ev-er—they—want. Get it?”

She’d felt all fluttery, she said, “Like I do now.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

She said, “Yes, I get it.”

“Yeah, you get it,” Dan said. He grinned at her. “See, just ’cause you ain’t the all-American girl, it don’t mean you gotta be dumb.”

She started to cry.

“I di’n’t want to, but I coul’n’t help myself.” She sniffled and her eyes got moist.

I nodded. “Go on.”

“But, but that man last night,” she told Dan, “that—Bugsy? He hurt me.”

She sniffled again. “I think he like’ hurting me.”

I nodded. Yeah, that sounded like Bugsy.

Dan grinned again. “Oh, now, it wasn’t so bad,” he said, and pointed at her arm. “It’s not like he left scars.”

“Please, Dan.” She didn’t want to do that, she told him. Not anymore.

He took a step toward her. He was still smiling, very sweetly. Then he raised his hand to her face.

“I finch’, but he put it on my cheek and he stroke’ it, gently.” Lizabeth dabbed at her eyes with a napkin.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Dan whispered. “It’ll just be one more time. I told him you’d come by Friday night; then he’s goin’ back to Vegas and you’ll never have to see him again. He gave us a whole lot of money. And you got to keep some. Buy yourself some pretty things. Most of the girls I work with, they gotta give me everything. But you? You’re special. You’re my sweetheart.” He bent down and he kissed her forehead.

“‘I don’t care about the money,’ I tol’ him.” She blew her nose into the napkin.

I nodded. “Go on.”

“I care about it!” he yelled at her. Then he took her face in one hand and squeezed. “I care,” he said again. “And if you know what’s good for you, you will too. Right?”

She pleaded with him. He slapped her.

“Right?” he said.

“No, please, I, I . . .”

He slapped her again, harder this time, with the back of his hand.

“I coul’ taste bloo’ on my tongue,” Lizabeth said.

“Right?” he said again.

“I coul’n’t do anything else. So I . . . move’ my hea’ up an’ down.”

Dan got a drink. “See?” he said. “That wasn’t so hard.”

“‘I’ll do it,’ I tol’ him. Whatever he sai’. I just di’n’t want him to hit me anymore.” She sobbed and covered her face with a new napkin. “‘Please,’ I begg’ him.”

But Dan kept smiling and got another drink. He gave it to her. “I always knew you was smart. Just keep bein’ smart and I won’t have to”—he raised his hand, like he was going to hit her again; she screamed; he laughed—“do that, or this”—he grabbed her wrist and held up her gloved hand—“ever again.”

“I—move’ my hea’ up an’ down again. He let go of my wrist, an’ he smile’ again, and finish’ his drink.”

* * *

I handed her my handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose into it, then tucked it, and both napkins, into her bag and finished her coffee. Her eyes were as red as her lips.

I looked through the diner’s front window. There were big patches of condensation; drops of water formed around them and slid down like babies down Yosemite Falls. The gloom beyond looked like another world people called Los Angeles, a world where everyone hid in the dark and men like Dan Scott slapped around girls like Lizabeth Duryea every day to their hearts’ content, then sent them off to other men like Bugsy Siegel for their own profit and their clients’ pleasure. Never mind hers. It made me boil, even more than the heat did. Guys like Scott and Bugsy Siegel and Moe Sedway were big shots. They lived any way they chose to. Sixteen years as a private eye. All I had to show for it was a beaten-up client, a broken-up office, an old Buick, a small apartment, four cheap suits, three pairs of shoes, and a cat to keep me warm at night. Same as Ed Hopper. Nuts.

Yeah, I had a clear conscience, too—most of the time, anyway. Whatever that might be worth come Judgment Day.

“I’m not happy, about doing those things, Mr. Grahame,” Lizabeth said. She sounded like the hurt little girl she’d looked like through the window. I wanted to put my arm around her, and I wanted to walk away from the whole thing.

“No.” I stirred my coffee. “I’m sure you’re not.” I started to take a sip. Then I thought better of it. “So that’s where Siegel comes in.”

“Yes.” She looked toward Ed and called “Coul’ I have more of this?” and pointed to her cup.

“Really? Sure thing!” Ed said, and grabbed the metal pot beneath the spigot of the tall aluminum urn.

I smiled. Ed was probably as surprised as I was. I wondered when was the last time that had happened. “Tell me something,” I said, and waited while Ed refilled her cup; I put my hand over the top of mine. “You really had ten thousand dollars in your bag last night? And a gun?”

“The money,” she acknowledged. “The gun was empty. I look’ for bullets for it, but . . .” She shrugged. “He . . . he woul’ not let me have one that really shoots. I even trie’ to buy a different one, at a”—she searched—“prawn shop, but I, really, I—don’t know how to use one. He fears I might . . . See?” From her bag she withdrew the same weapon I’d glimpsed the night before and handed it to me. It was heavy, the short barrel rainbowed a couple of degrees. It looked like the one Scott had pulled at The Pickup, only Lizabeth’s was smaller and a lot less ornate. I figured it took something other than a standard slug, and you’d really have to know how to aim that baby before you fired it. It looked like it loaded from behind the trigger guard and had about ten chambers. They were all empty. “It scares people, he says, if you just show it to them. ‘You don’t nee’ bullets.’”

“Hm. Kind of an unusual weapon.” I handed it back.

“Oh,” she said, and put it away.

“Why didn’t you just take the money and go somewhere?”

She shook her head urgently. “You don’t know. Dan is a powerful man. He has many powerful—allies. There are miles a—” She stopped herself, like it was a forbidden word, looked around quickly, and went on. “He, he woul’ . . . locate me and hurt me again. Like . . .”

She looked at me, again afraid of something. I couldn’t tell what. Then she slowly peeled the glove down her left arm and completely off. Beneath it, her hand and wrist were blackened, burn-scarred and ridged with keloids, like she’d grabbed a falling star and held on.

I looked at it and tried not to look away. “I see,” I said, and looked instead at her face while she carefully slipped her fingers into the glove’s, then eased the black satin all the way up her arm again.

“I hope’ not to show you this. It is very ugly. It makes me very ugly.”

“It’s just a hand.” I had an urge; I followed it and laid my hand on hers. She didn’t flinch or pull it away. I didn’t know whether I was glad or not. “The rest of you is . . .”

“Thank you,” she said, and laid her other hand on top of mine. “Now do you believe me?”

I sighed. “I’m not sure. But . . . I’m sorry, Miss Duryea.”

“Please, call me Lizabeth.”

“Lizabeth.” Her eyes were oh-so-blue. And gold.

She lifted a glove to my cheek. “What happen’ to your face?”

“Oh, a little souvenir from a couple of Dan’s friends. Nothing to worry about.”

“But I do worry, Mr. Grahame. May I call you Robert?” I nodded. She was only a client. She wasn’t my secretary. “You are very . . .” She leaned forward and stroked the dark stubble around the bandaged wound. When she did that, it stopped hurting.

“Yeah. You too.” Even with the glove, her hand felt cool. Surprisingly. She looked into my eyes; I continued to look back. We sat that way, silent, not quite staring but not quite just looking, either. “But why me?” I asked finally. “Why give me whatever was in the package?”

“I don’t know, Mr.— Robert. You must believe me. It’s what he tol’ me to do. Will you help me? Please.”

I nodded and let her hand go. She sat up and drank her coffee. All of it, in one gulp.

“First, let’s get you someplace safe. Come on.” I started to get up, then stopped. “One more thing: You’re just a kid. Were you really married?”

“I’ve—no.” Her eyes filled. “I’ve never been anyone’s wife, Robert. I think I seem . . . more ol’, but I’m only twenty. And now, now . . . who woul’—ever—have me?”

I hate it when women cry. I’m useless, and I know it. Unless it’s because they’re scared of going to jail. I’ve run into a couple of those; they thought their tears would make me soft: I’ve got a yolk, too, but all a little salt water does is cook it.

“Hey, hey, take it easy. You’re still young. There’s a lot of guys out there.”

“Are there?” She sniffled.

“Sure there are.”

She looked up at me. I’ve seen deer in my headlights that had wider eyes, but not by much. I wanted to wipe away the tears. I didn’t. “Nice guys?” she said. “Like you?”

“Yeah, nice guys like me.” Twenty. She could be my daughter. I took hold of her arm and lifted her out of the booth as carefully as I could. “Come on. Let’s get you in a taxi.” She started to protest. “It’s only a ten-minute ride. I’ll tell him to kill the air-conditioning. You won’t freeze.”

I dropped a half-dollar on the table and led her out.

* * *

The night air had grown even thicker while we’d been inside; it was as sultry as she was. I figured rain could hit any minute. The guy in the brown hat was sitting in a doorway just down the block. I hailed a taxi. Brown Hat stood up. Lizabeth got in. I opened the window and closed the door. Brown Hat sat down again.

I wrote down my private home number and told her to call me from the room, and to keep calling until she got me. Then I leaned in, handed the driver a fin, and told him “the Hotel Niagara—and leave the windows up and the A/C off on the way.” Fritz Lorre, the Niagara’s night manager, was an ex-client—I’d helped him beat a frame when I was just starting out—and Lorre still felt like he owed me favors. Now and then I’d put in a collection notice. This was one of those times.

The driver looked at me like I was crazy, but he pocketed the five and nodded. I watched him shut down the air conditioner, roll down his window, turn on the meter, and shift the car into gear. I waved the cab away and shook my head. I had too many doubts to have done that, but I couldn’t help it. I liked Lizabeth Duryea. And I felt sorry for her. Even if I didn’t trust her.

I watched the taxi drive off and dropped a nickel in the phone that was in the booth outside the Criss Cross. I called Fritz Lorre to let him know she was on the way and tell him to take good care of her. Fritz said he “vas heppy to do so” in the heavy German accent that had endured his thirty years in America. Then I hailed another cab. Brown Hat jumped up. I yelled “I’m going to my office” loud enough for him to hear. I was too tired and too impatient to wait around for a streetcar. I’d stop by the office, put Dan Scott’s money away, and head home. If I was lucky, I’d be in bed before one.

I jumped in the Yellow that pulled up and gave the hack the address and closed the door. I watched Brown Hat wave frantically. He was still waving when my driver stepped on the gas pedal.

I looked at my watch. It was getting close to midnight: Greenstreet had been home alone all day, and he’d be plenty hungry. And sore. I wasn’t looking forward much to his greeting.