CHAPTER 19

I grabbed a sandwich and passed up the ritual evening meal in the dining room. Eating in style would take time, and I needed every minute I could muster. There were things to do. The big lobby was empty of customers when I began to interview the collection of bellhops near the main door. I questioned them all, trying for a crack at the mysterious character who had made the phone call to Margo’s room early this morning. The boys could tell me nothing at all. Ask questions about something that happened a few hours back, and you get a variety of answers, all of which are meaningless and born of man’s short memory and violent imagination. Nobody seemed to recall any users of the two wall phones at the front of the lobby. And I got less from the man who had the stationery concession at the rear. His booth faced the phone against the back wall, but he had seen nobody, out there, of course.

I wandered into The Champagne Room, now a huge cavern of emptiness and silences. The chairs were being taken off the tabletops and a few casual menials mopped at the floor in slow motion. Back on the stage, nothing remained to remind the future audiences or performers that oily recently a fire had licked away at the proscenium. There was a thin and tickling smell of burned dry goods, but even this was only a thread of odor, since most of the stench had been rubbed away by the use of powerful disinfectants and commercial room perfumes. Behind the big drape on the right side of the stage, I browsed and brooded among the odds and ends of theatrical equipment. The metal basket that had started the fire was now pushed back into the shadows, away from the draperies. I brought it around and examined it carefully. The inside was scorched and scarred by the flames, enough to blacken the metal and give the thing a feeling of great age. I hauled it back to its original position. I stared at it and studied it opening my mind to anything it might say to me. On the stage, along the wooden siding behind the drapes, the fire had licked and tasted the wood, briefly. I closed my eyes and projected the fire scene through the retina of my personal camera, the imaginary lens that could restage the entire production for me. I saw the fire begin and the flames bite the draperies and roil up the wall and fill the room with the black and biting smoke. It was all very dramatic.

It was dramatic enough to stab me somewhere deep inside my brain, where the whirling thoughts sometimes solidify into theories. It was dramatic enough to take me out of The Champagne Room, into the open air and beyond the entrance to The Montord, where my car was parked. I drove quickly up to Indian Cliff and got out and stood at the edge of the cliff. The darkness made me mutter an indecent few words at my own stupidity. I should have come up here during the daylight hours. Now I was forced to make use of my flashlight, beaming it at the earth on the rim of the canyon, where Grace Lasker’s car had gone over to its doom. I examined the barrier through which the convertible had crashed. Two of the crossbeams were still dangling on the uprights, hanging over the rim of the cliff at a crazy angle. There was a skirt of grass extending from the edge of the road to the fence, a broad patch of which had browned and died recently.

I got down on my hands and knees and searched the brown grass, my nose down low above the turf and tussocks. All around me the black circle of woods held its breath as I scanned the earth, the sticky quiet hammering at me. There was a thin moon, a glimmering disc that might have been a big help, if it hadn’t hidden behind a miasma of fleece and fluff. It was only a pale and lemony circle up there. The night boiled around me, hot and dank, so hot that my collar burned and my head bubbled with sweat. But the expedition began to pay off after I had crawled a few yards hither and thither. There was a section of grass that was singed black. I stared at it and smiled at it and let it play a tune for me, against the wall of information I had tucked away in my mental storehouse. And out of the backwash of the past few days, out of the incredible welter of characters and events, a small light clicked on in my head.

I hopped back into my car and started down the long hill to The Montord. I had been away for almost two hours. When I wheeled my crate into the parking lot, the customers were already starting their mid-evening prowl. The preliminary skirmish outdoors before returning to the big lobby and the show in The Champagne Room. I skirted the terrace and entered The Champagne Room by way of the bar.

The musicians were onstage, gassing and grumbling because Buddy Binns had not yet arrived for his rehearsal. Don Trask grabbed me and tugged me toward the bar and insisted that I allow him to buy me a fast one. He was loaded again, the alcohol clouding his eyes and converting him into a pushing, uncoordinated lump of nothing, already only able to blubber at me.

“Where’s Buddy?” I asked.

“Hell with him,” Don gurgled. “Have another drink, pal.”

“And Manny Erlich?”

“Went outside. Out looking for Buddy.”

I brushed him off and ran into the night, down the path and around the garden, past the pool and through the surrounding area of tables and gin rummy players. They had abandoned the indoor card area for this retreat, forced into the air because of the stifling heat, the unseasonable pressure of damp stickiness that would not lift until the early morning winds blew over the mountain behind The Montord. Buddy Binns was not playing cards. I crossed the garden and began a systematic check of the outbuildings, beginning with the one that housed Buddy. Buddy Binns was not in his room. I returned to the pebbled paths and backtracked around the main building, entering through a rear door and examining the Coffee Shoppe, the Ladies’ Lounge, the Music Room and even the Kiddy Korner. Buddy Binns was not in any of these cozy retreats. My running scrutiny of The Montord built the heat in me, converted my collar into a damp and dewy itch of annoyance, so that I yearned for a change of shirting and started back across the garden and into my personal nest.

And that was where I found Buddy Binns.

He was leaning over my mattress when I walked in, probing the underside with nimble fingers. He straightened up when I flipped the light switch. He stared at me brazenly and showed me he had a gun in his hand. He enjoyed the star role in this little drama, laying on with the heavy histrionics, smiling through his teeth and casting himself as a comic Alan Ladd.

“Where is it?” he inquired, adjusting himself to suit the character he was playing. He waved me to the right, toward the little chair at my window. His hand was loose and, light on the gun, as muscular as a nance gripping a daisy. A hot scowl darkened his face. “Sit down and answer my question.”

“They’re looking for you over in The Champagne Room,” I reminded him. “You go on in about an hour, Buddy.”

“I’ll make the show,” he said. “I’ll get back, in time, peeper. I left The Champagne Room so I’d have time to look around. Clever? I knew they’d all be around the bar or in the lobby. And that’s why I picked this time of day. I’ve been around, Conacher. I’ve been all through this dump, even in Lasker’s room. But I drew a blank until I began to think about you. The more I thought about you, the more I saw daylight. I went down the list of everybody who smelled bad up here. And when I hit you, I realized that everything pointed your way.”

“Brainy,” I said. “You thought all this up by yourself?”

“Why not? I’ve been nosing around, peeper. Who was the last person to see Grace Lasker alive? Conacher. Who was the last person to see Repp alive? Conacher. A hungry private eye like you could louse up anybody he picked out of the crowd.”

“And why did I louse up Grace Lasker?”

“You killed her to get the stag reel she bought from Repp.”

“Clever. And then what?”

“You put her in her car and drove her off Indian Cliff.”

“Delicious,” I commented. “You’re a hell of a lot smarter than I thought, Buddy. But you’re still a comic. You forgot to figure the element of time. How did I get back down off Indian Cliff and into the bedroom above Grace Lasker’s? It would have taken me almost a half hour to run down the hill and then go through the motions of playacting at the routine I went through. Even if I could fly, it would have been impossible for me to do the job. But I take my hat off to you for clear thinking. The trouble with you is that you’re operating out of personal prejudice. You don’t like me and you’re trying to pin this on me for that reason. If the tables were turned, I’d have accused you of the murders long ago. Because I think you’re a two-bit personality, Buddy. I think you stink. But that doesn’t mean I’d hang a rap on you.”

“What a mouth,” Buddy said with a stale smile. He was sweating as much as I was, but his heat came from the nerve-end hysteria that had gripped his bowels. He had an itchy trigger finger, a twitch that bothered me, because a small gun in the hands of a small idiot can do big damage. He was aware that I recognized his nervousness, but there was nothing he could do to kill it. He was in deep and would play it through. “You talk nice and smooth, peeper. Now I’ll ask you the question again. Where’s that reel?”

“If I knew where the reel was, I’d invite you to the burning.”

“You’d better start talking again, Conacher. This thing could go off.”

“Fire away. You’re shooting up the wrong alley.”

“I’ll count up to ten.”

“Movies,” I said. “You’ve been seeing too many movies.”

“One,” he said, and paused to take a deep breath. “Two.”

“Buckle my shoe,” I added.

“Three,” said Buddy. “Four.”

“Lock the door,” I said.

“Five, six.” His upper lip was bubbling with sweat as he came in closer to me. He was wearing a silk shirt and I could see the initials on the right side, over his heart: B. B., done in a reddish silk, neatly embroidered, but completely surrounded by the dark stain of perspiration that galloped and dripped over his barrel chest. He was completely off the beam, as determined as a Boy Scout over a fresh merit badge. He licked his lower lip and his mouth ironed out into a hard and purposeful line of antagonism. He began to blink in an off-beat rhythm.

“Pick up sticks,” I told him.

And then I jumped.

I didn’t want to hurt him. He was soft and flabby, a mass of blubber and fat underneath the snappy lines of his Kolmer Marcus special. But he had good legs. And he used them. He brought one of them up into my groin as he sidestepped my right cross. He dropped the gun on the way over to the wall and I kicked it away as I doubled up under his nasty knee. The gun skidded under the bed and against the wall back there where neither of us could get it. He bounced off the dresser and came at me, using the stance that went out with John L Sullivan, a stiff-armed pose that almost made me laugh at him. But he had power behind the corny gesture. He stuck a fist in my gut, over the place where he had marked me with his wicked knee. I sagged again and let him come again. He was quick to try for the advantage, slamming at me with both hands now. But I was waiting for this strong-arm act. I caught him on the downswing, my knee deep in his navel. He almost killed me as he came down in a thundering thud of pain and despair. He was struggling to set his stomach in order, moaning and grumbling over it, his voice high and edged with hurt, as sick and trembling as a woman in labor.

The scene was built for laughs, because I sat opposite him and watched him gather his resources while I struggled to set my own house in order. He had hit me a staggering blow, enough to fog my eyes and keep me close to him, wheezing and puffing and praying for my muscles to move me before he could make use of that knee again. I crawled away from him, edging toward the bed and beyond the bed to the wall, where the gun was. Then I had it in my hands and the feel of it revived me, especially when I rammed it under Buddy’s nose and let him feel the cool metallic touch of it.

“Jesus,” he groaned. “Get me some water. I’m dying. I can’t catch my breath. Please, Conacher. Please. Please.”

I found my feet and got some water and threw it in his face. Then I refilled the glass and stuck it under his foolish mouth and let him taste it. He sucked at it hungrily, and after a while his eyes cleared and he sagged back against the wall, cracking his head against it as he rolled away from me.

“Now,” I said. “Let’s start it again, Buddy. No more wrestling. It’s too hot. And we haven’t got time for it. I don’t blame you for taking a crack at me. What the hell, you’re in love. You’re doing all this for Margo. But you’re doing it wrong, believe me. I haven’t got the stinking film. And I didn’t kill Grace Lasker and Hugo Repp. I’m trying to do a job, that’s all. And you’re going to help me.”

He began to respond to my unvarnished sincerity.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“What started you my way?”

“I figured you were dirty enough to pull those jobs.”

“And that was all?”

“What else?” he asked sulkily.

“Some person,” I said. “Somebody could have given you a stray thought about me.”

“It was original with me, peeper.”

“So you started after me—just like that?”

“Not quite,” grumbled Buddy. “I happened to see you go into the Rhumba Hut by way of the back window today. I figured you were maybe hiding the reel there. But later, when I investigated, I found that the locker in there was smashed. That stopped me. I couldn’t decide whether you broke the locker—or whether somebody did it before you got there.”

“So you figured you’d check everybody?”

“That’s right. I left you for last. I searched all the other rooms before I came here.”

“And you found nothing in the other rooms?”

“Not a thing,” Buddy said. “That’s why I was so positive I’d locate the reel in here.”

“Whose rooms did you search?”

He rolled them off for me, as serious as a schoolboy giving out with the Emancipation Proclamation. He took great pride in his report, breaking it up into small and intricate segments, complete with his personal reaction to the problems of search and smell. He had lifted the keys he needed from the office, choosing a moment when he could enter it unobserved. He began his trek through the hotel with Paul Forstenburg’s room as his first stop. He found nothing in Paul’s place but the signs of the manager’s disturbance, an upheaval and disorder that seemed to indicate that Paul needed help in the brain department. He skipped Don Trask’s because he had been through it the night before, when he was forced to put the agent to bed. He next visited Lili’s slumber chamber, where he was almost caught when she returned for a cosmetic item she had forgotten. He hid in her closet, however, and gave her room a leisurely search. But he found nothing more unusual than a few half emptied bottles of liquor and a small automatic, which he appropriated for further emergencies. He next visited Jorgenson’s nest and reported the same foul and ugly upset I had witnessed on my visit there. He was forced to wait a while for Darlene, watching her window from under the trees in the garden, until she had transformed herself into the Spanish vixen and was ready to emerge for public appearance. Darlene’s room yielded nothing better than a strong and clinging stench of musk.

“I skipped over to Lasker’s after that,” Buddy continued. “But the old man had nothing of any importance. The same thing in Manny Erlich’s and Archy Funk’s. I didn’t stay very long in Chico’s room. The perfume stink was worse than at Darlene’s, believe it or not. After Chico’s, I came here.”

“You didn’t go into Repp’s?”

“What for? Jorgenson had a man up there. Was it worth the risk?”

“Probably not,” I said. “You did well, Buddy. You’ve saved me a lot of time.”

“You were going to search their rooms?”

“That was my idea.”

“And now?”

“I’m almost home.”

“You know where the reel is?” he asked, with sudden liveliness, his little black eyes alive again and burning into me. “You mean we’ll get it soon? Jesus, Margo will pay you plenty for it, Conacher.”

“Better get back to The Champagne Room,” I suggested. “You go on in about fifteen minutes. I’ve got a few more little things to wind up. I should have them done by the time you finish your act.”

“A drink,” he said. “I could use a drink, Conacher. I’m as wet as a diaper.”

I gave him a few shots of Scotch and managed a few for myself and watched Buddy Binns adjust himself for the rigors of his performance. He doused himself with cold water and rubbed away the sweat and buttoned his jacket and straightened himself a bit. When we left the room, he was bouncing in his usually energetic stride, alive and full of the nervous excitement all performers experience before making an appearance.

I saw him to the terrace outside the bar and then turned on my heel and headed the other way.