Detour (10 page)

As I drove along I began to think of what to christen myself. Paul Durant? Nuts, that sounded to phony, even for Hollywood. Richard Taylor? Alexander Gates? Fred Lawson? Bill Todd, maybe? Or Jack P. Garrison? Or how about Archie Robertson? That sounded real enough, because who in the name of Hannah would pick the name
Archibald
for an alias? But, I don't know. None of them had the kosher ring. They were names you'd find in a book, not a newspaper. For a minute I considered using my real name again—Aaron Rothenberg—which I'd changed almost ten years before at the advice of Professor Puglesi; but I vetoed that as soon as it entered my mind. I was afraid it could be traced. The best bet was to start from scratch. Howard Beldam? Max Allinson....

There were quite a number of fellows hitchhiking along the road but I passed them all by. It wasn't that I didn't want to give them a lift—hell, I was in sympathy—but I just didn't think it was fair having them in the same car with me. If I was picked up, the cops would grab them, too—as accomplices, accessories after the fact, or whatever they wanted to hold them on. Not only that, I was packing a mighty tempting roll. Some dirty crook might make a try for it and I didn't want to hurt anybody. I'd had quite enough excitement for one trip.

But near the airport at Desert Center I pulled up for water. There was a woman sitting outside the service station, exercising her thumb. Now most smart motorists pass up these female hitchhikers, because usually they're plenty tough and not exactly debutantes from The Four Hundred. They have a reputation for stickups, badgering and blackmail, using the Mann Act as a weapon. But what can a guy expect to find on a public highway? Anyway, this dame, looked O.K. to me—I put her down as just some local kid only going a few miles, maybe into Mecca to see an aunt or her boy friend—so I thought I'd give her a break. “Hop in, sister,” I called.

She came running over to the car, carrying a little overnight-case. I opened the door for her, took the bag and slid it on the floor under the dash. There was no sense fooling with the rumble for that tiny thing. She got in and I started up.

“How far are you going?” I asked her. How far are
you
going?
”

That took me by surprise and I turned my head to look her over. She was facing straight ahead so I couldn't see her eyes, but she was young, not more than twenty-four—and
dirty.
So help me God, I don't think I ever saw a woman as dirty as that in my life. She had on a torn dark dress which hung in wrinkles from her thin body, shoes that were rundown at the heel, and on her legs she wore what had once been a pair of silk hose. Man, she looked as if she'd just been thrown off the crumbiest freight train in the world. About the only clean part about her was her face, which was bare of make-up.

Yet, in spite of the condition she was in, I got the impression of beauty. Not the beauty of a movie actress, or the beauty you dream about when you're in bed with your wife, but a natural beauty, a beauty that's almost homely because it's so damned real. Probably after a bath, an appointment with the hairdresser and wearing a new outfit, she'd look like anyone else you'd meet on the street; but filthy like that and without a mask of cosmetics, she was, I felt, just the kind of woman Adam or Noah or some primitive geezer would have gone for.

Then, suddenly, she turned around to face me and I took it all back. Her mouth and eyes were enough to give a man the jitters. The mouth was stony and thin, almost a slit across her face; and the eyes—well, they might have been pretty if they hadn't had that glassy shine to them, that funny glint I wouldn't even attempt to describe. A peculiar feeling ran over me when I looked into them. It was goofy, but I got the impression there was something behind them, something pretty terrible...

“How far did you say you were going?” she repeated.

Keyed up as I was, almost to the breaking point, I wanted to get her out of the car. I don't know why, but I didn't like her. She made me uneasy and I was nervous enough, I can tell you, without adding to it. But before I knew it the cat was out of the bag and I admitted I was going through to Los Angeles. What I should have told her was I was only going as far as Mecca, and maybe I could have ducked her there. Too late.

“Los Angeles is good enough for me, mister.” I was afraid of that.

I kept the car rolling at about forty-five or fifty, no faster. This was California, and that meant speed cops, speed cops and more speed cops. They lay in wait for you in every side road and behind billboards to welcome you to The Land of Eternal Sunshine and to present you with a ticket as a souvenir, the bastards. A friend of mine had tipped me off to this and, since the last thing I wanted at that moment was to get myself pinched, I took it easy.

The girl must have been pretty tired because she fell asleep not twenty minutes after she stepped into the car. She lay sprawled out with her feet on her little overnight-case and her head resting against the far door—like Haskell. I didn't like that part of it much but I didn't wake her up. From the curt replies she had made to my questions, I could see she didn't care to carry on a conversation. Well, when it came to that, neither did I. It wasn't that she still worried me. I'd gotten over that peculiar feeling, which I put down as just my jangled nerves. Nevertheless, I reflected, the less I said to her the better. It has always been my suspicion that half the men in jail today would never have been caught if they had had sense enough to keep their mouths shut. Many a tongue has put a noose around a neck.

Now, with her eyes closed and the tenseness gone out of her lips, she looked harmless enough, almost helpless; and instead of disliking her I began to feel sorry for her. The poor kid probably had had a tough time of it. You could read work—hard work—on her little rough hands with the nails on some of the fingers chewed down to the quick, lack of food on her thin wrists. As far as the rest of her went, you couldn't tell much. Her nose was nice, turned up just a wee bit at the end; her lashes were long and black and genuine; and her breasts were small and high, the way I like breasts to be. But she was too thin and she had practically no hips. For this reason her dress didn't seem to fit.

I kept looking at her out of the corner of my eye for a long time, wondering who she was, why she was going to Los Angeles and where she had come from in the first place. I had asked her all of those questions when she first got in the car, but her answers had all been vague. Her name was Vera, though. I didn't quite catch the last part. Vera's manner puzzled me in a way. She didn't seem at all grateful for the lift I was giving her. She acted as if it was only natural, that it was coming to her. I had half-expected her to go into ecstasies when I told her I was going all the way to the coast. However, when I said I'd take her to Los Angeles, she wasn't at all surprised or pleased. She merely nodded her head and shot me a look I couldn't understand. It was a funny look, shrewd and calculating, and a couple of times I turned my head and caught it again. That gave me the notion that this dame was a little simple upstairs.

But I no longer had that uneasiness. With each mile that went by, my mind was clearing and I was losing that panicky fear of arrest. I knew that the closer I got to Los Angeles, the safer I was. Seeing that I'd missed my breakfast back in Blythe, I was very hungry. I stopped the car in front of an eating place in Mecca and tapped the girl on the shoulder. She opened her eyes, and for a second, while they blinked at the light, they were soft and pale blue. Then, when she saw me leaning over her, I could see them change, become dark and take on that steely glint. She sat up.

“Are you hungry, Vera?” I asked her. Before she could open her mouth to say she was, I knew she was. “O.K. Come on in here and I'll fill your tummy.”

Without a word, she opened the door and got out, taking her overnight-case along. That got me hot under the collar: I'm only human. When I do someone a favor I like to be thanked for it, the same as anyone. This Vera had no manners. “Don't you know how to say, 'Thank you'?”

But she didn't answer me. Maybe she didn't hear me.

It was cool in the place—not like Alaska, by any means, but cooler than outside. I took off my coat and hung it on a peg. Vera didn't stop at the table. She went straight back to the Ladies' Room. I was pretty dusty myself, but I let it slide. I didn't like the idea of spending even a minute in the washroom where I couldn't keep an eye on the car outside. I was all set to beat it out the back entrance if a cop went over to it. So I busied myself reading the menu until Vera came back. I was pleased to find she had changed her stockings, combed her hair and put make-up on her face. All cleaned up, she looked like a different person and as much as she got my goat I couldn't help standing up until she was seated.

A waiter shuffled over to the table to take our orders. I glanced at the menu again. Pot roast of beef, brown gravy. Hot veal sandwich with mashed potatoes. Liver and bacon—with onions 5c. extra.... Then my eye lighted on a certain item and a little devil started chuckling in me. I started to smile. I tried but I couldn't resist the temptation. I had to get it out if it killed me.

“Say, Vera. How about a steak?”

She didn't react the way I had hoped. She nodded and turned to the waiter cooly, not like the dame who had bummed a ride, like a god-damned aristocrat.

“Medium rare, please. And for the vegetable, I'll take the corn.”

“Coffee now or later?”

“With the dessert.”

I was disgusted. I swore up and down that before I did another thing for Vera I'd croak. That's how much I knew.

Vera, Vera. It was just my luck to have picked her up on the highway, just my luck that of all the hundreds of people waving thumbs
she
happened to be planted in front of the gas station where I pulled in for water. It couldn't have been Mary or Helen; it had to be Vera—the one person I should never have bumped into. But I didn't find that out until we were almost into Riverside. To make conversation, I had been asking her questions every now and then, getting a “no” or occasionally a “yes” in reply. Then, all at once, she turned to me.

“You've been asking me a lot of questions, mister. Now I want to ask you one.”

“Go right ahead, Vera,” I said, glad that for once she was going to contribute something.

“All right. What I want to know is this: Where did you leave him?”

Maybe you don't believe a man can turn to ice, that its only a figure of speech and nature doesn't function that way? Well, you're wrong, because I did. I got cold all over—my feet, my hands and the rest of me. The shiver shot up my spine so fast it shocked me, catching me with my mouth wide open and my throat so full of heart I almost gagged.

“Where did I
what?”

“Where did you leave the owner of this car? You're not fooling me. This car belongs to a fellow named Haskell, That's not you, mister.”

I fumbled for words, crazy with fear. “You're off your nut. I'm Charles Haskell. Look. I can prove it. Here's my driver's license.” I dug into my pockets, feeling for the wallet. She watched me for a second with an amused smirk on her pinched little face.

“Save yourself the trouble, mister,” she said at last with a bite to her voice.

“I know you've got Haskell's wallet. I spotted it in the restaurant. But having it doesn't mean a thing—makes it worse, if anything. It just happens I rode with Charlie Haskell all the way from Louisiana. He picked me up outside of Shreveport.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You rode with...?”

Then it all came back to me, all that talk about dueling and scars and scratches. In my mind's eyes I could see three mean red lines on Haskell's wrist. I could hear that loud laugh of his....
Right on both counts Detroit. I was wrestling with the most dangerous animal in the world. A woman...
. I shot a glance at Vera's chewed and ragged nails. Yes, they were capable of doing plenty of damage....
I want to buy some gum and put more iodine on these scratches. They, sting like hell. There ought to be a law against, women with sharp nails. I put her out on her ear....
No, there could be no doubt any more. Vera must be the woman Haskell had spoken, about. She must have passed me while I slept in Blythe.

“Well?”

What was there to say? I kept telling myself to snap into it and think, think! Jeeze, there must be some alibi...

“Well?”

Damn her, she had me dead to rights. There was no use trying to lie my way out of it. With time I probably could have figured out some excuse, but she was keeping after me. It was like hitting a man when he's down. Yes, my goose was cooked. That Haskell son of a bitch wasn't dead yet. He wasn't stretched out stiff and cold, in that Arizona gully; he was sitting right beside me in the car, laughing like hell while he haunted me. My head was whirling.

“Well? Are you tongue-tied? Where did you dump him?”

Slowly it came dribbling out, the whole story, just as it had happened. While I was talking I didn't look at her. I knew in advance she wouldn't believe me and I didn't want to see the scornful twist to her mouth. She interrupted me once or twice by asking a question, but when I got finished she sat in silence. I began to wonder what she intended to do—and what I could possibly do to persuade her to keep her mouth shut. I was aware that the girl sitting next to me, weak, undernourished and scarcely a hundred pounds, wielded a terrible weapon. She could finish me if she chose. I drove along slowly, waiting. It was her move.

I DIDN'T phone the Fleishmeyer Agency; I missed my three o'clock appointment at Paramount and came to work the next afternoon twenty minutes late. The boss was very nice about it though—in the pig's neck. He suggested, in his broken English, that I fix my alarm clock, spend less time in the company of broken down picture actors and deduct a dollar from my weekly pay. But he didn't fire me. He knew what a hard time he would have trying to hire another girl to fit my uniform.

“What I do after hours is my own affair,” I told him. “And I'll go out with whomever I please. ”