Talk of The Town (2 page)

I nodded, and went on listening. The soft and whispered laugh was like something crawling across your bare flesh in a swamp. “Because we’ve got a secret, honey. We know you killed him, don’t we?”

I frowned. That wasn’t part of the usual pattern. The whisper continued. “We know, don’t we, honey? I like that. I like to think about just the two of us—” He repeated some of the things he liked to think. He had a great imagination, with things crawling in it. Then, suddenly, there was a brief punctuation mark of some other kind of sound in the background, and the line abruptly went dead. He had hung up. But maybe not soon enough, I thought.

I replaced the receiver and looked down at the bowed head. “It’s all right,” I said. “They’re usually harmless.”

She raised her face then, but uttered no sound.

“How long has he been doing it?” I asked.

“A long—” she whispered raggedly. “Long—” She collapsed.

I whirled round the end of the desk and caught her. Carrying her out, I placed her gently on the floor on one of the rugs. She was very light, far too light for a girl as tall as she was. I stood up and called out “Josie!” and then looked back down at her, at the extreme pallor of the slender face and the darkness of the lashes against it, and wondered how long she had been running along the ragged edge of a breakdown.

Josie pushed through the curtains and looked questioningly at me.

“Have you got any whisky?” I asked.

“Whisky? No, sir, we ain’t got none—” She had taken another step nearer the desk, and now she could see Mrs. Langston on the floor. “Oh, good Lawd in Heaven—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Bring me a glass. And a damp cloth.”

I hurried out and brought in the two-suiter bag from the station wagon. There was a bottle in it. Josie came waddling back through the curtains. I poured some whisky into the glass, and knelt beside Mrs. Langston to bathe her face with the wet wash-cloth.

“You reckon she goin’ to be all right?” Josie asked anxiously.

“Of course,” I said. “She’s just fainted.” I felt her pulse. It was steady enough.

“Ain’t you goin” to give her the whisky?”

“Not till she can swallow it,” I said impatiently. “You want to strangle her? Where’s her husband?”

“Husband?”

“Mr. Langston,” I snapped. “Go and get him. Where is he?”

She shook her head. “There ain’t no Mr. Langston. He’s dead.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You reckon we ought to call the doctor?” Josie asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Wait a minute.”

Mrs. Langston stirred, and her eyes opened. I raised her with an arm round her shoulders, and held the whisky to her lips. She took a drink of it, and coughed, but kept it down. I handed the glass to Josie. “Get some water.”

In a moment she was able to sit up. I helped her into one of the armchairs and gave her another drink, mixed with water. Some of the color had come back to her face.

“Thank you,” she said shakily.

I waved it off impatiently. “Do you know who he is?”

“No,” she said.

“You don’t have any idea at all?” She shook her head helplessly. “But you reported it to the police.”

She nodded. “Several times.”

There was no time to lose. I went over to the phone and dialed Operator. “Give me the Sheriffs office.” A man’s voice answered after the second ring, and I said, “I’d like to speak to the Sheriff—”

“He’s not here. This is Magruder; what is it?”

“I’m calling from the Magnolia Lodge,” I said. “It’s about the psycho that’s been calling Mrs. Langston. I think you’ve had a complaint on it—”

“On the what?”

“A psycho,” I repeated. “A nut. He’s been bothering Mrs. Langston, calling her on the phone—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “What about him?”

“I think I can give you a lead, and if you work fast you may be able to nail him. He just hung up about two minutes ago—”

“Hold if, friend. Not so fast. Who are you?”

I took a deep breath. “My name’s Chatham. I’m staying at the motel, and I happened to be in the office here when the creep called this time. I listened to him—“

“Why?”

That might not be the stupidest question it would be possible for a police officer to ask, I thought, but it was close. I choked down a sarcastic reply. “Just to see if I could get a lead on where he was calling from—”

“And he told you? That was nice of him.”

I sighed. “No. I’m trying to tell you. I think I lucked into something that could help you—”

“Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You got his prints over the phone.”

“Then you’re not interested?”

“Listen, friend,” he said coldly, “you think we got nothing to do but pussyfoot around looking for a drunk on a telephone jag? Tell Mrs. Langston if she don’t want to listen to this goof all she’s got to do is hang up.”

“She can’t take much more of it,” I said.

“She don’t have to answer, does she?”

“A business phone?” I asked coldly.

“I can’t help what kind of phone she got. But nobody’s ever been hurt over one of ‘em, believe me.”

“I never thought of that,” I said. “I’ll tell her, and everything will be all right.” I hung up, burning.

I turned back to her. Josie had returned to work. She pushed a hand up through the dark hair with that weary gesture she had, and she was still too pale. One of these days she was going to come apart like a dropped plate.

“They ever do anything about it at all?” I asked.

“The first time or two. They sent a deputy out to talk to me. But I’m not sure they even believe me.”

That’s about it, I thought; it was a pretty even bet.

“He bother any other women, do you know?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Then the horror came back into her eyes for a moment, and she cried, “Why does he do it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do they jump out of the shrubbery in a park without their clothes on? But they’re nearly always harmless.”

It occurred to me I was almost as silly as that clown Magruder. Harmless? Well, in any physical sense they were.

She glanced up at me. “Why did you ask me to answer him?”

I shrugged. “Force of habit. I used to be a cop.”

“Oh,” she said. “You wanted to keep him talking, is that it?”

“Sure. That’s your only connection with him, and once he hangs up he might as well be in another universe. The longer he spews, the more chance there is he’ll say something that’ll give you a lead. Or that you’ll hear something else in the background.”

She looked at me with quickened interest “And did you hear something?”

That’s right. He was calling from a box. That doesn’t mean much, of course; they nearly always do. But this one was in a beer joint or a restaurant, and I think it could be identified—”

“How?” she asked wonderingly. “I mean, how did you find out?”

“Dumb luck,” I said. “You play for the breaks, and sometimes you get one. Most of those booths have fans in ‘em, you know; this one did, and the fan had a bad bearing. It was just noisy enough to hear. And I heard a jukebox start up.”

I stopped, thinking about it. This guy was off his rocker, but still he was smart enough to hang up when that music started. Well, it didn’t mean anything. A sexual psychopath didn’t necessarily have to be stupid; he was just unbalanced.

She frowned. “Then they might have caught him? I mean, if they had listened to you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “With luck, and enough men to cover all the places in town within a few minutes—” Her County police force was none of my business. And they could have been swamped and shorthanded. Police forces usually were.

“You say you were a policeman?” she asked. “Then you aren’t any more?”

“No,” I said.

I put the whisky back in the bag and closed it. The room key was on the desk where she’d dropped it. I put it in my pocket. She stood up. Instead of helping her, I watched to see how she handled it. She was still a little shaky, but apparently all right.

“Thank you for everything, Mr. Chatham,” she said.

“How many times have you fainted lately?”

She smiled ruefully. “It was so ridiculous. I think this was only the second time in my life. But why?”

“You ought to see a doctor. You need a check-up.”

“That’s silly. I’m perfectly healthy.”

“You’re running on your reserve tanks now. And when they’re empty you’re going to crash. You don’t weigh a hundred pounds.”

“A hundred and ten. You don’t know your own strength.”

“Okay,” I said. It was none of my business.

I went out and lifted the other bag from the station wagon. No. 12 was across in the opposite wing. It was in the corner, and there were three doors between it and the end; fifteen rooms altogether. As I put down the cases and fished in my pocket for the key, I turned and looked back across the bleak area baking in the sun. A twenty by forty foot swimming pool right there, I thought, visualizing it: flagstones, deck-chairs, umbrellas, shrubs, grass—It screamed for grass. It was a shame. I went on in.

The room was nicely furnished with a green wall-to-wall carpet and twin beds with dark green spreads and a chest of drawers with a big mirror above it. There were a couple of armchairs. On the left at the rear a door holding a full length mirror opened into the bathroom that was finished in forest-green tile. It was hot, but there was a room air-conditioner mounted in the wall near the closed and curtained window at the rear. I turned it on. In a moment cool air began to flow out. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and took a shower. The towels, I noted, were worn and threadbare, the type of thing you’d expect in a cheap hotel room. Contrasted with the good quality of the permanent furnishings, they told their story. She was probably going broke. I frowned thoughtfully, and then shrugged and poured out a whisky. Lighting a cigarette, I lay down naked on one of the beds.

It would be better when I had something to do. Some kind of hard work, I thought, maybe out in the sun, something I could get hold of with my hands. Building something. That was it. You made something with your hands and it was tangible. There were no people mixed up in it, no fouled-up emotions, no abstractions like right and wrong, and you couldn’t throw away six years’ work in five crazy minutes.

I thought of the house up there on the side of Twin Peaks with the fog coming in like a river of cotton across the city in the late afternoon, and I thought of Nan. There wasn’t any particular feeling about it any more, except possibly one of failure and aimlessness. We’d been divorced for over a year. The house was sold. The job was gone—the job she’d blamed our failure on.

I took a drag on the cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling, wondering if she’d read about it when it finally happened. She’d married again and moved to Santa Barbara, but some of her friends in the Bay area might have written her about it or sent her the clippings. There’d been no word from her, but there was no reason why she should write. She wasn’t the kind for that ‘I told you so’ routine, and there wasn’t much else to say. I hoped they hadn’t sent her that picture. It was a little rough. So was the simple caption: VICTIM OF POLICE BRUTALITY.

I crushed out the cigarette and sat up. If I spent the whole afternoon cooped up in a room with my thoughts I’d be walking up the walls. I thought of Mrs. Langston, and that telephoning creep who had her headed for a crack-up. The phone directory was over on the chest. No, I thought sourly; the hell with it. It was nothing to me, was it?

He’d be gone, anyway, by this time, so what good would it do?

But the idea persisted, and I went over and picked up the small phone book. It presented a challenge, and it would kill the afternoon, wouldn’t it? I grabbed up my pen and a sheet of stationery, and flipped through the yellow pages.

Cafés. . . . There were eight listed, three of them on one street, Springer. That was probably the main drag. I wrote down the addresses.

Taverns. . . . Nine listed.

Beer Gardens. . . . No such heading.

Night Clubs. . . . One, a duplicate listing for one of the taverns.

That made a total of seventeen places, with the possibility of some duplications. I called a cab, and dressed quickly in sports shirt and lightweight trousers. As we drove out I noted one of the places on my list was just across the road. The neon sign bore the outline of a leaping fish and said: Silver King Inn. Well, I’d stop there on the way back.

I watched the street signs as we came into town. The main drag was Springer, all right. I got out of the cab in the second block in front of one of the cafés, paid the driver, and went in. There was a call box, but it wasn’t in a booth. The next one was on the other side of the street in the next block. The phone was in a booth near the back, and there was a jukebox not too far from it. When I closed the door the fan came on, but it wasn’t the one. It made no noise at all. I dropped in a dime, dialed four or five digits at random, pretended to listen for a minute, and hung up, retrieving the coin.

Inside a half-hour I’d hit nine, ranging from the glass-and-chrome upholstered booths of the Steak House to a greasy hamburger-and-chili dive backing the river on Front Street, and from the one good cocktail lounge to dingy beer joints, and I had a fairly good picture of the layout of the town. The river and Front Street ran along the west side. South of Springer was another street of business establishments, and then the railroad and a weather-beaten station, with a colored section beyond the tracks. North of the wide main street were two more parallel to it, with the courthouse on one and a small post office and Federal Building on the other, and beyond them a school or two and the principal residential area. There were four cross streets, beginning with Front. Springer, which was of course also the main road, was the only east-west street that continued across the river; the others terminated at Front.

But I still hadn’t found it. I went on. Most of the places were air-conditioned, and stepping out of them was like walking into an oven. The blacktop paving in the street bubbled and sucked at the soles of my shoes. My shirt was wet with sweat. An hour later, I ground to a halt, baffled. There wasn’t a public telephone booth in town that had a noisy fan.

I still had two places on my list, however. One was the Flamingo, the night club, with an address on West Highway. But the chances were it wouldn’t even have been open at the time he called, around two-fifteen. The other was the Silver King Inn, across the road from the motel. He wouldn’t have called from there, would he? Practically in her lap? But who could guess what a creep would do? I’d go back and hit it. There was a cab stand around the next corner, by the bus station.

I climbed into one, and when we came out on Springer and stopped for the first light, the driver turned and glanced at me over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a pinched-up face, sad brown eyes, and a badly made set of false teeth that were too big and too symmetrical. He looked like a toothpaste commercial.

“Say,” he asked, “ain’t you the man that had the run-in with Frankie?”

“I wouldn’t call it a run-in,” I said. “A little fender-gnashing.”

“I thought I recognized you. Man, you sure been lookin’ the town over, haven’t you? I bet I seen you three or four times.”

I’d lived all my life in a city, and that hadn’t occurred to me. It was a small town, I was a stranger in it, and a pretty big one at that. Add a dark red face, spiky red hair, and you’d never go anywhere unobserved.

“Just wandering around,” I said. “Killing time while they fix the car.”

“Where you staying?”

“Magnolia Lodge motel.”

“Oh,” he said.

I frowned at the back of his neck. There it was again, that same strange reaction you couldn’t quite put a finger on. I thought of the bystanders at the accident, and that foreman at the garage. The light changed. We went on.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing wrong with the motel, I reckon. Little run-down.”

“Well, it’s a big job for a woman alone. I understand her husband’s dead.”

“Oh, he’s dead, all right.”

Maybe I’d run across something new here. Varying degrees of being dead. “What’s that mean?”

“That’s right, you’re from California, ain’t you? I reckon the papers didn’t play it up so big way over there—” He had to skid to a stop at the next cross-roads as the light went red. Then he looked back over his shoulder.

“Langston was murdered,” he said.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was thinking of a soft and filthy laugh, and a whisper.
We know you killed him, don’t we?

I snapped out of it then. “Well, did they catch the party that did it?”

“Hmmmm. Yes and no.”

That was the kind of answer you liked. I sighed, lit a cigarette, and tried again. “Did they, or didn’t they?”

“They got one of ‘em,” he said. “The man. But they ain’t found out to this day who the other one was. Or so they say.”

The light came up green then, and he shifted gears and shot ahead in the afternoon traffic. It made no sense at all, of course. I waited for him to go on.

“Course, now, they could have a pretty good idea, what with one thing and another, if you know what I mean. But they just ain’t sayin’.”

I read him even less. “Wait a minute. It
is
against the law to kill people around here, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, it sure is. But the law also says you got to have evidence before you arrest anybody and go to court.”

It was like probing a raw nerve. Well, I thought angrily, I did have evidence. It just wasn’t enough.

We’d left the business district behind now and were passing the box factory and ice plant on the edge of the town. I wished he’d slow down; there were a dozen questions I wanted to ask. “You mean they got one of them,” I said, “and he admits there was somebody else, but won’t say who? They can’t get
anything
out of him?”

He tossed the words back over his shoulder. “Mister, they won’t never get anything out of that feller. He tried to pull a gun on Calhoun, and he was dead before he hit the ground.”

“Who’s Calhoun?”

“That big cop that stopped you from clobberin’ Frankie.”

“Hell, I wasn’t going to hit him—” I stopped. Of all the idiotic things to waste time on.

“You look like a man that could take care of hisself just about anywhere, but let me give you a tip. Don’t start nothin’ with Calhoun.”

“I’m not about to,” I said impatiently. I was sorry I’d asked.

“You think that’s fat. Mister, I got one word for you. It’s not fat. You know, I seen that man do things—” He paused, sighed, and shook his head. “Salty. What I mean, he’s salty.”

I wished he’d shut up about Calhoun and get on with it. “All right,” I prodded, “you say one was killed instantly, resisting arrest. So he didn’t say anything. Then how do they know there
was
another one? Did Calhoun catch him in the act?”

“No. That is, not exactly—”

We pulled to a stop before the Silver King. Heat shimmered off the highway, and the glare from the white gravel of the parking area was dazzling. I could hear a jukebox inside, and through the big window opposite us I could see some men drinking coffee at a counter. The driver put his arm up on the back of the seat and turned to look at me.