The Little Sister (5 page)

And then, for even less reason, I saw Orfamay Quest’s face without the glasses, and polished and painted and with blonde hair piled up high on the forehead with a braid around the middle of it. And bedroom eyes. They all have to have bedroom eyes. I tried to imagine this face in a vast close-up being gnawed by some virile character from the wide-open spaces of Romanoff’s bar.

It took me twenty-nine minutes to get to the Van Nuys Hotel.

8

Once, long ago, it must have had a certain elegance. But no more. The memories of old cigars clung to its lobby like the dirty gilt on its ceiling and the sagging springs of its leather lounging chairs. The marble of the desk had turned a yellowish brown with age. But the floor carpet was new and had a hard look, like the room clerk. I passed him up and strolled over to the cigar counter in the corner and put down a quarter for a package of Camels. The girl behind the counter was a straw blonde with a long neck and tired eyes. She put the cigarettes in front of me, added a packet of matches, dropped my change into a slotted box marked “The Community Chest Thanks You.”

“You’d want me to do that, wouldn’t you,” she said, smiling patiently. “You’d want to give your change to the poor little underprivileged kids with bent legs and stuff, wouldn’t you?”

“Suppose I didn’t,” I said.

“I dig up seven cents,” the girl said, “and it would be very painful.” She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel. I put a quarter after the seven cents. She gave me her big smile then. It showed more of her tonsils.

“You’re nice,” she said. “I can see you’re nice. A lot of fellows would have come in here and made a pass at a girl. Just think. Over seven cents. A pass.”

“Who’s the house peeper here now?” I asked her, without taking up the option.

“There’s two of them.” She did something slow and elegant to the back of her head, exhibiting what seemed like more than one handful of blood-red fingernails in the process. “Mr. Hady is on nights and Mr. Flack is on days. It’s day now so it would be Mr. Flack would be on.”

“Where could I find him?”

She leaned over the counter and let me smell her hair, pointing with a half-inch fingernail toward the elevator bank. “It’s down along that corridor there, next to the porter’s room. You can’t miss the porter’s room on account of it has a half-door and says PORTER on the upper part in gold letters. Only that half is folded back like, so I guess maybe you can’t see it.”

“I’ll see it,” I said. “Even if I have to get a hinge screwed to my neck. What does this Flack look like?”

“Well,” she said, “he’s a little squatty number, with a bit of a mustache. A sort of chunky type. Thick-set like, only not tall.” Her fingers moved languidly along the counter to where I could have touched them without jumping. “He’s not interesting,” she said. “Why bother?”

“Business,” I said, and made off before she threw a half-nelson on me.

I looked back at her from the elevators. She was staring after me with an expression she probably would have said was thoughtful.

The porter’s room was halfway down the corridor to the Spring Street entrance. The door beyond it was half open. I looked around its edge, then went in and closed it behind me.

A man was sitting at a small desk which had dust on it, a very large ashtray and very little else. He was short and thickset. He had something dark and bristly under his nose about an inch long. I sat down across from him and put a card on the desk.

He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read. He picked half of a cigar out of his ashtray and burned his nose lighting it.

“What’s the gripe?” he growled at me.

“No gripe. You Flack?”

He didn’t bother to answer. He gave me a steady look which may or may not have concealed his thoughts, depending on whether he had any to conceal.

“Like to get a line on one of the customers,” I said.

“What name?” Flack asked, with no enthusiasm.

“I don’t know what name he’s using here. He’s in Room 332.”

“What name was he using before he came here?” Flack asked.

“I don’t know that either.”

“Well, what did he look like?” Flack was suspicious now. He reread my card but it added nothing to his knowledge.

“I never saw him, so far as I know.”

Flack said: “I must be overworked. I don’t get it.”

“I had a call from him,” I said. “He wanted to see me.”

“Am I stopping you?”

“Look, Flack. A man in my business makes enemies at times. You ought to know that. This party wants something done. Tells me to come on over, forgets to give his name, and hangs up. I figured I’d do a little checking before I went up there.”

Flack took the cigar out of his mouth and said patiently: “I’m in terrible shape. I still don’t get it. Nothing makes sense to me any more.”

I leaned over the desk and spoke to him slowly and distinctly: “The whole thing could be a nice way to get me into a hotel room and knock me off and then quietly check out. You wouldn’t want anything like that to happen in your hotel, would you, Flack?”

“Supposing I cared,” he said, “you figure you’re that important?”

“Do you smoke that piece of rope because you like it or because you think it makes you look tough?”

“For forty-five bucks a week,” Flack said, “would I smoke anything better?” He eyed me steadily.

“No expense account yet,” I told him. “No deal yet.” He made a sad sound and got up wearily and went out of the room. I lit one of my cigarettes and waited. He came back in a short time and dropped a registration card on the desk. Dr. G. W. Hambleton, El Centro, California was written on it in a firm round hand in ink. The clerk had written other things on it, including the room number and daily rate. Flack pointed a finger that needed a manicure or failing that a nailbrush.

“Came in at 2.47 P.M.,” he said. “Just today, that is. Nothing on his bill. One day’s rent. No phone calls. No nothing. That what you want?”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him. You think I stand out there by the desk and take pictures of them while they register?”

“Thanks,” I said. “Dr. G. W. Hambleton, El Centro. Much obliged.” I handed him back the registration card.

“Anything I ought to know,” Flack said as I went out, “don’t forget where I live. That is, if you call it living.”

I nodded and went out. There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.

9

Room 332 was at the back of the building near the door to the fire escape. The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives. The sand bucket under the racked fire hose was full of cigarette and cigar stubs, an accumulation of several days. A radio pounded brassy music through an open transom. Through another transom people were laughing fit to kill themselves. Down at the end by Room 332 it was quieter.

I knocked the two longs and two shorts as instructed. Nothing happened. I felt jaded and old. I felt as if I had spent my life knocking at doors in cheap hotels that nobody bothered to open. I tried again. Then turned the knob and walked in. A key with a red fiber tab hung in the inside keyhole.

There was a short hall with a bathroom on the right. Beyond the hall the upper half of a bed was in view and a man lay on it in shirt and pants.

I said: “Dr. Hambleton?”

The man didn’t answer. I went past the bathroom door towards him. A whiff of perfume reached me and I started to turn, but not quickly enough. A woman who had been in the bathroom was standing there holding a towel in front of the lower part of her face. Dark glasses showed above the towel. And then the brim of a wide brimmed straw hat in a sort of dusty delphinium blue. Under that was fluffed-out pale blond hair. Blue ear buttons lurked somewhere back in the shadows. The sunglasses were in white frames with broad flat side bows. Her dress matched her hat. An embroidered silk or rayon coat was open over the dress. She wore gauntleted gloves and there was an automatic in her right hand. White bone grip. Looked like a .32.

“Turn around and put your hands behind you,” she said through the towel. The voice muffled by the towel meant as little to me as the dark glasses. It was not the voice which had talked to me on the telephone. I didn’t move.

“Don’t ever think I’m fooling,” she said. “I’ll give you exactly three seconds to do what I say.”

“Couldn’t you make it a minute? I like looking at you.”

She made a threatening gesture with the little gun. “Turn around,” she snapped. “But fast.”

“I like the sound of your voice too.”

“All right,” she said, in a tight dangerous tone. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way you want it.”

“Don’t forget you’re a lady,” I said, and turned around and put my hands up to my shoulders. A gun muzzle poked into the back of my neck. Breath almost tickled my skin. The perfume was an elegant something or other, not strong, not decisive. The gun against my neck went away and a white flame burned for an instant behind my eyes. I grunted and fell forward on my hands and knees and reached back quickly. My hand touched a leg in a nylon stocking but slipped off, which seemed a pity. It felt like a nice leg. The jar of another blow on the head took the pleasure out of this and I made the hoarse sound of a man in desperate shape. I collapsed on the floor. The door opened. A key rattled. The door closed. The key turned. Silence.

I climbed up to my feet and went into the bathroom. I bathed my head with a towel from the rack soaked with cold water. It felt as if the heel of a shoe had hit me. Certainly it was not a gun butt. There was a little blood, not much. I rinsed the towel out and stood there patting the bruise and wondering why I didn’t run after her screaming. But what I was doing was staring into the open medicine cabinet over the basin. The upper part of a can of talcum had been pried off the shoulder. There was talcum all over the shelf. A toothpaste tube had been cut open. Someone had been looking for something.

I went back to the little hallway and tried the room door. Locked from the outside. I bent down and looked through the keyhole. But it was an up-and-down lock, with the outer and inner keyholes on different levels. The girl in the dark glasses with the white rims didn’t know much about hotels. I twisted the night latch, which opened the outside lock, opened the door, looked along the empty corridor, and closed the door again.

Then I went towards the man on the bed. He had not moved during all this time, for a somewhat obvious reason.

Beyond the little hallway the room widened towards a pair of windows through which the evening sun slanted in a shaft that reached almost across the bed and came to a stop under the neck of the man that lay there. What it stopped on was blue and white and shining and round. He lay quite comfortably half on his face with his hands down at his sides and his shoes off. The side of his face was on the pillow and he seemed relaxed. He was wearing a toupee. The last time I had talked to him his name had been George W. Hicks. Now it was Dr. G. W. Hambleton. Same initials. Not that it mattered any more. I wasn’t going to be talking to him again. There was no blood. None at all, which is one of the few nice things about an expert ice-pick job.

I touched his neck. It was still warm. While I was doing it the shaft of sunlight moved away from the knob of the ice pick towards his left ear. I turned away and looked the room over. The telephone bell box had been opened and left open. The Gideon Bible was thrown in the corner. The desk had been searched. I went to a closet and looked into that. There were clothes in it and a suitcase I had seen before. I found nothing that seemed important. I picked a snap-brim hat off the floor and put it on the desk and went back to the bathroom. The point of interest now was whether the people who had ice picked Dr. Hambleton had found what they came for. They had had very little time.

I searched the bathroom carefully. I moved the top of the toilet tank and drained it. There was nothing in it. I peered down the overflow pipe. No thread hung there with a small object at the end of it. I searched the bureau. It was empty except for an old envelope. I unhooked the window screens and felt under the sills outside. I picked the Gideon Bible off the floor and leafed through it again. I examined the backs of three pictures and studied the edge of the carpet. It was tacked close to the wall and there were little pockets of dust in the depressions made by the tacks. I got down on the floor and examined the part under the bed. Just the same. I stood on a chair, looked into the bowl of the light fixture. It contained dust and dead moths. I looked the bed over. It had been made up by a professional and not touched since. I felt the pillow under the dead man’s head, then got the extra pillow out of the closet and examined its edges. Nothing.

Dr. Hambleton’s coat hung over a chair back. I went through that, knowing it was the least likely place to find anything. Somebody with a knife had worked on the lining and the shoulder padding. There were matches, a couple of cigars, a pair of dark glasses, a cheap handkerchief not used, a Bay City movie theater ticket stub, a small comb, an unopened package of cigarettes. I looked at it in the light. It showed no sign of having been disturbed. I disturbed it. I tore off the cover, went through it, found nothing but cigarettes.

That left Dr. Hambleton himself. I eased him over and got into his trouser pockets. Loose change, another handkerchief, a small tube of dental floss, more matches, a bunch of keys, a folder of bus schedules. In a pigskin wallet was a book of stamps, a second comb (here was a man who really took care of his toupee), three flat packages of white powder, seven printed cards reading Dr. G. W. Hambleton, O.D. Tustin Building, El Centro, California, Hours 9—12 and 2—4, and by Appointment. Telephone El Centro 5-0406. There was no driver’s license, no social-security card, no insurance cards, no real identification at all. There was $164 in currency in the wallet. I put the wallet back where I found it.

I lifted Dr. Hambleton’s hat off the desk and examined the sweatband and the ribbon. The ribbon bow had been picked loose with a knifepoint, leaving hanging threads. There was nothing hidden inside the bow. No evidence of any previous ripping and restitching.

This was the take. If the killers knew what they were looking for, it was something that could be hidden in a book, a telephone box, a tube of toothpaste, or a hatband. I went back into the bathroom and looked at my head again. It was still oozing a tiny trickle of blood. I gave it more cold water and dried the cut with toilet paper and flushed that down the bowl. I went back and stood a moment looking down on Dr. Hambleton, wondering what his mistake had been. He had seemed a fairly wise bird. The sunlight had moved over to the far edge of the room now, off the bed and down into a sad dusty corner.

I grinned suddenly, bent over and quickly and with the grin still on my face, out of place as it was, pulled off Dr. Hambleton’s toupee and turned it inside out. As simple as all that. To the lining of the toupee a piece of orange-colored paper was fastened by Scotch tape, protected by a square of cellophane. I pulled it loose, turned it over, and saw that it was a numbered claim check belonging to the Bay City Camera Shop. I put it in my wallet and put the toupee carefully back on the dead egg-bald head.

I left the room unlocked because I had no way to lock it.

Down the hall the radio still blared through the transom and the exaggerated alcoholic laughter accompanied it from across the corridor.