Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (2 page)

“
Ay, Dios
,” Mrs. Ganguish whispered.

“Cynthia got friends or family?”

“She been here two months, mister. Nobody calls her except this Clyde. I think she don’t give nobody her number. Family, I don’t know. First thing, when this Clyde brings her here, I ask, I want to know what kind of family my girls are from. She says they all are dead. No aunties or cousins, no nothing. I don’t believe her. Everybody has somebody. I almost don’t take her because maybe she lies too much. But I think I give her a week or so, watch what kind of girl she is.”

“She’s behaved herself?”

“You bet. She’s working two jobs, you know? One with a lawyer. Six days a week, she’s leaving at twenty to nine o’clock, to run for the bus. Maybe you never seen her in the morning. She don’t wear perfume, smells like Palmolive, no kind of makeup except a dab of lip rouge.”

From upstairs came a giggle. Dolores heaved herself out of the love seat, marched to the parlor door, and yelped, “Scat, you vixens!” She leaned against the door frame and sighed. “Every day she wears a nice plain dress and flat heels so she don’t look like no giant. By six o’clock she’s home just long enough to dress fancy and speed off in the taxicab. I don’t know what she’s eating.”

“Usually a T-bone, swordfish on Fridays, and a salad. At Rudy’s. How about the other girls? They her friends?”

“No, sir. They don’t like her because she don’t want no friends. When she got time for friends? On Sunday she goes to church or shopping for a new fancy dress or shoes.”

“What church?”

“Catholic. I don’t know which one she’s going to.”

For a while Mrs. Ganguish had seemed to warm to his questions. Now her voice was getting brusque, and when Hickey asked to have a look in Cynthia’s room, she woodened her lips and squinted at him as though he’d asked to borrow her underwear. When he argued that the girl, who’d always acted responsibly, must be in a jam, Dolores suggested they call in a cop. He told her he used to be one and gave her a Hickey and Weiss business card. Finally, dubiously, she led him toward the stairs.

The two girls who’d eyed him and a new one, a frizzy brunette in a white robe stretched and belted so tight the resulting bulges above and beneath made Hickey’s eyes water, glided out of the first upstairs room to meet him on the landing. Stiffly, as though on a dare, the dwarfish girl stepped forward.

“You’re Moony’s boss, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Lucky her.”

The brunette squirmed forward. “Take us out for a drink, cutie, we’ll tell you what you need to know.”

“Wash your mouth, Brenda,” Mrs. Ganguish snapped. She tugged Hickey’s arm, hustled him down the hallway to the third door. She kept a tight grip on his arm while her other hand fumbled in several pockets of her housecoat until she found the passkey. Like a burglar on her virgin outing, she needed both of her hands, one steadying the other, to turn the key in the lock and shove open the door.

The room was as small as those in old hotels. A single bed required half the floor. On the faded once-rose-colored wall above the bed hung the portrait of a handsome man about forty with dark hair and worried eyes bright blue as Cynthia’s were green. The portrait was so expert that Hickey looked for the signature. Joshua Bair. Better known for the landscapes Hickey’d seen when his daughter Elizabeth dragged him to the art museum.

The bed was piled with a half dozen large pillows, each with a differently flowered pillowcase. The bedspread was solid black. The small window had no curtain, only a lowered manila-colored shade. Beside it sat a small mahogany desk with a vanity mirror on top and drawers left open, same as they were on the oak dresser against the opposite wall, next to the door. The dresser top was littered with stacks of clothes, a towel, and a flatiron. To the side of the dresser was a hat rack on the wall, every post occupied, ladies’ hats with lace or flowers, beside the cowboy sombrero, sailor’s cap, marine campaign hat, fedora, and panama, which she’d worn as costumes at Rudy’s. In place of a closet, a clothes rack stood in the corner. A dozen or so dresses and a few coats hung there.

Hickey reached for a pull chain, flicked on the overhead light. He stepped around Mrs. Ganguish and into the narrow space between the bed and the desk. On the left side of the desk, leaning against the wall, were three stuffed dolls—a ragged teddy bear, a dusty white elephant, and the remains of what must’ve been a raccoon. The right half of the desk was crowded with jars of perfume and makeup, half of them open. Between the makeup and the animals he found the stuff that chilled his brain and fingers. A drawing in what looked like pencil and crayon, and an open tin of bullets.

Dolores wedged in beside him. “What you got there?”

The bullets were .22 caliber. The tin looked about half empty. A few of the bullets had spilled out onto the picture.

“She have a gun?”

“No sir, I don’t allow no guns. I only got ladies here. They are good girls, except Brenda, who only gets to stay because she’s my cousin’s daughter. By marriage,” she added, as if that explained Brenda’s libertine behavior.

Hickey swept the bullets off the picture and picked it up. He dug into a coat pocket for his glasses and put them on.

The sketch was on legal-size white paper, above a note a few sentences long written in a stylized hand at the bottom. The drawing was no Joshua Bair, but its message seemed clear. On the dirt floor of a room with cracked brown walls, a female lay. From the awkward angle of her arms, out to her sides and turned upward at the elbows, and from the way her face fell sideways, cheek against the floor, she looked dead.

A thin person stood over her. A smallish long-haired man or shapeless female, leaning down, hands pressed on the inside of the fallen woman’s knees as if to push her half-spread legs farther apart.

Both faces were turned away. The fallen person had dark hair with flecks of yellow and red crayon. She had broad shoulders, a long waist, legs so long they looked to have been stretched. Wide, flat breasts with dark nipples. Behind the hipbone, where the flesh of buttocks started, it looked like the woman had a tattoo. Eleven tiny circles in three upright rows, five circles in the middle one. Each was connected to the closest on every side by a branch. The lowest circle on the right was colored green.

The standing person was less defined. Even the lines were blurred, as if the artist had intentionally smeared them, implying that this might not be a person at all but an apparition, a spook or vision out of a half-lost dream.

Mrs. Ganguish, who’d been gazing over his arm, reached tentatively for the picture. Hickey nudged her hand away and read the note on the bottom.

“Beloved, you saw through him from the start. He truly is a fiend. You must rescue us, before your wife and daughter are lost. Otherwise, I have been deluded these many years, and loved a cowardly, pitiful man. Every day the Fiend grows bolder. Soon I may die.”

Hickey checked the back. A blank page, no signature or date. “Whew. What the hell?” He passed the picture to Mrs. Ganguish.

She read the note first, her lips buzzing as they moved, and sat back onto the bed as she studied the picture. The fingers of her free hand lifted to her eyes as if to pluck them out.

“Make any sense?” Hickey asked.

Dolores wagged her head fast like a tremor, and Hickey started rifling through the desk drawers, looking for an envelope with an address, or something. He found more bottles of makeup, a stack of sheet music, receipts from Marston’s. A drawer half full of crucifixes and rosary beads. Another full of tags that came off flowers and gifts, greeting cards from her admirers. Most of the names Hickey knew from Rudy’s. Captain Mitchell. Barney Pottinger, the stockbroker. Both of the Schwartz brothers.

Hickey gathered the cards and tags to sort through later, crammed them into a coat pocket.

“You gonna steal them, mister?”

“Borrow,” Hickey said, and plucked the picture from her hand. He folded it carefully along previous folds and stuck it into a separate pocket inside his coat. He stood up, squeezed past Dolores, and went around the bed to the dresser by the door. Three drawers, the top one open. He slid it farther out.

“Get out of there,” Dolores snapped.

Hickey lifted the scarves and shawls, found nothing. The second drawer had leather purses, small ones in a half dozen colors, and all the sweaters Hickey’d seen her wear. The bloodred angora was his favorite, the way it tucked snugly around the waist and the short sleeves form-fitted her graceful white arms. “Looks like she didn’t take much with her, except a couple dozen bullets.” He lifted a hot-water bottle and a heating pad. Nothing.

Mrs. Ganguish whacked him from behind with her elbow. “I tell you stay out of there, mister. You already got a dirty picture, what else you need?”

The bottom drawer was stuffed with bras, stockings, garter belts, and panties, cut low and with lacy designs, mail-order stuff, Hollywood- or Paris-style. Dolores grabbed his bicep and tugged. “That’s far enough. You’re no police. Out of here, now, you don’t got to paw her dainties.”

With his free hand, Hickey scooped underthings while the landlady grabbed the hat off him and slapped him on the crown with it. Still he kept rooting in the drawer until he found the red ledger.

By the time he got it out and shut the drawers, his head stung and his hat was limp and shapeless as a hobo’s. He snatched it from the landlady, mashed it onto his head. Mrs. Ganguish tried to grab the book. He had to keep nudging her back while he leafed through it. A journal or diary.

“You give me her stuff, mister,” Dolores shouted furiously, her brown face turning a color like redwood, her eyes bulged and sparking. “Maybe Cynthia walks in here tonight. What do I tell her, I let a man go stealing her secrets? Give me!”

She grabbed for the book. He pressed it to his chest and made for the door. He had to use his shoulder to move her out of the way. When he got past her, she socked him in the kidneys.

The dwarf, Brenda, and Goldilocks, all in pajamas, suddenly blocked his way. Instinct told him to bend his knees, lower his head, and run that gauntlet like when he played fullback for Hollywood High, yet he tried to slither gently between them. For thanks he got his cheek clawed and coat sleeve ripped. He raced down the stairs, outside, and away. He yelled from the car, “Simmer down. Jesus. Blame it on me. Tell her I picked the lock.”

Goldilocks heaved a flowerpot that crashed on the sidewalk as he pulled away.

Chapter Three

A mile north of Old Town on the Coast Highway, Hickey crossed the bridge over the dry river and pulled into an all-night truck stop, Milly’s Texaco Beanery. He wanted a jolt of coffee, a moment of peace to recover from being turned against by those females, and a quiet place to read Cynthia’s book.

With Milly’s windows shaded, the neon sign out, her place looked like a deserted roadside fruit stand. A marine truck convoy had commandeered most of the gravel parking lot. Three old rust-spotted cars with Kentucky plates waited in line at the single gas pump. A gathering of hillbillies milled around them. Inside at the register, a balding, weather-beaten fellow in overalls was giving Milly hell. Arms stiff at his sides, voice quavering, he seemed about to crack from the strain.

Milly looked stocky as a wrestler, with oranging peroxide hair and makeup applied liberally. Because her voice could squawk and bellow at the same time, which alone might’ve sent the hillbilly running, Hickey thought she could be the offspring of a buccaneer and an Amazon parrot. Leaning patiently on the cash register, she let the hick unload on her. Hickey gave her a salute.

In the one long booth, a gang of marine drivers hooted over some gag. A sergeant, albino blond, reached under the table and grabbed a fifth of brown liquor from the next guy, shot it into his coffee, then spotted Hickey noticing. The marine crimped his bushy eyebrows and steeled his eyes to duel with Hickey’s. After a few seconds, he gave a sheepish wince and turned to his coffee.

Hickey took the corner booth closest to the lamp, laid his hat and the book on the table, reached for his glasses and fitted them on, and opened the book. Red, leather-bound, with ledger pages. From Woolworth’s. The first six pages, numbered in the top right corner, beginning with “83,” were filled with medium large feminine handwriting.

Milly showed with a mug of coffee. She set it in front of the ledger, between Hickey’s arms and under his nose. He hardly noticed. When Hickey got engaged in reading, Japs could’ve raided the city by land and air without his catching on.

The story ended there, on page 89. Hickey sat brooding on the last few lines while Milly showed, topped off his coffee, stood over him. Finally she set the coffee pot on the table and kneaded Hickey’s shoulders while he eased out of his trance.

“Tom, how you fixed for gas stamps?”

“I got a few.”

“That’s all, huh?” Milly leaned on the table and bent close enough to nibble Hickey’s ear. “Story is, you got pals on the ration board, is what’s making Rudy’s the hot spot—you holding all the prime beef in town.”

Hickey turned on her. “That’s a lousy story, babe,” he growled. “Don’t bother telling it to anybody else.”

She jerked upright and grabbed her hips. “We’re pals, Tom. Only reason I asked was, you seen the fella up front. Family’s been working their way from Kentucky, doing what they had to for little bits of gas. They got three dry tanks. Claims there’s a job of dock work in San Pedro his cousin’s saved for him, but only to tomorrow morning.”

Hickey already had his wallet out. He peeled off fifteen gallons—a month’s worth—of ration stamps. Milly took them, leaned close again, and gave him a kiss on the bald spot. “What I like best about you, Tom, is you take off your hat when you step inside. You got manners. You oughta get the hat blocked, though. Losing its shape. I’m gonna bring you a hunk of banana cream pie.”

“Naw. Had one earlier.”

“Coffee’s on the house, then.”

Hickey nodded and turned to his coffee, to shut her up before he lost his fix on the ledger.

Besides the general stuff he’d learned about Cynthia, such as she was several times wackier than he’d guessed, he’d collected a few details. She had a father who might be dead or alive, and she doted on the guy. If he was alive, he probably had tuberculosis. She believed in God, in some guardian saint, and maybe in the devil. Also, it seemed she didn’t want to call anybody by name. Instead she entitled them. The Mormon Tramp, Miss V. And the Bitch who wanted her dead.

The Bitch, Hickey mused. A relative, neighbor, longtime friend, maybe her daddy’s lover or ex. He could check the pawnshops, see if anybody’d given up a Motorola radio in the past year. There wouldn’t be many. You could sell one on the street for ten times what you gave for it a couple years ago, now with all the new ones going straight to the forces overseas. He could ask around the U. S. Grant Hotel for a Mormon hustler.

The only real names besides Stan Kenton’s were of local personalities. Bobby Wisdom, a pianist, regular entertainer at the Del Mar Club, Madeline’s hangout, and Mr. Bair, whose paintings, one of which the Bitch had slung at Daddy, sold for plenty. The same guy that painted the portrait over Cynthia’s bed. Hickey would’ve bet Cynthia didn’t know either of them personally or she would’ve dropped their names in conversation. Maybe the only way she acted like a seventeen-year-old was in idolizing even the marginally famous.

The best odds seemed in hunting for Daddy. He’d been typing a brief. Could be a lawyer. Tomorrow Hickey’d call the county bar association, ask for an attorney named Moon. He wasn’t in the phone book. Clyde McGraw had called all the Moons who were.

Daddy might be dead or down with TB. Maybe in Greenwood, the mortuary where most Catholics got planted. Or Mercy Hospital. Dolores Ganguish claimed Cynthia attended a Catholic church, and the girl’s desk had held a couple pounds of crosses and rosary beads. Needing somewhere to start, Hickey’d try the Catholic angle. Cynthia hadn’t mentioned being a Catholic—God hadn’t figured into their chats. She always steered the talk to music, gossip about jazz people and bigshots around town, and the war. In the
Tribune
and the
L.A. Times
, she followed every move as though she had a loved one in each battle. Her night off, she’d stand in line at the Spreckels, not so much for the movie as for the newsreels.

Outside Milly’s, a little Kentucky girl squatted beside the rear fender of a ’32 Ford coupe, making a pool on the gravel. As soon as she hopped into the backseat, the three old cars pulled out onto Pacific Coast Highway. Hickey got stuck behind the caravan. Cruising speed about ten mph. One car’s dragging muffler shot up sparks, the brightest spots on the highway. In the dark, with dimmed headlamps on some cars, lights out on the rest, you didn’t want to cross the center line to pass. If he used the shoulder, passed them on the right, he risked bowling over a gang of Mexican hoboes. Yet if he kept driving ten mph, impatience would detonate his brain. He flipped his headlights on and off a couple dozen times until the hillbillies got the message. One by one they edged over. Hickey whizzed by at twenty-three mph.

He turned left onto Grand Avenue, headed west on Pacific Beach Drive, and cut left on Fanuel, which dead-ended on the bay. He pulled up by the posts at the dead end because his carport was already being used. A blue ’39 Caddy. Paul Castillo’s.

Hickey locked the car and stood awhile, Cynthia’s book tucked under his arm, breathing the salt air and fragrances of his neighbors’ orange trees and their trellised wall of bougainvillea. He listened to the ripples from a motorboat lap against his pier, to the squawk of a parrot, somebody’s pet that had gotten loose and haunted the neighborhood, perching atop the eucalyptus, pepper, and palm trees. Finally he started toward the house, restrained himself from kicking a dent in Castillo’s chariot. He wondered why the sight of it riled him so deeply. Maybe it was just that the guy had swiped his parking spot again. Typical for Castillo to act like every morsel belonged to him. Or Milly’s remark about the rationing could’ve piqued Hickey’s conscience, which he’d been struggling to ignore. He didn’t know what kind of strings Castillo was pulling on the ration board. Logic told him not to question, to stash the money away without looking to see if it was dirty. That was the problem with money—you wouldn’t find much both clean and numbered higher than twenty.

So Hickey’d concentrated on his tasks. He’d decorated Rudy’s, and now he was hosting, motivating, and pacifying the employees. While Castillo procured supplies, created the menu, kept the books. Sure, he wasn’t Hickey’s first choice for a business partner. Madeline had brought Castillo to him. But in some things she knew best, like which guy had the Midas touch.

She and Castillo stood in the kitchen holding glasses, Madeline wearing a nightgown Hickey hadn’t glimpsed since last summer. It showed a square yard of pale shoulders, back, and chest. She was immune to the sun. Though she’d lie out and swim every summer day, her skin never darkened past the shade of milk with a dash of nutmeg. Her hair was down—wavy, tawny brown with golden highlights, the bangs flipped over her right eye. Her cheeks were flushed and her mouth, even poutier than usual, had fresh cherry lipstick. She put the glass to her lips, chewed on the rim, finally took a sip.

“Find your songbird?” Her voice was lusciously dark and cool. When she used to sing, tough fellows would dance gaily and smooth characters trying to charm her stuttered like Boy Scouts.

Hickey touched her hair, kissed her cheek. “Not yet. Who said I was looking?”

“Clyde phoned. Said call him as soon as you’ve got a clue. She’s a precious little thing.”

Turning to Castillo, Hickey tried to summon a cordial voice. “What brings you over, Paul?”

The Cuban set his drink on the counter, folded his hands, turned them backwards and stretched them out in front of him. The knuckles cracked. With his thick ebony hair, pomaded flat, always hatless, Castillo looked a few years younger than Hickey, though he wasn’t. Their birthdays were only weeks apart. His face was mountain-shaped, his nose a jutting peak. A little taller than Hickey, a few inches over six feet, he was thin, erect as a mannequin. The black linen suit with burgundy pinstripes hung perfectly on him. His voice was what people called liquid. Like vinegar, Hickey thought.

“Visiting, it’s all. I been watching the talent at the Mission Beach Ballroom. I hope tomorrow, Tom, you will go there and listen to Charley Wayne’s Orchestra. If we having to break the contract with McGraw, they can open for us in one week, day after Christmas, that is if you don’t find the girl.”

“Snoop out any clues?” Madeline drawled.

“I got a few ideas.”

The Cuban bowed shortly to Madeline, reached for Hickey’s hand, and shook. Castillo’s hand, too lean and hot, always felt like it belonged to a different species. Maybe a spider monkey. “I will leave you to your pleasures.”

As the Cuban disappeared, Madeline lit a Pall Mall. Watching her husband as if he were a coiled snake, she let the match flame until it reached her fingertips, then flipped it into the sink. “Why the frown, Tom?”

“Tired, a little gloomy. Lots on my mind.”

“Such as?”

“How come you’re wearing that outfit?”

Her eyes flashed then darkened, as though she were plugged in and lightning had struck a power line. “When Clyde called, I figured you might stop by the songbird’s place and still get home early.”