Murder Most Foul Page 16

  Behind the registration desk in the office, a woman was avidly reading a magazine. Her shoulders and bosom were massive. Her hair was blond, piled on her head in coroneted braids. There were rings on her fingers, a triple strand of cultured pearls around her thick white throat. She was the woman Donny had described to me.

  I pulled the screen door open and said rudely, “Who are you?”

  She glanced up, twisting her mouth in a sour grimace. “Well! I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

  “Sorry. I thought I’d seen you before somewhere.”

  “Well, you haven’t.” She looked me over coldly. “What happened to your face, anyway?”

  “I had a little plastic surgery done. By an amateur surgeon.”

  She clucked disapprovingly. “li you’re looking for a room, we’re full up for the night. I don’t believe I’d rent you a room even if we weren’t. Look at your clothes.”

  “Uh-huh. Where’s Mr. Salanda?”

  “Is it any business of yours?”

  “He wants to see me. I’m doing a job for him.”

  “What kind of a job?”

  I mimicked her: “Is it any business of yours?” I was irritated. Under her mounds of flesh she had a personality as thin and hard and abrasive as a rasp.

  “Watch who you’re getting flip with, sonny boy.” She rose, and her shadow loomed immense across the back door of the room. The magazine fell closed on the desk: it was Teen-age Confessions. “I am Mrs. Salanda. Are you a handyman?”

  “A sort of one,” I said. “I’m a garbage collector in the moral field. You look as if you could use me.”

  The crack went over her head. “Well, you’re wrong. And I don’t think my husband hired you, either. This is a respectable motel.”

  “Uh-huh. Are you Ella’s mother?’’

  “I should say not. That little snip is no daughter of mine.”

  “Her stepmother?”

  “Mind your own business. You better get out of here. The police are keeping a close watch on this place tonight, if you’re planning any tricks.”

  “Where’s Ella now?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. She’s probably gallivanting off around the countryside. It’s all she’s good for. One day at home in the last six months, that’s a fine record for a young unmarried girl.” Her face was thick and bloated with anger against her stepdaughter. She went on talking blindly, as if she had forgotten me entirely. “I told her father he was an old fool to take her back. How does he know what she’s been up to? I say let the ungrateful filly go and fend for herself.”

  “Is that what you say, Mabel?” Salanda had softly opened the door behind her. He came forward into the room, doubly dwarfed by her blond magnitude. “I say if it wasn’t for you, my dear, Ella wouldn’t have been driven away from home in the first place.”

  She turned on him in a blubbering rage. He drew himself up tall and reached to snap his fingers under her nose. “Go back into the house. You are a disgrace to women, a disgrace to motherhood.”

  “I’m not her mother, thank God.”

  “Thank God,” he echoed, shaking his fist at her. She retreated like a schooner under full sail, menaced by a gunboat. The door closed on her.

  Salanda turned to me. “I’m sorry, Mr. Archer. I have difficulties with my wife, I am ashamed to say it. I was an imbecile to marry again. I gained a senseless hulk of flesh and lost my daughter. Old imbecile!” he denounced himself, wagging his great head sadly. “I married in hot blood. Sexual passion has always been my downfall. It runs in my family, this insane hunger for blondeness and stupidity and size.” He spread his arms in a wide and futile embrace on emptiness.

  “Forget it.”

  “If I could.” He came closer to examine my face. “You are injured, Mr. Archer. Your mouth is damaged. There is blood on your chin.”

  “I was in a slight brawl.”

  “On my account?”

  “On my own. But I think it’s time you leveled with me.”

  “Leveled with you?”

  “Told me the truth. You knew who was shot last night, and who shot him, and why.”

  He touched my arm, with a quick, tentative grace. “I have only one daughter, Mr. Archer, only the one child. It was my duty to defend her, as best as I could.”

  “Defend her from what?”

  “From shame, from the police, from prison.” He hung one arm out, indicating the whole range of human disaster. “I am a man of honor, Mr. Archer. But private honor stands higher with me than public honor. The man was abducting my daughter. She brought him here in the hope of being rescued. Her last hope.”

  “I think that’s true. You should have told me this before.”

  “I was alarmed, upset. I feared your intentions. Any minute the police were due to arrive.”

  “But you had a right to shoot him. It wasn’t even a crime. The crime was his.”

  “I didn’t know that then. The truth came out to me gradually. I feared that Ella was involved with him.” His flat black gaze sought my face and rested on it. “However, I did not shoot him, Mr. Archer. I was not even here at the time. I told you that this morning, and you may take my word for it.”

  “Was Mrs. Salanda here?”

  “No sir, she was not. Why should you ask me that?”

  “Donny described the woman who checked in with the dead man. The description fits your wife.”

  “Donny was lying. I told him to give a false description of the woman. Apparently he was unequal to the task of inventing one.”

  “Can you prove that she was with you?”

  “Certainly I can. We had reserved seats at the theatre. Those who sat around us can testify that the seats were not empty. Mrs. Salanda and I, we are not an inconspicuous couple.” He smiled wryly.

  “Ella killed him then.”

  He neither assented, nor denied it. “I was hoping that you were on my side, my side and Ella’s. Am I wrong?’’

  “I’ll have to talk to her, before I know myself. Where is she?”

  “I do not know, Mr. Archer, sincerely I do not know. She went away this afternoon, after the policemen questioned her. They were suspicious, but we managed to soothe their suspicions. They did not know that she had just come home, from another life, and I did not tell them. Mable wanted to tell them. I silenced her.” His white teeth clicked together.

  “What about Donny?”

  “They took him down to the station for questioning. He told them nothing damaging. Donny can appear very stupid when he wishes. He has the reputation of an idiot, but he is not so dumb. Donny has been with me for many years. He has a deep devotion for my daughter. I got him released tonight.”

  “You should have taken my advice,” I said, “taken the police into your confidence. Nothing would have happened to you. The dead man was a mobster, and what he was doing amounts to kidnapping. Your daughter was a witness against his boss.”

  “She told me that. I am glad that it is true. Ella has not always told me the truth. She has been a hard girl to bring up, without a good mother to set her an example. Where has she been these last six months, Mr. Archer?”

  “Singing in a night club in Palm Springs. Her boss was a racketeer.”

  “A racketeer?” His mouth and nose screwed up, as if he sniffed the odor of corruption.

  “Where she was isn’t important, compared with where she is now. The boss is still after her. He hired me to look for her.”

  Salanda regarded me with fear and dislike, as if the odor originated in me. “You let him hire you?”

  “It was my best chance of getting out of his place alive. I’m not his boy, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You ask me to believe you?”

  “I’m telling you. Ella is in danger. As a matter of fact, we all are.” I didn’t tell him about the second black Cadillac. Gino would be driving it, wandering the night roads with a ready gun in his armpit and revenge corroding his heart.

  “My dau
ghter is aware of the danger,” he said. “She warned me of it.”

  “She must have told you where she was going.”

  “No. But she may be at the beach house. The house where Donny lives. I will come with you.”

  “You stay here. Keep your doors locked. If any strangers show and start prowling the place, call the police.”

  He bolted the door behind me as I went out. Yellow traffic lights cast wan reflections on the asphalt. Streams of cars went by to the north, to the south. To the west, where the sea lay, a great black emptiness opened under the stars.

  The beach house sat on its white margin, a little over a mile from the motel. For the second time that day, I knocked on the warped kitchen door. There was light behind it, shining through the cracks. A shadow obscured the light.

  “Who is it?” Donny said. Fear or some other emotion had filled his mouth with pebbles.

  “You know me, Donny.”

  The door groaned on its hinges. He gestured dumbly to me to come in, his face a white blur. When he turned his head, and the light from the living room caught his face, I saw that grief was the emotion that marked it. His eyes were swollen, as if he had been crying. More than ever he resembled a dilapidated boy whose growing pains had never paid off in manhood.

  “Anybody with you?”

  Sounds of movement in the living room answered my question. I brushed him aside and went in. Ella Salanda was bent over an open suitcase on the camp cot. She straightened, her mouth thin, eyes wide and dark. The .38 automatic in her hand gleamed dully under the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling.

  “I’m getting out of here,” she said, “and you’re not going to stop me.”

  “I’m not sure I want to try. Where are you going, Fern?”

  Donny spoke behind me, in his grief-thickened voice: “She’s going away from me. She promised to stay here if I did what she told me. She promised to be my girl—”

  “Shut up, stupid.” Her voice cut like a lash, and Donny gasped as if the lash had been laid across his back

  “What did she tell you to do, Donny? Tell me just what you did.”

  “When she checked in last night with the fella from Detroit, she made a sign I wasn’t to let on I knew her. Later on, she left me a note. She wrote it with a lipstick on a piece of paper towel. I still got it hidden, in the kitchen.”

  “What did she write in the note?”

  He lingered behind me, fearful of the gun in the girl’s hand, more fearful of her anger.

  She said: “Don’t be crazy, Donny. He doesn’t know a thing, not a thing. He can’t do anything to either of us.”

  “I don’t care what happens, to me or anybody else,” the anguished voice said behind me. “You’re running out on me, breaking your promise to me. I always knew it was too good to be true. Now I just don’t care any more.”

  “I care,” she said. “I care what happens to me.” Her eyes shifted to me, above the unwavering gun. “I won’t stay here. I’ll shoot you if I have to.”

  “It shouldn’t be necessary. Put it down, Fern. It’s Bartolomeo’s gun, isn’t it? I found the shells to fit it in his glove compartment.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I talked to Angel.”

  “Is he here?” Panic whined in her voice.

  “No. I came alone.”

  “You better leave the same way then, while you can go under your own power.”

  “I’m staying. You need protection, whether you know it or not. And I need information. Donny, go in the kitchen and bring me that note.”

  “Don’t do it, Donny. I’m warning you.”

  His sneakered feet made soft, indecisive sounds. I advanced on the girl, talking quietly and steadily: “You conspired to kill a man, but you don’t have to be afraid. He had it coming. Tell the whole story to the cops, and my guess is they won’t even book you. Hell, you can even become famous. The government wants you as a witness in a tax case.”

  “What kind of a case?”

  “A tax case against Angel. It’s probably the only kind of rap they can pin on him. You can send him up for the rest of his life like Capone. You’ll be a heroine, Fern.”

  “Don’t call me Fern. I hate that name,” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “I hate everything connected with that name. I hate myself.”

  “You’ll hate yourself more if you don’t put down that gun. Shoot me and it all starts over again. The cops will be on your trail, Angel’s troopers will be gunning for you.”

  Now only the cot was between us, the cot and the unsteady gun facing me above it.

  “This is the turning point,” I said. “You’ve made a lot of bum decisions and almost ruined yourself, playing footsie with the evilest men there are. You can go on the way you have been, getting in deeper until you end up in a refrigerated drawer, or you can come back out of it now, into a decent life.”

  “A decent life? Here? With my father married to Mabel?”

  “I don’t think Mabel will last much longer. Anyway, I’m not Mabel. I’m on your side.”

  I waited. She dropped the gun on the blanket. I scooped it up and turned to Donny: “Let me see that note.”

  He disappeared through the kitchen door, head and shoulders drooping on the long stalk of his body.

  “What could I do?” the girl said. “I was caught. It was Bart or me. All the way up from Acapulco I planned how I could get away. He held a gun in my side when we crossed the border; the same way when we stopped for gas or to eat at the drive-ins. I realized he had to be killed. My father’s motel looked like my only chance. So I talked Bart into staying there with me overnight. He had no idea who the place belonged to. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew it bad to be something drastic. Once I was back with Angel in the desert, that was the end of me. Even if he didn’t kill me, it meant I’d have to go on living with him. Anything was better than that. So I wrote a note to Donny in the bathroom, and dropped it out the window. He was always crazy about me.”

  Her mouth had grown softer. She looked remarkably young and virginal. The faint blue hollows under her eyes were dewy. “Donny shot Bart with Bart’s own gun. He had more nerve than I had. I lost my nerve when I went back into the room this morning. I didn’t know about the blood in the bathroom. It was the last straw.”

  She was wrong. Something crashed in the kitchen. A cool draft swept the living room. A gun spoke twice, out of sight. Donny fell backward through the doorway, a piece of brownish paper clutched in his hand. Blood gleamed on his shoulder like a red badge.

  I stepped behind the cot and pulled the girl down to the floor with me. Gino came through the door, his two-colored sports shoe stepping on Donny’s laboring chest. I shot the gun out of his hand. He floundered back against the wall, clutching at his wrist.

  I sighted carefully for my second shot, until the black bar of his eyebrows was steady in the sights of the .38. The hole it made was invisible. Gino fell loosely forward, prone on the floor beside the man he had killed.

  Ella Salanda ran across the room. She knelt, and cradled Donny’s head in her lap.

  Incredibly, he spoke, in a loud sighing voice: “You won’t go away again, Ella? I did what you told me. You promised.”

  “Sure I promised. I won’t leave you, Donny. Crazy man. Crazy fool.”

  “You like me better than you used to? Now?”

  “I like you, Donny. You’re the most man there is.”

  She held the poor insignificant head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-colored at the mouth. It was Donny who went away.

  His hand relaxed, and I read the lipstick note she had written him on a piece of porous tissue:

  Donny: This man will kill me unless you kill him first. His gun will be in his clothes on the chair beside the bed. Come in and get it at midnight and shoot to kill. Good luck. I’ll stay and be your girl if you do this, just like you always wished. Love. Ella.

  I looked at the pair on the floor. She was rock
ing his lifeless head against her breast. Beside them, Gino looked very small and lonely, a dummy leaking darkness from his brow.

  Donny had his wish and I had mine. I wondered what Ella’s was.

  Old Willie

  William P. McGivern

  This is a story I’ve heard told by old-timers around Chicago newspaper offices. They don’t insist it’s true, of course, since it hangs chiefly on the word of a reporter who was far more at home in speak-easies than he ever was at a typewriter. Still, parts of the tale can’t be explained away as the splintered dreams of a drunk. Maybe that’s why the old- timers go on telling the story…

  It begins in 1927, prohibition time, when Chicago was run by a band of Sicilian immigrants under the austere leadership of a man named Al Capone. And it also begins when an amiable little man, whom everyone knew only as Old Willie, became interested in a shy Danish girl named Inger Anderson.

  Willie was the handy man and janitor around the West Side boardinghouse where Inger roomed. He was a straight-backed, lightstepping character, with drooping gray mustaches and pale-blue eyes. He could have been in his middle sixties or seventies—it was hard to say. Everyone at the boardinghouse liked him because of his obliging, courteous manner and consistent good humor, but they didn’t know very much about him; nor care a great deal.

  Old Willie’s interest in Inger was purely fatherly, of course. He knew she’d come from a Minnesota village and he felt she needed looking after in the big city. He fussed over her as if she were a baby. Inger was pretty capable despite her shyness, but she was touched by Old Willie’s interest in her, and they became good friends.

  Inger’s ambition was to become a concert singer. She had a pleasant, untrained voice which wouldn’t have excited a small-town choirmaster, but she loved to sing and was ready to do almost anything to fulfill her dreams. She signed up for voice lessons in the evenings and found herself a job as a hotel maid through an employment agency. She was thrilled at her luck in finding work so quickly. What she didn’t know was that the employment-agency director, spotting her as an earnest but unknowing Minnesota specimen, had assigned her to the hotel which was the headquarters of the Capone mob—the old Star at Wabash Avenue near Twelfth Street. Considering this, considering that the Star was filled with as choice a collection of gorillas as were ever assembled under one roof, Inger got along O.K. for the first few weeks. She cleaned the rooms, made beds and kept her eyes cast down when the sharply dressed torpedos stared insolently at her lovely, graceful figure and beautiful legs. One of the hoodlums, Blackie Cardina, a Sardinian with alert eyes and a strong, bold jaw, stared longer than any of the others, and then grinned.