the Hills Of Homicide (Ss) (1987) Page 12

  "Never do anything by halves," he said, dropping back into the chair. He looked up at her. "On second thought, I "

  "I'm leaving!" she said hastily, and slipped quickly out of the door.

  He grinned after her and wiped the lipstick from his mouth, then stared at the red smear on his handkerchief, his face sobering. He swore softly and dropped back into the chair. Despite his efforts, he could not concentrate. He walked to the washbasin and wiped away the last of the lipstick.

  What did he know, after all? Tom Marcy was an alcoholic with few friends, and only one or two who knew him at all well. Slim Russell was a wino he occasionally treated, and another had been Happy Day. Marcy minded his own affairs, drank heavily, and was occasionally in jail for it. Occasionally, too, he was found drunk in a doorway on skid row. The cops knew him, knew he had a room, and from time to time, rather than take him to jail, they'd take him to his room and dump him on his bed.

  Then something happened to change him suddenly. A woman? It was unlikely, for he did not get around much where he might have met a woman. Yet suddenly he had straightened up and had become very busy. About what? The pawn ticket might prove something. The ticket was for Tom Marcy's watch. Obviously, he had reached the limit of his funds when some sudden occasion for money arose, and rather than ask his sister for it, he had pawned his watch.

  When he failed to appear at the restaurant, something that had not happened before, Marilyn was worried. She returned to the restaurant several times, but Tom Marcy had not showed up. When the following month came around, she went again, and again he had not appeared. In the meantime, she had watched the newspapers for news of deaths and accidents. Then she hired a detective. Vin Richards was a shrewd operative with connections throughout what has been called the underworld. A week after taking the case, he was found dead in an alley not far from the hotel in which Kip Morgan sat. Vin Richards had taken a knife in the hack and another under the fifth rib. He was very dead when discovered.

  Morgan began with a check of the morgue and a talk to the coroner's assistants. He had checked hospitals and accident reports, then the jails and the police.

  The officers who worked the street in that area agreed that Tom Marcy never bothered anybody. Whenever he could, he got back to his room, and even when very drunk, he was always polite. It was the police who said he had straightened up.

  "Something about it was wrong," one officer commented. "Usually when they get off the bottle they can't leave the street fast enough, but not him. He stayed around, but he wouldn't take a drink."

  Seven weeks and he had vanished completely; seven weeks with no news. "We figured he finally left, went back home or wherever. To tell you the truth, we miss him.

  "The last time I saw him, he was cold sober. Talked with me a minute, asking about some old bum friend of his. He hesitated there just before we drove away, and I had an idea he wanted to tell me something, maybe to say good-by. That was the last time I saw him."

  He had disappeared, but so had Vin Richards. Only they found Vin.

  "Odd," the same officer had commented. "I would never expect Vin to wind up down here. He used to be on the force, you know, and a good man, too, but he wanted to work uptown. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, that crowd." The pawn ticket answered one question but posed another. Tom Marcy needed money, so he hocked his watch, something he had not done before. Why did he need money? If he did need it,. why hadn't he asked Marilyn?

  The news clippings now two of them were his own idea, one he found in Tom's room. And there was a clue, a hint. His clipping and one of Tom's were identical.

  It was a tiny item from the paper having to do with the disappearance of one Happy Day, a booze hound and clown. Long known along East Fifth Street and even as far as Pershing Square, he had been one of Marcy's friends.

  Marcy's second clipping was about a fire in a town sixty miles upstate in which the owner had lost his life. There was little more except that the building was a total loss.

  The last clipping, one Kip Morgan had found for himself, was a duplicate of one Tom Marcy left behind in the hock-shop. The owner, thinking it might be important, had put it away with Tom's watch and mentioned it to Kip Morgan. At Kip's request, the pawnbroker had shown him the clipping. In a newspaper of the same date as the hocking of the watch, Morgan found the same item. It was a simple advertisement for a man to do odd jobs.

  That Marcy had it in his hand when he went to hock his watch might indicate a connection. The pawning of the watch could have been an alternative to answering the ad. Yet Marcy had straightened up immediately and had begun his unexplained running around.

  Could the advertisement tie in with the disappearance of Happy Day? A hunch sent Morgan checking back through the papers. Such an ad appeared in the papers just before the disappearance of Happy Day! Once Kip had a connection, he had followed through. Had there been other disappearances? There had.

  Slim Russell, Marcy's other friend, had vanished in the interval between the disappearance of Happy Day and that of Tom Marcy himself. Apparently, it had been these disappearances that brought about the change in Tom Marcy.

  Why?

  Checking the approximate date of Slim Russell's disappearance, for which he had only the doubtful memories of various winos, he found another such ad in the newspaper. The newspaper's advertising department was a blind alley. On each occasion, the ad came by mail, and cash was enclosed, no check.

  Morgan paced the floor, thinking. Not a breeze stirred, and the day was hot. He could be out on the beach now instead of there, sweating out his problem in a cheap hotel, yet he could not escape feeling he was close to something. Also, and it could be his imagination, he had the feeling he was being watched.

  Richards, cold and cunning as a prairie wolf, an operator with many connections and many angles, had been trapped and murdered. Before that, three men had disappeared and were probably dead.

  Clearing away the Marcy collection, Morgan packed it up, then shifting the gun to a spot beneath his coat, which lay along one side of the bed, he stretched out and fell into an uncomfortable state of half awake, half asleep.

  Hours later, his mind fogged by sleep, he felt rather than heard a faint stirring at the door. His consciousness struggled, then asserted itself. He lay very still, every sense alert, listening.

  Someone was at the door fumbling with the lock. Slowly, the knob turned.

  Morgan lay still. The slightest creak of the springs would be audible. Perspiration dried on his face and he tried to keep his breathing even and natural. Now the darkness seemed thicker where the door had opened. A soft click of the lock as the door closed.

  His throat felt tight, his mouth dry. A man with a knife? Gathering himself, every muscle poised, he waited.

  A floorboard creaked ever so slightly, a dark figure loomed over his bed, and a hand very gently touched his chest as if to locate the spot. Against the window's vague light, he saw a hand lift, the glint of a knife. Traffic rumbled in the street, and somewhere a light went on, and the figure beside the bed was starkly outlined.

  With a lunge, he threw himself against the standing man's legs. Caught without warning, the man's body came crashing down and the knife clattered on the floor. Kip was up on his feet as the man grasped his fallen knife and turned like a cat. Blocking the knife arm, Kip whipped a wicked right into the man's midsection. He heard the whoosh of the man's breath, and he swung again. The second blow landed on the man's face, but he jerked away and plunged for the door.

  Going after him, Kip tangled hiniself in a chair, fell, broke free, and rushed for the door in time to see his attacker go into a door across the hall.

  Doors opened along the hall and there were angry complaints. He whipped open the door into which the attacker had vanished, a light went on, and a man was sitting up in bed. A window stood open, but his attacker was gone.

  "Who was that guy?" the man in bed protested. "What's goin' on?"

  "Did you see him?" The man in bed showed n
o signs of excitement, nor was he breathing hard.

  "See him? Sure, I saw him! He came bustin' in here and I flipped the switch, and he dove out that window!"

  The alley was dark and the fire escape empty. Whoever he had been, he was safely away now. Kip Morgan walked back to his room. They had killed Richards when he got too close for comfort, and now they were after him.

  When the hotel quieted down, he pulled on his shoes and shirt. It was not as late as he had believed, for he had fallen asleep early. He went downstairs into the dingy street; a man was slumped against a building nearby, breathing heavily, an empty wine bottle lying beside him. Another man, obviously steeped in alcohol, lurched against a building staring blearily at Morgan, wondering whether his chance of a touch was worth recrossing the street.

  It was early, as it had been still light when he stretched out on the bed. It was too early for the attacker to have expected Morgan to be in bed unless he already knew he was there. That implied the attacker either lived in the hotel or had a spy watching him.

  Weaving his way down the street through the human driftwood, Morgan considered the problem. The killer of Richards used a knife, and so had his attacker. It was imperative he take every step with caution, for a killer might await him around any corner. Whatever Tom Marcy had stumbled upon, it had led to murder.

  Back to the beginning, then. Marcy had straightened up and quit drinking after the disappearance of Slim Russell. He had known enough to arouse his suspicions and obviously connected it to the disappearance of Happy Day.

  It was not coincidence that the two men who vanished had been known to him, for the winos along the streets nearly all knew each other, at least by sight. Many times, they had shared bottles or sleeping quarters, and Marcy might have known sixty or seventy of them slightly.

  What aroused Marcy's suspicions? Obviously, he had begun an investigation of his own. But why? Because of fear? Of loyalty to the other derelicts? Or for some deeper, unguessed reason?

  Another question bothered Morgan. How had the mysterious attacker identified him so quickly? How had he known about Richards? Richards, of course, had been a private operator for several years, but he, Kip Morgan, had never operated in that area and would be unknown to the underworld except by name from his old prizefighting days.

  Something had shocked Tom Marcy so profoundly that he stopped drinking. The idea that was seeping into Morgan's consciousness was one he avoided. To face it meant suspicion of Marilyn Marcy, but how else could the attacker have known of him? Yet why should she hire men, pay them good money, and then have them killed? If not Marilyn then somebody near her, but that made no sense, either. The distance from East Fifth to Brentwood was enormous, and those who bridged it were going down, not up. It was a one-way street lined with empty bottles. Instead of returning to his room, Morgan went to the quiet room where Tom Marcy had lived when not drinking heavily. It was a curious side of the man that during his drinking spells, he slept in flophouses or in the hideouts of other winos. In the intervals, . he returned to the quiet, cheap little room where he read, slept, and seemed to have been happy.

  At daybreak Morgan was up and made a close, careful search of the room. It yielded exactly nothing.

  Three men missing and one murdered; at least two of the missing men had answered ads. What of Marcy? Had he done the same?

  The idea gave Morgan a starting point, and he went down into the street. The crowding, pushing, often irritable crowd had not yet reached the downtown streets. The buses that fed their streams of humanity into the downtown areas were still gathering their quotas in the outskirts, miles away.

  The warehouse at the address in the advertisement was closed and still. He walked along the street on the opposite side, then crossed and came back down. Several places were opening for business, a feedstore, a filling station, and a small lunch counter across the way.

  The warehouse itself was a three-story building, large and old. There was a wooden door, badly in need of paint, a blank, curtained window, and alongside the door a large vehicle entrance closed by a metal door that slid down from above.

  Kip crossed the street and entered the cafT. The place was empty but for one bleary-eyed bum farther down the counter. The waitress, surprisingly, was neat and attractive. Kip smiled, and his smile usually drew a response from women. "How's about a couple of sinkers? And a cup of Java?"

  She brought the order, hesitating before him. "It's slow this morning."

  "Do you do much business? With all these warehouses, I should imagine you'd do quite well."

  "Sometimes, when they are busy, our breakfast and lunch business can be good. As for the late trade, there's just enough to keep us open. We get some truck and cab drivers in here at all hours, and there's always a few playing the pinball machines."

  Kip indicated the warehouse across the street. "Don't they hire men once in a while? I saw an ad a few days ago for a handyman."

  "That place?" She shrugged. "It wouldn't be your sort of work. Occasionally, they hire a wino or street bum, and not many of those. I imagine it's just for cleaning up, or something, and they want cheap labor.

  "There was a fellow who came in here a few times. I think he went to work over there. At least he waited around for a few days waiting for somebody to show up."

  "Did he actually get a job?"

  "I believe so. He waited, but when they actually did show up he did not go over. Not for the longest time. He was like all of them, I guess, and really didn't want work all that bad. He did finally go over there, I think."

  "He hasn't been in since?"

  "I haven't seen him. But they haven't been working over there, either. If they've been around at all, it was at night."

  "They work at night?"

  "I don't know about that, but one day I saw the shade was almost to the bottom, and the next day it was a little higher. Again, it was drawn to the bottom."

  Kip smiled and asked for a refill. A smart, observant girl.

  "I'd make a bet the guy you speak of was the one I talked to. We were looking over the ads together." Kip squinted his eyes as if trying to remember. "About forty? Forty-five, maybe? Medium height? Hair turning gray? Thin face?"

  "That's the one. He was very pleasant, but I think he'd been sick or something. He was very nice, but jittery, on edge, like. He was wearing a pin-striped suit, neatly pressed, and you don't see that down here."

  So Marcy had been there, too? Kip sipped his coffee while she worked at the back bar doing some of her side work.

  "What kind of business are they in?" He turned his side to the counter so he could look across the street. "I could use some work myself, although I'm not hurting." "You've got me. I have no idea what they do, although I see a light delivery truck, one of those panel jobs, once in a while. One of their men, too, comes in once in a while, but he doesn't talk much. He's a blond, stocky, Swedish Morgan Morgan glanced down the counter at the somnolent bum whose head was bowed over his coffee cup.

  Through another cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie, they talked. Twice, truck drivers came in, had their coffee and departed, but Kip lingered, and the waitress seemed glad of the company.

  They talked of movies, dancing, the latest songs, and a couple of news items.

  The warehouse across the street was rarely busy, but occasionally they moved bulky boxes or rolls of carpet from the place in the evening or early morning. Some building firm, she guessed.

  The bum got slowly to his feet and shuffled to the door. In the doorway, he paused, and his head turned slowly on his thin neck. For a moment, his eyes met Morgan's. They were clear, sharp, and intelligent. Only a fleeting glimpse and then the man was outside. Kip got to his feet. How much had the man heard? Too much, that was sure. And he was no stewbum, no wino.

  Kip walked to the door and stood looking after the bum, if such he was. The man was shuffling away, but he turned his head once and looked back. Kip was well inside the door and out of view. Obviously the man had pause
d in the door to get a good look at Morgan. He would remember him again.

  The idea disturbed him. Of course, it might be only casual interest. Nevertheless there was a haunting familiarity about the man, a sort of half recognition that would not quite take shape.

  There was no time to waste. The next step was obvious. He must find out what went on inside that warehouse, who the two men were who had been seen around and what was in the boxes or rolls of carpet they carried out. The last carried unpleasant connotations to Kip Morgan. More than ever, he was sure that Tom Marcy had been murdered. Except for the narrow rectangle of light where the lunch counter was, all the buildings were blank and shadowed when Kip Morgan returned. Nor was there movement along the street, only the desolation and emptiness that comes to such streets after closing hours.

  Like another of the derelicts adrift along neighboring streets, sleeping in doorways or alleys, Morgan slouched along the street, and at the corner above the warehouse, he turned and went along the back street to the alley. No one was in sight, so he stepped quickly into the alley and stopped still behind a telephone post.

  He waited for the space of two minutes, and nobody appeared. Staying in the deeper shadows near the building Morgan went along to the loading dock at the back of the warehouse.

  A street lamp threw a triangle of light into the far end of the alley, but otherwise it was in darkness. A rat scurried across the alley, its feet rustling on a piece of torn wrapping paper. Kip moved along the hack of the building, listening. There was no sound from within. He tried the door and it was locked.