Leave Her to Hell Page 10

  In a phone booth, I used the directory but not the phone. All I wanted was an address, and the address I wanted was Colly Alder’s. Specifically, Colly’s office. I was curious about something I frequently get curious about.

  Why, I mean, does a person who wants a private detective hire one particular private detective instead of another particular private detective? I suppose the same question could be raised relative to doctors and dentists and lawyers. But there are more people who hire doctors and dentists and lawyers, and there are, therefore, more and easier ways to find out about the ones they hire. Very few people hire detectives, relative speaking. And how do the relative few who do, decide which one? Do they just shop around until they find one with good references? Do they just pick a name they like from the yellow pages? It’s an interesting speculation in which I’ve indulged, and right now I was speculating as to why Graham Markley, who could have afforded anybody, had hired Colly, who was practically nobody. The answer was something I wanted to get, and I thought that I might even be willing to pull Colly’s nose to get it.

  The office was in a better building in a better block of a better street than I had expected. The office itself, congruously, was also better. It was, as a matter of fact, a suite of offices, if you can call two rooms a suite. There was an outer office and an inner office, and the inner office had a door with a nice pane of frosted glass and Colly’s name on the glass above the word PRIVATE. The outer office was small, as was the inner; but both were nicely appointed, and one of the nicest appointments in the outer was a small-sized secretary-receptionist. If I had to describe this small-sized secretary-receptionist in a word, I would say that she was cute. She had curly titian hair and sassy eyes and a pert nose and alert breasts and agreeable legs. She had, besides, an indefinable air of being more than merely employed.

  “How do you do?” she said.

  “How do you do,” I said, as polite as anybody. “Is Colly in?”

  “Mr. Alder?”

  “Excuse me. Mr. Alder.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Not I. I just dropped in.”

  “Would you care to state the nature of your business?”

  “I’m not sure. I may only ask Colly a few questions, and I may pull his nose.”

  She flushed and looked at once hostile and wary, which led me to believe that others had dropped in to pull Colly’s nose and that she resented it. She was, definitely, more than merely employed.

  “Who shall I say is calling?” she said coldly.

  “Percy Hand. Tell Colly I’m determined.”

  She stood up and smoothed her skirt over her hips and walked on her agreeable legs into Colly’s private office. In a couple of minutes she came back, leaving the door open behind her.

  “Mr. Alder will see you,” she said.

  “That’s generous of Mr. Alder,” I said.

  I went in and closed the door that she’d left open. Colly was sitting in a swivel chair behind a desk that was big enough to emphasize his runtiness. He didn’t bother to get up and welcome me, but neither did he look as if he wished especially that I hadn’t come. As a matter of fact, he looked rather friendly.

  “Hello, Colly,” I said. “What a fancy den you’ve got here. I didn’t dream you were so prosperous.”

  “Business is good,” he said smugly. “Sit down and have a cigar, Percy.”

  “Cigars even! I’ll just have a cigarette, though, if you don’t mind.” I sat down in an upholstered chair beside his desk and lit the cigarette and looked around the room. “YOU must have quite a bit of overhead here, Colly.”

  “Quite a bit.”

  “Everything nice and fairly expensive. Even that little red-headed item in the outer office. I’ll bet she’s fairly expensive too.”

  “Rosie? I never counted the cost. Anyhow, you get what you pay for.”

  “Sure. It’s a sweet sentiment. It’s fine as long as you keep a good set of values.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’ve got no idea. I had an idea it might sound profound or something.”

  He shifted his weight in the swivel and stuck one of his cigars in his mouth. It was long and fat, king-size, and it looked almost ludicrous in the middle of his midget mug.

  “You didn’t come here to moralize and make an inventory, Percy. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I got to thinking about our little encounter last night, and the more I thought, the curiouser and curiouser I got. Like Alice.”

  “Like who?”

  “Never mind. It’s an allusion. Incidentally, you aren’t sore about what happened, are you, Colly?”

  “It’s all in the business.” He shrugged and rolled his cigar from one corner to the other. “Why should I be sore?’

  “Has Markley called you today?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s going to fire you. I told him he might as well, and he agreed.”

  He sighted me over the unlit tip of the cigar, and for the merest instant his little eyes turned yellow, but then he shrugged again and managed what might have been a laugh.

  “I couldn’t care less, Percy. I was ready to give it up anyhow.”

  “That’s a sensible attitude. Let me congratulate you. What I’ve been curious about, though, is how you got on the job in the first place.”

  “It was a job. It was offered to me. Like you said, I’ve got quite a bit of overhead.”

  “But why you? Colly Alder specifically?”

  He looked at me in silence for a few seconds, and I began to feel that there was something turning over and over in his mind. I’m pretty sure that he was wondering whether to lie or tell the truth or simply to invite me to go to hell, and I was also pretty sure, when he finally answered, that he’d decided for his own reasons to tell me the truth.

  “We’d had a previous contact,” he said. “I did some work for him.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “I tailed his wife when she was on the prowl with Regis Lawler. Back before she and Lawler broke loose and ran.”

  “Why did he want her tailed? According to my information, he wasn’t much concerned with what she did.”

  “True enough. He wasn’t. But it doesn’t hurt to have evidence on your side in case it’s needed. It might save some alimony.”

  “I see. So you tailed Constance Markley. What did it come to?”

  “Nothing. I did the job and made a few reports, and then she and Lawler made their break. That was the end of it.”

  “Were you on her tail the night she disappeared?”

  “I started on it, but I fell off. I lost her.”

  “Where’d you lose her?”

  “At Lawler’s apartment. She went in, but she didn’t come out. Not the way she went in, I mean. They must have left together by a back way or something.”

  I was pretty sure, as I said, that Colly had started telling the truth, but I wasn’t so sure at all that he was keeping it up. Somehow, I had lost my conviction.

  “No wonder Markley’s firing you,” I said. “It seems like every time he’s given you a job, you’ve fumbled it.”

  If he was raw, he didn’t show it. He leaned back and closed his eyes, and his face had in repose the kind of dry and bloodless and withered look that I have seen in the faces of aging midgets. Not that he was a midget, of course. He was just a runt.

  “It makes no difference,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of the racket anyhow. I’m thinking of giving it up.”

  “Is that so? What are you thinking of doing instead?”

  “I don’t know. I been thinking about going south. Out of the country south. Maybe Mexico. Maybe South America. I’ve got a yen to lie on a beach and soak up some sun. I been thinking about taking Rosie and going.”

  “How does Rosie feel about it?”

  “Agreeable.” He opened his eyes and stared at me with an odd kind of quiet assurance. “Rosie’d go anywhere with me, and I wouldn’t go anywher
e without Rosie. She’s the only person in the world I’ve ever trusted, and I guess that’s because she’s the only one who’s ever trusted me.”

  I had again the conviction that he was levelling. Colly and Rosie forever. One of those odd and dedicated pairs that sometimes stick together in the attrition of things that happen. There was a kind of pathos in it that made me, for a moment, feel almost partial to them.

  “You and Rosie at Acapulco,” I said. “It sounds like fun, and it sounds like money.”

  “Could be I’ve got money.” He leaned forward earnestly. “How’d you like to earn a little of what I’ve got?”

  “I wouldn’t. Why do I have to keep repeating to people that I’m poor but honest?”

  “This is honest, Percy. All you have to do to earn a century is one simple thing. One simple thing.”

  “Nothing doing.”

  “Maybe you’d do it as a favor.”

  “Why the hell should I do you a favor?”

  “Look, Percy. I know how you feel about me. You don’t like me, and you don’t trust me, and I don’t give a damn. You’ve got a reputation for being honest, and I need an honest, dependable guy for one hour to do one honest, simple thing.”

  There was something compelling in the runt’s earnestness. He had something on his mind, that was certain, and whatever it was, whatever piece of sordid craft for the sake of Colly Alder, it was something big by the dimensions of Colly’s world.

  “What one honest, simple thing?” I said.

  He took a deep breath and released it in a long sigh that seemed exorbitant as a reaction to my slight concession of asking for information that committed me to nothing.

  “This is it. You go to your office tonight at nine and stay until ten. Just an hour. If I haven’t called by ten, you go see Rosie in her apartment. She’ll have something interesting to tell you. I promise it’ll be interesting.”

  “Nix, Colly.” I shook my head and stood up. “I can smell this thing already. Do I look like the kind of cheap crook who’d get himself involved in one of your shady operations just to do a favor or earn a lousy century?”

  He popped out of his swivel and came around the desk and put a hand on my arm. I looked down at the hand without moving or speaking until it dropped away. In his voice when he spoke was a peculiar mixed quality of entreaty and sincerity and tiredness.

  “You won’t get involved in anything, Percy. I swear to God you won’t. If I call before ten, you’ll never hear anything more about it. If I don’t call, you’ll hear something you’ll be glad to know.”

  “From Rosie?”

  “That’s right. From Rosie.”

  I looked down at him and wondered what it is that makes a man agree in the end to do something he feels he shouldn’t do. Maybe it’s because he’s a fool or avaricious or curious or riding his luck or whatever may be in accordance with the man and the circumstances. In my case, I think, it was because I had this odd conviction of Colly’s sincerity and need and something more. Was it fear? I thought it was. He was, I thought, a bad little egg involved with something bigger and worse, and what he wanted to make of me at most was a kind of precarious insurance against some kind of threat. Besides, he had been connected in at least a minor way with Constance Markley, and he knew that I was trying to find her, and he had now appealed to me to do this one honest and simple thing—me of all persons to whom he might have appealed or might have bought. And why would he have chosen me if there were not a connection between the two that might or might not become clear later?

  “All right,” I said. “From nine to ten. One honest, simple thing.”

  “Thanks, Percy,” he said. “You won’t be sorry.”

  I hoped I wouldn’t, but I wasn’t sure.

  “Give me Rosie’s address,” I said.

  He wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to me, and I folded it four times into a small square and stuck it in the watch pocket of my pants. Then I went out of the better office and the better building and down the better street.

  12

  Since I was not going to Amity that day, I decided that I might as well run out to Fat Albert’s county seat. It was the middle of the afternoon when I got there, and it was like coming home. I had, as I’d told Lud Anderson, been born there, and I had lived there until I was old enough to move away. Afterward, until my mother and the old man were dead and buried, I had gone back now and then for a few hours or a day; but now I hardly ever went if it could be avoided, and I was saddened and depressed when it couldn’t and I did. The reason for this, I think, was that the town reminded me too clearly of what a particular kid there had planned largely to do, and of how little of it had been done by a particular man.

  The county jail was on the east side of town and sat in the middle of a square block of blue grass and crab grass and oaks and maples and catalpa trees. There were lots of catalpa trees in the town. Long green beans come on them in the spring, and in the summer the beans ripen and dry and turn black. They burn as well as a cigarette or a cigar, only faster and hotter; and they give off, when drawn upon, great and satisfying clouds of hot, oily smoke. I guess I smoked, when I was a kid, at least a thousand altogether.

  I parked on one side of the square and walked up across the front yard beneath the oaks and maples and catalpas to the jail. A couple of trusties were working in the yard. One of them was pushing a mower, and the other was trimming along the front walk with a pair of grass clippers. Inside the building, a central hall ran straight ahead for about twenty-five feet and terminated at a steel grill. There were cells at the back, I knew, and a flight of narrow stairs ascended to a second floor, where there were more cells. There were a couple of doors on the left side of the hall. One was closed and one was open, and I went through the open one into a littered office.

  Fat Albert was standing beside a water cooler with a paper cup in his hand. He had shed his coat and was wearing a faded blue shirt and bright yellow tie. The tie had been loosened and the collar of the shirt opened to free the particular chin it entrapped when fastened. Although it was not a hot day, the shirt was soaked with sweat beneath the arms and around the open collar and under the heavy galluses that crossed it to suspended seersucker pants, and the pants were settled comfortably under the maximum bulge of a monstrous belly. I had known Fat Albert in the old days, and he had been fat enough then to deserve the name, but he had continued to grow more gross by the year until now, I judged, he must surely weigh well over three hundred pounds and possibly closer to four. His eyes were hardly more than twin glitters in an encroachment of flesh.

  “Hello, son,” he said. “Come on in. You want a drink of water?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He moved over to a desk and sank into a chair that must have been specially made, or at least enlarged and reinforced. His movement, for a man so monstrous, was incredibly easy and light.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  I sat in the chair he indicated and held my hat in my lap.

  “I guess you don’t remember me,” I said.

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Percy Hand. Miller Hand’s kid.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ,” he said. “Didn’t I have you in jail once for swimming naked in the creek behind the country club?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You did.”

  “I remember. I was a deputy at the time. Jailed half a dozen of you kids that day.” His laugh was an asthmatic wheeze. “God-damn women used to sit on the veranda of the club house and watch you kids swim naked until they got tired of it, then they’d call here and want us to put you in jail for indecent exposure or something. I finally had to do it to get them off my back.”

  “We all understood how it was. You only kept us a couple of hours.”

  “Sure. You can’t keep a kid in jail for swimming naked in a creek. I tried to tell those God-damn women that, but they wouldn’t listen to reason.” He laughed again and peered at me with his l
ittle twin glitters. “Didn’t I hear that you’re a private dick?”

  “I try to be.”

  “Thought so. That’s what I heard. Why the hell would anyone become a private dick?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve often asked myself the same question.”

  “Any money in it?”

  “It’s a living.”

  “I suppose you run into lots of interesting stuff.”

  “Once in a while.”

  “I mean divorce cases. Stuff like that.”

  “I don’t take divorce cases.”

  “Murder?”

  “Not very often. Mostly routine investigations. Pretty dull on the whole.”

  “That’s not the way it is in the books.”

  “I know. I read the books myself to see how it ought to be.”

  He leaned back in the massive chair and laced his fingers in front of his belly. His arms, in accomplishing this, were extended almost to their limit. Staring at me, he shook his head slowly from side to side and sucked his lips audibly.

  “Miller Hand’s kid,” he said. “I never dreamed you’d turn into a private dick.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “You here on business or just for old time’s sake?”

  “A little of both.”

  “What’s the business?”

  “A hit-and-run accident that happened in your county. I wonder if you can tell me anything about it.”

  “Hit-and-run? Haven’t had one for quite a time. When did it happen?”

  I gave him the exact date and watched him close his eyes and suck his lips and cogitate.

  “The victim was a woman named Spatter,” I said. “She was killed, and the driver was never found.”

  He raised his lids, exposing the glitters, and blew moist air between his lips. I had the notion that a mountain of flesh was about to collapse in front of me.

  “It’s coming back to me. The way it looked, this Spatter woman started across the highway just below the crest of a rise. Car came over the rise and hit her. Probably killed her instantly. You’re right about no one ever finding the driver. I tried and the troopers tried, but it wasn’t any good. No witness, no evidence, nothing at all we could ever get hold of. Why you interested?”