By Blood We Live Part 40

Something warm, and coppery, and salty, and so good. The windshield wipers went ka-thump ka-thump, and her Ford must've had something going on with the engine, because there was another regular thumping, high and hard and fast. My mouth wouldn't close all the way. I kept making that wheezing sound, and she finally risked another look over the seat at me.

"I'm taking you to Samaritan General," she said, and I stared at the sheen of her dark hair. "You sound terrible."

"No." Thank G.o.d, it was one word I could say without whatever was wrong with my mouth interfering. "No hospital." The slurring was back, like my jaw was broken but I wasn't feeling any pain. As a matter of fact, now that the headache was gone, the only thing bothering me was how thirsty I was.

Another mile squished under the tires. She turned the defroster up, and that regular thumping sounded like her car was about to explode, it was going so fast. "Mr. Becker, you are beginning to worry me." She lit a Chesterfield, keeping her eyes on the road, and when she opened the window to blow the smoke out the smell of the rain came through and I realized what that thumping was.

It was Miss Dale's pulse. I was hearing her heartbeat. And the tires touching the road. And each raindrop smacking the hardtop. The hiss of flame as she lit the cigarette showed the fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, and I realized Miss Dale was nervous.

"Don't worry, dollface. Everything's fine. Take me..."

Where can you go, Jack? The lady in green knows your office, and if she thinks you're dead- "Take me to your house." Only it was more like hauwsch, like I was a G.o.dd.a.m.n German deli-owner, and when I ran my tongue along the inside of my teeth everything got interesting. My tongue rasped, and I lost whatever it was Miss Dale would have said because the taste of copper filled my mouth and I suddenly knew what I was thirsty for.

The knowledge might have made me scream if I hadn't gone limp against the seat as if someone had sapped me, because it was warm and the twisting in my gut receded a little bit, and because G.o.ddammit, after a man claws his way up out of his own grave and breaks into a diner, he deserves a little rest.

The green dress hugged her curves like the Samaritan freeway hugs the coast, and under the little veil on her hat those eyes were green too. She even had green gloves, and she accepted a light from me with a small nod and raised eyebrows, settling her emerald velvet clutch purse in her lap.

"You come highly recommended, Mr. Becker." A regular Bryn Mawr purr, over the sound of Miss Dale typing in the front. The lady kept her back straight as a ruler and the lamp on my desk made her out to be pale, not one of those sun-bunnies.

Miss Dale stopped typing.

"Glad to hear that." I made it noncommittal, as casual as my shoes on the desk. It was five o'clock and already dark, the middle of winter, and I was behind on the rent.

"Mr. Becker?" Miss Dale stood tall and angular in the doorway. "Will you be needing anything else?" Her cat-tilted dark eyes met mine, and she had a sheaf of files in her capable, narrow hands. If she got a little more meat on her, she'd be a knockout. If, that is, you could chip through the ice.

Right now she was giving me the chance to say we were closing and the dame in green could come back another time. I waved a languid hand. "No thanks, Miss Dale. I'll see you in the morning."

"Very good, sir." Frosty as a Frigidaire. Miss Dale spent a few moments moving around the office, locking the files in the front cabinet, and the dame in green said nothing until my secretary left, locking the door behind her and her heels click-tapping down the hall, as efficiently as the rest of her.

The sign outside my office window blinked. We were up over an all-night lunch counter and newsstand, and the big neon arrow drenched the room with waves of yellow and red after dark once Miss Dale turned the lights off. The couch opposite my desk looked inviting, and it would have looked even more inviting if I hadn't been looking eviction in the face, I suppose.

"So what do you want me to do, Mrs....?" I made it into a question.

"Kendall. Mrs. Arthur Kendall. Mr. Becker, I want you to follow my husband."

It smelled like Chanel and dirt. And even though I was under a pile of blankets, I was lying on something soft and I shot up straight, swallowing a scream. It was the sound a bullet makes when it hits a skull, the explosion that was death.

My fingers were around something soft, but with a harder core. My other hand flashed up, catching Miss Dale's other wrist as she tried to slap me. Silk fluttered-she was dressed in a wrapper, a red kimono with a sun-yellow dragon breathing orange fire.

She yelped, and I realized I was half-naked, only in a pair of mud-crusted skivvies. Someone had undressed me and put me in a bed made of pink fluff, pillows spilling over the edges. The Chanel was her, and the dirt? That was me, stinking up a nice dame's bed.

"Mr. Becker," she said, and it was my imperturbable secretary again, the belt of her kimono loosened enough to show a strap of her-well, I'm only human, of course I looked. "Mr. Becker, let go of me at once."

The nightmare receded. I let go of her wrists. She retreated two steps, b.u.mping her hip against a bedside table loaded with a jar of cold cream and a stack of big leatherbound books that looked straight out of Dr. Caligari's library, as well as a lamp with a frilly pink shade and an economy-sized box of Kleenex. We stared at each other, and the fine damp texture of her skin looked better than it ever had.

She rubbed at her right wrist, the one I'd grabbed first. "You were screaming," she whispered.

For once, I had no smart-aleck thing to say. Of course I'd been screaming.

Miss Dale drew herself up, tightening her kimono with swift movements. She was barefoot, and her dark hair wasn't pinned back. It tumbled down to her shoulders in a ma.s.s of curls, and it looked nice that way. She folded her arms and tried her best glare on me, and if I hadn't been lounging half-naked in what I suspected was her bed, it might have worked.

"I'm sorry." It was all I could say.

"You'd better be. You're wanted for murder."

I closed my mouth with a snap and started thinking furiously.

"You disappeared three days ago, Mr. Becker. The police tore apart your office. I am sad to report they also took your last three bottles of Scotch. They questioned me rather extensively, too."

My throat was dry. The thirst was worse than ever, and that distracting sound was back, the high hard thumping. It was her pulse, and it sounded like water in the desert. It sounded like the chow bell in basic training.

Her heart going that fast meant she was terrified. But there she stood, high color on her cheeks, arms folded and shoulders back, ready to take me to task once again.

Three days? "Murder?" I husked.

"The murder of Arthur Kendall, Mr. Becker. His widow identified you as the killer." Hung on the bedroom wall behind her was a Photoplay page of Humphrey Bogart in a fedora, leering at the camera like the b.u.m he was. I was beginning to suspect my practical Miss Dale had a soft spot for leering b.u.ms.

"The Kendall job." It was difficult to think through the haze in my head and the sound of her pulse, calming down a little now, thank G.o.d.

There was something very wrong with me.

"The Kendall job," she echoed. "Naturally I have an extra copy of the file you prepared. And naturally I didn't mention it to the police, especially to Lieutenant Grady. I think you are many things, Mr. Becker-a disgraceful drunk and an immoral and unethical investigator, just to mention a few. But a murderer? Not the man who does widow cases for free." She rubbed at her right wrist.

So I'm a sucker for dames with hard stories. So what? "I didn't kill anyone." It was a relief to say it. "You've got the file?"

"Naturally." She dropped her arms. "I would appreciate an explanation, but I'm only your secretary."

"You're a stand-up doll," I managed. "The Kendall job went bad, Miss Dale. I didn't kill him."

Being that practical type, she got right down to bra.s.s tacks. "Then who did, Mr. Becker?"

Even though the thirst was getting worse by the second and the sound of her pulse wasn't helping, I knew the answer to that one. "Get me that file, Dale. And while you're at it, can I have some clothes or am I just going to swing around like Tarzan?"

If she'd muttered something unladylike under her breath as she swept from the room I wouldn't have blamed her.

I cleaned the rest of the mud off in her pink-and-yellow bathroom. She had an apartment on the seedier side of Parth Street, but everything was neat and clean and prim as you'd expect from the woman I'd once caught alphabetizing my incoming mail. She even had a suit hanging on the back of the door for me, one of mine. The door didn't shut quite tight, and I could hear her moving around the kitchen, and hear that maddening, delicious, irresistible thumping.

I looked like I'd been dug up that morning. Which, if you think about it, I had. There was an ugly flushed-red mark over my right eye, a divot I could rest my fingertip in. It was tender, and pressing on it made my whole head feel like a pumpkin again. The back of my skull was sore too, seamed and scarred under my short wet hair. There were bruised bags of flesh under my eyes, and my cheeks had sunken in, and I looked yellow as a jaundiced Chinaman.

I peeled away my shirt collar and looked. A fresh, bruised mark above the collarbone, two holes that looked like a tiny pair of spikes had gone into my throat. The bruise was fever-hot, and when I touched it, the rolling thunder of a heartbeat roared in my ears so loud I grabbed at Miss Dale's scrubbed-white sink and had to fight to retain consciousness.

What the h.e.l.l happened to me?

The last thing I remembered was Let.i.tia Kendall wiping her mouth and the skinny, nervous redhead putting the barrel of the gun to my forehead. Right where that livid mark was, the one with speckles of dark grit in an orbit around its sunken redness. Then that sound, like an artillery sh.e.l.l inside my skull...

...and waking up in a cold, cold grave. Wanting a drink, but not my usual drink. Not the kind that went down the gullet like liquid fire and detonated in the belly, wrapping a warm haze between me and the rest of the world.

You're insane, Jack. You got shot in the head.

The trouble with that was, I shouldn't be insane. I should be dead.

But I had a pulse too. Just like Miss Dale. Who was starting to smell less like Chanel and more like...

Food.

A sizzling sound drifted down the hall. I tied the shoes she'd thoughtfully left right outside the bathroom door and saw her front door, and the warm light of the kitchen, a square of yellow sanity. She had her back turned and was fiddling with the stove, and a steak waited on a plate on the drainboard. She poked at the pan with a fork, and I was moving up quietly, just as if I was going to sap her.

Three steps. Two.

She never even turned around.

I reached out, saw my hand, yellow in the yellow light, shaking as it brushed past Miss Dale's hip...and fastened on the plate with the steak.

She jumped, the fork went clattering, and I retreated to the table. If I hadn't been so cold I would have been sweating buckets. I dropped down in one of Miss Dale's two straight-backed, frill-cushioned chairs next to her cheap gold-speckled kitchen table, and I found out why my mouth hadn't been working properly.

It was because the fangs had grown, and I licked the plate clean of b.l.o.o.d.y juice before burying my teeth in the raw meat and sucking as if it was mother's milk.

Dale's hand clapped over her mouth. She pinched so hard her cheeks blanched white from the pressure of her fingers, and her cat-tilted dark eyes turned big as the landlord's on rent day. The pan sizzled, I sucked and sucked, and the two sounds almost managed to drown out the thunder of her pulse again.

Her free hand shot out and jerked the pan from the stove. The gas flame kept burning, a hissing circle of blue, and Miss Dale stared at me, holding the pan like she intended to storm the barricades with it.

I kept sucking. It wasn't nearly enough, but the thirst retreated.

This was what I wanted. When it was as tasteless as dry paper, I finished licking the plate clean, and I dropped the wad of drained meat down.

I looked at Miss Dale. She looked at me. I searched for something to say. Dames on her salary don't buy steak every day. She must've thought I'd be hungry.

"I still need a secretary, dollface."

Her throat worked as she swallowed. Then she put the pan down on an unlit burner. She peeled her fingers away from her mouth, the bruise still a dark bracelet on her right wrist. It took her two tries before she could get the words out.

"There's another steak in the fridge, Jack. It's...raw."

Winter nights last forever, and the rain was still coming down. Dale's wrist was swelling, but she wrapped it in an Ace and told me in no uncertain terms she was fine. She drove the Ford cautiously, the wipers ticking, just like her pulse. I spread the file out in my lap and checked for tails-we were clean.

Down on Cross Street, she parked where we had a good view of The Blue Room, and I paged through the file. Pictures of Arthur Kendall, millionaire, who had come back from Europe with a young wife who had begun to suspect him of fooling around.

If I hadn't been so interested in the greenbacks she fanned out on my desktop, I wouldn't have taken the job. Divorce jobs aren't my favorites. They end up too sticky.

This one had just gotten stickier. Kendall wasn't just a millionaire, he was as dirty as they come. I'd been careful, sure, but I'd gotten priceless little shots of him canoodling with the heavies in town-Lefty Schultz who ran the prost.i.tution racket, Big Buck Beaudry who provided muscle, Papa Ginette whose family used to run gin and now ran dope. Big fan of tradition, Papa Ginette.

I'd thought I was just getting into a dicey situation until I snapped a few shots of Kendall and his wife at a pricey downtown joint where the jazz was hot and the action was hotter. The Blue Room had a waiting list ten years long, but money talks-and it was Willie Goldstein's place. If Goldstein hadn't owned more than half the cops in town, he'd have been in Big Sing years ago.

Another late-night appointment, and the dame in green waltzed in my door just as Miss Dale was waltzing out. I spread the shots out and told her Kendall wasn't cheating. She'd married a dirty son of an unmentionable, but he wasn't hanging out with the ladies.

Those green eyes narrowed, and she picked up the glossy of the crowd outside Goldstein's. There they were, Kendall and the missus and the redheaded, ratfaced gent who followed Kendall like glue. He wasn't heavy muscle-his name was Shifty Malloy, and he had a dope habit the size of Wrigley Field-but he was dapper in a suit and lit Kendall's cigarettes.

Mrs. Kendall set the photo down again, and smiled at me. She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray and I glanced down at the pictures again. Something very strange occurred to me.

I remember thinking that for a dame who wore green so much, she had awfully red lips. I remember snapping the shot, and I remember the flash of white calf as she turned to follow her husband past the velvet ropes and into the restaurant.

But there in black and white was Kendall, and Malloy, and a crowd of other schmucks thinking it was hot stuff to pay five bucks for a steak and ogle the other rich schmucks, and there was a s.p.a.ce where the dame in green should have been.

But Let.i.tia Kendall wasn't in the picture. She was sitting across the desk from me, the last ghost of her cigarette rising in the air, and her face suddenly shifted under its little green veil. She came over the desk at me like a feral tiger, and everything went black...

"There he is," Dale whispered. "The redhead."

And sure enough, there was Shifty Malloy, dapper as ever in tails, getting out of a shiny new Packard. The Blue Room had a long awning to keep the rich dry, but the ratfaced b.u.m actually unfolded an umbrella and held his hand out to help a lady out of the backseat. Miles of white, white leg through a slit in her dress, and she rose up out of the back of the car like a dream. Only she wasn't in green. The dame was in mourning like midnight, her red lips a slash on the white powder of her face, and I wondered how long it would take people to catch on that she liked to sleep in all day. I wondered if anyone would know her hands were cold as ice cubes under the satin gloves, and I wondered if anyone would guess how Arthur Kendall gurgled when she had her teeth in his throat.

Because if I hadn't killed him, that only left one suspect, didn't it.

It was cold. I lay on the floor and looked at the shapes in front of me-a wall full of splinters and long handles ending in metal shapes. It was the type of shack you have when you've got a pool and a garden and you need somewhere to store all the unattractive bits needed to keep it clipped and pretty-a lawnmower, shovels, all sorts of things.

"You'll do as I say," Let.i.tia Kendall said.

"Aw Jesus." Shifty Malloy whined. "Jesus Christ."

Then a dainty foot in a green satin pump stepped into view. I blinked. Felt like I'd been hit by a train, throat was burning, couldn't take a deep breath, and I couldn't even squirm. My hands were tied back and my feet felt like lead blocks. She bent down, the dame in green, and she wasn't wearing her pretty face anymore. The smear of crimson on her lips was fresh, and she wiped at it with one white, white hand as her other hand came down, snagged a handful of my suit coat and shirt, and hauled me up like I weighed nothing.

"You have to cut off the head," she said. "It's very important. If you don't, you won't get any more."

Malloy was sweating. "Got it. Cut off the head."

"Use a shovel. They do well." Her head tilted a little to the side, like a cat's considering its prey. "It is very important, Edward, to cut off the head."

If I could have opened my mouth, I might have said that asking Shifty Malloy to decapitate someone was like asking a politician to be honest. I knew the b.u.m. Malloy might shoot a man in the back, but he was squeamish about c.o.c.kroaches, for Christ's sake.

"All right, already." Malloy stepped into view, and his ridiculous little pasted-on moustache was limp as a dead caterpillar with sweat. He raised the gun, a serviceable little derringer, and put it to my forehead. "You might wanna put him down. This is going to make a mess."

"Just do it." Let.i.tia gave me an impatient little shake. My feet dangled like a puppet's. "I have a party to attend tonight."

When I came back from the war some b.u.m asked me what the worst thing about it was. I told him it was the G.o.dd.a.m.n food in the service. But the worst thing in the war was the not knowing, in the smoke and the chaos, where the next bullet was coming from.

The only thing worse than that is knowing where it's coming from, and when that gun is to your head and nothing comes out of your crushed and dry throat but a little sound like nuh-nuh-muh.

Then the world exploded.

"Wait until I get around the corner," I said, handing her the file. "Then go home. You're a standup dame, Dale."

"For Christ's sake." She slid down in the seat, as if afraid someone would see us parked here. "Call me Sophie, Jack. How long have I worked for you?"

"Three years."

Kept me on time and kept that office from going under, too.

"I deserve a raise." Her pulse was thumping again. Like a rabbit's. The thirst was back. It scorched the back of my throat like bile from the worst hangover ever, and it smelled her. Chanel and softness and the steak she'd cooked, and my fingers twitched like they wanted to cross the air between us and catch at her dress. It was a pretty blue dress, high in the collar and tight in the waist, and she looked good.

Never noticed before how easy on the eyes Miss Dale was. Yeah, I'm an un.o.bservant b.u.m.