Girls in Pink Read online

  When I woke up a little while later, Annie was gone. I went inside to bed.

  -Fifteen-

  The next morning, I went to my office bright and early. I wasn't always sure why I kept an office. Some guys in the business didn't; they relied on word-of-mouth, printed business cards, and the telephone. I liked having one. It was a place to go. It was a reason to brush my hair and put on a necktie in the morning.

  I slid open the window behind my desk. Three floors above the street, the air felt cool, nearly cold. The sun had just come up, but it was already losing its battle with coastal smudge and the smoke from the fires outside the city. It couldn't chase away the shadows from the street below. The traffic was just getting started, and in between the occasional hiss of brakes and bursts of exhaust the neighborhood was quiet.

  Somewhere out of sight, a truck backfired a couple of times with a sound like gunshots. It startled me for just a moment, and then instinct subsided and I relaxed again. State Street was somewhere between the drunken craziness of the night before and the hum of normal daylight business that was coming. It was a pause in the city that you had to get up early to see, and I liked it fine.

  If I sat on the sill and leaned out far enough, I could see a sliver of the Pacific, five blocks down. No matter how many times I looked, it was never the same color. This morning the clouds were low and gray, but the ocean was a blue-green that almost glowed. Someone told me once that the water reflected the sky, but I've never found it to be particularly true. The ocean doesn't follow anyone's rules but its own.

  “It's going to rain tonight.”

  The voice called up from the sidewalk, thirty feet below the window. Annie Kahlo looked up at me. I was happy to see her.

  “It might rain any minute,” I called back.

  She shook her head, definite. “Tonight,” she said. “The fires will all be out soon.”

  “Going to take a lot of rain to put this fire out,” I said. “Come on up. I have coffee and a clean cup.”

  “The life of a private detective,” she laughed up at me. “Cream and sugar, maybe read a little. Cream and sugar, look out the window.”

  “It's a dangerous racket,” I agreed.

  She wore a white dress printed with a pattern that looked like handwriting, and her hair was tied up in a scarf. It set off the gold tones in her skin. She looked like about a million dollars even, with less than a nickel's change back.

  “I have a better idea,” she said. “You come down. I'll buy you a cup of coffee in some strange place you've never been to.”

  A big truck was trying to get into the alley behind the Schooner Inn. It said “Schlitz” on the side in maroon-and-white script. The driver had some trouble with the corner, and the cars began to back up behind him. From up the line, the first horn blew. Encouraged by the bravery, others joined in. A man in a blue coupe gunned his engine and swung around. A car coming from the other direction locked its brakes and shrieked.

  “Come down now?” I asked, and pantomimed looking at my watch. “Leave my office during business hours? That has to be against some kind of rules.”

  “Rules?” She smiled up at me. “I hate rules and so do you. Sitting in your window and yelling down into the street at strange women is against the rules, too.”

  “You aren't strange,” I said.

  “Oh, yes I am,” she laughed. “Count on it.”

  “You might be right,” I smiled. “I'm on my way.”

  I was still smiling as I slid the window back down and picked up my keys off the desk. My steps echoed down the steps around and around and out to the front door and the street where Annie waited. She was radiant.

  “You look good,” I said. “I worried about you last night.”

  “Never worry about me,” she said.

  She took my arm and we walked south. The sidewalks on State Street were wide and made up of colored concrete poured in geometric patterns. It looked like dusty tile. Bars ran down the block, most of them closed for whatever morning cleaning they got before another tired day of drinking got started. There were other businesses in between, but the open ones didn't have any trade yet.

  “You feeling better about things?” I asked.

  “A little,” she said. “I read a National Geographic this morning. It had to do with baby elephants.”

  We walked a little further in silence. A man in a white shirt and tie swept the cement in front of a jewelry store. He eyed Annie appreciatively as we passed. I thought about asking him who bought jewelry at eight o'clock in the morning, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Baby elephants?” I prompted.

  She looked at me, faintly surprised. “What about them?” she asked.

  “Is there more?” I asked. “To the magazine article?”

  “They reminded me of something. The baby elephants. Something sweet and wonderful, but I don't know what. There was so much more...”

  “More?” I prompted.

  “There's always more,” she said. “Sometimes all at once. Aside from spelling, punctuation and grammar errors, there's always more.”

  Her free hand gestured around us, expansive and graceful. We were only a block from the beach, and the color of the water was still a luminous turquoise under the dirty sky. I wouldn't have minded a closer look, but she steered me into the coffee shop.

  Noises echoed off the high ceilings and plastered walls of the nearly empty place. Obviously a dark watering hole until recently, the bright lights and low counter inside looked unnatural. Pale shadows on the walls revealed where pictures and menu boards used to hang.

  It all looked like someone else's dream.

  Hand-lettered signs pushed New York Style doughnuts for a nickel. I didn't know why anyone would want them on the west coast, but I'd never run into a really bad doughnut anywhere. We got coffee from a woman who was still half asleep and took it to sit at a wooden table where we did the cream and sugar ritual.

  “Why did you ask me about the baby elephants?” Annie asked.

  Her mouth was faintly amused. She always had a complete stillness about her features, but more expression moving beneath the quiet than anyone I had ever met. I struggled to find the right words. “I was interested. Just for a second, I thought they reminded me of something, too. I see things differently when you tell me about them. When you talk, I always want to hear more. I want to see what you see. Does that make any sense?”

  She looked at me for a long time, and finally gave a very slight nod. “Even if it didn't,” she said. “It could.”

  I nodded back, relieved. She understood, or close enough. I tasted my coffee. It wasn't bad at all.

  “Are you feeling better about last night?” I asked.

  “I'm fine,” she said. “Much better now. I changed my mind.”

  “Changed your mind? About what?”

  “I don't want you to kill anyone. You can still help me find out what happened to June, but I don't need you to kill Sal.”

  I stirred another spoonful of sugar into my coffee to cover up the relief I felt. “I wanted to ask you something,” I said. “You were gone from Santa Teresa for what, twenty years, or more?”

  She looked at me over the rim over her cup. I paused to give her a chance to answer, but she didn't.

  “You lived in New York and England and Mexico. You can't have many good memories here. Why did you come back?”

  Her half-smile didn't budge. I took the plunge.

  “Because of Sal Cleveland? Did you come back because of him?”

  Her expression changed. Her eyes moved away; she looked a little bit trapped. “I told you, I came back to watch over June.”

  “Do you still have feelings for him?” I persisted.

  She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. She slid her knees from under the table, and I realized she was leaving. My face grew hot.

  “You do, don't you?” I asked. “Is that what this is all about? Asking me to kill him?”

  She stood beside
the table, staring at me. I realized how slender she was, and how all-at-once vulnerable she looked. I was caught right between the tides of jealousy and pity. She slipped on the dark glasses.

  “Go to hell, Nathaniel,” she said, and walked out.

  I stayed and finished my coffee. There was no point in wasting it.

  A crowd gathered in front of my building. I saw the red light blinking on the back of a prowl car pulled onto the sidewalk. Another black-and-white blocked the middle of the street, and still another sat in the intersection of State and Ortega. I crossed the road and pushed through the gathered people like I had some business doing it. Most of them moved aside willingly.

  A uniformed cop who I knew from around was setting up a flimsy wooden barricade across the mouth of the alley.

  “What's the excitement?” I asked him.

  “We're kind of busy here, Crowe,” he said, without looking up.

  He fitted the end of a board into a metal brace, and then straightened to look at me.

  “How you doing, Sullivan?” I asked. “This is my building.”

  “Yeah? You see anything last night or this morning?”

  “Anything to do with what?”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, into the alley.

  “Got two guys not moving,” he said. “In the blue car back there. Someone called it in a half hour ago.”

  I peered over his shoulder. The gap ran between two structures; my office building in front and a repair garage in the rear. Garbage cans lined the laneway. Most of them belonged to the restaurant on the ground floor of my building. At the far end, just before the alley turned to the right and out of sight, I saw the tail end of a car surrounded by official-types, milling around. The humped shape identified it as a Nash; an old one, faded and rusty.

  “Son of a bitch,” I murmured. “Can I get back there?”

  “Let him through, Sullivan.”

  The voice belonged to Rex Raines. He stood fifteen or twenty feet up the alley in the shade. His normally sunny expression was closed-up and grim. The beat cop shrugged and moved aside.

  “Mind you don't tear your skirt, Crowe,” he said.

  I stepped over the barrier and walked over to join Raines. We didn't shake hands.

  “Figured I'd see you here,” he said. “Said to myself 'Where's Crowe?', and here you are.”

  “Why? What's that supposed to mean?”

  “The last time I saw you we were looking at a mummified little girl on the coroner's table,” he said. “You were bent out of shape at Sal Cleveland, you said you had a witness who saw him kill your client.”

  “My client, his wife.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the blue car.

  “Now I got a couple of Cleveland's gunsels sitting there with holes in their heads,” he said. “Right outside your office. What're the odds, you think?”

  I gave him a look, and he spread his hands.

  “Not saying you did this,” he said. “I just expected to see you around, that's all. This happened about an hour ago. Kitchen worker in the restaurant heard the shots.”

  “As it happens, I think I know the car,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow and waited for me to say more.

  “It looks like a car been hanging around my neighborhood,” I said. “Cleveland's guys, trying to intimidate Annie Kahlo, the witness you don't want to believe.”

  “Never said I don't believe her,” he said. “I said she's too crazy to go in front of a judge. You think it's the same guys?”

  “I'd have to see them.”

  “Let's take a look.”

  The blue Nash sat and waited for us. It looked tired and sad and haunted. I don't think I'm an especially superstitious man, although I don't know if many of us came back from the war without at least a few charms laid away against the constant fear. There was always something about a scene with dead people in it that seemed to echo, as though the people who had left weren't all the way gone.

  The group of official uniforms that stood around the car paused and watched us approach. They were waiting, too. Everyone waited and the walk down the alley to the car seemed to take a long time.

  “You identify these guys?” I asked Raines, just to be saying something.

  “Sure we did,” he said. “We know these two. They've been players for a long time. We know everyone in the game. Names are Raw and Lowen.”

  A patrolman stood at the door of the car. Raines nodded to him, and he stepped back. He used a handkerchief to pull on the Nash's door handle. The hinges squealed loudly, like they didn’t want the door to be opened.

  The driver's hand fell off the steering wheel and dangled limp by his side. Blood smeared the sleeve of his light blue suit. It looked like a pretty nice outfit got ruined. I knew the guy didn't imagine when he was putting it on that it would be the coroner who took it off him.

  “Guy behind the wheel is Raw,” Raines said. “Goes by 'Dog'. The skinny one over there is Virgil Lowen.”

  The light blue suit belonged to the red-faced guy who had been sitting on my street, all right. The last time I had seen him, I'd had a pistol stuck into his collar. I held my breath against the smell of blood and leaned into the car. The skinny guy who had pulled his heater on me slumped against the far door, like a sleeping child. Both of them had been shot in the head.

  “Raw and Lowen, huh?” I mused. “I told them I'd kill them if I saw them again. Someone beat me to it.”

  “Some mother's child,” Raines said. “Somebody's broken heart, now.”

  He stared at the dead men.

  “Bad guys, though,” I said. “They broke a lot of other hearts.”

  “They were bad guys, yes,” he agreed.

  He shook his head. “I seen a lot of stiffs,” he mused. “In the war, and now on the job. It gets so I don't care so much. They aren't people I know, and mostly they signed up for whatever got them. Every once in a while, it crosses my mind.”

  I nodded when he looked at me. I knew what he was going to say.

  “Every once in a while I remember that it was a kid once. Somebody who passed out paper valentines in a classroom and watched a certain girl or boy to see how they'd look when they read it. A person who got held when they were a baby. Some woman looked down at their face and thought they were the most perfect thing she ever saw in her whole life. It hurts a little when you think about it like that.”

  He looked at me and shrugged. “So then I remember it's just a job, and I don't think about it anymore. One thing’s a little strange here. See the rope?”

  I looked where he pointed. The end of a hemp cord dangled over the seat back, between the two men. It trailed onto the floor of the back seat. It didn't look like a new rope.

  “There's been a rumor for a long time that when Raw and Lowen did a job, they tied up their marks and took them someplace private for some...games, before they killed them.”

  “Women?” I asked.

  “Men and women,” he said. “They had a taste for sex with doomed people. That's the story, anyway. Who knows where it started, might not be true.”

  Suddenly, I felt a lot less sorry for them. “Cleveland kills enough people that he kept a couple of monsters on the payroll?” I asked. “He have enough work for them?”

  “Nah, not really,” he answered. “This isn't Tijuana or L.A. These guys may have indulged their tastes from time to time with a missing person or two. Lot of desert around this city… a missing hooker or tosspot bum vanishes, who's the wiser?”

  He paused to light a cigarette. “Rope makes it look like something to me,” he said. “Looks like someone might have been tied up and got free, someone who got their hand on a gun. They missed once. See the hole in the windshield? Lowen's shot in the side of the head. He was turning around. This wasn't any calm execution, I don't think.”

  “So...two guys I was having a problem with tie someone up in back of my office, someone who gets free and turns the tables,” I said. “Why outside my offi
ce, first thing in the morning? Doesn't add up.”

  “Everything adds up some way, pal,” he said. “We'll find out what it adds up to, sooner or later.”

  “Last time these guys were parked on my street, a cop named Earnswood came along and shooed them off. He had been watching them.”

  “Earnswood?” he asked. “Which Earnswood?”

  “Brass is what I hear,” I said. “Upstairs guy. You must know him. Why was he interested in these two?”

  His face became suddenly guarded. “Of course I know Earnswood. I don't know why he'd be interested in these two.”

  “Might be a good thing to find out,” I said.

  He stared thoughtfully at the blue Nash. The smell of blood seemed stronger. I had seen enough. “Maybe not,” he said. “That might be a good thing to not know anything about. There's one more thing.”

  He led me over to the open driver's door. “You'll have to lean in.” He sounded apologetic. “Look at what's on the front seat. Don't touch anything. Once we get them out, the print boys still have work to do.”

  I did as he said, with my breath held. On the seat beside Raw's fat, slack knee, a playing card rested. It had been torn in half, and both pieces faced up. The atmosphere inside the car was unbearable, and I backed out quickly.

  “Three of spades,” Raines said. “Mean anything to you?”

  I felt as though I couldn't get enough air.

  “Not a thing,” I managed.

  He nodded and waved the morgue boys in. We walked back toward the light at the end of the alley.

  -Sixteen-

  I spent the rest of the day at the office, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. I tried to reach Annie Kahlo on the telephone, but she didn’t answer. At four o'clock, I pulled the bottle from my desk drawer. I looked at it for a while and put it back. I went home early instead.

  When I got there, I left the Ford on the street in front of the house for no particular reason, except I wanted to be able to reach it in a hurry if I needed to. I stood at the curb and looked over at Annie's house. The dusk was too early for anyone to have lights on so I couldn't tell if she was home. My own windows were dark as pitch.