Free Noir(ish) (9781101610053) by Evan Guilford-blake Page B

Scott. I think you’re lookin’ for me.”

Chapter 5
    Wednesday, June 25th, 1947, 8:15 p.m.
    The Pickup is a bar and grill on South Street, a ten-minute streetcar ride from my office that I could have walked in twenty if there hadn’t been something I was vaguely aware of in my shoe, and if my body hadn’t still been sore from its unplanned morning workout. It’s nicer than most spots that cater to a crowd that would just as soon not be recognized the way they would be in the dens where the Hollywood hoi polloi and their admirers are known to lurk. It’s dimly lit, the chairs are large and red plush, and the tables are dark wood planks studded together and far enough apart that you don’t usually hear the goings on at the ones near you. For some reason there are large silk fans on every wall, and the gold-wallpapered bathrooms are spotless. At least the men’s is. A guy about the size of a jockey is the attendant. He’s easygoing enough, but he looks like he’d bite you if you dropped a soap wrapper on the floor or left your towel on the marble vanity.
    It was also a place
we’d
frequented. In the past year, I hadn’t gone there much. Alone, it was just another memo re: used-to-be. But it was a nice, public place, just the sort I wanted in case Scott decided to show up accompanied. By Wilma and Elisha, for example. I was especially concerned because when I left the office there’d been a guy in a brown hat leaning against the Hellinger Building, reading a newspaper, and chomping a two-for-a-nickel cigar that gave off the aroma of flies hovering over carrion. I saw him fold the paper and head off in my direction, keeping a dozen steps behind me. When I stopped, he stopped. When I got on the streetcar, he got on the streetcar, and when I got off, so did he. When I got to the Pickup, I turned around and waved to him. He didn’t wave back. He just leaned against a building, opened his paper, and chomped some more.
    It didn’t make sense that he was working for Scott or Lizabeth Duryea, but I didn’t have any idea who he might be working for.
    I’d made a few calls that afternoon, but who Wilma and Elisha were—and where Scott might be—had remained a mystery. I hadn’t been able to reach anyone in Seattle, but I figured there wasn’t much reason to anymore. Wally Dietrichson had never heard of Dan Scott; he said he’d try to find out—then he asked whether I needed any more insurance—and neither Stanwyck nor even my buddy Mark McPherson had been able to help.
    McPherson was a fellow PI. Like most of us, he was an ex-cop. I was the exception. I sort of wandered into it. I’d gone to Frisco—no reason except it sounded exotic—when I finished high school. I had fifty bucks saved up and a romantic notion of life on the docks, which I’d probably gotten reading Eugene O’Neill. I met Sam Spade a couple of years later in a bar there. He’d needed an office boy to run errands and now and then provide diversionary actions. I’d learned the business from him and got my license, then headed down to L.A. after the Maltese Falcon case—and Ruth Wonderly. She hit him harder than most people knew, or than he was willing to admit, even to himself; he went into seclusion for a year or two after it was over. We still kept in touch via Christmas cards and the like. Spade was a good guy—tough but not as tough as people made him out to be. He had a heart. And a conscience, even if he was having a fling with his partner’s wife when Wonderly killed Archer. He passed the conscience on to me, and I was glad to have it. There are a lot of guys in this business without one.
    That June morning, it wasn’t my conscience that was bothering me. It was my stomach. But by one o’clock, it had recovered enough that I’d kept down my lunch, a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of seltzer. But a big purple