Free Find a Victim by Ross MacDonald Page B

against her. I was kind of uppity myself at one time. So I’m paying for it.” Her hand closed on her thigh where the twenty was hidden. “How serious?”
    “I won’t know until I talk to her. Maybe I won’t know then. Let’s see, she lives in an apartment house on Yanonali Street?”
    “That’s right, the Cortes Apartments. If she’s still there.”
    I got up and thanked her.
    “Don’t mention it. I need the money,
how
I need the money. But you had me worried there for a while. I thought I was losing it all. Which maybe I am at that.” Her smile was bright and desolate. “Good night, Information. It’s been the most to say the least.”
    “Or the least to say the most. Good night, Jerry Mae.”

 
    CHAPTER 10 :
Driving east on Yanonali Street
, I remembered the evidence case in the back of my car. It contained several hundred marijuana cigarettes, done up in packs of five. I had taken them from a pusher in South Gate and was going to turn them over to the State Bureau in Sacramento. If five were missing, the Bureau would never know the difference.
    The Negro boys had vanished from the corner. I parked in front of the Cortes Apartments, opened the rear trunk, and found the small key to the evidence case on my ring. I unlocked the steel case and took out one of the little packets wrapped in butcher’s paper.
    The inner door of the lobby was locked. Cards bearing the tenants’ names were stuck in the tarnished brass mailboxes banked along the wall. There were eighteen of them, in rows of six. Only one card was printed. Only three of the eighteen were men. Miss Jo Summer, a large immature signature in green ink, was on number seven. I pushed her button and waited.
    A low voice drifted through the grille of the speaking tube. “Is that you, doll?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    The buzzer released the door-catch. I mounted the rubber-treaded stairs into the obscurity of the building. A wall-bracket at the head of the stairs was the only light in the second-floor hallway. Someone had written a message below it with lipstick: “Chas am at Floraines see you there.” My shadow climbed the wall and broke its neck on the ceiling.
    Seven was the last door on the left. Its metal numeral rattled when I knocked. The door came ajar, letting out a seepage of purple light. I moved sideways out of it. The girl peered through the crack, blinking at me astigmatically. She said in her kittenish mew:
    “I wasn’t expecting you so soon. I was just going to take a bath.”
    She moved toward me, her body silhouetted in a thin rayon wrapper. One of her hands insinuated itself between my arm and my side. “A kiss for baby, Donny?”
    Her wet mouth brushed the angle of my jaw. I must have tasted strange. She let out a little groan of surprise and pushed herself away from me, stood with both hands flat against the wall. Her wrapper fell open. Her body gleamed like a fish in murky water.
    “Who are you? You said you were him.”
    “You got me wrong, Jo. Kerrigan sent me.”
    “He didn’t say nothing to me about you.”
    She looked down at her breasts and gathered the wrapper across them, folding her arms. Her scarlet-taloned fingers dug into her shoulders. The kitten in her throat was scared and hissing: “Where is he? Why didn’t he come himself?”
    “He couldn’t get away.”
    “Is
she
holding him up?”
    “I wouldn’t know. You better let me come in. He gave me something for you.”
    “What?”
    “I’ll show you inside. You have neighbors.”
    “Have I? I never noticed. R.K.O., come in.”
    She backed into the purple-lighted room, a tiny girl no taller than my shoulder, with a sleek small head and a rich body. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. I wondered how she would look when she was forty, if she lived that long.
    The room was like a segment of her future waiting for her fate to overtake it. A black iron standing lamp with a red silk shade lined with blue cast its unreal light on red drapes hung from