MAMBO
TO
MURDER
DALE CLARK
Mambo to Murder
Copyright © 1955, renewed 1983, by Ronal Kayser.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
ONE
“YOU’RE through, Moran. And you can thank me for that.” It made my guts squirm to listen to this creepy cop, this Lieutenant Elmer Hoke.
He was telling me my fortune . . . no future at all! Three years ago I’d come out to the West Coast, had spent all that time and all my dough trying to make a go of the Joe Moran Agency, and now Hoke was running me out of California.
That’s what he thought. The future had its own ideas: a dancing girl playing post office with crime, a redheaded kid dreaming about Three Bears, an ex-carnie hardshot cracking a bullwhip, a deafie reading lips in a night-club, a Mr. Murder spinning the Hot and Cold valves . . .
Let me tell you about the last, dying hours of Friday, March 19.
Hoke’s a lanky, big-boned cop with a sour look on his hatchet face. As he talked now he waved his sap at me. How that man loved his billy. He was always hauling it out of his hip pocket, limbering it up, testing his skill by swatting flies off the walls of San Diego Headquarters without denting the plaster. A while back, before the Eleredge mess made enemies of us, he’d explained to me the special construction of his sap. Besides the usual load of buckshot, the leather tube was sewn around an eight-inch coiled steel spring. The spring was the secret of Hoke’s touch. With a flick of the wrist he could knock you cold, with just a little extra wrist snap could crack your brain pan.
This Friday Hoke had been up in Sacramento testifying to the State Board that the Eleredge dame swiped her own jewels for the insurance, and that he figured I was in on it. He’d flown back to San Diego on a plane which dropped onto Lindbergh Field around eleven P.M. Cabbing up Broadway, he’d seen the light burning in my office, and naturally he couldn’t resist the first chance of rubbing my face into his dirt.
What he didn’t know was that in the middle of the afternoon the attorney representing me in Sacramento had phoned long-distance . . . and I was waiting for Hoke, laying for him . . . going to clobber the very be-Jesus out of him.
He walked across the office to where my license hung behind the glass of its blondewood frame. “You won’t be needing this any more. I’m gonna take it with me, gonna plaster it on my wall at Headquarters.”
A flirt of his billy wiped the glass clean out of the frame. The fingers of his left hand reached up and peeled out the license paper. He looked at me. I looked back at him, and I didn’t say a word. Losing the license hurt me where it’d hurt Marciano if they sawed his right arm off at the elbow.
“It’s my trophy now, Moran,” Hoke smirked. “Like when a man shoots a moose. He’s sure as hell entitled to hang up the stuffed head and horns. Ain’t he?”
Still I said nothing, just thought to myself how much fun I could have toasting Elmer Hoke’s eyeballs on kabob sticks. My silence annoyed the cop. The sap in his fist started a weaving motion, same as the head of a striking rattler.
“Another thing,” he gibed out of a twisted, seamy lip sneer. “Now you’re out of business, you don’t qualify for a gun permit. You hand that over, and I’ll pin it up with the rest of my souvenirs.”
Actually I could have given him an argument there, since I’d got the permit through the sheriff’s office, not the police department. I didn’t argue. A California firearms permit is an outsize deal that has to be folded to go into a wallet. I opened my wallet, shucked out the permit onto my desk top.
Hoke stepped up to the desk, and to do that he planted his foot on the floor throw rug. I snatched the desk lamp, jerked it, and the cord from the lamp that ran on down under the rug’s edge came up behind Hoke’s ankle. He gave a surprised jump and looked comically to see what had him by the hind leg.
I grabbed his right arm in both my hands, lifted it, brought it down across the desk edge as you’d snap a kindling stick over your knee.
Elmer Hoke squealed like a stockyards pig. . . . I had to laugh when I thought of the recorder hooked up in the next office, of the tape I could play over for the rest of my life, and in my ears it’d be sweeter than love’s old sweet song.
The sap spilled out of Hoke’s numb paw. I grabbed it . . . and leaned the weight of my other hand onto the cop’s throat, twisted and pinned him across the desk. He had a gun, sure . . . but he wore it in a fanny holster so he’d no chance of making a draw.
Keeping him pinned, I started tickling his face with the sap. I tapped him teasingly at first, then harder and harder, while his puss bounced like crazy.
“You lying bastard! Framing me! Crucifying me!”
After a while, I caught on I was talking to myself. Hoke hadn’t any bounce left in him . . . tell the truth, my emotions had gotten the best of me! My eardrums were roaring with delirious pressure, and my glands were squeezing out saliva that drooled down my chin. I stepped back, and looked at Hoke sprawled in front of me with his face and the desk top all one gorgeous lather of blood.
What the hell! I’d known all along it’d be like this . . . once I got started, I maybe wouldn’t have sense enough to stop . . . and I’d fixed things for a fast get-away.
I had my suitcases all packed into my green Chevvie outside and the tank loaded for an all-night run. I’d hung Arizona plates on my car, plastered a Vote for Water Bonds sticker across the rear bumper, put a squirrel tail on the radio mast and a big red plastic wind divider in front. So it wasn’t a green Chevrolet the highway patrol would be apt to stop if they had a description of my machine.
And I was damned glad I’d taken care of these details in advance, because maybe I’d killed Hoke. He was alive, though, and he blew a blood bubble to prove it. So I took his gun, racked the slugs from it, then walked to the window. I raised the sash, tossed the cartridges into Broadway below.
As I stood there at the window, I kind of half-noticed a Yellow Cab drawn up in front of the Sheldon Dance Studio across the drag, under the neon dancing-girl sign inviting guys to Be Popular, Learn to Dance in 10 Easy Lessons. By the time I pulled down the sash, a dame had unloaded onto the sidewalk . . . her dress, what there was of it, being about the same yellow as the cab. The two yellows made a dim impression on me, then were forgotten as I walked back and hung the empty rod onto Elmer Hoke’s tail.
He stirred, wheezed out some lispy words. “Goddam yuh, Moran . . . arresh yuh . . . reshishing an offisher!”
His voice sounded all screwed up because I’d busted the plate that anchored a pair of his front teeth.
I said, “Yeah. Let’s tear-ass down to Market Street and put it on the blotter how I beat the crap out of you. Only don’t kid yourself you can make any charges stick.”
Feeling swell, I hauled out the desk drawer and gave him a peek at the recorder “bug.” Way that worked was, I had a phone jack installed and an extension wire fixed so when I was out Jean Orlando next door could take my phone calls in her public stenographer’s office. I’d the bug hooked into this set-up, and the recorder in Jean’s desk was swallowing every word.
“Got it on tape I wasn’t resisting you in any official capacity,” I enlightened the cop, “seeing you said yourself you were paying me a strictly personal, souvenir-chasing call.”
Hoke wheezed out a short breath blew a spray of blood that rained mostly on his own shirt front. He knew he’d get nowhere with a jury trial while such a recording