I shrugged. Why should I be surprised?
“Guy fed you a line,” I said. “Guy changed his mind and moved on.”
Shona said in the same slow, spaced-out tones, “But he came to Sheldon’s that Saturday night as usual. He didn’t say anything then about leaving. In fact, he told me he’d made all the arrangements to buy an antique store out in La Jolla.”
“Guy changes his mind, he leaves a lot of people in the lurch.”
“Oh, but Mr. Westburne wouldn’t deliberately . . . go off without a word.” The brunette threw in a nervous gulp of the gin and quinine. “He might have taken the trailer somewhere on a day trip. He’s just the kind of lonesome, unsuspecting man who might pick up the wrong hitchhiker, and be murdered.”
“Well, what’d he look like? You got a photo of him?”
“No-o, but he’d be about my height. Five-five, he’d weigh a hundred forty to fifty, gray hair and blue eyes. He wears quite thick glasses and smokes a pipe.”
“How many men do you think that description would fit . . . ?”
I broke off, being distracted by Felix Perry teetering up to lean against our booth.
Felix wasn’t staggering drunk, he normally teetered from the effort of balancing a 48-inch belly on top of his stork legs. Out of a gloomy horse face, circles under his eyes the size of feedbags, he cracked:
“Hiya, Moran. I heard the Board took action on Lieutenant Hoke’s beef. You care to make a comment for the press?”
I gagged.
The “press” he represented was a scandal rag called the Low-Down. It came out once a week, printed on salmon pink paper, loaded with sex crime news and pub ads. Felix was the editor, besides writing a column of nightclub gossip . . . the Perryscope. He took his pay mostly in advertising duebills that he drank up around the joints.
I couldn’t decide, though, whether this frustrated Winchell was leaning into our booth to needle me or to look down inside Shona’s dress.
“Moran,” he wheedled, “you should place a quarter-page ad with us. Remember, the Colonel always gives our advertisers a fair shake in the news columns.”
The son of a bitch was trying to shake me down!
“Why don’t you beat it,” I jeered, “before you get knocked on your can?”
“You’re in no position to insult me so easy. The Low-Down packs plenty of political punch. Buy the ad, and I’ll see the Colonel goes to bat for your agency and makes it hot for Hoke.”
I jumped up . . . not so much insulted as afraid with his yak-yak he’d tip off Shona that I’d been disbarred from private investigation.
I said, “Scram, you smut-sheet phony, before I kick your ass so hard the Colonel’s back teeth rattle, too.”
Damned if he didn’t swing on me!
A punch that felt like a bee sting bopped my kisser landed by the sheer surprise of such a screwball turning pugilist. He’d asked for it, so I shifted and drove him a straight left that sank half a foot into his gut tub.
Perry pinwheeled end over end, rolled in among the legs of the commander and his wife. He lay there, waved his legs like a spider. It was a laugh, but he was belching dirty words at the top of his voice, and by grabbing the tablecloth he brought all the glasses, ice and booze into the lap of the commander’s lady. She hopped up screaming, and the commander proved he knew some dirty words.
Result was Nick Alession bull-charging across the Hawaiian Room.
“I warned you, Moran. Told you what you’d get the next time you started anything in here.”
It was no use to try and explain to Nick that I hadn’t started this shindy. He sailed a drop kick in my direction with all his two-hundred twenty pounds of ex-pro football guard behind it.
Good job I knew his style. I’d seen him bust groins before when he had a rough customer to manhandle. I jumped to one side, hammered my fist against his jowl.
He floundered backwards, might have gone down but Babe came running up in time to catch him.
“Cut it out, honey,” she pleaded. “I know how to handle Joe Moran and . . .”
“You handle him?” That idea fired Nick off again, as if Babe’s words had lighted a rocket in the seat of his pants.
I met him by grabbing his lapels, pulling the shoulders of his coat down as far as his elbows. With his arms pinned down, he couldn’t swing, and now I proceeded to cure him of dropkicking, too.
I drew back, cocked my fist, and gave him first a right smash, and then a left, and then the right again. I pegged him hard. It was deliberate work, no more hurry than a batter knocking fungoes to the outfield. I didn’t see Babe snatch a water carafe off a busboy’s stand and whirl it against the back of my head. The ceiling caved in . . . and when I woke up, it was a different ceiling. I came to my senses stretched on the divan of my apartment in the Poinsetta, with Shona making cold wet towel passes over my face and giving out pitying croons.
“Your poor mouth,” she babbled.
“It’s the back of my coco that hurts . . . what happened?”
I was feeling lower than a snake’s belly, not so much from the aching noggin, for my memory stopped with swinging on Nick Alession. I had the idea the bouncer must have nailed me with a surprise sneak punch or kick, and the last thing I wanted to take away from ’Diego was the knowledge I’d been polished off by that musclebound jerk.
Shona told me about Babe and the carafe, and I felt better. Not so quick, and not so damned much better, but good enough after a while to sit up on the divan. I didn’t hold it against Babe, I’d so many other recollections of Babe that I could stand to live with this one. Especially when Shona added that Nick was in worse shape than I was. He’d been laid out cold waiting for the ambulance when Babe sent me home propped between a pair of busboys. It seemed I’d been out on my feet, glassy-eyed but able to stagger, and hadn’t actually collapsed until I landed on the divan.
“I guess I’m a better man than I realized.”
“Don’t talk . . . your mouth’s starting to bleed all over again. A piece of flying glass must have struck you there.”
“No, that’s where Perry landed.” I put up my hand and sure enough, the bee-stung spot was leaking blood It puzzled me. I hadn’t thought Felix Perry was capable of mangling a mouse, bareknuckled.
“Mr. Moran, really, you ought to see a doctor. That could leave a lasting scar.”
“Face like mine, who could tell the difference? Stick on a Band-Aid, forget it,”
“I’ll see if I can find one.”
She’d already located the bathroom, and she carried the wet towel back in there. I fingered the swollen spot on the corner of my mouth, tongued the inside of it, and there seemed to be a hole all the way through.
It occurred to me that maybe the scum-sheet scribbler had been clutching a penknife or a nail file in his fist. To make sure of it, I got up and walked into the bathroom.
All I’d intended was to have a look-see in the mirror. But the medicine cabinet mirror door was hanging open with Shona in front of it. She stood on tiptoe, leaning across the lavatory basin and searching the upper shelves for a Band-Aid.
For a second or so, I was riveted . . . stunned by the form of her hips, the taut dancer’s shape that I sensed could kindle into atomic passion. I kindled, blazed with