toyed with her glass.
“Westburne just recently came out here from Chicago. He had a furniture business there. He and his partner disagreed, and finally he sold out to the partner. He and Mrs. Westburne had the idea of buying a trailer and knocking around seeing the country, then suddenly she died. Her name was Frieda. They never had any children. He was all by his lonesome, out here thinking of buying a small retirement business, and he was looking around too at back-country ranches. And he told me a lot of other little stuff that I’ve got written up in my diary.”
“How come he rated space in your diary?”
“I make notes about all my students,” Shona said. “That way I can refresh my memory, and I don’t make the mistake of trying to discuss the furniture business, for instance, with some man who’s really a paving contractor.”
I could see how they might all look pretty much alike to her, and certainly Westburne sounded average as hell. Only one detail in the picture seemed phony.
“Age 51’s pretty young to be retiring,” I said.
“He may have shaded that a little, been a few years older,” she admitted. “Anyway, he’s a nice guy, a successful man with plenty of money, but at the same time a shy, lonely kind of sad man. He reminded me of a stray pup I picked up once when I was a kid . . . you know the wistful look a lost dog has? It’s pretty rough on a man over fifty when his fife busts up . . . his marriage, his business. I think through dancing Westburne hoped to overcome his shyness and make some new social contacts. I think that’s really why he was willing to sign up for the life membership, and it wasn’t so dumb, because sometimes it really works out that way.”
I studied Shona as she talked, decided there was a lot of maternal instinct in her make-up.
“Something’s happened to him,” she worried. “When he missed last Wednesday night, well, I thought he had a cold or the flu or something. I kept expecting he’d phone, but he didn’t. Tonight when he didn’t appear again, I took a cab out to 2814 Los Gatos.”
Natch, I knew she’d done that. Nobody spends fifty smackers on a detective without first doing a little checking up on anything as elementary as a street address. Shona’s voice slowed. She spaced her words thoughtfully.
“2814 Los Gatos is a trailer court. The number twenty-one trailer space was rented to Westburne. He owned a trailer with a State of Washington tag, and Westburne put it on the court register that he hailed from Seattle. The last the court manager saw of him was Saturday. About four in the afternoon he pulled the trailer out of there. . . . What do you make of all that?”
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
