Dream Town Read online

  The back door was locked. There was an enclosed deck on the upper level that one reached by a set of metal circular stairs. So Archer reached them and went up. The beige French door leading into the house was not locked. He opened it and went inside.

  His light showed him this was a bedroom. The bed was made, and there were no discarded clothes anywhere that he could see. He stood in the middle of the room, listening. The house was as still as any morgue he’d ever been in. Yet there was nothing scary about a morgue. Other than the coroner, everyone else was dead. A pitch-dark house maybe full of lethal surprises was a different ball game altogether.

  He looked into the en suite bathroom. Blue and white tiles, blue tub, and towels monogrammed with an L were neatly arranged on a built-in shelf; no dead bodies were behind the shower curtain or stuffed in the linen closet. He grabbed a washcloth and used it to open the medicine cabinet, where he found the typical items like face powders, a box of Tampax, creamy moisturizers, tonics, and other patent medicines. He also found a bottle of black hair dye, and a hair straightener. So the lady was not a natural brunette with straight locks. Why had she lied about that?

  He next searched the other rooms up here. One was no doubt a guest bedroom outfitted in Spartan fashion, with a bathroom that was half the size of hers. But maybe Lamb didn’t want to encourage guests, so she made the accommodations uninviting on purpose. He could easily see her being that sort of introvert.

  Another room was obviously Lamb’s office or writer’s den, or literary sweat shop, whatever one wanted to deem it. There was a portable Smith-Corona typewriter in its open carrying case on a desk with a chair in the kneehole. Next to it were stacks of yellow legal pads and loose white pages with notes and doodles littered over them. They all seemed to pertain to various scripts she was working on.

  On the other side of the typewriter was a script marked “Bette Davis film.” He didn’t bother to open it. If he ended up seeing the movie, he wanted to be surprised.

  There were other scripts marked “DRAFT” stacked next to it from a number of other projects, with several other studios. Lamb was one busy scribe. Next to the telephone was a Wheeldex. He fingered through the cards there and saw some famous names and others that were obscure. His first inclination was to take the whole thing; his second inclination won out, and the Wheeldex stayed where it was.

  He looked through the drawers and found a check register. There was no bank balance listed, but her checks seemed to be made out to the sort of folks you made checks out to. He made a note that she banked with the Second National Bank of Malibu. He wondered if the First National Bank of Malibu was still in business and, if so, why a town this small needed a spare.

  Against one wall was a small leather couch with fluffy pillows embroidered with cats and puppies, and a coffee table with stacks of books. There were bookshelves filled with more books and scripts. The sole window held a view of the canyon. Archer noted that Lamb’s back would be to it. Focus, focus, apparently.

  A large world globe sat next to the couch. When he hinged it open, revealed was a bar with bottles and glasses arrayed in round cut holes.

  He glided down the stairs, reached the ground level, and turned to his right.

  He stumbled hard and hit the floor with a grunt; his light fell from his left hand and his gun was knocked out of his right with the sudden impact. The next moment he was smacked on the back of the head with something hard enough to qualify as a blunt instrument. He briefly saw fireworks and then the flames went out and the coal-black around him became complete.

  When he slowly came to, he rubbed his neck and stretched out his jaw, which had seized up with the blow to his skull. Vague stars knitted against a black background floated through his mind. He slowly checked his watch. It was now after four in the morning. He reached up and massaged the back of his head where a lump had risen like a volcano from the ocean of his scalp. His fingers came away sticky with his blood. He groped around for his light and his gun. He found both and turned the light on to see what he had stumbled over.

  The person was dead, that was certain. The pupils were fixed, and neither one bit even a little on Archer’s light. Only it wasn’t Eleanor Lamb. It was a man.

  Someone had ushered him into 1953 with one right between the eyes.

  Chapter 10

  THE FIRST THING ARCHER DID WAS FIND a bathroom on the main floor off the foyer, where he threw up everything he’d eaten and drunk on New Year’s Eve. The White Russian felt particularly egregious coming back up his throat, like his own painfully private Cold War. After that he snagged a washcloth, filled it with some cubes from the refrigerator, and laid it over the bloody bump on his head. He’d had concussions before, and he knew he was suffering from one now.

  He sat on the bottom step and stared dully at the dead man. The guy was in his fifties, with thinning, gray hair and a florid face that was turning paler by the minute. He was around five-ten and about two hundred pounds. The bullet wound on his face was blackened, with the skin crusted up like furrows of dirt in a tilled field.

  That told Archer that whoever had shot him had been close to the guy. He was dressed in a gray two-piece that looked off the rack and was baggy and off-kilter in all the places a cheap suit always was. His tie was red and too short. It barely reached the top of his now-slack belly.

  Archer looked at his face more closely. There were bruises on his cheeks and jaw and one on his neck. His nose looked puffy and swollen. He checked the dead man’s pockets. The suit was courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and Company, the label said. If this was the Ford man, Archer could match the name from the car. Only the fellow had no ID and no wallet. And no car keys. And there was no business card or other clue that would solve the whole thing in short order. So someone had rolled him and taken everything that could tell who he was.

  Except the damn car. So is this Cedric Bender?

  That would make sense. The car was outside and the dead guy was inside. But Archer needed to be sure. He glanced down at the corpse again. Archer had no idea how the man had lived his life, but that life was now over. It was a callous and sad send-off, however you looked at it.

  Archer put the ice back on his head and took another minute to think what to do. He decided to search the rest of the house to make sure that Lamb wasn’t lying somewhere with a hole added to her head as well.

  He didn’t find Lamb’s or any other body. He saw walls and beamed ceilings that were all painted white. The fireplace surround in the front room was etched with musical notes, and film awards were aligned on the mantel. Hanging on one wall was a cuckoo clock. There was a white china cabinet and a built-in buffet.

  The kitchen had all the latest appliances and gadgets, marble countertops, an island with bar stools around it, a large refrigerator with practically nothing in it, and an electric stovetop. There was a library filled with books that actually looked read, and a door that led to an outdoor shower enclosed by a wooden wall. A small dining room had a rectangular Craftsman-style table with six chairs. This was no doubt where the Marses and Greens had eaten during their visit. Aside from that there were comfortable couches, chairs, rugs, a portable bar outfitted in chrome, some paintings, interesting light fixtures, and lots of windows both large and small.

  Other than that, the only things in the house were a dead body, and a very much alive PI nursing a cracked head and a bruised ego for letting someone so easily sandbag him.

  He went back up to Lamb’s office and looked through the Wheeldex again. His fingers plucked out two cards that seemed promising because, unlike all the others, they each had a large X written in under the name.

  When in doubt, X marks the spot. That must be in some PI mail order course somewhere.

  He wrote the information down and put the cards back. He liked to play fair with the cops, even if they didn’t always play fair with him.

  He went out the way he had come, wiping his prints off along the way. His sense of fair play had its limits, thus Archer was
n’t about to leave behind any evidence that might earn him a trip to San Quentin to sniff a bunch of cyanide gas as the concluding frame of his personal horror flick.

  He got back to his car and drove off, winding his way down after winding his way up. He stopped at a call box on the highway and reported a dead body at Eleanor Lamb’s house, giving the address. He didn’t provide his name, rank, or PI license number despite the dispatcher’s demanding all personal info from him except his ring size. It might come back to bite him, but so would willingly sticking his neck out.

  He didn’t want to meet the deputy sheriffs on the drive east. At this hour of the morning, in a car that stood out, that would only get him pulled over with difficult questions to follow. So he drove past the Sea Lion and the Albatross and headed west. When he was far enough away from Las Flores and reached a part of Malibu that was far less developed, he pulled over to the beach side and parked behind some scrub bushes, just in case the cops decided to look for whoever had called them, or killed the guy in the house.

  He got out, took off his shoes and socks, and put them on the car seat, then rolled up his pants and walked along the beach. It was low tide, and the coolness of the sand worked its way up to his injured head. He found a dry place to sit down and watched the ocean recede south toward San Diego and Tijuana. During the summers a surfing crowd had started invading the beaches here. He’d watched the surfers serenade the bathing suit ladies with their tales of derring-do, often strumming a ukulele while doing so. He’d seen more than one fresh-faced, wide-eyed young woman taken in by this glib crap, which usually ended with a face slap and/or a paternity suit.

  He looked out to the water and saw a white light. It might be from the cargo ship he had seen earlier, but then again probably not. Enough time had passed for it to be well out of sight by now. And this light was far closer. The ship was probably making for port along the coast.

  Malibu was a slender appendage sticking out from the torso of California. He was on a part of Malibu sand that also had sharp, vertical bluffs as a backstop. At high tide some of the old caves would fill up with water. People would occasionally find gold doubloons from Spanish vessels that had gone down in the notorious storms that made this section of the coast a mariner’s nightmare back in the day.

  In the distance a few minutes later, he heard the LA County Sheriff’s radio patrol cars come flying along the coast road, the pitch of their sirens wound so high they could probably be heard high up in the canyons. He was too far away to see them from here, but he could imagine their flashing lights being like stark embers in the darkness. He listened to their cacophony until the canyon swallowed them all whole, just like the whale had Jonah. Only then did he rise on shaky legs and start to walk to his car.

  The next moment he dropped to the sand. He had happened to glance back out toward the water and his gaze had held on that same light out there. It had changed course and was coming closer by the second. He could hear its motor revved high over the crash of the waves. He knelt there, his heart hammering, as the now-revealed boat swept over the line of breakers. It quickly beached and the men swarmed off. Archer lay flat on the sand and continued to watch as one of the men splayed a flashlight beam around the area. The light passed just over the sharp brim of Archer’s hat and then swung back.

  Under the moonlight he saw the other men begin to unload large crates from the boat. It had to be illegal what they were doing. Honest businesses did not do their work well before dawn on a deserted beach on the first day of the new year.

  He edged back on the beach as the men carrying the boxes headed to the dry sand.

  Some words came to him over the sounds of the breakers. Spanish, then English.

  Archer began to inch backward in a crabwalk because the men’s path was taking them dangerously close to where he was. He managed to reach a spot that seemed far enough away to commence a hastier retreat. He turned, half rose, and hoofed it, his bare feet struggling in the loose sand and his injured head pounding beyond all reckoning.

  He had looked back to make sure no one had seen him when he suddenly slammed into something hard. He and the other man went down in a tangle of arms and legs. Archer couldn’t see the fellow’s face because of the darkness and the extreme thrashing the two were engaged in, with their bodies rolling around violently. He had to keep shutting his eyes because their movements were causing the sand to fly all over them. Archer felt a hand reach for his throat and grip there. He pushed the palm of his hand into the man’s face, levering the neck back enough to where the man gasped and let go his grip.

  The next instant Archer saw the glint of a knife and the blade came at his throat. Before it plunged into him he grabbed the man’s wrist and luckily found his strength superior to his opponent’s, so he could keep the knife at bay. He smelled the garlic and tobacco breath and felt the foul spit on his face as they writhed and tussled in the sand, each trying to gain control of the weapon.

  Then, needing to end this before the other men on the beach saw what was happening, Archer closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and rammed the crown of his head into the left side of the man’s jaw. The man cried out and he dropped the knife. Archer next clocked him with a stunner of a right cross, and the man fell limp to the sand, with his face turned away. Archer got to his feet, fought the blinding pain in his head, and ran for it.

  The sand got more densely packed the farther he went. Archer picked up speed, but his strides were still wobbly and clumsy. He heard the report of a gun and felt a round crack past him and embed itself in the wood of a fence set up to stop erosion. It couldn’t have been the guy he’d fought, it had to be the men from the boat, which meant they had spotted him.

  He redoubled his efforts, running flat-out, his breaths coming in bursts and his heart beating so fast he wasn’t sure what would give out first, his lungs or his ticker.

  More shots came, and with them he heard feet running hard behind him and the cries of the men to whom those feet and gunfire belonged. As he approached the road, from the corner of his eye he thought he saw what looked like a truck parked about a hundred yards away on the edge of the sand. He reached his car where it was hidden behind the scrub bushes, slid into the front seat, turned the key, and slammed down the starter button. The French beast roared to life. He wheeled the Delahaye around, pointed it to the coast road, and pushed his bare foot down hard on the accelerator.

  He hit the asphalt, and in the straightaway he wound the car up to a hundred. He zipped around the first curve as the car banked around the wall of a canyon and he was out of the sight line and range of the guns. He drove fast for another mile and then, conscious that more cops might be on the way to the murder scene, he slowed down and drove the rest of the way back to Callahan’s place at a sedate pace. He reached it just about the time the milkman dropped off three fresh bottles on her front porch. Archer pressed his face against the steering wheel and thanked God and everyone else he could think of for sparing him tonight.

  Chapter 11

  CALLAHAN HAD GIVEN HIM A SPARE KEY earlier that night, just in case he needed to crash at her place in the future. He staggered inside and put the milk in the white Frigidaire refrigerator, then walked to his bathroom and cleaned up his head with a bottle of peroxide he found under the sink. It stung so badly he almost threw up again. He got some ice and put it on the growing bruise on his head where he’d slammed it into the man’s face. At least his hair hid much of the damage.

  He stared in the mirror and saw someone looking older now than three decades. Nineteen fifty-three was not doing wonders for him so far.

  In one night he had fallen over a dead body, gotten sapped, run into smugglers on the beach, and been nearly killed. Maybe he needed to run out and buy a box of rabbits’ feet to change his fortunes. But then again, he had survived it all.

  So, you are one lucky son of a bitch after all.

  And then he turned his mind to the murdered man at Lamb’s place. That was his case. The smugglers wer
e somebody else’s problem.

  While a small gal like Lamb might not have been able to sap him that hard, she sure could employ a couple foot-pounds of force to pull a trigger. That meant the woman was not off the hook for the killing. Was the dead guy the same one who answered the phone? It wasn’t like Archer could check his voice against the one he’d heard on the call. If not, who was he? The betting was pretty good that the Ford belonged to him since the dead could not drive off into the sunset. If so, the loved ones of Cedric Bender were in for a rude shock.

  So who had sapped Archer? Whoever killed the guy? The shooter had cleaned out the man’s pockets, presumably to prevent an ID, but he’d left the man’s car across the street. How did that make sense? But if Bender was the shooter, why was his car still out there? You kill someone, you usually wanted to get away, fast.

  And the big question: Where was Eleanor Lamb? Guilty or innocent? Dead or alive?

  He stripped down to his skivvies, and then flapped his clothes through an open window to get out most of the sand. He hung them up in the closet and dropped into bed, closing his eyes at twenty minutes past six. He reopened them sometime later when Callahan knocked on his door.

  “Archer, you in there? What’s this note about? Did you go somewhere last night?”

  He sat up and groaned. He’d forgotten to toss the note.