King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  “You mean you planned it that way? Got them to follow you on purpose?”

  I laughed, but the sound was a little hollow.

  “Wouldn’t it be lovely to think so?” I said. “Clear, cold, logical gamesmanship; the master strategist, omniscient and subtle. Wonderful! But no, love. No, no. What we have here is clear, cold, logical hindsight. I walked in like Yakkity Doodle—deaf, dumb, and blind. Especially dumb. Turning it around later was mostly luck. And basic meanness.”

  She didn’t ask what that last meant, and I didn’t volunteer.

  “But if the phone’s tapped,” she said, getting back to her original line of thought, “isn’t that all the more reason for us to tell the police? I mean if we don’t, Gideon’s sure to figure out it’s because I know who it was. And what he was after.”

  “What he got.”

  “What he got, all right. But wouldn’t that mean he might come back looking for me?”

  “It could work that way. Yes.”

  She sat very still and took a very deep breath and let it out and then looked at me, the black eyes steady under raised brows. “You trying to use me for bait or something?”

  “Or something.”

  More thinking, and then a little nod of comprehension.

  “We’re going after him,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going,” I said. “I, me. Singular and alone. You’re going right back to Best Licks, where there are regular meals and lots of quiet for sleeping and people on your side who kill rattlesnakes on sight—without mercy and without remorse.”

  “Like hell!”

  “And I’m not really going after Gideon, either,” I continued, ignoring the interruption. “At least, not in the sense you mean. Revenge isn’t any part of any business I’m in—that’s for Rambo movies and Wile E. Coyote—and neither is retrieval of lost fortunes. Deal me out, thank you kindly. But there’s more than money or hubris at stake here. A lot more.”

  The shoulders that had been raised for combat sagged suddenly, and the wa that had blazed with heat turned cold.

  “Terry,” she said.

  “Terry. Maria Theresa Palermo. Dom’s niece. Your daughter. Gideon Goode can find his own way to perdition for all of me, and welcome. But the girl is another matter entirely. She’s a hostage, pure and simple, and that means the pot is too big to lose . . . so let’s get back to work, and later we can discuss ways and means.”

  But the discussion got postponed.

  The mention of Maria Theresa had damped Angela’s spirits, and her mind wasn’t on it when she tried to rehang a picture in the hallway. She hit her fingers instead of the nail head and said something forceful in a language I knew was Sicilian because Dom had used the same words from time to time, for similar reasons, and instead of bringing sadness the memory brought only the warming sense of joy that had always been a part of his presence. I smiled. And then laughed, because it was what he would have done at the sudden switch in languages.

  Angela wasn’t pleased.

  “Sciocco!” she snapped, still nursing the insulted digits.

  That word, at least, I knew.

  “Takes one to know one,” I said, and for a moment I thought she was going to throw the hammer at me. But she didn’t, and finally she managed a smile of her own.

  “Papa taught us that,” she said. “Dom and me. Taught us to swear in Sicilian instead of English. God knows why.”

  “Courtesy?” I suggested. “Company manners? The words can’t offend the guests because they don’t know what they mean.”

  That got a real laugh.

  “Our guests,” she said, “knew the words. No. I think the real reason is that Sicilian’s a better language for swearing than English—better even than German. More words, and from all different sources: Greek, Arab, Italian, French. All the tourists who came through the island over the centuries.”

  “Sounds likely.”

  “Believe it!”

  We went back to work, but the atmosphere had changed and there was more laughter when my foot slipped while we were wrestling the king-size mattress back onto the bed in the master bedroom and we wound up peering owlishly at each other from different sides of the heavy padding.

  It also brought her face very close to mine and kept it there a moment or two longer than necessary. Long enough to know I probably hadn’t tripped by accident, but not long enough to be sure which one of us had been the choreographer.

  She tried to give me a large and wicked wink, but she wasn’t much of a winker and couldn’t close one eye without squinting the other almost closed as well.

  This time nobody laughed.

  I got up quickly, giving my sickly little conscience a stern lecture about apples from the Tree of Libido, and not looking at her. But it was uphill work. And ultimately, futile. We had to pass in the narrow space of the hallway and she contrived to bump me with one round hip, the black eyes suddenly full of challenge and fire, the mouth tricky and smug. The business of showing me where to stack scattered magazines somehow ended with the heat of a mellow breast against my arm, and there was suddenly an overwhelming awareness of woman in the room, accompanied by a flow of small talk that had no relationship whatever with what was really going on.

  Finally, she managed to trip and turn, setting up the movement for me to catch her just so—silky weight close, breath warm and unscented, lips gone soft. And not nearly enough air in the room.

  “Now . . . hold it right there, Angela,” I said, straightening us back to full vertical and forcing a few inches of space between. “Just a goddam minute!”

  She backed off and snorted.

  “Oh, wow,” she said. “How noble. How sincere! Morals and ethics and everything! The defenseless little sister of the dead friend. Terrible to come down here ready to take care and do all manner of good things and then wind up doing things my brother didn’t intend. Un-for-goddam-givable! Naughty-naughty-naughty! Oh, my goodness gracious me!”

  “Angela—”

  “Don’t ‘Angela’ me, you hypocritical son of a bitch! I’m hollering to keep from crying and you know it. You think it would be so wrong to get in bed with me? Because of Dom, maybe? What the hell do you think my brother was—a monk? Or a saint? You think something like this didn’t cross his devious Sicilian mind? Crap! Thinking about it now, it’s my guess he laid it out this way from the start, but you’re so damn involved with this role you think you have to play. The preacher. Margery talked a lot about you in the times I wasn’t sleeping. She thinks you’re the next thing to God, did you know that? But she also has sense enough to know that you’re still just a human being, down under there somewhere . . . even if you seem to need reminding now and then.”

  She was tall and female and furious. And right about most of the things she had said.

  I laughed and reached out toward her, but she said something else in Sicilian and suddenly burst into tears, switching back to English to tell me in effect that the moment had passed and to hell with it and with me, the situation was beyond salvage, it was all spoiled and get the hell away from me. Dammit.

  There was only one good way to stem the flow of words, and I used it repeatedly until the sound finally stopped and she was standing still—quiet but not docile—taking big noisy gulps of air and bending forward finally to lean against me while I worked awkwardly to unlatch the hook from the eye at the back of the dress and strip the zipper down.

  “You’re a clumsy shit,” she whispered, and I agreed that this was undoubtedly a fact as I scooped her up and carried her out of the room while offering silent apologies and excuses to an absent friend. I asked him to give me credit for trying. But I didn’t wait for an answer.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  The priests of Moloch, who sacrificed living children to their beast-deity, left such a spoor.

  SIXTEEN

  The next day started far earlier than I might have liked and I woke to find myself alone in the king
-size bed—which contributed a moment of pure male guilt-panic.

  Angela was still convalescent. Emotionally frangible. Sleep had come only after several false starts, and the initial shyness of strangers had been the first casualty of détente, with restraint and prudence a close second. Regrets in the cold light of morning, with the acid-etched image of Gideon and his vicious sex-games still fresh in memory, could lead to anything—anything at all—and I groped for undershorts and trousers while a miserable lantern-show of horrors played itself out on the screen of imagination.

  The cellar . . .

  Rounding a turn full-tilt en route to the concealed door, I burst in upon a calm and cheerful Angela who had just finished pouring juice into a pair of glasses set out beside plates and silverware on the table. She yelped, almost dropping the pitcher, and then stepped back with a shaky little laugh.

  “Sweet leaping Jesus, lover,” she gasped. “Are you always like this in the morning? And . . . what became of your eye?”

  Back in the bedroom I retrieved the errant prosthesis—plus the socks, shoes, shirt, and sense of humor that also seemed to have been left behind in unwarranted haste—and returned to the kitchen in a vastly improved state of mind.

  Angela was apologetic. But not very. “It’s not so much the eye itself,” she said, scooping sunny-side eggs onto the plates beside the bacon and toast. “I mean, I’d never seen you without it before but I knew, because Margery told me, that the right one wasn’t real. And why. So, it wasn’t that.”

  “But seeing me without it was a shock.”

  “Uh, yes. Well, sort of. I guess it’s just that not having—something there makes you look . . . different.”

  “Like a cyclops, you mean?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not really,” she said. “No. Not a cyclops.” She paused, dark brows knitted as though searching for just the right image. “More like a drunken owl,” she said finally. “Yes! That’s right: You looked just exactly like an owl that’s been locked up for a week in the fermentation shed!”

  I had a forkful of egg in my hand, and the temptation to flip it in her direction was almost irresistible.

  But I was too hungry. And besides, I suspected she might be the better shot.

  After breakfast we discussed ways and means.

  My original idea of sending Angela to safety at Best Licks wasn’t mentioned, and the plan I outlined for her was an edited version of the original. Expanded for two players.

  “Just how the hell,” she asked when I was done, “did you find out so much in such a short time about a kind of nowhere place like South Bay City?”

  “Friends of friends,” I said. “And a tiny little bit of personal experience, way back along. I spent a few weeks there, once, learning a very expensive lesson about playing poker with people you don’t know.”

  That got a little grin. “Learning your trade?”

  “On-the-job training.”

  “You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime,” she said with an elaborate yawn that she did not trouble to hide. “I’m sure it’s fascinating. But right now . . . ”

  “Nap time?”

  “Nap time.”

  “Promise?”

  “Bastard . . . ”

  I didn’t bother to protest. It didn’t seem worthwhile.

  Much later in the morning, we set out for southern California via connections I had arranged by telephone with an air charter service based in Santa Rosa.

  The flight was smooth and the specially selected rental car I had ordered, also by phone, was waiting at Torrance Airport when we arrived. I went through the plastic-identity rigamarole that enables strangers to do business without using real money or firearms and drove away with Angela looking bemused and slightly apprehensive in the passenger seat of the Cadillac Seville hardtop.

  “Won’t you . . . get in trouble doing that?” she inquired as soon as we were safely inserted into the westbound traffic stream on Pacific Coast Highway.

  “Doing what?”

  “Using a phony credit card.”

  I tried to look indignant. But I’ve never been very good at that and it probably didn’t come off.

  “Phony is,” I said, “as phony does, and this credit card will stand muster in anyone’s laser beam. It’s perfectly legitimate. Almost.”

  “George Armbruster,” she scoffed. “Where did you ever come up with a name like that? And don’t tell me it’s your real one. An Armbruster you might be. But a George . . . ”

  I shrugged.

  “Still almost on the level,” I said. “George Armbruster is a semi-retired, semi-rich semi-invalid who lives in Cleveland. An old friend of my father’s. He used to play a little poker and got in over his head one time a few years ago, bucking a couple of cold-deck operators who nicked him pretty good. I heard about it and figured out a way to nick them back. With accumulated interest. So now he and I have a handy little arrangement that allows me to carry a few credit cards and even an Ohio driver’s license with his name on them. Just in case it gets inconvenient or unhealthy for me to be myself for a while. The bills are sent to his home address, and I get a monthly statement from his accountant.”

  “And they, in turn, receive a monthly check from Margery.”

  “You got it.”

  She turned her head to look at me and started to smile, but didn’t.

  “You know,” she said seriously, “I’d been wondering who it was you reminded me of—and I just now figured it out.”

  I had already formed my own idea of who it might be and didn’t want to hear her telling me she’d reached the same conclusion.

  “Robert Redford?” I suggested, trying to turn it into a joke. “Bela Lugosi?”

  But she wouldn’t play.

  “Papa,” she said, ignoring the attempt. “You remind me of my father. Of the don.”

  It wasn’t the comparison I’d expected and I was able to laugh, albeit a bit uneasily, at myself in the private spaces where the ego contemplates its own image.

  “Not physically,” she went on. “And not the voice or mannerisms. But you’re like him in the way he had of handling things, as though there was never any possibility he might fail—and doing so much of it by favors. Things he did for people and things they did for him in return.”

  “Angela . . . ”

  “He wasn’t a bad man, you know. I think if he’d grown up in a Boy Scout neighborhood, he’d probably have been a Boy Scout.”

  “Like me.”

  It finally got the laugh I’d wanted, and a moment later I managed to switch the conversation to the immediate problem of finding living space in our target city. But I knew the subject would come up again.

  No doubt with a less flattering comparison. And closer to home.

  South Bay City was, and is, a pocket of comparative poverty wedged uncomfortably into the sun-and-sand yuppiedom of lower Santa Monica Bay.

  It is a monument to the democratic political process gone totally wrong.

  Blessed with the broadest and flattest of fine-sand beaches and founded as a stop on an interurban trolley line that put the job centers of Los Angeles within easy commuting distance, the little town had enjoyed nearly half a century of quiet seaside growth before the twin malignancies of inflation and the automobile began to do their work. But then everything seemed to happen at once.

  The sand hills closest to the sea—the ones with a view of the ocean—were already covered with business establishments and dwellings by the time someone finally noticed that there was nowhere to park the cars that were bringing more and more weekend sun worshipers to the seashore, and even when the problem was identified, no one seemed to have any clear idea what to do about it, least of all the city fathers whose own business establishments and real-estate schemes might find themselves compromised by the condemnations necessary to create the needed parking lots.

  Even the minor half-measure of curbside parking meters was slow to gain acceptance by local merchants who w
ere convinced that potential customers would be alienated by the little coin boxes.

  Meanwhile, growth continued.

  Neighboring towns like Torrance and Redondo, which had at first attempted to resist the manifest pressures of an increasing population decided to settle for guiding and controlling the changes they could not prevent. Annexation of territory not yet occupied by tax-paying development is a major financial risk for any city, and the depression of the 1930s left the more aggressive annexers staring at an annual deficit that never seemed to go away. But at length the depression years were ended and the Sunbelt land rush after World War II finally justified the original estimates—and then exceeded them in a way that even the wildest optimist could never have foreseen.

  El Segundo had traded all its beach rights to Standard Oil in return for a low tax rate, and there was still a little strip of rock-and-pebble tideland unclaimed at the very top of the Palos Verdes peninsula, but these were the only exceptions to the rule of beachfront building and incorporation along the southern half of Santa Monica Bay. Everything else, every inch of sand littoral and sand berm, was firmly in the grasp of one little municipality or another by the 1950s—and all but one town seemed to be caught up in a race to see how much inland territory could be annexed before it was all gone.

  The holdout was South Bay City.

  Its boundaries hadn’t increased since the thirties when a city council, unwilling to burden itself with police and fire protection obligations on undeveloped land, had rejected an opportunity to annex a key parcel to the east of its present territory. The land had gone instead to the city of Manhattan Beach, which extended it by the few yards necessary to link up with areas claimed by another beach town—and to forge a legal fence around South Bay City that would prevent its expansion for all time.

  Nobody seemed to care at first, and there were even a few jeering editorials in the weekly South Bay City Clarion predicting early financial ruin for its neighbor city.

  But the truth became painfully apparent a few decades later when money was needed for upgrading and capital improvement of the little city’s civic assets.