Beneath a Bloodshot Moon

by Sam Roskoe

  “And why’s that, sweetie?”

  The look in her eyes would have given Superman a run for his money in a steel melting competition.

  “Because you just called me sweetie, that’s why.”

  “Only just now though, I never called you that earlier. You already made up your mind about me, didn’t you…sweetie?”

  She jabbed the air in the direction of a row of empty, leather chairs off to the right of the reception desk.

  “These are the last words I’ll say to you, Mr. Finch, so you better listen.”

  I batted my eyelids at her like they do in the movies all the time when they want to get their way.

  “I’m all ears,” I said,

  “And very little brains,” she said, under her not inconsiderable breath. “Listen up, Mr. Finch, you may take a seat over there. You may wait as long as you like for Miss Martin to return. For all I care you can pitch a tent and learn how to tie knots, but you will, under no circumstances, see Miss Martin unless she makes an appointment with you.”

  “That’s not going to happen is it?”

  “Unless you suddenly become important, no, it is not going to happen. I have no idea why you thought you could saunter into one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood and get to see whoever you like. There are rules, Mr. Finch.”

  I was already looking for ways to break those rules as she spoke.

  I wasn’t getting past her that was for sure. Everyone has a weakness, everyone has a soft spot that you hit just right and you can get what you want out of them. I figured it would take me two weeks and a squad of Sherpas to find the soft spot for Kay Martin’s secretary.

  “Well, you’ve been a laugh riot, Ruth. But you know what mountain climbers say, don’t you?”

  “They do it because it’s there?” she said, enjoying her moment of quickness.

  I wagged my head.

  “If you can’t go up, go around.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  Ruth self-consciously adjusted the sides of her dress that were fighting gravity and girth to remain unwrinkled.

  “Hold up, I just need one favor, that’s all.”

  She folded her arms over her chest and they just about made it to each side.

  “A favor? Are you kidding me?”

  I crossed my heart, at least where I thought it might be. I’d never been much on biology. “On my life, if you just help me out with this, you’ll never see me again, Ruth.”

  “With what?”

  My smile was sheepish enough to fool a shepherd.

  “What, I mean, how does…how exactly…”

  “Spit it out.”

  “Seeing as you’re the mountain, Ruth, and I’m no climber, I’ll have to figure out some way to meet up with Miss Martin, won’t I?”

  “How dare you call me—“

  “I meant no harm, Ruth, honest. But if you’d just tell me what Miss Martin looks like then I can be on my way and haunt some other place until I see Miss Martin in the flesh, so to…”

  I thought she might blow her stack. The redness in her cheeks turned to a purple. She unfolded her arms. She made a move that hinted at the use of my face as a punch bag.

  And then she stopped.

  She turned from a rampaging gorilla into a delicate little doily of a thing in the time it took for me to ask myself if I was dreaming all this.

  I wasn’t dreaming.

  I was in luck though.

  “Evening, Ruth, any calls while I was out?”

  The woman speaking was five feet and ten inches of Cleopatra-like grace poured perfectly into a red two-piece with matching pumps. Her eyes shined like an inquisitive cat. Her voice had the soft surety of someone who got what they wanted no matter what it was they were asking for or who they asked.

  Ruth went from Drill Sergeant to mouse in the time it took to open her mouth again.

  “A few calls Miss Martin, I’ve placed them on your desk along with your mail.”

  “Kay Martin?” I said, walking up to the desk.

  “Ignore this man, Miss Martin, he’s been hanging around here all day. I’ll call the police right away and have him removed from the premises.”

  Kay Martin looked me over. She saw something that interested her. Maybe it was my roguish charm, or my boyish smile. Or maybe it was because she’d never seen such a cheap suit. Whatever the reason, Kay Martin held up one of her slender hands and waved away Ruth, the secretary’s concerns.

  “So you’ve been hanging around here all day have you Mr…?”

  “Finch, call me Finch.”

  “Have a first name to go with that do you?”

  “I only bring it out on special occasions, Finch will do for now.”

  If she was impressed with my witty banter, she wasn’t showing it. She was interested though, enough to carry on the conversation at any rate.

  “A man who only uses the one name, that’s intriguing, Mr. Finch, or should I just call you Finch?”

  “Either will do. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

  She gave me a smile that at any other time might have hinted at a darkened bedroom, the smell of perfume in the air and a lot of sweet nothings sometime in my near future. But I wasn’t here to play footsie with Kay Martin.

  “Comfort,” Kay Martin said, reaching for a cigarette from the dispenser on the desk, “is the worst vice of all, Mr. Finch. Have you heard that before?”

  Ruth leaned across the desk without being asked and lit the cigarette that dangled from Kay Martin’s mouth.

  “I heard it was opium, but I’m not in the loop when it comes to vice, Miss Martin.”

  “You may call me Kay.”

  Now the look on her face was that of someone inspecting a shipment of beef, looking for flaws in the meat.

  “Okay, Kay, how about me and you we go somewhere private and talk, what do you say to that? A drink perhaps? Somewhere more comfortable than here.”

  She took a long drag from the cigarette and blew the smoke in my direction. She didn’t blink once as the smoke curled up into her eyes.

  I blinked three times as it hit me.

  “What makes you think we have anything to talk about, you and I? Are you in the business, Mr. Finch? I don’t recall ever having seen or heard of you before.”

  “I have my own business.”

  “And that would be?”

  I thought back to Elsnick’s warning and the thought made me smile.

  “I’m a professional grave digger,” I said.

  “Deeper and deeper the well goes, wouldn’t you say? And which grave would you be digging here at my office, Mr. Finch? Please don’t tell me you’re here to dig mine. That would make me ever so upset.”

  She wasn’t upset. I doubted there was much that would put the shakes on Kay Martin. You didn’t climb to the top of the ladder in Hollywood without making plenty of enemies, and if you made it to the top and managed to stay there, you had to have a head for heights.

  “Marla Donovan,” I said.

  Kay Martin fell off her ladder.

  She didn’t know where to look, but she definitely didn’t want to look in my direction or have me look at her. She stubbed the cigarette out on the desk, missing the ashtray altogether.

  “I’ve got to…Ruth, no more calls tonight, I’m…will you call my driver and have him…”

  “Miss Martin? That drink I suggested?”

  She wouldn’t look at me. She wanted to ignore me until I’d gone, like a pimple that appears the night before a teenager’s first date.

  “Or, you know, I could take myself over to the L.A. Times and have a talk with someone over there? I hear they work late and they always like to chat, especially when it’s about murdered movie stars. They’re funny that way.”

  Kay Martin whipped her head around to face me. There was a fire in her eyes that threatened to burn the whole building to the ground, maybe even L.A.

  She leaned in close and her hot whispers singed my ear.<
br />
  “One drink, and I swear, if this is some ruse, Mr. Finch, I’ll have you thrown into the county jail and the key tossed into the sewers. If you think I’m lying, then you just try me as I’m no mood for silly games, not ever, and especially not tonight.”

  I pulled away and rubbed the burn out of my ear as I spoke.

  “I suppose I’m buying?” I said.

  She snorted at me.

  “Where we’re going, Mr. Finch, you’d need to take out a mortgage to afford a drink.”

  “Fancy,” I said, “should I phone my loan shark now or when we get there?”

  “What you can do is wait outside for me and the car service to arrive.”

  “And my dog?”

  “Dog?”

  “I don’t go anywhere without him.”

  “You want to bring a dog along with us to the Blue Palm? Are you crazy?”

  I looked at Ruth and she confirmed that I was crazy with the look in her eyes, but I wasn’t going to let Steinbeck sit outside in the Cadillac all night why I lived it up at some fancy club.

  “I tell you who likes dogs, those crazy folks over at the L.A. Times. Me and my dog might just take a stroll over there if we can’t go to this Blue Palm of—“

  “Fine, fine,” Kay Martin said, “you may bring your dog along with you. But he will stay in the coat check room once we arrive, are we in agreement?”

  “I’ll have to ask him.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s fifty-fifty sometimes, even though I don’t like to admit that to myself.”

  She turned her back to me.

  “Wait outside for me, Mr. Finch before I change my mind and leave everything up to the fates to decide.”

  “It’s a date,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Chapter 7

  The Blue Palm was a gaudy slice of neon nightclub somewhere between a good time and Malibu. The front end leaned over the Pacific while the rear waited at the end of a private road lined with palm trees. But no ordinary palm trees. The fronds on each tree were painted blue. Up-lights were buried at the foot of each so that you didn’t miss the paint-by-numbers job they’d had done on the local foliage.

  Money could buy you almost anything, except good taste it seemed.

  In the back of the private car Kay Martin had hired for us there was also a clean, expensive suit with shirt and shoes to match. If I wanted to sit with Kay I would have to look presentable. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

  There was no change of clothing for Steinbeck, just a lot of sharp looks from Kay Martin and an incident with a little stray pee.

  Wolves and dogs alike had to mark their territory.

  At the club, Steinbeck went into the hands of a bright, helium-voiced checkout girl who promised to treat him like as if he were her very own. I hoped that didn’t mean I’d return at the end of the night and find him dressed up like a baby with a pacifier in his mouth and diapers on his ass.

  Kay Martin found us a table at the back of the Blue Palm far enough from the band to hear each other, and with just enough shadows so that I might never be seen by anybody who knew her.

  “How about that drink then?”

  “First things first,” Kay said and held her hand in the air. She clicked her fingers.

  I don’t know if the waiter had the keen hearing of a bat, or maybe some other super-power, but he came running from the opposite side of the floor to our table.

  “Yes Ma’am, can I take your order?”

  “I’d like you to bring a phone to the table,” she said.

  “Yes Ma’am,” he said.

  “A phone? Is that some fancy cocktail I’ve never heard of?” I asked.

  The waiter returned quick enough with an answer.

  He placed an ebony telephone onto the table and plugged it into a socket just beneath. He held it to his ear and nodded.

  “Anything else, Ma’am?”

  “Come back in five minutes for our order.”

  Kay Martin waved him away, her eyes now fixed on me.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Okay, so what’s the deal with the phone? Are you planning on talking to someone else all night?” I said.

  She pulled it towards herself.

  “It’s insurance, Mr. Finch. The moment you say something I don’t like, the moment I catch you in a lie, and I intend to catch you in such a lie, then I pick up this phone and I place a call.”

  “And call who, Superman?”

  “The lead detective at the Hollywood Homicide bureau, that’s who.”

  “Funny, you’re the second person today who’s tried that line on me. The other one wasn’t so pretty though. Well, maybe if he put some effort into his appearance he might be.”

  “It’s not a line, Mr. Finch. It is not an idle threat either. Are you one of those men who believe a woman only gets on in this world if she turns the head of the right man? If she’s pleasing enough to the eye?”

  “I figured it was your humanitarian work and your charitable heart that rocketed you to the top, Miss Martin. I mean, this is Hollywood after all. Whoever heard of anybody getting on in this town just because they had a pretty face or they lay back on the right couch?”

  “Sarcasm, yes, I thought as much when I first laid eyes on you this evening. A man so slovenly dressed, so forthright in the company of those he does not know or would probably want to know, well, that’s the kind of man who is only comfortable when he’s masking what he truly feels with a sly remark or two.”

  “Should I see if there’s a couch in here going spare and you can do a little more work on me, Dr. Freud?”

  “What I’d like you to do is state plainly who you are, what you know and who it is you’re working for, Mr. Finch.”

  “And I like to open up a Café and do that the rest of my life, but it’s not happening right here and right now, is it?”

  “I don’t’ know anything about Cafés or the owning of such, what I do know is that you said the magic word. You rubbed the lamp, Mr. Finch, and the genie appeared. Now we’re here and I think you should explain yourself.”

  I’d played a hunch back in the lobby of the ASSOCIATED TALENT building. I’d mentioned Marla Donovan and gotten a rise out of Kay Martin without much work. Now I was going to have to put a bit more into what I said and not give too much away of the little I had.

  “You were at a wrap party. The same wrap party as Marla Donovan, am I correct?” I said.

  “Don’t you already know the answer?”

  “I do.”

  “Then why ask the question?”

  She took a cigarette out of a thin, silver case and hung it between her lips.

  I was supposed to offer her a light. I was supposed to lean across the table like a good gentleman and put a flame to the end. I let it dangle.

  “There were others at that party, many others, and they all witnessed what happened there. And not all of what happened there was reported in the papers or given over to the police, was it, Miss Martin?”

  It was a stretch, a long stretch and I didn’t know if it was going to play out or not. What I did know is that the party was the beginning of the troubles for Tarquin Meriwether and if you got enough people together and let the spirits flow, eventually someone would do something regrettable. You added in some Hollywood movers and shakers and you had a recipe for a cover-up and lots of bitten tongues.

  “So this is straight up bribery, is it? Somehow, despite your clothes and your demeanor, I had you pegged for something more, let’s say, romantic. A reporter maybe, or connected to somehow to Marla. I’d even entertained the thought you might be an old boyfriend out for some payback. But no, Mr. Finch, you’re just another soul with a little knowledge trying to parlay that into a big payday.”

  “Are you sure about that, Miss Martin?”

  “If not bribery, then tell me what? You come here saying you know what happened at the party, you know about Marla and expect me to believe tha
t money isn’t behind this?”

  There was money behind it, but not for the reasons Kay Martin thought. I wanted my payday, sure, and I wanted my Café up and running, but I wanted it from Tarquin Meriwether when those G-Men had taken him off their list. I wasn’t a knight in shining armor by any stretch, but I wasn’t the lowlife scum Kay Martin was making me out to be.

  “What would you say if I told you I didn’t want any money from you?” I said.

  “I’d ask who it is you want money from, if not from me.”

  “You really are sure I want a payoff, aren’t you?”

  “As sure as the sun rises in the morning and every single waiter and waitress in Hollywood wants one day to be a star.”

  “And if I told you I was a private detective?”

  “A Dick?” She laughed and held onto her stomach as though the laugh had filled her up. “If there is one thing I am certain of, Mr. Finch, it’s that you are not a private detective.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “You haven’t threatened to slap me or throw me under a moving truck once all night, that’s how.”

  “They make private detectives tough around these parts don’t they.”

  “Dumb, Mr. Finch, they make them dumb and big and cheap too. Are you telling me that you’re the exception to the rule? Where you come from they make them tall and intelligent and delicate, do they?”

  “I’m a special little flower that grows in the garden.” I flapped my eyelids at her like a cartoon deer about to be shot by someone horrible and just for the damned fun of it all. “But I am what I am, Miss Martin, and I was hired to come here and do some work that includes the death of Marla Donovan.”

  She gestured to me with hrt cigarette.

  This time I wasn’t such a heel and I lit the thing.

  She took a long, thoughtful drag and took just as long to blow the smoke up into the air.

  “Who do you work for, Mr. Finch?”

  “That’s confidential. You should know I wouldn’t reveal my client, being an expert on this matter and all.”

  “Then we are two people on a bridge unwilling to let the other pass, wouldn’t you say? If I’m to believe you I’ll need some proof. Maybe a name would do, or maybe it wouldn’t do. As it stands you are a man who I do not trust with a story I do not believe, who has given me nothing at all to go on. I’m going to order a drink now, and by the time I finish that drink, you will have given me proof or I will pick up the phone and end this charade quicker than you can say—“