by Sam Roskoe
“It’s our duty.”
“Sworn to protect this lot from all criminal elements, we are. A solemn vow we both took.”
“Nothing in this world could stop us from keeping up with that vow. Not a King or a Queen, not a Prince or a President could make us step down from our duty.”
“Of course, it would depend on which President we were talking about,” Shorty said.
“Indoubetedly,” Long and Tall said.
They both looked at me, and I knew what that meant. Whatever grudge they might have had they were willing to let it slide as long as the payout was big enough.
I gave them a shrug.
“Well maybe what I’m talking about is you find a folded up bill or two here on floor next to your hutch. You find that bill and maybe while you’re looking over that bill, you know, to see if there’s a name on it or not, someone might get by.”
Shorty’s smile was as lustful as it was wide.
“So what you’re saying is that me and my colleague here, we’re investigating this bill that we found on the floor. We’re being good upstanding citizens. And maybe while we’re looking one of us might accidentally raise the barrier for a moment or two, while we’re looking into the lost bill of course.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Sounds like an interesting idea,” Shorty said, “but it’d depend on who lost that bill.”
Long and Tall agreed. “Yeah, I mean, we could be looking for the wrong man when we’re taking a look at that lost bill. What I’m saying is that we’d have to look at the picture of the guy on the front, you know, to see if it’s that guy we’re looking for.”
“It’d have to be the right guy on the front, that goes without saying,” Shorty said.
I looked at them both again. They couldn’t be making more than twenty-five a week, if that. But I wasn’t here to pay their wages.
“I hear Andrew Jackson might be the kind of guy who loses stuff around these parts,” I said.
Shorty wagged his head at me.
“No dice, unless Andrew Jackson is bringing along a twin with him, you’re clear out of luck.”
“I’d say Grant was a better bet. Now there’s a man I could see looking away for. Grant’s my man,” Long and Tall said.
Shorty wanted forty to let me in, Long and Tall was talking fifty bucks. It might as well have been a million bucks for all the money I had in my wallet.
“Unless you have the crown jewels of England on that lot back there, you’re both whistling in the wind. You can say hello to Jackson or nothing at all.”
Long and Tall held onto his stomach as he let out a fake laugh.
“Our athlete here thinks we’d risk our jobs for a measly twenty bucks,” he said.
“All he’s going to get is a smack in the chops for that insult,” Shorty said.
I was supposed to be scared.
I wasn’t.
“Come on, fellas, I’m not flush enough to be throwing around the kind of money you’re talking about. What do you think I’m doing here, playing Raffles?”
Shorty stepped to the side of the Cadillac.
“What I think you’re doing is sitting in this heap arguing. What you might be doing any minute is turning this heap around and getting the hell out of here. What you want to do I couldn’t care less.”
“Forty bucks, between you,” I said, “that’s twenty a piece just to let me on the lot and see a man about a script.”
A wrinkle of confusion crept into the folds of fat above Shorty’s nose.
“What man?”
“The man who called us on you the other day? The kid in the writers’ pen?” Long and Tall added.
“Yep, goes by the name Charlie Jones. You know him?”
Shorty made a tutting sound through pursed lips. He was still angry, but it wasn’t in my direction. He turned for a moment and looked into the far distance where the pigpen and Charlie Jones were housed.
Then he looked back to me.
“You got a beef with Charlie Jones, do you?”
“Might have,” I said.
“So you want in to settle that beef, do you?”
“Could be I do, yes.”
Shorty licked his lips. He was on edge, nervous about something. Then he told me what that something was.
“It’s like this, see, kid like that Jones, we should be paying you,” he said, “that is if you were going in there to sock him in the jaw. Is that what you’re planning, fella?”
Long and Tall nodded in my direction to get my attention.
“Is that why you’re here, to teach that snot-nosed little punk a lesson, are you?” Long and Tall asked, his voice raising with expectation.
“Do I get any kind of discount if I do?”
Shorty leaned in toward me. He gave a quick look around to see if anybody might be listening. “Kid like that is nothing but trouble for us, see. Treats us both like dogs. Punk had the gall to send me for coffee one day, hand deliver the damn Variety another. But he’s got the pull, see. He’s got the pull with the high-ups.”
Long and Tall nodded.
“He’s related to the big guy,” Long and Tall rode a thumb up into the air, “the big boss over all this.”
“Elsnick?” I asked.
“Snap,” Shorty said. “Don’t know what exactly, nephew or cousin or some such. Kid’s rode some pretty big coat-tails onto the lot and he hasn’t let go of them yet, believe you me.”
I shot Shorty a suspicious glance.
“What if I’m not going in there to give my fists a workout? You think you should be telling me all this?” I said.
He shrugged. “Shouldn’t, thinking on it a bit. You could get me fired as quick as snapping your fingers, but I figure if you’re willing to drop forty bucks then you’re probably the kind of man whose going in there to ruffle that little bird’s feathers, not pat the jerk on the back. And if that’s how it is, then maybe I want to help you out, see. Maybe I’d like to see that kid nursing a few bruises and talking out of the side of a split lip. I’d like to see that just once, that would make me happier than any twenty bucks you got.”
“You think I’m the man to do that, do you?”
Now he looked worried, but it didn’t last for too long. He remembered where he was and what he had over me.
“Maybe no. Maybe you’re pals with the jerk and he called us out on you for larks, I wouldn’t put it past that snot-nosed little runt. Maybe you’re playing me and my colleague here for saps and we ain’t figured just how yet. But as day is long as night, it don’t matter, because unless we pull up that barrier there, you ain’t going nowhere today and tomorrow it won’t matter anyway. For none of us.”
“Tomorrow?”
Long and Tall looked to Shorty.
Shorty looked back.
They both nodded at each other as though they were part of some on-stage routine that I’d just walked in on.
“The kid is out of here come tomorrow, and good riddance to him,” Shorty said.
“Out? What do you mean, out?” I said.
Long and Tall took over. He made a plane out of his bony hand and sent it into the air.
“He’s on the red-eye to New York after the Premiere. They put him in charge of something, not sure what, but it’s the buzz all over the lot. Kid’s out on his ass and the big guy is mighty upset with him for some reason.”
Shorty got a faraway look in his eyes.
“I’d sure like to see him hurting before then, though, Jeez, that’d be like Christmas and my birthday all wrapped up in one.”
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the Jackson I’d promised.
I handed it over to Shorty.
He turned it over in his hand, a puzzled look on his face.
“You still want in?”
I nodded.
“What do you plan on doing once you get in there?” Long and Tall asked.
All I’d planned was asking some questions, figure out what might be in that s
cript Kay Martin thought I had. But now I had other ideas in my head. Other questions forming about Charlie Jones and his involvement in the whole mess.
“I don’t know, fellas, maybe I’m thinking of starting Christmas a little early this year,” I said, and winked.
Moments later the barrier lifted and I drove onto the lot.
Chapter 17
I entered Charlie Jones’ office the way I’d left it the last time.
Through an open window.
Something looked off immediately. The interior of the place had been ransacked, as though a rushed crook had tossed the place looking for a safe or a stash of bills.
Only I had an idea that whoever had turned the office over wasn’t looking for cash, but something a lot more important.
The script?
Could it be that Charlie Jones had the copy of the script that Kay Martin wanted so badly? And if so, why would she not offer Charlie the same deal as she’d offered me? Or maybe this was revenge by other disgruntled employees off the lot? Shorty and Long and Tall had wanted blood for Christmas, who knew what kind of ire Charlie Jones had planted in others on the lot.
Those questions I couldn’t answer then and there, but I knew I would have some kind of answer the next time I saw Kay Martin. And I figured the next time I saw that lady I would either have all the answers I needed already, or I’d be doing the cemetery shuffle with the two icebergs she kept for company.
Something about Kay Martin tipped me off that violence wasn’t always a second option when it came to her victories. Something hot and uncontrollable lurked behind her cold eyes, and I had no doubt I’d see that fire before I left Hollywood.
Or this life.
Kay would have to wait. I had some digging to do.
I wore kid gloves as I went through the Charlie Jones’ desk looking for any clues as to where he’d scrammed.
I found a daily diary in one of the drawers. A bound in leather monstrosity that would put a Gideon bible to shame.
Most of the pages were empty for the year as I expected them to be. Whether Charlie Jones had pull or not on the lot, there was a secretary out front of the pigpen who kept a diary for all the writers so they could concentrate on daydreaming without having to do such mundane things as remember where to be and when to be there. There was one marked page in the whole book. That day’s date at the top and some neatly printed words beneath.
S6. Lunch. Bring protection.
What was S6? Where could that be? I’d heard of plenty of swanky eateries in town where they would take an arm and a leg and maybe another arm just for a Waldorf salad, but never one that had such a strange name. Besides, who would take ‘protection’ to somewhere out in the open like a restaurant.
S6?
No, it didn’t fit right with me. That wasn’t the name of a place where you grabbed lunch, it was somewhere you might meet someone else at lunchtime. Someone you needed to be protected from in any case.
Charlie Jones was packing heat, had to be. Armed and going to some place designated S6 over lunch time to meet someone I supposed you would need to be armed against.
But where the hell was S6?
I gave the office another going over, but couldn’t find anything else. It was then that I decided to go the more forthright route.
Out of the window I went, then patted myself into a halfway decent looking state before I entered the pigpen from the front.
The secretary was the same bird-beaked, giraffe necked lady who’d been there the day I was chased off the lot. She hadn’t looked up from her typing the morning she’d announced my presence to Charlie Jones. But she looked up as I said my hellos that afternoon.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” She said, as I stood before her desk.
“I’m a big shot in the movies.”
She seemed genuinely nonplussed. “I don’t remember ever seeing you in any movies. Name one.”
I didn’t need to invent any names as I already had a name in mind. It was what I supposed would be on the front of that script Kay Martin wanted to pay me a million dollars to get back.
“Ever heard of a little flick called Beneath a Bloodshot Moon?” I asked.
She giggled like a schoolgirl who’d just been told her first dirty joke.
“You’re a silly man,” she said.
“I’ve never been called silly before. How come I’m so silly?”
“You know full well that they changed the name of that movie, like they always do.”
Old goldfish memory seemed to have a good memory for the titles of scripts and how they’d changed, so I pumped her a little more.
“Okay you caught me,” I said, putting my hands up in the air for a moment. “I’m no big shot, but I bet you a dollar you can’t remember what the name of that movie is now?” I said.
“Silly, everyone knows the new title. It’s going to be a smash hit. That girl, the one who died…”
Sadness dropped her head a few inches.
“You mean Marla Donovan?”
She nodded.
“It’s a shame. She was so beautiful, so young and talented and…”
I feared that my information gathering skills would mean nothing if the tears flowed and the tissues were brought out, so I gave her one of my full-teeth smiles, the kind that I get out at New Year to impress the drunks.
“I’ve got a cousin in Poughkeepsie who doesn’t know and I bet he’d like to know what they changed that title to. He doesn’t know anything about the movie business. He’s a real bumpkin.”
She lifted herself quick out of the sadness and shifted quick into shyness. Her cheeks flushed red. Maybe she thought I was mashing her, maybe this was as close as she got to any kind of back and forth with a man on the lot. Writers put things down on paper that sounded grand, but they rarely had anything to say.
I hated to flim-flam a woman with empty promises, but I wanted to know what she knew and I couldn’t afford to play footsie all day.
I hopped onto the edge of the desk and tossed two cigarettes into my lips. I lit both and handed her one.
“I tell you what…” I glanced at her name badge. “Denise. I tell you what, Denise, let’s me and you play a little game, shall we?”
She wasn’t a smoker, but she was game enough to take a drag from the offered cigarette and then tried her hardest to stop from choking as she blew out that smoke.
“A game? What kind of game?” She wafted away the smoke and blinked, all the while trying to look as poised as she could be.
It was a shame, I supposed, they’d stuck this wallflower out front of a place where there was no sunshine and way too much time to spend dreaming of White Knights and horses.
Least, that’s how I had Denise pegged. Could be that I was way off the mark and she was the biggest man eater alive. Could be they called Denise the pigpen shark and that no man, quiet or otherwise, was safe from her charms.
There were a lot of couldbes.
I wanted something more solid from her, and it wasn’t a house and two kids in a nicer part of town.
“It’s like this, Denise, we’re going to play a game of truth,” I said.
Her smile was wide enough to threaten the edges of her cheeks.
“Who’ll go first?”
“Me,” I said.
“How do we know who’s won?”
I let my eyes roll a little in my head. I put on a schoolboy grin.
“I’ll win of course.”
“Oh,” she said, some of the buzz gone from her voice.
“But you haven’t heard what I win yet,” I said.
Hope returned just as quick. “What do you win?”
I leaned in close and whispered. “Dinner with you tonight at whichever restaurant you choose.”
She was going to say something, but whatever it was got trapped in her open mouth and she managed nothing more than a strangled little chuckle that was somewhere close to joyous and far away from sad.
I felt like a real louse, but
I couldn’t let my game down now. I promised myself that when this was over I would come back and take Denise on that date, and maybe I’d find her someone while we were there that wasn’t such a dirty heel.
“Shall we start?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said, and then pretended like I was thinking of something to ask. “Truth. You’re twenty-one years young, right?”
She was nearer thirty and not the kind of thirty that could be considered young. But she had the giggle of a teenager.
She giggled at me then.
“You’re a charmer,” she said.
“Truth. You really don’t know the name of that movie from before, do you?”
“I do, I swear I do.”
“Do you now, Denise, or were you just trying to impress little old me?” I said it with the kind of charm that would make Crisco jealous.
She folded her arms in mock annoyance. She stuck her tongue out at me like a child. “It’s called ‘The Deadly Moon’, mister smarty-pants.”
“One more, Denise, and we both win.” I winked at her.
An excited shiver pulled her shoulders up.
A worm twisted in my gut.
What a louse I was. It was all wrong what I was doing to the poor woman. She was the kind of sweet that didn’t play well in Hollywood, or any other place where her kind of joy came over as a weakness, not strength. And here I was playing on that weakness.
“Okay, here it is. Truth. Charlie Jones, the man down the hall, has gone for lunch somewhere off the lot, right?”
She lost her sweetness quick enough and gave me a stare that was nothing but sour.
“You know, you could have just asked me where Mr. Jones was instead of playing this stupid game and promising me things you’ll never deliver. That’s what I do, you know. That’s my job here.” Her voice wavered on the edge of tears.
I wanted to dig myself a hole and climb inside.
I hopped off the desk.
“Okay, Denise, I’m a louse, a stinking louse and you have every right to hate my bones, but I need your help now.”