Come Clean (1989)

by Bill James

  ‘This wise, Leo?’ Desmond asked.

  ‘I’ll be brief. Only two or three matters.’ He glanced around nervously and she realized then that police were not the only ones who had to take care about the company they were seen in.

  Leo did not speak at once, though, and the delay was more than his usual hesitancy. Eventually, he said: ‘I don’t know whether it’s all right to be telling you these things in front of Mrs Iles. I mean from the point of view of distressing her, at a meal, and so on.’

  ‘Let’s see how it goes, shall we, Leo?’ Desmond replied. ‘If Sarah’s here it looks less like a briefing, only social.’

  Leo nodded. ‘Perhaps.’ He still did not seem comfortable, though, as if he thought there were things she should not hear. ‘This is the first item then: Panicking Ralph has taken a beating, I mean, a real beating, possible deep damage, internal.’

  Sarah forced herself to keep eating and to keep looking at Leo and Desmond in turn, though she was badly thrown.

  ‘This is this afternoon,’ Leo went on. ‘My other boy, Gerald, he has a contact, a lad who’s done a bit of nursing far back, and he feeds us certain facts now and then. He was called over to the Monty and found Ralph not too good at all. He says Ralph might have gone under if he’d taken only a little more of it.’

  ‘Robbery?’ Desmond asked. ‘He surprised someone?’

  ‘Not as I understand. No sign of a turn-over and Ralph’s not making a complaint.’

  ‘Ralph doesn’t make complaints, not to us,’ Desmond said.

  ‘No mention of robbery to Gerald’s contact.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Mr Iles, we can both makes guesses. Some sort of disciplining?’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Sarah forced herself to ask. She tried for a puzzled, innocent smile, as if learning all this for the first time.

  ‘He’s gone wrong somewhere,’ Leo replied. ‘Offended. The thing is, who is he working for?’

  ‘Yes?’ Desmond said.

  ‘Not me. I can tell you that.’

  ‘Offended how?’ Desmond asked.

  ‘Obviously, that’s the problem,’ Leo said. A waiter came and asked about drinks. ‘Can I at least buy you brandies?’

  Desmond said: ‘We’ll buy you one. Put them on the bill.’

  ‘If you say,’ Leo replied.

  ‘So who is he working for?’ Desmond said.

  ‘Benny?’

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  ‘No, not sure.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Not sure of that either. You know Ralph: free-lance, small-time business commissions now and then. Consultancy matters you could call it, when needed, like the royal family’s gynaecologist.’

  ‘Sure,’ Desmond said.

  Sarah felt some relief for a moment. She finished her cassoulet. The waiter brought the brandies.

  ‘This develops,’ Leo went on. ‘The nurse lad is patching up Ralph and one of his kids comes into the room and asks about some woman who was there in the afternoon – who left, so it seems, just before the nurse arrived. The kid says the woman was talking to them in the yard, asking their names and what have you, discussing their school, and the child wants to know who she was. But Ralph gets ratty – he’s lying there, bandages and lint trailing all ways from him like a maypole, but he throws a real rage, saying he told this woman not to talk to them.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Desmond said. ‘She’s part of the attack? Hangs about talking to kids?’

  ‘I don’t get it either. But something’s going on, Mr Iles. Our nursing lad can’t ask questions, just keeps an eye open.’

  ‘Ralph knocking off someone’s woman? Is this a vengeance thing?’

  ‘So why is she still there afterwards?’

  ‘You ought to be a detective, Leo.’

  ‘The kid says she’s a very nice lady, but Ralph is still shouting his head off about it. You know Ralphy: there’s his family, and there’s the rest of the world, and he thinks they ought to be kept apart. Sanitized they call it?’

  ‘So, what else, Leo?’ Desmond asked.

  ‘Else?’

  ‘You said two or three items.’

  ‘No, just about Ralph.’

  Sarah had a feeling he had changed his mind and decided to say no more while she was present. In a little while, Leo stood, laboriously made his farewells, and went to the pay desk to join his wife and son.

  ‘So, was that a powerful revelation?’ she asked Desmond. ‘This man, Ralph?’

  ‘Not much we can do about it unless he wants to bring charges, which he won’t. An internal business matter, like a death in the Kremlin.’

  ‘He seemed to think it pointed somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, where, Sarah?’

  ‘God, I don’t know.’

  ‘Nor me. Nor him. These people, they love to stir, that’s all.’ His face became impenetrably shuttered and the topic was closed. She and Desmond talked only gossip for the rest of the meal.

  As they were leaving, Tacette came out to the foyer with his wife to say goodbye. ‘Daphne so much wanted to meet Mrs Iles,’ he said. Sarah saw Desmond immediately grow troubled again as the connections and phoney affability here mounted. He would feel he was being deliberately sucked in.

  Dressed in a white silk trouser suit which must have cost a handful, Daphne Tacette began to talk chummily to Sarah about food and the quirks of customers. Round-faced, dyed-dark, full of life, she seemed pleasant enough, unpolished but bright: who the hell expected polish from the wife of a very heavy, career villain? Her conversation was salty and vivid, and Sarah could see why Leo might not be accustomed to saying much. Sarah found chatting with her a treat.

  After a few minutes, though, it occurred to her that Daphne might have been brought out deliberately to take her aside, while Leo talked again to Desmond, this time one-to-one. Leo drew him out of earshot, and Desmond was listening carefully, his face now not so much troubled as blank: again that closed-off, professional look he could put on when keeping his reactions private.

  ‘So you’ve a big day coming?’ Sarah said to Daphne.

  ‘Oh, the silver wedding? Frankly, kid, I’ll be glad when it’s over. So many preparations, and people to be kept sweet. “If you ask her you’ve got to ask her mother as well” – you know the carry-on.’

  ‘But grand to have all the family and friends close around you for the day.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose that really will be nice, though half of them bore the eyebrows off of me. And maybe it really is something, twenty-five years together. Christ knows how. Matter of keeping your loathings locked away, wouldn’t you say? But it gets no easier, that’s what amazes me. There’s still some good, tough, brainy part of you piping up to ask, “What the hell am I doing with this guy still, putting my life on a plate?” You know what I’m getting at? But, obviously, you’ve got a distance to go before your silver.’

  ‘Quite a way.’

  ‘Going to make it?’

  ‘Who can tell?’

  ‘And who cares? Want to make it? What’s so brilliant about a quarter of a century in the same bed, more or less, same hands, more or less, digging their nails into your bottom three nights a week? So, where’s he digging them the other four? And then set sail for the gold? Jesus.’

  Sarah shrugged.

  ‘I’m prying? If you like, tell me to get lost.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Somebody else in the frame, dear?’

  ‘Twenty-five years is a very long time.’

  ‘Yes, I am prying. But lucky you. Hang on to it, regardless.’

  ‘Well, I hope it’s a wonderful party, and everything goes beautifully. I know you’re going to have a really great time.’

  ‘Yes. I sound cynical, but really, love, I’m thrilled to bits.’

  On the way home, Sarah asked: ‘More disclosures? Big after-thoughts from Leo?’

  ‘Afraid not. As a tipster, he falls dismally short.’

>   She said: ‘But he looked really intense.’

  ‘He was. About nothing much, though.’

  ‘Honestly, Des? He had nothing else interesting?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’ll say this for you, when you lie you do give it all you’ve got. Ever thought of joining the police?’

  Chapter Eleven

  Benny Loxton said. ‘Some of my boys was real anxious about this meeting, Leo, I mean, coming here alone and leaving it to you to decide where.’ Loxton felt a bit anxious himself, although he was armed. ‘They can be fretful, my people.’

  The bugger smiled very big and grand over that. ‘They don’t understand about you and me, Benny – the old days, school, all those years. Good God, this talk is something agreed on at Miss Binns’ funeral. Don’t they see what that means to you and me?’

  ‘How could they? They’re bloody kids. They got no history.’ They were sitting opposite each other in Tacette’s golf club. God, Leo was a crude-looking item – all that nose and the jumpy eyes, real common. He could have been an MP, or working on the rubbish trucks.

  ‘They think everything’s so simple, Benny. Way they see it, there’s friends, there’s enemies. And friends stick together and enemies try to hurt and kill each other. They wouldn’t realize that enemies, well, so-called enemies, you and me, could have a great deal of mutual respect, and might want to come to an accommodation for old times’ sake.’

  Benny said: ‘Vision’s what they haven’t got even a spot of. They can be good boys every other way, the best, but vision? Not a chance.’

  ‘I remember from school, that text in a frame by Miss Binns’ room: “Without vision the people perish.” I didn’t know what it meant, then, but –’

  ‘There you are. Vision’s top priority. Vision’s the difference between humanity and the animals, as I see it. A horse or an elk, have it got vision? Not that I heard, Leo. Churchill or Bobby Bartok with his music or them lads who did the bank through sewers in France – what people like that got first and last is great vision. Think of Columbus, Ronny Biggs.’

  Somehow, Leo had wangled a membership of this place, out in the back of beyond, and with big clouds of flaky grime from an industrial estate blowing right across the greens, you could watch it, like telly interference. But a decent enough spot with very strong, old-fashioned, wood toilet seats and the chairs in this room real green leather.

  Phil Macey had said Loxton was a fool to come and that he was offering a target. Well, Macey would. Even this morning he had still been arguing. Phil saw threats from all ways. He wouldn’t turn his back on his mother, and them pictures on the screen of the Metro in the dock had made him worse than ever. In a way, you could understand it. Macey had come right out and yelled it was stupid to be so casual and easy-going about this meeting. Sometimes, he talked like he ran the fucking operation, but he meant well, mostly. If you bought a savage for your team don’t ask him to act like baby powder.

  ‘Look, I got to go to this,’ Loxton had said. ‘Leo got to believe things are coming all right between us, like almost harmony, nothing brewing. He get a whiff of anything and that silver wedding do is somewhere else, with everyone on the look-out, and we’re finished. That Metro – it could worry him. He got to be convinced everything’s nice.’

  ‘So, how did they find that bloody car, anyway?’ Macey had asked. ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t like it, either,’ Loxton said. ‘But they got no identification yet.’

  ‘They will,’ Macy replied.

  ‘Let’s wait till they do before we start worrying. In any case, I got to play Leo along.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Macey replied. ‘Yes, you got to keep up a show, but on ground he picks, Benny? No. A time he picks? No. We got to have participation in the planning, we got to demand parity of influence.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Loxton had said. ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘Yeah, well feeling it, I don’t say that don’t add up to nothing at all, Benny. You got a great way of getting to things intuitive, I see it plenty of times, and it’s great, why this outfit is where it is today, no question. But certain risks – well, one got to invest due forethought, make everything as neat and non-hazard as it can be.’

  ‘My feeling is Leo really wants this agreement, Phil. He’s getting to feel old. He’s not old, only my age, but some it gets to sooner. So, there isn’t going to be no funny work at the meeting.’

  ‘Suppose he’ve had a whisper?’

  ‘What whisper?’

  ‘Suppose he’ve had a whisper about what we got lined up for the silver wedding? The surprise. I mean, everybody knows they’re having a silver wedding. Just a small whisper would make him worried.’

  ‘He can’t have had no whisper.’

  ‘We hope he can’t, of course we do. But if he had. We so sure Justin never spoke to anyone? We got to that boy early, very early, but was it early enough? He got a girlfriend we can’t find, he got a mother, there’s them people in the Monty. This meeting Leo’s setting up could be for them to get in first. You remember what we spoke about before, what’s known as pre-emptive? Leo saying to himself, I’ll wipe this sod out before he wipes me and mine out? That’s the danger.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Loxton had replied. ‘I don’t feel it’s like that at all. This have got real genuineness in it, on his side, I mean. Daphne been talking to him, maybe – a time for live-and-let-live. I wouldn’t be surprised she been thinking like that. She got a nice soul full of decency and calm.’

  ‘Except she hatched Lay-waste.’

  ‘Not out of her soul. Didn’t nobody ever tell you how babies was born? A woman can’t be blamed for how her kids are. Or not total. Think of Mrs Hitler. I heard she was smiles and sweetness and “Have another slice of applestrudel.”’

  ‘Look, Daphne Tacette still got to go in the shooting, most probable,’ Macey had said.

  ‘All right, that’s obvious. All I’m saying, maybe she been putting some gentle influence.’

  Just the same, Macey had not liked it, nor Norman, but Loxton told them discussion was over and he would see Leo where Leo wanted and alone. If you ran an outfit you ran it. You listened to advice, yes, but in the end you had to do what you thought was the best. The best was to let Leo believe he could come closer in a sort of partnership, and also to let him get nice and lulled by hosting and swaggering in his waste-tip golf club.

  ‘I like this place, Leo. It got class.’ There were photographs of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the walls, one with a yellow and green water stain across the bottom, like a flood from an upstairs toilet or something, and a board with the names of captains of the club in gold lettering going right back, people nobody outside ever heard of but glorious years ago in this tripe den. ‘There’s tradition here, that’s the secret, Leo.’

  ‘Reasonable people. A bit loud. Not much spare pussy, not that’s worth looking at: arses all corners, like drawing boards, and in tartan trousers. Watery eyes. I can’t stand having a woman under me all bloodshot and runny. You’d think you were in bed with a funeral. Now and then you see something dinky by herself out on a green, but there’s always a husband having a piss in the bushes. What I was hoping, Benny, was that today these could be talks about talks. That’s what the union boys and the diplomats call these kinds of preliminaries. It’s a useful formula.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough.’ Loxton decided it had been so right to let Tacette fix the meeting here. The place made him real confident, unworried, anyone could see. Loxton had never heard him talk so much before, and he could talk good – top quality accent, proper grammar and everything. You would not have known the only school he been to was Marl View, and they thought he was thick as mud pies even there.

  ‘We want some headings, Benny – the ground we could cover later in detail. Maybe we’d both like others present then. I’d probably ask Anthony to join us, and you could nominate anyone you want.’

  ‘Today, just see w
hich way we’re going?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That looks to me real civilized and positive, Leo.’ Loxton stood up and went to the big window that gazed out over the last hole and away to other greens in the distance. He watched as the smuts from the factories swooped down on golfers like birds on worms. Or it reminded him of in the Navy, passing some foul old merchantman, spewing its smoke everywhere. ‘You’ve got nobody with you at all, Leo?’

  ‘Not a soul. Same for you?’

  ‘By myself. That was the agreement. Real outlook here. It’s a soother.’

  ‘Maybe I could get you membership, Benny. If you were interested.’

  ‘That’s very nice of you, Leo.’ The bastard would really enjoy being kindly like that, offering a leg up. Who would have believed Leo could have ever got to that situation? Year or two ago he would have been kept out of the Muggers And Threatening Behaviour Club, for being too savage.

  ‘It would cost, one way and the other. You know what I mean?’

  ‘No problem.’ Loxton returned to his seat.

  Leo leaned forward and spoke quietly, a real confidential, intimate voice, a buddy’s voice. ‘As I see it, Benny, there’s six casinos worth talking about. That’s three in the town and then Baize, The Spinning Wheel and The Pimpernel, outlying.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘There are others in the patch and they might do something one day but just now they’re not worth protecting, that’s our thinking – more trouble than the take.’

  ‘Accepted,’ Loxton said. Yes, Leo was no great talker usually, but when it came to business, and here in the golf club, he could really take off. This sort of thing was obviously what he was made for. In some way he would be a loss. It was a pity he could not have offered a lot earlier to arrange the club membership. Too late now.

  ‘Okay, in the town, you hold Black Jack, undisputedly, and we have Cleo’s,’ Tacette said. ‘I don’t know the figures, not details, but they ought to be around the same. Say we’re taking from each about two hundred grand a year, more if it’s a wet summer, or the royal wedding, so everybody’s excited and flash with their cash.’