Dead Man

by Joe Gores

  “So double my salary, Harry.”

  “Funny! Funny! Listen, baby, how about you be nice to me? I got friends. I can do you a lot of good in this town.”

  She had just enough time between numbers to do it if… But Harry’s greedy fingers half cupped the ivory cone of one of her naked breasts as she tried to get through the dressing room door. She stepped back with a look of utter revulsion.

  “Jesus, what a turd!” she said in a low, despairing voice.

  Harry crowded her back against the door frame, grabbed her hand, pressed it against the bulging front of his pants.

  “Feel it, baby! C’mon, feel it!”

  She bent his little finger back, he squealed and let her go as she darted through the doorway and slammed the door an inch from his nose. She shot the bolt, yelled through the door.

  “Go jerk off into a Handi-Wipe!”

  Harry smashed the heel of his hand against the wall and turned away with a vicious, congested look. Inside, Vangie put her head down on her arms. Oh God, for just a little release from pressure! She raised her head and looked at her reflection in the mirror. The makeup lights made her look garish and cheap.

  “They don’t lie,” she said aloud to her reflection.

  She had $2 million in bearer bonds but still had to dance until four in the morning because it wouldn’t be safe to cash them in for another six months. Two million! Freedom. A way out. Worth whatever it took, worth doing damn near anything. The music reverberated through the walls and she stood up.

  If only Jimmy didn’t bring the hunters down on them in the meantime.

  Dain, backlit for a moment by the lights of a turning automobile, looked hulking and pitiless. It was ten o’clock and San Francisco’s financial district was zipped up for the night except for a few old-style restaurants like Schroeder’s down on Front Street. As he passed the Russ Building’s inset entrance, Moe Wexler fell in beside him to hand over a small flat packet a few inches in diameter.

  “Great work, Moe. But why all the cloak-and-dagger?”

  Moe’s eyes were constantly shifting, probing the empty street ahead and behind them. “When I went to check the apartment bug tonight, there was another one in place that wasn’t there before.” His roving eyes slid across Dain, were gone again. “Ah… what if we’re talking Maxton here?”

  “I thought Maxton didn’t bother you any.”

  “Yeah, well, that was talk, this is the real world, like.”

  Moe peeled off into Sutter Street. Dain kept going down Montgomery to Market, his face thoughtful.

  He sat on the edge of the bed in his loft, a yellow Walkman Sport beside his thigh, listening again to Moe’s tape. Shenzie listened also, head cocked to one side as if waiting at a mouse hole. The voice talked of the bonds with remarkable clarity.

  “Nothing wrong with them, is there?” asked Farnsworth in a jocular voice. “Not forged? Counterfeit? Stolen?”

  “Good God no!” Zimmer’s voice was high-pitched and full of fear. A voice that looked over its shoulder as it talked.

  “Then take them to our Chicago office and—”

  “I’m out of town.”

  Farnsworth’s voice said, “Out of town where?”

  “N… I can’t tell you that.”

  Dain hit the stop button.

  “Hear it, Shenzie? Hear the ‘N’ he didn’t quite swallow?”

  Dain punched EJECT to pop out the cassette. Shenzie reached out a sudden delicate paw and struck the Walkman three times, very quick light blows, then whirled and ran to the far corner of the bed where he crouched, glaring balefully. Dain ignored the histrionics.

  “Just what I told you, cat. Hiding in her life, not his.” He tapped the cassette thoughtfully against his open palm. “But just who put the other bug on Farnsworth’s apartment phone?”

  Shenzie said meow, then relaxed his baleful stance to wash himself with a delicate pink tongue. Dain picked up the phone. “You’re gonna visit Randy for a few days, cat. He volunteered.”

  In the Vieux Carré, Vangie and Zimmer walked away from the far sad dying sounds of Bourbon Street. It was four in the morning. Around them were darkened windows, rumbling garbage trucks, early delivery vans; ahead, a darkened movie theater marquee with light spilling out across the sidewalk beyond it.

  “Jimmy, I thought we’d agreed you’d stay off the street until I could get together another traveling stake for us.”

  “I’m taking care of the traveling stake,” boasted Jimmy.

  Since the bond theft, their original sexual relationship had developed an almost mother/son dimension. Vangie grabbed his arm and hurried him toward the light laid across the sidewalk beyond the darkened theater.

  “I don’t want to hear this—but I’ve got to hear it.”

  They passed under the sagging marquee. Half its unlit bulbs were broken. It advertised a triple bill: Caught fromBehind, Stiff Lunch, Nympho Queens in Bondage. Beyond was the DELTA HOTEL—DAY—Week—Month—Maid Service, with rooms on the upper floors above the theater.

  In the rear of the lobby a sallow-faced clerk dozed behind the check-in desk. A huge slow floor fan was trying to stir around the heat and perhaps shove some of it out the open door. Two shirt-sleeved white men and three black men seeking some illusory coolness not to be found in their rooms sat there despite the hour, wide-kneed and slack. Vangie half dragged Zimmer back toward the elevator. Their eyes followed her across the lobby as most men’s eyes would always follow Vangie.

  Zimmer was babbling. “See, Vangie, what I did was—”

  “In the room, honey.”

  “But you have to understand that—”

  “In the room.”

  It was a room where love and hope would bleed to death, blessedly dark except for street light leaking around the drawn window curtain. Vangie locked the door, Zimmer switched on the single low-watt overhead. Vangie got a flat brown pint of bourbon from the dresser, at the sink poured some of it into the glass from the toothbrush holder, added tap water. She leaned against the sink to face Jimmy with glass in hand.

  “Okay, Jimmy,” she said wearily, “hit me.”

  “I called Bobby Farnsworth tonight.”

  Despair entered her eyes, but somewhere she found a smile to paste on her mouth. “What’d you call him?”

  “You know what I mean, Vangie—on the telephone.”

  “Okay, what’d you tell him?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. He told me things. What’s the matter with you anyway?” His voice had a febrile hostility; since he’d found in Vangie the strength he could never possess himself, he had to rebel against it. “I got the bonds for us.”

  “Yes, Jimmy.” She took a big gulp of her drink, made a face. “You got the bonds for us.”

  “Now I’m going to get us the money for the bonds.”

  “Or get us killed.”

  “Why do you always have to belittle everything I do?” His face was petulant, his voice whiny. “I told Bobby I was out of town with some bearer bonds, and he told me how to convert them. I didn’t even leave him a phone number or anyplace where—”

  “We agreed we didn’t touch the bonds for six months, didn’t we, Jimmy?” Vangie set her glass in the sink. “Here it is less than three weeks, you’re calling a broker already.”

  “It’s easy for you. I’m stuck in this cockroach palace staring at the walls, while you…” His voice had been rising, suddenly he was shrieking, his face red, veins standing out along the sides of his neck. “While you get your rocks off shaking your titties for a bunch of fucking rednecks!”

  Vangie seized her breasts and squeezed them cruelly. “You think having guys do this to you is fun?” she cried.

  Then as fast as it had come, her anger was gone. She shivered and poured the rest of her drink down the sink.

  “I know it’s hard for you to be cooped up here, honey, but as soon as I’ve gotten us together a traveling stake, we’ll move on, I’ll get a waitressing job—”


  “And make extra money on your back in the private room?”

  She sighed and went to look out the window, standing with one knee on the edge of the bed, her other foot on the floor. It was an unconscious pose of great grace, a dancer’s pose. Her voice was harsh and strained.

  “Why don’t I just split with the bonds and leave you here for Maxton to find? Who the hell needs you?”

  “Vangie, don’t talk that way!” He came up behind her, slid his hands under her arms. “Vangie, please, I… I love you. I want…” His hands cupped her breasts as he kissed the nape of her neck. “I need to make love to you, need to know that…”

  She shook him off without turning, irritation in her face.

  “Jimmy, Jimmy, there’s somebody coming after us and all you want to do is fuck. Can’t you feel him out there?” “All I feel is your rejection of me.”

  He used his chastised-child voice. Vangie wasn’t hearing.

  “Once I saw a deer some dogs had been running, Jimmy. They lost its scent, he came down to the bayou to drink.” She paused to lay her forehead against the cool window pane. “Usually deer, they just stay on the bank, sort of nuzzle aside the lily pads and duckweed and dead vegetation to drink. But those hounds, they’d run this one pretty hard, he wanted fresh water. So he waded out toward the channel…”

  “Vangie, I’m sorry, honey. Please don’t… shut me out.”

  “Only the little regular splashes a deer makes walking are different from those a muskrat makes swimming or a raccoon makes wading, and a gator can tell the difference, every time. Up the channel came ol’ gator, underwater. When the deer waded out to the edge of the channel and put his head down to drink… Snap!”

  She slapped both hands, fingers splayed, against the glass.

  “Ol’ gator had him by the nose.” Her palms left long wet smears on the glass. “He drug that deer into the water and gave a jerkl”—her hands jerked into fists pressed convulsively against her cheeks— “and the deer’s neck was broke.” She gestured down at the empty dawn street. “Out there somewhere is our gator…”

  “Vangie, please…”

  She turned to transfix Zimmer with a whisper.

  “Waiting to break our neck.”

  15

  After his 5:30 A.M. workout at World Gym, Dain swung back to Tam Valley to pick up Shenzie. He let himself in through the front door, got the carry case from Albie’s now-deserted bedroom, and went through to the kitchen.

  “What?” he exclaimed.

  There was a scrabbling of paws as the bandit-faced baby raccoon who was eating Shenzie’s kibble ran to squirm his fat little butt back out through the cat door in a panic. An outraged Shenzie was sitting on the kitchen counter watching the thief eat, his white whiskers standing straight out from the sides of his face like a radical acupuncture treatment gone awry.

  Dain, fighting the morning rush across the Golden Gate, laughed at Shenzie all the way into the city. He arrived at Mel’s Drive-in on Lombard just at eight. Mel’s was a deliberate anachronism, an attempt to recapture the fifties feeling of the original Mel’s on south Van Ness, which had been a huge circular barn of a place with roller-skating waitresses.

  On the walls of this Mel’s were black-and-white photos—stills from American Graffiti; Marilyn Monroe at the original Mel’s, sucking on a malt; waitresses with beehive hairdos, wearing slacks and IKe jackets, serving hamburgers to grinning boys with duck’s-ass haircuts and packs of Camels rolled up in their sleeves. A lot of the boys would have died in Korea.

  Somewhere they had found old booths of cigarette-scarred vinyl with miniature jukebox selectors on the back wall. You could flip through deliberately dated original cuts of Frank Sinatra, the Pretenders, Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine—pick your tunes, drop your quarters, and the Wurlitzer gleaming in pastel yellow and purple and cherry red up by the cash register would play them for you.

  Doug Sherman waved a languid hand around when Dain joined him in one of the booths. “How banal of you, dear boy.”

  “Not at all,” said Dain. “Lets you rub elbows with the common man.” He had been finding Sherman extraordinarily smug as of late. “Have you ordered?”

  “Just coffee. I figured once you’d had your little joke, we’d go somewhere to get—”

  “This is a great breakfast place, Dougie. The four basic food groups—salt, fat, cholesterol, carcinogens. And fourteen Elvis selections on the juke, including ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ On Tuesdays you can join the fun with carhop waitresses. I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  “My, aren’t we antic this morning,” said Sherman snidely.

  A waitress bustled up on thick ankles, wearing a rustling black nylon skirt and white cotton men’s-style shirt with miniature black bow tie. She would have been about twenty when the original Mel’s had opened a few years after the war.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Dain decided to do the entire job on Dougiebaby. “And I’m ready to order. Bacon cheeseburger with fries, order of onion rings, a chocolate shake.” He looked over at Sherman’s ashen face. “You ought to get one, Doug—they’re great!”

  “My God!” breathed Sherman. “Do you realize what’s in…”

  The waitress chirped at him, “How about you, sir?”

  “Nothing, er, ah, a refill on the coffee, and, ah, a glass of orange juice.” She wrote, nodded, started away, Sherman called after her, “Is that O.J. fresh-squeezed?”

  “Yessir,” she piped, aged eyes bright, “I squoze it out of the carton myself just this morning.”

  Sherman repeated, “My God,” then turned to Dain with a glint of anger in his eyes. “Why did you really bring me here?”

  “I’m on my way to the airport, I’ve got something I—”

  “Back to Chicago?”

  “No.”

  “So Mr. Maxton’s problem was resolved quite rapidly.”

  “Not resolved. Suspended. I’ve been waiting for the tape of a phone tap to confirm my next move. My man found someone else was tapping the same phone. Maybe Maxton is playing games with me, so…” He shrugged. “I wanted you to hear something, check my assumptions.”

  The waitress arrived with their food on a single big platter balanced on one arthritic hand. Sherman took a cautious sip of orange juice; Dain slurped his chocolate shake, began wolfing down golden-brown french-fried onion rings. The look on Sherman’s face was worth it.

  Munching away, he took the yellow Walkman out of his pocket and set it on the table, punched PLAY.

  “Robert Farnsworth here. How may I—”

  “This is Jimmy.”

  Sherman’s hand darted out to hit stop.

  “Are you crazy?” he hissed at Dain across the table. “Playing an illegal surveillance tape in a public place…”

  Dain looked around. In the next booth were a tall trim brown-haired man with glasses and a short white-haired muscular overweight man wearing a red shirt in a Southwest American Indian motif. Whenever the jukebox paused to change tunes, they could be heard taking turns trashing publishers and bemoaning Hollywood agents who never returned their phone calls.

  Back in the open kitchen the cooks, just out of their teens and wearing tall white chefs’ hats on top of too-long hair, bopped and jinked to Buddy Holly’s stuttery “Peggy Sue.” The air was heavy with the smell of frying bacon, sizzling eggs, french fries bubbling in hot grease. The place was jammed, the din atrocious.

  “With the music going, you’d need a shotgun mike in here to hear what those guys are saying at the next table.”

  He turned on the Walkman again.

  “Jimmy! I’ve been calling your office long-distance, they keep saying you’re out of town. I want to know if you have any phone numbers out here in San Francisco for me. Girls like—”

  Zimmer’s voice interrupted. “Bobby, that… ah, client who has the…” he cleared his throat, “bearer bonds…”

  Farnsworth was immediately all business. “These a
re the bonds you were telling me about in Chicago, Jimmy?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Nothing wrong with them, is there?” asked Farnsworth in a jocular voice. “Not forged? Counterfeit? Stolen?”

  Zimmer exclaimed in a near panic, “Good God no!”

  “Then take them to our Chicago office and—”

  “I’m out of town.”

  Farnsworth’s voice said, “Out of town where?”

  “N… I can’t tell you that.”

  “Attorneys!” He sighed. “Okay, look in your local phone book and see if Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth has an office in whatever city—”

  “I already did. They do.”

  “Bravo! Take in the bonds and…”

  Dain punched off the Walkman. “The rest is just verbiage.”

  “What’s it all about?” said Sherman. “Who’re the players?”

  “Jimmy Zimmer stole two million bucks in stolen bearer bonds from our friend Maxton. Bobby is his stockbroker buddy temporarily in San Francisco. It was Bobby’s phone I bugged.”

  “So the bonds were stolen twice.”

  “Technically, embezzled the first time. Anyway, Jimmy-baby is running around with a woman named Vangie Brous sard. By her Chicago arrest record, her first busts were in New Orleans for dancing nude on barroom tables at the age of sixteen. So…”

  “You’re off to New Orleans?” demanded Sherman in surprise. He gestured at the Walkman. “On the basis of that?”

  “That—and the second bug on Farnsworth’s phone.”

  “But why New Orleans? Because a woman dances on tables when she’s a teenybopper—”

  “It’s on the tape—didn’t you catch it?” His food had gotten cold while they listened to the recording. Maybe he wouldn’t have to eat it. “When Jimmy was asked where he was calling from, he voiced the letter ‘N’ before he caught himself. ‘N.’ New Orleans. The brokerage firm has a New Orleans office, Broussard’s first arrest was in New Orleans, it’s home territory for her. Plus her name—Broussard. That’s a Cajun name.”

  “I suppose it fits.” Sherman was staring at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Have you ever considered what a very strange man you are, Dain?”