Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde

by Max Phillips

  I sat down, saying, “For a minute back there, you seemed to forget all about me. I was lonely.”

  “Friend,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing. But you know what I’m doing. I’m working for a living.”

  “I didn’t take it personally.”

  “I wouldn’t care if you did. Actually, though, now you’re part of the family, I guess I got to care. What’s your magic, anyway? I never seen the old man fall in love so fast.”

  “You pour a good drink,” I told him.

  “Thanks. That’s one thing here, they let you pour ‘em right. It’s why I’ve stayed so long.”

  “Thinking of going?”

  “Been saving up for my own place. Another year should do it. I got my eye on a property in Culver City.”

  “Yeah? Which? If you’re behind the bar, I’ll have to make a note of it.”

  “Friend, don’t take this wrong, especially since you’re Burri’s new nephew. But when I get my place? I don’t want you anywhere near it.”

  I left him with a smile and no tip and went to get my hat back. Outside, I gave my ticket to the valet. He still treated me like I didn’t smell, and I gave him two bucks, his and the bartender’s, and pulled out the circular drive and headed north. A quarter mile up the road, I made a U-turn and drove back. There was a liquor store, a florist, and a late-night drugstore across the road from the Centaur, and I pulled into the parking lot, where I could see the club’s entrance, and killed the lights. They might have a man watching the road, just on general principles, but unless he was on the roof with binoculars I didn’t see where they could put him, and I figured I was probably clear.

  My watch said about 9:40. I decided I’d wait an hour to see if Halliday showed. They had strong lights under the port cochère, I’d seen his picture, and there’s nothing wrong with my eyes. In the army, I was company sniper. It’s interesting what snipers do. When your company retreats, you’re supposed to cover them by climbing a tree or something and firing on the approaching enemy. They don’t say what you’re supposed to do when the Germans arrive and you’re still up the tree. I didn’t mind. By the time I joined up I was twenty-six and had been on the bum for eight years, just rattling around loose from town to town, and I was ready for someone to tell me what to do, even if they were telling me to go climb a tree and wait to be shot. Anyway, we didn’t retreat much and I made it to the Elbe without so much as a skinned knee. Around ten past, a dark blue Lincoln pulled up with two suits in front and a blonde head in back. The blonde head got out and became a big young guy with sort of sparkly hands and what looked like Halliday’s chin. He breezed right by the valets with his hard boys and breezed back out at 10:25. By then I had my engine running, and I slipped into traffic two cars behind him.

  7

  Jade Mountain

  We headed back toward town on the Golden State. The radio was broken, so I was singing That’s Amore. I had the window open and was letting my hand fill with cool wind and molding it like clay. Late as it was, there was a bar of dull blue light floating over the western horizon somehow, and the glow you always see over downtown, and all the lights, spreading out to the mountains. When they turned east onto 10 I was right behind them, and a good thing, too, because they turned off right away onto Soto and if I’d been bashful I’d have lost them. We cruised through Boyle Heights for a few blocks and then they pulled into a big Chinese place called Jade Mountain. I pulled into a supermarket two blocks further on, got the car turned around, and waited.

  The market had a big neon sign of a performing seal. It had a red ball balanced on its nose, and then the ball was floating a little above its nose, and then higher, and then gone. Then it reappeared on the nose again. After five minutes I drove back to the Jade Mountain. The blue Lincoln was in the back corner of the lot, almost out of sight behind the restaurant. I got out of the car, locked my door, and went inside.

  The bar was off to the right as you come in the front door, one of those grotto things with a low ceiling, all the light coming from behind the bottles. There was an old Chinese gent in a short jacket behind it, and Halliday at the far end, chatting with the cocktail waitress. She wore a snug brocade dress and had a smooth cool face you wanted to cup in your hands. Her waist was about as big as my neck. He had big rings on every finger, as advertised. They must have been pure hell during piano lessons.

  I guessed his lugs were still out in the car. Aside from us, the bar was empty. I sat down at the other end and ordered my fifth gimlet. I hoped there weren’t going to be too many more. The waitress was neat and smooth. She had everything a man could want, only little. She and Halliday looked awfully pretty together, and I watched them talk and tried not to get sad. People talk a lot of crap about the Chinese being inscrutable, but there was nothing mysterious there. She was looking up at him as if she thought he was just fine. He gave her a business card, and she did a little series of head-bobs over it and admired it and tucked it away somewhere in her dress. Then he kept talking, looking friendly and reasonable, and you could see her wondering if she might not be understanding him right. Then her face went slowly dead, and then she said something brief and walked steadily out of the bar. Halliday looked after her ruefully. When he turned, he found me grinning at him. I raised my glass.

  He came over in no hurry and said, “Laughing at me, friend?” It was a nice voice, medium deep and not trying too hard.

  I shook my head, still grinning. “Toasting you. You got more nerve than I do.”

  “For whatever good it did,” he said, sitting down next to me. “I guess I got told.”

  “I guess. What were you told?”

  “Actually, I couldn’t make it out. But whatever it was, I got told, all right.”

  “Honorable wound, anyway. Let me buy you a drink. Make up for my bad manners.”

  “The hell you’ll buy me a drink,” he said amiably. “I just got trimmed down to nothing. I need to feel like a big shot again. I’ll buy.”

  Halliday was about the best-looking man I’ve seen. He had thick, dull blonde hair swept straight back from a broad forehead, thick straight brows, a straight nose that wasn’t too small, and a small, sensible-looking mouth. He might’ve had a little more jaw than he needed, but it had a good shape. He wore a tan mohair jacket with shoulders padded out to here, but he had plenty of his own shoulders underneath. He wasn’t sissy-looking, either, like some of these perfect types. His eyes were calm and he looked friendly. You found yourself thinking it wasn’t his fault he was gorgeous. You almost thought the rings weren’t his fault, either.

  He asked me my name and I told him Stuart Rose, and we shook hands. I don’t look much like a Yid, but neither did Rosey. We’d gotten to be pretty good friends at Camp Claiborne and stayed that way until halfway through the Ardennes. He wouldn’t have minded me using his name. He didn’t need it anymore. Halliday told me his name was Halliday and I said “Huh.”

  “Heard of me?” he said.

  I said, “Director, right?”

  “More of a producer.”

  “You thought little Lotus Blossom was your next big star?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Must be the only woman in L.A. who doesn’t want to be in the movies.”

  “Well,” he said lightly, “maybe she doesn’t like the kind of movies I make.”

  “What kind are those?”

  “Well, you know. We strive to entertain.”

  “Guy with your looks, how come you’re not in front of the camera instead?”

  “Tried it,” he said. “Stank up the joint. Now I produce.”

  “Landed on your feet, huh?”

  “Hope so, anyway. You look like you might’ve played a little ball sometime.”

  I shook my head. “I come from a pretty small town, and pretty much all the guys were on all the teams. But I never cared for it much.”

  “I was a tailback,” he said. “I wasn’t bad, either. I could hit a little and run a lot, an
d we had a quarterback with an arm and some guys on the line who could chase off the riff-raff. We did all right. That was a good time. That was about as good a time as I’ve had. Of course, when I was acting, my press bio said I was the quarterback.”

  “Where was this?”

  He shook his head. “I’m funny about that, I guess. I’d rather not say.”

  “Ashamed of your old home town?”

  “Other way round, friend,” he said. “Other way round. I don’t think everybody there would be too pleased with some of the things I’ve done out here. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway, but like I said, I’m funny about it. Anyway, the press kit said Tarzana, which sounds better than the real thing would’ve, anyhow.”

  “Quarterback from Tarzana.”

  He grinned. “I wouldn’t’ve been quarterback, even if I’d had the arm. I was having too much fun where I was. You never played football? You must’ve done something. I don’t meet that many guys who make me look dainty.”

  “Boxed a little.”

  “Yeah? Pro?”

  “For a while. Army and then pro.”

  “Kid Rose, huh?”

  I laughed. “I was thirty when I had my first professional bout. I fought as plain old Stu Rose.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “Nine and two. Six of the nine were knockouts or TKOs, most of them in the first three rounds. That’s not bragging. That’s to say I couldn’t box. I could hit, but that’s all. If you made me box, you could take me on points. I quit before everybody knew it.”

  “You must’ve been able to take a punch, then, too.”

  “I don’t like it, but I don’t mind it.”

  “Didn’t, or don’t?”

  “What are we talking about?” I said.

  The waitress came back and dropped Halliday’s business card on the table. She turned on her heel and walked off without a word. Halliday looked at me with raised eyebrows, then picked up the card and turned it over. On the back, there was a phone number in a neat feminine hand and a deft little sketch of a movie screen with a smiling, almond-eyed face on it. I gawped at it with my jaw hanging down. The thing about me is, I really understand women.

  Halliday laughed. “Don’t feel too bad. I thought just what you thought: not a chance.” He tucked the card away. “You say you boxed in the Army? This Korea?”

  “Flatterer,” I said. “Belgium and Germany, and I was pretty old for that.”

  “Siegfried Line, huh? I guess you saw some action.”

  “It got a little noisy.”

  “How was that?”

  “Well, I don’t like it when people shoot at me. But they gave me a gun to shoot back with, so I guess it was okay.”

  “Combat didn’t bother you any?”

  “Sure. But it was better than sitting around. When you’re mixing it up, you’re too busy to get scared. When you’re lying around waiting, you’ve got nothing to do but picture different ways you could get it.”

  “What was the worst thing you ever saw?”

  “Out there? I dunno. I never tried stacking ‘em up against each other.”

  “Tell you what I mean,” Halliday said, turning his glass around bit by bit as if he was looking for something along the outside of it. “There are some things you see, they get under your skin like a splinter and just stick. You keep seeing them. Give you an example. When I was a kid, I had this sort of gang I ran with. I guess I was the leader, or anyway, the guy who always had an idea what we could do next. And there was one of these jerky little guys who used to try and run with us. You know the type. Funny-looking and never does anything quite right. We used to give him a pretty bad time. Anyway. One day we were all out somewhere north of town, and I noticed these three trees next to each other that had big branches pretty much at a level. And I said, I’m going to climb up that tree over there, and walk across the branches on that tree in the middle, and not climb down until I’m on that tree. So I did, and of course, then everybody had to try. We were all crazy for something to do. Well, some of the kids made it fine, and some chickened out partway and had to crouch down and wriggle back, and some decided they’d better stay on the ground. But Gavin, that was the kid’s name, Gavin was hell-bent to show he could do it, and halfway across he dropped like a stone, maybe fifteen feet, and broke his arm, the compound kind. Where there’s a little nub of bone poking out.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said.

  “No, wait. He broke his arm, and it was the best thing ever happened to him. We carried him back to town, even though we shouldn’t have, and he didn’t make a noise practically the whole way. When he was in the hospital, we all came to see him. It was more attention than he ever had in his life. And when he got out, he was one of us. Everybody just agreed that, without talking about it. And once he was in, you know? He wasn’t so jerky. He was pretty much one of the fellows from then on. He got what he’d wanted. But you know, not a week probably goes by that I don’t see that little nub of bone in my mind, and I’m not squeamish. I just think about Gavin wanting so badly to be one of the guys. And then him lying there with his bones poking out. And it seems as if, whenever things are going along nice and smooth, I’ll always see that sharp little nub again, and it — ” He made a hooking gesture with two fingers. “Catches.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Well, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about,” he said.

  “That’s a good story.”

  “Your turn.”

  “Huh. All right. Well, I guess a lot of things over there happened that stuck with me. But what I think you’re talking about, that one’s just something I saw for thirty seconds out the back of a truck. It was just a guy slapping a woman around.”

  “That’s what you remember, huh?”

  “I know. We saw a lot of things out there. There were these things called tree-bursts, where the Germans wired a charge to a tree as they were retreating, head-high or knee-high or, you know, balls-high, and I saw one of those take a man’s head off who’d just been humping along next to me singing Bang Bang Lucy. And there were towns we came through that you could tell had been beautiful, and now they were just a few stone walls and a big sea of trash. And we’d done that. Helped, anyway. But the kind of thing you’re talking about?” I took another swallow of my drink. “I remember this guy. I didn’t know his name, but he was in our company. We were rotating to the front after ten days back, and everybody was stopping overnight in a place called Vise, in Belgium, and trucks’d been coming in all day. And I guess this guy had gotten himself a Belgian girl, but he wasn’t pleased with her. He had her by the arm, even though she wasn’t trying to go anywhere, and he was slapping away with his free hand, grinning down at her. He’d stop and wait for her to lift her head, and then give her another one. He was enjoying himself. I guess he was pretty lit up.”

  “And that stayed with you.”

  “I know, it was just a few slaps. He wasn’t even closing his fist.”

  “But it stayed with you.”

  “I’m not getting to the point of this. They were feeding us good. They were treating us all right. He didn’t have any call to act that way. I don’t care how drunk he was. But that isn’t it, either. It’s the way she was standing there taking it. Like everybody had a perfect right to step up and do whatever they liked to her. Like that’s what she was born for. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Gavin.”

  “That’s right, Gavin. No one’s got a right to lean on somebody like that, who can’t help themselves, who can’t even cover up, because they think they must deserve it.”

  “All right, Rose,” he said mildly. “We were just kids.”

  “It’s not just kids. Everybody does. Everybody. I’ll never forget it, any part of it. She’d curled her hair, and now it was all down over her face, and she wasn’t a beauty, and she was wearing man’s shoes too big for her. His blouse was coming untucked over his hip. The guy next to me in the truck was ea
ting an orange, and he’d just given me some, and my fingers were wet with it. And this man was whaling on this woman who’d been born to take it. I’d seen it all my life, but just then’s when I realized, I’d always be seeing it. Because that was the world.”

  I took a breath and finally managed to shut up. Halliday had something, all right. You wanted to talk to him.

  He waited a minute, then said, “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did you do to the guy when you found him?” Halliday said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Okay. Fair enough,” he said. “We just met.”

  At last I said, “I didn’t do anything he wouldn’t get better from someday.”

  “Galahad, huh?” he said lightly.

  “No,” I said slowly. “I’m not a Galahad. I’m a bully, too. I guess that’s why I hate ‘em so much.”

  After a moment, he laughed.

  It was pretty nice of him, actually. He knew what I was talking about. But we just sat there laughing, like I’d been joking.

  “Listen, Rose,” he said when he’d stopped. “Tell me something. What sort of things scare you?”

  “What? Jesus, I don’t know. Lots of things. I’m not stupid.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Your little Lotus Blossom, like I said.”

  He laughed. “Wise man. Me too, boy. Ever hear of a guy named Lenny Scarpa?”

  “Sure.”

  “He make you nervous?”

  “He’s just a guy.”

  “Who can kill you.”

  “Anyone can kill you, if you let them. What are we talking about here?”

  “What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Not enough. I work construction when I can.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve done a little bodyguarding. What are we talking about?”