Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde

by Max Phillips

  She looked blissfully happy. She bent quickly to towel her legs, then raised her arms and worked the towel roughly through her hair, smiling with closed eyes into the sun. She opened her eyes again and her smile turned mocking. I’d been staring at her endowments, and she’d noticed it first. I don’t look like the kind that blushes, and I’m not, but I felt my face redden and prickle. “Sorry,” I said. “They really are the eighth and ninth wonders, aren’t they? Jesus, imagine being you and having them around all the time.”

  “You can touch one for a dollar,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Give me a dollar,” she said, drying her back.

  After a moment, I took a dollar from my pocket and handed it to her. She folded it twice and tucked it under the right strap of her suit, then swung my towel around her shoulders like a shawl. Beneath it, she lowered her left strap. She took hold of my right hand, slipped it under the towel, and placed it on her breast. It was heavy and firm. The skin was still cold and goose-pimpled, but I could feel the heat inside.

  She said, “Where the hell have you been for the last two days?”

  I blinked and would have jerked my hand back, but she had a good grip on my wrist. Her eyes were pale and hard.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she said.

  “Working,” I said.

  “Working how? For whom? I’ve been trying to call you for two goddamned days.”

  “I was out.”

  “Where?”

  “First night? The Centaur. I wanted to see Halliday.”

  “My God. You didn’t talk to him, did you?”

  “Yeah, we had a nice chat. Rebecca—”

  “Oh my God. My God. I’m surprised he didn’t set the dogs on you.”

  “He did.”

  “I wish they tore your head off. My God, what a bungler. Do you want to spoil everything? Do you want to get my face burnt off?”

  I was having a hard time paying attention. I was pretty wrought up and afraid someone would look out a window and see. Rebecca was crisp and composed. The breast in my palm seemed to crowd out all my thoughts. I gave it a little squeeze. That seemed to be included in the rental. I said, “No.”

  “And all day yesterday?”

  “I did a little research. I checked out Halliday’s office.”

  “Checked out?”

  “I broke in and had a look around.”

  “You broke in. In the middle of the day? And when he finds somebody’s broken into his office?”

  “There’s no reason for him to need to know.” I couldn’t even talk properly. “Rebecca, I’m looking for a lever. There seems to be some rivalry with the Scarpa—”

  “That’s what you found out? Everyone knows that.”

  “I didn’t, and you didn’t tell me. Becky, Halliday’s low man on the totem pole and trying to wriggle up. If he’s, ah, Jesus.” I took a breath. “If he’s been wriggling onto Scarpa’s turf, maybe we can use the threat of Scarpa to control him.”

  “This is all pretty iffy.”

  I nodded and reached for the other breast with my free hand. She pushed it away. “I said you could touch one.”

  I dug in my pocket left-handed and held out another dollar.

  “The second one,” she said seriously, “is twenty dollars.”

  I stared, then said, “The hell with it. It’s probably just like the first one.”

  She stepped back and tucked herself away.

  “I’ve been hiding in my room for two days,” she said, “not knowing what in God’s name was going on, my heart in my mouth every time I had to open my door and walk down to the phone, while you ran around town playing Private Eye and Daring Daylight Burglar.” She turned away from me and pulled on her slacks. Dark marks like peonies bloomed on the seat. She slipped into a white blouse and knotted it savagely at the waist. “I never was too good at picking ‘em, and I guess I’m still not. But what I do know how to do is cut my losses. You’ve got twenty-four hours, Ray. Twenty-four hours to do something. To bring me something better than some theory — a plan, a solid plan — or admit you’re just another false alarm.”

  She yanked on her sandals and stalked away from me without a backward look.

  I stood there, rubbing my right palm with my left thumb.

  12

  Suit

  I arrived at the Centaur that night a bit before nine, because I’d arrived there just before nine on Tuesday and found Burri in his banquette. He was there again. Scarpa was with him. Burri’s bodyguards were at the bar. They watched me walk up with no special interest, but they watched. I didn’t see Green Eyes or Round Head anywhere. Then Scarpa saw me, and then Burri did, and opened his hands in a big look-who’s-here gesture, and I walked over to the table. Burri raised a bony finger and a waitress trotted over in another little gold dress. She was a chubby little sweetie with coppery hair. She needed a lot more cloth of gold than the gazelle did to keep her decent. She wasn’t getting it. Burri pointed at me and said, “This young man requires a gimlet. A gimlet, do I seem to recall that this is your drink?”

  I never wanted to see another goddamned stinking gimlet as long as I lived.

  I sat down, saying, “Thanks.”

  “Now,” Burri said. “This is nice. You came to keep an old man company.”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No. I’m taking your advice, Mr. Burri, and passing up that other opportunity we were discussing. You mentioned the possibility of a job. I came to see if I could get it.”

  “There,” Burri said, smiling at Scarpa. “You see? God provides.”

  “Nice of Him,” Scarpa said woodenly.

  “I would like to introduce you to a fine young man of my acquaintance, a Mr. Corson, but why do I have this feeling that I don’t need to?”

  “We’ve met,” Scarpa said.

  “Is this so?” Burri asked me. “This is what you do, go around meeting everybody?”

  “I get lonesome,” I said.

  “Well, then everybody knows everybody,” Burri said. “Very good. Now, I should admit that I have already seen enough of you, young man, to form for myself a preliminary opinion of your character. And I believe you might be suitable for a small matter Mr. Scarpa and I were discussing. Lenny, you agree?”

  “Padrone, this is the man from the Jade Mountain. That I was telling you about.”

  “This?” Burri said wonderingly. “This is the guy?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  Burri began to giggle. “You’re the one? The one with Lance’s people? You’re in the Chink place, and they both got guns, and you got nothing, just your bare fanny, and you go in there and you put them both in the hospital?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “This tickles me,” Burri said, wheezing. “This tickles me. I don’t believe I’m mistaken in saying that this is quite something. What, Leonardo, you don’t like it? You don’t think it’s funny?”

  “You can have my share,” Scarpa said.

  “Ah, Leonardo, it’s a terrible thing, to be such a young man and already so serious. You mustn’t lose your sense of humor, Leonardo. Because really, we’re all just a little joke God is having. Ah? The nuns didn’t teach you that? You didn’t ask them the right questions.”

  Burri grinned at me, and for just a moment, I saw Scarpa examining him. It was a calm look, a look I’d seen before. Like a butcher with his cleaver raised, measuring by eye.

  By the time Burri turned back to Scarpa, still grinning, the look was gone.

  Burri said, “Now, you two are both fine, able young men, and I’m sure you can work together constructively.”

  “I can work with anybody,” Scarpa said.

  “That’s fine now,” Burri said.

  I said, “If—”

  “I think that we’re all in agreement now,” Burri said.

  I said, “Thanks, Mr. Burri.”

  Scarpa stood and said, “Come i
nto the office.”

  “But he hasn’t gotten his drink!” Burri said.

  “I’ll get him a drink,” Scarpa said. “Let’s go.”

  I followed him across the big room and through a door at the end of the bar. As it swung shut behind me, the music and the roar of the big nightclub fell away to a whisper. Soundproofed. To our right was a narrow staircase, windowless and two stories tall, covered with spotless ivory carpeting, and Scarpa motioned me ahead. I started climbing the stairs ahead of him. At the top was another door, one with no knob. “Push it,” Scarpa said behind me. I pressed on the door. After a moment, there was a click and it swung inwards, and we stepped into a good-sized office, carpeted in taupe, with milk-glass sconces along the walls. The door swung silently shut behind us and the faint noise of the club abruptly ceased. It was quiet enough that I could hear the hum of the electric clock. Before me was a big desk of bird’s-eye maple and black glass, and beside it, a row of tall windows looking out over a dark, wooded slope. Three comfortable armchairs faced the desk, each with a small glass table beside it. A sofa took up the wall across from the windows. I looked behind me and saw a counter with a row of circular grilles along it, a small red stud and a black number next to each. On the wall above it was a numbered floor plan of the club. I strolled over to the window and looked down at a sunken loading dock. It was about fifty feet down to the cement. Scarpa seated himself behind the desk and sighed.

  “I guess I was born to be a babysitter,” he said.

  There was another grille set into his desk, and he leaned toward it, pressed a stud, and said, “Two gins.” He leaned back. “I hate gimlets. I hate goddamn lime juice. You like gimlets?”

  “Not anymore. I was drinking them that night at the Jade Mountain.”

  He let out a little huff of laughter. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?”

  I shrugged, looking out the window. “I’ll find out.”

  “Getting ready to jump?”

  “Not till I’ve had my drink.”

  “What would you’ve done if you came in here and met Halliday instead?”

  “Smiled pretty.” I dropped into one of the armchairs.

  “You know,” Scarpa said. “The old man likes to talk like a fool. He enjoys it. But if he was really such an old fool, somebody would have taken care of him by now.”

  The door behind Scarpa’s desk opened and the gazelle stepped through it, carrying a tray with two tall gins. Through the door as she closed it, I glimpsed what looked like an apartment decorated in ivory and taupe. She set a drink on a coaster at Scarpa’s elbow, then came around the desk, and I saw that she wore no shoes or stockings, just the little gold dress. She set the other drink on the table by my chair, then laid the empty tray on the corner of Scarpa’s desk, walked around behind his chair, and ran her fingers down his temples. She took hold of his shoulders and began to knead them. Neither had stopped looking at me.

  “I dunno,” Scarpa said. “What does he look like to you? To me, he just looks like a mutt.”

  “Mutts come all kinds,” she remarked, digging her thumbs in.

  I sipped my drink. Scarpa ignored his. She stopped rubbing his shoulders and draped her arms loosely around him, resting her belly against his nape. He pushed her away with an irritable shove of his head, and she seated herself on the credenza behind him and rested her bare feet on the desktop, knees together. Scarpa rose and came out from behind the desk.

  “Stand up,” he said.

  I stood up.

  “Come over where I can see you.”

  I stepped forward. He took hold of my lapel and rubbed it between his fingers. “You like this suit?”

  “Why would I?” I said.

  He opened my jacket, lifted out my gun, and let it slip back into its holster, nodding. “You don’t work with jeweler’s tools.”

  He strolled around behind me and I felt him try to brush something off my shoulder. He ambled back into view. He lifted my tie and examined it. It was a plain deep yellow silk tie.

  “The tie’s all right,” he decided.

  He let it fall and slammed his fist into my stomach.

  Scarpa could hit, and he gave me plenty. But he’d also given me all week to get set. I rocked back on my heels and then looked at the gazelle to take my mind off it. Her mouth was open, and I held mine shut and smiled at her. You’ve got to take the first breath right away, and then the next ones are easier. Scarpa was standing before me, hands on hips, staring up at me, chin out, waiting.

  “Feel better now?” I said. My voice was tight.

  “I do,” he said. “I guess you can screw the lid on it after all.”

  He leaned back against the edge of his desk, hands in his pockets.

  He said, “I make you as some kind of hick, right? But you got a head. You got eyes. You got a mouth, too, but all right. All right. Sometimes the old man still sees things first.”

  Now she saw I was okay, the gazelle decided she’d liked me being hit just fine. There was never a dull moment with me around. She was showing me just about all the legs she had. It was more legs than I thought one girl was allowed.

  Scarpa said, “Scamper, honey.”

  She picked up the tray and went back through the door behind the desk. It closed the way it had opened, without a sound.

  “Here’s the thing,” Scarpa told me. “We sell a lot to movie people. But the last couple three months, I’ve lost a number of my nice steady customers. I don’t have any competition I know of, not in that part of town. There’s four five guys, and some of them have guys, and they compete with each other, but they all get their stuff from me. I’ve talked to my neighbors. I think they’re on the level. So it’s a new guy, an independent. Maybe he’s a movie guy himself. I wanna talk to him.”

  I said, “I’m not a finger man, Lenny. If you use me that way, you’ll find I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”

  “Just talk, to begin with. I don’t waste that stuff.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “If I wanted him iced,” he said patiently, “would I have you bring him to me? Think I still do that kind of work myself?”

  “Okay. I don’t.”

  “You work for me now. So I don’t need as much mouth from you as I been getting.”

  “All right. I’ll want some money.”

  “You’ll get paid when you show you’re worth paying.”

  “I’ll have to be nice to people. I’ll probably have to make a buy myself.”

  “All right.” He pulled out his wallet, counted off two fifties and five twenties, and handed them over. New bills, fresh from the bank. Two weeks’ work for Nestor. He took out a small leather notebook and began writing. “You find the guy, you call this number. I don’t care what time it is.”

  He tore out the sheet, turned it over, and began writing again. “And this, this is my tailor. You’re gonna be there tomorrow morning when he opens at eight. He’ll be expecting you. Don’t tell him what you want. He’ll give you what I want. The tie’s all right. You can keep the tie. But if I gotta look at you? It’s not gonna be in that suit.”

  13

  Coast Highway

  Joseph Callender, Suitings wasn’t right on Rodeo Drive, but just around the corner on Brighton, behind a door that was freshly painted green but didn’t look like much and up a flight of stairs with gleaming black marble treads. There wasn’t any sign out front. Mr. Callender was there, sirring away at me, when I reached the top of the stairs at eight the next morning. There was no one thing about his clothes you’d notice, but he was about sixty and pear-shaped and the way he dressed, he made you wish you were sixty and pear-shaped, too. I thought I might be a problem for him but he said I was actually a fairly classic 50 Long and wouldn’t need much work. I said that was good to know. He ran a tape over me just to make sure, dictating to an assistant the while, and took tracings of my stocking feet, and then sat me down in a green leather chair with a Tribune that was hot and flat, as if it had
just been ironed, and some coffee in a cup I was kind of proud of myself for not breaking. In the next half hour three boys came up the stairs, loaded down with packages from some of the stores around the corner: Carroll & Co. and Lanzetti and D. Salzburg. Callender had me try on suits until he found one he could live with, then touched it here and there with chalk. He asked whether I’d need a little extra room under the left arm. I said I carried a .44 Python and should I have brought it? He said he’d seen them. He gave the jacket to one assistant and the pants to another, then sat me down and poured me more coffee, and I asked if he usually did alterations on off-the-rack clothes. He said that for a customer like Mr. Scarpa one made exceptions. I said yes, one did.

  He had the whole shop working at once, it looked like, and got me out the door in under three hours. It was a little before noon when I pulled back into the lot at home. Rebecca was there, sitting in her convertible in a big sun hat and sunglasses. She took off the glasses when she saw me, and got out of her car, and I parked and walked over to meet her. I was wearing a sharkskin suit like Scarpa’s, only a darker gray they called oxford, a white button-down shirt — I had three more in the car, wrapped in paper — a snap-brim hat with a midnight blue band, black wingtips that shone dully, like obsidian, gray silk socks — I had a dozen of those — and my tie. I stood before her and held out my arms. “This is it,” I said. “As Sinatra as I’ll ever get.”

  She shook her head helplessly. “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Last night Lenny Scarpa made me one of his gentlemen-in-waiting. He didn’t like my clothes, so he sent me to his tailor this morning. They let me keep my tie.”

  “You got a job with Scarpa,” she said.

  “Someone’s been poaching his snowbirds. He hired me to find out who. If it’s Halliday, we’ll have a number of angles to play, plus Scarpa’s backing. If it’s not, we’ve still got more leverage then we did. I know you wanted a plan, and this is a little vaguer than that, but it’s what I’ve got. If it doesn’t sound good, you can have your money back.”