“So what are you buying,” I asked, “and what’s the tariff?”
She reached inside the kneehole of the desk and placed a briefcase on top of it. It was one of those portfolios that women executives carry, tan pigskin with double handles and fine, almost invisible stitching, a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of office luggage. I rose a little from my seat and tilted it to see inside. The bundles were banded in paper and laid out with a mortician’s attention to propriety.
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said, in the tone she’d used when James Darren dumped her for Debbie Watson in Hang Ten. “Give it to Sam and tell him Gail wants out.”
I smoked my Winston down to the filter and extinguished it next to hers. “Do you want the briefcase back?”
2
“THE ACTUAL DEBT’S more like a million, counting cars and furs and jewelry and getting set up here,” she said. “This is as much as I could raise on this place and the house in West Bloomfield. Anyway, you’re supposed to get a break when you pay off early.”
“‘Early’ meaning before you and Sam walk hand-in-hand through the big gates,” I said. She nodded. “What’d he do, forget an anniversary?”
“Sam’s been good to me. He used to knock me around a little, but I stabbed him in the back with a serving fork one night and he gave me a Volvo and never hit me again. I didn’t figure in the Volvo; I earned that. I did include the fifty grand he spread around to keep the fork story out of the media. He did that strictly for me, bad press being a way of life for him.”
She lit another cigarette and pointed it at the ceiling. This time I didn’t join her. “I think it started last year when I made Sam late for dinner with a business associate. We were going to the show at the Fisher afterwards so he was bringing me along. I was still drinking then, it was before AA, and I had a hangover the size of Southfield. Anyway we were twenty minutes late. Time enough for two guys in ski masks to go in through the kitchen and plunk the business associate and his companion full of holes while they were waiting. Maybe you read about it.”
“I didn’t know Lucy was involved.”
“He wasn’t, thanks to my head and stomach. But he could just as well have been, and now the only thing that scares the living hell out of me is a dinner date with Sam. The associate’s companion was twenty-seven years old, a former Miss Ohio.”
“Why don’t you give him the money yourself?”
“Because if I see his face I may not go through with it. I know, he kills people and he steals from the government and when he was younger he did things with a blowtorch I wouldn’t wish on Will Hays, but in some ways he’s like a puppy, you can’t look him in the eye and tell him you’re giving him away because the landlady won’t let you keep pets. I admit I’m a coward, Mr. Walker. They tell me you’ve got guts for rent and that’s why I called you.”
“It’s not his reaction you’re afraid of?”
“No. Sam’s mellowed, and even when he was younger it wasn’t like him to become violent. He was facing two years on a trumped-up stolen credit card rap when he hit me. That would make anyone crazy.”
I stroked the briefcase. It was as close as I was ever likely to come to three quarters of a million dollars. “You’ve been with him a long time. Unless you’re deaf and blind or an idiot you had to have seen and heard things. He might not want to let you go for reasons other than love.”
“I had to consider that, from the men around him if not from him. That’s why the money. I’m hoping it will convince him I’m not looking to sell him out. It’s unlikely even the federal task force on organized crime would shake loose this much for one witness against one hoodlum. Sam’s not Meyer Lansky, or even Myron Floren.”
“There’s a cheaper way. You could turn witness against him.”
“Sure, and live the rest of my life as Mamie Underbrush in a prefab house owned by the feds in Salt Lake City or someplace, wetting my panties every time someone rings the doorbell. No, thanks. Besides, I like Sam. I met him at a dinner when I couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood. He made me happy, he and his rough friends who looked like truck drivers dressed up for somebody’s wedding, and he put up the money for Broken Blossoms even if it did stink up the place. He’s been good to me and he never treated me like his whore. We whores appreciate that. I just don’t want to end up full of holes with my face in the linguini.”
“You always did know how to make an impression.”
She laughed for real, and this time I heard the waves off Malibu. “Like the time I took a champagne bath at David O. Selznick’s sixtieth birthday party. That’s when the studio was waxing my hooves to make me the next Jayne Mansfield. Poor Jayne. Six months after she was decapitated in that crash I took a leave of absence and never went back until Broken Blossoms. God hates sex symbols.”
“This one did okay.”
She looked around. “It’s a roof. Everyone wants the sixties back, or what they think the sixties were. The club was Sam’s idea. I added the bubble-gum touches and the hokey ads with muscleheads in white suits. Fags, the bunch of them. I made sure of that, to keep Sam from getting jealous.”
“Does he know you’re unhappy?”
“I don’t know. You don’t slip up on him from behind. He comes on like a lug and dresses like one, but after thirty years in the mill he’s got his health and a lot of uptown boys in silk suits and manicures haven’t. It isn’t all luck.” The column of ash on her Bel-Air was two inches long. She tipped it into a tray. “Do you accept the job?”
The briefcase stood on the desk between us. I had to sight along it to see her face. “I charge two-fifty a day, three days up front to cover expenses. Have you got that much left in the jar?”
She produced an industrial-size checkbook from the top drawer, wrote one out, and tore it off. I glanced at it — she dotted the i in Gail with a circle, otherwise it might have been a man’s signature, no flourishes — and put it in my wallet. “It may take a few days. Meanwhile I’d be more comfortable if you’d hang on to the cash. The last time I had this much to work with was before they canned me from the board at Chrysler. It’s too painful to talk about.”
“I’d rather you took it with you. I know me. The less chance I have to change my mind the better. I read a script on Friday once, thought about it over the weekend, and turned it down on Monday — who’d watch a gangster picture in 1967? They gave the part to Faye Dunaway.”
I scribbled a receipt for the $750,000 and another for the $750 check — three zeroes will change lives and topple governments — gave them to her, and stood up to heft the briefcase. Money never weighs as much as it does. She stood up too, a tiny woman, not much bigger than her posters, who had a way of lifting her chin slightly that made her look like a small girl playing at being grown up. Well, we all were.
I said, “You’re not letting me walk out of here with three quarters of a million dollars because of anything L. C. Candy said. Who checked me out?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not for the reasons you might think. I’ve peeked between too many curtains myself to worry about who’s watching my windows. But if he’s good enough to find out I can be trusted with a stash this size, he should be good enough to make the delivery himself.”
“It’s a fair question.” She rested five neatly pruned nails on top of the desk. They weren’t painted and she didn’t go in for those daggers you see around. When you’re small I guess it pays to grow everything to scale. “I have ethics too. I don’t give out names. He’s not in your line, but he knows people and he’s not on friendly enough terms with Sam to go running to him with this. Beyond that I wouldn’t trust him to hold my cheapest fur coat.”
“He’s good,” I said. “I usually know when someone’s sniffing after me. Maybe I’m getting too comfortable.”
“Not on two-fifty a day.” She tore the top sheet off a pad on the desk with Snoopy in one corner and gave it to me. “That’s Sam’s home address. Don’t give it out. Not th
at every loyal Rendezvous reader didn’t memorize it years ago when they ran a two-page spread on the stately homes of the Mafiosi.”
I took a second to burn it in and gave it back. “I hope I won’t need it. The last article I read about him had him still working in Southfield. I’ll probably make the drop there. They get awful jumpy when strangers come to their homes.”
“He’s still there. Sam doesn’t like change. He never got over Repeal.”
“Who did?” I harvested my hat and coat from the tree. “See you in the movies.”
She had come around the desk and now she squeezed my hand again with her small strong one. “Call me when it’s done.”
I went out the suckers’ entrance, under the switched-off neon sign. The nightspot had a stale nicotine smell by day, and a bleary, fish-out-of-water look, like a working stiff at home sick in his robe and pajamas watching the soaps. Gray November glowered at me in front of the flamingo, kicked snow in my face. Short of the Canada clippers of January it was about as far as you could get from the beach. So was Gail Hope.
But there was something else out of line besides the season and the time of day, something you couldn’t touch but that you knew was there somehow, like a dubbed foreign soundtrack where the actors’ words didn’t quite match the action. It had my built-in smoke alarm hooting. It hooted all the way to the National Bank of Detroit’s downtown branch, where I stuffed two safety deposit boxes with bills and had to come back out of the vault and ask sheepishly for a third before I could empty the briefcase. The female clerk, blonde and pretty in a machine-punched sort of way in a floppy bow tie and football pads, glanced from the expensive case to the cheap suit and said nothing. I lost a little respect for her then.
3
AT THE TELLERS’ CAGES in front I conducted a less spectacular but more personally satisfying transaction, depositing four hundred of the $750 Gail Hope had given me in my savings account and turning the rest into long folding. The bills looked more real than the ones I had placed in the boxes. It’s like that when you’re reasonably honest.
My car, a big gray Mercury with a history and two serial numbers under the hood, the original concealed beneath a steel plate with the new one stamped on it, smelled of old fries and the ghosts of cattle gone to market, reminding me that it was coming on noon and I hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday. I had spent the afternoon turning the foxed pages of pasture-size plat books in the basement of the City-County Building, and the evening following my finger down rows of death notices in the microfilm reading room at the Detroit Public Library, reconstructing the life of a realtor who had died owing people money, which was as interesting as the life got. It had taken two highballs afterward to poke a hole big enough to breathe through in the cake of dust in my throat. The morning call from the Club Canaveral had interrupted a pleasant dream in which I was an archaeologist sifting through the remains of an Egyptian tomb to find out where Pharaoh had skipped with the treasury. It wasn’t Indiana Jones but it kept the electricity on.
Being in tall cotton, I tried out a new place on Gratiot for lunch, one of those leafy-lit establishments with brass rails and oak panels and an upholstered bar in the center with flutes and snifters suspended upside-down over it like bats. After five minutes a blue-black brunette in a white blouse and slit black skirt seated me between the rest rooms and the kitchen, where I ordered a New York strip and a cabernet and watched the busy waitresses galloping between tables, ducking trays and one another. I chewed my steak and sipped my wine and admired the choreography.
While I was waiting for the bill I placed a call from the telephone opposite the reservation desk.
“You’ve reached the Stackpole residence. Leave your message after the beep.”
Barry’s irrepressible puckishness just would spill over into his recording. I had just started dictating when he came on the line for real.
“Amos?”
“The machine’s new,” I said. “I suppose you’ve got a word processor now and everything.”
“Don’t remind me they exist. Every jerk in the world who has one thinks he can write. Are those bar sounds I hear?”
“There’s one in the room. Being on the wagon hasn’t hurt your ears.”
“Anytime I can’t hear ice hit glass I’ll move to Tibet. What’s your pleasure?”
A long time ago I might have been calling just to talk; but we both knew how long ago that was. “What’ve you got on Sam Lucy?”
“Not much. I write about organized crime, the sharks and the victims. Lucy’s a fat fish in the middle of the school. He’s not going any higher and he knows it. He doesn’t rate much space in my files.”
“Whose files would he?”
There was a cagy little pause on his end. “What’s the beef and do I get a cut?”
“You couldn’t do much with it. I’m supposed to give him something.”
“If you’re thinking of changing professions, forget it. You think too much before you pull the trigger.”
“Nothing that lethal. I’m paying off a debt for a client.”
“So pay it. What’s to know?”
“He’s not expecting it.”
“Heavy,” he said. “That’s like climbing into the cage with a tiger to give him raw meat.”
“That’s why I need to talk to someone who’s counted his stripes. If it turns into anything I’ll see you get it. I’m hoping it won’t.”
“Mitchell Trout.”
“What’s a Mitchell Trout?”
“It’s not a what, it’s a who. He’s retired now. He used to be Detroit bureau chief for Rendezvous magazine. Remember Rendezvous?”
“I’ve been hearing about it a lot lately.” Gail Hope had mentioned it three times.
“The old issues look pretty tame now, but in its heyday it made the National Enquirer look like U.S. News and World Report. The Postal Service shut it down finally for sending pornography through the mails. These days they use racier stuff to sell Pepsi on TV, but pornography never really was the issue. They printed a lot of bad stuff about a lot of famous people. Some of it was true.”
“What about Trout?”
“My mentor, after a fashion. It was his stuff about the Detroit underworld that got me interested in the subject. Sam Lucy was his pet story, back when it looked like the Brotherhood might elect him to the national board of directors. Trout infiltrated his eighteenth wedding anniversary party. He was there with a camera when the organized crime task force smuggled Lucy in handcuffs through the back door of the First Precinct on that trumped-up stolen credit card rap. Trout scooped everybody on Lucy’s romance with Gail Hope. Remember Gail Hope?”
“In what bar do I find this wonder?”
“No bar.” He gave me an address on Sherman.
I took it down in my notebook. “What’s his price?”
“If I know Mitch he’ll be happy enough to talk about Sam Lucy for free. Tell him I gave you his name.”
“Thanks, Barry. How are things at the News?”
“Same as ever when I quit last week. That joint operating agreement with the Free Press is the death of journalism in this town. I’m back to freelancing, which is a classy way of saying I’m out of work. Anytime you need a one-legged legman, you know where to find me.”
“I’d call you ahead of anybody I know with two.”
“That’s sweet, but you still owe me a piece of whatever it is if it’s whatever.” The connection broke.
My bill was waiting for me at the table. I paid it and left a twenty percent tip. The service wasn’t that hot, but they deserved something for mileage.
Sherman is inner city, bleached cracked asphalt and shattered sidewalks and weedy lots where pheasants nest, raising streetwise little chicks whose natural enemies are rats and plastic six-pack carriers. The houses need paint and some of them have bullet holes from afternoon drive-by shootings aimed at teenage heroin lords that almost invariably get little girls by mistake. The address Barry had given me belonged to a nar
row house built of cement block with tobacco-colored tiles on the outside. The porch roof sagged over a wicker rocker that no one had sat in since LBJ.
I had never seen a copy of Rendezvous, but I knew the breed: Photographic covers with chesty starlets hunched forward in gowns cut to their ankles, banners over the logos and down the left side that read JACKIE O. NUDE AT PARTY ON MILLIONAIRE’S YACHT and I’M CARRYING A MARTIAN’S CHILD, dusty brown pulp pages inside with mail-order advertisements offering security work and ninety-day bust-expansion programs and columns with Hollywood datelines based on information supplied by maids and chauffeurs and temporary secretaries. Their time had been brief but purple, a bridge constructed of peepholes between the fan magazines of the forties and fifties and the supermarket trash papers of today. They went with sweaty former newspapermen in windowless rear offices with their sleeves rolled up and their neckties tucked into the front of their pants.
The man who answered my knock didn’t look as if he belonged to that litter. My height, built along clean tapering lines in a steel-gray cardigan, pleated slacks, and loafers with a soft sheen like clean oil, he had black hair going gray in front in natural waves and a lean brown face set off by a thin moustache and steel-rimmed glasses. He read my card aloud with a Ronald Colman accent pushed through Kipling and let me into an interior that was as far removed from the face of the house and the neighborhood as Mitchell Trout in person was from the braying moist-palmed world of tabloid journalism.
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