Spider’s Cage

by Jim Nisbet

  “Hah!” Gleason said.

  “He was a louse and she hates the guy. Marty only had to hit Lobe once after he threw him through the door…” she stopped and bit her lip. Bdeniowitz looked at Windrow, who wiped the grin off his face, and back to Opium Jade. “Go on,” he said. “Fill in the blanks.”

  “Well, I knew that just wouldn’t be enough for Candy in the straight telling of it. You just had to’ve been there.” She cranked her hand around her wrist a couple of times. “It was OK live, but I just kind of jazzed the replay up for her, make her feel good.”

  “Shit,” said Candy.

  “Well,” Opium Jade shrugged. “You get bored standing on the lousy corner, and it’s cold, too. All those creeps driving by looking to do weird things to you, a girl wants a little conversation to keep her nerve up…”

  “You told me he creamed that jerk like hot black coffee!” Candy screamed. “You told me—”

  “Sometimes it’s like talking to yourself out there, goddamn company’s so goddamn stupid…”

  “—Lobe’d never walk or talk or fuck again your lousy dick friend crippled that scum for—”

  “ … discussing wigs and genitalia for godsakes…”

  They went on like that for a while, being good at it. Bdeniowitz, however, had seen it more times than they’d performed it and patiently ignored them. Everybody in the room knew the two women were arguing just to avoid discussing anything factual. Finally he jerked the office door open and pushed Candy and Marlene past Johnson into the hallway. Flashbulbs popped and questions filled the air.

  “Hey,” said Marlene, backing out of the door behind Candy, “doncha wanta take a statement or nothing?”

  “We’ll be in touch,” said Bdeniowitz, pushing her into the hall. “Johnson.”

  “But what about my important material evidence?” she said, smoothing her dress over her hip.

  Bdeniowitz ignored her. “Johnson. Escort these ladies to their side of the street.”

  “Not you,” Bdeniowitz said, stepping between the door and Sister Opium Jade. “You stick with us for a while longer.”

  A reporter had backed Candy up against the far wall of the hallway, leaning his elbow on the wall, and was explaining his research for a big feature on prostitution, in low not to say furtive tones, as Bdeniowitz closed the door.

  Bdeniowitz quickly established that Sister Opium Jade had been with Windrow for most of the afternoon and evening, until he’d left her in front of the grocery across the street at about eight thirty. He tried a few angles, mostly veiled threats, but couldn’t shake her. The coroner’s assistant allowed as how he thought the deceased had been that way since at least eight, possibly earlier. Bdeniowitz finally ordered him to remove the body.

  The two coroner’s assistants produced a black rubber bag and zipped the body into it. Then they strapped it onto a stretcher, and departed with it through the crowd stacked up against the office door. Flashbulbs popped in the hall. Nobody said much until after the door had closed again. Then Gleason said, “Hey.” He walked over to the front of Windrow’s desk and picked up a light blue three by five card that lay within the chalked perimeter marking where the body had been. He handled the card by its edges.

  “This yours?” he said, and showed the card over the desk to Windrow.

  One side of the blue card was blank, the other had two lines Windrow recognized as Greek, though he had no idea of what they said, carefully hand-lettered in white.

  Gleason stepped, behind the desk to look at the card over Windrow’s shoulder. “It must have been under the girl’s body.”

  Windrow studied the card for a few seconds, then shook his head. He looked at Sister Opium Jade who, with Bdeniowitz, was looking at him. He took the card from Gleason, holding its edges between his finger tips, and showed it to Sister Opium Jade. “Greek,” she said. Tou gar douloua technae archei tou desnotou. —Diogenes.

  Everybody except Windrow came on surprised.

  Gleason swiveled his head from Sister Opium Jade to Windrow and back again. “Easy for you to say, Sister,” he muttered.

  “What’s it mean, goddamit,” said Bdeniowitz, exasperated.

  “ ‘The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.’ ” She handed the card to Gleason. “Diogenes was the name of the guy who said it.”

  Everybody stared at the educated streetwalker.

  Windrow stared at her too, but he was also recalling a bit of pillow talk with Jodie Ryan.

  “You know,” Opium Jade coaxed, “the guy with the lantern?” She held one hand over her head and looked from one blank face to another.

  “Skip it,” she muttered, lowering her hand.

  “The art of being a slave is to rule the master,” Gleason repeated, as if to himself. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Right now, this Alvarez girl is looking pretty artless,” Bdeniowitz adduced bitterly, staring at the outline chalked on the bare floorboards in front of Windrow’s desk. “No matter what it means.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE SPEEDOMETER ON THE RED FORD SHIMMIED AROUND 110. The motor seemed to like it, and Highway 5 unreeled like a hallucinated ribbon behind him. The front end floated a bit at that speed, like a small boat working its way against a mild swell, but the steering still worked when he passed the slower traffic. And all the traffic was slower, with one exception. This was a black Ferrari that passed him just south of the Los Banos turnoff. Doing perhaps twenty or thirty miles an hour better than his car, it used the visible fifteen miles bisected by Windrow’s mirror and windshield in a little over six minutes, threading its nocturnal trace among the San Francisco-to-L.A. freight and produce trucks as if it were a sleek, gravityless wedge mysteriously propelled by its own lights through so much cubist furniture. Some of the trucks, illuminated in red, green and amber, like carnival booths, twinkled their lights appreciatively at the Ferrari and even Windrow’s Ford, as they flashed in turn down the fast lane. Shortly after the Ferrari passed him a Highway Patrol car also passed him, all its lights going, a thin plume of smoke spiralling out of one of its two exhaust pipes. At that moment, going slightly uphill, Windrow’s speedometer read over 100.

  Though he accelerated to 110, the CHP cruiser left him behind.

  After everybody had departed his office, a few telephone calls provided Windrow with a few hard facts.

  Though she was a little drunk when he finally found her at a Malibu number, Jodie Ryan’s mother, Kitty Larkin, happily answered everything Windrow cared to ask her. Yes, though she wasn’t aware of the specific terms of O’Ryan’s will, she knew he’d left her out of it entirely. But, she’d cheerfully pointed out, that was OK by her. She and her father hadn’t spoken since she had married her third husband, because her third husband was in the movie business, Jewish, and rich. Toward the first two categories O’Ryan had begun to manifest an unreasonable animosity in his later years, and that her present husband’s money made Kitty Larkin—who had grown to expect a ‘minimum standard of excess,’ as she put it, assuring Windrow he understood these things—independent of O’Ryan’s influence, had further irked Sweet Jesus to the point that he wrote her out of his will.

  Kitty Larkin, she explained to Windrow, the ice in her glass tinkling near the mouthpiece of the telephone, had not resented her father’s behavior toward her, which she described as ‘peevish,’ but merely reduced her direct communications with him to annual Christmas and birthday cards since ‘at least ten years ago.’

  Their excision from the will, Windrow thought at the time, might explain why Kitty Larkin and her husband had experienced no unusual activities in their lives since O’Ryan’s death. They had received no threatening telephone calls, there had been no burglary, no violence… “Just the usual small arms fire,” Mrs. Larkin had observed, “down on the beach at night.” The ice clicked again. “Marijuana smugglers you know, landing bales in the quiet residential areas, only to encounter pirates waiting for them. Not a damn one of them over seventeen.�
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  The smugglers or the pirates?

  “Neither. Both. Whatever. Jodie… You know, Mr. Windrow, Jodie has told me quite a lot about you, and, although you’re not really of our circle, socially I mean, I must say you seem an interesting man.” She laughed, a full, deep laugh. “Please don’t be offended, that wasn’t what I meant to say at all… Heavens, I think I’m getting tipsy. No, what I meant to tell you was that Jodie named herself for the old man’s first wife, you know. The one who left him when he went broke the first time, Jodie Dweem. She went back to Philadelphia. Broke his heart. He never forgot her. Named his damned oil wells after her, and tried to get his second wife, my mother, to name me after her. Of course, for all she cared, he could have named those marvelous oil wells after the saints and the Holy Family if he’d wanted to, but as for naming her own flesh and blood after that woman, well: momma absolutely wouldn’t stand for it, poor thing. He sprung it on her when she was still in the hospital, with me in the incubator—I was born a tad early, it must explain my absolutely smashing figure, knock on wood.”

  He heard the tap of her glass against the tabletop.

  “Of course she wouldn’t stand for it. Can you imagine? Right in the damned hospital. She finally left him after they bought a mansion in Beverly Hills and he tried to call it Jodieland, or something. Absolutely the last straw. Of course,” she added, with a chuckle, “she got the mansion in the settlement, lock, stock and barrel-chested chauffeur, and raised all of us lovely neurotic children there, and called it Tara. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Windrow, scratching the stubble on his throat. “What I really need to know is how to get to the shack your father died in, and where I might find this fellow Hardpan. Also, do you have any idea where Jodie is? And what do you know about a woman—I think she’s a woman—called—.”

  “Sal? Oh, you must mean Sal.”

  “Sal, yes ma’am.”

  “Well, Mr. Windrow, I don’t see Jodie much, and certainly not since Dad died. She stays here sometimes, when she’s singing in L.A., but not too often. Last time would have been this past summer, I think. She was here for about two days.”

  “You don’t get along?”

  “Oh, we get along alright. But Jodie is determined to make her own career, her own money, her own way. Hal, my husband, Hal offered to help her when they first met, and she jumped all over him! Naturally I was rather sharp with her at the time, and she’s been in a qualified snit ever since. I think I understand her, but really, the way she thumbs her nose at millions —well…” Mrs. Larkin sighed. “So, I don’t see much of Jodie, as she calls herself. But she still calls regularly enough.”

  “So, Jodie was close to your father?”

  “Very. I haven’t seen his will, or Jodie to ask her, but I’ll bet he left most of the shooting match to her.” She sighed again. “I hope she has the sense to ask Hal for some advice, at least, I fear she’ll find it very difficult to be a business tycoon and a nightclub singer.”

  “And Sal?”

  “Oh yes. Sal. Would do anything Edward would tell her to. She was his bodyguard, if you can believe it.”

  Windrow touched the sore side of his face. “I can believe it.”

  “Among other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “She used to keep an eye on Jodie, for one. Always knew where she was, who she was shacking up with, how her career was doing. That sort of thing. Whenever Daddy would hole up in the desert place, Sal would keep tabs on Jodie until he got ready to go public again.”

  “What would he do there, while he was holed up?”

  “Read. His first wife, the original Jodie, always made him feel inferior about his education. That and his financial status. I never met her and don’t want to, if she’s still alive, but from what I understand, she must have been quite a bitch. I mean, when I was a kid, before mother threw daddy over for the house and the chauffeur, he came into my room drunk one night and sat on the edge of the bed to say goodnight, and I asked him about this Jodie business—you know, how come we had a mare called Jodie, and the pump sites. Well, he cried. I’ll never forget it. He sat there drunk as could be and just blabbered about this Jodie, how beautiful she was, how educated she was, what good family she came from—in the strangest tone of voice. I was five years old and it scared me sick. Later on I thought about it, and realized that, as of that night, he must not have seen or heard from the woman in over fifteen years. Yet, he cried like she’d died in his arms at the Battle of the Alamo or something.”

  A short silence ensued, during which Mrs. Larkin did not take a drink. Windrow said nothing.

  “So anyway,” she resumed, “he would always read a lot, not only technical books about oil drilling and grain futures and things, you know the kind of stuff, but also a lot of philosophy, history, the Latin poets and statesmen, Plutarch and Cicero and their ilk.” she giggled. “Writers and thinkers of the first water, as my second husband used to say.”

  “Diogenes?” Windrow asked, fishing.

  “Mm,” she said. “He was Greek, wasn’t he? I don’t know but I would say Daddy probably read Diogenes. And Socrates and Heraclitus and Homer and Suetonius and plenty of others. This woman Jodie actually shamed him into becoming an educated man, much more educated than I could imagine her being. His success too, was probably motivated by her rejection of him, at least in part. That man could work harder and longer than anybody I ever met and honey,” she clucked her tongue twice, as if urging a horse through its paces, “I’ve met a few. Jodie inherited that penchant for work.”

  Windrow cleared his throat. “Anything else about Sal?”

  “Totally loyal to Sweet Jesus O’Ryan. I don’t know what she’s doing now, or who’s she’s working for, but it’s a cinch that daddy told her how it would be when he was gone. Now he’s gone, that’s the way it is, if she has any to do with it.”

  “Did you go to the funeral?”

  “Can’t stand ’em, honey. I send flowers. Roses. Red roses, if it’s a woman. Yellow roses for the boys.”

  “Ahm—” Windrow began.

  “Yellow cause I figure they just kept a date with somebody else, and I’m jealous.”

  “What color did O’Ryan get?”

  “He was a man, yellow, same as the rest. Maybe a better man, actually. I always was a tad jealous of that first Jodie, when I was younger. Almost like she broke up our home personally. Yeah…. Yellow.”

  She gave him directions to O’Ryan’s place, and the name of a cafe in Taft in which Hardpan had been seen between five and six o’clock every morning for thirty years.

  “Thanks for all this time, Mrs. Larkin.”

  “Think nothing of it,” she had said cheerily, “it’s been fun getting sloshed and nostalgic over Daddy, bout time I gave him a proper wake. I guess this’ll be all the mourning the son of a bitch gets out of me.”

  Windrow thought he heard the hint of a catch to her voice. He’d nearly hung up when he’d thought to ask what she might know about Pamela Neil and Woodruff.

  “She got red ones,” she said, “even though I hadn’t seen Pam and Manny since Jodie’s first big performance in L.A. A dump called the Shotgun, about five years ago…. Disgusting place. Cement floor, stank of beer, too loud… .”

  About to pour himself another drink, Windrow almost let the name go by.

  “Manny?” he said, the bottle poised over the glass.

  “Woodruff,” said the lady from Malibu. “Manny Woodruff. How do you think they met? Pamela and Woodruff, I mean. It was at a party at my house. Daddy was holed up in the desert, see, and Pamela got tired of sitting around the San Francisco place… Or was it the Carmel place? I can’t remember. Anyhow, whenever she got bored, she’d hang around with Jodie or me or both of us. Unless she had something going on the side, of course. A fella, I mean. After all, Daddy was in his seventies and she wasn’t thirty yet, to hear her tell it. She wasn’t very particular about hiding the boys from me
and Jodie, and, hell, I understood the—”

  “What about Woodruff?” Windrow said, putting the bottle down.

  “They met at a party at my house. Bango, just like that. And I do mean bango. That was right before he sold a faked Matisse to some big producer. About a year later the guy had it authenticated and, sure enough, it was a de Houry. Beautiful picture. Too bad he didn’t hang onto it. Now it’s worth almost as much as the real thing since deHouri killed hims—.”

  “So who called him Manny?”

  “Why darling everybody in L.A. called him Manny. Of course he had to close the Laguna Beach Gallery after the stink that ignorant producer raised over the fake painting, but Manny rode that one out. He’s no dummy, either. The customer dropped the charges when Manny bought the picture back. His reputation was ruined around here, but by then Pamela was all his. He moved to San Francisco to be with her and took it easy for a while. After de Houry got famous Manny got a little local press about his picture, sold it for a lot of money, and picked up a reputation for a sharp eye to boot. After Pammy divorced Sweet Jesus, Manny opened a new gallery with the proceeds—one would imagine a little help from Pamela’s annuity—and started to clean up peddling unknown abstract expressionism like some people peddle vacuum cleaners—every house needs at least one, right?”

  “Manny,” Windrow murmured.

  “Good old Manny, dearie. Is there anyone else in my immediate or not so immediate circle you’d like to gossip about? Hmmm?” she hiccupped. “Excuse me.”

  “No thank you ma’am, not just now. If I think of anything else I’ll give you a call.”

  “Love to hear from you darling. So lovely to have met you. Ta.”

  They hung up.

  He sat in his office, not moving, not drinking, just sitting, for about fifteen minutes. Then he stirred the coke and speed into his glass of whiskey. While the mixture spun in the glass, he made two more calls. One to Gleason, to give him the tip about Woodruff’s nickname, which tied Woodruff, circumstan tially at least, to the initials in Lobe’s appointment book. Gleason promised to obtain a warrant to search Woodruff’s gallery.