The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels

by Charles Alverson

  “No,” she said in a voice that was calmer than her face had shown. “I’d swear it. The mayor was the only man in Tina’s life. If there’d been another, I’d have had to know.”

  “What about Tony Scar?”

  “What about who?” She wasn’t faking it.

  “Tony Scarezza. He used to be a big man on the docks. He was Tina’s lover some years back. Did you know that she’d had a baby about fifteen years ago? Scarezza’s baby. And it died young over at Tina’s home in the East Bay?”

  She was silent for a moment. Then Irma spoke: “You may have known Tina to talk to, Joe,” she said, “but one thing you didn’t know about her was that for Tina there was no yesterday, only today and tomorrow—mostly tomorrow. I didn’t know about the baby or this Tony Scar person because for Tina they didn’t exist. To Tina, yesterday was something you threw away with last night’s paper. She was through with it, and it didn’t matter.”

  “What did matter to Tina?” I asked.

  “Her career,” Irma answered after thinking carefully, “and her friends.”

  “And who were her friends besides you?”

  Irma had to think that one over hard. I let her do it in peace as we plowed toward downtown San Francisco. We were just negotiating the link with the Embarcadero when she said: “There weren’t any, really, I guess, unless you count Dr. Irving and maybe Phil Franks. But Dr. Irving was mostly concerned with keeping her body in shape. And Phil—I don’t know exactly what Phil was. Sometimes Tina talked about him fondly; other times he was just a money-grubbing fat man. Tina knew a lot of people at other clubs on the street, but no one I’d really call a friend. Maybe Kolchik was a friend. I don’t know.”

  Neither did I, and I wasn’t getting much closer to finding out. It looked as if Kolchik didn’t have any better eye for detectives than for girls. For all I knew, Johnny Maher had Tina’s killer hog-tied in the basement of city hall.

  We rolled down the Broadway off ramp.

  15

  “Are you hungry?” I asked Irma as we crept along in the tentative beginnings of what would later turn into the nightly traffic jam. “We could continue this over dinner.”

  She agreed, and a few minutes later we were being seated in a rear booth at Hungry Joe’s by Mario, the headwaiter. Mario made up for being incredibly handsome by oozing an oily hospitality which always made me feel faintly in need of a steam cleaning.

  “The veal tonight, m’sieur and m’selle,” he said, “is exquisite. Besides, I’ve been asked by the chef to move it if at all possible.” Save me from honest headwaiters. I told Mario to send us two Kahluas over crushed ice and promised to give the veal every consideration.

  The drinks arrived, and I was about to beam back in on Irma with what I hoped would be pertinent questions. She’d gotten her nose stuck into the short, chunky glass of dark-brown coffee liqueur. When she came up for air with a sliver of ice on her lower lip, I was all set with a sure-fire winner. But just then George, the barman, caught my eye with a fancy bit of cocktail bar semaphore. He looked as if he meant it.

  “Sorry,” I said, pushing back from the table and standing up. “Somebody seems to need to talk to me.” I shoved my drink across the table toward her. “If you feel dehydration setting in, try this. I’ll make it short.”‘

  George, the younger brother of a big-league baseball star, fancied himself a celebrity by genetic association, like the third son of an earl. Just then he was busy dazzling a motherly type with his way with a gin fizz, so I leaned against the polished oak bar and marveled. But quietly.

  The fizz delivered and an unmotherly smile returned, George turned to me. “Hey, Joe,” he said, “is it true that you’re no longer a cop? That you’re going to be a private detective?”

  “Am a private detective, George,” I corrected. “Am. And I’ve got the papers to prove it.”

  “Gee, that’s too bad,” he said, giving the bar an ellipsoidal sweep with a damp rag.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Now you won’t be able to put your drinks on the tab. Mario won’t deadhead anybody but the real thing.”

  “I’ll try to survive the blow. Is that what you frantically signaled me over here to tell me?” I started to push myself away from the bar.

  “Oh, no,” he said. ‘That’s not it. It’s something more important. Marley Phillips wants to see you.”

  Marley Phillips. In a B movie, that would have been a great spot for some theme music. Something with kettledrums. Instead, the only noise was the tinkle of ice cubes and the rustle of lies brushing up against broken promises.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “He sent one of his mugs around this afternoon. An old guy running on one lung and strong hair oil. He nearly passed out on the stairs.”

  “Did he say what Phillips wanted?”

  “The way he was puffing and blowing,” George said, “he was lucky to get that much out. That lad is a candidate for an iron lung. Are you going to see Phillips?”

  “Maybe. But thanks for the message anyway.” It doesn’t pay to tell bartenders too much. I went back to the booth where Mario loomed over Irma like a walking lamp.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Irma, “but I’ve got to go see someone. It may be important.” Mario turned his back discreetly, but his ears kept twitching. “You have dinner, and we’ll meet later…say, at The Jungle at ten o’clock?”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll see you there. In the meantime is there anything I can do”—she flicked her eyes at Mario’s attentive back—“you know?”

  “Not really,” I said in a low voice. “Just keep your eyes and ears open and try to remember anything that might help.” Without raising my voice or changing my tone, I said: “Mario, give this nice lady a good dinner. Anything but the veal.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, whirling around as if on ball bearings to gracefully take money from my hand. “I’ll take good care of m’selle.”

  I was sure of that.

  The car parker at the Mark Hopkins reluctantly accepted the Morris, and the doorman let me pass with no more than a look which said he didn’t think much of my wardrobe, haircut, or career prospects. George had told me Phillips’ suite number, so I gave the ramrod-stiff clerk behind the desk a miss and headed for the bank of elevators. I could feel his eyes on my back.

  The elevator was soundless enough, but it stopped with a nasty jerk which brought back painful echoes of an old football injury to my left knee. I wondered whether I had sufficient grounds for a lawsuit. The closing door caught me wondering, and I had to strong-arm my way into the eighteenth-floor corridor.

  The Mark Hopkins is a plush hotel. Not tacky-prefab posh like some of the newer high-rise mausoleums in San Francisco, but full of character like a sable coat with a moth-eaten lining. The corridor carpet wasn’t an ankle-grabber, but its well-kept, timeworn veneer hinted that it had been trodden on by some of the quality.

  The door to 18D, Phillips’ suite, was slightly ajar. It had the air of a door that had never been anything else. I moved it a bit to see if the hinges were rusty. I edged through the door and stepped right out of the Mark Hopkins Hotel.

  At first I didn’t know where I was. I was dazzled by the pure drabness of the decor. Someone had walled off a section of the suite, forming a shallow, dark antechamber. The walls were the color of stale, diluted tobacco. The only decoration on them was a faded, flyblown Goodyear Rubber Company calendar. Some wiseacre had made a clumsy attempt to turn the Goodyear blimp into a tit. The carpet underfoot was thin to the point of near translucence and exuded dust with every footstep. The furniture—a cruel-looking library table, four broken-spirited chairs, and an ashtray on a bayonet stand—said back-alley abortionist.

  But a half-glass door across the anteroom dimly lit from within said “M. Phillips, Private Investigations” in peeling bronze letters. “Knock First” warned a footnote on the door, so I did. I almost expected my knuckles to raise dust.

  “Come
in,” said a heavy voice. “The door’s not locked.” I tried the knob and found that it was. I tried the knob a little harder, and it came off in my hand. “Come in, come in,” said the same voice with distracted impatience. It came from a throat that had been well-cured with cigarette smoke.

  “I’d sure like to,” I said through the frosted glass, “but the door is locked, and I seem to have the knob in my hand.”

  Silence. Then the springs of a swivel chair squeaked pitifully, and footsteps—slow but not too heavy—came toward me. The door swung inward, and Marley Phillips filled most of the doorway.

  It had been nearly five years since I’d seen Phillips, and he’d aged. Not radically, but gently, as if he were a shale boulder gradually being eroded by balmy winds and Pacific waves. He stood just under six feet tall, not slumped or bent but slightly telescoped, as if he’d been pressed down for a long time by a steady but not unbearable load. Phillips must have been close to seventy, and his face had the lines to prove it. But the brown eyes were bright and unclouded. Above them, his still-thick hair had gone gray-white.

  When he opened the door, Phillips’ face wore an expression I can only describe as martyred—tough, rude, likely to tell you to go to hell, but a martyr all the same. He was all set to hear about my problem.

  Instead, I said, “Hello, I’m Joe Goodey.”

  The crown of thorns slipped from Phillips’ brow, and the martyr was transformed into a professional. Old, tired, maybe past it, but a pro all the same. “Come in, Goodey,” he said, turning back into the room. “Come in. Sorry I took so long to answer. I’m having a hell of a struggle with Steinitz. He’s a stubborn son of a bitch.”

  As I followed him into the small, rectangular office, I swiveled my neck, trying to locate the son of a bitch. But all I could see was a room which equaled the antechamber in drabness. The only furniture in it was a blocky, heel-marked desk made of something which might have been wood once, a battered, slightly listing file cabinet with one drawer hanging open like a sleeping drunk’s mouth, and an elderly hat rack groaning under the weight of an antique fedora with a turned-down brim. Rolled-down shades the color of dust dully reflected the light from a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling like a hanged man. On the far wall was a door with a frosted window labeled “Gents.” A gooseneck telephone stood on the very edge of the desk as if it were thinking of jumping.

  Phillips pointed me toward a chair and retired behind his desk. He instinctively fell into the pose of a man who’d seen everything—twice. Then I noticed that set up in the middle of a pool-table-green desk blotter was a fine ivory chess set on a board which looked like ebony. I don’t know much about chess, but I could tell that somebody was getting the hell knocked out of him.

  Phillips reached out and knocked over his sole bishop with a defeated hand. “If Steinitz hadn’t been dead for over sixty years,” he said, “I’d go step on his face.” Then he looked up at me with eyes that might have seen the Crucifixion. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m Joe Goodey,” I reminded him gently. “You said you wanted to see me. George, the bartender at Hungry Joe’s, gave me the message.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Goodey. You’re the cop who quit the force last week to become a private detective. I heard about it and wanted to have a talk with you. But first let’s buy ourselves a drink. I think you’ll find a bottle in the bottom drawer of that file cabinet.” Yeah, he thought I’d find a bottle the way I think I’ll find hands at the end of my arms. I turned, pulled open the drawer, and reached into its depths. My hand encountered and gripped something round, smooth and cool. I pulled out a quart bottle and set it on the blotter next to his busted chess game. The label said “Fine Canadian Rye, 12 Years Old,” but the bottle was as empty as Miss America’s smile.

  Phillips had ducked down to a desk drawer and came up with a couple murky glasses. He took in the empty bottle with the expression of a condemned man whose reprieve from the governor turned out to be a singing telegram. He put the glasses down with a muted clunk. He raised his eyebrows wryly and said: “I forgot. They won’t let me drink.” A silence settled, and we sat there, me looking at nothing much and him fixing me with what was either a benevolent gaze or a disgusted stare.

  Phillips pulled himself together manfully. “What I really want to know, Goodey,” he said, “is are you going to turn out to be a shit-heel like most of the dicks in San Francisco, or are you trying to be a real private investigator?”

  That must have been a rhetorical question, because I hadn’t even opened my mouth to answer him when he was off and running again.

  “I expect you know something about me, Goodey,” he said, “but let me fill you in a bit. For nearly thirty years I was a private eye in Los Angeles. I never got rich, but I did all right. I never took a dirty dollar or chased too hard after a clean one. There are some old cops, retired now or maybe dead, who’d have told you I was a sneaky, crooked son of a bitch, but they’d have been wrong. I lied to a few cops in my day, held out on them. But I never sold a client out or betrayed a confidence. I’ve seen the inside of a cell on that account.” All this he said almost to himself, but then Phillips looked up and got my eye in a hammerlock. “You know what I’m talking about, Goodey?” he demanded.

  “I’m pretty sure I do.”

  “I’m not saying I haven’t done things I shouldn’t have,” he went on. “I’ve killed men I wouldn’t have had to if I’d been better at my job. I’ve slapped a few women around, but only when it was absolutely necessary. You ever hit a woman, Goodey?”

  I riffled through my memory for a few moments and then said, “Not many, outside of my wife, that is.”

  Phillips didn’t like that much, but he let it pass. “You married, then, Goodey?” he asked disapprovingly.

  “I was,” I said, “but the thing seems to have died a natural death. She’s in New York.”

  He liked that better. “It’s just as well,” he said, the way surgeons don’t mind talking about taking out your gall bladder. “I never met a married private detective who was worth a damn. Though there was one fellow once working out in the Valley who used to take his wife along on jobs. She’d sit in the car and knit while he worked. You have any idea what she was knitting?”

  “You’ve got me.”

  “It turned out to be his shroud,” said Phillips, not, I wouldn’t be surprised, for the first time.

  We both chewed that one over silently for a while.

  Then Phillips started patting the breast pocket of a rumpled but very expensive sharkskin suit as if he were trying to put out a brush fire somewhere in his underwear. He stopped and looked up at me balefully.

  “I used to get through forty to fifty Fatimas a day,” he said, “some years back. But the sawbones said it was either cut down or put a down payment on a coffin. But that’s my problem. What about you, Goodey? You pick up any jobs yet?”

  “I’ve got a little something to keep me busy,” I said modestly. “Would it by any chance have anything to do with the murder of Tina D’Oro?” he asked.

  I put on my best poker face and looked back at him. “I’ve been wondering, Mr. Phillips,” I said, “just what is behind that door with the ‘Gents’ sign.”

  “You’re okay, Goodey,” he said with a stiff smile. “You might just do eventually, though I never had much faith in cops turned private detective.”

  “I wasn’t much of a cop,” I said. But I was getting a bit sick of this routine, and I was curious. “If you don’t mind me being nosy, Mr. Phillips, what the hell are you doing in this squalid mockup office in the middle of what must be a very nice hotel suite?”

  I thought his eyes looked a little sad at the question.

  “That’s a very good question, Goodey,” he said. “The truth is that I married a very rich woman. Not exactly just like that, mind you. I didn’t just get up one morning and say: ‘Phillips, you’re getting too old and flabby to keep wearing your butt out on the LA freeways. Why not go out an
d find yourself a nice millionairess?’”

  He paused, and when my look didn’t exactly say, “Oh, yeah?” he went on.

  “This woman,” he said, “now Mrs. Marley Phillips, just sort of appeared one day. I hadn’t seen her in over fifteen years, since we’d crossed paths on a job I did involving her family. Something clicked then, but I was relatively young and more than relatively stupid. I went back to knocking my brains out against other people’s problems, and she went on to three or four more husbands. Then one day about ten years ago I looked up and there she was. I’d forgotten to turn on the buzzer in my outer office. Well, eliminating some of the cornier dialogue, we got married and moved up here. She can’t stand the heat and smog.”

  “But,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he grinned, “but it wasn’t any good. She was happy as two clams, and I wasn’t in any obvious pain. But something was wrong. I felt like a hound dog in a bubble bath. I kept looking at the marvelous views and getting morbid thoughts. So I had some very expensive gentlemen go down to LA and bring back most of my office. I was lucky: they got there just ahead of the wrecker’s ball. And now I sit here working on chess problems, reading a bit, and waiting for a knock on the door. I might still be in Los Angeles.”

  I started to ask him if the knock came often, but then the old gooseneck telephone started jangling, and Phillips snatched it with what I took to be just a bit of eagerness.

  “Sure,” he said, “in a minute.” And he hung up.

  “My wife,” he said. “Dinner’s ready.” He dropped his big feet to the floor and stood up. “Thanks for coming by, Goodey,” he said. “If I can ever do anything for you, you know where to find me.” He turned toward the door with the frosted window.

  I got an idea.

  “You can help me, maybe,” I said. “I’m trying to find somebody called Tony Scarezza. A guy who used to be a waterfront hood.”