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This time when he finished Karen said, “He’ll tell the DEA guys you set it up. Won’t he?”
“If they get him,” Chili said. “Yeah, Bones’ll try to put it on me. If they come around looking and I get hauled in, I say I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“But they saw you there today,” Karen said, “at the airport.”
“Yeah, well, they’d still have to prove I put the money in the locker and there’s no way they can do that, ’cause I didn’t. I never touched that locker. If I see I’m in too deep I can always give ’em Catlett. But I don’t want to go through all that right now. Even if I didn’t have to post a bond it would be annoying, the way they keep after you asking questions. So I checked out of the Marquis. Now I have to find another place.”
She was giving him that amazed look again. “You’re serious.”
“Yeah, I tried the Chateau Marmont, see if I could get Jean Harlow’s room, but they’re full up. One thing I did, not knowing any better at the time, I told the DEA guys I was with ZigZag. They didn’t write it down, so they might not remember it, and I didn’t have a card to give them. But if they do, they’ll look up Harry, try to find me that way.”
“What Harry will have trouble accepting,” Karen said, “you didn’t get the money, not that you could go to jail.”
“Yeah, I’ll have to explain it to him. Once Bones found the key, the way his one-track mind works it was out of my hands. I had to let it happen.”
“I’d like to have seen that,” Karen said. She pushed out of her leather chair, came around the desk in a black skirt a few inches above her knees and leaned against the edge of the desk, close, looking down at him. He thought for a moment she was going to touch his face. She said, “I’ll bet you have scars . . .”
“A few.”
“I like your hair.”
“That’s another story I could tell you sometime.”
She said, “Why don’t you hide out at my house?”
“Sleep in the maid’s room?”
She said, “We’ll work something out.”
There was a certain look about the Mexican gardener that made Harry think of one of his maniacs: the little gnomelike one in Grotesque Three who took over after the original hideously disfigured maniac was burned to death in Grotesque Two and the picture went on to gross twenty million worldwide. The Mexican gardener coming this way across the lawn was bowlegged. Maybe that was it. Grotesque Three did almost eight million, which still wasn’t bad. Or it was—of course, it was the shears the guy was carrying, the way he held them in front of him with both hands. The gnomelike maniac had used shears a lot.
Harry was on Karen’s patio. Out here now as he kept moving, waiting for the phone to ring. Harry nodded to the Mexican approaching with the shears, wishing he’d point them down. “How are you?”
“Miss Flores isn’ home.”
“I know that,” Harry said.
“She’s at work.”
“I know where she is,” Harry said, “and she knows I’m here. It’s okay, I’m a good friend of hers. We’re amigos.”
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This Mexican, with his dark skin and big nose, reminded Harry of an Aztec figure carved in relief on a stone wall. It got Harry thinking about human sacrifices, a blood cult four centuries old, virgins into the volcano . . . like movie ideas presented to a studio. The Mexican was saying something.
“What?”
“I ask you want a drink.”
“Do I want a drink—I thought you were the gardener.”
“The houseman, Miguel. I do outside, inside, everything.”
Harry said, “You’re Miguel?” feeling a change in his mood, a sudden lift knowing Karen wasn’t sleeping with her houseman, not this old guy and not that it made any difference, really, but he felt better in general and said, “Yeah, Miguel, let me have a Scotch, lot of ice.”
Four times now Catlett had tried to get hold of the Bear: phoning his house from home, from the limo office, from his Porsche coming here and now here, in the turnaround part of the driveway at Karen Flores’s French-looking house. Still no answer, only the Bear’s recorded voice: Leave a message if you want. The only thing good happening Catlett could see was Harry’s old Mercedes parked there, and Harry was the reason he’d come. Catlett went up to the door and rang the bell, set his sunglasses on straight, smoothed down his double-breasted navy blazer he wore with a white cotton shirt open wide at the throat and cream-colored pants.
The door swung in and the man standing there startled him, flashed him back in his mind to migrant camps and hundreds of guys with round, tired shoulders just like this one. Catlett said, “Man, I haven’t seen you since picking lettuce down the Imperial Valley. How you doing?” Found out this was Miguel the houseman and got taken out to the kitchen where his good friend Harry Zimm was sitting at the table with a drink, a bottle of Chivas Regal and a big pair of garden shears, the kind with ten-inch blades and wooden handles. Harry had that expectant look in his eyes, hoping for news.
“You hear anything?”
“I was about to ask you,” Catlett said. “There’s been plenty of time to do it.”
He turned his head and there was Miguel the houseman asking what would he like to drink, this stoop-labor field hand, Catlett thinking Karen Flores must be a strange kind of lady.
“Let me have a glass of chilled white wine. Some Pouilly-Fuissé, you happen to have it in the house.”
Harry said, “Well, I guess he ran with it.”
Harry sounding tired out, depressed.
“Or, as I mentioned could happen if he wasn’t careful,” Catlett said, “somebody hit him on the head. Or, there’s the chance he got busted.”
“What he got was the money,” Harry said. “I called his hotel. They said he checked out.”
“He could’ve done that before.”
“I spoke to him at ten this morning. He was just leaving.”
“That’s right, that’s what I heard.”
From the Bear, phoning as he tailed him, the Bear in communication up to that time.
“He didn’t check out,” Harry said, “till two-thirty this afternoon.”
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Catlett said, “Hmmmmm,” to Harry, nothing to Miguel, noticing the man’s broken fingernails, big knuckles, handing him the glass of wine; or when Miguel said he was leaving, going home, and walked out the back door to the garage.
Harry looked so depressed he seemed in a daze.
“I didn’t think he’d do it. I said to him, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see you again.’ But I honestly thought I would.”
Catlett sat down with Harry at the table wondering why, if Chili Palmer was going to run with it, he didn’t take a flight out while he was at the airport. Why come back to the hotel? The Bear would have the answer if he could ever locate the Bear.
“Harry, you can’t trust nobody like that, has those bad connections. This man come in off the street, nobody speaking for him, you don’t know who he is.”
“He was working for Mesas. I know the people there and they know him. They use him for collections.”
“They know the guy that takes out the garbage too. Harry. How’d he find you right away if I could-n’t?”
“Through Frank DePhillips.”
“Man, what does that tell you? What you’re saying to me right there?”
“I was staying here that night . . .”
“Yeah, with Karen?”
“We’re in bed, we hear a noise. Voices. We listen awhile. It’s the TV, downstairs. Karen says, ‘But it can’t just come on by itself.’ I tell her, ‘That’s right, somebody had to push the button.’ So I go down . . .”
“You have a gun?”
“Where do I get a gun? Karen doesn’t own one. No, I went downstairs figuring it has to be somebody she knows. Some friend of hers probably stoned, thinks he’s a riot. I walk in the study, the TV goes off—it was the Letterman show—th
e light comes on and there’s Chili sitting at the desk.”
“Chili Palmer,” Catlett said, “yeah. Sneaky, huh? You should’ve known right then, just from the way he does things. Man breaks in the house . . .”
“The patio door was open.”
“Yeah? Was there a sign on it, ‘Come on in’? Harry, you walk in where you don’t belong it’s breaking and entering, whether you have to break in or not. Chili Palmer commits a felony against the law and you take him in, make him your partner.”
“He isn’t my partner,” Harry said, and took a drink from his glass. “I don’t know what he is.”
That was okay as far as it went. But what Catlett wanted would be for Harry to kick and scream, call the man names. A no-good lying motherfucker would cover it. Harry though, for some reason, did-n’t seem all the way unsold yet on Chili Palmer. So Catlett reset his gold-frame sunglasses and went at him again saying, “The man robs you and you tell me you don’t know what he is? If he managed to get his hands on the hundred and seventy thousand and took off with it . . . Harry, you paying attention?”
“Yeah, if he got it, what?”
“Or, if he messed up out there and they got it, but somehow or other they didn’t get him . . . What I’m saying is either way, Harry, it was your money. You understand? Soon as I presented you with the key to the locker it was the same as giving you the money. So you the one he ripped off, huh?”
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Harry was looking at him with a frown turning all of a sudden from worried to mean.
“You’re saying I still owe it to you? A hundred and seventy grand I haven’t even seen?”
It wasn’t the point Catlett had intended to make. Yeah, but it was true. He opened his hands, helpless, and said to Harry, “Man, you owe me something.”
Karen had given him a key to the front door, in case her houseman had already left.
Chili dropped his suitcase in the foyer, checked the study, the living room, then moved down the back hall to the kitchen. He knew Harry’s car, could guess who the Porsche belonged to and got it right— Mr. Bo Catlett in the kitchen with Harry, Catlett looking this way through his hotdog sunglasses. It was in Chili’s mind to grab a frying pan from the rack, go over the table with it and whop him across the head. Right now, not say a word. But he was no sooner in the kitchen Catlett was on his feet, Christ, holding a pair of shears in front of him. Chili said, “You knew I was coming, huh?” looking at the shears, the blades gunmetal, clamped together. “The Bear tell you?”
He wanted Catlett to answer, keep it between them and settle with this guy. But now Harry got into it, Harry again, ruining the moment.
“I don’t know how many times I tried to call you,” Harry said. “Where’ve you been?”
“Talking to federal agents,” Chili said, still looking at Catlett. “DEA, the ones were waiting for me.”
“They let you go?” Harry said.
“It didn’t take too long.”
Catlett said, “Uh-huh. Harry, you understand what he saying? If he was talking to federal agents, how come he’s here talking to us?”
Chili said, “I didn’t have the key on me.”
Catlett said, “You didn’t have the key . . .” and let his voice trail off. “All right, why would they pick you up then, if you didn’t have the key?”
“They thought I opened the locker.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Ask the Bear, he saw it.”
“Is that right? You talk to him?”
“After. He wanted me to give him back the key,” Chili said, and watched Catlett take that and run with it.
“Sure, ’cause I told him, anything goes wrong, see if you can help out. Like take the key off your hands, case you get followed and picked up again they won’t find it on you.” Looking at Harry: “I told you it could happen, didn’t I? That’s why I said don’t you go out there, send your man here.” Looking at Chili again. “You know what I’m talking about. You experienced in shit where you have to keep your eyes open. Was I wrong? If you still have the key, what’s the problem? Wait for it to cool and try again. Only be more careful next time.”
Chili said, “That’s all you have to say?”
Catlett frowned in his sunglasses. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“I told you, they were waiting for me.”
“You’re the type they go for, man. I can’t help it how you look.”
This guy was not only sure of himself, he was starting to get cocky, insulting even. Chili fingered the button holding his double-breasted jacket closed.
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He said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you can get out of here before I take my coat off, I won’t clean the floor with you, get your yachtclub outfit all messed up.”
Catlett shook his head, acting tired. He said, “Harry, you hear this?”
“Harry, stay out of it. This’s between me and him,” Chili said, undoing the button to let the jacket come open. He said to Catlett, “You have your choice.”
“You don’t know me,” Catlett said, his voice quiet now. “You only think you do.”
“I know if I wanted to,” Chili said, “I could take those shears away from you and cut your nuts off. You want to stay around, take a chance?”
“I think the party’s getting rough,” Catlett said. “Harry, this make any sense to you?”
“It will, when I tell him how they knew I was coming,” Chili said, holding the coat open now to slip it off his shoulders. “You want to add something to that? Ask me how I found out?”
Catlett shrugged, keeping whatever he felt about it to himself, behind his sunglasses. He said, “What’s the difference? I’m not gonna get into it with you,” and laid the shears on the table. “This kind of shit is not my style.” He moved to the door saying, “Whatever is, huh, Harry? But you still need all kinds of money, don’t you?” and walked out of the kitchen, into the hall.
Chili reached across the table to pick up the glass of wine, ice-cold on the tips of his fingers, and took a sip, Harry watching him.
“What it comes down to after all that, you didn’t get the money.”
Chili stood listening till he heard the front door close.
“There’s more to it, Harry.”
“But you still have the key?”
“There’s a lot more to it,” Chili said, pulling a chair out from the table.
Turning out of Karen’s drive, Catlett was busy handling all the stuff flashing in his head at once. He had to talk to the Bear, find out before he did anything else what happened at the airport, where the key was, how Chili Palmer knew he was informed on unless he was lying, telling Harry stories now, except the only good thing about it was Harry needed money more than he needed Chili Palmer, but Chili Palmer still had to be removed from the situation. There was something else flashing in his head, that suitcase . . . And Catlett had to crank the wheel, quick, waking up to the BMW turning in directly in front of him. The cars came side by side, the windows going down, the woman’s face in the BMW a bit higher than his. Catlett put his sunglasses up on his head. He smiled, seeing late sun reflected in her sunglasses, not smiling. He said, “Miss Flores, this is my pleasure. Harry Zimm might’ve mentioned my name to you, Bo Catlett?”
She kept looking, though her face didn’t change.
So he said, “Can I tell you I’ve always been one of your biggest fans?”
Her face still didn’t change as she said, “What’re you doing here?”
He said, “I was with Harry,” acting a little surprised on account of her tone. “We had a meeting.
Her face still didn’t change, this time saying to him, “If I ever see you here again I’ll call the police.”
The BMW was there and then it wasn’t and he was looking at shrubs. Man. Whatever the woman
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had heard about him couldn’t have been too good. Like Chili Palmer had been talking to her. Already today, with everyth
ing going on he had taken the time. Came back from the airport, checked out of his hotel . . . And there was that other thing that had flashed in his head to think about, the black nylon suitcase sitting in her front hall by the door.
The suitcase hadn’t been there before Chili Palmer came.
Checked out of the hotel and was moving in with Karen Flores. Sure, the one he wanted in the movie as the girl. Checked out in case the DEA people wanted to look him up again and came here to hide. Which presented new possibilities, didn’t it? Catlett drove down the hill thinking of some, deciding which one he might use. The one he liked best was the simplest. Shoot the motherfucker and have it done.
For a few moments he wasn’t aware of her standing in the doorway.
Karen watched him sitting alone at the table. Saw the bottle of Scotch, the garden shears, saw him raise his glass of wine and take a sip. He had a cigarette going too. She watched him draw on the cigarette and raise his head to exhale a thin stream of smoke. Karen the camera again watching him, this guy who had told her in a matter-of-fact way federal agents might pick him up and he might have to post bond. . . . She wanted to know what happened while Catlett was here. Where was Harry and why the garden shears? She had questions to ask and something amazing to tell him—Chili Palmer in his pinstripe suit, tough guy from Miami. Not a movie tough guy, a real one. She kept watching him with her camera eye wondering if, real or not, he could be acting. If
he was, he was awfully good.
“Not a worry in the world,” Karen said.
He looked over. “Hey, how you doing?”
“You really aren’t worried, are you?”
He said, “About what?”
And she had to smile because that was an act, the bland expression. But he wasn’t serious about it, he was smiling now and that seemed natural.
“Where’s Harry?”
“I think he’s in the bathroom. He didn’t say where he was going, but that’d be my guess.”
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