The bathroom was full of steam, and I opened the rear window and looked out at the geraniums the landlady had bordering the rear yard. I thought of McGill’s remark about the rats and the geraniums and laughed. The trouble with McGill: he was just too slow for a fast town. The rats didn’t bother me.
I phoned the number Jean had given me and got a luxury hotel in Santa Monica. I asked for Charles Adam Roland and luckily caught him in.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Glad you’re with us, Mr. Puma. I’ll be in Hollywood around seven tonight. How about dinner at the Monterey Plaza, and we can talk it all over?”
“In the lobby at seven,” I promised.
I made the bed and rolled it back into the closet. Then I phoned Jennings and told him about my visit to Little Phil.
He asked, “How did the law learn about Rickett being there?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Jennings. They have all kinds of sources for their information. That Little Phil would be a tough nut to crack, though.”
“You sound like you don’t want the case,” he said. “What’s happened, Puma?”
“Nothing. I hate to waste a client’s money. I want you to know that I haven’t the police department’s resources and they’re already working on the Little Phil angle.”
“But they’re not working for me,” he answered. “They don’t report to me when they learn anything.”
“No,” I agreed, “they don’t. The detective who’s on it is a friend of mine, though. I’ll keep in touch with him and also check this Little Phil’s background, if you want.”
“I want. Stay with it, Puma.”
Well, why not? I got paid for my time, not results. Since I’d learned that Josie was dead, I had no personal interest in Little Phil. But Jennings was an influential man and I always like to stay on the right side of them. And if Deutscher was right about Jennings, the less I learned, the better he’d like it.
I went to my office, but there was nothing there but a few bills and some ads. I got out my checkbook and studied my financial position, deducting the bills, and decided the bills could wait.
Deutscher had said you have to think big to make the big money. I’d never seen any really big money in this racket, but this looked like the chance for it. If we could trust Roland, it would be split four ways. If we could trust Roland and Deutscher. Hell, why not go all the way and admit I trusted nobody but myself?
Think big, Joe Puma. How can you cut it down to a one-way split? Or, at most, two? None of the others were in a position to run to the law if I robbed them. And only Deutscher would be inclined to go for a gun. Con men avoid violence like the plague, and Charles Adam Roland was king of the con men.
Deutscher was the one I really feared. At dinner, I’d sound out Roland on his feeling regarding Deutscher. And there was another angle, the mark, herself. Willi Clifford might be a Lesbian all the way, or she might be bi-sexual. I mustn’t overlook that angle, not with the community property law in California. I wouldn’t mind marrying that kind of money.
Across the hall, the clatter of the typewriters was loud in the Gardaluck Music Company. Nice little racket they had, swindling amateur songwriters. Words to your music or music to your words, and we publish the song—at your expense. And both the partners drove Cadillacs. And on the floor below a reading fee literary agency and their typewriters were even busier, milking the clients, leading on the hopeless literary hopefuls at so much a thousand words for criticism and revision.
Only suckers played it the honest way, guys like my old man. He’d been a union organizer, working for peanuts, and been killed by cops in the Arranbee Aircraft strike. Sure, the locals all over town had his picture up now. He was a martyr, a saint. But he was dead and he’d died broke. I wouldn’t mind dying broke, but I sure as hell didn’t mean to live that way’.
I went to the window and looked out at the traffic on Selma. It was almost five o’clock, and the traffic was getting heavier by the second.
Working stiffs going home to a meatless meal and a gala evening in front of the mortgaged television set. Fun, fun, fun! Why didn’t the jerks get wise? A town loaded with suckers, and these guys beat their brains out over a machine or a drafting board or a bookkeeper’s ledger. And the bookies and the cultists and the con men spent more over a bar in one night than these working stiffs made in a week. Time-payment boys fighting their way to the cheap funeral of seventy-five dollars and no hidden charges. Rats there were under the geraniums, but mice too. A hell of a lot more mice.
But not for Joe Puma, not for any man with enough guts to decide what he wanted and then go and get it any damned way he could. Money, I wanted and now I had a chance for the big wad. Maybe Deutscher and Roland could out-think me, but they sure as hell wouldn’t out-muscle me. Use the weapons you have, Joe Puma, to get what you want.
What I had was a body men admired and women loved to touch. It had taken me through four years at a football college and three years with the Rams. It had seemed to make Jean Roland happy, and Jean was the inside track to Willi Clifford. My ace.
From behind me somebody said, “Watching the sunset?”
I turned, startled to find Sergeant Manny Rodriguez grinning at me from the doorway. “Hello,” I said. “You must have rubber heels.”
“Sure, a regular gum-shoe.” He sat down in my customer’s chair and leaned back. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes, offering one to me.
I shook my head. “Just finished one. What’s new, Manny?”
“Not enough,” he said. “McGill isn’t happy. He’s got Rickett as cold as a D.A. would want but he’s still fretting. It doesn’t look clean enough to him.”
“What does he care? A conviction’s a conviction, isn’t it?”
“Not to Captain McGill, incorruptible Captain Enoch McGill. He thinks it all goes back to that Bea Condor case. And that case is still a thorn in his side.”
I had to be careful. I said easily, “Well, Rickett was the man he wanted in that one. Now he’s got him cold.”
“Cold enough for a conviction,” Manny admitted, “but not clean enough for McGill’s conscience. He smells a frame.”
I said nothing.
Manny tilted his hat back and considered his cigarette. “I’ve been trying to find Josie Gonzales. Seen her?”
“She’s dead,” I said.
Manny turned to stare at me. “You’re sure?”
I shook my head. “Pete Deutscher told me.”
Manny was leaning forward in his chair now. “I don’t believe it. I’d know if she was dead. I knew her for years. I know a lot of her friends. I’d know if she was dead.”
“All I know is what Pete told me. Cancer. You could ask Pete.”
“I’ll do that.” He stood up. “Target dead and Josie dead. Would that make you happy, Joe?”
“Why should it?”
“I don’t know. Except that Condor case smelled to high heaven.” He put his cigarette out in the ash tray on my desk. “I’ve always been a sort of friend of yours for some damned reason. But if I knew you had paid off Target and Josie, I’d really come for you, Joe. I met that Bea Condor once, and she didn’t look like any whore to me.”
“You can’t always tell in this town,” I said. “She had a lot of talent but it doesn’t necessarily follow she had much character.”
Manny said nothing. His dark face was rigid and the hand that crushed the cigarette was clenched tightly. He turned without looking at me, said, “See you” over his shoulder and went out without closing the door.
I wondered if it was Bea Condor he was thinking of, or Josie Gonzales. Manny isn’t usually grim.
I thought of McGill. He’d been a Bea Condor admirer, too, and when her despoiler had been cleared by a susceptible jury because of Target’s and Josie’s testimony, he’d been deeply shocked. And he must know something about my part in it. So why had he been so genial today? Waiting for me to slip, using honey instead of vinegar? He’d wait a long ti
me.
I phoned Deutscher at his office and home, but didn’t get him. I wanted to tell him Manny was on the way.
At Herbie’s on Vine, I had a few cheese snacks and a couple drinks of rye and then I walked over to the Monterey Plaza. I bought a Times and settled down into a deep lobby chair.
Then the house detective, Art Gesler, came over to chin for a while, and time went by. And then a white-haired man in a beautiful blue gabardine suit was walking toward us across the lobby and I recognized Charles Adam Roland from the pictures I’d seen of him.
Gesler knew him and the three of us talked in the lobby for a few minutes.
When Gesler left us, Roland said, “Six years ago, he caught me trying to sneak out of this same hotel. You’d never know it by the way he acted tonight, would you?”
“Art Gesler’s got a lot of regard for wealth,” I said, “and you look wealthy tonight.”
“I’m solvent,” he said. “But we’re not wealthy yet, are we, Joe?”
He was quite a boy: that white silky hair and those dark blue eyes and a deep sincere voice that radiated good will, confidence, the fellowship of man.
He told me, “Willi might be hard to crack. It’s an axiom of my profession that the mark must have a larcenous soul. And she hasn’t. Willi’s all art and beauty. That’s why we need you.”
“Why? How?”
“You’re going to be the slant-head, the vulgar, stupid private investigator who Jean seems to be trusting too much. You’re the foil against which I will have to sparkle with my wit and urbanity. You’re the suspicious type and I’ll be the man with hope for the future, the forward thinker. Willi reads all the liberal magazines, all the arty magazines, the literary magazines. So you see what you should be to make her hate you.”
“A lowbrow? That’s easy.”
“No, a lower middlebrow, a pompous, opinionated ass.”
“I’ll study the part,” I said. “Though it’s more in Deutscher’s line.”
He chuckled. “Yes. Yes, indeed.”
An opening, so I widened it. “What is his part by the way? If he’s in for a cut, just what does he contribute?”
Charles Adam Roland’s fine forehead was creased in a frown. “I’ve been thinking along the same line. He wants to stay clear of everything that could nail him. He wants to be a sort of silent partner.”
“That’s the way he usually operates. But how did he get into the pitch?”
Roland looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Well, there was a client he had, to whom I was indebted.” He looked up and smiled. “I mean he had one of my marks for a client, and he found me for the mark.”
“And now he’s blackmailing himself into the big money?”
A pause while Roland looked thoughtful. “That puts it accurately enough.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m just a Johnny-come-lately in this deal, so maybe I’m not entitled to an opinion yet, but I can’t see him in this. Do we need him?”
Again Roland didn’t answer right away. Finally he smiled. “He serves no purpose in this pitch. But he does have connections; he’d be a hard man to shake. However, it’s a problem we can think about, isn’t it?”
I nodded. And then asked, “What do you think this Willi Clifford can be touched for?”
“That I’ve investigated. All I considered was her personal fortune, you understand, not her father’s. She has a little over three hundred thousand in cash and immediately negotiable securities and another half million in less fluid assets. She’s a really solvent mark, and Jean’s hold on her is tremendous.” He took a breath. “It is my opinion we can relieve her of nearly a quarter of a million.”
A quarter of a million. … I said, “And that would be cut four ways?”
“If Deutscher can’t be shaken, that would be cut four ways.”
He was smiling at me and I’d bet he thought he could read my mind. He probably thought I was trying to figure it as a three-way cut. But he’d be wrong on that.
I was thinking of how I could live on a quarter of a million dollars.
CHAPTER THREE
AFTER DINNER WE WENT out together, and he left me in front of the hotel with a firm handshake and another flash of that winning smile. At any rate, he thought he left me. My office parking lot was only a block away, and I had my Chev back on Sunset by the time his Cad pulled out of the hotel garage. I gave him a half block lead, and trailed him. I didn’t have far to go. He headed toward the Hollywood Hills section and stopped just short of that.
He stopped in front of Deutscher’s triplex, parking right behind Deutscher’s Plymouth. I drove by as he walked back along the walk toward Deutscher’s lighted apartment. They’d probably made the appointment before Roland met me. So Jean was right about them. A quarter of a million split down the middle is still a lot of money. And maybe Jean wouldn’t be hard to freeze out.
I went right home and phoned her. I told her about my talk with her dad and about my following him after the talk.
“There’s an off chance,” she said, “that it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Way off,” I guessed.
“Yes.” A pause. “What are you doing?”
“Sitting in front of the telephone. Why?”
“I’m bored. It’s such a beautiful clear night. I’d like to look at the ocean.”
“Where’s Willi?”
“Was that a crack?”
“No. I wondered.”
“She went to a concert in Santa Monica, a string quintette. Do you like string quintettes?”
“I never heard one. I guess not. Did you plan on my company to look at the moon over the water?”
“I was kind of hinting. I thought we could have a few drinks, too, at a place I know.”
“Gabby’s,” I guessed. “I’ve seen you there.”
“Mmm-hmm. And I’ve seen you there. Is it a date?”
“I’ll pay the tab,” I said, “but we’ll take your car. I’m trying to develop expensive tastes.”
I was waiting in front when she got there. She slid over and gestured for me to get in behind the wheel. Some heap that was, a hundred and eighty horse. Once we got beyond Beverly Hills, the traffic was light. I turned on the radio and lighted a cigarette, and just loafed along.
“Papa buy you this?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Willi?”
“Don’t be nasty. I was making eighteen hundred a week there for a while, Joe Puma.”
“Four years ago.”
Silence for a few minutes. Then as we left Brentwood she said, “You know you’re attractive to women, don’t you?”
“I’ve been told I am. Why? Do I attract you?”
“Too much. From the first time I saw you. Is it your size? I’ve seen handsomer men, dozens of them. I’ve been proposed to by handsomer men.”
“When you get your cut of that Clifford money, I’ll propose to you, too.”
“You dog. We could have fun though, Joe. If you were more—oh, sentimental—we could have a lot of fun.”
She had to make it romantic. Despite her background, her history and her full-bodied lust, she had to bury it in star dust. Like all women, she hated to face a fact.
I said, “Guys who scramble for a living aren’t inclined to be romantic or sentimental. Maybe if this pitch goes through, I can afford it. Your dad figures we could take the girl for a quarter of a million. That seems impossible to me.”
“He’s taken tougher marks for more.”
“He should be rich then.”
“None of them ever are. He gambles for one thing, and he gambles with people who make a business of it, the big money boys. Easy come, easy go.”
“Do you think he and Deutscher will double-cross us?”
“They might try. Of course, we can’t be sure why Dad went right from that dinner with you to Deutscher’s place. One thing you do have to remember, Dad’s first thought is himself. He’s always the number one boy in his own mind.”
&nbs
p; “And he’ll be handling the money.”
“We’ll give that some thought when the time comes. Let’s not think of money tonight.”
Her perfume came to me as she slid closer in the seat. She put a hand on my knee. The radio gave with Goodman. Big moon in a clear sky; all the ingredients for romance were there. But I was thinking of a quarter of a million dollars.
Gabby’s is on a pier south of Malibu and it gets a lot of the middle-caste studio trade: starlets and fading stars, assistant producers and writers.
It seemed like everybody there knew Jean. We wound up at a big table in one corner with nobody I knew and only one face I recognized. The face belonged to a guy named Moose Jelko. He’d been a fair club fighter, and now he was a heavy in B pictures and a professional bar brawler.
The talk went around me, names I didn’t know in pictures I’d never heard of, gossip and laughs and the smell of expensive perfume through it all. I hit the bottle.
Then, around eleven o’clock, Jean went into the other room to dance with some gent, and Moose slid over into the chair she’d been occupying. He was about half drunk, and I was a little beyond that.
He said, “Hear you’ve been bothering a friend of mine.”
“Who’s that?”
“Phil Sloan.”
“Don’t know him.”
“Little Phil. Runs a cheap bar on Lincoln.”
“Oh,” I said. “How long have you known him?”
“He used to be one of my handlers when I was in the ring. Real nice guy.”
“Sure. What’s his tie-up with the Rickett frame?”
“Look, Puma, I didn’t slide over here to get questioned. I just wanted to give you a friendly word of advice. Lay off Little Phil!”
“Go away, tough guy,” Í told him. “I’ve seen you fight.”
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