by L. A. Morse
He put the case across his bony knees and lay his forearms across it. His spine was completely straight, and he was leaning slightly forward. His eyes were watching the movement on the TV screen, without seeing it. Even though he was trying to keep it in check, I could see the strain was really getting to him. His tension, though, instead of feeding my own, had just the reverse effect. My nervousness and anxiety vanished. One of us had to stay calm, and I figured that that—if anything—was what I was being paid for.
“It’s all in there?” I said, nodding at the attaché case.
Obviously, it was all in there, but there were times when even fatuous remarks were preferable to nothing.
“Yeah,” Sal said.
“Hmm.”
I found it very bizarre to be one cushion away from so much money. I couldn’t relate to it. It seemed somehow unreal that an amount that could buy so many big things would take up so small a volume. On the other hand, I remembered pictures from Germany in the early twenties, when money became worthless, and even a suitcase full of the stuff couldn’t buy a box of matches. More and more, at least in the supermarket, it seemed as though we were moving in that direction. But inflation wasn’t the issue here. The issue was whether one attaché case of dollars could still buy one teenage boy.
“I didn’t hear the car pull up,” I said, in order to say something.
“I had Eric leave me at the corner.”
“Eric?”
“My driver.”
“Oh.” How nice to have a driver called Eric. Most chauffeurs used to be named Fritz, but I supposed styles had changed.
“I didn’t want him to know where I was going.”
“Right.”
That afternoon we had decided to use my car for the drop. Neither of us felt up to pushing that monster of a limo around, and we certainly didn’t want to involve anyone else in this thing. Besides, my car would be much less conspicuous. I had offered to pick Sal up, but he thought it’d be better if he got out of his house, rather than sit around. Considering what I had been feeling earlier, it made sense.
“You’re sure you want to do it this way?” I said.
“I’m sure.”
“It’s not too late. We can still bring in the cops. I can call them now and they’ll cover us.”
Sal shook his head, not turning to face me, keeping his eyes on the television.
I’d had to ask him because I still thought it was the smarter thing to do. At the same time, though, in a funny kind of way, I was glad we were going through with it. That reaction had nothing to do with the best interests of Sal and his grandson, Tommy, only with me. A last dream of action, I supposed. I wasn’t exactly pleased about feeling that way, but there it was, all the same.
“Why don’t we get going?”
Sal looked at his watch. “Not yet.”
“Come on. We’re both going crazy here. Believe me, it won’t matter if we’re a few minutes early.”
“No!” For the first time since he’d sat down, he looked at me. His lips were bloodless, a thin white line pulled taut against his teeth. His eyes were hot. It seemed like he was on the verge of uncoiling in all directions at once, like those spring snakes that leap out of trick boxes of candy. “No!”
Okay. Okay. I held my hands up. I wasn’t going to argue. It was his money, and his grandson, and I was his P.I. for the evening. If he thought that twenty minutes made a difference, it made a difference.
As quickly as he flared up, he relaxed. He shrugged, helplessly.
I nodded and smiled. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay.” I hoped I sounded more confident to Sal than I did to myself.
He turned back to the television, keeping his eyes fixed on the images of sanitized mayhem that raced across the screen. At frequent intervals he raised his wrist and glanced at his watch, trying to will time to speed up. I didn’t know why he was so concerned about the time.
Hell, I was sure the kidnappers would be happy if we were a little early. They’d probably been in position for hours already, looking at their watches as often as Sal did, and wishing it was over. Still, I knew that victims of kidnappings tend to follow instructions—however unimportant or meaningless—very precisely, like it was a magic ritual, every step of which had to be perfectly performed or else there’d be failure. If they’d told Sal to spit over his shoulder three times and recite “Jingle Bells,” he’d have done it.
Instead, we waited. All the time, Sal resolutely avoided looking at me. He was nervous and tense, all right, but there was something else in his manner that I couldn’t quite place. Before I had it pinned down, he gave a sigh, stood up, and nodded.
From the back of a chair, I grabbed the suit jacket that went with my trousers and started to put it on.
“Aren’t you taking a gun?”
“Come on, Sal.”
“You have one, don’t you?”
Yeah, I still had one, but I didn’t know why. Maybe because it was one of the few tangible things I had left from the major part of my life. Like a carpenter keeping the tools he knew he’d never use again. I should’ve gotten rid of it a long time ago, but it was in a box on a shelf in the closet. I got it down once in a while to clean and oil it. And, knowing it was stupid, put it back on the shelf again.
“Take it, Jake.”
“What for?”
Sal jiggled the attaché case.
“So what am I supposed to do if there’s trouble?” I said. “Shoot off a few of my toes? Or maybe put a bullet in your hip? Believe me, it’s much better if we don’t have it.”
“Take it. Please.”
“This is already crazy, Sal; let’s not make it ridiculous.”
But even as I said it, I knew I’d do it. I felt the same curious kind of ambivalence I’d had all day about this whole thing. I knew it was a mistake, but at the same time it excited me. I shouldn’t have been doing it at all, but since I was going to, I thought I might as well do it right. Or to put it another way, why be a partial fool, when I could be a complete one?
I got down the gun, a 9mm Browning, and slipped on the shoulder holster. Christ, it felt strange, seemingly much heavier than its two pounds. Strangest of all though, was the way that putting it on catapulted me back to a time when I wore it almost as a matter of course. Images, more recollections from the body than the mind, momentarily welled up, and I felt myself back in dark alleys and damp warehouses, waiting for goniffs like Joey Samosa or Pig Galway to show.
Ah, back in the saddle again.
Shit.
I put on my coat, and Sal and I went out through the back to the garage.
Outside, the air felt damp, heavy, gritty, like a towel in an Istanbul bathhouse, as the detective Al Tracker might have said. Down the street someone was having a late-night party in his swimming pool.
My car was a twenty-year-old Chevy. Had it been in better shape, it might have soon become a minor classic. As it was, it was just an old car. With the price of gas, and everything, I used it as little as possible, but I was still glad that I had it. It didn’t run too badly, once it got started, though every year it was harder and harder to get the engine to turn over. I knew the feeling.
“You’re sure this’ll get us there?” Sal said, fingering the peeling leatherette of the dashboard.
“No problem.”
To my surprise, the engine caught the first time. I said a silent thanks to whatever deity looked after the internal combustion engine. It would’ve looked real good if I’d had to call the kid at the garage for a start in order to make the ransom drop. Real professional. Real encouraging.
I headed over to the freeway. I didn’t go on it that often anymore. My night vision wasn’t as good as it used to be, and the car sometimes stalled when I accelerated. I figured, though, that if I could act like I was twenty years younger, maybe the old Bel Air could as well.
The breeze coming in through the wind-wing was warm and heavy. I was starting to stick to the seat.
“This fee
ls more like an East Coast night,” I said.
“Yeah, it does. This was the kind of night when kids’d play stickball in the street and all the men’d sit on the stoops in their undershirts and drink beer.”
“Right” I nodded. And tempers got short, and minor differences of opinion about John J. McGraw and the Giants ended up being resolved with broken beer bottles and kitchen knives.
“I really liked those nights when I was a kid. You got to stay up late because it was too hot to sleep.”
“Yeah. Or you took your mattress up to the roof or out on the fire escape.”
Sal turned to me, smiling for the first time that night “Of course! Shit, I haven’t thought about that for years. I used to love to do that, go up and sleep next to the pigeon coop. You had to listen to that fucking cooing all night long, but it was about the only time you ever got to be by yourself.”
Sal’s momentary brightness faded and he fell silent again, staring out the window and tapping his fingers on the attaché case resting on his lap.
I got up the on ramp and headed west along the Ventura Freeway. The freeway always felt like a new thing to me. Every time I got on it, I had to remind myself I’d been riding it for nearly twenty-five years. To me, it sure didn’t seem that long ago that there hadn’t been a freeway. Or much longer still since the Valley had been empty except for some orange groves, chicken ranches, and small vegetable farms. Passing the shopping malls and the thousands of tract houses, it seemed incredible that I could still remember when a lot of this had been wasteland covered with tumbleweeds. Now you had to drive almost as far to see a tumbleweed as you did to get a fresh egg.
We had just passed the Woodman Avenue exit, when Sal slapped the case with his palm and said, “Angela Delia Rossa!”
“What?”
“That’s who it was.”
“Who what was?”
“You got me thinking about going up to the roof in the summer, and I remembered how it was up there that I got my first hand job.”
“From Angela Delia Rossa?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
Great. I was concentrating as hard as I could, so that my aging reflexes didn’t put us into the back end of some jerk who was about to cut us off at fifty-five miles an hour, and Sal was telling me some sixty-year-old sexual reminiscence. Did I need that?
“Jesus! Did she ever have great tits. Big, but really firm, you know.” Sal closed his eyes and clicked his tongue in appreciation. “You know, I never plugged her, but even after I started making it regular, Angela Delia Rossa was still the dame I thought about when I beat off. Funny.”
Come on, Sal, give me a break. We’re out to ransom back your grandson and you’re talking about some Brooklyn bimbo from the Stone Age. What the hell’s going on here?
“I wonder whatever happened to her.”
“Well, Sal, she probably got married and had a bunch of kids and got fat. And if she’s still alive now, those great tits are hanging down to her waist.”
“Shit.” Sal sadly shook his head.
“And her only regret,” I said, “in a long and successful life is that she never let Sal the Salami stick it to her.”
Sal looked at me, maybe a little pissed, and then gave a brief laugh. “Okay, Jake.” He turned back to the window and started drumming his fingers again.
I got to the Topanga Canyon exit and started up into the hills. Time was, when the only people in the canyon were a few gaga old codgers in scrapwood shacks, and the land was almost being given away. Now it was filled with millionaire rock musicians who got back to nature surrounded by electrified fences and guard dogs.
We finally got to the coast highway, and I headed north.
“Now, where are we supposed to turn?” I said.
“It should be a little bit farther.”
The turning was just past the Soak ‘n ‘ Sip, a redwood-sided building that announced itself as L.A.’s first hot-tub wine bar. It must have been too late for soaking, if not sipping, because the place was dark.
The road we were on started out paved, and then became gravel. When it turned to dirt, I stopped the car. Except for the beam from my headlights, it was completely dark. Gulls cawed in the distance and there were some small animals rustling around in invisible bushes. Otherwise, nothing but heavy silence. It was the kind of place where bandits waited to stick up the midnight stage.
“Hey, Sal, this is feeling really bad. I don’t like the looks of this at all.”
“Come on, Jake, let’s go.” He rapidly tapped the case with his knuckles.
“No, I mean it. I think we better talk about this.”
“No time, Jake. We’ll talk later. Get going.” Sal was twitching, looking at his watch, and bouncing a little on the seat. “Come on.”
“If this is a set-up, we’re better off pulling back and making other arrangements. Don’t worry. They want the money. They’ll get in touch.”
“And if they don’t? I don’t know who the fuck these creeps are or what they’ll do. This is Tommy’s life we’re talking about, you son of a bitch. If you don’t feel up to it, I’ll go ahead by myself. Get out.”
“Hold on, Sal. Calm down. What’d they say? How much farther we supposed to go?”
“They said, about a mile after the dirt started. There’d be one of those flashing emergency highway lights. We leave the money there and go back. I’ll get a phone call later, telling me where to get Tommy.”
“Wonderful. We’re already way the hell in the middle of nowhere, and we’re supposed to go a mile farther. It stinks.”
Actually, from the kidnapper’s point of view it was nearly perfect. There was no chance of anyone coming along by mistake. They could see or hear anyone that did come along, and they’d have plenty of warning if we weren’t alone. And even if we tried to do something fancy, set up some kind of trap or surveillance, all they had to do was climb over a couple of hills, get to a fire road, and come out ten miles away. They obviously knew what they were doing.
“You shouldn’t have agreed to these arrangements,” I said rather lamely. Of course he shouldn’t have. And he shouldn’t have let his grandson be nabbed.
“But I did. And I’m going through with it, right by the book, just the way they said. Now, get out I’ll pick you up on the way back.”
I looked at Sal but I couldn’t see his face in the darkness.
Shit.
One of the few things I really believed in—and that was constantly reconfirmed for me—was that people got themselves into jams because they couldn’t anticipate the possible consequences inherent in a situation. They didn’t understand cause and effect, or they lacked imagination, and so they were surprised when they found themselves neck-deep in shit and sinking.
Even if nothing else was functioning terribly well, my imagination still was, and I sure didn’t like the possibilities I saw down that dirt road.
But I’d been hired to do a job, to help out Sal. I’d walked from jobs before, but even if I knew I was right, doing so had never made me feel real swell about myself.
Damn.
I put the car into drive and moved down the road. If I couldn’t keep Sal from being an ass, maybe I could keep him from paying the price.
I heard Sal exhale slowly, as though in relief. “Thanks, Jake.”
“Yeah, sure.”
We’d covered about half of the mile, when my headlights picked up the yellow and black stripes of a barrier across the road, the kind of heavy sawhorse that highway crews used.
“What the fuck’s that?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. They said the road’d be blocked. We just have to pull it aside.”
“Swell.”
Sal started to open his door, but I told him to stay put. I shifted to neutral and got out.
Except for the idling of the engine, there were no sounds. The night was oppressively still, not even a breeze. I smelled dust and dried brush.
As I walked to the barrier, I had the fe
eling that this situation somehow seemed familiar, struck a chord. I almost laughed when I realized it was something out of one of those thousands of books I’d read. A Chandler novel. Farewell, My Lovely, I thought. Marlowe and his client were delivering a pay-off, and the drop was in one of the deserted canyons off the coast road.
I tried to move the barrier, but something was holding one of the legs. As I bent down to free it, I remembered that in the book Marlowe gets knocked out. At the same instant, I heard a sound behind me; then Sal called my name. He might have said more, but I never heard it.
I was trying to stand up and get out my gun, when the back of my skull cracked like the San Andreas Fault and my vision exploded into Fourth of July sparklers.
They looked real pretty before they flared out and left me in blackness.
CHAPTER FOUR
I hadn’t been hit on the head since 1952, and I had forgotten just how shitty it could be. My entire body felt like it had been steam-rollered, my skull had been replaced with a decomposing grapefruit, and I heard a horrible sound, like a cat trying to get rid of a hairball.
That was me. I was on my elbows and knees, dry-heaving my guts out. I had tried to stand up too abruptly and everything, including my stomach, had flipped upside down. I’d dropped back to the ground even more abruptly, where I’d been repeatedly and unpleasantly sick.
I made the mistake of looking at the awful little puddle beneath me, and heaved a couple more times. Still no hairball.
Somehow, I managed to roll myself away and things began to settle down a little. After a few minutes I started to feel well enough to wonder where the hell I was and what the fuck had happened.
At first I thought I must have slipped in my bathroom and cracked my head on the tub, one of the things that they warn happen to old people all the time. But that didn’t account for the fact that I was lying on dirt, not my nice sea-green tiles. I knew I wasn’t a very good housekeeper, but I’d never let things get this bad.
Then I thought I’d been mugged in the park. But that didn’t explain how Sears and the rest of the shopping center had turned into a mountain. And why was everything so quiet and so dark? There was a little bit of light behind me, but nothing else.