Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  I did not have control of this conversation. I said, “Allan Frame.”

  “Allan Frame,” Dressler said. “The favor is Allan Frame, huh? Okay. You know, when you talk about dangerous people, there’s mainly two kinds. You got your hot dangerous people and you got your cold dangerous people. Like Allan Frame. Give me the hot ones any time.”

  “Which one are you?”

  He looked at me as though I’d asked which way was up. “I’m me,” he said. “When you bring it to me, what you get is what you bring, hot or cold, it doesn’t matter.”

  I said, “You’ve lost weight.”

  He surveyed the room. “It’s around here someplace.”

  “You’re not looking like—”

  “Don’t tell me how I look. I don’t tell you how you look, you should return the favor. You’re not exactly this year’s model, you know.”

  “I worry about you.”

  “Tell you something,” he said, “for years I wished people weren’t so afraid of me. I walked into a room, people stopped talking. They vibrated. You could smell the sweat. Now, nobody’s afraid of me. I got you worrying about me, I got TV shows want to talk to me with their cameras, I got fruitcake actors, pluck their eyebrows, want to play me in the movies, I got guys knocking on the door, want to write my life story. Like I went seventy-five years without saying how are you, and suddenly they think I want to tell the whole world everything I ever did, right out loud.”

  “It’s just this year’s stupidity,” I said. “Everybody’s supposed to want to be famous.”

  “There’s only one kind of stupid,” Dressler said. “They just wrap it different.”

  “I’m still worried about you.”

  “Who the hell wants you to be worried about him?”

  I didn’t answer.

  It took him a little time, but he reached over and patted my hand. “Don’t tell Tuffy,” he said. “I got a little something. Here.” He indicated the general area of his right kidney.

  I felt the whole room drop fifty or sixty feet straight down. Dressler said, “Hey, look at you. What’s it gonna do to me, kill me? You think maybe I haven’t been alive long enough? You think maybe I never want to stop getting up in the morning? How many times can you get up in the morning before you say, every fucking day I do this, and what do I get for it? I’m a day older and that’s my future, I gotta do it again. Maybe I’d just like to sleep.”

  “You and Jake Whelan,” I said.

  “Jake Whelan,” he said. “Jake Whelan is a teenager compared to me. What happened to him, he got a wrinkle?”

  I said, “I’d miss you.”

  “It’s a small club, the people who would miss me. Would you yell to Tuffy, ask what the hell he’s doing in there? The bottle’s open, breathing or sneezing or something, and the glasses are right next to it.”

  “I’ll get him,” I said. I got up, trudged through the deep carpet to a dining room the size of the one in Versailles, crossed it, and then angled down a short hall to the kitchen. Tuffy’s eyes were almost as wide open as Itsy Winkle’s. He looked like someone had just fired a gun about an inch from his ear.

  He said, “No.”

  I said, “Don’t show it. We have to get him to a doctor.”

  “He won’t even talk about it.”

  “Well, we can’t solve that now. Give me the wine. You bring the glasses, okay?”

  Tuffy took two steps toward me and threw his arms around me, squeezing me so hard I almost squeaked. “He can’t,” he said. “He just . . . can’t.”

  “Maybe he won’t, it’s not over yet. We’ll get him to a doctor. Come on, he’s going to figure we’re talking about him.”

  Tuffy stepped back and scrubbed his forearm across his face. “You first.”

  I took the bottle and my glass, which already contained an infinitesimal amount of wine, and carried them back through the hallway and the dining room. Dressler had been sitting with his chin lowered to his chest, an attitude of exhaustion, but the moment he heard me he sat up. “About time,” he said. “You and Tuffy been having a gossip?”

  I said, “Not everything is about you. I was checking the color and the aroma, memorizing the label.”

  Dressler said, “And?”

  “And bottoms up.” I knocked it back, nodded, and said, “Pretty damn good.”

  He said, “That’s it? That’s all you got, Mr. Expert?”

  “What do you want me to tell you? That it was aged for ninety years in oak from the True Cross and then strained through the Shroud of Turin?”

  From the dining room, Tuffy said, “It’s French.”

  “So the water is from the grotto at Lourdes. But who cares? Here’s what it is. It’s the kind of wine where people decide between buying a case of this or a new car, an expensive car, one that runs on bird song or something else with no emissions except maybe music. And since I’ll never have anything like this again, I’d like some more.”

  Dressler said to Tuffy, “Go bring those glasses. If it’s as good as our expert here says, you should have some, too.” Then he turned to me and said, “Allan Frame.”

  “Yeah,” I said as Tuffy trudged toward the kitchen.

  “I’m not going to set up a meeting.”

  I said, “Well, shit. All that wine expertise—”

  “I’d miss you,” he said, and then he released a creaky little laugh. “Allan Frame, you don’t want to mess with, believe me. I’ll take care of it.” He raised his voice. “Tuffy, can I get the phone over here?”

  “Sure thing.” Tuffy came in with the glasses and put them on the table. He poured some for me, a little for himself, and considerably more for Dressler. He put Dressler’s glass close enough so Dressler wouldn’t have to reach for it, and then went to a little niche I’d never noticed, in the wall that had been on our right as we came into the living room. He pulled out an old Princess phone in a queasy shade of graying avocado. It was the ugly clamshell version that had buttons instead of the old-fashioned dial. It looked like a dollhouse toy in Tuffy’s huge hand as he brought it over, trailing yards of twisted and knotted cord behind him.

  I said, “You’re kidding.”

  “It was my great-granddaughter’s,” Dressler said. “Sentimental.” To Tuffy he said, “When was the line swept last?”

  Tuffy looked at his watch. “They all get swept on the hour and it’s ten to six, so maybe fifty minutes ago.”

  “Good enough for Allan Frame,” Dressler said. He punched a couple of numbers, paused, and hung it up. “Maybe I should know what this is about before I bother the man.”

  “Bother him? You’re Irwin—”

  “Thank you for reminding me who I am. That, I still remember. But Allan Frame is putting together a lot of weight, more weight than anyone has had in the Valley since that thug Annunziato, who gave all of us a bad name, got shot. So tell me what this is about.”

  “Someone needed a house burglarized and she didn’t know how to find a burglar—” I stopped because Dressler had his hand up, palm facing me, a gesture that has probably meant enough for thousands of years.

  “Not Allan Frame,” he said. “Nobody who just needs a burglar, you should forgive my tone of voice, would go to Allan. They wouldn’t dare. Someone eight, nine levels down from Allan, maybe. But even then they’d have to be stupid, because if what they were after was worth more than a buck-fifty, Allan would have it before it even got warm in the burglar’s pocket.”

  I said, “He hired two burglars to hit the same house. On successive nights. Used two fences to do it, so he was one remove from both burglars.”

  “And the fences told you who he was?”

  “With some persuasion.”

  “I’m glad I’m not their life insurance company. But I’m telling you, Allan Frame doesn’t operate at that level. There’s gotta be somethin
g you don’t know.”

  “There are a million things I don’t know. But the main thing I don’t know is who his client is. She, or someone working for her, killed a friend of mine. And she’s just killed someone else, someone who’s no loss to the world, but she’s dead in a way that’s bad enough to make me personally nervous. Whoever his client is, she’s knocking them down left and right.”

  “It’s a she,” Dressler said, shaking his head. “Always a complication.”

  “So, can you still call him?”

  “You shouldn’t expect much. Whatever is going on, it’s outside the usual rules.” He looked off into the middle distance for a moment, picked up his wine glass and drained it, put it down—Tuffy got up and refilled it instantly—said, “Ehhh. Not bad,” and began to punch the buttons on the silly little phone.

  I hit my own wine again as he waited for an answer. It hadn’t deteriorated. Tuffy didn’t leap to pour me more, but Dressler made a tsk-tsk noise and pointed at my glass, and then he leaned back, turned away from me and said, “Is he there? This is Irwin Dressler.” He listened. “For a minute,” he said, “I can wait for a minute, but no more.”

  We all sat there. Tuffy’s eyes were wide and he was fidgeting a little, but Dressler did the tsk-tsk thing again, looking at Tuffy, and Tuffy subsided instantly.

  “Allan,” Dressler said in a new voice, a younger, deeper, and stronger voice. “It’s me. Yeah, yeah, good, what about you? Okay, we’re both good, it’s good to be good. Listen I need to ask you a question. See, there’s—”

  He broke off, both sparse eyebrows raised in surprise. Then he said, “No, it’s not something I can discuss with Harvey. If I wanted to talk to a pisher, I would have called a pisher. You’re the one I want to talk to, so just hang on for a—” He broke off and looked up at me. If it had been anyone but Dressler, I would have described his expression as puzzled. He said, “Son of a bitch put me on hold.”

  Tuffy, who was sitting on the floor, shifted nervously and cleared his throat.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Dressler said. “Where would I go? I called you, remember? Listen, somebody’s telling me you got some kinda client, you’re hiring burglars for them or something, and I know you don’t do that but I—” He blinked heavily and then he said, “Hold it, hold it, hold it. I want to know who your client is, and, no, I’m not going to tell you who told me about—” He pulled the phone away from his ear, blinking so hard I could almost hear it, and then put it back and said, obviously over whatever Frame was saying, “Hey, hey, you gotta watch that. That kind of thing is bad for the heart, you remember being polite, how people are supposed to be—” He looked at me and did the spiraling finger at his left temple that means crazy, and said, “Not to talk over you or anything, but no, I don’t know who that is, what kind of a name is Junior anyway and I’ve got to tell you, I don’t much like your—”

  His mouth dropped open, and he sat back on the couch, holding the phone out in front of him and looking at it. He tapped it a couple of times against his palm as though to fix it or get its attention, listened again, and said, “He hung up on me. Sonofabitch hung up on me.” Slowly, carefully, deliberately, he replaced the handset, the way he might handle a Faberge egg, drew two or three deep, soothing breaths, and then threw the phone across the room. The cord, whipping out behind it, knocked over and broke the crystal wine glasses and flipped the bottle end over end, creating a Jackson Pollack spatter in arterial raspberry across the white carpet.

  “Tuffy,” Dressler said. “More wine. I need Allan Frame’s home address and office address and the license plate number of whichever car he drives most, they’ll all be in the yellow notebook, third drawer, so bring it here, get me the number for Phil Romero, he used to work for Allan, give me a hitter’s list, and get that Annunziato girl—”

  “Trey,” I said.

  “Who the fuck cares?” Dressler said. “She’ll come to whatever I call her, she’s got acres of skin in this game, that vonce took away her business and most of her employees. She’ll be happy to pitch in. What are you doing, Tuffy, am I a TV show that you’re just sitting there looking at me with your mouth open? Wine, yellow notebook, Phil Romero, hitters, Miss Annunziato.”

  “Got it,” Tuffy said, getting up.

  “And call Dr. Fleiss, tell him I want him to come to his office at seven. Time is it?”

  “Six straight up,” Tuffy said, and my phone rang.

  “In his office at seven, okay? I need a once-over, this thing in my side. I can’t go after somebody like Allan Frame if I’m dying, can I?”

  “No,” Tuffy said with a fierce grin, “you can’t.”

  “So go get the stuff. Don’t forget the bottle. You,” he said to me, “answer that fucking phone.”

  25

  A Common Variety of Low Cunning

  “I’m here,” Eaglet said. “How long do you need me to stay?”

  I was standing in the hallway between Dressler’s front door and the living room. I could hear Tuffy opening and closing drawers somewhere. “Can you make it to midnight? Do you have anything that you can, uhh, that you can use—”

  “A bucket, but I won’t need it. I’ve been invited in. I assume they’ve got toilets.”

  “How did you get—”

  “What do you think? I knocked on the door? Hello, I’m your friendly gunperson for the evening.”

  “Then how—”

  “You know,” she said, “your daughter is really something. She came home just when I got there—”

  “At that hour? Why was she so late? School gets out at—”

  “I’m telling you. She took two friends of hers, both named Tiffany—”

  In the background, I heard Rina burst into laughter.

  “—to go see that little Chinese girl, the one with the girlfriend who—”

  “Anime,” I said.

  “Yeah, Annie. And they talked for a couple hours or more, at some Mexican restaurant, and she says Annie—”

  “Anime”

  “—is feeling a lot better from the talk, and they’re all going to get together with Annie’s little girlfriend, whatever her name was, because both of the Tiffanys have been through this and come out okay, and you know, I like to think I might have helped, but, I’ve got to admit it, my experience was a little on the special side, what with the mushrooms and the shaman all, but you know what? They invited me to come, too. Me, with, you know, just regular girls—”

  “You’re regular,” Rina said in the background. “Well, mostly regular. You’ve got the coolest business card.”

  “This never happened to me in high school,” Eaglet said.

  “That’s very interesting,” I said, “but—”

  “I’m not talking to you. So anyway, I can stay all night because I can sleep on the couch and be right up front to blow the shit—sorry, Rina—out of whoever comes in. If anyone does.”

  “Have you talked to Rina’s mom? To Kathy?”

  “Sure, she’s right here,” she said, and I squeezed my eyes shut like someone expecting a punch. “Say hi, Kathy.”

  Kathy said, “Hi,” but her tone wasn’t quite as effusive as Eaglet’s and Rina’s. It was a tone that promised additional discussion in the future.

  “Hang on a second,” I said as Irwin Dressler rounded the corner, walking slowly but with considerable purpose.

  “Go away,” he said. “If you should ever be asked to testify about what happens here tonight I want you to be able to say you left, and not make the lie detector even hiccup a little. Shoo, shoo.”

  “I’m shooing,” I said, and my phone buzzed to indicate a text.

  Opening the front door, I said to Kathy, “Gotta go. I just got a text I have to—”

  “We’re fine without you,” Kathy said. “Aren’t we fine, girls?” There was female chorus of yes, and she said, “And you and I w
ill talk about this later.” She hung up, and I went to the car.

  The rain was coming down with serious intent, so I cracked the windows just a little for air and retrieved the new text, which told me to check my email, which in turn had an attachment for me to download. Louie’s researcher had apparently accelerated her photo-taking so as to hurry things along and then amalgamated them somehow into a big document. I looked at the time and understood why: the library would be closing soon, and she wanted to get me all she could. Whatever Louie was paying her, she was earning it.

  When, at the age of seventeen, I fled Kansas to seek my place in the wider world, I possessed the unstoppable brute force of an ox and a common variety of low cunning. Like many young men who are still under the spell of their as-yet untested self-delusion, I mistook my force for strength and my cunning for intelligence. It took several years and many mistakes, some of them inexcusable, before I could identify the errors in that appraisal and see myself as I truly was. It was a frightening awakening.

  Those qualities, however, had been required of me if I were to survive my life with my father. He was a man who passed judgment first and sought clarification later. Indeed, he delighted in passing judgment, both because it gave him an opportunity to feel superior to me and also because he enjoyed inflicting the punishment that would follow. My mother’s death was a kind of furnace that burned away any softness or affection my father might once have possessed. He became as hard and unyielding as stones in the field he plowed so doggedly every year. When I think of my father now, I see a narrow, rigid man guiding a plow that is being pulled by a mule and scratching a dry, shallow line in the earth. My father knew that the earth would fail him and that the crops, in the main, would die before they were ready for harvest, but he could see no farther than the end of the furrow he was cutting. I hope my father’s spirit is at rest now. I am sure it is.

  I know it is unfilial of me to confess, even in a book that will not be read for decades (if, indeed, it is ever read), that I could not love my father. It was not until I was much older that I could understand somewhat how he became the man I knew, and it took me even longer to recognize him in myself, like looking in a mirror and seeing suddenly an unexpected likeness in the mouth or around the eyes. Indeed, as I sit here, pen in hand, devoting some of what will surely be my last days to this book that may never be read, I see again that straight, useless furrow, being cut this time into paper. So it may be that I am indeed my father’s son. I am afraid also that he taught me how to be a father, perhaps the worst thing he ever did to me. When people claim that we revisit the sins of our fathers, I am sorry to say, from my own experience, that we often revisit them upon our children. I know I did upon my daughter.