Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  But this is not the time to talk about my bungled relationship with my family. That will come in its turn. Suffice it to say that when I left Kansas I was running not only toward an unknown world but also away from my father. Later, when I did the things of which I have grown to be most ashamed, it seemed to me that I was somehow evening the score with my father, doing deeds that, had he known of them, would horrify him, trapped as he was in his useless, profitless rectitude.

  Well. As someone who’d had his own issues with his father, I found myself finding common ground with the founder of the short-lived Horton dynasty. I’d demonstrated my contempt for my father by replacing him with Herbie Mott and embarking, as soon as was humanly possible, on my own relatively modest life of crime. I had more in common with the old claim jumper than I’d thought. One problem with looking at people we dislike more closely, I’ve found, is that we usually see ourselves in them.

  The young woman in the library was hauling ass, because a little buzz and shimmy broke my concentration on the book to announce a third installment. That made me wonder how late the library was open, which in turn made me look at my watch, and that led me to wonder what was happening with the wills, and at that moment my phone rang.

  “It’s that sparkler, Walter,” Louie announced. “He’s got them both, although he says it cost him an extra couple hundred of his own. I asked him did he get a receipt, and he didn’t even chuckle.”

  “Nobody actually chuckles,” I said. “The chuckle is a fictitious form of laughter.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let me hear you chuckle. Three to one you’ll give me some kind of snort.”

  “Are you even interested in these wills?”

  “I’m interested in anything and everything that’ll help me get past what I saw this afternoon.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  I told him.

  “Why didn’t you lie to me?” he said. “Tell me you bought Girl Scout cookies and one of them went bad or something, anything except that. I would have lied to you.”

  “I had to give part of it to somebody,” I said. “You’re my best friend.”

  “Yeah? Do me a favor, make another friend.”

  “So is old Walter with you?”

  “Nah. He’s on his way, but it’s raining and it’s rush hour.”

  I looked out the window. It was, in fact, still raining and it was the raggedy end of rush hour. I was parked in Dressler’s driveway, just outside the gate. No one had come out yet to tell me to beat it. “What’s your guess at an ETA?”

  “What’re you, NASA?” Louie said. “His ETA?”

  “All right. Where and when do you think we should meet Walter? Is that better?”

  “Du-par’s,” Louie said. “We can put sugar on everything. How about we give him forty-five minutes?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Come a little early,” Louie said. “We can get some quality time.”

  I have to admit that I found the rhythm of Codwallader’s prose, stiff though it was, sort of hypnotic. It was so much more languid than most of the contemporary language I’d read. He had a story to tell and he assumed that his reader, if there ever was one, would have a lot of time to devote to it. The issue of free time without much of anything competing for it helped to explain the sheer length of novels like Middlemarch and the other triple-decker doorstops laid at the feet of the public by people like Dickens and Trollope and Eliot. None of those writers could have guessed that a time would come in which the standard attention span could be measured in seconds.

  It would take me a good twenty or twenty-five minutes to get to Du-par’s, so I began to skip a little. He had gone bad in the conventional way, one misdeed at a time, with the intervals between them growing shorter as his confidence grew and his conscience shrank. He stole, he betrayed, he stole some more. He terrorized the helpless. When he finally killed someone, at the age of twenty-four, it shook him, and he did a pious page or three about remorse and the blown-out candle of the spirit and death being a one-way street and all that, but the eventual upshot was that he accepted who he was; as he said, what was the alternative? At the same time, he became more violent; where before, he had used violence as a threat, in his mid-twenties it became his tool of first choice, a way of dispensing with the warm-up. Draw the gun, grab the stuff, clobber the sucker silly, and take off for the horizon. And also, for the first time—or at least the first time he admits it on the page—he began to look over his shoulder. As the malfeasance added up and the list of victims and double-crossed confederates grew, and the occasional wanted poster appeared, he spent less of his time and energy on crime, and more on making sure the trail behind him was clear. He was operating mainly in Nevada during this period, and while the unsettled West was enormous and empty and easy to get lost in, the towns were claustrophobically small; sooner or later everyone rode through. Codwallader was spending a lot of his time with one eye on the street.

  The narrative, for all its I’m being frank because I’m dead claim of honesty, was pretty vague on how much money he was pulling in. He was stealing mostly silver and a little gold, but he didn’t get very specific about how much of it he swiped or what he got for it. The most detailed description of his takings comes almost incidentally in a story about the time one of his saddlebags burst open beneath the weight of the silver it contained, silver that had been purified and melted into bars. At the time, he was being chased by people who were no more than a few miles behind him, and his horse was tiring. But the bag broke and he didn’t have the luxury of slowing down to pick up his haul, and the spill of silver across his trail distracted and delayed his pursuers. He was able to hole up in some convenient rocks until he could venture out without risk of being hung on the spot. After that, he kept a handful of silver bars within easy reach in case he ever again needed to put distance between him and the people who were after him. What that said to me was that he’d bagged considerable quantities of gold and silver.

  This was just a few months before the time when, after a hair’s breadth escape from the mining boomtown of Virginia City, that he began to think about going to New York, and perhaps beyond.

  26

  It’s All in the Wrist, Like Everything Else

  Traffic was heavier than I’d thought it would be, courtesy of the rain. I’d only just made the turn from Mulholland onto Coldwater when my phone rang. Louie again.

  No cops behind me. I put the phone on speaker and said, “Fifteen minutes.”

  “You’re not going to believe what’s in this will,” Louie said.

  “Which one?”

  “The daughter. Daisy. Jeez, she hated everybody.”

  “Is Walter still there?”

  “Sure. He’s eager to say hi, too, aren’t you, Walter?”

  Walter apparently managed to contain his enthusiasm, since I didn’t hear a reply. Louie said, “He’s just shy.”

  “Get rid of him,” I said. “Give him the whole seven hundred. I’ll give it to you, and some more, when I get there.”

  “Fine with me,” Louie said. “The older I get, the stricter I am about who gets in. If life is really getting shorter, and it’s silly to pretend it isn’t, maybe we should circle the wagons, you know? Put out sentries, be picky about who sits around the fire with us.”

  “That’s positively poetic.”

  “Well, the inspiration just got up to go to the bathroom. Has to wash his hands before he’ll pick up a teacup.”

  “Lean close and breathe all over him,” I said. “See you in a few.”

  On this side of the hill, the rain was more of a mist. The valley presented itself as an abstract painting, just formless smears of colored light stretching all the way to the dark hulks of the Santa Susana and San Gabriel mountains to the north. The mountains themselves were now invisible but their footh
ills were bordered by the farthest and dimmest margin of light. Below me and to my right were Glendale and North Hollywood, where I had caught my one horrified glimpse of Althea Beckwell-Stoddard, and that brought to mind the thought that cats are, by nature, nocturnal and this would be party time. Yet again I fought down the urge to report the killing. People in my position don’t call in information about murders, not in an era where cops have access to the highest of high-tech. Sooner or later, I thought. A client’s parent, a boyfriend, an unlucky UPS guy, someone would push that door the rest of the way open.

  My phone rang again, and this time the screen announced Ronnie.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “This has been—”

  “I haven’t even accused you of anything yet. Anyway, I’ve had a great time. Here’s a life-coaching tip: go to amusement parks when it’s raining. I owned the place.”

  “I’m on my way to the Du-par’s on Ventura to see Louie. You want to meet me there?”

  “Du-par’s? No, thanks. I totally ate my way through the day, one awful piece of fried junk after another, and I feel like my inside is bigger than my outside. Also, I have to confess that I didn’t sleep very well at Ratville, so my plan is to take a shower and some heartburn medicine, watch something undemanding on the drive-in theater screen they put in this big, quiet, mouse-free room, digest for a while, and then pass out. Maybe order a bottle of wine.”

  “What’s the bed situation?”

  “Twin queens. If I don’t wake up and say hello when you come in, do me a favor and sleep in the empty one. I’ll make it up to you in the morning.”

  “Oh, boy,” I said, passing Jake’s driveway yet again. “Pepsodent love.”

  “I’ll turn the covers down for you.”

  “And if you do say hello?”

  “Well, then,” she said. “It’ll depend on you.”

  Louie was steaming. I could spot it from the doorway. The look he gave me nearly cut me in half.

  I was most of the way to him when someone touched my arm. I looked down at a panorama of tattoos and said, “Hi, Glinda.”

  “You’re with Pie Guy over there?” she said.

  “I will be. How’s the transubstantiation coming?”

  “Piece of cake. It’s all in the wrist, like everything else. Be nice to him. His date ran out on him, that guy with all the flakes on his face? Mr. Flakey went out to the parking lot for something and left your buddy sitting there, and after a few minutes he got up to see what had happened, and when he came back in he looked like a lighted match. He’s been snarling at everybody ever since.”

  “I’ll smooth him out.”

  “The management thanks you. Coffee?”

  “Can you leave the pot again?”

  “Shhhh,” she said. “People will talk.”

  She headed toward the counter and I did a brief scan of the territory. Mostly families eating an early dinner, and other than the children whose parents had dragged them in, there was no one below the age of fifty: the Du-par’s demographic, shading older on a daily basis. No cops for the moment, although that would change. Like a lot of all-night operations, Du-par’s gives the cops a hundred-percent discount in exchange for the occasional drive-by and a pledge to respond within a couple of minutes to an emergency call.

  I was tired and wrung out, still carrying the shock of those cats exploding out at me, the sight and smell of Althea on the floor, and also the unexpected revelation of Irwin Dressler’s sudden mortality. And a prolonged case of the jitters that had been curled defensively inside me—just waiting for a chance to take charge again—since the moment I smelled the baby powder in that pitch-black hallway. This had not been a relaxing couple of days.

  Louie was doing his best to stare a hole in the table, so I had an unobserved moment. I used it to draw a few big breaths, blow them out, and contract and release my shoulders a couple of times. I could feel Glinda watching me from behind the counter, so I nodded her way, inhaled again, and slid into the booth.

  “So,” I said. “He left without saying goodbye?”

  “I could kill him,” Louie said. “I gave him the money, like a schmuck, and after I finished reading Miss Daisy’s will, which is more like a won’t, I asked for the old guy’s, and he slapped his forehead and said he’d left it in the car. Silly me, he said. Be right back, he said. Five minutes later I go out and his car is gone, and about two minutes after that he calls to say that the second will is gonna cost a thousand bucks, thank you very much. Said he knew we could get another copy tomorrow, and if that fit in with our schedule, we should feel free to do it. Son of a bitch.”

  I said, “I thought he was afraid of you.”

  Louie rubbed his face with both hands. “I knew you’d say that. If someone had bet me fifty K that I couldn’t predict what you’d say, I woulda taken the bet in a second.”

  “Well,” I said, “it doesn’t lessen my respect for you, that you can’t scare someone who hasn’t even gotten his law degree yet, someone who’s afraid to drink coffee, someone who—”

  “But nobody offered me the bet,” Louie said, continuing what he clearly saw as a monologue. “If they had, I’d be a rich man. I wouldn’t be sitting here getting abused, I’d be on my way to the Ritz-Carlton for a fancy rubdown and one of those things where they put warm rocks all over you.”

  “Did you get that address?”

  “What address? Oh, you mean the guy—”

  He stopped talking because Glinda had materialized beside the table, a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate containing a bonus-size piece of pie in the other. “Here,” she said, putting the pie in front of Louie. “On the house.”

  “Kind is it?” Louie asked squinting at it as though he expected a tiny hand, holding a gun, to emerge from it.

  “Blackbird,” Glinda said. “First, you take your four-and-twenty—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Louie said. “That’s nice, thanks to everybody. So what is it?”

  Glinda exhaled in a meaningful manner. “What color is the filling?”

  “Blue?”

  “That’s a clue,” Glinda said. She looked over at me, crossed her eyes, and said, “Get anything else for you?”

  “Cheeseburger,” I said. “Lots of Dijon mustard, some onion, and I don’t care how it’s cooked.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if you did.” To Louie, she said, “More coffee, hon?”

  “I’m good,” Louie said. “Thanks again for the pie.”

  When Glinda was gone, I said, “The address that goes with the phone number I gave you the last time we were sitting here.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, sure.” He leaned to one side so he could get to his wallet, pulled it out, and tore off the top page on the little pad. “Not exactly in the nabe.”

  “I don’t care. Gives me a chance to drive in the rain.” I pocketed the paper, sat back and picked up my coffee. “So, how are you going to get Old Horton’s will?”

  “I’m gonna pay him, whaddya think? Nine-thirty tonight. Walter and a couple friends, which apparently he’s got, will be in a movie theater. I’m supposed to send someone to meet him in the lobby, right by the popcorn, and make the switch, money in an envelope, the will not in an envelope. Then my guy leaves, and Walter and his buddy come out with like a thousand other people when the movie is over. I hope it’s a shit movie, something with Robert De Niro playing a wise, good-hearted father-in-law. With a beard.”

  “Not a bad pass-off plan,” I said. “Movie theater is a nice touch.”

  “I have to admit, he’s got skills. I can’t believe I fell for the I’ll get it from the car dodge, but he seemed so witless.”

  “He’ll make a good lawyer. By the time the other side has figured out he’s not an idiot he’ll have the case in his pocket.”

  “It’s embarrassing. The extra thousand is on me.”

  “No,
it isn’t. Add it to my bill.” I raised my cup and waved it around and got a nod from Glinda. “And don’t argue about it. I would have fallen for it, too.”

  “You think?” He picked up his fork, interested in his pie for the first time.

  “Come on. He looks like someone who stands outside the restrooms for a couple of minutes, trying to figure out which is which.”

  “So,” Louie said with his mouth full, “What’s next.”

  “I’m going to drop in on the person at this address.” I tapped my shirt pocket. “I think he can tell me something about what happened in Horton House during the last few months before Miss Daisy kicked it. If it’s what I think it was, I hope he’s not too old for me to hit.”

  “Yeah? You haven’t read her will yet. I don’t think she inspired much loyalty.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “let’s have a look at Miss Daisy’s will.”

  27

  Additional Layers of Toxic Waste

  It was a pretty crappy photocopy, considering how much it had cost. Some civil servant was obviously trying to save the tax dollars spent on toner.

  But it was legible, and as Louie had said, it was more a won’t then a will. And Miss Daisy’s personality was stamped into every sentence.