by Peter Israel
Or maybe there were twenty. Or maybe only one, who had a dozen pairs of arms and a baseball bat in each. One of them clubbed me in the belly and another in the small of the back. Something the size of an L.A. Ram caved in my legs and up between my ears Dizzy Gillespie was blowing “Onward Christian Soldiers” with the Heavenly Choir on the cymbals.
It was no contest. I think I must have been out before I hit the macadam.
9
I came to with the light still in my eyes, only it was the sun. I had a vague recollection of waking up sometime in the middle of the night and hearing the Chink guards bickering like mice. A familiar sound. I was cold, bone cold. The ache in my gut told me I was back home in Camp Number 5, since deep down inside I’ve always known that’s where I’ll wake up again some day.
But with the sun already high over the hills, the one fence in sight was the green spiked job which guarded the swimming pool, and the only people I saw stirring outside didn’t have slanty eyes, and they were shuffling about on the terraces of Blue Pacific Villas in good old sunny California.
I was scrunched up around the steering wheel of Jack Roland’s Dodge Polara. That was where they must have tucked me in. Mighty nice of them. I felt a little stiff in the joints but no more, and for a second there I was thinking I’d dreamt them too. But then I made the mistake of sitting up too fast, and the bugle started blasting again in my skull, and when I raised my hand to my forehead the muscle in my arm felt like the Peter Pain part of the commercials before the Ben-Gay showed up.
At least I was alive, though, and I sat there awhile wondering how that could be when Garcia was already on his way to Quetzalcoatl. When the news got out, if it did, the aztecs up in the barrio would start screaming their heads off about racism again. I told them to calm down, they’d made a hash out of me whereas they’d done a nice clean job on him. If my they and his they were the same they.
Then it occurred to me that one John R. Roland would have long since finished up his Crunchy Twinkies, kissed the Mrs. goodby and stepped out his front door, ready to slip on his ignition and beat his boss to the office for the 365th straight day. Then John R. Roland started screaming in my head, and I couldn’t think of a way to shut him up. On the one hand I couldn’t exactly drive up to 22 Acacia Drive, toss him his keys and thank him for the test drive. For one thing, I didn’t have the keys. But on the other, it wouldn’t have done to still be sitting there once the Polara made it onto the law’s stolen-car roster.
Before I left, I stumbled over to Garage Number 63 and peeked inside. The mobile pharamacy was gone, naturally. I was tempted to check on Garcia’s whereabouts, but from the stare one of the neighbors gave me as she headed up the circle of garages, I figured I’d outstayed my welcome.
So I plugged the Polara back together and drove it as far as the freeway. I parked it under a palm in front of a church. Then I pulled out my rusty thumb, and about a half hour later a northbound newspaper truck took a chance on me, and when he dropped me off I walked the rest of the way from the freeway exit, the exercise keeping my aches and pains down to a dull roar.
My friend in the Firebird was long gone, and when I finally found Acacia Drive there was no law in sight, no John R. Roland tearing his hair, no little Rolands beating the bushes for the missing family treasure. Only my beat-up Mustang, looking as ugly as I must have with her jaw bashed in that way.
I patted her on the snout, fished my keys out from the dashboard ashtray and listened to her grumble. And off we went, trading combat stories.
I went back to the motel. The morning was mostly shot. There were no messages for me, none at all, which was passing strange because all of a sudden I had a lot of people I wanted to talk to. I wasn’t particular about the order. Twink Beydon would have done for a starter, and for a change I wanted his report more than he wanted mine. I mean, if he was paying me to get my nose spread all over my face, well, even a blocking back has to eat, but I wanted the plays chalked out on the blackboard with a big X across the guys I was supposed to hit.
Maybe Garcia had felt the same way.
I lay down on the bed, telling him all this in my mind and plenty more. He took it all. He was sitting by the picture window looking out at the channel, behind a big polished wood desk with nothing on it but his elbows. Their portrait was up on the wall behind him. He kept running his hand through his hair, and while I was talking young Karie walked in, not the one in the portrait but the one with the lopped-off hair and the runny nose, and she put her arm around his shoulder and stared at me.
“Now I’m going to lay it all out for you, Cage,” he was saying, “clear as a picture …”
But before he could lay it all out for me, I fell sound asleep.
It wasn’t the phone that woke me up, it was my stomach. My watch said two o’clock. I called the motel operator and asked her what time it was. “Why it’s two o’clock, sir,” she said cheerily, and I told her to put me onto room service.
I guess that’s human gratitude for you. A couple of hours before I’d been happy as a pig in sunshine just to be alive. Now nothing would satisfy me short of a bath and a meal, both hot. I had them with a shave thrown in, also a couple of fingers of Chivas just to keep the ice cubes from making so much noise in the glass. All in all I wasn’t feeling as bad as I thought I should be, which goes to show what clean living will do for you, and the only thing missing was something I’d been going without for more days and nights than I cared to count. An idea which led me, oddly enough, to my friend Miss Plager.
I got no answer at the Bay Isle hideaway, ditto at the big house in town. Maybe the help got Friday off. I tried the Wilshire office and the switchboard operator said both Mr. Beydon and Miss Plager were in conference and not to be disturbed, and I told her to cut out the crap, sweetly enough though to keep her from hanging up on me. She checked it out and came back with the news that they were down at Bay Isle. I said if they were they weren’t answering the phone. She giggled nervously at that and said maybe I ought to call Pacific Telephone.
I tried Bay Isle again, letting the buzz buzz a few dozen times. I tried the various other numbers I’d used. Zero. I called the operator and let her try Bay Isle for me, and then on a hunch I got Andy Ford’s Blue Pacific Villas number from directory assistance and tried it and a recorded announcement told me “This is a recorded announcement, the number you have just called has been disconnected, please check your directory or dial directory assistance,” and then I dialed the campus and got through to Robin Fletcher’s dormitory and was told there was no answer up in 708, and then I called my answering service and the biddy’s substitute told me there were no messages for me at all. “None whatsoever, Mr. Cage,” said the biddy’s substitute.
A tough day for Ma Bell all around.
The one person I did reach, though it took some doing, was Freddy Schwartz. He had his buzz on for the day, and he was all ears. I asked him as casually as I could to run a check for me on the Diehl finances, not just the Diehl Corporation but the brothers as individuals. He wanted to know what was up. I wouldn’t tell him, and he accepted it pretty well. I asked him if he knew anything about the dope scene down this way, and he said that was out of his beat but he’d ask around. I also tried on the Society of the Fairest Lord for size. He thought I was pulling his leg. His laugh turned into a cough, and for a minute I thought he was going to have apoplexy right on the phone. “You laughed when you killed Christ too, old buddy,” I told him. Finally he agreed to check that one out too, but as I hung up I could see him shaking his head and motioning to the bartender.
Nobody followed me when I drove out of the motel. My bag was in the back seat and the receipted motel bill in my spiral, and I was heading home, home sweet home. It was spooky, kind of. I mean, for some twenty-four hours there I’d been right in the thick of it, the center of attention you could almost say, and now it was one of those don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you situations.
The two stops I did make before I hit the freeway
north were a waste of time. I went over to the Bay Isle Club just on a hunch. My stormtrooper at the gate had been replaced by another twice his size and half his age, but just as dumb. He told me there was no one home at Number 11, therefore he couldn’t let me across. I said I had reason to believe there was and asked him to call up. He said there was no point calling up because there’d be no answer. I said maybe they were down in the squash court. He thought about that awhile. Then he said his instructions were that the house was closed and he was to let across nobody.
I suppose if I were James Bond I’d have gotten my scuba tank out of the trunk and gone for a swim, but as is I didn’t feel like getting my knickers wet.
“What happened to Ingie?” I hollered at him as I started to back up. Something about him made you want to holler.
He didn’t seem to know who Ingie was.
“The guy who used to work here,” I shouted.
“Oh him!” he shouted back. “He’s on vacation!” and from the grin that spread his ears I got the impression the vacation might be permanent.
I doubled back to the campus. There was still no answer up in 708, and the Fish Net was jammed to the gills with people I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Even my Vice Chancellor had left for the weekend.
So I quit.
No Californian in his right mind, they say, would be caught dead on a freeway between four and seven of a Friday afternoon—none that is except a couple of million idiots, and me. The result being that it took the Mustang two and a half hours to make a normal hour’s run, two and a half hours of stop-and-go in the smog, the more so because around the airport I had to turn off the air conditioning and open up the windows. The temperature gauge was into the red and going purple, and the Mustang had developed a catarrh I hadn’t heard since Aunt Hilda died of pneumonia. As is, I just made it home before the grease monkey I go to closed up shop. He said with his workload and all he couldn’t get around to the Mustang for a week, no way, and it cost me double his usual exorbitant rates to squeeze a twenty-four-hour I’ll-see-what-I-can-do out of him.
I walked—walked, mind you—to the local gourmet shop and snack bar, and then home, loaded down with enough provisions to feed and water an army of Cages for the weekend, or at least two.
Two was what I had in mind.
I rode up in the elevator, juggled my bundles while I fished for the key, opened my door, turned on the lights and walked in on an uninvited guest.
He was sitting on my white leather couch, a little wimp of a guy, reading one of my Sports Illustrateds in the twilight. To judge, he’d been waiting some time, because there was a stack of Sports Illustrateds on the coffee table and he’d worked his way back to February. If I were his mother I’d have turned on a reading light for him, but I’d never seen him before. Except maybe in the dark.
He dropped the magazine when I came in, picked up a little cannon that was lying in his lap and pointed it in my direction. He motioned to me to sit down. I did, putting the bags gently on the floor.
Guns now. It had been a long time since I’d seen one—though I supposed Garcia hadn’t been dropped by a spitball—and longer still since I’d had one pointed my way. I own one myself, but like Andy Ford with his grass I keep it at the bottom of a drawer.
“I guess you know why I’m here,” he said. “It’d save us both a lot of trouble if you just handed it over.”
“Handed what over?” I said.
He tried to look annoyed, but patience must have been a habit with him.
“The papers you picked off a certain party last night,” he said. “Papers that don’t belong to you. Like a dozen sheets, say, handwritten.”
It didn’t sound much like a will, but it could have been a journal. Or a piece of a journal.
“You’ve made a mistake,” I said, “but take a look around if it’ll make you feel better. Feel perfectly free.”
“I already have,” he said. Probably he had at that, but as I found out later the place was neat as a pin, and if he’d so much as helped himself to a drink of water he must have rinsed the glass.
“You could try my car,” I suggested. “It’s downstairs in the garage.”
“I did that too,” he said. He smiled a little. “While you were asleep.”
I guess you can’t blame a guy like that for bragging a little the once in a while he gets the chance, but he gave himself away.
“You don’t by any chance pilot a black Firebird, do you?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer.
Sure, it figured. And when I’d slipped him the night before, he’d gone back to the motel and waited for me to show again. A bona fide detective then, a genuine private eye, what did you know? I thought of asking him to compare bank accounts, but then I thought better of it. After all, he was the one holding the surface-to-surface, and though I doubted he’d been paid to use it I didn’t much want to test him.
One thing made no sense though. The night before I’d pegged him as a Diehl employee. But if he was working for the Diehls, how had he known where I’d gone? I sure hadn’t told them, and I was pretty damn positive he hadn’t trailed me to Ford’s. In fact I hadn’t told anyone.
Or had I? Before I saw the Diehls?
Because, another thing: if Garcia had been sent there to pick up a dozen-say-handwritten sheets of paper, who’d known to send him?
I could think of only one person.
Well, maybe I had no squawk coming at that. “I’m going to find out what happened to Karen,” he’d said, and maybe another way generals get to be generals is by not putting all their arrows in the same quiver. Just the same, it was a hell of a way to run a war, sending out the privates to make sure the other privates hadn’t run off with the company payroll.
“Look,” I said. “Putting a few things together, I come up with the funny idea you and I are working for the same chief. And if that ‘certain party’ you mentioned is the same one I’ve got in mind, that makes three of us Indians. And one of us is already dead, and another is holding a gun on the third. It makes no sense. How do we know there’s not a fourth one downstairs ready to tomahawk whoever walks out the door? If you ask me, it’s a hell of a way to run a wigwam.”
He considered that, considered me, and then he shook his head.
“I’m not interested,” he said.
So we sat there, and behind him the sky went purple and then blue again, a dark blue, with a sea mist rolling in to blot out the stars. Meanwhile the caviar I’d bought for dinner was slowly going sour on the floor. He was a patient little bastard all right. After a while he got up and put me up against the wall and searched me. According to the script I was supposed to jump him then, but it struck me that was the one sure way of making him use his artillery. And if he missed and I took it away from him, what was I supposed to do with him, mail him back to Beydon in a plain brown wrapper?
We both sat down again.
It was a standoff, pure and simple, and probably what took him so long to buy it was that he was being paid on a commission basis.
“O.K.,” he said finally, “have it your way. But chances are it’s going to cost you one hell of a lot more than if you handed it over right now.”
“No hard feelings,” I answered. “If you have to tell him something, tell him I wiped my ass with it. You can even use my telephone.”
He was a very careful guy. He kept the gun handy all the way to my door, and probably while he waited for the elevator, and downstairs while he looked around for the tomahawk just in case, but I didn’t follow him to see if he ducked.
10
I should have asked him to stay for dinner. As it turned out I ate alone, and that night I slept alone with my aches and pains and not so much as a dream, wet or dry, to brighten up the dawn. At first I didn’t feel like company, and then when I did it was as though all the people I knew in the world had dried up and disappeared, including all my enemies ranging from 0 to 100 on the Screw Cage scale. By Saturday night I’d have settled
for the biddy from the answering service, but she already had a date.
I know, I know, stories like this aren’t supposed to work that way. Once the hero gets going he never stops, save for a piece of tail now and then, and a couple of days later it’s all wrapped up in a bundle and everybody can turn out the light and get a good night’s sleep. Be that as it may, the next thirty-six hours were a trip from nowhere to nowhere, and it got to me, and the only good thing that happened was that, lo and behold, my grease monkey showed up around six Saturday afternoon with the Mustang, fresh from the operating room and pretty as a picture.
Maybe I should have asked him too. I didn’t. Instead I got drunk, blind falling-down drunk, stinko, and not up in my crow’s nest either. I must have hit every watering hole from the Strip west before I let the Mustang take me home and put me to bed, and when I woke up early Sunday morning my head felt like a melon that’d gone from hard to ripe to mush to hard and was doing it again just for the hell of it.
I went down to the beach. The water was too cold to swim, and they had the yellow flag up in case anyone had ideas. I went out about half a mile to where they keep the mermaids and then back, fighting a rip tide the last hundred yards, not that the lifeguards gave a damn. I flopped on the beach and later, when the thundering herd got out of church and started trampling on my skull, I did it again. This time a couple of Andy Fords in the red underwear came sidling by in a motor launch to see if I needed help. I told them happily to stuff it, which cleared my noodle for good.
When I got home, I found a couple of pieces of mail propped up outside my door along with Sunday’s Times. A letter and a package, and for a minute I thought the U.S. Postal Service had freaked out altogether. (I mean, Sunday deliveries? With a couple of hundred shopping days left till Christmas?) But the package had no stamps on it, and whoever had sent the letter had set it all up for Special Delivery and then changed his mind, because the cancel marks were missing.
I opened the letter first. It was an IBM job, typed on the stationery of Curie, Etc., Etc. & Curie of Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, Bond Street and Timbuktu. In the old days we used to call them Dear Johns, and George S. Curie III had signed this one himself.