Hush Money

by Peter Israel

  I did it the way experience had taught me: that is, around the end. It may not have been the most heroic, but the Drummer, you could say, had taught me all I’ll ever need to know about heroics.

  I’d tracked her down by late morning, my onetime friend Miss Ellen Plager. As to where, if I’d felt cute I could ask you to guess: like where do the Ellen Plagers of this world go on a Saturday morning in May when the sun’s out and their boss and master is incommunicado? But I didn’t feel cute. It was in a beauty parlor off Wilshire in Beverly Hills, one of those joints so fancy they call themselves something else, I forget what. It was red plush, with chandeliers overhead and fake gaslight and gilt-framed mirrors on the red plush walls, Twink’s whore’s kind of place, and a bunch of pansies running around in bell bottoms and frilly shirts open to their navels playing let’s cut Mommy’s hair.

  From their expressions when I busted in, they must have thought I was out to liquidate the Gay Liberation Front all by myself. They backed up for me, tripping over their livery. I went down a line of numbers plugged into those oversized helmets. She saw me coming even without her specs. She flinched a little, and then she gave me one of those open-eyed squash-court smiles, and I grabbed her by the wrist, and out she came from under. Her head was covered with curlers about the size of rolling pins, a hair net on top, and she looked like unholy hell.

  I guess you’d have to say the beauty parlor is the biggest equalizer of them all for the fairer sex.

  Her smile went away.

  I dragged her out toward the front door, and it went away further. The row of heads craned and gawked. I heard a falsetto warble: “Wally darling, hadn’t you better call the police?”

  “Where is he?” I said. “I want to talk.”

  “It w-wouldn’t do you any good,” she stammered. “He’ll only see you when you’re ready to …”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know.”

  Then: “Where’s Margaret?”

  It set off a race in her face between surprise, anger and ignorance. Ignorance came home dead last.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Ow!” she said.

  With one hand I opened the door and with the other I pulled her toward it.

  She went strong, panic-strong. Her eyes bulged, and the blue started to run out of them.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “I can’t! Not like this!”

  “Out!” I said.

  She grabbed for her head. I yanked, and some of her bric-a-brac came loose.

  “All right!” she shouted. “Goddam you, I’ll tell you! Just let go of me for God’s sake!”

  I let go, stepped inside the door and closed it. The pansies were running every which way like somebody’d let loose a basket of mice, and Wally darling was dialing a number on an ormolu phone.

  “You won’t find him there anyway,” she said, rubbing at her wrist. “He never goes there any more.”

  She couldn’t resist a little gleam of triumph.

  “Never?” I said.

  For an answer she just glared at me.

  “Where is she?” I asked again.

  She told me the address. It was out in the Valley, and she made sure I knew it was out in the Valley with all the smugness she could muster.

  “And what’s her last name?”

  It brought her cool back in a hurry. She must’ve realized she’d been had, and all because women put curlers in their hair. It made her mad, then it made her tinkle.

  I didn’t get it at all.

  “You know, Cage, he could kill you for messing around in this.”

  Then she smiled at me, the smug cool smile which was the same one she’d worn with the oval specs when her hair was down.

  I saved my repartee for another time.

  “O.K.,” I persisted, “what’s her last name?”

  “You could always try Beydon,” she answered calmly.

  I have to hand it to her: it sent me out of there with my mind twisted into a ball. She watched me go, and Wally darling was lisping at the police presumably, and I’d given them all something to wag their tongues over till Clairol came out with a new rinse. Of course I’d been brainstorming with “Where’s Margaret.” “Twink’s whore,” Karen had called her, and I’d figured Twink’s latest whore might just know something. But Beydon! That blew my mind inside out. Ellen Plager hadn’t had to tell me that yet she had, and probably in hindsight it was her own way of getting even. But what did it mean? Unless Twink Beydon was a common garden-variety bigamist?

  He wasn’t, but on the spot, simple as it was, I missed the explanation. All I could picture was Ellen Plager yanking the blower loose from Wally darling and getting onto the Chief, and the Chief getting onto his Indians, and the Indians onto me. I headed west on Wilshire. When I hit the freeway I was doing sixty, and eighty-five by the top of the Sepulveda Pass, which was as fast as I dared at Saturday noon with all my fellow citizens on their way to the Akron or the Broadway or Bullock’s, depending on their pocketbooks, and the highway law making sure they got there in one piece.

  My escort stayed with me all the way, just the one (the guy in the gunmetal Ford happened to be the man on duty), and there wasn’t any roadblock waiting for me coming down the pass, or when I switched over to the Ventura, or when a dozen or so exists later I got off. By that time my adrenal in had eased up and the Mustang’s too.

  The Valley, you know. L.A. is surrounded by valleys, but there’s only one Valley, and to everybody who lives on the other side of the hills from it, it’s a standing joke. All the same, a couple of million people manage to get along out there, and nobody’s forcing them to stay. They keep their spades and aztecs penned up in Pacoima and San Fernando, and they vote Reagan, and when the smog comes on strong and the heat they lock their doors, turn on the air conditioning and wait for the next santa ana to blow it away. Sure it’s not as picturesque as it used to be but what is? I guess all I mean to say is that it gripes my ass when the smart money in Mansonland starts laughing at the Valley. They ought to open their eyes and look out their own picture window.

  End of lecture.

  Where I went was an older section, even though it was way out near the western rim. The houses were older too, further apart and two-storied, and some even had lawns growing in front and mailboxes near the sidewalks and tall pepper trees bordering the gutters. All clean as a whistle, neat and trim, the kind of rare community where you still see kids on roller skates and people don’t lock their doors every time they go out. I found my street, my house, parked at the curb, and the gunmetal Ford ducked into a space back near the corner. The name was Beydon all right, but Twink wasn’t on hand to greet me, and the only reception committee was a kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, backing a VW fastback out the driveway. He stared at me a minute as I went up the walk, then drove away.

  “Mrs. Beydon?” I said, gagging a little mentally over the name.

  “Yes?”

  Twink’s whore then, in the flesh.

  You think “Twink’s whore” and what do you see? Some number about as enormous as the Statue of Liberty with twice the tits. You see hair flowing down to her navel and nothing underneath it but “Mine All Mine” scrawled in red, white and blue finger paint. You see boots halfway up her thighs and around in back “Twink’s” tattooed on one cheek and “Whore” across the other.

  At least I did. Maybe by tuning down my imagination a little I’d have settled for Ellen Plager or thereabouts. But not Margaret Beydon in any case.

  She was a short dark-eyed woman on the chubby side, with a curious ferret-like expression people might have called cute once, but which had gained in character once the wrinkles caught up with it. I put her in her late forties. The gray did her short black hair no harm, and she hadn’t tried to disguise it. Legs on the stumpy side, a maroon figured skirt, a white short-sleeved blouse that pulled in tight under an ample bosom. Not bad, in short, and somehow you got the feeling she could have been better than not bad if she worked at it. But
still: Twink’s whore?

  Yet that was what she turned out to be, at least by the prevailing moralities.

  Something told me to play it straight with her and I did, after a fashion. I said Philip Beydon had hired me to investigate his daughter’s death, that he’d had a change of heart in midstream and had fired me. The way I put it, and without going into all the details, I said there were circumstances which made it pretty tough for me to back out now, if not impossible. I said I thought she might be able to help me out.

  If she knew about me already, she didn’t show it. Later on, she said she hadn’t seen him since before Karen died, which I believed, but for the moment her only comment was: “Yes, he’s given to changes of heart.”

  She invited me in.

  “I never met Karen Beydon,” she said, putting me in a two-seater couch under the front windows and sitting across from me. “Of course I heard about her. What was she like?”

  “I never met her either,” I said. “From what I know though, a pretty screwed-up girl.”

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully, and then without much hemming and hawing she launched into her own side of the story.

  Why me?

  It could have been the old chestnut about telling perfect strangers what you can’t tell your best friend. Or my blond curly locks. Or that she wanted to get some things off her chest and I was handy. Or else that I came for her help and she gave it to me straight out, without frills or tears or coyness.

  Sure, and when the sun comes up in the morning they’ll be giving away free lemon pies in the bakeries.

  What she said shortly was:

  “You’re a Leo, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “How’d you know?”

  “I can always tell.”

  A little later it came out that Twink Beydon was a Leo too.

  (For the record, I’m Scorpio. Not that it matters. I’m adaptable when it comes to horoscopes. The last time I looked up Scorpio in the ratings, it said we were cut out to be good farmers.)

  In any case she used to work for him a long time ago, or actually for the ad agency which had the account for a company he controlled. This was back before Karen was born, when Twink would have been in his early thirties. At first, I gathered, it was a sometimes thing between them, he with his life and she with hers and no questions asked. And then not so sometimes. More like all the time and twice on Sundays. She’d quit her job, and he’d bought this same house for her and set her up in it, far from the hurlyburly of the cruel world etcetera etcetera, also the prying eyes of snoops and columnists, and there they were going to live happily ever after as soon as his divorce came through.

  She seemed to hesitate just that one time, talking about his divorce.

  “If it’s about Karen’s pedigree,” I ventured, “I already know about that.”

  “Oh?” she said. “No, not that. But I’m surprised you knew. Who told you?”

  “He did.”

  She seemed surprised at that too.

  “Well,” she said, “what do you know! It’s always been such a dark secret, I wouldn’t have thought … Do you suppose it means he’s finally growing up?”

  It came out without bitterness or sarcasm, and not wanting to disillusion her I asked:

  “Was he going to divorce Nancy then?”

  “Yes he was. Looking back, I couldn’t say it was just because of me. It was a terrible blow to his ego, awful. Karen, I mean. But at the time, well, I loved him very dearly, I didn’t think it mattered why he was getting divorced, only that he was. Then, when he changed his mind about it, I could have gotten out. For that matter, I could have gotten out since.”

  I thought of him standing in front of the portrait, lecturing me on men who are afraid to make mistakes.

  “What made him change his mind?”

  “He said Nancy wouldn’t give him a divorce.”

  “Was that true?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was. But certainly he could have forced it under the circumstances, if he’d really wanted to.”

  “What kind of woman was Nancy Beydon?”

  She smiled at me.

  “I never met her,” she said. Then: “It wasn’t just her, though, it was the Diehl connection. Business. Or being married to the Diehls. He couldn’t let go of it. He wouldn’t let go of it.”

  She paused, reflecting.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s what I’ve always told myself. For what? twenty years? it’s been the party line. But it could have been that he loved her after all, in his way. Even without knowing it. He’s a very complicated man, Twink Beydon. I gather you’ve found that out.”

  I didn’t know whether I’d buy that or not. Sure, complicated and all that, but who isn’t complicated once you get down to histories? Histories, for instance, like his Silver Star brother Alan. According to Margaret, Alan had gotten himself kicked out of college and Twink had made him join up—to “straighten himself out.” Which, in a gruesome way, was exactly what had happened.

  Anyway, if Margaret could have gotten out easily once, a couple of years later it would have been tougher, the reason being that in between she got pregnant. The father—there’d been no doubt whatsoever, she said with a smile—was Twink Beydon himself, and the boy John (was this Karen’s “Twink Jr.?”) turned out to be the same teenager I’d seen tooling the VW out of the driveway.

  It must have been pretty nice for Twink to find out he could cut it after all. Better than nice, the way she told it. More like scoring the winning TD in the Rose Bowl he’d never played in.

  Well, he was a Leo, wasn’t he?

  And all over again he’d been ready to chuck it for her, and his son. Only he hadn’t, all over again. And there’d been other times when he hadn’t, and hearing her describe them, hearing her tell the dream Twink Beydon was supposed to have dreamed but never got around to living, I saw him again in the sweatsuit with the towel around his neck laying the same shit on me. Only when he’d laid the same shit on me, he’d been talking about his legal wife and daughter.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “I’ve no complaints coming. We’ve been well supported. I’m not that pure either, I’ve had my good times without him,” curling a finger through the side of her hair the way women do when they’re thinking about it. “But then after Nancy died …”

  Her voice trailed off, leaving me with Ellen Plager in my mind, and maybe all the other Ellen Plagers.

  “But it didn’t work out that way,” she said levelly. “So I did the next best thing. Dumb romantic thing. Idiotic really, and not at all like me. But I changed my name.”

  She grinned at me. Maybe she could read my thoughts.

  “I did it on the spur of the moment,” she said. “I mean, it’s easy! All you do is do it. I imagine if you wanted to change your name to Rockefeller, no one would stop you. Or Beydon certainly.”

  Then change it back, I told her in my mind.

  “Friends of mine thought I was crazy,” she said. “I guess I was. Am. Or getting back at him, but it wasn’t that. It was just something I wanted to do, always had I guess, and so I did it. It pulled me out of a bad time. After all, from my point of view it was the truth, do you see?”

  And weirdly enough, I did. Later on I might think her vanity must have come unglued along the way, and not only her vanity, because no number in her right mind is going to carry her torch that high. But at the time … well, if I’d stuck around her much longer, she might have had me believing in decency and love and God-knows-what-other of our time-honored values.

  As it was, she offered me a drink, which I turned down.

  “What about your son?” I asked her. It struck me he wouldn’t have taken so kindly to her changing the family label, or to be being a bastard for that matter, or to having his old man hanging around all those …

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Johnny’s not that kind of kid. It’s all right with him. He’s got his prob
lems, but he wouldn’t have had anything to do with Karen, if that’s what’s on your mind.”

  I asked her if she knew anything about a letter Nancy might have written Karen, or if Karen had left a will. No, she said, she was afraid she didn’t.

  “Just one other thing. Apparently Karen knew about you. Do you have any idea how?”

  “No, I don’t particularly,” she said, “but she did know. In fact she called me once—not that long ago either, a few months, as much as six maybe. I never told Twink. She wanted to meet me. She said a lot of other things that … well, that weren’t very complimentary. I said I didn’t think it would be a very good idea. I tried to explain, but she hung up on me finally. And that was that. I think now I should have done something about it, but of course you think a lot of things like that after the fact.”

  As for me, as I got up I was thinking: a nice woman, even if she was a damn fool it was a shame, etcetera etcetera. And that it had turned out a nice day after all, the sun was also shining nicely, and one nice thought led to another.

  But I happened to glance out the front windows in between Nice Thoughts 2 and 3, and what I saw brought trouble back on the run. The Mustang had company and so did we, plenty of it. Some four or five cars which hadn’t been there before were parked in the street around the house. The black Firebird was one, the gunmetal Ford another, and in a third I thought I saw my old and silent friend Gomez, who I hadn’t run into since before his brother passed away.

  14

  “How’d you know it was my birthday?” I said to her.

  “Your birthday?”

  She started.

  “But … I’m sorry, I thought you said you were …”

  Then she saw them too.

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  I wondered if she really didn’t know, not that it made a damn.

  “Well,” I said, “unless somebody else on your street’s throwing a party, I’d say they’d come for mine.”

  I counted noses—five that I could see—and decided I didn’t like the odds. I glanced around the house, looking for the trapdoor to the tunnel which would take me out to some place safe. I didn’t see any.