The Wheel is Fixed

by James M. Fox

  “Calling on Mr. Vanni,” I said with a lump in my throat.

  “No reporters, suh. Master done lef’ orduhs.”

  Inspiration sprang alive in my weary mind like a freshly sown dragon’s tooth. “That’s right,” I said. “No reporters, and don’t you forget it, boy. That’s just what I’ve come to see him about. Bailey’s the name, Globe-International Pictures, publicity staff. Tell him it’s urgent, but get him aside before you mention any names. I don’t want to disturb the guests.”

  He wasn’t happy, but I’d struck a note of casual insistence that had scored with him. He squirmed a little in his boots and peered at me over the gold-plated rims of his spectacles and reluctantly opened the door another sixteen inches. That put me in the hall, on the mangy lion skin that served as a doormat, and with two stands of Spanish conquistador armor for company. The butler apparently intended to leave me there, so I pushed my hat into his hand and barged on ahead through the most likely-looking archway.

  This was the room, all right, a thousand square feet of gleaming blond parquet featuring two bleached maple Bechstein concert grands, a built-in music library, and a huge carved-oak Renaissance desk that belonged in there about as much as a Sherman tank would belong in the Battle of Agincourt. One wall displayed a full-length canvas of a carousing Flemish peasant girl in the Rubens school; another was covered from ceiling to floor with blowups of opera singers and movie stars, all female and most of them fondly autographed. The French doors and the picture window next to it had forest-green velvet portieres, carefully drawn together. Behind them were the booming panatrope and the splashing and the rest of the big clambake.

  This time it was easy—split the curtains at a crack and get yourself an eyeful. They’d have you believe that those Hollywood parties at three in the morning are commonly run in a style that would curl the hair of any character in Quo Vadis. Out here we know a little more of what we can expect. I counted twenty-one people, some of them with faces equally familiar to the King of England and to the average Chinese rickshaw coolie. Three couples were dancing, two in formal evening dress, the other in bathing-suits. Four hardy souls were disporting themselves in the pool, tossing a plastic beach ball around with a great deal of unsophisticated hilarity. The remaining eleven made up one table of contract bridge and three of gin rummy. They appeared to be completely absorbed in a common effort of grim concentration on the cards, in blank defiance of the racket going on around them.

  There was no sign of Lorna Ryan anywhere on deck.

  The colored butler came in view and stood hovering over the nearest gin table. I’d been watching that table with a certain amount of wry amusement. It neatly solved the problem of what kind of badger game the Joneses were playing. Steve Kovac’s contemptuous warning rasped in my ears. Meestair Vanni, he one beeg spender. We mess with heem, iss bad for beezness—

  The butler was whispering now, and getting the lifted eyebrow, the sweeping gesture of impatient scorn. I dropped the curtains and backed away from the window—there would be a slight delay, a little kicking of heels, at least long enough for them to finish the hand. A studio publicity man, or flack, as the trade press calls him, swings about as much social respect as the second assistant janitor in the prop department. He may function in any capacity down the line, from father confessor to whipping-boy, but he’ll never see the day when someone holds still for him in the middle of a hand of gin.

  I sank into a monk’s cloth-covered armchair facing the painting on the wall. The bosomy peasant wench ogled me lecherously, offering her tankard at a tilt that spilled a runnel of scarlet muscadine. I caught myself staring at her and forced the sluggishly turning wheels in my mind back into gear.

  At least I wouldn’t have to fret about the Joneses any more. They were trespassing all right, but not on my property. I wondered now whatever I’d been thinking of to get excited over them. It meant nothing to me, the way they’d roped themselves a mark who seemed to enjoy being taken for a ride across the board. It was, after all, only money—the guy would spend it somewhere, on the ponies, at chemin de fer, or in the slot machines at Vegas. He might as well lose it in a game of gin at twenty bucks a point. The only member of the firm who would be taking a chance there was Doc Hunter. Milking the pigeons in syndicate territory sounded to me like a pretty unhealthy deal. But then Doc might be relying entirely on the local fix. The town of Formosa had certainly seemed as carefully buttoned up as they come. Maybe he could afford to relax in there, and indulge in occasional raids on the icebox, such as this one. I didn’t think he could, or that it mattered, one way or the other.

  What mattered was how they’d found out about Lorna. It was the only part I didn’t like. But gamblers setting up a kill will often spend a lot of time and effort scouting the mark in advance, finding out all about his background, his habits, and his friends, the way a burglar will case the joint. If that was it, then Burt and Rita probably knew the answer, had known all along. They’d been staying at the Hacienda del Sol for several days before I ever arrived on the scene, and so had Lorna; the days the big fellow up in Bel Air had needed to get a line on me and rub my nose into the job.

  “Signor Bailey?”

  The signor part was strictly for laughs—my host appeared to be in something of a jocular mood. He had sneaked in on me through the archway behind my back and now he stood smilingly watching me, in a typical singer’s pose, leaning into the crook of one of the Bechsteins, one hand pocketed, the other freely available for gesticulation. He was even shorter, portlier than I remembered him from the casino, the night before. Perhaps it was the dinner jacket with the fancy cummerbund in royal-blue satin, and the broad theatrical lapels. But the smile had more cigar than teeth in it, a cautious smile that was prepared to accept me only against its owner’s better judgment.

  “I think we meet before,” he said slowly, and his accent was almost imperceptible.

  “Sure, when you cleaned me last night,” I said with a grin. “Quite a coincidence. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Vanni. Globe didn’t send me down to keep tabs on you here in Palm Springs.”

  “Ah-ha!” This time he gave me a better glimpse of the dental work. “But you are from the publicity, eh, my friend? That is, as you say, quite a coincidence. Why do you come crash my party at such an hour, if you please?”

  “I wouldn’t have. Not without a pretty good reason.”

  “Okay, fine. You explain to me, eh?”

  I nodded and deliberately stalled him off by lighting a cigarette in slow motion. I’d made up my mind that he wasn’t the only ham in the world who could read a line and sing a song.

  “Hollywood called me out of bed half an hour ago,” I said. “Told me to rush right over and get a statement from you. Looks like you might be in a spot, Mr. Vanni.” Now I had his ear. The elaborate snap of the fingers, the pouting lower lip were supposed to convey his opinion of the studio’s judgment, not of mine. This was the sort of deal he had learned to expect from the jittery front-office bosses in the picture industry. It put me in the clear; he wouldn’t have dreamed of blaming the flunky, or suspecting his motives.

  “Santa Maria, is always same t’ing!” His accent was back on duty, from sheer good nature. “Somebody lose-a nerve, raise beeg fuss over notting. Send-a man to Vanni, take statement. Okay, you tell me, whatsa wrong?”

  “You won’t like this,” I said carefully. “Jimmie Piper’s on the warpath, and he’s after your scalp.”

  “Pouff! I like verree much. My scalp she’s fixed up pretty good, eh?” He patted his sleekly pomaded jet-black coiffure approvingly.

  “You could always buy a new one, at Perc Westmore’s,” I said. “But you can’t laugh off a guy who raises hell and fireflies every day in four hundred newspapers and twice a week on a major network. This time he’s on another of those clean-up-the-movies crusades, and he’s loaded for bear, where you’re concerned. It’s pure dumb luck that one of us happened to catch him at Ciro’s a couple of hours ago and fed him a bottl
e. Now we’ve got till noon tomorrow if we’re going to beat his deadline, and you’d better have all the right answers, Mr. Vanni. Remember the girl we tested last year at your suggestion?”

  The romantic hazel eyes were round and puzzled now.

  “Si, si, Mees Ryan. I remember—”

  “Jimmie Piper dug up that you paid for her passage from New York.”

  He stared at me, his hand with the cigar in it frozen in mid-air. From the patio the shouting and splashing of the beach-ball players seemed suddenly to come in much more noisily. The panatrope was obliging with a medley from Kiss Me, Kate.

  “But of course I pay. Cost money to fly—no pay, no ticket.”

  “Ever hear about the Mann Act?”

  That did it. He was Rigoletto and I was Sparafucile, showing him the dirk. “Santa Maria, what-a you doing to me? These Mann Act, it is for white slavery, eh? Whatsa-matta, you t’ink Vanni is-a pimp?”

  “Oh, come now,” I said. “Don’t you know it’s a Federal rap any time you pay the freight across a state line for the lady friend?”

  “Hah! Why you t’ink Mees Ryan my lady friend, eh?”

  “They don’t pay me to think,” I said. “I’m just telling you what we’re up against with Jimmie Piper.”

  He let go with a few choice bits of Italian on the subject of crusading newspaper columnists. I merely got the drift of it, but it seemed to relieve his feelings no end. When he came back to taw at last the accent was almost purged again, and his tone almost cagey. “She’s my niece, my late sister’s bambina—”

  “That’s better. If we can make that stick, we’ll spike the deal.”

  “Okay. You spike ’im.”

  “We’ll need to fill in a little more.”

  “How you mean, fill in?”

  “The details,” I said patiently. “Just so we’ll have the picture straight, in confidence, enough of it to make this Piper character lay off.”

  He scowled at me reluctantly, digesting the idea. “Okay, but no good for publicity, you understand. My sister, she run away from home in Milano, Italy. Some Irish hoofer with an American vaudeville troupe. Was big disgrace, big scandal, back in ’27, when I am still a chorister at La Scala. Maybe she never marry the guy, or anyway I never hear. But ten years later, when I am star at Metropolitan Opera already, comes a letter from Mother Superior, these convent school in Baltimore. Very confidential, very ’ush-’ush. I make a visit, and she tells me my sister gone, catch pneumonia years ago, she’s got the bambina in school but no more money, these guy Jack Ryan disappear before she ever born. Okay, fine, so Vanni pays up, you understand.”

  He was actually going through the motions of a bank teller counting out the scratch. I forced a grin of sympathy and said, “Go on, you’re doing all right. This is the stuff we need.”

  “Is not much more. She leave school at eighteen, I pull strings in New York, I fix up job. Pretty girl, make nice model, very respectable, lotsa nice clothes, good times. I explain situation, she catch on quick, very discreet, very sensible. I tell her Vanni takes care of her until she’s twenty-one; after that, keed, you’re on your own.”

  “You give her an allowance, is that it?”

  “Yes, nice girl, needs more money to live than she can make. Be twenty-one next month, maybe get married pretty soon. She try out in pictures, I coach her, is no damn good. Make nice model, not a movie star. Girl’s gotta be a bitch to go places in pictures—no bitch, no can act. You understand.”

  “You know anything for sure about marriage plans?” I asked. “Because in that case it would help a lot if we could show that she’s engaged right now.”

  He threw up his hands at me; he was getting a little tired of the deal. “She never tell me nothing. Whatsamatta you ask her yourself?”

  “You don’t want us to quote you on this, do you?” I said, blinking at him in surprise.

  “No, no, no! I tell you already, all very discreet, very confidential. But publicity man from the studio, okay, you not shy, you can ask a young lady a question, eh?”

  It was just that simple, and just that much of a farce. Of course I’d been fairly sure all along that he had no idea about Stuart Hitchcock. It suddenly occurred to me that up to now I might not even have decanted the cream of the jest. Eve Garand’s tart commentary flashed back through my mind. She has this young whippersnapper from Bel Air on a string who considers himself engaged to her. She’ll know better than to get stuck with him. Maybe the big fellow had, after all, taken far too much for granted; maybe his son’s colossal arrogance had fooled him and made him jump the gun. Does a fly want sugar? I almost laughed out loud; the irony of such a possibility was very nearly irresistible.

  “Could you tell me where we might get in touch with your niece, Mr. Vanni?”

  The shrug he gave me went all the way up to the ceiling. “I no see in two weeks. She gotta her own place in Beverly Hills, at Sunset Castle.”

  The address in the agency report; he did not even know she was here in Palm Springs, five miles away! Somehow it seemed impossible that he would slip in a joker on me at this point. It struck me that I liked the guy—I wanted to shake hands with him and pat him on the back and tell him I thought he was merely terrific, with a heart as big as his voice on the screen. I felt good about him and everybody else, including by all means one Mr. Walter Hitchcock, who appealed to me now as something just short of a churlish and very much misunderstood Santa Claus.

  “Well, thanks loads,” I said cheerfully. “I think this will be entirely satisfactory now. We can take it from there, Mr. Vanni.”

  “Okay, fine. You take ’im.” His hands picked it up, whatever it was, and dumped it in my lap, ceremoniously. His smile knocked me silly; I never saw the hint of mockery that must have twisted it a little. He actually threw an arm around my shoulder, showing me out through the hall, and me a publicity man who had crashed his party at three o’clock in the morning. It didn’t look right any more to let him go back to the Joneses at twenty bucks a point. “About last night,” I said, hanging onto the front door knob, “I hope you realize your friends were on the grift.”

  He got that one all right. He was tickled to death with me.

  “Si, si, I know. We play some more tonight. All finished now.”

  “They squeeze you?”

  “Sure, they squeeze me. Eighty t’ousand dollar!” It was such a good gag he had to poke me in the ribs.

  I stared at him; the damage was a lot worse than I had expected. “You mean to say you put up with that much of a boost?”

  “Sure, make out check, eighty t’ousand, okay, is like money in bank. Everybody ’appy.”

  The way he was chuckling about it, he had to have an angle. But I couldn’t help running it into the ground. “For God’s sake, man, that’s highway robbery! You can’t afford to let them get away with it!”

  “They no rob me. I give check, then tell ’em maybe I better call up the big boss. You are gambling man, Signor Bailey, you know who take care of games in California. Vanni good customer, ask simple question, no harm done, everybody ’appy. I tell ’em that, and the girl she tears up my check, you understand?”

  Chapter Thirteen: PLAYING WITH THE HOUSE

  JOE CORNERO sounded sleepy and skeptical when I called him on the house phone on Friday morning at nine.

  “Yeah, we got horses,” he allowed. “A whole corral of ’em we got, and they all need a workout, that’s for sure. Them old battle-axes that live here ain’t exactly Gene Autry. You want me to go with you, Mr. Bailey?”

  “Not this time, Joe, thanks just the same,” I said. “You could lend me some leather, though, and a Stetson, if you’ve anything handy in my size. How about wrangling these noble steeds of yours over to my bungalow in half an hour?”

  “Be glad to,” he assured me carelessly, and caught his breath. “Huh? You want two of ’em?”

  “That’s right.”

  He didn’t ask me who; he had a pair of eyes in his head. His whistle told m
e I’d be sorry. “Where you going, Mr. Bailey?”

  “You’re the Director of Recreation.”

  “Yeah, but you got to do your part. Well, shucks, I guess you better try Sapphire Canyon, if it’s privacy you want. Kind of nice up there, and the tourist crowd don’t know about it.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Aw, that’s easy. I’ll give you Prince, he’ll take you up and back if you just let him have his head. The trail ain’t bad, and I’ve marked it myself with piles of quartz, just in case. Want me to pack you some lunch?”

  “I suppose we’ll need it.”

  He hung up without quite laughing at me. I didn’t mind—he was my friend, he could laugh at me all he liked. Outside my bedroom window the sun and the lawn and the birds in the olive tree seemed to be amused with me, too. The boy from Room Service accepted his dollar tip with a knowing smirk. I grinned right back at him and loaded up on breakfast in a hurry and breezed into a clean blue sport shirt and a pair of slacks. I’d barely finished shaving when the clop-clop of hoofs came at my back door.

  “Where’s the lady, Mr. Bailey?”

  He was wearing tennis whites, climbing off a fat and sad-eyed pinto pony, and patting its withers. He clapped his own hat on my head and handed me a pair of fancy high-heeled cowpuncher boots. I slid my stockinged feet into them and said, “Haven’t asked her yet.”

  “I figured she’d wanna ride sidesaddle, but the tack room’s fresh out of ’em,” he told me, enjoying himself. “Huh? You ain’t asked her?”

  “No, but I’m just fixing to,” I said, casually inspecting the nervous little sorrel mare he’d brought along for her and turning away toward the cottage next door. I saw him staring after me as if he were convinced I’d lost my mind. That didn’t bother me, either. This was my day to break the bank.

  The blinds were still down; a girl needs her beauty sleep. I banged on the casement, good and loud, and announced in ringing tones of doom that the British were coming. Lights snapped on inside, and a sulky little voice admonished me to go away.