A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “His name is Leslie Denton.”

  “Les Denton?” She shook her head. “Not in a zillion years! He is integrity incarnate.”

  “You’re thinking of your idol, Len Deighton,” I said.

  “I am not! Les took the same night-school class that I did in restaurant management. We got to be very good friends. He works as a busboy at La Dolce Vita.”

  “I know. Were you vertical or horizontal friends?”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Petroff. Les is not heterosexual.”

  “Aren’t you glad I am?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Let’s have some more wine,” I suggested.

  At nine o’clock she went down to her car to get her luggage. When she came back, she asked, “Are you tired?”

  “Nope.”

  “Neither am I,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

  I was deep in a dream involving my high school sweetheart when the phone rang in my office. My bedside clock informed me that it was seven o’clock. The voice on the phone informed me that I was a lying bastard.

  “Who is speaking, please?” I asked.

  “Les Denton. Mr. Randisi at the restaurant gave me your phone number. You told me you were a friend of Howard Retzenbaum’s. Mr. Randisi told me you were a stinking private eye. You’re working for the Bishops, aren’t you?”

  “Leslie,” I said calmly, “I have a very good friend of yours who is here in the office right now. She will assure you that I am not a lying bastard and do not stink. I have to be devious at times. It is a requisite of my trade.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Cheryl Pushkin. Hold the line. I’ll put her on.”

  Cheryl was sitting up in bed. I told her Denton wanted to talk to her.

  “Why? Who told him I was here?”

  “I did. He wants a character reference.”

  “What?”

  “Go!” I said. “And don’t hang up when you’re finished. I want to talk with him.”

  I was half dressed when she came back to tell me she had calmed him down and he would talk to me now.

  I told him it was true that I was working for Mrs. Bishop. I added that getting her rug back was a minor concern to me; finding her daughter was my major concern and should be his, too. I told him I would be grateful for any help he could give me on this chivalrous quest.

  “I shouldn’t have gone off half-cocked,” he admitted. “I have some friends who know Janice. I’ll ask around.”

  “Thank you.”

  Cheryl was in the shower when I hung up. I started the coffee and went down the steps to pick up the Times at my front door.

  A few minutes after I came back, she was in her robe, studying the contents of my fridge. “Only two eggs in here,” she said, “and two strips of bacon.”

  “There are some frozen waffles in the freezer compartment.”

  “You can have those. I’ll have bacon and eggs.” I didn’t argue.

  “You were moaning just before the phone rang,” she said. “You were moaning ‘Norah, Norah.’ Who is Norah?”

  “A dog I had when I was a kid. She was killed by a car.”

  She turned to stare at me doubtfully, but made no comment. Both her parents are Russian, a suspicious breed. Her father lived in San Diego, her mother in San Francisco, what they had called a trial separation. I suspected it was messing-around time in both cities.

  She had decided in the night, she told me, to reside in Westwood for a while. I had the feeling she doubted my fidelity. She had suggested at one time that I could be a younger clone of Uncle Vartan.

  She left and I sat. I had promised Mrs. Bishop that I would “get right on it.” Where would I start? The three kids I had not questioned yesterday were now in school. And there was very little likelihood that they would have any useful information on the present whereabouts of Janice Bishop. Leslie Denton was my last best hope.

  I took the Times and a cup of coffee out to the office and sat at my desk. Terrible Tony Tuscani, I read in the sports page, had outpointed Mike (the Hammer) Mulligan in a ten-round windup last night in Las Vegas. The writer thought Tony was a cinch to cop the middleweight crown. In my fifth amateur fight I had kayoed Tony halfway through the third round. Was I in the wrong trade?

  And then the thought came to me that an antique Kerman was not the level of stolen merchandise one would take to an ordinary fence. A burglar sophisticated enough to outfox a complicated alarm system should certainly know that. He would need to find a buyer who knew about oriental rugs.

  Uncle Vartan was on the phone when I went down. When he had finished talking I voiced the thought I’d had upstairs.

  “It makes sense,” he agreed. “So?”

  “I thought, being in the trade, you might know of one.”

  “I do,” he said. “Ismet Bey. He has a small shop in Santa Monica. He deals mostly in imitation orientals and badly worn antiques. I have reason to know he has occasionally bought stolen rugs.”

  “Why don’t you phone him,” I suggested, “and tell him you have a customer who is looking for a three-by-five Kerman?”

  His face stiffened. “You are asking me to talk to a Turk?”

  I said lamely, “I didn’t know he was a Turk.”

  “You know now,” he said stiffly. “If you decide to phone him use a different last name.”

  I looked him up in the phone book and called. A woman answered. I asked for Ismet. She told me he was not in at the moment and might not be in until this afternoon. She identified herself as his wife and asked if she could be of help.

  “I certainly hope so,” I said. “My wife and I have been scouring the town for an antique Kerman. We have been unsuccessful so far. Is it possible you have one?”

  “We haven’t,” she said. “But I am surprised to learn you haven’t found one. There must be a number of stores that have at least one in stock. The better stores, I mean, of course.”

  An honest woman married to a crooked Turk. I said, “Not a three-by-five. We want it for the front hall.”

  “That might be more difficult,” she said. “But Mr.—”

  “Stein,” I said. “Peter Stein.”

  “Mr. Stein,” she continued, “my husband has quite often found hard-to-find rugs. Do you live in Santa Monica?”

  “In Beverly Hills.” I gave her my phone number. “If I’m not here, please leave a message on my answering machine.”

  “We will. I’ll tell my husband as soon as he gets here. If you should find what you’re looking for in the meantime—”

  “I’ll let you know immediately,” I assured her.

  I temporarily changed the name on my answering machine from Pierre Apoyan Investigative Service to a simple Peter. Both odars and kinsmen would recognize me by that name.

  Back to sitting and waiting. I felt slightly guilty about sitting around when Mrs. Bishop was paying me by the hour. But only slightly. Mrs. Whitney Bishop would never make my favorite-persons list.

  Uncle Vartan was born long after the Turkish massacre of his people. But he knew the brutal history of that time as surely as the young Jews know the history of the holocaust—from the survivors.

  I read the rest of the news that interested me in the Times and drank another cup of coffee. I was staring down at the street below around noon when my door opened.

  It was Cheryl. She must have been coming up as I was looking down. She had driven in for a sale at I. Magnin, she told me. “And as long as I was in the neighborhood—”

  “You dropped in on your favorite person,” I finished for her. “What’s in the bag, something from Magnin’s?”

  “In a brown paper bag? Lox and bagels, my friend, and cream cheese. I noticed how low your larder was this morning. Did Les Denton phone you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I bumped into him in front of the UCLA library this morning,” she said, “and gave him the old third degree. He swore to me that he and Janice were alone over the weekend, so she co
uldn’t have given her house key to anybody. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “I guess you were, Miss Marple. Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea for me. I can’t stay long. Robinson’s is also having a sale.”

  “How exciting! Your mama must have given you a big fat check again when you were up in San Francisco.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic! I stopped in downstairs and asked your uncle if you’d ever had a dog named Norah.”

  “And he confirmed it.”

  “Not quite. He said he thought you had but he wasn’t sure. Of course, he probably can’t even remember half the women he’s—he’s courted.”

  “Enough!” I said. “Lay off!”

  “I’m sorry. Jealousy! That’s adolescent, isn’t it? It’s vulgar and possessive.”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re not very talkative today, are you?”

  “Cheryl, there is a young girl out there somewhere who has run away from home. That, to me, is much more important than a sale at Robinson’s or whether I ever had a dog named Norah. This is a dangerous town for seventeen-year-old runaways.”

  “You’re right.” She sighed. “How trivial can I get?”

  “We all have our hang-ups,” I said. “I love you just the way you are.”

  “And I you, Petroff. Do you think Janice is in some kind of danger? Why would she leave Les’s place without even leaving him a note?”

  “That I don’t know. And it scares me.”

  “You don’t think she’s—” She didn’t finish.

  “Dead? I have no way of knowing.”

  Five minutes after she left, I learned that Janice had still been alive yesterday. Les Denton phoned to tell me that a friend of his had seen her on the Santa Monica beach with an older man, but had not talked with her. According to the friend, the man she was with was tall and thin and frail, practically a skeleton.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It’s not the first time she’s run away,” he told me. “And there’s a pattern to it.”

  “What kind of pattern?”

  “Well, I could be reading more into it than there is. But I noticed that it was usually when her mother was out of town. Mrs. Bishop is quite a gadabout.”

  “Are you suggesting child molestation?”

  “Only suggesting, Mr. Apoyan. I could be wrong.”

  And possibly right. “Thanks again,” I said.

  A troubled relationship is what Mrs. Bishop had called it. Did she know whereof she spoke? Mothers are often the last to know.

  Ismet Bey phoned half an hour later to tell me he had located a three-by-five Kerman owned by a local dealer and had brought it to his shop. Could I drop in this afternoon?

  I told him I could and would.

  And now what? How much did I know about antique Kermans? Uncle Vartan would remember the rug he had sold, but he sure as hell wouldn’t walk into the shop of Ismet Bey.

  Maybe Mrs. Bishop? She could pose as my wife. I phoned her unlisted number. A woman answered, probably a servant. Mrs. Bishop, she told me, was shopping and wouldn’t be home until six o’clock.

  I did know a few things about rugs. I had worked for Uncle Vartan on Saturdays and during vacations when I was at UCLA.

  I took the photograph of Janice with me and drove out to Santa Monica. Bey’s store, like the building Vartan and I shared, was a converted house on Pico Boulevard, old and sagging. I parked in the three-car graveled parking lot next to his panel truck.

  The interior was dim and musty. Mrs. Bey was not in sight. The fat rump of a broad, short, and bald man greeted me as I came in. He was bending over, piling some small rugs on the floor.

  He rose and turned to face me. He had an olive complexion, big brown eyes, and the oily smile of a used-car salesman. “Mr. Stein?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “This way, please,” he said, and led me to the rear of the store. The rug was on a display rack, a pale tan creation, sadly thin and about as tightly woven as a fisherman’s net.

  “Mr. Bey,” I said, “that is not a Kerman.”

  “Really? What is it, then?”

  “It looks like an Ispahan to me, a cheap Ispahan.”

  He continued to smile. “It was only a test.”

  “I’m not following you. A test for what?”

  He shrugged. “There have been some rumors around town. Some rumors about a very rare and expensive three-by-five Kerman that has been stolen. I thought you may have heard them.”

  What a cutie. “I haven’t heard them,” I said. And added, “But, of course, I don’t have your contacts.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. Maybe you should have. How much did you plan to spend on this rug you want, Mr. Stein?”

  “Not as much as the rug you described would cost me. But I have a rich friend who might be interested. He is not quite as—as ethical as I try to be.”

  “Perhaps that is why he is rich. All I can offer now is the hope that this rug will find its way to me. Could I have the name of your friend?”

  I shook my head. “If the rug finds its way to you, phone me. I’ll have him come here. I don’t want to be involved.”

  “You won’t need to be,” he assured me. “And I’ll see that you are recompensed. You were right about this rug. It is an Ispahan. If you have some friends who are not rich, I hope you will mention my name to them.”

  That would be the day. “I will,” I said.

  I drove to Arden from there, and the boss was in his office. I told him about my dialogue with Bey and suggested they keep an eye on his place. I pointed out that they could make some brownie points with the Santa Monica Police Department.

  “Thank you, loyal ex-employee. We’ll do that.”

  “In return, you might make some copies of this photograph and pass them out among the boys. She is a runaway girl who was last seen here on your beach.”

  “You’ve got a case already?”

  “With my reputation, why not?”

  “Is there some connection between the missing girl and the rug?”

  “That, as you are well aware, would be privileged information.”

  “Dear God,” he said, “the kid’s turned honest! Wait here.”

  He went out to the copier and came back about five minutes later. He handed me the photo and a check for the two days I had worked for him last week and wished me well. The nice thing about the last is that I knew he meant it.

  From there to the beach. I sat in the shade near the refreshment stand with the forlorn hope that the skeleton man and the runaway girl might come this way again.

  Two hours, one ice cream cone, and two Cokes later I drove back to Beverly Hills. Uncle Vartan was alone in the shop. I went in and related to him my dialogue with Ismet Bey.

  “That tawdry Turk,” he said, “that bush-leaguer! He doesn’t cater to that class of trade. He’s dreaming a pipe dream.”

  “How much do you think that rug would bring today?” I asked.

  “Pierre, I do not want to discuss that rug. As I told you before, that was a sad day, maybe the saddest day of my life.”

  Saddest to him could be translated into English as least lucrative. A chauffeured Rolls-Royce pulled up in front of the shop and an elegantly dressed couple headed for his doorway. I held the door open for them and went up my stairs to sit again.

  I typed it all down in chronological order, the history of my first case in my own office, from the time Mrs. Whitney Bishop had walked in to my uncle’s refusal to talk about the Kerman.

  There had to be a pattern in there somewhere to a discerning eye. Either my eye was not discerning or there was no pattern.

  Cheryl had called it right; my larder was low. I heated a package of frozen peas and ate them with two baloney sandwiches and the cream cheese left over from lunch.

  There was, as usual, nothing worth watching on the tube. I went back to read again the magic of the man my father had introduced me to when I was in my formative years, the sadly funny short stor
ies of William Saroyan.

  Where would I go tomorrow? What avenues of investigation were still unexplored? Unless the unlikely happened, a call from Ismet Bey, all I had left was a probably fruitless repeat of yesterday’s surveillance of the Santa Monica beach.

  I went to bed at nine o’clock, but couldn’t sleep. I got up, poured three ounces of Tennessee whiskey into a tumbler, added a cube of ice, and sat and sipped. It was eleven o’clock before I was tired enough to sleep.

  I drank what was left of the milk in the morning and decided to have breakfast in Santa Monica. I didn’t take my swimming trunks; the day was not that warm.

  Scrambled eggs and pork sausages, orange juice, toast, and coffee at Barney’s Breakfast Bar fortified me for the gray day ahead.

  Only the hardy were populating the beach. The others would come out if the overcast went away. I sat again on the bench next to the refreshment stand and reread Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It had seemed appropriate reading for the occasion.

  I had been doing a lot of sitting on this case. I could understand now why my boss at Arden had piles.

  Ten o’clock passed. So did eleven. About fifteen minutes after that a tall, thin figure appeared in the murky air at the far end of the beach. It was a man and he was heading this way.

  Closer and clearer he came. He was wearing khaki trousers, a red-and-tan-checked flannel shirt, and a red nylon windbreaker. He nodded and smiled as he passed me. He bought a Coke at the stand and sat down at the other end of the bench.

  I laid down my book.

  “Ralph Ellison?” he said. “I had no idea he was still in print.”

  He was thin, he was haggard, and his eyes were dull. But skeleton had been too harsh a word. “He probably isn’t,” I said. “This is an old Signet paperback reprint. My father gave it to me when I was still in high school.”

  “I see. We picked a bad day for sun, didn’t we?”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” I told him. “I’m looking for a girl, a runaway girl. Do you come here often?”

  He nodded. “Quite often.”

  I handed him the photograph of Janice. “Have you ever seen her here?”

  He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on to study the picture. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Was it yesterday? No—Wednesday.” He took a deep breath. “There are so many of them who come here. I talked with her. She told me she had come down from Oxnard and didn’t have the fare to go home. I bought her a malt and a hot dog. She told me the fare to Oxnard was eight dollars and some cents. I’ve forgotten the exact amount. Anyway, I gave her a ten-dollar bill and made her promise that she would use it for the fare home.”