A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “Do you do that often?”

  “Not often enough. When I can afford it.”

  “She’s not from Oxnard,” I told him. “She’s from Beverly Hills.”

  He stared at me. “She couldn’t be! She was wearing a pair of patched jeans and a cheap, flimsy T-shirt.”

  “She’s from Beverly Hills,” I repeated. “Her parents are rich.”

  He smiled. “That little liar! She conned me. And what a sweet young thing she was.”

  “I hope ‘was’ isn’t the definitive word,” I said.

  He closed his eyes and took another deep breath. He opened them and stared out at the sea.

  I handed him my card. “If you see her again, would you phone me?”

  “Of course. My name is Gerald Hopkins. I live at the Uphan Hotel. It’s a—a place for what are currently called senior citizens.”

  “I know the place,” I told him. “Let’s hold our thumbs.”

  “Dear God, yes!” he said.

  From there I drove to the store of the tawdry Turk. He was not there but his wife was, a short, thin, and dark-skinned woman. I told her my name.

  She nodded. “Ismet told me you were here yesterday.” Her smile was sad. “That man and his dreams! What cock-and-bull story did he tell you?”

  “Some of it made sense. He tried to sell me an Ispahan.”

  “He didn’t tell me that!”

  “He also told me about some rumors he heard.”

  “Oh, yes! Rumors he has. Customers is what we need. Tell me, Mr. Stein, how can a man get so fat on rumors?”

  “He’s probably married to a good cook.”

  “That he is. Take my advice, and a grain of salt, when you listen to the rumors of my husband, Mr. Stein. He is a dreamer. It is the reason I married him. I, too, in my youth, was a dreamer. It is why we came to America many years ago.”

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door . . .

  I smiled at her. “Keep the faith!” I went out.

  My next stop was the bank, where I deposited the checks from Mrs. Bishop and Arden and cashed a check for two hundred dollars.

  From there to Vons in Santa Monica, where I stocked up on groceries, meat, and booze. Grocery markups in Beverly Hills, my mother had warned me, were absurd. Only the vulgar rich could afford them.

  Mrs. Bey might believe that all the rumors her husband heard were bogus. But the rumor he had voiced to me was too close to the truth to qualify as bogus. It was logical to assume that there were shenanigans he indulged in in the practice of his trade that he would not reveal to her. To a man of his ilk the golden door meant gold, and he was still looking for the door.

  I put the groceries away when I got home and went out to check the answering machine. Zilch. I typed the happenings of the morning into the record. Nothing had changed; no pattern showed.

  There was a remote chance that Bey might learn where the rug was now. That was what I was being paid to find. But, as I had told Les Denton, the girl was my major concern.

  It wasn’t likely that she was staying at the home of any of her classmates. Their parents certainly would have phoned Mrs. Bishop by now if she hadn’t phoned them.

  Which reminded me that I had something to report. I phoned the Bishop house and the lady was home. I told her Janice had been seen on the Santa Monica beach on Wednesday and that a man there had told me this morning that he had talked with her. She had lied to him, telling him that she lived in Oxnard.

  “She’s very adept at lying. Did you learn anything else?”

  “Well, there was a rug dealer in Santa Monica who told me he had heard rumors about a three-by-five Kerman that had been stolen. I have no idea where he heard them.”

  “There could be a number of sources. My husband has been asking several dealers we know if they have seen it. And, of course, many of my friends know about the loss.”

  “Isn’t it possible they might inform the police?”

  “Not if they want to remain my friends. And the dealers, too, have been warned. If Janice has been seen on the Santa Monica beach, the rug could also be in the area. I think that is where you should concentrate your search.”

  It was warm and the weatherman had promised us sunshine for tomorrow. Cheryl and I could spend a day on the beach at Mrs. Bishop’s expense.

  “I agree with you completely,” I said.

  I phoned her apartment and Cheryl was there. I asked her if she’d like to spend a day on the beach with me tomorrow.

  “I’d love it!”

  I told her about the groceries I had bought and asked if she’d like to come and I’d cook a dinner for us tonight.

  “Petroff, I can’t! We’re going to the symphony concert at the pavilion tonight.”

  “Who is we?”

  “My roommates and I. Who else? Would you like to interrogate one of them?”

  “Of course not! Save the program for me so I can see what I missed.”

  “I sure as hell will, you suspicious bastard. What time tomorrow?”

  “Around ten.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  I made myself a martini before dinner and then grilled a big T-bone steak and had it with frozen creamed asparagus and shoestring potatoes (heated, natch) and finished it off with lemon sherbet and coffee.

  I had left Invisible Man in the car. I reread my favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, after dinner, along with a few ounces of brandy.

  And then to my lonely bed. All the characters I had met since Wednesday afternoon kept running through my mind. All the chasing I had done had netted me nothing of substance. Credit investigations were so much cleaner and easier. But, like my Uncle Vartan, I had never felt comfortable working under a boss.

  Cheryl was waiting outside her apartment building next morning when I pulled up a little after ten. She climbed into the car and handed me a program.

  “Put it away,” I said. “I was only kidding last night.”

  “Like hell you were!” She put it in the glove compartment. “And how was your evening?”

  “Lonely. I talked with the man Denton’s friend saw with Janice on the beach. She told him she had come down from Oxnard. He gave her the bus fare to go back.”

  “To Oxnard? Why would anybody want to go back to Oxnard?”

  “She claimed she lived there. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Maybe the man lied.”

  “Why would he?”

  “Either he lied or she lied. It’s fifty-fifty, isn’t it?”

  “Cheryl, he had no reason to lie. He told me the whole story and he has helped other kids to go home again. He gave me his name and address. Mrs. Bishop told me yesterday afternoon that Janice was—she called her an adept liar.”

  “And she is a creep, according to Les. Maybe Janice had reason to lie to the old bag.”

  “A creep she is. A bag she ain’t. Tell me, what are you wearing under that simple but undoubtedly expensive charcoal denim dress?”

  “My swimsuit, of course. Don’t get horny. It’s too early in the day for that.”

  It was, unfortunately, a great day for the beach; the place was jammed. They flood in from the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood and Culver City and greater Los Angeles on the warm days. Very few of them come from Beverly Hills. Most of those people have their own private swimming pools. Maybe all of them.

  We laughed and splashed and swam and built a sand castle, back to the days of our adolescence. We forgot for a while the missing Janice Bishop and the antique Kerman.

  After the fun part we walked from end to end on the beach, scanning the crowd, earning my pay, hoping to find the girl.

  No luck.

  Cheryl said, “I’ll make you that dinner tonight, if you want me to.”

  “I want you to.”

  “We may as well go right to your place,” she said. “You can drop me off at the apartment tomorrow when you go to the weekly meeting of the clan. It won’t be out of your way.”

&
nbsp; “Sound thinking,” I agreed.

  What she made for us was a soufflé, an entree soufflé, not a dessert soufflé. But it was light enough to rest easily on top of the garbage we had consumed at the beach.

  The garbage on the tube, we both agreed, would demean our day. We went to bed early.

  The overcast was back in the morning, almost a fog. We ate a hearty breakfast to replace the energy we had lost in the night.

  I dropped her off at her apartment a little after one o’clock, and was the first to arrive at my parents’ house. Adele was the second. She had brought her friend with her, Salvatore Martino, known in the trade as Ronnie Egan.

  It was possible, I reasoned, that I could be as wrong about him as Mrs. Whitney Bishop had been about Leslie Denton. I suggested to him that we take a couple of beers out to the patio while my mother and Adele fussed around in the kitchen.

  We yacked about this and that, mostly sports, and then he said, “I saw three of your amateur fights and both your pro fights. How come you quit after that?”

  “If you saw my pro fights, you should understand why.”

  “Jesus, man, you were way overmatched! You were jobbed. I’ll bet Sam made a bundle on both of those fights.”

  Sam Batisto had been my manager. I said, “I’m not following you. You mean you think Sam is a crook?”

  He nodded. “And a double-crossing sleazeball. Hell, he’s got Mafia cousins. He’d sell out his mother if the price was right.”

  That son of a bitch . . .

  “Well, what the hell,” he went on, “maybe the bastard did you a favor. That’s a nasty, ugly game, and people are beginning to realize it. Have you noticed how many big bouts are staged in Vegas?”

  “I’ve noticed.” I changed the subject. “How did you make out with the commercial?”

  “Great! My agent worked Adele into it. And the producer promised both of us more work. We’re going to make it, Adele and I. But we can’t get married until we do. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Very well,” I assured him. “Welcome to the clan.”

  My mother had gone Armenian this Sunday, chicken and pilaf. One of Sarkis’s boys hadn’t been able to attend; Salvatore took his place at the poker session.

  That was a red-letter day! Salvatore was the big winner. And for the first time in history Mom was the big loser. I would like to say she took it graciously, but she didn’t. We are a competitive clan.

  “Nice guy,” I said, when Adele and he had left.

  She sniffed. “When he marries Adele, then he might be a nice guy.”

  “He told me they’re going to get married as soon as they can afford to.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “He could be another Vartan.”

  The day had stayed misty; the traffic on Sunset Boulevard was slow. I dawdled along, thinking back on the past few days, trying to find the key to the puzzle of the missing girl and the stolen Kerman. The key was the key; who had the key to the house and why had only the rug been stolen?

  One thing was certain, the burglar knew the value of antique oriental rugs. But how would he know that particular rug was in the home of Whitney Bishop?

  It was a restless night, filled with dreams I don’t remember now. I tossed and turned and went to the toilet twice. A little after six o’clock I realized sleep was out of the question. I put the coffee on to perc and went down the steps to pick up the morning Times.

  The story was on page one. Whitney Bishop, founder and senior partner of the brokerage firm of Bishop, Hope, and Nystrom, had been found dead in a deserted Brentwood service station. A local realtor had discovered the body when he had brought a potential buyer to the station on Sunday morning. Bishop had been stabbed to death. A loaded but unfired.32 caliber revolver had been found near the body.

  According to his wife, Bishop had been nervous and irritable on Friday night. His secretary told the police that he had received a phone call on Friday afternoon and appeared agitated. On Saturday night, he had told his wife he was going to a board meeting at the Beverly Hills Country Club. When he hadn’t come home by midnight, Mrs. Bishop had phoned the club. The club was closed; receiving no answer there, she had phoned the police.

  When questioned about the revolver, she had stated that she remembered he had once owned a small-caliber pistol but she was almost sure it had been lost or stolen years ago.

  A murdered husband. . . . And there was no mention in the piece about a missing daughter or a stolen rug. Considering how many of her friends knew about both, that was bound to come out.

  When it did I could be in deep trouble for withholding information about the rug and the girl. But so could she for the same reason. And spreading those stories to the media could alert and scare off any seasoned burglar who had been looking forward to a buy-back deal. That was the slim hope I tried to hang on to.

  I put the record of my involvement in the case under the mattress in my bedroom. I showered and shaved and put on my most conservative suit after breakfast and sat in my office chair, waiting for the police to arrive.

  They didn’t.

  I thought back to all the people I had questioned in the past week. And then I realized there was one I hadn’t.

  I went down the stairs and asked Uncle Vartan if he had heard the sad news.

  He nodded and yawned. He had heard it on the tube last night, he told me. I had the feeling that he would not mourn the death of Whitney Bishop.

  “You told me you went with Mrs. Bishop when she was between husbands. Who was her first?”

  “A man named Duane Pressville, a former customer of mine.”

  “Do you have his address?”

  “Not anymore. It has been years since I’ve seen him. What is this all about, Pierre?”

  “I was thinking that it was possible he still had the key to the house they shared and would know where the alarm turnoff switch was hidden.”

  He stared at me. “And you think he stole the rug? That’s crazy, Pierre! He was a very sharp buyer but completely honest.” He paused. “And now you are thinking that he might be a murderer?”

  “The murder and the rug might not be connected,” I pointed out. “Tell me, is he the man who bought the Kerman from you?”

  “Yes,” he said irritably. “And that’s enough of this nonsense! I have work to do this morning, Pierre.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and went up the stairs to look up Duane Pressville in the phone book. There were several Pressvilles in the book but only one Duane. His address was 332 Adonis Court.

  I knew the street, a short dead-ender that led off San Vicente Boulevard. Into the Camaro, back on the hunt.

  Adonis Court was an ancient neighborhood of small houses. It had resisted the influx of demolitions that had invaded the area when land prices soared. These were the older residents who had no serious economic pressures that would force them to sell out.

  332 was a small frame house with a shingled roof and a small low porch in front of the door.

  I went up to the porch and turned the old-fashioned crank that rang the bell inside the house.

  The man who opened the door was tall and thin and haggard, the same man who had called himself Gerald Hopkins on the beach.

  He smiled. “Mr. Apoyan! What brings you to my door?”

  “I’m looking for a rug,” I said. “An antique Kerman.”

  He frowned. “Did Victoria send you here?”

  “Who is Victoria?”

  “My former wife. What vindictive crusade is she on now? No matter what she might have told you, I bought that rug with my own money. It was my rug, until the divorce settlement.”

  “Why,” I asked, “did you lie to me on the beach?”

  He looked at me and past me. He sighed and said, “Come in.”

  The door opened directly into the living room. It was a room about fourteen feet wide and eighteen feet long. It was almost completely covered by a dark red oriental rug. It looked like a Bokhara to me.

  The f
urniture was mostly dark mahogany, brightly polished, upholstered in well-worn velour.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  I sat in an armchair, he on the sofa.

  “Have you ever heard of Maksoud of Kashan?” he asked.

  “I think so. Wasn’t he a famous oriental rug weaver?”

  He nodded. “The finest in all of Persia, now called Iran. But in his entire career, with all the associates he had working under him, he wove his name into only two of his rugs. One of them is in the British Museum. The other is the small Kerman I bought from your uncle. I remember now—you worked in his store on Saturdays, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “You weren’t in the store that day this—this peddler brought in the Kerman. It was filthy! But far from being worn out. My eyes must be sharper than your uncle’s. I saw the signature in the corner. I made the mistake of overplaying my hand; I offered him a thousand dollars for it, much more than it appeared to be worth. That must have made him suspicious. We dickered. When I finally offered him three thousand dollars he sold it to me.”

  “And I suppose he has resented you ever since that day.”

  He shrugged. “Probably. To tell you the truth, after he learned about the history of the rug I was ashamed to go back to the store.”

  “To tell the truth once again,” I said, “where is your daughter? Where is Janice?”

  “She is well and safe and far from here. She is back with her real parents, the parents who were too poor to keep her when she was born. I finally located them.”

  “You wouldn’t want to tell me their name?”

  “Not you, or anybody else. Not with the legal clout Victoria can afford. Do you want Janice to go back to that woman she complained to when her third father tried to molest her, that woman who called her a liar? I did some research on Bishop, too. He was fired by a Chicago brokerage firm for churning. He had one charge of child molestation dropped for insufficient evidence there. So he came out here and married money and started his own firm.”