Noir

by Christopher Moore

  Bailey looked at him, lifted his sunglasses, looked Sammy in the eye. “Yeah, I know.”

  “So,” Sammy said, lowering the gun. “Are they going to leave us alone? Or are a bunch more people going to get scragged because some general in New Mexico went loopy and tried to impress some nobs?”

  Bailey let his sunglasses drop. “I haven’t filed a report since this started. Everything kept changing.”

  “Which means what?”

  “You keep your mouths shut, you and your friends should be fine,” said Bailey. “We don’t hurt civilians.”

  “Yet, the evidence says you are lying like a rug.”

  “Like Hatch—er—the other agent said, that didn’t come from our people.”

  “Then who did it come from?”

  “Someone over our people. I can’t say who, but someone high up.”

  “High enough that you guys can ice a general?”

  Hatch nodded. “You going to give us back our guns?”

  “Nope.”

  Again, Hatch nodded, just a twitch of a nod. “You’re sure this thing hasn’t moved?”

  “I’d keep an eye on it, I were you,” Sammy said. “Drop the seat of the Chrysler. It goes right through to the trunk, right?”

  Again the nod.

  “Where are you taking it?” Sammy said.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Bailey said.

  “Long drive?”

  “Maybe,” said Hatch.

  “Look,” Sammy said, “I don’t know what happened to your other guys, but last anyone saw them, they were near that thing.”

  “Who saw them?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Sammy said. “Tell your bosses to leave us alone. Or better yet, don’t tell them anything. Time for you to go.” Sammy waved him back into the car with the Walther, waited, then watched as the big black Chrysler rumbled away.

  * * *

  Five minutes later, an almost identical Chrysler jumped the curb at the Embarcadero, sending a hubcap wheeling down the wharf into the bay, then squealed around and stopped where Sammy was waiting beside Jimmy Vasco’s Ford coupe. The moonman, under Pookie O’Hara’s big fedora, was driving.

  Stilton jumped out of the passenger side. “He’s a natural!” She was holding the moonman’s cornet/blaster. She was wearing Myrtle’s gray slacks and a white blouse.

  “You let him drive?”

  “Yeah, of course. I cut the pedals off, welded some half-inch stock on as extensions, then welded the pedals back on. Fluid Drive, automatic transmission. It’s a wonder!”

  The moonman hung his head out the window and chattered.

  “Where’s Milo and Moo Shoes?” asked the Cheese.

  “Moo Shoes went home to sleep. Milo is picking up Jimmy Vasco and Myrtle to bring them here. The kid’s off getting some breakfast. Why do you have that thing?” Sammy nodded to the blaster.

  “Oh, I stopped by my place to see if I could blast out a rumpus room. Turns out you have to be a moonman for it to work. I can’t blast a stinkin’ thing.” She handed it through the window to the moonman. “Be nice,” she said. Then to Sammy, “Give me your jacket.”

  “Why, what?”

  “Just get everything out of the pockets and give me your jacket. The hat is okay from a distance, but he’s going to need a better outfit.”

  While Sammy transferred the contents of his jacket pockets into his trouser pockets, Stilton coaxed the moonman out of the Chrysler and stood him up behind the Ford, where no one from the road could see him. “Give me your jacket,” she said.

  Sammy took off his jacket and handed it to her, then watched as she put it on the moonman. It hung to the ground on him. She rolled up the sleeves until his froggy little hands showed again, but he was still swimming in it. “Give me your tie,” she said.

  Sammy took off his tie and handed it to her. She fashioned it into a sash and, in a few seconds, the moonman was standing there in Pookie’s wide-brimmed fedora and Sammy’s belted suit jacket, which hung to trench-coat length on him.

  “Ta-da!” said the Cheese, presenting the moonman’s new look. The moonman clicked, whistled, then made a la-la noise.

  He looked like a very tiny spy.

  “Okay,” Stilton said. “That’s it, you go get ’em, slugger.” She lightly punched the moonman on the shoulder.

  “Where’s he going?” Sammy asked.

  “How should I know? I don’t know what the hell he’s doing. I just taught him how to drive. He can’t stay here. They’ll come looking for him when they figure you gave them a fake.”

  “I’m not sure they will,” Sammy said.

  The Cheese opened the door of the Chrysler and waited while the moonman crawled in.

  She looked over her shoulder at Sammy as the moonman fired up the engine. “I put a switch in for him so he doesn’t have to mess with hot-wiring it every time.”

  “You know how to do that?” Sammy asked.

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Okay, off you go,” Sammy said, slapping the Chrysler’s front fender.

  The moonman stuck his head out the window, looked at the Cheese, and made a burbling noise while shaking his head back and forth.

  “No!” said the Cheese. “You go.”

  “Is he asking to motorboat your boobs good-bye?”

  “Go now, Scooter. Go.” She waved him off as if she were releasing a bird she had nursed back to health.

  “You named him Scooter?”

  “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” said the Cheese. “It’s sad. I’m sad.” She buried her face in Sammy’s shoulder as the moonman drove out of the parking lot and turned onto the Embarcadero. Sammy pulled her close and kissed her hair as he watched the Chrysler go out of sight on the other side of Jimmy’s Joynt.

  “Don’t cry, Toots. Maybe someday we can have a moonman of our own.”

  “Yeah?” she said, pushing back to search his face for sincerity. “You don’t think they’re going to hunt us down and kill us?”

  “No, of course not. Probably. If we’re lucky. We might have to see a guy about that.”

  They heard scuffling behind them, looked around.

  “So this the dame that put you through all the commotion?” asked the kid. He was holding a white bag and was eating a glazed donut. He came out from between two cars, stood next to Sammy, pushed his newsboy cap back on his head with the donut. He gave the Cheese the once-over, held up the bag of donuts. Sammy took out two, handed one to Stilton.

  “This is her,” Sammy said.

  “She’s a little lumpy for my tastes.”

  “Hey, watch it, kid!” Sammy said. “I will pop you one.”

  “That’s okay, Sammy,” said the Cheese. “A person can’t help what they like.”

  “He’s a horrible little kid,” Sammy said.

  “That’s okay, I like that in a kid,” said the Cheese. She leaned in and whispered to Sammy, “Although we don’t need to rush into having a moonman of our own.”

  “Hey, you keep that ice bucket from the motel?” Sammy said.

  “Yeah,” said the Cheese. “It’s at my place.”

  “Let’s go get it. I need to find another jacket, too.”

  “Sorry, but he looked like a goof in just a hat.”

  26

  The Nob

  The law firm of Stoddard, Whittaker & Crock was in one of those bank buildings faced with granite the color and pattern of dog vomit. It was a bank. But not a bank with counters and windows and whatnot, a bank where guys in suits sat at desks and talked to nobs about their money in quiet, civilized tones. The Cheese and me walked in like we owned the joint, but the guy working the elevator looked at us like we were there to clean the drains—me in my second-best suit and the Cheese looking sunny in a blue gingham number that would look natural on a farm girl from Kansas—if the Cheese wasn’t wearing a pair of red Mary Janes with heels high enough to give a stripper a nosebleed. “My ruby slippers,” she had said when she put them on.

  Right ou
t of the elevator there was a half-moon reception desk that was all bronze and marble, with a fortyish dame sitting behind it looking tightly wound enough to spin the hands off a clock, and enough hairpins in her coif to pick every lock in Alcatraz.

  “Can I help you?” she said, like she meant to say, “Did you get off on the wrong floor?”

  “We’re here to see Alton Stoddard the Third,” I told her, and I flashed Pookie’s badge. As impressed as she was, I might as well have flashed a cockroach.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she said.

  “He’ll want to see us,” said the Cheese.

  “Mr. Stoddard does not see anyone without an appointment.”

  “Tell you what, Toots, you tell him I have pictures of him and his Bohemian pals dressed like dames and giving each other the bent-over boogie-woogie and see if he wants to talk to us.” And here I threw a manila envelope I had prepared for just such an occasion on the reception desk. The Cheese set the ice bucket from the motel next to the envelope, which visibly confounded the receptionist down to her very hairpins.

  Flustered, Miss Officious worked the switch on an intercom a couple of times before she decided what to do, which was to stand up and continue to be flustered.

  “You might want to snap things up, Toots,” I told her. “We got an appointment at the Chronicle in half an hour.”

  This unfroze her. She said, “One moment, I’ll see if he is in.” And she hurried off down a hallway.

  “Like she doesn’t know if one of the guys with his name on the window is in or not,” I said to the Cheese.

  “I can’t believe you called her Toots,” Stilton said. “You’re just a hound, aren’t you? You better not be a hound.”

  A minute went by in which the Cheese bitterly chastised me for Tootsing another, then Miss Officious returned and said, simply, “Follow me.”

  She led us down a walnut-paneled hallway past several mahogany doors with reeded glass windows, until we reached the end of the corridor, where we were ushered through double, reeded glass doors into a carpeted office with another hairpin dame sitting at a desk trying desperately not to scowl as Miss Officious showed us right into the inner office. The office was about four times the size of my apartment, with the Cheese’s cozy dame-cave thrown in a couple of times to give it some air. The room was all Persian rugs and dark woods, law books on two walls, paintings with gondolas and golden canals on another, a gallery of windows looking out on the bay, as well as a stock ticker that was spitting out tape in the background like a mechanized chipmunk.

  There was an antique desk the size of a coal barge, and behind it sat a thin, balding guy in a houndstooth suit who peered at us over some Ben Franklin spectacles. He gave the Cheese the once-over, glanced at me long enough to dismiss me, then returned his gaze to Stilton. I could see it was the blue gingham dress and not the Cheese’s abundant charms that was giving him pause.

  “So who are you and what is this about?” he asked.

  There were a couple of leather side chairs in front of his desk. I swung a leg over one; the Cheese sat demurely in the other and held the ice bucket on her knees.

  “I’m Sam Two-Toes, and this dish of loveliness is Dorothy Gale, and we are here to talk to you about what you and your Bohemian pals were getting up to at your campout last week, and more importantly, the people you killed to cover it up.”

  He stood up behind his desk to show his outrage. He was taller than I expected, a head taller than me, and thinner. I really expected a shorter, fatter guy. With a monocle. Maybe a top hat. Yeah, okay, I was probably expecting the guy on the Monopoly cards.

  “Now see here,” he says. At which point I pull out Jimmy Vasco’s Walther .380.

  “Shut the fuck up and sit down, Alton,” I said. Wisely, he did.

  “He said, ‘now see here,’” said the Cheese. “See if you can get him to say, ‘my good man’?”

  “The police will be here in seconds,” Stoddard said. “My receptionist has already called them.”

  I threw the envelope on his desk and pulled Pookie’s badge from my jacket pocket, let him have a good look at it. “San Francisco’s finest.”

  “I know the police commissioner,” said Stoddard. “I know the mayor.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” I said. “Give them my best. I don’t work for them. That’s not relevant. It’s not my badge. Here, you can have it.” I threw the badge on his desk.

  “You think this is the first time someone has tried to shake me down?” he said.

  “Oh, no. But it’s my first time,” I told him.

  “You’re doing great,” said the Cheese.

  “Thanks, doll.”

  Stoddard said, “Mr. Two-Toes, I assure you, the Bohemian Club is made up of some of the most distinguished, accomplished, powerful men in the world. We do not kill people. You have no evidence of any misdeeds at all. I don’t know what is in the envelope, but it’s not pictures of the Bohemians.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked him, pushing back my hat with the barrel of the Walther.

  “Because we do nothing for which we would be ashamed.”

  “Except dressing up like dames, worshipping a concrete owl, and killing a stand-up dame like Pearl,” said Stilton.

  “That’s how you know, Alton, isn’t it?” I said. “You know there’s no pictures because you had some goons take Pearl’s camera, then they hurt her until they were sure that she hadn’t stashed any film. That’s how you know.”

  Stoddard stood again. “I’ll have you know—”

  I passed the Walther to my left hand and popped Alton Stoddard in the chops with a quick right jab, knocking him back into his chair.

  Stilton giggled.

  “Baby—”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  I said, “You probably never even met the guys who killed the general and the girl, did you, Alton?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Doll, introduce Alton to his hired killers, would you?”

  Stilton stood, curtsied, then took the lid off the ice bucket and dumped the ashes on Stoddard’s desk. A cloud of powder splashed over the desk. Stoddard rolled back to get out of the wash. I pulled the last pair of sunglasses out of my breast pocket and threw it into the pile of ashes. A light of recognition went on in Stoddard’s eyes, just for an instant, but I could tell he’d seen them before.

  “That’s all that’s left of them, Alton. And there were others, too. You may be hearing from them. General Remy showed you his special treasure, that little novelty he thought would impress you, didn’t he?”

  “General Remy was—he was not suitable material for the Bohemians.”

  “So you killed him?”

  “No, we had nothing to do with that.”

  “But you called a friend. Maybe a friend of a friend in Washington, and he told someone who told someone, and the next thing you know, these guys in sunglasses show up and start making people disappear. Well, this is what happened to them when they saw the thing you saw.”

  Stoddard dabbed at his bloody lip with a handkerchief and stared at the powder on his desk, shook his head.

  “You could be making all of this up,” he said, but he’d lost some of his rich-guy resilience.

  “You knew your friends were going to take care of Remy, so you asked them to do you a favor and get rid of the dames who saw your little party, too. Except two of them got away.”

  “They said there would be dancing!” Stilton said.

  I looked over at her. Gave her a what the hell? shrug.

  “Well, they did.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” Stoddard said.

  “You’re not getting my drift, Alton. I just used the pictures angle to get in here. I don’t need to prove any of this. This isn’t going to court or to the papers. You guys, you movers and shakers, who tell other people what to do. The worst thing you can think of happening to you is maybe you lose some money, maybe you’re embarr
assed. Things are different when you live closer to the bone, Mr. Stoddard. Things go wrong where I live, real people get hurt, real people lose their friends, lose their jobs, lose their lives—end up turning tricks or rotting from the inside down at the Third Street Sherry Society. Alton, I know it’s going to be hard for you to imagine anything bigger or more important than you and your nob pals, but this is real. This will make things real for you. I will make things real for you.”

  Stoddard sagged in his chair. “What do you want? We keep a limited amount of cash in the office—”

  “I want you to call everyone off, Alton. Everyone you talked to about the general, about the girls at the Bohemian Grove, about everything to do with it. You call them and you tell them to drop it. Right now and forever. They don’t send investigators, they don’t open files, they don’t read anyone’s mail or listen to their phone calls—all this, and everything to do with what happened in San Francisco is finished. You threaten them, Alton. You got them to move somehow before, so you do it again, make it clear that this is over. Do you understand?”

  “I have no control over—”

  “Get control. Because I’m promoting you into the real world, Alton. I will not ruin you, I will not embarrass you, I will not see you in court. If anyone I know so much as hears an extra click on a phone call, you are going to be in an ice bucket, Alton, just like your two goons. And so will everyone in your family. Any one of my friends so much as sprains an ankle stepping off the curb, you are ashes.”

  “You can’t get away with this,” he said.

  “Don’t care, Alton. All I have in the world is a few friends and this dame over here. Anything happens to them, I got nothing worth living for. Now, you can doubt me. You can send someone after me, after my friends, but if you do, you’ll live the rest of your short life in fear. You think you can go over my head? Everyone is over my head, Alton. Maybe you get me. But there’s a lot of people down here with me. Maybe you don’t get vaporized. Maybe it’s just a fillet knife slipped under that vest of yours one day when you step into the elevator. Thin and quick, you’ll barely feel it, and you’ll bleed out before anyone knows what hit you. Or, you can say no, tell me that I’m being outrageous, and I’ll just shoot you right now.” I shrugged. “Do some research. Ask your friends in Washington what happened to their guys. Although, it’s probably not the best idea to let them think you know too much, because I don’t think they’ll think you’re quite as important as you do. Remy was a general, Alton. One of theirs.”