Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde (14 page)

I opened the book and began leafing through the
P
s.

“Movie people aren’t like your regular doper,” Mattie said, “Your regular doper’s a working joe. He’s got someone down on the shop floor, say, and they go out for a smoke and do the buy on the loading dock and hurry back before break’s over, because they’ve got sandwiches to finish. Well, I guess some movie people’ll do that, gaffers and so forth, but mostly movie people like everything to be fun. And they get their stuff at parties. Any given time, there’s two three dope parties going in this town, just for folks in the business. They move around a lot, close down and open up again, but you tend to see the same folks setting out the onion dip. Thing is, a new one’s popped up just in the last few weeks, and nobody knows who’s behind it. Runs most nights at the old Paley place.”

“Nita Paley,” I read aloud. “1625 Marine Street, Santa Monica.”

“That’s it.”

“Nita Paley. Didn’t she used to do Gypsy types? For Griffith and so on.”

“That’s the one. Great big spooky black eyes. Ohio farm girl.”

“She must be getting on.”

“Drowned in ’46 off Malibu. Nance Altschuler bought the place four years ago when her folks finally kicked her out. She and her artistic friends played house there a while, but what goes on these days is a little too rank even for Miss Altschuler and I hear she don’t show so much anymore. Her friends do, though. Nancy’s got friends.”

“Who goes to that sort of place?”

“Different kinds. Not just hopheads, either. The thing’s supposed to be some kind of art bit, with these sculptors and so forth that come around, probably for the food, and also you got that little element of, ah, danger I guess is how they think of it, and so everybody in the business who likes to feel they’re a little bohemian or little dangerous thinks it’s cute to come by and have a few drinks with the dope fiends. And also, you get to show your date how connected you are, because they run the place like an old speak, with a hard boy on the door, and nobody gets in without somebody’s okay.”

“I think I can manage that,” I said, standing. I pushed his foot over and set the address book back where it’d been. “Thanks, Mattie.”

“I liked your old clothes better,” he said, looking off into the corner again. “These kind of have a smell.”

“You get used to it,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

“You see any of my people there, give ’em my love.”

“Buy me a suit and we’ll talk about it,” I said, and went out.

I stopped in the outer office, perched on the corner of an empty desk, and looked at my watch. Four o’clock. Lisa Rae Bellinger would still be at the Gellar Agency. I picked up a phone. “It’s the gumshoe,” I said, when she came on the line.

“Hello, Gumshoe,” she said. “You called after all. Did somebody show you how to use a telephone?”

“I went down to the library and got a book on the subject.”

“Someone taught you to read?”

“It had pictures. Want to go to a party tonight?”

“Why, how very nice. You’re taking me to a party.”

“No,” I said. “You’re taking me.”

Lisa Rae Bellinger was a skinny little thing, but what she ate was prime rib and peas, and what she drank was
champagne, and where she did it was Musso & Frank’s, and how I knew is, she told me so as soon as she got in the car at eight. Then I took her there and she demonstrated. She wore a steel-blue pleated dress with one of those three-inch patent leather belts you use to show how little your waist is. She looked awfully nice when she was eating, and just as nice when I was following her out to the car. When I pulled up in front of 1625 Marine she still looked nice, but she didn’t look happy anymore. It had been a pretty house once, a rambling brick one-story with a winding flagstone walk and a couple big mullioned bay windows, but the shutters needed paint and the weeds were coming up between the flagstones and waisthigh in the flowerbeds. There were cars parked all over what was left of the lawn. “Where are we,” she said.

“Nita Paley used to live here.”

“Uh huh,” she said slowly. “Uh ... huh.”

“I guess you’ve heard about this place.”

“I guess I have.”

“You’re not a china doll, Miss Bellinger, or I didn’t think you were. But I can run you home now if you’d rather.”

“Do you know, Mr. Corson, do you know how foolish I can be? Why, when you called me up this afternoon, I actually permitted myself to imagine you weren’t just working.”

“I am working,” I said. “I’m not just working.”

“That’s a little subtle for me.”

“I’m sorry. I need in over there. You know people and you’re a looker. They’d be happier to see you than me. I’d like to see you myself some night when I’m not working, but this is a working night.”

“Does it have to be?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“Because you can’t do the work when it suits you. You’ve got to do it when they give it to you.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” she said. “Well. I s’pose this is the sort of thing a girl should see at least once in her life. Like the Grand Canyon.”

“I can run you home now if you’d rather. I’ll find another way in.”

“No. No, I believe my curiosity’s getting the better of me.”

“Lucky curiosity.”

“Tomorrow, Mr. Corson, you can go back to the library and get a book on manners. With pictures. I imagine that’s a parking spot over there.”

The fellow on the door was wide enough that if you had to walk all the way around him you’d be tired. They’d brought out a bar stool for him to sit on. He was sort of half-sitting on it with one foot on the ground in case he had to move quick. He looked comfortable, like he was used to sitting that way. He wore a black turtleneck, old khaki slacks, and the kind of big straw hat you usually see on a horse. He watched us come up the walk as if he thought we might not be the Royal Couple, but he was polite enough when he said, “Sorry, friends. Private party.”

“Oh,” Lisa Rae said, “but we’re
very
private people.”

“Wish I could help you,” he told her, sounding like he meant it.

He was enjoying looking at her.

“Dear me how mortifyin’,” Lisa Rae said. “And here I thought I was ex
pec
ted.”

“Expected by... ?”

“If Grammy’s arrived, would you mind awfully much telling him that Lisa Rae’s out waitin’ on the front walk?”

“Mr. Neale’s expecting you?”

“If he can still recall what he expects,” she said
sweetly. “It’s early enough in the evenin’ for that, wouldn’t you think?”

The doorman considered, then reached out a big arm and opened the door for us. “Beg your pardon, Miss Bellinger,” he said. “But I’m sure you understand. Mr. Neale hasn’t been by yet this evening. I’ll tell him you’re here when he comes.”

“Oh, I’m Miss Bellinger now, am I?” she said.

“You wouldn’t remember, but last fall you told me my face was too round to play gladiators.”

“Well, come by the office sometime, cuz, and I’ll be happy to forget you again.”

“It’s a date,” he said affably as we went by.

The door opened into a living room. It was a big square room and looked bigger because it was half-empty. There were two sofas, and someone had taken the legs off one of them so it sat right on the floor. A young man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts was asleep on it facedown, a beach towel wrapped around his legs. There was an enormous fireplace on the far wall with two racing bicycles in it instead of logs. There were a couple big paintings on the wall with no frames, but they were longhair stuff that didn’t look like anything and you’ll have to ask someone else about them. There was a hi-fi in the corner, a good one, and piles of records on the floor and leaning up against the wall, and a trim gray-haired man in a blue blazer was down on one knee, going through the records with a disappointed look. I said, “Graham Neale comes here?”

“It’s the sort of place he’d be. He’s a sorry critter. Well, Mr. Corson, here you are like you wanted. Have I earned my dinner yet, or do you want Mr. Neale’s autograph, too?”

I shook my head. “Can it. It’s the doorman’s job to be bitched at. It isn’t mine. I asked you, in or out. You said in.”

“Well,” she said.

“Can it. I don’t want to have your moping all night on top of everything else.”

She squinched her eyes and put up her pointy little fists. She held the pose, looking mean.

“Well I’m damned. You pulled my file,” I said.

She dropped her fists and nodded, grinning. She looked almost embarrassed. “That’s right, Rocky Marciano. I read your file.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” I said. “I’d thought all that’d be thrown away by now.”

“Ollie never throws anything away,” she said. “That’s why he’s rich.”

“I’ll be goddamned.”

“I do apologize, Mr. Corson. I hate a mopey girl too. I hate a girl who says, oh, maybe I will and maybe I won’t, but remember, whatever happens’ll be all your fault. And now I will behave. And become a perfect delight. So. What brings the great gumshoe and his girl assistant to this low haunt?”

“Dope.”

“My my. I’d say we came to the right place.”

“I want to know who supplies this party. Not the people who sell here, but the man they get it from.”

“That’s easy enough. Lenny Scarpa, or one of his fellas.”

“No. Somebody new.”

“Says who?”

“Says Scarpa.”

“My my my.”

“Guess we’re a little early, though. It’ll be better when there’s more people and they’re drunker.”

“We’re way too early, Mr. Corson. It’s not even ten-thirty. If you’d asked me I could’ve told you that, and we could’ve gone someplace nice a couple hours first and I
could’ve taught you to dance.”

“What makes you think I can’t dance?”

“I don’t care if you can. I like teaching you things.”

Behind us, the man in the blazer must have found something he approved of, because the hi-fi let out a big blat of music, and then he adjusted the volume and a bossa nova started playing. He stood up and did a few steps by himself, nodding. He had a little bristly mustache. He was good.

Lisa Rae took my arm and said, “Let’s go see what we can see.”

The dining room was the old-fashioned long kind, with sideboards. There was a sort of buffet laid out on the table, or what was left of one. Some of it looked like it had been there yesterday. We went out the French doors at the back and were on a flagstone patio around a big pool. Around it a few people were chatting listlessly, dressed all different ways. The pool was half-empty, the deep end full of black water and leaves. They’d set up a bar with a guy in a white coat next to the pool and put a record player on the diving board with an extension cord running back to the house. It was playing Chubby Checker and two couples were dancing down on the bottom of the pool at the shallow end, where it was dry. They didn’t seem to be having a big time. They looked like they were doing it so they could say they’d been to a dope party and danced in the pool. Lisa Rae and I got drinks and went through a door on the other side of the
pool to what must have been called the sun room. There was a piano there and a folding chair, and the guy in the folding chair was reading the paper. He didn’t look up. There were five bedrooms, three of them empty, one of them locked, and one full of reef smoke and a card game. They didn’t look up, either. In the corner there was a big circular tray of sugar cookies. Lisa Rae ate three with a look of great concentration.

“This is no good at all,” she said. “We’re just sailing through here like the Seventh Fleet, and much too nice dressed. Everybody just stops what they’re saying and watches us sail on by.”

“Let’s split up,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what we should do. I’ll go off somewhere and make all the men think I like them, and you go find some girls and make them think you like them. And we’ll meet back here around midnight and see what we’ve got.”

I said that sounded fine and she headed for the living room and I went out back to the pool. The party was beginning to pick up. I walked past Dorothy Tremaine and almost didn’t recognize her. She was wearing big black-framed glasses and a baggy black sweater and toreador pants. She played wisecracking secretaries and I was surprised how young she was. I didn’t try to talk to her. She looked like she thought she was incognito. I saw a driver I knew from Republic and we gave each other the raised eyebrows and then chatted awhile, but he was just there to drink and chase kittens, or so he said. I saw a couple more people about as well-known as Neale and Tremaine, and some players who were just half-familiar faces, but you couldn’t think what they’d done, and some gaudy specimens who must have been choreographers or designers, and some set dressers and grips and a couple guys who might’ve been artists, the new kind, that try to
look like dockworkers. People were beginning to get just-nicely, and I thought I might find a loose thread to pull on pretty soon if I kept my wits about me this time. I’d finished my drink, a short gin, and I thought I’d go fill the glass up with water somewhere so I’d look like I was still drinking. The kitchen wasn’t anyplace obvious, because when they built this house, that was somewhere only servants went, so I worked my way toward the back and finally found it past a maid’s room and a little swinging door. There was a woman in there wearing not much and holding a knife. “Do you want a sandwich,” she said.

I said I did.

Her face was broad across the brow and cheekbones, young and coarsely pretty, with a turned-up nose and fine-grained pink skin. She had a nice shape and plenty of it. In a few years she’d have more than she wanted. Her nails were gnawed short, with little bits of flaked-off red polish on them, and she wore a satin kimono patterned with dragons and gold clouds, which she wasn’t too fussy about keeping closed in front. There was a big stack of sandwiches at her elbow. She seemed to like making them. She didn’t offer me one of the sandwiches in the pile. She took a loaf and sawed off a couple fresh slices. She made them a little thicker than the others. She set them side by side like it was important where they went, then looked over the cheeses and meats she’d set out on the counter, knife poised, drumming the fingers of her plump left hand thoughtfully on the cutting board. “How’s Miss Godalmighty?” she said absently.