Shakedown (4 page)

I shook my head. “Pete Deutscher told me.”

Manny was leaning forward in his chair now. “I don’t believe it. I’d know if she was dead. I knew her for years. I know a lot of her friends. I’d know if she was dead.”

“All I know is what Pete told me. Cancer. You could ask Pete.”

“I’ll do that.” He stood up. “Target dead and Josie dead. Would that make you happy, Joe?”

“Why should it?”

“I don’t know. Except that Condor case smelled to high heaven.” He put his cigarette out in the ash tray on my desk. “I’ve always been a sort of friend of yours for some damned reason. But if I knew you had paid off Target and Josie, I’d really come for you, Joe. I met that Bea Condor once, and she didn’t look like any whore to me.”

“You can’t always tell in this town,” I said. “She had a lot of talent but it doesn’t necessarily follow she had much character.”

Manny said nothing. His dark face was rigid and the hand that crushed the cigarette was clenched tightly. He turned without looking at me, said, “See you” over his shoulder and went out without closing the door.

I wondered if it was Bea Condor he was thinking of, or Josie Gonzales. Manny isn’t usually grim.

I thought of McGill. He’d been a Bea Condor admirer, too, and when her despoiler had been cleared by a susceptible jury because of Target’s and Josie’s testimony, he’d been deeply shocked. And he must know something about my part in it. So why had he been so genial today? Waiting for me to slip, using honey instead of vinegar? He’d wait a long time.

I phoned Deutscher at his office and home, but didn’t get him. I wanted to tell him Manny was on the way.

At Herbie’s on Vine, I had a few cheese snacks and a couple drinks of rye and then I walked over to the Monterey Plaza. I bought a
Times
and settled down into a deep lobby chair.

Then the house detective, Art Gesler, came over to chin for a while, and time went by. And then a white-haired man in a beautiful blue gabardine suit was walking toward us across the lobby and I recognized Charles Adam Roland from the pictures I’d seen of him.

Gesler knew him and the three of us talked in the lobby for a few minutes.

When Gesler left us, Roland said, “Six years ago, he caught me trying to sneak out of this same hotel. You’d never know it by the way he acted tonight, would you?”

“Art Gesler’s got a lot of regard for wealth,” I said, “and you look wealthy tonight.”

“I’m solvent,” he said. “But we’re not wealthy
yet
, are we, Joe?”

He was quite a boy: that white silky hair and those dark blue eyes and a deep sincere voice that radiated good will, confidence, the fellowship of man.

He told me, “Willi might be hard to crack. It’s an axiom of my profession that the mark must have a larcenous soul. And she hasn’t. Willi’s all art and beauty. That’s why we need you.”

“Why? How?”

“You’re going to be the slant-head, the vulgar, stupid private investigator who Jean seems to be trusting too much. You’re the foil against which I will have to sparkle with my wit and urbanity. You’re the suspicious type and I’ll be the man with hope for the future, the forward thinker. Willi reads all the liberal magazines, all the arty magazines, the literary magazines. So you see what you should be to make her hate you.”

“A lowbrow? That’s easy.”

“No, a lower middlebrow, a pompous, opinionated ass.”

“I’ll study the part,” I said. “Though it’s more in Deutscher’s line.”

He chuckled. “Yes. Yes, indeed.”

An opening, so I widened it. “What is his part by the way? If he’s in for a cut, just what does he contribute?”

Charles Adam Roland’s fine forehead was creased in a frown. “I’ve been thinking along the same line. He wants to stay clear of everything that could nail him. He wants to be a sort of silent partner.”

“That’s the way he usually operates. But how did he get into the pitch?”

Roland looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Well, there was a client he had, to whom I was indebted.” He looked up and smiled. “I mean he had one of my marks for a client, and he found me for the mark.”

“And now he’s blackmailing himself into the big money?”

A pause while Roland looked thoughtful. “That puts it accurately enough.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m just a Johnny-come-lately in this deal, so maybe I’m not entitled to an opinion yet, but I can’t see him in this. Do we need him?”

Again Roland didn’t answer right away. Finally he smiled. “He serves no purpose in this pitch. But he does have connections; he’d be a hard man to shake. However, it’s a problem we can think about, isn’t it?”

I nodded. And then asked, “What do you think this Willi Clifford can be touched for?”

“That I’ve investigated. All I considered was her personal fortune, you understand, not her father’s. She has a little over three hundred thousand in cash and immediately negotiable securities and another half million in less fluid assets. She’s a really solvent mark, and Jean’s hold on her is tremendous.” He took a breath. “It is my opinion we can relieve her of nearly a quarter of a million.”

A
quarter of a million.
… I said, “And that would be cut four ways?”

“If Deutscher can’t be shaken, that would be cut four ways.”

He was smiling at me and I’d bet he thought he could read my mind. He probably thought I was trying to figure it as a three-way cut. But he’d be wrong on that.

I was thinking of how I could live on a quarter of a million dollars.

A
FTER DINNER WE WENT
out together, and he left me in front of the hotel with a firm handshake and another flash of that winning smile. At any rate, he thought he left me. My office parking lot was only a block away, and I had my Chev back on Sunset by the time his Cad pulled out of the hotel garage. I gave him a half block lead, and trailed him. I didn’t have far to go. He headed toward the Hollywood Hills section and stopped just short of that.

He stopped in front of Deutscher’s triplex, parking right behind Deutscher’s Plymouth. I drove by as he walked back along the walk toward Deutscher’s lighted apartment. They’d probably made the appointment before Roland met me. So Jean was right about them. A quarter of a million split down the middle is still a lot of money. And maybe Jean wouldn’t be hard to freeze out.

I went right home and phoned her. I told her about my talk with her dad and about my following him after the talk.

“There’s an off chance,” she said, “that it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Way off,” I guessed.

“Yes.” A pause. “What are you doing?”

“Sitting in front of the telephone. Why?”

“I’m bored. It’s such a beautiful clear night. I’d like to look at the ocean.”

“Where’s Willi?”

“Was that a crack?”

“No. I wondered.”

“She went to a concert in Santa Monica, a string quintette. Do you like string quintettes?”

“I never heard one. I guess not. Did you plan on my company to look at the moon over the water?”

“I was kind of hinting. I thought we could have a few drinks, too, at a place I know.”

“Gabby’s,” I guessed. “I’ve seen you there.”

“Mmm-hmm. And I’ve seen you there. Is it a date?”

“I’ll pay the tab,” I said, “but we’ll take your car. I’m trying to develop expensive tastes.”

I was waiting in front when she got there. She slid over and gestured for me to get in behind the wheel. Some heap that was, a hundred and eighty horse. Once we got beyond Beverly Hills, the traffic was light. I turned on the radio and lighted a cigarette, and just loafed along.

“Papa buy you this?” I asked her.

“No.”

“Willi?”

“Don’t be nasty. I was making eighteen hundred a week there for a while, Joe Puma.”

“Four years ago.”

Silence for a few minutes. Then as we left Brentwood she said, “You know you’re attractive to women, don’t you?”

“I’ve been told I am. Why? Do I attract you?”

“Too much. From the first time I saw you. Is it your size? I’ve seen handsomer men, dozens of them. I’ve been proposed to by handsomer men.”

“When you get your cut of that Clifford money, I’ll propose to you, too.”

“You dog. We could have fun though, Joe. If you were more—oh, sentimental—we could have a lot of fun.”

She had to make it romantic. Despite her background, her history and her full-bodied lust, she had to bury it in star dust. Like all women, she hated to face a fact.

I said, “Guys who scramble for a living aren’t inclined to be romantic or sentimental. Maybe if this pitch goes through, I can afford it. Your dad figures we could take the girl for a quarter of a million. That seems impossible to me.”

“He’s taken tougher marks for more.”

“He should be rich then.”

“None of them ever are. He gambles for one thing, and he gambles with people who make a business of it, the big money boys. Easy come, easy go.”

“Do you think he and Deutscher will double-cross us?”

“They might try. Of course, we can’t be sure why Dad went right from that dinner with you to Deutscher’s place. One thing you do have to remember, Dad’s first thought is himself. He’s always the number one boy in his own mind.”

“And he’ll be handling the money.”

“We’ll give that some thought when the time comes. Let’s not think of money tonight.”

Her perfume came to me as she slid closer in the seat. She put a hand on my knee. The radio gave with Goodman. Big moon in a clear sky; all the ingredients for romance were there. But I was thinking of a quarter of a million dollars.

Gabby’s is on a pier south of Malibu and it gets a lot of the middle-caste studio trade: starlets and fading stars, assistant producers and writers.

It seemed like everybody there knew Jean. We wound up at a big table in one corner with nobody I knew and only one face I recognized. The face belonged to a guy named Moose Jelko. He’d been a fair club fighter, and now he was a heavy in B pictures and a professional bar brawler.

The talk went around me, names I didn’t know in pictures I’d never heard of, gossip and laughs and the smell of expensive perfume through it all. I hit the bottle.

Then, around eleven o’clock, Jean went into the other room to dance with some gent, and Moose slid over into the chair she’d been occupying. He was about half drunk, and I was a little beyond that.

He said, “Hear you’ve been bothering a friend of mine.”

“Who’s that?”

“Phil Sloan.”

“Don’t know him.”

“Little Phil. Runs a cheap bar on Lincoln.”

“Oh,” I said. “How long have you known him?”

“He used to be one of my handlers when I was in the ring. Real nice guy.”

“Sure. What’s his tie-up with the Rickett frame?”

“Look, Puma, I didn’t slide over here to get questioned. I just wanted to give you a friendly word of advice. Lay off Little Phil!”

“Go away, tough guy,” Í told him. “I’ve seen you fight.”

I wasn’t being very bright. But I’d been more or less ignored all evening, which annoyed me, and then this ape comes over to flex his muscles.

He put on his B picture scowl. “Maybe you’d like to see me fight at real close range?”

“Go away,” I said and turned in my chair.

The back of his hand caught me heavily across my ear, and I lost my head. It was probably the liquor. I came up out of the chair, twisting to the right, and bringing my left hand in a stiff arc with the swing of my body.

I caught him flush on the mouth and felt the tooth snap, and saw the blood spurt from his upper lip. I came in on his left, crowding him, and heard the women screaming all over the joint. I shoved the top of my head right into his bleeding mouth and kneed him in the groin as his head slammed back.

Where he got the moxie for the single punch he threw, I’ll never know. He made it a good one, a bulls-eye. The last thing I heard before the curtain was the chair crashing under me.

When I came to, I was out on the pier and somebody was bathing my face with cool water. Overhead, I could see the windows of the barroom and people looking out at me.

It was Jean bathing my face. I groaned and sat up, and a man’s voice in the dimness to my right said, “Easy, Champ. He really connected with that Sunday punch.”

It was a fat little producer who’d been at our table.

Jean said, “What started it?”

“He made some slurring remarks about you.” Rattles in my head and I dug at the back of my neck. “I marked him though, didn’t I?”

“Marked him?” the producer said. “You remodeled his face. He’ll need caps for four teeth and I think his nose is broken.”

“That’s enough, Nick,” Jean said. “Please—” Her voice sounded faint and sick.

I put a hand down on the planking of the pier and got up slowly. There was a pain behind my eyes and an ache at the back of my neck. Jean had her arm around my waist, partly supporting me as I took a deep breath of the sea air. We started to walk down toward the shore end of the pier, and then I had to stop as my brain began to rattle. My right hand began to throb.

“For me,” she said. “You took those lumps for me.”

“He only hit me once. I brought you, baby, and I’ll defend your character any place.” We started to walk again.

She chuckled. “You’re a little late for that. I didn’t think a girl’s character meant anything to you.”

“What the hell kind of remark is that?”

We were at the end of the pier and heading for her car. She said quietly, “I was thinking of Bea Condor.”

She had the door of the car open now, holding it for me. She said, “I’ll drive.” Her eyes met my stare without interest.

I said, “What do you know about Bea Condor?”

“Don’t be silly, Joe. Half the movie people in town know all about that case. You paid off the stooges, didn’t you?”

I said, “That was Deutscher’s baby. I was just the leg man.”

“Oh,” she said. “Get in, honey. I’ll drive.”

“I’m not getting in until you understand that,” I said.

She looked at me steadily. “What difference does it make? I’m no angel, Joe.”

“If it didn’t make a difference to you, you wouldn’t have mentioned it. If we’re going to work together, we’ve got to have some regard for each other.”