Shakedown (6 page)

“I try to be a gentleman,” I agreed. “It’s—difficult in this business, but I never forget I came from a good family. But if you were arrested, and they tortured you—” I shrugged.

“Torture—?” she whispered, her liquid eyes seeming to brim over. “They would torture—?”

“Haven’t you been reading in the papers about police brutality? City-fed storm troopers, that’s all, Josie. But I was thinking, it was really Deutscher who arranged for the money to pay you. You wouldn’t be lying if you told the police Deutscher paid you directly. I mean if they should torture you for information. If you claimed you never saw me, I’d back you up all the way, kid.”

She smiled. “Yes. Yes, I see. And then
he
would be in trouble.”

“A lot of trouble.”

She frowned. “But so would I.”

“You could say he threatened you. He did later, remember. And there’s a man down at Headquarters who would take it easy on you if he could nail Deutscher through you. A big man, a Captain of detectives.”

She nodded, her gaze steady on my face. “I see, I see. It
was
Peter who paid me.”

“Sure it was. That’s no lie. Josie, couldn’t you go back to working alone? Isn’t there more money in that?”

“There is no protection in working alone. With Al, I had protection and in the house, we have it, but not alone.”

I thought of Jean. And then I thought of Josie and though it wasn’t an easy topic, I voiced it. “Josie, when you came in, under the perfume, as strong as the perfume, I smelled your body. That’s no good in your business, you know.”

She nodded sadly. “I know. In this house where I work, there is only one tub and never any hot water. It is a place for laborers and they are not fussy.”

“I see. Well, while you’re here, why don’t you use my shower? I want to think about you anyway. I might be able to get you into a better position.”

She looked at me doubtfully.

I said, “The bathroom door locks from the inside, Josie.”

“All right,” she said. “It’s kind of you.”

Luckily, I had some clean towels and there was a woman’s terry cloth beach robe that had been in the closet for months. I gave her that and told her I’d make some coffee. Then I sat down and thought about Josie Gonzales. In relation to Deutscher, to Albert Target, to Bea Condor. And most of all, in relation to me.

When she came out, the coffee was done. The robe was tight on her and her full body firmly outlined. She smiled at me, and her face looked fresher, cleaner, younger.

In the kitchen, she sat across the table from me and I poured her coffee. I asked, “Keep you pretty busy, do they, in that house?”

“On Friday,” she answered. “It’s near Lockhart in Santa Monica, and Friday is payday.”

“It must be rough. Would you like a little—vacation from it?”

She looked at me curiously.

“I’m sure,” I told her, “I could get you on the list of a friend of mine with high class clients. He could get you out of town, too. But it might take a few days. You could stay here.”

She smiled.

“You’ll be safe,” I said. “I’m not Deutscher, Josie. If I had the money, I’d get you a hotel room but I’m broke right now. If you expect to get on my friend’s list, you’ll need some better clothes. I have a lady friend who might help there.”

She nodded. “I trust you, Joe. You want to help me, don’t you?”

“That’s exactly it.”

There was a cleaner fragrance in the air, my pine toilet water. The girl had taken my advice to heart.

She asked, “Could I wear this robe until I can wash my old things? I feel so clean.”

“You can have the robe,” I told her. “The girl who owned it doesn’t like me any more.”

“I like you,” she said.

I smiled at her, and winked. And went over to put some records on the player, turning the volume way down. The house was quiet except for the low music, but I felt a tension. Josie had some figure, a real womanly figure.

She asked, “Don’t you have to go to work?”

“No, I’m not on a case right now. I think I’ll take a shower, Josie. If you want to wash your clothes, there’s a tub on the service porch and some soap flakes.”

“All right,” she said. Her smile seemed to fill the room, to envelop me.

Maybe if I stayed under the shower long enough … But I’d forgotten if it was a cold or warm shower that did the trick. She had probably been had by every A and B assembler at Lockhart. What in hell was happening to my taste?

Hot water and then cold and then warm. I came out more or less at ease and opened the small window at the rear of the bathroom to get some of the steam out.

Josie had washed her cotton dress and her underthings and was hanging them on the line. She looked real domestic, flanked by the geraniums, wearing the terry cloth robe. She could have been somebody’s wife and maybe a good one. She could have been somebody’s wife in the wrong part of Santa Monica, in one of those leaning hovels with the weed-filled yard. And a houseful of kids, old at thirty and aged at forty. Maybe she was smarter to stick to her trade with a name like Gonzales.

I put on a robe and went into the living room to turn over the stack of records. The bed was still down, but the sheets had been smoothed. I sat in the living room, smoking a cigarette and feeling the need of a drink. Then I remembered there was some rye in the kitchen cupboard and an unopened bottle of seltzer.

Josie was on the service porch, right off the kitchenette, rinsing out the tub. I asked her, “Like a drink?”

“I would, please.” That all-embracing smile.

My mind began to hammer with images and I spilled some of the liquor and knocked over a glass.

Josie looked up at the clink of it and then looked at me and smiled. “I don’t feel about you like I did about Deutscher, Joe. And I am washed, now.”

What was her angle? Professionals don’t usually talk like that.

She came into the kitchen, and I handed her her drink and lifted mine. “To our success,” I said.

The ice clinked in her glass as she lifted it and the soft fragrance of pine came to me. The V of the robe parted and the inner swelling of both her full breasts peeped out at me.

I said calmly, “This man I know has some very wealthy customers in Phoenix and Houston, Josie. It will take some body to get by with that kind of trade.”

She smiled again and set down her drink. She said, “Is this a beautiful body, Joe?”

In one motion, she slipped the robe to the floor and her smooth olive body was in full view. Full but firm breasts, the brown nipples erect and taut. Deep, smoothly molded hips merging into the flowing lines of her thighs. Rounded knees and slim calves and healthy, straight-toed feet. A body designed for the uses to which it was being put, but deserving a better league.

“It’s too good a body to waste, isn’t it, Joe?” she asked. “Why are we wasting it now?”

I reached for her and drew her close.

Spent, gone, in a subdued world.

“You are all man, Joe.”

“So I’ve been told. And you are all woman, Josie. What sent you to me?”

“A long time ago a friend of mine told me that if I ever wanted to get something on Deutscher, I should come to you.”

“A friend? Who?”

“A policeman friend. I have known him for years. Manuel Rodriguez.”

The only sound in the room was the soft tone of the record player. I said carefully, “I didn’t think you’d have police friends, Josie. Did you ever tell Manny about my paying you that time?”

“Of course not, Joe. Manuel is a policeman. My friend, but still a policeman. I tell them nothing. At thirteen I learned that.” She sat up. “Could we have another drink?”

I put on a robe and we went out into the kitchen. There she told me,
“Nobody
will
ever
learn that you paid me.”

It seemed like a good time to get my scheme into gear, so I said, “That would protect me. But how about you, Josie?”

She shrugged.

I said, “I know a way but I want to work out the details. I want you to write a letter to Deutscher saying that he paid you to testify for Rickett in the Condor case, but now you think he didn’t pay you enough. And that if he doesn’t pay you more, a friend of yours is going to kill him, a friend of yours from Mexico. And that the police will never catch you or your friend, because he has a hideaway in Mexico. Would you write a letter like that? I’d deliver it. I could send you the money if you get the job in Phoenix.”

She nodded. “Would it scare him, though?”

“It would. He was knifed once by a Mexican hot-rodder and he’s scared to death of knives.”

“You tell me how,” she said, “and I will write it.”

I worded it first, trying to make it sound primitive and desperate. I mentioned the time Josie had spent with Deutscher and that she figured he owed her money for that too. I crossed out and re-wrote until it looked authentic.

Then I had her copy it and write out his name and address on an envelope in her rounded, childish script. This puzzled her.

“Aren’t you going to deliver it personally, Joe?”

I nodded. “Of course. And I’m going to get it back when he pays. But if it’s in an envelope, I can tell him that you were going to mail it, and that I talked you out of it and suggested I try and make a deal that would satisfy you both. That way Deutscher will think that I’m trying to save him money. And you’ll have me as a witness if he tries to come back at you. I’d lie for you any time, Josie, just as you’d lie for me. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

She nodded. “You’re one of my best friends, Joe.” She finished the writing and stood up. “Would you like some enchiladas? I’m hungry, aren’t you?”

“There isn’t much to eat in the place,” I said. “But there’s a super market about two blocks down the street. Do you want to do the shopping?”

“As soon as my clothes are dry. It shouldn’t take long in that sun.”

While she waited for the clothes to dry, she cleaned up the joint, scrubbing the kitchen floor, dusting all the Venetian blinds, running the wheezy vacuum cleaner over the living room rug. Deutscher should see this girl he’d called dead.

She was at the store when my phone rang. It was Jean. “I’m calling from the booth in the lobby, Joe. How are you feeling?”

“Back to normal. How do things look at your end?”

“Moving right along. I told Willi about last night and your fight. She’s already beginning to picture you as a vulgar monster. And dad has mentioned the Nevada Investment Company and accused me, in front of her, of having
you
investigate
him.”

“Great,” I said. “I’ll spend the rest of the day looking at new Cadillacs.”

She chuckled. “Don’t make a down payment yet.” Silence. “And be good, you slob.”

“I’ll try. See you tonight?”

“No, Willi’s having some people in.”

“Oh, that reminds me, have you some old clothes you want to give away? I’ve a poor girl coming to see me who needs some clothes for a job she wants to get.”

“Is she tall, my size?”

“No, I guess she’d be shorter than you.”

“I’ll get some of Willi’s, though they’re mostly tailored things. Tomorrow morning be all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

“I’ll be there. This I want to see, Joe Puma being charitable. I want to see why.”

It was a fine dinner Josie made, enchiladas and fried beans with lettuce and cold beer. She watched me take the first bite, anxious for my reaction, so damned eager to please.

“Great,” I said. “Perfect.”

That held her for the rest of the meal.

I didn’t want to sit around here with her any more than I had to. Deutscher or Manny might drop in, or even Jean. We went to a drive-in movie to kill the rest of the evening.

I slept like a man on a payroll and wakened to the smell of coffee, to the sight of Josie in the robe, standing next to the bed.

“Eggs?” she asked. “Bacon? Toast?”

“Right, Mrs. Puma.”

Color flooded her face and she went back to the kitchen. Sensitive? The damndest people are.

She was quiet at breakfast, her eyes avoiding mine while she served me.

For dialogue I said, “How come you never married, Josie?”

“I was married. At fifteen. He was killed in Germany, in the war.” She lifted her chin. “In the infantry, he was, a scout.”

“Oh. It’s a nasty world, Josie.”

Her chin was still up. “It doesn’t have to be, does it?”

“As long as there are people in it.”

She shook her head. “People I can’t always understand. You I can’t understand.”

“Why not?”

“You seem so kind. You help me. You seem so nice.”

I smiled. “Maybe I am kind and nice.”

She shook her head. “I think about that girl. I saw her pictures. She was a good girl, I know, and clean.”

Here we go again … I took a breath. “Do you mean Bea Condor?”

She nodded, and her eyes avoided mine again.

“I didn’t kill her, Josie.”

“No, but you saw that her killer went free.”

“The doctor? He’s in the clink right now.”

“The producer, I meant. The man who injured her.”

I waited until her gaze met mine and said, “You testified that he didn’t injure her.”

“You think I’ll ever forget that?”

“You can forget it, now. Because the producer’s going to the gas chamber anyway.”

“I know. I saw the papers. But it doesn’t change my lie.”

“Josie,” I said firmly, “you didn’t kill the movie girl. And the man who did is going to die. Maybe God wanted it that way. Maybe he wanted to kill Al, too.”

She looked at me gravely. “Your father, I’ve heard, was a good man. He did a lot for my people.”

“And died young and poor.”

“But good. What else matters?”

“It matters to me,” I said. “I want to die old and rich.”

She looked at me sadly. “Joseph, Joseph—”

Little Christian lectures over the breakfast table from a whore. She and Jean must have the same idea: adultery was no sin. Stealing and lying and all the rest were sins, but not adultery.

They all gave me a pain in the butt. All of them after the big buck, but the respectable ones did it the legal way, charging working stiffs thirty-five percent interest on cars and television sets they couldn’t afford in the first place. And going to church every Sunday, making a big thing of dropping a fin in the collection plate.