Driving back to the east side of town Collins was so agitated I was beginning to think some of the effects of those months on Hycodan might be permanent. He blamed me for Park’s defection, and all the way out there he grumbled about how I was a shit excuse for a driver and no bodyguard at all.
“And Huff isn’t supposed to be dead, he’s supposed to be working for us now,” he said.
I reminded him that he’d signed off on the plan, that he’d been delighted to see the incriminating photograph.
“Doesn’t matter. Now I’ve got to go to the goddamn funeral and act like I’m sorry the son of a bitch is dead. And I still don’t know how the board’s going to vote. He didn’t have a vote, you know.”
“I know.”
“Shit, who knows if he could have changed any of theirs.”
“There are still ways of influencing votes.”
“How? You going to dig up the goods on the whole board? In a week’s time?”
“I’m working on it.”
SINCE HE LEFT no note there was no proof Huff had put out his own lights, so he got a funeral mass at St. Bridget’s of Galway. The large crowd was a testament to the popularity Minnie Grau had spoken of, and I was surprised to see that the officiating priest was none other than my old childhood pal Joe McGill. I hadn’t seen him since before the war and though he’d grown a little rounder and slightly bald, there was still a childish air about him, as though he were merely posing as a priest and terrified someone was going to catch him out in his masquerade.
Huff’s sons sat with their mother, the youngest one crying silently and the older ones ranging in aspect from sullen anger to shell shock. They looked like fine boys, and I was proud to have spared them the discovery of the eight-by-ten. The newly minted widow was surprisingly attractive, younger looking in person than in the family photographs hanging in her upstairs hallway; perhaps a rejuvenating effect of the dark veil. She had nice legs, tapering down to a pair of heels that, even in black, were perhaps a little high for a funeral. Dr. Freud would have said she was sending out a subconscious signal, seeking some of the sexual attention she had certainly been missing for the last few years, and I wondered what Emily Post had to say about how soon after a funeral it was proper to proposition a widow.
In the audience I spotted several board members, including Lamarr, Burress, and Latham. A well-lobbed grenade would have taken care of our problems right then and there, and I felt a pang of nostalgia for my quartermaster days. If they’d been a trio of inconvenient bird colonels back in the European Theater of Operations it would have happened, though not without some complications for your trusty supply sarge. Ordinance, of course, was the trickiest item in a black marketeer’s inventory, since it was more strictly accounted for than morphine or liquor, and since the QM Corps didn’t handle it ourselves a dangerous bargain would have to be made, but for those three turdapples I would have pulled it off.
Lamarr squirmed in his pew like a man infested with a crippling dose of the crabs, his eyes bulging and wild, forehead glistening with sweat, the inch-thick layer of suet beneath his skin turning it the color of clotted cream. His demure, pretty wife sat next to him with her gloved hands in her lap and ignored him, never guessing how lucky she was to be married to a banker and not an army officer.
Collins sat toward the front, looking solemn next to Mrs. Collins, who looked the way I imagined she always must have in church: deep in contemplation of the divine mysteries of creation, first and foremost among these being why a just God would unite indivisibly one of his most pious and chaste creations with a syphilitic, drunken, promiscuous heathen of a husband.
Toward the back sat Millie Grau, wiping her eye with the corner of a handkerchief. To her left was a stiff with a clerical collar and slick blond hair, arms folded across his chest and avoiding her touch so scrupulously that I knew it was Donald. He looked as though the sound of the Latin mass and its attendant papist pageantry was tormenting his Lutheran soul to the point of distraction, and at several points in the proceedings I saw him blow out exasperated sighs.
The sound of Joe’s Latin didn’t suit me, either, though for different reasons. Having been raised by a classics scholar and freethinker I had rarely ever had occasion to hear church in Latin, and my old pal’s pronunciations sounded outright wrong to my ears. This was unfortunate, because it inspired an inappropriate urge to laugh, and I forced myself to conjugate verbs in Greek in order to drive the other language from the forefront of my mind. I hoped the concentration on my face read to my fellow mourners as pained supplication for the safe passage of Huff’s soul heavenward.
J.T. Burress stood up in the middle of the proceedings and headed for the rear. I followed him, having paid all the respects I considered due. Outside Burress stood smoking a cigarette and looking agitated. He must have flown in from New York, and I didn’t imagine he was happy about the prospect of two airplane trips to Wichita inside of a month. His suit was too heavy for a Kansas day in May, and he looked like he was about to drop. He had on the only pair of pincenez glasses I’d seen in years, and he glanced over at me as though trying to place me. Most likely he’d seen my picture in whatever reports he’d been getting from Huff or Lamarr or Latham, whichever of them had been doing the grunt work in the effort to oust the boss and me.
“Heck of a thing, isn’t it?” I said as I approached.
“Certainly is. Man in his prime like that.” He hawked up a little bit of phlegm and, after a moment’s silent debate, swallowed rather than spit on the church steps in front of the hearse driver and some stranger.
“Wonder what made him do it?”
“It was an accident. If it weren’t we wouldn’t be standing outside a Catholic church, I’ll tell you that.” He looked away, turning slightly so that there could be no mistaking his intentions. The conversation was over. Maybe he’d figured out who I was, or maybe he just didn’t like my looks, or maybe it was the shit-eating dopey grin I’d put on for his benefit.
Old J.T. had been a friend of Collins’s since the founding of the company, one of the first financiers to put money into the enterprise, and I almost admired the sangfroid with which he’d turned on his old pal. He looked like he hadn’t taken a good dump in years, like he was just counting the days until he was laid out like Huff, like the only joys he had left were screwing over friends and attending funerals.
DINNER THAT NIGHT was another abomination from a ladies’ magazine, involving a can of cream of mushroom soup, some undercooked potatoes, and a very bad cut of beef boiled into tastelessness, the whole thing seasoned with a great deal of salt. I suspected my dear wife of improvisation, since no sane editor could have allowed such a recipe into print as she had prepared it. I ate about a third of it like a soldier, avoiding the hardest of the potato chunks and complimenting her resourcefulness. When I was done she looked defeated and small, and I assured her it had been delicious. “I’ve got to take the old man out to a roadhouse later,” I said.
“How come he can’t drive himself?”
“Because he gets drunk when he goes out, and if he got killed I’d be out of a swell job.”
“How come somebody else can’t drive him?” she wanted to know.
It was a good question, especially since I wasn’t really driving the old man around that night, having managed to pawn the job temporarily off on the equally heavy-drinking Rackey. Probably Collins would have been better off driving his own car, but I wasn’t worried about that tonight.
“It’s just until we hire a new bodyguard. And I’ll be home as early as I can.”
She pouted, and I couldn’t get a kiss out of her as I left. That was all right; if she was mad she wouldn’t wait up.
I DROVE DOWNTOWN and met Irma and Wageknecht at the Bellflower Café and ordered some chop suey to make up for Sally’s inedible meal. The chop suey was lousy as ever, but by comparison it went down pretty well.
“It’s real white of you to call me in on this,” Wageknecht said.
“The old man promised you you’d get first crack at anything like this, and he keeps his word.”
“I been thinking maybe I could get me a license and do this kind of work full time,” he said. He looked at Irma. “Maybe you could be my gal Friday.”
“Nice try, I’d rather earn my money on my back than sitting in front of a typewriter all day.” She ground her cigarette into the ashtray and gave a little snort.
“Then you could be my partner. Like Myrna Loy and William Powell.”
“Sure, only difference is Powell’s not fucking her, he’s chasing Cary Grant instead.”
I was quiet, wolfing down the chop suey. I signaled the girl to bring me another plate of it while they mapped out their new careers. Finally I stopped eating for a minute and added my two cents.
“I don’t know shit about the detective business, but you could sure make some money taking dirty pictures. Nester could find some way to distribute them through the mail.”
They looked at one another and nodded slowly at the wisdom of my suggestion, scenarios brewing independently in their heads and growing into the seeds of a new enterprise, the future source of a million lonesome orgasms all across this land. I felt like I’d done them a favor, getting them off of this detective nonsense, which was a sure-fire waste of time and energy.
“All right then. You brought the 35 millimeter job?” I asked Wageknecht.
“Brought the Speed Graphic with a flashgun. I figure if you mostly want to intimidate this guy, the Speed Graphic is a scarier camera.”
“Good thinking. The picture will be better, too, if we actually have to use it, which I very much doubt. Are we all ready, then? Everybody know their part?”
IT WAS NEARLY ten thirty when we walked two blocks down to the Eaton, where Burress had a top floor suite. That made it eleven thirty Eastern time, and I assumed that Burress kept conservative hours. Jerry the hotel dick was waiting for us by the kitchen entrance, and when I handed him his envelope full of cash he grinned. “You’re trouble, Ogden, but I like your style. Always a little something extra.”
We went up the service elevator and Wageknecht and I waited outside in the corridor while Jerry quietly opened the door to the suite and let Irma in. Then he went back down the service elevator, pausing to give a jaunty little salute as the doors closed. Strictly speaking I shouldn’t have been on the scene, but I had to see the look on the smug son of a bitch’s face when he realized the game was up.
Two minutes later Irma gave the signal, an eardrum-crippling whistle of the two-fingers-in-the-mouth variety, a skill I’d never mastered myself. We hurried in to find a bewildered J. T. Burress on the floor of the bedroom in his nightshirt, straddled by Irma, who wore only bra, panties, and black stockings.
“Say ‘cheese,’” Wagknecht said, just to be an asshole, and he took the picture, the bulb in the flash gun exploding a little louder than seemed right. Burress was looking at me, and there was a dim sort of recognition in his eyes.
“You were . . . ” he said, pointing his finger at my face, “I saw you today . . . ” With that his eyes went wild and he yelped in pain.
“Oh, shit,” Irma said. “I’ve been around for this before.”
She picked up the phone and dialed. “Jerry, you’d better call an ambulance, there’s a guy up here having a heart attack.”
I drove them over to Norman’s. He was drinking alone and glad to have some company. Irma and Wageknecht were both in a funk, and once he’d heard the story Norman tried to cheer them up.
“You did good, it sounds like to me,” he said.
“That’s the way I see it,” I said. “If he lives, we’ve got a hell of a picture to send him. If he doesn’t, the problem’s solved a different way.”
Wageknecht wasn’t sold on it. “I don’t think I’m cut out for the detective business, if everyone I tail ends up dying.”
“It’s just two of them, and we don’t even know about Burress yet.”
Irma was quiet, and kept handing her glass back to Norman for more. “I kinda like the old guys. They’re generous.”
“Not this one, I’ll bet. He’s a goddamn banker, probably keeps his own dough stuffed inside his mattress.”
Norman perked up at the news that Irma liked old guys. “You know, one thing about us old guys is, we take our time and don’t jizz quite so quick as all that.” Irma and Wageknecht looked at one another, eyebrows raised.
During the solitary portion of his evening Norman had gotten a pretty serious head start on his drinking, and he wasn’t doing a very good job concealing his devotion to his new friend Irma. He was wobbling a little bit even in his sitting position, and when he got up to open a new bottle he had to lean against the wall on his way across the room. Upon his return he refreshed Irma’s glass first, and then knelt in front of her as if to propose marriage, which wouldn’t have surprised me at that point.
“Do you know that you bear a very strong resemblance to the motion picture performer and artiste . . . ” Here he had to stop and collect his thoughts momentarily. “ . . . Miss Joan Blondell, whom I consider to be the most sweet and attractive of all the stars in . . . ” Another pause came, and he closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “ . . . all Hollywood’s firmament?” This last word came at a cost of some effort, but he added no extra syllables and seemed quite pleased with himself once he’d finished.