The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (51 page)

Slabbe swore quietly but emphatically, jiggled the phone, gave a number and demanded of the female voice that answered: “Where’s Jake, Susie?”

“I don’t know, Benjie. Probably on a toot, the poor guy. Hasn’t been in since Monday afternoon.”

“ ’Cause why?”

“ ’Cause a client that was going to pay heavy got killed in that plane wreck Monday.”

“Who?”

“We-ell, it’s confidential.”

“Look, Susie kid, you know me. Tell me. There’s a guy dead over this, and if Jake hasn’t showed since Monday . . . well, you better tell me.”

“Benjie! You don’t think—”

“Talk, cookie.”

“Gee, yeah! Jake was working for Mr John Nola. He was tracing somebody for him for weeks. He had a big expense account and last week he was up to Lewisburg and said the job was practically cinched if his party showed up when he was sprung.”

“Did the party show? Was he about five-eight, light complected, a limp in the left leg?”

“
Yes!
He came to the office about three o’clock Monday afternoon and he saw Jake and went right out. Jake called him Lorenz. On the way out he whispered to me: ‘I’m taking him to Nola’s home and we collect.’ And about an hour later Mr Nola called and said Jake’s job was done and that he’d put a check for a thousand dollars in the mail next morning. I called around for Jake, caught him at Fudge Burke’s and told him. He said we’d celebrate that night, only a little later it came over the radio that Mr Nola was one of the passengers in the plane wreck and I guess when Jake heard that Nola had burned up and wouldn’t be putting the check in the mail after all, Jake got burned up, too, and . . . Ooo, I don’t mean it like it
sounds!
”

“Keep your snood on, honey. And I’ll call you back.”

Slabbe called seven numbers, said each time, “Seen Jake George?” and received four “Naws,” one negative grunt and two “No, dearies.” He called City Hall, reminded Carlin that this constituted cooperating with authority and relayed his information.

“We’ll put him on the air,” Carlin said. “What are you going to do?”

“See Fudge Burke,” Slabbe said and went there.

It was a block-long edifice which, besides serving as rendezvous and clearing house for the underworld, rendered various public services, starting with juke jive for the kiddies and working up to pool, bowling, bingo, a night spot complete with craps and roulette and geisha girls.

One wall of Fudge’s executive-type office on the third floor was slotted one-way glass overlooking the casino and bar. Slabbe handed over his compact .38 to an expert at the metal door and waded through the sponge-rubber-cushioned oriental rug, nodded genially to the candy man.

Fudge flapped a plump hand at one of the red leather club chairs. His dumpy body was a marshmallow. His face was a buttered bon-bon, topped with a puddle of chocolate syrup for hair. He said: “Trouble?”

Slabbe said, “Information.”

“Candy?” Fudge pushed a hammered copper dish an eighth of an inch toward Slabbe. “Drink?” He flapped a soft hand at his private bar. Slabbe looked over the bottles of various nectars and liqueurs, shook his grizzled head.

Fudge said: “Such as?”

“Max Lorenz,” Slabbe said. “Ex-con. See him here?”

The soft brown raisins of Fudge Burke’s eyes moved lovingly over the hammered copper dish. He selected a chocolate-covered cherry and nestled it in his cheek, sucked experimentally.

He said: “I don’t keep customers by advertising ’em.”

Slabbe agreed solemnly, but pointed out: “He’s cooked though, and that makes a difference. You can talk when they’re dead, can’t you?”

Fudge caressed the jowl that held the cherry. “I guess,” he said and spoke to the watcher on duty at the one-way glass. “Seen a Max Lorenz, Slip?”

Slip didn’t turn. “I’d say no even if I did, but I didn’t.”

“Know him?” Slabbe pressed.

“I would if I’d seen him here. Ten minutes after a stranger comes in down there, he ain’t a stranger or he ain’t in no longer. If he don’t make himself satisfactory, he goes out.”

Slabbe said to Fudge: “Slip isn’t on twenty-four hours. How about the other watchers? Maybe they saw Lorenz.”

“Charley’s sick and Slip and Dink Quint have been on alone for ten days,” Fudge said. “Dink’ll be here later. You can ask him.”

There was the sound of Slabbe’s hand sand-papering his gray-bristled jaw line. He said: “Tough about John Nola going in that plane crack-up, Monday.”

Fudge said delicately: “He was only one out of twenty-six. Why so tough about him?”

“Oh, prominent man and stuff,” Slabbe said. “His silk company gives work to about eighteen hundred men. Son a hero in the Pacific. Didn’t know Nola myself, did you?”

“To see,” Fudge yawned. “The hero pays his dues here regular. Blackjack and craps player. Can’t settle down, I guess, after what he went through. Maybe he’s here now. Is he, Slip?”

Slip didn’t turn. “Yeah. At the bar with that Reed biscuit. She’s a lotta woman, but built.”

Slabbe looked through the one-way glass at a couple half turned to face each other at the gleaming bar below. She was a lot of woman, he agreed. She was at least five feet eleven, a red-lipped brunette, an Amazon princess.

It was a job to look heroic beside her, but the livid scar on Prentice Nola’s right cheek and his fierce blue eyes and the combination of sun-whitened hair and black bushy beard got him by.

“Looks more than twenty-seven, don’t he?” Slip commented. “The beard hides all but that one scar. He was a pilot. He was strafing some Jappies on a move and cracked right up into them. Busted his legs but got a gun going and held ’em till his buddies come up. Nervous as hell. He can drink two bottles of Scotch and walk away from ’em. He just come from the old man’s funeral.”

“Never saw the girl before,” Slabbe decided.

“Her first time here was Saturday night,” Slip said. “She’s staying at the Carleton Arms, registered from New York City. She picked the hero up, only he thinks he picked her up. Watch when she turns her head.”

Slabbe watched, grunted. “What a beaut. Somebody must’ve hit that left eye with a roundhouse. She get it here?”

“G’wan, we don’t let stuff like that happen here. She come in with it Monday night, says she bumped into a something, but not a fist. Barney McPhail, the houseman at the Carleton Arms, says no commotion around her except wolves she brushes off like nothing. Ruby Reed. New York City. We don’t worry so much about babes as guys.”

Slabbe tongued his gum out of a cavity and got it going again, said, “Thanks,” and started for the door. Then he murmured: “Seen Jake George lately?”

Fudge Burke said: “Well, well. That’s what you want, eh?”

“Guess I wasn’t so cute,” Slabbe sighed.

The chocolate broke and Fudge tilted his head back to let the cherry syrup ooze down a favorite channel. He smacked his lips, started scouting for another cherry and said: “Tell you what, Slabbe, come back when Dink’s here. He saw Jake George. He’ll tell you all he knows. He’ll tell you when Jake was in last, what he ate and drank, who he went out with, what happened to him, all of it.”

Slabbe’s gray eyes were opaque. “Cooperation with a capital C. How come?”

For just a second Fudge’s candy-eaten teeth showed. Then he turned it into a grin and chuckle. “Well, like you said when you came in . . . when they’re dead you can talk.”

“Yeah.” Slabbe took a step, stopped. He did a double take. He licked his lips. “I heard it right, what you said?”

Fudge nodded.

“Then Jake’s dead?”

Fudge nodded again.

Slabbe took a breath. “What—”

Fudge flapped his hand at him. “Don’t heckle
me
. I told you Dink’ll tell you. He’ll be here at eight.”

Slabbe glanced at his railroader’s watch. It was three-thirty. “Eight o’clock, hell,” he growled. “Where’s Dink now?”

“Give ’em an inch and they want – Hell with it!” Fudge snapped. “Fairview Hotel.”

Halfway through the metal door Slabbe caught himself, held out his hand to the guard. “Gimme my gun back.”

Slabbe got out of the elevator in the casino and headed for the bar. At three-thirty in the afternoon a mere handful of fifty-odd citizens were anaesthetizing themselves. Slabbe jostled a half-dozen aside and came up beside Prentice Nola’s football shoulders.

He said: “You’re in a mood, Mr Nola, but this is important. Can I talk to you?”

The flick of the blue eyes was sharp enough to shave with, then dull. “A character,” Prentice Nola said to his and Ruby Reed’s reflections in the bar mirror. “A little man mountain who says I’m in a mood.” He sipped his Scotch and soda. “Take off.”

“I like Fred Allen, personally,” Slabbe said. “But you’re funny, too. So are dead men. So is life. So’s your old man.”

He moved back from the bar, fast, behind Nola. His hands made clamps on Nola’s biceps, which were hard-packed as cables. It looked like a friendly gesture, but Nola couldn’t move. Slabbe was set in case the bearded youngster put a knee against the bar and heaved backwards, but it didn’t happen.

Nola said: “The longer you hold me, the harder I’ll hit you when you let go.”

“I take it back about your old man. It slipped,” Slabbe said. He looked at Ruby Reed. She was ready for something but waiting for the right spot. “Talk to him,” Slabbe told her. “This is kid stuff. Two guys are dead so far. I’m a private dick.”

Ruby’s lips, red as red, parted ever so slightly. “It’s absurd, Prentice, but let’s not have a scene.”

“OK?” Slabbe asked Nola.

Some of the tension went out of Nola’s arms. “Let me drink,” he said. Slabbe let him, waiting, then moved back alongside him on the left. The purple mouse on Ruby’s left eye was several days old but still something to behold.

Nola said: “Spit it out. I’m still in that mood.”

Slabbe nodded. “Your father hired a detective named Jake George. Maybe you know why.”

“I don’t.”

“Ever hear of Max Lorenz?”

“No.”

“OK. I’ll be seeing you.”

Nola’s hand was the clamp this time, on Slabbe’s right wrist, “No, you don’t, big boy.”

Slabbe started to use the necessary twist and foot-pounds to release his wrist without quite fracturing Nola’s thumb, then stopped. The reason he stopped had nothing to do with the ex-pilot, it had to do with Ruby Reed. Her perfectly madeup face, stark white against the contrast of her upswept ebony hair, was showing no expression whatever – which was, of course, the giveaway.

Nola was saying: “I didn’t pull my weight while the old man was alive, but maybe this did something to me. Maybe I’m interested in something – for the first time since they invalided me out.”

Slabbe mumbled something, stared into the bar mirror. Ruby’s green eyes were on him. Her lips moved, formed the words, “See me later.” Slabbe winked into the mirror.

Prentice Nola snapped: “Why would my father have employed a detective?”

“That’s what I asked you,” Slabbe said. “Would I ask what I know?”

Nola’s blue eyes burned at him. Softly, he said: “Men ask what they know to find out if anybody else knows. Especially dicks, big boy.”

“Not this trip, junior,” Slabbe said easily. “How close were you to your father?”

“None of your damn business, big boy.”

“I can find out somewhere else.”

“I’m scared.”

Slabbe grimaced. “We should have a camera and sound truck. About here the director would say, ‘Cut.’ Let go of my wrist and get back on your bottle. Put milk in it. That’s for babies.”

Nola began to breathe the least bit deeper. The pupils of his eyes got small. Almost delicately, he released Slabbe’s wrist, slid off the barstool.

Slabbe warned: “Five bouncers will be on top of us.”

Ruby said huskily: “Prentice, stop!”

The words were repeated, and in a female voice, but not Ruby’s. In a tinkling voice, a voice clear as tiny bells in a fine Swiss watch. “Prentice, stop that!” it said.

Prentice winced, looked over his shoulder as if there might be a chance he was hearing things, saw that he wasn’t and moaned softly: “Good Lord, Aunt Serena, why didn’t you bring the servants too?”

“Don’t be rude, Prentice.” The tinkling voice had the clarity of ice, now. “I’m sure this is a charming place to mourn your father, but you’re coming home.”

Slabbe looked at her. Her ancient, rustling black taffeta with lace at the throat suggested another century. Her white hair under its black bonnet might have been a powdered wig. Her companions might have been a retinue of lady-in-waiting and footmen. They were instead a little-girl-sized ash-blonde, a slender, tired-faced young man and a brute in chauffeur’s livery.

The latter just stood there, yellow-flecked hazel eyes alert. The tired-faced young man put a hand on Prentice Nola’s shoulder, said, “Come on, chum,” and then saw Ruby Reed’s green eyes gleaming on him and was done for – literally. His thin, high-cheekboned face was no longer merely tired – it was dead.

“Prentice is so confused,” murmured the ash-blonde. “I know how he feels, I had nothing to live for, either, till Bill came.” Her soft gray eyes went to the dead-faced young man.

Prentice mocked: “My Lord, sweetness and light at Fudge Burke’s.”

“Shut up, Prentice,” ordered the tinkling voice. “Don’t be sentimental, Ione,” it told the blonde. “Start him moving, William,” it prodded the object of Ruby’s predatory gleam – not missing it at all.

It was then Slabbe’s turn. “May I ask who you are?” the old woman murmured. “You were about to fight with Prentice, weren’t you? You’d make mincemeat of him.”

Slabbe tongued his chewing gum into a cavity, suspecting that it would offend. “I’m a private detective, ma’am. Benjamin Slabbe.”

“Indeed. Prentice isn’t involved with the law? He became intoxicated one night and forged his father’s name to a check, but that was settled in the family, and he didn’t do it again.”

Prentice snarled: “Thank you, Aunt Serena!”

“Tchah! You can’t keep things from detectives, you jackanapes.” Her eyes were black moist olives, thirty years younger than the rest of her. She said to Slabbe: “I am Serena Yates, John Nola’s wife’s sister. You know Prentice. This is Ione Nola and William Teel, her fiancé. We’ve just buried John. We think Prentice should come home with us for the afternoon, at least. You’re not arresting him?”