In the course of that particular investigation (Peoria Smith, not Harris Brunner and Mavis Weld), I even found out the kid’s real name, although wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of me. Peoria’s father took a permanent coffee-break out a ninth-floor office window on Black Friday, his mother’s the only white frail working in that goofy Chinese laundry down on La Punta, and the kid’s blind. With all that, does the world need to know they hung Francis on him when he was too young to fight back? The defense rests.
If anything really juicy happened the night before, you almost always find it on the front page of the Times, left side, just below the fold. I turned the newspaper over and saw that a bandleader of the Cuban persuasion had suffered a heart attack while dancing with his female vocalist at The Carousel in Burbank. He died an hour later at LA General. I had some sympathy for the maestro’s widow, but none for the man himself. My opinion is that people who go dancing in Burbank deserve what they get.
I opened to the sports section to see how Brooklyn had done in their doubleheader with the Cards the day before. ‘How about you, Peoria? Everyone holding their own in your castle? Moats and battlements all in good repair?’
‘I’ll say, Mr. Umney! Oh, boy!’
Something in his voice caught my attention, and I lowered the paper to take a closer look at him. When I did, I saw what a gilt-edged shamus like me should have seen right away: the kid was all but busting with happiness.
‘You look like somebody just gave you six tickets to the first game of the World Series,’ I said.
‘What’s the buzz, Peoria?’
‘My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana!’ he said. ‘Forty thousand bucks! We’re rich, brother!
Rich! ‘
I gave him a grin he couldn’t see and ruffled his hair. It popped his cowlick up, but what the hell. ‘Whoa, hold the phone. How old are you, Peoria?’
‘Twelve in May. You know that, Mr. Umney, you gave me a polo-shirt. But I don’t see what that has to do with — ‘
‘Twelve’s old enough to know that sometimes people get what they want to happen mixed up with what actually does happen. That’s all I meant.’
‘If you’re talkin about daydreams, you’re right — I do know all about em,’ Peoria said, running his hands over the back of his head in an effort to make his cowlick lie down again, ‘but this ain’t no daydream, Mr. Umney. It’s real! My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest’y afternoon. He brought it back in the saddlebag of his Vinnie! I smelled it! Hell, I rolled in it! It was spread all over my mom’s bed! Richest feeling I ever had, let me tell you — forty-froggin-thousand smackers!’
‘Twelve may be old enough to know the difference between daydreams and what’s real, but it’s not old enough for that kind of talk,’ I said. It sounded good — I’m sure the Legion of Decency would have approved two thousand per cent — but my mouth was running on automatic pilot, and I barely heard what was coming out of it. I was too busy trying to get my brain wrapped around what he’d just told me. Of one thing I was absolutely positive: he’d made a mistake. He must have made a mistake, because if it was true, then Peoria wouldn’t be standing here anymore when I came by on my way to my office in the Fulwider Building. And that just couldn’t be.
I found my mind returning to the Demmicks, who for the first time in recorded history hadn’t played any of their big-band records at full volume before retiring, and to Buster, who for the first time in recorded history hadn’t greeted the sound of George’s latchkey turning in the lock with a fusillade of barks. The thought that something was off-kilter returned, and it was stronger this time.
Meanwhile, Peoria was looking at me with an expression I’d never expected to see on his honest, open face: sulky irritation mixed with exasperated humor. It was the way a kid looks at a windbag uncle who’s told all his stories, even the boring ones, three or four times.
‘Ain’t you picking up on this newsflash, Mr. Umney? We’re rich! My mom ain’t going to have to press shirts for that damned old Lee Ho anymore, and I ain’t going to have to sell papers on the corner anymore, shiverin when it rains in the winter and havin to suck up to those nutty old bags who work down at Bilder’s. I can quit actin like I died and went to heaven every time some blowhard leaves me a nickel tip.’
I started a little at that, but what the hell — I wasn’t a nickel man. I left Peoria seven cents, day in and day out. Unless I was too broke to afford it, of course, but in my business an occasional stony stretch comes with the territory.
‘Maybe we ought to go up to Blondie’s and have a cup of java,’ I said. ‘Talk this thing over.’
‘Can’t. It’s closed.’
‘ Blondie’s? The hell you say!’
But Peoria couldn’t be bothered with such mundane stuff as the coffee shop up the street. ‘You ain’t heard the best, Mr. Umney! My Uncle Fred knows a doctor up in Frisco — a specialist —
who thinks he can do something about my eyes.’ He turned his face up to mine. Below the cheaters and his too-thin nose, his lips were trembling. ‘He says it might not be the optic nerves after all, and if it’s not, there’s an operation . . . I don’t understand all the technical stuff, but I could see again, Mr. Umney!’ He reached out for me blindly . . . well, of course he did. How else could he reach out? ‘I could see again!’
He clutched at me, and I gripped his hands and squeezed them briefly before pushing them gently away. There was ink on his fingers, and I’d been feeling so good when I got up that I’d put on my new chalk worsted. Hot for summer, of course, but the whole city is air-conditioned these days, and besides, I was feeling naturally cool. I didn’t feel so cool now. Peoria was looking up at me, his thin and somehow perfect newsboy’s face troubled. A little breeze — scented with oleander and exhaust — ruffled his cowlick, and I realized that I could see it because he wasn’t wearing his tweed cap. He looked somehow naked without it, and why not? Every newsboy
should wear a tweed cap, just like every shoeshine boy should wear a beanie cocked way back on his head.
‘What’s the matter, Mr. Umney? I thought you’d be happy. Jeepers, I didn’t have to come out here to this lousy corner today, you know, but I did — I even got here early, because I kinda had an idea you’d get here early. I thought you’d be happy, my mom hittin the lottery and me gettin a chance at an operation, but you ain’t.’ Now his voice trembled with resentment. ‘You ain’t!’
‘Yes I am,’ I said, and I wanted to be happy — part of me did, anyway — but the bitch of it was that he was mostly right. Because it meant things would change, you see, and things weren’t supposed to change. Peoria Smith was supposed to be right here, year in and year out, with that perfect cap of his tilted back on hot days and pulled down low on rainy ones, so that the raindrops dripped off the bill. He was always supposed to be smiling, was never supposed to say
‘hell’ or ‘frogging,’ and most of all, he was supposed to be blind.
‘You ain’t! ‘ he said, and then, shockingly, he pushed his card-table over. It fell into the street, papers flapping everywhere. His white cane rolled into the gutter. Peoria heard it go and bent down to get it. I could see tears coming out from beneath his dark glasses and go rolling down his pale, thin cheeks. He started groping for the cane, but it had fallen near me and he was going the wrong way. I felt a sudden strong urge to haul off and kick him in his blind newsboy’s ass.
Instead, I bent over, got his stick, and tapped him lightly on the hip with it.
Peoria turned, quick as a snake, and snatched it. Out of the corner of my eye I could see pictures of Hitler and the recently deceased Cuban bandleader flapping all over Sunset Boulevard — a bus bound for Van Ness snored through a little drift of them, leaving a bitter tang of diesel fumes behind. I hated the way those newspapers looked, fluttering here and there. They looked messy. Worse, they looked wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. I fought another urge, as strong as the first one, to grab Peoria and shake him. To tell him he was going to spend the morning picking up those newspapers, and I wasn’t going to let him go home until he’d gotten every last one.