They weren’t twirling their fingers, but they hadn’t taken their eyes off me, either. The half-smart one seemed to be gauging the distance to the door marked STAIRWELL. Suddenly I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t such a bad guy when you got to know me; that there were, in fact, a few clients and at least one ex-wife who thought me something of a hero. But that wasn’t a thing you could say about yourself, especially not to a couple of bozos like these.
‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to jump you. I just wanted to ask another question.’
They relaxed a little. A very little, actually.
‘Ask it,’ Painter Number Two said.
‘Either of you ever played the numbers down in Tijuana?’
‘La lotería?’ Number One asked.
‘Your knowledge of Spanish stuns me. Yeah. La lotería.’
Number One shook his head. ‘Mex numbers and Mex call houses are strictly for suckers.’
Why do you think I asked you? I thought but didn’t say.
‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘you win ten or twenty thousand pesos, big deal. What’s that in real money? Fifty bucks? Eighty?’
My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana, Peoria had said, and I had known something about it wasn’t right even then. Forty thousand bucks . . . My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest’y afternoon. He brought it back in the saddlebag of his Vinnie!
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘something like that, I guess. And they always pay off that way, don’t they? In pesos?’
He gave me that look again, as if I was crazy, then remembered I really was and readjusted his face. ‘Well, yeah. It is the Mexican lottery, you know. They couldn’t very well pay off in dollars.’
‘How true,’ I said, and in my mind I saw Peoria’s thin, eager face, heard him saying, It was spread all over my mom’s bed! Forty-froggin-thousand smackers!
Except how could a blind kid be sure of the exact amount . . . or even that it really was money he was rolling around in? The answer was simple: he couldn’t. But even a blind newsboy would know that la lotería paid off in pesos rather than in dollars, and even a blind newsboy had to know you couldn’t carry forty thousand dollars’ worth of Mexican lettuce in the saddlebag of a
Vincent motorcycle. His uncle would have needed a City of Los Angeles dump truck to transport that much dough.
Confusion, confusion — nothing but dark clouds of confusion.
‘Thanks,’ I said, and headed for my office.
I’m sure that was a relief for all three of us.
IV. Umney’s Last Client
‘Candy, honey, I don’t want to see anybody or take any ca — ‘
I broke off. The outer office was empty. Candy’s desk in the corner was unnaturally bare, and after a moment I saw why: the IN/OUT tray had been dumped into the trash basket and her pictures of Errol Flynn and William Powell were both gone. So was her Philco. The little blue stenographer’s stool, from which Candy had been wont to flash her gorgeous gams, was unoccupied.
My eyes returned to the IN/OUT tray sticking out of the trash can like the prow of a sinking ship, and for a moment my heart leaped. Perhaps someone had been in here, tossed the place, kidnapped Candy. Perhaps it was a case, in other words. At that moment I would have welcomed a case, even if it meant some mug was tying Candy up at this very moment . . . and adjusting the rope over the firm swell of her breasts with particular care. Any way out of the cobwebs that seemed to be falling around me sounded just peachy to me.
The trouble with the idea was simple: the room hadn’t been tossed. The IN/OUT was in the trash, true enough, but that didn’t indicate a struggle; in fact, it was more as if . . .
There was just one thing left on the desk, placed squarely in the center of the blotter. A white envelope. Just looking at it gave me a bad feeling. My feet carried me across the room just the same, however, and I picked it up. Seeing my name written across the front of the envelope in Candy’s wide loops and swirls was no surprise; it was just another unpleasant part of this long, unpleasant morning.
I ripped it open and a single slip of note-paper fell out into my hand.
Dear Clyde,
I have had all of the groping and sneering I’m going to take from you, and I am tired of your ridiculous and childish jokes about my name. Life is too short to be pawed by a middle-aged divorce detective with bad breath. You did have your good points Clyde but they are getting drownded out by the bad ones, especially since you started drinking all the time.
Do yourself a favor and grow up.
Yours truely,
Arlene Cain
P.S.: I’m going back to my mother’s in Idaho. Do not try to get in touch with me.
I held the note a moment or two longer, looking at it unbelievingly, then dropped it. One phrase from it recurred as I watched it seesaw lazily down toward the already occupied trash basket: I am tired of your ridiculous and childish jokes about my name. But had I ever known her name was anything other than Candy Kane? I searched my mind as the note continued its lazy —
and seemingly endless — swoops back and forth, and the answer was an honest and resounding
no. Her name had always been Candy Kane, we’d joked about it many a time, and if we’d had a few rounds of office slap-and-tickle, what of that? She’d always enjoyed it. We both had.
Did she enjoy it? a voice spoke up from somewhere deep inside me. Did she really , or is that just another little fairytale you’ve been telling yourself all these years?
I tried to shut that voice out, and after a moment or two I succeeded, but the one that replaced it was even worse. That voice belonged to none other than Peoria Smith. I can quit actin like I died and went to heaven every time some blowhard leaves me a nickel tip, he said . Ain’t you picking up on this newsflash, Mr. Umney?
‘Shut up, kid,’ I said to the empty room. ‘Gabriel Heatter you ain’t.’ I turned away from Candy’s desk, and as I did, faces passed in front of my mind’s eye like the faces of some lunatic marching band from hell: George and Gloria Demmick, Peoria Smith, Bill Tuggle, Vernon Klein, a million-dollar blonde who went under the two-bit name of Arlene Cain . . . even the two painters were there.
Confusion, confusion, nothing but confusion.
Head down, I trudged into my office, closed the door behind me, and sat at the desk. Dimly, through the closed window, I could hear the traffic out on Sunset. I had an idea that, for the right person, it was still a spring morning so LA-perfect you expected to see that little trademark symbol stamped on it somewhere, but for me all the light had gone from the day . . . inside as well as out. I thought about the bottle of hooch in the bottom drawer, but all of a sudden even bending down to get it seemed like too much work. It seemed, in fact, a job akin to climbing Mount Everest in tennis shoes.
The smell of fresh paint had penetrated all the way into my inner sanctum. It was a smell I ordinarily liked, but not then. At that moment it was the smell of everything that had gone wrong since the Demmicks hadn’t come into their Hollywood bungalow bouncing wisecracks off each other like rubber balls and playing their records at top volume and throwing their Corgi into conniptions with their endless billing and cooing. It occurred to me with perfect clarity and simplicity — the way I’d always imagined great truths must occur to the people they occur to —
that if some doctor could cut out the cancer that was killing the Fulwider Building’s elevator operator, it would be white. Oyster white. And it would smell just like fresh Dutch Boy paint.
This thought was so tiring that I had to put my head down with the heels of my palms pressed against my temples, holding it in place . . . or maybe just keeping what was inside from exploding out and making a mess on the walls. And when the door opened softly and footsteps entered the room, I didn’t look up. It seemed like more of an effort than I was able to make at that particular moment.
Besides, I had the strange idea that I already knew who it was. I couldn’t put a name to my knowledge, but the step was somehow familiar. So was the cologne, although I knew I wouldn’t be able to name it even if someone had put a gun to my head, and for a very simple reason: I’d never smelled it before in my life. How could I recognize a scent I’d never smelled before, you ask? I can’t answer that one, bud, but I did.