Weld case. If Peoria hadn’t shown up on Harris Brunner’s houseboat when he did, I’d still be trying to swim with my
feet cemented into a kerosene drum, somewhere off Malibu. To say I owe him a lot is an understatement.
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 L.A. 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?’
`Ì’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.”
`Ìf 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