One Night Stands And Lost Weekends Part 24

"No?"

"No. We...my client needs special talents. He's prepared to pay ten thousand dollars as a reward for his daughter's return."

"Ten grand?"

"That's right."

"I don't work that way," I said. "I'm not a bounty hunter, Carr. I don't chase rewards any more than a decent lawyer chases ambulances to nail negligence cases. I get a hundred a day plus expenses. The price is the same whether I find your missing person or not."

"That's not how my client wants it."

"Then your client can find himself another boy."

"You're not a patient man," Phillip Carr said.

"Maybe not."

"You should be. Can't you use ten grand, London?"

"Anybody can."

"Then be patient. Let me show you a picture of my client's errant daughter; then you can decide whether or not you want to work for a reward. For ten grand, I'd be willing to chase an ambulance, London."

It was early in the day and it was hot as h.e.l.l and my head wasn't working too well. I let him dig a thin wallet from his hip pocket. He pulled a picture from it and pa.s.sed it to me.

Well, you guessed it. And I should have, but it was that kind of a day. The daughter-reward bit was as nutty as a male Hershey bar and the picture told me everything I had to know. Just a head-and-shoulder shot, the kind that made you want to see what the body looked like. A beautiful girl. A familiar face.

Rhona Blake, of course.

Carr was looking at me, a supercilious smile on his lips. I wanted to turn it inside out. But I could be as cute as he. I handed the picture back to him and waited.

"A familiar face?"

"No."

"Really?"

I stepped closer to him. "I've never seen the girl," I lied. "And the reward couldn't interest me less. I think you ought to go home, Carr."

He pointed the cigar at me. "You're a d.a.m.n fool," he said.

"Why?"

"Because ten thousand dollars is a healthy reward any way you look at it."

"So?"

He made a pilgrimage to the window. I felt like walking behind him and kicking him through it. He was a smooth little b.a.s.t.a.r.d who wanted me to sell out a client to him, and he didn't even have the guts to lay it on the line. He had to be cute about it.

"The girl is in over her head," he said levelly. He still had his back to me. "You're working for her. You don't have to. You can be cooperative and pick up a nice package in the process. What's wrong with that?"

"Get out of here," I said.

He turned to face me. "You d.a.m.n fool."

"Get out, Carr. Or I'll throw you out."

He sighed. "My client's a great believer in rewards," he said. "Rewards and punishments."

"I'd hit you, Carr, but you'd bleed all over my carpet."

"Rewards and punishments," he said again. "I don't have to draw you pictures, London. You're supposed to be a fairly bright boy. You think it over. You've got my card. If you change your mind, you might try giving me a ring."

He left. I didn't show him the door.

I looked at his card for a few minutes, then went to the phone. I dialed Police Headquarters and asked for Jerry Gunther at Homicide. It took a few minutes before he got to the phone.

"Oh," he groaned. "It's you again."

Jerry and I had b.u.mped heads a few times in one squabble or another. We wound up liking each other. He thought I was a bookish b.u.m who liked to live well without working too hard and I thought he was a thorough anachronism, an honest cop in the middle of the twentieth century when honest cops were out of style. We had less in common than Miller and Monroe, but we got along fine.

"What's up, Ed?"

"Phillip Carr," I said. "Some kind of a lawyer. You know anything about him?"

"It rings a bell," he said. "I could find out if this was a vital part of police routine. Is this a vital part of police routine, Ed?"

"No."

"What is it?"

"An imposition on your friends.h.i.+p."

"What I figured," he said. "Next time we have a vital conference, you buy."

"That could be expensive. You've got a hollow leg."

"Better than a hollow head, crumb. Hang on."

Finally, Jerry Gunther came back. "Yeah," he said. "Phillip Carr. Sort of a mob lawyer, Ed. A mouthpiece type. He takes cases for the kind of garbage that always stays out of jail. He's been on the inside of some shady stuff himself, according to the dope we've got. Nothing that anybody could ever make stick. Bankrolling some smuggling operations, stuff like that. Using his connections to make an illegal buck."

I grunted.

"That your man, Ed?"

"Like a glove," I said. "He wears sungla.s.ses and he's oily. He's the type who goes to the barbershop and gets the works."

"Like Anastasia," Jerry said. "It should happen to all of them. What's it all about, Ed?"

"I don't know yet."

"Nothing for Homicide, is it?"

"Nothing, Jerry."

"Then the h.e.l.l with it. I only get into the act when somebody dies, fella."

I thought about the corpse in Canarsie. But he never got into the files. The boys in our little poker game were too professional for that. By now he was sleeping in a lime pit in Jersey or swimming in Jamaica Bay all wrapped in cement.

"Remember," Jerry Gunther was saying, "you buy the liquor. And don't play rough with this Carr. He's got some ugly friends."

"Sure," I said. "And thanks."

I put down the phone, got out of the building, and grabbed a pair of burgers at the lunch counter around the corner. As I ate, I thought about a corpse in Canarsie and a man named Phillip Carr and a blond vision named Rhona Blake. Life does get complicated, doesn't it?

FOUR.

I picked up my car from the garage on Third Avenue where I put it out to pasture. The car's a Chevy convertible, an antique from the pre-fin era. I drove it down to the Village, stuck it in a handy parking spot, and looked around for a bar called Mandrake's.

Rhona was right. Mandrake's was open at two in the afternoon, even if I couldn't figure out why. It was a sleek and polished little club with a circular bar, and at night the Madison Avenue hippies came there to listen to a piano player sing dirty songs. They paid a buck and a quarter for their drinks, patted the waitresses on their pretty little bottoms, and thought they were way ahead of the squares at P.J. Clark's.

But in the afternoon it was just another ginmill, empty, and its only resemblance to Mandrake's-by-nightfall was the price schedule. The drinks were still a buck and a quarter. I picked up Courvoisier at the bar and carried it to a little table in the back. The barmaid was the afternoon model, hollow-eyed and sad. I was her only customer.

I nursed my drink, tossed a quarter into the chrome-plated jukebox, and played some Billie Holliday records. They were some of her last sides, cut after the voice was gone and only the perfect phrasing remained, and Lady Day was sadder than Mandrake's in the daylight. I waited for Rhona and wondered if she would show.

She did. She was a good three drinks late, waltzing in at three o'clock and glancing over her shoulder to find out who was following her. Probably the whole Lithuanian Army-in-Exile, I thought. She was that kind of a girl.

"I'm late," she said. "I'm sorry."

We were still the bartender's only customers. I asked her what she was drinking. She said a Rob Roy would be nice. She sipped at it, and I sipped at the cognac, and we looked at each other. She asked me for the story again and I gave it to her, filling in more of the details. She hung on every word and gave me a nod now and then.

"You're positive he was killed?"

"Unless he found a way to live without a head. They shot it off for him."

"I don't know what to do next, Ed."

"You could tell me what's happening."

"I'm paying you a hundred a day. Isn't that enough?"

This burned me. "I could make ten grand in five minutes," I said. "That's even better."

She looked at me. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing at all," I said. I finished my drink, put the empty gla.s.s on the table in front of me. "I had a visitor today, Rhona. A lawyer named Phillip Carr. He told me a client of his was missing a daughter. This client was willing to sh.e.l.l out ten grand if I dug her up and brought her around."

"So?"

"He showed me your picture, Rhona."

For a moment she just stared. Then her face cracked like ice in the springtime. She shuddered violently, and she spilled most of her Rob Roy on the polished tabletop, and her stiff upper lip turned to jello.

She said: "Oh, h.e.l.l."

"Want to talk now, Rhona?"

She stared at the top of the table, where her hands were shaking uncontrollably in a Rob Roy ocean. I walked to the jukebox, threw away another quarter, and sat down again. She was still shaking and biting her lip.

"You'd better tell me, Rhona. People are playing with tommy-guns and talking in ten-grand terms. You'd better tell me."

She nodded. On the jukebox, Billie was singing about strange fruit. Husky, smoky sounds shrieked out of a junked-up dying throat. The barmaid came over with a towel and wiped up the Rob Roy.

Rhona looked up at me. The veneer of poise was all gone. She wasn't ageless anymore. She looked very young, very scared. A scared kid in over her head.

"Ed," she said. "They want to kill me."

"Who does?"

"The man who came to see you. The same men who killed my blackmailer in Canarsie last night."

"Who are they?"

"Gamblers. But not real gamblers. Crooked ones. They run a batch of rigged games. They have some steerers who send over suckers, and the suckers go home broke. The lawyer who saw you works for a man named Abe Zucker. He's the head of it. And they're all looking for me. They want to kill me."

"Why?"

"Because of my father."

"Who's your father?"

I don't think she even heard the question. "They killed him," she said quietly. "Slowly. They beat him to death."

I waited while she took the bits and pieces of herself and tugged them back together again. Then I tried again. I asked her who her father was.

"Jack Blake," she said. "He was a mechanic."

"He fixed cars?"

She laughed humorlessly. "Cards," she corrected. "He was a card mechanic. He could make a deck turn inside out and salute you, Ed. He could deal seconds all night long and n.o.body ever tipped. He was the best in the world. He had gentle hands with long thin fingers-the most perfect hands in the world. He could crimp-cut and false-shuffle and palm and...He was great, Ed."

"Go on."