“I’d call you ahead of anybody I know with two.”
“That’s sweet, but you still owe me a piece of whatever it is if it’s whatever.” The connection broke.
My bill was waiting for me at the table. I paid it and left a twenty percent tip. The service wasn’t that hot, but they deserved something for mileage.
Sherman is inner city, bleached cracked asphalt and shattered sidewalks and weedy lots where pheasants nest, raising streetwise little chicks whose natural enemies are rats and plastic six-pack carriers. The houses need paint and some of them have bullet holes from afternoon drive-by shootings aimed at teenage heroin lords that almost invariably get little girls by mistake. The address Barry had given me belonged to a narrow house built of cement block with tobacco-colored tiles on the outside. The porch roof sagged over a wicker rocker that no one had sat in since LBJ.
I had never seen a copy of
Rendezvous,
but I knew the breed: Photographic covers with chesty starlets hunched forward in gowns cut to their ankles, banners over the logos and down the left side that read
JACKIE O. NUDE AT PARTY ON MILLIONAIRE’S YACHT
and
I’M CARRYING A MARTIAN’S CHILD
, dusty brown pulp pages inside with mail-order advertisements offering security work and ninety-day bust-expansion programs and columns with Hollywood datelines based on information supplied by maids and chauffeurs and temporary secretaries. Their time had been brief but purple, a bridge constructed of peepholes between the fan magazines of the forties and fifties and the supermarket trash papers of today. They went with sweaty former newspapermen in windowless rear offices with their sleeves rolled up and their neckties tucked into the front of their pants.
The man who answered my knock didn’t look as if he belonged to that litter. My height, built along clean tapering lines in a steel-gray cardigan, pleated slacks, and loafers with a soft sheen like clean oil, he had black hair going gray in front in natural waves and a lean brown face set off by a thin moustache and steel-rimmed glasses. He read my card aloud with a Ronald Colman accent pushed through Kipling and let me into an interior that was as far removed from the face of the house and the neighborhood as Mitchell Trout in person was from the braying moist-palmed world of tabloid journalism.
The furniture was white maple and green plush on a brown-and-ocher carpet that looked Middle Eastern. There were good oil paintings in baroque frames on the walls and a small brick fireplace with logs burning flatly on the grate — half the people who own them don’t know how to build a decent fire — and not a television set in sight. Rows of palm-worn books lounged behind glass in a cabinet with a clock ticking on top braced by crouched bronze lions. The clock struck the quarter-hour as Trout was hanging up my coat and hat in a closet off the door, the gears scratching and straining like an old convict trying to cough up a wad of jute.
“Your clock needs a good cleaning,” I said.
“It wouldn’t keep time any better if I cleaned it. Odd, isn’t it, how we continue to wind and maintain them long after we’ve ceased to trust them? Perhaps it’s for the same reason we still read newspapers.”
“That sounds like something you’d say to a media convention.”
“Media.” The moustache crawled. “I reject the term. There is the press and there is entertainment. It’s only when we allow them to bleed into each other that we get into difficulty. In any case I’m not invited to speak at conventions. I sold out, don’t you know. The
Times
— London, not Ochs’s upstart Knickerbocker sheet — Reuters, the BBC —
Rendezvous
? In the eyes of certain of my peers I’d have done better to keep two underage Ethiopian girls locked up naked in a flat in Soho. Sit down, please. I don’t have many visitors. Would you object to a martini at this ungodly hour?”
“Shaken, not stirred?”
“Stirred, of course. That blighter Fleming. I knew him when he was with MI-5. Oh, well, the man found his calling in the end, even if he didn’t know his drinks.” He was in the kitchen now, on the other side of an arch by the stairs. Ice crunched from a machine into a steel mixer, liquid splashed, a swizzle went to work with a frenzy. “How is Barry?”
“Freelancing.”
“Sorry to hear it. I offered him a job as a stringer when he came back from Vietnam. That was before he lost the leg. Then
Rendezvous
was shut down before he could answer. I like to think he would have said no. Blast, I’m out of olives. Are you one of those purists who won’t have an onion?”
I said an onion would be okay. A minute later he brought out two funnel-shaped glasses containing clear liquid and a pearl onion the size of a cufflink in each. We touched glasses, sipped, and sat down on a pair of green plush love seats set at right angles. He knew how to mix them, which made up for the embarrassment of a fire. Mine tasted like a cold cloud.
“Sam Lucy,” I said.
“Dear old Sam. What about him?”
“That’s my question.”
He frowned over his glass. He had sturdy features: a frank nose with a high curve, a thick lower lip built for frowning, a brow that furrowed in four deep lines without a break. His eyes were true hazel, a color not as common as a lot of driver’s licenses would have us believe. “Born Samuel Luschke in Hamtramck, 1922. Sigismund, his father, came over from Cracow in 1918 and drove a beer truck for Yonnie Licavoli. Sigismund died of throat cancer in 1930. After Repeal young Sam ran policy slips for Yonnie, and in 1940 at the age of eighteen he was given the pinball concession in Redford Township. After Pearl Harbor he tried to enlist in the army but was rejected because of a gambling conviction. A year later he was drafted. He was wounded at Monte Cassino, for which he received a Purple Heart. In 1951 he recited the Fifth Amendment at the Kefauver Committee hearings, where he was identified as the juice man for the Detroit mob, the man to see when the machine needed oiling. For a while after Joe Zerilli died, it looked as if Sam might fill the vacancy on the national board of directors, but they went with someone else. He retired a few years later, ostensibly. The term doesn’t mean anything more in the underworld than it does in show business. He keeps his hand in, or did until last year. Those are the bare bones.”
“Last year?”
He sat back, swirling his drink. People who do that make my teeth ache. “Feed an old journalist’s curiosity.”
“It can’t get out,” I said. “Not until the hide’s on the wall.”
His features weren’t engineered for smiling, but he hung one in front of the frown. “Mr. Walker, if the President fell dead of tertiary syphilis on my threshold and I telephoned it in, they wouldn’t print it. The so-called legitimate press threw me out into the storm the day I signed with the enemy.”
“I don’t think you’d tell them anyway. Gail Hope wants out. You know who Gail Hope is.”
“I broke the story on their affair. What do you mean ‘wants out’?”
“Out.
O
as in over the wall.
U
as in unfettered.
T
as in truffle, which rhymes with duffel, which is what a grunt carries when he musters out. That brings us back to
out.
She doesn’t want any more Lucy. I’m to deliver that message to him along with some cash to clear the books.”
“I don’t see why she’d bother,” he said after a moment.
“She has her reasons. They all have reasons.” It sounded a little shrill; the early drink on top of having $750,000 in safety deposit boxes under my name was getting to me. I shut up.
Mitchell Trout wasn’t paying any attention to that. “I mean I don’t see why she feels she has to do anything. Sam Lucy had a stroke last year, an aneurism. He’s been on life support for fourteen months. It’s not public knowledge, but he’s what you Yanks call a carrot. A vegetable.”
T
HE FIRE HAD THINNED
to a couple of threads of flame at one end of the log. I got up, found a poker, and bullied it a little, tilting the log and stabbing at the embers until they got good and mad and took it out on the wood. I put away the poker and returned to my seat. “Who’s your source?”
Trout stalled a moment, then moved a shoulder. “Well, you told me the name of your client. It’s Lucy’s wife, Henrietta. Hank and I go back a number of years. We became friends when the Guerrera brothers were stalking Sam during the cocaine wars and he went underground for a while. I kept pestering her for a line on her husband’s whereabouts and she kept having me thrown out until we discovered we have something in common.”
“Sam?”
“You’re perceptive. Yes, I have a certain affection for Sam. His affair with Gail Hope made me Detroit bureau chief and furnished this place. And Henrietta loves him despite everything. I rather think she appreciated the fact I never set myself up as better than Sam. I wasn’t, of course. The techniques he used to gain power and the ones I employed to get a story weren’t all that different.”
“Did you kill people?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. Would you care for a refill?”
My glass was empty. I stared at it until it meant something. I put a hand over it then and shook my head.
He hung the prefabricated smile on his face. “Not personally, of course. But a number of things I wrote got people killed. Our professions are similar that way, yours and mine. We’re catalysts, after all. A lot of questions would not be asked but for us, and the bare fact that we ask them is sometimes lethal. If someone dies so I can write the story or you can satisfy a client, are we any better than the thug who bends an iron pipe over an old lady’s head for her Social Security check?”
“Is that why you quit?”
“It quit me. Oh, I suppose I could have found a job after
Rendezvous;
there will always be publications like it and I could have used the income. The investments I had made hadn’t begun to pay off yet. I was tired. I was a forty-year-old man who’d spent half his life crouching in damp bushes with a camera or distracting grieving parents at their front door while a partner crept in the back and swiped a picture of the deceased off the mantelpiece. That’s colorful when you’re young, but after forty it becomes seedy and sad. How old are you, Mr. Walker?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about. Or you will soon.” He drained his glass. “We’re confidants, Hank Lucy and I. Widows gossiping over the backyard fence.”
“Where is Sam?”
He gave me a room number at St. John’s. “I haven’t tried to see him. Who wants to look at himself in twenty years?”
“So all you’ve got is his wife’s word.”
The air changed in the room then. It was as if a connection had been broken.
“Yes. That’s all I’ve got.” Trout was frowning again. He stood. “Tell Barry I said hello.”
It was the heave-ho. I got up and shook his hand and thanked him for the information. He opened the door for me and said good-bye, mixing courtesy and coldness with the same precision he applied to his martinis. Someday I’ll leave a place without having overshot my welcome; by which time I’ll be retired and living alone like Mitchell Trout, although not nearly as well. The thought was small consolation for the conviction that I’d blown a chance at a relationship worth starting.
I didn’t dwell very long on it. I had something to check out at St. John’s Hospital, namely who was lying to me this time and why.
Hospitals are the best places to approach the insulated in our society. They lock up the drugs all right, but you can get drugs anywhere; while their biggest cash asset, the patients, are exposed to the bright loud thorny world in wards and semi-private rooms without door latches, as cozy as the johnny robes they’re forced to wear with the backs flapping open. You can look like Charles Manson on a tear and stroll through the intensive care units gaily kicking out plugs and never get stopped. Unless you’re smoking.
I ditched my Winston butt in a potted plant in the lobby that looked to be doing better than most of the people seated there and used the elevator. It stopped on the next floor to admit a tragic-faced woman in her forties wearing a tailored suit and clutching a bright orange teddy bear under one arm with the tag still attached and a young bald orderly with an empty gurney. The orderly was humming the theme from
The Magnificent Seven.
The doors let us all out into a bright corridor like every other corridor in every other hospital, paved with linoleum as tough as a night nurse and echoing with the padding of rubber soles, the trundling of equipment on wheels, voices rising and falling at the nurses’ station down the hall like switch engines dragging the same tired cargo back and forth in a railroad yard, someone coughing dryly and without much hope in a room with the door open — all the canned flat reheated sounds of life in a sterilized bottle. I passed two nurses walking the other way in white pant-suits and orthopedic sneakers, splitting the air with their stride, and an old woman in a sky-blue robe pulling her way along the wall rail with both hands.
Security got a shot in the arm in front of the room I wanted. As I slowed down by the door, a young man with short dark blond hair, wearing a blue suit, rose from a chair by the wall and laid his paperback book open facedown on the seat. He was built to scale and didn’t seem very big until I was standing in front of him. He had smooth pale features, a short nose and a long upper lip that made him look younger than he probably was, and dark eyes with long Mediterranean lashes, a contrast to his generally Nordic coloring. Well, the Vikings got around. I glanced at the book he’d been reading.
The March of Folly,
by Barbara Tuchman.
“Must be the new breed,” I said. “It used to be
Leather Sheets,
by Anonymous.”
He asked me if I was with the hospital. He didn’t stutter like an ex-pug and he had no regional accent. I handed him the card I’d gotten out when I left the elevator. He read it without moving his lips, tore it in two, and gave me back both halves. His hands were long and white, with slender fingers. He would be accustomed to doing most of his communicating with them.
I put the pieces in my coat pocket. “Sam Lucy in there?”
He said nothing.