The Way Some People Die

Chapter 7

The man behind the wheel was a run-of-the-mill thug with a carbuncular swelling on the back of his neck. He gave me one dull look as I stepped into the back seat and paid no more attention to me. When he switched on his lights I saw that the thick windshield had the greenish yellow tinge of bulletproof glass.

“Dowser’s?” the driver grunted.

“You guessed it.”

The long black car rode heavily and fast. My companion sat in one corner of the back seat with his gun on his knee. I sat in the other corner and thought of a brigadier I’d known in Colon during the war. His hobby was hunting sharks in the open sea, with no equipment but a mask and a knife. I used to run his speedboat for him sometimes. Nobody on his staff could figure out why he did it. I asked him about it one day when he nearly got himself killed and I had to go in after him. He said that it gave him background for dealing with human beings. He was a very shy man for a general.

They took me to a hilltop between Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. A one-car private road turned off the highway to the left and spiraled up the steep slope. At the top a green iron gate barred the entrance to the driveway. The driver honked on his horn. As if in automatic response two arc-lights on telephone-poles on either side of the gate came on and lit up the front of the house. It was a wide low ranch-style bungalow painted adobe gray. In spite of the red tile roof, it looked a little like a concrete strong point. The man who came out of the gatehouse completed the illusion by strolling sentry-like with a shotgun under his arm. He leaned it against the gatepost, opened the gate, waved us through.

The front door had a Judas window shaped like a mail slot, above a brass knocker that represented copulating horses for some reason. Judas himself opened the door. He was a curly-headed man with a kind of second-hand Irish good looks. He was wearing headwaiter black for the occasion, with a dingy black bowtie that could have been made of leather.

Paleface lagged behind me and Judas walked ahead, down a hallway decorated with red, black, and gold striped wallpaper. It looked as if the decorator had been influenced by the Fun House at a carnival. The hallway ended in a door that opened into a bright high-ceilinged room. Judas stood aside to let us pass.

“Watch your lip with Dowser,” the man behind me said, and reminded my right kidney of his gun.

A man in a midnight-blue suit was standing with one foot on the brass rail of a twenty-foot bar that took up most of the other side of the room. He made a point of waiting and turning very slowly, as if he could easily take me or leave me alone. Behind the bar a great mirror with an old fashioned gold-scrolled frame hung on the oak wall. It repeated all the contents of the room: the television set built into a grandfather’s clock, the silver-dollar slot machines, the full-size snooker table, the illuminated juke box, the row of French windows in the left-hand wall and the swimming pool beyond them, everything a gentleman needed to entertain his friends if he had any friends. I could see myself, in sports clothes and hatless, with a gunman on either side of me, and the gunmen’s boss approaching across the polished floor. It made me angry. A Channel Island boar’s-head sneered from the wall above the Mauve Age mirror. I sneered back.

“Trouble, Blaney?”

“I picked him up in Tarantine’s flat,” Paleface said respectfully. “He claims Joe owes him money.”

“Him and everybody else. Was it smart to bring him here?”

“I did what you told me, Mr. Dowser, if anybody showed.”

“All right,” Dowser answered softly. We sized each other up. He was a head shorter than I was, almost as wide in the shoulders, wider in the hips. His double-breasted blue suit made him look almost cubical. His head was a smaller cube topped by straight sandy hair that was trimmed too short in a brush cut. He was forty, perhaps, trying to feel like thirty and almost succeeding. His skin was fresh and boyish, but there was something the matter with his eyes. They were brown and wet and protuberant, as if they had been dipped in muddy water and stuck on his face to dry.

“Who are you?” he said.

Having nothing to lose by telling it, I told the truth.

“That isn’t what he said to me,” Blaney complained. “He said he managed fighters in Pacific Point.”

“You caught me with my veracity down. When you cock a gun at me it breaks up my conversation.”

“Talkative,” Dowser said. “You from Pacific Point?” He took a sip from a pewter mug he was holding in his right hand. The liquid it contained looked like buttermilk. He made a buttermilk face. “I’ll have a look at your wallet.”

I took it out, removed the currency from it to insult him, and handed him the limp sharkskin folder. His dirty-brown eyes bulged over my identification, and his lips moved silently. I noticed that one of his ears curled inwards on itself like a misshaped mushroom.

“You want me to read it to you, Mr. Dowser?”

His fresh skin turned a shade darker, but he held his anger. He had an actor’s dignity, controlled by some idea of his own importance. His face and body had an evil swollen look as if they had grown stout on rotten meat.

“So you’re looking for Joey Tarantine. Who you working for, Archer? Or you working for yourself?” He tossed the wallet at me unexpectedly. His motions were fast and trained.

I caught it, tucked the bills back in, put it away in my pocket. “I’m working for a certain Mrs. Lawrence. Her daughter seems to be traveling with Joe. She’s worried about her daughter.”

Dowser laughed without showing his teeth. “Now why should she be worried about her daughter? Joe’s a sweet kid. Everybody likes Joe.”

“I like Joe,” Blaney said.

“I like Joe,” Judas repeated. Dowser had made a joke, so they made the same joke over again.

“And what are you going to do with the girl if you find her?”

“Take her home to mother.”

“That will be fun.”

“What girl is that?” a woman’s voice demanded.

I had been watching Dowser so closely that I hadn’t noticed her. He had a quality of unacted violence that held the attention. Now I saw her through the mirror standing in a doorway to my right, like somebody’s conception of a Greek goddess painted in a frame. Probably her own. She moved into the room with white silk evening pajamas tossing about her ankles, a girl so colorless in hair and skin that she might have been albino. Except for the dark blue eyes.

They passed me over coolly. “What girl, Danny?”

“Mind your own business.”

I said: “Galley Lawrence. Know her?”

“Shut up, you.”

The girl took up a cheesecake pose on the edge of the snooker table. “Cert’ny I know her.” The voice was flat and rasping, as incongruous from those fine lips as a peacock’s screech from a peacock. “I heard she was in Palm Springs. How come I never get to go to Palm Springs, Danny?”

He walked towards her quietly, speaking more softly than before: “What was that, Irene? You heard about Galley Lawrence someplace, huh?”

“Sandra down at the Beach Club. She said she saw Galley in Palm Springs last night.”

“Where?”

“Some bar, she didn’t say.”

“Who with?” His right arm was straight at his side, the fingers opening and closing at the end of it.

“Not Joey. I know you’re looking for Joey so I asked her. Some other male, she thought it was some actor. Sandra said he was cute.”

“Cute, huh? You’re cute. Why didn’t you tell me, Rene?” He reached up suddenly and took her chin in his hand, clenching it hard.

She struck his arm down. “Don’t handle me, you monkey. I was minding my own business, like you said.”

His fingers kept on working. “So you bust out with your business in front of this jerk.”

“He’s cute,” she said in a bored deadly whine, and shifted her look to me. “Danny can’t get away with rough stuff on account of he isn’t cute.”

“I think he’s cute.” I was getting bored myself.

The bulged eyes swiveled to me and back to the girl on the green table. She was hugging her knees as if she found them lovable. Her blue eyes met him levelly.

His left hand jerked up with the pewter mug, and the buttermilk spattered her face.

“All right,” she said, dripping white from the point of her chin. “You’ll buy me a whole new outfit, two new outfits. Tonight you take me to Ciro’s. Tomorrow I go to Westmore’s for the works.”

“I’ll give you the works,” he said slowly. “I’ll drop you off the Santa Monica pier.”

But he stood back as she swung her legs down. Her high-heeled gilt slippers hammered across the room. He followed her at a distance, shorter and much older and not nearly so beautiful.

“We might as well sit down,” Blaney said. “It goes on like this all the time.” The girl had given us something in common, though I didn’t know exactly what it was.

Judas went away. Blaney and I sat at the bar, one empty stool and the gun in the space between us. He wouldn’t talk, so I amused myself reading the labels on the bottles in the racks. Dowser had everything, including Danziger Goldwasser and pre-World-War Green River.

He came back ten minutes later, wearing a different suit. His mouth was red and slightly swollen, as if somebody had been chewing on it.

“Nice-looking girl,” I said, hoping to needle him.

He was feeling too good to be needled. “I got a proposition for you, Archer.” He even laid an arm across my shoulders. “A business proposition.”

I stood up, placing my shoulders out of his reach. “You have a very peculiar business approach.”

“Forget it.” As if I had apologized to him. “Put the gun away, Blaney. You’re working for old lady Lawrence, you said. You do a job for me instead, what do you say.”

“Churning buttermilk?”

He took it without a word. “Doing what you’re doing. You want to contact Galley Lawrence. Go to Palm Springs and contact her. I’ll pay you one grand for her, five for Joey.”

“Why?”

“I like them so much. I want to invite them over to look at my television.”

“Why don’t you go yourself?”

He paused, then decided to tell me: “It’s out of my territory. I don’t like crossing over out of my territory. Anyway I got you to go for me, isn’t that right?”

“If you say so.” It was an easy out.

“That’s the old espirit de corpse,” he said surprisingly. “You bring me Joey and I’ll slip you a quick five G’s.” He showed me a thick pack of bills in a gold clip shaped like a dollar sign.

“Joey alive or dead?”

“Alive if you can handle it. Dead, the deal’s still on. What could be fairer?” He turned to Blaney: “You got our friend’s gun here?”

“Yeah.” Blaney stood up to answer the boss.

“Okay, give it to him outside.” Dowser turned back to me, smiling with a kind of canine charm. “No hard feelings, old man. Everybody’s got to look out for himself, that’s my philosophy, isn’t that right?”

“Speaking of looking out for yourself, I usually get a retainer.” I didn’t want Dowser’s money, but I had to ask him for it. The giving and receiving of money, its demand and its refusal, were Dowser’s basic form of communication with other people. That and the threat, the blow, the infliction of fear and pain.

He grunted and gave me a hundred-dollar bill. A piece of money takes its feeling from the people that have handled it. This money twisted in my hand like a fat green tomato-worm.