“Yeah, and Bugsy Siegel didn’t get nailed out here in his goddamn living room, I suppose? Fuck—can’t you handle him, Lou?”
“He’s your friend.”
“He’s your friend, too!”
We all dated back to the Chicago P.D. pickpocket detail, in the early thirties, Sapperstein, Bill Drury, and me. After that, Lou and I and Bill’s partner Tim O’Conner played poker together, for years.
“Bill promised he’d lay off,” I said, “while he was on salary with us.”
“Drury is a lunatic on a crusade. Nice guy, great guy, but he’s supposed to be working for the A-1 and instead he’s out gathering evidence for that hick senator in the coonskin cap.”
Kefauver had worn a coonskin cap as a gimmick in his Tennessee campaign to win a Senate seat despite the best corrupt efforts of Boss Crump’s Dixiecrat machine.
“I’ll call Bill,” I said into the phone. “I’ll talk to him.”
“You need to fire him.”
“He’s my friend, Lou—one of my best friends.”
“Then come back and talk some sense into him.”
“I’m in the middle of a job out here.”
“Right—blonde or brunette?”
From the photo on my desk, Vera’s boyfriend Paul was looking up at me accusingly. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”
“Look, you can’t duck this Kefauver thing. You need to get back here, meet with those sons of bitches, tell them you don’t know anything, that they’re wasting their damn subpoenas, and—”
“And go to jail for contempt, and smear our agency’s good name.”
Lou blew me a long-distance raspberry. “Our agency’s ‘good’ name is built on your unsavory reputation, Nate. don’t kid a kidder.”
“Lou—I’ll talk to Drury.”
“Are you coming back? Should I put a light in the window?”
“I’ll talk to Bill, Lou. Goodbye.”
And I hung up.
I got myself a Dixie cup of water and sat and sipped and thought about Bill Drury and what a schmuck I’d been to hire him onto the A-l. I shook my head. This was one of the rare times when I’d fucked myself over by being too nice a guy….
My friend Bill Drury, former lieutenant on the Chicago P.D.—who’d been unadvisedly taking on the Chicago mobsters since he first came on the job, back when Capone was still in power—had been railroaded off the force (not for the first time) two years ago. He had been fighting for reinstatement in the courts, while writing antimob columns for the Chicago Herald-American and the Miami Daily News. Last year, when the Illinois Supreme Court refused to hear his case, Drury found his services as a crime reporter were no longer in demand, and he came to me, looking for a job as a private investigator. I had given it to him, on the condition he lay off the mob busting.
I knew I had to talk to him, but I didn’t feel ready to head back to Chicago. I enjoyed the Sunday afternoons with my sweet lovely son and my sweet lovely goddamn faithless bitch of an ex-wife. I’d gotten attached to the sunshine and the work was easy, and Kefauver’s people—some of whom were investigating out here, also, but looking for California crooks, not Chicago ones—hadn’t bothered me.
Both Bill Drury and his poor common sense were no longer in my thoughts as I parked on Le Conte Avenue, not far from the front gate of UCLA. I wandered through West wood Village—a collection of attractive boutiques and intimate restaurants in handsome Mediterranean-style buildings—enjoying the cool evening under a clear sky flung with more stars than Hollywood. The night was almost cold, a breeze biting through the slacks of my blue glen plaid tropical worsted, as I approached the building called the MAC.
An example of Southern California architecture at its best, the MAC was a mission-style castle with stone-tile masonry walls, a square tower, and a red clay tile roof. I strolled through a charming stone-and-landscape courtyard, across glazed ornamental tile, into a sprawling building rife with hardwood interiors, wooden beams, and decorative ironwork.
I soon found myself in a lounge, where pretty coeds and lucky college boys were laughing and talking, sipping Cokes, having smokes, a few gathered around a wood burning fireplace with a crackling fire going; some card playing and Ping-Pong was going on, too, and a couple couples were doing the hokey pokey to some music on the radio. I asked a coed for directions, then headed past a library, various conference rooms, a dining room, and the kitchen, into the large assembly hall where, on stage, the rehearsal was under way.
I sat with my hat in my lap, amid a scattering of students involved in the production. Vera did indeed play a floozy, and she did a bang-up job of it; but her part was small, and after about an hour, during which her scene was run through half a dozen times, she’d been dismissed, and joined me in the sparse audience.
“Any sign of Paul?” she asked. She was in the same fetching powder blue outfit she’d worn to my office, plus spike heels that may have been part of her Salesman characterization.
“Nope,” I said.
She craned around to look. “I’m surprised. He’s been haunting rehearsal all week.”
“How long do you have to stay?”
“I’m done, now. Would you walk me to my dorm? The entrance is around back of the building….”
We headed out through the courtyard, where we paused to admire a colorful tiled fountain in the shape of an eight-pointed star; lighting within the fountain painted the dancing spray with a rainbow effect. Her arm was in mine, and she was leaning against me; the smell of Camay soap in the fresh crisp air was bewitching. She was a young, shapely, pretty girl and I was a lonely divorcé in his forties, and I was distracted.
Which is why he was on us before I even knew it.
The guy grabbed Vera by the arm linked with mine, and yanked her away.
“Paul!” she squealed.
Paul was tall, knife-blade thin, wearing his army uniform, which was rumpled and wouldn’t pass inspection. Despite his weak chin, he was handsome enough, or would have been if his eyes hadn’t been so wild, and his nostrils flaring.
“What are you doing with this old fart?” he demanded of her. His fists were clenched. He looked like he might hit her at any moment.
But the real reason I sucker punched him was the “old fart” remark. I caught him in the side of the face with a hard left hand and he collapsed like a card table.
Vera stepped back and covered her mouth; college-kid faces began popping up in the arched windows along the ersatz stone facade of the building edging the courtyard. Smiles and wide eyes and pointing fingers….
“Don’t hurt him,” she said, but it wasn’t clear who she meant.
“Leave her alone,” I told him.
He was a pile of long limbs in khaki down there on the ornamental tile. His eyes were crazed, his lower lip trembling.
“She doesn’t want you bothering her,” I said, patting the air with my palms. “Just keep your distance—”
But something was coming up from deep within him, a scream of agony that took the form of words: “Bothering her!”
And suddenly he was reassembling himself, like a played-backward newsreel of a building demolition, and he was on his feet and hurling himself at me before I could say another word.
I did have time to throw a punch, which caught his jaw and should have sent him down again, but he was fueled by rage, and shook it off and came windmilling at me, fists flailing, one catching my chin and stinging. I backed away, but had forgotten the fountain, and tripped over a star point and tumbled back into the water in a spattering spray. Then I was the one who was flailing, floundering on my back in the shallow water, lucky not to have cracked my skull or broken a damn rib or something.
He was laughing at me, pointing, hysterical, out of control, he had never seen anything so fucking funny, and he was still laughing when I rose like a human wave and leapt out of the fountain at him, dripping wet, hopping mad, doubling him over with a right to the belly, straightening him with a left under the chin, putting him down with a right to the side of his face.