“Vangie, please...”
She turned to transfix Zimmer with a whisper.
“Waiting to break our neck.”
15
After his 5:30 A.M. workout at World Gym, Dain swung back to Tam Valley to pick up Shenzie. He let himself in through the front door, got the carry case from Albie’s now-deserted bedroom, and went through to the kitchen.
“What?” he exclaimed.
There was a scrabbling of paws as the bandit-faced baby raccoon who was eating Shenzie’s kibble ran to squirm his fat little butt back out through the cat door in a panic. An outraged Shenzie was sitting on the kitchen counter watching the thief eat, his white whiskers standing straight out from the sides of his face like a radical acupuncture treatment gone awry.
Dain, fighting the morning rush across the Golden Gate, laughed at Shenzie all the way into the city. He arrived at Mel’s Drive-in on Lombard just at eight. Mel’s was a deliberate anachronism, an attempt to recapture the fifties feeling of the original Mel’s on south Van Ness, which had been a huge circular barn of a place with roller-skating waitresses.
On the walls of this Mel’s were black-and-white photos — stills from American Graffiti; Marilyn Monroe at the original Mel’s, sucking on a malt; waitresses with beehive hairdos, wearing slacks and IKe jackets, serving hamburgers to grinning boys with duck’s-ass haircuts and packs of Camels rolled up in their sleeves. A lot of the boys would have died in Korea.
Somewhere they had found old booths of cigarette-scarred vinyl with miniature jukebox selectors on the back wall. You could flip through deliberately dated original cuts of Frank Sinatra, the Pretenders, Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine — pick your tunes, drop your quarters, and the Wurlitzer gleaming in pastel yellow and purple and cherry red up by the cash register would play them for you.
Doug Sherman waved a languid hand around when Dain joined him in one of the booths. “How banal of you, dear boy.”
“Not at all,” said Dain. “Lets you rub elbows with the common man.” He had been finding Sherman extraordinarily smug as of late. “Have you ordered?”
“Just coffee. I figured once you’d had your little joke, we’d go somewhere to get—”
“This is a great breakfast place, Dougie. The four basic food groups — salt, fat, cholesterol, carcinogens. And fourteen Elvis selections on the juke, including ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ On Tuesdays you can join the fun with carhop waitresses. I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“My, aren’t we antic this morning,” said Sherman snidely.
A waitress bustled up on thick ankles, wearing a rustling black nylon skirt and white cotton men’s-style shirt with miniature black bow tie. She would have been about twenty when the original Mel’s had opened a few years after the war.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Yes.” Dain decided to do the entire job on Dougiebaby. “And I’m ready to order. Bacon cheeseburger with fries, order of onion rings, a chocolate shake.” He looked over at Sherman’s ashen face. “You ought to get one, Doug — they’re great!”
“My God!” breathed Sherman. “Do you realize what’s in...”
The waitress chirped at him, “How about you, sir?”
“Nothing, er, ah, a refill on the coffee, and, ah, a glass of orange juice.” She wrote, nodded, started away, Sherman called after her, “Is that O.J. fresh-squeezed?”
“Yessir,” she piped, aged eyes bright, “I squoze it out of the carton myself just this morning.”
Sherman repeated, “My God,” then turned to Dain with a glint of anger in his eyes. “Why did you really bring me here?”
“I’m on my way to the airport, I’ve got something I—”
“Back to Chicago?”
“No.”
“So Mr. Maxton’s problem was resolved quite rapidly.”
“Not resolved. Suspended. I’ve been waiting for the tape of a phone tap to confirm my next move. My man found someone else was tapping the same phone. Maybe Maxton is playing games with me, so...” He shrugged. “I wanted you to hear something, check my assumptions.”
The waitress arrived with their food on a single big platter balanced on one arthritic hand. Sherman took a cautious sip of orange juice; Dain slurped his chocolate shake, began wolfing down golden-brown french-fried onion rings. The look on Sherman’s face was worth it.
Munching away, he took the yellow Walkman out of his pocket and set it on the table, punched PLAY.
“Robert Farnsworth here. How may I—”
“This is Jimmy.”
Sherman’s hand darted out to hit stop.
“Are you crazy?” he hissed at Dain across the table. “Playing an illegal surveillance tape in a public place...”
Dain looked around. In the next booth were a tall trim brown-haired man with glasses and a short white-haired muscular overweight man wearing a red shirt in a Southwest American Indian motif. Whenever the jukebox paused to change tunes, they could be heard taking turns trashing publishers and bemoaning Hollywood agents who never returned their phone calls.
Back in the open kitchen the cooks, just out of their teens and wearing tall white chefs’ hats on top of too-long hair, bopped and jinked to Buddy Holly’s stuttery “Peggy Sue.” The air was heavy with the smell of frying bacon, sizzling eggs, french fries bubbling in hot grease. The place was jammed, the din atrocious.
“With the music going, you’d need a shotgun mike in here to hear what those guys are saying at the next table.”
He turned on the Walkman again.
“Jimmy! I’ve been calling your office long-distance, they keep saying you’re out of town. I want to know if you have any phone numbers out here in San Francisco for me. Girls like—”
Zimmer’s voice interrupted. “Bobby, that... ah, client who has the...” he cleared his throat, “bearer bonds...”
Farnsworth was immediately all business. “These are the bonds you were telling me about in Chicago, Jimmy?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Nothing wrong with them, is there?” asked Farnsworth in a jocular voice. “Not forged? Counterfeit? Stolen?”
Zimmer exclaimed in a near panic, “Good God no!”
“Then take them to our Chicago office and—”
“I’m out of town.”
Farnsworth’s voice said, “Out of town where?”
“N... I can’t tell you that.”
“Attorneys!” He sighed. “Okay, look in your local phone book and see if Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth has an office in whatever city—”
“I already did. They do.”
“Bravo! Take in the bonds and...”
Dain punched off the Walkman. “The rest is just verbiage.”
“What’s it all about?” said Sherman. “Who’re the players?”
“Jimmy Zimmer stole two million bucks in stolen bearer bonds from our friend Maxton. Bobby is his stockbroker buddy temporarily in San Francisco. It was Bobby’s phone I bugged.”
“So the bonds were stolen twice.”
“Technically, embezzled the first time. Anyway, Jimmy-baby is running around with a woman named Vangie Broussard. By her Chicago arrest record, her first busts were in New Orleans for dancing nude on barroom tables at the age of sixteen. So...”
“You’re off to New Orleans?” demanded Sherman in surprise. He gestured at the Walkman. “On the basis of that?”