“Why are you so interested in Maggie, Hearns?”
I took my eyes off the road — high cliffs dropping down to snow-white beaches packed with sunbathers on my right, tourist courts and greasy spoons on the left. Baby Tojo was smiling. I hoped I didn’t have to kill him. “She’s a conduit, kid. A pipeline to the woman.”
“The woman?”
“Right. The one I wasn’t ready for a while back. The one I would have flushed it all down the toilet for.”
“You think it will be different now?”
Eighty-one grand seed money; a wiser, more contemplative Hearns. Maybe I’d even dye a little gray in my hair. “Right. Once I clear up a little legal trouble I’m in, I’m going to suggest a long vacation in Acapulco, maybe a trip to Rio. She’ll see the difference in me. She’ll know.”
I looked back at the highway, downshifted for a turn, and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to face Bad Bob and caught a big right hand studded with signet rings square in the face.
Blood blinded me; my foot hit the brake; the car jerked into a hillside and stalled out. I swung a haphazard left; another sucker shot caught me; through a sheet of crimson I saw Murikami grab the money and hotfoot it.
I wiped red out of my eyes and pursued. Murikami was heading for the bluffs and a path down to the beach; a car swerved in front of me and a large man jumped out, aimed, and fired at the running figure — once, twice, three times. A fourth shot sent Bob Murikami spiraling over the cliff, the money bag sailing, spilling greenbacks. I pulled my roscoe, shot the shooter in the back, and watched him go down in a clump of crabgrass.
Gun first, I walked over; I gave the shooter two good measure shots, point blank to the back of the head. I kicked him over to his front side and from what little remained of his face identified him. Sergeant Jenks, Bill Malloy’s buddy on the Alien Squad.
Deep shit without a depth gauge.
I hauled Jenks to his Plymouth, stuffed him in the front seat, stood back and shot the gas tank. The car exploded; the ex-cop sizzled like french-fried guacamole. I walked over the cliff and looked down. Bob Murikami was spread-eagled on the rocks and shitloads of sunbathers were scooping up cash, fighting each other for it, dancing jigs of greed and howling like hyenas.
I tailspinned down to Tijuana, found a flop and a bottle of drugstore hop, and went prowling for Maggie Cordova. A fat white lezbo songbird would stick out, even in a pus pocket like T.J. — and I knew the heart of T.J. lowlife was the place to start.
The hop edged down my nerves and gave me a savoir faire my three-day beard and raggedy-assed state needed. I hit the mule act strip and asked questions; I hit the whorehouse strip and the strip that featured live fuck shows twenty-four hours a day. Child beggars swarmed me; my feet got sore from kicking them away. I asked, asked, asked about Maggie Cordova, passing out bribe pesos up the wazoo. Then — right on the street — there she was, turning up a set of stairs adjoining a bottle liquor joint.
I watched her go up, a sudden jolt of nerves obliterating my dope edge. I watched a light go on above the bottle shop — and Lorna Kafesjian doing “Goody, Goody” wafted down at me.
Pursuing the dream, I walked up the stairs and knocked on the door.
Footsteps tapped toward me — and suddenly I felt naked, like a litany of everything I didn’t have was underlining the sound of heels over wood.
No eighty-one-grand reunion stash.
No Sy Devore suits to make a suitably grand Hollywood entrance.
No curfew papers for late-night Hollywood spins.
No P.I. buzzer for the dramatic image of the twentieth century.
No world-weary, tough-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside sensitive code of honor shtick to score backup pussy with in case Lorna shot me down.
The door opened; fat Maggie Cordova was standing there. She said, “Spade Hearns. Right?”
I stood there — dumbstruck beyond dumbstruck. “How did you know that?”
Maggie sighed — like I was old news barely warmed over. “Years ago I bought some tunes from Lorna Kafesjian. She needed a stake to buy her way out of a shack job with a corny guy who had a wicked bad case on her. She told me the guy was a sewer crawler, and since I was a sewer crawler performing her songs, I might run into him. Here’s your ray of hope, Hearns. Lorna said she always wanted to see you one more time. Lor and I have kept in touch, so I’ve got a line on her. She said I should make you pay for the info. You want it? Then give.”
Maggie ended her pitch by drawing a dollar sign in the air. I said, “You fingered the B of A heist. You’re dead meat.”
“Nix, gumshoe. You’re all over the L.A. papers for the raps you brought down looking for me, and the Mexes won’t extradite. Givesky.”
I forked over all the cash in my wallet, holding back a five-spot for mad money. Maggie said, “Eight-eighty-one Calle Verdugo. Play it pianissimo, doll. Nice and slow.”
I blew my last finnsky at a used clothing store, picking up a chalk-stripe suit like the one Bogart wore in The Maltese Falcon. The trousers were too short and the jacket was too tight, but overall the thing worked. I dry-shaved in a gas station men’s room, spritzed some soap at my armpits, and robbed a kiddie flower vendor of the rest of his daffodils. Thus armed, I went to meet my lost love.
Knock, knock, knock on the door of a tidy little adobe hut; boom, boom, boom, as my overwrought heart drummed a big band beat. The door opened — and I almost screamed.
The four years since I’d seen Lorna had put forty thousand hard miles on her face. It was sun-soured — seams, pits, and scales; her laugh lines had changed to frown lines as deep as the San Andreas Fault. The body that was once voluptuous in white satin was now bloated in a Mex charwoman’s serape. From the deep recesses of what we once had, I dredged a greeting.
“What’s shakin’, baby?”
Lorna smiled, exposing enough dental gold to front a revolution. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened, Spade?”
I stayed game. “What happened, baby?”
Lorna sighed. “Your interpretation first, Spade. I’m curious.”
I smoothed my lapels. “You couldn’t take a good thing. You couldn’t take the dangerous life I led. You couldn’t take the danger, romance, the heartache and vulnerability inherent in a mean-street-treading knight like me. Face it, baby: I was too much man for you.”
Lorna smiled — more cracks appeared in the relief map of her face. She said, “Your theatrics exhausted me more than my own. I joined a Mexican nunnery, got a tan that went bad, started writing music again, and found myself a man of the earth — Pedro, my husband. I make tortillas, wash my clothes in a stream, and dry them on a rock. Sometimes, if Pedro and I need extra jack, I mix Margaritas and work the bar at the Blue Fox. It’s a good, simple life.”
I played my ace. “But maggie said you wanted to see me — ‘one more time,’ like—”
“Yeah, like in the movies. Well, Hearns, it’s like this. I sold ‘Prison of Love’ to about three dozen bistro belters who passed it off as their own. It’s ASCAP’d under at least thirty-five titles, and I’ve made a cool five grand on it. And, well, I wrote the song for you back in our salad days, and in the interest of what we had together for about two seconds, I’m offering you ten percent — you inspired the damn thing, after all.”