“What?”
“Nickel-and-diming it, trying to come up with two bits. Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Djakarta — the circuit. Opals, a little gold, some blue-sky shares. Hell, I was even a tour guide in Bangkok for a couple of months. The real Bangkok, know what I mean?”
“I can imagine,” she said. “Then what?”
“Then — well, then I got lucky.”
“Tell me,” she said. “I like happy endings.”
“What happened is I ran into one of the Maneras brothers. Remember the Manerases?”
She nodded. “At the Bay. They were to have gone in on the first wave, except they were no-shows.”
“The Manerases always were pretty smart — for Cubans.”
“Which one did you run into?”
“Bobby — he’s the oldest, isn’t he?”
Again, she nodded.
“Well, Bobby’d got himself into a mess. They were all looking for him. The narcs, some hard cases, the feebies, not to mention a whole bunch of other people. I mean, he was in a real mess. And what’s more, he was broke. When I ran into him in Singapore he was living off an American Express gold card he’d dipped off some tourist. So what the hell, Gladys. You know me. I got a heart as big as a house. I took him in.”
“Why?” she said.
“You got any more of this bourbon?”
“Help yourself.”
“I will.”
Meade crossed to the liquor and made himself another drink. On the way back to his chair he gave the living room another calculating inspection, and then sank down into his chair with a long pleased sigh.
“Why’d you take him in?” she said.
“Bobby? Because he had something to sell. Cheap.”
“What?”
“A story.”
Gladys Citron leaned forward in her chair, caught herself, and leaned back. Drew Meade grinned. She noticed that he still seemed to have all his teeth. They were big teeth, nearly square and absolutely even. They were also a strange shade of very pale yellow, although she now remembered that they had always been that peculiar shade ever since she had first met him in France thirty-what? — dear God, thirty-eight years ago.
“What kind of story?” she said.
“Interested, huh?”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s some sheet you help put out, Gladys. I’ve seen a couple of copies. One had a story about this little girl who was swooped up by a flying saucer and flown to the moon or someplace and had a talk with Jesus. Hell of a story. People really buy that crap, huh?”
“Six million copies a week.”
“You pay for some of those stories, right?”
“We pay.”
“You pay pretty good?”
“We can be generous.”
Meade looked around the living room again, much as a bank appraiser might have looked. “How much does a house like this go for?”
“Three-fifty to three-seventy-five now. I paid three-twenty-five.”
“Seems like a hell of a lot to me.”
“It’s in Beverly Hills.”
“Jacks up the price, right?”
“Right.”
“I oughta buy a place. Maybe a condo in New York or Chicago. Settle down, you know? Maybe write my memoirs. I’ve even got a title. ‘More Lives Than a Cat.’ What d’you think?”
“They’d never give you clearance.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
“Tell me about Bobby Maneras and his story.”
Meade lit another cigarette from the one he was already smoking. He tossed the finished butt into the fireplace. “I’d like to, Gladys, but I’ve got a little problem.”
“You’re broke.”
“That’s part of it.”
“I could fix that.”
“I wanta put my feet up, know what I mean? I’m tired of the hustle. In New York, Chicago, I’d need fifty a year just to get by. That means I’d need half a million, doesn’t it? Put it into municipals maybe.”
“You’re dreaming, Drew.”
“I’m talking about cash, of course.”
She shook her head slowly. “Impossible.”
“I was thinking maybe I could tap you for around a hundred thousand. Secondary rights, I think they call it.”
“Who’s your principal buyer?”
“Lemme tell you about Bobby first, okay?” She nodded. “Bobby was in a real jam and flat on his ass and all he had to sell was this story of his. Well, shit, I didn’t have any money and he wouldn’t tell me the story until I came up with some. So what I did is, I got him to tell me just part of the story, and I’ll tell you this much, it’s some story. So then I had to figure out who’d pay for what I had. It just so happened there was this guy in Singapore I’d known a little, back in the fifties. I got ten thousand out of him.”
“For just part of the story?”
Meade nodded. “That’s how hot it is.”
“Who is he?”
“We’ll get to that. Lemme get back to Bobby. Now Bobby’s problem was he had to disappear. So what I did was, I got him a Filipino passport and offered him that and seventy-five hundred for the rest of the story. He grabbed it and for all I know Bobby’s in Manila now, probably getting rich all over again.”
“But he told you the rest of the story?”
“Oh, yeah. All of it.”
“Then what?”
“Then I figured I’d better get out of Singapore.”
“Who?”
“They came looking for Bobby.”
“Who?”
“Everybody.” He paused. “And then they started looking for me.” He paused again. “Well, I had just enough money for a ticket to Santiago and then on to Caracas and from there to Mexico City. I crossed over at Mexicali.”
“Walked across?”
He nodded. “I figured I could sell the whole story for a bundle to this same guy who’d paid me ten thousand for just the taste. So I called him from a phone booth in Calexico and guess who I got?”
“I don’t guess. Who?”
“His widow.”
It was a long stare. The cool green eyes locked on the cold hazel ones. Neither gaze wavered. It was Gladys Citron who spoke first, asking a question whose answer she was fairly sure she already knew.
“Did he die in bed?”
Meade shook his head. “It was an accident. They say. A car wreck.”
She rose and reached for Meade’s glass. When she was at the liquor, pouring two more drinks, she asked her next question casually, her back still to him.
“Who was he?”
“Replogle. Jack Replogle. John T. Replogle.”
“Replogle Construction,” she said.
“Big bucks, Gladys.”
“An accident, you say,” she said as she turned, moved back to the fireplace, and handed him his drink.
“So his widow claims, but what does she know?”
“What do you do now?”
“There was a guy with him.”
“With Replogle?”
“When the wreck happened. A money guy. He wasn’t hurt.”
“I see. You think he’ll buy.”
“I know he will.”
“And he’s here — in L.A.?”
Meade nodded. “He gets first crack; you get second.”
“What’s his name?”
Meade swallowed some of his drink and then frowned. “I’ve been trying to decide if I oughta tell you.”
Gladys Citron smiled — a small, slight, confident smile.
“Well, why the hell not? His name’s Haere.”
The smile went away. “Draper Haere?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“We’ve met a time or two.”
“He’s a money man,” Meade said. “Politics.”
“I know.”
“What I’ve got is sort of a political shoot-’em-up.”
“I see. Do you know Draper Haere?”
“Sure, I know him. Not well. I used to know his old man pretty good, though. He was a commie.”
“How do you know that?”
“How?” Meade asked with a cold grin. “What the hell, Gladys, I turned him in.”