“Pardon,” I snapped back, with my usual lightning-fast wit.
“Just don’t. It’s too cold to go for a swim this time of year.”
“Even in a bathtub.”
“Especially in a bathtub.”
“Does Mr. District Attorney send his regards?”
Bernie laughed. I had been an investigator with the DA’s office a few years back, but we’d been forced to part company.
“Forget him. I have some more impressive names on my list.”
“Let me guess. Howard Hughes?”
“Close.”
“General Stillwell?”
“Getting warmer. Try Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Governor Culbert Olson, and State Attorney General Earl Warren. Oh, and Wax, of course.”
I whistled. “All interested in little me. Who’d ’a thunk it?”
“Look, I don’t know much about this myself. They just gave me a message to pass on. In the building, they apparently think of me as your keeper.”
“Do a British gentleman, a French lady and a fed the size of Mount Rushmore have anything to do with this?”
“I’ll take the money I’ve won so far and you can pass that question on to the next sucker.”
“Fine, Bernie. Tell me, just how popular am I?”
“Tojo rates worse than you, and maybe Judas Iscariot.”
“Feels comfy. Any idea where Laird Brunette is these days?”
I heard a pause and some rumbling. Bernie was making sure his office was empty of all ears. I imagined him bringing the receiver up close and dropping his voice to a whisper.
“No one’s seen him in three months. Confidentially, I don’t miss him at all. But there are others…” Bernie coughed, a door opened, and he started talking normally or louder. “…of course, honey, I’ll be home in time for Jack Benny.”
“See you later, sweetheart,” I said, “your dinner is in the sink and I’m off to Tijuana with a professional pool player.”
“Love you,” he said, and hung up.
I’d picked up a coating of green slime on the soles of my shoes. I tried scraping them off on the edge of the desk and then used yesterday’s Times to get the stuff off the desk. The gloop looked damned esoteric to me.
I poured myself a shot from the bottle I had picked up across the street and washed the taste of Janice Marsh off my teeth.
I thought of Polynesia in the early 19th Century and of those fish-eyed native girls clustering around Capt. Marsh. Somehow, tentacles kept getting in the way of my thoughts. In theory, the Capt. should have been an ideal subject for a Dorothy Lamour movie, perhaps with Janice Marsh in the role of her great-great-great and Jon Hall or Ray Milland as girl-chasing Obed. But I was picking up Bela Lugosi vibrations from the set-up. I couldn’t help but think of bisected babies.
So far none of this running around had got me any closer to the Laird and his heir. In my mind, I drew up a list of Brunette’s known associates. Then, I mentally crossed off all the ones who were dead. That brought me up short. When people in Brunette’s business die, nobody really takes much notice except maybe to join in a few drunken choruses of “Ding-Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead” before remembering there are plenty of other Wicked Witches in the sea. I’m just like everybody else: I don’t keep a score of dead gambler-entrepreneurs. But, thinking of it, there’d been an awful lot recently, up to and including Gianni Pastore. Apart from Rothko and Isinglass, there’d been at least three other closed casket funerals in the profession. Obviously you couldn’t blame that on the Japs. I wondered how many of the casualties had met their ends in bathtubs. The whole thing kept coming back to water. I decided I hated the stuff and swore not to let my bourbon get polluted with it.
Back out in the rain, I started hitting the bars. Brunette had a lot of friends. Maybe someone would know something.
By early evening, I’d propped up a succession of bars and leaned on a succession of losers. The only thing I’d come up with was the blatantly obvious information that everyone in town was scared. Most were wet, but all were scared.
Everyone was scared of two or three things at once. The Japs were high on everyone’s list. You’d be surprised to discover the number of shaky citizens who’d turned overnight from chisellers who’d barely recognise the flag into true red, white and blue patriots prepared to shed their last drop of alcoholic blood for their country. Everywhere you went, someone sounded off against Hirohito, Tojo, the Mikado, kabuki and origami. The current rash of accidental deaths in the Pastore-Brunette circle were a much less popular subject for discussion and tended to turn loudmouths into closemouths at the drop of a question.
“Something fishy,” everyone said, before changing the subject.
I was beginning to wonder whether Janey Wilde wouldn’t have done better spending her money on a radio commercial asking the Laird to give her a call. Then I found Curtis the Croupier in Maxie’s. He usually wore the full soup and fish, as if borrowed from Astaire. Now he’d exchanged his carnation, starched shirtfront and pop-up top hat for an outfit in olive drab with bars on the shoulder and a cap under one epaulette.
“Heard the bugle call, Curtis?” I asked, pushing through a crowd of patriotic admirers who had been buying the soldier boy drinks.
Curtis grinned before he recognised me, then produced a supercilious sneer. We’d met before, on the Montecito. There was a rumour going around that during Prohibition he’d once got involved in an honest card game, but if pressed he’d energetically refute it.
“Hey cheapie,” he said.
I bought myself a drink but didn’t offer him one. He had three or four lined up.
“This racket must pay,” I said. “How much did the uniform cost? You rent it from Paramount?”
The croupier was offended. “It’s real,” he said. “I’ve enlisted. I hope to be sent overseas.”
“Yeah, we ought to parachute you into Tokyo to introduce loaded dice and rickety roulette wheels.”
“You’re cynical, cheapie.” He tossed back a drink.
“No, just a realist. How come you quit the Monty?”
“Poking around in the Laird’s business?”
I raised my shoulders and dropped them again.
“Gambling has fallen off recently, along with leading figures in the industry. The original owner of this place, for instance. I bet paying for wreaths has thinned your bankroll.”
Curtis took two more drinks, quickly, and called for more. When I’d come in, there’d been a couple of chippies climbing into his hip pockets. Now he was on his own with me. He didn’t appreciate the change of scenery and I can’t say I blamed him.
“Look, cheapie,” he said, his voice suddenly low, “for your own good, just drop it. There are more important things now.”
“Like democracy?”
“You can call it that.”
“How far overseas do you want to be sent, Curtis?”
He looked at the door as if expecting five guys with tommy guns to come out of the rain for him. Then he gripped the bar to stop his hands shaking.
“As far as I can get, cheapie. The Philippines, Europe, Australia. I don’t care.”
“Going to war is a hell of a way to escape.”
“Isn’t it just? But wouldn’t Papa Gianni have been safer on Wake Island than in the tub?”
“You heard the bathtime story, then?”
Curtis nodded and took another gulp. The juke box played “Doodly-Acky-Sacky, Want Some Seafood, Mama” and it was scary. Nonsense, but scary.
“They all die in water. That’s what I’ve heard. Sometimes, on the Monty, Laird would go up on deck and just look at the sea for hours. He was crazy, since he took up with that Marsh popsicle.”
“The Panther Princess?”
“You saw that one? Yeah, Janice Marsh. Pretty girl if you like clams. Laird claimed there was a sunken town in the bay. He used a lot of weird words, darkie bop or something. Jitterbug stuff. Cthul-whatever, Yog-Gimme-a-Break. He said things were going to come out of the water and sweep over the land, and he didn’t mean U-Boats.”