When there was no immediate response Loretta, a busty big-haired blond some twenty years her husband’s junior took a drag on her cigarette and went to the foot of the stairs.
“REGGIE!”
Loretta was royally pissed off having to answer the door to Captain O’Connell’s hoodlum and low life friends. Three years ago she had mistakenly got the impression that she was marrying a cop not a small time mobster with connections at City Hall and on days like this she hated having been taken in. Sometimes she honestly wondered if Reggie knew any ‘real’ people; the only people she ever met were movie and TV people on the make, cops she would not trust to keep their hands to themselves in a kindergarten class or a nunnery, and wise guys like the two ‘IRS men’ standing in her porch scratching their crotches.
She thought she heard movement upstairs.
Reggie had had to be carried up the stairs last night; he was so drunk he had pissed himself in the car on the way back to the Hollywood Hills from some benefit he had attended last night.
A benefit!
More likely some studio party where he had had his sticky fingers up some starlets skirt!
“REGGIE!”
“Fuck it, Loretta,” Captain Reginald Carmichael O’Connell of the LAPD cursed angrily as he stumbled to the head of the stairs pulling on a long, lividly colored silk dragon night gown. “Just tell the lunks to fuck off!” With which he turned away muttering to himself. “What the fuck time of day is this!”
“THEY SAY YOU TOLD THEM TO CALL ROUND THIS MORNING!”
Reggie O’Connell halted, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
Too many balls in the air!
I am getting way too old for this shit!
He had very nearly shit himself when the Feds had turned up at Van Nuys and turned over his office. The bastards had turned up here and at his chalet up Loretta did not know about up in the Canyon, too. They had walked off with every piece of paper they could find.
Like I’d be dumb enough to put anything in writing!
As for sequestering of his bank and property records; that was joke!
What was the point of keeping a second set of books if you filed it in a box next to one with a label saying ‘HONEST BOOKS’.
He turned back.
The Feds had been on a fishing expedition. He had warned his friends and clients at City Hall and in the Los Angeles County DA’s Office to expect the Feds on their doorsteps. Nobody was about to break ranks any time soon. Shit like this happened from time to time; afterwards, things soon went back to normal.
“I’M COMING! I’M COMING!”
He stomped down the stairs.
“I’ll deal with this,” he grunted, waving his wife away in the general direction the kitchen. “Make me drink, Babe,” he suggested as an afterthought as Loretta flounced past him in high dudgeon.
He sighed; what fuck is her problem?
Jesus, you would think she had found me between a debutante’s legs! Sometimes I drink too much! Shoot me why don’t you!
Reggie O’Connell peered at the two men, both in their early twenties in the porch. He gestured for them to come in.
“This better be good news,” he growled.
His visitors looked thoughtfully, one to the other.
“Whoever you’re talking to at Irving doesn’t know squat,” the fairer of the two men in cheap, off the peg suits complained. “That club owner you wanted looked after?”
“Doug Weston?”
“He was moved out a couple of days ago. Nobody knows where. Or maybe nobody’s talking to your guy at the Department of Corrections.” The man shrugged, scratched the stubble on his chin and yawned as if he had been up all night. “The DA’s office has lost him, too.”
Reggie O’Connell was suddenly sobering up in a hurry. So much so that the hairs on the back of his neck were starting to stand on end.
“What about Brenckmann?”
“They say he’s knocked up pretty bad. Some guard who isn’t on our payroll broke up the fight. ”
“Knocked up bad? But not dead?”
The younger man shook his head.
“No, not dead, Chief.”
“FUCK!” Reggie O’Connell’s eyes had narrowed to suspicious, mistrustful slits. “Why the fuck are you telling me this shit? I don’t pay you to tell me this shit!”
The two men looked at him resentfully.
“What do you want us to do, Chief?”
“Nothing! Just fuck off! I need time to think!”
Actually, what he really needed was a drink.
Loretta had already got to the bar ahead of her husband. Although a warm breeze blew into the curving, glassy living room populated with plush chairs and low tables that overlooked the patio and the pool beyond, the atmosphere between the husband and wife was angrily frosty. Reggie O’Connell’s wife had thought that she had had her eyes wide open when she married him — that was why she tried very hard to put as much distance between herself and any of his friends — but had realized the magnitude of her error of her ways in recent months.
“What have you done?” She asked, splashing neat gin into crystal tumbler.
Her husband grabbed a half-empty bottle of Kentucky bourbon and snatched the nearest glass from the mini-bar that curved around the pool end of the room. He threw an impatient, sneering look at his wife.
“Why the fuck are you all dressed up?”
“I’m meeting some girls for lunch on Santa Monica Boulevard,” Loretta snapped waspishly.
Reggie O’Connell knew better than that. His wife had struggled into a too tight top which emphasised her ample cleavage, pinched her waist and flattered her spreading curves. She rustled as she moved, her silk stockings shone almost electrically and she had obviously spent a lot of time ‘making up’ to look nearer thirty than forty. Loretta had been a bit part player in B movies a decade ago; she was the shapely blond who always got to walk on by at the scene of a crime, the plucky almost heroine that the director never trusted with more than two or three lines, or the sensuous sacrificial offering to a marauding alien monster on a set that honest to god actually looked like cardboard and papier-mâché, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike without the screen presence, sexual magnetism or the ability to huskily evoke fascination…
Reggie O’Connell had actually met Marilyn Monroe a couple of times; once before she was famous but she had been unforgettable even then. He had met a lot of movie people and done some of them favours, just not as many favours as many of Hollywood’s finest imagined. He tended to operated down among the also rans, sorting out the little problems of small time city club owners, politicians and the sort of honest citizens who did not like to wait for smart lawyers to make their local difficulties go away.
“You aren’t listening to a fucking word I’m saying!” His wife raged, dunking her tumbler so hard on the bar the man was surprised it did not instantly shatter into a thousand splinters.
“Sorry. Didn’t think you had anything to say to me?”
“I asked you what you’d done?” Loretta repeated doggedly. “Ever since that night you’ve been running away from something?”
Reggie O’Connell had known there was more to Loretta than the big hair and big tits; he ought to have married a plain girl who had never lived in his world. Mrs Reggie O’Connell ought by rights to be a woman who could present a respectable front, who would never think to ask any of the obvious questions; but marrying his mother had never really appealed to him.