He came back ten minutes later, wearing a different suit. His mouth was red and slightly swollen, as if somebody had been chewing on it.
“Nice-looking girl,” I said, hoping to needle him.
He was feeling too good to be needled. “I got a proposition for you, Archer.” He even laid an arm across my shoulders. “A business proposition.”
I stood up, placing my shoulders out of his reach. “You have a very peculiar business approach.”
“Forget it.” As if I had apologized to him. “Put the gun away, Blaney. You’re working for old lady Lawrence, you said. You do a job for me instead, what do you say.”
“Churning buttermilk?”
He took it without a word. “Doing what you’re doing. You want to contact Galley Lawrence. Go to Palm Springs and contact her. I’ll pay you one grand for her, five for Joey.”
“Why?”
“I like them so much. I want to invite them over to look at my television.”
“Why don’t you go yourself?”
He paused, then decided to tell me: “It’s out of my territory. I don’t like crossing over out of my territory. Anyway I got you to go for me, isn’t that right?”
“If you say so.” It was an easy out.
“That’s the old espirit de corpse,” he said surprisingly. “You bring me Joey and I’ll slip you a quick five G’s.” He showed me a thick pack of bills in a gold clip shaped like a dollar sign.
“Joey alive or dead?”
“Alive if you can handle it. Dead, the deal’s still on. What could be fairer?” He turned to Blaney: “You got our friend’s gun here?”
“Yeah.” Blaney stood up to answer the boss.
“Okay, give it to him outside.” Dowser turned back to me, smiling with a kind of canine charm. “No hard feelings, old man. Everybody’s got to look out for himself, that’s my philosophy, isn’t that right?”
“Speaking of looking out for yourself, I usually get a retainer.” I didn’t want Dowser’s money, but I had to ask him for it. The giving and receiving of money, its demand and its refusal, were Dowser’s basic form of communication with other people. That and the threat, the blow, the infliction of fear and pain.
He grunted and gave me a hundred-dollar bill. A piece of money takes its feeling from the people that have handled it. This money twisted in my hand like a fat green tomato-worm.
Chapter 8
By ten I was in Palm Springs, making the rounds of the bars. I worked up one side of the main street, a miniature Wilshire with horsy trimmings, and down the other side. Old or young, fat or thin, the bartenders gave me the same cool pitying smile. They looked at me and down at the photograph and back at me again. – Nice little beast, eh, nope I never see her. – What’s the matter bud your wife run out on you? – If she was here last night I’d know it but she wasn’t. – She wouldn’t be your daughter would she? That was the most unkindest cut of all.
I had spent about six dollars on drinks that I left untouched or anyway unfinished, when I finally got my lead. It was in a little side-street place called the Lariat. A knotty-pine box of a place with longhorns over the bar, seats and stools upholstered with riveted saddle-leather, a color-retouched photomural of Palm Springs in the days when it was a desert outpost, which weren’t so long ago that I couldn’t remember them. A great deal had been done to fill the Lariat with old western tradition, but it was so contemporary that it barely existed yet. A pair of fugitives from a Los Angeles wolf-pack were playing shuffleboard in the rear. The bartender, who was watching the game, came forward when I took a seat at the bar. He was a youngish man in a Hopalong Cassidy shirt and a wide carved cowhide belt.
I asked for a Scotch and soda. When he brought it, I showed him the photograph and made my little speech. He looked at me and down at the photograph and back at me again, but without the pitying smile. His eyes were large and brown, and they slanted downward from the middle of his face, so that he looked like a cocker spaniel. They had the earnest look of one who sincerely wished to help.
“Yeah, I know the face,” he said. “She was in here last night. The joint was jumping last night, you wouldn’t believe it. It always slows down on Mondays, after the week-end and all.”
“What was her name?” It seemed to have come too easily, or maybe too much bar Scotch was making me uneasy.
“I didn’t catch the name. They weren’t at the bar, they sat down in the back booth there, by the shuffleboard. I just took them their drinks. Daiquiries, they were drinking.”
“Who was the other half of the they?”
“Some guy,” he told me cautiously after a while.
“You know him?”
“I wouldn’t say I know him. He’s been in here a few times, off and on.”
“Maybe you know his name.”
“I should. I thought I did. I guess it slipped my mind, though.” He lit a cigarette and tried to look inscrutable and failed.
My change from a ten-dollar bill was on the bar between us. I pushed it towards him. “You can tell me what he looks like.”
“Maybe I can and maybe I can’t.” He squirmed in his cowboy shirt, eying the money wistfully. “I don’t know what the setup is, mister. If this is a divorce rap or something like that, I wouldn’t want to shoot my mouth off too free.”
“If divorce comes into it, it’s news to me.” I told him it was a prodigal daughter case. But with Dowser and Tarantine in it, it was growing much bigger than that. I left them out, and tried to forget them myself.
The bartender was still worried. The bills and silver lay untouched on the black Lucite, nearer him than me. “I got to think about it,” he said in pain. “I mean I’ll try and remember his name for you.”
With a great appearance of casualness he went to the other end of the bar and took a telephone out from under it. Leaning over the bar and hunching his shoulders around the instrument so I couldn’t see him dial, he made a call. It took him a long time to get his party. When he finally did, he spoke low and close into the mouthpiece.
He came back briskly and took my empty glass. “Something more to drink, sir?”
I looked at my wrist watch, nearly midnight. “All right.”
He set the second glass on the bar beside the money. “Do I take it out of this, sir?”
“It’s up to you. It’s eating into your profits, isn’t it?”
“I don’t get you,” he said. But he waited for me to produce another bill.
I handed him a single from my wallet. “What did your friend tell you on the phone?”
“My girl friend, you mean?” he asked brightly. “She’s coming over to meet me when I close.”
“What time do you close?”
“Two o’clock.”
“I guess I’ll stick around.”
He seemed relieved. He flicked a dish towel out from under the bar and began to polish a row of cocktail glasses, humming Red River Valley to himself. I moved to the back booth. I sat and wondered if that was as close as I’d get to Galley Lawrence, and watched the coatless boys at the shuffleboard. Red beat blue, which meant that blue paid for the drinks. They were drinking vodka, and they were all of eighteen.
Shortly after midnight a pair of short fat men came in, ridiculous in ten-gallon hats and jeans. They were very very particular about their drinks, and filled the room with name-dropping accounts of their recent social triumphs, related in high loud tenors. They didn’t interest me.
A few minutes later a man came in who did. He was tall and graceful in a light flannel suit and an off-white snap-brim hat. His face was incredible. A Greek sculptor could have used him as a model for a Hermes or Apollo. Standing at the door with one hand on the knob, he exchanged a quick glance with the bartender, and looked at me. The tenors at the bar gave him a long slow once-over.