The Stiff Upper Lip (7 page)

She felt me go hard. It made her giggle, softly.

“I'll suck you if you like,” I heard her say softly. “Anything you like.”

I held on. After a while I felt her subside, go dead, limp. Then I pulled one sleeve of her blouse up past the elbow, found what I was looking for, then released her and stood clear.

“Is that why Odessa beat you up?” I said.

She stayed on her knees, rocking a little. Her arms were folded, and her hands rubbed at the inner elbows. Rubbed hard, like they could make the needle marks go away. And the smoke went in and out of her eyes and nobody had lit a match.

I repeated the question.

She seemed to hear it this time. It made her laugh, a high-pitched mulatto laugh, the kind that's got sass and chagrin mixed up in it. It didn't last long.

“Odessa beat me up?” she said. “That man beat me up when I
didn't!
”

“You mean he was supplying you with dope?”

“Supplying? Yeah. That man was supplying me with everything. Everything I needed, everything I didn't.”

“And now that he's gone?”

“Gone?”

“Dead, Marie-Josèphe. Odessa's dead, remember? Murdered.”

“Yeah. Don't need that man. Never did need him.”

“Who killed him, Marie-Josèphe? Why was he killed? Who got you to keep Roscoe here yesterday while Odessa got his?”

“He's sweet, Roscoe,” she crooned, gray-lipped.

“You sure freaked the hell out of him, Marie-Josèphe. When he lit out of here yesterday, it was a wonder he didn't get run over in the street. Or was that the idea?”

She looked up at me. Suddenly the smoke was gone from her eyes. It didn't become her.

“I told him to run, M'sieu,” she said. “I can't help him. I told him to run away.”

“Don't be a fool, Marie-Josèphe. Sooner or later the police are going to ask you the same questions. They won't be as nice as I am, and they won't pay for the answers. Probably they'll break all your needles while they're at it.”

For an instant she looked scared, but only an instant. Then her eyes went small, tired, professional.

“Time's up, M'sieu,” she said, uncoiling from the bed. She picked up her skirt from the floor.

“Maybe I'd like to go again,” I said.

She shook her head.

“You've had your money's worth,” she said, putting on her skirt and stepping up into her shoes. “Some other time.”

“Don't be a fool,” I repeated. “Nobody's going to protect you for very long.”

“Maybe you're the one who's being the fool, M'sieu,” she said, looking past me at the door. And in a way, she was right.

5

The trouble with your average French thug is that he's seen the same movie too many times. Maybe Belmondo could get away with imitating Bogart in
Le Deuxième Souffle
, but the French thug imitating Belmondo imitating Bogart is one too many, like a story that loses something in the retelling. For instance, the one who was holding the gun had a cigarette stuck in his mouth, but the cigarette was unlit, and when the time came for us to go and him to crush it under his heel, on Marie-Josèphe's floor … well, it was just a waste of a cigarette.

The one without a gun worried me more. They usually do. He was a quiet wimp of a guy with an odd way of bobbing and weaving his head, and I put him down for a knife-and-scissors specialist. The Belmondo did most of the talking, but it was the little guy who shook me down, and when we left Marie-Josèphe's—going for a conversation—they said—the little guy led the way, with me in the middle and the Belmondo making with the cannon behind me.

Marie-Josèphe may have had every reason to be scared, but she didn't show it. She looked past me like I was just another trick, and her last words were for them.

“I didn't tell him a thing,” she said.

They had a black 504 parked at the rue de I'Ouest end of the alley. A driver sat behind the wheel, reading
France Soir
. The Belmondo got in front with him, the wimp in back with me. Sure enough, when I looked across, the wimp had a shiv out in his palm. The blade was open, and it ran past the end of his fingertips. He grinned when he saw that I'd noticed it. Meanwhile the Belmondo had stuck another cigarette in his mouth. This one he lit. It was the brown-paper kind—Bastos or Celtique—and it stunk like cheap grass.

I made a try or two at the conversation we were supposed to have, but nobody was in a talking mood. We drove out of the warren of streets onto the avenue du Maine, then up through the traffic to the Alésia church, then across to René Coty and up toward the Pare Montsouris. The park is one of those keep-off-the-grass Paris showplaces, with enormous spreading trees and swans floating on the lake and a small nineteenth-century observatory up on the hill, and all that mars it is that the old Sceaux line, now a branch of the Métro, runs through an open gully up the middle of it. We drove into the sun along the west edge of the park, then abruptly onto a cobbled street that curved up between rows of handsome, ivy-covered private homes. They would have belonged in a well-heeled suburb. But this wasn't a suburb, it was Paris, meaning you had to be better than well-heeled to live there. Enough better, say, to keep a couple of stiffs outside your front door in another 504, just in case you needed the parking space.

To judge, Didier “Dédé” Delatour was doing just fine. I'd never had the pleasure, but I knew the name. Dédé Delatour was Mafioso modern-style, meaning the kind it's considered chic to have at your dinner table or in your neighborhood discothèque. His above-board wealth came from being a “sportsman,” meaning he owned a racing stable as well as a piece of several go-go gambling joints on the Côte d'Azur. What went on below the surface nobody knew for sure, but he'd been connected to enough shady operations to give Parisian thrill-seekers just the right kind of shiver. What's more, he was good-looking in a dark, Mediterranean sort of way, with the Mediterranean accent to go with it, and, to top off the image, back in the past he'd done time. Not a lot, but time.

This made him the genuine article.

I was ushered upstairs in a hexagonal salon with a view down onto a garden that had a well-tended lawn, tall stone planters, and assorted statuary on pedestals. My escort was dismissed, and Dédé Delatour himself came on, self-assured and affable and flashing of tooth, in a dark flannel suit that was cut just a little tight, as though to remind you of the macho and muscle which had put him where he was. He gave me a glad hand and a sentence or two of pretty approximate English. He offered me a seat, a drink, and a cigar. I refused the last two, sank into a soft divan, and lit my pipe, puzzled by his bonhommie, while he apologized for any rough treatment I might have had. He wanted to know how things were in California. I said I hadn't been there for a while. He said he'd always wanted to go to California—“'ollywood,” the girls, the sunshine, the skyscrapers, the big cars. And sports, the betting, fabulous. In France they had no sports betting, only horses. A little boxing. But it would come. It had in Spain, Italy, England. A question of organization. But he'd never had the time for California. It was business, always business, I knew how that was, didn't I?

At this point Dédé Delatour unleashed his eyebrows. He had thick, mobile ones, and a bristling mustache to go with them, and he did a lot of work with both.

I'd surprised him, he said. I had what I wanted, didn't I? Wasn't Adlay what I wanted? It was too bad, such an excellent athlete, the public liked him, he scored many points. He would be hard to replace. But business was business, he was willing to let me have Adlay.
Alors …
?

Alors
is French for
then
. The way he used it called for me to take up the conversational ball. At least to tell him he'd made a mistake about me.

I didn't.

In addition there was the matter of Greemse.

“What is your interest in Greemse, Monsieur? Why have you been bothering about him and his whore? He wasn't even part of our arrangement. On the contrary …”

He left it hanging there, his eyebrows up, and I realized he'd jumped to a conclusion about me. It may have been a cockeyed one, but at least it explained the kid-glove reception, and if it was cockeyed, even simple-minded, you have to remember that he was French. Because just like if you told the average Frenchman you came from Chicago he'd assume you were a cousin of Al Capone, so to Dédé Delatour an American from California who'd been hanging around Roscoe Hadley was no garden-variety basketball freak. And the fact that this particular Californian lived in Paris and spoke passable French only proved that he was fronting for others who didn't.

Or so it seemed to me, on the spot. The fact that there could be another, more plausible explanation didn't so much as occur to me.

“Maybe that's just the point,” I said, taking the bait. “That Grimes wasn't part of the arrangement.”

“
Comment
?” he said. Then: “Ahhh …” and the eyebrows relaxed. It was as though I'd just explained a lot of things. “But don't forget, Monsieur, we don't
own
the basketball clubs ourselves. Not all of them, not yet. Greemse's and Adlay's club only just came up from the lower division this season. The club owner signed them to play without consulting us. But now, with them gone, it will be much simpler.”

“How is that?”

“Obviously. Without them, their club is no longer competitive. Where will they find two other players of such quality? They will have to be replaced … by you, of course. But only after the club has been put up for sale. Cheaply.”

“Obviously,” I said. “But did Grimes have to be murdered for that to happen?”

Dédé Delatour shrugged, with his eyebrows as well as his shoulders.

“Maybe you should ask Adlay about it.”

“Maybe I did.”

“What did he say?”

“Maybe he says he doesn't know why Grimes was killed.”

“Gr … How do you say it in American?” He made another stab at “Grimes,” but it just wouldn't come. “Greemse,” he said, chuckling. “There's no reason for us to mourn him. He was a troublemaker. The Italians didn't want him, the Spanish either. A nigger hoodlum of low intelligence. Not even the other players liked him.”

“You mean he got his throat cut just because he didn't get along with the other players?”

Again the double shrug.

“Perhaps he had begun to meddle where he wasn't wanted.”

“Meddle in what?”

Dédé Delatour looked at me strangely. He didn't answer. I decided to take a shot at it.

“Like in the dope trade?” I persisted.

It lay there between us. We stared at each other, and suddenly it was like each of us had things to hide. Then his eyebrows made a frowning
v
What uses over his nose, and he repeated:

“Where he wasn't wanted.”

That too lay there a moment.

“Please remember, Monsieur,” Dédé Delatour said evenly, “our relationship is based strictly on
le basket
. You supply the players, we arrange for contracts and payments. It is a small business now. It could be a much bigger one.”

“Could be?”

“
Will
be.” The flash came back into his eyes. “We are creating something from the bottom,” he said, gesturing, “The European project is getting people excited. The right people. We will have our European league. It will take time, that's all. We must all be patient. But once this little … episode … is out of the way, our control can only emerge reinforced.”

“Yes,” I said. “But meanwhile there's a problem.”

“What problem?”

“Hadley.”

“That's what I don't understand.”

“Somebody has been setting him up for Grimes' murder.”

“Setting up …? Ah, yes, the police. I heard you spent yesterday afternoon with them yourself.” The idea seemed to amuse him. “You were the one who discovered the body, weren't you?”

“That's right.”

“An unfortunate coincidence.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. But was it a coincidence that somebody tipped the police off to Hadley?”

“Did they? Perhaps that was just a little joke.” He chuckled at it. “Our police have no sense of humor.”

“Neither did Grimes when he was slit ear to ear.”

“I don't see …”

“Simply that Grimes was murdered with a knife, and one of your boys seems pretty handy with the cutlery.”

“You mean Jeannot?”

“I don't know his name. The little guy. And here's another coincidence that may or may not be one. The woman Hadley was with at the time. Now she claims she never saw him yesterday.”

“What woman is that?”

“Come on, Monsieur Delatour. Her name is Marie-Josèphe Lamentin.”

“Ah, you mean Greemse's whore?” He dismissed her with a waving gesture. “That one will say whatever she is told to say, Monsieur.”

The message, then, was clear enough. Whatever the real reasons for Odessa Grimes' murder, it had been used as a warning. Against me, presumably, and the people I presumably worked for. For a minute there I thought I had Roscoe all but off the hook.

All but.

“Now, Monsieur,” said Dédé Delatour, “I've answered your questions. I'll tell Jeannot you made the connection, it will flatter him. And rest assured, the whore can be taken care of, and also, if need be, the police. But I, in turn, have something to ask you.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Why haven't you disposed of Adlay?”

It was the $64,000 Special, the one we've all been waiting for, and, logical as it may have been from Delatour's point of view, I had no ready answer.

“Hadley is our business,” I said finally, keeping my voice level.

“Yes, of course,” with a magnanimous wave. “Just as Greemse was ours. But who is
our
, Monsieur? Who is
us
?”