A Flash of Green (23 page)

Durley leaned forward, wearing a rather strange smile. “You want to know about my attitude? I got this kind of an attitude. I got the attitude of a man with a heavy piece of money in this thing. I sold out a nice operation in Jersey. You know when we were due to open? December first last year. So we open in April with the season over. You know the occupancy I run? Forty percent is a good night, a helluva good night. You know where the break-even is? Seventy-one per cent. So you come around doing a favor for a friend. I’m hurting, fella. I’m hurting real bad, and I’ll rent units to anything that’s warm, breathing and has money.
Nobody around here ever heard of your kids. Anybody rents an overnight key here, they buy privacy too. You want something on anybody, fella, you don’t get it the easy way, not from me. You go around the other way, like following them. If we got to do a hot-pants trade to keep alive, we’ll do it until we get fat enough to pick and choose. You following me? In the meantime, they rent the key and they buy privacy. We need the local plates we’re getting, and if I fink on any of that business, word gets around and we lose it. Right now I’m running a hot-pillow trade in a six hundred thousand dollar plant, which makes no sense at all and sometimes makes me feel ashamed, but I’m doing it to survive, and I’ll keep doing it until I decide I don’t have to. That’s the kind of attitude I’ve got.”

Jimmy Wing poured the rest of his beer into his glass. He smiled and shook his head and said, “Rough talk, Mr. Durley. This local trade, you put them way in the back units so the cars are out of sight?”

“I got a lot of book work to do tonight, fella, so if you’ll …”

“Wait a minute. You’re in Palm County. I was born and raised here. I know a hell of a lot of people, Durley. I’ve done favors for so many of them, they’d do little favors for me without asking why. I know everybody in the courthouse.”

“Where are you going with it?”

“You got hard with me, right sudden. I don’t know as that’s too smart. This isn’t like Jersey. This is small town around here. Do all your signs conform to county ordinances? How much inspection are you getting on those county licenses you took out? How about sanitation? How about setbacks? All your kitchen help fingerprinted? Maybe it could even be a lot easier than that, Mr. Durley. Maybe a sheriff’s deputy could take a swing through all your parking areas every hour on the hour all night long, with
that big red flasher working so nobody would miss him. Now, I’m telling you just as honestly as I can that the biggest mistake you can make right now is to decide I’m bluffing.”

Durley went over to the bar and came back with a drink. He sat quietly for almost a full minute. Finally he said, “I got so much on my mind, sometimes I forget how to be smart.”

“It was a week ago last Wednesday. They were in a unit in the last building in the back. Dark-haired girl, small and pretty. Big husky blond boy. Red Jaguar.”

“They would have checked in in the evening.”

“Probably. And left very early.”

“Let’s go check it with Pritch. He was on.”

They went into a small office beyond the switchboard. The desk clerk could not recall at first, and remembered when Wing said it was the night Gardner had stayed there.

“Oh, I think I’ve got it now. Let me check the cards.”

Pritchard came back with a card in his hand. “The girl came alone and registered right after I came on. Here’s the time stamp. Twelve after four. Haughty as hell. Wanted one way in the back. Went and looked at it and came back and paid cash. Eighteen fifty-four, with tax. She wanted to pay on her way in instead of out because she said she and her husband would be leaving early. Yes, I remember seeing the car out in front. Red Jag. She’s got here on the card Michigan plates.”

“That would be right,” Jimmy said.

“She said they’d take occupancy later on. And she …” He stopped, snapped his fingers, and excused himself again.

Durley examined the card and handed it to Wing. The writing was firm, large, angular, yet unmistakably feminine. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Tannis of Flint, Michigan. Wing was dryly amused to notice that Tannis was Sinnat spelled backward.

Pritchard came back and placed an identical card on the desk
between them. “They’re in the house tonight, Frank. I thought it was familiar. But Gil checked them in before I come on. Is there something wrong?”

“Nothing you have to know about, Pritch,” Durley said. “All you have to remember is how Mr. Wing here is a man we’re real good buddies with. We’re such good buddies, you take these two cards in and run off a photo copy for our good friend Mr. Wing.”

The clerk took the cards away. “I appreciate this,” Jimmy said.

“That’s why I’m doing it. So you’ll appreciate it. So if I get in a jam I’ve got a local buddy to turn to. I wouldn’t want anybody thinking of all the things you thought of, and wanting a shakedown.”

“It isn’t likely to come to that around here.”

“That’s nice to know. Funny, the girl doing the check-in.”

“The boy looks too young.”

“If you want to make my damn day perfect, now tell me the girl is fifteen.”

“Nineteen.”

“That’s a small help.”

“Are you going to make it?”

“We’ll make it,” Durley said. “If my wife has to make up every bed herself, and if I have to be desk clerk, bartender, chef and janitor, we’ll make it. We can’t afford not to. The trouble was, we missed the season that would carry us through the first summer.”

“The rates seem high.”

“The rear units have kitchen deals in them. We start at ten for a single. Once we hang out the low, low, summer rates signs, you’ll know we’ve been whipped. We’re not after the shoppers. It has to stay a class operation.”

Pritchard brought him the copies of the registration cards. Durley walked him to the lobby door. Durley said, “I don’t have to tell you what not to talk about and you don’t have to tell me,
right? We understand each other. Come out to dinner. Bring a friend. The food is good. It cost a hundred grand over estimate, and it was four months late opening, but the food is good.”

Wing started to drive out, then turned and drove past the registration lobby and the big sapphire pool, back to the last unit. He estimated there were twenty rooms in the building. There were five cars parked in the darkness, faintly illuminated by a parking-area light on a tall pole. The little red car was nosed up to the low shrubbery in front of number sixty-six. The canvas top was up. The windows of sixty-six were dark. The little car looked more patient than furtive.

He turned around and drove out. Durley was standing in the parking area in front of the office watching him as he turned out onto the highway and headed back toward Palm City.

It was quarter after midnight when he knocked at the side door, the office door, of Elmo’s home.

Elmo let him in. “Set, boy. When you phoned I was so far asleep Dellie liked to shook me to death waking me up.” He yawned and leaned against the edge of his desk, looking at Jimmy sitting on the couch. “Saturday night I used to howl till break of day, but I’m slowed a lot. Wish you could have waited until morning.”

“I don’t want to see too much of you in the daylight, Elmo. Here or in public places. It might not be smart. And if I’d waited until tomorrow I might have changed my mind about the whole thing. And you had the idea this was urgent, the last time I talked to you.”

“Everything is urgent, boy. The only un-urgent thing in the world is taking your pleasure, and that’s a sometime urgent thing
if you set it off too long. I hope to God you got something worthwhile on Sinnat.”

“I don’t know what it’s worth, but I damn well know it’s about the only thing you’re going to get.”

“Leroy said you’d get nothing at all. He poked around some.”

“When you ask me to do something, I don’t want a lot of other people I don’t know about doing the same thing.”

Elmo chuckled. He hitched himself up onto the desk, reached inside his silk robe and scratched his chest. “You got so many ideas about what you will do and what you won’t do, you leave me confused. So far, Jimmy, right up to now, I can’t see as you’ve done anything yet.”

“Maybe I’ve done something about Dial Sinnat. I don’t know how you can use it, or if you can use it. I don’t want to be mixed up in that end of it. I want that clear before we go into it, Elmo.”

“You keep this up, you’re going to put me in an ugly condition, boy. We’re going to get along fine. I won’t ask anything of you you can’t do. We went into that. I want you for what you can do … better than other people.”

“Sinnat is a tough-minded man. Pushing him the way I have in mind might not work out. By the way, he told Kat Hubble this deal is being handled smarter than any of the five men involved, and he wondered who could be the silent partner with the brains.”

Elmo’s eyebrows went up in wonder. “Well. How about that? So there’s another real good reason to make him stop thinking about any part of it. What have you got?”

“I had good luck getting it,” Jimmy said, and told him precisely what he had found out, and turned the copies of the registration cards over to him.

Elmo studied the copies, walked around his desk and sat down.
“Too bad it had to be Burt’s boy.” He shook his head and smiled. “No beaches and backseats for that little gal. No bugs and bushes for her. She travels first class. Whether it’s any use to us, then, depends on how much he thinks of his little girl.”

“We can assume he’s partial to her.”

“You look beat and you talk mean, Jimmy. You tired?”

“A little. This isn’t my normal line of work.”

“It’s a little special for all of us. But don’t you start bleeding for her, hear? She’s a little girl got herself a husky young buck to while away the long summer with. You sure Burt’s boy is seventeen?”

“Positive.”

“I’ll have to check the law on it with Leroy, but I got the idea she’s been tampering with the morals of a minor. And there’s some kind of an ordinance about conspicuous cohabitation, but I don’t know as it would fit this here situation.”

“I hope this won’t turn into some kind of a public mess.”

Elmo looked benignly at him. “Now, if there is any way in the world of this turning into a public mess, this girl’s father is going to be the first one in the world to want to prevent it. The way I see it, those men that run fast and loose through all the women they can reach, it’s an entirely different thing when it comes to their own daughters. He might be right sensitive about this, Jimmy.”

“He might be.”

Elmo leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “There’s another way to go at it too. There’s no way in the world this little girl could prove it was Burt’s boy with her these two times. She could be claiming it was Burt’s boy just because if it came out it was somebody else, it would be a worse mess.”

“I don’t see what you …”

“She could be trying to hide the fact it was actual old Tom Jennings seducin’ her. Two birds with one stone, you could say.”

“Now wait a minute!”

“I was just thinking out loud.”

“But I don’t want anybody making it into more than …”

“Hold it!” Elmo said sharply, raising both hands. “Lord God, what the hell kind of game are we playing here? Get yourself back in focus, boy. What are we talking about? Robbing the poor? We got a snotty little rich girl playing around with Burt Lesser’s innocent boy. And we got Dial Sinnat, with more money than Carter got pills, and a little cute-ass wife a quarter century younger than him. And they’re
outsiders
, boy! They come down here from Rochester, New York, or some goddam place like that. You and I were born and raised here. If they died here, they wouldn’t even be buried here. And if they decide they don’t like it, they can go any damn place in the world and live fat. You look at that committee list. There isn’t a
one
of them didn’t come here from some other place. What the hell right have they got telling us what to do with the landscape we were raised in? Boy, you act as if I’m going to skin those folks, salt ’em down and fry ’em. All I’m going to do is give a little bitty nudge here and there, just enough to make every one of them take a sudden disinterest in Grassy Bay. I want to do it nice and gentle, with your help. If you haven’t got the stomach for a little thing like this, a little job that’s going to work out fine for everybody, with nobody getting hurt bad, then I can have Leroy bring some folks in who maybe set their feet down a lot heavier than you and me. Now, I’m not going to do any more thinking out loud. I’ll maybe find a good way to use this, and maybe I won’t, but you don’t have to know about it if it makes you feel easier. This is the way the world works, boy. This is the way things get done. You should know that much by now.”

“How
do
things get done, Elmo?”

“Why, I was just now … Is there more to that question?”

“I was wondering about Martin Cable the Third. And I was wondering about Eloise. How did you get things done with Eloise, Mister Commissioner?”

“She’s a fine-looking woman.”

“Lately she’s taking a big interest in local economics. Martin says she’s real bright about it.”

“You know, you’re being real bright too.”

“Thanks.”

“You ever see that shack Leroy has down in the Taylor Tract east of Everset?”

“No.”

“He calls it a shack, but it’s more a lodge, I guess. Fifty-some acres he’s got down there, gate and cattle guard and a little old windy road going in, so you’d never know he had it fixed up so nice back in there. It’s about the onliest place Leroy can get away from his maw. He’s got power going in there. He’s even got an unlisted phone. Real fine. I guess Eloise has been going down there off and on for six, eight months, little afternoon visits like. There were only three knew about it, them and me. Now it’s four. He’s been teaching her about business, you might say. Martin is a stubborn man, but when he won’t listen to her, she just won’t have anything to do with that poor man at all. And he’s been coming around to her way of thinking. Or Leroy’s way, you might say.”

“Or your way.”

“But she doesn’t know that. She’s just real anxious to help Leroy. Somehow she’s got the idea that unless this development goes through, Leroy is ruined. She’s got a tender heart.”