Black money (2 page)

"It's away back in the foothills. You'll need a map."

He rummaged in the bottom drawer of his desk and produced a map, on which he made some markings. "I suppose you know that General Bagshaw is dead."

"I'm sorry to hear it."

"We were devastated here at the bank. He always did his local banking with us. Mrs. Bagshaw still does, of course. If it's Mrs. Bagshaw you want to see, she's moved into one of the cottages at the Tennis Club. The house is leased to a fellow by the name of Martel."

"You know him?"

"I've seen him. He does his banking at our main office downtown."

McMinn gave me a quick suspicious look. "Are you acquainted with Mr. Martel?"

"Not yet."

I drove back into the foothills. The slopes were still green from the rains. The white and purple flowers on the brush gave out a smell like the slow breath of sunlight.

When I stopped my car at the Bagshaw mailbox, I could see the ocean below, hung on the horizon like unevenly blued washing. I had climbed only a few hundred feet but could feel the change in temperature, as if I had risen much nearer to the noon sun.

The house sat alone in its own canyon head, several hundred feet above the road. It looked almost as tiny as a bird-house. A blacktop driveway hair-pinned up to it from where I was parked.

A convertible with a snarl in the gearbox was toiling up behind me from the direction of town. It passed me, an old black Caddie, gray with dust, and stopped in front of my car.

The driver got out and came toward me. He was a middle-sized man wearing a hound's-tooth jacket and a good-looking pearl gray fedora, which he wore at a cocky slant. He moved with a kind of quick embarrassed belligerence. I had no doubt that he was Peter's "detective", but he didn't look like a detective to me. An air of desperate failure hung about him like a personal odor.

I got out my black book and made a note of the Cadillac's license number. It had California plates.

"What are you writing?"

"A poem."

He reached through the open window for my notebook. "Let's see it," he said in a loud unimpressive voice. His eyes were anxious.

"I never show work in progress."

I closed the book and put it back in my inside breast pocket. Then I started to turn up the window on his arm. He yanked his arm away and pressed his face against the glass, blurring it momentarily with his breath.

"I want to see what you wrote about me."

He took a miniature camera out of his pocket and rapped on the window with it, foolishly and frantically. "What did you write about me?"

It was the kind of situation I liked to avoid, or terminate quickly. As the century wore on - I could feel it wearing on angry pointless encounters like this one tended more and more to erupt in violence. I got out on the right-hand side and walked around the front of the car toward him.

As long as I was in my car, he had been yelling at a machine, a Cadillac yelling at a Ford. Now we were both men, and he was shorter and narrower than I was. He stopped yelling. His whole personality changed. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as if to disclaim the evil spirit that had invaded him and made him yell at me. Self-doubt pulled at his face like a surgically hidden scar.

"I didn't do anything out of line, did I? You got no call to write down my license number."

"That remains to be seen," I said in a semi-official tone. "What are you doing here?"

"Sightseeing. I'm a tourist."

His pale eyes glanced around at the sparsely inhabited hills as if he had never been out in the country before. "This is a public road, isn't it?"

"We've had a report of a man who was representing himself as a law officer last night."

His glance lighted briefly on my face, then jumped away. "It couldn't be me. I never been here before in my life."

"Let's see your driver's license."

"Listen," he said, "we can get together on this. I don't have much with me but I got other resources."

He drew a lonely ten from a worn calfskin billfold and tucked it in the breast pocket of my jacket. "Here. Buy something for the kids. And call me Harry."

He smiled with conscious charm. But the charm he was conscious of, if it had ever existed, had dried up and blown away. His front teeth glared at me like a pair of chisels. I removed the ten from my pocket, tore it in half, and gave him back the pieces.

His face fell apart. "That's a ten-dollar bill. You must be a kook to tear up money like that."

"You can put it together with Scotch tape. Now let me see your license before you commit another felony."

"Felony?"

He said it the way a sick man pronounces the name of his disease.

"Bribery and impersonating an officer are felonies, Harry."

He looked around at the daylight as if it had betrayed him, again. A little pale moon hung in a corner of the sky, faint as a thumbprint on a windowpane.

A fiercer light flashed down the canyon above us and almost dazzled me. It seemed to come from the head of a man who was standing with a girl on the terrace of the Bagshaw house. For a second I had the impression that he had great round eyes and that they had emitted the flashing light. Then I realized he was watching us through binoculars.

The man and the girl with him were as small as figures on a wedding cake. Their height and distance from me gave me a queer feeling, as if they were somehow unattainable, out of reach, out of time.

Harry Felony scrambled into his car and tried to start the engine. It turned over slowly like a dead man turning over in his grave. I had time to open the far door and get in on the gnawed leather seat.

"Where are we going, Harry?"

"Nowhere."

He turned off the ignition and dropped his hands. "Why don't you leave me alone?"

"Because you stopped a young man on this road last night and said you were a detective and asked him a lot of questions."

He was silent while his malleable face went through new adjustments. "I am a detective, in a way."

"Where's your badge?"

He reached into his pocket for something, probably a dimestore badge, then changed his mind. "I don't have one," he admitted. "I'm just a kind of amateur dick, you might say, looking into something for a friend. She" - he swallowed the pronoun- "they didn't say anything about this kind of trouble."

"Maybe we can make a deal after all. Let me see your driver's license."

He got out his worn billfold and handed me a Photostat.

HARRY HENDRICKS 10750 Vanowen, Apt. 12 Canoga Park, Calif.

SEX M COLOR HAIR brn COLOR EYES blu HEIGHT 5' 9 " WEIGHT 165 MARRIED no DATE OF BIRTH Apr 12 1928 AGE 38

From the lower left-hand corner a photograph of Harry grinned at me. I took down the address and the number of the license in my notebook.

"What do you want all that stuff for?" he said in a worried voice.

"So I can keep track of you. What do you do for a living, Harry?"

"Sell cars."

"I don't believe you."

"Used cars, on commission," he said bitterly. "I used to be an insurance adjuster but the little fellows can't compete with the big boys anymore. I've done a lot of things in my time. Name it and I done it."

"Ever do time?"

He gave me a hurt look. "Of course not. You said something about a deal."

"I like to know who I'm dealing with."

"Hell, you can trust me. I've got connections."

"In the used car business?"

"You'd be surprised," he said.

"And what do your connections want you to do to Martel?"

"Nothing to him. I'm just supposed to case the joint and find out who he is if I can."

"Who is he?"

Harry spread his hands on top of the steering wheel. "I only been in town less than twenty-four hours, and the local yokels don't know a thing about him."

He peered at me sideways. "If you're a cop like you say - "

"I didn't say. I'm a private detective. This area is strictly patrolled."

The two facts were true, but unrelated.

Harry related them. "Then you should be able to get the information. There's money in it, we could split it two ways."

"How much?"

"A hundred I could promise you."

"I'll see what I can find out. Where are you staying in town?"

"The Breakwater Hotel. That's on the waterfront."

"And who is the woman who put you up to this?"

"Nobody said anything about a woman."

"You said `she'."

"I must have been thinking of my wife. She's got nothing to do with this."

"I can't believe that. Your driver's license says you aren't married."

"I am married, though."

The point seemed important to him, as if I'd denied him membership in the human race.

"That's a mistake on the license. I forgot I was married that day, I mean - " His explanation was interrupted by the smooth mutter of a car coming down the winding driveway above us. It was Martel's black Bentley. The man behind the wheel wore rectangular dark glasses, which covered the upper part of his face like a mask.

The girl beside him had on dark glasses, too. They almost made her look like any Hollywood blonde.

Harry got out his miniature camera, which was hardly bigger than a cigarette lighter. He ran across the road and planted himself in the entrance to the driveway, holding the camera concealed in his right hand.

The driver of the Bentley got out facing him. He was compact and muscular, dressed in English-looking sports clothes, tweeds and brogues, which didn't go with his own swarthy sleekness. He said in a controlled, faintly accented voice: "Can I help you in any way?"

"Yeah. Watch the birdies." Harry raised the camera and took his picture. "Thanks, Mr. Martel."

"You are not welcome."

Martel's fleshy mouth became ugly. "Give me that camera please."

"Nuts. It's worth a hundred and fifty bucks."

"It's worth two hundred to me," Martel said, "with the film in it. I have a passion for privacy, you see."

He pronounced the word `passion' with a long nasal `o,' like a Frenchman. But he was dark for a Frenchman.

I looked at the blonde girl in the car. Though I couldn't see her eyes, she seemed to be looking back across the road at me. The lower part of her face was immobile, as if she was afraid to react to the situation. It had the dead beauty of marble.

Harry was calculating in his head, almost audibly. "You can have it for three hundred."

"Tres bien, three hundred. That should include a - what is the word? - receipt, with your signature and address."

"Uh-uh."

I had a quick impression of Harry's whole life: he didn't know how to stop when he was winning.

The girl leaned out of the open door of the Bentley. "Don't let him hold you up, Francis."

"I have no intention of that."

Martel moved suddenly on Harry and plucked the camera out of his hand. He stepped back, dropped it on the asphalt, and ground it under his heel.

Harry was appalled. "You can't do that!"

"But I have. It's a fait accompli."

"I want my money."

"No money. Pas d'argent. Rien du tout."

Martel got into the black car and slammed the door. Harry followed him yelling: "You can't do that to me! That camera doesn't belong to me! You've got to pay for it."

"Pay him, Francis," the girl said.

"No. He had his chance."

Martel made another sudden movement. His fist appeared at the window, with the small round eye of a gun peering over his index finger. "Listen to me my friend. I do not like to be bothered by 'canaille'. If you come this way again or trespass on my privacy in any way, I will kill you."

He clicked his tongue.

Harry backed away from him. He backed to the edge of the driveway, lost his footing, and almost fell. Unimpeded by false shame, he came up like a sprinter and ran for the Cadillac. He got in wheezing and sweating.

"He almost shot me. You're a witness to that."

"You're lucky he didn't."

"Arrest him. Go ahead. He can't get away with that. He's nothing but a cheap crook. That French act he puts on is as queer as a three-dollar bill."

"Can you prove it?"

"Not right now. But I'm gonna get that dago. He can't get away with smashing my camera. It's a valuable camera, and it wasn't mine, either."

His voice was aggrieved: the world had let him down for the thousandth time. "You wouldn't just sit there if you were a security cop like you say."

The Bentley rolled out of the driveway into the road. One wheel passed over the broken camera and flattened it. Martel drove away sedately toward town.

"I've got to think of something," Harry said more or less to himself.

He took off his hat as if it limited the sweep and scope of his mind, and held it on his knees like a begging bowl. The printing on the silk lining said that it came from The Haberdashery in Las Vegas. The gold printing on the leather sweatband said L. Spillman. Harry stole his hat, I thought. Or else he was carrying a false driver's license.

He turned to me as if he had heard my unspoken accusation. With carefully rationed hostility, he said: "You don't have to feel you have to stick around. You've been no help."

I said I would see him later at the hotel. The prospect didn't seem to excite him much.

3

LAUREL DRIVE ran deep between hedges like an English lane. An immense green barricade of pittosporum hid Mrs. Fablon's garden from the road. On the far side of the garden a woman who at a distance looked like Ginny's sister was sitting with a man at an umbrella table, eating lunch.

The man had a long jaw, which hardened when I appeared in the driveway. He stood up wiping his mouth with a napkin. He was tall and erect, and his face was handsome in a bony pugnacious way.

"I'll be shoving off," I heard him say under his breath.

"Don't hurry away, I'm not expecting anyone."

"Neither was I," he said shortly.

He flung his napkin down on top of his half-eaten salmon mayonnaise. Without speaking again, or looking at me, he walked to a Mercedes parked under an oak, got in, and drove out the other side of the semi-circular driveway. He acted like a man who was anxious for an excuse to get away.