Dreams Die First (3 page)

She smiled. “Okay. What time?”

“The Collector’s going to pick me up in the morning. I’ll go on home now and let you get some sleep.”

“It’s after four. You stay here. I’ll drive you over in the morning.”

“But what about your office?”

“It’s Saturday.” She reached for the coffee cups and put them in the sink. “The office is closed.”

***

The Collector’s red Jag was already in front of my house when we pulled up at ten o’clock in the morning. I walked over to his car and stuck my head in the window. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked.

He grinned. “Not on Lonergan’s time.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Verita’s car. “How’d the chick take the bad news?”

“She’s not mad.”

“I figured that when I saw her drive you over to the clinic at Cedars. You got your shots?”

I nodded. “I don’t get it. Lonergan has to have more important things for you to do than to follow me around.”

“I just do what I’m told.” He pulled a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. “Ready to go?”

“I just want to go upstairs and change. Then we’ll be right with you.”

“We?”

I nodded my head toward Verita, who was walking toward us. “She’s coming along.”

“What for? Lonergan said nothing about her.”

“She’s my accountant. Even Lonergan knows that nobody buys a business unless their accountants go over the books.”

For the first time he wasn’t as sure of himself. “I don’t know.”

I pointed to the telephone under his dash. “Call him and check it out. I’m going upstairs. If it’s okay, toot your horn and I’ll come down. If not, just forget it.”

Verita and I went into the building as he was picking up the phone. She followed me up the flight of stairs and into the apartment. I opened the door and stared in astonishment. The apartment had never looked like this.

It had been cleaned so thoroughly that even the windows and the crummy furniture shone. And when I went into the bedroom, I found that my clothes had been pressed, all my shirts washed and neatly ironed.

“You’re quite a housekeeper,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

Before I could answer, the boy came out of the bathroom. He was nude except for an apron around his middle. In one hand he held a bottle of Clorox, in the other a cleaning brush. He stared at us. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Gareth,” I said. “I live here.”

His face broke into a sudden smile. “Oh, Gareth, I love you,” he said. “I want to cook and clean and wash and press for you. I want to be your slave.”

Just then I heard the horn blast from the Jaguar outside in the street. I looked from one to the other. Nothing made sense anymore.

There was a hint of laughter in Verita’s voice. “I think you’d better send him down to the clinic and get him a shot—but not until after he finishes in the bathroom.”

CHAPTER 4

The offices of the
Hollywood Express
were located in a dingy store on Santa Monica Boulevard about a block from the Goldwyn Studios. The Collector pulled his car to a stop in front of the store in a no-parking zone. With a fine disregard for the rules of the road he managed also to take up half the bus stop.

The windows of the store were painted over with dirty white paint so that you could not see inside, and smeared black lettering spelled out the newspaper’s name.

The Collector opened the door and walked in. Along the walls of the store were eight or nine empty desks. At the back of the room was a large wallboard filled with papers pinned up with red, yellow and blue tacks.

“Anybody here?” the Collector called out.

There was the sound of a door creaking from a back room and a tired-looking middle-aged man came out, drying his hands on a paper towel. He dropped it on the floor as he came toward us. “You’re an hour late,” he said in a complaining voice.

“I wasn’t late, you were early,” the Collector said flatly.

“Lonergan said—” The man’s voice faded as the Collector looked at him.

The Collector gestured to me. “Gareth Brendan, Joe Persky.”

The man shook my hand unenthusiastically. Even his fingers felt tired. “Nice to meet you.”

I nodded. “This is Verita Velasquez, my accountant.”

He shook hands with her, then turned back to me. “Lonergan says you’re interested in buying the paper.”

“I’m glad he told you. I didn’t hear about it until last night.”

Persky turned back to the Collector. For the first time a note of emotion came into his voice. “What the hell is Lonergan trying to pull? He told me he had a bona fide customer.”

The Collector just looked at him.

Persky turned back to me. “Are you interested or not?”

“Maybe. That depends. I’d like to look over your operation before I make up my mind.”

“There’s nothing to look over. It’s all here.”

“You don’t sound as if you want to sell. Maybe we’d better forget the whole thing.”

“He don’t have any choice,” the Collector said. “Lonergan says he wants to sell.”

There was a moment’s silence; then the anger seemed to seep out of the man. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

“The usual things. Circulation, sales, advertising revenue, costs. If you’ll show your books to Miss Velasquez, I’m sure we can find out everything we want to know.”

The man was sullen. “We never kept any formal books.”

“You must have records of some kind. How else would you know how you were doing?”

“I operated mostly on a cash basis. The money came in. I paid it out. That’s all.”

I turned to the Collector. “Does Lonergan know that?”

The Collector shrugged. I should have known better than to ask. Of course Lonergan knew. I turned back to Persky. “You must have some figures. You had to file tax returns.”

“I don’t have any copies.”

“Somebody must have. Your accountant?”

“I didn’t use an accountant. I did everything myself. And that included stuffing the paper into mailboxes.”

I’d had it. If Lonergan thought I was going to stick my neck into this mess, he was crazier than I was. I turned to the Collector. “Let’s go.”

The Collector moved so fast I hardly saw his hand. Suddenly Persky was thrown back against a desk. His hands clutched at his stomach and he was bent over and almost retching. The Collector’s voice was empty. “You give the man the information he asks for.”

Persky’s voice rasped in his throat. “How do I know this guy an’ this dame ain’t some kind of revenue dicks? There’s nothing in the law that says I got to incriminate myself.”

“Fuckhead! Internal Revenue ain’t goin’ to get Lonergan’s money back for him.”

Slowly Persky straightened up. His face returned to its normal color. “I don’t keep the books here. They’re in my apartment.”

“We’ll go over there and look at them then,” I said. “Where is your apartment?”

“Upstairs,” he said. “Over the store.”

***

Verita spread the ledgers and the pile of forms across the kitchen table. “It’s going to take me some time to sort this out,” she said.

“How long?” I asked.

“Maybe the rest of the day. It’s a mess.” She turned to Persky. “Do you have a four-column pad?”

“What you see is what I got.”

“I’ll run down to a stationery store and get one,” she said.

Persky looked at me after she had gone out. “Would you like a beer?”

“Thanks,” I said.

I followed him into the kitchen and he took two beers from the refrigerator. We drank from the cans. “Ever run a paper?” he asked.

“No.” I let the beer run down my throat. It was cool, not cold.

He saw the expression on my face. “There’s something wrong with the damn refrigerator. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. If you’ve never run a paper, what makes you interested in this one?”

“I didn’t say I was. It was Lonergan’s idea.”

“What makes him think you can do it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I used to write and worked on some magazines.”

“It’s not the same thing,” he said. He looked at me shrewdly. “Lonergan got you, too?”

“No. I’m straight with him.” That was the truth. At the moment I owed him nothing.

He was silent for a moment. “Be careful. Lonergan’s got half the world by the balls now and he’s looking to get the other half.”

I didn’t say anything.

For the first time an expression of interest came over his face. “Write, you said? What kind of material?”

“Articles, commentary, poetry, fiction. I tried them all.”

“Any good at it?”

“Not very.”

“I’d settle if I could be even a half-assed writer, but I know now I can’t get enough words together to make a decent sentence. Once I thought I could. That’s how I got into this paper.”

“What did you do before?” I asked.

“I was circulation manager for several papers like this around the state. They all did pretty good and it seemed easy, so when I got the chance, I grabbed this one.” He paused heavily. “It wasn’t easy.”

“How’d you get in with Lonergan?”

“How does anybody get involved with Lonergan? You run a little short. Next thing you know you’re a lot short.”

“You had a business. What about the banks?”

“Zilch. I tapped out with them the first time around.”

“What do you owe Lonergan?”

“I don’t the fuck know. How does anybody know with that crazy six-for-five bookkeeping mushrooming week after week? I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a million dollars by now.”

By the time Verita finished at six o’clock that evening it turned out that he owed Lonergan nineteen thousand dollars. Plus about eight thousand dollars to the printers and suppliers and thirty-seven thousand dollars in withholding taxes to the state and federal governments. And no assets except a couple of lousy old desks.

“You hit the jackpot. Sixty-four thousand dollars,” I said.

His voice was a whisper as he stared down at the yellow sheet covered with Verita’s neat little accountant’s figures. “Jesus! I knew it was a lot, but seeing it like that—it’s scary.”

Verita’s voice was gentle. “You have nothing really to sell. What you should do is go bankrupt.”

He stared down at her. “Does bankruptcy get me out of the taxes?”

She shook her head. “No, taxes are not forgiven.”

“Nobody busts out on Lonergan either. Not if you want to keep your head attached to your neck.” His voice was dull. He turned to me. “What do we do now?”

I felt sorry for him. Then I got angry at myself. I was feeling sorry for too many people. I had even been sorry for the gooks I lined up in my rifle sights in Vietnam. The first time it happened I couldn’t squeeze the trigger until I saw the bullets tearing into the shrubbery around me and realized that he was my enemy and wasn’t feeling sorry for anybody. Then I squeezed the trigger and saw the automatic fire hemstitch across his middle until he almost broke in half. I had had no business feeling sorry then and I had no business feeling sorry now. Not for the kid who tried to hit me last night or for this asshole, who was willing to go along while Lonergan ripped me off.

I turned to Verita. “Let’s go. We’re not catching the Hollywood Express.”

She began to get up. Persky grabbed my arm. “But Lonergan said—”

Roughly I shook my arm free. “I don’t give a damn what Lonergan said. Lonergan wants your paper, let him buy it. With his money, not with mine.”

“The Collector’s coming back for you at seven. What should I tell him?”

“You can tell him what I told you. He can give Lonergan the message. I’m going home.”

CHAPTER 5

Verita had left her car at my place, so we walked home. It took us about an hour.

“I’ll go home now,” she said as we reached the apartment.

“No, come upstairs. I have a bottle of wine. We can have a drink. I want to thank you for what you’ve done.”

She laughed. “It was fun. I had six years of training for this kind of work and today was the first time I ever got a chance to use it.”

Something hit me. “You’re not talking Chicano.”

She laughed. “That’s for the unemployment office. Accountants speak another language.”

I found myself with a new respect for her. “Come on up,” I said. “I promise we’ll talk American.”

She looked up at me out of the corner of her slightly slanted eyes. “But—the boy?”

I smiled at her. “He’s probably gone by now.”

But I was wrong.

The delicious odor of roast beef greeted us as we came through the door. The table was set for two—china, crystal, linen napkins and heavy silver flatware and candlesticks.

“You live pretty good,” Verita said, looking at me.

“None of those things are mine. I never saw them before.”

I went into the kitchen. The boy was standing in front of the oven. He was dressed in a light plaid jacket and white linen slacks, a St. Laurent foulard tied casually inside the collar of his silk shirt. He turned as I came in. “Dinner will be ready in about twenty minutes.” He smiled. “Go back inside and relax. I’ll be right out to fix you a drink.”

Without answering, I turned back to the living room. “He says he’ll be right in to fix us a drink,” I said in a stunned voice.

She laughed. “Looks like you came up with a winner.”

The boy came in from the kitchen, went over to the small hutch on the wall and opened it. The bottles were neatly arranged on the shelf—vodka, gin, scotch, vermouth. Without saying anything, he took some ice from a golden bucket, put it in a glass and poured scotch over it. He turned to me, holding it out. “You drink scotch if I remember?”

I nodded as I took the drink. He turned to Verita. “What would you like?”

“Vodka tonic?” Her voice was questioning.

He nodded and came up with a bottle of tonic from a lower shelf. Quickly he fixed her drink. She took it and we both stood there staring at him. He gestured toward the couch. “I rolled a few joints,” he said. “They’re with the cigarettes in the box on the coffee table. Why don’t you just have a few tokes? It will help you relax. You both look a little uptight.”

“Hey—” I called as he went through the door to the kitchen.

He turned. “Yes?”

“Where did all this come from?”