Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde (3 page)

Aside from my clothes and groceries, the only things in that room I owned were the typewriter on the desk and a trunk where I kept my books. I didn’t keep the books out on shelves because I didn’t have any shelves, and because if girls saw them they wanted to talk about the pug who reads and wasn’t that wonderful.

I only buy books by people I wish I wrote like. I had some Hawthorne, some Irwin Shaw, and some John Dos Passos. I had some Hemingway, but he tires me, and if we knew each other we’d have to fight. I had some Flannery O’Connor, but she makes me want to put my head in the oven. I had some Chekhov. I don’t care about who’s a Russky. If Chekhov’s a Commie, then I wish I was one, too. But let me tell you, when it comes to writing about war, give me Stephen Crane. You can have Tolstoy. You can keep him. The son of a bitch never crossed out a sentence in his life.

I bought the typewriter with my mustering-out pay. My drafts and carbons I kept in the bottom left drawer.
One drawer was enough, because I didn’t let them pile up. Every six months or so, I’d go through and read two or three pages at random of everything in the drawer, and if I didn’t see anything I liked, I’d chuck them. At any given time there’d be two or three screenplays, half a dozen treatments, and one or two short stories or pieces of stories. I threw most of it away, but I did keep a log with the names of everything I’d written and who I’d sent it to, so if I ever wanted to I could see what I’d been doing for the last nine years.

I had another drink, put on a sport shirt and loafers, and went to see Mattie Reece.

Reece’s office was a Quonset hut just inside the Republic studio gates. I found him where I always did, sitting behind a pair of big feet, a burning cigarette, and a pair of sharp black eyebrows. A rickety little man in a rumpled suit. He never seemed to take his feet off his desk, but somehow everything at Republic always ran smooth and tight. He could have left Poverty Row for a big job at the majors, but then he might’ve had to take his feet off the desk. “’Lo, Mattie,” I said.

“Hello, Ray. Come in and take a load off.”

“Thanks,” I said, sitting down.

“Getting a little gut there, soldier.”

I shook my head.

“I can see it from here,” he said.

I shook my head again. “I’ve had that gut for years. I don’t blame you for trying to ignore it.”

“Shame on you, getting out of shape like that. What if you wanted to get back in the ring?”

“I had it when I was fighting. My dance card was still pretty full. Who’s this lulu you wished on me?”

“Isn’t she a specimen?” he said. “I give you a week to get in. One week, you son of a bitch, if you haven’t
already. Tell me, how does an ugly bastard like you get in all the time?”

“A friendly smile and a firm handshake. What do you think of her?”

He opened his eyes wide. “Can you imagine posture like that on such a flimsy little thing? It’s like she borrowed ’em off a fat girl.” He gave a little shiver. “She wrecks me.”

“Anything else?”

“Why would there be anything else?”

“She says she’s being threatened.”

“Ah, no,” he said, concerned. “You’re not coming here to ask me about her
story
, are you? The mysterious man who’s gonna do mysterious bad things?”

“Sure. She’s hired me to help her.”

“You simple son of a bitch. I didn’t give her to you to work for. I gave her to you to
boff
. I couldn’t even get a glove on it, and, you know, I didn’t want her going to waste.”

“I already took her money.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure that’ll be a novel experience for her.”

“Any idea who the guy is?”

“The guy.” He waved away a smell. “What makes you think there’s a guy? Outside of her shaggy little head? Listen, Ray, I’m serious. You only know the girls you poke. I know every girl who ever tried to work in this town, and I’m telling you, this one’s nuts. Strictly wigsville. You don’t want to hop her, don’t hop her, but whatever you do, don’t become part of her
plans
.”

“I already took her money. Who’s she been hanging around with? I assume she’ll simmer down and tell me, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

“She don’t hang, that I know of. It looks like she gave
up the starlet bit a while back. I’ll give her that, she’s smart enough to give up. Since then she works in stores and so forth, you know, little pretty-girl jobs. I hear she might have posed for some, ah, pictures. As for guys, she’s been seen around with Lance Halliday.”

“Jesus, the names out here. Who’s he?”

“An ‘independent producer.’ Isn’t that nice? He’s a little hood who makes stag movies. Maybe that’s what he wanted with your nut job, he heard she’d done nudie stuff. He came out here to be the new Hot Diggity, and it wasn’t such a crazy idea, because he’s got the face, the voice, he even moves nice, but he’s one of those you get where, under the lights... ” Mattie slowly raised his hands, wiggling his fingers. “It all fizzles away. Like ice on a radiator. He’s a big blonde dreamboat and he’s always got a ring on every finger. You know, the debonair Lance Halliday was in attendance, wearing his trademark rings. I guess he played around with your nut job a little, like he does with a lot of ’em, but I can’t see him getting obsessed. He’s too queer for himself. But no, yeah, if she bounced him hard enough I guess he could turn nasty. He’s a very vain guy with not a lot to be vain about, and you don’t want to kid some of those too hard.”

“Could he be blackmailing her?”

“With what, for what? She’s nobody.”

“She says she’s done stag movies. Could he be blackmailing her with that?”

“Nah. In his line of work, that’s just cutting his own throat. It gets around he does that, how’s he gonna get girls?”

“Where would he spend time?”

“All over. He owns part of a place called the Centaur, out in Thousand Oaks.”

“I think I know it. Where does he live?”

“Palms somewhere. Come to think of it, he must have
an OK from Burri to peddle his movies.”

“I thought what’s-his-name ran that neighborhood. Scarpa. Lenny Scarpa.”

“Sure. And Burri runs Scarpa. Wake up, beautiful. Burri runs half the West Side.”

“Jesus, still? I thought he was one of those old Twenties guys.”

“He ran it in the Twenties, he runs it now, he’ll run it when we’re both in Puppy Heaven. You want to get mixed up in something Fausto Burri’s maybe part of? That what you want, Ray?”

“Listen, Mattie, I appreciate this.”

“Why do I waste time on you?” Reece said without joy.

“Ah, c’mon, Mattie. Cheer up.”

“Why do I waste my time?”

“I buy you drinks.”

“So you say.”

“C’mon, I’ll buy you one now. You’ve done enough damage for one day.”

He took his feet down off the desk one by one, like an old man, and sat there. “I hope you enjoy it when you get it,” he said.

“Let’s go get a drink,” I said. “I just got paid.”

In the morning I went to see the manager and squared myself on the rent. He didn’t kiss me. Then I got in the car and drove over to Torrance New & Used and saw Joey Moos, who couldn’t believe his luck, Ray Corson himself, right there in his own office. I’d just wanted to
get myself up to date, but on impulse I decided to pay off the rest of the car. I liked the idea of having something no one could take from me without stealing. It must have been a stupid move, because it delighted Joey, and as a token of our new friendship he tried to trade me up to a gray ’50 Merc. After that I just drove around enjoying the sunshine. I didn’t have much money left, but I owned my car outright and I felt too good to go see Rebecca LaFontaine. Guys probably didn’t feel good around her for very long.

She’d given me the address of a boarding house on Flower Avenue in Venice. It was a low two-story building with a surf shop and a hardware store on the ground floor and, above, what once must have been a floor of cheap offices, and of course that’s where I wound up. I pushed through a cracked plate glass door and went upstairs. The stairs were covered with a runner of green carpet, black and shiny with dirt and worn down to the silvery cords underneath. They were greasy. What the hell do you have to do to get stairs greasy? At the top was a corridor lined with doors with pebbled glass panels, each of which was crudely painted with a number in black, some of which still bore old company names in flaking black paint or gold leaf. At the end of the corridor was a Dutch door daubed in black with the word MGR. The top half was open. Inside, a woman in a housedress was watching TV. She looked up at me and then back at the set.

I walked down the hall to Number 6. I couldn’t make out what had once been lettered on the glass. Someone had scraped most of it off except for the word
APPRAISED
. I knocked and heard Rebecca call, “It’s open.”

There wasn’t room inside for much but a bed, which Rebecca was just then sharing with the biggest old cowboy I’d ever seen. He had the boots, the stovepipe
jeans, the shirt with pearl snaps, and his hat was on the pillow and wasn’t a disappointment. He and Rebecca were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed with a card game laid out between them. He started to get up, but Rebecca said, “Sit there and take your punishment, Lorrie. Excuse my manners, Mr. Corson, but I’m almost done giving this fellow a whuppin’.”

“She is, too,” he told me.

He looked like a whuppin’ from Rebecca was what he’d prayed for as a child on Christmas morning.

I watched them play for a couple of minutes, each turning over the cards very intently. Finally Rebecca laid down a card and said contentedly, “That’s gin. Lorrie, I’d like you to meet Ray Corson. Mr. Corson, Lorin Shade.”

Shade got up at once to shake hands with me. Just when I thought he was done standing up, he’d stand up some more. He shook my hand carefully, like he’d learned that hands break easy. He had a short nose and a pocked round face, and he really was a size. I’d put roofs on smaller things than Lorin Shade. She said, “Mr. Corson and I might be doing a little business together, Lorrie. Mr. Corson used to be a boxer.”

“A boxer! I like that,” he said. He put up his fists, smiling, and I obligingly put up mine, and he faked a few hooks and jabs at me. I was annoyed to find I could barely keep them off me. He was fast, along with the rest of it. He dropped his hands. “I like that,” he said wistfully.

“You could do the work,” I told him.

I wondered what she wanted with me if she had a big boy like Shade on a string.

“Lorrie’s from Warren City, Oklahoma,” she said. “But he lives right down the hall. He’s a stunt rider for the movies.”

“Well, that’s my plan,” he said. “That’s my long-range
plan. Right now I’m at the Ever-Brite Car Wash over on Del Amo.”

“Got to start somewhere,” I said.

“That’s right. We’re over on Del Amo, just near Anza. You keep going like you’s headin’ for the beach? You’ll see us on the right, just before Anza. Cain’t miss it. You a friend a Becky’s, come by some time and I’ll give you a shine. Make your car like new. On the house, if you’re a friend a Becky’s”

“I thought your car looked pretty nice,” I told her.

“I said I couldn’t afford to wash it,” she said merrily. “I didn’t say I wasn’t washing it.”

“You come on down to the car wash and I’ll fix you up, too,” Shade said. “Make you shine. It’s right before Anza. Cain’t miss it.”

“Lorrie hasn’t gotten his break yet, but he really is
something
in the saddle. Lorrie rides,” she said sweetly and emphatically, “like a
dream
.” Shade flushed with pleasure. Then he thought about it a little and began to look panicky. But Rebecca was moving smoothly onward: “He’s a real ride-em cowboy. But I keep telling him, no stunt director’s going to put a fellow his size on one of his horses.”

“Aw, I told you, Becky,” he said. “I sit real light. You know how to sit light, you can ride any size a horse.”

“You did tell me that. So you did. But right now I have to talk to Mr. Corson, Lorrie. Could you be a honey right now and give us a few minutes?”

Shade stood up at once and gave my hand another careful squeeze. He told me it had been a real pleasure, and that he hoped to see me around, and maybe we could all three have us a game of poker sometime, because Becky there was quite a hand with the cards, don’t think she wasn’t, you might not think so but you’d be wrong, at which point Rebecca smiled at him again with almost terrifying
brightness and he shut up as if he’d been kicked. “Well, so long,” he said, and left, closing the door softly behind him. Rebecca smiled distractedly at the door and said, “Lorrie is the sweetest man in the world, and he’s been a true friend to me. So no remarks.”

“No remarks,” I said.

As she had been the other day, she was dressed neatly and primly in good-quality clothes that were a little dressy for the middle of a weekday. This time it was a dark oatmeal dress, high-necked, with tiny brass buttons shaped like knots down the front and one on the cuff of each short sleeve. She took a powder-blue engagement book from her bedside table, the kind that closes with a zipper, and unzipped it. I saw she’d been using it as a notebook. What looked like a draft of a letter or an essay ran straight down the page, the words sidling around the numbers of the days like surf rolling around rocks. She opened it to a fresh page, took a pen from the little loop inside the cover, and uncapped it. Then she was ready for business. She patted the bed beside her and I sat down in Shade’s place.

“I knew you’d come,” she said, her eyes shining. “You have every cent I own in the world, and you could have just taken off and no one the wiser. Or you could have just laughed at me and said what money, because what proof would I have? But Mattie told me you were honest.”

“Old Mattie,” I said.

“I knew I picked the right man. And now I guess you deserve a little information.”

“I do,” I said. “First off, are we talking about Lance Halliday?”

She went completely still. She looked almost resentful. Then she leaned forward and gave me a sharp little punch in the leg. It hurt. “You’ve been busy,” she said,
beaming. “I knew I picked the right man.”