Operation Bamboozle (19 page)

Try being called Holly, also. America has these hermaphroditic first names: Hazel, Marion, Carol, Sue, even Shirley. Parents mean well, but a boy called Holly is always going to struggle. As soon as he could, he changed his name, legally, to Alexander Carey MacFarlane. He'd noticed that tall men have long names. Too late. He still got called Holly Hanna. He gave up. “I'm a joke,” he told his shrink. “You guys don't know how lucky you are. Take sex. Suppose I score with a tall girl. When we're face-to-face my feet are in it. When we're toe-to-toe my face is in it. When I'm on the job there's no-one to talk to.”

“If you could talk,” his shrink asked, “what would you say?”

Hanna Fine Art was on Alameda Street near Wilshire Boulevard. The chairs were low, the desk was like a coffee table, but the pictures had to hang up high, so he hired a sleek young Latino called Raul. It was Raul who greeted Julie and Princess and took their stack of canvases, but it was Holly who bustled forward.

“You wanted to meet the artist,” Julie said. “Here she is. Princess Chuckling Stream, the Picasso of the Comanches.”

“Enchanté,”
Holly said. He'd expected a sawed-off squaw, not this Amazon, six feet in heels and a redhead for God's sake.
“Enchanté
in spades.” He bowed. Princess said nothing. She was working on a wad of gum. It was a long time since breakfast.

“Nobody paints like Princess,” Julie said. “Get a load of those skin tones. See the dynamics in her palette. And that wet look? Pure
trompe l'oeil.
She's unique.”

“Yeah. These nudes are good. They're very—”

“Don't say nice,” Julie warned.

“They're more than nice. They're real cute.”

Princess hit him. It was a jab to the head that knocked him flat on his ass, a short journey. Raul jumped forward to protect the boss and Princess decked him with a straight left. Julie grabbed her and marched her to the door. “Go wait in the car,” she ordered.

Holly Hanna was sitting on the coffee table desk, working his jaw from side to side. “My apologies,” Julie said. “You shouldn't have said cute. One thing Princess ain't, she ain't cute.”

“She married?” he asked. Julie shook her head. “Some lucky guy,” he said.

They called on one more gallery. Julie told Princess to stay near the door, say nothing, keep out of fights. But as she began showing the canvases, she knew Princess was wandering, was on the prowl. “I can leave these with you, if you like,” she said.

“That's won't be necessary.” He was middleaged and should have worn spectacles but he was too vain. As a result, he frowned a lot. “These paintings bear a close resemblance to my daughter.”

“Lucky girl.”

“This is some form of trickery. What's more, I don't believe your artist is a pureblooded Comanche.”

“We're on our way,” Julie said quickly.

“You admit it, then.”

“Watch your chops, gringo,” Princess said. “Us heathen savages was here first.” She punched him lightly on the nose and his legs folded.

“Let's go eat,” Julie said.

They found a diner that served veal and peppers. “You gotta stop smackin' people, kid,” Julie said. “It ain't ladylike.”

“Well, neither was Sheboygan ladylike. If a guy pinched my ass, I bust his face. Dad taught us how to hit. Tell the truth, that's why I left town. I decked a cop. He groped my boobs in a bar so I got mad and stopped his clock. Folk in the bar passed the hat, gave me sixty-seven dollars, that's a lot in Sheboygan, I took the bus to Texas.”

“Amazing.”

“Nah. He was fat, slow, sorta drunk too. I could of taken him one-handed.”

Agent Moody in LA got a teletype from Agent Fisk in NYC. The female Fantoni would probably be returned to her father. No action necessary. Background information only. Moody thought briefly about meeting Milt Gibson. No. Any more steam rooms and he'd be a dill pickle. He phoned him instead. “Daddy Fantoni wants his little girl to come home,” he said. “Could be daddy's scared she'll get burned by a hot dollar.”

“Could be he wants someone to play gin rummy with.”

“Put your ear to the ground, Milt. The dirty one.”

“I'm sick of this lousy deal,” Gibson said. “You get the gravy and I get the washing-up.”

“Your choice. Remember?”

“Yeah. Choice between getting' screwed or reamed.”

That same day, Tony Feet flew into LA. Beyond meeting Stevie, he had no plan. They knew each other, he would explain things, she would act sensibly, problem solved. Or she wouldn't, he'd knock her cold, stuff her in the car, drive three thousand miles to Jersey, problem solved. Tony Feet's life had been changed by a book by Dr. Skip Golightly MD called
Take It As It Comes: Let Stress Kill The Other Guy.
Since then he had seen many other guys die, a few from stress, most from short-range gunshots, but all in a state of considerable anxiety. Tony avoided that. He took it as it came.

He rented a Buick and made sure it had air conditioning: LA was a lot warmer than Chicago. He checked in at the Hotel Lafayette in Bel Air, expensive but what the hell: Fantoni was paying. Fantoni also paid for a haircut, a manicure, a couple of silk shirts from the shop in the lobby, a tennis lesson from the hotel pro, and lobster thermidor with a bottle of Blanc de Blanc, lightly chilled. Tony Feet was in no hurry. Stevie Fantoni was going nowhere until he suggested it.

The house detective at the Lafayette knew Tony Feet as soon as he saw him; knew him from the twinkletoes way he walked. He called Agent Moody. It paid to have a friend in the Bureau. Even at the best hotels there were guests who left in disgrace, and it helped if the body wasn't wheeled out through the lobby with a battery of flashbulbs advertising it.

Counterfeiting meant printing. Milt Gibson drove past Konigsberg and wondered if that was really where it happened. George Parr was an actor, he wouldn't have printing machinery in his house. This Cabrillo-Conroy couple were on a short lease. Would they set up printing stuff, and have paper and ink delivered? No, too public, too risky. The place to do counterfeiting was in a printing business. There must be a thousand in LA. Gibson went back to his office and thought of the guys who might know a thing about hot dollars. Then he went out again and called on them. No soap. They were noncommittal. They said
Ain't buyin', ain't sellin', now beat it.
They said
Forget it, you ain't smart enough to make change, never mind funny money.
They said,
What you want, you bum? You're always snoopin' about. Take a hike.

Nobody knew anything. Moody wouldn't buy that. Gibson looked at his life and saw that it wasn't getting any better. He was a free man but he didn't feel free. He felt trapped in the city that invented smog.

That night, Gibson met a girl. Well, a woman, she was 35, but young at heart, a small blond with a ready smile who never took him seriously, and quite soon he stopped taking himself seriously,
stopped taking his car business seriously, stopped taking LA seriously. It was all a joke. Relax and enjoy.

They met in a bar. He heard her voice, took one look, the whole night changed. Most women can't laugh and they shouldn't try, it comes out like a shriek or a cackle, but Betty had a soft warm chuckle that did good things to the bar lights, made them softer and warmer. Milt eased his way near to her and within a minute she was giving him her cockeyed smile—one side up, the other down—and saying: “I'm looking for a really good bad joke to tell grandpa.”

“Show him the mayor. He's the biggest joke in LA.”

“Cheap shot.” She looked away.

He was being tested. Amazing. First time a woman had done that. Fail, and he'd lose her. “Okay, try this. Guy meets an old couple, asks them the secret of a long and happy marriage. Man tells him, oral sex. Every night we get into bed, I say to her ‘Fuck you,' she says ‘And fuck you too,' we fall asleep.”

Betty chuckled. She took his arm and they walked out of the bar. Milt was astonished: it was all so easy!

They went from bar to bar, drank, ate, talked. By 2 a.m. they were in a lazy competition to see who could name more of what didn't matter a damn. “Baseball,” she said. “Just an excuse for guys to scratch their crotch and spit.”

“The Alamo. We lost! Forget it.”

“Pizza. Hot cardboard with garbage on.”

“Pigeons. Rats with feathers.”

“Detroit,” she said, and that silenced him. “Fess up, Milt,” she said. “You don't own that fancy car business. It owns you.”

He leaned back in his chair, hands linked behind his head, and stared at a couple of wizened green balloons, left over from a St. Patrick's Day party. “It's all I've got,” he said.

“You've got the world. I've got a Harley-Davidson. We can leave this stinkin' city and go ride around the wonderful, beautiful world.”

“Yes,” he said, and that was it. They kissed, for the first time; nothing sexy, just a kiss to seal the deal. Milt knew his life was about to take a huge and happy leap into a glorious adventure for two.

Betty had a good reason for taking a trip around the world on her Harley-Davidson.

A Seattle lawyer called Earl McGrath had hired her as his secretary. He was 40, looked a bit like Charlton Heston, drank a bit like W.C. Fields. He got bored with the law, said it was the same problems with different faces. Told Betty he was going to quit, move to Hawaii, did she want to come with him?

She knew how much there was in his client accounts: about 25 grand. She also knew he sometimes borrowed from these same accounts to cover his debts for a few days. Strictly illegal, but he paid it all back, he never got caught. They were in a bar, having a few drinks, it had been a long hard day, and Betty took a dumb risk and asked if the client accounts were going to Hawaii too. She laughed and made it a joke. Earl laughed and the muscles at the corners of his jaws bunched like little rosettes, and she knew. “Where's the harm?” she said. “It's not really stealing. Insurance covers everything.” He tugged his lower lip while he thought. “The years I've paid that indemnity,” he said. “Years and years. For what?” Now they both knew she knew. Either she agreed to go to Hawaii, or he fired her.