Umney's Last Case (2 page)

back on hot days and pulled down low

on rainy ones, so that the raindrops dripped off the bill. He was always supposed to

be smiling, was never supposed to

say ``hell'' or ``frogging,'' and most of all, he was supposed to be blind.

``You ain't!'' he said, and then, shockingly, he pushed his card-table over. It fell

into the street, papers flapping

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everywhere. His white cane rolled into the gutter. Peoria heard it go and bent down to

get it. I could see tears coming

out from beneath his dark glasses and go rolling down his pale, thin cheeks. He

started groping for the cane, but it had

fallen near me and he was going the wrong way. I felt a sudden strong urge to haul off

and kick him in his blind

newsboy's ass.

Instead, I bent over, got his stick, and tapped him lightly on the hip with it.

Peoria turned, quick as a snake, and snatched it. Out of the corner of my eye I could

see pictures of Hitler and the

recently deceased Cuban bandleader flapping all over Sunset Boulevard--a bus bound for

Van Ness snored through a

little drift of them, leaving a bitter tang of diesel fumes behind. I hated the way

those newspapers looked, fluttering

here and there. They looked messy. Worse, they looked wrong. Utterly and completely

wrong. I fought another urge, as

strong as the first one, to grab Peoria and shake him. To tell him he was going to

spend the morning picking up those

newspapers, and I wasn't going to let him go home until he'd gotten every last one.

It occurred to me that less than ten minutes ago, I'd been thinking that this was the

perfect L.A. morning--so perfect it

deserved a trademark symbol. And it had been, dammit. So where had things gone wrong?

And how had it happened so

fast?

No answers came, only an irrational but powerful voice from inside, telling me that

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the kid's mother couldn't have won

the lottery, that the kid couldn't stop selling newspapers, and that, most of all, the

kid couldn't see. Peoria Smith was

supposed to be blind for the rest of his life.

Well, it's got to be something experimental, I thought. Even if the doctor up in

Frisco isn't a quack, and he probably is,

the operation's bound to fail.

And, bizarre as it sounds, the thought calmed me down.

``Listen,'' I said, ``we got off on the wrong foot this morning, that's all. Let me

make it up to you. We'll go down to

Blondie's and I'll buy you breakfast. What do you say, Peoria? You can dig into a

plate of bacon and eggs and tell me

all ab--''

``Fuck you!'' he shouted, shocking me all the way down to my shoes. ``Fuck you and the

horse you rode in on, you cheap

gumshoe! You think blind people can't tell when people like you are lying through

their teeth? Fuck you! And keep

your hands off me from now on! I think you're a faggot!''

That did it--no one calls me a faggot and gets away with it, not even a blind newsboy.

I forgot all about how Peoria

had saved my life during that Mavis Weld business; I reached for his cane, meaning to

take it away from him and

whack him across the keister with it a few times. Teach him some manners.

Before I could get it, though, he hauled off and slammed the cane's tip into my lower

belly--and I do mean lower. I

doubled up in agony, but even while I was trying to keep from howling with pain, I was

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counting my blessings; two

inches lower still and I could have quit peeping for a living and gotten a job singing

soprano in the Palace of the Doges.

I made a quick, reflexive grab for him anyway, and he brought the cane down on the

back of my neck. Hard. It didn't

break, but I heard it crack. I figured I could finish the job when I caught him and

ran it into his right ear. I'd show him

who was a faggot.

He backed away from me as if he'd caught my brainwave, and threw the cane into the

street.

``Peoria,'' I managed. Maybe it still wasn't too late to catch sanity by the

shirttail. ``Peoria, what the hell's wrong

with--''

`Ànd don't call me that!'' he screamed. ``My name's Francis! Frank! You're the one

who started calling me Peoria!

You started it and now everyone calls me that and I hate it!''

My watering eyes doubled him as he turned and fled across the street, heedless of

traffic (of which there was currently

none, luckily for him), hands held out in front of him. I thought he would trip over

the far curb--was looking forward

to it, in fact--but I guess blind people must keep a pretty good set of topographical

survey maps in their heads. He

jumped onto the sidewalk as nimbly as a goat, then turned his dark glasses back in my

direction. There was an

expression of crazed triumph on his tear-streaked face, and the dark lenses looked

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more like holes than ever. Big ones,

as if someone had hit him with two large-caliber shotgun rounds.

``Blondie's is gone, I toldja!'' he screamed. ``My mom says he upped and ran away with

that redhead floozy he hired

last month! You should be so lucky, you ugly prick!''

He turned and went running up Sunset in that strange way of his, with his splayed

fingers held out in front of him.

People stood in little clusters on both sides of the street, looking at him, looking

at the papers fluttering in the street,

looking at me.

Mostly looking at me, it seemed.

This time Peoria--well, okay, Francis--made it as far as Derringer's Bar before

turning to deliver one final salvo.

``Fuck you, Mr. Umney!'' he screamed, and ran on.

_______________________________________________________________________

II. Vernon's Cough.

I managed to pull myself erect and make my way across the street. Peoria, aka Francis

Smith, was long gone, but I

wanted to put those blowing newspapers behind me, too. Looking at them was giving me a

headache that was somehow

worse than the ache in my groin.

On the far side of the street I stared into Felt's Stationery as if the new Parker

ball-point pen in the window was the

most fascinating thing I'd ever seen in my life (or maybe it was those sexy imitation leather appointment books).

After five minutes or so--time enough to commit every item in the dusty show-window to

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memory--I felt capable of

resuming my interrupted voyage up Sunset without listing too noticeably to port.

Questions circled in my mind the way mosquitoes circle your head at the drive-in in

San Pedro when you forget to

bring along an insect stick or two. I was able to ignore most of them, but a couple

got through. First, what the hell had

gotten into Peoria? Second, what the hell had gotten into me? I kept slapping at these

uncomfortable queries until I got

to Blondie's City Eats, Open 24 Hrs, Bagels Our Specialty, on the corner of Sunset and

Travernia, and when I got that

far, they were driven out in a single wallop. Blondie's had been on that corner for as

long as I could remember--the

sharpies and the hustlers and the hipsters and the hypes going in and going out, not

to mention the debs, the dykes, and

the dopes. A famous silent-movie star was once arrested for murder as he was coming

out of Blondie's, and I myself

had concluded a nasty piece of business there not so long ago, shooting a coked-up

fashion-plate named Dunninger who

had killed three hopheads in the aftermath of a Hollywood dope party. It was also the

place where I'd said goodbye to

the silver-haired, violet-eyed Ardis McGill. I'd spent the rest of that lost night

walking in a rare Los Angeles fog

which might have only been behind my eyes . . . and trickling down my cheeks, by the

time the sun came up.

Blondie's closed? Blondie's gone? Impossible, you would have said--more likely that

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the Statue of Liberty should

have disappeared from her barren lick of rock in New York Harbor.

Impossible but true. The window which had once held a mouth-watering selection of pies

and cakes was soaped over,

but the job had been done indifferently, and I could see a nearly empty room through

the stripes. The lino looked filthy

and barren. The grease-darkened blades of the overhead fans hung down like the

propellers of crashed airplanes. There

were a few tables left, and six or eight of the familiar red-upholstered chairs piled

on them with the legs sticking up,

but that was all . . . except for a couple of empty sugar-shakers tumbled in one

corner.

I stood there trying to get it into my head, and it was like trying to get a big sofa

up a narrow flight of stairs. All that

life and excitement, all that late-night hustle and surprise--how could it be ended?

It didn't seem like a mistake; it

seemed like a blasphemy. For me Blondie's had summed up all the glittering

contradictions that surround L.A.'s

essentially dark and loveless heart; I had sometimes thought Blondie's was L.A. as I

had known it over the last fifteen

or twenty years, only drawn small. Where else could you see a mobster eating breakfast

at 9:00 p.m. with a priest, or a

diamond-decked glamorpuss sitting on a counter-stool next to a grease-monkey

celebrating the end of his shift with a

hot cup of java? I suddenly found myself thinking of the Cuban bandleader and his

heart attack again, this time with

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considerably more sympathy.

All that fabulous starry City of Lost Angels life--do you get it, chum? Are you

picking up this newsflash?

The sign hung in the door read CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON, but I didn't

believe it. Empty

sugar-shakers lying in the corner do not, in my experience, indicate renovations in

progress. Peoria had been right:

Blondie's was history. I turned away and went on up the street, but now I walked

slowly and had to consciously order

my head to stay up. As I approached the Fulwider Building, where I've kept an office

for more years than I like to think

about, an odd certainty gripped me. The handles of the big double doors would be

wrapped up in a thick tow-chain and

held with a padlock. The glass would be soaped over in indifferent stripes. And there

would be a sign reading CLOSED

FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON.

By the time I reached the building, this nutty idea had taken over my mind with the

force of a compulsion, and not even

the sight of Bill Tuggle, the rummy CPA from the third floor, going inside could quite

dispel it. But seeing is

believing, they say, and when I got to 2221, I saw no chain, no sign, and no soap on

the glass. It was just the Fulwider,

the same as ever. I went into the lobby, smelled the familiar odor--it reminds me of

the pink cakes they put in the

urinals of public men's rooms these days--and glanced around at the same ratty palm

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trees overhanging the same faded

red tile floor.

Bill was standing next to Vernon Klein, world's oldest elevator operator, in Car 2. In

his frayed red suit and ancient

pillbox hat, Vernon looks like a cross between the Philip Morris bellboy and a rhesus

monkey which has fallen into an

industrial steam-cleaning machine. He looked up at me with his mournful basset-hound

eyes, which were watering

from the Camel pasted in the middle of his mouth. His peepers should have gotten used

to the smoke years ago; I

couldn't remember ever having seen him without a Camel parked in that same position.

Bill moved over a little, but not far enough. There wasn't room enough in the car for

him to move far enough. I'm not

sure there would have been room in Rhode Island for him to move far enough. Delaware,

maybe. He smelled like

bologna which has spent a year or so marinating in cheap bourbon. And just when I

thought it couldn't get any worse, he

belched.

``Sorry, Clyde.''

``Well, you certainly ought to be,'' I said, waving the air in front of my face as

Vern slid the gate across the front of the

car and prepared to fly us to the moon . . . or at least to the seventh floor. ``What

drainpipe did you spend the night in,

Bill?''

Yet there was something comforting about that smell--I'd be lying if I said there

wasn't. Because it was a familiar

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smell. It was just Bill Tuggle, odoriferous, hung over, and standing with his knees