Day of the Ram

by William Campbell Gault

  I didn’t answer. I went to work on my second plate of hot enchiladas and ice-cold lettuce. She sipped her beer and lighted a cigarette nervously. Overhead, a plane droned, heading for the Santa Monica Airport.

  Manny brought another plate of enchiladas and Jackie put out her cigarette. The bartender went over and opened the door with the frosted-glass panel. He went through it and closed it quietly behind him.

  Jackie said, “Are you going to tell Rick?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “All right, damn you, it makes a difference. Are you going to?”

  “I don’t know. Anything you want to tell me?”

  She went after her enchiladas hungrily. “I suppose you think I’m some kind of — of spy or something for Lenny Heffner.”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course not. He knows a producer I’m trying to get to, that’s all.”

  “I see. And you came over to make a personal appeal. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

  “Once. With Johnny Quirk. That’s when I learned they had Einlicher.”

  “Oh? And when did you learn Lenny Heffner knew a producer?”

  “That same night. A lot of big wheels eat here. They have the best Mexican food for miles.”

  “Johnny knew Lenny pretty well, did he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  I sat there silently a moment, sipping the finest beer money can buy.

  Jackie said, “There were a lot of things about Johnny people didn’t know, I’ll bet. He was — secretive, moody at times. You’d think he was in another world.”

  He was, now. I asked, “Going to the funeral?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “I can’t stand funerals. I couldn’t even go to my dad’s.”

  Another silence, except for the throb of traffic from Olympic. Then the glass-paneled door opened and two men came through it. They walked over without smiling.

  One was big, with a bald head and light blue eyes. He looked a little soft. The other was equally big, and was dressed in a T-shirt and cocoa-brown gabardine slacks. He had curly black hair on his head and forearms and peeking out of the top of his T-shirt. He didn’t look soft.

  The bald one said, “Brock Callahan, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Lenny Heffner. Cops I got to talk to; it’s the law. But not you. What are you snooping around here for?”

  “Einlicher and enchiladas,” I answered. “What else?”

  “Don’t get smart,” he said.

  I studied both of them. “I won’t if you won’t. What’s your beef with me, Mr. Heffner?”

  “I don’t want you in here.”

  “It’s a public place. But I won’t make an issue of it. When I’ve finished my beer, I’ll go.”

  Curly came into the act now. He pointed a thumb at the door. “Move, Irish.”

  Jackie said quickly, “There’s no need to get all excited, Mr. Heffner. Mr. — ”

  “Shut up,” Heffner said.

  I stepped off the stool, the bottle in my hand. I said, “I’m going to report this.” I had lifted the bottle up, to sip it, when Curly reached a hand toward my shoulder. It was his left hand and his right hand was balled.

  I backhanded the bottle into the side of his jaw. I. heard Jackie squeal and then something crushed my solar plexus and I went down next to the stool. Curly had swung a left hand faster than the eye.

  I was sick and dizzy, but my groping hand found one leg of my bar stool and I came up swinging it. It caught Curly in the hip and he yelped, and came in before I could swing it back.

  It was my lucky day. He got tangled in the rungs as I retreated and he started to fall. And I put all of my two hundred and twenty pounds into the right hand I threw at his exposed chin.

  A knuckle went, and I prayed he wouldn’t get up. He didn’t look like a man I could handle with my left hand. He didn’t get up.

  I looked at Heffner. “You next?”

  He didn’t seem frightened. He said, “Get out. Your beer and food is on the house. But beat it.”

  “All right. And I’m reporting it, too. You’d be smarter to play along with me, Heffner. The whole town’s behind me.”

  He said nothing, staring at me with those ice-blue eyes. At the bar, Jackie was sniffling. Manny Cardez came quietly through the doorway at the rear and went over behind the bar. He kept is head down, rearranging bottles.

  I stared at Heffner and he stared at me, and then I turned and went out to my car. I didn’t drive away immediately. I sat in the front seat, gingerly rubbing my swelling hand and watching the entrance to the bar through my rear window.

  Twenty minutes went by and Jackie still hadn’t come out. Maybe she was having a second helping. I considered driving over to the Santa Monica Headquarters, but decided against it.

  I wondered who the curly-haired boy was and whether I’d see him again. I had a feeling he could take me any time he wanted to; that stool had been the difference today. And the hardness of that beer bottle.

  But there was no point in running myself down too much; that had still been a very fine right hand.

  My ribs were sore and my hand ached in a steady beat as I drove back to Beverly Hills. The morning haze had vanished completely; visibility was unlimited.

  Ned Allen had told me the trouble between Martin and Heffner had started over a girl. I wondered if Jackie Held had been that girl. She was certainly moving through this case like an interlocking thread, friendly to three men. Or at least to two of them, and knowing the third.

  I wondered if she was playing both ends against the middle. A girl like her would be in a position to hear things worth money. She knew men in their most intimate moments, as they say. She knew them drunk and she knew them sober. And maybe a naïve kid would tell her things he shouldn’t.

  But had Johnny Quirk been a naïve kid?

  If he had been, and had told her things, she’d find a way to earn a dollar from them if they were salable. She worked in a hard world, a world of angles and opportunists and extremely muddy ethics. But she didn’t have the muscles or the friends to play it cute with Heffner and Martin.

  I went back to the office and soaked my hand. I took off my shirt and saw the red line along the ends of my ribs. Curly could have been a pro, and if he was, that was a felony. A fighter’s fists are a lethal weapon in this state.

  I typed up the morning’s interviews, trying to recapture the phraseology as exactly as I could remember it. I included the things Rick Martin had told me and I tried to include my thoughts on all I’d learned. I had no thoughts beyond the obvious and the obvious was the same as it had been when Martin had walked in this morning.

  Either he was guilty, or he’d been set up by somebody who wanted him to appear guilty. But he wouldn’t have shot Johnny in plain view of all that traffic. And where was the weapon, if he had?

  Had there been an accomplice in a car who had taken the weapon from him before he’d gone up to report to the house? Again, there was the traffic; somebody would have seen that. No, if Martin had killed Johnny, it hadn’t been premeditated.

  And if Johnny had phoned him, why had he phoned him? A number of people had called him a secretive lad; I wondered how many of his secrets had died with him.

  I put what I’d typed into a folder and walked over to David Keene’s bookstore. Keene was in the front of the store, staring out through the plate-glass window. He looked pale and distraught.

  “I was just going out to lunch,” he told me. “Have you had yours?”

  I nodded. “But I could drink a cup of coffee. I’d like to talk about Johnny, if you don’t mind.”

  He took a deep breath. “Anything that will help. I just can’t — seem to accept what I know is a fact.”

  “He was pretty close to you, was he?”

  Keene didn’t answer right away. He gave it some thought Then, “I’m not sure he was ever close to anybody, anybody male. With women, now …” H
e shrugged.

  “Let’s go and have lunch,” I said, “and you can tell me about the women.”

  We ate at Leslie’s while he told me some of the romantic history of Johnny Quirk. The lad had been either an awesome stud or a pathological braggart.

  I said, “He was lucky, too, wasn’t he? I mean, most girls are attracted to money, but the girls Johnny knew already had money.”

  He nodded. “The majority of them did.”

  I said, “I think he felt sorry for the bad time he had given his dad. How did they get along?”

  “Not very well, when Johnny was younger. He might have had an Oedipus complex.”

  “In love with his mother, you mean?”

  He nodded. “And a hatred for his father.”

  “But Johnny’s mother died when he was nine.”

  “He could be in love with her memory, maybe. I don’t know; I’m no psychiatrist.”

  “How about this teacher that he got in trouble with in high school?”

  David Keene stared at me blankly. “Teacher?”

  I nodded. “Johnny told me about it. Some woman he got involved with. I guess it broke her up more than it did him. And really hurt his dad.”

  Keene shook his head wonderingly. “That’s a new one on me. You’d think I’d know about it; I went all through high school with him.”

  Which was true enough. But it was beginning to appear that John Gallegher Quirk’s secretiveness had many facets. There was a good chance that women had been more frequent recipients of his confidence than men had. But not the females he’d grown up with; they might be too refined to relish the real Quirk story.

  I asked young Keene, “Did Johnny tell you much about this Jackie Held? Was that a major romance with him?”

  He looked at me candidly. “I wouldn’t think so. He’d known too many show girls. But who can tell? Is she enough older so that she’d have a — a maternal appeal for him?”

  I shook my head. “I doubt if she’s any older than Johnny was. But she’s been on her own longer, probably.” I finished my coffee. “Well, there might be something there I’ll never dig out. She’s a pretty sly operator.”

  I was getting steadily nowhere. I had the feeling of a light-weight halfback beating his brains out against the Bears’ line. I’d been constantly on the move since last night, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I left David Keene at the restaurant and went back to the office. I picked up a Herald-Express on the way, to see if there was anything new the police hadn’t kept me informed about.

  The story on Dom Ristucci had come out, as I’d expected it would. His relationship to Rick Martin was termed “interesting” by Lieutenant Remington, and I could almost read the overtone of suspicion in the word.

  Coach Sid Gillman of the Rams called it an “unfortunate coincidence.” Which was what it looked like to me. But then I was a Ram, too. Mr. Gillman hadn’t commented beyond that except to state that Dom Ristucci would be his starting quarterback in Sunday’s exhibition with the Philadelphia Eagles.

  I thought about the situation and realized that a fan with an overactive imagination could read a lot beyond coincidence in the setup. If the gamblers wanted to take over football as they had boxing, what better way than to kill off a man beyond price? And find as his substitute a man related to one of them.

  As I’ve explained before, as the quarterback goes, so goes the T-formation; he’s the key to success in the National Football League.

  I wrote up all that David Keene had told me and phoned the Quirk residence.

  The butler told me, “Mr. Quirk is under a sedative again, Mr. Callahan. Is there some way I can be of service?”

  “I wondered if he wanted daily reports.”

  “I doubt it, sir. Results are what Mr. Quirk wants. The funeral will be tomorrow morning, sir. From Elysian Fields.”

  Tomorrow they would put him away. And the day after that, Dom Ristucci would trot out with the rest of the boys and the game would be on. The fans would undoubtedly think of Johnny Quirk when Dom took over the team this Sunday. But there were a lot of Sundays in a season and the name of Quirk would get dimmer every week.

  There was some nausea in me; I went to the water cooler and drank a paper cup of water slowly. The sun burned through the windows to the west, but didn’t warm me.

  I went to the phone and called Jan.

  “How are you?” I asked her.

  “Not busy and a little blue. How are you?”

  “Cold. Couldn’t I buy some steaks for dinner and you could broil them?”

  A few seconds silence. Then, “I suppose.”

  “I don’t want to be alone tonight,” I said. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “All right,” she said. “But is it love or loneliness, Brock?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Both, I suppose.”

  “I’ll see you,” she said.

  seven

  HER BEDROOM held a faint smell of spice. One finger traced a pattern on my chest. She said softly, “You’re a fine, strong and gentle man, Brock the Rock.”

  “I aim to please, ma’am. You’re a fine cook.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Huh. That’s all in the kitchen. You’re fine all around the house, in every room.”

  “What were you thinking of when you phoned me?”

  “Of you.”

  “And what else?”

  “Of Johnny Quirk and the shortness of life and the coldness of the ground.”

  “Who wants to live forever?”

  “Everybody. Almost everybody.”

  “Not I,” she said. “Do you want to sleep now? Can you sleep now?”

  “I can sleep now,” I said.

  The last sound I remember was a bark from the Doberman next door. He hates me and loves Jan. Maybe he’s jealous.

  I dreamed of a putting green atop a tall building and a ball that went over the edge and I remember leaning over the edge of the building to watch the ball fall toward the toy cars and people below.

  I wakened to a sunny room and the sound of a power lawn mower next door. My right hand was stiff and the soreness in my ribs was still present.

  When I came out to the kitchen, later, Jan was whipping up some eggs and cream in a huge yellow bowl.

  “Omelet and pork sausages,” she told me. “Good enough?”

  “Excellent. Anything I can do?”

  “Relax. Pretend you’re a husband.”

  I looked at her face to see if there was any meaning in that, but saw no bitterness. “You make more money than I do,” I said.

  She looked up quickly, puzzled. Then she smiled. “Oh. I meant nothing, lover. Don’t sound so — trapped.” The Times was on the coffee table in the living room; I brought it out to the kitchen.

  A sports reporter I’d rather not name devoted his column to the relationship between Dom Ristucci and Enrico Martino. The hack tried to be subtle about it, but subtlety was beyond his talent. He was an ignorant blusterer and the piece couldn’t have been much more than an inch short of libel.

  Jan asked, “What are you muttering about now?”

  “Nothing. The funeral’s this morning, Johnny Quirk’s funeral. I’m going to it.”

  “I’m not. I can’t stand funerals.” She was at the stove and staring unseeingly at the griddle when she asked, “Brock, do you have — any other girls?”

  “None. But you have other men.”

  “Dates, yes.”

  I looked at her until she turned to face me. Then I said, “So?”

  “So we’re kind of moral, aren’t we? That’s a kind of morality, isn’t it?”

  “It’s all I need,” I told her. “But I haven’t your guilt complex.”

  Her eyes flared a little. “Don’t be so glib with words like that. This circulating library psychiatric phraseology is the mark of a boob, Brock.”

  “Honey, I had five years at Stanford. I was in the upper tenth of my class. Don’t be so scornful. I’m not all physical.”
/>   She turned the omelet. “Five years wouldn’t get you a doctor’s degree. And without that, you shouldn’t use words like ‘guilt complex.’”

  “Okay, I take it back. I haven’t your caliber of conscience, then. How’s that?”

  “That’s not true, either. You have too much conscience.”

  I went back to the front page, trying to ignore Jan as politely as possible. She wasn’t really digging at me; she was digging at herself through me. The non-sport sections of the paper had nothing new in theory or fact about the murder.

  Breakfast was unusually quiet, though she wasn’t sulking any more. She was reading about the murder. I told her about the sport columnist’s piece on Dom Ristucci and she read that.

  When she’d finished, she asked, “He didn’t get this information from you, did he?” I shook my head.

  “Because I remember that I told you, and I’d be sick if I thought that’s where this — this monster had learned it.”

  “Think of young Ristucci,” I said.

  “I am. You’re working on this, aren’t you? You’re working for Mr. Quirk?” I nodded.

  “I hope you find the killer. Not so much because of Johnny but because of this Dom. I’ll hold my thumbs, Brock.”

  I did the dishes while she dressed. Then I kissed her on the forehead and went out into the sunny day. Next door, behind the wire-mesh fence, the Doberman stood stiff-legged, growling deeply in his throat and trembling, staring at me.

  I went over to spit in his face.

  • • •

  A lot of the boys were there and I sat next to Dean McLaughlin, quite possibly the greatest center who ever played football. I asked him about team morale and he shrugged.

  Tomorrow would tell the tale, he thought.

  This was the chapel at Elysian Fields, and the body of Johnny Quirk was buried in flowers. I hadn’t gone up to look at him; it’s a thing I can’t do.

  Deacon Dan Towler gave us a short eulogy and a short prayer and then a minister said so much less in so many more words it was embarrassing to listen to him.

  The pallbearers were one relative, one Ram, Deborah Curtis’ brother and David Keene. The services at the graveside were even shorter.

  There were reporters and photographers waiting on the driveway at the foot of the slope. A knot of Rams came down the hill near me and I looked over to see that Dom Ristucci was in the middle of the knot.