by Sam Roskoe
“Another Gumshoe?”
“Don’t you all hang out together swapping stories at the same dive?” His voice had enough sarcasm in it to floor an elephant.
“I didn’t pay my dues this year so they won’t let me in the dive. What was the other Gumshoe’s name?”
“What’s it to you?”
I was tempted to grab him by the throat in imitation of my unknown colleague, but the kid was small and would have snapped like a willow branch if I’d tried.
“I’ll tell you what, here’s an idea. Why don’t I ask the questions and you answer them. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like my greatest wish come true.” Somewhere two elephants keeled over.
“What about I pay you then? We make this a business deal you and I.”
“I make seventy-five a week here pounding out crap, hundred a fifty if the crap earns out better than expected, I doubt you make that in a month, Mr…Mr…”
“You don’t need my name.”
“Figures. I should just call you Mr X, should I? That’s a great way to start up a business deal.”
“You’re willing to deal?”
“I never said that, Gumshoe. You need me, least, you think you need me for some reason. I’m the one holding all the cards.”
I had enough of the roll-around.
“Show me your hand then, kid,” I said.
“I’ll tell you this for nothing, and it’s what I told your friend when he came poking around. I was at that party for around an hour and I was doing my best impression of wallpaper all that time. I wasn’t there because I’m a special little flower blooming on the lot, I was there by mistake. I was there because my name is the same as…do you know anything about cartoons by any chance?”
I shrugged. “They show them before the main feature, they’re good for a laugh or two.”
“I meant the people who put them together. Do you know anything about the people who put them together?”
“Nope.”
“One of the people who puts them together over at Warner Brothers, well that man he’s got the same name as me, but he’s at the top of the ladder, see? And he couldn’t make it that night so I thought it would be a laugh riot if I…listen, I wasn’t invited, I wasn’t supposed to be there, God knows why that lush even remembered me being there at all. One thing is sure, Mr…whatever your name is, I don’t know what happened at the party, what happened after and I sure as hell don’t care one way or the other.”
I looked into his eyes. They were lidded a little with anger and not as shiny as when I’d first walked in carrying a whole bag of false hopes with me. But they were truthful.
“Let’s say I believe you. Let’s say that you don’t know a thing, least you don’t think you know. That still leaves me with one question unanswered.”
He reached for the desk.
I lunged, palm out and smacked his hand before it could reach the phone.
“What did you do that for?” He said, rubbing the red mark on his skin.
“I don’t like cops, even fake ones.”
“Jesus, you Gumshoes, you really like throwing your weight around, don’t you?”
“I lost a couple pounds since last year, fit as I was in my prime.”
“Hilarious, Mr…whoever you are, now if you’d let me, I’d like to grab the card from the desk, that’s what I was going to do in the first place, not use the goddamned phone.”
“Card?”
He reached for the desk, slowly, with his good hand. He picked up a white card off the surface and handed it over to me.
“I was going to say that I gave you this because you didn’t try any rough stuff on me, but now I’m just going to say get lost Mr….whoever you are and please don’t ever contact me again.”
I turned the card over in my hand and read the name:
Johnny Jackson
PRIVATE EYE
There was a number beneath and a Hollywood address.
“What does he look like this, Johnny Jackson?” I asked, pocketing the card.
“Oh you know, sloping brow, hairy knuckles, like one of those Neanderthals they have on display at museums, the usual type of Gumshoe.”
“Get that line from a book, did you?”
“I wrote that line. It was in my last picture, The Pier at the End of the World. Maybe you saw it?”
“Nope. What was it about?”
Charlie Jones gave me a big, knowing smile.
“It was about a private eye who came to Hollywood to put the squeeze on a writer and how that writer got his revenge.”
“Who won in the end?”
Charlie Jones leaned away from the table to show me his finger pressed against a red button just below the lip of the desk. He pressed it a few more times. There was no sound to it, no alarms shaking the building, but I knew somewhere a fat man in a fake cop outfit had just spilled his lunch and was already imagining new and interesting ways to use the wooden baton he’d been issued.
“Who do you think won?” Charlie Jones asked me, smug as could be.
I smiled a big smile.
Then socked him hard enough in the stomach to drop him on his ass.
One leg out of the open window I looked back at Charlie.
“I figure they called it even and nobody won,” I said.
Chapter 3
Took me fifteen minutes to shake off the Keystone Cops, would have taken me less if I’d known my way around the Omniverse Studio lot, but these kind of things you can’t plan for.
Well, maybe you can, but I hadn’t and I wasn’t thinking on it too hard as I reached my parked Cadillac.
Steinbeck had his head out of the side window of the Cadillac when I returned. He was taking in some of that golden Californian sunshine and didn’t seem the least bit interested in my little jaunt around the Omniverse dream factory.
“Comfortable?” I asked him.
He blinked a few times but didn’t acknowledge me.
“Well that’s charming,” I said, “here I am busting my ass so that we can get the Café up and running and here you are tanning yourself like some Prima Donna. Remind me to stop with the belly rubs when we get back home.”
He turned and glowered at me, which was no mean feat for a Jack Russell.
I knew what he meant, somehow that strange telepathy that grew between an owner and their pet over time was in work again. He couldn’t really understand my words, but he could sense my mood and react accordingly.
I liked to think that he could understand me and that one day he was going to turn around and in a voice that would make Cary Grant jealous, he would talk.
One day.
Not that day.
I gunned the engine and pulled out of the Omniverse lot just as the two out-of-breath and overheated guards turned the corner. I gave them a little wave in my rear-view, but I don’t think they saw me. Poking fun at the guards wasn’t high on my list of priorities just about then.
I had one name crossed off my list, but now I had another name to add before I got to the rest.
Johnny Jackson.
A Private Eye no less, and what I knew about Private Eyes was easy enough to sum up.
There were two types of Private Eye. Those who wanted to right the world’s wrongs and those who wanted to wrong the world’s rights.
I’d started off as the former, but I’d never become the latter, least I was trying hard what with the Café and all.
I wondered which of the two Johnny Jackson might be and who had hired him to be that way on their behalf? Could that lush Tarquin Meriwether have hired two separate men to do the same job? Wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but then why would he have traveled all the way to San Francisco and to my Café-cum-office to hire me? That didn’t make as much sense.
What I did know was that I could cut my time in half if Johnny Jackson, Private Eye, had already done the leg work on this case. Maybe we could team up? Maybe we could hold hands and sing campfire songs underneath a sky bright with falling
stars?
Sure.
I knew it would be money or fists when it came down to getting what I wanted from Johnny Jackson. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to get my knuckles dirty again before I left La-la land behind.
You could build a lot of castles on hope, but the tide always knocked them down.
Johnny Jackson had set up business above a pawn shop. His name was painted professionally on the frosted glass of the door at the top of a steep flight of stairs. His body was behind me before I had a chance to knock.
“Okay, Gunsel, what’s your game?”
His voice was like rocks being broken against other rocks. The cold edge of a pistol touched the skin at the nape of my neck. A hammer clicked into place.
“Polo, but don’t tell any of my friends, I’ll never live it down,” I said.
“Smart guy, huh?”
“I have my high-school diploma framed at home if you want to come around some time and have a look, you can show me yours. We’ll make it a party.”
He shoved me hard into the glass and kicked my legs apart.
I knew the position by now, and he knew that I knew.
“Figure you for hired gun, fella, am I close?”
Johnny Jackson gave me a one-handed pat down and kept the gun close to the back of my head. He’d done this plenty of times before and not in any private hire kind of way. I’d have put good money that Johnny Jackson had carried a badge and a grudge at one time. You didn’t learn that one-handed frisk from postal detective school.
“Here we go,” Johnny said, pulling out the .38 from its nest in the small of my back, “not much of a cannon for a hired gun. Turn around, keep your hands nice and high.”
It was an age before I faced Johnny Jackson.
I smiled.
“Something funny?” Johnny asked.
Johnny looked exactly like Charlie Jones had described. A stuffed Neanderthal on display in a library exhibit. Only this one they’d crammed into a suit and given it a battered gray Fedora in hopes of making it look respectable.
“Just thinking about how sometimes people tell the truth when they don’t even know they’re telling the truth.”
Johnny pocketed my .38 and and pushed the door to the office open with the noisy end of a mean looking .45 Browning automatic.
“Truth is it? How about you ‘fess up with a little of that right now, fella? How about me and you go into my office here and you tell me why you were parked out front the last half hour watching my joint?”
“Maybe I want to hire you?”
“People who hire me aren’t people like you. People who hire me don’t come carrying pea-shooters with them. People who hire me don’t park up so close to the building, they’re nervous see, don’t like anybody knowing they’re coming to see a Private Dick.”
“Maybe I’m one in a million, a delicate little snowflake?”
“Maybe you talk too much? Maybe, Gunsel, I toss you down the stairs and see if you bounce?”
His grip tightened on the Browning. His knuckles turned white. He flashed a grin that looked like a shark that had seen a seal pup on its lonesome.
Johnny Jackson wanted to hurt me but bad. Maybe he hadn’t gotten his fill of strangling the kid, Charlie Jones, and he wanted a little more.
“You can try, but I can save you the trouble, Johnny. I don’t bounce. Not for you, not for anybody.”
“Tough guy are you?”
Johnny took a step forward.
I held my ground.
“Maybe you and me we’re chasing the same rabbit, Johnny, what would you say to that?”
I thought I heard the clicking of cogs inside his head as Johnny thought over what I’d said. Wherever he’d picked up his smarts it wasn’t any place that moved too fast. Like so many Private Eyes Johnny had probably put one flat foot in front of the other and walked out of a uniform into a rented office. Most of the flatfoots who went into the business thought it was all fistfights and flashy dames and that a gun in the hand was all you needed to set the world to rights.
Johnny wasn’t any different.
“Walk on, Gunsel, slow now.”
“Did you hear me, Johnny? Did you hear what I said?”
“I ain’t deaf.”
I didn’t know what Johnny had in mind for me once we got into the office, but I knew it wasn’t going to be a surprise party and a rousing chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow.’
I was right.
Johnny pushed me down into a chair and yanked the phone from its cradle on the desk.
“See, this is how it’s going to play out, Gunsel. I’m going to phone a good friend of mine who works for our upstanding police force. I’m going to tell my friend I bagged me a grade-A burglar who was going through my precious things here.”
I took a quick look around.
There wasn’t anything precious about Johnny Jackson’s office. Desk, couple of chairs, a water cooler that looked like it had last seen moisture sometime around the year of the Wall St crash. Everything was held together with dust and hope.
“I don’t think they’d believe there was anything precious around here, Johnny.”
“You’d be surprised what a good friend in the right place can do, Gunsel. You’d be surprised how many people end up with an assault charge on their sheet just because I said so. Then again, we can save ourselves all that hassle now, can’t we?”
“We can?”
“Sure, sure we can. You’re no amateur, I can see that. Carrying that chickenshit pea-shooter around won’t win you no awards, but at least you came prepared. Now, all you have to do is tell me who sent you and why and well, maybe we forget about my putting in the call.”
I wasn’t in the mood to be blackmailed. I was never in the mood to be blackmailed and I was beginning to wonder just what Johnny thought he had on me and if he would use it. Did he really pull any weight with the law in La-la Land? Wearing a suit that cost less than mine and with an office one cobweb away from a Haunted House, I doubted Johnny Jackson had any pull with anybody.
“You know, Johnny, that writer was wrong.”
“What writer?”
“He got some of it right, yeah, the overall description about how you look, but he got one thing dead wrong.”
Anger twisted his face. He slammed the receiver down on the desk and came at me.
“You’re going to start telling me what I want to know, Gunsel,” he said and jammed the business end of the .45 up under my chin, “you’re going to tell me or you’ll be eating bullets for lunch.”
My jaw tightened, but I still managed to talk.
“Yeah, Johnny, what that kid didn’t know was how much you talked. Jesus H. Christ, but you flap more than a flag in a hurricane. The kid didn’t get that right when he described you to me. Then again, maybe he was too busy being strangled to notice any of your wittier—“
He pushed forward.
I saw my chance.
Anger can make a man do all kinds of crazy things, but most of all it makes a man forget how vulnerable he is.
Poor Johnny.
I brought a knee up hard and fast between his legs.
And now Johnny was speaking just how Charlie Jones had described. In grunts.
He dropped to the floor and lost his gun and hat as he grabbed for where it hurt the most.
I kicked the .45 across the room and reached into Johnny’s pocket for my chickenshit pea-shooter.
I sat in the chair, the .38 in hand aimed at Johnny’s writhing body on the floor. I lit a cigarette and waited for Johnny to get his breath.
“Bastard,” he said.
“That’s up for discussion,” I said.
Johnny huffed and puffed as he got up onto his knees.
“If you’re going to do it, just do it already and stop pussyfooting around. I haven’t got time for you to watch me squirm, Gunsel.”
I leaned forward a little and blew a ring of smoke in his direction.
“You expecting someone to kill
you, are you?”
“You’re not here put the hammer down on me?”
He sounded genuinely surprised.
“Why would someone who wanted to kill you knock on your door, Johnny? I don’t think you’ve thought this through. But just to put your mind at rest, I’m not here to kill you, no.”
Johnny Jackson looked at me with confusion in his slow, lidded eyes.
“Then why are you here, Gunsel?”
“Did you hear anything I said about you and me chasing the same rabbit, about the kid who described you to me, any of that?”
He shrugged.
“What’s that supposed to mean to me?” he said.
“It means you and me are in the same game, Johnny. It means you and me are swimming in the same pool. I’m a Private Eye too.”
He laughed.
I wasn’t sure if I was upset or confused. I went with upset.
“Did I tell a joke?”
“It’s funny is all. I thought you were here to put a bullet in me and here you are just…what are you doing again?”
I put out the cigarette in an ashtray on the desk.
“I’m here because you’re asking questions and I’m thinking that maybe you’re asking the same questions as me. I’m here because you might save me some shoe leather, that’s why.”
Johnny Jackson pulled himself up onto his feet. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He showed them to me.
“You mind?”
“Why would I?”
“You’re the one with the gun, I thought it might be worthwhile showing you my hand before I got a bullet for my troubles.”
“Smoke away,” I said.
Johnny lit a cigarette and puffed on it deeply. He was thinking, not anything deep I reckoned, if it had been deep I figured I’d see a vein throbbing at his temple.
After a few puffs, Johnny nodded at me.
“You’re working the same case as me, is that what you think?”
“Figure that kid you strangled over on the lot says as much.”
Johnny smiled as he remembered his earlier exploits.
“Snot-nosed little brat gave me lip, I had to get tough.”
“Join the club.”
“Choke him did you?”
“Knocked him on his ass.”
