Last Call

by Tim Powers

  There was nothing in that for Trumbill, so he just kept looking at her stolidly.

  “And the Jack of Hearts showed up way too often, generally with the Four of Hearts.”

  “What’s the Four?”

  “It’s—sort of an old-bachelor figure. I don’t see it as a threat to me, but I wonder who the hell it is.”

  “Who’s this jack, is the question.” Trumbill shifted in the chair and wished he had brought another one of his tropical fish out with him. A cichlid would go down well right now. He hated bringing up awkward topics with Betsy lately; he wished she’d wear the Richard body more often, or even haul the Art Hanari one out of mothballs. “It’s got to be the jack you sensed last night, doesn’t it? That seemed like the big one, the one to worry about.”

  “It’s a jack,” she said shortly. “I can handle jacks. I’m the King.”

  “But—” Oh, Jesus, Trumbill thought, here I go. “But it sounds like it’s as—as far outranking the other jacks as this Diana woman is outranking the other wanna-be Queens. Now, Diana has that advantage because she is the actual kid of Issit.” Unobtrusively he took a deep breath. “Way back when you were in the Georges Leon body—didn’t you have a second kid, besides Richard? A second biological son?”

  Her lower lip was pouched out, and there were tears in her eyes when she looked at him. “No. Who told you that?”

  “You did, Betsy, one time in the sixties when you were in Richard, Ricky Leroy. Remember? I don’t mean to…hurt your feelings, but if this jack may be that kid, isn’t it something you’ve got to think about?”

  “I can’t think. I’ve got to do everything by myself. I—”

  Trumbill flexed his massive arms and legs and got out of the chair. “Time,” he said when she looked at him in alarm. “Got to get the tape going.”

  “Time? Oh, that call. Sure, go ahead.”

  Trumbill had just got the tape recorder going when the phone rang. He picked it up before the answering machine could cut in.

  “Yes?” He turned on the speakerphone so that Betsy could hear.

  “This is the guy that called before, about Scott Crane, Ozzie, and Diana. I know where they are, I can get to them for you. Are you interested?”

  “Yes,” said Trumbill. “We’ll pay you twenty thousand dollars, half when you tell us and half after we’ve determined that your information is valid.”

  “Uh…okay. That’ll do. Where do you want to meet?”

  Trumbill looked over at Betsy. “The Flamingo,” she mouthed.

  “The Flamingo,” said Trumbill. “Two o’clock this afternoon. In the coffee shop, Lindy’s Deli. I’ll be at the Trumbill table.”

  He spelled the name and then hung up.

  “I’m going with you,” Betsy said.

  “I don’t think—”

  “You don’t want me to, is that it? Who is this guy you’re meeting, anyway?”

  “You know as much about it all as I do, Betsy.” He thought about asking her to step into the Art Hanari body and give him a call, but he suspected that she was too agitated right now to agree to it. “Betsy, I don’t mean to upset you, but it might help me to help you if I knew the name of the boy, your son who got away in ’48.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, and then she stuck her tongue out at him.

  Funo arrived early, and walked around the hotel for a while. He picked up a pamphlet and read it on one of the couches by the registration desk and learned that the hotel had been founded by a gangster named Bugsy Siegel.

  Ordinarily that would have fascinated him, and he might have made a mental note to read up on this Siegel character, but right now his nerves were too jangled. He shook another couple of Tic Tac mints out into his palm and popped them into his mouth, wishing he could get rid of the taste of vomit.

  He had got talking to a man at breakfast, and the fellow had seemed very nice, very well educated—but then he had started talking in a direction Funo hadn’t followed. Funo had bluffed, pretending to understand and agree, until it had dawned on him that the man believed Funo was a homosexual. Funo had excused himself and gone to the men’s room, had rid himself in one of the stalls of every bit of the breakfast, and then had simply hurried out of the place and driven away. He’d have to mail the amount of his bill to Denny’s. Ten times the amount of his bill. The waitress must think he was some kind of no-account. He’d go back in person, not mail the money, when she was working again, and he’d not only pay the skipped bill but give her some expensive piece of jewelry.

  That’ll take cash, he thought.

  He knew that these people he was going to meet here today would want to handle Scott and Ozzie and Diana themselves; but he could point out that he was a professional, too. The fat man, assuming that’s whom he had talked to on the phone, seemed to be in a position of authority here, not hired by Obstadt back in L.A., and he would probably welcome help from a competent workman.

  He wondered how Obstadt’s “guys in Vegas” were doing at trying to find Crane. He hoped they hadn’t found out about the Iverson-Crane Visa card.

  The Pacific Time Zone clock over the registration desk said a couple of minutes to two. He stood up and walked toward the escalator that would take him down to Lindy’s Deli.

  As soon as he stopped by the cash register and could look out across the rows of booths and quaint dark wood tables, Funo recognized the fat man’s big old bald head poking up above one of the farther booths.

  He grinned and strode over to the booth. The place smelled wonderfully of corned beef and coleslaw.

  Trumbill was sitting with a very attractive older woman, and Funo bowed. “Hi, I’m Al Funo. I believe I spoke to…you, sir? On the phone earlier. I got your number by tracing the registration on your Jag.”

  “Sit down,” said the fat man coldly. “Where are the people you mentioned?”

  Funo winked at the old woman, as if sharing amusement at Trumbill’s bad manners. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your lovely companion?”

  She nodded, and Trumbill said, “This, is Elizabeth Reculver.”

  That had been the name the car was registered to. “A p-p-pleasure,” said Funo, keeping his smile but blushing at this recurrence of the stuttering he thought he had licked as a kid. Hastily he slid into the booth, next to her.

  “Where are the people you mentioned?” Trumbill said.

  “I know where they are,” said Funo, “and that’s what’s important, because I’m in your employ, as it were. I’ve done a lot of this kind of work.”

  Trumbill was frowning at him. “This kind of work.” The fat man leaned back and sighed. “The money is for the information, Alvin. After you give us that, you just take the money and go away.”

  Alvin? Like the chipmunk? And talking to him as if money meant more to him than people! Funo felt his face heating up again. “I d-d-don’t—” Damn it, he thought. “I’m professional, and I don’t…appreciate—”

  Reculver leaned forward.

  “Don’t, Vaughan,” she said, looking the fat man straight in the eye. “I think we should listen to what young Al has to say. I think he could help us.”

  Suddenly the situation was clear to Funo. This ridiculous Trumbill person was in love with this woman! And resented the fact that she so clearly found Funo attractive.

  After a pause, “Okay,” said Trumbill, nodding. “Then I guess I should make a call, tell our other guys to put it on bold until they hear different. It looks like we may be doing it your way after all, Mr. Funo.” He slid his bulk out of the booth and got to his feet.

  Funo could be gracious. “I suspected you’d come to that conclusion, Mr. Trumbill.”

  Standing up, Trumbill could see the other tables, and be must have liked what he could see, for his nostrils flared and he licked his lips. “Why don’t we have lunch while we talk?” he said. “Order me a Reuben’s sandwich. Extra coleslaw and pickles. And a big V-8.”

  “Lunch sounds good to me,” said Funo cheerfully. He
was sure he could hold food down now. “Good talk with good people over good food, right?”

  “Right,” said Trumbill.

  Trumbill strode off toward the exit, and Funo turned to Reculver, his heart beating fast. “I understand,” he said softly, giving her his boyish smile.

  The old woman smiled back at him a little uncertainly. “Understand what?”

  “Your…feelings. Really.”

  “Good, I was hoping you did. Vaughan—that’s Mr. Trumbill—sometimes he just…” She paused, for Funo had slid over next to her and was pressing his thigh against hers. “Uh, I think you should sit over there, back where you were.”

  Was she teasing him? Of course. The old hard-to-get routine! Ordinarily he’d have played along, done the winks and the short-but-intense glances, the witty double entendres, but today he needed a little reassurance.

  He looked around. At the moment there wasn’t anyone who could see them.

  He curled his arm across her shoulders, and then with deliberate slowness lowered his mouth onto hers.

  Her mouth opened—

  —to cough out one harsh syllable of laughter: an awkward, embarrassed laugh, as if she bad suddenly found herself in a profoundly distasteful situation and wasn’t sure how to get out of it without giving offense, without making her revulsion evident. There had not been any slightest response in her lips or her body.

  Funo felt as if he had tried to kiss an old man.

  Then he was up and running, and by the time he burst out of one of the north doors onto the bright Strip sidewalk, he was crying.

  He was long gone. Reculver walked back to the booth and sat down. In a few moments Trumbill came swinging and stamping back to the table. He looked at Betsy alone in the booth and raised his eyebrows.

  “Gone to the head?” he asked.

  “No, he—he ran away.” She shook her head bewilderedly. “I…had him wrong, Vaughan. I thought he was just a, you know, small-time ambitious hood; Moynihan’s guys get him out of here quiet, we shoot him up with sodium pentothal or something, and then we bury him in the desert when we’ve found out what he knows. But he…tried to kiss me! Sit down, will you? He tried to kiss me, and I guess I didn’t react—properly.”

  Trumbill stared at her. His mouth kinked in a rare, ironic grin. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

  “I wonder if we’ll hear from him again.”

  He sat down. “If we do, you’d better tell him you were…on your period, but now you’re okay again and you think he’s sexy.”

  “I couldn’t possibly do that.”

  Two men in shorts and flowered shirts hurried up to the table now, panting. “He got clean away, Mrs. Reculver. He was in a cab and gone by the time we got to the sidewalk. We were walking toward here, from by the kitchen, but then he just up and ran out.”

  “Yeah,” said the other man nervously. “You didn’t tell us to watch for him to just up and run out.”

  “I know,” said Reculver, still distracted. “Get out of here, and next time be quicker.”

  “I better get back on the phone,” said Trumbill, wearily getting up again, “and tell Moynihan we don’t need his guys after all. Did you get a chance to order?”

  “No. We should be heading back home.”

  Trumbill pursed his lips but didn’t argue. There were the tropical fish at home.

  CHAPTER 20

  Isis, I Have Your Son

  The sky was dark, but the white lights of the wedding chapels jumped and crawled in the cracks in Arky’s windshield.

  One beer, thought Crane as Arky gunned the old truck south on Las Vegas Boulevard and the full Coors cans bumped around in the ice chest. What conceivable harm could there be in having one beer? In this town people walk down the street with glasses of hard liquor; get a free drink in one casino, and you can take it right outside with you, leave the glass in the next place you go to and get another.

  But it wouldn’t be just one, he told himself. No matter how emphatically you swore and promised that it would. And if it’s possible to save your life here, you’ve got to not let Dionysus get any better a grip on you than he’s already got.

  The World Series of Poker was due to start at the end of this month at Binion’s Horseshoe, and if this was going to be like 1969, the Assumption games on the lake would take place before that, during Holy Week. Which was next week. Crane didn’t have a plan, but if there was any way he could elude the death his real father had planned for him, he would have to stay sober.

  But, he thought, Ozzie says I’m doomed—and if he’s right, why should die sober?

  Okay, he told himself, maybe. But not tonight, okay? Just this one night you can do without a drink, can’t you? If we find Diana, you want to be functioning at your best, don’t you? Such as your best is.

  “Watch for Charleston,” said Ozzie from the back seat. “You’re going to turn left.”

  “I know, Oz,” said Mavranos wearily.

  “Well,” said the old man, “I don’t want you missing it and then cutting capers in this traffic to get back.”

  “Cutting capers?” Mavranos said, sneaking a sip of his current beer. “Those fish eggs?”

  Crane was laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Mavranos demanded. “Oh—you mean those little birds people cook on New Year’s. Capons.”

  “He means clowning around,” Crane said.

  “Why didn’t he say so then. I don’t know about cutting capers.” He drove moodily for a while. “I know about cutting farts.”

  Even Ozzie was laughing now.

  A neon sign over a liquor store read PHOTO IDS. Crane read it as one word, photoids. What would that be, he wondered, things like photons? False light? Faux light, as they’d say? Maybe the whole town was lit with such.

  But suddenly Crane’s heart was thumping and his palms were chilly. I should have done something, he found himself thinking. I’ve got to get home. His hands were on the upholstery of the seat, but for a moment be could feel a telephone; his right hand seemed to be hanging it up.

  This isn’t me, be realized; these aren’t my thoughts and sensations.

  “Diana’s worried,” he said tightly, “scared. Something she heard on the telephone just now: She’s going home.”

  “Here’s Charleston,” Ozzie said, leaning forward over the seat and pointing.

  Mavranos nodded. He angled into the left-turn lane and stopped in the middle of the intersection, waiting for a gap in the oncoming northbound traffic. The only sounds in the car were Crane’s panting and the click-click, click-click of the turn indicator.

  Crane could feel Diana walking quickly, stopping, talking urgently to someone. He stared at the headlights ahead of them moving slowly forward, and he wanted to get out of the car and run east, toward the next place on their list of supermarkets—what was it, Smith’ s.

  “We’d better find her tonight,” he said. “I think she’s losing her job. If you could catch all the green lights between here and there…”

  “I get it,” Mavranos told him.

  At last the light turned yellow and Mavranos was able to make the turn. He drove fast to Maryland Parkway and passed it, then turned right, into the expansive parking lot that was streaked and puddled with the white light spilling out from the wide open entrance of Smith’s Food and Drug.

  Ozzie pushed open his door as soon as Mavranos had parked, but Crane turned around and grabbed the old man’s shoulder. “Wait,” Crane said. “I feel pavement under my shoes, her shoes, And warmer air. She’s outside.” The old man nodded and hastily pulled the door shut.

  Mavranos started the car and backed out of the space, drawing an angry honk from a Volkswagen.

  “Drive around,” Ozzie said. “I’ll know her.” He was peering at a woman walking a child across the asphalt, then looking past her at another woman unlocking a car. “Is this the right place, the right store?”

  “I…don’t know,” Crane said.

  “She might be at some other s
tore:”

  “—Yes.”

  Crane was staring around too, and Mavranos drove the car past the glaringly bright store entrance, past a closed GOLD BUYERS store, then turned right to loop around again.

  “Is she still walking?” Mavranos’s voice was harsh. “Is she in a car yet?”

  Crane reached out with his mind, but couldn’t sense anything now. “I don’t know. Keep moving.”

  Lost her job, he thought. If we miss her now, we’ve missed her for good.

  “Worthless windshield,” he hissed, rolling down his window and sticking his head out. Everywhere cars seemed to be starting up, driving out of the lot, disappearing up or down the dark street.

  “That’s—” squeaked Ozzie. “No. Goddammit, my eyes aren’t good enough for this! What the hell good am I?”

  Crane squinted forward and around and back, trying to make his eyes focus better and still desperately trying to pick up mental impressions.

  “Around by the front of the store again?” asked Mavranos.

  “Uh,” said Ozzie unhappily, “yes. No. Circle out here.”

  “Been already probably half a dozen women drive away,” Mavranos said.

  “Do as I say.” The old man had already rolled down his window, and now he put his head outside, too. “Diana!” he yelled, his parroty old voice not carrying at all. Crane thought of how the old man had, though exhausted, tried to catch up with him in the Mint Hotel stairwell in ’69, when Crane had left to play in the Assumption game, and now his eyes blurred with tears.

  “Goddammit,” Crane whispered, blinking them away. He made himself calm down and look carefully at each person in the lot.

  Away from the store, closer to the Jack in the Box restaurant on the Maryland Parkway side of the lot, Crane saw a woman opening the door of a tan Mustang. She tossed back her blond hair and got in. An instant later the car’s lights came on, and smoke blew out of the exhaust.

  “That’s her,” he shouted at Mavranos, pointing, “that Mustang:”

  Mavranos spun the wheel and stepped on the gas, but the Mustang was already in the exit driveway, signaling for a right turn.