Private Eye 4 - Nobody Dies in Chinatown

by Max Lockhart

  He looked up to find Meyer and Sidney waiting respectfully. He nodded and tossed Sidney the car keys. He watched them as they left the room, turning off some of the lights as they went. They were good boys: loyal, dependable, respectful boys. Up to a point. Mickey Gold never trusted anybody, man or woman, past the power he had over them.

  Mickey took a meditative drink of his milk and then went back to making notations on the napkins. Maybe he should give Meyer and Sidney a bonus. Not a big one, no sense spoiling them, but a small one, tiny even, a token of appreciation. Businesses did it all the time. Gave employees some incentive to be even more loyal, dependable, and respectful. It was an interesting idea. He would give it some thought.

  He heard a sound where no sound should be coming from and looked up. He froze in middrink as Ralphie Santangelo stepped out of the shadows. Mickey recognized him as one of Frank Tucci's hoods, and was angered by the youngster's tanned good looks. Not much of a worker if he had time to lie around the beach. On the other hand, the way Santangelo raised the specially taped .38 said the boy was good at something.

  After that observation Mickey put visual impressions on hold and ducked as Santangelo calmly fired four times, shattering the table Mickey was hiding behind, and transferring everything on top of it to the top of Mickey Gold's brand-new, eggshell-white suit. The mobster added Ralphie Santangelo's name to the list of people who had no respect.

  Santangelo, a wisp of smoke curling out of the barrel of his .38, stepped up to finish it when Meyer Alliance and Sidney flicked the lights on as they rushed back in. Santangelo hesitated a minute, then melted back into the shadows. He holstered his gun reluctantly. He was tidy in his work habits. He liked to finish what he started.

  Sidney and Meyer, each mentally making plans to take over the kingdom and wondering what the other was thinking, rushed over to the still smoking table. Like a fat, angry phoenix, Mickey Gold rose from the ashes and broken dishes, ghost white, but miraculously unharmed. The king was not dead, and Sidney and Meyer shelved their plans.

  Mickey Gold decided that Sidney and Meyer would definitely get a bonus. Loyalty and respect deserved it. He might even throw in an engraved gold watch, plated, of course, just to show his appreciation. He sighed. The cost of doing business was going up all the time. Maybe he would skip the engraving.

  FOUR

  A young Mexican boy hosed down the sidewalk in front of the Black and Tan Club. The sun, peering through the smog like a tawdry whore in a cheap lace veil, caught the water droplets in its feeble light, making them glitter like cloudy diamonds. He meticulously moved the hose from side to side, sluicing into the gutter the cigarette butts, wadded-up napkins, used-up Kleenex, and the other hundred and one pieces of trash dropped by drunk, careless, sloppy patrons of the Black and Tan for someone else to clean up. All the while he stared at Cleary out of the corner of one dark brown eye.

  Cleary grinned to himself. He well knew one tired private eye wasn't fascinating enough to hold the interest of one medium-sized boy. It was his car. Even on the jaded Strip, a gleaming black on black '57 Cadillac Eldorado convertible with a chrome explosion of grille, Sabre wheels, and predatory tail fins, still caught the eye. Add the dual quad high-compression, full-bore 365, and racing suspension, and it was one hell of a car.

  He slid out and gently closed the door, ran his hand over the soft leather upholstery, and winked at the boy. "You can touch it, kid, but careful with the fingerprints. It's the only thing I own I'm proud of." The boy dropped the hose like it had suddenly turned into a snake, wiped his hands on his faded jeans, and carefully touched the hood ornament with one brown forefinger. "I'll be careful, mister."

  Cleary grinned again and walked into the Black and Tan, wondering if he had ever been that young. Not in a long time, he thought, stretching his lips into a thin-lipped line as he caught sight of Mickey Gold.

  "Cleary, come in, come in. Sidney here was just making a liquid repast, a pick-me-up, you might say. Would you care to join me?"

  "I just drink with friends, Gold," Cleary said, eyeing the mobster, resplendent in starched shirt, tie, gleaming diamond cuff links, tiepin, and pinkie ring that altogether cost more than the Eldorado. "Besides, I want to keep my waistline where I can see my toes without bending over."

  Gold managed a belly laugh about as false as his smile. "You're a real comic, Cleary. Ever thought of doing a nightclub act?"

  Cleary caught the sudden flash of an expression in Mickey's eyes, but like the flick of a lizard's tail, it disappeared too quickly to identify. "No. I like to play to an audience of one."

  A loud grinding sound like an engine without oil came from the blender Sidney was manhandling with all the grace and style of a baboon. Mickey pushed him aside. "You're gonna ruin it, you bum. You know how much these things cost?" He dropped in a few unrecognizable ingredients and turned it on. "Take a chair, Cleary," he said over the sound of the blender.

  Cleary pulled out a chair and sat down to watch Mickey's usual three-ring circus. Sidney; a hurt look on his bruised face, hunched his way over to a table where Meyer Alliance was working on a half-dozen tout sheets. Sidney moved like a man with taped ribs. Wingtip damage, thought Cleary without any regret. He should've known better than to go for his gun and try to get up at the same time. Muscle-bound leg-breakers weren't known for agility.

  He glanced around the room and wondered what happened to Mickey's special table. There was an empty space where it usually sat. The little slug probably made the mistake of leaning on it, he thought.

  "Why don't you talk to Tucci yourself, Gold?" he asked.

  Mickey watched the blender with unusual attention, punching the buttons on the small appliance like a kid playing with a toy typewriter. "Nah, I go over there and I'll just get acid indigestion."

  Cleary smiled with his first feeling of enjoyment since he had walked in. "He's really got you worried, doesn't he, Gold? Don't want to think about him because you're afraid of losing your appetite?"

  Mickey yanked the lid off the blender before it stopped grinding and jumped back from its splattering contents. "Goddamn it!" He examined his clothes for damages. "My dry cleaning bill's going to be three figures this month." He looked up at Cleary. "Well, I got a right to be worried. When he moved into Vegas, everyone thought it was for the low humidity. But in less than sixteen months, one Francis Michael Tucci had taken over three hotels on the Strip."

  "They're still finding Moe Fein's body parts along Highway 91..." Sidney's voice trailed off as Mickey shot him a look. Cleary was surprised the bodyguard didn't drop dead right on the spot.

  Mickey took a sip of his concoction, and turned to Cleary with another false smile. Cleary had seen used-car dealers selling stolen cars as previously owned who looked more honest. "You got a rep as a straight shooter, and Tucci's a businessman. He'll listen to reason. All you got to do is ask him what he wants to settle this."

  Cleary straightened, his face tight. "Let's get our terms settled first. I talk to Tucci and you forget about Joe Quinlan? Is that the deal?"

  Mickey took another swallow of the pink glob. "Yeah, yeah. Absolutely."

  Cleary rose from his chair. "You got yourself a deal, Mickey." He walked half the distance to the door before he turned around. "You welch, and I'll come after you. And your ribless wonder with the space between his ears won't be able to stop me."

  "You talking about me?" asked Sidney, certain he had been insulted, but not sure how.

  Mickey touched his chest, his eyes wide and innocent. "You stab me to the heart, Cleary."

  "You don't have one, Gold. And if you did, I still wouldn't stab you. I don't like you well enough to get that close."

  He walked to the door, then glanced back. "By the way, you got a mustache around your mouth. Better wipe it off. Makes you look like a slob." He had the satisfaction of seeing Gold's face swell up and turn cherry red before he closed the door behind him.

  He walked into the sunshine and watched the Mexican boy gazing
mournfully at the Eldorado's dashboard. "Get in, kid, and I'll run you around the block."

  The boy looked up. "But I got to do the sidewalk."

  "It'll still be there when you get back," said Cleary, opening the passenger door and waving the boy into the car.

  Mickey grabbed a napkin and wiped his mouth as he watched Cleary leave. "Son of a bitch's got no respect." He turned to Sidney and Meyer. "No respect," he repeated.

  "He's a real bum," said Sidney in one of his more brilliant observations.

  "Shut up, Sidney," said Mickey, sliding into a booth and picking up a clean napkin. He began making notations in his crabbed, awkward hand. He tapped his pencil against his expensively capped teeth. "This Joe Quinlan might end up solving a big problem for us."

  Sidney's face looked like a kid who's been told he can't go to the ball game. "Too bad. I was looking forward to seeing how he skates with two broken legs."

  Mickey doodled on his napkin, drawing stick figures with the heads cut off. "Skates? Guy's a little big for the Ice Capades, ain't he?"

  Sidney did a double take. "Capades, nothing. I'm talking Roller Derby."

  Mickey's cheeks quivered as he laughed. "Roller Derby! That ain't no sport for a grown man. Does he chew bubble gum and collect baseball cards, too?"

  "Hey, don't laugh, boss. It's a hell of a popular sport. They're expecting a gate of more than twenty thousand for the Silver City Indians match tomorrow night. I got tickets. And Joe Quinlan's their star. He's dynamite on skates. He makes the wheels smoke."

  Mickey shook his head. "This guy's mental or what?"

  Meyer cleared his throat and pushed his glasses up. "It's a twenty-five-thousand-dollar, winner-take-all grudge match, Mickey. Lots of dough is going to change hands." Meyer only looked like a statistician. He talked like a thug.

  Mickey's eyes lit up like neon dollar signs. He rubbed the side of his nose and considered. There might be a way to gain some respect from Joe Quinlan after all. "Where can we find this punch-drunk Roller Derby star?"

  Cleary lit a cigarette and looked up and down the street. The smog wasn't bad this far out in the San Fernando Valley. The sun was hot and bright, the grass green, and the kids fat and healthy on this tree-shaded street of suburban tract homes, post-World War II models built on G.I. loans and the American Dream. He tried to imagine Joe Quinlan in this setting and failed. It would be like trying to hitch up a plow to a thoroughbred.

  "It was his idea—suburbia. He thought a couple of orange trees and a white picket fence were going to make everything right again," said Eileen Quinlan as if she were reading his thoughts.

  Her voice quivered and she turned to watch two matrons pushing strollers stop to examine a lawn mower. "It works," she called to them. "You're welcome to start it."

  The matrons wandered off to look at a table loaded with knickknacks, and Eileen saw Cleary checking out the amount of furniture and household goods stacked on the lawn. "Just having a yard sale to get rid of a few things that have been cluttering up the house."

  Cleary didn't believe her. "Things like beds and all your living room furniture?"

  She bit her lip and looked away, picking up a black-and-white photo of Joe and herself. Cleary recognized it; he had taken it just before Joe and he had been shipped out. Joe in his World War II uniform and Eileen in a bright yellow dress holding her hat with one hand while Joe bent her over his arm in a kiss like Valentino in The Sheik. They both looked so damn young and hopeful.

  "I never met anyone like him, Jack. He was so full of life," she said, taking the photo out of its silver frame and laying it aside on a table. "I guess that's what kept me married to him for twelve years." She stuck a price tag on the picture frame and set it on another table.

  Eileen was talking as if she were a widow, Cleary thought as he studied her face. She must be in her early thirties, still pretty, still athletic, but at the same time, she seemed old, plain, weathered; sucked dry by the emotional roller coaster called Joe Quinlan.

  Eileen touched the photo with a shaking hand. "He was never the same after the war, Jack. And when he re-upped for Korea, I knew I'd lost him."

  "The war changed us all," he said, reaching for the right words and knowing he hadn't found them.

  "I know that. Most of you grew up, but not Joe. And it's not like he's trying to be like he was before the war. It's more like he's frozen into what he was during the war." She looked at him, her eyes puzzled. "Am 1 making any sense?"

  "More than you know," he said, his stomach beginning to churn. He knew exactly what she meant, and he knew exactly who was responsible. And his name was Jack Cleary.

  He looked around at the bargain hunters going through the yard sale items, selecting and discarding according to some pattern known only to themselves. Taking another drag on his cigarette, he surveyed the table that held the photo. It was a shrine, cluttered with the remains of her life with a man she couldn't understand.

  "You're leaving him, aren't you?"

  Eileen nodded and looked away, but not before Cleary saw a sheen of tears in her eyes. "It's over, Jack. God knows I've tried, but"—she drew a shaky breath—"I love him too much to watch him touch bottom. I'm going to Nebraska. I've got a sister there, some other family. I'll have another chance."

  "That explains it"—he caught her questioning expression—"the look in his eyes these days."

  She scraped her teeth over her bottom lip and clenched her hands together as if gathering her strength. "He still thinks we can make it." She drew another breath. "We can't. Not unless he changes. I used to try to fit into whatever plans he had, but he changed them too fast. I'd depend on one dream, get used to it, and he'd come up with another. And there were other women, Jack, like he was trying them out, too. All of it together was too much. We ended up with no dreams to build on."

  She looked up at him, her wide brown eyes those of a wounded survivor. "He doesn't live here anymore. He's got a room behind the skating rink."

  Cleary ground out his cigarette. "I already looked there."

  A patina of new lines seemed to form around Eileen's eyes. "He's in trouble again, isn't he?"

  He put his arm around her and kissed her forehead to avoid answering. What was the point? She had had a corner on worrying about Joe Quinlan long enough. Time for someone else to take over. "Do you have any idea where I can find him?"

  "It's his birthday tomorrow, Jack."

  Cleary nodded. He knew exactly where Joe was. And he didn't like it.

  "It was his birthday when it happened."

  "I know it. I was there. Hell of a thing to happen on your eighteenth birthday. But how did you know? You didn't meet him until afterward."

  She looked across the lawn at nothing. Or rather at something he couldn't see—like a hopeful young girl in a bright yellow dress, and a young man in a uniform. "Birthdays were always bad for him, Jack. He always went on a binge. Once I even went so far as to hide all the calendars in hope the day would be past before he realized it. It didn't work. It was like he had some kind of alarm clock in his head that went off on one particular day. The first birthday after we were married, he disappeared for three days and I didn't know where he was. I nearly went crazy worrying about him. He came back home hung over and sick and apologetic. It was the war and I knew he was due to be shipped out, so I didn't do anything like walk out. But I did demand to know what had happened. He told me part of it, and his mother told me the rest before she died. I'm sorry it happened to him. It was horrible and tragic. I've tried to be understanding and forgiving, but what good does that do when he won't forgive himself?"

  She pushed a strand of thick auburn hair off her face. "He's been going out there a lot lately," said Eileen, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger, but never quite taking it off. "Sometimes he's better when he comes back, but most of the time he's worse."

  "I Walk the Line" reverberated across the rooftops as a bald, dirty white baseball smacked against a wall again and again in
a frantic tattoo of sound. Cleary stepped out onto the tar-paper roof and stood quietly, listening to the grunts of exhaustion and the sound of footfalls, and watching Joe Quinlan play a game of baseball against the wall. The rooftop was smaller than he remembered it being as a kid. Part of the building jutted upward another floor, so it really was more like half a rooftop. And some of that was taken up with the little building that housed the elevator cables, one wall of which Joe was using as a backstop.

  A portable radio, cranked up all the way, sat on the roof ledge, but Cleary doubted that Joe even heard it. It was just background noise to drown out the sounds echoing in his head. The dreams of sounds, rather. Because Joe had never really heard his sister scream. When they found her, huddled against that same wall, she had been dead more than an hour. Cleary remembered how the blood, sticky to the touch, had looked black in the moonlight. He remembered something else, too. He remembered that was the first time he saw the wild, angry look in Joe's eyes.

  Stripped to the waist, body dripping sweat and smeared with dirt from impact with the rooftop, the Roller Derby star played his solitary match as if his life depended on it. Or his sanity. The police never caught the murderer-rapist, and neither had Joe Quinlan. He had been looking for a target for all that anger ever since. Killing a baseball was better than killing someone else. Or himself.

  Joe made a lunge for the ball and somersaulted across the tar paper. "Who's winning?" asked Cleary.

  Joe looked up and smiled. "The home team."