by Ross Thomas
“Well?” he said.
“It’s Sacchetti,” I said.
“He’s alive.”
“So it seems.”
“The godfather would like you to find him.”
“Who took the pictures?”
“Different people. The godfather has lots of contacts.”
“Then tell him to get the contacts to find his godson.”
“That won’t do.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a delicate matter.”
“Tell him to use some delicate persons.”
Callese sighed and lighted another cigarette. “Look, Mr. Cauthorne. I can tell you just three things. First, Angelo Sacchetti is alive. Second, there’s twenty-five thousand in it for you when you find him. And third, the godfather wants to talk to you in Washington.”
“Then there’s more to the story?” I said.
“There’s more. But the godfather’s got to tell it to you. Look at it this way, you find Angelo and you clear your name.”
“Of what?”
“The accident rap.”
“I can live with that.”
“Why don’t you just talk to the godfather?”
“In Washington,” I said.
“That’s right. In Washington.”
“He’ll tell me what it’s all about?”
“Everything.” Callese rose and stood there as though it were all settled. “You’ll go then.” There was no question in his tone.
“No,” I said.
“Think about it,” he said.
“All right. I’ll think about it and when I’m through doing that I’ll still say no.”
“Tomorrow,” Callese said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Same time.” He started for the office door, paused, and looked around again. “You got a nice little business here, Mr. Cauthorne. I hope it makes a lot of money.” He nodded as if satisfied with a good day’s work, turned, and walked across the showroom towards the street door. Palmisano started after him, but stopped and spun around quickly to me.
“What’s your final price on the Caddy?”
“To you, six grand.”
He smiled, apparently considering it a perfectly splendid bargain. “I used to have one just like it except it was green. Real dark green. What do you drive?”
“A Volkswagen,” I said, but he was already walking across the showroom for another close look at the Cadillac and I don’t think he listened. I don’t think he really cared.
CHAPTER III
When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company finally decided that the dog-eared supermarket it had located near La Brea and Santa Monica was a loser, probably because of urban blight and excessive pilferage, it emptied the shelves of a couple of hundred varieties of breakfast food, loaded up the meat case and the cash registers, and moved out to some distant suburban shopping center where the customers were more honest and where there were twenty acres or so of convenient parking.
The land on which our establishment rested was part of a complicated lease-buy-back package which I never fully understood other than that the real estate man who handled the property was willing to give us a five-year deal dirt cheap if we agreed to a stipulation not to “engage in the retail sale of foodstuffs.” We agreed to that and none of the neighbors objected when we opened Les Voitures Anciennes. The neighbors consisted of a Cantonese carryout, a car wash, a sheet metal firm, and three bars.
We kept the remodeling of the building to a minimum and it managed to keep its aura of cat food, Vienna sausage, and Clorox. We moved the interior wall that divided the store closer to the plate glass windows, built the cubicle of an office around a safe that the A&P thought was too much trouble to remove from its cement cage, and used almost four-fifths of the floor space for the paint, body and mechanical shop. We kept three or four cars in the display area to sell, and to show the odd passerby what we could do in the way of the house specialty, which was the restoration of any car built prior to 1942.
Despite the firm’s rather chi-chi name, supplied by my partner in a rare moment of aberration, our balance sheet was surprisingly profitable almost from the first. My partner was Richard K. E. Trippet who, in 1936, had been a member of England’s fencing team at the Berlin Olympics. He had placed third with the foil, losing out to a gentleman from Costa Rica. After having his hand shaken by both Hitler and Goering, Trippet had gone back to Oxford to brood about the state of the world. The next year he joined the Loyalists in Spain, became fascinated with the Anarchists, and now claimed to be chief poohbah (chairman, I suppose) of all the Anarcho-Syndicalists in the eleven western states. Not counting Trippet, I believe there were seven of them. He was also chairman of his Democratic precinct in Beverly Hills and seemed to grow offended when I sometimes accused him of political dualism.
I had met Trippet and his wife Barbara at a Sunday afternoon cocktail party given almost two years before by perhaps the most obnoxious couple in Los Angeles, which takes in a great deal of territory. The couple was Jack and Louise Conklin. Jack was a film editor, one of the best, and Louise was one of those actresses in television commercials who go into a kind of sexual ecstasy over new brands of detergent, furniture polish and floor wax. When they weren’t working, the pair of them liked to cruise the supermarkets in their 2 + 2 Jaguar on the lookout for young, grocery-laden matrons who needed a ride home, but who wouldn’t mind stopping by for a drink at the Conklins’. Once home, Jack and Louise would both put the make on the young matron, and, according to Jack, they got them into bed, or onto the dining room table, or wherever they did it, seventy-five percent of the time. But then Jack Conklin was a confirmed liar and I cut his estimate by twenty-five percent at least. He was also a loudmouth, a bore, and for all I knew he cheated at cards. The reason I was at his cocktail party that Sunday afternoon was that I had no place else to go which, I am convinced, is the only reason anyone ever goes to a cocktail party.
Conklin must have been born a cuckolder. Once he and his wife had made out with a young matron, she and her husband went on the guest list for the next cocktail party. Conklin liked to talk to the husbands; Louise liked to relive old memories with the wives. That Sunday I was on my third drink when I wandered into a discussion held by my future partner, Richard Trippet, his wife, Barbara, and a rather drunk pediatrician who, I suspected, was one of the husbands that Conklin liked to talk to. The pediatrician, a short man of about fifty with a pink shaved head that did nothing for his small face, was force-feeding the Trippets the details of how he had just bought a 1937 Plymouth coupe for $250 and was planning to spend $2,000 more in New York to have it restored to what he described as “mint condition.”
“You know where I found it?” he asked, his left hand wrapped around a highball glass and his right hand slicing the air for emphasis. “I found it in an ad in The New York Times. I picked up the phone, called the guy in Delaware, and airmailed him a check all in the same day.”
“How interesting,” Barbara Trippet said, which was a more polite comment than I could think of.
Trippet, however, seemed fascinated by the pediatrician. He placed a hand on the doctor’s shoulder, leaned forward, and in a low, intimate tone confided: “After careful consideration, I have decided that although there were a great many models manufactured in the United States in the 1930’s, none could match the 1937 Plymouth for either vulgarity or inadequate workmanship.”
The pediatrician considered that carefully, took another gulp of his drink, and came back with: “You think so, huh? Vulgar, huh? Well, just tell me one thing, buddy, what kind of car do you drive?”
“I don’t,” Trippet said. “I have no car.”
A look of what I felt to be true commiseration ap peared in the eyes of the pediatrician. “You don’t have a car—in Los Angeles?”
“No car. I usually walk.”
“Sometimes we hitchhike though,” Barbara Trippet said.
The pediatrician shook his head sadly and swayed towards me. “How ‘bout yo
u, mister? You got a car, don’t you?” He seemed to be almost pleading. “Your friend here with the funny accent doesn’t have one. Not even one.”
“Motor scooter,” I said. “A 1947 Cushman.”
By now the doctor was visibly moved. “You ought to get yourself a car. You know, save up enough for the down payment. I got a Continental and my wife’s got a Pontiac and my two kids have both got Mustangs, and now I’m going to get that little 1937 Plymouth and I’m going to love that little car more’n all the rest of them put together. You know why?”
“Why?” Trippet said and I was surprised at the genuine interest in his voice.
“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because in 1937 I was going to college and I was poor. You guys must know what being poor’s like.”
“Not really,” Trippet said. “I’ve never been poor.”
For some reason, I believed him.
“Well, you’re lucky, fella,” the doctor said, obviously convinced that a man who didn’t have a car in Los Angeles probably was not only poor, but destitute. “I was church-mouse poor. I was so poor that I got kicked out of my room one night because I couldn’t pay the rent. So I was wandering around the campus and I see this car, this thirty-seven Plymouth, that belonged to this rich kid in one of my classes. Biology class. So I crawled in and went to sleep. Christ, I had to sleep someplace. But this rich prick (excuse me lady) comes out about eleven o’clock to lock his car and finds me in it. And do you think that son of a bitch would let me sleep in it for the rest of the night? Hell no, he wouldn’t. Not on your life. He said he was afraid I’d get it dirty. Well, you know what I promised myself right then and there?”
“That some day,” Barbara Trippet said, “you would earn enough money to buy one exactly like the one your friend had.” She smiled sweetly. “The rich prick in biology class.”
The doctor looked at Mrs. Trippet with approval. “Right,” he said. “That’s exactly what I promised myself.”
“Why?” Trippet asked.
“Why what?”
“Why did you promise yourself that?”
“For Christ’s sake, mister, I just told you.”
“But what are you going to do with it? The Plymouth, I mean.”
“Do with it? What do you mean, do with it? I’m going to own it.”
“But you already have four other cars,” Trippet said. “What possibly useful purpose will it serve?”
The doctor’s pink, shaved head became a shade pinker. “It isn’t supposed to be useful, damn it! It just has to be there—sitting out there on my driveway so I can look at it. Christ, I can’t talk to you people. I’m going to get another drink.”
Trippet watched the doctor weave his way through the crowd. “Fascinating,” he murmured to his wife. “Absolutely fascinating.” Then, turning to me, he asked: “Do you actually have a motor scooter?”
I didn’t have the chance to answer because Jack Conklin, Los Angeles’s number one cuckolder, slammed what he thought was a hearty hand against my shoulder blade. “Eddie, boy! Good to see you. Getting any?”
Before I could reply he turned to the Trippets. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure. I’m Jack Conklin and I’m the lad who’s footing the bill for this little get-together.” Conklin really talked like that.
“I’m Richard Trippet and this is my wife, Barbara. We came with some friends, the Ramseys, but I’m afraid we didn’t have the opportunity to be introduced. I hope you don’t mind gate crashers.”
Conklin applied a heavy right hand to Trippet’s back and encircled Barbara’s waist with his left arm. She edged away. Conklin didn’t seem to notice. “Any friend of Billy and Shirley Ramsey’s a friend of mine,” he said. “Especially Shirley, eh?” and this time he dug an elbow into Trippet’s ribs.
“To be sure,” Trippet murmured when he was through wincing.
“If you want to meet anybody, just ask old Eddie Cauthorne here. Old Eddie knows everybody, right Eddie?”
I started to tell him that Old Eddie didn’t know everybody and didn’t want to know everybody, but Conklin had moved off to use his ever busy hands on other guests.
“I believe,” Trippet said, turning to me again, “that we were talking about your motor scooter. Do you actually have one?”
“No,” I said. “I drive a Volkswagen, but I have twenty-one other cars. Would you like one?”
“Thank you, no,” he said.
“All pre-1932. Prime condition.” As I said, I was on my third drink.
“What in the world for?” Trippet said.
“I inherited them.”
“What do you do,” Barbara Trippet asked, “drive hither and yon?”
“I rent them. To studios, producers, ad agencies.”
“That makes sense,” Trippet said. “But the gentleman we just spoke to—the one with the 1937 Plymouth. He’s afflicted, you know.”
“If he is, so are thousands of others.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” I said. “Take those twenty-one jalopies I have. I keep them in a warehouse way to hell and gone out in East Los Angeles—past 190th. Nobody sees them; they’re not advertised; my phone’s unlisted. But I get at least one or two calls a day from nuts who want to buy a particular car—or even all of them.”
“Why not sell?”
I shrugged. “They produce an income and I can use the money.”
Trippet glanced at his watch, a gold affair that was thicker than a silver dollar, but not much thicker. “Tell me, do you like cars?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
“How splendid. Why don’t you join us for dinner? I think I’ve just had a perfectly marvelous idea.”
Barbara Trippet sighed. “You know,” she said to me, “the last time he said that we wound up in Aspen, Colorado, with a ski lodge.”
After escaping from the cocktail party, we had dinner that night at one of those places on La Cienega which seem to change owners every few months. Barbara Trippet was a small, bright brunette of about my age, thirty-three, with green eyes and a wry, pleasant smile that she used often. At fifty-five, Richard K. E. Trippet just missed being elegant. Perhaps it was the way he wore his clothes or the manner in which he moved. Or it could have been what at first seemed to be a totally languid carriage until you noticed that actually he held himself fencepost straight and that it was the grace of his movements that gave him that curious air of blended indolence and energy. His hair was long and grey and it kept flopping down into his eyes as we talked over the steaks. He was not in the least reticent about himself, and most of the things he told me that night were true. Maybe all of them. I never found otherwise.
Not only was he an Anarcho-Syndicalist in theory and a registered Democrat in practice, but he was also a naturalized U.S. citizen, a top-grade fencer, a saxophone player of merit, a specialist in medieval French, and had been, at one time or another, a captain in what he described as “a decent regiment,” a racing driver-mechanic, a skiing instructor and ski lodge owner (in Aspen), and finally he was still—now—a person of “independent means.”
“Grandfather made it all in Malaya, you know,” he said, as if everyone else did. “Tin mostly. When he came back to London to retire he couldn’t abide the climate and died within a fortnight. My father, who knew absolutely nothing about business and had no intention of learning, simply looked up the most conservative bankers he could find in the City and told them to take care of things. They still do. Barbara’s also rich.”
“Wheat,” she said. “Thousands of acres of Kansas wheat.”
“I feel like Tacky Tom at Rich Rollo’s party,” I said.
“Not to worry,” Trippet said. “It’s just that when we get to my perfectly marvelous idea, I want you to rest assured that we can handle the necessary financing.”
That brought us up to the coffee and brandy, but it still took a while to get to the point.
“That chap at the party with the Plymouth,” he said.
“What about hi
m?”
“Pathetic case really. Yet typical.”
“How?”
“Most middle-aged Americans, I’ve noticed, attach an inordinate amount of sentiment to the first car that they owned. They may not remember their children’s birthdays, but they can tell you that first car’s year, model, color, even date of purchase, and exactly what they paid for it down to a dime.”
“Probably,” I said.
Trippet took a sip of his brandy. “My point is that there is scarcely an American over thirty whose life hasn’t been touched in some meaningful way by a particular make and model of car—even if he only lost his virginity in it despite an awkwardly located gear lever.”
“It was a 1950 Ford convertible and the gear shift didn’t seem to bother anything,” Trippet’s wife said. “In Topeka.”
Trippet ignored her. “Snobbery, greed and status play an important role, too. I know of a lawyer in Anaheim who is actually hoarding five 1958 Edsels. Hoarding, mind you, waiting for their price to rise. Another chap I heard of retired at thirty-five from whatever he was doing, something profitable, I’d venture, and began to collect Rolls-Royce. Why? Because he liked ‘big things,’ big houses, big dogs, big cars. Such temperaments are perfect for exploitation.”
“Here it comes,” his wife warned me.
“I’m braced,” I said.
“What I propose,” Trippet went on, not in the least perturbed, “is that we establish one of the nation’s most useless, unneeded businesses.”
“Something like the ski lodge?” his wife said.
“To the young,” he continued, “we become vendors of snobbery and status. To the old and middle-aged we cater (or rather pander, don’t you think?) to their nostalgic yearning for the past. We provide them a tangible link with yesterday, with that time when not only their cars were simpler, but also their world.”
“He does talk pretty,” I said to Barbara.
