by Ross Thomas
“He’s just warming up.”
“How do you like the proposition?” Trippet asked.
“Interesting, I suppose. But why me?”
“Obviously, Mr. Cauthorne, you don’t care a fig about cars—no more than I. You have a most presentable appearance and you also have twenty-one sturdy relics safely garaged in East Los Angeles which we can use for bait.”
“Bait for what?”
“For suckers,” his wife said.
“For future clients,” Trippet said. “My idea is that we establish a garage—no, not a garage. That’s too plebeian a word. We establish a clinic. Yes! We establish a clinic that specializes in restoring junkers to their original, pristine condition. Note that I stress the word ‘original.’ For instance, if a microphone to the chauffeur’s speaker were needed for a 1931 Rolls, we would not settle for a microphone that was used in—say—a 1933 Rolls. No, we would scour the country, indeed, the world for exactly the right part. Only the 1931 microphone will do. Guaranteed authenticity will be our motto.”
“Unfortunately,” I said, “I’m not of independent means.”
Trippet waved my objection away. “We’ll capitalize your twenty-one cars. That will do nicely and I’ll manage the rest.”
“All right,” I said. “Now I understand the why me. What about the why you?”
“He wants to get out of the house,” his wife said.
Trippet grinned and brushed the hair out of his eyes for the twenty-third time that evening. “Can you think of a better method to study the decay of the system than by establishing a useless business that charges exorbitant fees to foolish persons for services and products that are absolutely unneeded?”
“Not offhand,” I said. “But I really don’t think you’re serious.”
“He’s serious,” his wife said. “It’s the only time he gets serious—when he comes up with a nutty one like this.”
“Of course I’m serious,” Trippet said. “While trafficking in sentiment and snobbery, I strike another blow at the underpinnings of the system and at the same time turn a neat profit. I’m not above that, you know. Must be some trait I inherited from grandfather.”
“Let’s suppose we’re in business,” I said. “Who does the work—you know, the kind where you get your hands dirty?”
Trippet looked surprised, then offended. “I do, of course. I’m really quite good with cars although I no longer have a liking for them. Prefer horses, actually. Naturally, we’ll pick up a couple of bodies to train and to perform the more menial tasks. By the way, just what is it that you usually do when you do something?”
“I’m an unemployed stunt man.”
“Really? How fascinating. Do you fence?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. We should have some jolly times together. But tell me, why unemployed?”
“Because,” I said, “I lost my nerve.”
In the two years that followed it worked out much as Trippet had predicted that night in the restaurant on La Cienega. He discovered the A&P building near La Brea and Santa Monica, supervised most of the remodeling, bought the necessary equipment, arranged for the legal papers to be drawn up, and then counseled me to have my own lawyer go over them. When everything was ready Trippet set out to restore a 1930 Packard which was part of my legacy. The car was a straight eight Model 7/34 boat-tailed speedster with a high-ratio rear axle that enabled it to do one hundred miles per hour on the straightaway if its future owner were so inclined. Trippet gave the car fourteen coats of handrubbed lacquer, reupholstered the interior in glove-like leather, supplied it with a new top and white sidewall tires, including those in the fender wells, and then instructed me to sell it for $8,000.
“Not a penny less,” he warned.
The first day that the Packard went on display, twenty-three persons came in to look at it. The twenty-third was a seventy-year-old retired cowboy singer who now lived in Palm Springs. He walked around the Packard twice and then came back to my office.
“Does it run?” he asked.
“Perfectly,” I said.
“How much you asking?”
“Eight thousand.”
He grew a canny expression. “Give you seven. Cash deal.”
I lifted an eyebrow and smiled what I hoped was a chilly smile. “I’m sorry, sir, but we do not haggle.”
The ex-cowboy singer nodded at that and went back out to look at the Packard some more. Five minutes later he was back in the office writing out a check for $8,000.
I thought about some of this, but not all, after the man in the spats had left, trailed by his outsized companion. If they were a problem, so was the rain that splashed against the plate glass windows. Then the rain finally stopped and I picked up the phone and dialed a number. A voice answered on the third ring and I made an appointment for later that evening. I had some questions about the man in the spats and the man I was to see that evening might have the answers. And then again, he might not.
CHAPTER IV
The rain had started again, a thick, grey downpour that slowed homeward-bound traffic on Wilshire Boulevard to a fitful crawl and made drivers champ their jaws in unison as they cursed the idiot ahead. There was an opening in the curb lane and I slipped into it, turning right some two or three blocks past Doheny. Behind me a horn blasted out of pique or jealousy or both. A few blocks and a turn or two later I parked next to a fire hydrant, deciding that if a cop left a dry patrol car to write out a ticket in that rain, I no doubt deserved it.
The apartment house that I parked in front of was a fairly new two-story garden-type structure, built in a U around a swimming pool, and coated with pale yellow stucco that the rain had wetted down so that it looked like tapioca. I sat in the Volkswagen for a while, smoked a cigarette and watched the windows grow steamy. At six-thirty I draped a raincoat around my shoulders and made a dash for the shelter of the building. There were some pale pink roses growing near the outside staircase that led to the second floor, but the rain had knocked most of their petals to the ground. I was only slightly wet when I went up the stairs, turned right, and rang the bell of Christopher Small. There was a light scraping sound as someone inspected me through the security peephole. Then the door opened wide.
“Come on in, Eddie. How are you, wet?”
“Not too bad. How’re you, Marcie?”
“Fine.”
Marcie Holloway was a tall black-haired girl with blue eyes, a wide mouth with an attractive overbite, and a nose that could have been just a little snub and perhaps a trifle shiny if you worried about such things. She carried a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her narrow plaid slacks seemed to be part of a suit and she comfortably filled the white blouse that topped them. She had been living with Christopher Small for almost three years which, in that town, may have been some sort of a record.
I made another inane comment about the weather, she asked if I would like a drink, and I said that I would.
“Chris’ll be out in a minute. Scotch and soda okay?”
“Make it water.”
Marcie disappeared through a door with my raincoat and I sat down on a green divan and studied some of the photographs that almost covered the opposite wall. There seemed to be more of them than I remembered. They ran from the ceiling to near the floor, were framed by thin, black molding, and shielded by glareproof glass. They portrayed Christopher Small and friends and he seemed to have a lot of them. The room also had a built-in bookcase that held six books, some crockery, and a collection of china cats and kittens. There was a color television set in one corner, a stereo unit in another, and twin speakers were strategically placed at ceiling height in opposite corners. The rest of the furniture looked as if it came with the apartment.
Those who have eyes good enough to read the “and featuring” credits on the late show might recognize Christopher Small’s name. He had earned a comfortable living in Hollywood for more than thirty years by playing minor roles in films that called for a cab driver, a reporter, a tou
gh sergeant, a bartender, a number two cop, or—most often of all—a number three or four gangster, the one who gets queasy about the entire setup and takes off in the getaway car before the rest of the gang has had a chance to clean out the tellers’ cages.
By his own rough estimate, Small had appeared in more than five hundred feature films and television productions, but he is probably best remembered for a picture that earned him a brief vogue during World War II. The film had the members of a New York mob deciding, for God knows what reason, that the Germans posed an even greater threat than the cops. The mob enlisted en masse, went overseas, and apparently won the war—only to gulp back their tears at the film’s end as they crowded about their mortally wounded chief while he took his own sweet time to die in Small’s arms, muttering something unlikely about brotherhood, democracy, and peace.
Small’s brief moment of fame occurred in an earlier scene in the film which required him to burst into a farmhouse, his Thompson submachine gun at the ready, and capture what appeared to be the entire German high command with the line: “Freeze the mitts, Fritz!” A radio comedian picked it up and for a while it became a popular saying around high schools and colleges. In the mid-sixties some Merry Andrews at an Eastern university decided to hold a Christopher Small Festival, but nothing ever came of it other than a press release.
Small came through the door that led to a bedroom, shook hands with me, and asked how business was. I told him that it was fine.
“Marcie getting you a drink?” he asked and lowered himself into a green overstuffed chair that matched the divan.
“Yes.”
He turned his head and yelled back at the kitchen: “Make it two, Marcie.”
There was an answering yell which I assumed to be one of assent. Marcie and Small yelled at each other a lot.
“Doing anything?” he asked and I knew that he was talking about the stunt business.
“Nothing,” I said.
“And you’re not pushing either.”
“No, I’m not pushing.”
“You could get something if you pushed,” he said.
“There’s not much demand.”
“The hell there isn’t.”
“Let’s just say that I like what I’m doing.”
Marcie came in from the kitchen carrying the drinks on a hammered aluminum tray. She served them and then curled up on the other end of the sofa, one foot tucked under her rear in what has always seemed to me a most uncomfortable position.
“You getting the usual lecture, Eddie?” she asked.
“Chris still seems to think that I’m neglecting a promising career.”
Small stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. He wore tan, wide-wale corduroy slacks, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and brown loafers. He had let his hair go grey and his stomach pushed a little at the front of the knit shirt, but his face was still the same: lean and long with a pointed chin, hollow cheeks, a strong thin nose, and deepset dark eyes that he could make crafty or frightened or cruel, depending upon what was called for by the script.
“Well,” he said, “you have to admit that you invested a hell of a lot of time to get where you were. Now it’s just going to waste. Your old man would be goddamned sore.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“He’s sore wherever he is. I remember when you were just a brat—no more than five or six. He used to tell me then how someday you were going to be top stunt man.”
“Sure,” I said, “and for my tenth birthday I got fencing lessons. Just what I always wanted.”
My father had been a stunt pilot, one of the first of that strange breed who descended on Hollywood in the twenties, willing to attempt anything that the writers could dream up for ten dollars and a place to sleep. He never got over the fact that he had flown with Frank Clarke in 1927 when the dogfight for Hell’s Angels was filmed over San Francisco Bay. It was still the highlight in his life when, heading for yet another flying assignment at age sixty-one, he crashed into the tail end of a seven-car freeway pileup, went through the windshield, and bled to death before they got him to the hospital. He left me the twenty-one pre-1932 cars, a house full of furniture, and some odd memories. But as Small said, my father had always wanted me to be top stunt man. He taught me to drive at twelve, fly at fourteen, and by the time I entered UCLA I was an accomplished rider, fencer, gymnast, boxer, member of both the Stuntman’s Association and the Screen Actors Guild, and working regularly.
“I can put in a word for you at a couple of places,” Small said.
“No thanks. It just wouldn’t work out.”
“You ought to try once more anyhow,” he said. “It’s such a damned waste—all those years you spent at UCLA in their film school.”
“Just three years,” I said. “I was a dropout.”
“You ought to try anyhow,” Small said again.
“Maybe he likes what he’s doing,” Marcie said. “Maybe he just doesn’t want to go around falling off horses anymore.”
“I’ll think about it at any rate,” I said in an attempt to mollify Small and end the lecture.
“Let me know if I can help,” he said.
“Well, actually you can.”
“Just name it, kid.”
“I need some information.”
“About what?” he asked.
“Not what, who. A couple of guys.”
“Okay, who?”
“Salvatore Callese and somebody called Palmisano,” I said.
Small made his face go blank. There was absolutely no expression on it—no surprise, no warmth, no anything. He looked at Marcie. “Go see about something,” he said.
“What?”
“Christ, I don’t know what. Anything. Go cook something.”
Marcie rose quickly and started towards the kitchen. Then she paused, and turned to Small. “How about some fudge?” she said nastily.
“I mean for dinner, for God’s sake!”
“Fudge for dinner,” she yelled, and disappeared into the kitchen and started to slam some pots around.
His name really wasn’t Christopher Small. It was Fiore Smaldore and he had been born in East Harlem on 108th Street and by the time he was fourteen he was running numbers after school. His older brother, Vincent Smaldore, had risen quickly in the gangland hierarchy and seemed destined for a brilliant career until one October morning in 1931 when somebody dumped his body out at the corner of 106th Street and Lexington Avenue, a casualty of the bitter feud between Joe (the Boss) Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. The older brother of Fiore Smaldore (soon to become Christopher Small) had insisted that the youngest member of the family finish high school, but the seven bullets in the body of Vincent convinced the younger brother that safety lay elsewhere. Los Angeles was as far as he could get before his money ran out on Christmas Day, 1931. He drifted into motion pictures, first as an extra and then as a bit player when they discovered that he had a voice that recorded well. It satisfied him, and his friends and enemies back in New York, inveterate movie-goers all, liked to punch each other in the ribs whenever they saw him on the screen. They also thought that it was nice to know a motion picture actor who could show them around Hollywood even if he weren’t a real star. There wasn’t much Small could do about it, and over the years he had served as tour leader for a large number of those who made their very good livings on the darker side of the law in such cities as New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Kansas City.
“It wasn’t so bad in the forties and the fifties,” Small once told me. “We’d go to places like Ciro’s and the Derby and Romanoff’s and we’d get our pictures like you see over there on the wall took. But now you know where they got to go? Disneyland, that’s where. Christ, I must have been to Disneyland fifty times.” The pictures, I once noted, were all signed and bore such salutations as “To Chris, a swell guy, from his pal, Nick,” or “Thanks for a swell time, your buddy, Vito.”
Small was now leaning towards me, his elbows on his knees, a look o
f apparently genuine concern on his face. “What do Callese and Palmisano want?” he said.
“You know them?” I said.
“I know them. What do they want with you?”
“They want me to see a man in Washington.”
“What man?”
“The godfather of Angelo Sacchetti. They say that Angelo isn’t dead and that his godfather wants me to find him.”
“Where?”
“Christ, I don’t know where.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Small rose and walked over to the bookshelves and picked up one of the china kittens. “Marcie collects these things, you know,” he said.
“I know. I gave her a couple.”
“Salvatore Callese,” Small said to the kitten. “Or The Yellow Spats Kid as they used to call him a long time ago in Newark.”
“He still wears them,” I said.
“What?”
“Spats. Only they’re pearl grey now.”
“He’ll always wear them. You want to know why?”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because his feet are cold. You want to know why his feet are cold, even on a warm day in Los Angeles?” Small turned from the collection of cats and kittens, leaned over the back of the green overstuffed chair, and stared at me with eyes that seemed almost haunted.
“Okay,” I said again. “Why are his feet cold even on a warm day in Los Angeles?”
“Because about thirty-seven years ago when he was just a punk the 116th Street boys caught him screwing one of the guy’s sisters. So you know what they did? They had a party. They got a washtub full of ice and dumped some rock salt in it to make it good and cold and then they put the beer in and they also took off Callese’s shoes and socks and put his feet in the tub so that they’d cool off. They kept them in there for about three hours until all the beer was drunk up and then they took him back to Newark and dumped him. He damned near lost both feet and they’ve been cold ever since and that’s why he wears spats and that’s why they used to call him The Yellow Spats Kid.”
“What happened then?”
