Write Me a Letter (Vic Daniel Series)

by David Pierce

  "It couldn't have been the guitars," I mused aloud, "although a couple of those Fender Rhodes looked like custom jobs to me and worth a small fortune." All right, I may not be a great connoisseur of faience, sue me, but guitars I do know something about. Back east one time in the long long ago when all things still seemed possible, I labored as a gopher/chauffeur/bodyguard for a pop star whose star ascended mightily for a brief span until its inevitable wane due to the old and trite reasons. However, thus it was that I gained what little expertise I had on the subject of custom Rhodes and one-off Martins, to say nothing of the customs of rising pop stars before, after, and sometimes during their gigs.

  "Not the guitars," Momma agreed. She hooked up her seat belt, made me do likewise, and drove us off down the street to our rendezvous.

  "No fair if it was something you saw I didn't," I said. "Like in the uncluttered bedroom you adored so much."

  "You saw it, too," she said.

  "Ah yes," I said. "The carpet he was sitting on. Mongolian. Early nineteenth. Fourth dynasty. Did you ever see such closeness of weave!"

  Momma grinned at me.

  "A silver, copper, and brass gau," she said. "Not too old. I suspect it was made by one of the Tibetans living in Kalimpong, West Benal. Elaborately repousséd. Chased silver face. Ornamented with the traditional eight Buddhist symbols of good fortune. Not enormously valuable but highly collectible."

  "That there tinny shrine thing?"

  "That there tinny traveling shrine thing." She pulled up at our meeting place and backed deftly into a parking space between two cars that obviously wasn't big enough. "Silly of him to keep it, really, but it is gorgeous and I guess he figured no one would ever spot it as the real thing and even if someone did, so what. It was on one of the lists I ran through before we left."

  "Little did he reckon on Mighty Mom dropping in for tea," I said. Momma beamed and slouched down in her seat so she could keep an eye on D. Gresham's entrance in her wing mirror.

  "I wish that bloody patrol car would get here," she said.

  "What's the hurry?" I said.

  "What if D. Gresham gets to thinking?" said Momma. "Wonder how they got my name and address, he thinks. Had to be from Ron, he thinks. He calls up Ron. 'Did you give my name and address to a private detective named V. Daniel or a Captain Chapman?' 'No,' says Ron, 'but I did give it to some mother called Don Upton who said he was getting married next month.' "

  "Oh-oh," said V. Daniel.

  "Adiós, amigos," said Momma. "D. Gresham is out of there pronto with that there tinny shrine thing tucked under his arm."

  "And maybe a Hockney or two under his shirt," I said. "Why didn't you collar him then and there? You're a cop."

  "One thing you learn, and you learn it the hard way," she said.

  "As if there was any other way," I said.

  "Always, always phone in for a backup first."

  "What about me?" I said indignantly. "A girl couldn't want a better backup than me."

  "An official one, dear," she said, patting my cheek. The cop car drove up right then and coasted to a halt beside us. "About time," Momma said. She explained all to the boys in blue. Off they went, with us following them.

  Sure enough, like Momma said, we got back to D. Gresham's just in time to head him off at the pass, or the gate, in his case. And no bonus points, kids, for guessing what he had in a brown paper bag under his arm.

  The oldest of the two cops took out a printed card and mumbled through the reading of the suspect's rights. The suspect responded by bestowing a beatific smile on the cop, and led the way meekly back to his apartment.

  The forces of law and order, all three of them, gave the place a rapid but thorough shakedown. The only thing relevant to our inquiry they unearthed was, in a locked cupboard in the bedroom, a reference library of some twenty books covering all types of antiques and valuables from Russian icons to classic cars. I snuck a quick peek at something called The Antique Encyclopedia, and discovered that faience was a brightly decorated version of majolica, which was a big help. I didn't have time to see if there was a picture of my multihued darling in the book on classic cars.

  Now I know I've mentioned it before, but beware of taking things at face value, kids. Who would believe at first glance that V. Daniel would own a classic anything? And Jasper, with all his rantings about being deskbound. Who would believe that a zonked-out guitarist studied things like Persian carpets in his spare time? Flying carpets, maybe. And the chances of one of the two people in the world who could spot a gau across an uncluttered room, the other being the Dalai Lama, dropping in, we have already discussed.

  It was about a half an hour later, I suppose, when we took our leave. Tin-Thieu slammed the door behind us. As D. Gresham the Third was climbing into the back seat of the patrol car, he said to me over his shoulder, "Namaste."

  I figured that meant something snappy, like "Up your enchilada" in Nepalese, and was about to reply "And from what teaching of the great Buddha does that come from, o humble seeker after truth?"

  But no, D. Gresham immediately translated it as, "I salute the God within you." He even waved at us as the cop car pulled away.

  So like I said, watch those prejudices, especially when there's someone listening.

  Momma drove us back downtown. She turned in the Olds, I retrieved my Nash. She promised to let me know how things developed. I said great. She'd also get off an official letter for me, stressing my valuable contribution, in case I ever needed it. I said terrific. She patted me on my downy cheek one last time and disappeared into the station by the back way. I checked the time, noted that I was a little early for my rendezvous with Fats, so I took a short drive down to MacArthur Park, where one went to observe dope peddlers, winos, bums, and crackheads in their natural habitat. Thought I also might drop in and say howdy-do to an ambulance chaser of my acquaintance, Mel ("The Swell"), whose one-and-a-half-room office overlooked the park, and who might perchance have something for me in the work department. But no dice, no one was at home, so I continued on downtown, finally found an almost-legal place to park behind the old courthouse, then strolled around the block to Fats' first-floor place of business, getting panhandled a mere three times on the way.

  Fats still had his old neon sign hanging outside: INSTANT BAIL—WALK IN—WALK OUT—EASY TERMS. Well, I guess you could call an arm and a leg easy. There was a squawk box beside the downstairs door; I pressed the appropriate button, announced myself, and it squawked at me to come up.

  Up I went. Fats had two rooms; in the outer, the waiting room, an acned, two-bit hood was lounging on the wooden bench attending to his cuticles with a foot-long switchblade. How amusingly passé, I thought. He looked up briefly as I entered and gave me a sneer. I smiled at him graciously and passed into the inner room where Fats was leafing through the latest Playboy.

  "Got some real inneresting items in it this month," he said around a gold toothpick.

  "I hear the stories aren't bad, either," I said.

  Fats' place of business was surprisingly comfortable, almost opulent, especially compared to the bareness of the waiting room. It was thickly carpeted, had a plush sofa with matching occasional chairs, in one of which Fats was sitting in front of a low, glass-topped table he did his business from; I guess he'd read in some childish "how to succeed in business" rag that the way to make a potential client feel at home isn't to put him on one side of a huge desk and you in a taller chair on the other. And tally ho! if he didn't have fox-hunting prints on the walls.

  There was a booze cabinet in one corner disguised as a tallboy and an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone complete with horn in another. Fats himself, like I said, was fat. He was wearing a sleeveless white shirt with his initials monogramed on the pocket; it was unbuttoned enough so the observant could detect he was wearing an off-white string vest underneath. His dainty feet were clad in highly polished snakeskin loafers, the tassles of which had little brass bits on the ends. He had a gold wedding ring on the ap
propriate pinkie but otherwise no jewelry except on one pudgy wrist he wore that kind of very expensive, aluminum-looking chronometer pilots wear even in bed that tell you everything including when your matzoh balls have boiled three minutes.

  "So what you got for me, Fats?" I inquired, sitting on the arm of the spare chair.

  He arose in a surprisingly spritely fashion, considering his bulk, crossed to a set of wooden drawers, on top of which sat a small, compact TV–radio–tape deck, unlocked the top drawer, took out a sheet of paper, crossed back to me, and dropped it in my lap.

  "You drinkin'?" he said.

  "Maybe later," I said.

  "Just holler," he said.

  "William Gince," I read off the top of the piece of paper. There followed an address on Lynwood Gardens, which I surmised was in a part of L.A. called Lynwood, which I knew was east and a bit south of LAX, the main L.A. airport. There followed after that a phone number, which I took to be that of the missing William Gince, then the words "mother/sister, s.a.," then the initials "B.F" and that was all. I turned the paper over to see if there was anything helpful on the back, like a map with a line saying, "I am hiding here," with an arrow pointing to a house of ill repute in West Texas. No such luck, needless to say.

  " 'Mother/sister, s.a.,' meaning same address?"

  "Brains," said Fats. "Wish I had 'em." He took a bottle of soda water out of the booze cabinet, uncapped it, and poured the contents carefully into a blue-tinted tumbler, then took a sip.

  "Not a lot on paper, is there," I said. "Not even an IOU."

  "We go a lot on trust in my business," Fats said, poker-faced.

  "I bet," I said. "You big Boy Scout, you. The initials 'B.F,' what do they refer to?"

  "Nothin' that concerns you," Fats said. "That's the guy who recommended him is all."

  "I'm surprised he hasn't taken off for the Outer Hebrides, too," I said. "So how much is this guy into you for?"

  "Six grand," he said. "It'll be seven Saturday. Eight a week Saturday."

  "You make the Bank of America look generous," I said.

  "So why didn't he go there?" Fats said. "He knew the score. I didn't drag him up here, he just walked in. If you don't like the odds, stay out of the game." And six to five is what the odds in that game are, rather six for five, you borrow $100 bucks, you pay back $120 seven days later, amigos. In five weeks the interest, or vigorish, equals what you borrowed to start with. And if you don't come up with at least the interest, pleasant types like myself and Mickey come a-calling just as you're heating up your Swanson's TV chicken dinner with peas.

  "Why me, Fats?" I asked him, as I had not so long ago put to someone a lot prettier than him. "Why not the boys in blue or one of your regular collectors or even that punk outside who's lowering the tone of your waiting room?"

  Fats shrugged. "I don't like to bother them with penny-ante shit like this," he said. "Besides, I'm gettin' soft, I guess, I like to help out the needy and the unemployed from time to time."

  "Touché, Fats," I said. What I thought was, Fats, you're not only fat, you're a liar. It seemed to be my day for them. Why pay me a grand or so when he could get some amiable cop to take on the chore for a case of Four Roses and a jar of Hot-Styx? Something was no doubt up; maybe I'd find out what it was somewhere along the way. I figured I'd take the job, what the hell. It has already been established that I could use the work; also, having something to do might drive away any lingering apprehension I still had about storm troopers lurking in the offing and Estonian beauties lurking everywhere else. At least for a while—better than nothing.

  "If I do find him, then what?"

  "Then nothin'," Fats said. "You just find him, that's all, and without rousting him, either.' "

  "Nothin'?" I said. "Nothin' at all? Not even a phone call to you letting you know where he is?"

  "Said you was smart, didn't I," Fats said. He finished up the last of his tipple, burped delicately behind one cupped palm, put his glass back in the cabinet, and closed it up again.

  "Do you know where the guy worked?"

  "In a garage down on Wilcox somewhere, he said," Fats said.

  "And what does this guy look like?" I said. "Don't suppose you got a picture or anything useful like that."

  Fats shook his head.

  "What's he look like? A nobody. A nebbish. Skinny, pale face, glasses, losin' his hair, what can I say?"

  "A grand," I said. "Five now. Plus expenses. If I don't trace him in three days, I'll deduct my expenses from the grand and give you back half of what's left. Deal?"

  "Deal," he said. He got out his wallet, counted out five crisp hundred-dollar bills, padded over to me, dropped them in my lap, then seated himself again in his chair. I got out my memo pad, copied what was on the sheet of paper, then got up and dropped the sheet onto his lap.

  "I'll let you know how it goes," I said.

  "That would be nice," he said.

  I went out into the waiting room. The kid was still working on his nails.

  "Frosted scarlet," I said to him on the way past. "That would be a divine color for your nails. Go great with your complexion." I blew him a kiss and opened the door. His knife thudded into the door jamb an inch from my left ear. I picked up the water cooler, complete with stand, which was right next to the door, and threw it none too gently into his lap. He said a dirty word. I crossed to him and cuffed him, hard, with cupped palms, on both his ears. (Be careful when you try this one, kids, it's all too easy to pop someone's eardrums.) Then, just to make sure I had his attention, I let him have a short but solid left hook right on his temple.

  Fats came out to see what the commotion was all about.

  "Poor kid came over faint," I said. "I was just giving him a drink of water."

  "You didn't have to give him the whole cooler," Fats observed mildly.

  "So I got carried away," I said, tugging the kid's blade out of the wood. "Sue me." I propped the knife up in the angle where the floor met the wall and gave it a healthy kick in the middle with one heel, just the way my pop taught me to break kindling many a moon ago. It broke cleanly into two pieces. "Where's he from, anyway?"

  "South Chicago," Fats said. "Why?"

  "I knew he wasn't local," I said. "A true Hollywood type would have asked me to recommend a good manicurist."

  7

  On the way down the stairs I figured that the first task ahead of me was to ascertain whether or not William Gince had ever done time—for example, for shooting at people—which would be a useful tidbit of information to know if I ever got within a hundred yards or so of him. It would also mean there'd be pictures of him, full face and profile, on record. His arrest sheet might also mention other potentially helpful items like his last place of work.

  There were two main ways of finding out whether William had ever been in the clink. One was to find him and ask him, but then of course he might lie about it. The other, slightly simpler way, was to ask Sneezy, an irascible little geezer who worked in the Records Department in the basement of the LAPD's Downtown Station with my younger brother, Tony. You might ask, why not ask my brother, isn't that what brothers are for, to help one another, as in brotherhood? Not mine, especially for favors like tapping the police computer for me, and I'll spare you the details why, but I might just remark it is strange how jealousy can affect a human being sometimes.

  Actually, if you want to know, if you don't already—and even if you don't want to know, frankly—it wasn't really jealousy that was involved. I was in no way jealous of my little brother, Anthony, and he sure never showed any signs of being jealous of macho old me. What he did show to me was hostility, because way back in the olden and supposedly golden days when we were kids, back when the Dodgers played in a stadium that hadn't been designer-decorated in fetching pastels, when the crunch came, he chickened out, while I, for once, did not.

  The tale of woe is briefly told. Tony imbibed an alcoholic beverage, stole a car, then went a-joyriding, unfortuantely knocking over an elder
ly female pedestrian en merry route. For reasons I will not go into at this time, I took the can for him and did a couple years subsequently in a charming juvenile detention center in glorious upstate Illinois. So: if one accepts the far-from-highfalutin proposition that a long-standing guilt complex might just conceivably produce hostile behavior as a pathetic cover-up, the rest is silence.

  So, from the first phone booth I found that hadn't been razed to the ground, I called the Downtown Station and in a moment of forgetfulness asked the lady cop at the switchboard for Sneezy, instead of using his official name and rank. She laughed, but knew who I meant all right, and put me through.

  "Yeah?" he barked into the phone.

  "Want a picture of Andrew Jackson for your very own?" I asked him.

  "Who doesn't?" he said. "What do you want, Daniel, and whatever it is, why don't you bother someone else about it once in a while, like your brother?"

  "Because he's my brother," I said. "Didn't you ever have a brother?"

  "No," he said. "My family was so poor we could only afford a dog once a week."

  "William Gince," I said, spelling out the last name. "LKA in Lynwood Gardens. See if he's got a sheet for me, will you, Sneezy, there's a good chap, and that twenty is as good as in your hot little hand right now." He hemmed and hawed awhile but I knew he'd do it eventually because Sneezy hated felons and therefore was partial to folks that got them their just deserts, even lowlife private types like me. Also, he adored money, because he had one of mankind's most expensive habits—listening to wedding bells.

  The line went dead. I waited. After thirty seconds or so he came back on and said, "No form under that name. You owe me," then he hung up.

  "Adiós," I said. Then I said, "Damn!" and hung up, too.

  I made an entry in my memo pad: "Expenses: For Info. Received, $25.00. Phone, .25." Then I strolled back to my car, put the top down, and leisurely made my way via the Long Beach freeway south to Lynwood, or at least as leisurely as one can on a California freeway, which is hair-raising. I defreewayed at Century, by mistake, asked someone, then drove around for a bit, then found Lynwood Gardens more or less accidentally, then proceeded along it to the number I was looking for, 947½. Fractions mean as little in L.A. as they did to me in school; 947½ turned out to be an apartment building twice as big as the one at 947, which might tell you something about real estate in this part of the world. Then again it might be completely meaningless, like real estate in this part of the world.