by Jim Nisbet
“WHO WAS THAT, BLOODCLOT?” OPIUM JADE ASKED sweetly.
Windrow ignored her. He jammed the receiver between his ear and shoulder and thumbed through his address book. He had a seldom-used number for Jodie Ryan that rang at her stepmother’s house in Sea Cliff. He found and dialed it.
“Casa Los Altos.”
“Hello, Concepción,” said Windrow. “Favor de hablar con la señora Neil.”
“Y de quien llamar?”
“El señor Martín Windrow.”
Pause. The El Salvador woman, who spoke with a Castillan accent, placed the mouthpiece of the telephone on her left breast. Windrow very distinctly heard her ask La señora in excellent English whether she were indisposed or not. He thought the muffled answer might have been delivered in a man’s voice. The mouthpiece went back to the mouth.
“La señora no esta en casa. Favor de telephonar mas tarde, después de seis o siete por la tarde, mejor mañana, por la tard—”
“Escúchame Concepción chulita,” Windrow interrupted. “Favor de informing the señora that I’m still a private investigator, and that I’m in possession of evidence indicating the existence of a last testament from Mr. Edward O’Ryan that postdates the one she thinks is going to make her sunset years comfortable beyond the wildest dreams of her childhood in Visalia.”
Another pause, while Windrow’s message was relayed back to him through the Castillana’s left breast. Then she was back.
“Señor Windrow?”
“Yes?”
“La señora dice so what?”
“So I’d like to speak with her as soon as possible, to discuss the legal ramifications.”
Another pause. While he waited, the light went out of the room in front of him. He turned. New curtains draped unevenly across the window. They were calico.
“Señor Windrow?”
“Yes?”
“The señora suggests that such a complicated matter is difficult to discuss over the telephone. She asks me to request your presence here this afternoon, at three o’clock. Is that convenient?”
“You know I can’t speak English. Why don’t you ask me these things in Spanish, la lingua d’amor?”
The maid giggled.
“Three would be fine.”
“Of course.”
“One more thing, Señorita. Have you seen Miss Ryan lately? This development may well affect her, too. Would it be possible for Miss Ryan to join us this afternoon?”
More pectoral translation. A long pause. The phone changed hands.
“Mr. Windrow?”
Ah ha.
“Hello, Mrs. Neil.”
“How do you do, Mr. Windrow. We’ve not seen Jodie in several days. I was just at the point of having Concepción telephone to ask you if you’d seen her?”
“Not since Sunday, Mrs. Neil.”
“Well, that’s certainly since we’ve seen her, isn’t it Concepción. I presume she was all right, Mr. Windrow?”
“Quite all right, Mrs. Neil. A little tired, maybe. Up all night, as usual.”
“The poor dear drives herself absolutely beyond the limits of physical endurance. I don’t know how she stays on her feet, warbling in front of all those sweating people night after night.”
“She must like it.”
“Yes it is glamorous, isn’t it. Well, I really must go, Mr. Windrow. At three, then?”
“Three o’clock, Mrs. Neil.”
She rang off. Windrow hung up.
“Classy dame on the phone just now. Hates my guts.”
“Dial with your pinky,” Sister Opium suggested helpfully.
“Good idea.” Windrow dialed another of the numbers under Jodie’s name with his forefinger. Opium Jade noticed.
“Tough guy,” she said.
The number rang one half of a ring.
“Lobe Theatricals,” growled an impatient voice. It sounded like a truck dumping gravel.
“Harry Lobe, please. Windrow calling.”
“Just a minute,” said the voice. After a pause, the same voice said, “Lobe here.”
“You should at least put it on hold,” Windrow said.
“You mean like this?” Lobe said. Windrow heard a click and found his ear in the middle of an orchestral arrangement of Old Man River. He waited a minute. Abruptly, the tune ended and the tape began to hiss a brassy rendition of There’s No Business (Like Show Business). He severed the connection and dialed again.
“Lobe Theatricals.”
“Mr. Lobe, please.”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“Ronald Reagan.”
“Just a moment, please.” There followed a click, three seconds of Muzak, same tune, and another click.
“Ronnie! Baby! You got the part!”
Windrow sighed. “Look, Lobe. I’m a busy man. You seen Jodie Ryan lately?”
“Try the chitterling circuit, Windrow. Third dive after the national forest.”
“Got a name?
“Don’t know. Could be the Dew Drop Inn; or maybe Fly Inn, the Drive Inn, the Steppe Inn, the Lumber On Inn, the Be Inn, the Put It Inn, the Is It Inn? or the just plain It’s Inn. Forty bucks a night, her and the guitar. Acoustic, electric or both. All standard tunes with a few originals mixed in for the over-twelve drinkers. And confidentially,” Lobe lowered his voice, “spring for nice accommodations and a good tip and you get the whole act. Get me? Har har.” Through the telephone wire Windrow could hear the lascivious wink and feel the sharkskin elbow digging for his ribs.
“What’s her schedule, Lobe?”
“Hey, you wanna hear a good cop joke? Martin Windrow. Har har har.”
Windrow said nothing. Lobe spent most of his time exhibiting his calloused brand of affection to the female talent who tried to work for him. Lobe was in fact a legitimate booking agent, but the other telephone in his office rang to a number listed in the yellow pages as an escort service. Pimping had gotten Lobe started in the modeling and finally the booking business, and in these he had marginally succeeded. But he’d never shaken the habit of ordering women around at one hundred dollars an hour minus his percentage and he’d never arrived at being financially independent of others doing it with his women. So he was still a pimp. That was okay. But when the talent from his booking operations refused to act like the talent from the escort service, he became acrimonious. Frequently, it was a long time before the legitimate actress or singer or dancer who’d said No to Lobe realized she was getting no legitimate work because her own agent was turning it down in her name. Through a series of ill advised deals, Jodie Ryan had found herself in this category. Lobe liked to call his game ‘hardball,’ but Jodie was making it in spite of him.
Windrow glanced at the calendar on the side of the file cabinet. According to the X Jodie Ryan had put there, her contract with the Johnny Lobe Agency had almost a year to run before it expired. He shifted the phone to his left ear and tried another angle.
“Come on, Lobe, have a heart. I just want to catch her working some night.”
“As they say in the movies, shamus, fuck off.” The line went dead.
Windrow cradled the receiver and rubbed the injured side of his face. The harder he rubbed, the brighter the chartreuse sparks on the back of his left eyelid, and the faster they swam. With any luck and some astral projection, the sparks might turn into green insects with sticky little feet that would hound Mr. Johnny Lobe in his sticky little sleep. Save Windrow the trouble of doing it himself. A man could draw 5 to 10 for just thinking about a parasite like Lobe.
Windrow turned to look at Sister Opium Jade’s curtains, calico and hanging straight, now. She was standing on the floor again, bent over the bottom edge of the cloth. She looked up at Windrow, several pins sticking from between her clenched lips.
“Hey ill heed to he hemmed,” she said, and wiggled her behind as if dancing.
Windrow noticed a strange flutter, as of the merest taste of the beginnings of the giddy vertigo experienced at the top of the steep steps l
eading down to the cellar speakeasy. Sister Opium Jade, being not insensitive to these things, slowed the tempo of the wiggle by half, and added a flourish every other time.
Windrow reached under the bridge of his sunglasses and pinched the corners of his sinuses.
A timely whisper of paper from the direction of the front door announced that the morning’s mail had been slipped under it. Windrow backed away from Opium Jade with his hands extended before him in mock horror until he came up against the front door and was standing on the mail.
The mail included the late notice from the telephone company, a client’s check being returned by his bank for insufficient funds, a notice of the brief availability of spiritual advice from Mother Lobelia Stilson, a symphony schedule, and a Desert Sunset postcard postmarked Bakersfield, California.
Dear Marty; Look at
One week of chittlins and oil
wells in Merle Haggard country.
Apologize for Sal’s behavior,
but we’re all confused. Try
to catch you Fri. or Sat. Got
some questions & a tumbleweed for you.
love Jodie
Windrow went to the top drawer of the file cabinet and pulled a map of California out from under his gun and holster. He laid the L.A. Times obituary column next to the map folded open to Kern County, Ca. on his desk and began to study.
Opium Jade hummed “Summertime” softly to herself. When Windrow had finished reading the article again, he put in a call to the Chron-Examiner’s Obit Staff.
Chapter Five
CASA LOS ALTOS WAS THREE STORIES OF NEO-GEORGIAN stone nestled in manicured junipers and self-leveling rye grass. Every streetside window displayed the backsides of thick, tightly drawn drapes. Four two-story columns, examples of tasteful entasis, framed a wide marble staircase that led to a narrow porch and a recess that centered on a four and a half by eight foot oaken door. The bronze lion with a ring in his nose was strictly ornamental. Windrow pushed an illuminated button to the left of the door, and gave the video camera perched high over his left shoulder a fitful anterior and a profile.
The maid who opened the front door and stepped aside to let him in was short, plump and as obsequious as she had to be. She showed Windrow through a pair of French doors into a large sitting room to the left of the front hall. Here the ceiling was twelve feet high. Dark gilt-framed paintings of waist-coated and befrocked men, tightly buttoned up to their distinguished whiskers and whisky-fired cheeks and prescient eyes, alternated wallspace with giant, open canvases, more simply framed, containing wild swaths of bright primary colors that looked to have been executed on high seas in a small boat with a whitewash broom. The painting over the hearth was an exception to the others. This was a seascape, containing a sloop tacking into a sunset, as perceived perhaps from the terrace at Carmel Highlands over martinis and tooth-picked meatballs. In spite of the source of the light in the painting, the name on the stearn of the sailboat, Arcadia II, was highly visible. Below, leaning against the fireplace, a large painting stood on the hearth. This was a precise rendition of a desert scene, containing a hawk on the wing, creosote bushes, a kangaroo rat, and distant hills. The dominant feature was a wooden walking beam oil pump with its ancillary plumbing, surrounded by a chainlink fence. Several tumbleweeds were huddled against one side of the fence, and two larks perched on one corner of it.
Left to himself, Windrow paced the richly appointed room. The rugs were thick, oriental and tightly woven; their patterns seemed to actively surround his feet. One of the couches was upholstered in striped silk, another was draped in large animal pelts. Exotic, heavy knick-knacks were distributed sparsely about the room’s horizontal surfaces: the top of the grand piano, whose veneer was a strange blond and brown wood with a violent grain Windrow had never seen before, contained only two examples: a yellowing ivory sculpture of an elephant, about eighteen inches high and intricately carved, complete with tusks, and a translucent red stone, set on a small square of black velvet. Windrow noticed that this velvet square seemed to be very precisely aligned with the angles made by the piano frame and the elephant’s base.
Pamela Neil found Windrow next to the piano, puzzling over this relationship.
“Ah, Mr. Windrow,” she said, coolly extending her hand palm down on a limp wrist, as if its ring were to be kissed. “Jodie’s told me so much about you.”
She wasn’t thirty. Brunette, straight hair, fashionably dressed in thin trousers whose cuffs tied at the ankles, high heels, a smartly unbuttoned white blouse, with a high ruffled collar, unfettered breasts, appropriate jewelry on the neck and fingers. She was pretty in a way that fashion models are pretty, and thin in that way, and tall. Also, she had a runny nose.
“That’s funny,” Windrow said, taking her hand. “She never mentioned you to me.”
She removed her hand from his and walked to an end table next to the silk couch. She removed a cigarette from something designed to sit on a table and contain cigarettes, sniffled, and lit it.
“Please sit down,” she said, exhaling nervously. “What’s this about a will?”
Windrow cleared his throat, and sat on the other couch, facing her. “There’s time enough for that, Mrs. Neil. I was expecting Jodie to be here, too, in as much as the matter concerns her as well as yourself.” He looked around the room. “Is she late?”
Mrs. Neil frowned uncertainly and said nothing. Her businesslike composure evaporated, and the big eyes had blinked twice when two people came into the room.
The first was a dapper man in a necktie and vest with matching pants. He had his shirt sleeves rolled just so, each cuff turned up once, as neat as the fresh crease in his trousers. The second was a kid in overalls and a checked flannel shirt. A hammer hung from a loop on his thigh, and his hair was in his face.
“Why, Mr. Windrow,” said the man, “Thurman Woodruff.” He extended his hand. “Jodie’s told us so much about you.” He pumped Windrow’s arm. When his eyes caught Windrow’s, he looked away. “Pamela,” he said, chiding the woman. “Haven’t you offered Mr. Windrow a drink?” He turned back to Windrow, not releasing his hand. “What’ll it be Mr. Windrow? It is a little early…?” His voice trailed off. Before Windrow could say anything, Woodruff turned to the kid. “Jason. Take this hideous icon down to the storeroom.” He pointed at the painting of the oil pump on the hearth.
The kid had been watching Woodruff. Now he snapped his head so that his hair was thrown out of his eyes onto the top of his head, and stretched his arms around the painting. As he stopped to pick it up, the hair fell back over his eyes, and a corner of the frame banged the curb in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Neil gasped and looked at Woodruff, who turned and walked away, listing boozes.
“Scotch? Bourbon? Vodka? Gin? Brandy? Pernod?”
Windrow, watching Jason, ordered scotch. As the huge painting moved past him, he caught the wording on the brass plate centered on the lower edge of the frame: JODIE I.
Woodruff, busy at a sideboard bristling with bottles, hollered over his shoulder after Jason to mind the stuff on the walls on the way down to the basement. The picture floated doubtfully through the French doors into the hall and disappeared. Pamela Neil smiled thinly at Windrow. “Thurman’s very particular about the artwork in this room.” She nervously indicated the painting over the mantelpiece. “It was all I could do to persuade him to hang the Arcadia at all, let alone in the living room. But we finally agreed, the mantel is my space, and—”
“And anything to get rid of that godforsaken oil well,” Woodruff finished for her, giving her a look, and arrived with Windrow’s drink. As he took the glass, Windrow saw that Woodruff was staring at the bruise on the side of his face. Windrow sipped his Scotch. “Thanks,” he said. “Lot of stuff around here called Jodie.”
Woodruff looked at Mrs. Neil. She sniffed. “Just ten oil wells and the brat,” she said.
Windrow angled his eyes at her. “You’re maybe…”
The maid came into the room
and announced a telephone call for Mr. Woodruff. He excused himself and left, the maid following, closing the French doors after them. Mrs. Neil immediately crossed the room and sat very close to Windrow. She drew her knees up and put her arm along the sofa back behind him.
“You were saying?” she said, huskily.
Windrow raised his eyebrows and eyed her over the rims of his shades. “I was saying,” he said, “that you’re maybe four years older than the so-called brat?”
She leaned very close to him, and put her hand on his thigh. “But I know much more, Mr. Windrow,” she whispered.
“About what, Mrs. Neil?”
“Call me Pamela—no wait,” she held up her free hand. “Call me Pam,” she said decisively.
“Sure, Mrs. Neil. About what, for instance, do you know so much?”
“Why, about almost anything do I know much,” she smiled coyly. “Except two things,” She made a face. “Nasty old oil wells and that country music.”
“That must make you the least sensitive member of the family, Mrs. Neil.”
She pretended to misunderstand. “Oh, no one’s as sensitive as Thurman,” she said peevishly. She gestured to indicate the departed Woodruff, then the room around them. “Why, the least little old picture in this room gets out of square, or a particle of dust gets on it, Thurman just climbs up the walls and howls like a dog.” She took a sip of her drink. “After removing his jacket, of course,” she added. She touched the bruise on Windrow’s face. “He’s a different kind of man than you are, Mr. Windrow. It’s as simple as that.” Her fingertip traced the top of the puffed cheek beneath Windrow’s swollen eye, the top of her nail running under the rim of the dark lens. Her touch made the bruise itch.
“Yet,” Windrow said, gently taking her hand and placing it in her lap, “he’s not so much older than you as Mr. O’Ryan must have been.”
Before he could remove his hand from her wrist, she grasped it with both of her hands and held it. “No,” she quickly said, “no, he’s only about twelve years older than I am, but he’s,” she leaned closer and tilted her face up to his—he could see alabaster mucus in one nostril—as she whispered, “an art dealer,” as if this were a significant secret. She pressed his hand deep into her lap.
