Jackpot (Nameless Dectective)

by Bill Pronzini

“Yes. She finds it just as hard to believe.”

  “What about his friend, the one who was in Reno with him? Did you ask him about it?”

  “Jerry Polhemus. He and David used to share an apartment, before David moved in with Karen last year. Yes, I asked him. At the funeral. He couldn’t tell me anything ... didn’t have much to say at all.” She paused, frowning. “It was odd, though, the way Jerry acted that day.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  “He seemed ... I don’t know, angry about something. Almost as if he weren’t ...”

  “Weren’t what?”

  “Weren’t sorry David was dead.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be, if they were close friends?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. I was so upset that day ...”

  “Had he and your brother had some kind of falling out?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You didn’t talk to him about it? Then or since?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him since.”

  I allowed another little silence to build. She looked so forlorn, sitting there. And I had a soft schedule at present, with more than a little extra time on my hands. And I needed to work as much and as often as possible....

  “Well,” I said finally, “I suppose I could talk to Jerry Polhemus for you. See what else I can find out.”

  “Would you?” Relief brightened her voice.

  “I’ll do what I can. But don’t expect too much of me. Detectives aren’t miracle workers.” Nor clinical psychologists, I thought.

  “I know. It’s enough to have you try.”

  It wasn’t and we both knew it. Still another little silence descended. Then Kerry came in—she’d been listening in the kitchen, if I knew her—and distributed coffee and gave me an approving glance before she went over to sit beside Allyn.

  There was some more talk, not much. I took down Allyn’s address and telephone number, the addresses of Jerry Polhemus and Karen Salter, and such other information as I thought I might need. Allyn asked me if I wanted a retainer—they get that word off TV—and I said no, not until I had drawn up a contract for her to sign. She thanked me again, and we shook hands, gravely, and Kerry showed her out while I sat there sipping my lukewarm coffee and wondering why I had never learned how to say no.

  When Kerry came back she plunked herself down in my lap and said, “That was nice of you, offering to help Allyn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it was. There really isn’t much you can do, is there.”

  “I doubt it. But I’ve always been a sucker for stray cats and lost waifs, as if you didn’t know. How much does she make at the agency?”

  “Three-fifty a week.”

  “Uh-huh. And the rest of her family’s poor as church mice.”

  “Her mother and father are dead too. All she’s got left now is an aunt in Los Altos.”

  “Christ. I’ll be lucky if I make expenses.”

  Kerry kissed me, ardently. “You’re a nice man, you know that?”

  “Yeah. And you know where nice guys finish.”

  “In my bed, if they’re lucky.”

  “I thought we were going out to dinner.”

  “We are. After dinner you get your nice-guy reward.”

  “So what are we waiting for? Go get your coat.”

  She went and got her coat. On the way downstairs I said, “That Hollywood producer called again today.”

  “What did he have to say this time?”

  “Fortunately I wasn’t home. He left a message. Things are getting burn-your-fingers hot, he said. He talked to one of the biggies on the little screen, he said, and the concept melted the guy’s chocolate bar. Once we get our signals straight, he said, there’ll be some extra maple syrup on my waffles.”

  Kerry shook her head. “They’re all crazy down there,” she said.

  “Yup. He wants me to have breakie with him tomorrow morning.”

  “Breakfast? Are you going to?”

  “Probably not. In the first place, he’s a lunatic. And in the second place, I don’t want him or anybody else making a movie about what happened last winter.”

  “Didn’t he say it would be your life story?”

  “Yeah, sure. But my life story is dull. What happened up at Deer Run isn’t dull.”

  “Well, you’d have the final say about what goes into it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Supposedly. You think I should see him?”

  “Not if you don’t want to. I know how you feel about what happened.”

  No, you don’t, babe, I thought. But I smiled at her and said jokingly, because I did not want things to turn serious between us tonight, “The last time I saw Brucie he drank five shots of Wild Turkey for lunch. I wonder what he drinks for breakie.”

  “Booze is better than cocaine or heroin,” she said.

  “Marginally. But that’s about the only positive thing you can say about him.”

  “He’s produced a couple of movies, hasn’t he? He can’t be a complete idiot.”

  “His big hit was called Shoplifter: A Mother’s Tragedy. You think it takes a Rhodes scholar to make a TV movie about shoplifting?”

  “I never saw it. Maybe it was good. Who’s to say he couldn’t make a good, honest movie about you?”

  “Nobody’d watch it.”

  “Sure they would. You’d be immortalized on TV.”

  “Immortalized on TV is a contradiction in terms.”

  “Says you. Who do you suppose the ‘biggie’ is?”

  “The guy with the melted chocolate bar? No idea. You know how much prime-time TV I watch.”

  We were outside now, climbing uphill into the teeth of the wind. Halfway to where my car was parked, Kerry said, “I wonder if it’s Brian Keith.”

  “Who?”

  “Brian Keith. The ‘biggie.’ You look a little like him, except that he’s fair and you’re dark.”

  “And he’s Irish, with a name like Brian Keith, and I’m Italian. How about they get an Italian to impersonate me?”

  “Ben Gazzara,” she said.

  “Dom DeLuise,” I said.

  She was horrified. “My God, what a thought!”

  “It’s all nonsense, that’s the point. Bruce Littlejohn isn’t going to get financing to make a TV movie about me, with Brian Keith or Dom DeLuise or Rin Tin Tin or Howdy Doody. Any day now somebody will realize what an airhead he is and put him away for observation.”

  “Don’t bet on it. If they put away all the crazies in Hollywood, there wouldn’t be anybody left to make movies.”

  Now we were at the car. I unlocked the passenger side, went around and got in under the wheel. “I just figured it out,” I said.

  “Figured what out?”

  “Why you want me to see Brucie tomorrow. Why you want him to make a movie about me. You’re a closet groupie.”

  “I’m what!”

  “A closet Hollywood groupie. You think Bruce Littlejohn is your ticket to La-La Land and audiences with the stars.”

  She glared at me. “Shut up and drive,” she said.

  I shut up and drove, smiling a little, enjoying myself. This was one of my good days. Even Allyn Burnett’s dead brother hadn’t changed that.

  Chapter 2

  I TRULY DID NOT WANT to go downtown on Saturday morning to meet Bruce Littlejohn for “breakie.” Unfortunately I spent Friday night at Kerry’s. She was awake at seven, had me awake not long afterward, went and fixed me coffee, and made sure I was aware of the time. At a quarter to eight she said, gently, that I ought to get ready if I was going to make it down to the Stanford Court by nine.

  I said, “But I don’t want to have breakfast with an asshole from Hollywood.”

  “He might actually have good news for you.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Aren’t you just a little curious?”

  “No.”

  “I am,” she said, and she gave me one of her wistful looks.

  I would rather do battle with
a slobbering, attack-trained Doberman than a woman’s wistful looks; I’d have a better chance of coming up winners. I sighed, I grumbled. And then I got out of bed and showered and dressed and went off to have maple syrup poured on my waffles. Figuratively speaking, I hoped.

  It was nine-fifteen by the time I walked into the Stanford Court, but that didn’t matter because Littlejohn was also fifteen minutes late. We ran into each other in the middle of the lobby.

  He was a short, round, middle-aged guy who wore flashy clothes made for somebody half his age and a couple of pounds of gold jewelry, most of it around his neck. This morning he had on lemon-yellow trousers, a ruffled pink shirt open at the throat, a paisley neck scarf, and a mod-type off-white jacket with tight sleeves that ended halfway up his forearms. All of the clothing was wrinkled and baggy, whether on purpose or not I had no idea. His hair was even bushier than I remembered it, and so black he might have dyed it with shoe polish. At his best he looked like one of the Three Stooges in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. Today he was not at his best. Today his eyes were blood-filled and sunken deep inside puffy hollows, his face had a swollen look, his appendages trembled, and he walked the way a man might if he were barefoot on a bed of hot coals. Hangover with a capital H.

  The Stanford Court is a very ritzy, conservative Nob Hill hotel, even more exclusive than the Mark Hopkins and the Fairmont nearby. Well-dressed citizens, most of them past fifty, stared warily at Littlejohn as if they thought he might suddenly become violent. They stared at me, too, when he threw one arm around my shoulders and used his other hand to squeeze mine like a grocery shopper squeezing a peach to see if it was ripe. He also breathed on me, which made it difficult for me not to throw up on him. He had a breath like a goat with pyorrhea.

  “Oh, baby,” he said in rueful tones, “I got a head big as a watermelon. Goddamn booze. Sometimes I think I should have kept on doing coke, never mind what happened to guys like Belushi. At least you don’t wake up with a head like the Goodyear blimp and a taste in your mouth like some dog took a dump on your tongue.”

  An aristocratic lady in furs heard that, gasped delicately, and then cut him up with a glare like a laser beam. He didn’t even know she existed. I tried offering her a small, apologetic smile, but she curled her lip at me. Guilt by association.

  “It was worth it, though, kid,” Littlejohn said. He had hold of my arm now—the way Kerry holds it when we’re walking together—and was steering me toward the restaurant. “I got a couple of sugar daddies lined up. Mucho bucks. Last night it was fast serves and hot volleys; now the ball’s in their court. But the linesman’s on our side and we’ll get the call, I feel it in my gut. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” I said. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

  The restaurant wasn’t crowded, but it took a few minutes for us to get a table. I think that was because there was a discreet discussion among the staff as to the advisability of seating somebody who looked like one of the Three Stooges with a hangover. Two different employees asked him if he was a guest of the hotel, as if they couldn’t believe the management had been so lax. When we finally did get a table, it was at the rear and well removed from any of the other patrons.

  A cherubic blond waitress appeared, looking as wary as the people out in the lobby. She couldn’t keep her eyes off Littlejohn; she may have thought she was hallucinating. At length she asked him, “Black coffee for you, sir?”

  He pulled a face. “Christ, no. Tell you what I want, sweetmeat. Three cinnamon buns, the frosted kind. Big ones. Six bananas, cut up in a bowl, no milk or cream. And a couple of bottles of Amstel lager.”

  She just looked at him. So did I. Pretty soon she said, tentatively, “Are you making some kind of joke?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking? I’m in pain, sweetie.”

  “Three cinnamon buns, six bananas, and ... two bottles of beer?”

  “Amstel lager. Right.”

  “All just for you? For breakfast?”

  “Right, right. Give my man here whatever he wants.”

  She shifted her gaze to me, not without reluctance. I eased her mind some by ordering coffee, orange juice, and an English muffin. She wrote that down, stared some more at Littlejohn, and went away looking dazed.

  Littlejohn leaned toward me, as if he were about to impart a great truth. “Glucose,” he said.

  “Uh ... pardon?”

  “Glucose, baby. That’s the secret.”

  “Of what?”

  “Life. Yours and mine—everybody’s. We’re like cars and glucose is our high octane unleaded. Capeesh?”

  “Glucose,” I said, nodding.

  “Too much booze, see, that sends the old corpus into a glucose depression. So the first thing you got to do the morning after, you got to build your glucose level back up. That’s what the cinnamon buns are for. Lots of sugar, see?”

  “Lots of sugar.”

  “Right. The bananas, they’re for serotonin and norep. Norep, that’s short for norepinephrine. The booze knocks down your serotonin and boosts up your norep. Adrenaline is what puts ’em back in balance, so you got to give the old adrenals a kick in the ass to get them producing. Gorilla fruit is the ass-kicker.”

  “Ass-kicker,” I said.

  “Right. And the beer, that’s how you rebalance your screwed-up electrolytes. Beer’s loaded with sodium and potassium, right? And what it also does, it manufactures urine. That washes all the alcohol poisons out of your system.” He leaned back and spread his hands. “You see how the whole thing works?”

  “Sure,” I said. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

  He nodded vigorously, winced, and nodded again much less vigorously. “Sure. I got the poop from this med student wanted to write screenplays. Lousy screenplays but he sure as hell knows his chemistry. Works like a charm. Eat those buns and bananas, drink the beer, go take a leak, and voilà! you’re a new man.”

  This was going to be a long breakie, I thought. This was probably going to be the longest breakie of my life.

  Littlejohn didn’t want to talk business until his serotonin was down and his norep was up and his adrenals had been kicked in the ass; so we sat there and waited for the waitress, and after she came I sat there and watched Littlejohn hunch over his cinnamon buns and bananas and beer like a gaudy vulture over a road kill. The spectacle was such that I had no appetite for my English muffin and managed to get only half the orange juice down. After he was done eating he belched, not too loud, and went off to take the leak that would make him a new man. When he came back the new man looked as hungover as the old one, except that it was grinning. He sat down again, leaned toward me, and imparted his big news in the same great-truth tone he had used to tell me about glucose.

  “Eldorp,” he said.

  At first I thought he’d belched again. I just stared at him.

  But it wasn’t a belch; it was a name. “Frankie Eldorp,” he said.

  I said, “Who?”

  “Frankie Eldorp, kid.”

  “Who’s Frankie Eldorp?”

  “You’re putting me on, right? Joke, right?”

  “No joke. I never heard of Frankie Eldorp.”

  “You never heard of the hottest face on the little screen?”

  “No.”

  Littlejohn stared at me as if I might be an alien life form masquerading as a human. “Star of The Destructor. Don’t tell me you never watched The Destructor.”

  “I don’t watch much TV,” I said.

  “Geez,” he said, awed.

  It developed that The Destructor had been the number-one-rated show a couple of years back, about a guy who went around murdering lawbreakers in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. Frankie Eldorp had been its star. And it was Frankie Eldorp’s chocolate bar that had been melted by the possibility of portraying me, a real-life private eye, in a TV movie based on my life.

  That was the good news, according to Littlejohn. The bad news was that Frankie Eldorp was
twenty-seven years old, stood five six, and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds fully armed. He also had petulant lips and a scraggly blond beard. Littlejohn showed me a publicity photo in which Eldorp bristled with prop Uzis and handguns.

  “He’s so hot he sizzles,” Littlejohn said. “Steak on the grill, baby. The young chicks are apeshit over him.”

  “That figures,” I said.

  “Yeah. He plays older, too, don’t worry about that. He did Father O’Mara in that flick last year, the one about the defrocked priest knocks up this black woman from the Detroit ghetto and they take off for Canada in a Winnebago. You remember that one, right?”

  “One of my all-time favorites,” I said. “Does he play taller and fatter, too?”

  “Huh?”

  “Frankie Eldorp. Does he play taller than five six and fatter than one-thirty?”

  “Huh?”

  “All those guns in his photo,” I said, and now there was an edge to my voice. An edge in me, too, of a sudden. “Is he going to carry a gun when he plays me? Shoot people with it?”

  “Well, hey, there’s a certain amount of action—”

  “I don’t carry a gun,” I said. “I don’t shoot people.” I wanted to shoot somebody this past winter, real bad, but not anymore. Never again. Those were crazy drays. Terrible days.

  “Sure, sure, we’ll downplay that,” Littlejohn said. “But what we’re talking about here is TV, you know what I’m saying? Private eyes on TV, they got to carry guns—”

  “Why?”

  “Why? They just do, that’s all. They always have, sweetheart. It’s what the public expects.”

  “Lots of shooting, then. Heavy on the violence.”

  “Action. Like I said, kid, it’s the name of the—”

  “Car chases, helicopter chases, all that bullshit.”

  He spread his hands and said like a father trying to explain the facts of life to his not very bright child, “We’re talking prime-time crime here. Capeesh? I mean, you’re a private eye; we’re not doing comedy or social drama, nothing light and nothing heavy, just boffo entertainment. You do a crime thing, you got to have action. And Frankie Eldorp’s your top action actor, it’s his trademark. He likes guns, he likes to do stunts, we got to take advantage of his talents to get the Nielsen numbers—”