Women Crime Writers

by Sarah Weinman

  Skip was wary, more than half disgusted. He saw the girl throw a victorious cat-smile at the other chippie, who appeared to take it philosophically and began to inspect the loot in her handbag. The girl in red then snatched Salvatorre’s arm. “Not him,” she mouthed, nodding toward Skip. “Let’s leave him out of it.”

  It would have suited Skip; he had four or five dollars in quarters and half dollars and two ten-dollar chips. He had no desire to get better acquainted with the eccentric old man.

  But Salvatorre roared a protest, threatening to dislodge the chippie on his arm. “Leave him here? Course not! Going to buy the boy a drink. Makes me think of my boy Al, over in England. Foxy boy, good boy, needs a drink.”

  “Tell him you’re under age, darling,” the blonde purred to Skip.

  “Twenty-two,” Skip said, unwilling to oblige her.

  She showed her teeth at him.

  The three of them went from the casino into the huge lobby. Outside, beyond great glass doors, was the pool, lit with pink light at its edges, surrounded by late swimmers and a few diners at the little tables in the dusky distance. Inside here was an air of carpeted quiet and the watchful eyes of two clerks at a desk in a niche across the way. Skip knew their gaze was for him, and he tensed with a sense of danger. The girl, that was expected, but they had cold stares for Skip. He might be up to something with their valuable Mr. Salvatorre, who had just provided a good chunk of the overhead for the day.

  Skip stared back in defiance, but his heart wasn’t in it. There was power here, concealed, it was true, under a show of hospitality, but nevertheless capable of swift and ruthless action. He had no illusions as to what would happen to him if he should try to slip off, say, with an added chunk of Mr. Salvatorre’s money.

  In Mr. Salvatorre’s room the air-conditioning ducts hummed softly. There were flowers, bottles of good wine, a tray of snacks. Salvatorre ignored all this and rang for room service. The waiter came so quickly that Skip wondered if he had been stationed in the hall. “Drinks!” Mr. Salvatorre commanded, motioning toward the girl on the couch and Skip standing over by the windows.

  The waiter looked patient and obedient; his attitude was one of simple politeness and not that of the cold hostility of the desk men.

  “A stinger,” the blonde said languidly, stroking the fat side of the gilt handbag.

  “A double Scotch with water back,” said Skip.

  “Good boy!” the old man approved. “That’s what my Al would say. And waiter, I want Irish whiskey with Coca-Cola in it.”

  Now that’s a drink for you, Skip thought in distaste. He listened to the sounds from outside, where swimmers were splashing in the pool and a girl was laughing in a high-pitched squeal. He thought of the old dun-colored house, Uncle Willy’s garage apartment, Mr. Chilworth and the amount of work he got from Uncle Willy for practically nothing; and he looked with disbelieving eyes on Salvatorre. How did a crazy old man like this acquire so much money?

  He said tentatively, “You made it in mining, I’ll bet.”

  “Some in mining,” said Salvatorre, nodding his head, sitting down by the blonde and playfully squeezing her knee through the red sheath dress. “Some in oil. All by accident, boy. A man owed me some debts and all he owned, all he had left, was some desert land out in the middle of nowhere. Worth nothing. So he gave it to me and I forgot it and I went on working until five years ago. Then came the oil. I was a butcher for more than thirty years.” He looked the girl over, as if she were some toy he meant to see perform before the evening was over. The blonde had taken a tiny vial of perfume from the overstuffed bag and was dabbing her ears and her palms with scent.

  Skip thought, now why in hell couldn’t something like that have happened to Uncle Willy? Uncle Willy had spent his years desperately planning how to scrounge a little money here and there, and being sent to prison for his efforts, and here was this stupid old coot who’d had it handed to him, who’d done nothing. The unfairness of it was stupefying.

  The waiter brought the drinks. Salvatorre paid him and ordered refills at once, before they had even started on the first ones. Skip sat and drank, trying not to look very often at the couch. It was embarrassing, the old man almost paralyzed with booze and the skillful and willing chippie, whose skill and willingness weren’t enough. Presently Skip took his drink into the bathroom and stayed there a long time. He heard the second arrival and departure of the waiter. Finally he went back into the other room. The sight he saw was curious.

  Salvatorre lay stretched out on his back on the couch, obviously dead to the world. The blonde was at the dresser, fluffing her hair with a little silver comb. “Hi,” she said to Skip. There was no animosity in her now. She winked at him in the mirror. “I’m going back to the casino. He’ll be passed out for hours.” She slipped the comb back into the purse and Skip saw the enormous roll of bills.

  “Give me some,” he said.

  She crinkled her nose at him. “Oh, now, let’s be realistic.”

  “You didn’t give him anything for his money,” Skip persisted, “because he was too drunk to take it. You’ve charged him for nothing. I want a cut of it.”

  She adjusted the neck of the sheath, tucking it a little lower over her sharply pointed breasts. “Don’t get funny here, lover boy. You’d better take your small change and blow. The management will be along pretty soon to look Mr. Salvatorre over and maybe put him to beddy-bye. And they’ll kick you out then if you haven’t already gone.”

  Skip stepped close and put a hand at the back of her neck, where the skull joined the fragile spine, and he closed his fingers slowly. She tried to lunge forward, out of his grip, but the dresser held her. Then she tried to twist sidewise and away and Skip put an arm tight around her waist. He went on pinching the base of her skull and she turned white and started to scream and he lifted his free hand and slapped her hard. “Give,” he said. He let up on the pressure at her neck and her head sagged forward drunkenly.

  “My head! My head!” she moaned.

  “It’ll ache a little,” he agreed. He pushed her aside and inched his fingers into her purse and extracted a chunk of money.

  “Don’t . . . take it all!”

  “I’m not. I’m leaving you plenty.”

  He had a bad moment when he opened the hall door. A big man stood there, beefy inside a neat blue suit, hands like slabs of granite, a cold green eye. Skip repressed a start of fright. He said quietly, “I’m just leaving.”

  “Fine,” said the man with the green eyes. He looked inside the room at the girl in front of the dresser. “You leaving too, Tina?”

  “Yes, I’m leaving,” Tina got out.

  The big man waited, intending to see that Mr. Salvatorre was comfortable and alone. Skip started down the hall, and then from nowhere at all came a curious hunch, a thing to say. He obeyed it instinctively. He paused and looked back at the beefy man in Salvatorre’s doorway. “I don’t suppose it means anything.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What Mr. Salvatorre was telling me. He said if I wanted a job here in Las Vegas, he’d speak to somebody he called Mr. Stolz.”

  No change in the green eyes or the patient manner; the beefy man looked at Skip as from a vast distance, somebody looking at nobody, or a man on a curb watching a bit of trash blow by in the gutter.

  “This . . . this Stolz. Is he anybody?”

  The granite lips parted. “Mr. Stolz has retired for the evening. If I were you I wouldn’t try to come back to see him. Mr. Salvatorre might not recall what he promised to do.”

  “Mr. Stolz owns the hotel?”

  “A partner.” The beefy man turned away to look at Tina inside the room.

  Skip went away, through the lobby and into the desert night outside. He looked for a cab. In a freakish way he could never have foreseen he had found out about Stolz and made a little money into the bargain.

  Chapter Five

  UNCLE WILLY got off the bus in Beverly Hills and walked two blocks nort
h of Sunset, up the hill where the big homes and apartment houses towered perchlike against the sky. He entered a small open courtyard. The low one-storied building surrounded it on three sides. There was a great deal of tropical shrubbery and a tiny fountain in a copper bowl. On the left was the door of a dentist’s office, to the right were a couple of doctors. In the rear, beyond a screen of bougainvillea, was a door on which, in gilt letters, was printed R. Mocksly Snope, Attorney At Law. Uncle Willy crossed the courtyard and entered.

  An artfully cosmeticked redhead in a tan sleeveless dress was seated in the outer office. The thing she was seated behind might have been a desk or it might have been a slab of metallic substance which had fallen through the roof off an airplane; Uncle Willy couldn’t make up his mind which.

  “Yes, sir?” The smile was careful, the eyes amused.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Snope.”

  “Do you have an appointment, sir?” She clipped legal-sized pages together and stacked them at the edge of the metallic structure before her.

  “No. Just tell him it’s Willy Dolman. He knows me.”

  “Mr. Snope is very busy today.”

  “I’ll wait.” Uncle Willy looked around for a chair and found some contorted steel tubing and black plastic foam. He sat down. The thing fitted you strangely close, he thought, once you got into it.

  She lifted a section of the metallic desk and peered into it, as if she might have a cake baking inside; then she spoke, softly inaudible words and afterward she listened. Then she looked in surprise at Willy.

  “Mr. Snope will see you now,” she said, as if she could scarcely believe it. She rose and walked to a door and opened it. Uncle Willy, with his hat in his hands, went on in. Snope was grinning at him from the other side of the room. Snope’s carpet was a deep garnet red and his desk had no resemblance to a wing fallen off a plane; it was solid mahogany, six feet across, and shone like a mirror.

  “Well, long time no see. Have a chair,” Snope said, and opened a leather box and offered Willy a cigar.

  Snope was about sixty, a stout man with a ruddy skin. He wore a gray hard-weave suit which must have cost around three hundred dollars in Willy’s opinion. There was a peculiarity about Snope; in spite of his obvious age he had a certain juvenile softness and cheerfulness, an odd innocence, considering his class of clients and the seamy side of the legal profession he practiced.

  “I was glad to hear you were out, Willy. How are things with you?”

  “Not too bad.” Willy explained about Mr. Chilworth and his job.

  “Well, that’s fine.” Snope lit their cigars with a silver lighter. “I’m glad to know that you’ve settled down and aren’t planning any more mischief.”

  “I’m settled down, all right,” Willy said.

  “You were a good man, a clever man, in your day. But we all get old. We all get to a certain point, and then it’s time to take stock and think a bit and figure what the odds are. Sometimes the odds are such that we have to quit taking chances.” Under Snope’s mild tone was a warning, and Willy sensed it.

  “I know I’m too old to plan any more jobs. I haven’t any ideas along that line at all.”

  “Fine, fine. You’re looking well, too. Taking on a little tan.”

  “That’s the yard work,” Willy explained. “What I came about is something else entirely. Not a job of mine. It’s one I got wind of by accident.”

  Snope’s face closed coldly and he inspected the cigar as if he thought it might harbor some species of insect life. “Now . . . Willy, I’ve advised you to the best of my knowledge——”

  “It’s not my job,” Willy insisted. “I wouldn’t touch it, in fact. But the thing is, the people who are planning it are punks. They don’t know how to organize. It’s going to skyrocket unless somebody with know-how takes over.” He waited, a careful moment. “If someone with experience, the right person, got into it there might be a big payoff.”

  There was a tick-tock of such silence that Willy could hear Miss Redhead typing rattledy-clack in the outer office.

  “Well, then——” Snope put his cigar into a crystal ash tray and stuck his hands palm down on the desk. His mouth had tightened. “Whom do you want to see?”

  “I thought, well . . . Big Tom, if he isn’t too busy.”

  “Big Tom.” Snope thought about Big Tom, revolved Big Tom in his brain and inspected him from various angles. “It’s his kind of job?”

  “No.”

  Snope allowed a touch of suspicion to come up under the juvenile cheer, and Willy saw as usual and with the usual surprise that the youthful optimism was as false, really, as Mr. Snope’s beautiful white teeth.

  “I owe Big Tom a favor,” Willy explained. “I’ve waited a long time to pay off. You know, when that last job went sour, when we were keeping our heads down and the heat was so bad we could hardly breathe, it was Big Tom did me a good turn. He loaned me a car and some money and it was just chance he didn’t get pinched over it.”

  “I see.” Snope twiddled his fingers on the mahogany. Then he said abruptly, “How big?”

  “I don’t know that yet.”

  “Will you know it before you pull the job?”

  “Hope to.”

  Snope nodded. He had said nothing yet about his cut; and Willy understood that this was taken for granted. Snope got up from his chair and went to a steel file cabinet and extracted a folder. He studied the folder for a while; it contained some items about car accident statistics and the legal settlement of the same, but Mr. Snope seemed to be reading between the lines. After a while he said, “All right. Here’s the address.”

  Willy copied down what Snope told him.

  Snope laid the folder on his desk. “How many more?”

  “I’ll let Big Tom handle it.”

  Snope nodded. “Fine.” He was smiling youthfully, his manner full of boyish good will. “Leave a phone number with Miss Weems. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” On the way to the door he clapped Willy cheerfully on the shoulders.

  There was wind in the canyon, the smell of sage and sycamores, the old dry taste of summer dust, heat, a muffled quiet. Uncle Willy paused on the rutted road to wipe the sweat off his face with his handkerchief. He hated not having a car. Being afoot in southern California meant depending on a public transportation system which would have been insufficient for 1890.

  Above him a pink-trimmed cabin peeped from a grove of trees. Uncle Willy looked up at it, narrowing his eyes against the glare. Steps led up from the unpaved road. There were patches of ivy and geraniums on the slope, and, seeing these, a look of recognition flickered in Willy’s eyes. Big Tom had always been great for gardening. Gardens and cats. Sure enough, there was a big yellow cat on the porch above, looking down at Willy with the air of watching a mouse.

  Willy climbed the steps, went up on the porch, rapped at the door. It wasn’t a big place, but there was a great deal of privacy. From the porch there were no other houses visible, just the road leading off into the lonely sunlight. Willy heard a stir in the room, steps, then the door opened before him. “Hi, you old son of a gun,” Willy said, and the man inside let forth a great cackle of laughter.

  “Well, for God’s sake, look who’s here!”

  Big Tom wore a pair of jeans and a knitted white tee shirt. His big toes were hooked into rubber sandals. He had a great mane of gray hair, stiff as wire, pale skin matted with freckles, a broad face, a heavy mouth. He was fat now; Willy commented at once upon how much fatter Big Tom was than when he had last seen him.

  “Hell, you were salted away a long time, Willy!” They were seated by now. Big Tom gazed suddenly at Willy with his hazel-colored eyes. “Who gave you the address here?”

  “Snope.”

  “What the hell were you doing with him?” Then an air, quiet and watchful, settled over Big Tom. “Wait a minute. You’ve come on business?” Big Tom shook his head decisively. “Afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. Don’t plan on me, Willy. I’m all through.”<
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  Willy nodded mildly. “I know, it’s not even your kind of job. I wanted to offer it, though, because of the favors you did me in the past.”

  “Forget it.” Big Tom turned the talk to other subjects: the house, the yard and the flowers, his family of cats. They were outdoors presently and Big Tom led Willy toward the lath house. “Begonias in here. I’m slipping some gardenias and camellias—not hard to do, but it takes them forever to start growing. See this fern? Jap gave it to me. The Japs irradiate or poison the damned fern some way; it comes all crinkly like that, like green lace.”

  Willy nodded over the ferns. He thought the place smelled mossy and fungus-like. He said, “There’s this guy from Vegas, owns a chunk of a hotel over there. He’s got some dough hid out in an old barn of a place in Pasadena. Nobody around but an old woman and a young girl. The girl won’t make any trouble.”

  Big Tom rearranged some potted plants and ran a hose over some fuchsias. “I’m sorry to hear that you’re meddling around with such things, Willy. You know and I know that you can’t afford it.”

  “I’m not going to have any part of it,” Willy said. “I’m just offering you the information because you tried to help me a long time ago when nobody else would have spit on me if I was afire.”

  Big Tom thrust a finger into a basket. “Getting dry. That’s the trouble with the canyon, the wind through here drying everything out. I water these fuchsias three, four times a day. Can’t keep ’em damp otherwise. Not even here, under the lath.” He worked his way around the bench.

  “You always went for this stuff,” said Willy, trying not to walk on the fine green creeping growth on the floor.

  “I’d of sure been better off if I’d done what the old gardener wanted me to. You know, that first time I was inside—they let me help Mr. Wilcox and he taught me to garden and grow things. Vegetables, too, that was the work end of it; we had to supply the tables at Preston. Then the flowers—he showed me how—that was the fun end of it, the beauty end, and I almost got a job gardening when I got out. Only, there was my brother. You remember Buddy.”