One Night Stands; Lost weekends

by Lawrence Block

  “It’s out.” She clicked the receiver in my ear.

  So I drank the drink and crossed another Sweet Young Thing off my mental list of Things to Be Physical With. I was already giving up a lot for Rhona Blake.

  She called around six. “This is Rhona,” she said. “I talked to…to the man. He wanted me to come personally but agreed to meet with you.”

  “Sweet of him.”

  “Don’t growl. You’re supposed to meet him at nine-thirty at a place called Johnny’s. It’s out in Canarsie on Remsen Avenue near Avenue M. Give him the money and get the goods, Ed.”

  “Maybe I could get the goods without giving him the money.”

  “No. The money doesn’t matter. Don’t do anything silly, like getting rough with him. Just…just follow orders.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Ed—”

  “What?”

  A long pause. “Nothing,” she said, finally. “I’ll…I’ll call you tonight, Ed.”

  THREE

  My cabby came off the Manhattan Bridge at Canal Street, then found the East Side Drive and headed uptown. It was close to eleven and the traffic was thin. We made good time. The meter was a few ticks past $5 when he pulled up in front of my brownstone. I gave him a five and two singles and waved him away.

  It was still too damned hot out. I went inside, took the stairs two at a time, unlocked my door, and pulled it shut after me. I poured a stiff drink and drank it.

  It was getting cute now. My client had given me five grand, and I still had that. But the little blackmailer was dead and gone, and the stuff he had on her was nowhere to be found. It was time for me to call my client, of course. Time to fill her in on all the novel developments. But I couldn’t get in touch with her. She was willing to sleep with me but she wouldn’t let me know where she lived.

  A few minutes after twelve, the phone rang.

  “Rhona, Ed. Everything go all right?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  I gave it to her in capsule form, telling her how I met the little man, how they waylaid us, how they killed him and tried to kill me. She let me talk without an interruption, and when I stopped she was silent for almost a minute.

  Then: “What now, Ed?”

  “I don’t know, Rhona. I’ve got five thousand bucks you can have back. I guess that’s about all.”

  “But I’m in trouble, Ed.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  A pause. “I can’t tell you over the phone.”

  “Then come over here.”

  “I can’t, Ed. I have to stay where I am.”

  “Then I’ll come over there.”

  “No.”

  I was getting sick of the whole routine. “Then give me a post office box and I’ll mail you five grand, Rhona. And we can forget the whole thing. Okay?”

  It wasn’t okay. She got nervous and stuttered awhile, then told me she would call me in the morning. I told her I was sick of phone calls.

  “Then meet me,” she said.

  “Where?”

  She thought it over. “Do you know a place called Mandrake’s?”

  “In the Village? I know it.”

  “I’ll meet you there at two in the afternoon.”

  “Are they open then?”

  “They’re open. Will you meet me?”

  I thought about that red mouth, those green eyes. I remembered the poetry of her body. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll meet you.”

  Hanging up, I hauled the .38 out of its resting place and broke it open. I wanted a full gun handy. It looked as though it was going to be that kind of a deal.

  It was too early for sleep. I thought about the girl I’d broken my date with: dark hair, soft curves, a sulky mouth. Right now we’d have been out of the theater. We’d be sitting in a cozy club somewhere on the East Side, listening to atonal jazz and drinking a little too much. And then homeward, for a nightcap and maybe a cup of kindness. But a date with a blackmailer had made me break my date with Sharon Ross. And now she was mad at me.

  For the hell of it, I called her. The phone rang and rang and rang and nobody answered it.

  I went into the kitchen and made instant coffee and thought about Canarsie. A tommy-gun—that was something to mull over. Only prison guards have them. They’ve been illegal in the States since the Dillinger era, and a hood who wants one has to shell out two or three grand for the thing. And needs good connections.

  It sounded pretty complex for an ordinary blackmail dodge, and made me wonder what kind of league Rhona Blake was playing in. Triple-A, anyway. They don’t use choppers in the bush leagues.

  It was late by the time I got into bed. I wedged a stack of records on the hi-fi and crawled under the covers. They played and I thought about things, and I fell asleep before the stack was finished.

  THE MORNING WAS RAW AND RAGGED. I’d gone to sleep without flipping on the air-conditioner, and when I woke up the blankets were sticking to my skin. I pried them loose and took a long shower.

  I was through with breakfast by 10:30. I wasn’t supposed to meet Rhona until two, but my apartment was beginning to feel like a jail cell. I looked through the bookcases for something to read and didn’t come up with anything. I plucked the Times off my doormat, glanced through it, and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  I left the apartment wearing slacks, a sport jacket, and a gun. I locked my door and headed down the stairs, and was on my way through the vestibule just as a man was leaning on my bell. I saw his index finger pressing a button next to a strip of plexiglas with E. London inscribed thereon. He didn’t look like anyone I wanted to meet, but it was a hot day and I had a few hours to kill. I tapped him on the shoulder.

  “You won’t get an answer,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No. I’m E. London, and there was nobody home when I left.”

  He didn’t smile. “Carr,” he said. “Phillip Carr, attorney at law.” He handed me a card. “I want to talk to you, London.”

  I didn’t really want to talk to him. We went upstairs anyway, and I unlocked my door again and led him inside. We sat down in the living room. He offered me a cigar and I shook my head. He made a hole in the end with an elaborate cigar cutter, wedged it in his mouth, lit it, blew foul smoke all over my apartment. I hoped it wouldn’t clog the air-conditioner.

  “I’ll come to the point,” he said.

  “Fine.”

  “I’m here representing a client,” Carr said, “who wants to remain nameless. He’s a wealthy man, a prominent man.”

  “Go on.”

  “His daughter’s missing. He wants her located.”

  “That’s interesting,” I told him. “The Missing Persons Bureau is at Headquarters, on Centre Street. They have a lot of personnel and they don’t charge anything. You go down there, make out a report, and they’ll find your man’s daughter a damn sight faster than I will.”

  He chewed his cigar thoughtfully. “This isn’t a police matter,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No. We…my client needs special talents. He’s prepared to pay ten thousand dollars as a reward for his daughter’s return.”

  “Ten grand?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t work that way,” I said. “I’m not a bounty hunter, Carr. I don’t chase rewards any more than a decent lawyer chases ambulances to nail negligence cases. I get a hundred a day plus expenses. The price is the same whether I find your missing person or not.”

  “That’s not how my client wants it.”

  “Then your client can find himself another boy.”

  “You’re not a patient man,” Phillip Carr said.

  “Maybe not.”

  “You should be. Can’t you use ten grand, London?”

  “Anybody can.”

  “Then be patient. Let me show you a picture of my client’s errant daughter; then you can decide whether or not you want to work for a reward. For ten grand, I’d be willing
to chase an ambulance, London.”

  It was early in the day and it was hot as hell and my head wasn’t working too well. I let him dig a thin wallet from his hip pocket. He pulled a picture from it and passed it to me.

  Well, you guessed it. And I should have, but it was that kind of a day. The daughter-reward bit was as nutty as a male Hershey bar and the picture told me everything I had to know. Just a head-and-shoulder shot, the kind that made you want to see what the body looked like. A beautiful girl. A familiar face.

  Rhona Blake, of course.

  Carr was looking at me, a supercilious smile on his lips. I wanted to turn it inside out. But I could be as cute as he. I handed the picture back to him and waited.

  “A familiar face?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  I stepped closer to him. “I’ve never seen the girl,” I lied. “And the reward couldn’t interest me less. I think you ought to go home, Carr.”

  He pointed the cigar at me. “You’re a damn fool,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because ten thousand dollars is a healthy reward any way you look at it.”

  “So?”

  He made a pilgrimage to the window. I felt like walking behind him and kicking him through it. He was a smooth little bastard who wanted me to sell out a client to him, and he didn’t even have the guts to lay it on the line. He had to be cute about it.

  “The girl is in over her head,” he said levelly. He still had his back to me. “You’re working for her. You don’t have to. You can be cooperative and pick up a nice package in the process. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  He turned to face me. “You damn fool.”

  “Get out, Carr. Or I’ll throw you out.”

  He sighed. “My client’s a great believer in rewards,” he said. “Rewards and punishments.”

  “I’d hit you, Carr, but you’d bleed all over my carpet.”

  “Rewards and punishments,” he said again. “I don’t have to draw you pictures, London. You’re supposed to be a fairly bright boy. You think it over. You’ve got my card. If you change your mind, you might try giving me a ring.”

  He left. I didn’t show him the door.

  I looked at his card for a few minutes, then went to the phone. I dialed Police Headquarters and asked for Jerry Gunther at Homicide. It took a few minutes before he got to the phone.

  “Oh,” he groaned. “It’s you again.”

  Jerry and I had bumped heads a few times in one squabble or another. We wound up liking each other. He thought I was a bookish bum who liked to live well without working too hard and I thought he was a thorough anachronism, an honest cop in the middle of the twentieth century when honest cops were out of style. We had less in common than Miller and Monroe, but we got along fine.

  “What’s up, Ed?”

  “Phillip Carr,” I said. “Some kind of a lawyer. You know anything about him?”

  “It rings a bell,” he said. “I could find out if this was a vital part of police routine. Is this a vital part of police routine, Ed?”

  “No.”

  “What is it?”

  “An imposition on your friendship.”

  “What I figured,” he said. “Next time we have a vital conference, you buy.”

  “That could be expensive. You’ve got a hollow leg.”

  “Better than a hollow head, crumb. Hang on.”

  Finally, Jerry Gunther came back. “Yeah,” he said. “Phillip Carr. Sort of a mob lawyer, Ed. A mouthpiece type. He takes cases for the kind of garbage that always stays out of jail. He’s been on the inside of some shady stuff himself, according to the dope we’ve got. Nothing that anybody could ever make stick. Bankrolling some smuggling operations, stuff like that. Using his connections to make an illegal buck.”

  I grunted.

  “That your man, Ed?”

  “Like a glove,” I said. “He wears sunglasses and he’s oily. He’s the type who goes to the barbershop and gets the works.”

  “Like Anastasia,” Jerry said. “It should happen to all of them. What’s it all about, Ed?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Nothing for Homicide, is it?”

  “Nothing, Jerry.”

  “Then the hell with it. I only get into the act when somebody dies, fella.”

  I thought about the corpse in Canarsie. But he never got into the files. The boys in our little poker game were too professional for that. By now he was sleeping in a lime pit in Jersey or swimming in Jamaica Bay all wrapped in cement.

  “Remember,” Jerry Gunther was saying, “you buy the liquor. And don’t play rough with this Carr. He’s got some ugly friends.”

  “Sure,” I said. “And thanks.”

  I put down the phone, got out of the building, and grabbed a pair of burgers at the lunch counter around the corner. As I ate, I thought about a corpse in Canarsie and a man named Phillip Carr and a blond vision named Rhona Blake. Life does get complicated, doesn’t it?

  FOUR

  I picked up my car from the garage on Third Avenue where I put it out to pasture. The car’s a Chevy convertible, an antique from the pre-fin era. I drove it down to the Village, stuck it in a handy parking spot, and looked around for a bar called Mandrake’s.

  Rhona was right. Mandrake’s was open at two in the afternoon, even if I couldn’t figure out why. It was a sleek and polished little club with a circular bar, and at night the Madison Avenue hippies came there to listen to a piano player sing dirty songs. They paid a buck and a quarter for their drinks, patted the waitresses on their pretty little bottoms, and thought they were way ahead of the squares at P.J. Clark’s.

  But in the afternoon it was just another ginmill, empty, and its only resemblance to Mandrake’s-by-nightfall was the price schedule. The drinks were still a buck and a quarter. I picked up Courvoisier at the bar and carried it to a little table in the back. The barmaid was the afternoon model, hollow-eyed and sad. I was her only customer.

  I nursed my drink, tossed a quarter into the chrome-plated jukebox, and played some Billie Holliday records. They were some of her last sides, cut after the voice was gone and only the perfect phrasing remained, and Lady Day was sadder than Mandrake’s in the daylight. I waited for Rhona and wondered if she would show.

  She did. She was a good three drinks late, waltzing in at three o’clock and glancing over her shoulder to find out who was following her. Probably the whole Lithuanian Army-in-Exile, I thought. She was that kind of a girl.

  “I’m late,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  We were still the bartender’s only customers. I asked her what she was drinking. She said a Rob Roy would be nice. She sipped at it, and I sipped at the cognac, and we looked at each other. She asked me for the story again and I gave it to her, filling in more of the details. She hung on every word and gave me a nod now and then.

  “You’re positive he was killed?”

  “Unless he found a way to live without a head. They shot it off for him.”

  “I don’t know what to do next, Ed.”

  “You could tell me what’s happening.”

  “I’m paying you a hundred a day. Isn’t that enough?”

  This burned me. “I could make ten grand in five minutes,” I said. “That’s even better.”

  She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing at all,” I said. I finished my drink, put the empty glass on the table in front of me. “I had a visitor today, Rhona. A lawyer named Phillip Carr. He told me a client of his was missing a daughter. This client was willing to shell out ten grand if I dug her up and brought her around.”

  “So?”

  “He showed me your picture, Rhona.”

  For a moment she just stared. Then her face cracked like ice in the springtime. She shuddered violently, and she spilled most of her Rob Roy on the polished tabletop, and her stiff upper lip turned to jello.

  She said: “Oh, hel
l.”

  “Want to talk now, Rhona?”

  She stared at the top of the table, where her hands were shaking uncontrollably in a Rob Roy ocean. I walked to the jukebox, threw away another quarter, and sat down again. She was still shaking and biting her lip.

  “You’d better tell me, Rhona. People are playing with tommy-guns and talking in ten-grand terms. You’d better tell me.”

  She nodded. On the jukebox, Billie was singing about strange fruit. Husky, smoky sounds shrieked out of a junked-up dying throat. The barmaid came over with a towel and wiped up the Rob Roy.

  Rhona looked up at me. The veneer of poise was all gone. She wasn’t ageless anymore. She looked very young, very scared. A scared kid in over her head.

  “Ed,” she said. “They want to kill me.”

  “Who does?”

  “The man who came to see you. The same men who killed my blackmailer in Canarsie last night.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Gamblers. But not real gamblers. Crooked ones. They run a batch of rigged games. They have some steerers who send over suckers, and the suckers go home broke. The lawyer who saw you works for a man named Abe Zucker. He’s the head of it. And they’re all looking for me. They want to kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my father.”

  “Who’s your father?”

  I don’t think she even heard the question. “They killed him,” she said quietly. “Slowly. They beat him to death.”

  I waited while she took the bits and pieces of herself and tugged them back together again. Then I tried again. I asked her who her father was.

  “Jack Blake,” she said. “He was a mechanic.”

  “He fixed cars?”

  She laughed humorlessly. “Cards,” she corrected. “He was a card mechanic. He could make a deck turn inside out and salute you, Ed. He could deal seconds all night long and nobody ever tipped. He was the best in the world. He had gentle hands with long thin fingers—the most perfect hands in the world. He could crimp-cut and false-shuffle and palm and…He was great, Ed.”

  “Go on.”

  “You ought to be able to figure the rest of it,” she said. “He quit the crooked-gambling circuit years ago when my mother died. He went into business for himself in Cleveland, ran a store downtown on Euclid Avenue and went straight. I worked for him, keeping the books and clerking behind the counter. The store was a magic shop. We sold supplies to the professional magicians and simple tricks to the average Joes. Dad loved the business. When the pros came in he would show off a little, fool around with a deck of cards and let them see how good he was. It was the perfect business for him.”