Chasing Sam Spade

by Brian Lawson

  “For them.”

  “Yeah, for them. Until that one got away and the cops found her.”

  Danny sipped his spiked coffee, feeling it carry its warmth out through his arms and chest. Good brandy, probably too good to throw into a cup of coffee.

  “She wasn’t the first they had and she wasn’t the first that got away. They were kind of careless,” he said, laughing, his face starting to get some color back and looking animated again. “Anyway. Old granddad found out, got the names, got the dates, got all it put together. Wasn’t likely he could really do anything to them, maybe embarrass the shit out of ‘em, but he played it right and they cut a deal.”

  “With whom? Who was involved?”

  “I don’t know, but that was the question. The guys involved were strong about not being involved, I guess. It wouldn’t matter so much now, you know. I mean, who cares, right? But it mattered back then all right. Anyway, next thing he splits from the DA’s office and he’s out running his own practice, doing work for the Democratic machine downtown, moving and grooving, you know what I mean,” he said.

  In the morning light the pale sagging skin didn’t look gray any more, but it couldn’t be called healthy looking either; even the grin looked sickly. And he was starting to sweat. Danny said, “Okay, I guessed that much. What else?”

  “Yeah, but you were guessing. A helluva good guess, but you didn’t have anything except that newspaper story and the old man knows that. You can’t bluff him, nobody can. You didn’t have the good stuff, the court records, police files, anything,” he said, poking a thick finger at Danny. “He knew that ‘cause he’s got it all. Everything old granddad had. All the players, what they did, what the cops did, what he did.”

  “How did he get his hands on the official files?”

  “Who knows, for sure. Grandfather had connections. Juice. He could get anything, do anything. The Irish ran the town and he was one of the Irish. It only matters that he had them and my old man has them now and you don’t. Without them you can’t do anything official and he knows it.”

  “And how did your father find out about all this?”

  “Funny thing, I guess your old man tipped him off,” he said, looking at Danny with a strange, quizzical look. It was the look of a man who was getting in his licks, for the first time in days, and wanted to see how much he really had left. Danny felt a cold breeze ruffle his hair; he took his time, took another drink, then nodded at Skelley.

  “Tell me about it,” he said, hoping his voice was even, calm. He didn’t want young Skelley to know what this meant. It must have worked; Skelley gave a quick little nod and his eyes lost that searching look.

  “Well, I think he found something. Maybe some file or something, I don’t know....”

  “…and ‘he’ being your father?”

  “Right. Well that must have started him looking. He didn’t find out until a lot after your old man had dropped out of the picture. I think grandfather must have brought it down on himself, maybe even bragging about how he had handled your old man, what, back in the late 50s or something? Anyway, that probably got my old man looking for the files.”

  “1959,” he said, his throat very tight and dry despite the drink

  “Yeah, whenever,” Skelley said, waving Chuck and the incident aside with one manicured hand. “So, he must have found out about it and what they did. You know, getting him fired and the trouble with the cops?”

  Danny nodded, he knew, now for sure.

  “So, the way he tells it, it made him curious. Curious, that’s it, just curious about why Grandpa David went to so much trouble for a nobody. Sorry, but that’s the way he saw it. He started digging. And I guess he eventually got the goods on his old man and pieced it all together.”

  There comes a time when truth is a very clear, bright thing and for Danny the moment seemed to freeze time: Patrick Skelley relaxing in his deck chair, expensive drink in hand, expensive life as still as the thin fog that froze into ropes strung through the cypress tress, the air itself still, calm, cool. He suddenly knew, and knew he didn’t have to say anything, but did anyway.

  “So it’s all true. They really ruined him, just for that, for nothing,” Danny said, spitting the words out with a weariness in his voice he found surprising.

  And like most moments of truth, it melted as fast as the morning fog under the sun and Skelley’s barking, humorless laughter, “Oh sure, that part’s true, but you still don’t get it. That’s the bitch, man. You were right on. Your old man was right on. Nailed granddad right to the wall. All this time, that’s the only thing the old man is scared of. I’m sorry about what they did to your old man. At least you know he was right. He messed with the wrong guy and got fucked,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry; he didn’t sound much of anything.

  Danny felt the muscles tense in his neck and shoulders at Skelley’s tone of genial admiration for his grandfather’s crime, but kept it inside, waiting. He took a breath, then another and finally said, “All right, we won’t worry about Chuck right now. What else?”

  “We’re getting there, don’t worry, but you won’t get it unless I educate you a little about the Skelleys,” he said, smiling that wide, sad smile with too many teeth and too little in the eyes. This wasn’t easy, for him or for Skelley; he could see the quick flashes of fear chasing anger across the man’s puffy face, see that he was laboring to tell it and Danny would hear it best by waiting, letting him set his own pace. “Anyway, thanks to granddad shooting off his mouth, dear old daddy had all of it tracked down, or enough that a few missing pieces didn’t matter. He had the old man and they both knew it and still he wouldn’t let go. I guess the old man gave him a choice. Retire or face the music.

  “It must have been a real head knocker. Young bull taking over the herd and all that. The old man says they damn near got into a fistfight, but there was nothing he could do. So old grand dad worked it out with some pills. Voila, the heart attack,” and he paused for a moment and looked with a kind of riveting intensity at Danny that made him squirm in his seat. “So the old man killed him. Or got him to kill himself, same thing.”

  Danny felt suddenly lost in the sordid story. Tracing the family up through the years he had come across the 1964 front-page obituary in the Bulletin that talked about the grand old man’s sudden surprising heart attack. He dropped his feet to the deck and leaned forward straddling the chaise. “What? Are you saying your father killed your grandfather? So he could take over the business?”

  Skelley shrugged and again gave him the rueful smile. “Okay, you think that’s too strong? Maybe he killed himself with some help from daddy. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. If we can prove....”

  “...there’s no proof,” Skelley said. “He’s too smart, way too smart. You don’t get it. Nobody can do anything to him, not in a million years. But he did it. That’s the way he operates. He makes you kill yourself. Or want to. He gives you the reason so it doesn’t matter who actually shoves the pills in your mouth.”

  Danny shook his head, trying to bring order out of the suddenly chaotic story. “So what the papers had, that he had a heart attack?”

  “Sure, that’s the story the papers got. Daddy made sure of that but he either killed him or got him to off himself, no question,” he said, pushing himself out of the chair and heading for the bar.

  Danny sat sideways on the chaise; he picked up the heavy cut glass crystal mug and took a drink of tepid coffee and brandy that tasted like burned dreams and ashes in his mouth. Another quick gust of wind found its way over or around the glass walls; it smelled like dust and cypress trees, and something else, faintly, the smell of the salt bay heating up in the morning sun. It was quiet on the deck, a rich man’s isolation from traffic and congestion and city noise, a quiet paid for by long dead little girls dreaming opium dreams and spreading their legs for the latest pin stripe asshole to walk through some bedroom door. His stomach turned over.

  “Listen
, ah, Patrick, am I following you right? You’re saying your father either killed his father outright, or blackmailed him into killing himself?

  “Don’t sound so shocked. You wanted the truth and now you sound like you don’t want it. Which way is it?” he said, walking across the deck, the dark amber booze sloshing a quick black stain onto the aged redwood decking. He leaned against the glass wall, staring down the hill, sipping at his drink.

  He shook his head. “I, I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine you’re calmly telling me all this. Your grandfather’s corrupt, your father’s a killer, or something else like it. I just don’t know,” he said and if Skelley heard the edge in his voice, he didn’t react.

  “Yeah, right. So, the old man takes over and that’s where it gets really fucked up,” he said, tapping on the glass panel with his drink. “You know, there’s this broad, down the hill? Does exercises, karate or something, out on her deck in the nude. Man oh man, you should see her.”

  Danny looked up, past Skelley and his glass wall, staring straight up at the sky. Another rich guy thing, enough money and you don’t ever have to look up at any other buildings; Patrick Skelley looked down at naked broads but nobody looked at him. The morning had started to close in on him, the good brandy turning sour in his stomach now. It didn’t seem like the sun would burn off the last of the fog and the gray damp mist might crawl back out of the cypress trees and retake the hill. Hell, he’d come so far, why not go all the way.

  “Okay, good. Listen, sit down. Let’s just stick to your father.”

  Skelley turned and smiled at him; the shallow, stretched grin had a sad, very tired look now and his skin seemed to be sagging with the weight of talking.

  “Okay, sure,” and he walked over, pulled the captain’s chair close enough to the side of the chaise that Danny could smell the after shave and see every nose hair. “Daddy likes ‘em young and juicy himself. Guess reading those files all these years got him going.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. He’s always had something on the side. Thought we didn’t know, but we knew. Younger the better. Fourteen, fifteen year old hookers. Paid ‘em and played ‘em, sometimes two at a time and I don’t know what else. But I know he took pictures, lots of them.”

  That was another dirty little secret the man was protecting, but he wasn’t the first old man to go soft for young girls. And that wasn’t enough to explain Chuck’s death. He wanted to ask young Skelley if the rape gene was passed down the line, did he like them young, too? But he didn’t; the man seemed exhausted, sitting with his arms hanging down on each side of the chair, head bowed, eyes half closed. He’d done better tied in the back seat of the car than he was doing now.

  Danny tried to fit the chronology to Skelley’s story and the strange “we” that had dropped into the narrative. He said, “Since about when, late 1970s? Did your mother know about all this? Didn’t she die in, what, the newspaper said, 1978?”

  Danny jumped at the sharp cracking sound as Skelley slammed the heavy crystal down on the glass topped table; a thin sketch of a cracks now snaked half way toward Danny. The young man’s voice was low, raspy, a tight thing like a whisper being forced out through some terribly constricted throat. “This has nothing to do with her, you understand. Nothing. You don’t even talk about her. Ever, you understand.”

  “No harm meant. Just a question, don’t....”

  “...never. You never talk about her. Ever,” he whispered, turning suddenly away and standing up to begin pacing the deck in quick, jerky strides, arms waving, muttering.

  “She was a goddamn saint. She put up with all his shit all those years. I remember, I really do. Year after year. He was running around but she put up with it but it wasn’t her fault. I don’t think they were young, then. That was after, later, you know. After he killed her,” he muttered.

  “What did you say? He killed your mother?”

  “Same as grandfather. Took her there, stood her up on the edge of the cliff and walked away. All the years, the abuse and always making fun of her. He used to call her Shanty Irish, say she was no good, all the time. He beat her down year after year after year until she couldn’t stand it. So he waited and twisted the knife in her until she couldn’t take it,” he said, and his voice was soft, thick in his throat and it almost hurt to listen to him.

  “You know what did it? He told her about all the whores. She told me how he made her sit down and look at pictures he had and told her everything. He killed her. I know it. I didn’t find out until last year. I found her diary. I’ve got it. And he’s going to pay,” he said and his head dropped and he sobbed softly, steadily while Danny looked over his head, into the fog distance, trying to stay above the man’s pain.

  Not a new story, not even a particularly unpleasant one, but it was too much on top of the last few days. There was an oedipal swamp bubbling somewhere inside Patrick that was the rotten, fertile home for all the fear and rage that danced quickly across his face before he managed to beat it back into its dark, secret place. Danny knew that swamp would take him too if he got even close. Danny believed him; it was easier than trying to separate the lies of childhood from the adult facts. He was prepared to believe almost anything about the elder Skelley. What he was less sure of was how he felt about the son. He felt sorry for him in a strange way he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to explain, as though under the bluster and Porsche and $5,000 Armani tux was a bruised kid who loved mom a little too much and hated dad in ways that he couldn’t even say. He felt for him, but he didn’t like him, and just hearing this family’s little horror story made him feel like he needed a shower. Plus, he couldn’t get around the fact that Patrick was part of all this and he’d been part of it for a long time, long enough to grow up rich and self-indulgent. He didn’t know what to think but there wasn’t any time for anything beyond the need to save Johnny Larkin and he had to stay focused on that.

  “That’s the story? But you say there’s no proof, right? So we can’t get him on anything. Any chance to getting those original files, the one’s about your grandfather and the cover-up?”

  Skelley shook his head. “No, I tried to find them. I know he’s got them. I remember a filing cabinet full of stuff that used to be around, when I was a kid, but he’s got them locked up somewhere. He’s not stupid.”

  No, in fact he wasn’t stupid. John Skelley probably knew long before this that his son was a weak sister and prudently salted the files away where nobody could get them, in particular the son. Or already destroyed them. The files were a dead-end.

  “Then what’s your idea? No files, so we can’t do anything about the cover-up. Nothing on these other things. You said you’d get him. How?”

  Skelley rubbed his jaw in a parody of some wise, tough old character in half a hundred old “B” movies. Danny wanted to reach out and slap him. He waited. Finally, Skelley said, “That cover up doesn’t matter, except to the old man. But it matters to him a lot. And we can use that against him, make him trade Larkin for me.”

  “He won’t. He said as much. He knows I won’t do anything to you, anything that matters.”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t know what I know. I can call him up and say you made me talk. That I had evidence about the cover-up and had to give it to you and you’re going to take it to the police.”

  Danny shook his head. “Naw, he won’t buy it.”

  “He has to. He won’t believe it, but he won’t know, not for sure. Not enough to risk it getting out”

  Something wasn’t fitting. All of a sudden the lazy morning he had engineered, the simpering man in the expensive tux, had changed the rhythm of the thing. Somehow Patrick seemed like he was in charge, setting the pace.

  “What’s in this for you?”

  “It’ll ruin him. We’ll make him turn everything over to me. The business, all the investments, everything.”

  “Wait a few years,” Danny said. “Won’t you get everything anyway?”

  Patrick shook his head.
“Not for sure. He doesn’t like me. He thinks I’m not tough enough.”

  “I thought he wanted you to run for office or something.”

  “Yeah, but it’s just my name. He’d be behind everything, making all the deals, telling me what to do.”

  “Then don’t do it.”

  Patrick laughed, a small, wet laugh and got a strange smirk on his thick fleshly lips. “Oh yeah, give up this, huh? You ever owned a Porsche? Had two hundred dollar shirts or paid a thousand for a pair of shoes? That brandy you like? Three fifty a fifth, bring it in special from France. No way. He’s got the wallet and I want it, once and for all.”

  Danny shrugged. Underneath it all, after all the talk about avenging his mother and grandfather, after all of that, it was always about the money. He suddenly didn’t want to be there. He’d find another way to help Larkin. Something other than this. He shook his head.

  “Naw, I’m tired of all this. Do what you want, I found out what I wanted to find out. Chuck was right, all along. That’s enough.”

  He stood up, shrugging his jacket back into place. The morning was still damp and standing, he could feel a cold, thick breeze on his forehead. He wanted to get out, drop everything and leave. He took one last swig of the brandy and coffee against the morning air.

  “That’s it? You going to just quit like that?”

  “You take care of your father. I don’t need this.”

  “What if I told you something, about your old man’s death?”

  He stopped, looking down at the damp, suety face. “What?”

  “You heard me. What if I said you were right all along. He killed your old man. And those other guys. Now you had enough?”

  He felt the air go out of him in a thin, grunting whistle. He felt like he was back in the deserted store, rolling around on the floor, gasping for air, and being kicked, again and again. He sat down, shaking so bad the drink was sloshing out of his glass. The wet, ice wet feeling of the liquor running down his hand and over his wrist broke through and he took a deep shuddering gasp, then another.