“They’d put me in jail. I just rented this crate.”
He gulped, performed a mental back somersault, and landed on his feet: “So why pay rent? On our terms, you can own a car for less money.”
“You wouldn’t be Generous Joe?”
“Mr. Culotti’s in the back. You want to talk to him?”
I said I did. He waved me toward the shed, and yelled: “Hey, Mr. Culotti, customer!”
A gray-haired man came out, looking cheaply gala in an ice-cream suit. His face was swarthy and pitted like an Epstein bronze, and its two halves didn’t quite match. When I got closer to him, I saw that one of his brown eyes was made of glass. He looked permanently startled.
“Mr. Culotti?”
“That’s me.” He smiled a money smile. “What can I do for you?” A trace of Mediterranean accent added feminine endings to some of his words.
“A man named Lemberg called you yesterday.”
“That’s right, he used to work for me, wanted his old job back. Nix.” A gesture of his spread hand swept Lemberg into the dust-bin.
“Is he back in Reno? I’m trying to locate him.”
Culotti picked at his nose and looked wise, in a startled way. He smiled expansively, and put a fatherly arm around my back. “Come in, we’ll talk.”
He propelled me toward the door. Hissing sounds came from the shed, and the sweet anesthetic odor of sprayed paint. Culotti opened the door and stepped back. A goggled man with a paint-gun turned from his work on a blue car.
I was trying to recognize him, when Culotti’s shoulder caught me like a trunk-bumper in the small of the back. I staggered toward the goggled man. The paint-gun hissed in his hands.
A blue cloud stung my eyes. In the burning blue darkness, I recalled that the room clerk Farnsworth hadn’t asked me for more money. Then I felt the sap’s soft explosion against the back of my head. I glissaded down blue slopes of pain to a hole which opened for me.
Later there was talking.
“Better wash out his eyes,” the first gravedigger said. “We don’t want to blind him.”
“Let him go blind,” the second gravedigger said. “Teach him a lesson. I got a hook in the eye.”
“Did it teach you a lesson, Blind-eye? Do what I tell you.”
I heard Culotti breathe like a bull. He spat, but made no answer. My hands were tied behind me. My face was on cement. I tried to blink. My eyelids were stuck tight.
The fear of blindness is the worst fear there is. It crawled on my face and entered my mouth. I wanted to beg them to save my eyes. A persistent bright speck behind my eyes stared me down and shamed me into continued silence.
Liquid gurgled in a can.
“Not with gasoline, greaseball.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? You’re a blind-eye greaseball, hamburger that used to be a muscle.” This voice was light and featureless, without feeling, almost without meaning. “You got any olive oil?”
“At home, plenty.”
“Go and get it. I’ll keep store.”
My consciousness must have lapsed. Oil ran on my face like tears. I thought of a friend named Angelo who made his own oil from the olives he grew on his hillside in the Valley. The Maffia had killed his father.
A face came into blurred focus, Culotti’s face, hanging slack-mouthed over me. I twisted from my side onto my back, and lashed at him with both feet. One heel caught him under the chin, and he went down. Something bounced and rolled on the floor. Then he stood one-eyed over me, bleeding at the mouth. He stamped my head back down into earthy darkness.
It was a bad afternoon. Quite suddenly it was a bad evening. Somebody had awakened me with his snoring. I listened to the snoring for a while. It stopped when I held my breath and started again when I let my breath out. For a long time I missed the significance of this.
There were too many other interesting things to do and think about. The staring speck was back again in the center of my mind. It moved, and my hands moved with it. They felt my face. It bored me. Ruins always bored me.
I was lying in a room. The room had walls. There was a window in one of the walls. Snow-capped mountains rose against a yellow sky which darkened to green, then blue. Twilight hung like blue smoke in the room.
I sat up; springs creaked under me. A man I hadn’t noticed moved away from the wall he’d been leaning on. I dropped my feet to the floor and turned to face him, slowly and carefully, so as not to lose my balance.
He was a thick young man with shiny black curls tumbling over his forehead. One of his arms was in a sling. The other arm had a gun at the end of it. His hot eyes and the cold eye of the gun triangulated my breastbone.
“Hello, Tommy,” I tried to say. It came out: “Huddo, Tawy.”
My mouth contained ropes of blood. I tried to spit them out. That started a chain-reaction which flung me back on the bed retching and cawing. Tommy Lemberg stood and watched me.
He said when I was still: “Mr. Schwartz is waiting to talk to you. You want to clean up a little?”
“Wheh do I do dat?” I said in my inimitable patois. “There’s a bathroom down the hall. Think you can walk?”
“I can walk.”
But I had to lean on the wall to reach the bathroom. Tommy Lemberg stood and watched me wash my face and gargle. I tried to avoid looking into the mirror over the sink. I looked, though, finally, when I was drying my face. One of my front teeth was broken off short. My nose resembled a boiled potato.
All of this made me angry. I moved on Tommy. He stepped back into the doorway. I lost my footing and fell to my knees, took the barrel of his gun in the nape of my neck. Pain went through me so large and dull it scared me. I got up, supporting myself on the sink.
Tommy was grinning in an excited way. “Don’t do things like that. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Or Culligan, either, I bet.” I was talking better now, but my eyes weren’t focusing properly.
“Culligan? Who he? I never heard of any Culligan.”
“And you’ve never been in Santa Teresa?”
“Where’s that?”
He ushered me to the end of the corridor and down a flight of steps into a big dim room. In its picture windows, the mountains now stood black against the darkening sky. I recognized the mountains west of Reno. Tommy turned on lights which blotted them out. He moved around the room as if he was at home there.
I suppose it was the living-room of Otto Schwartz’s house, but it was more like the lobby of a hotel or the recreation room of an institution. The furniture stood around in impersonal groupings, covered with plastic so that nothing could harm it. An antique bar and a wall of bottles took up one whole end. A jukebox, an electric player piano, a roulette layout, and several slot machines stood against the rear wall.
“You might as well sit down.” Tommy waved his gun at a chair.
I sat down and closed my eyes, which still weren’t focusing. Everything I looked at had a double outline. I was afraid of concussion. I was having a lot of fears.
Tommy turned on the player piano. It started to tinkle out a tune about a little Spanish town. Tommy did a few dance steps to it, facing me and holding the gun in his hand. He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself.
I concentrated on wishing that he would put his gun away and give me some kind of chance at him. He never would, though. He loved holding the gun. He held it different ways, posturing in front of his reflection in the window. I began to draft a mental letter to my congressman advocating legislation prohibiting the manufacture of guns except for military purposes.
Mr. J. Edgar Hoover entered the room at this point. He must have been able to read minds, because he said that he approved of my plan and intended to present it to the President. I felt my forehead. It was hot and dry, like a heating-pad. Mr. Hoover faded away. The player piano went on hammering out the same tune: music to be delirious by.
The man who came in next radiated chill from green glacial eyes. He
had a cruel nose and under it the kind of mouth that smiles by stretching horizontally. He must have been nearly sixty but he had a well-sustained tan and a lean quick body. He wore a light fedora and a topcoat.
So did the man who moved a step behind him and towered half a foot over him. This one had the flat impervious eyes, the battered face and pathological nervelessness of an old-fashioned western torpedo. When his boss paused in front of me, he stood to one side in canine watchfulness. Tommy moved up beside him, like an apprentice.
“You’re quite a mess.” Schwartz’s voice was chilly, too, and very soft, expecting to be listened to. “I’m Otto Schwartz, in case you don’t know. I got no time to waste on two-bit private eyes. I got other things on my mind.”
“What kind of things have you got on it? Murder?”
He tightened up. Instead of hitting me, he took off his hat and threw it to Tommy. His head was completely bald. He put his hands in his coat pockets and leaned back on his heels and looked down the curve of his nose at me:
“I was giving you the benefit, that you got in over your head without knowing. What’s going to happen, you go on like this, talk about murder, crazy stuff like that?” He wagged his head solemnly from side to side. “Lake Tahoe is very deep. You could take a long dive, no Aqualung, concrete on the legs.”
“You could sit in a hot seat, no cushion, electrodes on the bald head.”
The big man took a step toward me, watching Schwartz with a doggy eye, and lunged around with his big shoulders. Schwartz surprised me by laughing, rather tinnily:
“You are a brave young man. I like you. I wish you no harm. What do you suggest? A little money, and that’s that?”
“A little murder. Murder everybody. Then you can be the bigshot of the world.”
“I am a bigshot, don’t ever doubt it.” His mouth pursed suddenly and curiously, like a wrinkled old wound: “I take insults from nobody! And nobody steals from me.”
“Did Culligan steal from you? Is that why you ordered him killed?”
Schwartz looked down at me some more. His eyes had dark centers. I thought of the depths of Tahoe, and poor drowned Archer with concrete on his legs. I was in a susceptible mood, and fighting it. Tommy Lemberg spoke up:
“Can I say something, Mr. Schwartz? I didn’t knock the guy off. The cops got it wrong. He must of fell down on the knife and stabbed himself.”
“Yah! Moron!” Schwartz turned his contained fury on Tommy: “Go tell that to the cops. Just leave me out of it, please.”
“They wouldn’t believe me,” he said in a misunderstood whine. “They’d pin it on me, just because I tried to defend myself. I was the one got shot. He pulled a gun on me.”
“Shut up! Shut up!” Schwartz spread one hand on top of his head and pulled at imaginary hair. “Why is there no intelligence left in the world? All morons!”
“The intelligent ones wouldn’t touch your rackets with a ten-foot pole.”
“I heard enough out of you.”
He jerked his head at the big man, who started to take off his coat:
“Want me to work him over, Mr. Schwartz?”
It was the light and meaningless voice that had argued with Culotti. It lifted me out of my chair. Because Schwartz was handy, I hit him in the stomach. He jackknifed, and went down gasping. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, and that gave me a happy feeling which lasted through the first three or four minutes of the beating.
Then the big man’s face began to appear in red snatches. When the light in the room failed entirely, the bright staring speck in my mind took over for a while. Schwartz’s voice kept making tinny little jokes:
“Just promise to forget it, that will be that.”
“All you gotta do, give me your word. I’m a man of my word, you’re another.”
“Back to L.A., that’s all you gotta do. No questions asked, no harm done.”
The bright speck stood like a nail in my brain. It wouldn’t let me let go of the room. I cursed it, but it wouldn’t go away. It wrote little luminous remarks on the red pounding darkness: This is it. You take a stand.
Then it was a light surging away from me like the light of a ship. I swam for it, but it rose away, hung in the dark heaven still as a star. I let go of the pounding room, and swung from it up and over the black mountains.
chapter 17
I CAME to early next morning in the accident ward of the Reno hospital. When I had learned to talk with a packed nose and a wired jaw, a couple of detectives asked me who took my wallet. I didn’t bother disturbing their assumption that I was a mugging victim.
Anything I told them about Schwartz would be wasted words. Besides, I needed Schwartz. The thought of him got me through the first bad days, when I doubted from time to time that I would be very active in the future. Everything was still fuzzy at the edges. I got very tired of fuzzy nurses and earnest young fuzzy doctors asking me how my head felt.
By the fourth day, though, my vision was clear enough to read some of yesterday’s newspapers which the voluntary aides brought around for the ward patients. There was hardware in the sky, and dissension on earth. A special dispatch in the back pages told how a real-life fairy-tale had reached its happy ending when the long-lost John Galton was restored to the bosom of his grandmother, the railroad and oil widow. In the accompanying photograph, John himself was wearing a new-looking sports jacket and a world-is-my-oyster grin.
This spurred me on. By the end of the first week, I was starting to get around. One morning after my Cream of Wheat I sneaked out to the nurses’ station and put in a collect call to Santa Teresa. I had time to tell Gordon Sable where I was, before the head nurse caught me and marched me back to the ward.
Sable arrived while I was eating my Gerber’s-baby-food dinner. He waved a checkbook. Before I knew it I was in a private room with a bottle of Old Forester which Sable had brought me. I sat up late with him, drinking highballs through a glass tube and talking through my remaining teeth like a gangster in very early sound.
“You’re going to need a crown on that tooth,” Sable said comfortingly. “Also, plastic surgery on the nose. Do you have any hospital insurance?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I can’t commit Mrs. Galton.” Then he took another look at me, and his manner softened: “Well, yes, I think I can. I think I can persuade her to underwrite the expense, even though you did exceed your instructions.”
“That’s mighty white of you and her.” But the words didn’t come out ironic. It had been a bad eight days. “Doesn’t she give a good goddam about who murdered her son? And what about Culligan?”
“The police are working on both cases, don’t worry.”
“They’re the same case. The cops are sitting on their tails. Schwartz put the fix in.”
Sable shook his head. “You’re way off in left field, Lew.”
“The hell I am. Tommy Lemberg’s his boy. Have they arrested Tommy?”
“He dropped out of sight. Don’t let it ride you. You’re a willing man, but you can’t take on responsibility for all the trouble in the world. Not in your present condition, anyway.”
“I’ll be on my feet in another week. Sooner.” The whisky in the bottle was falling like a barometer. I was full of stormy optimism. “Give me another week after that and I’ll break the case wide open for you.”
“I hope so, Lew. But don’t take too much on yourself. You’ve been hurt, and naturally your feelings are a bit exaggerated.”
He was sitting directly under the light, but his face was getting fuzzy. I leaned out of bed and grabbed his shoulder. “Listen, Sable, I can’t prove it, but I can feel it. That Galton boy is a phony, part of a big conspiracy, with the Organization behind it.”
“I think you’re wrong. I’ve spent hours on his story. It checks out. And Mrs. Galton is quite happy, for the first time in many years.”
“I’m not.”
He rose, and pushed me gently back against the pillows. I was still as weak a
s a cat. “You’ve talked enough for one night. Let it rest, and don’t worry, eh? Mrs. Galton will take care of everything, and if she doesn’t want to, I’ll make her. You’ve earned her gratitude. We’re all sorry this had to happen.”
He shook my hand and started for the door.
“Flying back tonight?” I asked him.
“I have to. My wife’s in bad shape. Take it easy, now, you’ll hear from me. And I’ll leave some money for you at the desk.”
chapter 18
I SPRUNG myself out of the hospital three days later, and assembled myself aboard a plane for San Francisco. From International Airport I took a cab to the Sussex Arms Hotel.
The room clerk, Farnsworth, was sitting behind the counter at the rear of the dim little lobby, looking as if he hadn’t moved in two weeks. He was reading a muscle magazine, and he didn’t look up until I was close enough to see the yellows of his eyes. Even then he didn’t recognize me right away: the bandages on my face made an effective mask.
“You wish a room, sir?”
“No. I came to see you.”
“Me?” His eyebrows jumped, and then came down in a frown of concentration.
“I owe you something.”
The color left his face. “No. No, you don’t. That’s all right.”
“The other ten and the bonus. That makes fifteen I owe you. Excuse the delay. I got held up.”
“That’s too bad.” He craned his neck around and looked behind him. There was nothing there but the switchboard, staring like a wall of empty eyes.
“Don’t let it bother you, Farnsworth. It wasn’t your fault. Was it?”
“No.” He swallowed several times. “It wasn’t my fault.”
I stood and smiled at him with the visible parts of my face.
“What happened?” he said after a while.
“It’s a long sad story. You wouldn’t be interested.”
I took the creaking new wallet out of my hip pocket and laid a five and a ten on the counter between us. He sat and looked at the money.
The Galton Case Page 13
