by Ted Lewis
And the guys, the two guys, one of them could play the lead in The Tab Hunter Story, and the other one could be his faithful friend who gets the hand of Tab’s girl’s confidante. They’re even wearing ties.
The four of them spill into the silence of the bar, full of life, apparently only conscious of their own immediate situation. The girls allow the guys to shepherd them to a booth and there’s a lot of stuff about deciding what they’re all going to have. Then the one who looks like Tab Hunter detaches himself from the group and comes over to the bar to order. But of course his name isn’t Tab Hunter; for all his blondness he’s called Harold Schwarz, and I know him very well. And he knows me and Murdock, but he’s not aware of either of us until he’s two-thirds of the way to the bar and then, when he realizes that Murdock and Boldt are sitting where they’re sitting, it’s too late for him to do anything else but complete his approach. The bartender glides into a serving position and Schwarz orders four draught beers. The bartender goes to work and Schwarz begins to go back to the booth but as he turns from the bar Murdock says to him, “Hello, Harold.”
Schwarz pretends he hasn’t heard and keeps on going but Murdock says, “Talk to me Harold, will you?”
I look toward the booth. None of the others is taking any notice of what’s going on at the bar and Harold takes this in too, so it’s easier for him to turn around and look at me and Murdock.
“Never knew you worked this ground, Harold,” Murdock says.
“There’s nowhere he doesn’t work, is there, Harold?” I say.
“Join us,” Murdock says, sliding off his seat and leaving room for Schwarz to get between the two of us. “Have a drink.”
“I just ordered one,” Schwarz says.
“Have a drink,” I tell him, so he climbs onto the stool and sits between us glancing over his shoulder at the booth. I say to him, “Don’t worry, Harold. Your partner won’t be leaving without you.”
“What would you like, Harold?” Murdock asks. “Not beer, hey? Something a little stronger?”
“A Bacardi and Coke,” Harold says. “Some ice.” Murdock passes his order.
“So,” I say to him, “it’s looking good today, hey? Nice merchandise. Should work out good, something classy. A collector’s piece for buffs. Only make sure the dog isn’t a little mutt, huh? You need at least let’s say, a Borzoi; I mean, it’d be a real shame to penny pinch on production costs, you agree?”
Schwarz shrugs and gives a faint smile. The bartender sets the drink down in front of him but Schwarz makes no move to touch it.
“What I can never figure,” I say, “is not the pick up, not the act, because I can see how that would work, you looking the way you do and all. No, what I can never figure is the transition, the pitch; where you go from this to getting them to do what you always manage to get them to do.”
“That’s right,” Murdock says. “How’s it done, Harold? Paint the picture for us.”
I look over my shoulder toward the booth. The two girls can’t see what’s going on but Schwarz’s partner has picked up the scene and he’s trying to figure whether to sit tight or make for the exit. Schwarz picks up his glass and takes a sip.
“You guys sure never let a guy get bored,” he says. “I mean, how can a guy get bored trying to figure out what the guys he’s talking to are talking about?”
“You don’t know what we’re talking about?” Murdock says.
“That’s right,” Schwarz replies.
Murdock leans away from the bar slightly, makes a right- angle of his arm and punches Schwarz hard in the kidneys. Schwarz arches his back and I grab his tie and pull hard so that Schwarz’s face crashes against the counter, in the process overturning his glass so that a mixture of rum and Coke seeps into the lapel of his white sportscoat. I keep my grip on Schwarz so that he can’t lift himself up from the counter. The bartender has already turned his back on the scene and is now bending down below the level of the counter to attend to some stock-taking he’s overlooked. I look over my shoulder again and now the girls are into the scene but they don’t know what the Christ to make of it. The guy with them doesn’t want to have to think of how to express the essence of the situation to them so he gets up and begins to wander across in the direction of his partner.
“You don’t know what we’re talking about?” Murdock says.
Schwarz can’t answer for the moment, so Murdock punches him in the kidneys one more time.
“Hey,” says Schwarz’s partner, a little unsure, and who wouldn’t be. I turn around on my stool and face Schwarz’s partner.
“Yes?” I say to him.
Schwarz’s partner is not as good-looking as Schwarz but he’s of the same mold and he even has creases in his pants.
“What gives?”
“You want some of it?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer. Murdock says to Schwarz, “You still don’t know what we’re talking about?”
Schwarz manages to nod his head.
“That’s good,” Murdock says. “Because now I don’t have to embarrass myself by going into details.”
“Like I always say,” I say to Schwarz, “my partner’s too sensitive for this job. That’s why he gets angry with people like you. You bring him face to face with his problem.”
Schwarz breathes out and with the breath comes the word “Florian.” I smile and close my fist over a piece of his hair turning his head so that he’s looking up at me.
“Florian,” I say to him, still smiling. “Oh, yeah. He’ll look after you. We wouldn’t dare because Mr. Florian would take care of it, and there’d be no point. But Harold, I’ve got to tell you, you’re wrong. Because if you got trouble from us we could make it stick because basically Mr. Florian wouldn’t even get his secretary to get the number for him. It’d be too much trouble because he doesn’t care enough. He’ll just get somebody else, even double their pay, and if that annoyed you and you decided to talk to us about Mr. Florian,, you wouldn’t be telling us something we didn’t already know, and basically, we don’t care about you either. We could take you down now, but you don’t interest us today. We don’t care about you today. We just wanted to say hello. Another day, we’ll want to talk to you, but not now. So why not live a little, Harold? Enjoy life. George, buy Harold another drink. His other drink got spilled.”
Murdock calls the bartender and I release my grip on Schwarz’s hair and my grip on his tie. He straightens up as best he can and the bartender sets down three more drinks in front of us. Murdock and I lift our glasses but Schwarz slides off the stool, bumps into his partner and makes his way back over to the booth, his partner following after him. The two girls are open-mouthed. Schwarz says something to them and they get up very quickly, all four of them hustling out of the bar in a tight bunch, not one of them ever once looking back.
Murdock says, “He’s one I’ll enjoy, one day.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But Florian’d never let us make it stick.”
Murdock shrugs. “It depends. Maybe one day it’ll suit Florian to wave goodbye to Harold.”
“And you think he’ll have us to hold the flags? You’re crazy. Harold would get whacked and even the devil’d have a hard time finding the corpse.”
The bartender drifts back up the bar toward us.
“Two more,” I tell him.
He gets us two more.
“You get busy here these days?” I ask him as he sets them down.
“No,” he says, keeping a straight face, “but we get plenty of action.”
Murdock grins. “You know him?” he says.
“Never seen him in my life before,” the bartender replies.
“Sure,” Murdock says. “Have a drink?”
“In the mornings I drink gin and fresh orange juice.”
“And the rest of the day you d
rink anything,” I say.
The bartender grins and goes to work on his drink.
“Santell around?” I ask him.
“Mr. Santell?” he says, slicing the lemon peel. “Sure. He’ll be in his office, I guess.”
I slide off my stool. “We’ll be back to pick up our tab,” I tell him.
Murdock follows suit and we walk out of the bar across the lobby to the reception desk. The desk clerk is alone now but the memory of the bitchy dame and her husband lingers on in his expression. I stand in front of him. “I want to see Santell,” I tell him.
The desk clerk looks at me. “Mr. Santell’s very busy,” he says.
“Too busy to come and do your job for you besides his own?”
The desk clerk practices his sneer but he picks up a phone. A second later he says, “A couple of cops want to see Mr. Santell.”
Somebody on the other end of the phone says something.
“Who?” the clerk asks, looking at us.
“Boldt and Murdock,” I tell him.
“Boldt and Murdock,” he says into the phone. There is a pause; then he puts the phone back on its cradle. “He’ll see you,” he says.
I smile at him and shake my head then Murdock and I walk to the door that leads to the short corridor down to Santell’s office. At the end of the corridor there is a small reception area and as soon as she sees us come through the door into the corridor, Santell’s secretary gets up and opens the door into Santell’s office, waiting by it, smiling, as if we’re the best thing that’s happened to her all day. We go into Santell’s office.
If Santell ever went to college, he must have been voted the Guy Most Likely to Become a Hotel Manager. He must have looked like a hotel manager in his crib. He is the neatest man I ever saw. He’s also the greyest man I ever saw. His white shirt looks a riot of color against the rest of his outfit. Even his office must have been designed by a decorator who’d lost his colored pencils. No wonder his secretary is pleased to see us.
Santell gets up and leans forward slightly over his desk and stretches out his hand in Murdock’s direction. For a second Murdock is thrown but then he gets the idea and shakes hands with Santell, then Santell shakes hands with me and indicates the two chairs which have been neatly arranged on our side of the desk. We sit down, followed by Santell.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he asks, and while he waits for an answer the secretary reappears with a tray and on the tray is a very nice coffee set. She puts the tray down and Santell reaches for the coffee pot and pours, leaving us to add our own cream and sugar. “We have a scare,” I tell him. “And we need your cooperation. We have this note, one of those threatening notes. Somebody says they’re thinking of loosing off a few shots at a prominent person and, of course, as yet we’ve no way of knowing whether or not it’s for real, but we have to check everything out. Now your hotel is well placed to cover the station frontage. Obviously, on the day in question we’ll have this place staked out pretty well, have everything pretty well tied down, but we’re not, of course, only interested in preventing anything happening, we’d like very much to get the guy who sent the note. And so what we’d like you to do is to let us look at your bookings for the past week and for next week and at the same time let us have any observations you may have on any of your present guests that you think might be interesting to us.”
Santell takes a sip of coffee and then shakes his head. “There’s nothing for you here,” he says. “Not now at least. That I can tell you for certain. There’s no one in this hotel at this time who you could possibly be interested in.”
“Well,” I say, “you’re very certain. That’s good because it means you keep a sharp eye on your customers, but, well, maybe there’s someone who you’d never think could interest us in a million years, and, maybe, they just might.”
Santell shakes his head again. “To begin with,” he says, “there are only three singles booked in the hotel at this moment. Now none of them has a room facing front, and if they had, none of them is staying beyond the weekend. So that rules those three out. Apart from a honeymooning foursome, I would hazard a pretty fair guess that none of our remaining guests are below the age of fifty, or are other than what they appear to be: good solid citizens who are too close to cashing in insurance policies to be over-concerned about firing off rifles at other people, political or otherwise.”
“Just the same,” I say to him, “I’d like to see your register, and your advance booking list.”
“Of course,” he says, pressing a buzzer on his desk, “anything you wish.”
“I mean, even you could overlook some things. Or did you know Harold Schwarz was operating in your bar these days?”
For the first time a trace of color shows on Santell’s face, but only very faintly.
“Harold Schwarz?” he says.
“Mr. Santell doesn’t know who Harold Schwarz is, George,” I say to Murdock.
“Oh really?” Murdock says. “Well, well.”
Santell colors up a little bit more.
“Do you think, we ought to tell him?” I say to Murdock.
“No, better not,” Murdock says. “I’d hate to upset Mr. Santell.”
Santell’s secretary comes in and Santell snaps at her to get the stuff we’re asking for and it’s her turn to color up. Murdock and me just sit there and wait for the girl to go out and come back again. She leaves the stuff on the desk and goes out. Santell makes no move to hand us the stuff so Murdock leans forward and begins to go through it. I take a cigarette from a box on Santell’s desk and say to him, “I’ll be putting a couple of men in the hotel as of today and my partner here’ll be taking a room for the duration. I want him to have a room overlooking the station and I want the rooms on either side to be kept vacant. The rest of your guests I’m afraid will have to put up with a certain amount of inconvenience—spot checks, that kind of thing, but don’t complain to me; Bolan’s your man or Draper—Draper’s authorizing everything. Or even Mr. Florian, if you care to complain, but he won’t thank you for it because this is going to be one of those nice things, leading city businessmen cooperating with the vigilant police department, and the papers will write it nice and big. So there you have it.”
Murdock says, “I can’t see anything in the book, but maybe we should have a couple of these advance bookings checked out.”
“We’ll have someone come over and get some copies made and hand all that over to Bolan,” I tell him.
I light my cigarette and then I pick up my coffee cup. Santell watches me drink then says, “With or without a bath?”
“What?”
“The room for your partner. With or without a bath?”
“Oh, with,” I tell him. “Us dirty pigs got to bathe all the time. Like the niggers, we got to take care of our stink.”
Santell doesn’t say anything else. Murdock puts the stuff back on the desk and the two of us stand up.
“Thanks for your time,” I say to Santell, but this time he doesn’t get up and give us the treatment.
Murdock and I leave the office and go down the corridor back into the lobby. I start to make it back to the bar.
“Where you going?” Murdock says.
I turn around. Murdock has stopped by the reception desk.
“I’m going to pay the bar tabs,” I tell him.
“Why?”
“One more guy on our side.”
I turn and go back into the bar. The bartender takes up his position. I sit down on a stool and I say to him, “You want to be of some assistance to the Police Department?”
“That depends,” he answers.
“On what?”
“On whether or not I have a choice.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think I’m going to be helping the Police
Department.”
“That’s right,” I tell him. “Now, all I want you to do is, the next time I come in, to tell me about anybody who has come in here you think I’d be interested in. And I mean anybody. Particularly anybody staying in the hotel.”
“Well,” he says, “that’s fine. I can do that for you, but I’m not really sure of what you have in mind. It’d be easier if I knew what kind of person you were thinking of.”
“Yes, I know it would,” I tell him. “But if I had an idea of who I was looking for then I wouldn’t be asking bartenders to work on my behalf. Just anybody, when you look at them you get a kind of feeling... I don’t know, they could be capable of anything. Loners, mostly, I guess.”
“Well maybe you could tell me what exactly they’re most likely to be capable of.”
“Assassination.”
The bartender strokes his throat with his forefinger. I nod.
“Yeah,” he says. “Well, if anybody comes in with a hunting rifle, I’ll let you know.”
