Cheap as Beasts

by Jon Wilson

  “I realize they aren’t up to your standard, Mr. Kelly, but times are hard.”

  “You think you’re a joker.” He didn’t seem to appreciate it. Tossing my duds on the foot of the far bed, he stepped over to a long, low dresser against the wall. The Old Crow was sitting there, nearly dead, beside two tumblers. “I rinsed some glasses. You want a drink?”

  “No, thanks. I never touch that cheap stuff. Stifles my wit.” I sat on the bed nearest the door. “Tell me what happened.”

  He poured some whiskey for himself, hoisting the glass and looking at his reflection in the half length mirror mounted atop the dresser. There in the light, having had water sprayed over it, his face wasn’t so bad after all. His left check was red and swollen and had clearly been tapped once or twice, and his upper lip had a single clean slit on the same side. But his left eye had escaped mostly unscathed, and his nose didn’t appear to be broken.

  He ran his free hand through his wet hair, sweeping it straight back. It was thick and wavy and didn’t want to be pushed around. He gave up and drained his glass instead. I noticed that his knuckles were raw.

  “Like I said, you fought back.”

  “I tried, I suppose.” He smirked and looked down, returning his tumbler to the dresser but not refilling it. He stared at the whiskey bottle a while, then turned to me with a wistful look. “Why do you keep saying it like it was foolish?”

  “Because it was. Look what it got you. As I tried to explain to Mrs. O’Malley, Velasco’s a businessman. There’s no profit in killing people. Or in roughing them up too much. For instance, if you’d just stood there and took it, they never would’ve strayed above the neck. Now you’re gonna have a swell black eye to explain to all the fellows at your club. And a busted lip. I don’t suppose you box.”

  He looked at himself in the mirror again and touched his belly, fingering another unhealthy bruise located just east of his navel. “I never got anywhere near Velasco, of course. He probably doesn’t even know I tried.”

  “Sure he does. He probably just has no idea why you tried.” He jerked his head toward me, and I tried to make my voice soothing. “I know, I’m not making any sense. Why don’t you tell it from the beginning?”

  He did, sparing a lot of details. After dragging the tale of our adventures in Marin from Mrs. O’Malley, he had contacted an attorney, Lester Benz, who had acted as a go-between for Velasco on another matter some months prior. Kelly admitted to being brusque with Benz. He also admitted to being distressed about recent events, and had demanded Benz arrange a face-to-face with Velasco. Benz had phoned back an hour or so later with the news an appointment had been set for seven o’clock. Kelly had arranged with his driver, Hector Papalia, and his butler, Fenton Barber, to stage a ruse to lose his police tail. Hector took Fenton, dressed as Kelly, in the Hudson sedan for a merry cruise. With the mechanic’s coveralls over his suit, Kelly had slipped out the back gate and taken public transport.

  “That’s what I call fancy espionage,” I told him.

  He had got my trousers on and was closing the buckle on his belt, but he stopped to look at me. The suspicious squint of his eye told me he wondered if I was joking again. Air filled his lungs as he squared his shoulders, letting me know that he was beginning to reassemble his wits. All in all, it wasn’t a half-bad play. A manly patch of brown curls bristled at the center of his chest as he flexed the muscles beneath them. “It was a farce. And when I got to Benz’s office, three of Velasco’s goons were already there. Benz claimed no one knew anything about a hold up. He made it sound like I was trying a frame. The conversation went downhill from there, and one of the men punched me in the stomach with something hard. I mean, harder than his fist.” He touched the big bruise on his belly again.

  I looked at the bruise and at the line of smaller curls that extended from the bottom of the aforementioned manly triangle, running down the center of his belly into the top of my trousers. I mean, my trousers he was wearing. I glanced back up at his face. “Where did all this happen?”

  “At Benz’s office in China Basin.”

  “How’d you end up down at the shipyards?”

  “Like you said, I fought back. I tried. They knocked me cold, and when I came to, I was in a car. They told me they were taking me to Butchertown. I panicked and I—” He stopped and tossed me a quick embarrassed glance. Then he stared at the worn yellow carpet. “I threw up.”

  I laughed, not politely, and he glared at me.

  “I suppose I had no business calling you a coward,” he said. “I threw up on the lap of the guy next to me.”

  “Hell, it worked, didn’t it? They pulled over, and that’s when you managed to get away?”

  “Something like that.” He mustered enough nerve to show me a slight grin. “It sounds nearly heroic the way you tell it. Give me another cigarette.”

  I did. We’d already killed two apiece while he orated and dressed and paced back and forth in his bare feet. He’d also finished the Old Crow all by himself. Lighting that third cigarette, he tossed me a sidelong glance. “You brought a gun.”

  I imagine he’d noticed enough tell-tale signs as I drove and then sat listening to his story. As mentioned, the Colt’s large and produces a sizeable bulge, but I peeled back my lapel to give him an honest peek.

  He said, “We could go back there together.”

  “To that shyster’s office? No offense.”

  “Why not? We could get the truth out of him.”

  “He’s probably long gone. Besides, I’m a great coward, remember?”

  He cussed at me in a way that I would not have expected him to know. Then he explained, “You know the reason I called you earlier this evening was to ask you to come with me. I shouldn’t have said that in the car. Damn it, why can’t we go back?”

  “You’re mixed up. You’re dizzy from the booze and the blows to the head. Have a seat and let me explain things. I mean, the truth that you think you might get from Benz. Because I can pretty much assure you you already got the truth from him. He and Velasco probably have no idea about any holdup this afternoon in Marin.”

  He had sat down, but that brought him right back up onto his toes. “Are you calling Miranda a liar?”

  I raised my hands, cowering just like I had for the bandits earlier, only letting him see by my face that it was a sham. “Don’t start fighting with me. I’m a coward and I’m armed.”

  He called me another name and sat down again on the other bed, facing me.

  I leaned back on my arms. “There was no holdup.”

  I paused and he waited, squinting at me. He took a drag, blew smoke and said, “Explain that.”

  “It was a set-up. At first I bought that the men were Velasco’s. They came from the wrong direction and we were just a few miles from his joint, but none of that ruled it out. I figured maybe she had arranged a payment of some debt.” Kelly clenched his fists into tight balls around the yellow coverlet on his bed, and I nodded to show him I sympathized. “She picked the spot we stopped at. It was obvious we were there by appointment. That’s why I played along.”

  That right there, just to be open and honest for the record, was a lie. I mean that last line. I hadn’t actually played along. While the pantomime unfolded, it occurred to me that maybe the reason I was there was so that I would try to stop it and possibly pay for my foolishness by taking a slug or three or four. But if Kelly had jumped up at my hinting his cousin might be a liar, I dreaded to think what he’d do if I let on that I suspected she’d tried to get me killed.

  I sighed. “So the payment, or what I thought was a payment, went off without a hitch other than the fact that a stupid lug thought it might be nice to introduce his gun to the back of my head. And they drove off scot-free. But then halfway home, she told me that she’d recognized one of them.”

  I stopped to see if he followed, but he was still playing the skeptic. I spelled it out slowly. “If Velasco had been behind the holdup, why would she have told me?”
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br />   “Maybe she hoped you would confront him.”

  “Exactly. Like what you did. Only, if Velasco had been behind it, he wouldn’t have been bothered by me calling him on it. He would have laughed at me.” I took another breather, savoring my smoke and hoping he might tie up the loose threads himself. He showed no signs of any thread-tying whatsoever. I exhaled, disgusted. “But say, for instance, some hotheaded gumshoe comes to him accusing him of a crime he had no hand in, that could get a reaction. As you found out.”

  He sat mulling it over. His eyes were aimed off to my right, but swinging slowly around as if taking careful notice of every detail along their path. He pushed his lips against one another, pulling them in and out and side to side. The last cigarette I’d given him was smoldering on the bedspread; he’d nearly crushed it when his fingers had clenched into fists, and it had broken apart completely as he opened his hands again. I reached over to get it, not wanting to start a fire, when he suddenly lunged at me.

  He knocked me back onto my sitter atop my bed. He went for the Colt, but I got my hands flat against his chest and shoved him off and he sat back down too. We both bounced up fast, and I beat him by seconds, but he came up swinging his fist at my head. I didn’t much mind that. It would have required me to lean six inches forward and three more to the side to get my face anywhere near the path of it, but I caught his wrist and gave it a twist. Simultaneously I dealt him a swift solid short punch atop that manly patch of chest hair. It knocked the wind out of him and he gulped like a landed fish, making the same face and the same lame mouth movements you’d expect from a dying trout.

  I twisted his arm some more, turning him around and bending his wrist up between his shoulder blades. He bowed over the bed, his face going down onto the rumpled coverlet. I planted my left knee in the small of his back and shifted a good portion of my weight to pin him down.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  He was still trying to get his breathing back on track. I’d hit him pretty hard, but it must have surprised him even more than it hurt him. Thinking I had a moment, I leaned down and crushed out his broken smoke under my thumb.

  He tried to twist his arm free, but that proved impossible. When his voice came, it was a defeated croak. “Get off.”

  “Not ‘til you explain to me what the hell just happened. People say I’m crazy. Hell, what were you thinking?”

  He lay there another moment, not fighting me at all, staring at something off to our right. His breath came deep and loud, occasionally interrupted by a sort of strangled hiccup. Drool seeped out of his open mouth onto the yellow bedspread.

  “Got hold of yourself?” I asked him.

  He stared a bit more and then nodded as well as he could with the side of his face pressed against the bed.

  I let him go but didn’t sit down. I backed away around the foot of the bed I’d been sitting on, stretching the distance between us to at least eight feet. He didn’t get up, but slid off his bed until his knees hit the carpet. His right arm unwound slowly to hang limp at his side.

  “Well?”

  He continued to lean against the mattress. “She didn’t do it.”

  “Who didn’t do what?”

  He called me another name. I figured maybe he was having some sort of wartime flashback. I’d seen such things before. He told me, “Miranda didn’t kill Ramona.”

  I cussed right back at him. “Who said she did? Not me. And why jump for my gun? The only thing that tells me is that you suspect she might have done it.”

  He sat back on his ankles and glared up at me. “You take that back.”

  I couldn’t help but smirk at him. “Sure. Cause what you need right now is another beating. Look at you, you’re about used up.” I put my smirk away. “I know, its your job to protect them. It’s what you’ve always done. But at some point you got to realize it may not be possible. They’ve sucked you dry. Maybe that’s what they do to their attorneys—suck them dry. Hell, maybe that’s what all rich folk do.”

  Turning his eyes down, he reached for the broken cigarette, lifting it delicately and wedging it between his lips. It was maybe the second saddest thing I’d ever seen, a grown man naked but for his borrowed trousers, kneeling beside that ugly yellow coverlet like a kid set to recite his bedtime prayers. The only thing that made it bearable was that the battered side of his face was turned away from me. And even in profile, I could still see him trying to suck on a crushed and cold cigarette.

  I pulled out my pack and matches and threw them at him. They bounced off the side of his head and tumbled to the carpet. He looked down to see what they were and then went for them with the same slow, deliberate movements he’d been making.

  “I tried to help you,” I told him. And then, feeling the fury surge up again in my chest I took a step toward him like I was going to kick him. And I wanted to. Boy, did I. I held my leg cocked. “You went for my gun!”

  Kelly didn’t seem to notice. He got a fresh cigarette into his mouth and set to work on a match.

  I lowered my foot to the floor. I watched him a bit longer, deciding he might have forgotten I was there. I sucked in some air through my nose. “I got you the room for the night.” That didn’t elicit any response, and I started for the door. As I was shutting it, I took a last look behind me. Kelly had settled on the floor, sitting back against the side of the bed. He was staring at something down by his feet and working methodically on doing away with my cigarettes.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I went down and got in the Zephyr and drove. It felt like I drove for hours, but it was probably nearer fifteen minutes. Or maybe it felt like fifteen minutes but was actually hours. I made two stops: one early on, to resupply myself with cigarettes, matches and whiskey, splurging on a bottle of ten-year-old single malt from my good friend Jack Daniels, and a second on a quiet street in North Beach. Sitting there, I decimated the entire bottle of Jack. The problem with tossing the extra coin for the good stuff is that it goes down too easy.

  Not that I didn’t do other things to occupy my time. For instance, parked in North Beach, I engaged in a little game of spot the stake-out, trying to decide from among the other half dozen or so vehicles resting along the block which, if any, contained cops. I had narrowed it down to two, a Chrysler and a Ford, the former parked across the street and way down nearly at the corner, and the latter parked two cars back. Almost certainly the Chrysler had two figures hunched down in it.

  Then, at about ten past twelve, the yellow Highlander cruised up and pulled into the driveway of a long low house set back on a lot across the street. My client got out and opened the garage door, steered the Highlander through, and closed and locked the door from the outside. He was in light-colored slacks and an open-collared shirt, with no jacket. A sack of what were probably groceries was in his arm. Going up the walk, he was sorting keys, and I couldn’t make out his face, but I wondered if he’d got over his disappointment. Even if you have money to spare, it can’t be easy to hear you’ve blown it on a disreputable private eye.

  Just as he entered the house, another car came along past me, a black forty-two Olds that was in no hurry. A shiny Dodge I hadn’t even suspected flashed its lights. The passing Olds flashed back and then sped off.

  So not only did I lose the game of spot the cops, but I’d sat staking out an empty house. And all I had to show for it was an empty bottle of Jack. Deciding I was outclassed, I started the Zephyr and blew.

  It seemed worthwhile to keep an eye on the mirrors since they may have noticed me sitting there and decided to investigate, but I didn’t spot anything. Of course, that didn’t mean they hadn’t noticed and weren’t interested; it might simply mean I really was outclassed or maybe just too damned drunk. Or both.

  I got the Zephyr to my garage and tipped the night man a dollar to put her to bed. I walked back to my office and put the Colt and the holster into the safe. It occurred to me splashing cold water on my face might not hurt, except I’d paid a lot for that bu
zz, and it seemed a shame to waste it. Instead I went back down and out, made a sharp right turn, took two steps and stopped.

  Neighbors tell me the Oriental Palace used to be called the Tokyo Palace, but then Pearl Harbor and Internment happened, and no one wanted to cop to being a Nip. Fortunately, for the actual Nips, most white folk can’t tell one from a Chink or even certain Malaysians. So, the Oriental Palace remained in operation, same management and staff, servicing the non-stop stream of sailors that funneled through San Francisco on their way to get killed by kamikazes. Of course, they serviced marines who died on the islands as well, and probably some who actually made it back alive—but it was never those guys I thought about when I stepped through that plain wooden door under that buzzing neon sign.

  The anteroom was tiny and painted sky blue, probably having taken its last coat back when the place was still called the Tokyo Palace. A dim light somewhere helped keep the room’s secrets hidden and reminded the clientele to do the same. Making my way up a narrow lane between two surprisingly comfortable-looking sofas along either side wall, I reached a counter protected by thick glass. It being well after midnight, no one was stationed at the window, but there was a button over which someone had posted a hand-written sign explaining Please Press Only Once. I pushed it, heard a far off buzz, and let it go.

  After a few moments, a curtain to one side of the counter was pushed aside and a woman moved into the protected space behind the glass. She was tall, in a cotton kimono with chopsticks shoved into the thick dark hair piled atop her head. “Good evening, welcome to the—” She saw it was me and dropped the B-movie accent. “Oh.”

  Sometimes I think one of the reasons I ever crawl into that hole is just so I can stand and let her look at me like that. It’s a goddamned outrage. An unholy yellow Nip, with her dime-store geisha face paint and her ridiculous fake accent and her cheap plastic fingernails, snarling down at me like I was shit on her least favorite shoes. It made me want to put my fist through the wall. But, I suspect, sometimes its good to be reminded of one’s place.