by Ross Thomas
Haere read the investment-counselor side and then turned it over. “Well, Haere we know,” he said. “Who's B. Maneras?”
“Maybe he's the one they want us to find out about.”
“You think it was planted?”
Citron shrugged. “If we hadn’t found it, you would’ve been talking to the cops.”
Haere thought about that and then shook his head. “I can’t decide whether it was planted or not.” He turned to examine Meade thoughtfully, then turned back to Citron. “What d’you think we should do about B. Maneras?”
“We can stop where we are and call the cops—or I can find out who Maneras is, which I don’t think is going to be too hard. You call it.”
Instead of replying, Haere once more turned back to the dead Drew Meade and again seemed to study him thoughtfully. After fifteen seconds went by, Citron said, “Well?”
“I’ll take the feet,” Haere said.
They had no trouble getting Drew Meade down the stairs, but they did experience some difficulty in folding him into the rear of Citron's 1969 Toyota sedan. Either Meade or the rug wouldn’t fold. They finally managed to fit him in by lowering the head end of the rug down onto the floor and letting the feet end stick up in the air, pointing at the rear window.
Haere slammed the rear door shut. “Well, that should do it,” he said, taking a step backward to see how it all looked.
“You’re coming, aren’t you?” Citron said.
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“It crossed my mind.”
“Mine, too,” Haere said as he opened the curbside front door and got in.
In Culver City they found an industrial side street with a vacant lot that contained six junked cars, and there they dumped Drew Meade. They left him, still wrapped in his cheap blue rug, lying between the remains of a 1970 Volvo and a 1973 Ford Fairlane.
Back on the Santa Monica freeway, Draper Haere said he coulduse a drink, and they decided on a bar in Venice they both knew, the Mainsail, a place that catered to serious drinkers.
After the waitress brought Haere his double Scotch on the rocks and Citron his double vodka, also on the rocks, they both drank and then waited for the other to begin. Finally, Haere lit one of his occasional cigarettes and said, “You’ve got something else, haven’t you? That's why you were outside waiting.”
“A place name. Tucamondo.”
Haere nodded as he drew a mental map and pinpointed Tuca-mondo. “Is that where it happened—the small secret war Meade was going to tell us about?”
“Maybe.”
Haere had some more of his Scotch. “How’d you find out—if you don’t mind my asking?”
“There's a guy from Miami called B. S. Keats. The B. S. stands for Byron Shelley. He's got a remittance-woman daughter who he wants me to baby-sit. Mr. Keats was once very active in the cocaine trade. He wanted to pay me to baby-sit his daughter, who's a touch fey. I agreed, but instead of money, I asked him to make a few phone calls. He did and came up with Tucamondo.”
“Just like that?”
Citron nodded.
Haere sighed and said, “I think you’d better tell me about Mr. Keats and his daughter.”
“Yes,” Citron said. “I think I’d better.”
They were on their second drink, singles this time, when Citron finished his report. The report was delivered to an impressed Haere in short paragraphs, none more than two sentences long. Citron had spoken in a flat, almost uninflected voice, pausing at the end of each sentence, pausing even longer before a new paragraph began, and spelling out each name as if he thought Haere might want to write it down. The most important facts were grouped together first, and therest were recited in their descending order of interest and importance. He's calling in a story, Haere marveled, as Citron ended his report with a precise accounting of how much of Haere's money he had spent thus far.
Draper Haere was silent for almost a minute as he digested what he had been told. “I rather liked the two Haitians,” he said. “The two bodyguards.” He paused. “And Keats, too. B. S. Keats. B for Byron, S for Shelley. I liked him, too. And all it took him was a couple of phone calls.”
“Four actually.”
“Four.”
There was another silence. Haere finished his second drink and said, “That's it, then?” “Not quite.”
Haere nodded slowly. “I sort of expected there’d be something else. A kicker.”
“Velveeta Keats.”
“Velveeta. I like her, too. The name, I mean.”
“She was once married to someone called Maneras.”
“R. Maneras, maybe?”
“J. Maneras. J for Jimmy—or Jaime.”
“Maneras. That's a pretty common name, isn’t it?”
“About like, oh, say, Hansen or Nichols.”
“Still a pretty common name.”
“Not if you find it written on a card that's folded up and stuck down inside some dead man's watch pocket just a couple of hours after you agree to baby-sit a lady who was once married to somebody called Maneras. I’d say that makes it a rather unusual name.”
Haere rattled the ice in his empty drink. “So where are we?”
“I think we’re being pointed in a certain direction, don’t you?”
“The right direction?”
“I don’t know.”
Haere rattled his ice again. “Velveeta Keats,” he said. “It's a pretty name, if you forget about the cheese.”
“I thought I’d take her to dinner tonight.”
“Someplace nice.”
“Yes.”
“Buy her some wine.” “She likes wine.”
“Maneras,” Haere said. “I wonder who B. Maneras is.”
“I’ll try to find out.”
“If you do, call me.”
“No matter how late?”
“Anytime,” Haere said.
CHAPTER 19
At 7:45 that night the two men who sometimes called themselves Yarn and Tighe parked their Oldsmobile 88 behind the Mercedes sedan in Gladys Citron's driveway. John D. Yarn was behind the wheel, Richard Tighe beside him. They examined the house briefly. A light was on in the living room. The porch light had also been turned on.
Without speaking, they got out of the car and walked through the iron gate and up the curving cement walk to the front door. Tighe rang the bell. The door was opened almost immediately by Gladys Citron. Nothing was said. The two men went inside, through the small foyer, and into the living room. Gladys Citron followed them.
Tighe headed for the tray that held the bottles and glasses. He spoke over his shoulder to Yarn. “What d’you want, Scotch?”
“Scotch.”
“Gladys?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Tighe mixed the two drinks, turned, and handed one to Yarn. Gladys Citron crossed to the wing-back chairs, hesitated, then sat down in the one where Drew Meade had died. She was wearing a longdressy robe of dark-blue silk. It went nicely with her hair. She leaned her head back against the chair, closed her eyes, and said, “Well?”
Tighe sat down in the chair opposite her and took a swallow of his drink. Yarn continued to stand, sipped some of his Scotch, and said, “I like that, Gladys. The way you plopped down in old Drew's chair.”
“It's my chair,” she said, her eyes still closed. “He merely died in it.”
“Well, it went about like we thought it would,” Tighe said. “They dumped him over in Culver City.”
“And?”
“They found the card.”
“You’re sure?” she said.
“It was gone, anyway.”
“I wonder which one,” Tighe said.
Yarn looked at him. “Which one what?”
“Found it.”
“Haere. I’d say Haere.” “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Yarn said. “Maybe just because he's foxier.”
Gladys Citron opened her eyes. “I won’t have him hurt.”
Tighe
smiled at her. “You should’ve thought of that before, Gladys.”
“He's still my son. They won’t have to hurt him.”
“We’ll tell them that, won’t we?” Tighe said to Yarn.
Yarn grinned and nodded. “Maybe we can hang a sign around his neck. ‘Handle with Care.’ Something like that.”
Gladys Citron leaned forward in her chair. When she spoke, her tone was surprisingly soft, but her stare was hard and unwavering. “I must not be making myself clear.”
Tighe finished his drink. “Sure you are, Gladys. You’re playing Mommy—maybe forty years late, but you’re playing it pretty well. You have to understand something, though. If it comes to choosing between your son and us, and I’m talking about all of us, then a hard choice will have to be made. I mean, if it comes to us or him, who do we choose?”
Gladys Citron leaned back in the chair and again closed her eyes. “I’ve got a migraine,” she said. “Why don’t you two run out and play somewhere.”
“Who, Gladys?” Yarn said.
“It needn’t come to that,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“But if it does?”
She opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling. “He was a very pretty baby. One of the prettiest I’ve ever seen. But then I was never really very much of a mother.”
“He was never much of a son either, was he?” Yarn said.
It was several moments before Gladys Citron answered, her gaze still fixed on the ceiling. “No,” she said, “not much.”
They drove to the restaurant in Santa Monica in Velveeta Keats's dusty yellow Porsche, a 911 model that had been given to her on her thirtieth birthday.
“I just went out to get the mail that day,” she told Morgan Citron, “and there the keys were with a little note in the mail-box that said, ‘Happy Birthday, honey—Love, Mama,’ but of course it was Papa that went out and bought it and all.”
She was not a good driver. At the corner of the Pacific Coast Highway and Topanga Canyon she ran through a red light and just missed a pickup truck that had two large brown dogs in its bed. The dogs barked at her as she barely scraped by on the right. Citron closed his eyes automatically and opened them only when he was sure the danger had passed. “When was this?” he said.
“My birthday? Last August. August ninth. I turned thirty. How’d you feel when you turned thirty?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I think it was just another day.”
“How about forty?”
“Forty. Well, forty wasn’t so hot.”
“Where were you?”
“In jail. In Africa.”
“What’d you do?”
“On my fortieth birthday?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think I cried,” he said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I did.”
“Did you do that much? Cry, I mean.”
“No,” Citron said. “Only that once.”
They drove in silence for nearly a minute until she broke it with a question. “Did he say anything about me?”
“Your father?”
Velveeta Keats nodded as she stared straight ahead, her jaw clenched, her hands wrapped tightly around the wheel. Her sudden tension was almost palpable, and Citron at first thought it might be because she feared the car, but then he realized she wasn’t a good enough driver to be afraid of the car. His answer was really what she feared. He answered carefully.
“We talked about you quite a lot, your father and I.”
“He tell you I made all that up about me and Cash, you know, going to bed together?”
“He said your brother died when you were seven and he was, I think, nine.”
“My old man,” she said slowly, choosing each word with care, “is a fucking liar.”
“I see.”
“Jimmy—I told you about him—he was my husband?”
“Right. Maneras, wasn’t it? Jaime Maneras, the one whose family used to own all the milk in Cuba.”
Nodding again, she said, “Well, it was just like I told you. Jimmy caught us in bed and shot Cash dead. With a pistol. Then Papa killed Jimmy, or had him killed, I reckon, and they shipped me off out here to be a widow woman.”
“When was all this?” Citron said. “I don’t think you said.”
“Last spring. June. The first part of June.”
“Did you ever know anyone else called Maneras whose first name started with an R?”
She gave her head a small hard shake. “The only other Maneras I ever knew was Jimmy's brother, Bobby.”
“Roberto, maybe?”
She took her eyes off the road to look at him. “Yeah, that would be his real name, wouldn’t it? But nobody I ever knew called him that. Everybody always calls him Bobby.”
“What did Bobby do?”
“He did coke with Jimmy and Papa. I told you about all that, didn’t I?”
“Not about Bobby.”
“He's older’n Jimmy was. Five, maybe six years older.”
“Where is he now?”
“In Miami, I reckon. At least, he was the last I heard. Why?”
“Somebody mentioned his name to me.”
“Papa?”
“No, not him.”
“Did he, Papa, I mean, did he, well, say anything else about me— anything at all?”
“He said for me to tell you hello,” Citron paused only briefly before deciding to embellish the father's sketchy greeting to his exiled daughter. “And to give you his love.”
Again, Velveeta turned to stare at him, disbelief on her face and in her tone. “He really say that?”
“Watch the road,” Citron said, and added, “He really did.”
They had dinner in the front parlor at Vickie's, which was the name of an expensive restaurant on the south edge of Santa Monica. The menu claimed, in a small italic note, that Vickie's was named for the Victorian mansion in which it was housed, a sixteen-room structure built in 1910 and painstakingly moved in 1977 from Boyle Heights inEast Los Angeles to its present location, where it had been, according to the note, “lovingly restored.”
Velveeta Keats read all this to Citron as they waited for the waiter to return and take their order.
“If it was built in nineteen-ten,” she said, “then it really couldn’t be Victorian, could it? She died before that, didn’t she? Queen Victoria, I mean.”
“Nineteen-oh-one, I think.”
“Then it's Edwardian, isn’t it? And instead of Vickie's they oughta be calling it Eddie's.”
Velveeta Keats's small attempt at humor, the first that Citron could recall, transformed her. She smiled broadly and her eyes half closed into arcs through which something merry slyly peeped. She even laughed, although it was really no more than a chuckle that sounded seldom used, but not at all rusty. Gone was the somber poor-thing look, as Citron thought of it, and in its place appeared a look of near radiance that was not too far from beauty.
Still smiling, she looked at him and said, “You know what I used to do a lot? I used to giggle a lot.”
He smiled back. “You should take it up again.”
Her smile went away, but slowly, as she picked up the menu again and studied it. “Maybe I will,” she said, looked up, smiled again, and asked, “Would it be okay if I had the sole?”
The sole proved to be excellent, as did Citron's steak, and between them they finished off a bottle and a half of wine. When the coffee came, she declined a brandy and, bare tanned elbows on the table, leaned toward Citron. The wine, or perhaps the evening, had given her face a higher color that was more glow than flush. Her eyes also shined with something, either pleasure or excitement or possibly anticipation. Citron felt it might even be all three.
“Can I talk to you about something?” she said. “Something I maybe should’ve talked to you about before?”
“Sure.”
“It's about last night when you came with the flowers and those two men were there.” She paused. “Can I talk to you about that?”
; “I don’t see why not—if you want to.”
“Well, they came up over the balcony from the beach and in through the sliding doors. They had those wet suits on and their masks and they had the gun, of course. Well, they didn’t say anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Not to me—not a word. One of them just pointed the gun at me and the other one, he just kept looking at his watch like, well, you know, like he was waiting for somebody.”
“Then I knocked.”
She nodded. “Then you knocked and came in and threw the flowers at them. They could’ve shot you.” “I know.”
“But they didn’t. All they did was leave. Then I got real scared and you were so great and everything, and I just never said anything about them just—you know—waiting for you. I reckon I should’ve, shouldn’t I—said something?”
Citron smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. But then again, maybe not.”
“Well, I’ve said something now. Does that make it all right?”
“That makes it perfect,” Citron lied, trying to determine what it was that caused the cold prickling on the back of his neck. Apprehension? he wondered. Dread? And then he realized it was neither. It was something far simpler, far more elemental, and so familiar that Citron almost said hello. It was fear.
CHAPTER 20
It had taken two men from Bekins Moving and Storage to carry the thing up the stairs and into Draper Haere's enormous room. The men, irritated because they had to work so late, were gone now, mollified by the twin $20 bills that had been thrust into their hands by the white-haired man in the $800 suit who watched, grinning broadly, as Draper Haere slowly circled the seven-foot-tall hatrack.
It was made from black cherry with two deep dishlike cast-iron weights at the bottom where the tips of wet umbrellas could be left to drain. Two beveled arms reached out and curved in on themselves. The curved arms were there to embrace the umbrellas. The main support, all scalloped and nicely carved, held an oval mirror. Surrounding the mirror were six protruding twisted steel pegs that ended in china knobs. On these, coats and hats could be hung. It was an imposing, even dominating piece of furniture, completely ugly, and Draper Haere found it magnificent.
