The ambulance arrived and the attendants came, loaded Detto onto a gurney, and took him away. Wilson rode in the ambulance, and Roy and I stood in front of Louie’s to get away from the stink in the alley and talked a bit more.
I told him I wouldn’t press charges. “The kid’s sick,” I said, “he got nothing for his efforts, and I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”
Roy’s voice was as bitter as a dandelion. “Why protect him? He’s only trouble.”
“All the same, I’m not interested in making charges. You’ll get him for something else. A narcotics charge, maybe.”
With gritted teeth and growing anger, Porter said, “But maybe we don’t and the next guy he pulls a knife on gets dead. You’re protecting the wrong guy, Summers.”
“I’m not protecting anyone,” and I wiped a hand across my lips. “I’m not interested because it’s a waste of time. Put him up on charges, and what will he get? He’s still too young for Quentin, so maybe he’ll spend a little time at Nelles, and then what? He’ll be back on the streets before you know it.”
Roy spit and said, “In Nelles, he won’t use that damn knife. Not on guys like you. Not on young dolls who make bad jokes.” He poked at me hard with his fingers and said, “That’s something, Summers. It’s not nothing.” He spit again, looked at me with weary eyes, and said, “And maybe it’s the best we can ever get.”
After that, there wasn’t much to say, and Porter left, and I walked over to Buster’s garage for my car. I was still hungry and thought I’d stop at Willie’s Drive-in on Hollywood Boulevard for something to eat on my way home, maybe a plate of their spaghetti with chili. I liked that.
But Diane didn’t. And she hated eating in the car. She said she could smell the food for days after and there was just something wrong about being shut away like that. So, we always went in for table service, and I still wouldn’t eat in the car but always went inside.
It was late when I parked the Chevy down the street from Willie’s. The weather was changing, and the rain wanted to fall, but I guess it didn’t think it was worth the effort because it just hung there, heavy and wet. Willie wasn’t running any fans, and the air was just as thick inside. I took a table near an open window hoping for a breeze and ordered the spaghetti and chili.
As I waited, I watched the traffic, and wondered where everyone was going and what kept them all moving. I heard a siren far off. Maybe someone was hurt. Maybe, like Diane, they had run out for an onion and some carrots, stepped in front of a car, and that was that. And somewhere, maybe, a guy was waiting for a woman who never would come back.
Maybe somewhere people were drinking, I thought, and some of those would be laughing and happy. Maybe they even thought they were in love. Or maybe they were just lying to themselves, hoping to shove away their loneliness for a few hours. And how would they know which was which?
But then I thought that, somewhere, some guy was playing a horn and he wasn’t lying. And maybe someone was listening.
I lit a cigarette, blew pale smoke at the window, and watched it bounce away.
I thought about Detto and Roy Porter. I had no use for the kid and felt about him the same as Roy did: he’d be trouble for the rest of his life. He’d be in and out of the joint – maybe more in than out. He’d do his time, then hit the streets, and maybe even be good for a few months. But then he’d need money or just want to prove he was still a man, and he’d pull something – stick up a liquor store, maybe strong-arm some guy to get a wallet and a watch, maybe cut somebody in a fight – and be back in the can. And every time he got out, the cops would be waiting for him. Watching him. He’d never have a penthouse at Presidents Quay or a big, fancy house on a lake. He’d never drink with guys like Clark Gable or George Raft. He’d never get a break. He might be dead before he was thirty – a lot of them are. But until then, he’d get all the law and justice Los Angeles could throw at him.
I told myself the story I had of Benny and the jewels and the Henderson kid. It seemed almost complete, and it all made sense, even if I still had questions and there were holes to fill. But I never expected my cases to give me all the answers. Few were ever complete from start to finish. They all had facts that went nowhere or contradicted everything else. They all left unanswered questions. That’s the way life is.
But I was sure I needed one answer, though. I needed the name of the careful guy who sat with Henderson and Benny at the Gilbert. The big guy with the big house. The guy with the money.
Roger Clayman had been a big guy with a big house. But he was dead by the time Benny took Jack Henderson up to room 914 and wasn’t lively enough to sit in the lobby of the Gilbert, waiting for Benny’s call. He also didn’t live in the right part of town. And who would pay to have someone steal from them?
But why did Clayman want David Henschel to make such good quality fakes? And who did he expect to fool with them?
Well, maybe those were questions that went nowhere and meant nothing. And maybe I’d never know.
The spaghetti came, covered in chili, and heaped on the plate, with a lettuce salad on the side. It was more than I could eat, but I made a good-sized dent in it. I ordered some coffee, smoked another cigarette, and thought about Walford and his film. And I started to think that, maybe, Henderson wasn’t just a crook.
But then crooks come in all kinds, don’t they? You can find them in churches, standing in front of crosses, crying for Jesus, and swearing you can buy your way into heaven – if you put enough money in their collection basket. Phony shepherds fleecing the frightened and the well-meaning. Worse are those godly and righteous men who claim they know who is holy and who is unclean – know who deserves our love and who doesn’t – and tell us to hate our unrighteous neighbors to prove our commitment to their God.
And other crooks stand nobly with their flags and official titles, grasping for everything they can take, despite the bags of graft already overflowing at their feet. Then there are those who hide behind their piles of money, as if every cent is proof of their goodness and greatness. And some just beat old men to death – old men who don’t have any money but aren’t afraid to fight back.
If you spend your time with enough crooks, you start seeing them everywhere – and the darkness just gets deeper.
I smoked my cigarette to the end and smashed it into a flimsy tin ashtray, scraping burnt, black streaks across the “Willie’s” pressed into the metal.
I paid my bill and went home.
When I got there, my door was unlocked. Someone had closed it carefully enough so that would look shut to anyone who might pass by. But it wasn’t latched; it was open.
I put my back against the wall nearest the hinged side of the door, pulled my gun from under my arm, stood there, and listened quietly for several minutes. Hearing nothing, I stretched out my arm and put my hand against the door. I took a deep breath, braced my hip and my leg against the wall, and shoved hard. The door swung open. I waited and listened some more, my gun ready.
I heard nothing. I peered into the room, bit by bit. Seeing nothing and hearing nothing, I slipped into the apartment. Quietly and cautiously. No one was in the rooms I could see from the doorway.
I searched the rest of the place, slowly and carefully, and found no one. I put away my gun and went back to the living room and closed the door.
Whoever had been there hadn’t come to search the place or to steal anything; they hadn’t tossed the joint, and they hadn’t left it a mess. But they had left subtle, and unmistakable, markers that they had been there. A glass where it shouldn’t be; a newspaper open on the dining table; a pillow that belonged on the sofa placed in my chair instead; a book on the wrong night table.
They wanted me to know they had found me, and they could come and go as they pleased. They wanted me to know I wasn’t safe. And I could only think of four people who would have wanted to send me that message.
I took off my coat and tie and sat in my big chair. I lit a cigarette and smoked for several minutes without moving. I smoked until that cigarette was a stub and then lit a second off the still burning end of the first. When the second was done, I lit a third. By the time I snuffed out the third cigarette, rubbing it into the glass ashtray until it was a dark smudge, I thought I knew who my visitor was.
Benny was the obvious choice, but this was too careful, too subtle, and too professional to be his work. Benny’s messages were delivered personally. He would have been in my apartment – sitting in my chair, drinking my booze, holding a gun – when I got home. And he wrote his messages in pain when he could. He couldn’t resist the opportunity to hurt someone. He liked to see men suffer, knowing he was the cause.
Konstanidis was another possibility. I had thought about that one for a long time, but I couldn’t get it to work at all. If he had wanted to throw a scare at me, he could have done it at the Golden Tower, or he could have had his boys take me somewhere out of the way – like Ballona Creek. He could have done it with no mistakes and from miles away. He wouldn’t have had to invite me to his home, pretend everything was all cozy and warm, and make that big show about the agreement he said wasn’t any kind of agreement. He wouldn’t have had to send someone into my apartment.
Benny’s big man was the third. I thought about all I had done over the last two days, looking for some place I had been or something I had done that might have put me close enough to make him nervous, but I couldn’t find it. Most everyone I remembered talking to about Benny – Bruce and Russ, Davey Washington, Walford and Konstanidis – knew very little. There was Spoons, but he only led back to Benny as far as I knew. Detto knew the most and ran in Benny’s circle, but I couldn’t see how the kid could have told anyone that we had talked. Certainly not in time for anyone to come and frisk my place. In any case, it looked like this guy with the big money relied on Benny for all the hard work – as if Benny was the only crook he knew – and I had already decided Benny was too dirty for this stunt. That seemed a good reason to rule the man out, but it didn’t feel right dismissing him either. In the end, I admitted I couldn’t do anything with the guy. I had no good reason to leave him in but no good reason to leave him out. He would have to stay a curious possibility.
And that left Nick Drakos. From all I knew and had seen, he was professional enough to pull this kind of job. And it sure seemed he wanted to scare me off. The bruises on my arm and shoulder proved that. But on my score card, he was already dead.
I had spent most of the second cigarette and a good part of the third thinking about that and decided I was wrong. Drakos had to be alive. There were lots of boys in Los Angeles professional enough to do the Bolardis job the way it had been done, but Drakos was close enough to the big gunsel to do it without much trouble. I thought about the fire in Els’s kitchen and my fight in the alley down by the St. George. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Drakos was the one person who had a reason for wanting Bolardis, Els, and me out of the picture. After all, we were the three who could put him on the scene when Ray Schmidt was killed.
By the end of that third cigarette, I had convinced myself it was the best answer of the four.
I looked at my watch, and it was almost 11:30. I thought about calling Cliff but decided it could wait until the morning. I spent some time thinking about taking a hotel room for the night. But I decided it wouldn’t make much difference, and that, anyway, I wanted to get some sleep and didn’t want to play games for an hour or two, just to be sure I wasn’t being followed.
I didn’t fix a drink and I didn’t smoke another cigarette. Instead, I put a chair against the apartment door and stacked the few pots I had on it as a makeshift alarm. I undressed and put my gun under the pillow. I wound and set the alarm clock and may have been asleep midnight for the first time in almost a week.
Lettres d'un Inconnu 