“We’ve got one down, ten to go. I’ll get them all provided they haven’t skipped town with no leads,” I said. “One a day, something like that. All the people are working.”
“Good, good. I have faith in you. You’ll do your usual superb job.” Cal looked at me seriously. “Any plans for your future? It’s been a while now; I think you’ll make it.”
“No real plans, as yet. Europe this fall, though. Work will slack off here, and I can catch the great orchestras of Germany and Austria at the beginning of their concert seasons.”
“You speak the language, too.”
“Enough to get by. I want to hear great music in its birthplace. That’s the main thing. Check out Beethoven House in Bonn, the Vienna Opera, Salzburg. Take a boat ride up the Rhine. I have a feeling that there are all kinds of hot chamber ensembles, unsung, playing in little country inns all over Germany. I’ve got the money, the weather is good in the fall, and I’m going.”
“Before you leave, we’ll talk. I’ll give you a list of good hotels and restaurants. The food can be great over there — or lousy. Right now, though, I have to split. I’m due on the tee in half an hour. Do you need any money?”
“Not for myself, but I need three hundred seventy-six dollars and twenty cents for my driver.” Cal went to the wall safe, extracted the amount, and handed it to me.
“You take care, Fritz,” he said, leading me outside, grabbing a twenty-pound bag of dried dog food as he locked the door behind him. He called to his secretary, “Feed Barko, will you, honey? I think he’s hungry.” The attractive, bespectacled blonde smiled and went for Barko’s dish.
I looked at Cal and shook my head. “All the money that dog has made for you, you cheap fuck, and you still feed him that dried shit?”
“He likes it. It’s good for his teeth.”
“He doesn’t have any teeth.”
“Then I must be a cheap fuck. I’ll see you, Fritz.”
“Take care, Cal.”
Larry, the sales manager at Casa, fixed me up with an old Cutlass demo, loaded. I told him I’d hang onto it for a week or so and return it gassed up. Rather than check out the places where my repo’ee’s worked, I decided to take the day off, maybe see my friend Walter. I headed down Ventura toward Coldwater. It was ten-thirty, and hot and smoggy already. Driving over the hill I felt good; relaxed and even a little hungry. Coming down into Beverly Hills, I felt again that my life was going to change.
2
I’ve got my own tax shelter, the Brown Detective Agency. It’s a detective agency in name only. As far as the IRS knows, I’m a starving gumshoe, declaring nine grand in total income and paying $275 in income tax. I save about eighty bucks a year by claiming myself as a deduction. I used to advertise in the Yellow Pages, before the repo racket got lucrative, and actually handled a few cases, mostly runaway kids who had dropped into the drug culture; but that was two years ago, when I had more illusions about myself as an urban manipulator. I still retain my office, an $85 write-off, in a crummy office building on Pico in Rancho Park. I keep my library there and go there when I want to read. It’s a dump, but it’s air-conditioned.
I decided to head for the office now, since Walter was probably still passed out from last night’s bout with T-Bird and TV. I parked in the lot, crossed the alley to the Apple Pan, and returned with three cheeseburgers and two coffees to go. I had wolfed down two of the burgers by the time I opened my office door. It was musty inside. I hit the air-conditioning immediately and settled into my chair.
It’s not much of an office; just a small, square room with Venetian blinds over a rear window facing an alley, a big, imitation-walnut desk with a naugahyde swivel recliner behind it for myself, a cheesy Bentwood rattan chair for clients, and an official-looking file cabinet that contains no files. There are two photographs of me on the wall, both designed to inspire confidence: Fritz Brown, circa 1968, my Police Academy graduation picture; and one of me in uniform taken three years later. I was drunk when that one was taken and, if you look closely, you can tell.
I scarfed my last burger, flipped on KUSC and sat back. The music was early baroque, a harpsichord trio; nice, but without passion. I listened anyway. Baroque can send you off on a nice little cloud, conducive to quiet thoughts, and I was off on one of them when the doorbell rang. It couldn’t be the landlord, since I paid by the year. Probably a salesman. I got up and opened the door. The man standing there didn’t look like a salesman, he looked like a refugee from the Lincoln Heights drunk tank. “May I help you” I said.
“Probably,” the man replied, “if you’re a private detective and this is your office.”
“I am, and it is.” I pointed to the visitor’s chair. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me how I can help you.”
He sat, grudgingly, after checking out the furnishings. He was close to forty, and fat, maybe 5'6" or 7" and about 220. He was wearing ridiculous soiled madras slacks three inches too short in the leg, a tight alligator golf shirt that encased his blubbery torso like a sausage skin, and black and white saddle golfshoes with the cleats removed. He looked like a wino golfer out of hell.
“I thought private eyes was older guys, retired from the police force,” he said.
“I retired early,” I said. “They wouldn’t make me chief of police at twenty-five, so I told them to kiss my ass.” He got a bang out of that and started to laugh, kind of hysterically. “My name is Fritz Brown, by the way. What’s yours?”
“I’m Freddy Baker. You got the same initials as me. You can call me Fat Dog. It ain’t no insult, everybody calls me that. I like it.”
Fat Dog. Jesus. “Okay, Fat Dog. You can call me Fritz, or Mr. Brown, or Daddy-O. Now, why do you need a private investigator? Incidentally, the fee for my services is one hundred twenty-five dollars a day, plus expenses. Can you afford that?”
“I can afford that, and more. I may not look like no millionaire, but I’m holding heavy. I’ll whip some bread on you today, after I tell you what I want.” Fat Dog Baker bored into me with wild blue eyes, and said “It’s like this. I got this sister, my kid sister, Jane. She’s the only family I got. Our folks is dead. For a long time now she’s been staying with this rich guy. A Jewish guy. He’s old; he don’t try no sex stuff with her — it ain’t like that — he just supports her and I never see her no more. This guy, he don’t want her to have nothing to do with me. He pays for her music lessons, and Janey, my own sister, shines me on like I’m a piece of shit!” His voice had risen to a shout. He was sweating in the air-conditioned room and had clamped his hands around his thighs until his knuckles were white.
“What do you want me to do? Is your sister over eighteen?”
“Yeah, she’s twenty-eight. I wasn’t thinking about hanging no morals rap on him, I just know he’s not right somehow! Somewhere, somehow, he’s using my sister for something. She won’t believe me, she won’t even talk to me! You could follow her, couldn’t you? Follow him, tail him around town, check out what he’s into? He’s fucking her around somehow, and I want to know what’s happening.”
I decided not to pass it up. I could work it in on my offtime from the repo’s. I liked the idea of a surveillance job. It sounded like an interesting change of pace.