The aging clerk was propping himself up on the counter, staring at nothing. Two flies were taking their morning constitutional walk over his bald head. He paid them no attention.
‘Can I borrow a typewriter for a couple of hours?’ Frost asked.
The reception clerk stared at him as if he had just landed from the moon.
‘What was that again?’
Frost pointed to the battered looking typewriter on the desk behind the reception clerk who looked around, stared at the typewriter as if he hadn’t seen it before.
‘Can I borrow that?’ Frost produced a dollar bill.
The reception clerk eyed the bill, let the two flies play tag in what was left of his hair, then nodded.
‘Help yourself.’
‘Got any paper?’
The reception clerk thought about this, then reluctantly heaved himself to the desk and produced some sheets.
Frost gave him the dollar and lugged the typewriter back to his cabin. He spent a sweaty hour typing. When he returned the typewriter, the clerk was still in the same position, but another fly had joined the other two.
The book had told Frost that Joe Solomon had an office on Roosevelt Boulevard.
‘Where do I find Roosevelt Boulevard?’
‘City centre: runs parallel with Paradise Boulevard.’
‘How far from here?’
The reception clerk pulled at his nose, thought, then said, ‘Give or take, five miles.’
‘Have you a car I can rent?’
‘Five bucks a day. That one over there in the last bay,’ and he pointed.
The car was a beaten up VW. Frost decided anything was better than walking five miles in this heat. The car got him to Roosevelt Boulevard without falling to bits.
Joe Solomon’s office was on the tenth floor of an impressive high rise with four express elevators, air conditioning, and important looking people moving around the vast lobby with that busy, preoccupied air of ants on the march.
A Spanish-looking chick sat behind a desk in Solomon’s outer office. Her long black hair lay on her shoulders and made a frame for a face that had everything until you reached her eyes. They were black, and they had seen everything, and what they had seen, they hated. Her age would be around thirty, but she had already lived eighty years of experience, and each year had increased her hate. Frost thought she was a very tough cookie.
She looked him over. He was wearing his best suit: light cream with a faint, narrow blue stripe, a dark blue shirt and a white tie. He had checked himself on the fly blown mirror at the cabin before leaving. He thought he looked pretty impressive, but he saw at once his size, his looks and his clothes made as much impact on her as a lump of dough thrown against a brick wall.
He decided to play this one brisk.
‘Mr. Solomon,’ he said.
Black eyebrows lifted.
‘You have an appointment? Your name?’
‘The name’s Frost. I have something better than an appointment,’ and Frost dropped the letter he had written, sealed in an envelope, on her desk.
She regarded the envelope as she might regard something nasty the cat had brought in.
‘If you will give me your telephone number, Mr. Frost, you will be contacted.’
He placed his big hands on her desk and leaned towards her. She gave off a faint body smell that if bottled would have been a rave as an after-shave lotion.
‘I know J.S. likes to play hard to get,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘I know you are paid to sit where you are sitting, making it easy for him to feel important. It’s all part of the racket, but I don’t buy it. J.S. is here to make money. I can make money for him. Suppose you get off your fanny, give him this letter, and if he doesn’t want to talk to me, I’ll let you spit in my right eye.’
Her eyes widened, then she laughed, and when she laughed, she really looked a beauty.
‘I thought I’d seen them all,’ she said, ‘but although the dialogue is corny, at least, it’s a new approach.’ She picked up the envelope and stood up. She had a sensational body. ‘It won’t buy you anything, but you deserve a try.’
She went through a doorway behind her desk, swinging her hips. At least that was a step forward, Frost thought as he looked around. For an outer office it was very lush. The nigger brown carpet, the apricot-coloured walls, the picture window with a view of the sea, the battery of telephones, the built-in filing cabinets and the three lounging chairs along the far wall produced an air of considerable prosperity.
He thought of the letter he had written:
Dear J.S.
Marcia Goolden told me to look you up. She said if you played the Big Shot with me she would hate you for the rest of your life.
Do you care?
He wondered if he should get out his handkerchief to wipe his right eye when she came out. Maybe Marcia had been playing at being important. Maybe Solomon would come out and spit in his left eye, but he needn’t have worried.
The chick came out, smiling, and jerked her head.
‘He’ll see you. It still won’t buy you anything.’
Frost leered at her.
‘Want to bet?’ and he walked past her into a vast room that was more a lounge than an office. Apart from a big desk by the picture window, the rest of the room resembled a millionaire’s nest where he can entertain some fifty people without feeling crowded.
Behind the desk which was big enough to play billiards on, sat a fat little man in a grey suit that must have set him back seven or eight hundred dollars. His round, sun baked face, with hooded eyes, a nose like a buzzard’s beak and a mouth like a pencil line was framed with long white hair down to his collar.
He watched Frost cross the big room, then he smiled and waved Frost to a chair.
‘Very nice, Mr. Frost. How’s Marcia?’
‘Fine and busy,’ Frost said, sitting down.
Solomon nodded approvingly.
‘There’s a worker!’ He leaned back in his executive chair. ‘She’s my favourite hooker. There’s not much I wouldn’t do for Marcia. I take it you’re here for a vacation and employment to defray expenses?’
‘Right,’ Frost said.
‘You’ve come to the right place. What’s your line? What are you looking for?’
Frost produced the details of his various qualifications he had typed out, and handed them over.
‘This covers my working life, Mr. Solomon. Maybe you can get ideas from this how to fix something for me.’
Solomon read what Frost had written, whistling softly from time to time.
‘You seem to have had a number of jobs in the past twelve years,’ he said, laying down the paper. ‘Let me see, three years as a patrolman with the New York police, promoted to Detective, second grade, resigned after two years to join the F.B.I, as field agent. Resigned after three years to become a rifleman in Vietnam. You then became a bomb instructor for the I.R.A. You later became a mercenary in the Angola upheaval. Finally, this year you worked for a short time as a security guard for Western Security Corp in Boston.’ He cocked his head on one side. ‘Quite a life of action and violence.’ He picked up the paper again and read on: ‘Knowledge of most modern weapons and explosives, judo black belt, karate, marksman with military citations, pilot’s licence etc. etc.’ He put down the paper. ‘Very impressive, Mr. Frost, but no one is planning to start a war in Paradise City. I feel your talents would be wasted here.’ He brooded, then went on, ‘There are jobs, of course, I can offer you, but...’
‘Such as?’
‘With your looks and build, you could earn five hundred a week. I have an old trout who needs a chauffeur, but you would have to lay her regularly once a week.’
‘Not my thing,’ Frost said firmly.