We eyed each other. In that moment I realized I needed his truth more than he needed mine. “I’m a private detective working a missing-person case. Now it’s your turn.”
The Pope let his hand fall from the knob of the closed door. His voice became a whisper. “Fair enough. Parrish isn’t allowed in here anymore, so I haven’t seen him in a couple of months. I don’t know where you’d find him.”
“What did he do to make you boot him?”
He took a long breath. “Mr. Nash, have you ever met someone with so much hate that you can no longer see the soul in their eyes?”
I’d been in the war too. “Yeah.”
“That’s Tommy. He’d steal from a match girl just for the fun of it.”
“Don’t you see that a lot around here?”
“Not really. Most of the boys are harmless. They drink too much, but their real problem is that they can’t handle responsibility. They may get into fights, but they still have a heart buried somewhere beneath the dirty clothes and the scar tissue. Not Tommy. He has no heart.” He shifted his considerable weight. “But like I said, I don’t know where he is.”
“Sure you do. Everybody tracks devils like him. Mostly out of fear. Nobody wants to cross them.”
The Pope’s crimson cheeks admitted the lie. He tilted his head and scratched the side of his neck. “Most nights he’s at the Palms.”
“The Palms?”
“The Persian Palms. The biggest clip joint this side of Chicago. He goes there for the second show if he goes there at all.” His eyes squinted, showing something I hadn’t expected to see from anyone on skid row: real concern. “But watch yourself. It can be a dangerous place.”
The Pope’s words fell on deaf ears. In that way, he really was a poet.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast on the train and it was pushing six p.m. The Senate Cafe looked passable even though it was one of those dumps where you can see the swarthy short-order cook through an open door sweating and dangling a cigarette from his lips above the food sizzling on the grill. Over the “Special” — it wasn’t — of roast pork and applesauce, I thought about Tommy Parrish’s brother.
I’d met Dan Parrish on a case last fall. I’d been lured to rural Minnesota by a client who wound up dead before my train had had the chance to give the station a whistle. Dan Parrish was the sheriff who had investigated her murder. He’d taken a bullet in his shoulder for his troubles, and I’d come to respect him. I guess he must have respected me too because he’d called me in L.A. the week before to see if I’d come to Minneapolis to look for his brother.
“Tommy hasn’t been the same since the war,” the sheriff had told me over the hissing telephone line. “Not since Buchenwald.”
The line hissed some more.
“We used to be close, but I haven’t heard from him in six years.”
“What was your last contact with him? In person? By telephone?”
“A letter. The return address was the Senate Hotel in Minneapolis. That’s skid row, Nash.”
My feet were on the desk and I was using my slouch hat as a fan. I’d stripped down to my sleeveless undershirt after the air inside my office in the Cahuenga Building had died from the heat. The phone was making my ear sweat. “But why me, Dan? What’s wrong with the dicks in Minneapolis?”
“No privacy. Everybody on skid row knows them because they get hired to find people like Tommy. You’d be anonymous. You could ask around like an old war buddy.”
“You don’t want anyone to know you’re looking for him?”
“I may be out here in Glenwood, Minnesota, Nash, but I still have a reputation to think about. I don’t want to be stuck here forever. When word gets out that a cop has a wayward brother, it affects how other cops treat you. They start thinking you’re soft. That you’re in it to make it up to your folks. Like Pat O’Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces, only with a badge instead of a collar. I don’t need that getting in the way.”
“Whether it’s true or not?”
“Yeah. It makes me look weak.”
I knew from experience that he wasn’t, but what good would that do him?
“Why now?”
The sigh he gave came through the line like a desert wind. “My father is dying. Despite my efforts to convince him otherwise, he insists on seeing Tommy before he dies.”
“Before who dies? Tommy or your father?”
There was a long pause. “Either one. I don’t think Tommy’s worth the effort, but the old man won’t listen to me. Never has. And I’m the good son.” He managed to blend irony and sarcasm into one frustrated tone.
“Did I just catch a whiff of sibling rivalry?”
His voice took on the tenderness of high-grade blue steel. “Maybe it’s just you.”
I got the message and left it alone.
Normally I don’t work for free. Too many times I’d seen my pal Marlowe, another P.I. with an office on the same floor of the Cahuenga Building, risk his life for nothing more than friendship or simple justice, and I’d told him to his face that he was a sap for doing it. But I guess I’d been in his office one too many times, because it turns out being a sap is contagious.
When I agreed to go to Minneapolis, Dan offered to pay my full fee plus expenses, but I couldn’t bring myself to say okay. It wasn’t really friendship or justice. It was my own category. Respect.
“No charge,” I’d said. Then I saw Marlowe standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, his feet casually crossed, his hat pushed back on his head. He had a smirk on his face and was using his index fingers to send me a near-fatal barrage of tsks.
I hit the Palms just as “The Sweater Girl” was leaving the stage after her second show. From the name, she was supposed to look like Lana Turner, and she did. And the stage was supposed to look like a stage, but it didn’t. It was more of a built-in corner shelf behind the bar, perched four feet above the floor on a handful of grayish four-by-fours. Neither the stage nor Lana looked terribly interested in doing their jobs. And they had one more show to go. The sign outside boasted of “3 floor shows nightly.” Everyone looked like they’d had enough after two.
A thin cloud of blue smoke hovered near the pressed-tin ceiling ten feet above the heads of a couple of dozen men and women clustered along the thirty-foot bar. A couple of sweaty thugs dressed in white shirts and aprons snarled at the customers like cornered lion tamers.
The dozen or so booths on the opposite side of the large room looked dark and uninviting. I could see in a couple of them the orange pinpoints of smoldering cigarettes held in fingers that were little more than shadows. Tommy Parrish seemed like the type to operate from that kind of setting. So I went to the bar. I knew approaching him would take some finesse.
I started with the Sweater Girl. She had climbed down from the stage and had left the safety of the lion tamers behind the bar to offer herself up to the lions. She had adopted the pose of female invitation: her back to the mirror, her elbows leaning on the bar, her hands dangling, a high-heeled stiletto propped on the brass foot rail, one naked knee covered in black nylon poking out at a seductive angle. Her dress was tight and black and cut high and low in all the right places. Her hair was Lana blond, so blond it looked white. The Wednesday night crowd had apparently seen enough of her act, because they completely ignored her. I accepted her attempt at an invitation and introduced myself.
She read my clothes before she read my eyes. “Buy me a drink?”
“Whatever you want, Lana.”
That sent a charge through her. She snapped her fingers toward one of the lion tamers without taking her eyes off of mine. “Do you see a likeness?”