“Could he be blackmailing her?”
“With what, for what? She’s nobody.”
“She says she’s done stag movies. Could he be blackmailing her with that?”
“Nah. In his line of work, that’s just cutting his own throat. It gets around he does that, how’s he gonna get girls?”
“Where would he spend time?”
“All over. He owns part of a place called the Centaur, out in Thousand Oaks.”
“I think I know it. Where does he live?”
“Palms somewhere. Come to think of it, he must have an OK from Burri to peddle his movies.”
“I thought what’s-his-name ran that neighborhood. Scarpa. Lenny Scarpa.”
“Sure. And Burri runs Scarpa. Wake up, beautiful. Burri runs half the West Side.”
“Jesus, still? I thought he was one of those old Twenties guys.”
“He ran it in the Twenties, he runs it now, he’ll run it when we’re both in Puppy Heaven. You want to get mixed up in something Fausto Burri’s maybe part of? That what you want, Ray?”
“Listen, Mattie, I appreciate this.”
“Why do I waste time on you?” Reece said without joy.
“Ah, c’mon, Mattie. Cheer up.”
“Why do I waste my time?”
“I buy you drinks.”
“So you say.”
“C’mon, I’ll buy you one now. You’ve done enough damage for one day.”
He took his feet down off the desk one by one, like an old man, and sat there. “I hope you enjoy it when you get it,” he said.
“Let’s go get a drink,” I said. “I just got paid.”
4
Shade
In the morning I went to see the manager and squared myself on the rent. He didn’t kiss me. Then I got in the car and drove over to Torrance New & Used and saw Joey Moos, who couldn’t believe his luck, Ray Corson himself, right there in his own office. I’d just wanted to get myself up to date, but on impulse I decided to pay off the rest of the car. I liked the idea of having something no one could take from me without stealing. It must have been a stupid move, because it delighted Joey, and as a token of our new friendship he tried to trade me up to a gray ’50 Merc. After that I just drove around enjoying the sunshine. I didn’t have much money left, but I owned my car outright and I felt too good to go see Rebecca LaFontaine. Guys probably didn’t feel good around her for very long.
She’d given me the address of a boarding house on Flower Avenue in Venice. It was a low two-story building with a surf shop and a hardware store on the ground floor and, above, what once must have been a floor of cheap offices, and of course that’s where I wound up. I pushed through a cracked plate glass door and went upstairs. The stairs were covered with a runner of green carpet, black and shiny with dirt and worn down to the silvery cords underneath. They were greasy. What the hell do you have to do to get stairs greasy? At the top was a corridor lined with doors with pebbled glass panels, each of which was crudely painted with a number in black, some of which still bore old company names in flaking black paint or gold leaf. At the end of the corridor was a Dutch door daubed in black with the word MGR. The top half was open. Inside, a woman in a housedress was watching TV. She looked up at me and then back at the set.
I walked down the hall to Number 6. I couldn’t make out what had once been lettered on the glass. Someone had scraped most of it off except for the word APPRAISED. I knocked and heard Rebecca call, “It’s open.”
There wasn’t room inside for much but a bed, which Rebecca was just then sharing with the biggest old cowboy I’d ever seen. He had the boots, the stovepipe jeans, the shirt with pearl snaps, and his hat was on the pillow and wasn’t a disappointment. He and Rebecca were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed with a card game laid out between them. He started to get up, but Rebecca said, “Sit there and take your punishment, Lorrie. Excuse my manners, Mr. Corson, but I’m almost done giving this fellow a whuppin’.”
“She is, too,” he told me.
He looked like a whuppin’ from Rebecca was what he’d prayed for as a child on Christmas morning.
I watched them play for a couple of minutes, each turning over the cards very intently. Finally Rebecca laid down a card and said contentedly, “That’s gin. Lorrie, I’d like you to meet Ray Corson. Mr. Corson, Lorin Shade.”
Shade got up at once to shake hands with me. Just when I thought he was done standing up, he’d stand up some more. He shook my hand carefully, like he’d learned that hands break easy. He had a short nose and a pocked round face, and he really was a size. I’d put roofs on smaller things than Lorin Shade. She said, “Mr. Corson and I might be doing a little business together, Lorrie. Mr. Corson used to be a boxer.”
“A boxer! I like that,” he said. He put up his fists, smiling, and I obligingly put up mine, and he faked a few hooks and jabs at me. I was annoyed to find I could barely keep them off me. He was fast, along with the rest of it. He dropped his hands. “I like that,” he said wistfully.
“You could do the work,” I told him.
I wondered what she wanted with me if she had a big boy like Shade on a string.
“Lorrie’s from Warren City, Oklahoma,” she said. “But he lives right down the hall. He’s a stunt rider for the movies.”
“Well, that’s my plan,” he said. “That’s my long-range plan. Right now I’m at the Ever-Brite Car Wash over on Del Amo.”
“Got to start somewhere,” I said.
“That’s right. We’re over on Del Amo, just near Anza. You keep going like you’s headin’ for the beach? You’ll see us on the right, just before Anza. Cain’t miss it. You a friend a Becky’s, come by some time and I’ll give you a shine. Make your car like new. On the house, if you’re a friend a Becky’s”
“I thought your car looked pretty nice,” I told her.
“I said I couldn’t afford to wash it,” she said merrily. “I didn’t say I wasn’t washing it.”
“You come on down to the car wash and I’ll fix you up, too,” Shade said. “Make you shine. It’s right before Anza. Cain’t miss it.”
“Lorrie hasn’t gotten his break yet, but he really is something in the saddle. Lorrie rides,” she said sweetly and emphatically, “like a dream.” Shade flushed with pleasure. Then he thought about it a little and began to look panicky. But Rebecca was moving smoothly onward: “He’s a real ride-em cowboy. But I keep telling him, no stunt director’s going to put a fellow his size on one of his horses.”
“Aw, I told you, Becky,” he said. “I sit real light. You know how to sit light, you can ride any size a horse.”
“You did tell me that. So you did. But right now I have to talk to Mr. Corson, Lorrie. Could you be a honey right now and give us a few minutes?”
Shade stood up at once and gave my hand another careful squeeze. He told me it had been a real pleasure, and that he hoped to see me around, and maybe we could all three have us a game of poker sometime, because Becky there was quite a hand with the cards, don’t think she wasn’t, you might not think so but you’d be wrong, at which point Rebecca smiled at him again with almost terrifying brightness and he shut up as if he’d been kicked. “Well, so long,” he said, and left, closing the door softly behind him. Rebecca smiled distractedly at the door and said, “Lorrie is the sweetest man in the world, and he’s been a true friend to me. So no remarks.”