Harry paused. He was getting off the track, wasting time.
“But when Leo tried to play the game, you pulled it out from under him. That was pretty neat, it’s a good scene.”
Harry paused again and was aware of the refrigerator humming in the silence. It was too bright in here, uncomfortable and his head ached. He didn’t want to move, though. Not now.
“I like the coat story, too, you mentioned. It plays, but would work better if it wasn’t a flashback. What it does, though, it shows you know how to handle yourself in that kind of situation. I imagine in your line of work there were other times . . .”
“I’m out of that now.”
“But there were times, right, you had to get tough? Say one of your customers stopped paying?”
“They always paid,” Chili said. “Oh, I’ve smacked guys. Smacking was common, just an open-hand smack. I’m talking to a guy trying to get my money, he looks away and I smack him in the face. ‘Hey, you look at me when I’m fuckin talking to you.’ Like that, get their attention. See, the kind of people we were dealing with, a lot of ’em thought they were tough guys, you know, from the street, guys that were basically hustlers, thieves, or they were into drugs. We had them besides the legit people, who ordinarily didn’t give us any trouble, always paid on time. I think what you’re getting at, Harry, you have the same attitude as some of the legitimate people I did collection work for. Like a car dealer, or a guy runs a TV store . . . They’re carrying a deadbeat, they want you to get the money and they don’t care how, break his fuckin legs. That’s the first thing they think of, come up with that statement. I say to ’em, ‘How’s he gonna pay you he’s in the hospital?’ They don’t think of that. They want a piece of the guy and their money.”
Harry said, “Well, you’ve been in some tight spots. The business with Ray Bones—that’s a good name for a character. I meant to ask you, you weren’t arrested for shooting him that time?”
“Bones had the idea of doing me on his own,” Chili said. “He told the cops it happened out on the street, an unknown assailant come up to him. He still wants to do me, it’s on his mind.”
“And you still have to pay him?”
“Yeah, only we have a different arrangement now. I talked to Tommy Carlo on the phone. . . . You have to know Tommy, his personality, he gets along with everybody. Jimmy Cap I mentioned, Capotorto? He always liked Tommy. But he has to go along with Ray Bones up to a point, Ray’s his guy. So Jimmy Cap says split what the dead guy owes, me and Tommy, fuck the running vig, a flat eight grand each and that’s it, forget it.”
“You spoke to Tommy,” Harry said, leaning over the table on his arms. “So now he knows Leo’s still alive.”
“Did I say that?”
Harry sat back again, questions popping in his mind along with the headache, but wanting to appear relaxed, the producer showing a certain amount of interest in a story.
“So you didn’t happen to mention it to him,” Harry said and grinned at the deep-set eyes staring at him. “You want Leo Devoe for yourself.”
“What I don‘t want,” Chili said, “is Ray Bones finding out. Tommy, he’d think it’s pretty funny, this drycleaner taking an airline. He’d swear he wouldn’t tell a soul, but I know he would. So why put him in that position?”
“But you still have Ray Bones to think about.”
Chili moved his shoulders. The deep-set eyes didn’t change.
“You gonna pay him?”
“Maybe, when I get around to it.”
“What if he comes looking for you?”
“It’s possible. The guy’s got a one-track mind.”
“Have you been involved in any shootings since Ray Bones?”
Chili’s eyes moved and he seemed to be thinking about it or trying to remember, looking off for a moment.
“Well, there was one time, it was when me and Tommy were running a club in South Miami, a guy came in looking for another guy, not me, but I was in the way.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. He shot the guy and left.”
Now Harry paused. Chili Palmer had been sent to him from heaven, no question about it.
“You were running a club?”
“Belonged to Momo. We had entertainment, different groups’d come in; catering mostly to the younger crowd.”
Harry had the next question ready.
“You pack a gun?”
Chili hesitated. “Not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“Not ordinarily. Maybe a few times I have.”
“You ever been arrested?”
“I’ve been picked up a few times. They’d try to get me on loan-sharking or a RICO violation—you know what I mean? Being in what they call a racketeering kind of activity, but I was never convicted, I’m clean.”
“Racketeering, that covers a lot of ground, does-n’t it?”
“What do you want to know?”
Harry hesitated. He wasn’t sure.
“Why don’t you get to the point, Harry? You want me to do something for you, right?”
8 
Here was a man had made forty-nine movies and named a bunch of them earlier, when he was making coffee. Chili remembered having seen quite a few. The one about the roaches—guy turns on the kitchen light, Christ, there’s a fuckin roach in there as big as he is. He had seen some of the Grotesque movies, about the escaped wacko who’d been in a fire and was pissed off about it. The one about the giant ticks trying to take over the earth. The one about all the people in this town getting scalped by an Indian who’d been dead over a hundred years, Hairraiser . . . Forty-nine movies and he looked more like a guy drove a delivery truck or came to fix your air-conditioning when it quit, a guy with a tool kit. When he’d gone over to the range to get the coffee in his shirt and underwear showing his white legs, skinny for a fat guy, he looked like he should be in detox at a booze treatment center. Chili had seen loan customers in this shape, ones that had given up. Harry’s mind seemed to be working okay, except all of a sudden he wasn’t as talkative as before.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Harry.”
Maybe he didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a dummy.
“Okay, you want me to help you out in some way,” Chili said. “How do I know—outside of your asking me questions here like it’s a job interview. I happened to mention—we were in the other room— I said when I came out here I talked to some people and you kept saying ‘What people?’having a fit. You remember that? Well, they were a couple lawyers I was put in touch with. I told you I talked to Tommy Carlo . . .”
Harry was listening but making a face, trying to understand everything at once.
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“I go to your apartment, your office on Sunset, ZigZag Productions, you’re not either place and nobody knows where you are. So I call Tommy, now in tight with Jimmy Cap, and ask him, see if he can get me a name out here, somebody that knows somebody in the movie business. Tommy calls back, says, ‘Frank DePhillips, you’re all set.’You ever hear of him?”
Harry shook his head.