“Try looking in his wallet,” somebody said from under the table.
Nobody had thought of that, either.
“Bring it to me, Frank,” Father F. said.
“He was my one friend, let someone else,” Frank declined.
Father F. went over and turned the blanket down and reached in and brought back Joe’s wallet.
Joe’s wallet, fat as leaves. But when he laid it on the bar it just lay there, so thin, so flat, so gone, it looked like it must have had some sort of little stroke of its own. When Father F. reached in, all there was one thin single, nothing more.
Everybody pushed to see.
“What was he doing when he went?” Father wanted to know.
“Playing poker, Father,” we told him.
“Penny ante?”
“Two-dollar limit.”
“Put on Perry Como,” I told one of the kids, because I didn’t care how I spent just then.
Perry came on singing Whither Thou Goest I Shall Go. Oh, he sang it so easy, he sang it so free. And while he sang Phil poured a shot for John and a shot for me. He poured a shot for Father F. and a shot for Sam and a shot for Al and a shot for Frank. Then he poured a shot for himself and lifted his glass.
“To Joe, old Joe,” he made a kind of toast.
“Oh, Frank,” I heard a whisper from under the table. “How you massage! So good! How God is going to punish!”
William F. Nolan
The Pulpcon Kill
William F. Nolan is an authority on Black Mask magazine. His most recent book, The Black Mask Boys (1985), is what he calls a “historical anthology” — a collection of stories, each of which is preceded by an essay about the writer and his role in the development of what is now called the Black Mask tradition. “The Pulpcon Kill” evolved out of Nolan’s research.
Like his Sam Space novels, about a tough, space-age private eye, “The Pulpcon Kill” pays humorous homage to the past masters of hard-boiled fiction. The story introduces a new private eye, Nick Challis, whose half-brother Bart was the detective in Nolan’s first two mystery novels, Death Is for Losers (1968) and The White-Cad Cross-Up (1969).
William F. Nolan lives in California.
Late. Beyond midnight. A twenty-four-hour Italian joint in the heart of New York. Big party. Mafia kingpin’s birthday. Everybody laughing it up, drinking, singing off key, yelling at each other. The head honcho is Luigi somebody, and he’s really zonked. Chug-a-lugging from a half-empty bottle of vino. Has a Sweet Young Tiling on his lap. She’s stroking his mustache and he’s squeezing one of her boobs.
Outside, a misting rain makes the pavement shine. The street is quiet and dark. But you can see the party going on through the big plate glass window.
Three long, black limos, pebbled with rain, ease around the corner, rolling slow along the street. Their rear windows come whispering down as they near the twenty-four-hour joint and some shit-mean automatic weapons poke out.
The plate glass window explodes into jagged fragments as each limo glides past, cutting loose with enough firepower to win World War II. Total mayhem inside the Italian joint. Bullets cutting up chairs, walls and people. Luigi goes down in slow motion, gouting ketchup from a dozen wounds, the wine bottle splintering in his hand...
I’d had enough. I got up and walked out. For one thing, I figured I’d seen the best part of the picture and, for another, the air conditioning unit was on the fritz and the theater was too damn hot.
It was a lot hotter outside on Ventura. The San Fernando Valley was having a real bitch of a September heat wave, with temperatures over 105, and some sticky humidity had been added to the package. Tropical storm off the Pacific was messing up the L.A. basin and the weather boys said it would last through the weekend.
I was in a bad mood. Muggy, excessive heat makes me tough to get along with. Result: a fight with the pneumatic red-haired flight attendant in Santa Monica. When she kicked me out of her condo I decided to take in the latest Bronson Mafia movie, just to cool off. Now I was hot and irritated. Figured I needed something cold inside me, so I drove down Ventura to Van Nuys, took a hard right up the alley behind the newsstand, and parked right under the “You Won’t Believe It’s Yogurt” sign.
Went inside. Ordered a two-scoop dish of coconut, with crushed chocolate-chip topping. The skinny college kid who worked there asked me how come I always ordered the same topping for my frozen yogurt when there were so many others to choose from. I thought that was a dumb question, so I didn’t answer him.
I sat down at one of the little round butcher block tables and began spooning cold yogurt inside my hot stomach. Very soothing. My mood began to improve.
It was late afternoon and the place was nearly deserted. There was one other customer, a blue-eyed blond wearing shorts (with a particularly nice pair of legs inside them) and a splendidly packed T-shirt that said: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET. She smiled across the room at me. “Are you Nicholas Challis?”
“Never call me Nicholas,” I said. “Makes me sound like a Romanian prince — and that’s not my image. How come you know who I am?”
“I know a lot more than that,” she said, moving over to sit down at my table. Her no-bra act was terrific.
“What else do you know?”
“That you are thirty-two years of age, your father was Irish and your mother is a Mescalero Apache, and you have been a private detective for two years — since you moved here from San Diego after the death of your wife.”
“Go on,” I told her. “So far you’re scoring 100 percent.”
“You have a half-brother on your father’s side who also works as a private investigator in the Los Angeles area. Your father is deceased, and your mother now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.”
“Bet you don’t know when I quit biting my nails,” I said.
“Originally, you wanted to be a commercial artist, but you were not talented enough to make it work out financially. Your present office is located in Studio City here in the Valley and you don’t smoke or have any children or pets. Shall I continue?”
“I don’t see any reason to,” I said. “You’ve obviously done a hell of a research job. The question is, why?”
“Let’s go to my place and you’ll find out. How does that sound?” And she gave me another flash of her perfect teeth.
“Sounds like I’m being seduced,” I said. “And I’m always ripe for seduction.” I stood up, leaving my yogurt. “I just hope your T-shirt is telling the truth.”
It wasn’t. What I saw I did not get, nor was I going to from what she told me once we were inside her Malibu pad. All I got was her name: Charlene Vickers. The surf was doing its usual in-and-out number on the beach outside her picture window and Charlene was standing there looking at the afternoon ocean when she informed me that I had not been brought here for a romantic interlude.
“This is strictly business, Mr. Challis,” she said. “I represent someone who urgently requires your services. He asked me to bring you here.”
“I was hoping you were a P.I. groupie eager to partake of my sun-bronzed flesh,” I said. “Instead, you want to put me to work. Doing what?”
“I’ll let my employer tell you that.”
“And who’s your employer?”