I had my lines down pat by the time I hit the third one. My name was Jones, said with that emphasis which indicated it was anything but Jones. My employment was “managing my own investment program.” That brought a little flicker into tired eyes. My young Italian wife was playing around. I was positive of two men. Perhaps there were three. I wanted somebody who could get some flagrante pictures of her, very quietly and inconspicuously, without her knowing. Then, with the pictures in hand, I could dicker with her and get out of the marriage without too much expense.
No sir, we don’t do that kind of thing. Who does? Where should I go?
I just wouldn’t know, mister.
At four o’clock I hit one who was sufficiently unsavory and hungry. He had the cop look. Not the good cop look, but the apple-stealing look. It was a very good guess that he had been busted for the wrong combination of greed and stupidity, and that he wasn’t going to do too well in this line of work either. He had a desk in one of those warehouse offices, the kind where you get the desk, the mail drop, switchboard service and an hourly rate on secretarial help-along with a ragtag collection of phone solicitors, speculators in distressed merchandise, independent jewelry salesmen and so an.
He listened to my story and looked at me with the concealed anguish of a toothless crocodile inspecting a fat brown dog on the river bank. He wanted to know how to get at me. We hitched chairs close and hunched toward each other. He had that breath which exceptionally bad teeth can create.
“Now, Mr. Jones, I maybe can help and maybe I can’t. A thing like this, it would be strickly a cash arrangement. You unnerstand?”
“Of course.”
“Now I’ve got a guy in mind. He’s tops. What he goes after, he gets. But he comes high.”
“How high?”
“Considering the risks and all, I would say this guy couldn’t be touched for less than five thousand, but he’s a real pro, and he will come up with shots of that little two-timing wop that’ll nail her but good. This guy, he’s got all the techniques and equipment, but he’s funny. He doesn’t feel like working, he doesn’t work.”
“I never heard of such a thing.”
“Like an artist, like, he’s got temperamental, you know?”
“I guess I know what you mean.”
“What would happen, he would work through me. Now I don’t want to be wasting my time trying to talk him into anything. What I need, I need a guarantee of good faith on your part, I mean that you want to go ahead at least far enough to take care of the first part of the trouble I’m going to, namely trying to get him on the phone long distance.”
I took my wallet out below the desk edge, took a hundred-dollar bill and put it near his elbow. “Is this okay?”
A big paw fell on it and it was gone. With the back of the other paw he wiped his mouth. “Just fine. Now you go wait out in the hall. There’s a bench out there to sit on.”
I sat for nearly fifteen minutes. Odd-looking people came and went, tenants and clients and customers. Underside people. The ones that somehow seem to be clinging to the damp underside of reality. The ones that look as if they could truly astonish a psychiatrist or a bacteriologist.
He came out and hunkered in close beside me, to rot my collar with his foul exhalations. “What happened, I can’t get him, but the way it looks I got some leads, there’s somebody can do a nice job, give me a little time on it.”
“Why can’t you get the man you were talking about?”
“He’s been dead a while. I didn’t know that. I didn’t hear about it, the way things are, him out of town.”
“What was his name?”
“There are guys around just as good. What I want, you give me how I can get in touch with you, and when I get a good man lined up, one I can guarantee will do this little job, then…”
“I’ll give you a ring in a few days.”
“On account of I got to do some digging to find the exact right guy for your problem, what about you give me the same figure again as a retainer?”
“We better talk about that if you can find anybody.”
After a few more half-hearted attempts, he went shuffling back into his rental bull pen, pants droopy in the seat, hair grizzled gray on the nape of his thick neck.
I made it to the nearest rancid saloon in about eight big bounds, shut myself into a phone booth and called back. I had remembered the name of the switchboard girl on duty. It was posted on her board.
“Miss Ganz, this is Sergeant Zimmerman. Bunco Squad. Within the past twenty minutes you placed a long distance call for Gannon.”
“Who? What?”
“Please give me the name, number and location of the call he placed.”
“But I’m not supposed to…”
“I can send for you, Miss Ganz, and have you brought down here if you want it that way.”
“Did… did you say Zimmerman?”
“If you want to play it safe, Miss Ganz, call me back here at headquarters. We have a separate number.” I gave her the pay phone number. She had been starting to cool off, and I had to take the chance or get nothing.
In thirty seconds the phone rang. I put my thumb in the side of my mouth, raised my tone level a half octave and said, “Bunco, Halpern.”
“Sergeant Zimmerman, please.”
“Just a minute.” After a ten count, I said, “Zimmerman.”
“This is Miss Ganz,” she said briskly. “About what you wanted, the call was to a Mr. D. C. Ives, in Santa Rosita. 805-765-4434. That number had been disconnected. Then he called a Mr. Mendez in Santa Rosita, 805-384-7942. They talked for less than three minutes. Is that what you wanted, Sergeant?”
“Thank you very much for your cooperation, Miss Ganz. We’ll protect our source in this matter. We may have to ask you for some other favor along the same line in the future.”
“You’re very welcome,” she said.
A nice efficient careful girl. She had to make certain she was really talking to the cops. Dana got back to the hotel a little after six. She looked pallid and twitchy. Her smile came and went too quickly. She had called me as soon as she got in, and I went down the hallway to her room. A woman in that condition needs to be hugged and held and patted a little. But we weren’t on any kind of basis where I could do that.
I lit her trembling cigarette and then she switched around the room and said, “I am now a real drinking buddy of Mrs. T. Madison Devlaney III. I call her Squeakie, as does practically everyone. I poured drinks into her potted plants. Until she passed out. She is twenty-nine. She is two days younger than Vance M’Gruder. She has known him all her life. She has a teeny little voice, ten thousand freckles, ten million dollars, and she’s muscled like a circus girl. Swimming every morning, tennis every afternoon, potted every night. No tennis today. Strained ankle.”
“What cover story did she buy?”
“Trav, don’t be angry, but I couldn’t have gotten to her at all without using the best connection I have. Lysa Dean. That opens a lot of doors. And I do have those calling cards.”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t. I just said don’t use her if you don’t have to.”
“I had to. I told her that Lysa had met Vance. I told her that Lysa was forming a little production company of her own and, as a first picture, was thinking of basing it on one of the ocean races, perhaps the race to Hawaii, and she was asking me to find out just how much cooperation she could get from the people who do own the big boats. It’s nonsense, of course, but people know so little about the industry they’re ready to believe anything. I made up sort of a plot as I went along.”
“So she bought it. That’s the important thing. What about M’Gruder?”
“Let me see. Oh, lots of things about M’Gruder. He is a physical fitness nut. He is a fine deep-water sailor. He is fantastically stingy. He gets quarrelsome and violent when he gets drunk. The marriage to Patricia Gedley-Davies was, according to his friends, a grotesque mistake. She said that forty-two times at least. Grotesque mistake. Squeakie and her friends are convinced Patty was a London call girl. I wouldn’t say that anyone is particularly fond of Vance, but they are glad to see that marriage ended. They think it was bad form. And so lucky there were no children.” She took out her little note book. “The new wife is supposed to be enchanting. Her name is Ulka Atlund. She turned eighteen a few days before their marriage. Her mother is dead. Her father brought her over here two years ago. He came to lecture for a year at the University of San Francisco, and stayed for a second year. He opposed the marriage, then agreed on the basis that after the honeymoon, she continues her education. They plan to honeymoon for six months. They’ve been gone two months. Squeakie thinks she heard somewhere that Vance plans to have somebody else bring the boat back from Acapulco. Too much beating into the wind on the way back. She thinks Vance planned to spend that last two months of the honeymoon in his house at Hawaii. Then back to live here while Ulka goes back to college.”