Write Me a Letter (Vic Daniel Series) Page 5

  As I hadn't drunk at all the night before hardly, it couldn't have been the booze that caused the ooze, excuse the poetry, so it must have been my dreams that drenched the seams. Although, as usual, I couldn't remember anything about them, and I wonder if that means something. But they must have been your veritable nightmares, no doubt brought on by the company I had recently been keeping, like having your molars drilled without anesthetic by Himmler or having to sit through all of Waiting for Godot again without a full hip flask and a portable opium pipe.

  I used to dream a lot about islands, hence I would suppose my firm penchant for Hawaiian chemises, but I don't need Freud to tell me what islands stand for in dreams, they stand for islands, they stand for escape and planter's punches and sandy kisses and, dream of dreams, not one Boston Celtic fan within a million miles.

  " 'No man is an island,' " someone once wrote, which always seemed pretty obvious to me, unless he's the Isle of Man.

  " 'Little islands are all large prisons,' " someone else wrote, which is obviously rubbish. I think he meant to say, some islands, like Devil's Island, are prisons, but so what? Everyone knows that. My island, call it what you will, Daniel's Dunes, The No-Clothes-At-All Atoll, in whatever balmy southern sea it may lie, is no prison, believe me. I've been in prisons, and not to take a cake with a file in it for a wayward chum on visiting day either. Prisons are prisons, are what prisons are, and they tend to be a little short on fresh coconuts, fish barbecues, free bananas, and all the clams you can dig.

  Morning thoughts, perched atop a porcelain bowl—mornings would be far more tolerable if they came later in the day, like just after Happy Hour. . . it was still strange not having Mom around, especially in the mornings, when we always had breakfast together. . . . Some people sing when they are happy; some when they are sad. When I was but a tiny, tiny tot, someone, I don't know for sure who, used to sing me toward slumberland with the old folksong "Down in the Valley," from which ditty, you may already know, comes the hopeful plea "Write me a letter." Well, I hope it was my mom who'd been doing the singing, is what I hope, and I also hope 'twas not the blues she was singing. . . .

  Actually, I'm not sure I ever was a tiny, tiny tot—I have the feeling that even when I was small, I was big. . . . Remember that philosopher, whoever he was, who claimed that you could never arrive at a finite point because every time you traveled half the remaining distance to your goal, half was still left, and if you traveled half that half, that still left another half, and so on. Which, as we all know, is foolishness, because you can get somewhere, like I managed to get to the john. But he almost had it right. If he'd used toothpaste as an analogy, he could have convinced me—there is no such thing as a completely empty tube of Colgate. There is always a weeny bit left, even if it means cutting the tube open along the bottom and one side with nail scissors. Yes, A.M. bits and pieces, which don't seem to be that much different from late-night ones, come to think about it.

  John D. was waiting for me when I got to the office, sitting out front in his car. I opened up and he followed me in. John was a trim-looking six-footer, an ex–pro bowler who'd bought control of a bowling alley just east of where I lived, after he left the professional circuit. As far as I knew, he was doing pretty good; there was always plenty going on at the Valley Bowl whenever I dropped in, which was at least once a month, as I had installed and looked after his building's security system for him. He looked a mite weary that Tuesday morning, though; he sank into the spare chair with a noise part sigh and part groan and rubbed his gray eyes tiredly.

  I got my checkbook out of the safe, wrote out one for a cool ten grand, and slid it across the desk toward him.

  "Thanks, Vic," he said, putting it away in his wallet without looking at it.

  "Sure, pal," I said. "You helped me out with a modest sum once, remember?"

  "I do."

  "You lent me your office once, too, remember?"

  "I do."

  "And your car that time?"

  "Guilty."

  "You even lent me yourself that time I needed a Marlboro man type."

  "I lent you a bowling ball once, too," he said. "Always wondered what you wanted it for. I figured it wasn't just to drop on someone's tootsies."

  I gave him an enigmatic smile, but he wasn't that far wrong, actually. He made no move to get up and go, so I figured he still had something on his mind, so I said, just making small talk, "Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted to help, John, but how come you didn't go to the bank? Your business is booming and God knows how much equity you've got in your plant and equipment."

  "My wife is an accountant," he said. "She does the books every quarter, along with our personal finances."

  "Ah," I said, as if I understood. I did; partly, anyway. If he didn't want his wife to know about it, it was either the ladies or gambling or maybe drugs, but I knew John didn't gamble at all, ever, and he'd never shown any signs sat all of being into drugs, or them being into him, so that left the ladies. To narrow it down still further, as we professional deducers like to do, John didn't play around, and he had plenty of chances as he was a handsome man with a good line of chat and his place was buzzing night after night with lady bowlers from a dozen local leagues and many of them didn't mind a drink or two during the evening, or a few in the bar afterward, either. To me, that left but one possibility—love. Some purple-eyed knockout had transfixed my friend John D., who was one of the last two surviving true romantics to be found west of the Pecos. I don't believe I need to mention the name of the other, the somewhat taller, romantic.

  "Well, that's handy," I said, "having an accountant in the family. I always wanted to have a masseuse in mine."

  "It is, it is," he said. "Except once in a blue moon."

  "Ah," I said again, nodding wisely. I took off my spectacles and polished them on a shirttail during the long pause that followed, which I finally broke by saying, "OK, pal, out with it, what else?"

  "Money," he said. "What else. Don't happen to know any way I can legally put my creditors off for a month or two, do you?"

  "Which ones?" I said.

  "The usual," he said. "The ones I pay every month—my major suppliers, the cleaning company, the landlord, the other half-dozens. I don't want to blow my credit with them, though, no way."

  "I presume you won't want to arouse your wife's curiosity either," I said, "let alone ire."

  "Let alone World War Three," he said, ruefully. "Vic, what happened, happened. I'll never forget it, I don't regret it, and I'm willing to pay for it, it's the least I can do. As for the creditors, I just need a month or two, then no problem, I'm straight again. As for you, you know soon as I got it, you got it."

  I waved that one off.

  "The money will be there," he said. "You likely know my lanes, or most of them, are booked up months in advance by the leagues, so I can figure out pretty well to the odd buck how much I got coming and when, and it is a tidy sum, believe me."

  I believed him. Before I got to bowl gratis at John's I used to have to pay for the dubious pleasure of missing two out of three spares. I well knew what a money-making machine those warped boards were for him. I also knew what beers cost at the Valley Bowl, and brandy and ginger ales, and hot dogs, mustard and relish only.

  "John," I said to him, "if you put off your creditors for a couple of months because you need the cash now for what I assume is a one-time payout—"

  "One-time for now, anyway," he said.

  "OK, one time for now, how is your wife not going to know you've been holding out?"

  "Because I got a short-term deposit she doesn't know about, as cover," he said. "Trouble is, it's got a ninety-day lock on it."

  "I get you," I said. "OK, my friend, attend, as I recently said to a young Evel Knievel type in this very office: this one I got from Benny, who else? It's completely legal, although you wouldn't want to do it every couple of days. What you do is write checks in the normal way at the end of the month to all your regular creditors. You mai
l them. The next day you call up your bank and tell them your checkbook and various other bits and pieces got stolen out of your office. You might have to tell your wife the same. You ask the bank to please close your account immediately. You ask the bank for a letter confirming you have reported a stolen checkbook and thus your account has been closed. You tell them, to avoid any possibility of confusion in the future, you think it wiser to open a new account at a different branch. OK?"

  "I'm with you," he said. "Press on, McDuff."

  "So you immediately open another account, but better you do so at another bank entirely, because banks have been known to make mistakes and some employee might just run a couple of your creditors' checks through your new account in error. Anyway, so says Benny, and when Benny talks, I listen. I might yawn a lot, but I listen."

  "Me too," my friend said.

  "Then you make copies of the bank's letter, which you send, along with a heartfelt letter of apology, to the billing departments of all your creditors, asking them to kindly return your now-worthless checks and informing them that of course new checks will be in the mail as soon as the bank prints them up. All of which will take some time, which is exactly what you need. That cheer you up any?"

  "No," he said. "It is in no way cheering, but it is distinctly helpful, and I thank you." He slapped the desktop lightly with both palms and got to his feet. He held out his hand; I took it.

  "Thanks again, pard."

  "Anytime, amigo." He left. I went to the window and watched him drive away, thinking, Ain't love the bee's knees until it gets expensive. I bet whoever she was, though, she wasn't half as cute as my latest heartthrob. But then I thought, what was it that didn't add up about the whole . . . affair, one might say? Although it had to be more than that, given the considerable sum of money involved (mine, thank you), and John having to cover it all up and lie to his wife and goodness knows what else. One might conjecture a spot of blackmail on the fair damsel's part, but (a) John, although not brimming with cheer, hadn't behaved like V.D.'d behave if he was being blackmailed, i.e., to name but three, going through the fucking roof, plotting for dire revenge, and swearing off the so-called "fair" sex (make that all sex) for life. And (b) I find it impossible to believe that any damsel, fair, brown, or red, would stoop to such behavior in the first place. So what did that leave a poor deducer to deduce? That a certain door-to-door diaper service might have a new client some half-a-dozen, say, moons in the future? Getting warmer, maybe . . . and maybe, like a lot of things, maybe it was none of my business.

  Right about then, the phone rang, disturbing my sensitive reflections on such things as young love, not-so-young love, autumn leaves a-falling, and calendar leaves likewise. It was my least-favorite bail bondsman, a guy called Fats Nathan, and Fats wasn't called Fats using the kind of reverse humor hoboes and other noted comedians often employ wherein a midget will be nicknamed Lofty and a skyscraper like me Peewee, Fats was called Fats because he was fat. I suppose he wasn't really a bail bondsman anymore if one wanted to nitpick, and it's surprising how many do; since a fairly recent change in the law, the courts now accepted a person's personal recognizance bond, as in a check, which pretty much obviated the need for outside sureties that used to be supplied by guys like Fats for a hefty price. So Fats had moved more into loan sharking, but he also continued with his old lucrative sideline, which was acting as an intermediary between felon and fuzz.

  Say, for example—perish the thought, dismiss instantly from your mind—you were a felon. You had a trial coming up. A key witness exists whom you would very much like not to testify against you. A friendly cop appears on the witness's doorstep, the one supposed to deliver to said witness his subpoena to appear in court. He bears the welcome news that the witness can forget the whole business, he won't have to go through the hassle of a long trial and getting off work and, who knows, putting himself in danger of retaliation, it has happened; his testimony is no longer needed. Merry Christmas. The cop reports back that the witness skipped town, or went back east to his sister-in-law's ordination as a Baptist minister, anyway he's done gone. The cop gets a healthy hit, the felon gets off, and Fats takes his middleman's slice.

  Or so the story goes; far be it from me to even suggest that such things really occur. I for one certainly hope not, and the fact that it is a board of police commissioners that has to yearly decide whether or not to renew my PI license has nothing to do with the matter.

  "Vic?" Fats said. "Fats."

  "Hey, Fats," I said, perching on the corner of the desk. "Still going to Weight Watchers?"

  "Ha, ha," said Fats. "Listen, you want one?"

  "One what?"

  "A skip," he said. "Smart guy like you, should only take a couple of days at most."

  "Maybe," I said. "How much are we talking?"

  "Five plus expenses up to another five?"

  "How about a grand plus unlimited," I said. "That's for three days max."

  "So come on down," he said. "We'll talk it over."

  "Let me check what I got on," I said. I held my hand over the mouthpiece for a minute, then said to him, "I might be able to get to you about three, or a little after. How does that grab you?"

  He said it grabbed him OK, and we rang off.

  All right.

  Business was booming suddenly.

  I'd done a couple of skip traces for Fats before, and gotten paid, but you did have to watch your step with him, he was brighter than he looked, which wasn't hard, and as crooked as a hummingbird's flight path. And besides, Fatso had connections, good ones, on both sides of the law, but especially below it. But could a fatty like that be any match for V. Daniel?

  Unlikely, amigos.

  I gave Jasper Johnson a call at the Downtown Station and luckily found him in.

  "Johnson, Robbery," he barker.

  "V. Daniel, likewise," I said.

  "Who?"

  "V. Daniel. I'm a friend of Frank and Annie O'Brien, I'm in the same sort of line as Frank. I saw them last night, they put me on to you."

  "They OK?"

  I allowed they seemed to be in tolerable shape, considering.

  "Frank making a buck?"

  "Getting by," I said.

  "Good," he said. "Glad someone is. I should've gone in with him when I had the chance. So I made detective, big deal, I'm stuck at this goddamned desk and I'm gonna be stuck at this goddamned desk the rest of my goddamned miserable life."

  "Maybe I can put a little color into your cheeks," I said. I explained briefly about the Lubinskis and D. Gresham the Third, who might just be acting as an inside man when he wasn't rifling his way through "O Mein Papa." I mentioned I was aware that it was standard practice for the rich to be extremely wary about letting photographs of their mansion interiors appear in newspapers or glossy magazines as it was obviously asking for trouble, so some inside information could be very helpful to the criminal element among us. I said I had a list of names and addresses that, if checked out, might throw a little more light on the subject.

  "Better come on down," he said wearily. "Let's have a look. Anytime, I'll be here. If I'm not here, I'll either be in the canteen or the nearest nut house."

  He hung up. So did I. Then, just for the fun of it, I called up the Lew Lewellens again and, adopting a thick Teutonic accent, asked if I could speak with Lew.

  "Sorry, Mr. Daniel, they're still out of town," said the señorita at the other end. So much for the master of disguises.

  I then locked up, with my customary caution, climbed into my classic and made my way downtown via the Ventura and Hollywood freeways with my customary caution, keeping to the inside along with the other geriatrics, old maids, Sunday drivers, and those with a modicum of common sense.

  "I'm gonna get a wino to decorate our home," sang some guy on the radio. Then Emmy Lou Harris said she really had a ball last night, held all the pretty boys tight. Sometimes I wish I was a pretty boy, like the twerp's big pash. Sometimes I don't, but those times I've had so much to drin
k I'm convinced I really am a pretty boy. Such is life in the slow lane.

  I talked my way into the For Officials Only parking lot out back of the old courthouse building downtown, announced myself to the lady cop receptionist, who checked my ID, then checked with Jasper, then watched me all the way to the elevators. Jasper I tracked down in a small office on the fifth floor that contained three desks, two of them unoccupied, and wall-to-wall battered green filing cabinets. Detective J. Johnson was not, apparently, one to beat about the bush.

  "Daniel? Johnson. What've you got?" he said, without bothering to get up or shake hands or make small talk about the Dodger's chances. I gave him what I had, the pages torn out of Evonne's address book.

  "Herein are listed thirty-two private functions at which a group called Ron's Rhythm Kings played," I said. "Do not ask me how I obtained them, it is a professional secret. Now, no one is going to be stupid enough to knock over a joint a day or two after their inside man tootled the flute there, the connection might be a little obvious, so my skilled assistant and I only began listing dates roughly three months old and going back from there. So I thought if you could kindly run this list through your user-friendly police computer and then run all major robberies during the last nine months or so, who knows, we might get a match or two. If we're lucky. If D. Gresham really is an inside man instead of just some pothead having trouble finding the loo."

  "Yeah, if," said Jasper, scowling at the list.

  "You being a trained detective yourself, you will without doubt have figured out by now the cryptic letters after each name refer to parts of this loveable, madcap town of ours."

  "Really?" said Jasper. "I thought they was blood types," He got to his feet, rubbing his red hair in a harassed manner, then brushed ineffectually at the jacket of his rumpled gray suit. "C'mon. Let's go find a user-friendly computer outlet and someone who can work the goddamned thing."

  "Not a computer man yourself, then?" I asked delicately.