A Savage Place (3 page)

He slid, almost skittered across the room, and snapped a short chop at the side of my neck where it joins the shoulders. I hunched up the muscle and took the chop. It was good but it was a welterweight chop. He was out of his division.

I pushed out a slow right-hand punch that missed his head by a foot. He pounced on the arm, turned his hip into me, and tried to throw me. I didn’t let him. I kept the arm bent so he couldn’t work against my elbow and braced my front leg so he couldn’t pivot me over his hip. He heaved into his throw and nothing happened. We stood in strained counterpoise for a minute. Then, with my left hand, I took a good hold on his belt at the small of his back and lifted his feet off the ground. At the same time I forced my right arm back in against his neck until I could get a grip on his shirt front. He tried to spin loose, but with his feet off the ground he didn’t have a lot of traction. I shifted my feet, arched my back a bit, took a deep breath, and jerked him up over my head, holding him horizontal to the floor. The ceiling in the living room was just high enough.

“Mick,” I said, trying to keep my voice easy, as if there was no strain to it, “either we agree to be pals, or I fire you through that window.”

I don’t think I pulled off the no strain part. “Quick,” I said. My arms felt a little trembly. He wasn’t as heavy as a barbell, but he wasn’t as nicely balanced either.

“Yes,” he said.

I set him down on his feet. He was very flushed, and his breathing was quick and short. He stared at me without any sound but the quick breathing. His eyes were very wide. His nostrils seemed flared and pale. One eyelid trembled.

I waited.

The breathing eased slightly, and he nodded his head, the nods getting smaller and smaller. “Yeah,” he said.

I waited.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. You can take me.” He inhaled big, once. “No way you can’t take me.” He put out his hand.

I took it. It was hard but small, like him.

RAFFERTY AND I drank several more cups of the weak coffee, and Candy drank a little fruit juice through a straw in one corner of her mouth, and I tried to find out everything I could about the both of them and movie racketeering.

“I’m a stunt man,” Mickey told me.

“And he gets a lot of speaking parts too,” Candy said.

Mickey shrugged. “Mostly stunts though, so far,” he said.

“You live here?” I said.

He shook his head. “Right now I’m living up in the Marmont, got a nice housekeeping setup there.”

“On Sunset?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Place looks like the castle of a low-income Moor?”

Rafferty grinned. “Yeah. That’s the place, I guess. I been there a year or so. I’m looking for a place maybe in the Hills somewhere.” He looked at Candy. “Or here, a‘ course. I’d move in here in a minute.”

Candy would have smiled softly if she could. As it was, she just looked at the carpet.

“Candy’s sort of old-fashioned,” Rafferty said. “We been going around together for a while, but she still won’t move in with me or”-he made a wobbling motion with his hand-“vice versa.”

“I go with other men too, Mickey,” Candy said. He looked at the carpet this time.

I said, “Who you got for an eyewitness on this thing?”

Candy nodded her head slightly toward Rafferty. “You?” I said.

“Yeah,” Rafferty said. “Me. I saw the goddamn payoff. I was-”

I put my hand up, palm out. “I’ll want to know every detail, but not yet. Are you it?”

“It? Yeah, I’m it. I saw the whole thing.”

“I mean, is there any other witness?”

“Sure. Sam Felton, the slug he paid.”

“Will either of them talk?”

Candy said no.

“So Mickey is your only talking witness?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him. “And you’re going to look out for her?” I said.

“I’m not scared of them,” he said.

“I am,” I said. “The limpest pansy in the world can get a gun and put you away without perspiring.” Rafferty shrugged. “I’m not scared,” he said again.

“So,” I said to Candy. “I am sitting here with everything you’ve got on the Mob payoffs.”

“Well, I have a lot of people to talk with,” she said.

“But if a bomb went off in this room right now, the investigation would be over, wouldn’t it?”

She and Rafferty looked at each other. “Wouldn’t it?”

“The station would follow up,” Candy said.

I breathed deeply. “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Mick, I assume you go first.”

“We were shooting a movie on location out in the valley,” Rafferty said. “Bike picture called Savage Cycles, and I see Felton talking with a guy. I’m behind one of those little commissary trucks, having a Coke and a donut, you know, and they don’t really notice me.”

“What did the guy look like?” I said.

“Fat guy, bald, had a little beard-you know, a Vandyke-but strong-looking, you know? Hard fat.” I looked at Candy.

“Sound familiar?”

“Maybe,” she said.

Rafferty looked back and forth between us. “What did I miss?” he said.

“You were out in the kitchen looking at the sink,” I said. “It sounds like the guy that poured it on Candy last night.”

“Him?” Rafferty’s eyes widened and his mouth thinned. “That fat fuck?” He opened his mouth to say something else, realized he had nothing to say, breathed in instead, and shut his mouth.

“We’ll file that information,” I said. “Who’s Sam Felton?”

“Producer. Studio is Summit.”

“And you saw him talking to a fat man?”

“Yeah and the fat guy said, `Here I am.‘ And Felton says, `Here’s your money. Same as last week?’ And the fat guy says, `Absolutely.‘ He says, `I don’t jack up the price. I don’t do business that way. You make a deal, you stick with it.’ And Felton hands him an envelope, and the fat guy takes it and folds it over and puts it in his hip pocket without looking. And Felton says nothing else. Just stands there. So the fat guy says, ‘See you next week. Same time, same station,’ and gives him a kind of little salute. You know, like this.” Rafferty touched his forehead and flipped his hand away. “Like, `ta-ta,‘ you know?”

“Yeah. Did you see what he drove away in?”

“No.”

“Why do you think it’s a payoff?”

“What else could it be?”

“Did you say anything to Felton?”

“No.”

“So for all you know, Felton could be paying off his bookie.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Rafferty said. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it was a payoff. There was a threat there. The way the fat guy stood and talked. The way Felton was. There was something going on.”

“And you’d heard rumors about payoffs already.”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, Candy had mentioned she was looking into it.”

“So you were keeping an eye out.”

“Sure. But I didn’t read anything into it. I’m telling you, this is straight. Besides, look what happened to Candy. Doesn’t that prove it?”

“It adds credence,” I said.

“I went to see Felton,” Candy said. “He denied the entire incident. I talked to other people on the set. They didn’t know anything, but I had a sense Felton was covering up something. As if he were scared or guilty.”

“Just a feeling, like Rafferty’s?”

“Yes. But I’m a reporter; it’s a trained feeling. I think they used to call it a hunch in the old Bogart movies.”

“And?”

“And I had an appointment scheduled with the head of Summit Studios, Roger Hammond. It was scheduled for today.” She paused. “I missed it,” she said.

“Did you tell Felton that Rafferty saw him?”

“No. I just said I had an eyewitness.”

“Anybody know that Rafferty is it?”

Candy was quiet for a moment. “Just the police and the news director at the station.”

“You tell anybody, Mick?”

He shrugged. “Well I asked around a little. People on the crew. Some of the cast, like that.”

“So a lot of people know you saw the payoff.”

“Well, yeah. So what? I can handle what comes along.”

“Be prepared to,” I said. “I can look out for her, but you’re on your own.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Rafferty said.

“Listen,” I said. “I can take you, and there’s guys can take me. Don’t be such a goddamn rooster all the time. Someone wants to kill you, it’s not hard.”

“Just ‘cause I’d lose doesn’t mean I won’t fight you,” Rafferty said. “I don’t have to listen to a lot of cheap shit from you, win or lose.”

I nodded. “That’s true. I’ll give it a rest. But you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with. These aren’t tough guys who are trying to prove their manliness, or guys who are interested in who can take who. These are people who will shoot you in the back while you. walk up to your door, or guys who will run you over when you’re crossing Melrose Avenue on your way to Lucy’s El Adobe. They don’t care if it hurts. They don’t care if. it’s fair. They care about you being dead and silent. These are people you’re supposed to be scared of.”

“You be scared of them,” Rafferty said. “I got no time for any more goddamn lectures.” He looked at Candy Sloan. “I’ll be around. You need me, I’ll be there.” He left the room, walked down the short hall, opened the door, went out, and shut it behind him. Firmly.

Candy and I were quiet. The living room seemed to take on the blue clarity of the pool outside. Candy said, “He’s been small all his life.”

“I know,” I said.

The walls of the house were thick and stuccoed. No sound came through them. There was only the faint purr of central air conditioning somewhere inside. A single leaf drifted onto the surface of the pool and turned slowly.

“What now?” Candy said.

“Now you rest and I watch you. When you’re better, we’ll keep that appointment you broke today.”

“You and I?”

“You and I.”

CANDY WAS a quick healer. I sat with her for two days while the swelling subsided and the cuts began to heal. I cooked soup for her and whatever I could find in her kitchen for me. The first night I made pasta with fresh vegetables in a thin cream sauce. After that it was downhill. Candy didn’t have a rich larder, and by the end of the second day I was reduced to crackers and peanut butter with a side of instant coffee. Nights I slept on the couch; days I read whatever she had handy; Rachel Wallace’s new book, Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Redbook, a collection of essays by Joan Didion. I wished I’d brought my copy of Play of Double Senses with me. It would have impressed the hell out of Candy. I could let drop that it was by the president of Yale, and she’d think I was learned. However, the book was in my suitcase at the Beverly Hillcrest along with my clean shirt and my toothbrush. Candy had a razor, so I was clean-shaven, but my breath was beginning to tarnish my teeth.

Late morning of the third day, I was doing sit-ups with my back on the floor and my feet on the couch when Candy came out of her bedroom dressed, with her hair combed and a good job of makeup that covered a lot of the damage. I was looking at her upside down. She looked very good.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“For what?”

“For Roger Hammond, for getting you a real meal, for going out and getting back to work. Not necessarily in that order.”

“No,” I said. “Definitely not in that order. First the decent meal.”

She smiled, sort of. “Okay,” she said. “It’s late enough to make it brunch, maybe. Do you always sleep that way?”

“Sit-ups,” I said. “Isolates the stomach and saves the back.”

“I thought you were supposed to keep your legs straight.”

“You were wrong.”

She smiled again, sort of, favoring the side where the stitches still pulled. I got up.

“How many do you do?”

“A hundred.” I put the gun and holster back on my belt, got my blazer off the back of a chair, and slipped into it. My yellow shirt was in trouble, and my pants were baggy. “How about we go to my hotel while I get a change of clothes and a brush of tooth and then off to some elegant Hollywood bistro for an early lunch.”

She nodded. “I’ll call a cab. I left my car in Griffith Park.”

The cab took us to the Hillcrest, where I showered and shaved and brushed my teeth and put on clean clothes and left the others to be cleaned. I had switched to a light gray blazer, charcoal slacks, white shirt, black and red paisley pocket handkerchief.

“Tie?” I said to Candy Sloan.

She looked as scornful as she could without pulling her stitches.

“I’ll try to find a place that requires one before you leave, so you won’t have brought one out here in vain.”

“I brought several,” I said. “Keeps me in touch with my roots. Where shall we eat?”

“I can’t eat much. Is there any place you’ve heard of you’d like to try?”

“Actually I’d like to go back up to the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset.”

“Near my apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“After I saw you make that pasta the other night, I thought you were a fancy eater.”

“I am. And a plain one. And a big one. I like Hamburger Hamlets.”

“All right, but you must let me take you to Scandia when I can eat too.”

“I’ve been to Scandia. But I’ll go again.”

At Hamburger Hamlet I had a frappéed margarita and a large hamburger and a big beer. Candy managed a dish of something called Custard Lulu. Then we took a cab out to Griffith Park and found Candy’s car where she had parked it, near the zoo entrance. It was a brown MGB with a chrome luggage rack. She put the top down, and we drove back to Hollywood on the Golden State Freeway then along Los Feliz to Western and then onto Hollywood Boulevard. The sun was Lright. The smog was in remission. I was struck, as I always was, with the shabbiness of Hollywood Boulevard. It was a small-town shabbiness: low stucco with paint peeling, burrito stands with plastic Mexicans and plastic cactuses and plastic burros. There were places that sold Hollywood memorabilia and places that sold papaya juice; there were office buildings about the size of those in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, there were gas stations and record stores, and pink-and-yellow motels, and a steady mingle of street kids and tourists.

“Gee,” I said, “if things really started booming out here, this could become another Forty-second Street.”