Natural Causes (7 page)

"You must be Stoner," he boomed, as he
pulled up a chair. "Sy Goldblum."

I nodded at him.

"And you're Moon?" he said, glancing at
Jack.

"Yeah." Jack gave me a quick look. "If
you want me to leave, Harry . . ."

"I guess that's up to Sy."

"No problem," Goldblum barked. "I
could use a beer, though. Just got back from Chavez Ravine and I'm
all dried out."

"I'll get you one," Jack said and walked
over to the bar.

"Is he standing in a trench?" Goldblum
said, staring at Jack. "Little men are a pain in the ass. Always
trying to make up for being short."

"That right?" I said. "You were on
special duty at the stadium?"

Goldblum laughed loudly. He wasn't completely
driedout, because his breath smelled like a bottle of Pabst with
a cigarette butt floating on the bottom. "Hell, no. I went to
the game."

"How'd they do?"

"How d'you think?" he said with a grin.
"The Dodgers can't be beat. They're too good. Won a few bucks on
'em, too."

"That's great."

Goldblum wrapped an arm around his chair and leaned
back lazily. "So you're from Cincinnati, huh?"

"That's where I'm from."

"What a joke town. I spent a couple of weeks
there one afternoon. It was the pits. Couldn't wait to get back here
and catch a few rays."

"You from L.A.?"

"Nobody's from L.A., man," Goldblum said.
"I'm from Butte, Montana. Came out here seven years ago, after a
hitch in the Marines. Tried to break into the movies. Did some stunt
work. Had a few bit parts. Maybe you saw me? I was in a couple of
'Happy Days' and one 'Barney Miller'."

"I don't own a TV."

Goldblum gawked at me as if I were from another
planet. "Now that is weird. You know about TV, don't you? A
little box with a screen? Shows pictures that talk?" He clapped
me hard on the arm. "Just kidding, Harry. Maybe they haven't got
TV in Cincinnati, yet. You look for it in the papers."

"What happened to your acting career?" I
asked.

"Aw, it went right in the toilet. Nowheresville.
I got an agent. Changed my name. Took an ad out in Variety. Nothing
worked."

"What did you change it to? Your name?"

Goldblum looked abashed. "To Sy Goldblum,"
he said. I laughed.

"Yeah, I know," he said miserably. "But
there are a lot of Jews in the business. No offense."

"I'm not Jewish."

"Good," he said. "I thought a kike
name might help. Now I'm stuck with it."

"Why don't you change it back to what it was
before?"

"To Seymour Wattle? No, thank you. Besides,
having a kike name doesn't hurt in this town, if you know what I
mean. Your pal, Moon, isn't a hebe, is he?"

"No, he's a wop."

"Good," Seymour said. "I get along
good with wops."

Jack came back to the table with Seymour's beer.
Seymour snatched the bottle out of Jack's hand and patted the chair
beside him. "Have a seat, Shorty."

Jack grunted and sat down. "Well, did I miss
anything?"

"Only the story of Seymour's life," I said.

"Hey!" Wattle said, giving me an angry
look. "Don't call me that. I'm Sy Goldblum, now."

"Sorry."

Wattle drained the beer in one gulp. A couple of
drops leaked onto his shirt. When he noticed them, his face reddened.
"Shit, this thing cost me seventy-five bucks on Rodeo Drive.
It's pure silk. Some dago design." He glanced at Jack and said,
"No offense."

Jack said, "None taken."

"Shall we get down to business, Sy?" I
said.

Wattle nodded. "You want to know about Dover,
right?"

"Right the first time."

"Well, I'll tell you," he said, leaning
forward and cribbing the empty beer bottle in his hands. "I
don't have much. The guy was found dead on Monday by a maid in the
Belle Vista. Some Mex cunt. As near as we can guess, he'd been dead
since early Sunday morning--maybe thirty-six, forty hours. I wasn't
in on the investigation, but I've seen the lab photos and the boy was
a real mess. He'd apparently been taking a shower and lost his
balance and fell right through the glass curtain.

"Broken glass is the worst," Wattle said,
peeling the label off the beer bottle with his thumbnail. "Give
me a shotgun any day. Shit, the guy was sliced to ribbons. Belly
open, guts hanging out. One eye dangling on his cheek. Even his
pecker-"

"That's enough!" Jack said in a commanding
voice. Then he ducked his head in embarrassment. "I'm sorry. I
knew the man, that's all."

"Well, you wouldn't have recognized him
anymore," Wattle said. "What wasn't cut up or off was
scalded by the shower water or half-eaten by maggots."

Moon's face turned white.

"I think we can skip the clinical details,"
I said to Wattle, who was enjoying Jack's reaction. Wattle laughed.
"O.K. by me."

"You all right?" I said to Jack.

He nodded weakly.

"What caused the fall?" I asked the cop.

"We don't know. Could have been he lost his
balance and slipped in the tub. The guy had a heart, so it might have
been that. He was also a juicer, so it could have been any number of
things."

Since I was looking for a scandal, I said, "Could
he have OD'd?"

"We couldn't find any tracks on his arms, but
that's not the only place you can shoot up and the rest of him was
too messy to tell. If he was stoned, it probably wasn't on H."

"How about blow'?"

"It's possible," Wattle said. "But
that wouldn't change anything. Whether he was stoned or drunk or
sober, he still slipped and fell."

"What about the rest of the room? Was there any
indication that somebody had been there with him, before or after?"

Wattle shook his head. "He was alone. His
suitcase was open on the bed."

"As if he were packing?"

"Or unpacking," Wattle said.

"How come the maid didn't come into the room
before Monday morning?"

"Dover left a message at the desk on Friday when
he checked in that he didn't want any maid service or phone calls
until he said different. Since he was a regular at the Belle Vista,
they went along with it. The only reason the Mex maid went into the
room on Monday was because somebody complained to the management
about the stink."

"Did he say why he didn't want any calls?"

"Nope. Just wanted to be alone, I guess."

I turned to Jack. "You buy that?"

He looked at me uncertainly. "I don't know. It's
possible."

"You don't have any idea what Dover was doing
between Friday night and Sunday morning, do you?" I asked
Wattle.

He shook his head again. "The desk clerk checked
him in on Friday at five-thirty P.M. Dover had dinner in his room.
Left the tray outside his door. Then went for a drive in a rented
car. He must have come back after twelve, because the kid who works
the Belle Vista lot had already taken off for the night. The night
clerk claims she didn't see him come back in. But she was on break
between twelve-thirty and twelve-forty-five. Anyway, the car was
parked in the lot on Saturday and stayed there all day. It was in the
lot on Sunday, too. And on Monday, when the body was found."

"Did you check the odometer?"

"Yep. Nothing special. Sixty miles."

"Did anybody see him on Saturday?"

"Nope. But then nobody was looking for him,
either. He didn't eat in the hotel, so it's probable that he went
out. But we have no idea where or whether someone was with him. All
we know is that he didn't take the rental car."

"How about phone calls?"

"He made a few local ones on Friday night. And
one long distance one to Cincinnati."

"That would have been to his mother," I
said.

I stared at the half-eaten shrimp on Jack's plate.
"What's the matter, Harry?" Moon said. "There isn't
very much to go on, Jack."

"It was an accident," Wattle said. "That's
what I've been telling you."
 

9

Before Wattle left, he turned to Jack and said, "You
footin' the bill?"

"For what?" Jack said.

Wattle tilted his head and gave Moon a long, hard
look. "For what do you think, Shorty?"

Jack paled. "I thought this had all been
arranged."

Wattle shook his head. "You're not going to try
to stiff me, are you? Man, I'd hate it if you tried that."

Jack glanced at me and I said, "Pay the man."

"How much?" he said to Wattle.

"A hundred ought to cover it. If you want more,
it'll cost more. And in cash. I don't take Visa."

"I don't know if I have that much on me."

Wattle sighed heavily and patted Moon on the wrist.
"C'mon, Shorty. Don't make me mad. It just isn't worth it."

"Take it easy," I said to Wattle. "I'll
pay the bill."

Wattle lifted his hand from Jack's wrist. I got a
hundred out of my wallet and handed it to him. He folded the money up
with one hand and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

"There," he said with a tight little smile.
"Didn't hurt a bit. No hard feelings?"

"None," I said.

He looked at Jack. "No hard feelings, big guy?"

Jack managed to force out a "No."

"That's just swell," Seymour Wattle said.
"I like doing business with people who like me." He got up,
patted his shirt pocket, and gave us a Boy Scout salute. "See
you around, fellas."

He strode out of the bar. Jack watched him with
hatred. "Forget it, Jack," I said to him.

"Fucking asshole," he said.

"He's just a jerk cop."

"Yeah?" Moon's face had turned red. "I
guess you think I should have socked him."

"I think you should have paid him a hundred
dollars." "He's the kind of guy you're used to dealing
with, isn't he?" Moon said.

"Do you mean, he's my kind of guy, Jack?"

"I don't know what I meant." He rubbed his
red cheeks with both hands. "I'm sorry I said that. I should
have said something to him."

"Look, this is his bar on his street in his
town. The way he sees it, he's got squatter's rights." I got
tired of my own explanation halfway through it. "Let's forget
it, O.K.?"

"Yeah," Moon said without conviction. "It
was just the way he talked about Quentin's body--the pleasure he got
out of it." Jack stood up. "We better get going. Helen's
expecting us at the Belle Vista at seven-thirty."

We walked out to the street. "I'll get you that
one hundred dollars in the morning," Jack said. "I'll cash
a check at the desk."

Although I was getting tired of his indignation, I
said, "All right."

The doorman hailed a cab for us. Jack told the
cabbie, "The Belle Vista." And he didn't say another word
on the way over.

By the time we pulled up in front of the hotel, Jack
had grown up again.

"Why'd you call him Seymour?" he asked me,
as we stepped out of the cab.

I told him the story of Seymour's career in movies
and he laughed.

"Christ, that's typical. I wonder how many lives
people run through before they end up in this city? Three, four? It's
like Hindu hell. If you can't make it in Butte or Des Moines, you
live your next life waiting for a casting call in Studio City. And
when the karma dries up, you're reborn as a cop or a parking lot
attendant in Westwood." He turned to the doorman--a handsome
Chicano kid in livery, standing in front of a long, canopied bridge.
"You want to be in movies, don't you?"

The kid smiled. "You bet."

Jack smiled back at him. "Well, I guess we all
do," he said. "After all, I wasn't born to be the executive
producer of 'Phoenix'. It's guys like Frank Glendora who have the
luck. They want one thing and they get it. The rest of us keep riding
the wheel."

Moon tipped the kid a quarter and we walked across
the bridge, over a gully of flowers, and through a pair of French
doors into the hotel lobby. The lobby was nothing more than a short
breezeway with a second pair of French doors propped open on the far
side of the room. A prim woman in a floral print dress was sitting at
a desk beside the second pair of doors. She stood up when we came in.

"Can I help you?" she said pleasantly.

"We're here to see Helen Rose," Jack said.
"Tell her it's Jack Moon."

"I'll ring her room."

While the woman was phoning Helen Rose, I walked over
to the second pair of doors and took a peek at the hotel grounds.
There was a small cobbled court behind the lobby, with long buildings
surrounding it on three sides. The buildings were in the Monterey
Revival style stucco, lath, and concrete, with low, hipped roofs of
red clay tiles and wrought-iron trim on the doors and windows.