The Carpetbaggers (73 page)

"I took the liberty of ordering a hot supper for you, Mr. Cord."

"Thank you, Carter," I said. "That was thoughtful of you."

Carter held open the apartment door. A small table was set up in the dining alcove and there were fresh, gleaming bottles on the bar.

"If you'll just call down when you're ready, Mr. Cord, we'll send it right up."

"Give us a few minutes to wash up, Carter," I said.

"Very good, sir."

I glanced at Jennie, who was still shivering from the cold. "Carter!"

"Yes, Mr. Cord?"

"Miss Denton obviously wasn't prepared for the cold. Do you think we could manage to get her a warm coat?"

Carter allowed himself a brief glance at Jennie. "I believe it could be arranged, sir. Mink, of course?"

"Of course," I said.

"Very good, sir. I'll have a selection up here shortly for mademoiselle."

"Thank you, Carter."

He bowed and the door closed behind him. Jennie turned to me, her eyes wide. "That does it! I thought nothing could impress me any more but that does. Do you know what time it is?"

I looked at my watch. "Ten after twelve."

"Nobody, but nobody, can go shopping for mink coats after midnight."

"We're not going shopping. They're being sent up here."

She stared at me for a moment, then nodded. "Oh, I see," she said. "That makes a difference?"

"Of course."

"Tell me. What makes you so big around here?"

"I pay my rent."

"You mean you keep this apartment all the time?"

"Of course," I said. "I never know when I might be in Chicago."

"When were you here last?"

I rubbed my cheek. "About a year and a half ago."

The telephone rang. I picked it up, then held it out to Jennie.

A look of surprise came over her face. "For me?" she said. "But nobody knows I'm here."

I went into the bathroom and closed the door. When I came out, a few minutes later, she was sitting on the side of the bed, a dazed look on her face. "It was the furrier," she said. "He wanted to know which I preferred — light or dark mink. Also, what size."

"What size did you tell him?"

"Ten."

I shook my head. "I would have thought you took a twelve. Nobody ever buys a mink coat size ten. It hardly pays."

"Like I said, you're crazy," she said. Then she threw herself into my arms and hugged me. "But you're crazy nice."

I laughed aloud. Mink will do it every time.

The man from the detective agency arrived while we were eating supper. His name was Sam Vitale and if he thought it was odd that Jennie was eating in a full, almost black mink coat, his weary, wise eyes evinced no surprise.

"It's cold in Chicago," Jennie explained.

"Yes, ma'am," he answered politely.

"Did you have any trouble finding him?" I asked.

"Not too much. All we had to do was check the credit agencies. He left a trail of bad checks. It was just a matter of time. When we narrowed it down to around Chicago, we checked Social Security. They may change their names but they generally don't fool with their Social Security. He's going under the name of Amos Jordan."

"Where is he working?" I asked curiously.

"In a Cicero garage, as a mechanic. He makes enough to keep him in booze. He's hitting the bottle pretty hard."

"Where does he live?"

"In a rooming house, but he only goes there to sleep. He spends most of his spare time in a clip joint called La Paree. You know the kind of joint. Continuous entertainment. There's always a stripper working on the stage, while the other girls take turns hustling the suckers for drinks."

Amos hadn't changed, I thought. He still went where the girls were. I pushed back my coffee cup. "O.K., let's go get him."

"I'm ready," Jennie said.

Vitale looked at her. "Maybe you'd better stay here, ma'am. It's a pretty rough place."

"What?" Jennie said quickly. "And miss the chance of breaking in my new mink coat?"

La Paree was one of about twenty similar clubs on a street that looked like every other Strip Street clear across the country. Its windows were covered with posters of half-naked girls — Maybellene, Charlene, Darlene and the inevitable Rosie Tookus. All were dancing tonight.

The doorman wore an ear-to-ear grin as the big limousine rolled to a stop. He opened the door with a flourish. "Welcome, folks. They come from all over the world to La Paree."

They certainly did. The doorman rushed into the club, where a small man in a dark suit materialized before us. A hat-check girl, in a pair of tights, took our coats. Jennie shook her head and kept her coat on as we followed him down the dark, narrow smoke-filled room to a tiny table right in front of the stage.

A stripper was working just over our heads. The drums were taking a slow beat and she was grinding away, almost down to the bare essentials.

"Two bottles of your best champagne," I said. This wasn't the place to order whisky. Not unless you had a zinc-lined stomach.

At the word champagne, the stripper paused in her routine, right in the middle of a bump, and looked down. I saw her appraising eyes flick over me as she put on her most seductive smile.

Then Jennie let her coat fall back on the seat and took off her turban. Her long blond hair caught all the flashes of light from the spot as it tumbled down around her shoulders. As quickly as it had appeared, the stripper's smile vanished.

I looked at Jennie. She smiled back at me. "You gotta fight fire with fire," she said.

I laughed. A white-shirted waiter came up with two bottles of champagne in a bucket. Quickly he put three glasses down on the table and opened the first bottle. The cork popped and the champagne spilled down over the sides of the bottle. He filled all three glasses without waiting for me to taste the wine and hurried off.

It was still warm but it was a good champagne. I looked at the bottle. Heidsieck, 1937. Even if the label was a phony, it wasn't half bad. Then I noticed a white chit beside me on the table. Eighty dollars.

"If you'd come in a cab," Vitale said, "it only would have cost you twenty bucks a bottle."

"How much if we'd walked?"

He grinned. "Fifteen."

"'Cheers," I said, lifting my glass.

No sooner had we put down our glasses than the waiter was refilling them. He moved quickly, slopping some over the edge of the glasses, then started to upend the bottle into the ice bucket.

I stopped him with my hand. "Not so fast, friend. If I don't squawk at the tariff, the least you can do is let us finish the bottle."

He stared at me, then nodded. He put the bottle into the bucket right side up and disappeared. There was a roll of drums and the stripper went off, to a desultory clatter of halfhearted applause.

"He's over there, down at the end of the bar," Vitale said.

I turned to look. There still wasn't much light. All I could see was a figure hunched over the bar, a glass cupped in his hands.

"I might as well go get him."

"Think you'll need any help?" Vitale asked.

"No. You stay here with Miss Denton."

The lights went down again and another stripper came on. As I walked toward the bar, a girl brushed against me in the dark. "Looking for someone, big boy?" she whispered. It was the stripper who had just come down off the stage.

I ignored her and walked down the bar to Amos. He didn't look up as I climbed onto the empty stool alongside him. "A bottle of Budweiser," I said to the bartender. The bottle was in front of me and my dollar gone before I was fully settled on the stool.

I turned to look at Amos, who was watching the stage, and a feeling of shock ran through me. He was old. Incredibly old and gray. His hair was thin and his skin hung around his cheeks and jowls the way a skinny old man's flesh hangs.

He lifted his drink to his lips. I could see his hand shaking and the grayish-red blotches on the back of it. I tried to think. He couldn't be that old. The most he could be was his middle fifties. Then I saw his eyes and I knew the answer.

He was beat and there was nothing left for him but yesterdays. The dreams were gone because he'd failed all the challenges and the dry rot of time had set in. There was nowhere left for him to go but down. And down and down, until he was dead.

"Hello, Amos," I said quietly.

He put his drink down and turned his head slowly. He looked at me through bloodshot, watery eyes. "Go away," he whispered in a hoarse, whisky-soaked voice. "That's my girl dancing up there."

I glanced up at the stage. She was a redhead who'd seen better years. They were a good combination, the two of them. They'd both fought the good fight — badly — and lost.

I waited until the music crashed to its finale before I spoke again. "I got a proposition for you, Amos."

He turned toward me. "I told your messenger I wasn't interested."

For a moment, I was ready to get down off that stool and walk off. Out into the fresh, cold night and away from the stench of stale beer and sickness and decay. But I didn't. It wasn't only the promise I'd made Forrester. It was also that he'd been Monica's father.

The bartender came up and I ordered us both a round. He picked up the five and left.

"I told Monica about the job. She was very happy about it."

He turned and looked at me again. "Monica always was a damn fool," he said hoarsely, and laughed. "You know, she didn't want to divorce you. She was crazy mad, but afterward she didn't want to divorce you. She said she loved you."

I didn't answer and he laughed again. "But I straightened her out," he continued. "I told her you were just like me, that neither of us could ever resist the smell of cunt."

"That's over and done with," I said. "A long time ago."

He slammed the glass down on the bar with a trembling hand. "It's not over!" he shouted. "You think I can forget how you screwed me out of my own company? You think I can forget how you beat me out of every contract, wouldn't let me get started again?" He laughed craftily. "I’m no fool. You think I didn't know you had men following me all over the country?"

I stared at him. He was sick. Much sicker than I had thought.

"And now you come with a phony proposition, huh?" He smiled slyly. 'Think I'm not wise to you? Think I don't know you're tryin' to get me out of the way because you know if they ever get a look at my plans, you're through?"

He slid off the stool and came at me with wildly surging fists. "Through, Jonas!" he screamed. "Through! Do you hear me?"

I swung around on the stool and caught at his hands. His wrists were thin and all fragile old bone. I held his arms and suddenly he slumped against me, his head on my chest.

I looked down at him and saw that his eyes were filled with weak old tears of rage at his helplessness. "I’m so tired, Jonas," he whispered. "Please don't chase me any more. I'm sorry. I'm so tired I can't run any— "

Then he slipped from my grasp and slid down to the floor. The redhead, who had come up behind him, screamed and the music stopped, suddenly. There was a press of people around us as I started to get down from the stool. I felt myself pushed back against the bar violently and I stared into the face of a big man in a black suit. "What's goin' on here?"

"Let him go, Joe." Vitale's voice came from behind and the bouncer turned his head around. "Oh, it's you, Sam." The pressure against my chest relaxed.

I looked down at Amos. Jennie was already kneeling beside him, loosening his shirt collar and slipping down his tie. I bent over. "He pass out?"

Jennie looked up at me. "I think it's more than that," she said. "He feels like he's burning up with fever. I think we'd better get him home."

"O.K.," I said. I took out a roll and threw a hundred-dollar bill down on the bar. "That's for my table." I looked up and saw the redhead staring at me, a mascara track of tears streaming down her cheeks. I peeled off another hundred and pressed it into her hand. "Go dry your tears."

Then I bent down and picking Amos up in my arms, started for the door. I was surprised at how light he was. Vitale got our coats from the hat-check girl and followed me outside.

"He lives just a couple of blocks away," he said as I put Amos into the car.

It was a dirty gray rooming house and two cats stood on open garbage cans in front of the door, glaring at us with their baleful yellow night eyes. I looked up at the building from the car window. This was no place for a man to be sick in.

The chauffeur jumped out and ran around to open the back door. I reached out and pulled the door shut. "Go back to the Drake, driver," I said.

I turned and looked down at Amos, stretched out on the back seat. Just because he was sick didn't make me feel any different about him. But I couldn't get over the feeling that if things had turned out a little differently, it might have been my own father lying there.

The doctor came out, shaking his head. Jennie was right behind him. "He'll be all right when he wakes up in the morning. Somebody fed him a slug of sodium amytal."

"What?"

"Knockout drops," Jennie said. "A Mickey."

I smiled. My hunch was right. Vitale had left nothing to chance. I wanted Amos, he saw to it that I got him.

"He's very run down," the doctor added. "Too much whisky and too little food. He has some fever but he'll be all right with a little care."

"Thank you, doctor," I said, getting up.

"You're welcome, Mr. Cord. I’ll stop by in the morning to have another look at him. Meanwhile, Miss Denton, give him one of those pills every hour."

"I’ll do that, doctor."

The doctor nodded and left.

I looked at Jennie. "Wait a minute. You don't have to sit up all night taking care of that slob."

"I don't mind," she said. "It won't be the first time I sat up with a patient."

"A patient?"

"Of course." She looked at me quizzically. "Didn't I ever tell you I graduated from nursing school?"

I shook my head.

"St. Mary's College of Nursing, in San Francisco," she said. "Nineteen thirty-five. I worked as a nurse for a year. Then I quit."