The Kind One (25 page)

“Seitz was arrested for running a bookmaking operation that Los Angeles County District Attorney Buron Fitts called ‘the biggest on the west coast. It’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ continued Fitts. ‘Seitz has his fingers in every dirty pie in this part of the country, prostitution, gambling, drugs, you name it. This is just the latest example of how myself, Mayor Shaw, and Chief of Police Davis are taking our community back from those racketeers and crooked politicans that have preyed on the public for far too long.’

“Fitts also said he’d like to talk to Seitz about several unsolved homicides, including that of Clarence ‘Doc’ Travis, a bootlegger and known associate of Seitz’s. The decapitated head of Travis was found in the waters of Lake Arrowhead in 1929 by a troop of Girl Scouts on a nature hike. ‘I know some of those innocent young ladies are still having nightmares about their terrible discovery to this very day,’ said Fitts, his voice filled with indignation.

“Seitz was released later in the day on $10,000 bail. When asked by reporters on the steps of the Central Police Station about the charges against him, he said, ‘It’s all a big frame job. I’m a businessman and sportsman, not a mobster. Fitts is barking up the wrong tree.’ Queried about his involvement in the murder of Travis, Seitz answered, ‘They say I killed everybody but Cock Robin. Doc Travis was a friend of mine. I don’t kill my friends.’

“‘Or anybody else, for that matter,’ his lawyer, well-known mob mouthpiece Arnold ‘Blinky’ Dublinski, quickly added.”

I called Bud’s house. Dick Prettie picked up.

“Dick, what’s going on? I just read in the paper Bud got arrested.”

“Yeah. Louie Vachaboski made a deal with the D.A. and ratted Bud out.”

“Fay Wray?”

“Hey, I just remembered. I ain’t supposed to be talking about none of this shit on the phone. Bud’s scared it’s being tapped. Anyway, I was just about to call you. Come on over. Bud wants to see you.”

I drove to Bud’s. Beeped my horn at the front gate. A grotesque, unfamiliar face glared out at me through the bars.

“Yeah? What do you want?”

He was young, probably even younger than me. It was like a giant raspberry had been smashed against one side of his face, and his nose was nothing but a big red lump. He was holding a shotgun, pointing it not quite at the ground and not quite at me.

“Who the fuck are you?” I said.

Now the shotgun began to point a little more definitely toward me. The side of his face that was normal started turning red like it was trying to catch up with the other side.

“Who the fuck are
you
?” he said.

Willie the Coon strolled up. “Take it easy, Bo. That’s Danny. He’s with us.”

Bo lowered his shotgun with a look of deep regret. Willie hit a button and the gate opened.

I drove up to the house. Dick and Nello were standing outside, smoking.

“Who’s the asshole with the thing on his face?” I said as I got out of the car.

“Bo Spiller,” said Dick. “Some punk from Detroit.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Bud brung him in,” said Nello. “He’s supposed to be some kinda mad-dog shotgun killer or something.”

“What’s he need with a mad-dog killer?”

“He’s beefing up his pertection. He thinks everybody’s out to get him.”

“You hear about Teddy?” said Dick.

I shook my head. “What about him?”

“He went to work for Shitter.”

“No kidding. How come?”

“Maybe Shitter’s giving him more dough. Or maybe he’s thinking it ain’t healthy working for Bud Seitz no more.”

“There ain’t many of us old guys left,” said Nello. “Me, and you, and Nucky, and Mo—”

“And me,” I said.

Dick and Nello exchanged a look.

“That’s right, kid,” said Dick. “And you.”

I went inside. Anatoly led me into the dining room. Bud was having lunch with Darla. He looked glad to see me.

“You hungry, Danny? We’re having pheasants. Anatoly, get Danny a plate.”

Darla gave me a searching look but didn’t greet me as I sat down at the table. Anatoly brought me a plate with a honey-brown pheasant on it and roasted potatoes and green peas. I was starved, and I dug in.

Bud watched me eat. “How is it?”

“Delicious.”

“I hadn’t never even heard of a fucking pheasant when I was a kid. Now I can eat as many pheasants as I wanna. I could eat a dozen, two dozen a day if I didn’t mind looking like Moe Davis. That’s why this kinda shit really pisses me off.” He held up the same newspaper Dulwich had shown me, and slapped the photo of himself with the back of his fingers. “You see this?”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t eat pheasants in prison. You can only eat the worst kind of slop. And that’s what these sons of bitches wanna do to me. They wanna make it where I can’t eat no more pheasants. It says here I got arrested for running a bookmaking operation that was ‘the biggest on the west coast.’ That’s some joke. I’m only small potatoes in that racket, and everybody knows it. And the fucking Gangster Squad’s ‘an elite crimebusting unit’?!”

He pronounced elite “uh light.” He laughed incredulously.

“I’m a law-abiding citizen compared to them crumbs. And that fucking Jack Otay. I
made
that prick. When I met up with him he was just a dumb detective in a cheap suit that couldn’t have found a bull fiddle in a phone booth. Now he’s driving around town in a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac and he’s got a house in Palm Springs and he’s fucking some movie star that don’t speak any English. And him saying I was ‘mild as a kitten’! All I know is his face went white as this fucking tablecloth when I told him what I was gonna do to him when this is all over with.”

“Did Girl Scouts really find Doc Travis’s head?”

“Buron Fitts deserves some kinda prize for being the biggest liar in America. It wasn’t fucking Girl Scouts, it was this buncha whores from this cathouse in Big Bear. This old dame named Flo ran the cathouse. It was her seventieth birthday or some kinda shit, so her and all her whores got drunk and drove down to Arrowhead and stripped naked and took a midnight dip. That’s when they found poor old Doc’s head bobbing around. I heard they all run outa that lake and drove back to Big Bear so fucking fast they didn’t even take the time to put their clothes back on.”

He continued to eat as he looked over the story. “Now this ten G bail’s an interesting thing. Ten G’s is nothing. Maybe they
want
me to take it on the lam. Maybe that’d solve all their fucking problems for ’em. Maybe they don’t want me going up on the stand and yapping about everything I know ’cause I’d take a lotta them down with me. I’d be like that blind guy in the Bible, Goliath. He brung down the temple on his fucking head but killed everybody else too.”

“Samson,” said Darla. We both looked at her; she wasn’t really eating, just pushing around the peas.

“Samson brought down the temple. Goliath was this big giant that David killed.”

“Oh yeah. With a fucking slingshot, right? How come you ain’t eating nothing? You don’t like pheasants?”

Darla shrugged. “It’s not that. I just don’t feel so hot.”

“Whatsamatter?”

“I’m kinda sick at my stomach.”

“You want I should call a doctor?”

“Nah.” She took her napkin off her lap and put it on the table and stood up. “I’m gonna go sit out by the swimming pool. If anybody wants to join me later,” and she meaningfully caught my eye as she walked past, “I’d love the company.”

Bud waited till she was out of the room.

“You know what kinda doctor that dame needs? One of them head doctors. She’s getting screwier ever day. She nearly killed me the other night.”

“Oh yeah? How?”

Bud laughed. “With fucking perfume bottles. You know she’s got about a million bottles of the same kind of perfume. She was throwing ’em at me and I was ducking and dodging and they was busting against the walls. It looked like there’d been an explosion in a fucking perfume factory when she got finished up.”

“How come she was throwing them at you?”

“Same old story. She thinks the greatest thing in the world’s singing in some saloon in front of a buncha drunks trying to imagine what she looks like without no clothes on. I keep telling her all she’s gotta do is lift up one little pinkie and she can have anything she wants. She don’t need to sing.”

“Maybe it makes her happy.”

“One thing I’ve learned, Danny, there ain’t nothing ever gonna make a broad like that happy. I let her sing then two weeks later she’s gonna be throwing perfume bottles at my head again ’cause of some other damn thing. Anyway. What was we talking about?”

“Taking it on the lam?”

“Yeah. I did that when I was a kid. I ain’t doing it again. I like my life here,” and he gestured to the room; it was a beautiful room, with a high ceiling and a crystal chandelier and a breeze coming in through the French doors that opened out on a patio and the green, blossoming garden. “I ain’t gonna just walk away from it. I just gotta figure out how to turn the tables on these sons of bitches.”

Anatoly came in and re-filled our water glasses. I stared as always at his three-fingered hand. When he left, I said: “There’s this red Buick. It’s been following me.”

“Yeah?”

“It always has two guys in it, but I’ve never been able to get a good look at them. And they only follow me when I’m driving Darla around.”

Bud nodded, put some peas in his mouth, and chewed.

“You don’t seem too concerned about it,” I said.

“That’s ’cause I ain’t concerned. They’re my guys.”

“But how come? You don’t trust me with Darla?”

“That ain’t it. This town’s full of people with blood in their eye. I got you guarding Darla ’cause I don’t want her to get hurt. And when you’re guarding her, I got them two guys guarding you for the same reason.”

“So have you got two more guys guarding
those
two guys?”

Bud laughed. “Naw, them two are on their own. If somebody was to knock ’em off, I wouldn’t mind a bit. The world would be a better place without ’em.”

I finally worked up the nerve to say what I’d been dying to say.

“I know all that Two Gun Danny Landon stuff is made up. I know you brought me here on a train about a year ago.”

Bud wiped his mouth carefully with his napkin.

“Yeah? How do you know that?”

“Somebody told me.”

“Who?”

“Tommy.”

“Tommy told you? When?”

“A couple days before…”

I let my voice trail off discreetly. Bud smiled a little.

“He was playing a rib on you. That’s how Tommy was. Always with the jokes. I can’t believe you fell for it. You want another pheasant? Hey, Anatoly!” he yelled. “Get Danny another pheasant!”

As we were finishing lunch, Blinky showed up, lugging a thick briefcase; he was out of breath and mopping his face with a handkerchief like he’d come over here from his office on foot and at a dead run. I left him with Bud, and walked out to the swimming pool.

The seagull was sitting quietly on the sand under the shade of an umbrella. It cocked its head and watched me as I walked by it toward Darla.

She was sitting in a lounge chair, reading
House and Home.
She was wearing a light-green bathing suit and a white floppy hat and sunglasses. One leg was straight, the other bent; they were smooth and golden and a-shine with sweat and lotion.

“Feeling better?”

She lowered her magazine and peered up at me over her sunglasses.

“I always feel better as soon as I leave a room that has Bud in it.”

I dragged over another lounge chair and sat down.

“What did you guys talk about?” she said. “After I left.”

“About how you tried to kill him with Mitsouko bottles.”

She didn’t deny it. She seemed amused. She picked up a tall glass of lemonade with a straw sticking out of it. The glass probably had more than just lemonade in it. She took a suck on the straw, then said delicately: “You thought any more about, uh…?”

“What?”

“What we talked about. In my apartment.”

“Darla, if he goes to prison, everything’s gonna be okay.”

“Maybe he won’t go to prison. And even if he does, that won’t change anything. He’ll have his spies. They’ll tell him everything I do.”

“Look, I’m not gonna kill him for you. You can forget that.”

She looked at me without saying anything. She jabbed at the ice in the glass with the straw. Finally she said: “Okay.”

Now she returned to her magazine. She was doing her Danny’s-vanished-into-thin-air act.

“Darla?”

She continued slowly turning the pages. “What?”

But I didn’t know what. I heard voices. Willie the Coon and Bo Spiller were walking by. They were ogling Darla and giggling. Then Bo socked Willie in the arm and took off. Willie ran after him. Bo got behind the trunk of a palm tree and jumped this way and that as Willie tried to grab him. They were showing off for Darla like schoolboys.

“I’ve got a gun,” she said.

“You’ve got a gun?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Hidden someplace. For when I need it.”

The seagull started screeching. Darla and I looked over, and saw Anatoly approaching. He had a plateful of table scraps. The gull was beside itself with excitement, it flapped its wings and rose into the air as Anatoly started tossing it chunks of potato and crusts of bread and pieces of pheasant. Anatoly spoke softly to the gull in Russian.

“He sure loves that bird,” I said.

“That’s good,” said Darla. “It’s good to love something.”

   ALL I REALLY wanted to do was sleep. Over the next several days I would go to bed early and sleep late and then during the middle of the afternoon take a long nap. It was like my consciousness was an island in a sea of sleep and the waters were rising and threatening to overwhelm the island altogether.

I woke up from one nap, and saw Sophie standing at the dresser with her back to me, stealthily pulling a drawer open. She looked through it quickly, shut it, then eased the next drawer open.

She glanced over her shoulder at me. I snapped my eyes shut. Then I opened my eyes a crack, and peered out at her through the trembling shroud of my eyelashes.