THE MOON CLUB, LIKE SO many other things in life, wasn’t what it once had been. There was good news and bad news. The bad news was that the Moon Club was now in a sort of post-punk funk, which meant that it was frequented by skinheads, nutcases decked out in old Nazi regalia, and large specimens whose sexuality was in considerable doubt but might best be described as Martian. The music was earsplitting and awful, a fifth-generation parody of itself. The place was full of the ugliest people I’ve ever seen. The good news was that no one noticed me, dripping with blood, head split open. I fit right in. Perfect disguise. I was one of them.
Morris Fleury guided me down a dark hallway with a red light at the end and into the toilet. Two guys wearing enough chains to play Marley’s Ghost paid us no attention while he dabbed at the blood. He had the corncob pipe clamped in his teeth. His suit was soaked through. It was the same seersucker suit he’d been wearing that first night I’d found him camped on my terrace. I wondered if he’d ever dried out in the meantime. I was wondering about a lot of things while I listened to him breathing heavily through his nose, felt his surprisingly light touch on my scalp. He kept up a steady stream of muttered comments, the drift of which seemed to be that only a couple of stitches had pulled loose and he didn’t figure there was any real cause for alarm.
“You did, however, kill a man,” he mused, squeezing my head back together, “though I think we’re home free on that one, too. Nothing to connect you up with the stiff.”
I was staring down into the crackled, filthy sink while he kept dabbing at my head. “Why didn’t you help me?”
“Got there too late. You didn’t need no help no mo’.”
“I don’t get it,” I sighed.
“No, it’s all pretty confusing. This sort of thing always is. Too many details, too many angles. You just gotta let it wash over you like and check out what it leaves behind. Now lift your head real slow, don’t start the bleeding again. You’re gonna be just fine. What the hell happened to your head anyway? You got enough stitches up there for a sewing circle.” He chuckled to himself, not really caring about the answer. “Little Heidi close her legs too fast and pop your top?”
How can I say this? It just wasn’t worth telling him to shut the fuck up. So I ignored him. “You and Heidi,” I said, trying to focus my eyes in the mirror. My face was right at home among the pentagrams, swastikas, and depictions of dripping penises. “The Moon Club,” I sighed. There was a lot of screaming and shouting filtering down the hallway. These people were having a good time. “What are we doing here? Looking for Clive?”
“Soaking up atmosphere. Revisiting the past. Learning a lesson. Everything changes,” he said. He took off his Panama and mopped his bald head with its few strands of hair crossing the top like black threads. The handkerchief was wet with my blood and left pink streaks on the wet gray expanse of his skull. He blinked at me from pouches of wrinkles. He looked tired and sixty and not very dangerous anymore. In my mind I’d turned him into something scary. The reality was looking worn out and more frightened than I. “You look like sort of a human being now,” he said. “We used to say that about my uncle Verm. He was on my mother’s side, the Boolers. They was always in trouble, gettin’ blood on ever’ damn thang.” He was fanning himself with the straw hat, enjoying the dialect. “You gonna need a new shirt, sonny,” he grudgingly allowed. “Otherwise …” He shrugged. The thing was, I looked better than he did.
When we struggled free of the Moon Club it was past midnight. The mist had thinned for the moment and the moon was shining past the shredded clouds. A wind freshened off the water. The sound of the club faded behind us. The streets were empty. The body would be found tomorrow and the cops would be up against it. My head had stopped aching. Maybe the stitches had been squeezing my brain. It felt good to walk. I felt as if someone else had killed the man in the darkness.
“I’m tired,” Fleury said. “Need some java.”
He led the way to a dark coffeehouse he seemed to know. We settled down at a corner table not far from the steaming, spitting espresso machine. Candles sputtered on the tables. The windows were steamed up and streaked with rain. And somebody, I kept thinking, had just died trying to kill me …
We got coffees on the table and I told him I wanted to know who the hell he was working for and what his role was. I told him I had seen him at Cotter Whitney’s and with Heidi Dillinger in Tangier.
“Relax, chumley, you’ve had a tough night. You don’t want to get all worked up. Ever kill anyone before?” He started spooning sugar into the thick black brew.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Let me explain things to you. Just calm down—”
“Tell me that again and you’ll be wearing your coffee.”
“You’re looking at the head of security for Magna. Whole shootin’ match. Now I may not fit the image in your mind, but I am what I am and Mr. Whitney will tell you the same thing. I go back to the old days when Harry Mirsky ran the studio, but Whitney knew he was on to a good thing when he got me as part of the package. There’s damn little I don’t know about the movie and record ends of this outfit. I report directly to Whitney, you got that?”
I nodded, fumbling the pieces together in my mind, hoping the picture would eventually come clear.
“The first order of business for me these days,” he went on, sucking a tooth and puffing the pipe, “is the blackmailing of Magna. You heard about this, am I right? Okay. We’ve got a blackmail situation—only we’re not sure who’s doing it and we’re not sure what they want. It’s a one-way street so far. We can’t contact them, so we wait to hear … so they keep proving things to us, telling us things they know that they shouldn’t know. They’ve got a pipeline for information, no doubt about that—”
“Like what?”
“It has nothing to do with you, my friend. But you heard about the song we got and then Thumper Gordon’s letter … Well, we’re trying to fit that into the picture, see?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, we’ll get it all straightened out sooner or later.” He noisily slurped some coffee and gave it a thorough chewing. Vivaldi was playing in the background and losing the battle with the espresso machine. Most of the patrons at the small tables seemed to be students, deep in conversation. “You and Bechtol and Sally Feinman and Miss Dillinger, you all arrived on my plate at the same time. And Bechtol’s idea about a novel based on your brother coincided with the first blackmail overtures and the arrival of that damn song and the dead disc jockey and then the Feinman killing, and then Bechtol brings you into it and that goddamn Hugo Ledbetter …” He ran his hand over the broad bald scalp where his hair would have been. “Where to start? It’s like one of those whatchamacallits … Möbius-strip things, like a snake twisting around and eating its own tail. What parts are hooked together? Do we have two entirely different deals going on here? Not connected at all?” He sighed, leaned back, pushed one hand down inside the top of his baggy, rumpled trousers, behind the big belt buckle with the silver longhorn on it. “I’ve got too damn much to do is what it comes down to. On top of trying to figure out all this craziness, Whitney tells me he sorta wants me to keep an eye on you so you don’t step into any deep shit. I’m stretched too thin, that’s the truth of it. He needs fuckin’ Pinkertons and he throws it all in my lap … but he’s obsessed with the idea that none of this gets out, so it’s up to poor old Fleury to keep the lid on. And now Ledbetter, he’s making waves and Whitney’s bouncing off the walls. He hears about this little escapade of yours tonight, he’ll have my hindquarters for a paperweight, I promise you.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them hard. When he opened them he didn’t give the impression that the view had improved.
“So what’s going on with you and Heidi Dillinger? After I saw you sneaking around Whitney’s place in Minnesota I asked her if she knew you and she told me she didn’t. But there you were together in Tangier. What’s she lying about?”
“She wasn’t lying. She didn’t know me from Adam until she got to Tangier and Bechtol told her over the phone who I was, that I’d be on the lookout for her and she should keep it under her hat once we connected. She’s a straight shooter, Heidi is. Whitney told me I had to let her in on it so she could then report to me if she couldn’t reach him or Bechtol—hell, I’m the one on the case they’re watching from a sky box somewhere. And Heidi’s on the Magna team, she worked for Magna before she hooked up with Bechtol … you, Tripper, you’re a guest, more or less. She’s on the inside, she’s got responsibilities to the greater glory of Magna and Allan Bechtol. She’s working for us, see, and you’re more of an independent contractor, on board for just this one job … frankly, I wish I’d never heard of you or your brother. Nothing personal. Just makes my life a helluva lot more complicated.” He dug a pouch of Cherry Blend tobacco from his coat pocket and filled the old corncob again, sucking it to make sure of the draw.
“Who tried to kill me? He—or one of them if they were working together—was on the plane from Rome. He checked me out at dinner, he followed me, playing one of JC’s songs on his cassette player. He led me right to the guy who attacked me … Who are they?”
Fleury applied a match and the tobacco curled up over the rim of the bowl. He puffed, watching me through the clouds of smoke. He pushed the tobacco down with the side of the matchbook.
“Well, one of them is past tense.” He grinned in the worst possible taste, gaps between his yellowed teeth. “Look, I don’t know who they were … I wish to hell I did know.” He puffed reflectively. “Somebody who doesn’t want you to find JC Tripper, wouldn’t you say? You must be getting too close …”
“How close can you get to a ghost?”
“Have it your way, my friend. Nobody’s trying to kill me. I gotta go with what makes sense to me. Who the hell else would want to kill you? You’re looking and JC is hiding—”
“All right, all right. I guess I’m the only one who thinks JC is dead.”
“There’s always Taillor,” he said. “Maybe he knows.” He yawned.
“Did you leave me a note about Taillor at the hotel?”
He shook his head. I told him of my pointless trek to Taillor’s house. He kept shaking his head. Embers dribbled over the rim of the bowl, burning little black holes in his seersucker coat. “No, I’m not here to see Taillor. I’m investigating him from another angle altogether. Banking. I’ve been spending the day going through Taillor’s banking records—”
“Why would he stand still for that?”
“I didn’t ask him, Tripper.” He gave me a damp, quizzical smile.
“Silly me, I was under the impression that the secrets of the Swiss banking system are more or less inviolable.”
“Less. At least where clout like Magna’s is involved. All our European financial dealings come through a bank here in Zurich. Which means we’re a hellish large account.” He nodded smugly. I couldn’t bear to watch. “And Clive Taillor is a client of the same bank.” He chuckled nastily in that odd way unimportant men sometimes do. “The bank does us a favor every now and then. When we want to check up on Taillor, it’s not exactly something that requires board approval.” His power, however third-hand it was, gave him considerable pleasure.
“Find out anything interesting?” I was trying to act as if I were only making conversation, but it was the most important question I’d asked anybody since I’d thought I was picking up Heidi on Fifth Avenue.
“Yes, Mr. Tripper, I did.”
“Is it a secret?”
“Surely is.” He sighed at the notion of his own importance, puffed his corncob. “But you, you’re okay. You’re involved—but you don’t really give a shit how this comes out, one way or the other, right?”
“I can live with it. Unless somebody kills me.”
“What I found out is this: I proved JC Tripper is alive. Hear me out. Ever since JC died, or was reported to have died, for these twenty years, Taillor’s been getting a regular payoff, by wire—from here in Switzerland, or from the Bahamas, or from the United States. Just like clockwork, with cost-of-living increases, you might say … same amount for a year or two, once a month, then it increases for a year or two, then it increases again. So on and so forth. I ain’t a rocket scientist, but I can see the evidence of my own two eyes.”
“Any way to trace where these wire transfers are coming from? I mean the specific account holder?”
He massaged his chin, scraped his fingers in the stubble. “That’s a little harder to do. Oh, we can do it, but Whitney’s going to have to apply some personal pressure. Swiss bankers draw the line pretty quick once they start breaking rules. One rule, okay. The second rule comes harder … but when we do find out who’s paying Taillor, who’s been paying him for twenty years, I think I know what we’ll find. We’ll find your brother, Mr. Tripper. And I think you’d better get ready for that little reunion. You were a vegetable back there twenty years ago; he could have left Tangier in a camel caravan and it wouldn’t’ve made no never mind to you … Clive Taillor faked the whole thing, that’s my theory, he helped your brother disappear and he’s been getting paid off ever since. And, buddy boy, I’m about to show Cotter Whitney how Morris Fleury became a legend in this business.”
“Which business is that?”
“The find-out business, chumley. That’s what I do better than anybody else … find out. And I’m gonna find out who’s been paying Taillor off … and when I do we’re gonna have all the answers—who’s the blackmailer and where JC Tripper is these days—I’m real close. And then we’ll have the big reunion, buddy boy.”
“The big reunion?”
“Sure. You and your brother—who the hell else?”
“Aren’t you afraid somebody might wait for you in the dark and kill you?”
“Nobody gonna kill Morris Fleury, don’t worry about that.”
Watching Morris Fleury have a good laugh was not the sort of thing likely to give wings to your spirits and put a smile on your face.
“Say, chumley,” he said moistly, savoring what was to come, “she’d kill me if she knew I was running off at the mouth, but … but, man to man, I owe you, right?”
“How the hell should I know?” A man inside my head was trying to break out. All he had was a ball-peen hammer, but he was making do.
“Well, I got the idea from little things she said that our Heidi is sweet on you. Never knew her to get involved, not with any guy, ever. She’s always been all business, but she gets that look when she talks about you.” He chuckled. Damp, very damp. “I’d like to hear about that, if you ever get any, y’know? Poon. Love a good poon story.”
Believe it or not, Mr. Ripley, my head got worse.