The drive to Palo Alto isn’t too long, but it’s after five, and I get caught up in the rivers of cars heading home to the suburbs, the sun turning us all a warm liquid orange as it sets. Palo Alto is one of those places that’s growing fast, sprouting up like an oasis of wealth, with the college in the center. I pass fancy modern homes carved in sharp shapes, white concrete and glass, roofs like low pyramids. Everything smells new, and like money. An odd place for a mobster to hide out. But maybe that’s the point.
I find Arthur’s address near the college, one of the new houses, but with a high white picket fence that reminds me of the gate at Lavender House. I park in front and open the gate slowly, my head low, in case he’s waiting by the windows, ready to fire. But nothing comes. I step onto the property and can see more of the house—windows with curtains drawn, flowers planted along the wall. And I hear music, faintly. It’s not at all what I was expecting. There’s nothing menacing about it, none of the stale and quiet you expect from a hideout. Carefully, I walk to the front door and knock. I can hear the music louder now, and voices, I think. Laughter. I knock again and the door is opened by a handsome young guy, maybe twenty, with a great body, which is being shown off almost in full, aside from a small pair of yellow swim briefs.
He smiles at me, confused. The house smells of marijuana. “Hey.”
“Hi,” I say. “I’m looking for Arthur … or Joe?”
He smiles and nods. “Joe’s by the pool with all of us.”
He waves me into the house, and I follow. It’s nice in here—warm tan walls and a pink carpet. Dean Martin sings “Zing-A Zing-A Zing Boom” from one of those new Columbia record players. It stands to the side of the white-tiled kitchen, which has glass sliding doors into a tinted solarium with a pool. About a dozen young men—all in swimsuits, except for the two who are nude—are running in and out of the kitchen, laughing. They look at me strangely, but with smiles. Several drape arms around each other’s waists, a few are kissing, dancing. The one who greeted me at the door points at the pool, and I walk carefully out into the solarium area. If that’s what it can be called. All the glass in the walls is tinted, dark enough the neighbors can’t see in, I realize. Only the ceiling is clear. The place is warm, humid, and I feel vastly overdressed in my coat and hat.
I spot Joe easily, sitting at the edge of the pool. He’s the only one over twenty-five, closer to sixty than fifty, with a full head of bushy white hair, and more of it on his chest. He’s in white swim trunks, his heavy belly curving out over them as he looks around the pool, smiling at everything. He spots me, and the smile doesn’t fade at all. He waves me over instead, and I go and stand next to him.
“Take off your shoes,” he says. “Dip your feet in. It’s heated.”
“Thanks, but no,” I say. “You’re Joe?”
“I am. And who are you?”
“My name is Andy Mills.”
He looks up at me again, squinting. “The cop? Really? Why are you out here?”
“I’m not a cop anymore,” I say. “I’m a PI. A gay one.”
“Well, clearly a gay one, the way you’re looking at all the fellas. They’re all students from Stanford. Pretty, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” I say after a beat. He’s not what I expected. There’s none of the usual defensiveness from mobsters, no sense of secrets. He’s relaxed in a way a man in hiding shouldn’t be. And he doesn’t seem to mind me here at all. Doesn’t even seem surprised by it. I look around at the college boys. They don’t seem afraid of him. “You let them use your pool?”
He laughs. “Sure. I like the company. They’re all open-minded, about relationships, sex … age. You sure you don’t want to get in?”
I laugh, and sit down next to him, taking off my shoes and socks, then rolling up my pant legs. “This is not what I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?” he asks.
I take out my cigarette case and offer him one, which he takes, then light us both up. “Honestly?” I blow out a stream of smoke. “A gunfight.”
Joe laughs, a big belly laugh that fills the room and makes the guys turn to him. He smiles and waves and they go back to kissing, swimming. He waves his hand, the cigarette trailing a spiral of smoke. “I’m done with all that, Andy. If someone wants to shoot me, they’re welcome to do it. Is that why you’re here? Someone send you to kill me? It’s a few months earlier than I expected. Just do me a favor and don’t hurt the fellas, huh?”
I shake my head. “I’m not here to … You were expecting someone?”
“In a few months.”
“I thought you were hiding from the mob. Because of your book.”
“I am. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
He leans back on his hands and watches the guys, smiling. “Technically, I’m retired. Not really my choice, but … they don’t know where I am. But when they find out about the book, they’ll start looking. They’ll find me, probably, but by then … two months. I think that’ll be about right.”
I stare at him. He’s smiling slightly. Then I remember what Merle said—sick. It hits hard and quiet, the realization. They didn’t mean gay.
“What have you got?” I ask.
“Cancer.” He taps his head. “It’s not so bad now. I get the shakes sometimes in my hands. But they say in two months, probably, it’ll start getting real bad. So that’s when I think it’s a good time for someone like you to show up. I have it marked on my calendar, so I know when the fellas should stop coming over. I have it planned out. So … you being here. That’s confusing. That’s not part of the plan.”
I kick the water slightly. He turns to look at me.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
“I want to understand the plan first,” I say. “Wasn’t Howard going to get hurt, too?”
He waves the question off. “Howard is leaving for Mexico with Merle in a few weeks. I told him, I said, if he sent that book out, put it on shelves, to give it a week to get to people, but then he needed to be gone, before the reviews, people talking about it—’cause that’s when my old buddies would know. He’d been talking about running away with Merle for months. The book was going to give him the money to do it.”
One of the guys splashes another at the far side of the pool, and another splashes back, all of them laughing. The sound of the water and laughter echoes in the space. Joe watches them, grinning.
I take a drag on my cigarette. “Why write it, though?”
“Oh, that was Howard’s idea, been after me for years to write my stories down. He loved them, loved knowing this queer guy was in the Mafia doing … well, a lot. And doing a lot more with men, without the Mafia knowing. He said it was great stuff. I think he was right.” He puffs up his chest, proud for a moment. “But I never would have … until…” He looks down at his left hand. “When the doctors told me, they said there were new treatments. Experimental, but a lot of them working. Expensive, though. Now, technically, I was employed by Verdi Importers—vice president. We import olive oil, mostly.” He winks. Drugs, he means. “And that job came with benefits—health insurance. But they weren’t going to cover these treatments. So I went to my boss. I said, I’ve been loyal, I’ve been good for business, and now I need your help. He said no. He said nice knowing you.” His face starts to get hard as he remembers it. His hands are tight on the edge of the pool, one of them shaking. The air is hot and humid. “After all those years. It wasn’t so much money, not to them. They said I had my own money, but that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t going to spend my nest egg, give up my golden years…” He sighs. “They just wanted me to keep working. But I’m not in the family, I’m not a made man. Doesn’t matter what I did.”
He leans back again, and looks at me. “So I started thinking. Planned it out. I knew when the disease would get bad. I knew how long it would take to print the book. So I retired, bought this place cheap with a few suggestions of violence when I spoke to the seller.” He shrugs, not really apologetic, and kicks the water. A drop hits me on the nose. “I wrote the book. And then I laid everything out for Howard—when to print, when to sell. It was mapped out. I get months of…” He looks up, sweat and a big smile on his face. “Paradise. And then I get an exit before it gets bad. Not to mention a big ol’ fuck-you to my old employers. Imagine how embarrassing it’ll be when they start writing about my book, about me. And Howard gets rich enough to run away with Merle. Happy endings for all of us.”
I take a drag of my cigarette. “What about DeeDee?”
“Who?” He looks at me, confused, and wipes some of the sweat off his forehead.
“Howard’s partner.”
He turns away and shrugs. “I don’t know. I never met her. Howard was the one I wrote the book with. We’ve been friends for years, you know? Practically since I moved to San Francisco. Well, when I moved back.” He kicks the water again.
“After your public art with the rat?” I take a drag on the cigarette and watch him. At the other end of the pool, one of the guys jumps in, making a large, echoing splash.
He laughs, unbothered. “Yeah, that. I had some fame then, y’know, so I wasn’t being watched all the time. Everyone knew I was loyal. And I wanted to … have something outside the job. I never really liked the job, if I’m being honest. I mean, I don’t mind it. Maybe that doesn’t sound good to someone from your line of work, but I’m big, and when I was young I was fit, strong, and I saw how people reacted to that, learned to think ahead. So it seemed like a good way to make money, and…” He gestures at the room, the young men in the pool. One of them climbs out, his bathing suit slung low on his hips. “It was. But I wanted something outside that, so I decided to become a reader. TV, radio, they make noise, can’t have noise when you’re hoping to lie low. But I like stories. So I pop into this bookstore. Not Walt’s, that wasn’t around yet, but some other place where Howard worked when he was younger. And he could sell a book to an illiterate, y’know? I walked out of there with a stack, and he told me to come back, tell him what I thought. So I did. It was years before we figured out the fact that we were both queer. I thought about maybe trying to take things further, but I wasn’t Howard’s type—he liked ’em thin, pretty. I was an ogre. Still am.”
I sigh. “He’s dead, Joe.”
He turns to look at me suddenly, his face going from relaxed to sharp, menacing. I can see why people were afraid of him. “What?”
“Murdered. All the copies of the book are gone. I thought maybe you were having second thoughts. Or knew who wouldn’t want it out there.”
“He’s dead?” His face falls, and he looks down at the water between his knees. He’s quiet for a moment, and I look away, giving him privacy. The guys at the far end of the pool don’t seem to notice. They’re splashing and laughing. One does a headstand, his long legs swaying over the surface of the water. The smell of chlorine and sweat mingles in the steam. I can feel my shirt sticking to my back.
“I didn’t think he would die,” Joe says finally, voice soft. I look at him and he raises his head up again. His eyes are a little teary, but he runs his hands over his face and then he seems to relax. He looks at the guys again and waves, and one of them waves back, smiling. His hand shakes a little as he puts it back down, but he’s back to how he was when I came in. Relaxed. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he says to me. “That’s a real shame. You sure it was about the book? It wasn’t Bridges catching him and Merle or anything? I told him that was trouble. All his knights in shining armor stuff … told me to go by Arthur in my letters. He always loved that shit, stories, secret names…” He shakes his head. “What a shame.”
“It is,” I say. “But I think it had to do with the books. They were gone. And Merle is still singing at the Shore Club.”
“Well, Bridges would never let anyone hurt him. He’d do anything for that kid. But, if the books are gone … I guess somehow my old buddies could have found out about it earlier. When were the books taken?”
“Last week.”
He nods. “I probably still have a week left, then.” He looks at the young men, and smiles. “I’ll make sure they stop coming around next week. To keep them safe.”
“I don’t know if it was the Mafia,” I say. “DeeDee is still alive. She was part of this, too. And she walked right into the Shore Club the other day. Bridges didn’t even know her.”
Joe looks at me, confused. “Maybe they don’t know her.”
“She owns the bookstore with Howard.” I kick the water again, wondering if Bridges has just been waiting for me to lay off before taking out DeeDee, too. Good thing she’s leaving town. “Look, maybe it was the mob, but was there anyone else who wouldn’t want the book out there? Anyone else who knew about it?”
“Hey Jimmy, be careful!” he calls to one of the guys, who’s dunking the other underwater. “No drowning anyone.”
“Sorry, Joey,” Jimmy calls back, letting the other guy up for air. “Sorry,” he says to the guy, and then kisses him softly on the mouth. Joe watches, smiling.
“So can you think of anyone else?” I ask.
He watches the guys. One of them is swimming closer, and they lock eyes. “I only told a few other people about the book,” he says, watching the guy swim closer. “Folks who weren’t in the mob, who I mentioned in it. I wrote them letters, in case they wanted to pick up a copy, y’know? Finally see all my stories. But that’s…” He thinks.
“Okay.” I nod, pressing my feet along the inside of the pool. Now we’re getting somewhere. “Who were they?”
The young guy pops out of the pool. He’s wearing small white swim briefs, the kind that would be considered indecent on any beach in America, and probably run-of-the-mill in Europe. He sits next to Joe and leans on him, without saying anything.
“Well, one was an ex-boyfriend,” Joe says, letting his hand trail down the wet arm of the guy. “He never liked my work, we broke up over it. He moved to LA, but I don’t know why he wouldn’t have wanted the book published. I mean, he’s mentioned in it, but it’s very flattering.”
“His whole name?”
Joe shakes his head. “Oh, no. Just first name. You’d have to have known me and him to figure it out, and even then, you’d have to have known about my job.”
“Who else, then?”
“My sister, in Seattle. She knew all about me. But she’s not in the book.”
“Could she have wanted to protect you?”
He ponders, then shakes his head. “She loves me, even knowing everything, but she’s not that type. She’d stay out of it.”
“So who’s the third?”
He smiles. “An old friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I thought she could make it famous. And she’d like reading it.”
“You know someone who can make a book famous?” I ask.
“Hey, I know people! Funny thing is, she’s one of my best stories, but I didn’t put her in it. She’d get in too much trouble. But you remember the rat thing?”
I shiver, and my feet stir the water by my ankles enough it splashes. “Who? What did she do?”
“Everyone thinks I knocked off a fed, but truth is, I never killed a man in my life. Beat plenty up, sure, but mostly all you gotta do is talk to people, explain the situation, and they come around pretty easy. The fed was … I was helping her out, taking the blame.” His hand is on the thigh of the guy in white trunks now. He doesn’t seem to care what Joe is saying. He just smiles, leaning on his shoulder.
“Someone else killed the fed?” I ask. “Who?”
“This reporter. Like I said, I know people. I thought if she liked the book, she could make sure it got reviewed, reported on in the press, so it made some money for Howard.”
My body goes cold, then too hot, and I loosen my tie. “A reporter?”
“Oh yeah, known her for ages,” he continues, waving his cigarette in the air. “Way back, she was always hanging around, trying to get a story. I thought she was funny, so I chatted with her. Then one night, she comes to me, tells me she killed one of our guys—but he wasn’t really one of our guys, he was a fed. Said he tried to force himself on her, and she got lucky, threw his head back into a sharp corner. Found his badge after. Well, I liked her, and though I never killed anyone, I helped get rid of a few bodies in my time, so I took care of it for her. She told me, as thanks, I should show the boss his badge, say I handled it, so I did, made a show of it—made me famous. Infamous for a little, too, but no one could ever prove anything. I hadn’t been seen with the schmuck in days because he’d been hanging out with her. But from then on, I was trusted. Frank loved me, Tony, too.” He smiles at the guy who’s nestled into him. “It’s fun to imagine them reading the book, finally knowing the real me. I’ll be in in a second, I promise,” he says to the guy, and kisses him on the mouth. The guy stands up and Joe slaps him on the ass, which he smiles at before diving back into the pool.
“I kept up as her source on stuff for years, too. But we hadn’t spoken in a while. So I just wrote her. I never heard back, so I assume she didn’t care.”
She cared, I think. She cared a lot.
“What was her name?” I ask, just to be certain.
“Goodwin,” he says. “But then she got married. Can never remember what that name was. R-something.”
“Rainmeyer,” I say.
“Yeah!” he says, pointing at me. “That’s it. Rose Rainmeyer. You know her?”