CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

 

I was out of my hiding place and inside Paddy’s office within a minute of Mariutto’s departure.

“This is never going to work,” I said. “When Mariutto’s had time to think about this, he’s going to see holes inside of holes.”

“We’re not going to give him time to think,” Paddy replied. “This will be like one of those seventy-minute potboilers Max Froy cranked out for Warner Bros. in the good old days. They moved so fast, you never had time to worry about plot holes.”

“Okay, what happens when you can’t make Mariutto’s tax troubles go away because there is no Scarlet Pimpernel?”

“You’ll be telling Billy there’s no Santa Claus next. Leave the IRS to me. I’ll call in an anonymous retraction of my anonymous tip, if I can’t think of anything better. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“Ahead of ourselves? I can’t keep up with ourselves.”

Paddy laughed, though in a minor key. “Glad to know you’re keeping your sense of humor, Scotty. Now, I have a luncheon appointment with Linda Darnell. She wants us to handle a little problem. For a friend, of course. That is, if you’ve no other objections.”

“One or two. Say we get through this. The day it ends, Mariutto’s going to start thinking of ways to cut us out of the tax-fixing racket and himself in. Sooner or later, he’s going to figure out there’s no racket to hijack.”

“You’re forgetting he’s gone legit.”

“His drinking buddies haven’t. Suppose one of them gets in trouble with the IRS—that’s how they got Capone—and Mariutto sends him our way. Suppose it’s Morrie Bender.”

“Suppose Dewey beat Truman,” Paddy replied with no real interest. “How about we stop supposing and get to work. We have to move fast now, and not just because we have to keep Moose off balance. We don’t want a real IRS agent to show up before our man does. I don’t expect that to happen; government agencies move slower than Bing Crosby’s horses. But we can’t take a chance.”

“Who are you sending to collect from Mariutto?”

“Someone I can trust to spit in Moose’s eye if need be. Or Morrie Bender’s, for that matter. A retired cop named Dunne. You met him once, I think.”

I had. We’d acquired some inside information from Dunne, and I’d delivered his “consideration.” He was as tough as advertised, but also old enough to work a button hook from memory.

“Are you sure he’s up to it? I mean, he’s, ah . . .”

“Elderly?” Paddy suggested, not laughing now, not even in a minor key.

Paddy had adopted a breezy attitude with Mariutto on the subject of growing older, but I knew it was actually a sore spot for him. Peggy knew about that sore spot, too, and liked to poke it. She’d gotten a kick for years out of describing Paddy as prematurely gray. Lately, she’d been leaving out the “prematurely.”

“Dunne’s a good man and already coached in his part. Nothing can go wrong there. You hightail it over and relieve Fitzgerald on the Mariutto surveillance. And don’t doze off. It would be just like Moose to jump the gun and throw off our whole operation.”

Resisting the temptation to steal Peggy’s flea circus line, I headed out to retrieve the car I’d hidden away from Mariutto and Alsip. Paddy had called it a “circus wagon,” a term he’d used for every car I’d owned since my first day with the agency. He disliked flashy cars, which he thought inappropriate for surveillance work. I thought they blended right in with the normal Hollywood traffic. Besides which, I enjoyed them.

My current ride was a 1951 Hudson Hornet coupe that I considered a compromise between Paddy’s tastes and my own. True, it was long and sleek, with a rounded back end that reminded me of the observation car of a streamliner. But the colors were conservative: dark blue for the roof and pearl gray everywhere else. Everywhere there wasn’t chrome, that is. 1951 had been a great year for chrome. Most of the Hornet’s was concentrated in its grille, which had two heavy, concentric ovals of chromed steel reinforced by two diagonal bars of it that originated just below Hudson’s red emblem, which was itself topped by a rocket-ship hood ornament. Under that hood, my Hornet was a little less modest, as it featured the same dual carburetor setup that Marshall Teague had used to win the Southern 500 at Darlington.

I barely woke those carburetors on the short drive to Wilshire and San Vicente. As I passed the stretch of curb where Fitzgerald sat in his Chevy, I tapped my horn. Then I looked around for a parking space of my own. When I found one that commanded a view of both Mariutto’s building and the exit of its parking lot, I squeezed the Hornet into it. A little while later, Fitzgerald cruised by me on his way to lunch.

I relaxed in my seat with my hat brim pulled low, my Luckies on the dash, and an open newspaper propped against the steering wheel. Nothing happened for the first hour and then more nothing happened.

I fell into thinking about the fix we were in. More specifically, I wondered how Paddy would call off the IRS before somebody got hurt. There was always the chance he didn’t intend to call them off. He’d said he wanted Mariutto punished for his black marketeering. At this late date, a tax rap might be the only way to do that. But Paddy had also said that the only safe con was one the mark never spotted. If we left Mariutto hanging out to dry, he might realize he’d been set up. Or he might come after us for letting him down.

One possibility remained, as far as I could see. There had to be a real Scarlet Pimpernel. Paddy had never mentioned him before because Paddy was Paddy. And he was using Dunne as a front because he’d spotted the danger of Mariutto trying to cut himself in on the tax-fixing business. Mariutto or Alsip could trail Dunne all day—or try to. The ex-cop would never lead them anywhere important. Once we had whatever evidence Mariutto had collected against Rosa’s father, Paddy could place a call to the real Pimpernel and make the IRS problem go away, paying him out of the money Mariutto passed to Dunne.

Working that out calmed me a little. More than that, it gave me a warm glow of self-congratulation. The glow lasted until Hertel, another Hollywood op, came to relieve me. It lasted through a noisy dinner with Billy and a quiet one with Ella. In fact, it lasted until my next shift on the Mariutto watch. That took place after midnight, outside the Sunset Tower, an Art Deco survivor on Sunset Boulevard where the Mariuttos were renting the penthouse. I was again spelling Fitzgerald, a quiet guy from the East Coast whose home address had once been Fenway Park. At least, that was the only home he ever mentioned.

Instead of hurrying off to bed—perhaps at Gilmore Field—Fitzgerald visited me in the Hudson.

“The natives are restless tonight,” he said. “Little Al’s been doing circuits of the block. He’s carrying.”

“So am I,” I said. I’d brought along my Colt automatic on Paddy’s orders. Ella hadn’t liked it and then some.

“Okay then,” Fitzgerald said.

I sat there in the dark, my earlier worries back with reinforcements. I tried to tell myself that Alsip walking in his sleep did not mean they were on to us. There were plenty of other explanations. He was an insomniac, for all we knew. Or maybe Ted and Rosa had been cutting up rough in the penthouse and Alsip had needed to be elsewhere.

Or he might have felt eyes on him and not known whose they were. I’d been introduced to the feeling in France in 1944 and had felt it often since. Thinking of that phenomenon had the predictable effect: I started to feel watched myself. The sensation got so strong that I found I was spending more time swiveling my head than keeping tabs on the Tower. Finally, I got out of the car and walked to the far end of the block.

It was the kind of night the chamber of commerce would have ordered by the carload if it could have, a perfectly clear and slightly cool night with a million stars overhead and those stars close enough to make the Griffith Park Observatory seem like a waste of money. I told myself that a walk under the stars on a cool night had been all that Alsip had been after. Then I remembered how much like a marionette he’d seemed and called myself a liar.

There was an all-night restaurant across a quiet intersection from the Tower. I moved to its side of the street, crossing well away from the Hornet, and went inside for some nerve tonic. The woman who poured the coffee for me was easily forty, but she hadn’t given up the fight. Her hair was a shade of red that most fire departments would have considered excessive. Her big eyes, very big for that hour of the morning, were looking me over closely.

“Didn’t you used to be in the movies?” she asked.

It was a question I didn’t mind hearing, normally. But at that moment, I caught a moving reflection in the dark glass of the display case behind the waitress. Little Al Alsip had entered the restaurant behind me and was walking toward the counter where I stood. He was carrying either a big gun or a small toaster under the jacket of his boys-department suit.

I said, “Funny. I was just going to ask if you’d been in pictures.”

That long shot paid off for me. The waitress launched into a recap of her appearances in several Busby Berkeley musicals, starting with the featured turn she’d had in the opening number of Gold Diggers of 1933, “We’re in the Money.” As she talked, Alsip arrived at the counter and put a crumpled dollar bill on it. That must have been a regular occurrence, because the former dancer replaced the bill with quarters without taking her eyes from mine. I was careful not to break eye contact either, not until Alsip had taken his coins and shambled to the cigarette machine near the exit. He used both the machine and the door without a backward glance at me.

I used them both myself, after tipping the waitress so much she may have considered us engaged. Then I went back to my car, taking the long way again. “We’re in the Money” was playing in my head. I hadn’t believed the lyrics in 1933 and I didn’t believe them now.