Minnesota Strip, page 6
“Very possible,” Billy said. “You know a guy calls himself Eric Durning?”
“I know the name. Used to have some kind of a model agency a few years back. Yeah, I remember. Got himself busted with some other porn movie guys. The News ran it, I seem to remember. They didn’t pull any time, just a fine. Is that the guy?”
“That’s the one. Durning started out trying to run a straight model shop. Didn’t work. That was when he got in with these other guys. After that the agency was just a front to recruit broads who wanted to be movie stars. The guys he was working with were independents. That was before all the small independents found themselves with a new partner—the Mob. That’s who Durning works for now. He tried to quit until the goombahs explained how unfriendly that would be. I guess they like his work. I’ll say this for the cocksucker—he’s good at it. But watch yourself, my man. No need to worry about Durning—he’s a yellow crawling bastard—but, you know, all it takes is one phone call. If I turn up anything this end I’ll call you.”
I got up to go and Billy told me to hold on a minute. I knew what he was going to say; we had been over this ground before. “No, thanks,” I said.
“It’s an awful waste of talent,” Billy said as if he couldn’t possibly understand why a bright boy like me didn’t want to step up in the world. “You come in with me and you’ll be farting through silk, as some writer once said. I’m big and getting bigger all the time. This thing I’ve got is just the beginning. I’d like to get off the street and into where the really heavy bread is. Start my own string of houses, staff them with the best looking bitches in the world. That’s strictly a Mob gig, you think. Not any more, my man. The times they are a-changing. I’ve got the capital and the right connections. Throw in with me—I like your style—and you’ll be making more money in a year than you’ll make your whole life. Say you’ll think about it.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and from time to time I had considered Billy’s permanent offer of an executive position in his organization. Billy’s pimp business was no skin off my ass. I didn’t even have to convince myself that most of the world was made up of whores and pimps of one kind or another. The garment guys on 7th Avenue pimp for the out of town buyers, and they were no better or worse than the State Department flunkeys who pimped for the Shah of Iran.
“You could do worse,” Billy continued, doing the old you’re not getting any younger number on my head. “You’re pushing forty and you know it’s a crock that life begins at forty. You know and I know it’s more than half over when you hit the forty mark. Okay, you’re tough but you won’t be fast on your feet when you’re past forty. What are you going to do then, Peter? Get a wonderful rewarding job as a night watchman? Why don’t you get your shit together and make the rest of your life count for something?”
I knew he was right, in a way, and this time I put more emphasis in my voice. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do that,” Bill said.
Chapter Five
ERIC DURNING HAD a two-room office on West 42nd Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. It was in one of those big old rookeries built before the First World War. On one side there was a store that sold foreign newspapers; on the other a cheap shoe store. Across the street a sex movie advertised “live action on stage”; in front of the box office an old guy with a straw hat barked the news for those who couldn’t read.
I had to edge my way around a crowd buying hot kitchen ware from a peddler to get into the lobby. I hadn’t called ahead for an appointment. I just went up to the tenth floor hoping to find Durning at home. He was, but I had to lean on a fat blonde receptionist before she buzzed him on the intercom. She was reading a thick paperback novel called Love’s Brutal Torment, a work of literature with a big-knockered broad and two horny-looking guys on the cover, and she marked her place carefully before she buzzed her boss. Apparently she couldn’t make up her feeble mind whether I was an NYPD detective or a Mafia enforcer, not that there is that much of a difference. It looked like the kind of office a cheap hustler like Durning would have. In the window there was a huge old model air conditioner that dripped and complained, as if it wouldn’t wait for that last journey to the junk yard. Blow-ups of Bogart and George Raft shared space with Jean Harlow and Dietrich. A long low table in front of a worn leather couch was piled with old copies of Playboy, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
The secretary swiveled around in her chair and informed me that Mr. Durning would see me now but only for a few minutes. She picked up Love’s Brutal Torment and shook it at me like a bludgeon. “Next time please call for an appointment. Mr. Durning is a very busy man.”
Eric Durning opened the door to his office before I got to it, and while we were shaking hands I noticed how jumpy he was. That was understandable: if I had the kind of partners he had I’d be nervous too. I gave him my business card and showed him a photostat of my investigator’s license; but he didn’t look too hard. Neither the card nor the license meant anything. A guy like Durning would know that. In the circles he moved in it was no big thing to buy a forged passport, a forged anything, for a thousand bucks.
The air conditioner in Durning’s office was turned up to freezing—you could have hung sides of beef in there it was so cold—but there was sweat on his face. He wiped it away with a handkerchief drenched in shitty perfume, and waved me into a sling chair. Durning stank of perfume or toilet water; even so the sweat smell came through and I wondered how the women he slept with liked it. Sweat or no sweat, there was nothing to like about this man. I liked Tumulty and Diaz, murderous bastards though they were, better than this human zero. For a man so big and lanky he had a high thin hesitant voice, as if all his worries were always branching off into other worries. It wasn’t the kind of work he did that turned me off so completely. I don’t give a fuck what people do if they don’t do it to me.
“I don’t want a drink,” I told him with an edge to my voice. “I just want some information and maybe you can help me.” I took out the photo of the Jannssen girl and put it on his cluttered desk. He was drinking sugar-free iced tea from a can, and he sucked on the straw while he looked at the picture of the runaway. “Cute girl,” he said. “She’d be okay if she lost a little weight.”
“Have you seen her?”
“I don’t think so,” he answered cautiously. One thing Eric Durning was, and that was cautious. I liked him less every minute. “Why did you come to me?”
This guy worked with hard guys but none of the hardness, just the meanness, had rubbed off on him. I thought I was hard enough. “Because your business is young girls,” I said.
“Sure, I run a model agency.”
“Whatever. You also took a bust a while back. When you say you’re not sure about ever seeing this girl, are you just saying that to make conversation? If you say you’re not sure, then maybe you have seen her.”
He picked up the picture and looked at it again, saying as he finished his inspection of the Jannssen girl, “I never saw her before in my life. Is that good enough for you?”
“I don’t know. Suddenly you’re so positive.”
Durning made a feeble effort to assert himself by saying, “Hey listen, I don’t like your attitude, man. You asked me a question and I gave you a straight answer. Now if you don’t mind I’ve got things to do.”
“What’s your hurry, Durning? The bus station is open all night. Every bus brings at least one or two new chicklets.” Like I say, I couldn’t stand the creep, but that wasn’t why I was giving him a hard time. Not completely anyway. I’m not even trying to say that detective work gives a guy the ability to separate the truth from the lies. That only happens when the truth or the lies are too obvious to ignore. No way for that with Eric Durning because most of the bullshit artists aren’t too sure themselves. But there was something here that didn’t smell right, and I don’t mean Durning’s overpowering body odor. All I had going for me was instinct and that was a lot better than anything that had come up so far.
Durning was using his handkerchief again and reaching for the telephone at the same time. He was so nervous that all the junk jewelry he was wearing made little clinking noises. “You better leave right now. If you don’t leave I’m going to call the police.”
“No phone call,” I said, and I didn’t even get up while I said it. I knew I could stop him before he pushed the first button. “Anyway you’ve got to be kidding—a guy like you call the cops!”
“What do you mean a guy like me?” Durning put both hands on the sides of his horsey face and shook his head, a busy man of business troubled by a lunatic. “What did I ever do to you, you don’t mind me asking? Do I know you? Did I kill your mother or something? So why are you bothering me? One more time I’ll tell you I don’t know this girl, never seen this girl. I mean you can ask me the same question all day and the answer is the same. Now will you ...”
“After I lay a few facts on you, Eric. I was paid money to find this kid and I’m going to find her. Somehow I get a feeling about you I don’t like. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. All you have to know is I don’t quit any case I take and if you’re lying to me I’ll be back. Call the cops, call the fucking Mafia if you think that’ll do you good. I don’t give a fuck for the cops or the robbers. You won’t like it if I have to come back, Eric.”
“You’re crazy out of your skull,” he said.
“I’m crazy about you, doll. So crazy I’ll be thinking about you all the time.”
Now that I was ready to leave it seemed that Durning wanted me to stay a little longer. I had mentioned that any rough stuff from me might come in the future, and now that the threat of immediate violence had passed, Durning turned foxy. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You must be getting big dollars to go to so much trouble. To be ready to start so much trouble. What you just said—fuck everybody, is what I mean. This chick some kind of an heiress or something? She sure doesn’t look like it.”
I couldn’t see how he had reached that conclusion; in all her newspaper pictures Patty Hearst looks more like a waitress in a coal town diner than the heir to a fortune. The Jannssen kid, with her blonde good looks and dim expression, could easily have been the daughter of an important Midwestern banker. All that showed in the picture was her face, and it could have belonged to anyone. But I didn’t go into that with Durning because I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere with the son-of-a-bitch. Not then.
Now the question was, had he seen the girl or was he just trying to bullshit me? He seemed to know she wasn’t money. Once again I had no way of knowing how it was with Durning, but I hoped to find out.
“Love, not money, is what I work for, Eric,” I told him sternly before I went out. “That’s what makes me so persistent—think about it.”
My next telephone call was to a woman, now on the shady side of thirty, who had made the big step-up from the shitty hard core porn studios of the West Twenties to big budgeted soft core color productions, movies where the cameramen weren’t zonked out all the time on uppers and downers and booze. If that doesn’t sound like much you ought to consider that everything is relative, even in the sweaty world of sex flicks. I’ll call this smart fox Linda Longley, and she knew what she wanted and seemed to have a good shot at getting it. She started right at the bottom of the porn heap because she didn’t know her way around town. It didn’t take her too long to find it. She served her time in the roachy loft-studios of the West Twenties. Linda was in training for the big time, you might say.
I literally bumped info Linda in a dark West-Side bar; the way she was built the bumping came easy. I went in there after a long cold day on the streets, trying to catch up with a fast-talking Greek who had laid a stack of bad paper on his cousin, another Greek with a large wholesale flower business near Gimbel’s. I caught up with him, but not on that day.
It was January and the weather was a bitch, the streets full of dirty snow and the other nice things that fill the gutters when the garbage guys decide to keep their feet warm. I was heading for the bar and Linda was coming back from the box office, as the ladies’ john is known in show biz circles. We collided hard but she didn’t get mad about it. Her empty glass was on the bar and she must have noticed how beat I was when I slumped down on the bar stool beside her and told the bartender to hit me with a double Jack Daniels, no ice, no nothing. I didn’t make her for a hooker because she was too good looking, too hip looking, to be working that side of town.
I drank the double Daniels and was trying to decide whether to get the hell home or offer to buy her a drink. I was so whacked out I might have decided on my delightful hotel room, when some young would-be tough guy jerk with ten pounds of greasy hair started coming on strong with her. Even then she didn’t get mad, and I liked her for that because I hate chicks who dress to look sexy and pretend they don’t dig it when some guy gets a hard-on.
“Come on, honey, have a drink?” the jack-off said, snapping his fingers at the bartender. This was the kind of cheap hustler who probably admired Sinatra. The younger Sinatra, the one with the jive talk and the striped hatbands. This junior mobster must have had some clout in the place because the bartender was already moving to make the drink the girl didn’t want.
Without looking at the goombah she told the bartender she didn’t want it. “No thank you, I’m with the gentlemen here,” she said politely, proving to one and all how well brought up she was. To me she said, “You’re late, darling. Had a long day at the office?”
“You don’t know how long,” I said with considerable honesty. My office, after all, was the street. I signaled to the bartender and he brought drinks for both of us. The goombah didn’t like the way things were going, but he wasn’t ready to start anything, not just yet. He consoled himself with a large swallow of what was in his glass.
“And how was your day, darling?” I said to the girl. We had another drink—she was drinking Dewar’s and water—and traded small talk without saying a God damned thing. We were at the point of trading names when the greaseball gulped down his drink but kept the tall highball glass in his hand when he stepped away from the bar and came around to me. Now when a man comes close to me with a glass in his hand and a mean look in his eyes, I just naturally get set to kick him in the balls or spread his nose all over his face.
“Why don’t you butt out, jack,” the asshole said, sizing me up as he said it. I guess the punk thought I looked kind of old. That was okay—I was kind of old. “Why don’t you leave off bothering the lady. She don’t want you bothering her, only she’s too polite to say it. I’m telling you, fuck off!”
“Excuse me,” the gentleman said to the lady.
“You’re fucking welcome,” she said and that got a snigger from some of the other guys along the bar. Even the bartender cracked a smile though it was plain he didn’t want to get on the bad side of this slob.
I just up and smacked him hard in the nose before he got a chance to use the glass on me. I gave him two strong shots, one in the nose, one in the gut, and even if he were carrying a piece, which wasn’t all that unlikely, it wouldn’t have done him much good. The son of a bitch was doubled over, choking for breath, when his right hand started for his coat pocket. That did it for me: no way I was going to let him pull a gun on me. I lay back and punched him three times in the face. I had to grab him to get in the last punch, then I let him drop with blood gushing from his mouth and nose. The shithead was out cold and stayed that way while I threw money on the bar and turned to the girl. “Shall we?” I enquired, ever the little gentleman.
My place on West 38th was closer than her walk-up on Hudson Street, and that’s where we went. Man, what a night that was, getting drunk with one of the sexiest women I have ever known in my life. We put away a fifth of vodka and grapefruit, my usual at-home drink, and then tumbled into bed. Her pussy was as wet as my cock was stiff. She fucked the socks off me. That is just a figure of speech however. As Mary Astor is supposed to have written in that asbestos diary of hers. We fucked the whole sweet night away. We sat up in bed after the third fuck, had some more booze, and talked. It didn’t bother me that she had already fucked or pretended to fuck five other guys that day.
She was drunk and laughing and ready to go again as soon as I was. It took me a while so we talked about what we did for a living. “What do you think about when you fuck all those guys in front of a camera?” I had to know. Maybe it was a creepy thing to ask. I asked it just the same.
“I think about all the money I’m going to make when my career starts going right,” she answered. “You wanted to know what I think about. That’s what.”
“That’s okay with me,” I said.
“I don’t give a fuck whether it is or not,” she told me. “I’m going to make a whole shitpot full of money. You better believe it.”
I believed it.
Linda was a funny one all right. There was something oddly cold about her that I could never pin down. It wasn’t my business so I never tried. Naw, we were never in love, never anything like that. We both liked to fuck and we did it very well together. Out of bed, forget it—there was nothing going there. I suppose you could consider us some sort of friends. She never could understand why I wasn’t crazy about money, but we didn’t argue about it. I could never understand her anxiety about money: she was making at least as much as three garbage men with plenty of overtime.
I called her number in the high-rise where she lived on East 63rd Street, over by Second Avenue.
I had been there a few times in the past. It was another step-up for Linda, a step-up from the hotel apartment she moved to when she shook the dust of the loft-studios from her panties. I know my old lady would like to live in a place like that. No doubt she would have disapproved of Linda, despite the fact that she is a bigger whore than Linda would ever be.
