Minnesota Strip, page 7
It took her a while to answer the phone and when she did she said she was dripping water all over the rug. “Come on over and I’ll be all squeaky clean by the time you get here. Come to think of it, I’ll just stay in the tub and you can join me for some suds. I’ll run fresh water just for you.”
I would have jumped at the chance of a bath in fancy surroundings, even if Linda wasn’t included in the scrub-a-dub-dub. My work, the sweet people I talk to, makes me finicky; and I keep wanting to take showers all the time. I don’t know what a psychiatrist would make of that, but who gives a shit about headshrinkers. I liked the way Linda hadn’t bothered to ask me what I was calling about. Maybe she knew I just wanted to return all the fine fucking she had given me when I needed it most. Sure I wanted to fuck her: any day of the week I would rather fuck Linda than eat cheesecake. But I also wanted to know what she could tell, if anything, about this Jannssen kid. Linda has pretty little ears, but she manages to hear everything that happened the New York porn world.
I hopped a taxi and was already unloosening my tie by the time I got to her door. Her building is so secure that she can leave her door unlocked if she feels like it. She felt like it; it wasn’t locked, and we had been through this bit before. I went in yelling, “Are you decent?”
“No fucking way chum,” she yelled back from the bathroom. Linda’s place is so fancy that the tub and the john are in separate rooms, and you can’t get much fancier than that. She had a two-room apartment, bedroom and living room, but they were big rooms. The kitchen, if you can call a kitchen a room, was at least as big as my room at the hotel. I don’t know much from good taste, but I know it when I see it. Linda has such good taste she even reads books all the way through. There were fresh flowers in a cut glass vase, paintings on the walls.
I left a trail of clothes all the way to the bathroom, and when I got inside it was everything a tired, horny private detective could want. I wished my bitch of a wife could see me now—see what I wasn’t missing. Linda was past the thirty mark, but you’d never know it, to look at her. Everything about her was firm and well-muscled, and who says constant fucking isn’t the best exercise in the world! Linda had filled the tub only about six inches, and the warm water in it was pearled with bath oil bubbles. God, it was great to be off the dreary New York streets and in between Linda’s gold tanned thighs. I’d seen a few of her flicks and believe me, she looked even better in person. With me she never pulled her punches, just my cock when she felt playful. She was often playful. There was never any need for any kind of coy bull shit between us. I drove my dick into her and she responded with a soft scream of delight. From her instant reaction you would never guess that here was a women to whom no kind of sex was a mystery. Oh yes, in her flicks Linda did the lesbian bit, too. Whatever was called for she did and she did it well. So far as I know she had never been married but the guy who finally got her, that is if anybody ever did, would think he had died and gone to heaven. I was thinking something like that as I banged her steadily, wanting to get the best out of it, not wanting it to end.
After we finished screwing in the perfumed water, Linda let it out and turned on the shower. “You don’t want to go around smelling sweet all day. That wouldn’t be you,” she said, scrubbing my back with a long-handled brush. We scratched our backs with the brush and then, oh shit!—it was time to get dressed. Linda said she was going to have dinner with some old guy from South Carolina who wanted to put some capital into porn pictures. “I think he wants to put in more than that,” Linda said. “You know, Pete, before I get to be an old bag I’d like to get into the business end of pictures. Fuck flicks, whatever. My looks won’t last, nobody’s does, and then where will I be? I’ve got some money, even a lot of money, tucked away, but I’d like to live well when I retire. I don’t want to have to stretch the money and have to be scared all the time. I’ve got to make some real money.”
It was a funny friendship, me the ham-and-egg private cop (when I was lucky) and the ambitious professional fuck thrower. It surprises some of the people who know about it. It surprises me, too. Finally, after I got through listening to Linda’s idea of becoming the queen bee of porn pix, I got around to the Jannssen girl. “That’s what she looks like,” I said, handing Linda the photograph. I explained about the kid’s father, the seven hundred bucks I was endeavoring to earn. “I’ve been up one side of the street and down the other,” I said. “Not a sign of her. I called you after I talked to a sweetheart named Eric Durning. I guess you know who he is.”
“I know who he is,” Linda said. “I used to run into him when I was starting out though I haven’t seen him lately. Durning’s done a lot of things in his time, getting girls for porn pictures, conventions in the Catskills. You know. He used to have a good thing going for him until some Mob guys decided they wanted a share. They walked in and said, ‘Say hello to your new partners.’ Now they won’t even let him quit. Definitely not a nice man. What makes you think the girl might be mixed up with him?”
I explained that I asked all over town and Durning’s name came from a reliable source. “I don’t know why I think the kid is somewhere in the background. I guess from the way he acted, cute and suspicious at the same time. He seemed to know the kid didn’t come from money just by looking at the picture I just showed you. How would he know that from a snapshot?”
Linda smiled gently at me and patted me on the knee. We were both fully dressed now and having drinks, sitting together on the couch in front of the door to the terrace. “He knew it from you, Pete, not the picture. If she had money behind her they’d hire some ex-FBI agent, some hotshot with all the right connections on all the right levels.”
I picked up my drink and said, “Ouch, lady, that hurts! Does that mean you don’t think I’m a hot-shot?”
“Your shots are hot enough for me. You know what I mean. You’re not Bogart, I’m not Bacall. The facts, right, always the facts. Getting back to Durning, did you get tough with him? And don’t give me that shit-eating grin of yours! I know how rough you can get. Remember how we met. Answer me, did you get rough with Durning and did he threaten the Mob on you?”
“Mr. Durning implied that he had the ear of certain gentlemen of Italian descent. Does that answer your question?”
“Maybe it does. Maybe Durning will have more than somebody’s ear. Maybe he’ll have your balls if he cries hard enough for his partners. You want some good advice, Shay?”
“No, just information.”
“Call it anything you like. You know I don’t give advice—I don’t give it and I don’t take it. This time I’m giving it, which is—drop this thing with Durning. Let it go, Pete. No matter what this guy is paying you—and it can’t be much—isn’t worth the trouble it’ll buy you. These are bad people that run with Durning.”
“I know a lot of bad people. What’s so specially bad about this bunch of guineas?”
“Take my word for it. I’m telling you the truth. If you feel bad about this guy’s money, give it back to him. If you leave Durning alone, it probably won’t come to anything.”
There was something about her anxiety that didn’t altogether make sense to me. Linda was a tough broad and it took a lot to frighten her. Lots of guys go around boasting of Mob connections and it doesn’t mean a thing. If all the punks who say they work for the Mob really did you couldn’t fit them all in Yankee Stadium. I got bad vibes from Linda, something that had never happened before.
“Why are these pals of Durning’s so bad?” I asked her again. “Anyway, what do you know about them?” That was a dumb question. Linda heard all the dirt that was thrown up in the porn industry. “You just making conversation or really trying to tell me something? Like we were just talking and suddenly you’re so nervous about what Durning said. Why so nervous, is what I’d like to know.”
Linda finished her drink quickly. “What makes me nervous? You make me nervous. Who do you think you are anyway? Use your head.”
I didn’t know why my old pal Linda of the vibrator movies was making such a big thing out of Durning’s so-called Mob connections. I mean, it was no secret that guys like Durning were grabbing dopey youngsters to “act” in dirty pix. Any cop, any crime reporter, anybody who reads the daily sheets knows that. Ask any weary wise-ass waitress or waiter in a West Side coffee shop. They’ll tell you all about it if they’re in the mood. Everybody knows everything about the trade in young tender pussy. It’s bigger than the fast food business in New York. So Eric Durning, with his forty-dollar imported Yugoslavian shirts, four-inch belts and high-heeled gaucho boots, was hustling young gash for Mob-controlled moviemakers! So what else was new? And would the Mob guys that Durning knew be ready to knock off a lonesome P. I. who came around asking questions about some runaway? Not usually.
Once again, I didn’t know what Linda was wetting her drawers about. I told her so. I tried to. It wasn’t easy. I tried. “It doesn’t work like that, honey,” I said. “It could be that I know more about Mob guys than you do. Any Mob guy that knocks off another guy has to get his orders. If he doesn’t have his orders in order, then maybe he gets killed. Okay, some of the young Mob guys—some old ones, too—cut their own orders. Usually that happens when it’s personal shit, a grudge. They want to move in on the dead guy’s woman, they hate the dead guy because he’s blond and blue-eyed, while they hate themselves because they’re wop and dumpy and dark.”
“Spare me the lecture,” Linda complained. “I’m telling you for your own good. If you Irishmen are so fucking smart, why did you let the guineas take it away from you?”
Shades of Owney Madden and Vincent Coll! Small time corned beef and cabbage, the best day they ever lived. “We wanted to go on to bigger things,” I said. “I’m telling you again I’m too small for the Mob to care about unless there’s something bigger than I know about. Maybe you know what that is. Are we friends or not, old girl?”
“Sure we are. Do you know how many spenders would like to fuck me in my own bathtub? I’m just telling you to go easy—that’s all.”
“Thanks for the fuck,” I said, putting my glass down, knowing somehow that nothing would ever again be the same between us. I had nothing solid to go on. It didn’t matter: I felt it. “Then you don’t have anything except advice I can’t use.”
Linda set her glass down so hard it cracked and cut her hand slightly. I didn’t offer to kiss it and make it well. She probably lost more blood than that every time she shaved her legs. Not that you’d ever know it, of course. That new “liquid skin” works everyday miracles. “Why don’t you get the hell out of here, Shay?” she told me, as mad as I’d ever seen her.
Getting up to leave I said, “I am forever in your debt, my dear.” I was so pissed-off I didn’t even want to throw another fuck into her.
I was at the door when she called to me, calling me “Peter” when she did it. I have always hated the name Peter. I can stand it when my boss pimp friend on the East Side calls me that because he mixes humor with ridicule when he says it. Linda, saying Peter, was out of character.
“And anudder ting,” I prompted her.
“Wisecracks, that’s great, that’s just what everybody needs. I’m trying to set you straight and you come on like a very bad comic. This could be serious for you. Why don’t you want to believe that?”
“Who says I don’t?”
“You certainly don’t act as if you do. Why not just get off this case and find something else to do? If you don’t have a case maybe I can find one for you. I know a lot of people.”
“But I like this case,” I said.
“Why is that?”
“Because two detectives told me to get lost. And now you. This case is like a retarded child to me. I’m getting fonder of it by the minute.”
“Of all the stubborn ...”
“I took a man’s money and I’m going to do the best I can for him. Nobody would know if I didn’t try to find his daughter. But I’d know and while it wouldn’t ruin my life I’d probably think about it. I can do without that. I like myself little enough as it is. Can you understand that?”
“I can understand that you may be heading straight for trouble. I have no way of knowing what you’re heading for. But you could be. If you want to give this man back his money and don’t have it I can spring for the refund. Listen, Shay, don’t make faces at me. It’s a loan I’m offering you, that’s all. You think I go around giving money to men? Like hell I do!”
“No,” I said. “No loan. I took the case and I’m going to keep it till Jannssen tells me to drop it.” I grinned at Linda, who didn’t grin back. “Or till he stops paying me. When that happens everything goes out the window.”
“Would you be glad if he did? Stopped paying you.”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’ve worked for people I liked better.”
“Take it easy, willya,” Linda said as I went out. I think she meant it.
Chapter Six
YOU MAY THINK I’m some kind of rat to tail my sex pal Linda when she went out on her date with this so-called big spender from South Carolina. Think what you like: a private investigator is in the wrong business if he isn’t ready to spy on his own mother. I was using my own car now. As a rule I use it only at night when it’s late enough not to get a ticket every time you pull over to the curb. If you know the right taxi drivers and have the money to lay out you can use cabs for tail jobs. I hardly ever try to use regular cabbies, not since the night three years ago when I jumped into a cab and told the driver to follow the cab that was just pulling out ahead. Instead of a ride I drew a moonlighting cop who took me for his own kind of ride. I had to give the crook twenty bucks, all I had on me, to keep from getting busted for something or other.
Linda came downstairs a few minutes after I got into my car. The doorman whistled her up a cab and then licked his lips at her rear view as she got in. The cab went down Second Avenue to Houston Street, then west toward the Village. It stopped at Houston and McDougal, and Linda got out. Right at the corner there was an Italian restaurant named Colenso’s, and she went in.
I parked on Houston and walked up to the spaghetti place to take a look around. In front of the restaurant there was a dark blue Cadillac that took up a good part of the block. It was blocking at least one hydrant, so that meant it belonged to somebody. I don’t think it belonged to Mayor Koch or Cardinal Cooke. The license plate didn’t mean a thing, but when I walked to the end of the block and came back again, taking it easy, I decided that I knew the driver. Not personally, mind you, because this character was not the kind to know for any reason. Scotty DiSalvo was his name and his picture had been in the tabloids a few times. They called him Scotty because he had carroty hair and freckles and didn’t look Italian. Maybe he was part Scots; in New York you never know what kind of mix goes into a person.
We had gone to the same high school on the West Side. That had been twenty years before and I hoped he wouldn’t remember me, though I had always been one of Scotty’s biggest fans. If they ever bring back the electric chair I’ll be rooting for him to sit in it.
Unless times had changed Scotty would still be bodyguarding for Big John Amelia, who wasn’t really all that big, but liked the nickname. What’s the use of being a big-time hoodlum if you can’t have a catchy nickname. Nobody whispered in my ear that Linda had ridden all the way down to the Village to break bread with one of the Mafia’s finest. It couldn’t be the food because that Italian chow is murder on a girl who has to watch her figure. Amelia wasn’t the biggest goombah in the city; he was big enough—and related by marriage to one of those ancient hoodlums who have jointly inherited the mantle of Carlo Gambino.
I didn’t know anything about Linda and Big John. Again, there was just a feeling. There could be some connection between them through the porn movie business. Maybe that was all there was to it. Even so, why was Linda making a big secret out of it, since everybody knew that Italian hoods were to the dirty picture business what old-time Jews were to Hollywood? I couldn’t risk being spotted by Linda if I went in and bought a beer. I couldn’t be sure that she might not tip off Amelia and any of his brethren who might be there. But you don’t keep your health just by trusting people who are supposed to be old friends.
Good sense told me to get the hell out of there. I didn’t take my own advice. Instead, I went back to the car and sat in it. From there I could get a good look at Amelia’s limousine when it came southbound to McDougal. It had to go that way from where it was.
Within minutes Big John’s limousine, with Scotty DiSalvo at the wheel, rolled down the street like a tank on rubber wheels, the powerful engine making no noise at all. By then I was slumped down in my seat like a guy waiting for his waitress girlfriend to get off work. I prayed to my patron saint, St. Peter, that it would be held up by the traffic light. My prayers were answered and I thanked my patron. Oh yes, Linda was in the back of the big car with Big John and then, surprise of surprises, so was the light of so many young girls’ lives—Eric Durning. There was no mistaking any of them: the southbound light on McDougal is a long one, the lights on Houston, east and west on the busy street, are short, and I was able to take a good look. It was good old Eric, the aging pimp, and even at a distance he looked kind of pissed—that could be because Big John had put him up front with the driver. I thought of Linda—and so much for honesty! But why should I have been bitter about it? She had fucked me often and true, at times when I needed it the worst, and I was grateful for it at the time, and will always be. I didn’t mind Big John as much as I minded Durning. In fact, I didn’t mind Big John at all. Guinea gangsters are not my favorite people on this great ball of Earth but, I suppose, like rats and roaches, they have to live, too. The back-to-nature folks would agree with me there.
But Eric Durning! When I talked to Linda—questioned her is that it was—she had made such a show of hating his smelly guts. She had started out by dumping on the creep, as any good citizen might and ought to, and then she had ended up by advising me, warning me to stay clear of the cunt-lapper because of his mobster pals. And now here they were all together: the porn star, the important mobster, and the perfumed pimp. It was interesting—and did it have a single thing, one sensible sounding thing, to do with my nothing runaway?
I would have jumped at the chance of a bath in fancy surroundings, even if Linda wasn’t included in the scrub-a-dub-dub. My work, the sweet people I talk to, makes me finicky; and I keep wanting to take showers all the time. I don’t know what a psychiatrist would make of that, but who gives a shit about headshrinkers. I liked the way Linda hadn’t bothered to ask me what I was calling about. Maybe she knew I just wanted to return all the fine fucking she had given me when I needed it most. Sure I wanted to fuck her: any day of the week I would rather fuck Linda than eat cheesecake. But I also wanted to know what she could tell, if anything, about this Jannssen kid. Linda has pretty little ears, but she manages to hear everything that happened the New York porn world.
I hopped a taxi and was already unloosening my tie by the time I got to her door. Her building is so secure that she can leave her door unlocked if she feels like it. She felt like it; it wasn’t locked, and we had been through this bit before. I went in yelling, “Are you decent?”
“No fucking way chum,” she yelled back from the bathroom. Linda’s place is so fancy that the tub and the john are in separate rooms, and you can’t get much fancier than that. She had a two-room apartment, bedroom and living room, but they were big rooms. The kitchen, if you can call a kitchen a room, was at least as big as my room at the hotel. I don’t know much from good taste, but I know it when I see it. Linda has such good taste she even reads books all the way through. There were fresh flowers in a cut glass vase, paintings on the walls.
I left a trail of clothes all the way to the bathroom, and when I got inside it was everything a tired, horny private detective could want. I wished my bitch of a wife could see me now—see what I wasn’t missing. Linda was past the thirty mark, but you’d never know it, to look at her. Everything about her was firm and well-muscled, and who says constant fucking isn’t the best exercise in the world! Linda had filled the tub only about six inches, and the warm water in it was pearled with bath oil bubbles. God, it was great to be off the dreary New York streets and in between Linda’s gold tanned thighs. I’d seen a few of her flicks and believe me, she looked even better in person. With me she never pulled her punches, just my cock when she felt playful. She was often playful. There was never any need for any kind of coy bull shit between us. I drove my dick into her and she responded with a soft scream of delight. From her instant reaction you would never guess that here was a women to whom no kind of sex was a mystery. Oh yes, in her flicks Linda did the lesbian bit, too. Whatever was called for she did and she did it well. So far as I know she had never been married but the guy who finally got her, that is if anybody ever did, would think he had died and gone to heaven. I was thinking something like that as I banged her steadily, wanting to get the best out of it, not wanting it to end.
After we finished screwing in the perfumed water, Linda let it out and turned on the shower. “You don’t want to go around smelling sweet all day. That wouldn’t be you,” she said, scrubbing my back with a long-handled brush. We scratched our backs with the brush and then, oh shit!—it was time to get dressed. Linda said she was going to have dinner with some old guy from South Carolina who wanted to put some capital into porn pictures. “I think he wants to put in more than that,” Linda said. “You know, Pete, before I get to be an old bag I’d like to get into the business end of pictures. Fuck flicks, whatever. My looks won’t last, nobody’s does, and then where will I be? I’ve got some money, even a lot of money, tucked away, but I’d like to live well when I retire. I don’t want to have to stretch the money and have to be scared all the time. I’ve got to make some real money.”
It was a funny friendship, me the ham-and-egg private cop (when I was lucky) and the ambitious professional fuck thrower. It surprises some of the people who know about it. It surprises me, too. Finally, after I got through listening to Linda’s idea of becoming the queen bee of porn pix, I got around to the Jannssen girl. “That’s what she looks like,” I said, handing Linda the photograph. I explained about the kid’s father, the seven hundred bucks I was endeavoring to earn. “I’ve been up one side of the street and down the other,” I said. “Not a sign of her. I called you after I talked to a sweetheart named Eric Durning. I guess you know who he is.”
“I know who he is,” Linda said. “I used to run into him when I was starting out though I haven’t seen him lately. Durning’s done a lot of things in his time, getting girls for porn pictures, conventions in the Catskills. You know. He used to have a good thing going for him until some Mob guys decided they wanted a share. They walked in and said, ‘Say hello to your new partners.’ Now they won’t even let him quit. Definitely not a nice man. What makes you think the girl might be mixed up with him?”
I explained that I asked all over town and Durning’s name came from a reliable source. “I don’t know why I think the kid is somewhere in the background. I guess from the way he acted, cute and suspicious at the same time. He seemed to know the kid didn’t come from money just by looking at the picture I just showed you. How would he know that from a snapshot?”
Linda smiled gently at me and patted me on the knee. We were both fully dressed now and having drinks, sitting together on the couch in front of the door to the terrace. “He knew it from you, Pete, not the picture. If she had money behind her they’d hire some ex-FBI agent, some hotshot with all the right connections on all the right levels.”
I picked up my drink and said, “Ouch, lady, that hurts! Does that mean you don’t think I’m a hot-shot?”
“Your shots are hot enough for me. You know what I mean. You’re not Bogart, I’m not Bacall. The facts, right, always the facts. Getting back to Durning, did you get tough with him? And don’t give me that shit-eating grin of yours! I know how rough you can get. Remember how we met. Answer me, did you get rough with Durning and did he threaten the Mob on you?”
“Mr. Durning implied that he had the ear of certain gentlemen of Italian descent. Does that answer your question?”
“Maybe it does. Maybe Durning will have more than somebody’s ear. Maybe he’ll have your balls if he cries hard enough for his partners. You want some good advice, Shay?”
“No, just information.”
“Call it anything you like. You know I don’t give advice—I don’t give it and I don’t take it. This time I’m giving it, which is—drop this thing with Durning. Let it go, Pete. No matter what this guy is paying you—and it can’t be much—isn’t worth the trouble it’ll buy you. These are bad people that run with Durning.”
“I know a lot of bad people. What’s so specially bad about this bunch of guineas?”
“Take my word for it. I’m telling you the truth. If you feel bad about this guy’s money, give it back to him. If you leave Durning alone, it probably won’t come to anything.”
There was something about her anxiety that didn’t altogether make sense to me. Linda was a tough broad and it took a lot to frighten her. Lots of guys go around boasting of Mob connections and it doesn’t mean a thing. If all the punks who say they work for the Mob really did you couldn’t fit them all in Yankee Stadium. I got bad vibes from Linda, something that had never happened before.
“Why are these pals of Durning’s so bad?” I asked her again. “Anyway, what do you know about them?” That was a dumb question. Linda heard all the dirt that was thrown up in the porn industry. “You just making conversation or really trying to tell me something? Like we were just talking and suddenly you’re so nervous about what Durning said. Why so nervous, is what I’d like to know.”
Linda finished her drink quickly. “What makes me nervous? You make me nervous. Who do you think you are anyway? Use your head.”
I didn’t know why my old pal Linda of the vibrator movies was making such a big thing out of Durning’s so-called Mob connections. I mean, it was no secret that guys like Durning were grabbing dopey youngsters to “act” in dirty pix. Any cop, any crime reporter, anybody who reads the daily sheets knows that. Ask any weary wise-ass waitress or waiter in a West Side coffee shop. They’ll tell you all about it if they’re in the mood. Everybody knows everything about the trade in young tender pussy. It’s bigger than the fast food business in New York. So Eric Durning, with his forty-dollar imported Yugoslavian shirts, four-inch belts and high-heeled gaucho boots, was hustling young gash for Mob-controlled moviemakers! So what else was new? And would the Mob guys that Durning knew be ready to knock off a lonesome P. I. who came around asking questions about some runaway? Not usually.
Once again, I didn’t know what Linda was wetting her drawers about. I told her so. I tried to. It wasn’t easy. I tried. “It doesn’t work like that, honey,” I said. “It could be that I know more about Mob guys than you do. Any Mob guy that knocks off another guy has to get his orders. If he doesn’t have his orders in order, then maybe he gets killed. Okay, some of the young Mob guys—some old ones, too—cut their own orders. Usually that happens when it’s personal shit, a grudge. They want to move in on the dead guy’s woman, they hate the dead guy because he’s blond and blue-eyed, while they hate themselves because they’re wop and dumpy and dark.”
“Spare me the lecture,” Linda complained. “I’m telling you for your own good. If you Irishmen are so fucking smart, why did you let the guineas take it away from you?”
Shades of Owney Madden and Vincent Coll! Small time corned beef and cabbage, the best day they ever lived. “We wanted to go on to bigger things,” I said. “I’m telling you again I’m too small for the Mob to care about unless there’s something bigger than I know about. Maybe you know what that is. Are we friends or not, old girl?”
“Sure we are. Do you know how many spenders would like to fuck me in my own bathtub? I’m just telling you to go easy—that’s all.”
“Thanks for the fuck,” I said, putting my glass down, knowing somehow that nothing would ever again be the same between us. I had nothing solid to go on. It didn’t matter: I felt it. “Then you don’t have anything except advice I can’t use.”
Linda set her glass down so hard it cracked and cut her hand slightly. I didn’t offer to kiss it and make it well. She probably lost more blood than that every time she shaved her legs. Not that you’d ever know it, of course. That new “liquid skin” works everyday miracles. “Why don’t you get the hell out of here, Shay?” she told me, as mad as I’d ever seen her.
Getting up to leave I said, “I am forever in your debt, my dear.” I was so pissed-off I didn’t even want to throw another fuck into her.
I was at the door when she called to me, calling me “Peter” when she did it. I have always hated the name Peter. I can stand it when my boss pimp friend on the East Side calls me that because he mixes humor with ridicule when he says it. Linda, saying Peter, was out of character.
“And anudder ting,” I prompted her.
“Wisecracks, that’s great, that’s just what everybody needs. I’m trying to set you straight and you come on like a very bad comic. This could be serious for you. Why don’t you want to believe that?”
“Who says I don’t?”
“You certainly don’t act as if you do. Why not just get off this case and find something else to do? If you don’t have a case maybe I can find one for you. I know a lot of people.”
“But I like this case,” I said.
“Why is that?”
“Because two detectives told me to get lost. And now you. This case is like a retarded child to me. I’m getting fonder of it by the minute.”
“Of all the stubborn ...”
“I took a man’s money and I’m going to do the best I can for him. Nobody would know if I didn’t try to find his daughter. But I’d know and while it wouldn’t ruin my life I’d probably think about it. I can do without that. I like myself little enough as it is. Can you understand that?”
“I can understand that you may be heading straight for trouble. I have no way of knowing what you’re heading for. But you could be. If you want to give this man back his money and don’t have it I can spring for the refund. Listen, Shay, don’t make faces at me. It’s a loan I’m offering you, that’s all. You think I go around giving money to men? Like hell I do!”
“No,” I said. “No loan. I took the case and I’m going to keep it till Jannssen tells me to drop it.” I grinned at Linda, who didn’t grin back. “Or till he stops paying me. When that happens everything goes out the window.”
“Would you be glad if he did? Stopped paying you.”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’ve worked for people I liked better.”
“Take it easy, willya,” Linda said as I went out. I think she meant it.
Chapter Six
YOU MAY THINK I’m some kind of rat to tail my sex pal Linda when she went out on her date with this so-called big spender from South Carolina. Think what you like: a private investigator is in the wrong business if he isn’t ready to spy on his own mother. I was using my own car now. As a rule I use it only at night when it’s late enough not to get a ticket every time you pull over to the curb. If you know the right taxi drivers and have the money to lay out you can use cabs for tail jobs. I hardly ever try to use regular cabbies, not since the night three years ago when I jumped into a cab and told the driver to follow the cab that was just pulling out ahead. Instead of a ride I drew a moonlighting cop who took me for his own kind of ride. I had to give the crook twenty bucks, all I had on me, to keep from getting busted for something or other.
Linda came downstairs a few minutes after I got into my car. The doorman whistled her up a cab and then licked his lips at her rear view as she got in. The cab went down Second Avenue to Houston Street, then west toward the Village. It stopped at Houston and McDougal, and Linda got out. Right at the corner there was an Italian restaurant named Colenso’s, and she went in.
I parked on Houston and walked up to the spaghetti place to take a look around. In front of the restaurant there was a dark blue Cadillac that took up a good part of the block. It was blocking at least one hydrant, so that meant it belonged to somebody. I don’t think it belonged to Mayor Koch or Cardinal Cooke. The license plate didn’t mean a thing, but when I walked to the end of the block and came back again, taking it easy, I decided that I knew the driver. Not personally, mind you, because this character was not the kind to know for any reason. Scotty DiSalvo was his name and his picture had been in the tabloids a few times. They called him Scotty because he had carroty hair and freckles and didn’t look Italian. Maybe he was part Scots; in New York you never know what kind of mix goes into a person.
We had gone to the same high school on the West Side. That had been twenty years before and I hoped he wouldn’t remember me, though I had always been one of Scotty’s biggest fans. If they ever bring back the electric chair I’ll be rooting for him to sit in it.
Unless times had changed Scotty would still be bodyguarding for Big John Amelia, who wasn’t really all that big, but liked the nickname. What’s the use of being a big-time hoodlum if you can’t have a catchy nickname. Nobody whispered in my ear that Linda had ridden all the way down to the Village to break bread with one of the Mafia’s finest. It couldn’t be the food because that Italian chow is murder on a girl who has to watch her figure. Amelia wasn’t the biggest goombah in the city; he was big enough—and related by marriage to one of those ancient hoodlums who have jointly inherited the mantle of Carlo Gambino.
I didn’t know anything about Linda and Big John. Again, there was just a feeling. There could be some connection between them through the porn movie business. Maybe that was all there was to it. Even so, why was Linda making a big secret out of it, since everybody knew that Italian hoods were to the dirty picture business what old-time Jews were to Hollywood? I couldn’t risk being spotted by Linda if I went in and bought a beer. I couldn’t be sure that she might not tip off Amelia and any of his brethren who might be there. But you don’t keep your health just by trusting people who are supposed to be old friends.
Good sense told me to get the hell out of there. I didn’t take my own advice. Instead, I went back to the car and sat in it. From there I could get a good look at Amelia’s limousine when it came southbound to McDougal. It had to go that way from where it was.
Within minutes Big John’s limousine, with Scotty DiSalvo at the wheel, rolled down the street like a tank on rubber wheels, the powerful engine making no noise at all. By then I was slumped down in my seat like a guy waiting for his waitress girlfriend to get off work. I prayed to my patron saint, St. Peter, that it would be held up by the traffic light. My prayers were answered and I thanked my patron. Oh yes, Linda was in the back of the big car with Big John and then, surprise of surprises, so was the light of so many young girls’ lives—Eric Durning. There was no mistaking any of them: the southbound light on McDougal is a long one, the lights on Houston, east and west on the busy street, are short, and I was able to take a good look. It was good old Eric, the aging pimp, and even at a distance he looked kind of pissed—that could be because Big John had put him up front with the driver. I thought of Linda—and so much for honesty! But why should I have been bitter about it? She had fucked me often and true, at times when I needed it the worst, and I was grateful for it at the time, and will always be. I didn’t mind Big John as much as I minded Durning. In fact, I didn’t mind Big John at all. Guinea gangsters are not my favorite people on this great ball of Earth but, I suppose, like rats and roaches, they have to live, too. The back-to-nature folks would agree with me there.
But Eric Durning! When I talked to Linda—questioned her is that it was—she had made such a show of hating his smelly guts. She had started out by dumping on the creep, as any good citizen might and ought to, and then she had ended up by advising me, warning me to stay clear of the cunt-lapper because of his mobster pals. And now here they were all together: the porn star, the important mobster, and the perfumed pimp. It was interesting—and did it have a single thing, one sensible sounding thing, to do with my nothing runaway?
