Natural Causes Page 5

  “And that,” Jack said, downing the rest of the martini, “is the true story of Quentin Dover.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of the prodigy on you? I haven’t seen his face yet.”

  “I think I might.”

  I thought he was kidding, but Jack dug into his wallet and pulled out a snapshot of a lean, fleshless, vaguely reptilian-looking man. He had thick, black, shiny hair, combed straight back from the forehead without a part, sunken cheeks, a hawklike nose, a pencil moustache, pointed chin, tiny mouth, and the dark, elliptical, heavy-lidded eyes of a lizard. The photograph was inscribed, “To Jack—All the Best.”

  “He was a real looker, wasn’t he?” I said.

  “A dead ringer for Nosferatu.”

  “How come you kept the photograph?” I said, handing it back to him.

  “That kind of ugly is rare,” he said and tucked the snapshot back in his wallet. “It goes right through to the bone. And believe me—the picture doesn’t do him justice. He was much worse in the flesh, although a lot of people—including Helen—wouldn’t agree. Women seemed to find him attractive. He had the sort of ugly face that’s almost as striking as a real beauty.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “Well, look at Marsha, for instance.”

  He had a point, though Marsha hadn’t struck me as a particularly discerning judge of anything.

  “He looked a lot older than thirty-eight,” I said.

  “His heart did that to him. He used to be kind of pudgy before his attack. After that, he could barely look at food. And then all the booze dried him out pretty good and killed his appetite, to boot.”

  “For a sick man and a hypochondriac, he had some bad habits.”

  “Yep,” Jack said. “He picked his vices foolishly. But then most of us do. He’d rationalize the booze by saying that it raised his HDL cholesterol and stimulated his circulatory system. As for the sleeping pills and tranquilizers and Demerol...well, I guess he found some quack who was not only willing to prescribe them but to recommend their abuse. He always had his reasons, although I don’t think he really believed in them. He was scared—that was the real reason.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Dying. Failing. Succeeding. Take your pick. Different people will give you different answers.”

  “I’m asking you, Jack,” I said.

  He pulled the swizzle stick out of his martini glass. It was a piece of plastic shaped like a cutlass, with a lemon rind impaled on its tip. “He didn’t have any guts, Harry. I told you that. He didn’t have anything inside. He was all sham and bluster. And he was in a business that depends entirely on personality—on the show of complete and unassailable self-confidence. Hell, nobody knows what show is really going to sell more soap. It’s all a guessing game. And the man who makes the most dough is the man who can convince everyone else that he’s the best guesser. Quentin had Frank and Helen convinced, but he couldn’t fool himself. Jeez-Marie’s, man, there was half a million bucks riding on Quentin’s ability to fine tune his nervous system. Maybe a quarter million more come contract time. That’s a helluva load. You asked me what he was afraid of. I think he was afraid that somebody would find out that he was running scared.” Jack pulled the lemon rind off the sword and dropped it into an ashtray. “And now that we’ve hired you, maybe somebody will.”

  8

  HALFWAY THROUGH his second martini, Jack got an attack of the munchies and ordered a plate of shrimps. They didn’t go particularly well with my Scotch, but I ate a few anyway, just to put something in my stomach. I really had been feeling addlepated after the plane ride; and it was half-past seven, Cincinnati time, so the jet lag was creeping up on me, too. Neither the plane ride nor the jet lag seemed to bother Jack Moon. He ate and drank and chatted amusingly about Liz and Nick. We were just finishing the last of the shrimps when a tall, tan, strikingly handsome man in a silk safari shirt and khaki shorts walked into the bar.

  I took a look at him and said, “Is that someone I should know?”

  “They all look like movie stars out here, Harry,” Jack said, biting the head off a shrimp. “He probably hops cars at the Brown Derby.”

  The guy said something to the bartender and when the bartender shrugged, the man turned to face the room, parked his elbows on the bar rail, and said, “Harry Stoner?” in a very loud, very deep voice. Everyone in the place looked up.

  Jack dropped the tail of his shrimp on the plate. “I guess he is somebody you should know. That must be Goldblum.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “Is he your idea of confidential?”

  Jack laughed. He stood up and waved an arm at the man. “Over here, Sy.”

  Sy Goldblum pointed a forefinger at us and came striding over to the table. He was a large man—about six two, heavily muscled on his arms and legs. His physique was the only thing about him that reminded me of a cop, and even that was too good for a guy who spends most of his time sitting in a patrol car or behind a desk. The rest of him was pure Hollywood—thick razor-cut brown hair, blue blue eyes, a neatly trimmed moustache precisely one shade lighter than his sideburns, a half dozen gold chains around his neck, and a couple of diamond pinkie rings sputtering like neon on his manicured fingers. He’d left the top four buttons of his safari shirt open—to give everyone a good look at his hairy pecs.

  “You must be Stoner,” he boomed, as he pulled up a chair. “Sy Goldblum.”

  I nodded at him.

  “And you’re Moon?” he said, glancing at Jack.

  “Yeah.” Jack gave me a quick look. “If you want me to leave, Harry...”

  “I guess that’s up to Sy.”

  “No problem,” Goldblum barked. “I could use a beer, though. Just got back from Chavez Ravine and I’m all dried out.”

  “I’ll get you one,” Jack said and walked over to the bar.

  “Is he standing in a trench?” Goldblum said, staring at Jack. “Little men are a pain in the ass. Always trying to make up for being short.”

  “That right?” I said. “You were on special duty at the stadium?”

  Goldblum laughed loudly. He wasn’t completely dried-out, because his breath smelled like a bottle of Pabst with a cigarette butt lying on the bottom. “Hell, no. I went to the game.”

  “How’d they do?”

  “How d’you think?” he said with a grin. “The Dodgers can’t be beat. They’re too good. Won a few bucks on ‘em, too.”

  “That’s great.”

  Goldblum wrapped an arm around his chair and leaned back lazily. “So you’re from Cincinnati, huh?”

  “That’s where I’m from.”

  “What a joke town. I spent a couple of weeks there one afternoon. It was the pits. Couldn’t wait to get back here and catch a few rays.”

  “You from L.A.?”

  “Nobody’s from L.A., man,” Goldblum said. “I’m from Butte, Montana. Came out here seven years ago, after a hitch in the Marines. Tried to break into the movies. Did some stunt work. Had a few bit parts. Maybe you saw me? I was in a couple of ‘Happy Days’ and one ‘Barney Miller.’”

  “I don’t own a TV.”

  Goldblum gawked at me as if I were from another planet. “Now that is weird. You know about TV, don’t you? A little box with a screen? Shows pictures that talk?” He clapped me hard on the arm. “Just kidding, Harry. Maybe they haven’t got TV in Cincinnati yet. You look for it in the papers.”

  “What happened to your acting career?” I asked.

  “Aw, it went right in the toilet. Nowheresville. I got an agent. Changed my name. Took an ad out in Variety. Nothing worked.”

  “What did you change it to? Your name?”

  Goldblum looked abashed. “To Sy Goldblum,” he said.

  I laughed.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said miserably. “But there are a lot of Jews in the business. No offense.”

  “I’m not Jewish.”

  “Good,” he said. “I thought a kike name might help. Now I’m
stuck with it.”

  “Why don’t you change it back to what it was before?”

  “To Seymour Wattle? No, thank you. Besides, having a kike name doesn’t hurt in this town, if you know what I mean. Your pal, Moon, isn’t a hebe, is he?”

  “No, he’s a wop.”

  “Good,” Seymour said. “I get along good with wops.”

  Jack came back to the table with Seymour’s beer. Seymour snatched the bottle out of Jack’s hand and patted the chair beside him. “Have a seat, Shorty.”

  Jack grunted and sat down. “Well, did I miss anything?”

  “Only the story of Seymour’s life,” I said.

  “Hey!” Wattle said, giving me an angry look. “Don’t call me that. I’m Sy Goldblum now.”

  “Sorry.”

  Wattle drained the beer in one gulp. A couple of drops leaked onto his shirt. When he noticed them, his face reddened. “Shit, this thing cost me seventy-five bucks on Rodeo Drive. It’s pure silk. Some dago design.” He glanced at Jack and said, “No offense.”

  Jack said, “None taken.”

  “Shall we get down to business, Sy?” I said.

  Wattle nodded. “You want to know about Dover, right?”

  “Right the first time.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, leaning forward and cribbing the empty beer bottle in his hands. “I don’t have much. The guy was found dead on Monday by a maid in the Belle Vista. Some Mex cunt. As near as we can guess, he’d been dead since early Sunday morning—maybe thirty-six, forty hours. I wasn’t in on the investigation, but I’ve seen the lab photos and the boy was a real mess. He’d apparently been taking a shower and lost his balance and fell right through the glass curtain.

  “Broken glass is the worst,” Wattle said, peeling the label off the beer bottle with his thumbnail. “Give me a shotgun any day. Shit, the guy was sliced to ribbons. Belly open, guts hanging out. One eye dangling on his cheek. Even his pecker—”

  “That’s enough!” Jack said in a commanding voice. Then he ducked his head in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I knew the man, that’s all.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have recognized him anymore,” Wattle said. “What wasn’t cut up or off was scalded by the shower water or half-eaten by maggots.”

  Moon’s face turned white.

  “I think we can skip the clinical details,” I said to Wattle, who was enjoying Jack’s reaction.

  Wattle laughed. “O.K. by me.”

  “You all right?” I said to Jack.

  He nodded weakly.

  “What caused the fall?” I asked the cop.

  “We don’t know. Could have been he lost his balance and slipped in the tub. The guy had a heart, so it might have been that. He was also a juicer, so it could have been any number of things.”

  Since I was looking for a scandal, I said, “Could he have OD’d?”

  “We couldn’t find any tracks on his arms, but that’s not the only place you can shoot up and the rest of him was too messy to tell. If he was stoned, it probably wasn’t on H.”

  “How about blow?”

  “It’s possible,” Wattle said. “But that wouldn’t change anything. Whether he was stoned or drunk or sober, he still slipped and fell.”

  “What about the rest of the room? Was there any indication that somebody had been there with him, before or after?”

  Wattle shook his head. “He was alone. His suitcase was open on the bed.”

  “As if he were packing?”

  “Or unpacking,” Wattle said.

  “How come the maid didn’t come into the room before Monday morning?”

  “Dover left a message at the desk on Friday when he checked in that he didn’t want any maid service or phone calls until he said different. Since he was a regular at the Belle Vista, they went along with it. The only reason the Mex maid went into the room on Monday was because somebody complained to the management about the stink.”

  “Did he say why he didn’t want any calls?”

  “Nope. Just wanted to be alone, I guess.”

  I turned to Jack. “You buy that?”

  He looked at me uncertainly. “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  “You don’t have any idea what Dover was doing between Friday night and Sunday morning, do you?” I asked Wattle.

  He shook his head again. “The desk clerk checked him in on Friday at five-thirty P.M. Dover had dinner in his room. Left the tray outside his door. Then went for a drive in a rented car. He must have come back after twelve, because the kid who works the Belle Vista lot had already taken off for the night. The night clerk claims she didn’t see him come back in. But she was on break between twelve-thirty and twelve forty-five. Anyway, the car was parked in the lot on Saturday and stayed there all day. It was in the lot on Sunday, too. And on Monday, when the body was found.”

  “Did you check the odometer?”

  “Yep. Nothing special. Sixty miles.”

  “Did anybody see him on Saturday?”

  “Nope. But then nobody was looking for him, either. He didn’t eat in the hotel, so it’s probable that he went out. But we have no idea where or whether someone was with him. All we know is that he didn’t take the rental car.”

  “How about phone calls?”

  “He made a few local ones on Friday night. And one long distance one to Cincinnati.”

  “That would have been to his mother,” I said.

  I stared at the half-eaten shrimp on Jack’s plate.

  “What’s the matter, Harry?” Moon said.

  “There isn’t very much to go on, Jack.”

  “It was an accident,” Wattle said. “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

  9

  BEFORE WATTLE left, he turned to Jack and said, “You footin’ the bill?”

  “For what?” Jack said.

  Wattle tilted his head and gave Moon a long, hard look. “For what do you think, Shorty?”

  Jack paled. “I thought this had all been arranged.”

  Wattle shook his head. “You’re not going to try to stiff me, are you? Man, I’d hate it if you tried that.”

  Jack glanced at me and I said, “Pay the man.”

  “How much?” he said to Wattle.

  “A hundred ought to cover it. If you want more, it’ll cost more. And in cash. I don’t take Visa.”

  “I don’t know if I have that much on me.”

  Wattle sighed heavily and patted Moon on the wrist. “C’mon, Shorty. Don’t make me mad. It just isn’t worth it.”

  “Take it easy,” I said to Wattle. “I’ll pay the bill.”

  Wattle lifted his hand from Jack’s wrist. I got a hundred out of my wallet and handed it to him. He folded the money up with one hand and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

  “There,” he said with a tight little smile. “Didn’t hurt a bit. No hard feelings?”

  “None,” I said.

  He looked at Jack. “No hard feelings, big guy?”

  Jack managed to force out a “No.”

  “That’s just swell,” Seymour Wattle said. “I like doing business with people who like me.” He got up, patted his shirt pocket, and gave us a Boy Scout salute. “See you around, fellas.”

  He strode out of the bar. Jack watched him with hatred.

  “Forget it, Jack,” I said to him.

  “Fucking asshole,” he said.

  “He’s just a jerk cop.”

  “Yeah?” Moon’s face had turned red. “I guess you think I should have socked him.”

  “I think you should have paid him a hundred dollars.”

  “He’s the kind of guy you’re used to dealing with, isn’t he?” Moon said.

  “Do you mean, he’s my kind of guy, Jack?”

  “I don’t know what I meant.” He rubbed his red cheeks with both hands. “I’m sorry I said that. I should have said something to him.”

  “Look, this is his bar on his street in his town. The way he sees it, he’s got squatter’s rights.” I g
ot tired of my own explanation halfway through it. “Let’s forget it, O.K.?”

  “Yeah,” Moon said without conviction. “It was just the way he talked about Quentin’s body—the pleasure he got out of it.” Jack stood up. “We better get going. Helen’s expecting us at the Belle Vista at seven-thirty.”

  We walked out to the street. “I’ll get you that one hundred dollars in the morning,” Jack said. “I’ll cash a check at the desk.”

  Although I was getting tired of his indignation, I said, “All right.”

  The doorman hailed a cab for us. Jack told the cabbie, “The Belle Vista.” And he didn’t say another word on the way over.

  ******

  By the time we pulled up in front of the hotel, Jack had grown up again.

  “Why’d you call him Seymour?” he asked me, as we stepped out of the cab.

  I told him the story of Seymour’s career in movies and he laughed.

  “Christ, that’s typical. I wonder how many lives people run through before they end up in this city? Three, four? It’s like Hindu hell. If you can’t make it in Butte or Des Moines, you live your next life waiting for a casting call in Studio City. And when the karma dries up, you’re reborn as a cop or a parking lot attendant in Westwood.” He turned to the doorman—a handsome Chicano kid in livery, standing in front of a long, canopied bridge. “You want to be in movies, don’t you?”