Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” she said in a snide tone, the hostility becoming less latent as she talked. “You’re in some good company. She was going out with the owner of the club, Arnie Phalen, when she met that rich kid. The minute she found the kid had bucks, she dumped Arnie on his ass. Strutted around here bragging how she was going to set herself up for life with that score. I guess the joke was on her.”

“Why is that?”

The corners of her mouth turned up in a selfsatisfied leer. “She came back in a few months ago, crying to Arnie about how the kid was broke. The kid’s old man was the one with the money and he’d cut them off on account of her I guess. He had about as much use for her as a case of herpes.”

“She been back in since then?” I asked, sipping my beer.

“Naw,” she said, waving a hand disparagingly. “She’s too good for this place. All she did when she worked here was bitch her whole shift about what a dive this place was and how she was gonna make a score and get out She must have thought she was Grace Fucking Kelly or something, the way she acted.”

“Arnie around now?” I asked casually.

She shook her dark, ratted hair. “He doesn’t come in till around seven.” She looked down at the blond dancing in the pit and said, “I’m up.” I took out my wallet. “Thanks for the conversation, Noreen,” I said, and left her an extra five as a tip, just for public relations in case I needed to talk to her again.

Her changebox snapped up the bill and she smiled warmly. She had a live one now. “My shift is over at six,” she said. “Stop back then and maybe we can have a drink or something.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

When I left, she was moving her big body to Bob Seger’s “Fire Down Below,” and she threw me a few hip-pumps and breast-flops as I went out the door.

The Anixter’s ex-connubial love nest was in a new, two-story, vanilla-colored apartment building on a tree-lined street of apartments scissored out of the same nondescript mold. After making sure that the red Porsche Carrera John Anixter had bought his son for his twenty-first birthday was in its slot in the garage, I went back around front, and through the glass doors. At the edge of the swimming-pool courtyard, I stopped.

A lone woman was sunning herself in one of the deck chairs by the pool, and I knew instinctively it was Rhonda. She had on a tiny string bikini, and her tanned body glistened with oil. She had a hard, flat stomach and long, slim legs, and maybe a little too much in the chest department, but being the magnanimous person that I was, I figured I could live with that. Her face, although not as spectacular as her body, was a solid 8, framed by a mane of ash blond hair. She shifted languorously onto her stomach and I wiped a hand across my chin and checked for drool. I could see why Chip had ignored his father’s advice.

Figuring that if she intended to go out anywhere it wouldn’t be for a while, I went back to the car and drove to Carl’s Jr., where I grabbed a quick infusion of cholesterol with cheese, and was back in place across the street within half an hour. I found a jazz station and settled back with my styrofoam cup of coffee. Shadows lengthened, cars went by, cars pulled in and out of the driveway to the apartment building, but she was not in any of them. It was almost dark when a black Corvette cruised by slowly, and parked in a space a few cars up.

There was something about the man who got out of the Vette that attracted my attention. Maybe part of it was the shades he was still wearing, despite the thickening dusk; the sun is always shining when you’re cool. He was short and weaselly-looking, with a thin, olive-complected face and oily black hair slicked straight back from his high forehead. To go with the shades, he wore a gray sports jacket over a black shirt, jeans and white tennis shoes. He didn’t notice me watching him across the street; he was a man on a mission.

I waited until he was through the glass doors of the building before I got out of the car and followed. By the time I got to the mailboxes, he was on the other side of the pool, disappearing through a door into the building. The door opened into a corridor and he was standing in front of a door halfway down it. He glanced at me as I went past him, pretending to be looking at apartment numbers, and then Rhonda Anixter’s door opened and he went inside.

I hurried back outside. The Corvette was locked, so I contented myself with taking down the plate number, and went back to my car. At two-fifteen, I was rudely awakened by the sound of an engine starting. I slouched down while the Corvette flipped a U and roared up the block toward Overland. I pulled out with my lights off and drove that way until we picked up some traffic. He got on the freeway at Overland and headed north to the Wilshire exit, where he got off. At Barrington he made a right and half a dozen blocks up, turned into the driveway of a single-roofed, ranch-style house with a lot of trees in the front yard.

He had taken off his shades and was locking up the Corvette when I drove past. The house was dark and there was a yellow compact of some sort parked in front of the Vette. Up the block, I stopped and jotted down the address, counted to one thousand, then went back on foot

At the neighbor’s hedge, I crouched down and peeked into the front yard of the house. There was no sign of Mr. Cool, and I assumed from the faint glow behind the curtains of the living room window that he had gone inside. I stood up and sauntered by as if it were perfectly normal to be out for a casual stroll at three in the morning, then went into a crouch on the other side of the driveway and used the body of the Corvette as a cover to reach the yellow car.

It was a Nissan. I took down the plate number, then duck-walked to the door on the passenger side. It was locked, of course. My flash located the registration attached to the sun visor in a leather-framed case. I leaned close to the window to get a look.

Barbara Phalen. Arnie Phalen’s wife? Maybe Phalen was making a comeback, now that Chip was out of the picture. Maybe he had never left.

I snapped off the flash and something hard and small and cold pressed against the back of my head. The hammer clicking back sounded like a sonic boom.

“Just straighten up nice and easy, asshole,” a voice said quietly.

I did as I was told. I didn’t know what caliber the gun was, but at that range, a pellet gun would have muddled some of my fondest memories.

“If you’re thinking of getting cute,” the voice said, “you’ll never think again.” A hand slammed me into the car and the gun moved down to poke me in the kidney.

“Easy.” I said, the pain straightening me up.

“Fuck you. Stand back and spread your feet and put your hands on the top of the car.”

I did it and his free hand patted me down. It brushed my wallet and plucked it from my inside pocket. The pressure of the gun went away as he stepped back to inspect it. “Turn around,” he said after a moment.

Without the shades he lost some of his weaselly look. He was not bad looking, in fact, in a greasy kind of way. His eyes were dark and deeply set. In the dim light from the house, they were devoid of any emotion except for a mildly contemptuous curiosity. “All right, peeper, what the hell are you doing sneaking around here?” The corner of his mouth twitched.

“I’m on a case.”

“What case?”

I considered that for a moment. “A little girl hired me to track down her lost Lhasa Apso. Named ‘Button, as in ‘cute as a?’ Maybe you’ve seen him. About a foot tall, blond hair, brown eyes—”