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

The twitch stopped and tightened into an angry line. He pointed the gun at my head again. “You know who you’re fucking with, asshole? I could have you made into an ashtray if I wanted to. Now, I’m gonna ask you again: What case?”

I pointed at the gun. “Why don’t you put that thing down? I have trouble talking when I’m nervous.” I was sweating; he seemed to like that.

One side of his mouth lifted into a lopsided, self-confident sneer. “You’ll find a way.”

I had nothing to lose, so I threw out a guess. “Your wife hired me to find out where you go when you’re supposed to be watching tits bounce up and down. I wonder what she’s going to say when I tell her you’re watching them okay, but the wrong set?”

The confidence on his face dried up and flaked off like a month-old Christmas tree. “You’re a liar.”

It was my turn to smile. “Let’s get her out here and ask her.”

He shot a troubled look at the house, then back at me.

“Of course, I’m always open for a better offer.”

“What kind of an offer?” he asked in a clipped voice.

“That’s open for discussion.”

The porch light above the front door went on and his head snapped around. A woman’s voice called out from the crack in the door: “Arnie?”

I looked at Phalen’s panicked face. He was the one who was sweating now. “Well?”

“Get out of here,” he whispered, his voice thick with hate.

I held out my hand. “My wallet.”

He hesitated, and Barbara Phalen called out again: “Arnie?”

“Coming, hon,” he called back, and tossed the wallet at me. In a hoarse whisper, he said: “Move your ass out of here. Quick.”

“I’ll be in touch,” I told him, and hurried down the driveway. At the sidewalk, I turned left and used the other side of the street to circle back to my car so she wouldn’t see me.

All the way home, I chewed myself out for my carelessness. But it was more than just the fact that Phalen and Rhonda now knew they were being watched that bothered me; it was Phalen himself. The man was bad news, I could feel it. Maybe it was the comfortable way he handled a .38 or the dead eyes and the hard sneer, or the silent, deadly way he’d pounced on me. And now he knew who I was. I figured I’d better find out who he was before he made good on his threat and I wound up a receptacle for some Mustache Pete’s cigar.

I got up at nine, not wanting to. I’d spent a fitful night being pursued by various people and things, and although I didn’t remember exactly who they were or why they were pursuing me, there had been a lot of running and jumping done, and I woke up exhausted. Figuring that if I was going to be chased around in my sleep I should probably know by whom, I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee and drank half of it before calling Sheriff’s Homicide.

Al Herrera sounded chipper when he picked up the phone. I was glad to hear that; the last few times we’d talked he had sounded as if he were ripe for a stress disability.

Al and I went way back to my reporting days at the Chronicle , and if I had changed a lot since then, he hadn’t. He was still the same thick-skinned, straight-shooting, 100 percent cop, which was probably to his detriment. He took the job too seriously and had nearly suffered a couple of emotional and marital breakdowns because of it. “Jake boy, where you been keeping yourself?”

“On my knees, Al, looking through keyholes. How are things with you?”

“Great, if you like being up to your ass in dead bodies.”

After the obligatory small talk — how’s the wife and kids, that sort of thing — I sprung it. “Al, I need a favor—”

“Of course. Why else would you call?”

I told him that for a Mexican, he did a passable imitation of a Jewish mother, then gave him all the information I had on Phalen and Rhonda Anixter and asked him to run them for priors.

“And you need it done yesterday, right?”

“Today would be all right.”

He said he would be in the field until four or so and to call back then and I hung up and thought about my next step. Deciding a little soft-shoe might be appropriate, I dropped another quarter and dialed Rhonda Anixter’s number. Her voice was as sultry as her body — husky and vaporous.

“Mrs. Rhonda Anixter?”

“Yes?”

“This is Bob Exley at the Collection Department of Pacific Bell. I’m calling to inform you, Mrs. Anixter, that unless we receive immediate payment for last month’s bill, your phone will be disconnected on the first—”

The huskiness turned into a growl. “What the hell are you talking about? I paid that bill two weeks ago.”

“What was the date and number of the check and at what bank do you have your checking account?”

“Security National, West L.A. Pico branch,” she said in a vexed voice. “I’ll have to look up the number.”

“Just a minute, Mrs. Anixter, that may not be necessary. Running this through again, I see that the computer posted your check late, for some reason. I’m very sorry to have bothered you.”

“Sure you are,” she said in a nasty tone, and hung up.

I called Troy Wilcox. Troy was chief loan officer at L.A. First Federal, and two years ago, while working on an entirely different matter, I’d saved his ass when I tumbled onto a man who had skipped on a $75,000 bank loan Troy had okayed for him. Ever since, Troy had always been pleased to help me out with a favor when I needed one. And just as he would be pleased to do me a favor, the people at Security National would be pleased to do him one. There is no such thing as privileged information in the banking fraternity.

I was batting a thousand today; Troy was in a good mood, too. I gave him Rhonda Anixter’s name and told him him I needed to know if she had written any checks for sizeable amounts in the past two months, and if so, to whom. He told me to get back to him a little before three, that he should have the information by then.

Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do until that time, I went home to pack.

Both Al and Troy were ready for me when I got back to them that afternoon, and on the red-eye to Miami, I mulled over what they had given me.

Chip and Rhonda’s joint account at Security National showed a balance of $746.98. Only two checks of any sizeable amount had been written by either of them in the past two months, one on September 1 to Wynee World Travel for $3500, which would have been for the Caribbean trip, and another a week later to “Cash,” for $2000, which was more than likely for vacation spending money. I hadn’t really expected Troy to come up with anything incriminating; if Rhonda Anixter had paid someone to kill her husband and make it look like an accident, she wouldn’t have been likely to write him a check from their joint account.

Al’s stuff was more interesting. Rhonda had no record in California, but the Vice boys knew all about Phalen. Besides being the owner on record of the Paradise, Phalen was part-owner and front man for two other topless bars that were suspected of being laundries for mob money; he was also the main man at New Eros, a distributor of hard-core porn films and magazines. He had been popped three times — for extortion, pandering, and burning with intent to defraud an insurer — but never convicted. That last one particularly interested me. The arrest report had been filed by the Sheriff’s Office, and I asked Al if he could pull it for me. After three-and-a-half minutes of bitching and moaning about how busy he was, he finally agreed, but said it would take a couple of days. I told him I’d be in touch, threw my bag in the car, and drove out to LAX.

My flight didn’t leave until eleven-ten, and the three double-vodkas I absorbed in the airport terminal bar and the two more I ingested on the plane allowed me to sleep straight through to Miami. After a two-hour layover there and another three hours on an Eastern 727, I was sober, awake, and buckling up for a landing in St. Maarten.