Ross Thomas - Chinaman’s Chance

“Yeah. You know who Randall Piers is?”

“You told me last night. Maybe fifty-eleven times.”

“Well, this is the one, the real fat chance, Netta. It’s almost as good as that time I could’ve gone with the Daily News in Chicago, except you wouldn’t leave this horseshit town.”

“You could’ve gone without me; I didn’t hold you back.”

“Yeah, but Doris wouldn’t go without you.”

“You should’ve left her. Of course, I don’t know what you’d’ve left her for, because after that lunch you had with that guy from Chicago suddenly there wasn’t no job offer anymore. You got pissed. You’re not gonna do that this time, are you?”

Conroy took a swallow of his first vodka of the day. “Not this time. No way. This time I’m just going to coast. You know, just enough to keep the edge off.”

“Yeah, sure,” Netta said. “What’re you gonna wear?”

“My blue suit?”

Netta nodded. “Yeah, you always look nice in that.”

Eddie McBride started his search for Silk Armitage on the wrong end of the three blocks on Breadstone Avenue. If he had started at the other end, near the Tex-Mex Bar & Grill, things might have turned out differently. But perhaps not, because Eddie McBride never did have much luck.

Once he established his pattern of operation, McBride soon learned to his surprise that people were more than willing to talk to him about almost everything, but particularly about themselves. Even though he told them that he was from The Washington Post and looking only for Silk Armitage, nobody had seemed much interested in that, and none had seen her around anyway. What they really wanted to talk about, however, was the world they lived in, a world that, McBride soon found, was made up largely of sickness, divorce, apprehension, unpaid bills, shattered ambition, suspicion, resentment, quite a lot of hate, and not much hope.

So far that morning McBride had been in nine bars, two liquor stores, four gas stations, a Seven-Eleven, three beauty parlors, two dry cleaners, a laundromat, three cafés, a pet shop, a five-and-dime, and two drugstores, and he was about to enter a small Italian bakery called Angeletti’s.

From his car, parked about one hundred feet up the block and across the street, Solly Gesini watched McBride enter the bakery. Gesini had quickly figured out that McBride was looking for something or somebody, but he hadn’t been able to fathom what or whom.

Gesini noted the Italian name of the bakery, and it decided his course of action. After McBride left, he would go in and try to find out what the hell McBride was up to. If he couldn’t, well, he could use some cookies, maybe some of those kind with the walnuts and the chocolate frosting. The M & Ms were long gone, and Gesini was hungry again as well as curious.

Angeletti himself was behind the counter in the bakery when McBride entered. The proprietor was a short, tubby man with sad eyes who looked as if his feet might hurt and as if he might be fond of opera. He had one playing not too softly in the background: Verdi’s Rigoletto , the first act.

Angeletti was waiting on a customer, so McBride inspected the glass cases of pastry and bread, which didn’t interest him much because he wasn’t fond of sweets. Angeletti went to the cash register to make change, but paused and cocked an ear as the tenor tried for a high one. When he made it, as he always did, Angeletti nevertheless smiled with relief and punched the cash-register key.

When the customer had gone, McBride moved over to the cash register.

“You like opera?” Angeletti said.

“I don’t know. I never listened much.”

“Listen to that.”

The tenor was at it again, reaching for yet another high one, and when he caught it neatly, Angeletti smiled and said, “Something, isn’t it?”

“It’s pretty,” McBride said.

“So what can I sell you nice?”

“Actually, I’m not buying, I’m looking for somebody.”

“Oh? You a cop?”

“No, my name’s Tony Max and I’m a reporter with The Washington Post.” McBride brought out his fake press card and showed it to Angeletti, who glanced at it and handed it back.

“No kidding — Washington, huh? Who the hell you looking for in this crummy neighborhood?”

“Silk Armitage.”

“The singer?”

“The singer. Have you seen her around here?”

“You mean the singer who made all those records with her sisters, what was their names — Ivory and Lace? Yeah, Ivory and Lace. And she’s living around here? Huh.”

“We got a tip that she might be.”

“What’d she be living around here for?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“With her money, she can live some place nice. Beverly Hills. She in trouble?”

“I don’t know, but she’s dropped out of sight. We’d like to find out why.”

Angeletti settled himself down on the counter on his elbows. He again cocked his head as if listening to the recorded opera. “You know something, I remember the first time I heard them sing, those girls. It was back in what, the early ’60s? Yeah, about then. On the Sullivan show, Sunday night. I turned to my wife and said, ‘That little one’ — Silk was the little one, you know — well, I said, ‘that little one can sing .’ And by that, I meant she could sing this.” He straightened up and jerked his thumb at the speaker. “Of course, she would’ve had to’ve had a whole lotta training, you understand. I mean, you don’t start singing opera without a whole lotta training. But she had the — the quality, you understand?”

“But you haven’t seen her?” McBride said.

“No, but you wanta know something? My wife died of cancer six months to the day after we heard her sing. I started to get married again about four years ago, but then I thought, ‘What the hell you wanta go and get married for? At your age, who needs it?’ I’m sixty-four.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Well, I feel it. Standing up all the time is what gets you. I been standing up since I was fourteen years old. I tried to get my two kids interested in coming in with me, but hell, you think they wanta work? One of ’em turned out to be a drummer. What kind of musician is that, now, I ask you? A drummer.” Angeletti shook his head in sorrow for the lost son.

“Well, thanks for your help anyway,” McBride said.

“Sure,” the baker said.

Less than two minutes after McBride left, Gesini entered the store and bought a dozen cookies, the kind with the chocolate icing and walnuts. As he paid for his purchase he said, “You know, that young guy that was just in here, he looks familiar.”

“You from Washington?” Angeletti said.

“Nah, I’m from around here.”

“Well, he’s from Washington. He’s a reporter for The Washington Post and he’s looking for somebody.”

“Who?”

“Silk Armitage. You know who she is, don’t you?”

“Sure, the singer.”

“Yeah, well, he says she’s supposed to be living around here some place.”

“Around here?”

“That’s what I said. You know, you don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

“What do you mean, I don’t sound like I am?” Gesini said.

“You know, you sound like the way I do, like you’re from New York. You from New York — I mean, originally?”

“Yeah, New York, originally.”

“Me too, originally,” Angeletti said. Then a thought struck him. “I wonder if they got many Italians in Washington?”

Solly Gesini said that he didn’t know.

The Woodbury Club was just off Camden Drive on Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, and it looked like a bank, which was exactly what it once had been. When Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the bank holiday in 1933, the Liberty Bank and Trust Company had been one of those that never reopened, the victim of some poor loans it had made on a lot of land that nobody then wanted out in a place called Westwood.