Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“I have to see an old friend,” I said.

“The one from New York — Gorman Smalldane?”

“You keep busy.”

“That’s what I’m paid to do,” she said. “Smalldane’s in room seven-nineteen and he called you four times this afternoon according to my spies at the desk and on the switchboard.”

“How’s Vic?” I said.

“Who?”

“Orcutt.”

“Nobody calls him Vic.”

“I didn’t think so, but I had to make sure.”

“He’s fine, if you still want to know. He and Homer are meeting with Phetwick and one of his reporters tonight. The reporter’s going to write a profile-type piece on the aging boy wonder who’s to be Swankerton’s new chief of police. Orcutt and Phetwick are sitting in to make sure that Necessary doesn’t mention too many facts.”

“I think both of you underrate Homer,” I said.

“Victor may; I don’t. I don’t underrate him for a second.”

“That’s about how long he’d need.”

“If that.”

I told her that I would call later to see whether she wanted a nightcap and she said that if it were after twelve not to bother, and I said that I wouldn’t, and we hung up. I thought about Carol for a while and decided, or felt, or whatever it was that I did, concluded perhaps, which implies at least a little emotional involvement, that if I needed a temporary entangling alliance, it might as well be with her. It was the nicest thought I had all day.

Because I couldn’t postpone it any longer, although I wasn’t sure why I’d delayed as long as I had, I picked up the phone and asked for Smalldane’s room. When he answered, I said, “Let’s have dinner and get a little drunk.”

“Why a little?” he said.

“Because I’d only have a little hangover. I can’t stand the regular brand anymore.”

“You want to come down or do you want me to come up?”

“I’ll come down.”

I hadn’t seen Smalldane in more than ten years and I don’t quite know what I expected, but certainly not what opened the door to my knock. Age smooths many by rounding off craggy edges with personal growth which the unkind sometimes call fat. It dehydrates others by squeezing out most of their life juices, leaving nothing but dry husks. The cosmetics of age occasionally dignify a few past all recognition by anyone who knew what clunks they were when young. Age simply ravages some, and Gorman Smalldane was one of those.

When I’d first seen him more than a quarter of a century ago in Tante Katerine’s courtyard, he’d been a broad-shouldered man with a nipped-in waist who topped my present 6′ 1½ by at least 2″. He then had a long mop of light blond hair that always needed a trim and kept falling down over the pale blue eyes that had questioned it all. His mouth, I remembered, had been wide and sardonic and out of it had come some of the world’s most infectious laughter.

The hair was gone now except for some white tufts above his ears. His skull was the color of old putty and I seemed to top his height by almost half a foot because of the bent way that he held himself. He had gone to fat in his forties and fifties, which he had then carried well enough, but now the fat was gone too and the skin stretched tight across his face, but raddled around the neck. He must have weighed no more than 125 pounds. Only his eyes remained the same, set a little farther back in their sockets perhaps, but still bright pale blue and as skeptical as ever. So was his voice.

“Well, one of us looks healthy,” he said. “Come on in.”

I went in and watched him move across the room to the Scotch and the ice bucket. He walked slowly, as if he had to remember how to do it. With his back to me he mixed two drinks and said, “You’ve seen it before.”

“When did you find out?”

“Two months ago. They cut me open and there it was. Big as a grapefruit, they said.”

He crossed the room with the drinks and handed me one. “I keep going on booze and pills. I think the pills have opium in them because my dreams have been rather interesting lately. I get to screw some real dolls.”

“Well, I won’t say how are you.”

“That’s apparent, isn’t it? I never thought I’d be an ugly old man with the eagle pecking away at my liver. They say that I’ve got a couple of months left. That means a month.”

“You still don’t like hospitals?” I said.

“That’s where they want me so they can stick tubes up every hole they can find. I might last three months that way, but I won’t go through the indignity of it all. I don’t find life quite that precious.”

He eased down into a chair carefully, but it still made him wince.

“Bad?”

“You goddamned right it’s bad. Don’t ever let them tell you it’s not.”

“I won’t,” I said.

He took a long swallow of his drink and then looked at me and grinned with most of his former skepticism. “Now just what the hell are you doing in Swankerton?”

“I’m corrupting it.”

“I hear it doesn’t need much, but if it does, you ought to be better than a fair hand. After all, you did have a fine upbringing.”

“There’s that,” I said.

“Well, tell me about it.”

I told him the entire story, partly because in telling it I brought it into focus, but mostly because I knew that he’d enjoy it and there were few enough things left that he could.

When I’d finished, Smalldane nodded his understanding and held out his empty glass to me. “You mind?”

“Not at all,” I said.

I handed him a fresh drink and he said, “That’s quite a story. You only left out one thing. Why’re you doing it?”

“Lacks motivation, huh?”

“That and an ending.”

“I’m doing it because it seemed to be the thing to do at the time.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“Money,” I said.

“More bullshit.”

“I can see that we’re coming to the stop where the Smalldane Theory gets on.”

“I got one.”

“I never knew you to run short.”

“Born again,” he said. “How’s that?”

“You could give the one at Delphi some stiff competition.”

“A little oracular?”

“A little.”

“You should have brought along your chicken entrails.”

“I forgot.”

“I’ll spell it out for you,” he said.

“I’ll listen.”

“There were two persons killed that night in Maryland. One of them was Beverly and the other one was you. She may have been luckier because that night you turned into a zombie and, as such, a perfect candidate for the spooks because most of them, at least the ones I’ve known, have been zombies, too.”

“Not all,” I said, remembering Beverly’s father.

“For example,” he said. “That redheaded guy at her funeral, the one you never introduced me to.”

“Carmingler,” I said.

“He was a zombie. He couldn’t have been more than thirty then, but he’d been dead for fifteen years.”

“What do you mean dead? Emotionally castrated? Juiceless? Calculating? Cold? Remorseless? Unfeeling? I can go on.”

“You don’t have to. I can see you’ve already been turning it over. What I mean is that you’re like a vacant house. Nobody lives there.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve seen you among the living just twice, kid. When you were in Shanghai with Kate and me and when you were with Beverly. When they took you away from Kate, that really started it. Beverly stopped it, arrested it probably, and when she died, you went under. Succumbed, if you like the word.”

“To what?”

“To zombieism. What had you and Beverly planned to do?”

“I was supposed to go with the spooks. I was on that scholarship of theirs.”

“But what were you really going to do?”