Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) Read online

  “Tami now, is it?”

  “Miss Fluff. Miss Fluff hates…I can’t call anybody Miss Fluff.”

  “Tami. Get on with it,” Chico said.

  “Tami is pissed at McCue because he got her turned down for a role in a picture he did, something about Joan of Arc.”

  “Right. He was nominated for an Academy Award for that. So was his costar, I think.”

  “Well, Tami’s unhappy with that. I think. Let’s see. Who else is mad at my client?”

  “I don’t know. Who?”

  “Biff Birnbaum, the producer.”

  “You’re kidding,” Chico said.

  “No, I’m not. Biff Birnbaum is the producer of this thing. They call it Corridors of Death, by the way. He’s mad at McCue because Tony held him up for too much money and Tony hates the script and says the picture’s going to be crap. Oh, yeah. The screenwriter hates McCue too. His name’s Arden Harden. McCue calls him Hard-on.”

  “I’ve read a couple of his books. A modest talent at best,” Chico said.

  “He’s ticked at everybody because they’re making his screenplay into a mystery. Oh, and there’s this woman named Hallowitz. Harden calls her Half-wits. I don’t think she likes McCue ’cause he’s always picking on Birnbaum.”

  “Who is she, though?” Chico asked.

  “The assistant producer.”

  “Skip her. Gossip about assistant producers isn’t worth anything.”

  “There’s the director. Roddy Quine. You ever hear of him?”

  “Yeah. He made a couple of spy movies, I think.”

  “A horse’s ass to go with his horse’s face. McCue says he’s the worst director in the world.”

  “Why is McCue making this movie if everything’s so bad?” Chico asked, and I thought again how quick she was, most of the time, to cut through the nonsense and get to the heart of a matter.

  “He’s stuck with it on some kind of contract thing. I don’t understand it. He said when it’s done, he may take an ad in Variety and tell people to stay away.”

  “That should endear him to everyone,” Chico said.

  “Doctor Death doesn’t know why he does things either,” I said.

  “Who’s Doctor Death?”

  “Ramona,” I said.

  “Who the hell’s Ramona?”

  “The shrink. Her name’s Dedley or something, and McCue calls her Doctor Death. He travels with her so she can prescribe drugs from him in strange places. This place qualifies.”

  I told her about the hotel and the bar in town. She told me that she had found the deed to the condominium taped to the bottom of a dresser drawer.

  “Why’d you put it there?” I said.

  “I didn’t put it there, you imbecile. You did. For safekeeping, I suppose.”

  “It worked. It kept it safe till now,” I said. I didn’t remember ever putting anything on the bottom of a drawer. “Anybody interested in subletting?”

  “A lot of people,” she said. “I think half the Hoboken Fire Department has been up here already to look at the place. You’d be amazed at how many people come to Las Vegas and really think they’ll be able to make a living gambling.”

  “I wonder if we should warn the casinos,” I said.

  “I think they’ll survive without our help.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “How long what?”

  “So long, Oolong, how long you gonna be gone?”

  “No change. Ten days maybe. Why?” she said.

  “Because I’m only going to stay here until you come to New York and then I’m bailing out. This is a waste of time.”

  “Why? You said everybody wants to kill McCue. Maybe somebody will.”

  “Go ahead,” I snarled. “Try it. Make my day.”

  “That’s the lousiest Clint Eastwood I ever heard.”

  “That’s because it was John Wayne. Hurry up, will you?” I said. “You get to New York and we can look for an apartment.”

  “I knew it was going to fall to me eventually to do that,” she said. “You’d better be thinking of where we’re staying until we find an apartment. Your mother’s place is out, O-U-T, out. The last time we were there she accused me of breaking a plastic spoon with Virginia Beach printed on it. Listen, are you getting all these conversations on tape? I’d love to hear them.”

  “No. I left my tape recorder home. It’s the new me.”

  “You’re a pain in the butt. Call me tomorrow,” she said.

  I hung up and lit another cigarette and smoked awhile before I realized something was wrong. What was it?

  And then it hit me. I couldn’t hear Tony McCue snoring anymore.

  13

  I waited for a moment outside the door of McCue’s suite. I heard nothing from inside and then I tried the door. If it was locked, that meant McCue was inside because there was no way to lock the door from the outside. But the door opened easily.

  I found the light switch and flipped it on. I was inside a small living room, with a dining table, a small refrigerator, a couch, but like my room, no television set. There was a large old Gestapo-style radio in a corner and there were paintings on the walls, not the usual Holiday Inn prints but large oils of pastoral scenes, stuff Chico told me once was from the Hudson Valley School of Painting. That meant less than nothing to me. I just envied McCue his refrigerator.

  There was a locked dumbwaiter door in his wall too.

  I walked into the bedroom, but the bed was empty and still made. I guess McCue must have dozed off on the couch in the other room for me to have heard his snoring so clearly. Hidden in this bedroom behind that heavy door, even he could snore without being heard.

  I looked inside the bathroom just to make sure that the dippo wasn’t scuba diving in his bathtub, but it was empty. He was a more organized sort of traveler than I was because his shaving gear was neatly arranged on the shelf next to the sink. A half-dozen vials of drugs with prescription labels on them were neatly arranged behind the faucets. I glanced at them, but they all were capsules with little grains in them and they all looked like Contac to me. The physician’s name on each of the vials was Dr. R. Dedley.

  But where the hell was McCue?

  That was one big question. The other one was, Why did he rate a two-room suite with a refrigerator when I, the representative of the great insurance industry of the United States, had only a single room and not an ice cube in sight?

  I tossed on a jacket and went downstairs. The dining room was dark and empty. There was a small night-light on over the bar, and on one of the tables were urns of coffee and hot water and cups and tea bags and sugar and cream and a pile of individually wrapped Danish pastries.

  People must go to bed early around here, I thought as I looked at my watch—the old-fashioned kind with hands dipped in luminous paint that causes radiation poisoning of the wrist—because it was only eleven o’clock.

  I thought about having a piece of Danish, changed my mind, and was halfway out the door when a voice called to me out of the darkness.

  “Tracy.”

  It was a woman’s voice, and I walked into the darkness of the dining room and found Dahlia Codwell at a table, still drinking martinis from a pitcher. The pitcher was full and cold with sweat.

  “I thought it was you,” she said in her husky whiskey voice. “Birnbaum says you’re with the insurance company.”

  “Right. Trying to keep McCue alive.”

  “God, and I always thought there were some things people wouldn’t do, even for money,” she said. Without asking, she poured a drink from her pitcher into a glass and pushed it to me. “Have a drink. It’s fresh, I just made it.”

  “Have you seen McCue?”

  “He’ll be right back,” she told me. “Sit down.”

  I sat and sipped the drink.

  “So what do you think of our cozy little Hollywood family?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t ready for people dressing up like asparaguses,” I said.
r />   “Arden is harmless. He just likes attention and he likes to play Cassandra. It’s the refuge of the witless.”

  “Why witless?” I asked.

  “Did you know, Mr. Tracy, that ninety percent of all movies take a bath?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true. So if you predict that any movie is going to be a flop, you’ve got a ninety-percent chance of being right. It doesn’t require any thought or brains. That’s what Arden does, and nine out of ten times he’s right and then people say how smart he was to predict it.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that this movie isn’t as bad as everyone says it’s going to be?” I asked.

  “Nine chances out of ten it’ll flop,” she said.

  “If everybody knows that about movies, why bother making them?”

  “Because it’s a paycheck for everybody: actors, directors, crew, trollops who think they’re actresses. And even on a flop, the producers steal a lot of money, so they wind up all right. And if it’s that one out of ten that makes it, then everybody can get very rich. Everybody keeps coming back for the dream. That’s the way it is.”

  She refilled her glass and I said, “I’m very impressed, Miss Codwell.”

  “By what?”

  “By how much you can drink without collapsing.”

  “It’s like getting to Carnegie Hall. It takes practice, practice, practice.”

  “You said McCue said he’d be right back. Did he go to the men’s room?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see him,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I lied. I saw him going outside before and I heard his car start up. I wanted to give him a head start just in case he was on his way to get killed.”

  “Thanks a lot, lady.”

  “You might be upset, but the world will be better off,” she said.

  I went out on the front steps. Sure enough, the white Rolls-Royce was gone. The son of a bitch had sneaked out.

  It was only the end of September, but it felt like the new Ice Age had already started. It was freezing. Unfortunately, planning ahead wasn’t one of my strong suits, and there was no coat in my room. I was just going to have to be cold.

  There was a guard at the gate and I rolled down the window and said, “Did McCue say where he was going?”

  The guard was young and potbellied, with a mustache that hung down too far at the corners for my taste. Generally I find that people with Fu Manchu mustaches are people of low moral caliber.

  He came over and looked inside the car, past me. “Which one are you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t recognize your face.” He craned his neck trying to look on the floor of the back seat.

  “I’m not an actor. I’m McCue’s goddamn nursemaid,” I said. “Now, if you’re finished inspecting the upholstery, where the hell did he go?”

  “Sorrrrry,” the young man said, and I decided to get out of the car and hit him. Then I decided not to, just in case he was tough. He said, “McCue asked me where the nearest cocktail lounge was.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him New York City. He wasn’t going to find no cocktail lounge up here. He said something like, Young man, a watering hole, if you please, and so I sent him to the Canestoga Tavern. You know where it is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You going to get him out of there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That should be fun. He was six sheets to the’ fucking wind.”

  “That’s all right. So am I.”

  14

  I was a little surprised to see the parking lot around the Canestoga Tavern jammed with cars until I remembered that it was Thursday night—payday in most of the uncivilized world—and all those potbellied beer drinkers with wire cutters hanging from their belts would be in there getting shit-faced.

  How long would it be before one of them decided to make himself a local reputation by punching out a big “moom pitchur” star? If one of them hadn’t already…

  As I walked to the front door, I saw a basketball game on the television set. I didn’t see anyone flying through the air. Thank God for small favors.

  There were a dozen men at the bar and McCue was sitting in the middle of them. There were a dozen glasses in front of him, half of them already empty.

  Everyone looked over as I came in, and when McCue saw me, he yelled, “Hey, Trace, old peckerhead, come on over and have a drink.”

  Somebody made room for me next to him at the bar, and I said, “Well, at least you’re not in a fight. I had this vision of picking up your battered body.”

  “I learned a trick from Kirk Douglas that keeps me alive in strange saloons,” he said.

  “What’s that? Snarl and grow a dimple?”

  “No. I walk up and wait for everybody to recognize me and then I pound my fist on the bar and shout, ‘Every man in the house can lick me.’ That always seems to do the trick. Then I buy everybody a drink, and they buy me one back, and before you know it, we’re all friends.”

  “And all drunk,” I said.

  “Naturally. What in hell do you think I come to a tavern for? Hey, everybody, this is my friend Trace.”

  Some guy with a stomach that belonged to the ages asked me, “You an actor too?”

  “McCue, God bless him, answered for me. “No,” he said. “Trace is my bodyguard. Toughest guy in forty states.”

  “Why only forty states?” the guy said, measuring me with a look that said I wasn’t so tough. I’d have agreed if McCue ever shut up and gave me a chance.

  McCue said, “Because we haven’t been in fights in all fifty states yet.”

  I said, “Thanks, pal. You’re on your way to getting my nose busted.”

  “Think nothing of it,” McCue said with his best smile.

  Before I could do anything about it, there were four drinks in front of me, and because I always worry about the people starving in India, I had to drink them. The bartender was the same charming fellow I’d met that afternoon. I told him no more drinks for McCue and me.

  There were another dozen people sitting around at tables across the room, and occasionally one of them would pop up to the bar to buy us a drink. The bartender would nod and take their money and then follow my instructions and not pour us a drink.

  The guy with the belly said to me, “You really that tough?”

  The trouble with that question is that there’s no answer that doesn’t buy you trouble. If you say yes, you’re going to be challenged. If you say no, the guy’s going to think you’re making fun of him and you’re going to be challenged.

  I sipped my drink and said. “Tony doesn’t need me to do his fighting for him. He’s the toughest man I ever saw.” That’d teach that bastard. Let him get his own nose broken.

  The bartender announced last call at five minutes to one. The room let out a collective groan.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Closing’s at one. Those are the rules.”

  “You stayed open late last week when your stupid brother-in-law was here from Buffalo,” one man at the bar said.

  “Yeah. But I was hoping he’d choke on one of the free drinks and die. Drink up. You guys are done for tonight.”

  The guy with the belly went to the men’s room. I didn’t see him come out and I finally got McCue to his feet and told him we were leaving.

  Naturally, he had to do an exit speech.

  “Gentlemen,” he roared, and the bar quieted down. “We want to thank you all for showing us such a good time. We’ll be back again to see you all. Bring the wives and kiddies.”

  He left two twenty-dollar bills as a tip. They vanished into the bartender’s hands with the speed of light, I guess before any of his customers could steal the cash.

  Outside, I realized why I hadn’t seen the guy with the belly come out of the bathroom. He was standing near the trunk of McCue’s white Rolls-Royce, alongside a short wiry man whose lips sank
in as if he had already taken out his false teeth in anticipation of trouble.

  McCue was wobbling from side to side, lurching against me. He saw the two men standing together twenty-five feet away and staggered to a halt. “Trace, does this mean what I think it does?”

  “I think it means you’re going to get your ass kicked,” I said.

  “Surely you wouldn’t let that happen to me.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Damned if I know,” he said. “Wait. The movie. Think of all the people who are dependent on me. If I get a broken nose, there’s no movie. Oh, Trace. All those people out of work. The widows, the orphans.”

  “Oh, you’re a pain in the ass,” I said.

  I took a step forward and McCue said, “Across this land, women and children will go to bed, blessing your name in their prayers. God bless you, Trace. God bless you.”

  “Listen,” I said. “When I’m killed, I don’t want anybody but you to speak over my grave. You’re the best I ever saw.”

  “I’ll sneak you right into heaven,” he said, and grinned again. It was hard to be mad at a man who grinned like that.

  I walked up to the Rolls-Royce and said, “What can we do for you, fellas?”

  “You just back off, pal,” the one with the stomach said. “I want him.” He pointed past me at McCue. “I want to see if he’s as tough as he looks in the movies.”

  “Unh-unh,” I said, and shook my head.

  “You going to stop me?” he said.

  “Look, pal, let’s not make this a talking contest. If Tony was allowed to, he’d wipe up the street with you. With both of you. But he’s on a movie and he’s not allowed to get his hands bloodied; it screws up the filming schedule. Now, we’re going to get in the car and drive away. If you want a fight, let’s get it on and get it over with, but let’s not stand here, who said, you said, I said, what said, it’s too goddamn cold for that. What’s your pleasure, pal?”

  “This.” He lunged forward from the back of the car and threw a big roundhouse right hand, so slow you could have preserved it in amber. I leaned back. It missed. I leaned forward. I didn’t. I buried a left hand deep into his belly, and the air came out of him. He tossed himself forward and threw both arms around me. I ducked, slipped out, backed up a step, and hit him a right hand in the side of the face. He dropped.