Fugitive Nights Read online

  Rhonda Devon arose languidly, but staggered a step from too much predinner booze, and swayed across the marble foyer, leading the way to the door.

  Before leaving, the P.I. looked at the client, and said, “What’ll you do with the information if I’m able to get it? I mean, the name of the surrogate and the reason for your husband doing this? What would you do with the information?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Rhonda Devon said.

  “Oh, but I do. In fact, I’m not taking this case if you refuse to tell me.”

  Rhonda Devon studied the private investigator for a moment, showed perfect orthodontal teeth, and said, “Absolutely nothing. But I have to know.” Then she added, “I’d be happy to pay a bonus for results. Say, five thousand dollars? I won’t pretend that my husband and I have a close relationship or even a normal one. But I have to know. Surely, as a woman, you can understand?”

  On the fourth ring, he picked up the phone, or tried to. He made a swipe at it, but the phone fell off the nightstand. Somebody had squeezed him like a grapefruit. He was all acid and pulp, juiceless. Dry as tumbleweed.

  On the seventh ring he found it, a phone in the shape of a boxing glove. The guy whose mansion he was sitting probably had had one intramural match at prep school when he was ten years old, and had gone goofy over prize fighters. The study was full of Leroy Neiman’s nervous sports prints, as well as lots of boxing photos. Undoubtedly, he was the kind of guy who wouldn’t travel without his Water Pik.

  “Hello,” he croaked into the boxing glove. He heard a muffled reply and turned the phone right side up. “Yeah?”

  A woman’s voice said, “Detective Cutter?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?” He felt like somebody had inflated his skull with mustard gas.

  “Is it a bad time to call?”

  “No, it’s a bad day to call. What day is this?”

  “It’s Monday, February fourth.”

  “What year?”

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No, I had to get up and puke anyway. Who the hell is this?”

  “My name’s Breda Burrows,” she said. “I’m a P.I. here in Palm Springs, retired from LAPD.”

  “Yeah, so whadda … oh, shit!”

  Lynn Cutter slouched from bed in his gray silk pajama bottoms (property of the guy who was nutted out over boxers) and scuttled toward the bathroom like somebody trying to run underwater. Because the bathroom was bigger than the Palm Springs police station he didn’t quite get to the toilet, but did manage to upchuck in a Jacuzzi tub with gold-plated faucets.

  Lynn went down on the cool tile for a minute, examining a crumbled line of grout from a roach’s-eye view. He raised up, wiped his mouth on a monogrammed towel, and picked up the extension: a Sports Illustrated phone shaped like a sneaker.

  Speaking from the supine position, he said, “I’m dying.”

  “I can call back in thirty minutes.”

  “They’ll be pulling a sheet over me,” he moaned. “Look, lady, it ain’t easy talking into a tennis shoe. Whaddaya want?”

  “Well, Detective Cutter,” she began, then thought it sounded stiff and formal. So she said, “Whadda your friends call you?”

  “I don’t have any.” He was feeling more bile bubbling and rising. “But mother calls me Lynn. Kiss her for me. I’m all through.”

  “Lynn?”

  “Yeah, Lynn! I know! Marion Morrison didn’t like a girl’s name and changed it to John Wayne! I know! Lynn’s not a common name but life wasn’t easy for a boy named Sue, was it? Now, lady, will you tell me what the hell you want this time a morning?”

  “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, Lynn.”

  “Morning, afternoon! Kee-rist, have a heart!”

  “Can I drive over and talk to you? I have something to discuss that might be to our mutual advantage.”

  He paused, then said, “Save your gas. I ain’t about to jeopardize a disability pension by doing favors for private eyes, okay?”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t jeopardize your pension,” she said. “We’re in the same society. Society of the badge.”

  “Used to be. You ain’t carrying a badge no more. Far as I’m concerned, you’re just fuzz that was. Like just about every other P.I. I ever met. Fuzz that was.”

  “But I’ll always be a cop at heart,” she said. “How about a brief meeting?”

  “I gotta go,” he said. Then it occurred to him. “How’d you get my number?” He wobbled to his feet, weaved a bit, and considered peeing in the bathtub.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, “if you’ll meet me for lunch.”

  “Lunch?” He’d only raised his voice to twelve decibels, slightly louder than the sound of human breathing, but it sounded like a concussion grenade. When he turned on the faucet he heard Chinese New Year.

  “How about a drink?” she asked. “Let’s meet in one hour and have a drink. Whadda you got to lose?”

  “The Furnace Room,” he said, spotting an empty cognac bottle on the counter beside one of the bathroom sinks. The only thing he remembered clearly was that what’s-her-name drank every drop of booze in the house. “You’ll love the joint. It’s about as bright and cheerful as Gotham City. Can we hang up now? This conversation’s going on longer than the Lebanese civil war.”

  When it was time to shave, Lynn Cutter gave up on trimming his mustache, but held the mansion-owner’s electric shaver in both shaking hands and mashed his face up against it. The quiet hum of the shaver sounded like underground nuclear testing. After a hundred mashes or so, he was shaved. Sort of.

  Breda Burrows was one of those people who grinned when she was irked. When she was really mad the grin widened. Once, when she was working patrol on Hollywood Boulevard she had occasion to grin especially wide after a pimp named Too-Slick Rick, sitting in his Cadillac Eldorado, said to her, “Honest, I don’t make these street ladies work for me. I wouldn’t lie to you, cross my heart, Officer. On my momma’s grave.”

  And then Too-Slick Rick thought it would be real slick and real cute to cross a heart. Hers. He reached out the window of his pimpmobile, and with a manicured right index finger—longer than a broomstick and fitted with two diamond rings set in a bed of sapphires—he crossed her heart. Right under her LAPD shield. Right on the nipple of her left tit.

  She spread out that grin till it stretched from Hollywood and Vine to the Chinese Theater, and said, “On your momma’s grave? And does your momma have room down there for one more, chump?”

  Suddenly she leapfrogged. She vaulted up and sat down on his extended arm, the way a stuntperson vaults into the saddle over the rump of a horse.

  Too-Slick Rick played teeter-totter, with his elbow acting as fulcrum. His head shot up, smashing his mauve fedora flat against the ragtop Cad. Breda’s partner said that the elbow made a sound like a steel hull powering through polar ice, only louder. Too-Slick Rick didn’t beat up any of his girls for a couple of months, not with his left arm anyway.

  And the pimp didn’t lodge a formal complaint against young Breda Burrows, whose partner told her that if you’re going to maim some motherfucker make sure the motherfucker is a motherfucking pimp, because they seldom rat you off to those motherfucking headhunters at Internal Affairs.

  When Lynn got to The Furnace Room Bar and Grill, the neighborhood regulars were already on their way to oblivion. It was one of those generic smoky restaurant-saloons with hideaway nooks, walnut paneled walls and red vinyl booths. They mostly served red meat and garlic toast. And brand-new customers felt like they were back home in Indiana the first time they walked through the door.

  There were usually three or four ex-actors and actresses in the bar, maybe a dozen other seniors in golfing duds, a cop or two, and a few lawyers, since it wasn’t far from the Palm Springs courthouse. The drinks were man-sized and not expensive.

  Lawyer and cop jokes were preferred by the ex-actors in The Furnace Room.

  Question: “If you were a chef at a banquet for Sad
dam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and any lawyer of your choice, and you only had two cyanide capsules, who would you poison first and second?”

  Expected answer to both questions: “The lawyer.”

  Furnace Room answer: “Nobody. I’d slip the poison in the lawyer’s pocket, tell the Arabs it was meant for them, and watch while they boiled him in oil and cut off his freaking head.”

  There was lots of hate in The Furnace Room.

  Question: “How many cops does it take to push a handcuffed prisoner down a flight of stairs?”

  Answer: “None. The asshole tripped and fell.”

  And so forth.

  To further amuse the old actors at the expense of cops like Lynn Cutter, the proprietor, a seventy-six-year-old ex-character actor named Wilfred Plimsoll—who claimed he’d doubled for Ronald Reagan in Hellcats of the Navy—posted macabre quips on the bar mirror. His latest referred to a newspaper story out of Los Angeles, revealing that in three recent police shootings, cops had claimed that suspects pulled “a shiny object from a pocket,” causing the cop to react with deadly force, later to discover that the “shiny object” was only a plastic comb.

  One bar sign said: “Use a comb, go to heaven.”

  Another said: “Combs: 0. Cops: 3.”

  Lynn Cutter didn’t so much as glance at bar signs or other customers when he entered. He headed straight for Wilfred Plimsoll and said, “Scotch. Double.”

  The former actor usually wore a silk ascot and an Out-of-Africa shirt even on sweltering desert days. He poured the booze and watched the cop toss it down, then poured a second, saying, “Better? Need another?”

  “Like a goat needs a sidesaddle,” Lynn Cutter answered, but drank it anyway.

  When Wilfred Plimsoll started to put the bottle away, Lynn said, “One more. Make it Chivas this time. Your well drinks taste like stuff they rub horses with.”

  Wilfred didn’t mind the bitching about his goods or service. He was not a thin-skinned man, not after knocking around movie studios for thirty-nine years.

  “Bad night, Lynn?” he asked, speaking toward the clock high on the wall. Wilfred Plimsoll always spoke to the wall clock, which displayed bar time, ten minutes fast. He did it to show off his right profile, which photographed best.

  Moreover, he always aimed his cigarette holder—held fast in clenched dentures—at that wall clock. This, after he was told at an audition that he, Wilfred Plimsoll, resembled Franklin Delano Roosevelt more than Ralph Bellamy had in Sunrise at Campobello. And despite the fact that Wilfred wore a black Burt Reynolds toupee, and had done so long before Burt bought his first rug. Without it he looked more like Benjamin Franklin than Franklin Roosevelt; he was, in fact, a soulmate to the randy inventor in that no woman younger than electricity was safe from his advances. That explained why the more coquettish babes from the Senior Center had their afternoon cocktails at The Furnace Room.

  “Yeah, a bad night,” Lynn finally responded. “It’s amazing what I’ll do to take a chance with AIDS. Did I leave here with somebody last night?”

  “You’re having more blackouts than London in the Blitz,” Wilfred said to the wall clock. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Somebody with tits?”

  “Tits? Yeah, I think she had tits.”

  “Thank God,” Lynn said. “I have this vague image in my mind of a blonde mustache.”

  “She had a mustache too,” Wilfred said. “Do they serve testosterone takeout at the health stores these days? She was uglier than all three witches in Macbeth. I’d rather have red ants in my truss. Hope you wore protection.”

  “Oh, sure,” Lynn lied, unable to remember a single thing after the cognac ran out. “I wear camouflaged stitch-on condoms. Don’t know they’re there and can’t take em off. I got more protection than Pinkerton’s.”

  “It’s a real mistake, to unmuzzle your snake,” Wilfred advised, poetically.

  “Yeah yeah, gotta shroud my monkey,” Lynn agreed. God, his head hurt!

  “She had nice hair though,” Wilfred Plimsoll said to the clock. “Like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Did I ever tell you I almost got a speaking role in Gilda?”

  “Yes,” Lynn Cutter said to his booze. “You been telling that one since a peanut grower was president.”

  “Ah, Rita!” Wilfred Plimsoll mused, and it was too late now. He was losing himself in that golden gossamer mist peculiar to actors, especially failed actors. “Rita was some dish. I heard she could suck-start a leaf blower and the Mexican that ran it!”

  “Do you have any aspirin, Wilfred?” Lynn Cutter asked, and now he was talking to the clock. It was contagious.

  “I heard you’d have hairline fractures and hickeys on your knees after a date with Rita,” Wilfred said. “I could tell you something she said to me on location one time, but you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Sure, I always believe you, Wilfred. Like I believed Saigon Suzie when she swore she loved only me.”

  Taking the cigarette holder from his mouth, Wilfred Plimsoll said, “It’s too bad you’re not old enough to remember the great movie palaces, Lynn. The Golden Age it truly was!”

  “Yeah, I’m barely potty-trained at forty-five,” the cop moaned, “but my liver’s eighty-five so maybe my liver remembers. The aspirin, Wilfred!”

  Finally, Wilfred Plimsoll seemed to understand that Lynn Cutter had a sick head. He said, “We don’t have aspirin. Take another drink and it’ll go away.” He poured a Chivas for the unprotesting cop.

  Another old actor named Reginald Orlando—one of those who never made it trying to impersonate Gilbert Roland—was eavesdropping, and said, “Ah yes, the movie palaces. How I remember Lon Chaney in Hunchback of Notre Dame. Ruining his body with a hunchback harness-device for the sake of his art. Nowadays, Warren Beatty couldn’t even bring himself to put putty on his beautiful nose to look like Dick Tracy.”

  Just then a woman’s voice behind Lynn Cutter said to Wilfred Plimsoll, “A glass of your best Chardonnay and another of whatever Mister Cutter’s having. Over at the corner table, please.”

  Lynn turned and, headache or not, felt a little rush. His favorite combination: lustrous and abundant earth-brown hair, and eyes so blue the gloom couldn’t hide them. Cobalt blue, the kind that go electric when the owner turns them on. She wore a tailored hounds-tooth jacket and a slim black skirt, a bit wintry for such a hot day. He’d expected her to look matronly. He’d heard about the new P.I. in town who’d retired from LAPD, and he knew that LAPD cops could draw their twenty-year pensions as young as forty-one. She’d been in Palm Springs several months, so she had to be at least forty-two, he figured.

  Twenty years of police work in the big city hadn’t done much to the outside, but who could tell about the inside with babes like this? “I thought you’d be older,” he said.

  “I am.” When she parted her lips and smiled she looked even younger.

  “Somebody musta set your odometer back,” Lynn said. Jesus, she had long legs and incredible calves! All buffed up like she played soccer or something. He knew he wouldn’t have a chance, so he might as well act as cranky as he felt, after he’d gotten his free drink.

  They sat at a table in the corner under a series of wall photos of former and present Palm Springs residents: Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, William Holden, Dinah Shore, Steve McQueen, Lucille Ball, Truman Capote, Kirk Douglas, Ruby Keeler, Red Skelton, Liberace.

  What they all had in common is that they wouldn’t have set foot in The Furnace Room for the deed to Mount San Jacinto, which loomed two miles high over the city, throwing blue shadow over Palm Springs long before sunset.

  “I imagine I’m close to your age, Lynn,” she said, as he plopped down in his chair. “I ride a bike at least a hundred miles a week to keep fit.”

  Lynn said, miserably, “Yeah, well I just had a checkup and I got the stool of a much younger man.”

  Wilfred Plimsoll, with a fresh cigarette in his holder, put a drink in front of Lynn and jauntily poured a taste
of Chardonnay for Breda Burrows. Then, with his best leading man flourish, he adjusted his ascot and said, “Would m’lady wish to let it breathe for a bit?”

  “Just pour it, Wilfred!” Lynn said testily. “CPR couldn’t resuscitate the crap you serve!”

  After Wilfred said “Tut tut!” and returned to the bar, Lynn said to Breda, “Well, you got him talking like the Queen Mum so I guess you’re accepted in The Furnace Room. He might even buy you a drink for Valentine’s Day, but not this one.”

  “How about lunch?” Breda asked. “The food okay?”

  “The roaches thrive on it,” Lynn said. “That’s why they’re big enough for choker collars and don’t die from a single bullet wound. You might try the chili but I’d rather lick a toad. Now can you tell me what’s on your mind and how you got the number of the place I’m house-sitting?”

  “Sure,” she said. “The number came from your lieutenant. I knew his brother when he worked LAPD. The reason I wanted to meet you is because I’m having trouble getting my business going in Palm Springs.”

  “Well, you came to the right guy,” Lynn said. “I got enough banking acumen to be George Bush’s son. Here’s what I know: The tourist season goes from New Year’s to Memorial Day. That’s five months. And some people think May’s only a wash, so you’re down to four. Yet just because it’s so nice in the winter everybody with enough bucks to lease four walls and a roof thinks he can make a living twelve months a year. Restaurants’re the worst. Guys keep opening restaurants in the same spot where ten other guys failed. They go over the cliff one after another, dumber than a herd a lemmings. That’s it for my knowledge of commerce. So what do I got to do with your business problems?”

  Breda Burrows studied Lynn Cutter for a moment, and said, “Feeling better?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not quite ready to do eyelid surgery.” Lynn looked at his calendar watch and said, “We only got seven or eight weeks till Easter and I gotta color eggs this year. Do you think you’ll get to the point by then?”