Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 20:40:07 -0400 From: "J. Hall" Subject: INT:GP (aka Goldman Pictures): Tell them Trotsky doesn't live here anymore.. > "I brought you some chicken noodle. Mom's home remedy. You've been in and >out. I think it must have been a concussion." > Jeff tried to sit up. Reine rushed to prop him up with pillows. "Where have >you been?" > "Around. Here, let me feed you." > "I'm not hungry." > "Jeff. If you don't eat your soup, you won't have enough energy to play >later." > He looked at her. > >----------------- We traded more than glances and collapsed, spent under Huston's starched bone linen sheets, a storm blowing ragtime outside. > If this was Mom's home remedy then I could see why Dad was so disgustingly healthy. Well, heathy right up to the second Marlowe sent a .45 slug through his heart . After that the cures get a lot more expensive. I tickled her neck with a fingertip to get her attention. "Dear?" "Mm, what?" "Can you tell me what you put in the soup?" I watched the ceiling fan circle lazily through the lattice of her hair. Huston hadn't bothered installing glass in the windows and the thick oaken shutters were thrown open to the sounds and smells of the rain smashing into the banana trees on the hillside below. If it wasn't for the wrought-iron burglar bars, you'd never know it wasn't a cell. Posh, and the jailor was a doll, but it was still a cell. I wanted to know why. How was just a detail. Reinie lazed, her legs stretching the sheets then finding the edge. As long as I'd known her, and it wasn't long, she'd always slept with one foot hanging out of the covers. Maybe it was easier to make a run for it if you weren't tucked in properly. "A little barley, a little basil, some pepper, a dash of white wine," she said. A black and green parrot the size of a yorkie terrier flew up from the forest and grabbed onto the bars, leering at me. I winked back. One of Huston's Corona Majesticas smouldered cozily on the edge of a tray someone had left on the dark oak bedstand and I took a couple of locomotive puffs on it before Reinie made a face and pointed to the window. "Get rid of that stogie, will you? Smells like someone barbecuing a bale of hay." I tossed it at the bird who placidly watched it bank off a railing into the canopy of green below trailing sparks. Funny, you'd think a mob daughter wouldn't have an aversion to cigars. The parrot was probably used to dodging the cheroots of Huston's chums. Bogart, Flynn, that lot. Parrot Assassinators of Hollywood, Ltd. "Wine, huh?" "Mm, a little, why?" A sneaky little grin turned the crease of her lips up into something kissable. "What day is this?" I asked. The grin faded and an eyelid fluttered, then lifted, fixing me with a dark, worried pupil. "Sunday. I think it's Sunday," she nodded, all schoolgirlish. "Yes, definitely Sunday. I heard the bells down in the chapel go ding-dong. They only do that on Sunday, don't they?" "It's Tuesday. I asked Ramon," I said quietly. "When were you planning on telling me about the dope in the stew?" She blew out some breath, then rolled over and drew the sheet up to her neck, sliding a hand behind her head. The parrot hopped off the window bars and dropped down toward a bug. Or a frog. Or maybe there was another detective holed up in the carriage house he had to keep track of, if there WAS a carriage house. Huston's little pile had just about everything else, which wasn't surprising considering it had been a Benedictine monastery back when Pizarro was a pistol. Reinie chewed cooly on her hair and made an Audrey Hepburn sort of moue. "You needed rest. I just wanted to be sure you got it," she said carefully. "How's your head, sweetie?" She'd brought a plate of green figs chopped into quarters up with the gruel and I popped one into my mouth, then thought better of it and spit it out. "Crowded," I said, and inspected the fruit for suspicious activity. "I had to knock you out, you just wouldn't have stayed in bed." She'd fixed her nails somehow after the crash and let one of them skate spidery arabesques along my collarbone. The Dale Carnegie school of poisoning. A touch adds so much more to the testimonial. "And what were you up to while I was sleeping off the Chloral? Cutting cards again? Do you own this place now too?" I closed my eyes and wished for the cigar back. Nothing happened. Maybe the Blue Fairy would bring me one if I went back to sleep. Reinie let her arms go limp and then rolled over to snuggle. "Do you really want to know?" she murmurred. I thought about that. "Two days. That's long enough for you to do some serious damage to the state of the Mexican economy," I said. She giggled and shook her head. "No, I didn't go shopping with your little bag of money, baby." I'd forgotten about the money and a cold pondstone grew in my stomach wondering how the hell I got myself into these things. "Lariene, look," I pushed the hair away from her face. It was softer than eiderdown and the color of the leather in a '38 Cord, brown and maroon strands intermingled. "It's not mine. I don't keep things that belong to others. It's part of the Detective's Creed or something." She smiled hard with one side of her face, the other hidden in my shoulder. "Why didn't I meet you five years ago?" she whispered. "Five years ago I was Marlowe's junior partner and you wouldn't have looked twice at me, and if you had," I held up a finger, "Angie DeLauro would have invited me over for a re-circumcision with piano wire. That's if he was feeling generous. You were what? sixteen?" "Seventeen." I closed my eyes and tried to picture her at seventeen with bobby socks and couldn't. The holster and fedora outfit, maybe. One of Huston's cats ripped the night apart with a long, sardonic growling cry from somewhere very near the house and Reinie jumped. "Seventeen. Forget the piano wire. Think bolt cutters," I said. "You can't run from your past, Lariene. It has long legs." The cat yowled again, this time farther away, and the dank odor of sodden jungle blew into the room flickering the fat white candles in the hurricane lamps. "I went to see a friend in Washington," she finally said, and rolled over to rummage through the pile of clothing on her side of the bed, emerging with a long, ebony Sherman. The sheets decided enough was enough and slid off onto the floor for a siesta and we lay there sharing the expensive nicotine under nothing but a drawn mosquito netting. "So how was Wendell, anyway?" "Who?" "Wilkie." I stubbed out the Sherman and wondered if Huston had a toothbrush for me squirrled away in the tiled guest jakes. "Old guy. Democrat. Dead as spats though." Reinie frowned and shook her head, then stretched. I leaned across and brushed my lips over her ribs and she shivered. "Stop that!" "Why?" "Because we're talking." One of us was, anyway. I flopped back onto a pillow then drew the mosquito net closed. You could get yellow fever if you weren't careful. "Ok so tell me who you went to see," I said, deciding not to ask how in the hell she travelled five thousand miles in two days and still looked like something from a Nehi calender. "A friend," she began, and told me a story about evidence, the IRS, and the Feds. I had the feeling she was leaving pieces of it out, here and there, but I didn't interrupt. When she was finished I crawled out of bed and wobbled over to the window to stare at the darkening skies, the rain subsiding. "You can't play the Government like you play Tony. Or Lansky. Or me, Lareine." To hell with yellow fever. A string of lights, single bulbs on a line, led away from the main house down to a small dock where a pair of diesel cruisers, dark wood over white hulls, rode moored over a light chop. "Once the FBI or Kefauver gets a whiff of the games your uncle has been playing they won't stop at him." "You don't know that," she said. One of the boats was lit from within and I could see little stick men throwing bags off the deck onto the dock. "Did you know about the hootchie factories down here?" I asked, my throat parched. The chloral hydrate they'd been feeding me for the last two days had dried my sinuses out and left me feeling lightheaded and surly. "No," she said quietly. "I knew something was going on but they kept that hidden from me." "Did you know Tony was buddies with the Mexico City station chief for the MGB?" I asked, figuring I'd fish a little. "MGB? What the hell is that? A car?" "Russian Intelligence Service. They have a remarkably similar operation to his funhouses, but I think their wardrobe lady is not quite up to Tony's standards." "You don't know that either," she said irritably. "You're just saying that. He wouldn't. I've seen his medals from the war, he was a hero!" "That's probably true," I said. Fleming had said more or less the same, something about Sicily and the partisans and the liquidation of a few key officers in the Hermann Goering Division. "But to whom?" She didn't answer and I squinted over the haze of rising mist. Something was happening on the dock. A pair of figures clambered out of the cruiser and stood huddled together on the dock, which groaned audibly with the sudden weight. One was oversized, tall and heavy. The lights on the dock picked up a sheen off his bald head, but otherwise his face was indistinct. The other was dark, smaller, and dressed in business clothes, his white button-down spectral in the twilight. A tiny figure trotted up to the bigger of the two. Ramon? Ramon. They exchanged pleasantries, Ramon's M-1 pointed skyward. "What are you looking at," she breathed, leaning behind me. I hadn't heard her get up, but then Huston's beds were well oiled and feather-stuffed. "Trouble." I said. "As usual." "Bruno," she said wonderingly. "Gee, I wonder how he found you." She pinched me, hard. "Ok, found 'us'". "Not me. I swear." I believed her. It was getting easier. Either I was in love or they'd doped me up with something stronger than chloral. Someone rapped on the bedroom door twice, then twice more, soft as a priest. I reached behind me and ran a hand down her bare spine. It was covered with goosepimples and she pressed against me. "Go get something on, Reinie. I think we're about to be invited downstairs." She nodded and pulled away, then padded back with a fresh grey linen Palm Beach suit on a wooden hanger. I took it and gave her a grateful kiss. Como's dinner clothes were probably being used to dust the Del Azul bannisters and I'd been wondering what I was going to wear. A couple of dark silk ties hung off the collar of what looked like a starch-white handstitched Saville Row shirt. "Don't worry, I'm sure Bruno won't be any trouble," she said. "Sure." Reinie would just snap her fingers and he'd swoon like the pasha's head eunuch. Sure he would. But that didn't matter. It was the other one, someone I hoped I'd never see again, that worried me. She gave me a look that said 'stop staring at me and get dressed'. I turned and started throwing clothes on at the window, standing back far enough to be in shadow. Ramon was gone. The dark man in the clean shirt was limping up the dock behind Bruno slowly, his head on a swivel, watchful. I'd only met Pavel Abramovich Tlachssky once, in Magdeburg, and it hadn't been a happy occasion. He'd worn a kind of different uniform then, dark blue one with red stripes, and had been aiming a captured German officer's Luger at my forehead. I hoped time had leavened his zeal to the Party. Reinie stuck her head out of the bathroom and made a face. I held up a tie and she shook her head. "Wear the dark navy one, with the little red stripes," she ordered. Of course. The knock came again, this time firmer. to be continued...