Page 32 of Shadow Ticket
“No risk, no reward,” Rodney far more breezy about it than the situation may actually call for.
“This is the Al Capone of Cheez, Rodney. He runs empires. A byword of terror in milk sheds throughout the land. Public enemies shiver with fear. How much trouble could one cheap adventurer give him?”
“A million and a half,” Rodney sincerely offended, “is not cheap!”
“You could be going after twice that.”
“Oh?”
“Pikers like you never get it right. First thing you should’ve done was hire a manager.”
So as if contempt from the family of Rodney’s intended bride isn’t enough, there’s a certain coolness to be put up with from that old gang of his as well.
“Others in the family stand to lose carloads more than my insignificant sum,” he explains to Hicks. “We’re all chipping in, each according to their means, to foot the bill, whatever it amounts to, to get our Daphne back safe and sound.” With a meaningful wiggle of the eyebrows meant to suggest a per diem plus expenses lavish beyond the dreams of small-timers such as Hicks.
“Wait, but…you yourself…” Hicks pretending to grope for tactful language.
“I know—fine one to moralize, you’re going to say, but that’s all overwith now, isn’t it, the former scheming heel known as G. Rodney Flaunch is no more, I swear, he’s betrayed his last milkmaid.”
“Do tell.”
“What’s a million and a half, I’d gladly forgo it all if only she’d come back to me,” and so forth. Those who don’t mind hiring a private dick now and then have been refining these arts of sincerity since Pinkerton was a pup, though sometimes it only turns out to be professional courtesy among fellow con artists. Nothing around here of course but gentlemen, so Hicks doesn’t ask to see anything in writing.
“And how much appreciation do you think I get from this careless, hate-driven family? They sell each other used cars they know will catch fire at awkward moments, lure and get lured again and again into indiscretion and blackmail and who’s always the fixer running around cleaning up after everybody? Dear old Rodney the family lowlife. When he isn’t being delegated to deal with private coppers and other scum.”
“How lousy for you, and yet…”
“Out, out with it, please,” Rodney throbbing with resentment.
“Only thinking, what if it really is, well…something emotional. Sometimes,” pushing it, “it’s love, is all it turns out to be.”
“Love.” Rodney is squinting at him in a way that reminds him somehow of Boynt. “Let’s not forget simple insanity either, then, shall we. Nothing to concern yourself with in any case, your role is limited to finding her and convincing her to come back.”
“For a sum any self-respecting chicken would turn up their beak at—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Somebody did.”
“For just another crook with a license you’re sure a touchy customer.”
“And yet maybe you people need us as much as you do psychiatrists and bookkeepers, and better hope we never get together in a union either, John D., ’cause even one wildcat strike and it’ll all be over for the whole truckload of ya. Now here,” reaching for his briefcase, pulling out paperwork of various shades and sizes, “is where I’m supposed to remind you about this concentric zone system we use at the U-Ops—anywhere outside a hundred-mile radius of Milwaukee City Hall, which would include parts of Chicago, we’llneed to charge you some extra. Plus insurance billed weekly in advance, oh and there’s the hazardous-duty bonus? if somebody turns out to be packing a firearm, for example…”
Hicks is nodded on into a sub-parlor less vast but not quite intimate, tricked out with a cocktail bar, radio-Victrola console, telephones in gold-accented mother-of-pearl, modern art on the walls where the dames though possibly nude are lopsided in ways not easy to make sense of…plus what seems to be an excessive number of electric lamps, floor and table models, far too many for a room even this size. Some are unusual-looking, to say the least, and few if any in what you’d consider good taste—a disembodied nose with a light bulb in each nostril, a grinning Negro with a watermelon he isstrangely leeringat, assorted celebrities of politics, show business, and the criminal underworld misbehaving in ways somebody in the Airmont house must’ve found entertaining.
Mrs. Vivacia Airmont sweeps in, pretending to ignore Rodney and laying a hand noticeable for its lack of body temperature on Hicks’s sleeve, the one without the French reweave. “The latest we’ve heard of my daughter, she’s in Chicago with this Hop Wingdale person and the dance band he plays in, the Klezmopolitans, about to go off to New York and then overseas on tour and for all I know irrevocably ‘gone hepcat,’ all night in the black-and-tans breathing that mentholated smoke, running tabs that always end up being sent tome, sums the plutocrat of your choice couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at, and the press coverage!—class traitor, baby gun moll, this and worse, no delusions herself about what she’s become, and only a rough idea how it happened. She’s lost her grip but she’s still my daughter, for heaven’s sake, she needs to be rescued from that milieu.”
“Our sympathy, we’ll sure do what we can, which ought to be plenty…”
“I only wish she’d come back home, and if she’s still skating by on looks, well good for her and let’s hope she’s also been investing wisely—California real estate, for example, these Arabian oil wells one keeps hearing about…but don’t mind me, getting sentimental these days…yes, li’l Daffodil,” slipping into a sort of ballad tempo, “I’m beaming my thoughts to you by telepathy, wherever you are, how near yet oh so far…And you know what sheanswers? ‘Uh-huh, spare us those tears, Mother, God bless ’em, but gimme knockout drops any day.’ ”
This sort of thing in a movie would have Hicks reaching for the Kleenex, but out here in the daylight of normal civilian hypocrisy and fraud, having by now gained a dim idea of when and when not to dummy up, he finds it more helpful, as the Gumshoe’s Manual advises time and again, to try and appear professional, already knowing it’s no use, he’s in the soup once again and his job will be to get in the way of and absorb any violence that might arise, as if there’s some Private Dick Oath like the one doctors take, with a no-harm clause, which there isn’t.
14
Hicks just stepped into it without much thinking ahead. Having obtained by way of his Uncle Detlef master keys for most of the high-performance smuggling craft captured in local waters by the Drys and kept down at a lakeside boat pound they rented from the MPD, now and then Hicks liked to take one of these 12-cylinder whizbangs out for a cruise, usually down to an unincorporated patch of riot and sin north of Chicago known as No Man’s Land, right in the heart of the hoity-toity North Shore. Tonight with a storm heading in from somewhere out on the prairie, winter surf, the mournful high-low booming of more than one foghorn up and down the Coast, shifty air pressure, chances of rain, a longtime pal of Uncle Lefty’s, casting off lines, gives Hicks a meaningful headshake. “Don’t much like the looks of that sky. Already seeing some swells, might keep an eye out for local fogbanks too…”
No Man’s Land lies between Wilmette and Kenilworth, right up against the Lake. There were grand plans once upon a time. They were going to call it Plaza del Lago, and “Spanish Court” would be one of the first drive-in “shopping plazas” in the U.S.A…. But the timing was terrible, before anybody knew it the Depression had come swooping in to claim one more hopeful project, and the Plaza slid into an underlit honkytonk with its archways in permanent shadow. Nowadays among the derelict Spanish-style architecture there’s still a movie house, and Dopplinger’s Chinese Amusements, a Keno salon whose bar Hicks at the time was a semiregular at, just across the shore road from the Lake, close enough that you could hear waves coming in, withpermanently flickering electric light owing to a tangled history with Commonwealth Edison plus the fiercely independent power plant in Winnetka, and of course the Outfit, who were tapping off a percentage of everything that went in and out of No Man’s Land, every glass of beer, sack of movie popcorn, tip given, tip taken, not to mention the Chinese machines, the horse games, the slots, working ladies full- or part-time or semipro, including adventurous local housewives, and of course every tiny fraction of an amp of electric current, which kept sending foolhardy amateurs up the power poles trying to bootleg more juice in off of the ComEd line along Sheridan Road, too often ending in ambulance sirens and sorrowful headlines.
