I polished off a Joe's Special at Joe's Joe's Special Specialty House, and finished the hot black coffee dashed with Craig's Largely Wood-Free Rye, glancing down the fog on California Street for some cow-mouthed palooka I was tailing that was cheating on his wife with, as it turned out, a fetching redhead assistant carpet salesgirl, whose own carpet, I saw from my fancy color negs, didn't exactly match the drapes. I was churning with that fascinating contradiction when the fetching but gin-polluted waitress came by to refill my coffee with steak sauce. That's what you get for ordering a cup o' Joe in Joe's Joe's Special Special place.
Low, low work, marital infidelity. Sitting in cars, peeking in windows like a prairie dog with a fedora, hiding in noisy iceboxes, putting a mike in the lampshade, putting a lampshade over some Joe named Mike. I hadn't had a Nazi spy ring or a Chinatown murder or a municipal bond amoratization rate to check out in two months to relieve the monotony of confirming the amazing fact that Joe Lunchbox has a little love dumpling on the side. Not to mention it was hard to cash the checks when the tears smudged the ink, and bounced anyway, because the rutting little weasel involved invariably cleared out the account right while I was setting my hopes of a full jar of mayonnaise unrealistically high, and all I could look forward to was maybe an empty night of bad love in lieu of cash from the desperate proto-divorcee.
I took out my wallet to pay Joe, reached in and brushed the flies out of the way. Nothing in there but happy memories. Joe gave me one of those looks that a 300lb chef gives a barrel of rotten spinach. Lean month since my last three genius clients shot each other simultaneously over creative differences in a modern dance piece about the death of Trotsky. As an indirect result, my car was gracefully stolen by Martha Graham. I was so tapped out I was living on my office couch and showering at Dardenella's hydrant, whose patience was getting thinner than her panties in her teenager neighbor's fantasies. I'd resorted to stealing a tux and attending fancy parties for the venison puffs and high-living comestibles until I was caught with a bowl of pudding leaking through my diplomatic sash.
There at the old Pine Sol-smelling counter I stood with the kind of a look an 8 year old gets when he realizes he's accidently run over the new beagle puppy. Rattling in my pocket was 27 cents. 4 cents short. I'd seen richer pockets in a Bombay dust factory. Then a pasty-faced gorilla in a blue suit that barely hid a sawed-off shot gun walked up with an outstreched pie-sized hand and held out a nickel - it looked like a elephant foot with a bottle cap stuck in the middle.
"Thanks, pal. I'll pay you back next time I visit the zoo. "
You had to beat this kind of thing back. If you're grateful, it gets to be a bad habit, and the next thing you know you're into Frankie the Fish Head for 10 grand over an ill-timed deuce of clubs. But this muscle slab's black eyes were too small to shrink any farther, and the steam-shovel jaws didn't open, but with the slightest tilt of the head, a feat for a man with no apparent neck, he indicated a silhouette in a back booth.
The way the light through the blinds struck that particular dark shape you could tell she was loaded for bear.
Phyllis Poetilla. The deadliest girl in town, even if you didn't count the chlamydia. A notorious Tenderloin madam and sometime Disney distributor, she left a trail of broken hearts, empty accounts, severed limbs and cheerful sailors from the Oakland docks to Russian hill.
She crooked her index finger and wiggled it compellingly. "Dr. Brain." She said, professionally, although in her profession that could mean anything from fronting a bootleg print of Snow White to a sudden need for 26 cases of pennicillin.
"Phyllis. You're looking well." She was always some crazy combo of expensive and cheap, like a Faberge Egg full of pressed ham. The material was expensive, but her decolletage got up and danced without a formal introduction, and charged 10 cents for it.
"An economic necessity. You're looking desperate."
"Nah, sugar, I'm sitting on top of the world."
"Under of a cardboard box of crap on the top of the world, I'd say. You've got bigger holes in your shoes than the Lusitania. But I wanna check something. Prosciutto, rattle his cage." The gorilla came at me like a freight train. But I was like a penny on the tracks. I'd already tied his shoes together when I'd asked casual-like what on earth that was behind him. The result was like Casey Jones hitting a salad bar.
"Sharp, Mack. I hate that in a man. Except when I need it. Thinker and a fighter. Now I figure a guy like you can handle himself- that's two palookas for the money. Meet me at this address at nine. I'll make it worth your while. "
She got up and wiggled off, while some other goon of hers dragged Prosciutto along like a bag of idiot meat.
I looked at her card.
BAY AREA SECRET CASTLE OF LOVE
2-4-69 Bush
(Hard Right on Johnson)
San Francisco, California
KENTUCKY 5497 Ask for the Comprehensive Phyllis
Unnecessary double-entendres in a cathouse ad annoyed me. It's like living in a mansion and putting out a huge sign on the lawn that says "Guess what? I live in a Mansion!" The Chanel #5 on the card smelled mostly like bait- a gilded chum bucket for lovelorn chumps. But money flows from loneliness, and I needed money more than I needed self-respect. I had a suspicion this job would drive me lower than a groundhog limbo dancer. But you don't pay Joe, or any other chef with fragmentation grenade on hand in the kitchen, in pride.
It was raining downtown, cold and wet and bouncing like a shower of kitten noses, and I managed to soak my last pair of dry socks (one argyle, the other Stanford Varsity) before I casually yanked a couple of tourists off the cable car and rode bitterly to Bush street.
It was just my luck that the cloth from the umbrella I'd stolen from the tourists was not really attached at all, and the second I opened it it blew away, covering the windshield of an Oldsmobile which spun out of control and took out a Tibetan restaraunt which was empty because as a sideline I'd happened to have written a less than stellar review of the joint, Madame Than's Yak Noodles N' Chips, just last week in the Examiner. I turned left at the resulting sesame oil fire, briefly hosed off the crying passengers, and found Phyllis's -a bright red and lilac Victorian with the real San Francisco rarity of a wrap-around porch and attached pig-iron foundry, where the off-duty girls poured cast-iron molds of presidents and famous European historical figures for sale at disreputable university book shops. At least, that was the story.
I was about to knock on the door with the velvet cushioned knocker when insert knockers joke here Phyllis came around outside, holding a briefcase. She was all business, like Henry Ford breaking a sit-down strike with a pack of Pinkerton goons, if Henry Ford was a wearing an overstuffed red satin dress and wielding a pretty little chromed .32 auto instead of mooning over the picture of Hitler on his desk. Ironic, because it was a Pinkerton problem. Phyllis laid it out- ten or twelve slabs of pasty-faced, mustachioed Pinkerton detectives snooping around, questioning the girls. They wouldn't be bribed off and they even turned down special favors. Why? Always the question. Pinkertons were the biggest whores and goons around. Odd indeed. It was worth a 100 a day and expenses to her to find out. I was getting hired as a private counter-dick.
"Sure, no sweat. " I said. Unlike a church or a bank, with a whorehouse you know exactly where the money's coming from. She kissed me on the chin and gave me the the briefcase. It had a file with photos of the Pinkertons, $500 cash, a card with the triple underlined address of a good tailor, and my own pitted and slightly rusty .45 retrieved from Mystic Eva's Pawn and Psychic Readings (2 locations.) I never trust a man whose gun is too clean.
"Friday," she said. "I need to know by Friday."
"Not much time, Toots."
"And Mack, I hate to tell ya but your girl's stepping out on ya. Get me the info and I tell you who." She closed the door.
Boy, that dame could pull strings like a piano factory. I walked, through the looming towers of cement and glass and the rain and neon lights and the heaving sea of hats. A paperboy cried out Rommel's Victory in North Africa. A single daisy dropped in the street was run over by meat van. A mother smacked her crying little girl with a soaking wet copy of Being and Nothingness. I walked on, tried put Dardenella out of my mind by concentrating on municipal bonds and drinking a pint of Vjorn's Stumbling Icelander Gin - it was enough to get me to the tailor in one piece.
An hour later I had a cash, a gun, a mission, a new wool suit and a wicked hangover. I was begining to feel like an American again.
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