Umney's Last Case

III. Of Painters and Pesos.

The smell of fresh paint seared my nose, overpowering both the smell of Vernon's smoke and Bill Tuggle's armpits. The men in the coveralls were currently taking up space not far from my office door. They had put down a dropcloth, and the tools of their trade were spread out all along it – tins and brushes and turp. There were two step-ladders as well, flanking the painters like scrawny bookends. What I wanted to do was to run down the hall, kicking the whole works every whichway as I went. What right had they to paint these old dark walls that glaring, sacrilegious white?

Instead, I walked up to the one who looked as if it might take a twodigit number to express his IQ and politely asked what he and his fellow mug thought they were doing. He glanced around at me. “Hellzit look like? I'm givin Miss America a finger-frig and Chick there's puttin rouge on Betty Grable's nippy-nips.”

I'd had enough. Enough of them, enough of everything. I reached out, grabbed the quiz-kid under the armpit, and used my fingertips to engage a particularly nasty nerve that hides up there. He screamed and dropped his brush. White paint splattered his shoes. His partner gave me a timid doe-eyed look and took a step backward.

“If you try taking off before I'm done with you,” I snarled, “you're going to find the handle of your paint-brush so far up your ass you'll need a boathook to find the bristles. You want to try me and see if I'm lying?”

He stopped moving and just stood there on the edge of the dropcloth, eyes darting from side to side, looking for help. There was none to be had. I half-expected Candy to open my door and look out to see what the fracas was, but the door stayed firmly closed. I turned my attention back to the quiz-kid I was holding onto.

“The question was simple enough, bud – what the hell are you doing here? Can you answer it, or do I give you another blast?”

I twiddled my fingers in his armpit just to refresh his memory and he screamed again. “Paintin the hall! Jeezis, can't you see?”

I could see, all right, and even if I'd been blind, I could smell. I hated what both of those senses were telling me. The hallway wasn't supposed to be painted, especially not this glaring, lightreflecting white. It was supposed to be dim and shadowy; it was supposed to smell like dust and old memories. Whatever had started with the Demmicks” unaccustomed silence was getting worse all the time. I was mad as hell, as this unfortunate fellow was discovering. I was also scared, but that was a feeling you get good at hiding when carrying a heater in a clamshell holster is part of the way you make your living.

“Who sent you two dubs down here?”

“Our boss,” he said, looking at me as if I were crazy. “We work for Challis Custom Painters, on Van Nuys. The boss is Hap Corrigan. If you want to know who hired the cump'ny, you'll have to ask h…”

“It was the owner,” the other painter said quietly. “The owner of this building. A guy named Samuel Landry.”

I searched my memory, trying to put the name of Samuel Landry together with what I knew of the Fulwider Building and couldn't do it. In fact, I couldn't put the name of Samuel Landry together with anything... yet for all that it seemed almost to chime in my head, like a churchbell you can hear from miles away on a foggy morning.

“You're lying,” I said, but with no real force. I said it simply because it was something to say.

“Call the boss,” the other painter said. Appearances could be deceiving; he was apparently the brighter of the two, after all. He reached inside his grimy, paint-smeared coverall and brought out a little card.

I waved it away, suddenly tired. “Who in the name of Christ would want to paint this place, anyway?”

It wasn't them I was asking, but the painter who'd offered me the business card answered just the same. “Well, it brightens the place up,” he said cautiously. “You gotta admit that.”

“Son,” I asked, taking a step toward him, “did your mother ever have any kids that lived, or did she just produce the occasional afterbirth like you?”

“Hey, whatever, whatever,” he said, taking a step backward. I followed his worried gaze down to my own balled-up fists and forced them open again. He didn't look very relieved, and I actually didn't blame him very much. “You don't like it – you're coming through loud and clear on that score. But I gotta do what the boss tells me, don't I? I mean, hell, that's the American way.”

He glanced at his partner, then back to me. It was a quick glance, really no more than a flick, but in my line of work I'd seen it more than once, and it's the kind of look you file away. Don't bother this guy, it said. Don't bump him, don't rattle him. He's nitro.

“I mean, I've got a wife and a little kid to take care of,” he went on. “There's a Depression going on out there, you know.”

Confusion came over me then, drowning my anger the way a downpour drowns a brushfire. Was there a Depression going on out there? Was there?

“I know,” I said, not knowing anything. “Let's just forget it, what do you say?”

“Sure,” the painters agreed, so eager they sounded like half of a barbershop quartet. The one I'd mistakenly tabbed as half-bright had his left hand buried deep in his right armpit, trying to get that nerve to go back to sleep. I could have told him he had an hour's work ahead of him, maybe more, but I didn't want to talk to them anymore. I didn't want to talk to anyone or see anyone – not even the delectable Candy Kane, whose humid glances and smooth, subtropical curves have been known to send seasoned street-brawlers reeling to their knees. The only thing I wanted to do was to get across the outer office and into my inner sanctum. There was a bottle of Robb's Rye in the bottom lefthand drawer, and right now I needed a shot in the worst way.

I walked down toward the frosted-glass door marked CLYDE UMNEY PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, restraining a renewed urge to see if I could drop-kick a can of Dutch Boy Oyster White through the window at the end of the hall and out onto the fire-escape. I was actually reaching for my doorknob when a thought struck me and I turned back to the painters... but slowly, so they wouldn't believe I was being gripped by some new seizure. Also, I had an idea that if I turned too fast, I'd see them grinning at each other and twirling their fingers around their ears – the looney-gesture we all learned in the schoolyard.

They weren't twirling their fingers, but they hadn't taken their eyes off me, either. The half-smart one seemed to be gauging the distance to the door marked STAIRWELL. Suddenly I wanted to tell them that I wasn't such a bad guy when you got to know me; that there were, in fact, a few clients and at least one ex-wife who thought me something of a hero. But that wasn't a thing you could say about yourself, especially not to a couple of bozos like these.

“Take it easy,” I said. “I'm not going to jump you. I just wanted to ask another question.”

They relaxed a little. A very little, actually.

“Ask it,” Painter Number Two said.

“Either of you ever played the numbers down in Tijuana?”

“La loteria?” Number One asked.

“Your knowledge of Spanish stuns me. Yeah. La loteria.”

Number One shook his head. “Mex numbers and Mex call houses are strictly for suckers.”

Why do you think I asked you? I thought but didn't say.

“Besides,” he went on, “you win ten or twenty thousand pesos, big deal. What's that in real money? Fifty bucks? Eighty?”

My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana, Peoria had said, and I had known something about it wasn't right even then. Forty thousand bucks... My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest'y afternoon. He brought it back in the saddlebag of his Vinnie!

“Yeah,” I said, “something like that, I guess. And they always pay off that way, don't they? In pesos?”

He gave me that look again, as if I was crazy, then remembered I really was and readjusted his face. “Well, yeah. It is the Mexican lottery, you know. They couldn't very well pay off in dollars.”

“How true,” I said, and in my mind I saw Peoria's thin, eager face, heard him saying, It was spread all over my mom's bed! Forty-frogginthousand smackers!

Except how could a blind kid be sure of the exact amount.. . or even that it really was money he was rolling around in? The answer was simple: he couldn't. But even a blind newsboy would know that la loteria paid off in pesos rather than in dollars, and even a blind newsboy had to know you couldn't carry forty thousand dollars” worth of Mexican lettuce in the saddlebag of a Vincent motorcycle. His uncle would have needed a City of Los Angeles dump truck to transport that much dough.

Confusion, confusion – nothing but dark clouds of confusion.

“Thanks,” I said, and headed for my office.

I'm sure that was a relief for all three of us.