“That’s a lot of power for our fat little former pimp.”
“It is indeed.” He straightened up in his chair and smiled tightly, smugly. “Mr. Heller, I intend to expose Willie Bioff for the panderer he is.”
“That should be easy. He’s been arrested enough times.”
“Yes, but has he been convicted?”
“At least once that I know of.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I was the arresting officer,” I said.
He smiled. “That was a rumor we heard, but we’ve not been able to verify it.”
So that’s how my name got picked out of the hat to be the dick Pegler pegged for his legwork.
“I’m not sure I want to be involved in this,” I said. “I hear Browne is tied in with Nicky Dean, and Dean’s an Outfit man. If this is an Outfit operation, my future health precludes my involvement.”
“You don’t need to decide this instant. Have you ever been to California?”
“No.”
He reached in his inside pocket and produced an envelope, which he handed to me.
I took it.
“Look inside,” he prompted.
I did. Two one-hundred-dollar bills and an airline ticket.
“Your flight to Hollywood leaves at six-twenty this evening,” he said.
Train travel I was used to; plane travel was something new, and a little frightening. Truth be told, I slept through a lot of it. Twenty-five other hearty souls and I sat within the DC-3 “Flagship,” a noisy, rattling projectile that churned through the night sky like a big kitchen mixer. The businessman I sat next to actually read Fortune magazine, as if this sort of travel was an everyday thing to him. Maybe it was. We spoke a few polite words, but, sitting over the wing, fighting the sound of the propellers, there just wasn’t much to be said. I was relieved when the thing sat down in Dallas, sometime after one o’clock in the morning, and was surprised to find I could make my stomach accept a little something in the airport cafeteria, where oddly enough the people working had Southern accents. Within an hour I was on a sleeper plane, within which two facing seats in a sort of train-type compartment were converted to a berth by a good-looking blonde woman in a vaguely military outfit, a “stewardess” she was called, who then shut the curtains and I got awkwardly undressed, hanging my clothes in the netting provided, and slipped under cool sheets and I’ll be damned if the sound of the props and the up-and-down motion didn’t put me to sleep. Some hours later the stewardess woke me to let me know the airliner was landing-at Tucson, Arizona, which, unlike my present confusion, was a state I’d never been in. I dressed, and then helped her turn the berth back into two seats, into one of which I was strapped, and we landed. Another airport, another cafeteria. Soon I was sleeping again, in my pants atop the blankets this time, and before long it was eight o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles (ten o’clock in the real world, but never mind).
But this wasn’t the real world, it was Glendale, where I caught a cab, despite the six-mile ride I was in for. All expenses were paid on this little jaunt, after all; that was the deal: two hundred bucks, all expenses, no strings. I could enjoy the trip to sunny California, pocket the two C’s, and head back for the windy city, even should I refuse the job.
Which well I might, but I didn’t see how I could turn down this preliminary offer. Besides, I was going to meet a real-life movie star, unless that was a contradiction in terms.
“Where to?” the cabby said. He was a blond handsome kid of about twenty, who’d been sitting behind the wheel at the curb reading something called the Hollywood Reporter.
“One forty-four Monovale Drive,” I said.
“That’s in Beverly Hills,” he said, matter of factly.
“If you say so.”
I climbed out of my raincoat, folding it up and easing it into my overnight bag; anticipating warmer weather here, I’d taken the lighter coat, but was already warm in spite of it. The sun was bright in a blue sky, bouncing off the asphalt, slicing between the fronds of palm trees. This was California, all right.
“What street is this?” I asked, after a while. This seemed to be a central business and amusement district-shops, movie houses, office buildings, some of the latter approaching skyscraper stature (if not Loop skyscraper stature).
“The Boulevard,” he said. He wasn’t friendly; he wasn’t unfriendly.
“Hollywood Boulevard?”
“Right.”
I’d thought people might sleep till noon out here, but I was wrong. Either side of the Boulevard was busy with folks sauntering along looking at each other and themselves, reflected in the shop windows, where fancy displays showed manikins wearing expensively informal clothing, the latest polo shirts and sport jackets for men, sporty blouses and slacks for women, earlier examples of which the window-watchers were already wearing, white their predominant color. A few years before, I’d been in Florida; this seemed much the same, and not just because of the sun and pastel art-deco look-the spirit here was similarly that odd combination of sophistication and naivete I’d noticed in Miami.
Not that I wasn’t impressed.
“That’s the Brown Derby,” I almost shouted, pointing over toward the east side of Vine Street, where a great big hat squatted. Chicago’s Brown Derby was just a building.
“Sure is,” the cabby said, blase.
Pretty soon he turned off on a side street, into an area of stores, taverns, small hotels, motor courts, drive-in markets, apartment houses. We passed green parkways, pepper trees, palms. A pastel rainbow of stucco bungalows, white, pink, yellow, blue, with tile roofs, often red.
Then we turned onto a major thoroughfare. “What’s this?”
“Sunset Boulevard.”
Soon, he condescended to inform me, we were on the “Strip”: he pointed out such movie-colony night spots as the Trocadero and Ciro’s and the Mocambo. Many buildings along the Strip were painted white with green shutters, housing various little shops with windows boasting antiques or couturiers or modistes and other French-sounding, expensive-sounding nonsense, and restaurants with Venetian blinds protecting patrons from the glare of sun and passersby.
Hollywood was every bit as strange a place as I’d expected. Later that day, in another cab, I’d pass a small independent movie studio where chaps in chaps and sunglasses and Stetsons, and girls in slacks and sunglasses and bright kerchiefs (protecting their permanent waves) were standing at a corner hot dog stand either flirting or talking shop or maybe a little of both. The hot dog stand, of course, looked like a great big hot dog. Giantism was big out here: fish and puppy and ice cream cone buildings, mingling with papier-mache castles. It was like the ’33 World’s Fair, but screwier. People ate in their cars.
Right now, however, I was in a cab winding its way through the rolling foothills of Beverly Hills, on which were mansions, luxuriating behind fences in the midst of obscene green lawns, two stories, three stories, white Spanish stucco, white English brick, yellow stucco, red brick, you name it. The rich north suburbs of Chicago had nothing on these babies.
“This is Robert Montgomery’s house,” the cabby said, breathlessly, pausing before entering onto the private drive.
“So what?” I said, unimpressed.
After all, what was it to me? Just another rambling two-story Colonial “farmhouse,” white frame and brick, surrounded by a rustic rock garden, perched on a hill against a horizon of more hills. Hell, there’s one of them on every third corner back in Chicago.
He took me up the winding drive, up the sloping lawn. Plenty of trees, too, and not a palm in sight. Clearly this Montgomery was a guy with dough who wasn’t afraid to spend it. Clearly, too, this was a guy who’d rather not be in Hollywood, to the point of reinventing the place into New England.
I got out of the cab and handed in a sawbuck to the guy, saying, “Keep it.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Do you know Robert Montgomery?”
“We’re like this,” I said, holding up crossed fingers.
“I’m an actor, too,” he said, earnestly.
“Aren’t we all,” I said, and turned my back on him and went up the sidewalk.
I knocked on the polished white door, and soon it swung open and a small, attractive woman in her thirties, with light brown hair and a fine smile, greeted me, smoothing her crisp print dress, blue on white, as she spoke.