Get Shorty: A Novel

check, some broad she knows Leo met at a drycleaners’ convention. It’s why I’m staying at the motel over on Ventura Boulevard. It’s near Hi-Tone Cleaners, the broad’s place, but she’s out of town. I’m hoping she’s with Leo and they’ll be back sometime.”

“Say you find him, then what?”

Chili didn’t answer right away and Harry waited. He saw the guy himself having far more possibilities than his idea for a movie.

“There are different ways I could go with it,” Chili said. “Basically, you might say it’s the wife’s money. It was paid to her.”

“Basically,” Harry said, “it’s the airline’s money. That doesn’t bother you?”

“Bother me—I didn’t cop it, they did.”

“Yeah, but you’re talking about going halves with the wife.”

“No, I said that’s what she offered. I never said anything else about it. There might even be a few things, Harry, I haven’t told you.”

Starting to get cagey on him.

Harry had to think a moment, go at it another way. He said, “The plot thickens, huh? You have a girl in it now, even though she doesn’t do much. See, it gets better the more details you give me. So you’re at the roulette table, he pays off his debt . . . You did-n’t discuss the wife?”

“He realized I must’ve talked to her. That’s what brought him back to earth.”

“I mean you didn’t say anything about basically it was her money.”

“It looked like management was gonna get involved, so I left. But I told him, yeah, he better call her.”

“So then you took the twenty gees in your hot little hands,” Harry said with some pleasure, “and blew it.”

“I dropped a little over seventeen,” Chili said, “before my brain started working again. But the thing that got me about Leo, he looks me right in the eye and goes, ‘When I’m through here I’ll write you a check.’ Like he’s telling me he’ll do it when he has time, so get off my back. This drycleaner, been on the hook to us for years, talking to me like that. I couldn’t believe it.”

Harry said, “He must’ve thought you ran into him by accident.”

“Yeah, like I don’t know he’s suppose to be dead. But what I’m talking about, he knows he’s six weeks behind on the vig. That has to be right in the front of his head. But what’s he do, he cops an attitude on me. I couldn’t believe it. He comes on to me like there was no way I could touch him.”

“It made you mad,” Harry said.

“The more I thought about it, yeah. At the time, it surprised me. I never saw him act like that before. Then after, I got pretty mad thinking about it.”

“That kind of attitude,” Harry said, “is called delusions of grandeur, or, trying to play the power game. Having the bodyguard carry his bag was the tip-off. Out here it’s very common. You see it in actors—guy making a hundred grand a picture gets lucky, his next one turns out to be a hit and his price goes up to a million. Pretty soon he’s up to several million a picture plus a cut of the gross. He’s the same schmuck who made it on his tight pants and capped teeth, but now all of a sudden he knows everything there is about making pictures. He rewrites the script or has it done. He tells the director how he’s gonna play his part, and if he doesn’t like the producer he has him barred from the set. But directors, producers, anybody can play the power game, especially agents. You keep score by getting so many points for being seen with the right people, driving a Ferrari or a Rolls, what table you get at Spago or The Ivy, what well-known actress blew you on location, how many of your phone calls to the real power players in town are returned, all that kind of bullshit.”

Harry paused. He was getting off the track, wasting time.

“But when Leo tried to play the game, you pulled it out from under him. That was pretty neat, it’s a good scene.”

Harry paused again and was aware of the refrigerator humming in the silence. It was too bright in here, uncomfortable and his head ached. He didn’t want to move, though. Not now.

“I like the coat story, too, you mentioned. It plays, but would work better if it wasn’t a flashback. What it does, though, it shows you know how to handle yourself in that kind of situation. I imagine in your line of work there were other times . . .”

“I’m out of that now.”

“But there were times, right, you had to get tough? Say one of your customers stopped paying?”

“They always paid,” Chili said. “Oh, I’ve smacked guys. Smacking was common, just an open-hand smack. I’m talking to a guy trying to get my money, he looks away and I smack him in the face. ‘Hey, you look at me when I’m fuckin talking to you.’ Like that, get their attention. See, the kind of people we were dealing with, a lot of ’em thought they were tough guys, you know, from the street, guys that were basically hustlers, thieves, or they were into drugs. We had them besides the legit people, who ordinarily didn’t give us any trouble, always paid on time. I think what you’re getting at, Harry, you have the same attitude as some of the legitimate people I did collection work for. Like a car dealer, or a guy runs a TV store . . . They’re carrying a deadbeat, they want you to get the money and they don’t care how, break his fuckin legs. That’s the first thing they think of, come up with that statement. I say to ’em, ‘How’s he gonna pay you he’s in the hospital?’ They don’t think of that. They want a piece of the guy and their money.”

Harry said, “Well, you’ve been in some tight spots. The business with Ray Bones—that’s a good name for a character. I meant to ask you, you weren’t arrested for shooting him that time?”

“Bones had the idea of doing me on his own,” Chili said. “He told the cops it happened out on the street, an unknown assailant come up to him. He still wants to do me, it’s on his mind.”

“And you still have to pay him?”

“Yeah, only we have a different arrangement now. I talked to Tommy Carlo on the phone. . . . You have to know Tommy, his personality, he gets along with everybody. Jimmy Cap I mentioned, Capotorto? He always liked Tommy. But he has to go along with Ray Bones up to a point, Ray’s his guy. So Jimmy Cap says split what the dead guy owes, me and Tommy, fuck the running vig, a flat eight grand each and that’s it, forget it.”

“You spoke to Tommy,” Harry said, leaning over the table on his arms. “So now he knows Leo’s still alive.”

“Did I say that?”

Harry sat back again, questions popping in his mind along with the headache, but wanting to appear relaxed, the producer showing a certain amount of interest in a story.

“So you didn’t happen to mention it to him,” Harry said and grinned at the deep-set eyes staring at him. “You want Leo Devoe for yourself.”

“What I don‘t want,” Chili said, “is Ray Bones finding out. Tommy, he’d think it’s pretty funny, this drycleaner taking an airline. He’d swear he wouldn’t tell a soul, but I know he would. So why put him in that position?”

“But you still have Ray Bones to think about.”

Chili moved his shoulders. The deep-set eyes didn’t change.

“You gonna pay him?”

“Maybe, when I get around to it.”

“What if he comes looking for you?”

“It’s possible. The guy’s got a one-track mind.”

“Have you been involved in any shootings since Ray Bones?”

Chili’s eyes moved and he seemed to be thinking about it or trying to remember, looking off for a moment.

“Well, there was one time, it was when me and Tommy were running a club in South Miami, a guy came in looking for another guy, not me, but I was in the way.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He shot the guy and left.”

Now Harry paused. Chili Palmer had been sent to him from heaven, no question about it.

“You were running a club?”

“Belonged to Momo. We had entertainment, different groups’d come in; catering mostly to the younger crowd.”