Get Shorty: A Novel

GET SHORTY 249

This Mexican, with his dark skin and big nose, reminded Harry of an Aztec figure carved in relief on a stone wall. It got Harry thinking about human sacrifices, a blood cult four centuries old, virgins into the volcano . . . like movie ideas presented to a studio. The Mexican was saying something.

“What?”

“I ask you want a drink.”

“Do I want a drink—I thought you were the gardener.”

“The houseman, Miguel. I do outside, inside, everything.”

Harry said, “You’re Miguel?” feeling a change in his mood, a sudden lift knowing Karen wasn’t sleeping with her houseman, not this old guy and not that it made any difference, really, but he felt better in general and said, “Yeah, Miguel, let me have a Scotch, lot of ice.”

Four times now Catlett had tried to get hold of the Bear: phoning his house from home, from the limo office, from his Porsche coming here and now here, in the turnaround part of the driveway at Karen Flores’s French-looking house. Still no answer, only the Bear’s recorded voice: Leave a message if you want. The only thing good happening Catlett could see was Harry’s old Mercedes parked there, and Harry was the reason he’d come. Catlett went up to the door and rang the bell, set his sunglasses on straight, smoothed down his double-breasted navy blazer he wore with a white cotton shirt open wide at the throat and cream-colored pants.

The door swung in and the man standing there startled him, flashed him back in his mind to migrant camps and hundreds of guys with round, tired shoulders just like this one. Catlett said, “Man, I haven’t seen you since picking lettuce down the Imperial Valley. How you doing?” Found out this was Miguel the houseman and got taken out to the kitchen where his good friend Harry Zimm was sitting at the table with a drink, a bottle of Chivas Regal and a big pair of garden shears, the kind with ten-inch blades and wooden handles. Harry had that expectant look in his eyes, hoping for news.

“You hear anything?”

“I was about to ask you,” Catlett said. “There’s been plenty of time to do it.”

He turned his head and there was Miguel the houseman asking what would he like to drink, this stoop-labor field hand, Catlett thinking Karen Flores must be a strange kind of lady.

“Let me have a glass of chilled white wine. Some Pouilly-Fuisse, you happen to have it in the house.”

Harry said, “Well, I guess he ran with it.”

Harry sounding tired out, depressed.

“Or, as I mentioned could happen if he wasn’t careful,” Catlett said, “somebody hit him on the head. Or, there’s the chance he got busted.”

“What he got was the money,” Harry said. “I called his hotel. They said he checked out.”

“He could’ve done that before.”

“I spoke to him at ten this morning. He was just leaving.”

“That’s right, that’s what I heard.”

From the Bear, phoning as he tailed him, the Bear in communication up to that time.

“He didn’t check out,” Harry said, “till two-thirty this afternoon.”

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Catlett said, “Hmmmmm,” to Harry, nothing to Miguel, noticing the man’s broken fingernails, big knuckles, handing him the glass of wine; or when Miguel said he was leaving, going home, and walked out the back door to the garage.

Harry looked so depressed he seemed in a daze.

“I didn’t think he’d do it. I said to him, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see you again.’ But I honestly thought I would.”

Catlett sat down with Harry at the table wondering why, if Chili Palmer was going to run with it, he didn’t take a flight out while he was at the airport. Why come back to the hotel? The Bear would have the answer if he could ever locate the Bear.

“Harry, you can’t trust nobody like that, has those bad connections. This man come in off the street, nobody speaking for him, you don’t know who he is.”

“He was working for Mesas. I know the people there and they know him. They use him for collections.”

“They know the guy that takes out the garbage too. Harry. How’d he find you right away if I could-n’t?”

“Through Frank DePhillips.”

“Man, what does that tell you? What you’re saying to me right there?”

“I was staying here that night . . .”

“Yeah, with Karen?”

“We’re in bed, we hear a noise. Voices. We listen awhile. It’s the TV, downstairs. Karen says, ‘But it can’t just come on by itself.’ I tell her, ‘That’s right, somebody had to push the button.’ So I go down . . .”

“You have a gun?”

“Where do I get a gun? Karen doesn’t own one. No, I went downstairs figuring it has to be somebody she knows. Some friend of hers probably stoned, thinks he’s a riot. I walk in the study, the TV goes off—it was the Letterman show—the light comes on and there’s Chili sitting at the desk.”

“Chili Palmer,” Catlett said, “yeah. Sneaky, huh? You should’ve known right then, just from the way he does things. Man breaks in the house . . .”

“The patio door was open.”

“Yeah? Was there a sign on it, ‘Come on in’? Harry, you walk in where you don’t belong it’s breaking and entering, whether you have to break in or not. Chili Palmer commits a felony against the law and you take him in, make him your partner.”

“He isn’t my partner,” Harry said, and took a drink from his glass. “I don’t know what he is.”

That was okay as far as it went. But what Catlett wanted would be for Harry to kick and scream, call the man names. A no-good lying motherfucker would cover it. Harry though, for some reason, did-n’t seem all the way unsold yet on Chili Palmer. So Catlett reset his gold-frame sunglasses and went at him again saying, “The man robs you and you tell me you don’t know what he is? If he managed to get his hands on the hundred and seventy thousand and took off with it . . . Harry, you paying attention?”

“Yeah, if he got it, what?”

“Or, if he messed up out there and they got it, but somehow or other they didn’t get him . . . What I’m saying is either way, Harry, it was your money. You understand? Soon as I presented you with the key to the locker it was the same as giving you the money. So you the one he ripped off, huh?”

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Harry was looking at him with a frown turning all of a sudden from worried to mean.

“You’re saying I still owe it to you? A hundred and seventy grand I haven’t even seen?”

It wasn’t the point Catlett had intended to make. Yeah, but it was true. He opened his hands, helpless, and said to Harry, “Man, you owe me something.”

Karen had given him a key to the front door, in case her houseman had already left.

Chili dropped his suitcase in the foyer, checked the study, the living room, then moved down the back hall to the kitchen. He knew Harry’s car, could guess who the Porsche belonged to and got it right— Mr. Bo Catlett in the kitchen with Harry, Catlett looking this way through his hotdog sunglasses. It was in Chili’s mind to grab a frying pan from the rack, go over the table with it and whop him across the head. Right now, not say a word. But he was no sooner in the kitchen Catlett was on his feet, Christ, holding a pair of shears in front of him. Chili said, “You knew I was coming, huh?” looking at the shears, the blades gunmetal, clamped together. “The Bear tell you?”

He wanted Catlett to answer, keep it between them and settle with this guy. But now Harry got into it, Harry again, ruining the moment.

“I don’t know how many times I tried to call you,” Harry said. “Where’ve you been?”

“Talking to federal agents,” Chili said, still looking at Catlett. “DEA, the ones were waiting for me.”