just the little gold dress. She set the other drink on the table by my chair, then laid the empty tray on the corner of Scarpa’s desk, walked around behind his chair, and ran her fingers down his temples. She took hold of his shoulders and began to knead them. Neither had stopped looking at me.
“I dunno,” Scarpa said. “What does he look like to you? To me, he just looks like a mutt.”
“Mutts come all kinds,” she remarked, digging her thumbs in.
I sipped my drink. Scarpa ignored his. She stopped rubbing his shoulders and draped her arms loosely around him, resting her belly against his nape. He pushed her away with an irritable shove of his head, and she seated herself on the credenza behind him and rested her bare feet on the desktop, knees together. Scarpa rose and came out from behind the desk.
“Stand up,” he said.
I stood up.
“Come over where I can see you.”
I stepped forward. He took hold of my lapel and rubbed it between his fingers. “You like this suit?”
“Why would I?” I said.
He opened my jacket, lifted out my gun, and let it slip back into its holster, nodding. “You don’t work with jeweler’s tools.”
He strolled around behind me and I felt him try to brush something off my shoulder. He ambled back into view. He lifted my tie and examined it. It was a plain deep yellow silk tie.
“The tie’s all right,” he decided.
He let it fall and slammed his fist into my stomach.
Scarpa could hit, and he gave me plenty. But he’d also given me all week to get set. I rocked back on my heels and then looked at the gazelle to take my mind off it. Her mouth was open, and I held mine shut and smiled at her. You’ve got to take the first breath right away, and then the next ones are easier. Scarpa was standing before me, hands on hips, staring up at me, chin out, waiting.
“Feel better now?” I said. My voice was tight.
“I do,” he said. “I guess you can screw the lid on it after all.”
He leaned back against the edge of his desk, hands in his pockets.
He said, “I make you as some kind of hick, right? But you got a head. You got eyes. You got a mouth, too, but all right. All right. Sometimes the old man still sees things first.”
Now she saw I was okay, the gazelle decided she’d liked me being hit just fine. There was never a dull moment with me around. She was showing me just about all the legs she had. It was more legs than I thought one girl was allowed.
Scarpa said, “Scamper, honey.”
She picked up the tray and went back through the door behind the desk. It closed the way it had opened, without a sound.
“Here’s the thing,” Scarpa told me. “We sell a lot to movie people. But the last couple three months, I’ve lost a number of my nice steady customers. I don’t have any competition I know of, not in that part of town. There’s four five guys, and some of them have guys, and they compete with each other, but they all get their stuff from me. I’ve talked to my neighbors. I think they’re on the level. So it’s a new guy, an independent. Maybe he’s a movie guy himself. I wanna talk to him.”
I said, “I’m not a finger man, Lenny. If you use me that way, you’ll find I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”
“Just talk, to begin with. I don’t waste that stuff.”
“Uh huh.”
“If I wanted him iced,” he said patiently, “would I have you bring him to me? Think I still do that kind of work myself?”
“Okay. I don’t.”
“You work for me now. So I don’t need as much mouth from you as I been getting.”
“All right. I’ll want some money.”
“You’ll get paid when you show you’re worth paying.”
“I’ll have to be nice to people. I’ll probably have to make a buy myself.”
“All right.” He pulled out his wallet, counted off two fifties and five twenties, and handed them over. New bills, fresh from the bank. Two weeks’ work for Nestor. He took out a small leather notebook and began writing. “You find the guy, you call this number. I don’t care what time it is.”
He tore out the sheet, turned it over, and began writing again. “And this, this is my tailor. You’re gonna be there tomorrow morning when he opens at eight. He’ll be expecting you. Don’t tell him what you want. He’ll give you what I want. The tie’s all right. You can keep the tie. But if I gotta look at you? It’s not gonna be in that suit.”
Joseph Callender, Suitings wasn’t right on Rodeo Drive, but just around the corner on Brighton, behind a door that was freshly painted green but didn’t look like much and up a flight of stairs with gleaming black marble treads. There wasn’t any sign out front. Mr. Callender was there, sirring away at me, when I reached the top of the stairs at eight the next morning. There was no one thing about his clothes you’d notice, but he was about sixty and pear- shaped and the way he dressed, he made you wish you were sixty and pear-shaped, too. I thought I might be a problem for him but he said I was actually a fairly classic 50 Long and wouldn’t need much work. I said that was good to know. He ran a tape over me just to make sure, dictating to an assistant the while, and took tracings of my stocking feet, and then sat me down in a green leather chair with a
He had the whole shop working at once, it looked like, and got me out the door in under three hours. It was a little before noon when I pulled back into the lot at home. Rebecca was there, sitting in her convertible in a big sun hat and sunglasses. She took off the glasses when she saw me, and got out of her car, and I parked and walked over to meet her. I was wearing a sharkskin suit like Scarpa’s, only a darker gray they called oxford, a white button-down shirt — I had three more in the car, wrapped in paper — a snap-brim hat with a midnight blue band, black wingtips that shone dully, like obsidian, gray silk socks — I had a dozen of those — and my tie. I stood before her and held out my arms. “This is it,” I said. “As Sinatra as I’ll ever get.”
She shook her head helplessly. “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Last night Lenny Scarpa made me one of his gentlemen-in-waiting. He didn’t like my clothes, so he sent me to his tailor this morning. They let me keep my tie.”
“You got a job with Scarpa,” she said.
“Someone’s been poaching his snowbirds. He hired me to find out who. If it’s Halliday, we’ll have a number of angles to play, plus Scarpa’s backing. If it’s not, we’ve still got more leverage then we did. I know you wanted a plan, and this is a little vaguer than that, but it’s what I’ve got. If it doesn’t sound good, you can have your money back.”
“You’re working for Scarpa,” she said again, like somebody had sapped her and she was waiting to fall down.
Then, starting with the eyes, a smile spread over her face. You’ve never seen a smile like that.
I pity you.
She said, “You’re — You really are the most amazing man I have ever met in my life.”
“You ought to get out more.”
