packets from her left hip, one from her right, and began rummaging around behind her, looking at the ceiling. “I sewed the pockets in back too deep,” she said. She got out one more and set them all in a row before me. “That’s what’s left tonight,” she said. “Like I said, it’s been a nice party.”
“I was thinking more of fifty than five,” I said.
She took back the four sealed packets and stowed them away beneath her tummy, and nodded at the one in my hand. “You tasted that and it was good, so you’re buying it. For the rest, you’ll have to talk to Billy when he gets here.”
I gave her a twenty and said, “When’ll that be?”
“When he wants,” she said, stowing the bill where she’d stowed the merchandise. “People wait for Billy long’s they have to.”
She was murmuring, but I couldn’t see why she had to talk so loud. I thought it might be a good idea to bust her one in that little nose. Or maybe marry her. They were both brilliant ideas. I felt like I could pick up the house and throw it if I wanted. It was an unrestful way to feel.
“Close that robe before I fall in love,” I said, and went back into the dining room.
After that, all I had to do was kill time. It didn’t die without a struggle. I went back out to the pool and had a couple more drinks and then took another stroll through the dining room. Maddy had finally put out that stack of sandwiches. I had one. It was delicious. But in the middle it began to seem very strange to go around putting things in your mouth and chewing them, and I left the rest of it on the mantelpiece and tried playing the piano in the sun room. I’ve never learned how, but it seemed worth a try. Outside, someone bounced on the diving board for a joke so that the record player fell into the pool in the middle of a song. I thought that was pretty funny. I saw a door I hadn’t noticed and went down some stairs. There was a long drab room down there with padding on the ceiling and side walls, and I remembered that Nita Paley had built an underground shooting range for some reason, but what they kept down there now was a pool table and a couple of busted easy chairs and some drunks, and I began playing pool for money. The first game, I wanted to jog around the table between shots. But by the second game I started coming out from under the powder, and soon I was thirty-two bucks up and the guy wanted double or nothing again. We were well along toward my sixty-four bucks when a thin man stepped up to my opponent and held out his hand for the cue. He nodded to him and to me and began to play.
He pocketed the first ball as if he was trying to get it out of the way so we could move on to something interesting, and then he sank another the same way. He chalked up sparingly and made two more. He was running the table, all right. I rested the butt of my cue on the floor and studied him. He held his shoulders high and wore his black hair slicked straight back. He would have been a handsome man if the bones of his face hadn’t been a little too big and the skin over them too tight. His wore narrow gray boots with heels, tight black trousers that buttoned up the front and had no belt-loops, a yellow shirt, a bolo tie, and a charcoal gray jacket, cut short, like a bolero jacket. All of his clothes looked as if he’d spent money to have them made that way on purpose. He was a real desperado. He looked as much like Zorro as anyone could look who didn’t have a sword and a flat black hat. Most coke hounds blink like fury, but he blinked only once in a while, slowly and sort of precisely, like a falcon. I wondered how much hop you had to run through to get that way. It wasn’t hurting his game any. He sank the white with no more fuss than the other balls and laid his cue gently on the felt. I opened my wallet, counted out thirty-two dollars, and added it to the thirty-two on the edge of the table. Without taking his eyes from mine, he picked it up and held it off to the side. The other man I’d been playing said, “Well — Well, thanks, Billy,” and put it in his pocket.
“Now we been introduced,” Billy said.
He led me back out to the pool. There were twice as many people out there as I’d seen at midnight. Someone had lit the patio torches and turned off the colored floodlights, and all you could see was shadows. When the shadows talked they looked like they were conspiring, and when they danced they looked like black flames. Billy led me to a bench by a fitted fieldstone wall that ran along the back of the property. We sat and watched the dancers. “Pretty good brawl, huh?” he said.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said.
“You’re looking for two three pounds.”
“No.”
“That’s what Maddy said. Her hearing’s usually pretty good.”
“That’s what I told her. I came to talk to you, Billy, not your women. My name’s Rose.”
“Yeah? That the punch line?”
“Jesus, what’re they teaching you kids these days? Stu Rose.”
“I never heard of you.”
I shook my head, amused. “Well, let’s just say if you were running this luau anywhere up the Valley, you’d’ve heard of me a while ago.”
“Yeah? Well, we’re not up the Valley, dad, and you’re not buying, you say. So what’s the grift?”
“You picked an interesting spot, Billy. Right in Scarpa’s back garden. Or haven’t you heard of Lenny Scarpa either?”
“I hear way too goddamn much about Lenny Scarpa. You and him good buddies?”
“No,” I said truthfully.
“I’m not a sociable boy, dad. Why’re we talking?”
“Maybe we’ve got nothing to talk about,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got all the supply you want. All the organization you want. Maybe you’re never short of kale when you get a shot at a nice score. Maybe you want to stay small forever.”
“You raise a lot of dust, don’t you, daddy?”
“Talk English. And wipe your upper lip.”
He didn’t wipe it, but he had to stop himself.
I said, “I’m on your patch now, so I guess I’ll let you call me daddy once in a while. But your patch ends where the driveway does. And at high tide my patch might slop right over yours. Why don’t we try a little manners and see how it goes?”
He didn’t say anything. We watched the dancers.
“You’re Billy Metz,” I said.
“Who’d you think I was?”
“All I knew was Billy, but I make you now. William R. Metz. Production design at Paramount. You were really up there for a while. They bounced you last fall and nobody liked to say why.”
“I walked,” he said.
“Catherine the Great’s palace in
“I was there seven years, dad. I did a lot of stuff.”
“You were good,” I said. “Really good. I could do something like that, I wouldn’t fool with anything else.”
“Time comes you get tired of drawing little pictures.”
“We might agree on one thing, Billy. Scarpa’s had it his own way in Santa Monica an awful long time.”
“I’m not looking to be adopted. I like it on my own.”
“You’re brand-new, son. Fresh out of the cellophane. It doesn’t work that way, not without a setup. You got to come in with somebody. Why not me?”
“You talk a lot.”
“I like to talk, don’t you?”
Metz stood.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he said.
We walked toward the house. When we came through the French doors, I looked around and said. “Gimme a minute. Jesus, I should’ve dropped bread crumbs.”
“One off each bedroom,” he said, waving. “Take your pick. I’ll be out front.”
I nodded and headed off down the hall. The first bedroom had some folks getting acquainted on the bed, but
