“Okay, clam up,” Goble sneered. “I thought maybe we could do a little business together. You got the physique and you take a good punch. But you don’t know nothing about nothing. You don’t have what it takes in my business. Where I come from you got to have brains to get by. Out here you just got to get sunburned and forget to button your collar.”
“Make me a proposition,” I said between my teeth.
He was a rapid eater even when he talked too much. He pushed his plate away from him, drank some of his coffee and got a toothpick out of his vest.
“This is a rich town, friend,” he said slowly. “I’ve studied it. I’ve boned up on it. I’ve talked to guys about it. They tell me it’s one of the few spots left in our fair green country where the dough ain’t quite enough. In Esmeralda you got to belong, or you’re nothing. If you want to belong and get asked around and get friendly with the right people you got to have class. There’s a guy here made five million fish in the rackets back in Kansas City. He brought up property, subdivided, built houses, built some of the best properties in town. But he didn’t belong to the Beach Club because he didn’t get asked. So he bought it. They know who he is, they touch him big when they got a fund-raising drive, he gets service, he pays his bills, he’s a good solid citizen. He throws big parties but the guests come from out of town unless they’re moochers, no-goods, the usual trash you always find hopping about where there’s money. But the class people of the town? He’s just a nigger to them.”
It was a long speech and while he made it he glanced at me casually from time to time, glanced around the room, leaned back comfortably in his chair and picked his teeth.
“He must be breaking his heart,” I said. “How did they find out where his dough came from?”
Goble leaned across the small table. “A big shot from the Treasury Department comes here for a vacation every spring. Happened to see Mr. Money and know all about him. He spread the word. You think it’s not breaking his heart? You don’t know these hoods that have made theirs and gone respectable. He’s bleeding to death inside, friend. He’s found something he can’t buy with folding money and it’s eating him to a shell.”
“How did you find out all this?”
“I’m smart. I get around. I find things out.”
“All except one,” I said.
“Just what’s that?”
“You wouldn’t know if I told you.”
The waiter came up with Goble’s delayed drink and took dishes away. He offered the menu.
“I never eat dessert,” Goble said. “Scram.”
The waiter looked at the toothpick. He reached over and deftly flicked it out from between Goble’s fingers. “There’s a Men’s Room here, chum,” he said. He dropped the toothpick into the ashtray and removed the ashtray.
“See what I mean?” Goble said to me. “Class.”
I told the waiter I would have a chocolate sundae and some coffee. “And give this gentleman the check,” I added.
“A pleasure,” the waiter said. Goble looked disgusted. The waiter drifted. I leaned across the table and spoke softly.
“You’re the biggest liar I’ve met in two days. And I’ve met a few beauties. I don’t think you have any interest in Mitchell. I don’t think you ever saw or heard of him until yesterday when you got the idea of using him as a cover story. You were sent here to watch a girl and I know who sent you—not who hired you, but who had it done. I know why she is being watched and I know how to fix it so that she won’t be watched. If you’ve got any high cards, you’d better play them right away quick. Tomorrow could be too late.”
He pushed his chair back and stood up. He dropped a folded and crimped bill on the table. He looked me over coolly.
“Big mouth, small brain,” he said. “Save it for Thursday when they set the trash cans out. You don’t know from nothing, friend. My guess is you never win.”
He walked off with his head thrust forward belligerently.
I reached across for the folded and crimped bill Goble had dropped on the table. As I expected it was only a dollar. Any guy who would drive a jalopy that might be able to do forty-five miles an hour downhill would eat in joints where the eighty-five cent dinner was something for a wild Saturday night.
The waiter slid over and dumped the check on me. I paid up and left Goble’s dollar in his plate.
“Thanks,” the waiter said. “That guy’s a real close friend of yours, huh?”
“The operative word is close,” I said.
“The guy might be poor,” the waiter said tolerantly. “One of the choice things about this town is that the people who work here can’t afford to live here.”
There were all of twenty people in the place when I left, and the voices were beginning to bounce down off the low ceiling.
17
The ramp down to the garage looked just the same as it had looked at four o’clock in the morning, but there was a swishing of water audible as I rounded the curve. The glassed-in cubicle office was empty. Somewhere somebody was washing a car, but it wouldn’t be the attendant. I crossed to the door leading into the elevator lobby and held it open. The buzzer sounded behind me in the office. I let the door close and stood outside it waiting and a lean man in a long white coat came around the corner. He wore glasses, had a skin the color of cold oatmeal and hollow tired eyes. There was something Mongolian about his face, something south-of-the-border, something Indian, and something darker than that. His black hair was flat on a narrow skull.
“Your car, sir? What name, please?”
“Mr. Mitchell’s car in? The two-tone Buick hardtop?”
