The Tough Guys

"Shut up." I didn't have to say any more. When I pulled out the handkerchief and wiped my nose he saw the .45 in the hip holster, swallowed hard and backed into a chair.

"Mac . . . I'm clean, see. I paid my freight. Ask Forbes, he'll tell you. What kind of stuff is this? I'm nickels and dimes. Last week I clear sixty bucks. I don't bother nobody. I . . ."

"Shut up."

I gave him the full treatment, going around the room, just looking until I was satisfied, then pulled up a straight backed chair, turned it around and sat down facing him. His face was wringing wet. So was his undershirt.

"Bannerman," I said. "What do you know about them?"

He seemed genuinely bewildered. "Them? Jeez, Mac, I . . ."

"Quick."

The side of his mouth twitched. "You . . . you cops?"

For a full five seconds I just stared at him until his eyes couldn't meet mine at all any more. "I'm not from Culver City," I told him.

Between my face and where the gun was he couldn't keep his eyes still. He said, "So they're big wheels. Live west of here. Hell, I . . ." I started to move my hands and he held up his for me to wait. "Okay, they're real fancy stiffs. You think I meet them? The two kids are always traveling with some hot tomatoes from the clubs and they blow the dough like it's water. The old one's a crap shooter and his brother likes the wheel. So what else do you want? They got the money, let 'em spend it."

I sat without speaking another minute and let him sweat some more, then I got up and walked to the door. I turned around and said, "What do I look like?"

He got the message. "Man, I never seen you in my life."

"Remember that," I said.

There were five major clubs in town all located on the bay side. None of them were open for business, but somebody was in each one and when I told them I was checking on customer credit they weren't a bit backward about obliging me. I mentioned the Bannermans and all I got was a fat okay. They were big spenders and had been for a long time. They paid their bills and could get credit any time they wanted. They weren't big winners, though. Like any habitual players against the house they wound up in the red, but at least they enjoyed the pleasure of laying it out.

But I could still see the gates hanging off their hinges and picture the worn spots in the oriental rug in the library and it didn't make sense. There was just too much pride and tradition behind the Bannermans to let the old homestead run down.

I never knew what the financial setup was. My old man's father had piled up the loot during the gold rush trade. He had made a find, exploited it as far as he could, then sold out to a company. He had split the pile down the middle between Miles and Max, but the old man wasn't one for investments when he could hightail it around the world chasing wine, women and song. Max had me and Miles nursed his dough. And that's how it goes. The snag in the picture was the gaming tables because you can always spend it faster than you can make it and the signs were that the Bannermans weren't what they had been.

I had gone through all the spots where you can usually pick up a word or two without coming out with a single thing at all. At a quarter to four I tried the public library on State Street, found all the recent issues of the Culver Sentinel and started scanning through them.

In two weeks there were five mentions of the Bannermans, all in connection with some civic project or social function, but not a squib about them in the traffic violation column. Three weeks back the headlines were having a ball because there were four rape cases, a hit-and-run that killed two prominent local citizens, a murder in the parking lot of the Cherokee Club and a raid by the Treasury Department men on a narcotics setup in town. The rapes and the narcotics angle were solved, three teenage kids were being held for the hit-and-run and the parking lot murder was still up in the air. The dead man there was the lot attendant who had been fooling around with a friend's wife and the husband was being sought after. He was an ex con who had done time for second-degree murder and had blown town the night of the killing.

Past that the Bannermans came up again, but only in the society columns. There was one half page of notes and pictures devoted to the engagement of one Anita Bannerman to Vance Colby, a prominent realtor who had settled in Culver City some year and a half before.

When the library closed I went up the hill to Placer Street where the Culver Sentinel still turned out the only paper in town and walked in the bar in the next block, sat down and ordered a beer. A few minutes after five-thirty the place started filling up with thirsty types and it wasn't hard to pick out the news hawks in the crowd. But one was a guy I remembered well. He was a little weatherbeaten guy who had lost one ear when he and the old man had sailed the Turia II with a load of Canadian booze on board and the Coast Guard hard behind shooting with everything they had. The old man lost the boat and Hank Feathers had lost an ear and I had heard them laugh over the story many a time.

I waited until Feathers squeezed into what seemed to be a customary spot and ordered a drink, then I moved up behind him. I said, "If it isn't Vincent Van Gogh himself."

He put the drink down slowly, craned around and looked at me with the two meanest eyes I ever saw. Old as he was, there was a peculiar stance about him that said he was ready to travel no matter who it was. I grinned at him and the slitted eyes lost some of their meanness.

"That's what you get for sticking your head out a porthole," I said.

"Damn you, kid, only one man ever knew about that."

"And he liked to call you Van Gogh too didn't he?"

"Okay, son, who are you?"

"The bastard Bannerman. The old man used to tell you lies about my mother."

"Cat Cay! I'll be hanged." His face went into a broad, wrinkled smile and he held out his hand. "Yep, you got his eyes all right. And son, they weren't lies about your mother. I saw her. She was something." He grabbed my arm and pulled me to the bar. "Come on, drink up. Damn if we haven't got something to talk about. What the hell you doing here? I heard you were dead."

"Passing through, that's all."

"See the family?"

"Briefly."

"All slobs. Idle rich and they stink. The girl's okay, but the boys and the old man the world can do without. They got too many people in their pockets."

"Come on, Hank, who could they control?"

He took a pull of the drink and set the glass down. "It's not control exactly, it's just that they've been here long enough to know where the bodies are buried and can play the angles. The old man wants a bit in the paper . . . he gets a bit in the paper. He wants opening night tickets to the Civic Theater, he gets them. He wants his name out of the paper, he gets that."

"When does he want to be ignored?"

"Ha. Like when Theodore wrapped up two cars in a drunken driving spree and later when his old man had a statutory rape thing squashed for him and like when they interrogated everybody at the Cherokee Club after the attendant was killed. But not Rudy. He went home and no mention of him when everybody was listed in black and white. The power of social position, my boy, especially when wives try to climb the white ladder to the blue book and politicians need an in through an exclusive club in the state capital." He stopped and laughed. "But how about you? Where the hell have you been?"

I shrugged it off. "Ran away at twelve, tied in with a family of migrant bean pickers until they all died of the flu, latched on to a rancher in Texas who made sure I went to school, joined the Army . . . hell, I've been through the mill."

"You look it, son, you sure do." He cocked his head then, gave me a kind of sidewise look, his eyes studying my face intently and he said, "Damn if you don't look familiar. You do anything important?"

"I stayed alive."

"Well, you look familiar."

"I look like the old man, Hank."

He nodded slowly and finished his beer. "Yeah, I guess that's it, all right. Come on, have another beer."