Planet Willie (4 page)

“I don’t
know,” he says. “Maybe she’s got some whiskey in the kitchen.”

“If you could
just ask her to bring out the bottle. Save a trip, so to speak.” The last thing
I need is a cardiac arrest. Kafka gives her some instructions, and she goes
off. We watch her go, and man is it tense. When she’s finally clear Kafka
invites me to squeeze onto the couch beside him and offers me a cigarette,
which I decline. They’re little brown ones, and I realize that’s what I smelled
in my room. Sort of like a mixture of cinnamon and body odor.

“Where’s
Twiggy?” I say.

“Who?”

“The blonde
with the ribcage.”

He laughs a
little nervously. “Yes, I guess she is a bit like a twig,” he says. The big
woman brings out a bottle and some glasses, and I pour drinks for everybody.

“Don’t tell me
you live here, Kafka,” I say. “Artist of your stature should be fitted out in
style.”

“This is
Willie Lee,” he says to the others sitting close. “He’s interested in art. We
met him down around the galleries in Soho.”

A kid Kafka’s
calling Max asks if I saw anything I liked.

“Not unless
you like your redheads ornery,” I say. “Didn’t get to see many paintings on
account of her.”

Max nods and
says: “I’m sure Kafka has told you about our mission.” Kafka smiles faintly and
stares at his combat boots. “ALF will turn the entire capitalistic hierarchy of
the art world on it’s head,” he says real smooth, making it sound like Eastern
religion.

Which gets me
a lecture on ALF, which stands for the Art Liberation Front, apparently, although
I could think of a few less polite names beginning with those letters. ALF is
what these kids have in common, apart from Albania. It takes me half an hour of
having big vocabulary words shouted at me from all corners of the room in
questionable grammar to make any sense of it. What I finally get, more or less,
is that these kids are all artists of some form or another, and that their art
just is the first step in some kind of worldwide revolution to destroy what
they’re all calling the capitalist power structure.

“Well, it’s
been nothing short of fascinating,” I say after a while, beginning to wish I’d
never met Kafka. Nobody’s paying me to spend the afternoon chatting with ALF,
and even if they wanted to, I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified. So I throw down
a twenty-dollar bill for the bottle, bid adieu to my new Albanian friends, and
head out to the streets where I can breathe again.

4

On the corner
I find phone booths, but no phones. They’ve all been clipped away with bolt cutters.
I walk up to the next corner, where one still looks intact, and put in a
quarter, which fails to get me a dial tone, much less my quarter back. I reach
my finger up into the change slot and feel some plastic up in there, which I
pinch between two fingers and pull out till it becomes a plastic shopping bag
and quarters come raining out like a one-armed bandit, fifteen dollars’ worth
at least. Oldest trick in the book, and it does make you a little nostalgic for
your youth. In any case, I load down the pockets with quarters till the Italian
pants are almost falling off and give her another whirl. This time I get a dial
tone and punch in the number Shore’s given me for his insurance company. The woman
tells me I need two more quarters. Honey, quarters I got. I go ahead and put in
about a dozen, in case we want to get into an extended discussion of the
insurance business.

The
receptionist at Brattle Brothers Insurance answers the phone and introduces
herself as Jean. I ask to speak to the person in charge of Harry Shore’s account.

“Whom may I
say is calling,” Jean says.

“
Who
,
sweetheart. You’re working too hard. And this is Willie Lee, private
investigator.” Which gets me some extended elevator music. The good news is I
could hold through midnight and still have quarters to spare, but in three
minutes or so she’s back, telling me that the man I want is in a meeting. I ask
her when she thinks he’ll be out of that meeting, she tells me she just doesn’t
know. Not particularly helpful, Jean, so I decide to help myself.

“Seeing as how
as I’m not overly occupied at the moment,” I say, “why don’t just I come on up
and settle in to wait for him. First on the list, so to speak.” Jean doesn’t
like this at all. This is simply not protocol. Her voice goes high, but before
I can make out what she’s saying, I’ve hung up the phone.

I decide to
walk uptown, which has always been my preferred mode of transport in the big
city. Subways make a job out of moving from one place to another, and city
buses with their old ladies can have devastating and long-term effects on a
man’s libido. So you walk and you take it all in, contributing your little
hopes and dreams to the big show. And apparently I’m part of the show. Brattle
Brothers is up near Rockefeller Center, and by the time I reach midtown, I’m
about as certain as I’ll ever be that somebody’s on my tail. He’s wearing a
black leather jacket and a fedora down over his face. Not particularly built,
but his height is intimidating. I mean you hate to think what he could do to
you from up there. When I turn up Thirty Second Street, he turns too. I stare
up at the Empire State, he stares up like he’s just noticing skyscrapers for
the first time. I move on, stopping at a Don’t Walk sign. He stops halfway down
the block until the light turns red, then follows me across the intersection. I
have no idea where he came from, though as tall as this guy is, and if Kafka
and Twiggy are any indication, I’m leaning towards Albania. It doesn’t make
sense, but then a hell of a lot doesn’t make sense, and I do mean in general. I
pick up the pace and manage to lose sight of him among the crowds of tourists
on Fifth Avenue. Brattle Brothers is just around the corner from Saks, and in
the lobby of the building I beat the elevator doors before they close.

You ask
yourself what makes a man go into the insurance business. All those little
newborn babies out there, not a care in the world, and more than a few of them
will grow up and decide they’re made for insurance. Boggles the mind, it does,
but pop into Brattle Brothers and you start to understand some of the thinking
that goes into this. I’m talking wood-paneled waiting rooms and enough flowers
to hold a funeral at a moment’s notice. Guy dies in the elevator, they can hold
the ceremony right there. Carpets about a foot thick. I wobble over to the
front desk thinking I may just go ahead and ask for a job application. Making
me a little sexy, the carpet is, but then I meet Jean, with whom I’ve had the
pleasure of speaking over the telephone. Jean’s cleared sixty, which experience
has taught me can sometimes be edifying, but weighing in at over two-fifty
she’s about one fetish too many. True to form, I manage to be polite in the
face of disappointment. Grace under pressure is what it’s called, but then I
don’t have to tell you that.

“Hi Jean,” I
say, giving her a little smile I’ve developed that goes by the name of the
Diligent Schoolboy. A lot of rosy cheek-work and a general widening of the eyes
designed to give them full advantage of the baby blues. Works wonders on the
over-sixty set, but apparently it’s been a decade or three since anybody worked
a wonder on Jean. Terrible how we neglect our elderly, I think.

She looks me
over and tells me to have a seat on the couch, where I get to flipping around
in some ladies magazines, catching up on my beauty tips and whatnot. Meanwhile
Jean goes about typing like the possessed. She’s wearing these little half-moon
glasses with a cord around her neck and has to get so close to that computer
screen to see what she’s doing that she must be feeling some electrical fuzz on
the tip of her nose, which can’t be good for the general health of the body.
Then as if to confirm my diagnosis, she starts making these little indigestion
noises that cause a man to think back to what he last ate and consider whether
it’s still sitting right. Can’t really recall too much since the breakfast
buffet, and that starts the old stomach rumbling. I could eat – let’s just say
that – and the more I think about it, the more the old stomach gets to feeling
the need to express its feelings. I mean it’s some serious experimental music
in there with Jean and me. I’m thinking we ought to consider taking it on the
road. Thank you, Wichita, I’m thinking. Looks like we’ve got a good crowd out
there tonight.

I’m
introducing the other members of the band to the good people of Kansas when the elevator doors slide open to reveal a little Hawaiian fella smelling of
Tex-Mex, and it is frightening how in tune with the world I am. Armies of
little Hawaiian deliverymen out there anticipating my needs. He’s got two big
brown paper bags and seems to be on a first name basis with Jean. He hands over
the bags and waits while she talks into an intercom on her desk. “Loku’s here,”
she says.

“I have no
time for guessing games, Jean,” a man’s voice says.

“
Loku
.
With lunch,” she says, and this young guy in a cheap suit immediately comes
hurtling out of the nearest office. Hair so slicked back you wouldn’t exactly
call it hair. There are a hundred uses of petroleum jelly, and this is one.

He pays off
Loku, whose spoken vocabulary may or may not be restricted to the Hawaiian
language, and gives a bag to Jean, which is honestly exactly what she doesn’t
need. She points me out, he comes over to shake my hand.

“Mister Lee,”
he says. “I’m Brice Darling. Mister Shore called yesterday to say you might be
stopping by. Have you eaten?”

“I was hoping
you’d ask,” I purr.

He nods and
leads me back to his office, which unfortunately returns my opinion of the
insurance industry back to about where it started. Sort of like a broom closet
with a diploma on the wall. He pulls out two big Styrofoam cups of chili from
the bag and provides his own plastic spoons from a drawer. The chili appears to
have pineapple in it, but I guess you can’t complain.

“Good of you
to see me, Darling,” I say as we sit. “I was hoping you’d let me have a look at
whatever information you have concerning the estate of Harry Shore.”

“I’m not
authorized to do that without the expressed permission of our client,” he says,
spooning up some chili.

“Correct me if
I’m wrong here, Darling,” I say, “but Shore called yesterday expressing that
permission.”

“Not to look
into his entire estate,” Darling says, real pleased with himself here. Been in
an office so long he thinks like a Xerox machine. The good news is that there’s
a framed black and white photograph on his desk of Miss Ava Gardner, in
The
Killers
if I’m not mistaken, and anytime you get Miss Ava Gardner in a
room, you figure there must be some kind of hope.

“Let’s skip
the estate,” I say, taking a bite of chili and wishing I hadn’t. In this modern
day you want to be open to cuisines of all nations, but there are some you only
need to do once, and brother that’s Hawaiian chili. “I’m really just interested
in his school of Botticelli Madonna. The one with the sexy smile, not unlike
Miss Gardner’s.”

He looks over
at her and says, “
The Killers
. Robert Siodmak.”

“I figured as
much,” I say. “She was something.”

“She was,” he
says, relaxing a bit. “It’s a great film, and she’s the tops. But if we’re
talking about Siodmak, I prefer
Phantom Lady
. Ella Raines, she was
something too.” He grins to himself and wolfs down some chili. I wince with
each bite, but I guess you have to let the kids make their own mistakes.

“How do you
know so much about movies, Darling?” I ask. “They let you out of here
occasionally for good behavior?”

“Actually I
studied film in college. Film studies.”

“You spent
four years studying the likes of Ava Gardner,” I say, “but the pull of
insurance proved too strong.”

“This is a
great career in a great firm, Mister Lee,” he says, forgetting Ava and giving
me the look I guess he’s been practicing in the mirror for his first board
meeting. “Not a job, not just something I’m interested in, but a
career,
Mister
Lee.”

“Call me
Willie,” I say. “Nobody’s called me Mister Lee since I fired the butler. Now
how about everything you’ve got on Shore’s Madonna. I don’t want to waste your
time.”

He doesn’t
like it, but he goes over to a large filing cabinet. After some searching he
comes back over to the desk with a file the size of a Russian novel and starts
going through it in search of the Madonna.

“When was the
last time you had any contact with the Shore family?” I ask as he works.

“As you know, Mister Shore is confined to a wheelchair,” he says, “so most of our business is conducted
over telephone or through his lawyers.” Which wasn’t the question, so I decide
to follow up with another little zinger. They don’t pay me the big bucks for
nothing. “Shore mentioned that his daughter Fernanda is closely involved in his
business affairs.”

“Miss Shore does occasionally visit us as her father’s representative,” he says. “She’s naturally
very concerned for his financial welfare.”

And that’s
putting it mildly, I’m thinking, as he slides a folder from the stack. It’s one
of those folders printed with blank lines where you can sign or fill in a date.

“Now then,”
Darling says. “The school of Botticelli Madonna.” He pulls out some papers and
turns them on the desk for me to read – certificates, attestations, bills of
sale, and a lot more I couldn’t begin to understand. I ask him how much the
painting’s worth, he tells me it’s insured for a million dollars, which does
put the case into perspective.

“How about
photographs?” I say.

“There’s one
in here,” he says, flipping through papers. Near the bottom of the folder, he
finds an eight-by-ten and passes it over. I look at the eyes. That’s what I do
– I look at the eyes. Unfortunately I’d have to be Harry Shore to say how blue
they are.

“Could I get a
copy of this, Darling?”

He chuckles
like this is really the most comical statement he’s heard in all his many years
of experience. Difficult line to take when you’re still fighting facial acne,
though in all honesty the petroleum jelly can’t do wonders for the complexion.
“I’m afraid not,” he says.

“And that’s
the only photograph you have on record?”

He looks down
at the Shore file. “It would be in this file if we have it,” he says.

“Do me a
favor,” I say. “I’ll turn my head if you like, but would you mind just taking a
quick glance to see if you find any other photographic evidence of our lovely
Madonna? Then I can say I’ve done my job, you’ve certainly done yours, and I
can let you get back to work.”

He sighs
deeply and makes a big show of opening and closing folders. I see statues go
by, jewelry and Persian carpets, and then Darling’s as surprised as I am to see
our coy Madonna again, fixing us both with that mysterious smile.

“This file’s a
mess,” Darling says under his breath. “I’ll have to speak with Jean.”

I ask if he’d
mind if I have a look at the photograph, and he passes it over. Shore’s not
nuts. Or maybe he’s nuts, but he’s right about this. The eyes in the second
photograph are darker than the first, which is faded and must have been taken
at a different time. So somebody saw the wrong photograph…and then what
happened?

“What are
those dates on the outside of the folder?” I ask.

“Anytime we
consult with a client about an item, we’re supposed to date the folder,” he
says.

“This one’s dated
March this year,” I say. “That was about a month ago.”

“Mister Shore’s daughter was here, as I believe I mentioned,” he says quickly.

“She was
looking at the Madonna folder,” I say.

“That’s
confidential,” he says.

“Well it says
it right here, Darling. March 10
^th
.”

“We may have
discussed the Madonna,” he says.

“Fair enough,”
I say, “and I thank you for your time.” I make to get up as he shuffles the
folders back into a neat little stack, but the truth is I’m only getting
started. I make a point of gazing admiringly at Ava a bit, then I tell him I
loved her in
Mogambo
.

“Her in that
shower when Gable shows up?” he says.