The Emerald Cat Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
Читать онлайн книгу.
“Lindsey.”
“Jesus Christ on a crutch, did you come in here to interrupt me every five words? Look, I’ve been in this racket all my life. You know I worked with Aaron Wyn in New York? I sold pictures for Irving Klaw. You wouldn’t believe it, I once made a move on Bettie Page. So innocent she didn’t even know what was going on. But there was some hot, hot stuff. I mean, hot. I worked for Hamling in Chicago. I gave Milton Luros his start. I published pulps that would make a Donnenfeld blush and Miltie painted covers for me.”
He had placed his cigar on the edge of a huge cut-glass ashtray. The cigar had fallen off and added a blackened spot to the many on the wooden desktop before burning out. He picked it up, clicked a butane lighter into life and reignited the cigar. After a couple of puffs he leaned back in his chair and started up again, looking and sounding to Lindsey like the great Lee J. Cobb.
“These snooty s.o.b.’s want to put me out of business. I’ll fight the bastards. I’ll fight ’em all the way. I’ll whip their asses in court.”
Lindsey raised his hand, feeling like a schoolboy asking permission to leave the room.
Burnside grunted acknowledgement but he kept on rolling. “There’s no way they can beat me but if they do it’s on your backside, not mine. International Sure-As-Hell, that’s what I call you guys. International Sure-As-Hell. If I lose—no way I lose, I’m going to clank their clock, those arrogant s.o.b.’s, but if they do win International Sure-As-Hell has to pay, not Gordian House.”
He paused again to draw on his cigar. Before he could resume, Lindsey said, “Mr. Burnside—”
Burnside exhaled a cloud of blue-gray smoke. “Jack. Call me Jack. What’s your first name?” He squinted at Lindsey’s business card. “Hobart. Hobart. What the hell kind of name is that? I think I bought a Hobart stove one time. Or was it a dishwasher? My wife buys these things. I give her an allowance, I don’t know what she does with the money half the time.”
“Yes, well, that’s my name. You’d have to ask my mother how she picked it. Jack. All right. Jack. What I need to know is your side of this story.”
“You been talking to those snobs at Murder and Monkeyshines?”
“No, sir. I haven’t talked to them yet. I hope I can get this matter straightened out. If Gordian House is blameless I hope we can convince the other side to drop their case. If not, International Surety will try and work out a settlement. We don’t want a court fight and I hope they don’t want one either. Nobody wins that kind of battle except for the lawyers.”
“You want to hear my side?”
Lindsey nodded.
“I already told my lawyer all about it. What’s her name, Caswell. J. P .Caswell. Won’t even use a first name. I call her Jaypee. Firm is Hopkins, MacKinney, Black. In Oakland.”
“Yes, I’ll talk with them. With Ms. Caswell. But I’d like to hear it in your own words, Mr., ah, Jack.”
“Okay. Here we go.”
He pushed himself up and opened a door to another room. Lindsey peered though the doorway. The room was full of modern equipment. A crew of young men and women sat at computers, busily clicking away at keyboards. Burnside disappeared. Lindsey waited. Burnside reappeared, closed the door behind him. He tossed a paperback book at Lindsey. Lindsey managed to catch it. He turned it over and studied the cover.
The cover painting showed a woman wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse and a short, tight skirt sitting on a barstool. A tough-looking, unshaven male in a tee-shirt and jeans had one hand on her thigh. His other hand held a revolver. The whole scene was framed in a porthole-shaped window. The title of the book, lettered in simulated neon tubing, was The Emerald Cat.
“This is the cause célèbre?” Lindsey asked.
“The what?”
“The cause of all the trouble.”
“Yeah, right. See the byline on that thing?”
Lindsey read it aloud. “Steve Damon.” He opened the book, looked at the copyright page. The book was credited to Gordian House, Inc.
“Why isn’t it copyright by the author?”
Burnside said, “Huh. We bought it. Agent sold it to us. What they call work-done-for-hire, even though it wasn’t done for us. But it’s ours now.”
“You bought it from Steve Damon?”
“Nope.”
Lindsey decided that it was time to wait the other man out.
They stared at each other for a minute, then Burnside said, “Agent.”
“All right, then I’ll need to talk to Mr. Damon’s agent.”
Burnside opened a desk drawer and pulled out a Rolodex. “Here you go.” He flipped cards until he found the one he wanted. “Rachael Gottlieb.” He read off a Berkeley address. “Says she’s Damon’s agent. She signed the contract, he signed it, too. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Check went to Gottlieb. I guess she took her pound of flesh and gave the rest to Damon but I wouldn’t know for certain. Maybe she screwed him out of it. No pun intended, Linsley. No skin off my back either way.”
Lindsey jotted Gottlieb’s name and address in his organizer and slipped it back into his pocket. “So you never actually met Damon.”
“Nope. Never talk to authors. I have people to do that.” He gestured toward the door that led to the high-tech room. “Don’t think anybody talked to him, though. I handled that one myself. Met Gottlieb. Nice piece. Tight jeans, what the kids wear nowadays. Made me wish I was twenty years younger.”
Forty would be more like it, Lindsey thought. He stood up. “All right. Thank you, ah, Jack. I’ll be in touch.”
“Any time. Any time. Say hello to my girl on the way out.”
Lindsey said hello to Burnside’s receptionist on the way out. Shortly, in the building lobby, he studied the address Burnside had given him for Rachael Gottlieb. Dana Street. He remembered that from past years.
He was about to retrieve his rented Avenger from the parking garage and head for the Gottlieb Literary Agency but standing in the bright sunlight of Shattuck Avenue he realized that he wasn’t ready to meet Damon’s agent. Instead, he walked the short distance to the Berkeley Public Library, settled himself in the airy, high-ceilinged reading room, and opened the copy of The Emerald Cat that Jack Burnside had tossed at him.
It was a short novel, less than two hundred pages, and Lindsey felt no need to study every paragraph of Steve Damon’s deathless prose. He could get a reasonable take on the book by skimming, and in fact an hour’s attention proved sufficient.
The Emerald Cat seemed to be a standard hardboiled murder mystery. The title referred to a sleazy saloon on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito, a town just north of Berkeley. It had obviously been written in the recent past, as the author wrote at length about the Emerald Cat’s Dutch doors. Smokers could stand inside the tavern while leaning over the half-door and getting their nicotine fix outside the establishment.
Damon’s tough-as-nails private eye was one Troy Percheron. Percheron had an equally tough girl-friend. Damon referred to her as a frail, bringing a grin to Lindsey’s face. Her name was Helena Cairo. She was obviously the sexy woman featured on the cover of the book.
There was a fairly brutal murder, motive not quite clear to Lindsey. The victim was one Henry Blank. It wasn’t altogether clear to Lindsey why Blank had been garroted, either, but after a series of chases, beatings, drunken interludes, sexual encounters described in almost as much detail as Percheron’s fights with fists, brass knuckles, and tire chains, Percheron subdued the killer, a gigantic brute known as Frank “Frankenstein” Farmer, and turned him over to the local gendarmerie.
Lindsey wasn’t exactly an authority on hardboiled