Write me a Letter

the work; also, having something to do might drive away any lingering apprehension I still had about storm troopers lurking in the offing and Estonian beauties lurking everywhere else. At least for a while—better than nothing.
    ”If I do find him, then what?”
    ”Then nothin’,” Fats said. ”You just find him, that’s all, and without rousting him, either.’”
    ”Nothin’?” I said. ”Nothin’ at all? Not even a phone call to you letting you know where he is?”
    ”Said you was smart, didn’t I,” Fats said. He finished up the last of his tipple, burped delicately behind one cupped palm, put his glass back in the cabinet, and closed it up again.
    ”Do you know where the guy worked?”
    ”In a garage down on Wilcox somewhere, he said,” Fats said.
    ”And what does this guy look like?” I said. ”Don’t suppose you got a picture or anything useful like that.”
    Fats shook his head.
    ”What’s he look like? A nobody. A nebbish. Skinny, pale face, glasses, losin’ his hair, what can I say?”
    ”A grand,” I said. ”Five now. Plus expenses. If I don’t trace him in three days, I’ll deduct my expenses from the grand and give you back half of what’s left. Deal?”
    ”Deal,” he said. He got out his wallet, counted out five crisp hundred-dollar bills, padded over to me, dropped them in my lap, then seated himself again in his chair. I got out my memo pad, copied what was on the sheet of paper, then got up and dropped the sheet onto his lap.
    ”I’ll let you know how it goes,” I said.
    ”That would be nice,” he said.
    I went out into the waiting room. The kid was still working on his nails.
    ”Frosted scarlet,” I said to him on the way past. ”That would be a divine color for your nails. Go great with your complexion.” I blew him a kiss and opened the door. His knife thudded into the doorjamb an inch from my left ear. I picked up the water cooler, complete with stand, which was right next to the door, and threw it none too gently into his lap. He said a dirty word. I crossed to him and cuffed him, hard, with cupped palms, on both his ears. (Be careful when you try this one, kids, it’s all too easy to pop someone’s eardrums.) Then, just to make sure I had his attention, I let him have a short but solid left hook right on his temple. Fats came out to see what the commotion was all about. ”Poor kid came over faint,” I said. ”I was just giving him a drink of water.”
    ”You didn’t have to give him the whole cooler,” Fats observed mildly.
    ”So I got carried away,” I said, tugging the kid’s blade out of the wood. ”Sue me.” I propped the knife up in the angle where the floor met the wall and gave it a healthy kick in the middle with one heel, just the way my pop taught me to break kindling many a moon ago. It broke cleanly into two pieces. ”Where’s he from, anyway?”
    ” South Chicago ,” Fats said. ”Why?”
    ”I knew he wasn’t local,” I said. ”A true Hollywood type would have asked me to recommend a good manicurist.”

7

    On the way down the stairs I figured that the first task ahead of me was to ascertain whether or not William Gince had ever done time—for example, for shooting at people— which would be a useful tidbit of information to know if I ever got within a hundred yards or so of him. It would also mean there’d be pictures of him, full face and profile, on record. His arrest sheet might also mention other potentially helpful items like his last place of work.
    There were two main ways of finding out whether William had ever been in the clink. One was to find him and ask him, but then of course he might lie about it. The other, slightly simpler way, was to ask Sneezy, an irascible little geezer who worked in the Records Department in the basement of the LAPD’s Downtown Station with my younger brother, Tony. You might ask, why not ask my brother, isn’t that what brothers are for, to help one another, as in brotherhood? Not mine, especially for favors like tapping the police computer for me, and I’ll spare you the details why, but I might just remark it is strange how jealousy can affect a human being sometimes.
    Actually, if you want to know, if you don’t already—and even if you don’t want to know, frankly—it wasn’t really jealousy that was involved. I was in no way jealous of my little brother, Anthony, and he sure never showed any signs of being jealous of macho old me. What he did show to me was