The Way Some People Die (3 page)

I sat down tentatively in the canvas camp-chair beside his, and offered him a cigarette.

He waved it away. “Not for me. Asthma and heart condition. But you go right ahead. The old biddy must be really anxious, hiring detectives and all.”

I was beginning to think she had reason to be anxious. “You said the pinball boys tried to scare you. Any particular reason?”

“They thought I might know where Galley Lawrence was. Her and this slob she went away with, some kind of a dago or wop. They said his name was Tarantine, and I told them it sounded like something you put on your hair. The lean one wanted to make something out of that, but the short one thought it was funny. He said this Tarantine was
in
his hair.”

“Did he explain what he meant?”

“He didn’t say very much. Seems that this Tarantine ran off with the collection money, something like that. They wanted to know if Galley left a forwarding address, but she didn’t. I told them try the police and that was another laugh for the little short one. The lean one said they’d handle it themselves. That’s when he showed me the gun, a little black automatic. I told them maybe
I
should try the police, and the short one made him put it away again.”

“Who were they?”

“Pinball merchants, they said. They looked like thugs to me. They didn’t leave their calling cards but I wouldn’t forget them if I saw them again. The one with the automatic, the one that worked for the other one, he was as thin as a rake. When he turned sideways he cast no shadow. Front-ways
he had his shoulders built out so his jacket hung on him like a scarecrow. He had a jail complexion, or a lunger’s, and little pinhead eyes and he talked like he thought he was tough. Take his gun away and I could break him in two, even at my age. And I’m old enough to qualify for the pension, if I needed it.”

“But you don’t.”

“No sir. I’m a product of individual enterprise. The other one, the boss, was really tough. He walked into my office like he owned it, only when he saw he couldn’t push me around he tried to be friendly-like. I’d just as soon make friends with a scorpion. One of these poolroom cowboys that made his way in the rackets and was trying to dress like a gentleman. Panama hat, cream gabardine double-breasted suit, hand-painted tie, waxy yellow shoes, and he rode up here in a car as long as a fire truck. A black limousine, and I thought the undertaker was coming for me for sure.”

“You expecting the undertaker?”

“Any day now, son.” He started to laugh, and then decided against it. “But it’ll take more than an L.A. thief with a innertube on his waistline to kiss me off, I can tell you. The little man was hard, though. He had his own shoulders and you could see on his face that he’d taken his share of beatings. He had a way of looking at you, soft and steady-like, that chilled you off some. And the way he talked about this Tarantine, the man was as good as dead.”

“What about Galley Lawrence?”

He shrugged his heavy collapsing shoulders. “I don’t know. I guess the idea was if they found her this Tarantine would be tagging along. I didn’t even tell them I knew him by sight.”

“You didn’t tell Mrs. Lawrence either. Did you?”

“Sure I did. Twice. I didn’t like the lady but she had a right to know. I told her when Galley moved out this Tarantine carted her stuff away in his automobile. That was on December the 30th. She was away for a week or ten days and when she came back she said she wanted out. I could have soaked her thirty days’ notice but I thought what the hell, I had people waiting. She drove away with Tarantine and I haven’t seen her since. Didn’t even tell me where she was going—”

“Mrs. Lawrence didn’t know Tarantine’s name.”

“Neither did I, till the pinball merchants told me. They only came here two days ago, Saturday it was, and Mrs. Lawrence hasn’t been here for weeks. I thought she gave up.”

“She didn’t. Can you tell me anything else about Tarantine?”

“I can tell you his fortune, maybe, and I don’t need a Ouija board. Folsom or San Quentin, if the long and the short of it don’t catch him first. He’s one of these pretty-boy wops, curly black hair that the women want to run their fingers through. Hollywood clothes, fast roadster, poolroom brains. You know the type. You’d think a girl like Galley would show better taste.”

“Think she married him?”

“How the hell would I know? I’ve seen pretty young girls like her take up with coyotes and live on carrion for the rest of their lives. I hope she didn’t.”

“You said he drove a roadster.”

“That’s right. Prewar Packard with bronze paint and white sidewalls. She hopped into the front seat and tooted away and that was the last of Galley Lawrence. If you find her, you let me know. I liked the girl.”

“Why?”

“She was full of vim and vigor. I like a girl with personality.
I’ve got a lot of personality myself and when I see somebody else that has it my heart goes out to them.”

Thanking him, I retreated to the sidewalk. His loud optimistic voice followed me: “But you can’t get by on personality alone, I learned that in the depression. They say there’s another one coming but I don’t worry. I’m sitting pretty, ready for anything.”

I called back: “You forgot the hydrogen bomb.”

“The hell I did,” he yelled triumphantly. “I got the bomb outwitted. The doctor says my heart won’t last two years.”

CHAPTER
4
:     
It took me half an hour to find the
Point Arena, though I had a hazy notion where it was. It stood in the lower depths of town, near the railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks the packing-case shanties of a small hobo jungle leaned in the corner of a dusty field. One of the huts had a roof of beaten gas-tins which gleamed like fish scales in the sun. A man lay still as a lizard in its dooryard.

From the outside the arena looked like an old freight warehouse, except for a kind of box-office at the street entrance, the size of a telephone booth. A dingy yellow billboard over the closed box-office window announced:
WRESTLING EVERY TUES., GENERAL
.80,
RESERVED
1.20,
RINGSIDE
1.50,
CHILDREN
.25. A door to the right of the window was standing open, and I went in.

The corridor was so dark, after the bright sun, that I could barely see. The only light came from a window high in the left wall. At least it served as a window; it was a square hole cut in the unpainted boards and covered with heavy chicken-wire. Stretching up on my toes I could see into the cubicle on the other side. It contained two
straight chairs, a scarred desk bare of everything but a telephone, and an heirloom brass spittoon. The walls were decorated with calendar nudes, telephone numbers scrawled in pencil, publicity photographs of Lord Albert Trompington-Whist the Pride of the British Empire, Basher Baron Flores from the Azores, and other scions of the European aristocracy.

Somewhere out of sight a punching-bag was rat-tat-tatting on a board. I stepped through a doorless aperture opposite the door I’d come in by, and found myself in the main hall. It was comparatively small, with seats for maybe a thousand rising on four sides to the girders that held up the roof. An ingot of lead-gray light from a skylight fell through the moted air onto the empty roped square on the central platform. Still no people, but you could tell that people had been there. The same air had hung for months in the windowless building, absorbing the smells of human sweat and breath, roasted peanuts and beer, white and brown cigarettes, Ben Hur perfume and bay rum and hair oil and tired feet. A social researcher with a good nose could have written a Ph.D. thesis about that air.

The punching-bag kept up an underbeat to the symphony of odors, tum-tee-tum, tum-tee-tum, tum-tee-tum-tee-tum-tee-tum. I moved toward a door with a push-bar marked
EXIT
, and the beat sounded louder. The door opened into an alley that led to the rear of the building. A colored boy was working on a bag fastened to the corner of the wall. On the other side of the alley a Negro woman was watching him across a board fence. Her black arms rested on the top of the fence and her chin was laid on her arms. Her great dark eyes had swallowed the rest of her face, and looked as if they were ready to swallow the boy.

“Who runs this place?”

He went on beating the bag with his left, his back to me
and the woman. He was naked to the waist; the rest of him was covered by a pair of faded khakis, and pitiful canvas sneakers that showed half his bare black toes. He switched to his right without breaking the drumming rhythm. The full sun was on him, and the sweat stood out on his back and made it glisten.

He was light-heavy, I guessed, but he didn’t look more than eighteen, in spite of the G.I. pants. With his height and heavy bone-structure, he’d grow up into a heavyweight. The woman looked as if she could hardly wait.

After a while she called to him: “The gentleman asked something, Simmie.” All gentlemen were white; all whites were gentlemen.

He dropped his arms and turned slowly. The taut muscles of his chest and stomach stood out in detailed relief like moulded iron sculpture. The head was narrow and long, with a slanting forehead, small eyes, broad nose, thick mouth. He breathed through the nose. “You want me?”

“I wondered who runs this place.”

“I’m the janitor. You want something?”

“I’d like to talk to the boss. Is he around?”

“Not today. Mr. Tarantine is out of town.”

“What about Mr. Speed? Isn’t Herman Speed the boss around here?”

“Not any more he isn’t. Mr. Tarantine been running things since the beginning of the year. Before that.”

“What happened to Herman?” The surprise in my voice sounded hollow. “He leave town?”

“Yeah. Mr. Speed left town.” He wasted no words.

“He got shot,” the woman said. “Somebody riddled his guts. It broke his health. It was a crying shame, too, he was a fine big man.”

“Shut up, Violet,” the boy said. “You don’t know nothing about it.”

“Shut up yourself,” she answered in ready repartee.

“Who shot him?” I asked her.

“Nobody knows. Maybe he knows, but he wouldn’t tell the police, he was real tight-mouthed.”

“I said shut up,” the boy repeated. “You’re wasting the gentleman’s time.”

I said: “Where’s Tarantine?”

“Nobody knows that either,” the woman said. “He left town last week and nobody seen him since. Looks as if they left young Simmie here to put on the shows all by himself.” She laughed throatily. “Maybe if you talked to Mrs. Tarantine, she might know where he is. She just lives down the road a few blocks from here.”

The boy jumped for the fence on silent feet, but the woman was already out of his reach. “Stay on your own side, Simmie, I given you fair warning. Trim’s in his room.”

“You’re trying to get me in trouble, been trying to get me in trouble all winter long. Ain’t you? Why don’t you get out of my sight and stay out of my sight?”

She wiggled her heavy body disdainfully, and disappeared around the corner of the buildings: warped plyboard cubicles laid end to end like miniature ten-foot boxcars and fronting on another alley. There were dark faces at some of the windows in the row and after a while the woman appeared at one of them.

The boy was talking by then. I’d broken through his reserve by praising his muscles and asking about his fights. He had beaten the local talent, he said, and was grooming himself for his professional debut. He called it that. Unfortunately they hadn’t had fights in Pacific Point since he started to get his growth. Mr. Tarantine was going to try
and get him on a card at San Diego one of these weeks. I suggested that Mr. Tarantine was a pretty good friend of his, and he agreed.

“I hear he married a beautiful wife.”

“Mr. Tarantine got no wife.”

“I thought Violet said something about a Mrs. Tarantine.”

“That’s the old lady. Violet don’t know nothing.” He cast a wicked glance across the fence at the woman in the window.

“What does she think about the trouble he’s in?”

“There isn’t any trouble,” the boy said. “Mr. Tarantine is a smart man. He doesn’t get into trouble.”

“I heard there was some trouble about the pinball collections.”

“That’s crap. He doesn’t collect on the pinball machines anymore. That was last year, when Mr. Speed was here. Are you a policeman, mister?” His face had closed up hard.

“I’m opening a place on the south side. I want a machine put in.”

“Look it up in the phone book, mister. It’s under Western Variety.”

I thanked him. The drumming of the bag began again before I was out of earshot. After a while he’d be a fighting machine hired out for twenty or twenty-five dollars to take it and dish it out. If he was really good, he might be airborne for ten years, sleeping with yellower flesh than Violet, eating thick steaks for breakfast, dishing it out. Then drop back onto a ghetto street-corner with the brains scrambled in his skull.

CHAPTER
5
:     
I stopped for gas at a service station
near the arena and looked up Tarantine in the phone book attached to its pay phone. There was only one entry under the name, a Mrs. Sylvia Tarantine of 1401 Sanedres Street. I tried the number on the telephone and got no answer.

Sanedres Street was the one I was on. It ran crosstown through the center of the Negro and Mexican district, a street of rundown cottages and crowded shacks interspersed with liquor stores and pawnshops, poolroom-bars and flyblown lunchrooms and storefront tabernacles. As the street approached the hills on the other side of the ball park, it gradually improved. The houses were larger and better kept. They had bigger yards, and the children playing in the yards were white under their dirt.

The house I was looking for stood on a corner at the foot of the slope. It was a one-story frame cottage with a flat roof, almost hidden behind a tangle of untended laurel and cypress. The front door was paned with glass and opened directly into a dingy living-room. I knocked on the door and again I got no answer.

There was a British racing motorcycle, almost new, under a tarpaulin at the side of the house. Moving over to look at it, I noticed a woman hanging sheets on a line in the yard next door. She took a couple of clothespins out of her mouth and called: