Herbie's Diner Read online

  “And you should know if a cop pulls us over, I’m gonna put a knife through the back of your skull and take my chances,” Muncey said in his too-high voice.

  “See? Everyone is a player here, even Muncey.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Muncey asked.

  “Nothing. Let’s drive.”

  Arlene did as told. The speedometer read a steady thirty-five miles per on the way back. It took roughly twelve to fifteen minutes before we reached Herbie’s Diner. I filed that information away in case I needed it, though it was more likely that I would never find the clearing where they had kept me, even if I searched. I wasn’t sure that I would ever need to, but I liked to know as much as I could about an op. It tended to boost my confidence, which came in handy when things looked grim.

  The diner was dark, and a sign in the window said it was closed for repairs. Arlene unlocked the door and went inside. She turned on a few lights, but nothing more than was needed. She left the sign in the window to discourage customers. Muncey nudged me inside.

  Arlene was on automatic pilot. She started brewing the coffee before she even knew what she was doing, but recovered by asking Muncey if he wanted any. He grunted. I bummed a cigarette off him and mentioned I wouldn’t mind a cup. My captors looked at me like I owed them money. I went to make my phone call.

  Muncey made to follow me, but I stopped by the swinging door. “Look, I do this alone, or you can just put two in my head right now.”

  He grinned at me. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “This is going to be difficult enough without you breathing down the back of my neck, Muncey. I need to have my wits about me.”

  He gave me the eye. “Fine, but I’ll be right outside the door. Try any funny stuff, like calling the cops, and I’ll know it.”

  I pushed through into the little hallway. At the far end was the john. I thought of how Mort Peters had gone there after being drugged, probably to splash some water on his face from the basin, all the while thinking it was the strain of his situation making him ill, never realizing Arlene and Muncey had his number.

  I thought about what Peters’ last moments must have been like. He’d probably been tied to a tree, just like me. It made no sense. Why let a gorilla like Muncey pound on him? He was a producer, a salesman, the kind used to proposing nebulous, iffy deals. Why hadn’t he offered Muncey some of the money? It made no sense to me. The ideal would have been to ask him, but that was impossible now.

  I picked up the receiver and dialed. An operator with a husky, sexy voice picked up. “How can I connect you?” she asked.

  “Look, I made a number of calls from this line earlier today, but I lost the number. Could you be a dear and look it up for me?”

  “One moment.”

  She came back with a number, Malibu-69755. I nearly choked. The number was in West Hollywood. Half a state away. It could have been worse, of course. It could have been New York, or the moon, but it was doubtful Arlene or Muncey’s mood was going to improve when they learned the truth. I asked the operator to connect me and filed the number away in case I needed it later.

  “Collect call to that number, then, from Mort.”

  “One moment while I direct, sir.”

  A pouty, dimwitted voice answered. “Mort? Darling, what’s the matter? I thought you said we weren’t supposed to talk after six.”

  “Mrs. Peters, I presume?” I said.

  There was a long pause. I imagined blonde pincurls beneath a pretty, if vacuous, face doing its best deer-in-the-headlights impression. The receiver was slightly away from her face, and she was torn between answering and hiding in the closet. I couldn’t let her get away; she might never answer her phone again.

  “Don’t hang up, Mrs. Peters. Mort’s life depends on you cooperating. Do you understand?”

  A little girl version of the voice came back over the line. “Is he okay?”

  “For now. Whether or not he stays that way is entirely up to you. I say this not to scare you, but to impress upon you the gravity of this situation.”

  “May I speak to him?”

  “No, you may not. You can talk to him all you want later, when we have what we want. Until then, you talk to me. I’m your best friend for the next few days. And ma’am, I don’t want anything to happen to him, either. I want everything to go smoothly, and then we’ll all go our separate ways, but that only happens if you play ball. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  “The money, naturally.”

  “What money?”

  I turned on the menace. “Now, see, that’s not very smart of you. It’s just that kind of funny business that’s going to wind up with some postal employee finding a body in a ditch. Capisce?”

  Mrs. Peters issued a squeak of terror. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” she cried. I felt a knot working into my gut. She was really afraid. Whatever kind of man Mort Peters might have been, and whatever kind of girl this young lady might be, it did not take a swami to see that she loved him. If I had been more of a man I would have found another way out of this, but right then I was playing to get out alive. I don’t know what it said about me, but I would have worked the same play on my mother if it had a chance of getting me away from Muncey and Arlene.

  “That’s better. Any more of that, and I hang up. And Mrs. Peters, if I hang up, I won’t be calling back. It’s up to you to keep me on this phone, so you had better play it straight from here on out.”

  “I will. Just don’t hurt Mort. He hasn’t done anything.”

  “Sure he has. He’s done plenty. That’s how you’re sitting on a pile of dough.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cuz he told me people might be calling, trying to trick me into telling them stuff. He said not to talk to anyone.”

  “I’m not with those people. I’m with me.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because I know that Mort has been in Sacramento, and that his cousin, Paul, has been doing his dry cleaning for him. I know that he’s fond of a gray suit with a powder blue tie that doesn’t go with it, that he probably wears because you bought it for him, and I know he’s been calling you collect from Herbie’s Diner south of Sacramento periodically all day. Now if I know that much about him, the question you have to ask is, if I was with the people who want their money back, why wouldn’t I just beat the location of the money out of him and go get it?”

  There was another long pause while she processed the information. “So why don’t you beat the location out of him anyways? Why call me at all?”

  Not bad. My opinion of the faux Mrs. Peters improved. “Because I’m a businessman, Mrs. Peters. I found out what I did with coercion, not muscle. I don’t want to be that man, but if you don’t cooperate I’ll be forced to cut my losses and move on. That means doing a lot more than just beating a guy like Mort for information. I’d rather do this easy and get him home safely to you ASAP. Now, listen. I want the money, as much of it as you can scrape together.”

  There was a pause. “There is no money.”

  “What did I say about playing games with me? I’m hanging up, Mrs. Peters.”

  “No! Wait! Please, I’m not trying to trick you. Please believe me. There was money, a lot of it, but there isn’t any. Not anymore.”

  “You spent it?”

  “No. Oh, no. Morty thought…well, we talked it over, and we thought it would be a good idea to take what we had and fold it into a business interest.”

  “What kind of interest?”

  “A movie.”

  It made sense. A guy like Peters was smart, but he was also a gambler. It wasn’t the notion of making money that got a guy like him out of bed in the morning. It was in the risk of failing or coming up big. A move like this would satisfy that need, and then some. Further, he could show a Herculean chutzpah and invest his stolen money in the very thing tha
t had made him rich to begin with. I wouldn’t be surprised if the money was tied up in All-American Pictures, the same people he had bilked, through some dummy company, as a matter of fact. That would have been the ultimate jab and twist of the knife to the people he’d robbed, to use the money he’d stolen to make a killing on a sure thing, and then disappear forever. Talk about the crime of the century. The sheer scope of the scheme did little for my gut, though. Arlene and Muncey were not going to be happy if they found out.

  “You can’t have put everything into it. You need money to live on, and you don’t strike me as a gal who likes to operate from Skid Row.”

  This hardened her up a bit. “You don’t know a thing about me,” she said. “I’ve been on the bottom. I can make do.”

  “How much have you been making do with?”

  “About forty-thousand.”

  “You’re a real martyr. All right, look. I know Peters would never let his wife handle his affairs while he’s away: it’s too risky. And anyway, women don’t negotiate movie deals. That means there’s been a friend of your husband’s around to handle the leg work. Am I right?”

  “Arthur Hands. His name is Arthur Hands.”

  “He doesn’t need to know about this. Do you understand? He gets nowhere near this, or you never see your husband again. Got it?”

  “O-okay.”

  “Good.” I gave her directions to Herbie’s Diner and that she had until five tomorrow afternoon to get the money to me. She tried to keep me on the line, but I hung up. I felt sick.

  Muncey and Arlene were waiting for me when I came back into the dining room. The lights were on, but the Closed for Repairs sign was still up in the window. I bummed a cigarette from Arlene’s pack.

  “So?” Arlene asked.

  The first drag made its exit through my nostrils. “So, she fell for it.”

  “What’s the score?”

  “Couldn’t say. There’s a lot of money in this deal, and she doesn’t have a head for figures.”

  “Speculate, then.”

  I let go of a long plume of smoke. “She’s going to hold out on us. That much is a given. Women like her lie so much, it’s second nature. But she’s going to scrounge enough that I think you’re going to be pleased.”

  “Quit stalling, pretty boy.”

  “You could see as much as a million.”

  They haven’t invented the words to describe the looks I got. Until then it had probably seemed like a dream. Maybe it was a last gasp of some guy who was desperate not to end up rotting in an orchard somewhere. Whatever the case, they hadn’t considered the scam I was proposing was real. Finally, after a series of twitches and jerks had rolled across their faces, Muncey smiled. It was genuine. It was also more horrifying than his scowl ever was.

  “That’s something,” he said.

  “Yep. We’re gonna be rich.”

  Arlene snorted. “We? Who’s ‘we’, huh?”

  “The three of us.”

  “And you think you’re gonna get some of this, huh? Maybe the best you can hope for is we let you walk away from this with your skin intact. No way you’re getting scratch, too. You got way too high an opinion of yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m getting a little,” I said, “and I’ll tell you why. If I get part of the money—just a small part, mind you—then I’m complicit in the crime. You can let me go, and there’s no way I can squeal without going down with you. Look, if I get back to L.A. I’m getting nothing for all my hard work. Peters is dead, and All-American is never getting their money back. Most of what I stood to make on this case was contingent on returning the money. You guys are going to have that money, not me, so I get nothing. I’m broke to begin with, and my rep is going to take a serious hit. It’s going to be six months or more before a warm body even walks through the door, and it’ll be another six months before the cases are worth my time again. That’s a long time to be living on boiled potatoes and cheap whiskey. I might get desperate, and my mouth might start to squawk a little about a charming greasy spoon outside Sacramento.

  “Now, you can kill me. Sure you can. Muncey is twice my size, and I’m unarmed. So, I’m at your mercy. I know that. So I’m not even pretending otherwise. But then you won’t have the advantage anymore.”

  “Who needs an advantage when it’s just some broad showing up to deliver the money?”

  “You’ll need it because she is a broad, as you put it. What’s a woman do better than anything in the world?”

  Muncey piped up immediately. “Talk. Boy, do they like it.”

  “Exactly. Do you not think she’s going to tell someone where she’s going, and if she’s not back in, say, two days, to call the cops?”

  “So? What can she tell people?”

  “A lot.”

  “So the cops look around an empty lot or a patch of field. So what?”

  “I told her the drop-off point is here.”

  Arlene’s eyes narrowed. “Now why would you go and do a thing like that?”

  “For my security.”

  “That’s not smart, mister, lemme tell you.”

  “Maybe not, but that’s how it shakes out.”

  “You need to call her back and arrange for a different drop.”

  “No.”

  Arlene was angry, and indeed she should be. I had thrown her plan, which was to kill me, take the money, and probably kill Mrs. Peters as well, into a tizzy. Now everything was messy. People like Arlene didn’t handle messy well. As long as they were in control of a situation, they could be formidable. Take them outside their usual territory, and they would get sloppy, start to panic. I had no illusions that they would modify their plan, which still included killing me, but now they had to plan for things that they could not easily control, like the possibility of customers coming by, snooping around for a bowl of chili whether the Open sign was up or not.

  Arlene fished a cigarette from her pocket, and with a shaky hand got a light. “You got a lot of nerve,” she said. I had definitely misjudged her level of cool. She looked ready to scrap the whole thing and put a bullet in my brain. I had to do something to keep the peace.

  “If you were in my place, you’d have done the same thing. Now, look, this is still your show. I just want to keep things on an even keel. You’re angry with me for being such a wisenheimer. I get that. You want blood. But you have to look beyond that to something far more profitable than just seeing my head on a stick. There’s a lot of money coming your way. I want just enough of a taste to make me a part of the conspiracy. That’s insurance for you, not for me, that I don’t say anything.”

  “And what do we do about this chippy who’s showing up with the cash?” Arlene said. “Her hubby’s dead in our trunk. You don’t think she’s gonna be angry when she finds out what we done?”

  “Maybe, but once we show her we’re wise to her, she’ll be too afraid to do anything.”

  “How are we to do that?”

  “By taking out her insurance policy.”

  “Come again?”

  “Arthur Hands.”

  “I don’t think I follow.”

  “I told you about Mort Peters stealing a lot of money from these movie people, right? Well, I don’t know if I told you the rest. It’s been a long day, after all. But Peters faked his own death. His widow—his real widow—buried the wrong guy after the cops fished his car out of a lake. Now, a guy like Peters is many things, but he’s not a killer. No, he’s a powerful man. Or was. When you’re powerful, you don’t get your hands dirty. You find a man who is capable of doing the nasty things that you need done with little or no remorse. For that, you need an animal. A real monster. For Mort Peters, that guy is Arthur Hands. He’ll be coming up here with the wife.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I told her not to bring him.”

  Arlene shook her head. “That don’t make no sense.”

  “I specifically mentioned Hands in case he wasn’t already in her head. By putting him there,
we ensure that she calls him. Likely, she’ll need him to put together the money, anyway, as I doubt Peters left her in charge of its location. But he’ll come, and she’ll have the confidence of having a gorilla like him in her corner.”

  “Only that evens the odds for her side.”

  “Not exactly. See, we know he’s coming, so we have a chance to prepare for him. He’ll do nothing overt. In fact, we probably won’t see him at all unless the deal goes south, which we know it will. His first priority will be to his boss. He wants Peters back, and he’ll play ball until then. If he can make us pay for the inconvenience, he will, but that’s not his focus. Muncey, you’re going to lie in wait for him. He’ll have Mrs. Peters drop him somewhere away from the diner. Either that or he’ll have her park out of sight so he can slip out of the car. Regardless, you’ll be outside to keep an eye on his approach. I imagine he’s a pretty tough guy if he’s got the drop on you, but he’ll be a plate of beans if he can’t find the upper hand. You deal with him, and you bring me evidence of him that she’ll recognize. This way, I can show her that we have the whole thing figured. She’ll be near hysterics, but I think I can convince her not to make a scene. She’ll toss in the money, and you’ll give me a cut off the top. We then tell her that Mort is in Sacramento, and that I’ll drive her to his location. I plan to take a long, leisurely route, so the two of you will have ample time to get out of town. Then, I’ll drop her at the first bus station I come to, and I’ll disappear for a while before making it back to L.A. She’s out money, her husband, her husband’s bodyguard, and all that, but she’s alive. A girl like her is dumb as a bag of hammers, but even she can figure that getting out with her life is a big payout.”

  The two sat a while, chewing over my big plan. I tried to keep a straight face and not betray any of what I was feeling. It wouldn’t serve me for them to know that I had just rehashed the plot of a film script I’d read several years ago but had never gone into production. Arlene already thought little of me. If she could just be convinced a little while longer that I was a useless punk out to save his own skin, this might work. I wasn’t worried about Muncey. I could tell by the look in his eyes he liked his part in this. Anything that involved breaking someone’s head was all right with him. It was Arlene I had to convince. For better or worse, she was the brains of their operation. If she said it was a go, we were good. Otherwise, I felt like I would be joining Mort in the trunk of the rusted-out Ford pretty soon.