“Siegel is dead.”
“What?”
“Somebody shot him through his window in Beverly Hills. His eye was blown out of his head. The photo was in the paper. Maybe he wasn’t so tough after all.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“We’re on the same side. We can help each other.”
“Wrong on both counts,” I said.
“Wait till you hear what I have to say. That cunt is in the middle of it.”
“What did you sa
y?”
“I’m talking about Linda Gail Pine. Get off your high horse. They’re going to cook the flesh off your bones, Holland. I know who’s going to do it, and I know how. You want to talk or not?”
Valentine gave me the name of a bowling alley. I found him in the lounge. He wore a fedora and a brown shirt with a red-and-silver-striped tie, zoot trousers hitched up on his sides. He was drinking a beer at the bar. A pinball machine was dinging just inside the door, the maple-floored bowling lanes echoing with the explosion of wood pins. I sat down on a stool next to him. “You always hold your business meetings here?” I said.
“Some people have electronic ears, know what I mean?” he replied. “You ever hear a clicking sound on your telephone?”
“Somebody has my phone tapped?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I don’t trust you.”
“Linda Gail got me fired.”
“How?”
“Through Roy Wiseheart.”
“Too bad.”
“I want my job back. He’s your friend. I’ll give you his number. You get me my job back, I’ll give you everything you want.”
“What is it you think I want?”
“I know all their secrets. I know who’s blackmailing who, I know who’s screwing who. I know they’re going to hang you up by your scrotum.”
“Can you tell me why ‘they’ want to do that?”
“You grew up down here, right? A coon gets out of line, they give him a warning. Next time around, they take the skin off his back. He does it again, they bounce him off a tree limb. Hollywood works the same way.”
“What do I have to do with Hollywood?”
He shook his head as though he had been talking to someone of diminished capacity. “I hear you got a private screening of your wife’s film talents. That was for openers, Holland.”
“You know about the Nazi film reel?”
“Word gets around.”
He was smirking. I picked up his bottle of beer and poured it on his fly. “You don’t want to come near me again, Mr. Valentine.”
When I walked out of the lounge, the sound of the bumpers on the pinball machine seemed to have crawled inside my head, growing louder and louder, turning to flashes of light behind my eyes, reaching a crescendo that left my ears popping.