Page 18 of Shadow Ticket
Some believe it was masterminded by Bruno Airmont, even though he was the loudest complaining—that it could’ve been intended as an early warning to dairy folk who were thinking about joining in any mass effort to redefine the price structure.
In any event, Bruno, bewildered as anybody, emerged as the last man, if not standing, at least able to stumblebum around, somehow finding himself in supreme command of a darker project he may never have learned the true depth of.
The world of cheez and its ways, already perplexing, had turned suddenly opaque as well for Daphne, who found sometimes she had trouble keeping a handle on it all.
If Bruno really was, or maybe still is, the Al Capone of Cheese, didn’t that suggest there also had to be somewhere a Cheese Outfit that could be running at any scale from statewide on up, blessed with supernaturally accurate bookkeeping, short on mercy, located either nowhere or anyplace it liked—and why stop there?
Whatever levels Bruno might be reporting to, Daphne gathered from notes scribbled to himself, he was already too high up for personal comfort.
Found himself thinking of all the public toilet walls across the Midwest and the names he was being called, the fates that ungifted restroom cartoonists were imagining for him.
Starting to worry about marksmen out there waiting for him to wander into their sights.
—
Sooner or later the kingpins had to meet—as things fell out, at Al Capone’s own Midnight Frolics cabaret, on East 22nd in Chicago. Bruno at this point in the evening was entering a haze of indifference as to the exact ingredients of what he might be drinking, as long as it did the job.
“Yeah! Yeah I’m the Al Capone of Cheese, see? Il Al Capone di Formaggio.”
“Pleasure to meet you—in fact I happen to be Al Capone.”
“Hep to that, my paisan! And what is it you’re the Al Capone of again?”
Al Capone after a pause only shrugged, laughing nervously, not always regarded as a good sign by those familiar with him and his impulses.
Despite this uneasy beginning, the two seemed to hit it off. Bruno began to feel a perverse kind of protective aura. Soon he was making with the cheese quips. “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Ricotta?” and “You don’t like it, eh va’ fondue,” and so forth.
“Bruno, you card.” The Big Fella meant the Joker, but Bruno may’ve been thinking of an older deck, an older card, numbered XIII, the one nobody likes to see turn up, especially considering how mysteriously rival figures in the Velveeta/Radio-Cheez/Pabst-ett theater of combat were beginning to disappear from the cheezscape.
“How many’d you lose?” Al Capone, as the story goes, once asked Bruno, who in his innocence thought Big Al was talking about dollars.
“Oh,” Bruno pondered, “um…”
“Now you’re the boss,” advised the celebrated bootlegger, “don’t think you can relax.
’Cause now there’s even more people out to get you, see, Valentine’s Day comes more than once a year, any minute can be your last, you need to be more alert than ever, capeesh?
Sleep especially. How you been sleeping lately, goombah—things OK with that? ”
—
G. Rodney Flaunch, a onetime male flapper somehow delivered into premature middle age, seems unable to maintain a direct gaze with anybody, preferring to glower off into space, throwing the word “fiancé” around a lot, embarrassingly open about the scale on which he hopes to profit.
“A million and a half, that’s my magic number, I’m not greedy, only asking a fair return for the work I’ve put in… ”
According to Rodney, everyone up here on Prospect despises him while secretly admiring his courage in daring to actively court the daughter of the Al Capone of Cheese, honorific or whatever.
“Step easy, G. Rod,” fellow loophounds caution, “you know what they can do to you.”
“No risk, no reward,” Rodney far more breezy about it than the situation may actually call for.
“This is the Al Capone of Cheez, Rodney. He runs empires. A byword of terror in milk sheds throughout the land. Public enemies shiver with fear. How much trouble could one cheap adventurer give him?”
“A million and a half,” Rodney sincerely offended, “is not cheap!”
“You could be going after twice that.”
“Oh?”
“Pikers like you never get it right. First thing you should’ve done was hire a manager.”
So as if contempt from the family of Rodney’s intended bride isn’t enough, there’s a certain coolness to be put up with from that old gang of his as well.
“Others in the family stand to lose carloads more than my insignificant sum,” he explains to Hicks.
“We’re all chipping in, each according to their means, to foot the bill, whatever it amounts to, to get our Daphne back safe and sound.
” With a meaningful wiggle of the eyebrows meant to suggest a per diem plus expenses lavish beyond the dreams of small-timers such as Hicks.
“Wait, but…you yourself…” Hicks pretending to grope for tactful language.
“I know—fine one to moralize, you’re going to say, but that’s all over with now, isn’t it, the former scheming heel known as G. Rodney Flaunch is no more, I swear, he’s betrayed his last milkmaid.”
“Do tell.”
“What’s a million and a half, I’d gladly forgo it all if only she’d come back to me,” and so forth.
Those who don’t mind hiring a private dick now and then have been refining these arts of sincerity since Pinkerton was a pup, though sometimes it only turns out to be professional courtesy among fellow con artists.
Nothing around here of course but gentlemen, so Hicks doesn’t ask to see anything in writing.
“And how much appreciation do you think I get from this careless, hate-driven family? They sell each other used cars they know will catch fire at awkward moments, lure and get lured again and again into indiscretion and blackmail and who’s always the fixer running around cleaning up after everybody?
Dear old Rodney the family lowlife. When he isn’t being delegated to deal with private coppers and other scum. ”
“How lousy for you, and yet…”
“Out, out with it, please,” Rodney throbbing with resentment.
“Only thinking, what if it really is, well…something emotional. Sometimes,” pushing it, “it’s love, is all it turns out to be.”
“Love.” Rodney is squinting at him in a way that reminds him somehow of Boynt. “Let’s not forget simple insanity either, then, shall we. Nothing to concern yourself with in any case, your role is limited to finding her and convincing her to come back.”
“For a sum any self-respecting chicken would turn up their beak at—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Somebody did.”
“For just another crook with a license you’re sure a touchy customer.”
“And yet maybe you people need us as much as you do psychiatrists and bookkeepers, and better hope we never get together in a union either, John D., ’cause even one wildcat strike and it’ll all be over for the whole truckload of ya.
Now here,” reaching for his briefcase, pulling out paperwork of various shades and sizes, “is where I’m supposed to remind you about this concentric zone system we use at the U-Ops—anywhere outside a hundred-mile radius of Milwaukee City Hall, which would include parts of Chicago, we’ll need to charge you some extra.
Plus insurance billed weekly in advance, oh and there’s the hazardous-duty bonus?
if somebody turns out to be packing a firearm, for example… ”
Hicks is nodded on into a sub-parlor less vast but not quite intimate, tricked out with a cocktail bar, radio-Victrola console, telephones in gold-accented mother-of-pearl, modern art on the walls where the dames though possibly nude are lopsided in ways not easy to make sense of…
plus what seems to be an excessive number of electric lamps, floor and table models, far too many for a room even this size.
Some are unusual-looking, to say the least, and few if any in what you’d consider good taste—a disembodied nose with a light bulb in each nostril, a grinning Negro with a watermelon he is strangely leering at, assorted celebrities of politics, show business, and the criminal underworld misbehaving in ways somebody in the Airmont house must’ve found entertaining.
Mrs. Vivacia Airmont sweeps in, pretending to ignore Rodney and laying a hand noticeable for its lack of body temperature on Hicks’s sleeve, the one without the French reweave.
“The latest we’ve heard of my daughter, she’s in Chicago with this Hop Wingdale person and the dance band he plays in, the Klezmopolitans, about to go off to New York and then overseas on tour and for all I know irrevocably ‘gone hepcat,’ all night in the black-and-tans breathing that mentholated smoke, running tabs that always end up being sent to me, sums the plutocrat of your choice couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at, and the press coverage!
—class traitor, baby gun moll, this and worse, no delusions herself about what she’s become, and only a rough idea how it happened.
She’s lost her grip but she’s still my daughter, for heaven’s sake, she needs to be rescued from that milieu. ”
“Our sympathy, we’ll sure do what we can, which ought to be plenty…”
“I only wish she’d come back home, and if she’s still skating by on looks, well good for her and let’s hope she’s also been investing wisely—California real estate, for example, these Arabian oil wells one keeps hearing about…
but don’t mind me, getting sentimental these days…
yes, li’l Daffodil,” slipping into a sort of ballad tempo, “I’m beaming my thoughts to you by telepathy, wherever you are, how near yet oh so far…
And you know what she answers? ‘Uh-huh, spare us those tears, Mother, God bless ’em, but gimme knockout drops any day. ’ ”
This sort of thing in a movie would have Hicks reaching for the Kleenex, but out here in the daylight of normal civilian hypocrisy and fraud, having by now gained a dim idea of when and when not to dummy up, he finds it more helpful, as the Gumshoe’s Manual advises time and again, to try and appear professional, already knowing it’s no use, he’s in the soup once again and his job will be to get in the way of and absorb any violence that might arise, as if there’s some Private Dick Oath like the one doctors take, with a no-harm clause, which there isn’t.