Violent Ward

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Get the Fire Department, and tell them to make it snappy or they’ll be hosing her off the sidewalk.’

‘You should not talk that way,’ Miss Huth said, with a sniff, and cut me off before I could reply. I hung up so gently it didn’t make a sound.

I looked through the kneehole of the desk so that I could see the window. The woman was still there, fidgeting around, trying to look down into the street below her. This would happen today of all days. My new boss, the mighty Zachary Petrovitch – el supremo, ichi-ban, tycoon extraordinaire – was spending a few days at his Los Angeles mansion so he could be guest of honor at the ‘surprise party’ his minions had been planning for weeks. Petrovitch wanted his own little law firm here in the city, and he was bringing to this partnership something it had never had before – money. By putting one of his tame in-house lawyers behind Korea Charlie’s empty desk he’d found a legal way of getting control of a law practice. It had been decreed that I should be at his party tonight, tugging my forelock and bowing low and telling everyone how grateful I was to become a toiler ant in the Petrovitch zoo.

The phone buzzed and I snatched it up. It was Miss Huth again. ‘The people from Graham’s builders’ discount store have come out into the street; they are all staring up here, Mr Murphy.’

‘So?’

‘I thought you would wish to know.’

‘What did the Fire Department say?’

‘They’ve put me on hold,’ she said.

‘On hold?’

‘I’ve got them on the other line. They asked was it a fire, and I said no, it was not a fire.’

‘Well, that’s dandy. I’ll throw a lighted cigar butt into the shredder basket, and then maybe they’ll discuss the possibility of dropping by sometime.’

‘They are on the line now!’ she said urgently and cut me off again. I had to crouch real low to see properly. The woman outside my window was still shifting her ass about. Maybe the rubbernecks in the street thought she was getting ready to throw herself off the ledge, but I had my reasons for guessing that she was getting a cramp in the gluteus maximus and moving around to be more comfortable.

There was a tapping noise – imperious and persistent – on the frosted glass panel. It was Miss Huth, making a menacing shadow against the whitened glass with just her fringed hair and beady eyes peeping over it. She signaled to tell me that I’d put the phone down without putting it properly on the hook. I picked it up and she said, ‘They are coming. The firemen. They are coming – right away.’

‘I should hope so.’ There was the sound of a siren, but it grew fainter and went north up Western Avenue toward Hollywood. ‘Maybe I could use that cup of coffee,’ I told her. ‘If you put it on the mat inside the door, I’ll crawl over and pull it toward me.’

‘I don’t see what good you think you’re doing sitting there on the floor, Mr Murphy.’ She was peering over the frosted glass again; I could hear it in her voice.

‘I’m trying not to alarm her.’

‘The firemen will arrive and the woman will see them, won’t she? Why don’t you get up and go over and talk with her?’

‘And if she jumps, I take the blame? You come in and talk to her. Maybe you’ve got an insight into the motivation of women who jump off ledges.’

She let that one go and busied herself with placing two tall polystyrene cups on the mat, together with a Bear Claw on a paper napkin. I’d ordered one coffee and an almond croissant; the Bear Claws were too big and had brightly colored strawberry jelly inside, and I didn’t like them. The little old Vietnamese guy who had taken over Tony’s Deli employed his relatives, and some of them couldn’t understand a word of English. When Big Tony and his brother ran that place, Tonichinos – large cappuccinos to go – had froth you could cut with a knife. Now it withered and died within five minutes; I guess the Vietnamese didn’t understand the froth machine. Even so, Tony’s Deli still made the best cappuccinos in this part of town. Thank God those guys had passed on the recipe to their successor, because I was hooked on them.

Gently I pulled the mat over and grabbed the coffees. They were still warm; I savored them. Sitting there on the Persian carpet, the final sixteen payments for which had now been underwritten by our new owner, gave me a chance to reflect on the arrangements for the party that night. It had to go well. I needed the money, really needed it.

Before I’d finished the second cup of coffee I heard a siren coming along Olympic. I looked under the desk to see the window. The woman outside must have heard it too, for she was slowly and painfully getting up. First she brought one foot up onto the ledge, then she was kneeling there. Finally, moving like someone terrified of heights, she stood up and leaned back against the window, with both arms pressed flat against the glass. She was wearing an expensive light-weight tweed pants suit and a gold and blue Hermès scarf around her head, the kind of outfit a choosy woman would need to throw herself out of a Los Angeles window in springtime. I watched her cautious movements with great interest. Considering the way she’d been acting out there on the ledge, enjoying all the motions of a would-be suicide, she was certainly taking great pains now to make sure she didn’t lose her balance.

I went across the room. She had her back to me now. I slid the window up and said, ‘For God’s sake come on in.’

She swung her head around and stared at me with hate in her eyes. ‘Did you send for the Fire Department?’ She coughed to clear her throat. Her cheeks had reddened; I could see she was cold. Maybe that was why she’d decided to come in.

‘Why me?’ I said. ‘Any one of those people down there might have sent for them. The whole neighborhood’s been watching you.’ This was one of the few tall buildings in a street of one-story shacks; everyone could see her. ‘Come in!’

‘You’re a shit,’ she said, and moved suddenly, swinging her feet into the room with commendable dexterity. Spotting the polystyrene cups on the mat, she went across to get a hot drink. Finding that both cups were empty, she tossed them across the room with a violence that made me shudder. She didn’t seem to fancy the Bear Claw; I suppose it was the strawberry jelly. She made for the door.

‘The Fire Chief is going to be asking you some questions,’ I called after her.

‘You answer them, you goddamned lawyer,’ she yelled. ‘You’ve always got an answer for everything!’ She slammed out through the door that leads to the back stairs, just as the sirens were dying outside in the street. She knew the way to the back entrance; it was the way she got in.

The next moment the whole room was filled with burly men in shiny oilskin coats, rubber boots, and yellow helmets. They were mad at me. ‘How is it my fault?’ I yelled back at them. ‘You let her get away.’

‘Where’d she come from?’ said a burly fire fighter, picking up the Bear Claw and chewing a piece out of it.

‘How should I know where she came from? Maybe she escaped from the zoo.’

‘You called in and said this was an emergency,’ said a rat-faced little guy who seemed to be the chief. He smelled of metal polish and mint digestive tablets.

‘Is that so? Did I interrupt a poker game or something? What am I supposed to do when someone comes into my office and wants to leap out of the window, get an entertainment license?’

The burly one tossed the remains of the Bear Claw into the wastebasket, where it landed with a loud clang. No wonder they give me indigestion: toss away an almond croissant and it makes only a soft swoosh.

Maybe if I’d been a little more diplomatic, Ratface wouldn’t have turned nasty and sent two of his men to search out violations of the Fire Department Code. ‘You should have been doing that before your own block burned down,’ I said. But these guys were young kids; they hadn’t been with the department long enough to remember that scandal. Finally Ratface came up with a clipboard reading aloud what he said were twenty-two infringements. ‘The fire escape is rusty,’ he said, jabbing at the clipboard with his finger.

‘We just ran out of Brillo,’ I said. I looked over his shoulder and read the sheet. Most of the faults were minor ones, but it looked like someone was going to have to renew the sprinkler system, put up new smoke detectors, and install some kind of fire doors. If I knew anything about the small print in the lease, it wasn’t going to be my rapacious landlord, but no matter. It wasn’t my pigeon. Two months earlier, the bottom line on that kind of work might have been enough to bankrupt me, but now it was just something to pass on to the new owner: the mighty Petrovitch. ‘These old firetraps should be torn down,’ said the guy who didn’t like Bear Claws to his buddy. ‘The whole block should be flattened. It’s just a shantytown.’

‘We can’t all live in Bel Air, buddy.’

After they all trooped out, I examined the carpet and the dirty marks that their boots had left. The carpet needed cleaning anyway, but the extra stains were not going to help me when Zachary Petrovitch came to see what kind of premises he was getting for his money.

When at last I was free to sit down behind my desk and leaf through all the work outstanding, I found there was plenty to do. A new client, hooray. A one-time soap star, drunk and resisting arrest. It took me a minute to recognize her name; there is no limbo more bleak than the oblivion to which the soapers go. Then there were two movie scripts, one dog-eared and the other pristine. This client was a writer – a nice intelligent guy until now – who had worked himself up into a roaring frenzy about a movie that was being made by a producer he used to work with. He wanted me to read the two scripts and sue the production company for plagiarism. Plagiarism! He must be living on another planet. Start seeking injunctions for that kind of larceny and Hollywood would slither to a complete standstill. Did he think those guys with the Armani suits could write connecting the letters just because they had Montblanc fountain pens? Original ideas?

None of it was more urgent than the red box file marked Sir Jeremy Westbridge. A lawyer gets used to the idea that most of his clients are on a course of self-destruction, but this Brit was something else. Every mail delivery brought word of some new and more terrible misdeed. I could see no way of keeping him out of prison, it was just a matter of whether he got ten or twenty years. The only consolation was that he had me on retainer and paid up like a sweetheart. How did I ever get into this crock? When I left high school I had everything set for a career as a car thief.

Dumping the whole stack of work back into the tray, I found myself looking at that damned window ledge, so finally I decided to go see Danny. I picked up the phone and told Miss Huth, ‘I have to see my son.’

‘No. You have an appointment at eleven-thirty.’

‘Cancel it.’

‘It’s far too late to do that, Mr Murphy. It is already eleven-twenty-two.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Mr Byron.’ She purred: she recognized his name. Women always knew his name. Budd Byron was now old enough for his early shows to be on daytime runs.

‘Oh,’ I said. I guess his old shows were on TV in Germany too.

‘I think he’s here,’ she said, and I heard the outer door buzz. ‘Shall I show him in?’ I could hear the emotion in her voice. No woman could catch sight of Budd Byron without losing her emotional equilibrium.

‘Yes, do that, Miss Huth … Budd! It’s good to see you.’ Budd was slim and tanned. He came into my office with the kind of cool, calm confidence of General MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines, Newton demonstrating the force of gravity, or Al Capone denying that he owed income tax.

Budd had been a college classmate; you maybe would not have guessed that from the hellos. Budd has a certain sort of Hollywood formality. He fixed me with a sincere look and gripped my hand tight while giving my upper arm a slap: a California salutation.

‘You’re looking great,’ I said. ‘Great.’ He was wearing Oxford brogues, custom-made gray-flannel slacks, and a jacket of Harris tweed, the heavy sort of garment worn in the winter months by Southern California’s native male population. His shirt was tapered and his collar gold-pinned to secure the tight knot of a blue-and-red-striped Brooks Brothers silk tie. The effect was of a prosperous young banker. It was the look many Hollywood actors were adopting now that so many of the bankers were going around in bleached denim and cowboy boots.