The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page B

him.
    The guy behind the counter was fat, in his fifties, and unimpressed by either of us.
    I shook Pinketts’s hand and sat across from him in the booth.
    “Coffee?” he asked.
    “A gallon,” I said.
    Pinketts waved at the fat guy behind the counter.
    “Coffees,” Pinketts called. “And I’m a bit hungry. Let us try the fried-chicken special, a double coleslaw, mashed potatoes, and your homemade apple pie.”
    “Not for me,” I said. “Just coffee.”
    Up close, Pinketts was definitely six years older and at least six years shabbier. The scarf around his neck was just about out of life and color, and I had the feeling it was draped carefully to cover some rough spots in the jacket.
    “You look much the same, my old partner in arms,” he said.
    “I look older,” I said. “I cut the sideburns so the gray shows a little less and I check the mirror every morning to see if I still look tough or look like a bum trying to look tough.”
    “In this business,” Pinketts said, welcoming the cups of coffee placed in front of us by the fat counterman, “we gamble, amigo. Our appearance, our reputation. We are mariners in a sea of troubled lives.”
    The fat guy walked away.
    “That Andy?” I asked.
    “There is no Andy,” said Pinketts. “Andy is Andy Gump, the cartoon character. Paramount once considered a series, live, not animated. Lots of publicity. A woman who later went back to Houston, Texas, had a cartoon of Andy Gump painted on a sign and hung over this shop. A few tourists came, but the bread-and-butter workers at Paramount stayed away until the sign came down.”
    “A Hollywood story,” I said, downing most of my first cup of coffee and hoping it would bring me back to the land of the living.
    “A Hollywood story,” he said. “One of the sad, the comic thousands of stories. Now, I have told you a story and you have bought my attention with the price of a meal. Business.”
    I hadn’t promised Pinketts a meal, but I nodded. “The record,” I said.
    “Record?”
    “The one we did of Ham Nelson blackmailing Howard Hughes and Bette Davis,” I reminded him.
    Pinketts leaned forward to look at me over the tops of his dark glasses.
    “History,” he said. “You were paid.”
    “I’m not after more money. I want to know what you did with it.”
    “I sold it for far, far too little to a dealer. I might as well tell you, since I cannot share with you what I have long since spent. I got ten thousand dollars. Invested it in an office and a starlet wife, a golden creature of Amazonian proportions and beauty. It was amazing how quickly both she and the money vanished.”
    “I spent my two hundred dollars on pink teeth. Who did you sell it to?” I asked.
    Pinketts removed the thin cigar from his mouth, drank some coffee, and regarded me for a full minute.
    “What will I earn for giving you this valuable information?”
    “Four thousand nine hundred and eighty dollars. My share of the sale of that recording minus the two hundred.”
    “Ah, but that is all money in the past. An additional five hundred dollars in the present …”
    “One hundred dollars and maybe some night work at twenty a day for keeping an eye on Bette Davis.”
    Pinketts thought about the offer for two whole seconds.
    “Cash?”
    “The hundred right here and now,” I said, reaching for my wallet.
    He held out his hand and I counted out five twenties.
    “Grover Niles,” he said.
    “Grover Ni … The agent?”
    “The agent,” said Pinketts. “He paid in cash for the record, and I walked away and did not look back.”
    “Did you tell Niles I knew about the recording?” I asked.
    “What possible reason would I?…”
    “You told him,” I said.
    “I told him,” Pinketts agreed, tilting his head back to blow smoke at the ceiling. “But that was long ago, another life. What difference does it make now?”
    “Someone who knows I was with you on that job wants to sell the record to Bette Davis’s husband,” I