Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [5]
I scarfed my last burger, flipped on KUSC and sat back. The music was early baroque, a harpsichord trio; nice, but without passion. I listened anyway. Baroque can send you off on a nice little cloud, conducive to quiet thoughts, and I was off on one of them when the doorbell rang. It couldn’t be the landlord, since I paid by the year. Probably a salesman. I got up and opened the door. The man standing there didn’t look like a salesman, he looked like a refugee from the Lincoln Heights drunk tank. “May I help you” I said.
“Probably,” the man replied, “if you’re a private detective and this is your office.”
“I am, and it is.” I pointed to the visitor’s chair. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me how I can help you.”
He sat, grudgingly, after checking out the furnishings. He was close to forty, and fat, maybe 5'6" or 7" and about 220. He was wearing ridiculous soiled madras slacks three inches too short in the leg, a tight alligator golf shirt that encased his blubbery torso like a sausage skin, and black and white saddle golfshoes with the cleats removed. He looked like a wino golfer out of hell.
“I thought private eyes was older guys, retired from the police force,” he said.
“I retired early,” I said. “They wouldn’t make me chief of police at twenty-five, so I told them to kiss my ass.” He got a bang out of that and started to laugh, kind of hysterically. “My name is Fritz Brown, by the way. What’s yours?”
“I’m Freddy Baker. You got the same initials as me. You can call me Fat Dog. It ain’t no insult, everybody calls me that. I like it.”
Fat Dog. Jesus. “Okay, Fat Dog. You can call me Fritz, or Mr. Brown, or Daddy-O. Now, why do you need a private investigator? Incidentally, the fee for my services is one hundred twenty-five dollars a day, plus expenses. Can you afford that?”
“I can afford that, and more. I may not look like no millionaire, but I’m holding heavy. I’ll whip some bread on you today, after I tell you what I want.” Fat Dog Baker bored into me with wild blue eyes, and said “It’s like this. I got this sister, my kid sister, Jane. She’s the only family I got. Our folks is dead. For a long time now she’s been staying with this rich guy. A Jewish guy. He’s old; he don’t try no sex stuff with her—it ain’t like that—he just supports her and I never see her no more. This guy, he don’t want her to have nothing to do with me. He pays for her music lessons, and Janey, my own sister, shines me on like I’m a piece of shit!” His voice had risen to a shout. He was sweating in the air-conditioned room and had clamped his hands around his thighs until his knuckles were white.
“What do you want me to do? Is your sister over eighteen?”
“Yeah, she’s twenty-eight. I wasn’t thinking about hanging no morals rap on him, I just know he’s not right somehow! Somewhere, somehow, he’s using my sister for something. She won’t believe me, she won’t even talk to me! You could follow her, couldn’t you? Follow him, tail him around town, check out what he’s into? He’s fucking her around somehow, and I want to know what’s happening.”
I decided not to pass it up. I could work it in on my offtime from the repo’s. I liked the idea of a surveillance job. It sounded like an interesting change of pace.
“Okay, Fat Dog, I’ll do it. I’ll tail your sister and this nameless bad guy. We’ll give it a week. I’ll dig up all I can. But first, I need some more information.” I got out a pen and a notebook. “Your sister’s name is Jane Baker and she’s twenty-eight years old, right?”
“Right.”
“Have you got a photograph of her?” Fat Dog got out an old hand-tooled wallet and handed me a snapshot. Jane Baker was a good-looking woman. There was humor in her mouth and intelligence in her eyes. She looked like the antithesis of her fat brother. When I put the photo in my desk drawer, Fat Dog looked at me suspiciously, like he had just handed