Stephen King - Umney's Last Case

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Stephen King "Umney's Last Case"

The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood

hills you can see snow on the high

mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that

specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins

are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are

beginning to bloom.

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

I. The News from Peoria.

It was one of those spring mornings so L.A.-perfect you keep expecting to see that

little trademark

symbol--(R)--stamped on it somewhere. The exhaust of the vehicles passing on Sunset

smelled faintly of oleander, the

oleander was lightly perfumed with exhaust, and the sky overhead was as clear as a

hardshell Baptist's conscience.

Peoria Smith, the blind paperboy, was standing in his accustomed place on the corner

of Sunset and Laurel, and if that

didn't mean God was in His heaven and all was jake with the world, I didn't know what

did.

Yet since I'd swung my feet out of bed that morning at the unaccustomed hour of 7:30

a.m., things had felt a little

off-kilter, somehow; a tad woozy around the edges. It was only as I was shaving --or

at least showing those pesky

bristles the razor in an effort to scare them into submission--that I realized part

of the reason why. Although I'd been

up reading until at least two, I hadn't heard the Demmicks roll in, squiffed to the

earlobes and trading those snappy

one-liners that apparently form the basis of their marriage.

Nor had I heard Buster, and that was maybe even odder. Buster, the Demmicks' Welsh

Corgi, has a high-pitched bark

that goes through your head like slivers of glass, and he uses it as much as he can.

Also, he's the jealous type. He lets

loose with one of his shrill barking squalls every time George and Gloria clinch, and

when they aren't zinging each

other like a couple of vaudeville comedians, George and Gloria usually are clinching.

I've gone to sleep on more than

one occasion listening to them giggle while that mutt prances around their feet going

yarkyarkyark and wondering how

difficult it would be to strangle a muscular, medium-sized dog with a length of

piano-wire. Last night, however, the

Demmicks' apartment had been as quiet as the grave. It was passing strange, but a

long way from earth-shattering; the

Demmicks weren't exactly your perfect life-on-a-timetable couple at the best of

times.

Peoria Smith was all right, though--chipper as a chipmunk, just as always, and he'd

recognized me by my walk even

though it was at least an hour before my usual time. He was wearing a baggy CalTech

sweatshirt that came down to his

thighs and a pair of corduroy knickers that showed off his scabby knees. His hated

white cane leaned casually against

the side of the card-table he did business on.

``Say, Mr. Umney! Howza kid?''

Peoria's dark glasses glinted in the morning sunlight, and as he turned toward the

sound of my step with my copy of the

L.A. Times held up in front of him, I had a momentary unsettling thought: it was as

if someone had drilled two big

black holes into his face. I shivered the thought off my back, thinking that maybe

the time had come to cut out the

before-bedtime shot of rye. Either that or double the dose.

Hitler was on the front of the Times, as he so often was these days. This time it was

something about Austria. I thought,

and not for the first time, how at home that pale face and limp forelock would have

looked on a post-office bulletin

board.

``The kid is just about okay, Peoria,'' I said. ``In fact, the kid is as fine as

fresh paint on an outhouse wall.''

I dropped a dime into the Corona box resting atop Peoria's stack of newspapers. The

Times is a three-center, and

over-priced at that, but I've been dropping that same chip into Peoria's change-box

since time out of mind. He's a good

kid, and making good grades in school--I took it on myself to check that last year,

after he'd helped me out on the

Weld case. If Peoria hadn't shown up on Harris Brunner's houseboat when he did, I'd

still be trying to swim with my

feet cemented into a kerosene drum, somewhere off Malibu. To say I owe him a lot is

an understatement.

In the course of that particular investigation (Peoria Smith, not Harris Brunner and

Mavis Weld), I even found out the

kid's real name, although wild horses wouldn't have dragged it out of me. Peoria's

father took a permanent

coffee-break out a ninth-floor office window on Black Friday, his mother's the only

white frail working in that goofy

Chinese laundry down on La Punta, and the kid's blind. With all that, does the world

need to know they hung Francis on

him when he was too young to fight back? The defense rests.

If anything really juicy happened the night before, you almost always find it on the

front page of the Times, left side,

just below the fold. I turned the newspaper over and saw that a bandleader of the

Cuban persuasion had suffered a heart

attack while dancing with his female vocalist at The Carousel in Burbank. He died an

hour later at L.A. General. I had

some sympathy for the maestro's widow, but none for the man himself. My opinion is

that people who go dancing in

Burbank deserve what they get.

I opened to the sports section to see how Brooklyn had done in their doubleheader

with the Cards the day before. ``How

about you, Peoria? Everyone holding their own in your castle? Moats and battlements

all in good repair?''

``I'll say, Mr. Umney! Oh, boy!''

Something in his voice caught my attention, and I lowered the paper to take a closer

look at him. When I did, I saw

what a gilt-edged shamus like me should have seen right away: the kid was all but

busting with happiness.

``You look like somebody just gave you six tickets to the first game of the World

Series,'' I said. ``What's the buzz,

Peoria?''

``My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana!'' he said. ``Forty thousand bucks! We're

rich, brother! Rich!''

I gave him a grin he couldn't see and ruffled his hair. It popped his cowlick up, but

what the hell. ``Whoa, hold the

phone. How old are you, Peoria?''

``Twelve in May. You know that, Mr. Umney, you gave me a polo-shirt. But I don't see

what that has to do with--''

``Twelve's old enough to know that sometimes people get what they want to happen

mixed up with what actually does

happen. That's all I meant.''

``If you're talkin about daydreams, you're right--I do know all about em,'' Peoria

said, running his hands over the back

of his head in an effort to make his cowlick lie down again, ``but this ain't no

daydream, Mr. Umney. It's real! My

Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest'y afternoon. He brought it back in

the saddlebag of his Vinnie! I

smelled it! Hell, I rolled in it! It was spread all over my mom's bed! Richest

feeling I ever had, let me tell you--

forty-froggin-thousand smackers!''

``Twelve may be old enough to know the difference between daydreams and what's real,

but it's not old enough for that

kind of talk,'' I said. It sounded good--I'm sure the Legion of Decency would have

approved two thousand per

cent--but my mouth was running on automatic pilot, and I barely heard what was coming

out of it. I was too busy

trying to get my brain wrapped around what he'd just told me. Of one thing I was

absolutely positive: he'd made a

mistake. He must have made a mistake, because if it was true, then Peoria wouldn't be

standing here anymore when I

came by on my way to my office in the Fulwider Building. And that just couldn't be.

I found my mind returning to the Demmicks, who for the first time in recorded history

hadn't played any of their

big-band records at full volume before retiring, and to Buster, who for the first

time in recorded history hadn't greeted

the sound of George's latchkey turning in the lock with a fusillade of barks. The

thought that something was off-kilter

returned, and it was stronger this time.

Meanwhile, Peoria was looking at me with an expression I'd never expected to see on

his honest, open face: sulky

irritation mixed with exasperated humor. It was the way a kid looks at a windbag

uncle who's told all his stories, even

the boring ones, three or four times.

``Ain't you picking up on this newsflash, Mr. Umney? We're rich! My mom ain't going

to have to press shirts for that

damned old Lee Ho anymore, and I ain't going to have to sell papers on the corner

anymore, shiverin when it rains in

the winter and havin to suck up to those nutty old bags who work down at Bilder's. I

can quit actin like I died and went

to heaven every time some blowhard leaves me a nickel tip.''

I started a little at that, but what the hell--I wasn't a nickel man. I left Peoria

seven cents, day in and day out. Unless I

was too broke to afford it, of course, but in my business an occasional stony stretch

comes with the territory.

``Maybe we ought to go up to Blondie's and have a cup of java,'' I said. ``Talk this

thing over.''

``Can't. It's closed.''

``Blondie's? The hell you say!''

But Peoria couldn't be bothered with such mundane stuff as the coffee shop up the

street. ``You ain't heard the best, Mr.

Umney! My Uncle Fred knows a doctor up in Frisco--a specialist--who thinks he can do

something about my eyes.''

He turned his face up to mine. Below the cheaters and his too-thin nose, his lips

were trembling. ``He says it might not

be the optic nerves after all, and if it's not, there's an operation . . . I don't

understand all the technical stuff, but I could

see again, Mr. Umney!'' He reached out for me blindly . . . well, of course he did.

How else could he reach out? ``I

could see again!''

He clutched at me, and I gripped his hands and squeezed them briefly before pushing

them gently away. There was ink

on his fingers, and I'd been feeling so good when I got up that I'd put on my new

chalk worsted. Hot for summer, of

course, but the whole city is air- conditioned these days, and besides, I was feeling

naturally cool. I didn't feel so cool

now. Peoria was looking up at me, his thin and somehow perfect newsboy's face

troubled. A little breeze--scented

with oleander and exhaust--ruffled his cowlick, and I realized that I could see it

because he wasn't wearing his tweed

cap. He looked somehow naked without it, and why not? Every newsboy should wear a

tweed cap, just like every

shoeshine boy should wear a beanie cocked way back on his head.

``What's the matter, Mr. Umney? I thought you'd be happy. Jeepers, I didn't have to

come out here to this lousy corner

today, you know, but I did--I even got here early, because I kinda had an idea you'd

get here early. I thought you'd be

happy, my mom hittin the lottery and me gettin a chance at an operation, but you

ain't.'' Now his voice trembled with

resentment. ``You ain't!''

``Yes I am,'' I said, and I wanted to be happy--part of me did, anyway--but the bitch

of it was that he was mostly

right. Because it meant things would change, you see, and things weren't supposed to

change. Peoria Smith was

supposed to be right here, year in and year out, with that perfect cap of his tilted

back on hot days and pulled down low

on rainy ones, so that the raindrops dripped off the bill. He was always supposed to

be smiling, was never supposed to

say ``hell'' or ``frogging,'' and most of all, he was supposed to be blind.

``You ain't!'' he said, and then, shockingly, he pushed his card- table over. It fell

into the street, papers flapping

everywhere. His white cane rolled into the gutter. Peoria heard it go and bent down

to get it. I could see tears coming

out from beneath his dark glasses and go rolling down his pale, thin cheeks. He

started groping for the cane, but it had

fallen near me and he was going the wrong way. I felt a sudden strong urge to haul

off and kick him in his blind

newsboy's ass.

Instead, I bent over, got his stick, and tapped him lightly on the hip with it.

Peoria turned, quick as a snake, and snatched it. Out of the corner of my eye I could

see pictures of Hitler and the

recently deceased Cuban bandleader flapping all over Sunset Boulevard--a bus bound

for Van Ness snored through a

little drift of them, leaving a bitter tang of diesel fumes behind. I hated the way

those newspapers looked, fluttering

here and there. They looked messy. Worse, they looked wrong. Utterly and completely

wrong. I fought another urge, as

strong as the first one, to grab Peoria and shake him. To tell him he was going to

spend the morning picking up those

newspapers, and I wasn't going to let him go home until he'd gotten every last one.

It occurred to me that less than ten minutes ago, I'd been thinking that this was the

perfect L.A. morning--so perfect it

deserved a trademark symbol. And it had been, dammit. So where had things gone wrong?

And how had it happened so

fast?

No answers came, only an irrational but powerful voice from inside, telling me that

the kid's mother couldn't have won

the lottery, that the kid couldn't stop selling newspapers, and that, most of all,

the kid couldn't see. Peoria Smith was

supposed to be blind for the rest of his life.

Well, it's got to be something experimental, I thought. Even if the doctor up in

Frisco isn't a quack, and he probably is,

the operation's bound to fail.

And, bizarre as it sounds, the thought calmed me down.

``Listen,'' I said, ``we got off on the wrong foot this morning, that's all. Let me

make it up to you. We'll go down to

Blondie's and I'll buy you breakfast. What do you say, Peoria? You can dig into a

plate of bacon and eggs and tell me

all ab--''

``Fuck you!'' he shouted, shocking me all the way down to my shoes. ``Fuck you and

the horse you rode in on, you cheap

gumshoe! You think blind people can't tell when people like you are lying through

their teeth? Fuck you! And keep

your hands off me from now on! I think you're a faggot!''

That did it--no one calls me a faggot and gets away with it, not even a blind

newsboy. I forgot all about how Peoria

had saved my life during that Mavis Weld business; I reached for his cane, meaning to

take it away from him and

whack him across the keister with it a few times. Teach him some manners.

Before I could get it, though, he hauled off and slammed the cane's tip into my lower

belly--and I do mean lower. I

doubled up in agony, but even while I was trying to keep from howling with pain, I

was counting my blessings; two

inches lower still and I could have quit peeping for a living and gotten a job

singing soprano in the Palace of the Doges.

I made a quick, reflexive grab for him anyway, and he brought the cane down on the

back of my neck. Hard. It didn't

break, but I heard it crack. I figured I could finish the job when I caught him and

ran it into his right ear. I'd show him

who was a faggot.

He backed away from me as if he'd caught my brainwave, and threw the cane into the

street.

``Peoria,'' I managed. Maybe it still wasn't too late to catch sanity by the

shirttail. ``Peoria, what the hell's wrong

with--''

``And don't call me that!'' he screamed. ``My name's Francis! Frank! You're the one

who started calling me Peoria!

You started it and now everyone calls me that and I hate it!''

My watering eyes doubled him as he turned and fled across the street, heedless of

traffic (of which there was currently

none, luckily for him), hands held out in front of him. I thought he would trip over

the far curb--was looking forward

to it, in fact--but I guess blind people must keep a pretty good set of topographical

survey maps in their heads. He

jumped onto the sidewalk as nimbly as a goat, then turned his dark glasses back in my

direction. There was an

expression of crazed triumph on his tear-streaked face, and the dark lenses looked

more like holes than ever. Big ones,

as if someone had hit him with two large-caliber shotgun rounds.

``Blondie's is gone, I toldja!'' he screamed. ``My mom says he upped and ran away

with that redhead floozy he hired

last month! You should be so lucky, you ugly prick!''

He turned and went running up Sunset in that strange way of his, with his splayed

fingers held out in front of him.

People stood in little clusters on both sides of the street, looking at him, looking

at the papers fluttering in the street,

looking at me.

Mostly looking at me, it seemed.

This time Peoria--well, okay, Francis--made it as far as Derringer's Bar before

turning to deliver one final salvo.

``Fuck you, Mr. Umney!'' he screamed, and ran on.

_______________________________________________________________________

II. Vernon's Cough.

I managed to pull myself erect and make my way across the street. Peoria, aka Francis

Smith, was long gone, but I

wanted to put those blowing newspapers behind me, too. Looking at them was giving me

a headache that was somehow

worse than the ache in my groin.

On the far side of the street I stared into Felt's Stationery as if the new Parker

ball-point pen in the window was the

most fascinating thing I'd ever seen in my life (or maybe it was those sexy

imitation- leather appointment books).

After five minutes or so--time enough to commit every item in the dusty show-window

to memory--I felt capable of

resuming my interrupted voyage up Sunset without listing too noticeably to port.

Questions circled in my mind the way mosquitoes circle your head at the drive-in in

San Pedro when you forget to

bring along an insect stick or two. I was able to ignore most of them, but a couple

got through. First, what the hell had

gotten into Peoria? Second, what the hell had gotten into me? I kept slapping at

these uncomfortable queries until I got

to Blondie's City Eats, Open 24 Hrs, Bagels Our Specialty, on the corner of Sunset

and Travernia, and when I got that

far, they were driven out in a single wallop. Blondie's had been on that corner for

as long as I could remember--the

sharpies and the hustlers and the hipsters and the hypes going in and going out, not

to mention the debs, the dykes, and

the dopes. A famous silent-movie star was once arrested for murder as he was coming

out of Blondie's, and I myself

had concluded a nasty piece of business there not so long ago, shooting a coked-up

fashion-plate named Dunninger who

had killed three hopheads in the aftermath of a Hollywood dope party. It was also the

place where I'd said goodbye to

the silver-haired, violet-eyed Ardis McGill. I'd spent the rest of that lost night

walking in a rare Los Angeles fog

which might have only been behind my eyes . . . and trickling down my cheeks, by the

time the sun came up.

Blondie's closed? Blondie's gone? Impossible, you would have said-- more likely that

the Statue of Liberty should

have disappeared from her barren lick of rock in New York Harbor.

Impossible but true. The window which had once held a mouth-watering selection of

pies and cakes was soaped over,

but the job had been done indifferently, and I could see a nearly empty room through

the stripes. The lino looked filthy

and barren. The grease-darkened blades of the overhead fans hung down like the

propellers of crashed airplanes. There

were a few tables left, and six or eight of the familiar red-upholstered chairs piled

on them with the legs sticking up,

but that was all . . . except for a couple of empty sugar- shakers tumbled in one

corner.

I stood there trying to get it into my head, and it was like trying to get a big sofa

up a narrow flight of stairs. All that

life and excitement, all that late-night hustle and surprise--how could it be ended?

It didn't seem like a mistake; it

seemed like a blasphemy. For me Blondie's had summed up all the glittering

contradictions that surround L.A.'s

essentially dark and loveless heart; I had sometimes thought Blondie's was L.A. as I

had known it over the last fifteen

or twenty years, only drawn small. Where else could you see a mobster eating

breakfast at 9:00 p.m. with a priest, or a

diamond-decked glamorpuss sitting on a counter-stool next to a grease-monkey

celebrating the end of his shift with a

hot cup of java? I suddenly found myself thinking of the Cuban bandleader and his

heart attack again, this time with

considerably more sympathy.

All that fabulous starry City of Lost Angels life--do you get it, chum? Are you

picking up this newsflash?

The sign hung in the door read CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON, but I didn't

believe it. Empty

sugar-shakers lying in the corner do not, in my experience, indicate renovations in

progress. Peoria had been right:

Blondie's was history. I turned away and went on up the street, but now I walked

slowly and had to consciously order

my head to stay up. As I approached the Fulwider Building, where I've kept an office

for more years than I like to think

about, an odd certainty gripped me. The handles of the big double doors would be

wrapped up in a thick tow-chain and

held with a padlock. The glass would be soaped over in indifferent stripes. And there

would be a sign reading CLOSED

FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON.

By the time I reached the building, this nutty idea had taken over my mind with the

force of a compulsion, and not even

the sight of Bill Tuggle, the rummy CPA from the third floor, going inside could

quite dispel it. But seeing is

believing, they say, and when I got to 2221, I saw no chain, no sign, and no soap on

the glass. It was just the Fulwider,

the same as ever. I went into the lobby, smelled the familiar odor--it reminds me of

the pink cakes they put in the

urinals of public men's rooms these days--and glanced around at the same ratty palm

trees overhanging the same faded

red tile floor.

Bill was standing next to Vernon Klein, world's oldest elevator operator, in Car 2.

In his frayed red suit and ancient

pillbox hat, Vernon looks like a cross between the Philip Morris bellboy and a rhesus

monkey which has fallen into an

industrial steam-cleaning machine. He looked up at me with his mournful basset-hound

eyes, which were watering

from the Camel pasted in the middle of his mouth. His peepers should have gotten used

to the smoke years ago; I

couldn't remember ever having seen him without a Camel parked in that same position.

Bill moved over a little, but not far enough. There wasn't room enough in the car for

him to move far enough. I'm not

sure there would have been room in Rhode Island for him to move far enough. Delaware,

maybe. He smelled like

bologna which has spent a year or so marinating in cheap bourbon. And just when I

thought it couldn't get any worse, he

belched.

``Sorry, Clyde.''

``Well, you certainly ought to be,'' I said, waving the air in front of my face as

Vern slid the gate across the front of the

car and prepared to fly us to the moon . . . or at least to the seventh floor. ``What

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Stephen King - Umney's Last Case

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