The Stiff Upper Lip Read online

“I don’t know her,” he answered.

  “Or him?”

  There was a mirror behind the bar, and I could see the card players watching me through it while pretending not to.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not the police. I’m not even French. I just want to talk to her. I was a friend of Odessa Grimes, the black man.”

  I said it loud enough for the whole bar to hear, but nobody answered, and when I turned toward them, the card players looked the other way.

  Your friendly neighborhood saloon, in sum.

  I sipped at the wine. It had a taste that would have taken some acquiring. The card game stopped and the conversation died off. The only noise was that lovesick singsong from the jukebox, and the bartender stared at me with the patient, unseeing stare his people had learned when the French invaded the Casbah. Odessa Grimes had been murdered; his sweetie pie had known about it. Roscoe Hadley had been shacked up with her at the time, and the first inkling he’d had of what had happened was when he’d started worrying about Odessa coming back and finding them between the sheets.

  Because Marie-Josèphe had told him not to worry, that Odessa wouldn’t be coming back.

  Which had driven Roscoe Hadley out of his skull, or at least out into the streets.

  According to Roscoe Hadley.

  A fly crawled across my change.

  I sipped some more wine, and the fly flew off. The bartender’s eyes flicked away from mine, then blandly returned, and there was a sudden burst of conversation from the table behind me.

  Not much of a signal, but enough of a one.

  I went out through the plastic curtain in a hurry, leaving the Allah-worshipers to fight over my change.

  “Mlle. Lamentin!” I yelled after her. “Marie-Josèphe!”

  It’s funny how often oversized studs team up with little bits of women. By Parisian standards Marie-Josèpbe Lamentin wasn’t that small, but even in the three-inch heels she wore, she couldn’t have come up to Odessa’s Adam’s apple. In respects other than the center jump, though, she looked like she could more than hold her own. Her calves were thin but muscular, her tight-skirted ass had an independent strut. Her make-up was heavy and gray on the lips, and her lower lip protruded in that perpetual thick pout characteristic of the girls from down Pointe-à-Pitre way.

  Maybe she heard me call her, but she didn’t stop. I caught up with her in the inner courtyard.

  “Marie-Josèphe,” I repeated, taking her arm.

  She half-turned, not seeing, then yanked her arm free and headed into the second entryway.

  “It’s too early,” she said in an annoyed hiss. “Go away. I’m busy.”

  “I only want to talk to you. I’m a friend of Roscoe’s. Of Odessa’s too.”

  “Idiot!” she said, shaking free again. “I’m busy, can’t you see?”

  She started up the stairs. I followed, to the independent beguine of her behind.

  I caught up with the rest of her at her landing. She fumbled in her bag for her key, then opened the door and went inside.

  I followed.

  The apartment was one room with a slanting, dirt-smudged skylight. Some plants hung from pots mounted on the walls, but otherwise the furnishings were nondescript. The bed was the principal object. It was covered with a large, multi-colored, India-cotton spread.

  “All right, then,” said Marie-Josèphe, turning to me. “But it will cost you double.”

  “How much is double?”

  “Two hundred francs.”

  “I only want to talk to you.”

  “Talk or make love, it’s all the same. Two hundred francs.”

  I gave her the money. She kicked off her shoes and wriggled out of her skirt. She had nothing on under the skirt. She curled her body on the bedspread, her legs tucked under her, her blouse still on, and shook loose her black, curly hair and stared out in front of her, not at me, in a pose that was smoky, sullen, full-lipped. Her skin was the color of café au lait.

  “You go in for plants,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I said: You seem to go in for plants.”

  “Is that what you want to talk about?”

  “No. It’s just something I wouldn’t have expected of Odessa’s girl friend.” She didn’t react. “You are Odessa Grimes’ girl friend, aren’t you?”

  “I knew him.”

  “You know what happened to him, then?”

  “Yes.” Matter-of-factly.

  “You don’t seem particularly grieved about it.”

  She didn’t disagree, or agree either. She just shrugged a little.

  “He did this to me,” she said. With an index finger, she pulled the skin taut under one eye, and bending over her, I could see what the heavy make-up largely hid: red welts on the cheekbone and, above, the remnants of a black eye.

  “Did he beat you up a lot?’”

  “When he felt like it.”

  “When did he feel like it?”

  She shrugged again, a dull, uncaring gesture.

  “When you messed around with other men? Like Roscoe Hadley?”

  The name brought a trace of smile to the corners of her mouth.

  “He’s sweet, Roscoe.”

  “Is that why Odessa beat you up? Because you were messing around with Roscoe?”

  “I wasn’t messing around with Roscoe.”

  “That’s not what he says. What about yesterday, for instance?” She didn’t answer, though more from lassitude, you’d have said, than from having anything to hide. “Wasn’t Roscoe here yesterday? From, say, the late morning till the middle of the afternoon?”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “I didn’t see Roscoe all day yesterday.” Tonelessly.

  “Listen, Marie-Josèphe. This is important. Roscoe says he came here yesterday morning to pick Odessa up. Only Odessa had already left. And one thing led to another and he ended up balling you till the middle of the afternoon. Isn’t that the truth?”

  “I didn’t see Roscoe all day yesterday.”

  It wasn’t just what she said but the way she said it: that vague and smoky-voiced refrain. I reached for her arm, as though by accident, but she shifted toward the center of the bed.

  As though by accident.

  “Don’t you realize that by saying that you’re getting Roscoe into a hell of a lot of trouble? You knew Odessa was going to get it, didn’t you? Did you also know they were going to finger Roscoe for it? But Roscoe wasn’t there, Marie-Josèphe. He didn’t kill anybody. He was here, with you. You’re his alibi. But lest you forget, he’s yours too.”

  This didn’t seem to fluster her, not in the slightest. She shrugged again.

  “Didn’t you tell me you weren’t a cop?” she said.

  “I didn’t tell you anything. My name’s Cage. Here’s my card.”

  I took one out of my wallet and reached it toward her. But I went past the card and grabbed for her arm. She tried to yank away. Then, caught, she became a bundle of twisting muscle. She thrashed like a trapped cat and cursed and carved wildly at my face with her free hand.

  I caught the free hand and pinned her against me. She was on her knees on the bed, held fast, and her hair spun and flailed at my eyes, her teeth flashed, and her body contracted into a single muscle, sprung, contracted, sprung. I held on, forcing her head back with my own. She had a cheap, animal smell, and I could feel her body beating like a pulse, and the beat came inside me and did a high-assed beguine down into my scrotum.

  She felt me go hard. It made her giggle, softly.

  “I’ll suck you if you like,” I heard her say softly. “Anything you like.”

  I held on. After a while I felt her subside, go dead, limp. Then I pulled one sleeve of her blouse up past the elbow, found what I was looking for, then released her and stood clear.

  “Is that why Odessa beat you up?” I said.

  She stayed on her knees, rocking a little. Her arms were folded, and her hands rubbed at the inner elb
ows. Rubbed hard, like they could make the needle marks go away. And the smoke went in and out of her eyes and nobody had lit a match.

  I repeated the question.

  She seemed to hear it this time. It made her laugh, a high-pitched mulatto laugh, the kind that’s got sass and chagrin mixed up in it. It didn’t last long.

  “Odessa beat me up?” she said. “That man beat me up when I didn’t!”

  “You mean he was supplying you with dope?”

  “Supplying? Yeah. That man was supplying me with everything. Everything I needed, everything I didn’t.”

  “And now that he’s gone?”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead, Marie-Josèphe. Odessa’s dead, remember? Murdered.”

  “Yeah. Don’t need that man. Never did need him.”

  “Who killed him, Marie-Josèphe? Why was he killed? Who got you to keep Roscoe here yesterday while Odessa got his?”

  “He’s sweet, Roscoe,” she crooned, gray-lipped.

  “You sure freaked the hell out of him, Marie-Josèphe. When he lit out of here yesterday, it was a wonder he didn’t get run over in the street. Or was that the idea?”

  She looked up at me. Suddenly the smoke was gone from her eyes. It didn’t become her.

  “I told him to run, M’sieu,” she said. “I can’t help him. I told him to run away.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Marie-Josèphe. Sooner or later the police are going to ask you the same questions. They won’t be as nice as I am, and they won’t pay for the answers. Probably they’ll break all your needles while they’re at it.”

  For an instant she looked scared, but only an instant. Then her eyes went small, tired, professional.

  “Time’s up, M’sieu,” she said, uncoiling from the bed. She picked up her skirt from the floor.

  “Maybe I’d like to go again,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “You’ve had your money’s worth,” she said, putting on her skirt and stepping up into her shoes. “Some other time.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” I repeated. “Nobody’s going to protect you for very long.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s being the fool, M’sieu,” she said, looking past me at the door. And in a way, she was right.

  5

  The trouble with your average French thug is that he’s seen the same movie too many times. Maybe Belmondo could get away with imitating Bogart in Le Deuxième Souffle, but the French thug imitating Belmondo imitating Bogart is one too many, like a story that loses something in the retelling. For instance, the one who was holding the gun had a cigarette stuck in his mouth, but the cigarette was unlit, and when the time came for us to go and him to crush it under his heel, on Marie-Josèphe’s floor … well, it was just a waste of a cigarette.

  The one without a gun worried me more. They usually do. He was a quiet wimp of a guy with an odd way of bobbing and weaving his head, and I put him down for a knife-and-scissors specialist. The Belmondo did most of the talking, but it was the little guy who shook me down, and when we left Marie-Josèphe’s—going for a conversation—they said—the little guy led the way, with me in the middle and the Belmondo making with the cannon behind me.

  Marie-Josèphe may have had every reason to be scared, but she didn’t show it. She looked past me like I was just another trick, and her last words were for them.

  “I didn’t tell him a thing,” she said.

  They had a black 504 parked at the rue de I’Ouest end of the alley. A driver sat behind the wheel, reading France Soir. The Belmondo got in front with him, the wimp in back with me. Sure enough, when I looked across, the wimp had a shiv out in his palm. The blade was open, and it ran past the end of his fingertips. He grinned when he saw that I’d noticed it. Meanwhile the Belmondo had stuck another cigarette in his mouth. This one he lit. It was the brown-paper kind—Bastos or Celtique—and it stunk like cheap grass.

  I made a try or two at the conversation we were supposed to have, but nobody was in a talking mood. We drove out of the warren of streets onto the avenue du Maine, then up through the traffic to the Alésia church, then across to René Coty and up toward the Pare Montsouris. The park is one of those keep-off-the-grass Paris showplaces, with enormous spreading trees and swans floating on the lake and a small nineteenth-century observatory up on the hill, and all that mars it is that the old Sceaux line, now a branch of the Métro, runs through an open gully up the middle of it. We drove into the sun along the west edge of the park, then abruptly onto a cobbled street that curved up between rows of handsome, ivy-covered private homes. They would have belonged in a well-heeled suburb. But this wasn’t a suburb, it was Paris, meaning you had to be better than well-heeled to live there. Enough better, say, to keep a couple of stiffs outside your front door in another 504, just in case you needed the parking space.

  To judge, Didier “Dédé” Delatour was doing just fine. I’d never had the pleasure, but I knew the name. Dédé Delatour was Mafioso modern-style, meaning the kind it’s considered chic to have at your dinner table or in your neighborhood discothèque. His above-board wealth came from being a “sportsman,” meaning he owned a racing stable as well as a piece of several go-go gambling joints on the Côte d’Azur. What went on below the surface nobody knew for sure, but he’d been connected to enough shady operations to give Parisian thrill-seekers just the right kind of shiver. What’s more, he was good-looking in a dark, Mediterranean sort of way, with the Mediterranean accent to go with it, and, to top off the image, back in the past he’d done time. Not a lot, but time.

  This made him the genuine article.

  I was ushered upstairs in a hexagonal salon with a view down onto a garden that had a well-tended lawn, tall stone planters, and assorted statuary on pedestals. My escort was dismissed, and Dédé Delatour himself came on, self-assured and affable and flashing of tooth, in a dark flannel suit that was cut just a little tight, as though to remind you of the macho and muscle which had put him where he was. He gave me a glad hand and a sentence or two of pretty approximate English. He offered me a seat, a drink, and a cigar. I refused the last two, sank into a soft divan, and lit my pipe, puzzled by his bonhommie, while he apologized for any rough treatment I might have had. He wanted to know how things were in California. I said I hadn’t been there for a while. He said he’d always wanted to go to California—“’ollywood,” the girls, the sunshine, the skyscrapers, the big cars. And sports, the betting, fabulous. In France they had no sports betting, only horses. A little boxing. But it would come. It had in Spain, Italy, England. A question of organization. But he’d never had the time for California. It was business, always business, I knew how that was, didn’t I?

  At this point Dédé Delatour unleashed his eyebrows. He had thick, mobile ones, and a bristling mustache to go with them, and he did a lot of work with both.

  I’d surprised him, he said. I had what I wanted, didn’t I? Wasn’t Adlay what I wanted? It was too bad, such an excellent athlete, the public liked him, he scored many points. He would be hard to replace. But business was business, he was willing to let me have Adlay. Alors …?

  Alors is French for then. The way he used it called for me to take up the conversational ball. At least to tell him he’d made a mistake about me.

  I didn’t.

  In addition there was the matter of Greemse.

  “What is your interest in Greemse, Monsieur? Why have you been bothering about him and his whore? He wasn’t even part of our arrangement. On the contrary …”

  He left it hanging there, his eyebrows up, and I realized he’d jumped to a conclusion about me. It may have been a cockeyed one, but at least it explained the kid-glove reception, and if it was cockeyed, even simple-minded, you have to remember that he was French. Because just like if you told the average Frenchman you came from Chicago he’d assume you were a cousin of Al Capone, so to Dédé Delatour an American from California who’d been hanging around Roscoe Hadley was no garden-variety basketball freak. And the fact that t
his particular Californian lived in Paris and spoke passable French only proved that he was fronting for others who didn’t.

  Or so it seemed to me, on the spot. The fact that there could be another, more plausible explanation didn’t so much as occur to me.

  “Maybe that’s just the point,” I said, taking the bait. “That Grimes wasn’t part of the arrangement.”

  “Comment?” he said. Then: “Ahhh …” and the eyebrows relaxed. It was as though I’d just explained a lot of things. “But don’t forget, Monsieur, we don’t own the basketball clubs ourselves. Not all of them, not yet. Greemse’s and Adlay’s club only just came up from the lower division this season. The club owner signed them to play without consulting us. But now, with them gone, it will be much simpler.”

  “How is that?”

  “Obviously. Without them, their club is no longer competitive. Where will they find two other players of such quality? They will have to be replaced … by you, of course. But only after the club has been put up for sale. Cheaply.”

  “Obviously,” I said. “But did Grimes have to be murdered for that to happen?”

  Dédé Delatour shrugged, with his eyebrows as well as his shoulders.

  “Maybe you should ask Adlay about it.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Maybe he says he doesn’t know why Grimes was killed.”

  “Gr … How do you say it in American?” He made another stab at “Grimes,” but it just wouldn’t come. “Greemse,” he said, chuckling. “There’s no reason for us to mourn him. He was a troublemaker. The Italians didn’t want him, the Spanish either. A nigger hoodlum of low intelligence. Not even the other players liked him.”

  “You mean he got his throat cut just because he didn’t get along with the other players?”

  Again the double shrug.

  “Perhaps he had begun to meddle where he wasn’t wanted.”

  “Meddle in what?”

  Dédé Delatour looked at me strangely. He didn’t answer. I decided to take a shot at it.

  “Like in the dope trade?” I persisted.

  It lay there between us. We stared at each other, and suddenly it was like each of us had things to hide. Then his eyebrows made a frowning vWhat uses over his nose, and he repeated: