86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,25

to and from their doctor’s appointments at no charge.”

“I pay my own way. I always have.”

“Hey, no problem. You’re the customer.”

“Precisely,” she nodded. “Now wait here a moment. I’ll have to get Tahuti.”

“Tuhootee?”

“T-A-H-U-T-I. My cat. We go everywhere together.”

J.C. closed the door in my face then stepped back inside her bungalow.

Half a minute later she was back, beaming, holding in her arms the fattest monster black cat I had ever seen. “Bruno Dante, meet Tahuti.”

The beast opened its heavy eyes, glanced at me, then closed them again. “We can go now,” J.C. whispered.

On the street I opened the rear limo door for my passenger and her beast. J.C. shuffled toward me up the sidewalk then waved me off. “I’m not an oil sheik nor am I with the State Department, Mr. Dante,” she said. “Tahuti and I ride in the front seat.”

“Whatever you say,” I said back, knowing when I was licked.

After I got in behind the wheel I was about to start the car when J.C., now done situating Tahuti on her lap, leaned toward me. “And Mr. Dante, one more thing,” she chimed, eyeing me coldly in my chauffeur’s cap.

“What would that be?” I said, fearing the worst.

“Please, no cheap thrills.”

It turned out my passenger was also a speed-talker. While I drove I learned that she was an avid reader, that she’d gobbled up every mystery series of novels ever written. Every one. Her unoccupied garage space behind the Villas contained, at her count, thirty-five thousand books. J.C. still read four books a week and had once spent time as a fiction editor at DeMoore Brothers in downtown L.A. Her poetry and short fiction had been published in anthologies and literary journals and she’d been married to a screenwriter named Arthur Smart who had cashed in years before on the ninth fairway at Riviera golf course. Art once worked at MGM Studios as a contract writer with Jonathan Dante. His big hit was the fifties musical film A Crowd of Stars, and as a writer/producer-partner he’d made a fortune from his percentage of the gross and willed the whole bundle to J.C.

My customer went on. She once sat between Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo while dining at the Brown Derby with her husband and William Saroyan, after Saroyan had been awarded but declined the Pulitzer Prize. She and Basil Rathbone had been intimate pals. The last blast of spontaneous unsolicited information aimed at me was the strangest: I learned that, for the last thirty years, in her spare time, J. C. Smart had become an expert tarot card reader. Ba-boom.

My customer’s doctor’s appointment was in Santa Monica, half an hour away. Tahuti purred loudly during the whole ride.

The ritzy building had gold-rimmed double-glass doors and a new bright green awning that reached to the street. I parked in front in the handicapped zone.

I got out to help her but before I could hurry around the car J.C. had opened her own door. She and the cat were on the sidewalk.

“I’ll be back in half an hour. No more,” she said. “Where will you be?”

“Right here,” I said. “Waiting.”

J.C. handed me her credit card. “Will this do to open an account with your firm?”

“That’ll be just fine,” I said back.

Twenty minutes later I’d called in J.C.’s information and was waiting, reading the movie reviews in the L.A. Times, when my passenger door popped open. She tossed her purse on the seat, then she and Tahuti got in. After situating the cat on her lap she turned to me. “Shall we go?” she said.

“Where to? Back to your bungalow?”

“No, actually. I’ve got a special errand,” she beamed, ten thousand facial wrinkles appearing, then flattening out. “I’m meeting my granddaughter. We’re off to Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. Do you know where it is?”

“Ten-four,” I said.

“Tell me, Mr. Dante, what does the recitation of those numbers signify, if anything?”

“Sorry. That’s two-way radio jargon. It means, ‘Okay, I heard you loud and clear.’”

“May I suggest that we continue our conversations absent trucker shorthand?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you.”

I shifted into “D” and began pulling the big stretch out into traffic. “So,” I said, breaking a clumsy silence, making small talk, “how did it go at the doctor’s? Is everything okay?”

J.C. snickered. “Well, I’m dying, Bruno, if you must know. That’s how it went. May I call you Bruno?”

“Sure. But c’mon, you look fine.”

“I am fine. But I have a vertebral-basilar aneurysm. Apparently it’s inoperable and could rupture at any time.”

“You’re smiling?”

“It amuses me because I received