much back there except some fool slapping on another fool.”
“I was the fool on the floor,” I said. “Fenk was the fool on his feet.”
Manley left his chair and walked to the bar. When he came back, his glass was full and darker than amber. He had a fresh cocktail napkin wrapped around the bottom. My glass could stand a recharge, but I didn’t want to risk losing the audience with Manley.
“You’re a lawyer for damn sure,” he said to me. “First you say, hey, Harp, what about this kiddie plays in the band? Now you say, Harp, what about this other kiddie here? That’s a lawyer’s way of getting what you really got on your mind for Harp.”
Was this an invitation to call him Harp?
“You’re going to have to take my word on this, Harp,” I said. “Some of it’s conjecture. But I think the man I asked you about, Raymond Fenk, he’s the heavy. He banged Dave over the head or something as bad, and that’s why Dave isn’t up there on the stand tonight.”
“Conjecture, huh?” Manley said. “The kiddie send you down here with this conjecture?”
“My point, Harp, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know where Dave is. Hurt some place. Worse maybe.”
“Laying up with some woman more likely.”
As skeptics went, Manley was making H. L. Mencken sound like a true believer.
He said, “The kiddies always got the stories when they don’t make the job on time.”
“Harp,” I said, “the thing may be a story about Dave, but I’m an eyewitness, partly anyway. It happened.”
“This the first time I remember a kiddie hired a lawyer to save his ass.”
It seemed the moment for a switch in tactics.
I said, “May I ask how come you were the surprise package at Cam Charles’s press conference?”
“You a movie man, Mr. Lawyer?” Manley asked.
“You should’ve won the Oscar, Harp.”
“Saw me, huh?” Manley said.“Gonna see me again. What’s it today? Thursday? All right, Mr. Lawyer, Sunday night, there’s gonna be them long black stretch limousines, spotlights looking up in the sky, me in my tuxedo, all that fine shit. You hear what I’m saying? A world premiere.”
He gave premiere the French pronunciation. Harp Manley hadn’t come back from his years on the continent an unlettered man.
“Cam Charles?” I said. “He’s got first dibs on your new movie?”
“You see that skinny little grey-haired kiddie beside me?” Manley asked.
“Where? At the press conference? Can’t say I did.”
“My man Cam and that kiddie did the deal,” Manley said. “The skinny little kiddie owns the movie. Listen to this, Mr. Lawyer, he paid me cash money in my pocket. None of that, hey, Harp, we gonna be rich some day. He say, Harp, you take the cash money right now.”
“Back up a couple of steps, Harp. You’re talking about the producer of your new movie, and he’s given Cam Charles rights to a first screening at the Alternate Festival. I’m with you?”
Manley nodded and drank some Scotch.
“The skinny kiddie wrote the movie,” he said. “Then he got the cash money from the bank and he told me on the phone, Harp, you make this movie, you gonna be big as Clint Eastwood. Damn, I think that kiddie’s right.”
“Has he got a name? This paragon of a writer-producer?”
“Bobby.”
I waited. Manley added no more names.
“Well, I asked, didn’t I,” I said.
“Huh?”
Manley swallowed more Johnnie Walker. I was stuck with an empty glass and a man whose narrative style fluctuated between convoluted and terse.
“Is Bobby a Hollywood guy?” I asked. Once again into the fray.
Manley shook his head.
“New York,” he said. “Bobby don’t mess with them big California studios. He got his own cash money.”
“From the bank. So you said.”
Manley’s drink had reached the level of the white paper napkin. How much of the stuff could he absorb before it fluffed his trumpet work?
I said, “I take it Bobby isn’t likely to have connections in the business with Raymond Fenk?”
Manley frowned and gave me the same inspecting look he’d greeted me with earlier. The look must have been a specialty of his. Or else he saved it for people who roused the suspicious side of his nature. Me, for instance.
I said, “My thought is, Fenk’s in movies, but he seems to be strictly Hollywood, and Bobby isn’t.”
“What’s going on, Mr. Lawyer?” Manley said. He still had on the frown and the look of close scrutiny.
“Let’s try to establish a small bond of trust, Harp,” I said. “We’re both interested in what’s happened to Dave Goddard, you for business reasons, me for personal reasons.”
“Personal, huh? You supposed to be the kiddie’s lawyer.”
“That too,” I said. “The reason I’m asking the questions about Raymond Fenk, I’m sure he’s got something to do with Dave’s disappearance. Why and how, I don’t know yet. You say you and your movie and good old Bobby have no tie-in to Fenk. That’s a start. Negative, but a start.”
“This Fenk whapped the kiddie upside the head?”
“That’s the assumption I’m going on.”
Manley’s eyes switched away from my face.
“I suppose I got to let that young kiddie I got on the piano stretch out some,” he said.
“Take up the solo slack until Dave comes back?”
“Ain’t worth shit.”
“Who isn’t?” I said. “You’re not talking about Dave?”
“The young kiddie on the piano. Plays too many notes.”
Manley finished the rest of his drink.
“All right if I ask something private, Harp?” I said. “How much Scotch can you hold when you’re on the job?”
Manley looked at his empty glass.
“I don’t hardly juice,” he said. “Only time is if the kiddies get to acting bad on me.”
“I’ll
