Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) by Charles Alverson Page A

Beach. At that hour the whores and other starlets were having breakfast; the pimps, who’d been up and hustling for at least three hours, were having lunch; and the honest citizens, who’d just closed their shops, were having dinner. Ranked in doorways in side streets, the Tokay Brigade was augmenting its liquid diet with more liquid.
    At The Jungle, a retired hubcap thief in an oversized doorman’s coat was shooing black kids away from the display pictures out front. Tina’s name was still on the marquee in eighteen-inch letters with the word “TONIGHT!” There was a lot of sentiment on North Beach. A lot of heart.
    “Business as usual, eh?” I asked the doorman.
    “Huh?” he said, aiming a last sharp-toed kick at one of the dodg ing kids.
    “Is Fat P hil around?”
    The doorman, a man of few words, jerked a dirty thumb toward the interior of The Jungle and went back to examining his life for the exact moment he’d gone wrong.
    I started to push open the door but then paused.
    “Too bad about Tina,” I said.
    “Huh?” he said.
    “If you can perfect that routine,” I told him, “you’ll be up on the stage inside instead of bruising your insteps out here.” I went in and closed the double door behind me before he could get off his famous rejoinder. He could wear out that act if he didn’t watch it.
    The inside of The Jungle looked like a bad interior for Tarzan Goes on the Bottle . But then I suppose darkness and seven or eight watered drinks would lend a certain amount of verisimilitude to the tired plastic foliage and stuffed animals. Up over the bar was the tiny jungle clearing where Tina had done most of her shaking. But she’d swung on her last vine.
    In front of the bar, taking up two stools and part of a third was Fat Phil Franks, front man for The Jungle and Tina’s former man ager. It had made big headlines in San Francisco late last year when Tina and Phil had split the managerial blanket. It doesn’t take much to make headlines in San Francisco. But she’d stayed on at The Jungle. Phil had lost his fifteen percent, and now he’d lost his headliner.
    I walked up to the back of his neck—a flabby tree trunk with a five-dollar haircut—and said: “It’s kind of you, Phil, to keep Tina’s name up in lights. She’d have been all choked up at that kind of sen timent.”
    Instead of waiting for him to turn around—that could have taken all evening at the rate he moved his three hundred and seventy-five pounds—I moved up to the bar to his right where he could swivel his neck at me without doing any serious damage to his system. I allowed him three or four bar stools for overflow and took a seat.
    “Oh, hi,” he said. “Yeah, I thought it was the least I could do for poor Tina. I’m leaving her up there until after the funeral—as a mark of respect.”
    “When’s that?”
    “Tomorrow afternoon,” he said.
    “You going?”
    “If I can,” he said sadly. “But you know how hard it is for me to get around. I’d really like to. I wasn’t even able to go up to her place when they found her.” With his weight and overworked heart, Phil hadn’t been above the ground floor of any building since he’d topped three hundred pounds. “But I’m sending a blanket of three thousand gardenias to the funeral. From me and The Jungle.”
    “Touching,” I said. “But tell me something. How can you leave Tina’s name on the marquee and not give the suckers any Tina? Don’t they get irate when they’re getting some second stringer in stead?”
    Fat Phil parted his face in a smile that would have been terrifying on a man half his size. “Movies,” he said. “The best of Tina D’Oro in sixteen-millimeter living color. Wide screen.”
    “You’re a genius, Phil,” I said. “How long do you think you can get away with that?”
    “Long enough,” he said, taking a long slurp of something vile and sickly from a tall glass, “for me to get my replacement for Tina ready to go on stage.