The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter Page A

I didn’t mind going to Enrico’s; I hadn’t been there in a long time, but I liked the place. And the Broadway exit led right to the Bayshore, so it was on the way.
    Jack parked our car in the lot next door after giving us a big hello, still running the lot after all that time. Jim and I had gotten our start in North Beach and knew a lot of people there.
    Enrico’s is a sidewalk cafe on a major truckroute, and so you sit at the marble tables sipping your espresso while the big tractors and their loads rumble through the gears, and the walking wounded of the quarter lurch past on the sidewalk.
    Most of the entertainers who come to San Francisco spend time at Enrico’s; for one thing, nobody makes too much of a fuss over you, and for another, the place stays open until three or four in the morning, although not serving liquor after two. I started to walk through the sidewalk part, but sitting at one of the tables and looking like a little wooden dummy of himself sat Grimaldi, Pierre Grimaldi, Uncle Peter, with his beret, his tremble and his double Martini.
    â€œUncle Peter!” I yelled and went over to him.
    â€œUhn, godd amn , if it isn’t, what’s-his-name, Dick Ogilvie,” Grimaldi muttered, and started to try to get to his feet. I pushed him back down in his chair and sat down. He was alone and looked terrible, old, shriveled, shaking, his chin in constant motion. But he sat as always erect, with his old hands folded neatly at the base of his Martini glass, and his eyes sparkled. “How are you, you old son of a bitch,” he said to me. “Where’s Doctor Jim?”
    Jim came around the corner then and spotted us and broke out into a big dazzling smile and hugged Grimaldi, kissed him, peeked under his beret, took a sip of his Martini and generally made the old bastard feel like the King of England.
    â€œGrimaldi, you old fart, I thought you were dead,” Jim said.
    â€œI would be dead if the women had their, uhn, way,” Grimaldi said slowly.
    Enrico came out of the back of the cafe and shook hands with us. “Hello, you old wop,” he said to Grimaldi.
    â€œI’m no wop, goddamn it,” Grimaldi said. “I’m a fucking Swiss.” But Enrico and his sidekick and a couple of dogs who had come out of the back of the place were gone by the time Grimaldi finished talking. He was always a slow talker, but now he was really slow. Back in the days when he had his club, Grimaldi always went around with at least one young pretty girl on his arm, even though he was already fifty or so and starting to totter from the combined effects of booze and tobacco. “I’ve drunk more kerosene than you’ve had liquor,” he said once to some punk who had patronized him about the number of Martinis he put away. Grimaldi’s club was where Jim and I first got our act together well enough to make a living at it, and in fact Jim had started in the house band there. But that was a long time ago.
    Now Grimaldi didn’t have any club. He had sold it at the height of the North Beach real estate boom, just before the topless craze turned Broadway into a war zone, and unlike a lot of the big sports who made money out of night clubs, he put a lot of it away and owned a couple or three apartment buildings on Russian Hill. “All full of Chinese,” he told me with a trembling grin. “Pay in gold, weigh it out every Friday night, we share a glass of Ng Ga Pai , and everybody’s happy.”
    â€œI think we should have a round of Martinis,” Jim said. After we placed our order with the waiter, Jim said to Grimaldi, “What do you do for pussy?”
    â€œJesus, Jim, the same as always. I just walk around North Beach with the tip of a hundred dollar bill sticking up out of my pocket.” But after a couple more raw jokes, Grimaldi told us he was living with a twenty-three-year-old girl. “She says she’s Korean, but I