The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter Page B

don’t believe her,” he said.
    â€œWhat do you reckon she is?” I asked.
    â€œJust another, unh, Chinese,” he said. He took out his cigarette lighter, an old gold Dunhill that had been fondled so much it glowed like an amulet. I must have watched Grimaldi go through this ritual a hundred times, but now it took him forever: taking out the lighter and putting it on the marble tabletop, then reaching into his inner pocket and coming out with his dark-stained old ivory cigarette holder, fooling with it, blowing through it and making sure it was clean, and then withdrawing a box of Benson & Hedges cigarettes out of his blazer side pocket and opening the box, removing the cigarette and slowly screwing it into the holder, both hands trembling enough to drive you crazy, and then finally putting the holder into his mouth and flicking the lighter.
    Civilizations could rise and fall while Grimaldi lit his cigarette, a lonely old guy walking the streets of North Beach, having his regular stops, Gino & Carlo’s for his first glass of beer in the morning, down the street to the Trieste for espresso and read the newspaper, and then across Columbus to the Chinatown part of Grant Street, slowly wandering from store to store, picking up the groceries and sundries of the day, and then up the stairs on Washington Street to the top floor flat where he kept his collection of Tiffany glass and local painters, the collection supposedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, I don’t know, I’ve never seen it, and then out into the saloons for the rest of the afternoon and evenings, unless his story about living with a Chinese girl was true, and of course there was no way to know, but it doesn’t matter, because Grimaldi was an important guy when he was giving starts to all kinds of things, his name was in the paper all the time, and he was interviewed on the television, and now that he didn’t have his club anymore, those days long in the past.
    We had a couple of Martinis apiece, the place was buzzing with the late lunch crowd, and then the waiter came out to our table and told me there was a phone call for me. Jim gave me a kind of funny look, and I went in to the bar and took the phone.
    It was the studio. How they found us I don’t know. I told them we were on our way, and they insisted that they were not worried, everything was fine, but of course they were worried sick, because we were late, not really late, but late on a schedule that allowed us to be late, just a little bit late. These couple of days late weren’t costing them anything much on the production board, but if we were really late, say, a week late, then the blood would begin to flow, sixty people on salary doing nothing but being paid anyway is enough to drive any production supervisor right out of his mind. But we weren’t that late, and I told them not to worry, we were going to have lunch here and then catch an afternoon commuter plane.
    When I got back to the table, Grimaldi was alone. I finished my second Martini and was looking at the menu when it occurred to me that Jim might not have gone to the toilet.
    â€œWhere’s Jim?” I asked Grimaldi.
    â€œHe went down the street,” the old man said.
    I ordered spinach crepes and another Martini. By the time I had finished lunch Grimaldi had gone on his way, moving down Broadway at about afoot a minute, and Jim had not showed up. I paid the check and left. The car was still in the parking lot so I took a stroll up to the all-night dirty bookstore and then across and down to City Lights Books and then to the Discovery bookstore where I used to work when it was a tiny place. I didn’t recognize any of the kids working in among the stacks of used books and records, so I walked on down past the old Hungry i, the Purple Onion, Grimaldi’s, and only the old Onion was still there, but I didn’t go down the steps, it was too creepy for me, so I went back up