What I want to hear about, the reporter starts in, is the day you first met that private detective… and I silence him again with a sneer, thinking to myself that this is supposed to be an interview about my best seller, The American Moron Movement, and how I nearly got beaten to death while researching it in the Midwest, and then again in the deep South, and how before that, despite my advanced age and slight stature, I bravely served two years with Green Peace disrupting whalers off the coast of Norway—never mind the rumors, I was seasick only part of time—so I’m not about to waste a minute on those humiliating events of so long ago.
Yet the mere mention of that name, one I rarely think of—yet hear often in my nightmares—brings back the only time since the Black Bird episode that I saw his smug, so superior face. That face with its long bony jaw, the jutting V of its chin, the more flexible V of its mouth, the nostrils curved back to make a smaller V, the horizontal yellow-grey eyes and thick brows above a hooked nose, and the slick hair drawn to a point on its forehead—the face of Satan himself.
He glanced past me as I crossed McAlister at Jones, and having passed several steps beyond me he said loudly, “Joel Cairo, you old lizard! Remember me?” So I paused and turned around, and faced him. There he was, Samuel Spade, now in his 60s and sporting a silver V-shaped goatee—how redundant is that? From his clothing alone he was quite better off than he had been thirty years before. “Well-well, Joel Cairo” he said, walking back to where I stood stock-still, bound to the horror of the moment. “As I live and breathe! I never thought I’d lay eyes on you again. You haven’t changed a bit, little fella. Tell me, do you still carry gardenia-scented hankies and that cute little Ruger automatic?”
Before I could think of a reply appropriate to such insulting patter, he leaned against a parking meter and proceeded to tell me all about himself, how he was now married to Effie Perine, his former secretary, and managing the Northwest district for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Having completed the Masters Program in Criminology at Stanford and obtained a Law degree from Berkeley he was studying for the Bar with an eye to becoming a District Attorney and eventually making a run for Governor. He kept yammering on and on, but I confess that though my eyes never left his mouth, I rapidly quit listening and, after about thirty minutes of his intolerable self-praising shit, I screamed, “Will you please… just… shut… the fuck… up? You pompous pain in the ass!” Then I shot him with my cute little Ruger automatic.
***
What I want to hear about, the reporter starts in, is why you shot… and I silence him again with a sneer…
E J Barron
E J Barron 