Shoot the Moon

Chapter Seven - The Corporate Head

The offices of Tropic Enterprises Inc. were in the Brill Building, the one time home of the song writing business in the fifties and early sixties. There were a lot of movie people there now. Tropic Enterprises's offices were once sleek, now going to seed. When I asked to see the boss, the receptionist informed me that he was seldom in the office, all of his time being devoted to "the many complicated ventures in which Tropic Enterprises Inc. had an interest." She was only twenty years old, if that, so I generally made a cheerful nuisance of myself until she was about to cry. She picked up the receiver in the complicated phone console.

"Mr. Colon, There's a man here asking for a Mickey Dolan." She repeated my name and nodded.

"Mr. Colon will see you when he finishes his call to the coast." The coast.

Colon's office was not like anything I had ever seen. It was large and the windows were darkly tinted, the city beyond looked to be shrouded in night. There was no desk. There were two large potted palms in two different stages of dying, one of which was death. It looked more like an abandoned living room in a seedy section of LA than an office in Midtown Manhattan. The oddest feature was a bank of twenty large lamps on a rack near one wall aimed at a redwood lounge chair with a faded canvas cushion. The lamps fed into a transformer which was patched into a circuit breaker box with a long thick electrical cable. The lamps were dark.

Colon was wearing khaki trousers and a loud blue Hawaiian shirt. He was smiling. His teeth had little spaces between them. His dark brown hair was thinning on top but long and tied in a pony tail. He had a gold ring in his ear. Just like a Pirate King. He jumped up like a windup toy that had taken a turn too many.

"Hey!" he shrieked, "Mr. Murphy?" He was stoned and trying too hard to appear sharp.

"That's right," I said.

"You know where Mickey is?"

"No. I'm looking."

"He disappears from time to time. No worries. He's probably out on a bender. He does that, you know. Must be all those freaking number's in his head. It would drive me nuts, too. Ha-ha."

"He works for you, then?"

"Yeah, on a sort of free-lance, when-he's-got-his-mind-right, basis. If you know what I mean."

"I'm beginning to get the idea."

"Really? Well, then..." We stared at each other as an awkward pause grew and grew. Finally, Colon stopped chewing the inside of his cheek, threw up his hands and grinned goofily. "What else can I tell you?"

"I have no idea. He was supposed to meet me and he didn't show. Have a current address for him?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess. We must. I thought you said he was a friend?"

"That's right. But you know Mickey."

Colon smiled but the skin around the eyes behind the dark glasses didn't move. His Rotary Club act was going bad on him while I watched.

"What is it that Mickey does here, by the way?"

"Little bookkeeping. When he's got it together. Ha ha."

"I'm surprised you would use him. His problem and all."

"Oh, he's okay. He's a friend and I like to help him out."

"Really? When did you first meet him?"

Colon fidgeted and adjusted his glasses. "Oh, I don't know. Five years ago. We met somewhere, a bar, I think."

"Have any idea where he might go these days when he's drinking?"

"No. He does this sometimes. The strain of... all that addition and subtraction and such. Ha."

I looked around the offices. The walls were bare, no indication of the nature of Tropic Enterprises Inc. There wasn't so much as a scrap of paper in the office. In fact, there was no more evidence of a business here than there was at the reception desk. Whatever Tropic was about it involved just two telephones and lots of room to sit around.

Colon made an inquisitive noise.

"What is it you guys do here?" I said.

He stretched his lips back into his grin and there was another pause as his brain took a drugs time-out. Finally he said, "A little of this, little of that. Import-export. Entrepreneur things. You know?" He squinted as if he were in pain.

"I understood from the receptionist that the boss wasn't in. I thought... I wanted to speak to Mickey's boss."

"Oh, no, I'm the boss. I have a partner, but he spends most of his time out on the road. I handle things at this end. Miss Feliconio must have thought you were referring to Mr. Gray." So he wasn't the guy in charge.

"Mr. Gray, huh? Mickey never mentioned him."

"Well, Mickey. Ha, ha. Mickey's job, see...There's just no reason he would come into contact."

I nodded and watched. Colon only had so much businessman patter on tap.

"Mickey might have gotten mixed up see..." He was in that state in which he couldn't remember what he had said at the beginning of his sentences and therefore couldn't finish them. He finally stopped and sighed. Then he said, "Anything else?" He wasn't quite so friendly now.

"I'd like that address for Mickey?"

"Maybe Miss Feliconio has something. If you catch up to him tell him to straighten out and get in touch. I got quarterlies to get out."

I could imagine. Colon must be hell at the stock holders meetings: And this part here... These - whaddahyacallems - Figures! They, ah, ladies and- Excuse me, I know I have them here somewhere. Sorry - Ah! Here we go...

As I was standing in front of the reception desk waiting for the girl to find Mickey's card in a dusty Rolodex she pulled out of a drawer, a man walked out of the only other door in the office. He didn't give me a glance.

The girl was writing Mickey's address on a small sheet of note paper, as the man went out the door of the office. I snapped my fingers and she handed it to me with a hurt expression. I hurried after the man I had last seen through a blur of blood, punching my lights out. Last seen striking a match before the hissing gas burner of Echo's lousy designer stove and smiling a bored little smile.