Free The Straight Man - Roger L Simon by Roger L. Simon

and his lawyer friends, season ticket holders, were
members and that was what a man did, had a steak lunch at the Stadium
Club and then sat in a box on the third base line, while his son
stared with a combination of curiosity and envy at the black and
brown people in the bleachers.
    There was nothing Wall Street about Purvis Wilkes's
office. Actually, it was more reminiscent of a credit dentist,
nestled like a bomb shelter into the dirty-yellow brick courtyard of
one of those soot-ridden Concourse apartment buildings in which all
the first-floor windows are honeycombed with steel grid antitheft
wire. Wilkes's window looked as if it had been smashed a few times
anyway. The name on the door read Feinstein & Wilkes, Attorneys
at Law, but Feinstein, I later found out, had defrauded a couple of
clients and skipped for Minneapolis some time ago, ending this
supposedly ecumenical partnership.
    Wilkes himself was a tall, slightly paunchy man in
his early thirties with light sepia skin and a neatly cut Van-dyke.
He was reading the paper and listening to an old Thelonious Monk
album on the radio when his secretary introduced me. The way he
acted, he didn't seem over-eager for clients. He seemed even less
eager when I told him what I wanted.
    " Hey, I'm Otis's manager. If I told some private
dick where he was, think how long I'd have that job."
    "But as Otis's manager you should have his best
interests at heart. The show business community is one tiny hornet's
nest of gossip. Word gets out Otis went bye-bye and you can say
sayonara to the fat movie contract. The people out there are getting
supersensitive to drug publicity."
    "Oh, yeah? Who're they afraid of? Nancy Reagan?"
    I half smiled.
    "Anyway, we got a contract, so what's the big
deal? Listen, you look like a decent guy."
    Wilkes leaned back and lit up a Jamaican cigar.
"Jewish intellectual . . . guilty . . . smart. One of those
ex-civil-rights dudes gone confused because the brothers have
rejected you. You oughtta be ashamed of yourself, workin' for that
social-climbing Svengali Bannister. That sinister fuck'll do anything
to get his claws into Otis. You call that therapy? Filling Otis's
head with all kinds of vile shit over a little toot?"
    "More than a little toot, if word has it
correctly."
    "All right. More than a little. But so what?
He's not hurting anybody except for himself. And Bannister's
shameless. He even tried to get to be Otis's beneficiary. Can you
believe that? . . . Janelle, where are you, girl? Bring this man some
coffee."
    Janelle sashayed into the room with the coffeepot,
five foot six of exquisitely formed burnt siena flesh bursting out of
a beige silk paratrooper jump suit. This was the kind of black woman
that would normally start my blood percolating so fast I'd have steam
coming out of my ears in under thirty seconds, but this time, oddly,
I scarcely reacted. I hadn't reacted on the plane either when the
stewardess practically grabbed my crotch while pouring me a Bloody
Mary. I wondered why that was and the image of Chantal filtered up
through my brain like a holograph. I pushed it away and focused on
Wilkes.
    "I share your opinion of Bannister, Purvis. But
I'm not really working for him. I'm working for Emily. Ptak's widow."
    "Sister Salvation? You gotta be kidding. What's
she after? There's not enough famine in Africa, she gotta be sending
you to the Bronx?"
    "What she's after is trying to figure out why
her husband committed suicide. More important to you is that the L.A.
police think it had something to do with some massive drug connection
between Hollywood and the Bronx."
    Wilkes broke up laughing. "That's pretty funny,
isn't it?"
    "My guess is Otis thought they were going to
connect him into it. That's why he split. Apparently, in the middle
of the night, some mysterious person called him to warn him his
brother was in trouble."
    Suddenly Wilkes wasn't laughing. He waved Janelle out
of the room with the back of his hand.
    "King's too smart for shit