THE SILVER PALM KILLINGS

A Noir Story

Part I

The first thing you learn in this city is that everybody lies. The second thing you learn is that some lies are more expensive than others.

I learned both at the Biltmore basement poker game on a Tuesday in November, 1947.

I was there because my informant -- a kid named Mickey who owed me twenty bucks and a story about police corruption -- told me the Bernstein family ran a numbers game out of the hotel's basement. I was looking for the ledger. I was not expecting what I found.

The basement of the Biltmore was a world away from the marble lobby above. Upstairs, you had chandeliers and tuxedos and waiters who carried champagne in silver trays. Downstairs, you had felt tables, cigarette smoke thick enough to chew, and men who played poker with the kind of concentration that suggested they were not playing for money but for something money couldn't buy.

I was sitting in the corner, nursing a whiskey and watching the table, when she walked in.

She was the kind of woman who made you forget why you were looking at the cards. Dark hair, sharp eyes, a mouth that looked like it had been painted by someone who understood the difference between beautiful and dangerous. She was wearing a black dress that was either elegant or funereal, and I couldn't tell which.

She sat at the table across from me. Not next to me -- across from me. That's important, because it meant she was either looking for a fight or making a bet.

She looked at her cards, looked at me, and smiled. It was not a friendly smile. It was the smile of someone who knows something you don't and is enjoying the fact.

"Playing for high stakes tonight?" I asked.

She looked at me properly for the first time. Her eyes were the color of whiskey -- the good kind, not the kind I was drinking. "Every game is high stakes, Mr. ...?"

"Morneau. Jack Morneau."

"Mr. Morneau. Are you here to play or to investigate?"

I didn't answer. She smiled again.

"I work for the Evening Chronicle," I said.

"Everyone works for someone, Mr. Morneau. The question is whether they know who pays them."

She played the hand. She won. She pushed the chips toward her with hands that were steady and sure. When she collected her winnings, she counted them with the same precision she applied to everything else.

I waited until she was done. Then I said: "I know about the Bernstein operation."

She didn't flinch. She didn't even pause. She just looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird it has already decided whether or not to eat.

"That's cute," she said.

"It's not cute. I have sources. I have --"

"Mr. Morneau. You have a reputation for writing stories that get other reporters fired. That's cute. What you don't have is evidence. And what you don't have is sense."

"What sense?"

"Sense is knowing when a story is bigger than you are."

She stood up. She counted her chips one more time, just to be sure. Then she walked toward the stairs, and I followed her, which was perhaps unwise, but I had been following unwise decisions since I was twenty-two.

She stopped at the foot of the stairs. She turned. The basement light was dim and yellow, and it made her look older than she was and younger than she should have been, all at the same time.

"You want to write about the Bernstein family," she said. "Go ahead. Write what you know. But when the story is done -- and it will be done, because your stories are always done -- you will be the one who is not publishing anymore."

"Why?"

"Because the people who run this city don't care about reporters from the Evening Chronicle. You're not even in the second tier of journalism. You're in the basement, Mr. Morneau. In the same basement as the poker game. Same level as the numbers. Same depth as the lies."

She walked out. I stood in the basement of the Biltmore and drank my whiskey and tried to figure out whether she was threatening me or warning me.

The answer, as I would learn, was both.

Part II

I slept at the office that night, which meant I slept on a chair in the newsroom with the smell of ink and stale coffee and the hum of the fluorescent lights that never quite turned off. I woke up at three AM with a story in my head and a bottle of cheap bourbon on the desk.

The story was about the Silver Palm Hotel -- Veronica Chase, General Manager, and her mysterious operation in the basement. I had spent four hours in the Biltmore basement. I needed four months in the Silver Palm's.

It started the next morning. I called in a favor from a contact at the police department -- a guy named O'Brien who owed me for a story that kept him out of jail -- and got a list of everything the Silver Palm had ever been involved in. It was longer than I expected.

Three deaths. One waiter who "fell" down the back stairs. One waitress who "committed suicide" in the hotel kitchen. One cop who "overdosed" in a motel room near downtown. All three had worked at the Silver Palm at some point.

I visited the waiter's sister. She was a small woman with tired eyes and a kid who was seven and didn't understand why his father was dead. "He fell down the stairs," she said. "That's what the coroner said. But he was afraid of heights."

I visited the waitress's mother. She was a loud woman who cried without shame. "Mary was happy," she said. "Happy people don't kill themselves. Unless they're lying."

I visited the cop's wife. She was a quiet woman who sat in her kitchen and stared at the wall and didn't say anything for ten minutes before she spoke. "He was scared," she said finally. "Scared of something. But he wouldn't tell me what. He just kept saying: 'Veronica knows. Veronica knows everything.' "

Veronica Chase.

I went to the Silver Palm Hotel and asked to speak to the General Manager. The receptionist looked at me the way the receptionists always look at reporters -- with the polite hostility of someone who has decided you are a nuisance and is waiting for you to go away.

"Ms. Chase is in a meeting," she said.

"I'll wait."

"You don't understand --"

"I understand perfectly. You think I'm a reporter. You think I'm a nuisance. You think I'm going to waste Ms. Chase's time with questions about a waiter who fell down stairs and a waitress who jumped and a cop who died. And you're right. I am going to waste her time. That's my job."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she picked up the phone. "Mr. Morneau is here to see you, Ms. Chase." A pause. "He says he's going to waste your time." Another pause. "Tell him to come up."

Her office was on the fourth floor. It was small, efficient, and decorated with nothing that anyone would admire. No art. No photographs. No personality. Just a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet that was locked.

She sat behind the desk. She looked exactly like she had looked in the basement: sharp, controlled, and carrying something heavy that she refused to put down.

"Mr. Morneau," she said. "You've been busy."

"I'm a reporter. Busy is what I do."

"Have you written it yet?"

"What?"

"The story. About me. About the Bernstein family. About the waiter and the waitress and the cop."

"I'm still gathering facts."

"That's Reporter-speak for 'I haven't decided whether to kill it.' "

I sat down. "Let me ask you something, Ms. Chase. Why should I publish this story?"

She looked at me. Her eyes were very calm. That was the most dangerous thing about them.

"Because," she said, "you already have."

Part III

She told me everything. Not because she trusted me. Because she was tired.

The Bernstein family had been running an operation in Los Angeles since before I was born. Gambling, prostitution, protection money -- the usual things that make cities rich and people poor. The Silver Palm was one of their operations, and Veronica was its bookkeeper.

"My father owed them a debt," she said. "He died trying to pay it. When he died, the debt passed to me. I've been paying it for six years."

"How?"

"By running their book. By processing their money. By making sure the cash from their gambling dens and their girls and their protection payments showed up in the hotel's ledger as room revenue and laundry charges and food costs."

"You're laundering money."

"I'm a bookkeeper. The money is what's laundered. I don't launder. I count."

"And the waiter? The waitress? The cop?"

Her face did not change. But her hands -- her hands, which had been perfectly still on the desk, moved. Just slightly. A finger tapping a rhythm that I might have missed if I hadn't been watching them.

"I didn't kill them," she said.

"I didn't ask you to."

"But you will publish this story. And then they will kill me. And then you will have written your story and you will have gotten your byline and you will have gotten everything you wanted. And I will be dead."

"That's not --"

"It is exactly that. You want the story, Mr. Morneau. But the story requires my death. And you have to decide whether the story is worth more than my life."

I left the office. I went back to the newsroom. I sat at my desk and I drank my coffee and I wrote the story.

It was the best work of my career. I knew it as I wrote it. I knew that when it ran, it would be the most important story in Los Angeles. I also knew that when it ran, Veronica Chase would be dead.

I submitted it to my editor. He read it in silence. When he was done, he looked at me for a long time.

"This is good," he said.

"It's dangerous."

"I know."

"Are you going to publish it?"

He looked at the phone on his desk. It was a green phone, separate from his other phones. It was the one that rang when someone important called. It was not ringing now, but it might be in five minutes.

"Yes," he said. "We're going to publish it."

The story ran three days later. It was the front page. It was the second page. It was the inside spreads. It was the thing that people talked about at dinner and in barbershops and in the halls of City Hall.

And it was wrong.

Not in the facts -- the facts were exactly as I had written them. But in the editing. Her name was removed. Every reference to "Veronica Chase" had been replaced with "an unnamed manager." My byline had been changed to a pseudonym. The sentence that would have protected her -- the one that said she was a bookkeeper, not a boss -- had been cut.

I read the edited version and I understood. They hadn't just protected the Bernsteins. They had protected themselves. Because the story that linked the Bernstein family to the police department was also a story that linked the Evening Chronicle to the police department. And my editor had a green phone.

Part IV

Veronica was gone the next morning. Not dead. Gone. The Silver Palm had new management. A man from Chicago, apparently. The basement poker game was still running. The laundry was still processing cash. The city was still a city.

I sat in my dark apartment and read the edited version of my own story and I understood something that I had been trying to understand since that first night in the Biltmore basement: I had been played. Not by Veronica. By the city.

She had told me the truth. She had given me the story. She had known that the story would be edited and that she would be erased. And she had done it anyway, because that is what people like her do -- they tell the truth even when they know it won't save them.

I looked at the photograph that my editor had left on my desk before he threw it away. It was a picture of Veronica from the hotel's staff directory. She was smiling in the photo -- a small, careful smile, the kind of smile that someone who knows she has to earn everything she gets learns to give without giving anything away.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I made myself a drink and turned off the light.

The city kept going. It doesn't know about stories, or reporters, or the people who slip through its cracks. It just moves, and takes everyone with it, whether they are ready or not.