Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  Her inner conflict finally buckles her. She buries her face in my chest. I can feel her tears soak through my shirt. I pull her close and suffer a pang of guilt for enjoying the feel of her body under this circumstance. After a minute, she pulls away self-consciously.

  “Sorry,” she says. I don’t reply, giving her the moment to compose herself. She finds a Kleenex in her purse to blow her nose.

  “This whole thing is probably me just being paranoid,” she says. “I’m not going to destroy my relationship for nothing.”

  End of discussion. She bites her cuticle. I bite my tongue.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Leaving me thoroughly frustrated, Sophia drives off to her studio to paint puppets or whatever the hell she does.

  When I get back to the office, Melody is thumbing the digits for Boom-Boom Laphroig. I’d left her a note to make the call and find out if Boom-Boom has a number for Don Patt, the Brothers’ bass player.

  As I check my inbox I hear her introduce herself. Within two minutes they’re chattering away as if they were long-lost roomies. How do women do that?

  I’ve been expecting an e-mail or letter or summons from Jerry, but so far nothing. Is that promising news? Or is he just waiting for the right moment to pounce? My only hope is that Holly can’t bring herself to hurt me anymore, no matter how badly Jerry wants to drop the anvil. She is already tormented over breaking my heart. I’m sure she’s afraid of compounding the burden. God bless Holly’s mother, the Mistress of Guilt.

  My deep thoughts are interrupted by a positive indicator: Mel is jotting something down.

  She hangs up. “Got him. Boom-boom doesn’t have a number, but a friend told her Don Patt was working at Ciacotti’s Hardware.”

  This is a stroke of luck. The place is only five minutes away.

  “I’ve got a yoga class,” she says. “If you want to wait till I get back, I’ll go down there with you.”

  That suits me fine. I’m in a section of Lana’s journal where she writes about Patt. I want to finish it before we meet.

  Melody heads out, and I find my Post-it bookmark in the journal. My readings haven’t revealed any clues, but I’ve gleaned quite a bit about Lana’s feelings toward the people in her life, at least those whose code names I’ve deciphered. She could be painfully blunt.

  She despised her father but couldn’t bring herself to cut off all ties with him, apparently because she didn’t want to dishonor her late grandmother.

  She put up with Billy because she liked his guitar work and “incidentally,” she noted, because he never hit her. She didn’t have much to say about him as the father of her daughters except that the girls loved his grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches. In the sack, she thought he was selfish and inept.

  Claudine seemed to be the only person whose company Lana actually enjoyed, despite the tiresome occasions when Claudine tried to steer her toward a healthier lifestyle. Lana suspected that Claudine had the hots for Billy, but she didn’t think anything would come of it. Nor did she care.

  Lana used the word “oafish” to describe Boom-Boom Laphroig, which struck me as an odd word for a rock star. But Lana loved Boom-Boom’s rhythms and artistic choices. Lana also thought having a black drummer gave her blues more authority, even though Boom-Boom grew up in a small mansion in Beverly Hills, the daughter of a plastic surgeon and an interior designer, the surgeon being her mother.

  Don Patt was the weakest musician in the band, according to Lana. She also suspected he was gay, even though she once walked in on him getting head from their bus driver’s wife. But because Don never came on to Lana, she assumed he couldn’t be attracted to women. She had a sizable ego, at least sexually.

  I always thought Patt was pretty good. I saw him rip out an unbelievable solo when the Brothers played the Hollywood Bowl in ’91. I’ll never forget how Lana heated up that cold October night. The next day I spent a half hour constructing a protective cardboard sleeve so that I could keep my ticket stub pristine forever. I still have it in my safe deposit box.

  The only person Lana mentioned having any respect for was Gary Cogswell. She thought he was both smart and shrewd, which she considered key assets to her continuing success. Aside from Claudine, he was the only person she trusted. Lana depended on him to bring order to her chaotic life.

  For the sake of expedience, she put up with his frequent sexual overtures. She couldn’t blame him for trying, seeing as how her multiple sex partners seemed to be chosen by the luck of the draw, but she didn’t find him attractive enough to give him a tumble. She called him Humpty Dumpty behind his back.

  Humpty’s luck changed when Lana found herself simultaneously negotiating a new recording contract and planning her estate. Cogswell was buried in a multimillion-dollar corporate lawsuit at the time. Ever the savvy businesswoman, she seduced him to reclaim his focus. As soon as the trusts were set up and the contract signed, she broke it off. He responded like a rejected teenager, but if she cared, I have yet to read about it.

  Lana wrote surprisingly little about her daughters, leading me to believe she didn’t afford them much time or attention. She rarely mentioned family outings or referred to her feelings for them, their grades, their boyfriends, their triumphs or disappointments. Lana was preoccupied by her own needs, and family wasn’t one of them.

  It bothers me to read Lana’s private thoughts, not so much because I feel like I’m trespassing, but because she was so petty and cruel. It hurts to see the woman of my dreams exposed as a small-minded bitch who I’d hate to spend time with.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Ciacotti’s Hardware has been on Ventura Boulevard forever. It should be a historic site, a cultural landmark. For the last few years it’s been a dungeon in there, because they turn the lights off to save money when no customers are in the store, which is most of the time. But such economy is no match for economies of scale. Home Depot and Lowe’s have finally trampled Ciacotti’s into the ground, as they have most neighborhood hardware stores. When Melody and I approach, we see a sign on the window announcing a going-out-of-business sale. A sad state of affairs.

  We walk in to find Don Patt minding the store, easing the hospice patient through its final days. Lana described Patt as “a Harley jacket on a Schwinn.” He still sports the anorexic biker look: greasy hair, dirt-encrusted nails, acne-scarred skin, jail tattoos scattered across his arms, and a dark-brown front tooth, long deceased. It worked a lot better onstage than it does behind the counter. Patt must be in his forties but he looks a lot older. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after the doors close next week, I can’t imagine anyone hiring this guy for anything except highway cleanup.

  Patt takes a drag on the butt of an unfiltered cigarette then drops it on the floor and steps on it. The smoke drifts into one eye, and he squints in response.

  “What can I do you for?” he asks. “Whatever ya want, gonna be half price. Goin’ outta bidness sale.”

  I tell him I need a toilet flapper, and he walks over to a wall switch and flicks on the bare fluorescent bulb over the plumbing aisle. He moves knowingly down the aisle and brushes his hand across an array of flappers, causing the packages to swing on their display rods like little doggie doors. Even in this tiny store, where most of the goods have already been picked over by bargain hunters, there are six different flappers to choose from, all standard size.

  This has always mystified me. Why is there more than one style of flapper? They all do the same simple thing: flap over a hole to seal it. Isn’t there an ideal shape and material? In a world where physics has defined the optimal automotive silhouette, toilet flappers are still all over the map. Some are flat, some conical, some almost globular. Hasn’t anyone put these things through a wind tunnel?

  “What’s the difference between them?” I ask, assuming Patt’s intimacy with the store grants him some sort of expertise. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sleeps in the back at night.

  “Well,” he says, “this one’s fifty cents mor
e than the others. With the sale, that’s only two bits.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t make my choice any easier.”

  “It’s a toilet part,” says Melody. “Just pick one.”

  Melody loves hardware stores even more than I do. She claims it’s endemic to her sexual orientation. But she’s champing at the bit to get out of this one. Don Patt is making her nervous. She wants me to get on with the interview and get the hell out. But I’m afraid to push it. He seems like the kind of guy who’s easily spooked. I want to ease him into a conversation.

  I pick the flapper that appears to have the least amount of dust buildup on the theory that it’s had less time to decay from the smog. We head back to the counter.

  Patt rings me up on an old-fashioned mechanical cash register. Two ninety-five. I hand him a twenty. He starts counting out ones to give me change.

  “Had a guy come in two days ago,” he says, “pulled out a wad of hunerds fatter’n a twin-bearin’ mare. Wanted change, like I’d have it here. I like to took my peacemaker, whack him on the head.” He gestures toward a two-foot crowbar hanging on a hook behind the counter and gives Melody a big grin to showcase that long-dead front tooth. What a kidder.

  I notice a photo on the wall behind the crowbar. It’s a group shot of the Brothers. Early eighties, from the looks of it.

  “That you?” I ask.

  He turns to look, as if he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  “In my heyday.”

  “That’s the Brothers of Libation. I saw you in concert at the Bowl in ’73. You’re Don Patt, right?”

  “Used to be.” He taps a Camel out of a soft pack.

  “I knew you looked familiar. I loved you guys.”

  “Them was the days. Didn’t need no talent in them days, just calluses, guts, and a broken pool cue, if ya know what I mean.”

  He lights a kitchen match with his thumbnail and fires up the cancer stick.

  “That’s illegal in a place of business, you know,” says Melody, ever the guardian of public safety.

  “What they gonna do? Shut me down?” He sucks deep then blows two streams out his nose.

  “My name’s Nob Brown. I’m a writer. Could I ask you a few questions about Lana Strain?”

  His perpetual frown becomes a grimace. “Fuck no. I been shat on by enough writers to flood a cesspool.”

  “I just want some background.”

  “What part of ‘fuck no’ don’t you understand?” He takes his crowbar off the wall and smacks it on the counter. Melody jumps, moving toward the door.

  “Okay, I hear you,” I say. “No quotes, no questions about the band, no questions about Lana.”

  “Then we’s done.”

  “Can I have my change?” I nod toward the stack of ones he’s still holding in his hand.

  “You wanna come on over here and git it?”

  “Let’s go, Nob,” says Melody. She’s had enough.

  But I’m determined to get something more than a toilet part out of this.

  “Look, you can keep the change if you’ll just help me out with something that has nothing to do with you or your band.”

  His eyes narrow as he tries to figure my angle.

  “I’m trying to find Vern Senzimmer. I’m hoping you can help me out.”

  “Who the fuck is Vern Senzimmer?” he asks.

  “Sticky White?”

  He bursts out in one of those surprise laughs that comes of a long-forgotten memory jetting to the surface. It seems to break the tension. “Fuckin’ Sticky White, man.”

  “So you remember them?”

  “Total asshat of a band. One of them boys put me in the hospital on Mercer Island one night. Fucker got behind me with a beer bottle when I wasn’t lookin’.”

  “Vern Senzimmer, by any chance?” asks Melody.

  “Now I remember him. He was the scrawny-ass bitch. He’d never have the balls. It was that tight-ass brawler played drums. What the fuck was his name?”

  “You wouldn’t have any idea how to get in touch with any of them, would you?” I ask.

  His face suddenly clouds with suspicion. “You a cop?”

  My glance flicks to the crowbar. “I told you I’m a writer. I’m doing a piece on Lana. I understand Senzimmer had some kind of thing going with her.”

  He lets out a guffaw that segues into a hacking smoker’s cough. “Little shit hops her once, thinks he’s a fuckin’ rock star. Truth is, he was just in the tight pants at the right time. She’d fuck a drape if it was hung.”

  “You have any idea how we can reach anybody from Sticky White?” asks Melody.

  “Try lookin’ down the toilet.” He blows a perfect smoke ring then blows another one through it. Then his brow clenches as if he’s had a second thought. “Lasky might know.”

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  “Moe Lasky. He’s an old barker used to book gigs for a shitload of Seattle bands. If he didn’t book Sticky White, he’ll sure as fuck know who did.”

  He starts hacking again. I wait until he gets his lungs under control. “How about a number for Lasky?”

  “If I had one, it’d be twenty years old. But you could call any club in Seattle. I reckon they’ll know him if the fucker’s still breathin’.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Melody hits the phone as soon as we get back and starts calling Seattle clubs. Everyone knows somebody who knows somebody, but no one knows anybody directly. She follows Moe Lasky’s trail like a rat in a maze, hitting several dead ends, backtracking, and winding in circles. She finally connects with a friend of a friend of a friend of an ex-partner’s friend who visited Lasky last year in a retirement community in Big Lake, Washington, about an hour north of Seattle.

  It turns out that Moe’s still there, and his brain still works. He digs up a number for the third ex-wife of Brigs Long, former manager of Sticky White. The ex is no longer in touch with Brigs but gives Mel the office number of their son, who’s a CPA in Milwaukee. The son has a current number for Brigs but won’t give it to us. Mel flirts him into calling Brigs for us. About a half hour later the son calls back with an eight-year-old number for Senzimmer that may or may not still be good. I call it and hit the jackpot.

  Senzimmer agrees to a four o’clock meeting this afternoon in Long Beach. If I hit rush hour traffic, the forty-five-minute drive could take me two hours. There’s no predicting rush hour anymore, so I don’t know why I look at my watch, but I do. It’s quarter to three.

  I change into clean clothes while Melody plugs the address into my GPS. When I walk back into the office, she’s bent over with arms wrapped around her calves, stretching her head through her legs. A human pretzel. She manages to hand me my phone from this position. I shudder as I take it.

  The freeway is flowing pretty well, and the cruise to Long Beach is uneventful, except for a green Toyota that almost does a lane change into my lap.

  I get off at Cherry Avenue and open my window. I’m still three or four miles from the shore, but I can already smell the sea breeze. It’s a beautiful day with the temperature approaching only eighty along the coast.

  The address I have for Senzimmer is just south of Fourth Street on Junipero Avenue in a tranquil neighborhood just a few blocks from the beach. It turns out to be a fairly large Spanish-style church called Our Saviour’s Lutheran.

  Clouds are actually rolling in for the first time in two weeks by the time I park in front. It’s hot, but the air feels slightly muggy for a change. I walk toward the entrance and find a huge Pacific Islander, looks Tongan or Samoan, pruning a gorgeous burst of flame-orange birds of paradise with the concentration of a topiary artist. I ask him how to get to the courtyard, and he rises to his full height, dwarfing me. He must outweigh me by two hundred pounds. He raises his long hedge pruner, which looks like a nail clipper in his massive hand, and uses it to point me in the right direction. Without a word, he goes back to his gardening.

  As far as Google is concerned, Vern Senzimmer dropped of
f the planet around 1999, so I have no idea what he’ll be like. I do know that a church is the last place I would have expected to find him. His last known address was Tehachapi State Prison, where he did time for selling heroin to a fifteen-year-old crack whore working out of a porta-potty on Skid Row. The only pictures I could find of him were from a few years earlier, at the height of his dubious rock career, before his decline into serious drugs, and even then he looked like a speed freak with pneumonia. So my expectations are low as I round the corner and see him, but nothing has prepared me for what I find.

  “You must be Nob Brown,” says a man who looks like a stranger wearing Vern Senzimmer’s eyes. This version of Vern is healthy, stocky but fit, about fifty pounds heavier than any Vern I’ve seen in a photo. The new Vern’s chestnut eyes are clear and bright, his skin tanned and glowing. He seems robust, vigorous, friendly. He’s sitting on a brick half wall that surrounds a sprawling tree, some sort of pepper or willow, I’m guessing. Holly would know.

  Senzimmer jumps up and gives me a firm, amiable handshake then gestures around the pastoral courtyard. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I see the obsessive hand of the Samoan in the perfectly manicured hedges that surround the brick walkways, flower beds, and patches of lawn.

  “Very peaceful,” I say. “Do you work here?”

  “I’m not that pious,” he says. “But I do coordinate four meetings a week here. AA.”

  “I take it you’ve renounced your former lifestyle.”

  “For twelve years, seven months, and sixteen days so far.”

  “But who’s counting?”

  He laughs. “Have a seat, Nob. Can I call you Nob?” I shrug my assent. He gestures toward two nearby benches placed to form a conversation corner, and we settle in.

  “You said you wanted to talk about Lana.”

  “I’m writing a story about her. It’s gotten a little out of hand.” I pull my reporter’s notebook out of my pocket and flip it open.