Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  Lamoureux freezes, turns, wary, “You know Hubertus?”

  “I was the one who caught him trying to sneak off to Brazil under the ID of a blind German grocer we later found rotting under the floorboards of his shop.”

  “He’s at Heidelberg,” Lamoureux says. “Running the physiological institute and doing top-secret research for the Air Force.” Lovely is pretty sure Lamoureux is lying when he adds, “I only know him in passing.”

  “Yeah. He said the same thing to me, once, about science. Future of everything. I guess not for all those Dachau human test subjects he crammed into air-pressure chambers and inflated and popped like cheap balloons. For science.”

  Bristling, Lamoureux reminds Lovely that Strughold was never charged with anything at Nuremberg.

  “No, he wasn’t,” Lovely admits. “They hung his assistant, though, for war crimes. Guess that makes it okay, then. Lamoureux your real name?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Were you Vichy, or just part of the Ruhr Valley crew that wound up working at Peenemünde?”

  Lamoureux stops and regards Lovely like some kind of nasty skin rash. Takes a deep breath, looks up at the sodden clouds. “Do you know what an inversion is, Lovely?”

  “When things are upside down?”

  “A deviation from the normal, or the natural order of things.”

  “David and Goliath.”

  “I mean meteorologically.” Gesturing to the sky. “All this stratocumulus. It never lasts. It burns off, bringing clarity.”

  “Is that what you think you have?”

  “Something else you wanted to ask?”

  Lovely wants to hit him again, but instead says, poker-faced, “Gee. No. Yours is a crackerjack story, Doc. Thanks. Normally I have to grind that kind of detail out of people, but you, you just had it all cued up for me like a goddamn dissertation.”

  A slow boil. “Do I detect sarcasm?” Lamoureux drifts back toward the open back door of the barn. “You bug me, Lovely.” And now Lovely realizes he’s made a miscalculation. Now it’s evidently beginning to dawn on the scientist that Lovely may be considerably more intelligent than he supposed. And while this might have rattled him more than Lovely’s fists ever will, it brings out the bully, too, the one with an inexhaustible legion of government goons standing loyal and patriotic right behind their golden boy so he can spit threats like “You know what? Security checks in on the half hour, they might take exception to a private dick tenderizing one of their prime assets. So why don’t you just cop a breeze and we’ll call it even.”

  Lovely chides himself for letting his pride manifest, but it’s an honest mistake, and the blush of entitled rage on Lamoureux’s cheekbones, the juvenile jut of chin cause him not to regret it. “Another girl tumbles out on Mulholland,” Lovely says evenly, “next time I won’t let you get up.”

  Lamoureux kicks the back barn door and slams it shut. Rattle of the deadbolt. The launch apparatus smolders and the smell of burned circuits lingers. There’s the muffled murmur of Lamoureux’s voice on the phone.

  Time for Lovely to make his usual uphill getaway. His head hurts, from all this thinking.

  7

  MARCH 1. With a pencil she’s blackened the whole page. A lamentation for the Bikini Atoll?

  March 14. A recipe clipped from the Examiner:

  SEAFOAM SALAD

  1 box green Jell-O brand gelatin

  1 6-oz. pkg. cream cheese

  1 can pears, drained

  Maraschino cherries

  Whipped cream

  March 19. The Pasadena dinner party. A dry, pressed carnation. A placeholder with Isla’s name misspelled. Blank verse of her fragment observations: Mediterranean Mansion on Orange Grove. Fountain in the front hallway, tiny glowing fish. Waiters in white coats. Caviar! Men of science. A Huntington. A Chandler. The ex-governor. Deborah Kerr. The host has devil eyes. Girls from church collected checks. Atlee says “faith is a scientific procedure for successful living.” Jazz trio outside by the pool. Negroes. Made to go around the side to leave. Caltech chemist assured me that nuclear war will be survivable. Host assured me that sex is a health-producing, life-changing, power-creating spirit lifter. Some girls stay after. Atlee says I’m a prude.

  —

  HUNDREDS OF TOWERING POTTED PALMS have been arranged along the banks of a speculatively Congolese river dug only recently, and Lovely would have guessed a new take on Heart of Darkness but for the three dozen African extras in grass skirts and bones through their noses—only two of whom are actually African in heritage. The others have pale skin lathered in various shades of brown and black body makeup drying and cracking and peeling in the broiler heat of the 10K lights simulating a tropical sun. Some kind of equatorial jungle cannibal situation seems to be the day’s dominant movie narrative on the Paramount Ranch, so deep northwest into the San Fernando Valley it took Lovely ninety minutes to drive here from Pasadena, and he can smell ocean leaking over the treeless coastal bluffs.

  Lily’s nephew is one of the cannibals. His hair is Brylcreemed and parted in the middle, like one of the Bowery Boys, for some unknown reason. Lovely keeps an eye on the kid, staying safely out of eyeline behind the sound cart until someone shouts Cut. The putative star, who may or may not be Robert Taylor in a mustache and pith helmet, has several times rushed in swinging a prop machete and, as the jungle tribesmen cowered the way savages must when confronted by a matinee man, slashed the vine rope restraints off a spunky Studio Brunette steeping in the boiling vat of dry ice, and put his arms around her as if to lift her free.

  Cut.

  The master shot ends there, with any actual lifting evidently to be done by the stunt double who’s been doing pull-ups on some scaffolding to make his oiled muscles pop.

  Fifteen minutes are called to move the camera closer and relight. With the 10Ks killed, the jungle escheats to the sorry score of potted plants, stagnant water, and green diffusion netting, its magic spell broken. Extras break and slouch toward the craft services table for something cold to drink, or a smoke. Lovely finds Lily’s nephew at a cooler prying the cap off a grape NeHi.

  “Your aunt’s been arrested.”

  The kid jumps, sees Lovely and, if his eyes can be read correctly, not only knows that Lily’s in jail, but knows what Lovely’s about to ask next. “That weren’t my dope,” he says defiantly. But this time he doesn’t run.

  Lovely pushes his hat back off his forehead and wonders aloud, as if he really needs the answer, how Oscar knew it was dope she got popped for.

  Oscar offers an adolescent shrug. “It were in her room, right? Possession is nine-tense of the law.”

  Lovely gives this a pass. “Where’d you stash that Mexican weed I helped you keep?”

  “That were for a friend.”

  “Oh.” Frowns. “All of it?”

  “Man—”

  “No. You went to see Lily yesterday afternoon.”

  Oscar tries the feeble lie that he just wanted to tell his aunt how he got a job on a movie. He pulls a wrinkled Lucky Strike from somewhere in the skirt grass, then seems to remember he has no match. Lovely flicks his chrome lighter.

  “I am aware that you are a lowlife, Oscar. But, goodness gracious, come on. Not even a shitheel like you is gonna let your aunt do your time.”

  The nephew smokes, and talks through exhaust that wreathes his phony nose-bone, cool. “Look, man. This is my break. They gonna Taft-Hartley me. Wrote me some speaking lines, I’m gonna get a SAG card, the writer, he says I do good on this one he’s got another pitcher, set the Civil War, I’d be perfect for.”

  “I bet. The writer.”

  “That’s right.”

  Lovely just stares at him, wondering how this miserable jamook could be a blood relation to Lily Himes.

  “Man, get real. I go tell the police it was my maryjane, they ju
st gonna put us Negroes both in jail, me and Lils, two for one. And I know you know about what I’m talking.” He hissed, “Bust us both. And what does that accomplish, hey? She got her career. Her club.” Oscar’s lids go half-mast. “Her white Man Friday.” He enjoys his own joke; Lovely doesn’t react. “It’ll sit,” Oscar continues, “but what about me? I’m just now standing at the opportunity door ’bout to open wide.”

  “You hid your grass in her dressing room.”

  “If I did? Well, shit, ordinarily, that’d be the safest place for it, sure, since she don’t even smoke. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Lovely’s hands twitch and curl. “If I do I don’t want to.”

  “You wasting your time, man.”

  “You won’t help her?”

  “Are you deaf?”

  A second AD calls the extras back to the set for blocking. “First offense, she’ll be fine,” Oscar assures Lovely. “Eight months maybe, time off for good behavior. Prolly even be a career positive for her, you want my opinion on the matter. I mean. Reputation-wise. Little time in stir. People loves their colored chanteuse be a little dirty, you understand what I’m saying? I mean, man, lookit how it did for Lady Day.

  “And anyway. Blues be all about pain,” Oscar concludes, “and Auntie Lil’s had it pretty easy peasy, so far, I’d say.” He drops the stub of his cigarette and watches it smolder in the dry, matted ground before crushing it out with his bare foot. “It all good, man.” He smiles, expansive. “Well. Showtime.”

  Lovely resists an urge to punch him, and tugs his hat down fretfully and lets the nephew take a couple strides back toward the safety of the Congo before he casts his line. “But where’s the rest of it, Oscar?”

  Oscar takes another step as this registers, then stops. The slow turn of his head, cocked, curious. “Rest of what?”

  “You had a brick. They only copped your aunt for the two ounces you parked in her room. You sell the rest?”

  As Lovely watches, Oscar goes from wide eyes with a smile of disbelief to the sly smirk of feigned indifference. His mind spins precisely the way Lovely wants it to, calculating. The hook sets, the line goes taut. “Yeah yeah,” Oscar says. “Shit’s gone, I moved it. Pretty good.” That bone in his nose makes this lie especially unconvincing. Lovely notes. The big 10Ks surge on; a jungle is conjured, sharpens, and gleams again, wild, untamed. “But listen up. You get Aunt Lily a real good lawyer, shamus, you know, I be happy to chip in.”

  —

  JOHNNY LEONG IS MISTING WATER over his bok choy and cabbage racks when Lovely passes by him, asking, not idly: “Is there a Chinese cure for moral indifference, Johnny?”

  “Eggplant.” The grocer tosses a measured, warning look to the counter where Reverend Atlee Drummond sits hunched over a cup of Hal’s coffee. Lovely nods, sighs, this is pretty much how his day has been going, crosses the sidewalk, and slides onto his usual stool.

  “Half of LAPD’s looking for you, Reverend. Which gives you more than half a chance.”

  Drummond’s voice is hoarse. Low, intense: “I didn’t kill her.”

  “Okay. Except. Cops found the murder weapon at your apartment. Guess whose prints on it?”

  Drummond says nothing, just looks into his coffee and stews.

  A gruel of jaundiced morning sun drips through the Farmer’s Market awnings; some TV comedy writers from CBS Studios, looking glum as if somebody died, as usual, are crowded around a single table at the waffle place that has no name. Hal brings Lovely’s coffee. “You see where Ike says this new bomb will ensure a generation of peace?”

  “I like Ike. I’d like to live in that world, where the H in H-bomb stands for ‘Happy,’ wouldn’t you?”

  Hal grunts, drifts away.

  “He’s setting me up.”

  Lovely asks who, just to keep the flow.

  “Lamoureux.” Drummond moves over, sliding his cup of coffee with him along the empty counter until it settles next to Lovely’s. “Isla was just my typist.” Drummond leans closer, his voice falls to a whisper. “He was the one who got her pregnant.”

  “Pregnant?” Lovely feigns surprise.

  “You gotta help me.”

  “Go back a square, Atlee: who got who pregnant?”

  “Lamoureux. Isla. He”—with his hands, unspecific—“got her—you know—in a family way.”

  Lovely offers him no real reaction, so Drummond plunges on. “Sexual congress. You see what I mean? And then he killed her because she wouldn’t take care of the situation.”

  “Take care?”

  “End it.”

  “Abort?”

  Drummond makes a strangled noise and his eyes dart around the market worriedly, like they’re trading state secrets.

  “That’s funny. I know a cop who’s seen this same movie, only you’re the star of his version. No top-secret stolen plans?”

  “What? No.” Drummond hisses, “Will you listen to me? Stolen plans is what he wants everyone to think. He’s untouchable, Lamoureux. Cold War hero. But me, I helped him move the body back to her apartment, and I can prove he did it—”

  “You helped him.” Lovely cuts Drummond off, peevish, shaking his head, processing as he talks through it. “Helped him hide her murder?” For the third time this morning he wills himself not to lunge at somebody—Drummond, in this instance—with one of Hal’s forks and a steak knife. Blind emotions flare nuclear behind the phlegmatic Lovely mask.

  Drummond, oblivious, prattles, “Believe you me, our so-called friendship long ago crossed into the realm of assured mutual destruction.”

  What can Lovely say to that? “Oh.”

  A sturdy little boy in a coonskin cap darts through the market, fleeing a marginally bigger boy in a dime-store Indian headdress. Cap guns and rubber tomahawk, warbling war whoops and gunfire noises made in the back of the throat.

  Johnny Leong’s sons.

  Sunken-eyed, Drummond watches them go, and repeats his claim that he can prove Lamoureux is guilty of Isla’s murder.

  Lovely says, “Turn yourself in. Tell it to the coppers. I’ll go with you, right now.”

  “They won’t believe me,” Drummond protests. “We need proof.”

  “We?” Here it comes.

  “I’m meeting the man tomorrow night.” Drummond drains his coffee and puts the cup down, rattling. “At Aerojet Labs. The barn, so. Lamoureux. I get him talking, you’ll be my witness. Eight o’clock.”

  “What if he doesn’t say what you need?”

  “Eight o’clock. He’ll spill, trust me.”

  The reverend drops off his stool, makes a gesture of confederacy, and melts into the morning shoppers, furtive. Just like that. Lovely sniffs traces of a setup, but doesn’t imagine it’s anything he can’t handle.

  Hal clears their cups. “I guess you’re payin’ for your pal.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “He don’t look worth it, you ask me.”

  Lovely shakes his head. “In the End Times, who can say, Hal? Who can say?”

  —

  IT TAKES A WHILE to convince Zeke Cazanov in Vice to waste his happy hour on Central Avenue humoring the possible resolution of Lovely’s fishing trip to Lily’s nephew. An acquaintance in Paramount Studio security has relayed the release time of jungle extras from the set of The Lost Expedition, giving Lovely and the narc a reasonable window in which Oscar should arrive at the Fall-Out, if he’s taken the bait, under the assumption that he’ll want to get his stash quickly; today, Lovely tells Cazzie, today or not at all.

  Cazanov has doubts. The arrest of singer Lily Himes was squeaky clean, the case is a winner, why mess with success? In fact, Cazzie would still be bitching about it while they sit and wait backstage in the darkened Fall-Out, if not for the providence of Cyrus the bartender, who has unlocked the doors and joined them, and who just happened t
o have a bottle of Old Overholt tucked away, and free hooch has mellowed the Vice cop out considerably.

  “People think we’re all about justice,” Cazanov waxes, “but we’re not. We’re about winnable cases. Because, truth be told, everybody’s guilty of something. Catholics got it right. Sacraments of penance and reconciliation: contrition, confession, absolution . . . and something else, I forget, don’t tell the nuns.” He holds his glass out for another splash of rye. “It’s not our job to decide who’s innocent or guilty. We just collect the evidence and haul in whatever unlucky sap is most likely to hang for it.”

  “Which, strangely, tends to noose the darker complected,” Cyrus adds.

  Cazanov frowns. “Excuse me?”

  “Shh.” The front door opens and closes, they hear footsteps across the concrete floor of the club, and then on the wide planks of the wooden stage. A shadow passes. From where they stand they can see down the back hallway and into Lily’s private dressing room and office when the door is pulled open.

  No light comes on, but the figure moves directly to a metal file cabinet and draws open the bottom drawer. A scrape of shoe when the shadow folds into itself to grope beneath the drawer for the expected hidden contraband.

  When Oscar finally retrieves the brick—the whole brick, since Cazanov agreed to put it all back where they found it, admitting that, yes, anyone who knows where it’s stashed would likely be its owner (although, “kid and the singer could be a team,” the narc posited feebly, trying, Lovely figured, to salvage his original arrest)—when Oscar stands up with the brick in his hands, Lovely is blocking the office doorway and Cazanov has come all the way inside to flick the switch on the dressing room light that catches Lily’s nephew cold.

  Oscar sulks and gives the stink eye to Lovely while Cazanov cuffs him and relieves him of the pound of weed. A couple of times it looks like the nephew’s going to say something, but he’s led away by the uniforms who were waiting outside, without protest, without comment.