“I wish I knew. I haven’t seen the bastard since he wrote Rip It Off here in my office in three days flat two years ago.”
“What about a mailing address?”
“He changed it six months ago to a post box in Los Angeles. But I haven’t had any personal correspondence from him either. He never writes back. If you knew the crap I had to go through to get him published in the first place. . . . Hey, what’s going on? I kind of like Senator Hawthorne. I mean, he’s a politician and all, but it might even be worth registering this time. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. What post office box, Ms. Garber?”
“Post office box? Did I say that? I meant General Delivery. General Delivery, Los Angeles, California. And, hey, if you do find Howard, tell him I want to talk with him. I’ve got a dynamite idea for a new book he could really get into—communes in Central Africa. We might even be able to arrange travel expenses.”
“Is that all, Ms. Garber?”
“Yeah, but please don’t tell anyone I told you that much. They’d use any excuse to get rid of me at this place.”
She hung up. Some lot she told me. General Delivery, Los Angeles. That was about as useful as the 1942 Yellow Pages. The operator called back with the overtime charges. I told her to bill them to Sam Sebastian at Hawthorne Headquarters and clicked off.
The businessmen were on their second beers as I walked around them toward the front. The jukebox had segued into a nauseating Jacques Brel ballad. The air-conditioning wasn’t working and I wasn’t feeling good. But when I reached the door, a lovely brown leg stretched out blocking my path. It was Alora, seated at the last table in the room nursing the end of her vermouth. She gazed at me with her inscrutable Indian eyes, black as an Aztec night. A moon goddess at a jungle sacrifice.
“Hello.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m waiting for my sister.”
“Can’t you leave her a note?”
I reached into my pocket and handed her a pencil. She looked at me for a moment, then bent over a cocktail napkin and wrote: “Dear Sister: I had to leave early. See you tonight.” She handed the note to the bartender.
“It’s for my sister,” she said.
The bartender’s lips curled almost imperceptibly and he folded the napkin in half, placing it under a bottle of maraschino cherries.
Alora took me by the hand. I pushed open the swinging doors and we walked into the glaring sunlight.
“How about my place?” she said. “My car.” She pointed to a battered Studebaker at the end of an alley. “It’s not far.”
We headed down the alley. Alora stood close to me. I could feel her warm thigh, her naked brown arm.
Halfway down, I shoved her into a doorway.
“Hey! What’re you doing?”
I kicked open the service door and, grabbing her by the wrist, pulled her down a corridor. I pinned her up against the concrete wall next to a wire window.
“Okay, hermana, who’re you working for? Who put you up to this?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t?!” I turned her around to the window, holding onto her arm. Outside, parked directly in front of her Studebaker, was the green Chevy. The two big men in banlon shirts sat in the front seat watching the building apprehensively. I could read the license plate: 328KLR, Nevada.
“Who are they?” I said, twisting her arm hard behind her back until I could hear her groan.
“I don’t know . . . goddamnit!”
“Do you expect me to believe that?” I twisted a little harder. I would have broken her arm right off if she hadn’t been a woman. Those bastards outside would have taken me for a ride and dropped me under the nearest railroad bridge for sure.
“I don’t know who they are. I swear. They just . . . ” At that moment, one of the men noticed us in the window. He punched his partner, who floored the Chevy in reverse and gunned out of there, leaving tracks halfway across Lincoln Boulevard. “They . . . they . . . gave me a hundred dollars if I’d lead you out here. I work over at the Venus Massage . . . in Panorama City.”
I reached into her pocketbook and found two crisp new U.S. Grants. She was trembling all over. Maybe she was worried I would take her money. I stuffed them back in the bag and walked out in the sun.
4
SOMEBODY HAD DONE his homework. There was no Venus Massage in Panorama City and license plate 328KLR, Nevada, was privately listed.
I lay on my bed under the Tensor light reading Rip It Off, Chapter Three, “Crash Pads.” It was a dreary production filled with the cliches of the late and middle sixties set in an archaic psychedelic type. His prose sounded like a bad underground disc jockey on uppers. I wondered who would pay $2.95 for the privilege of hearing about this or that “trip” or of discovering what was “groovy” and “right on.” Some acid-damaged fifteen-year-old from Des Moines, maybe, or a frustrated housewife in Waco, Texas, hoping for a way out into the cool world. I had bought it, of course, but I was looking for clues, some indication where Eppis might be hiding, betrayed by his own hand. Unfortunately, of the crash pads listed, only one happened to be in Southern California and that was the L.A. County Beach, a hiding place some thirty miles in length and a little too open to hold a mimeograph machine. I had turned to the chapter on “Free Food” when I remembered I knew a friend of Eppis’—or at least an acquaintance—Earl Speidel, the record producer. Three or four years back, right after the Chicago Convention and at the height of Howard’s celebrity, Earl had cut an album with him and other radicals called Voices of Dissent. Not long ago, I had seen it remaindered at Thriftymart for seventy-nine cents next to Gerry and the Pacemakers Gear the Merseyside Beat.
I reached for the phone to call Earl, but before I could dial information for the number of Grit Records, I was interrupted by another voice on the line. It was someone working for Sebastian. The county coordinator wanted to see me right away.
Finding a parking space in front of Hawthorne Headquarters was nearly impossible. There were still two weeks before the primary, but the surrounding blocks of Wilshire were bumper to bumper. In front of the office itself, the activity was fierce. High-spirited college boys ran up and down the stairs carrying large cartons of campaign literature to a pair of Dodge vans blocking traffic in the middle of the boulevard. A crew from Abbey Rents were setting up a scaffold along the sidewalk. Voter registrars strode up the street with their large grey ledgers and stacks of petitions. I rode up the elevator to the main lobby. The room was jammed with volunteers making phone calls, typing addresses and yakking furiously to each other. I walked up to the receptionist, a harried young lad in a USC sweatshirt.
“I’d like to see Sam Sebastian. I’m Moses Wine.”
“What’s this about?” The receptionist gave me a long skeptical look indicating I’d better have some high-powered explanation to get to see a heavy like Sebastian.
“I’m the dietary consultant.”
“The dietary consultant,” he nodded with a shit-eating grin on his face. “Sorry, my man, but Sam’s in conference. High priority stuff. If you’d like to leave a message?”
I wanted to push his face in the IBM typewriter but we were blinded as a movie crew switched on the arc lights to film Conrad Kimble, the daytime TV star, licking envelopes for Senator Hawthorne. A make-up man rushed forward with a hairbrush.
“This isn’t a good time, my man,” explained Mr. USC. “They’re caucussing in Colorado.”
“I don’t give a shit if they’re caucussing in the Caucasus. Sebastian just called me. I’m supposed to see him.
“Look.” I reached for my wallet. “This ten spot says you buzz Sebastian on your intercom and tell him the dietary consultant is here and I’ll be in there in ten seconds.”
“Okay,” said USC. “But you lose and you give it to the campaign.”
Magnanimous bastard.
He rang Sebastian’s office.
“There’s a guy here who
says he’s the dietary consultant.”
“What are you waiting for? Send him in.”
I stared the receptionist right in the eye. He wasn’t moving. At length he opened the top drawer and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. I took it and folded it in my pocket.
“Aren’t you going to donate it to the campaign?”
“No.”
When I entered Sebastian’s office, most of the lights were out and the county coordinator was slumped over the table. He had rings around his eyes as big as Pismo clams and the shocked expression of a man who has just been punched in the stomach. Sugars was in the comer hugging his slide rule like a security blanket. Two telephone lines were flashing on the desk, but neither of them was answering. I couldn’t figure what all the depression was about. The Harris Poll that morning had shown Hawthorne edging ahead of Dillworthy for the first time, thirty-seven to thirty-six with fourteen percent for the other candidates and thirteen percent undecided. They couldn’t be that scared of the undecided vote. It had usually gone in their favor. And with all the guilt-stricken celebrities contributing to their war chest, I would have guessed they had it in the bag.
Sebastian didn’t say anything but twisted painfully in his chair and pushed a photograph over to me. I picked it up and examined it carefully. It was a police glossy of a dismembered body. The legs were squashed into bloody stubs and the right arm was missing. One of the shoulders had been crushed and the head turned around in the opposite direction. The top of the cranium had been pierced and the brains were spilling out to the side. The torso itself had been so disfigured you could barely make out it was the corpse of a woman. I felt sick to my stomach. Sebastian pushed over another photograph. It showed a half-demolished Volkswagen upended at the side of a cliff. The concave roof rested on a concrete slab just above where the driver would have sat.
“Lila Shea,” I mumbled, barely audible.
Sebastian nodded.
“When did it happen?”
“Thirty minutes after you left here. Off a cliff below Cerro Gordo.”
“Sons of bitches.”
The campaign manager reached for a paper cup and crumpled it. Outside I could hear the television director yelling to Conrad Kimble. The cameraman hadn’t been ready when the star glued the address sticker on the envelope. Could he try it once more? Sugars joined us at the table, placing his slide rule in a leather sleeve. The photographs of Lila Shea lay between us. I concentrated instead on the benign visage of Miles Hawthorne tacked to the far wall.
“What about the police?” I asked.
“They’re investigating. A half-empty bottle of barbiturates was found in her glove compartment.”
He hesitated.
“What else?”
“Nothing much. Everything else was destroyed in the crash, except for two cartons of Hawthorne literature and the computer print-outs in the trunk.”
“Shit,” said Sugars, banging his fist as if the presence of the campaign literature were the unkindest cut of all. “It’s murder, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“Who did it?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t about to tell him about Nevada license plate 328KLR or my run-in with Alora. Or, for that matter, about the excessive price asked for the decrepit mansion on Columbia. Not now, anyway. Sugars pulled out another cigar from his vest pocket and lit it. It looked pretentious against his premature corpulence.
“You’d better find out soon,” he said, pointing the cigar. “This thing could blow up into a disaster for us.”
“Yeah.”
“Those bastards are out to stop us any way they can.”
“Yeah.” I watched Sugars smoke, detesting him for caring more about his candidate than the slaughtered woman. Sebastian noticed this and turned to the younger man with a discouraging look.
“Why was Lila Shea chosen to come to my house?” I asked. “You could have sent anyone . . . or telephoned.”
“She wasn’t chosen,” said Sebastian. “She came to me.” I waited for him to continue. “She was the one who brought me the Eppis flyer.”
“Did you verify it?”
“Of course we did.” He flared momentarily. “The flyers were mailed. Another batch turned up in Santa Monica this morning.”
“Who suggested you hire a private detective?”
The two men looked at each other.
“She did . . . and she suggested I hire you.”
“And then I checked you out,” Sugars chimed in. “Thoroughly.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“It didn’t seem important.”
“Oh.” I picked up a pamphlet from the table: “Democratic Candidates for Delegates to Party National Convention—Certified List.” I thumbed through it. Each candidate had 238 delegates and 103 alternates pledged to him. They were listed with their cities of origin. I recognized the names of a few entertainers and some secondline politicians.
“May I keep this?”
“Sure,” said Sebastian.
I stood to leave, sliding the pamphlet into the hip pocket of my jeans, and opened the door without looking back at them.
“Don’t give me excuses,” one young organizer shouted into his phone as I crossed through the front room. “We need that precinct and we need it bad. Get it canvassed.” Then he hung up.
5
THE NEXT MORNING a dense fog had blown in all the way from the ocean to Echo Park, about eighteen miles. When I went outside, the windshield of the Buick was covered with moisture. I wiped it off with a chamois cloth and let the engine run for a while. The tail pipe belched like an old man with catarrh. The parking lights weren’t working and the carburetor made a peculiar pinging noise. I checked the tires all around. They were as bald as a Mexican hairless. I should have done something about this, taken the heap into a garage or into Glendale for a new set of tires, but I got in and drove toward the Hollywood Freeway instead. It was Saturday. My day for the kids.
The fog was burning off as I headed through Cahuenga Pass in the Valley and transferred to the Ventura Freeway. Out in the distance a fierce smog was building up at the base of the San Gabriels. The sky was beginning to look like steamed piss. I turned off the freeway at Laurel Canyon Boulevard and made a left up the hill into the canyon. Soon the Valley tract homes faded from view and I climbed higher into the Santa Monica Mountains, the dense foliage folding about me. Taking one of the twisting side streets off Mulholland, I wound my way up to Suzanne’s house and parked beneath the jacaranda tree. Her guru Madas was squatting on the front porch in a meditation position, middle-aged muscles rippling on his bare chest. His trance must not have been very deep, because I could see him follow me with his eyes as I tramped past him and around the house.
Jacob was in the backyard watering the flowers and shaking his sheep dog hair like Ringo Starr. Simon, his one-year-old brother, watched in admiration from the playpen. They both wore yellow tee-shirts and Suzanne had sewn zodiac patches on the seats of their pants. Simon was a Gemini and Jacob a Scorpio like me.
I stood there for a moment, realizing how glad I was to see them. Then I sneaked up quietly, picking up Simon first, hugging him to me and feeling his tiny ribs like chicken bones against my side. Next Jacob jumped into my arms, nuzzling my neck and smearing peanut butter on my shirt collar. They felt good. I could see Suzanne through the window. She was making a carrot cake and smiling to herself.
“Mommy needs money,” said Jacob.
“What for?”
“The gas.”
“Twenty-four dollars,” Suzanne called through the window.
“I thought I paid for that,” I said, moving toward her.
“You owed three months.” She came out the back door with Jacob’s sandals and an extra pair of diapers for Simon.
“I don’t have it. All I’ve got is enough for the kids’ lunches. Why don’t you get him to pay for it? He lives here.” I nodded toward Madas.
“That’s your responsibility
. Besides, next week Madas is taking me to Squaw Valley to meet Swami Sri Prasnamurti. They’re having a meeting of the Human Potential Movement.”
“Great.”
“Well, have a good time.” She handed me the sandals and Simon’s diapers.
I turned and carried the boys around the front past where Madas was sitting in the lotus position with the tips of his fingers over his eyelids, the picture of inscrutability.
“Reached the astral plane?” I asked him, dumping the kids in the back seat of my car. He didn’t say anything. I pulled out slowly, careful not to dent the fender of the guru’s powder blue XKE. In the rearview mirror I could see his holiness watching me like a hawk.
“I want three roast beef sandwiches and four macaroons,” said Jacob, bouncing on the seat as we coasted down Laurel Canyon Boulevard to Hollywood, then right on Fairfax. The streets were crowded with Orthodox Jews in payas and Miami Beach matrons in spangled pumps walking with their hippie sons.
“How come four macaroons?” I asked.
“Four ’cause I’m four.” The logic was indisputable.
We parked in front of Handleman’s Bookstore. Jacob peered in the window at the display of books and ancient manuscripts: The Talmud, the Midrash, the new translation of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. Old man Handleman waved to us and I picked up Simon so he could see him. Then we moved on down the street past Kugelman’s Bakery and Wholesale Candystore to Canter’s. I took a ticket at the delicatessen counter while Jacob pushed his face up against the glass in front of the dill pickles and stuffed derma.
“Let’s get something for Aunt Sonya,” he said.
We bought three roast beef sandwiches, two pastramis, pickles, potato salad, some macaroons, three bottles of Dr. Brown’s cream soda and halvah. Then we left the store and crossed the street to the Fairfax Senior Citizens Center.
The main lounge smelled of Lysol. We pushed through the revolving door, making our way through the Saturday morning crowd of relatives. On the moveable stage an ancient gentleman in a velvet yamulka sang “Oif’n Pripitchik” in front of a Yiddish dance band. Tears were streaming down his face, but the lines of backgammon players at the banquet tables didn’t seem to notice. We found Sonya in her purple babushka seated in her usual spot at a rear table opposite her old friend Mr. Bittleman. They were engaged in an argument.
The Big Fix Page 3