The Big Fix

by Roger L. Simon

  “Uhuh . . . and how am I going to do that?”

  “The wheels of justice, pal. You’ve got the materials—computers, files. This bird must have spent twelve of the last fifteen years in the slam.” I wrote the details of his identity on a paper napkin and passed them to him.

  “And what if I do? What’s in it for me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Glory, Koontz. The glory of a solved case. You’ll be hell’s own bloodhound. And just think. I’m bringing you the first solid clue you’ve got.”

  “Our first solid clue was your fingerprints on Lila Shea’s dashboard. You’re about a quarter of an inch from arrest, Wine.”

  The waitress came over with the cheese danish. Koontz sliced it in half, eating it as rapidly as the maple bar. When he had finished, the waitress reached under the counter and presented him with a box of a dozen doughnuts, neatly tie with a ribbon. It had his name on it. Eugene Koontz.

  “You know we private citizens pay for that stuff,” said, standing and pointing to the box. “I bet you’re the type who sleeps on the beat too.” I crossed toward the door. “Oh, by the way, you’d better look into this fast. I heard rumor about a freeway explosion the morning of May 31. Of course that might just be a rumor.”

  Koontz muttered into his coffee as I left the restaurant.

  I headed across Glendale Boulevard and up the hill on Alvarado opposite the radio antennae. I wanted to find out Alora Vazquez had returned from the campo. There were some questions I wanted to ask her, a matter of a purchase had made at Thriftymart earlier that morning. But I decided to stop home first and call a friend who was a public defender in Las Vegas. When I got to the door, the phone was ringing again. This time I was able to reach it before stopped, but I hesitated, sure it was Koontz eager to pun me about the freeway explosion. I let it ring a few more times, enjoying the image of the rumpled cop stewing in the phone booth next to Winchell’s, before I picked it up. But the voice on the other end bore about as much resemblance to Koontz’s as Judith Anderson reciting Seneca in Latin.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wine. This is Oscar Procari speaking.”

  “Senior or Junior?”

  “Senior . . . I hope I didn’t call at a bad time.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Procari. I’m glad you did.”

  “Because I would like to invite you out to my house for a talk. I think we have a great deal to say to each other.”

  “When would you like me to come?”

  “Right now.” His voice was flat and uncomplicated like someone used to giving orders without having them contradicted. He continued before I could formulate a response. “My address is 102 Bermuda Lane, Rolling Hills.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I hung up.

  Traffic was light around the interchange and in ten minutes I was on the Harbor Freeway heading south. I sped by Century Boulevard and Watts and the Cal State campus behind the oil refineries in Dominguez Hills. In a few minutes I could see the San Pedro docks and the bridge to Terminal Island. I turned off and cut over to Elvira Boulevard and then up the Coast Highway to Palos Verdes. The Marineland spire loomed in front of me where a series of cliffs dropped sharply into the ocean. A group of scuba divers were reclaiming garbage off the point. I continued around the bend and turned up into the hills on Amalfi Way.

  I had visited Rolling Hills several years ago with Suzanne, but we didn’t stay long. It’s not the kind of place you’d call hospitable. The intention is quite the opposite—to exclude the outside world, not in the coarse, planned manner of the new developments with their movie studio guard houses and electronic surveillance gadgets, but through shame. How could you break a stained glass window just to make off with a paltry color TV? Or defile their lovely tree-lined streets with a poorly-maintained 1947 Buick?

  Bermuda Lane was on the other side of the hill in a wooded gully out of direct sight of the ocean. A trio of teenage girls on horseback dressed in English riding costumes cantered past me as I turned into the driveway of number 102. The driveway was gravel and ran for perhaps fifty yards, surrounded on both sides by rows of green juniper cut low in the bonsai style. I drove down it to Procari’s house, an enlarged California bungalow similar to hundreds that lined the older areas of Los Angeles. But this one was perfect. Every shingle, every wooden beam appeared to have been crafted by hand. I guessed it had been built by Greene and Greene, famous architects of the 1920’s.

  I parked by the sun porch next to a Mercedes limousine and a Land Rover. When I arrived at the front door, a lanky young woman was standing there in a bikini. Her skin was well browned from the sun. She was peeling at the crest of her forehead near where a pair of tinted glasses were pushed back into her auburn hair, cut short in the European manner.

  “You must be here for Oscar,” she said without smiling. The accent was Scandinavian. She turned and walked off into the house, knowing I was watching her slim buttocks undulate in the flesh-colored suit.

  I took a step forward into the foyer, but before I could adjust my eyes to the light and get a look around, Procari emerged from a side corridor. He was also in his bathing suit with a towel draped over his neck, a short, stocky man, about five foot seven, but hard and vigorous. He must have been in his sixties. His silver hair was combed straight back over his head with the sideburns clipped modishly at his lower earlobe. On the fourth finger of his right hand, he wore a heavy gold ring with a large blue stone.

  “Mr. Wine,” he said, extending that hand. “I’m sorry to bring you out here on such short notice but I’ve a 5:00 flight to catch. I wanted to talk with you before I left.”

  “Happy to be here,” I said, following him into the living room. It was over seventy feet long with dark mahogany panelling and antique Navajo blankets hanging from wrought iron hooks. Through the window I could see the young Scandinavian woman walking across the grass toward the pool.

  “I understand you’re looking for my son,” he said, sliding his feet into a pair of house slippers.

  “Who told you that?”

  He didn’t answer but continued through the living room and into the study. It was masculine and leathery, lined with elaborate archery equipment and photographs of Procari hunting doves in the desert. A baccarat table stood against the wall next to an ebony roulette wheel. Procari pulled a chair from behind his desk, indicating for me to sit down.

  “What have you found out about him, Mr. Wine?”

  “Nothing much. I’m not really looking for your son, Mr. Procari. I was under the impression he died in an automobile accident two years ago.”

  “You mean he killed himself.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, he did.”

  “Why?”

  “To get back at me. Ever since he was a little boy he had been trying to get back at me.” He walked around the other side of the desk and sat in a swivel chair. “You needn’t look so puzzled, Mr. Wine. It’s quite basic. The son rises up to destroy the father. Oedipus and Laius. . . . May I get you something to drink?”

  Procari pressed a buzzer and a squat Indian woman appeared as if out of the blankets and stood by my chair with a distant expression on her face.

  “Gin and tonic.”

  “The same, Maria.”

  She departed through a swinging door.

  “You’re certain it was suicide then?”

  “As certain as this.” He stared at me for a moment, then swung around in his chair to pull a window cord. The curtain drew back revealing a wide window vista of the ocean. The Coast Highway was surprisingly close. In the water, the shoreline bent out to a promontory where a strong surf beat against the rocks, sending spray onto the road above. It was Deadman’s Curve. Procari noticed my look of recognition. “You don’t have ‘accidents’ in full view of your father’s study, do you, Mr. Wine?”

  We sat there without talking. I watched the waves smash into the shore. A young boy was walking his dog along the side of
the road. Soon Maria returned with the glasses, two Schweppes bottles, a bottle of Booth’s, lime and ice. Procari mixed the drinks himself in front of me, slicing the lime with some skill.

  “I see you’re a Yale man,” I said, pointing to the heavy gold ring with the blue stone.

  “Class of ’30.” He stirred my drink and passed it over. “The first American of Italian extraction admitted to Skull and Bones, I believe. . . . How’s the drink?”

  “You know there’s been one thing I don’t understand, Mr. Procari. If you’re so certain your son is dead, how come you wanted to talk to me?”

  Procari looked down at his desk. “I don’t know. I don’t know myself. I suppose I keep hoping. . . . I feel pretty guilty about this, as you might imagine.” He paused for a moment, waiting for that to sink in. “So if there is a possibility, if anybody finds my boy . . . finds Oscarino . . . I want it to be me. It has to be me. If it were someone else, I couldn’t live with myself. That’s why I want to hire you, Mr. Wine. As an insurance policy against my own failure.”

  “Hire me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m working for somebody, now, Mr. Procari.”

  “I know. I won’t ask you who it is—or what it’s about. I’ll offer you twice what they’re paying and ten thousand dollars at the end, if you find him.” Procari fidgeted. “You don’t know how painful this is to me, Mr. Wine.”

  “Why me, Procari?”

  “Look, what’s your price? Whatever it is, I’ll pay it. It’s worth it to have Oscarino back.”

  “Let’s get this straight. I couldn’t even consider working for you until I know who put you on to me.”

  Procari looked up, a thought flickering in his brain and then disappearing. He took a sip of his gin and tonic. “Isabel La Fontana,” he said.

  “Isabel La Fontana? Don’t tell me you’re involved with Satanism too?”

  Procari waved me off with a wry smile. “There were other reasons to know La Fontana in the old days.”

  I looked through the side window toward the pool. The Scandinavian had taken off her bikini and was bouncing on the high board. Her firm breasts moved with the bounce. Then she kicked her legs in and snapped them back in a perfect swan dive, her lovely body rippling through the water. It was clear Procari knew what he was talking about.

  “Is there anything I should know about your son? Anything you haven’t told me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Nothing?”

  “It was always the same. I gave him everything and he threw it back in disgust. Boats, cars, businesses. Even Skull and Bones. At great personal sacrifice I made sure he was chosen. But on Tap Night, when the old members came around, he left a dead rat on his pillow in a pool of blood with a note telling them he would never accept anything won for him by his father. Maybe he had a point, Mr. Wine.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you think he could still be alive?”

  “Possibly. People disappear and come back again. A new identity is simple and all you need for plastic surgery is the money.”

  “And you think you can find him?”

  “I can’t promise anything, Mr. Procari.”

  “But you will work for me?”

  “I can’t even promise that.”

  He seemed perturbed. I peered around him at the baccarat table where a newspaper was spread-eagled on the green felt under a stack of magazines. The headline read: “DILLWORTHY ACCUSES OPPONENT OF . . . ” The rest was obscured by the March Harper’s. Part of the article below was circled in red with some numbers.

  Procari leaned in and held me by the forearm. His grip was strong. “Mr. Wine. You must understand. This is not a small matter to me. . . . Do you have children of your own?”

  “Two boys.”

  “Then put yourself in my place. Think how it would be if they were grown up, in their thirties, and one of them killed himself because of you. Think of that. Then you will understand my pain.”

  Procari released his grip. The Scandinavian woman entered the back door, her hair still wet from the pool. She stood there for a moment, looking at us. Then she bent over the roulette wheel to implant a kiss on Procari’s brow.

  15

  I LEFT PROCARI’S place a few minutes later with the promise I would think over his offer. Driving down Bermuda Lane, I stopped for a moment to admire a jacaranda tree. It was late spring and the lavender flowers were in full bloom. A cascade of bougainvillaea flowed over the wall behind it. Sitting there, I considered going back on foot and having another look at the financier’s house, but decided against it. A man like that would have his grounds pretty closely guarded and if there was anything worth seeing, it was probably inside.

  I proceeded down the hill to the Coast Highway and onto the Harbor Freeway. Traffic was heavier now and continued to mount as I approached the Civic Center where the Hollywood and San Bernardino Freeways intersect with the Harbor, the famous Interchange pictured in so many aerial photographs of Los Angeles. I wondered if this was the spot Eppis had selected for his detonation. It would be the logical choice to guarantee nationwide publicity. I drove past, turning off the freeway on Second Street and following the ramp behind the Music Center over to Sunset. Soon I was in East Los Angeles again. It didn’t take me long to find Alora Vazquez’ apartment the second time. Just as before, I parked in front of the synagogue and got out, carrying the slim package from Thriftymart under my arm.

  I headed to the back of the court and knocked on her door. No one answered. I knocked again. Still nothing. After a moment’s hesitation, I walked down to the side window. The bed was unmade and a half-finished glass of orange juice stood on the end table, but the lights were out and the apartment empty. There was a sense of hasty departure. Something ominous. Looking down, I noticed the window had been smashed just above the flower box and then sealed off with a piece of plywood. The screen itself had been ripped along the edge as if the apartment had been broken into. I continued around to the rear and knocked on the back door. Then I twisted the handle, trying to force it open. The lock began to give.

  “Looking for something?”

  The voice came from behind me. I spun around, shielding my face with my arms.

  Two men were standing there.

  I studied them through my fingers. It was the guy from the Studebaker and a buddy of his who looked like a promising light-heavy. The brother held his knife in his hand and was picking at a poinsettia branch to the right of my rib cage.

  “Hello,” I said, pulling down my arms and putting on my most winning smile. “Remember me?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I . . . uh . . . was just looking for your sister.”

  “My sister isn’t home.”

  “Yeah . . . well, do you know where she is?”

  The brother didn’t answer. With a flick of the wrist, he sliced the branch from the tree, letting it fall to the ground at my feet.

  The buddy stepped forward.

  Another friend in a denim work shirt and Pancho Villa moustache appeared at the door of the next apartment. Slowly he moved down into the patio.

  “Look, guys, once was enough.” My voice was shrill, empty. “I’ve got an aged grandmother and this just might push her over.”

  The brother stared at me. “Someone tried to kill my sister last night.”

  “Funny. Someone tried to kill me last night too.”

  “That so?”

  “Maybe it was the same someone.”

  “Oh yeah. Who was that?”

  “A couple of skinheads in a green Chevy. One of them carried a piece.”

  The three men looked at each other.

  “She’s at rehearsal,” the brother said.

  I sat in the back of the warehouse watching the members of the Teatro Comunal work out. They were a mixed group, some of them with a lot of talent and others you wouldn’t want to cast in a high school production of Charlie’s Aunt. But they were enthusiastic and listening har
d to Alora who was director in the absence of her father. They were in the midst of warm-up exercises when I arrived, touching each other’s faces with their eyes closed and bumping shoulders like football players. Then they put on masks and began one of their actos. It concerned a gang leader in the barrio who was shot by a cop and came back to haunt his friends during the investigation. Alora had them do it again and sat down next to me.

  “The group hasn’t been the same without my father. . . . No concentration.”

  “They look okay to me. I understand you had visitors last night.”

  “How do you know?” she snapped.

  “Your brother told me.”

  “Jorge told you? That’s none of your business!”

  “I think I know who they were.” I exaggerated to get a rise out of her but she didn’t bite. “Any word from your father?”

  She shook her head and moved away from me, heading up to the stage to deliver instructions. The actors gathered around her at the apron. “Dance it,” I heard her say. “Dance the finale. Then invite the audience to join in. . . .”

  I walked around to the side and leaned against the warehouse wall. It was covered with Chicano graffiti I couldn’t read. After another run-through, the rehearsal was over and the actors filed out the stage exit. Alora stood alone at the apron.

  “You’re still here? What do you want? Are you going to play the big hero and find my father?”

  “Maybe.” I took the package from under my arm and removed a record album, handing it to her. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  “Voices of Dissent.” Her voice quavered slightly as she read the jacket. The liner notes had already yellowed from the years in the Thriftymart bin. “Michael Ofari, Howard Eppis and Luis Vazquez.”

  She signalled for me to follow her.

  Later I sat in her living room. Two copies of Voices of Dissent lay on the coffee table—mine and her father’s—next to a couple of .38 shells Alora had dug out of her bedroom wall that morning. Outside, her brother and his friend stood guard in the patio.