The Big Fix

by Roger L. Simon

  “He was listening to it all the time,” she said, “before he disappeared . . . as if the record were a time machine taking him back to 1968.”

  “What about Eppis?”

  “I never knew him.”

  “Did your father ever have contact with him after they made the record together?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did he ever talk about him?”

  She thought for a moment. “He felt sorry for him. I remember we were watching a documentary of the Chicago Convention. One of those television rehashes of the year’s news. They had footage of Eppis leading a demonstration in a Mickey Mouse cap. My father said it was sad that Howard was so confused between revolution and his own self-interest, that he wanted to change society but he was more intent on calling attention to himself.”

  “Your father sounds pretty militant.”

  “Not really. He was for anything he thought would help the Chicano. He even supported Hawthorne in this campaign.”

  “Did he ever mention anything about Satanism?”

  “Satanism?” She laughed. “No.”

  “What about a man called Oscar Procari, Jr.? Sometimes known as King Nestor.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Then why’d you follow me into that bar?”

  “My father left an address in case anything happened to him.”

  “23 Columbia Drive?”

  “Yes. . . . My brother saw you come by there the day after he disappeared. Now the building’s gone.”

  “What about the two fifties in your purse?”

  “Unemployment money.”

  I leaned back on the sofa next to her with my head against the bookshelf. I expected to see a political poster, but a Manet print was pinned to the wall opposite me. The bulletin board beneath it was filled with photographs of the Teatro. I liked her apartment. It smelled good, not of perfume and sachets, but like a real woman lived in it, a woman who worked and sweated and fucked on top of the sheets when the weather was hot.

  “I’ll have to ask you to leave,” she said, standing and unlocking the door. “I have a meeting tonight and I want to have dinner.”

  I didn’t move. I picked up the slugs and rolled them about in my hand like Captain Queeg. “Why don’t we have it together?”

  “What for?” She stared at me with her hand on the door handle.

  I shrugged.

  “You’re going to find my father and you want me as a prize, is that it? I heard that’s how private detectives operate.”

  “I saw that on Mannix once. Only it never seems to happen to me.”

  “Why do you suppose that is?”

  “I don’t know. How about something to eat? You must know some good places around here.”

  “All right,” she said.

  We drove down Soto Street to the Restaurante Merida, a hole-in-the-wall with four formica tables and an animated waterfall advertising Coors Beer. They had Yucatan-style food and Alora told me to order panuchos with black beans. It turned out to be a kind of Mayan tostada in a dark, pungent sauce. The taste of the beans was more delicate than the usual frijoles. Alora talked about her family. She was born in the Yucatan, near the Island of Cozumel, where her father worked on a coffee plantation. When she was six, her mother died and her father brought the family up to the States, first to the El Paso area and then to the San Joaquin Valley and then to Los Angeles. It was in the San Joaquin Valley, near Delano, that they had become involved with Chicano theater. A group had been formed there, splintering off from the Teatro Campesino and Luis Vazquez had been chosen to lead it. He didn’t know much about acting, but he learned fast and so did Alora and Jorge, her brother, although he didn’t like it much. He liked to fix cars. After the group was really together, they moved down to Los Angeles to help organize in the Barrio.

  We drank a few beers and then sat there awhile over our coffee. I was feeling pretty mellow, looking at Alora and watching the Coors waterfall splash over a smiling fisherman. I didn’t like the idea of returning to an empty house with nothing but Clue and hash to keep me company. But the waiter came with the bill and we left. Driving back to her place, Alora sat closer to the driver’s side of the Buick. My hand fell on her shoulder at a stoplight and I let it stay there. She didn’t move away. A sad Cuban canción drifted over from the jukebox of a local bar.

  “Do you think my father’s alive?” she asked, turning toward me, our thighs touching.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  When we got back to the apartment, her brother and his buddy were still there, tossing the knife into the trunk of an avocado tree. I allowed the car to idle, trying to figure a way to go in with her, but the men weren’t leaving.

  The brother turned toward us.

  “The meeting’s started,” he said.

  Alora nodded. She jumped out of the car and crossed the patio without looking back.

  I stared after her for a moment then drove off into the night. I didn’t know where I was headed. The car appeared to be guiding itself, flat out on the Golden State Freeway. The road was filled with eight-wheel trucks bound for Bakersfield and diesel tankers spewing black exhaust as they carried the oil from Long Beach to San Francisco and points north. I curved around Griffith Park and detoured onto the Ventura where the freeways intersect in Burbank. Soon I was northbound through the San Fernando Valley, speeding around the other side of the park past Warner Drive. Universal Studios loomed up in the distance followed by the off-ramp to Laurel Canyon.

  I pulled up behind Madas’ Jaguar. All the lights were out except for a flickering from the boys’ bedroom and an orange glow from Suzanne’s. I got out of the car, closing the door quietly, and walked over to the house I had bought almost a year ago but slept in for only two weeks. Jacob was sitting up in bed watching a cowboy movie on TV with Simon asleep beside him. In the next room, a candle glowed behind a cellophane screen, reflecting the naked backs of Madas and Suzanne. His legs were crossed in the lotus and she was seated on top of him, in the opposite direction, straddling his torso with her toes pointed forward. They both had their eyes closed. I wondered if this was one of those Tibetan positions I had read about, the ones in which Tantric priests were able to hold an erection for six hours. I stood there for a moment, watching them frozen in a sexual trance. Had I expected her to be alone?

  When I got home, I had a smoke and crawled into bed. I lay on my back stroking my penis, thinking about Lila Shea in the old Berkeley days, about us making it on mescaline in a eucalyptus grove in Tilden Park. But it didn’t work. A vision of Suzanne and Madas kept floating into my mind, spoiling it; the kids in the next room stupefied in front of the television set. . . . But then I conjured up Alora, naked on the beaches of the Yucatan, a jungle orchid tucked in her ear, bending over me, and things felt a little better for a while.

  16

  NO FINGERPRINTS!” SAID the clerk, his voice squeaking peremptorily. He towered over me, standing on a stool behind the counter at the county coroner’s office, the lower half of his jaw wrinkled in a prune-like sneer.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Do I have to say why? There just aren’t any.”

  “What about x-rays?”

  “We don’t have them.”

  “What do you mean you don’t have them?”

  “Do you expect us to keep x-rays on every case that comes through here?” He waved his finger at me like a schoolmarm chastising the class dunce. “This inquest was over two years ago. And even if we did have them, you wouldn’t be allowed to see them anyway.”

  “They were cited in the newspaper reports.”

  “Indeed.” The coroner’s clerk snorted, stepping down from his stool and pushing the file to the other side of the counter. From the front he looked like one of those ads for cut-rate clothes on the Late Show—a complete wardrobe for $89.95. He was all color-coordinated in a lime green shirt with forest pants and a yellow tie; but chintzy, as if he would unravel th
e moment you pulled one thread from the seat of his trousers. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, you’re taking up county time.”

  “Is that so?” I said, edging down the counter to the file. “May I have a look at this?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s against county rules.”

  “County rules? But it’s already ten o’clock.”

  I pointed up at the wall behind him. The clerk looked puzzled. He turned around in the direction I was pointing. When he had his back fully to me, I reached over his shoulder and grabbed hard on his sweet yellow tie, yanking it backwards. He sputtered and choked.

  “One move and you’ll have an Adam’s apple up your nose!”

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  I twisted the tie a quarter turn to the left, shutting him up, and reached down for the file with my other hand.

  “Sorry to violate county rules,” I said, flipping the file open in front of me. “I’ve always had a deep feeling of respect for the Board of Supervisors.”

  I looked down at the coroner’s report, skimming the information for something that might prove useful to me. Procari had lived in the Sunset Hills, not far from Isabel La Fontana, and was thirty-one years old at the time of death. He was five foot ten inches in height, brown hair, brown eyes, with a long scar on his right thigh from a childhood injury. There was a photograph of him in his Satan regalia looking like something out of an old Conrad Veidt movie. The next page had a silhouette drawing of the remains with an explanation by the examining physician. The bones themselves had been badly charred as if the body itself had been completely incinerated before the vehicle ever struck the water—a most remarkable case, according to the physician. A forensic surgeon, Dr. Adrian Wincorn, had been called in for consultation. Dr. Wincorn said the car must have exploded at least two hundred yards from the curve in order to have caused such severe burns. A faulty fuel line in the Maserati’s delicate intestines, perhaps. The inner organs of beast and fowl. Or a deliberate suicide, if one were to believe the father.

  “Unnnnh!” The clerk tried to scream for help.

  “Shut up.”

  A signature at the bottom of the page indicated the bones had been removed to Dr. Wincor’s laboratory for further study, but the space set aside to be stamped on their return was unmarked.

  “Now how do you explain an oversight like that?” I asked the clerk without giving him a chance to answer. “Isn’t that against the county rules? Not on the take, are you?” I released the tie and he fell back into the xerox machine. “I’d hate to think our public officials were on the take. That’s not the kind of thing that inspires people’s confidence.”

  I checked the address under Wincorn’s name—147 N. Cranberry Drive, Beverly Hills—and tossed the file on the desk in front of him.

  147 N. Cranberry was the typical Beverly Hills “Doctor’s Building”—a glass cube over five layers of subterranean parking with elevators that worked by thermal contact and pastel drawings of Paris on the wall. It had an overpriced pharmacy in the lobby and a receptionist with an eye for social class equal to the maitre d’ of the best restaurant in town. I eased past her and consulted the black-felt office listings. Dr. Wincorn’s name was nowhere to be found. I walked back to the receptionist.

  “Didn’t a Dr. Adrian Wincorn have his offices here?” I asked.

  “Dr. Wincorn is no longer with us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dr. Wincorn is not the kind of doctor who fits in at 147 North Cranberry.”

  “I see. Well where is Dr. Wincorn then?”

  “I shouldn’t know.”

  She turned away from me to deal with a matron in a macrame stole. Shouldn’t know, my ass. I walked around her into the pharmacy, stopping a young black salesgirl smiling behind an ad for Preparation H.

  “Have you been working here long?”

  “Three years.”

  “Remember a Dr. Wincorn?”

  “Wincorn . . . Wincorn . . . ” She picked up a bottle of Noxzema and replaced it on the shelf. “Stay away from him. A regular butcher.”

  “I wasn’t planning on seeing him for an illness.”

  “How about your girlfriend?”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “A malpractice suit, huh? He’s at the Self-Determination Clinic, if they haven’t condemned the place yet.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Over by the airport.”

  Over by the airport was right. I found the Self-Determination Clinic on a little street behind Century Boulevard about twenty yards off the New York flight line. It was tucked between a hangar and a car rental agency. A low-flying 747 rattled the window panes as I approached the front steps. The roar was deafening. I walked around to the side of the building examining the facade. The shades were drawn and decorated in pink with rainbow decals. A sign on the back door was ringed with flowers and read “Patients Entrance Only.” While I stood there, a Dodge van pulled up driven by a heavyset man in a cowboy hat and dark glasses. A nurse got out, followed by two young girls who looked around sixteen. They looked scared and carried overnight bags, one plaid and one grey. The girl with the grey bag had been crying. She had a sticker on her purse which said “Tulsa High Boosters ’72” with an oil well in the background.

  “Is it all right?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Miss Henderson. Money order or certified check only.” The nurse shook her head and stepped back a few paces to speak with the driver. “Jane Ellen Larkin. United Flight No. 31 from Salt Lake.”

  He nodded and drove off.

  The nurse turned toward me.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’d like to speak with Dr. Wincorn. I’m from the coroner’s office.”

  The nurse blushed.

  Five minutes later I was sitting in Wincorn’s office. The doctor was about to explain himself when another 747 roared overhead making speech impossible.

  “Listen,” he said when it had passed. “I don’t know what this is about but this is a legitimate business. Abortion is legal in the state of California when authorized by two physicians—or haven’t you heard?” He pointed at the clinic license over his head.

  “I’m not here to question your right to perform abortions, doctor.”

  Through his office window, I could see the van already pulling back into the clinic lot and depositing the new patient. Fast work indeed. A young girl in a pastel rain coat stepped into the van and headed off for the airport.

  “Our prices are fair. $175 for a vacuum, $285 for a D&C. That includes picking the girls up at the plane and returning them the same day so their friends back in Iowa don’t know a thing.”

  “I told you I’m not interested in abortions.”

  “Then what do you want?” Wincorn addressed me flatly, with an undertone of implied threat. He was a powerful man with the trim body of a twenty-three-year-old, but the wrinkled face of someone much older, in his forties. A Jack LaLanne or a Vic Tanney. He must have spent a lot of time working out.

  “I’m interested in the Procari case.”

  “The what?”

  “The Procari case.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on, doctor. Think back. It was only two years ago.” Wincorn shook his head. Another plane flew past and I waited to continue. “A thirty-one-year-old man shot over Deadman’s Curve in a Maserati. You know about it. Your name’s on the coroner’s report.”

  “It is?”

  “You signed out with the evidence and never brought it back.”

  “What evidence?”

  “Some bones supposedly belonging to the victim. The only question is which one. They must have belonged to some victim or other. Unless they were animal bones.”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea what this is all about.”

  “You don’t? Look, Wincorn, you’ve got a lucrative thing going here. You must be doing more business than Planned Parenthood and the La Leche League combined.”
r />   “Well?”

  “You wouldn’t want to upset it over some little oversight in a coroner’s report, some little miscue which you and I know was just a tiny accident in an otherwise impeccable career.”

  “Listen, buddy, I don’t even think you’re with the coroner’s office, but whoever—”

  “Whoever I am I can still inform the proper authorities.”

  Wincorn sat back in his chair. “Yeah.”

  “But I can assure you, doctor, I haven’t the slightest interest in you. If you’ve spent the last ten years giving physical therapy to ax murderers, that’s your affair. All I want is some information.”

  “What?”

  “Just tell me what you know about the Procari death and I’ll leave you alone. Otherwise you can kiss the Self-Determination Clinic good-bye along with your own license to practice medicine in the state of California.”

  The nurse stuck her head in the door. “You’re wanted in surgery, doctor.”

  “What happened to those bones, Wincorn?”

  “Tell them to wait,” he told the nurse. She ducked out, shutting the door behind her. The doctor was sweating profusely.

  “I don’t know. I never saw them.”

  “What do you mean you never saw them?”

  “They were handed to me in a black box at the coroner’s office and I delivered it to a man at the Enco Station on Sunset and Alvarado. I never even looked inside.”

  “Who? Who was the man?”

  “I never saw him again. He gave me five thousand dollars and disappeared.”

  “Who was he, Wincorn?”

  “A man in a Dacron suit, slate grey.”

  “What was his name?”

  The doctor reached into his desk and pulled out a sterile gauze pad, breaking it open to mop his brow. Sweat was soaking through the collar of his white coat.

  “If I tell you, they’ll kill me.”

  “If you don’t tell me, there’ll be a lot of cheap abortion equipment up for auction. What’s the name, Wincorn? You can trust me.”

  “Jonas,” he said. “Phil Jonas.”

  17

  WE WANT HAWTHORNE! We want Hawthorne! We want Hawthorne! We want Hawthorne!”