The Black Marble

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Madeline Dills Whitfield happened to pass the Brown Derby while driving in Beverly Hills that afternoon. She was fantasizing with delicious abandon. She and Vickie would be photographed at the Sign of the Dove in New York. (Did they let dogs in there? Well, how could they refuse a champion who had just won at Madison Square Garden?) There was a man with them at lunch. He was a well-known exhibitor from Long Island. He changed variously with her mood. Right now he looked like Paul Newman. Madeline would be pictured with Vickie in Time magazine, and the Los Angeles Times would do a feature article about the Pasadena dog who conquered New York. Madeline Dills Whitfield would be … well … famous.

  In Old Pasadena, family, money, even power seldom got one’s picture anywhere but the society page. It couldn’t buy celebrity. In Old Pasadena, Madeline Whitfield would soon be as popular as a movie star.

  She was so caught up in it she drove down Vine Street without rubbernecking. No matter, there were no movie stars lunching at the Derby at that moment. But if she had looked she might have noticed a gangly, middle-aged dog handler she’d often seen at shows. He was standing at Hollywood and Vine, thinking about a massage parlor on the Sunset Strip.

  He was watching the door of the Brown Derby. He was about to commit a crime on a very holy day. But then, only two waiters in the Brown Derby and nobody in a Sunset Strip massage parlor knew it was a holy day, that it was Russian Christmas.

  Like so many Big Moments in Philo’s life, it all came down to a lost erection. Philo Skinner, ever the gambler, tossed a quarter in the air. Heads I drive to that massage parlor on the Strip and give my last fifty bucks to some pimply runaway bubblegummer with undeveloped tits to go down on me. Tails, I snatch the schnauzer from the Rolls-Royce and get rich. The blood was surging in his throat, his temples, his ruined chest. He sucked his twenty-ninth cigarette of the day, and flipped the quarter.

  Heads. Later, maybe dejection, depression, regret, but now—relief. Thank God. He hadn’t slept five minutes all night. He was suddenly horny as a billy goat.

  But she wasn’t a pimply runaway. The woman in the massage parlor was a forty-five-year-old professional with lurid eyebrows, who wasn’t impressed with Philo’s white-on-white leisure suit, and the imitation gold chain dangling on his bony chest.

  “I already told you, honey,” she said, all business, “I’ll give you the standard massage, the businessman’s special, or the super massage of the day. The prices are listed.”

  “Sweetie,” Philo Skinner retorted, “I got a picture of General Grant in my pocket, but I’m not about to give him away without knowing exactly what I can expect.”

  “I’ll give you the standard massage, the businessman’s …”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing, Officer.”

  “Officer?”

  “You sound like a cop.”

  “A cop.”

  “Last vice cop that tossed me in the slam looked about like you. Can’t depend on cops being young and healthy-looking anymore. They dig up some ole bag a bones, give him a Lady Clairol dye job …”

  “You miserable cunt!”

  “Get outta my place of business!”

  “Why you old pile a dog shit you got some nerve!”

  “Get outta here!” she said, “before I call a young cop with a blue suit. I ain’t goin for any a your vice cop entrapment.”

  Philo Skinner was outraged when he roared through the door onto Sunset Boulevard, as limp as linguini. Lady Clairol! With her lousy dye job? That old hound had a lot of room to talk!

  And it was anger now, more than fear, even more than the thrill of it, which gave him the impetus. An amateur was about to make his irrevocable first step into crime.

  Millie Muldoon Gharoujian always had lunch at the Brown Derby on Friday. Just as she always had dinner Thursday at Scandia and Wednesday at La Strada. Millie Muldoon Gharoujian was a creature of habit. It made it much easier to keep her life in order because she had a third-grade education and a 90 I.Q. In her younger days she had a body and bleach job like Harlow which got her out of the uniform of a waitress and into the bed of an Armenian junk dealer who obligingly departed for the Great Scrapyard after his second heart attack, leaving Millie to marry and divorce four young studs in succession and live a hell of a sexy life high up in Trousdale Estates overlooking all the glittering lights of Baghdad. She had owned at various times, in addition to the studs, a pet ocelot, a cheetah, a boa constrictor and a baby alligator named Archie who was accidentally flushed down the toilet. She also had less exotic creatures like a Siamese cat, a standard poodle, and a miniature schnauzer bitch with terrific bloodlines who liked to amuse herself by chewing the hell out of Archie the alligator, who got sick and tired of it and went bye-bye down the john.

  The pup’s name was Tutu and she later had shown well, twice winning best of breed, until her mistress got bored with dog shows because lots of the young studs around there were geldings. And because Millie got sick and tired of Tutu’s handler always sniffing around like he was in heat. Millie Muldoon Gharoujian knew a fortune hunter when she saw one. Besides, the dog handler was at least fifty, about twenty years too old for her. Millie was seventy-six.

  A lackluster cop named Leonard Leggett was the instrument whereby Archie and Tutu were linked again in the Great Chain of Life. For when Archie took a powder, and found himself tumbling pell-mell in a wild surging torrent right through Millie’s new plumbing—while one of the studs in the round waterbed was going through Millie’s old plumbing—Archie eventually escaped with his life through a pipe vent. Then Archie began an incredible odyssey overland, living on bugs and grasshoppers and french fries which, lucky for him, lay like hordes of dead locusts on the streets of Hollywood. At last, Archie followed his instincts to the Los Angeles sewers, coming to rest in the wonderful, cool, filthy muck below the streets. There was enough tasty fare for a whole battalion of alligators: pastrami sandwiches, beef dips, the ubiquitous soggy french fries, and tons of half-eaten Big Macs and ribs from Kentucky Colonel. And there was plenty of game: rats, snakes, turtles, puppies, human fetuses, a full-term baby or two. Some of it live, most of it dead, the flotsam and jetsam of Los Angeles. People got tired of things very easily in the city and it was adios, down the sewer.

  But Archie found that peace and quiet were boring. In his dim reptile brain he perhaps remembered the bad old days when he was put upon by the schnauzer, and he became a tyrant in the sewers. He was soon five feet long, nose to tail, and still growing, rampaging around the sewers chewing the hell out of every hapless pet hamster or baby mouse that floated by on a Popsicle stick, right into the gaping maw of Archie the alligator. Then, one day, he made the mistake of chewing the hell out of the leg of Tyrone McGee, a sewer worker from Watts, who was sick and tired of being pushed around all his life and wasn’t about to take any crap even from an alligator. Not in his sewer, he wasn’t.

  Tyrone McGee did what he had always done when bullies picked on him. He went and got his big brother. In this case, big brother was Leonard Leggett, the lackluster cop, who reluctantly followed the bleeding sewer worker back down there in the dark and, shaking like a mouse on a Popsicle stick, dispatched Archie to the Big Sewer with three volleys from his Ithaca shotgun, giving Tyrone McGee a chance to grin malevolently at the belly-up sewer monster, and say, “Catch you later, alligator.”

  That same lackluster cop would make an insignificant bureaucratic decision which would decide the very destinies of four people: Madeline Whitfield, Philo Skinner, Natalie Zimmerman and A.M. Valnikov.

  Millie’s ex-dog handler, driven by anger for the massage parlor hussy, went for the Rolls-Royce three times. Each time a parking attendant came running by and Philo Skinner was forced to retreat to the safety of the street.

  So, as destiny is often decided by tiny vagaries of fortune, the dog was not stolen from the car. If she had been taken from the car, it would have been, technically speaking, a burglary from auto, and would have been handled by th
e auto theft detail at Hollywood Station. (Policemen, ever the civil servants, have been known to get in screaming battles over who has to work on a crime report which will entail only a phone call, and a notation which reads: “No suspects. Investigation continued.”) The parking lot attendant swore to Officer Leonard Leggett that no one got within a hundred feet of that Rolls-Royce, so it was correctly deduced by the lackluster cop that the dog got out of the car on her own. It was incorrectly deduced that the dog got lost. And since lost dogs don’t require a written report, Leonard Leggett was about to go lethargically on his way. Except that Millie Muldoon Gharoujian came jiggling out of the Brown Derby with two studs young enough to be her grandsons. And with much more interest in the young studs than in the fact her schnauzer was gone, she said to Leonard Leggett, “Look, kiddo, I got more invested in that pooch than you made in the last five years. Now write me out a police report so I can get my insurance company to pay me a little dough anyway.”

  So Leonard Leggett, the lackluster cop, reluctantly penciled out a quick “unknown suspects” theft report to mollify Millie, and since thefts that take place on commercial property such as restaurants are routinely given to business burglary investigators, like Valnikov and Natalie Zimmerman … destiny.

  The little terrier had spotted Philo Skinner on his first loping, crouching try for the Rolls-Royce. Philo was peeking up over the hood of a red Mark V when Tutu saw him. She hadn’t seen her former handler in months and went wild with joy. Tutu had always loved Philo madly.

  “Tutu! Hello, Tutu!” Philo whispered, squatting on the asphalt in his sweat-stained, white leisure suit.

  Then he had to beat a skulking retreat when he saw another parking attendant coming his way.

  After a few moments Philo came slinking back, sweat sticking in his lank dyed hair, all elbows and knees and bony shoulders, crouching behind a gray Mercedes 450 SEL, dizzy in the afternoon sun.

  Then still another parking attendant with long floppy blond hair came hotfooting it across the parking lot and Philo began another gasping lope, his imitation gold medallion beating a bruise on his frail chest.

  He was determined on the third try, pouring sweat, knees aching from all the squats, eyes raw from peeking over the shiny tops of Jaguars and Cadillacs like a movie Indian. His poor ragged lungs wheezed.

  “Tutu! Come, Tutu!” he gasped. “Come to Philo!”

  The little dog was berserk now, barking, growling, crying. Leaping up and grabbing the ledge of the open car window, holding herself against the glass, head and shoulders out the window, feet kicking and scratching, only to fall back inside.

  Then Philo Skinner eyeballed another one of those tireless frigging kids slapping across the parking lot in his tennis shoes, and he was off again on his last scuttling painful retreat. He knew he was finished.

  Five minutes later, Philo Skinner was sitting on the curb at Hollywood and Vine wheezing and creaking, wiping the sweat from his draining face with the sleeve of his ruined polyester jacket. He wanted to cry. He was thinking seriously about giving up this life of crime before it started, when he heard the shrill, ecstatic, beautiful bark.

  She leaped on his back, nibbling, licking, yapping with purest joy.

  “Tutu!” Philo cried.

  Philo Skinner hugged the terrier against his heaving chest, and jaded Los Angeles motorists figured it was just another kinky Hollywood freako when they saw a man sitting on the curb kissing a little dog passionately on the mouth.

  6

  Siberia

  “Uh, would you like to drive, Natalie?” Valnikov asked when they finally got their paper work arranged and began to make their calls on burglary victims.

  “Hooker didn’t even give me a chance to get my pending sex cases together,” Natalie grumbled as she opened the passenger door of the stripped-down, tan Plymouth police car. “Just gave my sex cases to somebody else.”

  “We once had a terrible sex case,” Valnikov said, sliding in behind the steering wheel. “Spring of 1953. Near the end of the war. The Reds sent in two whores with V.D. Almost wiped out our whole company. They say there’s a new strain of V.D. going around now.”

  Natalie lit a cigarette and sneered at Valnikov’s puny humor. But she saw nothing in those red and watery eyes. Nothing. Was he speaking without guile?

  That was the thing about Valnikov. Nothing seemed to follow. In his short time in Hollywood Detectives he hadn’t made any friends at all. His old crony, Clarence Cromwell, said he was just absent-minded these days. You talked to him and he answered, but you never knew what kind of an answer you’d get from the turkey. They said he was bombed, swacked, bagged. By noon? She wasn’t sure if it was booze. She wasn’t sure of anything about him except that he was the non-sequitur king of the whole goddamn police department.

  “How many calls do we have to make?” Natalie groused, settling on the well-worn passenger seat of the detective car.

  “Oh, not too many,” Valnikov said affably. His necktie was still askew and his cinnamon hair was fluffing up from the ridiculous combing he’d given it earlier.

  “I never thought it would come to this,” she sighed, thinking about the new assignment. “Maybe we can have a big day, huh? Maybe we can recover a stolen typewriter table and return it to the owner. Business burglary. Glorified furniture movers.”

  “I was a furniture mover for a year after I got out of the marines,” Valnikov said pleasantly, blinking and wiping his watery eyes on the sleeve of his suitcoat. “Lot of Korean vets looking for jobs then. I was lucky to get a job on the police department. I have a brother, he couldn’t find a job for eight months after World War II. He wasn’t so lucky.”

  Natalie lit a cigarette and decided to get the partner-to-partner biographies over with. Ought to be able to dispense with his life history with about three questions. Then she could give hers: two divorces, one daughter away at college. The police department, because it’s the best-paying job she could ever have, and she likes it well enough even though the brass does its best literally and figuratively to screw the policewomen every chance they get. And so forth.

  She didn’t smoke a cigarette, she sighed it. Sigh in the smoke angrily, sigh it out sadly, all the time pitying her luck. Why me? she asked her Friz.

  “I’m divorced. I hear you are too. Live alone, huh?”

  “Oh, no,” he answered, driving exasperatingly slow through the noontime Hollywood traffic. “I live with Misha and Grisha.”

  “Your kids?”

  “No. I don’t live with my kid anymore. He lives with his mother in Chatsworth.”

  “Too bad. How old?”

  “Forty-four.”

  Jesus Christ! She always had to look at the rummy to see if he was putting her on. He just drove aimlessly, blinking his sad patient eyes.

  “My father used to be amazed by all the luxury in Hollywood in the old days. But it scared him because he was an immigrant.”

  “Is your father still alive?” Natalie said, not really giving a shit.

  “No, my father died before my older brother was born.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said the Hollywood traffic scared him, but the Russian churches are mostly here in Hollywood.”

  Jesus Christ! The guy’s brain is marinated! Shriveled! Sanforized! But she couldn’t smell the booze on him. It must be dope. Jesus Christ! This rummy’s a doper!

  Natalie snuffed out her cigarette and tried to make it easier for him, as a test. “Valnikov, I wasn’t asking how old … your father couldn’t possibly die … never mind that. A moment ago I wasn’t asking you how old you are. We were talking about … you said you live with Misha somebody … I thought it was your kid.”

  “Oh!” he smiled. “No, you asked if I live alone. I said I live with Misha and Grisha. I think that’s how you got confused.”

  “I got confused.”

  Then he turned right on Gramercy and began humming something she didn’t recognize. He drove five miles an hour. He
didn’t speak. He hummed in a hoarse baritone.

  “Valnikov.”

  “Yes?”

  She was turned toward him now, looking and talking to him as carefully as she would to an axe murderer.

  “How old are Misha and Grisha? No, wait. Who are Misha and Grisha? These people you live with?”

  “Oh. Well, do you want me to answer the first question first?”

  “The first question. Yes, answer the first question.”

  Valnikov took the longer tail on Clarence Cromwell’s necktie and carefully wiped both eyes. The road was blurring.

  “Pardon me,” he said when he’d finished. “Well, let’s see, Grisha is eight months old. I’m sure of that because I got him when he was a little baby. I fed him with an eyedropper. He used to squeak …”

  “Valnikov …”

  “And Misha, I’m just not sure about. I think Misha is older because he was full grown when I got him. Well, I just wouldn’t like to say for sure.”

  “Valnikov,” Natalie said, positive now that he was still swacked from the night before, wondering if she should make him drive right back to the station for a breathalyzer exam. They couldn’t make her work with him if she could prove he was drunk on duty! “Valnikov, I was asking about … you said you have a son.”

  “Oh, yes. His name’s Nick.”

  “And how old is Nick?” It was a challenge now.

  “My Nick is twenty. I never see him anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he doesn’t like me. His mother doesn’t like me.”

  “Valnikov?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do Misha and Grisha like you?”

  “Of course! They like me a lot. I think Grisha likes me more. Misha only knows one word and I’ve tried hard to teach him lots of words. He just learned that word when I burned myself on the stove one night and I yelled ‘Gavno!’ That means shit. Hard as I tried to teach him other words, he goes and picks up a bad one on his own. Just like a real kid would.”