The Big Bitch

by John Patrick Lang

  I had been in rooms like this, but not for several years. While the walls in this one didn’t need paint, and most of the chairs actually matched, it was like all the other rooms. Two large posters hung on the wall: one with The 12 Steps and another with The 12 Traditions. It had all the requisite framed slogans from Keep It Simple to Take It Easy. I never liked the bumper-sticker aphorisms, the mantras like It Works If You Work It, or even the people. A great motivating force that kept me from cocaine and hard liquor was the incentive that I wouldn’t have to rejoin this cult, speak the magic language, and sit in meetings wondering if the cure was any better than the disease.

  Darryl told the story of his descent into alcoholism. He’d been living in Hawaii and his drinking got him eighty-sixed from all the gay bars and nearly all the straight bars on the entire island of Oahu. That’s when he found a place he came to call the Monkey Bar. He called it that for two reasons: one, because he didn’t think the place actually had a name—all it had outside was BAR in neon with the A burned out—and two, because at the end of the bar was a cage with monkeys in it.

  “Not only did the place look like Charles Bukowski had been the interior decorator,” said Darryl, “but I later came to believe that the place was actually haunted by his ghost. No one listened to the jukebox much, as it played nothing but polka music and Barry Manilow. On the walls were cracked neon signs of forgotten beer brands that hadn’t been brewed in decades. The bar stools were held together by duct tape, and behind the bar was a huge frame that once housed a mirror. It had been broken long ago and discarded, and the establishment’s owner, Gus, had not replaced it, citing the fact that none of his patrons wanted to see what they looked like anymore. He had also not bothered to replace either the broken urinal or the cracked toilet seat in a men’s room with a smell that was always equal parts vomit, urine, and Pine-Sol.

  “By the time I became a patron of the Monkey Bar, I was drinking well whiskey for breakfast and I started every day promptly at opening time, six a.m. I had the shakes so bad that I couldn’t hold a shot glass, so I would take the shot glass in my teeth, tilt my head back, and drink. Not a very efficient way to imbibe—when sponsees tell me they are drinking a fifth a day I tell them that I used to spill more than that every day. After three or four shots I’d be able to hold a glass and pour it down. And I poured it down.

  “As I continued to pour it down the blackout and black eye syndrome also continued. One morning, promptly at 6 a.m. when I arrived to drink breakfast, Gus, the owner, took me aside. He was very courteous and compassionate as he said, ‘Son, you’re a lowlife alki douche bag. You wouldn’t be drinking here if you weren’t. We’re all lowlife alki douche bags here, but still we have our standards. If you wish to continue to drink here there are two non-negotiable rules: first, you can’t talk to anyone except the bartender, and that is only to order drinks, and second, you can only sit in one stool and that is the one at the end of the bar across from the monkeys.’

  “I might have been humiliated if I didn’t need a drink so badly that my teeth chattered. By that time my personal hygiene had become so neglected that I’m not sure who smelled worse, me or the monkeys, but I took my seat at the end of the bar, drank my breakfast with the shot glass in my teeth, and introduced myself to Sid and Nancy, my new monkey companions. Over the next weeks and months I obeyed Gus’ rules to the letter. I learned to speak monkey, and Sid and Nancy learned a little English. When they weren’t screwing or tossing feces, the three of us spoke of many things. This went on from six a.m. to closing time every day for months. Just me, my shot glass, and the monkeys. I might still be there if the seizures hadn’t come, followed by the paramedics, followed by one institution after the other until I found this program.”

  The room reacted in chuckles that turned into laugher. Several men pounded the table with their fists. I even found myself laughing.

  “In this program we talk about how it was and how it is now. We talk of what we have lost and what we have found. What I found through my Higher Power was a path to personal redemption, and I found the things a man cannot lose, except if he himself throws them away. If I go out again, I know I will lose the path I am on now, and I know what I will find.” His eyes began to water; he swallowed and then cleared his throat. “I know that I’ll find myself drinking with the goddamned monkeys again. Thanks for letting me share.”

  There was general applause. The little man with the booming voice asked if anyone had a burning desire to speak. Pairs of eyes aimed down the table. When no one did, everyone stood for “The Lord’s Prayer.” I joined hands and prayed along. The reason I did was not to avoid breaking the bond of fellowship in the room, but for other reasons I couldn’t identify.

  Rosselli limped over to where I sat and extended a hand that was the size of a centerfielder’s baseball mitt.

  “Budd,” he said. “You must be Holiday.”

  I nodded that I was and he continued, “I didn’t put it together until you called. I mean, I heard on the news about a priest named Cortez getting it in Berkeley, but I had no idea it was the same one I’d interviewed three years back. When I talked to Hobbs, he said there were no real leads. These days if a priest is a homicide the first thing you look at is maybe him having fucked or sucked an altar boy.”

  “There’s no evidence of that,” I said, “and I doubt any will turn up.”

  “The case I worked, Father Cortez was an alibi witness, and we believed he’d had a sexual relationship with the party he was alibiing. But that person wasn’t an altar boy—not a boy at all. Fact is, she wasn’t even a Catholic.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Budd’s posterior was slightly larger than a Volkswagen Beetle. As he directed me to a corner of the room, I determined that he was approximately six and a half feet tall and easily half as wide. He dragged his left leg as if his knee, hip, or both were damaged and semi-functional, and as he moved he made the grunting and moaning sounds of a wounded animal. Budd took two folding chairs, and after carefully bracing them against the wall in the corner of the room, he slowly lowered one gargantuan buttock into each. Once he was settled he took out a bag of Red Man chewing tobacco and placed a plug in his mouth. The group dispersed, and as they did, they said goodbye to Budd and several men urged me to keep coming back.

  “Ever been in these rooms?” he asked as he chewed, and the metal chairs squeaked under his weight.

  “Yes, not AA, but NA. Heard a lot of stories, but Darryl’s is a classic.”

  “Yeah, I never tire of Darryl’s share because if you bottom out and end up in the program, then to one degree or another, you know what it’s like to drink with the monkeys. His story always reminds me of a meeting I was at in San Diego some years ago. The topic was how far down the scale we had gone. Some guy from Kansas tearfully shared how he had been so degenerate as to have once fucked a chicken. A guy in the back of the room shouted out, ‘Did yours die, too?’ ” We both laughed and then he asked, “How long you got?”

  “Last time I packed my nose was on the cab ride to rehab. Three years ago.”

  Budd nodded what seemed an approval of sorts and spat tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup. “So let me tell you why we’re talking. One reason is maybe you have something new on a cold case that still bothers me. Another is, if I help you, with your background maybe you can give me a quid pro quo for a new client of mine.”

  “My background?”

  “Yeah, you’re the Jackson Holiday that took a bank down. They call you Doc Holiday, don’t they?”

  “Nobody calls me Doc anymore,” I said, although lately that wasn’t really true. I let the remark about my “background” pass. “Tell me about your client.”

  Budd told me that his client was the estranged spouse of a very successful businessman. They were likely to get divorced, and she thought he was hiding assets in dummy corporations and offshore banks. Could I help him find these assets?

  “I can and will help you if you aren’t too particu
lar about how I do it,” I responded.

  “Thanks,” said Budd. “I don’t suppose you’re really going to tell me how you are going to make it happen.”

  “And I don’t suppose you’re really going to ask, Budd.”

  He worked the tobacco in his jaw, and after looking at me with his cop’s eyes for a moment, he appeared to take my point. He took my card and said he would email me the information.

  “So let me tell you how this thing with Cortez works,” he said, settling himself into his chairs, “You tell me everything about the killing in Berkeley, and I mean everything. I mean from day one, and you don’t leave anything out. If I think you are being less than a hundred percent with me, if I think you have a hidden agenda, we stop and we don’t start again. Follow me?”

  I said I did. I told him everything, from the first time I met Jesus until the day I found him dead in my driveway. I told him what had been released to the public and what hadn’t been. I told him about the money, about Silvestre, the miracles, what Hobbs thought, what happened outside the Five Spot, and finally, about the book of poetry from Muriel.

  “Muriel,” he said with a sick smile when I was done.

  “Name mean something?”

  “We’ll get to Muriel, don’t worry,” he said. “Let me take it from the top. The case I worked when I met Father Cortez was oddball. And I don’t mind telling you I’ve worked some oddball cases.”

  “Oddball?”

  “For example: I caught a case of two drinking buddies. I called them Mutt and Jeff. They used to get together at the same bar after work three, four times a week. They’d have a few pops and go to their respective homes. They did this for a couple years, and according to the bartender and the other patrons, they had the same routine every time they met: Mutt would arrive and ask Jeff ‘How’s your wife and my kids?’ Ha ha. And every time Jeff would respond saying, ‘The wife is fine, but the kids are retarded.’ Ha ha. Like I say, they were drinking buddies for a couple of years, and always greeting each other with this lame old joke. Until one day. Yeah, one day Mutt comes in saying, ‘How’s your wife and my kids?’ and Jeff, in place of his usual retort, pulls out a forty-four Mag and blows the top of Mutt’s head off and then turns the weapon on himself.”

  Budd dribbled some tobacco juice into his cup. “We have two bodies and we play hell trying to find out why. Jeff had no history of violence, drug use, depression, or any other mental illness and we could find no financial, marital, or health problems to speak of. Tox screen the coroner did showed no prescription or recreational drugs, and an alcohol level low enough to drive legally. No one ever heard Mutt and Jeff argue about anything. Where is, what is the motive? The case was oddball. It just didn’t add up. Like the Lichtman case didn’t add up. Lichtman was different, but just as oddball.”

  “Sid Lichtman? The car dealer?”

  “Yeah, Sidney Phillip Lichtman. And the case got national exposure.”

  “He was shot and killed. A carjacking gone awry.”

  “He was shot and killed, yeah. You got that part right.”

  As Budd dribbled more tobacco juice into his cup, I recognized that I was having the same feeling I’d had when I met Pete the Pineapple and discovered that my client had lied to me about when and where she had met the man she’d hired me to find, Jack Polozola. Yes, my client had lied to me about that and now I was finding that the death of my friend, Jesus, was somehow directly or indirectly linked to the death of her late husband. The merry widow hadn’t told me about the killing, which was all right, but now I was anxious to find out what else she hadn’t told me. For the time being, I decided not to disclose to Budd that I knew Lichtman’s widow, much less to admit that I worked for her.

  “Sid Lichtman’s was the largest car dealer in Portland and maybe the whole Northwest,” I said. “His slogan, ‘You can’t lick a Lichtman deal’ was as ubiquitous as ‘Things go better with Coke.’ ”

  Dribbling tobacco juice every few minutes, Budd told me about the investigation. It was a major case because not only was the shooting at a very upscale restaurant in a town where tourism is a major industry, but the victim had some VIP friends. Along with the pressure from the Mayor of San Diego’s Office, even more pressure was coming down from Portland. A special task force was formed and Budd and his partner, Freebie Freeman, headed it up.

  The facts of the case were that at 6 p.m. outside a posh San Diego restaurant, a valet walked up to park a Bentley and found the driver slumped over. Thinking he was drunk or otherwise incapacitated, he tried to revive him and found out he was dead. Budd and his partner showed up and found that the victim had been shot twice in the left temple with a small caliber pistol. Watch and wallet gone. The crime scene unit didn’t come up with much in the way of forensics: when it came to hair and fibers. All they had was the valet, the victim, and the victim’s wife and daughter. There was no witness to the shooting itself, but there was an eyewitness who saw a well-dressed, well-built blonde in her thirties walking away from the Bentley at the time of the murder. The witness picked Lichtman’s wife, Grace Lowell, out of a six-pack of pictures. A positive ID.

  Just as Budd started to refill his face again with tobacco, a disheveled man in his twenties came into the room and approached him. He had the downcast look of a neglected dog, and he appeared not to have eaten or slept in a week. He smelled of alcohol, sweat, and desperation. He sniffled as if he needed a line of cocaine like he needed air. He also looked like if he didn’t get the drug he didn’t much care about the air. It had been a while, but I knew the feeling.

  Budd managed to reach up from his chairs and embrace the man, who was now sobbing as well as sniffling. He asked me to give him ten minutes and I did.

  I walked outside and checked my voicemail on my cell. I returned a call from Dumpy Doyle and told him where I was.

  “In Hollywood for only an hour, Doc, and you already turned fag?” he said.

  “I’m in Boy’s Town on a case. Isn’t ‘fag’ politically incorrect?”

  “Maybe, but so is ‘midget.’ Doesn’t stop you.”

  “Spoken like a typical fucking midget. What is it with you people?” I said, laughing. “When do you want to get together?”

  We decided I would pick him up at his place tomorrow at noon for lunch.

  “Hey,” he asked, “what’s it like being a private detective? Is it like in the movies? You know, you got a client who’s a rich, beautiful blonde with tits to die for, and it turns out she’s setting you up?”

  “Yeah, Dumpy. It’s just like in the movies.”

  When I got back to Budd he was still embracing the young man.

  “Sometimes it’s not one day at a time. Sometimes it’s one minute at a time,” he said to me as the man left.

  Budd shifted his weight in his chairs. “Where were we? Yeah, the wife. Now this Grace agreed to a lineup and the wit picked her again as the woman walking away from the car. Case solved, let’s charge her and go home. Right? Wrong!”

  Budd dribbled more tobacco juice and told me why they’d never charged Grace Lowell. Neither she nor any of her clothes tested positive for gunpowder residue. Even though they had an eyewitness, the witness didn’t see her do the shooting. Plus eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. He said that in that part of San Diego you could throw a stick any day of the week and hit six good-looking, well-built, well-dressed blondes who looked like her. But the main reason they had to pass on Grace was that at the precise time of the murder she’d been one hundred and twenty miles away in Palm Springs putting together a real estate transaction. Among her clients/witnesses were a retired federal court judge, the president of the city’s Rotary Club, and a doctor who was the head of neurosurgery at a local hospital.

  “Talk about a dream team of attorneys,” said Budd. “She had a dream team of alibi witnesses.”

  “What was Grace’s demeanor when told of her husband’s murder?”

  “Seemed shocked and upset. As shocked and upset as an
ice-cold blonde ever gets.”

  Budd went on to tell me that along with the alibi there was lack of motive. She had only been married to the victim a few years and was twenty-four or twenty-five years his junior. She was a perfect trophy wife for him, and he was a perfect connection for her and her real estate business. She came into the marriage a millionaire, and signed a prenuptial agreement. All she received when probate closed was one hundred thousand dollars equity in their home—a small amount considering that the book value on his dealerships was somewhere north of twelve million dollars. Budd worked the case long enough for the estate to be settled, and Grace never contested the will. No one could find out how the murder of Lichtman benefited his spouse, which brought them to the daughter.

  “Cui bono?” asked Budd.

  “My Latin is a little rusty. Cui bono? Who benefits?”

  “Yeah, and who benefited from the murder was his grown daughter,” said Budd. “Outside of relatively small bequeathals to his synagogue and the American Cancer Society, Lichtman left his entire estate to his only living heir, his daughter, Esther. And we’re talking twelve million dollars plus. When we interviewed her she gave ‘dramatist’ as her profession, which while it was factual, was also pretty funny to us, because even for a JAP, she was a drama queen.”

  “JAP?”

  “You know, Jewish American Princess. Which is why we gave her the nickname we did. Remember Queen Esther from the Old Testament?’

  “Vaguely.”

  Budd said that he and his partner referred to her as “Princess Esther” and then just “The Princess.” They never considered her a real suspect because she already had a large trust fund that paid her over a hundred thousand dollars a year. She didn’t need the money; she was an only child, and by all accounts had been a daddy’s girl, particularly since her mother died while The Princess was still in her teens. The vibes were all wrong for her to be involved, but they had to investigate her anyway. She told them where she was at the time of the shooting, but she didn’t say with whom. She was staying in town with some friends while she did summer stock at a local theater, and she stated that she was at the Airport Hilton at the time of the shooting. This was verified with credit card receipts, and it was also verified that for the two months before the killing, she had rented a suite at that Hilton two or three days a week, every week. She said it was a place for her to write and practice her lines, but Budd and his partner turned up the fact that she had a guest.