“I ain’t gonna discuss it, Winnie,” Buster said. “It jist might be somethin along those lines, and if it is, so what?”
“You wouldn’t do something that’d get you in big trouble, I hope. I wouldn’t like to see that, Buster. Those boiler-room scams can get a guy chucked into a single room with three roommates. For about five years.”
“He beat us in court if you remember,” Buster said. “He’s probably got a job in one a those giant buildings with black windows up in Irvine, makin a million in salary and three million in stock options. Remember that boiler room you busted on Christmas Eve that time? That guy … whatzisname? I heard he owns a six-million-dollar yacht he keeps in Sardinia.
Had the Prince of Monaco aboard for lunch. So how bad did you hurt him with that case?”
“Well, I’d hate to see you do something that …”
“Don’t be worryin about me,” Buster said. “You’re the guy goin around tryin to put yourself into the middle a somethin that smells worse than red tide in still water. Me, I’ll prob’ly live out my old age as a scuba scrubber. Stuck to boat hulls underwater with a toilet plunger in one hand, scrubbin off slime with the other. That’s somethin like police work, come to think of it.”
The open highway between Corona Del Mar and Laguna Beach is about all that’s left of undeveloped coastline along that stretch of Orange County. Surfers still park their cars along the ocean side, and climb down the cliffs to unspoiled beaches, to ride in swirls of turquoise and midnight blue.
“How’d it be to live in a place like that?” Buster asked, pointing toward a huge home perched on a cliff overlooking Reef Point. It had a lighthouse wing with a green copper roof, and a redwood observation platform all the way around. The sky beyond looked inflamed and feverish.
“I’d prefer the one on Brideshead Revisited,” said Winnie. “Less rooms to clean. You know, I really appreciate this, Buster. You coming along with me.”
“I had important things to do,” Buster said. “Like takin the knots outta my telephone cord, but I’m a real balls-up guy. So tell me, whaddaya gonna say if we find this guy Starkey?”
“I’m gonna interrogate him,” Winnie said.
“Case you ain’t noticed, Win, you don’t have a badge no more. What’s your authority to make people sit still for an interrogation?”
“He’s a gay-bar drifter from what I know. He’ll look at two guys like us and see cop. We lean a little bit, he’ll roll over, belly up. That’s what I’m betting on.”
“Yeah, well, I ran into lots a sissies from gay bars that Heinrich Himmler couldn’t make snitch off a pal.”
“I’m betting he will. Or at least he’ll tell his boss we’re onto him.”
“What’ll that accomplish?”
“I told ya I wanna scare the crap outta Warner Stillwell. He’ll realize it was a bad idea and it ain’t gonna work. And he’ll have to be content to live out his life on the ranch.”
“That’s it, then?” Buster said, incredulously. “That’s the fallback position here?”
“Yeah, but I hope I can persuade Starkey to dime the old man. I’d like to make a case the D.A.’d have to prosecute. Like that attempted murder on Tess. Or maybe even the murder of Conrad Binder.”
“You get that much outta this guy and you can hire on with the KGB.”
“At least we’ll throw a scare into old man Stillwell if nothing else.”
“And your lady friend’ll be safe from future attempts?”
“Something like that.”
“And she jist waits around till the old guy croaks and gets her inheritance? And then what? You think she’s gonna remember you? You think she’s gonna remember you next month?”
“I don’t worry about that part,” Winnie said. “Far as I’m concerned, she’s a good friend who needs help. I’d help you if you were in trouble. Like you’re helping me right now.”
“Don’t go all sentimental on me,” Buster said. “I start cryin and the salt’ll hurt all the raw meat that used to be my left eye.”
Buster was silent during the drive past Irvine Cove and Emerald Bay—gated communities with homes on both sides of the highway. From there south, Laguna Beach wore a string of coves like a necklace: Santa Ana Cove, Fisherman’s Cove, Diver’s Cove, and the main cove where the crowds gathered on the sand to watch basketball or volleyball, or to scope-out the hardbodies, most of whom were male.
Buster looked at the bohemian Laguna street scene, and said, “I’d hate to work the beach patrol around here. You don’t know which bums might be artists. You can’t tell a future Picasso from a bag a garbage.”
Winnie left his car at the Hotel Laguna with a valet-parking attendant rather than fight for a parking space on the street. It was a landmark hotel, frequented by Barrymore in the thirties and Bogie in the forties: a flat-roofed block of stucco with a quixotic belltower.
“Want a drink before we go to work?” Buster asked.
“Just one,” Winnie said, but immediately provided Buster with a minor shock by changing his mind: “No, better not.”
They quickly found the ramshackle apartment house on Mermaid Street. It could be described as “Laguna casual,” which meant even more so than the Balboa peninsula.
Buster said, “This is the kind a place where dressy-as-it-gets means wearin a tank top that ain’t inside out.”
The man who answered the door didn’t remotely resemble the face on the police mug shot, and didn’t seem to recognize that he could be talking to cops.
“Hack Starkey?” he said. “He the guy used to live here before me? Young guy with a wooden leg? If it ain’t him, better talk to the landlady in number one.”
When Winnie knocked, the landlady yelled, “Door’s open!”
She sat at an easel painting a beach scene with pastel water-colors, which she probably hoped to peddle at the summer Sawdust Festival, a “people’s” art show where folks like her tried to catch the overflow from the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters, in which real people and painted ones become entwined in life-size tableaus of famous works of art, so that the viewer isn’t sure which figure breathes. People with binoculars pack the Laguna Bowl every night during the festival, trying to guess which ones in a massive reproduction—like “The Last Supper,” for instance—could be a flesh-and-blood citizen of Laguna who’d practiced all year turning to stone.
The landlady flip-flopped into the living room in worn-out rubber thongs, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a palette in the other. Her nose had more busted veins than the Klondike.
“I ain’t got an empty apartment,” she said.
“I’m looking for a former tenant,” Winnie said. “Hack Star-key? Middle-aged guy with dyed black hair?”
She gave them a closer look, saw cop written all over them and said, “Yeah?”
Winnie knew the look, and that if he said he wanted the guy for attempted murder, she’d say, “Moved. No forwarding address.”
So he said what usually gets cooperation: “We wanna talk to him about a report that he molested a kid.”
“Yeah? How old?”
“About six,” Winnie said. “A little boy.”
“That dirty cocksucker!” she said. “He moved, oh, eight months ago. But I hear he hangs around town in the gay bars. That son of a bitch! I hope he tries to run and you shoot him down!” Then she looked at Buster’s battered face and said, “Want me to lay hands on those wounds? I can usually drive out evil spirits in a couple minutes. You’ll feel better.”
To Winnie’s astonishment Buster said, “I do got some evil stuff in there.” Then he sat down on the greasy sofa and said, “Let ’er rip.”
The woman shuffled over to the refrigerator and got an egg. Then she drew a glass of water from the faucet. She put her red pudgy fingers gently on Buster’s head and passed the egg in circles over his face. Then she broke the egg into the water and studied it.
“What’s the verdict?” asked Winnie.
She said, “Yeah, there
are some unholy things in there, son, but I don’t think I can help you. I can tell you this: You better deal with it.”
They thanked her and left, deciding she was a fairly ordinary resident of Laguna Beach.
The first gay bar they tried was The Tango Tavern. It wasn’t as dark as a movie by Ingmar Bergman, but it was even gloomier. Six guys scattered around the bar looked as though sixteen-inch guns wouldn’t faze them.
Buster said, “These dudes’re down for the count. A barrel of amyl nitrate ain’t gonna start their rockets. They need a big booster. Your guy into drugs by any chance?”
“Not that I know of,” Winnie said.
Winnie went straight to the dour and listless bartender and flashed the mug shot. The bartender looked at the photo and said, “Not in this joint.”
It gave Winnie a boost to see that the bartender didn’t ask to see police I.D. He still had the look!
Buster said to a patron who resembled Alice Cooper, “I’m lookin for an old boyfriend. Had his toes amputated to fit in size three’s with four-inch spikes? Seen him around?”
The guy just stared. Buster thanked him, saying he’d seen more signs of life in an oyster bed.
The next stop was The Flaming Sunset, already rocking out at 8:45 P.M. The fire department poster said the saloon was okay for 145 persons. Buster said he saw that many guys holding other guys in their laps. He and Winnie squeezed into a corner close enough to the bar to spot anyone with the world’s phoniest-looking dye job.
A table six inches away was packed with androgynous drinkers, one of whom said something moderately amusing. Causing the one closest to Buster to cut loose with a shrill squeal.
Buster turned to the youth and said, “Butch it up, for chrissake! Mother’s on the way!”
The ceiling held enough baby spots and electrical tracks to mood-light the San Diego Freeway.
“This lighting could make even Spoon’s Landing look like champagne and violins,” Winnie observed.
“That’s the truth, Ruth,” Buster agreed. “Wonder if the cops gotta handle many drive-by slappings around here.”
There was live rock music playing on the other side of the barroom, but getting through the teeming multitude would be impossible.
“I ain’t seen a cocktail waitress,” said Buster.
“Any female person’ll be a waitress, I imagine.”
A female person finally squeezed her way through the crowd and looked at them with a please-order-something-simple expression.
“Beer,” Winnie said. “Any kind.”
“Me too,” Buster said.
Buster was taller than Winnie, but he wasn’t looking around much, so Winnie was on tiptoes half the time. He saw lots and lots of dye jobs, all colors, and most of them bad, but not Hack Starkey. After finishing their beer they managed to bump their way closer to the bar itself.
Winnie could finally see that it was a piano trio supplying the music on an elevated stage, and they were pretty good. Winnie hoped they wouldn’t play “Where or When.”
“Better stay sober,” he said to Buster, “or you might end up with a truck driver picking your pocket and he won’t be looking for money.”
Buster was bored with their mission. “You say the guy’s about fifty? This is a younger crowd. Let’s try another joint, one a those where they lace your drinks with minoxidil for the hair and Retin-A for wrinkles.”
The third place they tried was called Malcolm’s Lounge. It was more of a proper restaurant, on the ocean side of Coast Highway. A jazz combo was playing something from Thelonious Monk. It took Winnie a minute to realize it was “Mysterioso.”
“Far from the yammering crowd,” Buster said. “I think the guy next to me at the bar was fallin in love with me. Can you catch AIDS from slobber and drool?”
Winnie said to the bartender, a bleached, over-the-hill surfer, “I’ll teach you a drink I learned from a bartender named Coley, who claims he invented it. Toss two double shots of Absolut Citron into a shaker. Pour in a splash of Cointreau and squeeze in some juice from a fresh orange. Strain it into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with a lemon twist and pour one for me and one for yourself. You’ll make big tips on this one.”
“This is called working up an informant,” Winnie whispered to Buster while the bartender carried out his instructions. When the bartender put the two cocktails on the table, Winnie picked his up, sniffed it, sipped and said, “Perfect. This drink’ll sell very big with ladies.”
The bartender sipped and nodded. “What do you call it?”
Winnie thought for a moment and said, “I call it … let’s see, I call it The Golden Orange Cocktail.”
“The Golden Orange?” the bartender said. “Not bad.”
When the bartender was down at the other end of the bar, Buster said, “Any drink that goes over with ladies’ll pay the rent in this place. They could serve ’em with an endive hotdog to all the Nellies.”
When the bartender came back to see if they wanted a refill, Winnie beckoned him closer and said, sotto voce, “Now I gotta ask you for a favor. I gotta find a guy named Hack Starkey. Middle-aged with a bad dye job.”
“Got a lot of bad henna rinses around here,” the bartender said.
Winnie took out the mug shot and said, “I work for a private investigator. Been given the job a finding this guy that scams old pensioners outta their savings with phony investment schemes. We jist wanna serve a subpoena on him, make him go to civil court and pay some of it back. No big thing.”
The bartender picked up the mug shot and Winnie knew he’d scored a hit. But the bartender hesitated. Winnie said, “The Golden Orange’ll make you twenty bucks a night in extra tips.” Then he put a twenty on the bar and pushed it forward, saying, “Here’s the first one.”
The bartender looked at the twenty and said, “I think this is the guy that lives near The Windjammer Tavern, down by Sugarloaf Point. Used to come in here, but not in a long time. I think he’s sick.”
When they left the bar, Buster said, “Your ship come in? Twenty-dollar tips?”
“Tess loaned me a few bucks.”
“A perfect little helpmate,” Buster said. “Pretty soon you’ll tell me she’s buyin a saloon.”
Near The Windjammer Tavern could only have meant the small frame house on the ocean side of the highway, which, from the looks of it, was destined to be scraped. In the side yard was a filthy old kidney-shaped swimming pool bordered by a rusty chain-link fence. It was a very dark night and there was no yardlight. They opened the gate and picked their way through litter.
“If this guy’s a hit man he ain’t gettin rich off his commissions,” Buster noted. “That pool looks like a vat a cioppino.”
Winnie knocked and a skeletal figure in a tattered terry bathrobe opened the front door. Winnie almost gasped when he saw what the man from the mug shot had become.
“Mr. Starkey,” Winnie said, “we’d like to talk to you.”
Hack Starkey stepped back into a small foyer, and supported himself against a table that held a single vase of paper flowers. He turned and limped into a badly lit, cluttered living room where an orange-striped cat sniffed at a paper plate containing the residue of something coagulated. Something the man must have eaten within the last week or so.
He had to use both hands and then his elbows to settle himself into his recliner rocker, his forehead beading with the effort. His hair was no longer black. Two inches of gray showed, and the top layer was the same color as the tabby cat. Wisps of gray facial hair hung like Spanish moss from his bony jaw. His flesh was saffron yellow, but his fingers were saddle-leather brown. He lit a cigarette with the stub of another that he’d plucked from one of three overflowing ashtrays.
The tarnished lamplight was behind him and when he raised his face toward Winnie, his eyes disappeared in their sockets.
“You are policemen, aren’t you?” he wheezed, but when Winnie nodded and fumbled as though for his police I.D., Hack Starkey dropped his palm as if to sa
y it wasn’t necessary.
“We, uh, jist need to ask a few questions about your boss, Warner Stillwell,” Winnie said, sitting on the edge of the sofa.
Hack Starkey looked toward the TV in the corner of the room, and fumbled with a remote control. It fell on the floor and Winnie could see that picking it up would take major effort. Buster picked up the device and shut off the television.
The house didn’t need vacuuming, it needed a street sweeper. Buster used a magazine to dust two fur balls from a kitchen chair and dragged it into the tiny living room. He shot a glance at Winnie that said, This is your hit man?
Winnie said, “I jist wanna talk about your boss a little bit? A confidential police matter.”
Wheezing, Hack Starkey said, “He never was my boss. Mister Binder was my boss. Mister Stillwell let me go right after Mister Binder killed himself.”
“How long did you work for Conrad Binder?”
“Off and on, about thirteen years. I did jobs for him when he had the house at Bayshores. Paint the house. Clean the barnacles off the dock. Detail his cars. Then gradually he had me spend time at the ranch. I painted that whole ranch house, all by myself. One time I stayed there for three months.”
Hack Starkey was suddenly wracked with a rattling cough. He grabbed a handful of tissues from a box and gagged up some phlegm. Buster shuddered, and shot another glance at Winnie. The look said: Let’s boogie on out of here!
When Hack Starkey stopped coughing, he leaned his head back and wheezed some more. He inhaled from an aerosol device next to him. There were various prescription vials and bottles on the table, and an empty glass. Winnie picked up the glass and walked into the squalid kitchen. He filled the glass with tap water and brought it back to the sick man.
Hack Starkey nodded gratefully and drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a Ping-Pong ball in an air tube.
“You should be in a hospital,” Winnie said.
The man, his coughing spasm under control, said wheezily, “I have been. I will be again. I’m suffering from drug side effects as much as anything.”
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