Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  It took about twenty minutes to get to the Excalibur, a derelict Art Deco movie palace at San Vincente and Pico with rising ziggurat patterns cut into its stone façade. The few random letters hanging off-center on the marquee made an unbreakable code. There were no posters in the display windows at the entrance, and the thick glass on the cashier’s cage had a deep fracture someone had tried to suture with a couple of layers of heavy gray tape.

  We were an hour early. Apparently the Old Man had already scoped out the area because he told the drivers to park the Chryslers a block away after dropping us at a coffee shop directly across from the theatre. He demanded a table at the big front window, with a perfect view of the Excalibur’s entrance.

  I asked him why we were taking these precautions.

  “Because Beaufort’s a rat,” he growled, “and you don’t trust rats. And also because we don’t know what he’s selling yet or if someone else is backing his play.”

  Nobody came or went from the theatre during the time we sat silently sipping our lukewarm coffee. Finally, at a few minutes before three the Old Man told me to go in and check things out, and give him a high sign if everything looked all right.

  When I hesitated, he made a shooing motion with his hand: “Go on, nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  The theatre’s double door was unlocked and when I stepped into the lobby it was dark as a cave. I half expected to be smacked with a cosh or grabbed from behind in a chokehold.

  Light was leaking out from the bottom of the auditorium doors. I entered and saw Beaufort, an audience of one, rocking autistically in an aisle seat. His hair was carefully combed; the rest of him was a chapter of errors.

  He waved enthusiastically as if we were old friends, while trying to hide the bottle inside a paper bag on his lap.

  “I’m glad to see you but I hope you brought the Kennedys.”

  “Just me for now.”

  His wandering eye seemed to be checking out the periphery of the theatre to make sure the Old Man wasn’t hiding in the shadows.

  “Yes, of course. I understand. Mr. Kennedy sent you to make sure it’s safe. A careful man, Mr. Kennedy. One of the things I’ve always liked about him. Go ahead and have a look around so you can tell him that the coast is clear.”

  After a quick check, I went back outside and gave the Old Man the high sign. He hurried out of the coffee shop and across the street to the theatre, leaving me behind as he practically ran to the auditorium. When I caught up, he was standing menacingly over Beaufort.

  “What’s going on here, you goddamn freak?”

  “No need for unpleasantness.” Beaufort made an effort to get his eyes in synch so he could return the Old Man’s livid stare. “It’s just a movie premiere. I know you like movies, Mr. Kennedy. And I believe you will want to invest in the one I’m about to show you. It’s a double feature but it won’t take long because they are also short subjects.”

  Relishing the moment, he put on a smug smile: “I think it might be better if I left so you can react to what you’re about to see without my disturbing presence. But as I said to Mr. Billings, I would like to discuss the financing for this movie as soon as possible, so please contact me at the Hotel Highpoint.”

  He headed up the aisle in his oddly disjointed walk, pausing to turn and say with mock courtesy, “Please make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. Sadly the popcorn machine is not working today, but the feature will begin right away.”

  “Son of a bitch thinks he’s funny,” the Old Man muttered fiercely as he flopped into a seat.

  The theatre went dark and without warning Jack and Val appeared, on the bed at the beach house, all skin. There was no sound and the film looked to have been shot through a flimsy window covering, giving the print a gauzy look. But the two of them lit up the screen. She was on her side looking away, the knobs of her vertebrae curving from her neck to her waist like the keyboard of some fine fleshly instrument. Jack was behind her, one arm over her arm and chest as their bodies moved to spoon in a compatible double S. He said something that caused her to laugh into her pillow. Then he turned onto his back, his chest still slippery from sexual exertion, and looked in the general direction of the camera with the vacant face of someone who doesn’t realize he’s being watched.

  I could imagine the rustle of the sheets as bodies shifted again and limbs lengthened and contracted. Jack smiled appreciatively as she rolled over to face him and propped her head on an elbow so she could give him a once-over. As she watched him, he pushed her opulent hair back from her forehead and then twirled an index finger indolently on one of her nipples; she responded by gnawing on his ear and picking up his lolling penis from the inside of his thigh. She was so luminously alive that I could almost smell her and feel the consequence of her nearness. But then the film ended in light flashes and a blackout and she died again.

  The Old Man stood up and screamed at the projection booth, “If you think you can blackmail Jack with this, you fucking mutant, you’ve got another think coming!”

  He started up the aisle, but the transitional flickers and test patterns of another film that immediately appeared on the screen stopped him. He sat where he was, a few rows behind me.

  Also soundless, this one was shot from within the frame of some kind of opening, perhaps in the wall of an adjoining room, that gave deep perspective. Grainy and harsh, it had the feel of the contraband blue movies of the era that small groups of men watched being projected onto sheets tacked on the walls of secret locations.

  A diminished version of Val appeared, sitting naked on the edge of a bed facing the hidden camera, her whole front sagging like an older woman as she looked down at the floor. The Old Man was in profile in a nearby chair beside a nightstand, leering at her. He wore only a sleeveless T-shirt.

  She said something without looking at him. The Old Man smirked a reply. Then he pointed down at his groin and beckoned with his finger.

  She shook her head. He gave the shrug of someone who holds the hole card and said some more undecipherable words. Val didn’t move for several seconds. Then, beginning to cry, she lowered herself to her knees, crawled to him and buried her face in the pubic area just below the camera’s field of vision as the film ran off its spool.

  As I sat there paralyzed, the Old Man walked down to me with a look of panic on his face. His cheeks were mottled and his eyes big. I expected a brazen lie denying the empirical truth of what I’d just seen, but instead he held out his hands imploringly.

  “She wasn’t right for Jack. She wasn’t stable and would have just held him back. Can you imagine what the press would do to us when they found out about her family tree? I had to separate them. I didn’t do her any harm. Nobody was ever killed by fucking. I was just doing what was best for Jack.”

  “She was what was best for him, every minute of every day they were together. You know that.”

  The Old Man bought time by taking off his glasses, fogging the lenses with his breath and wiping them with the tail of his tie. Then, unable to stall any longer, he ratted on himself: “She went with me because I told her that if she didn’t I’d get Edgar to deport her criminal father and she knew I could do it.”

  “You blackmailed her into betraying Jack.”

  He knew that this was the bottom-line truth, and for a minute he looked like he might spill everything, but then he regained control and his faced settled into a caustic smile: “I don’t think the subtleties of sexual relationships are necessarily your strong suit, Lemoyne.”

  I ignored him: “You actually intended to hold up your end of the deal?”

  The tip of his tongue explored the edges of his mouth before he replied, “Sort of an academic question now, don’t you think?”

  We both looked up and saw Beaufort’s face briefly in the window of the projection room before it went dark.

  “That son of a bitch is going to regret this,” the Old Man muttered fiercely.

  Then he commanded, “Don’t you ever dare say a w
ord about any of this to Jack!” and bolted out of the theatre.

  I found him outside in the middle of the street, forcing traffic to stop as he looked for Beaufort, who was nowhere in sight.

  Chief among Joseph Kennedy’s prized mottoes—always announced as if it had just been freshly coined—was “Don’t get mad, get even.” But he was in an uncontrolled rage in the back seat of the Chrysler on the way back to the Biltmore, breathing noisily and working his jaw as if chewing tough meat. He looked like he might start bleeding from the ears any minute.

  When we arrived at the hotel, he jumped out and headed for the lobby without a word. He probably expected me to follow, but I felt that I needed to get away and asked the valet to bring up the Zephyr.

  On the drive home, I tried to put the events of the past few days into some kind of order, but it was impossible to dig a foundation strong enough to support them all.

  Soon after I hit the Pacific Coast Highway, I saw a cop car about a quarter mile ahead on the soft shoulder. I was going too fast and tried to brake inconspicuously. But after I passed, the flashing red light came after me.

  I pulled over and got out my license. I was fishing for the registration in the glove box when I heard a tapping sound on the window and looked up to see the rugged face of Temple Rose’s plainclothes boyfriend, Jimmy Adcock. When I rolled down the window, he put his forearms on the sill and looked in.

  “Is Vice giving out speeding tickets now?” I asked.

  “Ah, the false indignation of the lawbreaker,” he chuckled. “Actually, no, Vice is not giving out tickets. Vice just wants to have a brief word.”

  “How did you know I’d be coming this way?”

  “Ninety percent of my job is waiting. The other ten percent is knowing where to wait.”

  He raised his head to squint back at the traffic, the velocity of the passing cars making his hair stand on end. Then he came down to eye level again.

  “I’m here as a favor to Temple. She’s tried calling your friend and says he’s not all that receptive to new information right now. So this comes to you for safe keeping.”

  “Okay.”

  “Off the record.”

  “Okay.”

  “Temple asked me to drop by the coroner’s and try to unravel things. He basically told me that he was encouraged from on high to put this whole thing to bed, but he also said he probably wouldn’t have been able to take it anywhere anyhow. He says it’s possible that there was what we public servants call foul play, but just barely possible.”

  “It feels like we’re speaking in Braille,” I said. “Where does all this lead?”

  He shrugged and stood back from the window. “Not for me to say. Just filling in the picture for you so you see things the way cops do. Things rarely add up in this world, and when they do it’s usually an illusion. Anyway, you seem to be the lead detective on this case so you get to follow up. Temple says the girl told her that this was very much a love story. You don’t have to work for the LAPD to know that love stories are by their nature detective stories too. Good luck.”

  He got back into his car, pulled out around me and headed off, blending smoothly into the traffic.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Jack was on his back in bed with his hands folded over his chest like a corpse when I got home. Assuming he was asleep, I began softly closing his door to keep from disturbing him when he spoke without opening his eyes.

  “I’m awake. And I know what’s up. So you don’t have to figure out how to sugarcoat things. Temple called while you were gone. I didn’t want to talk to her but I did. She couldn’t stand the idea that I might really think Val was crazy, so she told me everything she knows. About Dad and everything else.”

  I started to speak but he raised a hand so imperatively it stopped my tongue in its tracks.

  “I don’t want you to say anything more about this to me, now or ever. Understand?” There was no hint of the drollery that he usually used to sweeten his serious pronouncements. “I don’t want to understand the details of the sex and blackmail thing. I don’t want to understand Dad’s rationale. I don’t want to understand why Val gave in. I don’t want to understand what Dad and Geist have been doing. I don’t want to understand why Selkirk had to be killed. I don’t want to know where Fortunato fits in. I don’t want to discover the truth of any of this, get it? I just want out.”

  The box springs creaked definitively as he turned toward the wall.

  Early that evening the phone rang. I knew it would be the Old Man.

  “What’s Jack doing?” he asked abruptly.

  “He’s back in bed.”

  “Pretty soon he’ll be his old self again.” I heard the sound of knuckles being cracked in the background and knew he was holding the phone to his ear by his shoulder. “He’s pissed off at me right now, but sooner or later he’ll realize that the girl would probably have wound up in a straightjacket, given what she went through.”

  He knew that his words sickened me, and he didn’t care.

  “Anyway, time to bring this fucking farce with Beaufort to an end. I’m sending Molly over to his place tomorrow with five grand cash for the film. We pay now and get it back with interest later on. Someone from the family needs to be there. Not me, certainly. Beaufort may be a goddamn morphodite himself, but he might have some muscle lined up, who knows? And I’m sure as hell not going to subject Jack to any danger, given the state he’s in. So it has to be you.”

  I thought of asking the Old Man how I had gone from being the wallpaper of his life to serving as his confidant and co-conspirator, the guy who caught the shit before it hit his fan, but he answered the question in advance.

  “To Beaufort and whoever else is involved in all this, you’re just some hanger-on. You’re not someone they’ll care about one way or another. So you don’t have to worry. I need a clear report about what happens when that prick is paid off, so I can plan for what comes next. That’s why you need to be there. Molly’s good in his way, but he sometimes doesn’t see the forest for the trees.”

  Then, with a combination of threat and supplication, he cinched the deal: “I need you to do this, Lemoyne. You’re doing it for me, you’re doing it for the family, but you’re mainly doing it for Jack. Don’t let him down.”

  I closed the cell door on myself: “I won’t.”

  “Good,” the Old Man said, pleased to have gotten his way as usual. “I knew we could count on you.”

  Late the next morning I heard the blast of a car horn and looked out to see Molly Maguire standing next to one of the idling Chrysler Imperials from the previous day. Jack’s bedroom door was still closed, so I left without saying anything.

  “How’s that shoulder you got banged up?” I asked Molly.

  He rotated it experimentally and took a batting stance, “I think I could still get around on a high hard one.”

  Then he said, “Tempus fugit, Lemoyne. Let’s vamoose.”

  He filled the car with the smell of Old Spice and Pepsodent tooth-powder; his skin was taut and shiny from a close shave. He took pride in piloting the car through the heavy morning traffic, weaving in and out of lanes like a slalom skier as he timed the traffic lights. When we finally hit a red after a long series of greens, he pulled a pint bottle out of the glove compartment.

  “Never too early for the little green man, is it?”

  “Bushmills?” I asked.

  “None of that feckin’ Protestant piss,” he made a face. “We would not defile our bodies with that. It’s Jameson, whiskey of the one true faith.”

  He unscrewed the cap and offered me the bottle. When I shook my head, he shrugged and held it up to the windshield in a mock toast: “May our enemies be afflicted with itching and have no possibility of scratching.”

  Then he took a long swig, gave a theatrical “Ah!” and said, “Thus is the world renewed again.”

  He drove in silence for several minutes, but I knew that he liked to talk so I gave him an excuse to tell about his a
lways befuddled Irish relatives by asking what was new back home. He launched right into a tale about the love life of Aileen, an eighteen-year-old second cousin living in Drogheda.

  “As beautiful as polished copper, this girl; the family jewel since she was a little tiny thing and courted by many fine young fellows. But then some cabbage twice her age appears. Underneath the fancy jacket and account books he’s a dirty tooth of a man. But everyone blandishes him because of his bank account and the next thing you know, he’s gone and plugged the fair Aileen. If it was me that was her father, I’d be making a shambles of the villain, but because she’s expecting, her father, son of my own father’s brother, calls in the priest. The next thing you know, it’s omnia vincit amor. And now Aileen, this fine lace of a girl, is harnessed to this eejit for a lifetime.” He morosely contemplated the injustice of it all until we reached the Hotel Highpoint in a seedy block of La Brea.

  Molly got a satchel out of the car trunk, cradled it carefully under one arm and gave it a little pat. “Beaucoup spondulicks in here.” He smiled like the money was his own.

  The Highpoint was a fleabag, just as the Old Man had said. The odor of fried onions hit like a rogue wave when we entered the lobby, although there was no restaurant or coffee shop in sight. Molly put two dollars on the reception desk and asked the clerk what room Beaufort was in.

  When the man held up one of the bills to examine it, Molly said, “Do you believe that some forger would bother with the one-dollar bill?”

  Hearing the sharp cutting edge in his voice, the clerk put the money down and began studying the registry. “Fourth floor, number four one eight,” he pointed upward. “But we don’t want any trouble.”

  “You’ll have not even a pittance,” Molly’s baleful smile wrinkled the corners of his eyes.

  We look around the tiny lobby for a minute.

  “No elevator,” said the clerk.

  “That’s a pain in the hole,” Molly grumbled as we headed up the stairs.