As he sleeps, Finkel dreams of Miller, an even skinnier and older Miller than the one in his arms, dreams of him wearing the long white hair and shimmering robes of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, handing him an amulet of some kind, he can’t tell what – a sword or necklace or power-wand or Army dog-tags or handgun or grenade . . .
Finkel wakes the next afternoon in a shaft of dismal sunlight, paralyzed by a vicious clawhammer hangover. He realizes dimly that the dog, Jimmy Jingles, has been frantically licking his cheek for some time; that he has been listening to the dog’s whimpering in his sleep; that he perceived hours ago, half-consciously, that the man slouching against his chest wasn’t breathing.
CHAPTER 26
In a Motel Six, somewhere in the Central Valley, I lay staring at the ceiling with my hands clapped over my ears, the world’s oceans massing and hammering against the insides of my skull . . .
In the motel lobby I poured myself cold black coffee and tried to figure out what day it was, blinking against the awful sun daggering through the blinds. Mid-afternoon and my bones felt ancient, heavy with a thousand years of accumulated crypt dust. The boil-faced man behind the counter was saying, ‘They’re showing it again. Watch how this hippie buys it.’
He pointed to the television, where an earnest anchorman was saying, ‘. . . DEATH in pagan bohemia! . . . Warn viewers about the graphic and very disturbing nature of the footage you’re about to see . . . ’ Then a flaming figure ran through the desert amid a chorus of screams. ‘. . . What was supposed to be a desert celebration became a NIGHTMARE as one of their own was INCINERATED before their horror-struck eyes . . .’ the anchor said. ‘. . . man not yet identified BURNED to death in what appears a FREAK accident . . .’
Back in the studio, a brunette co-anchor with a fashionable white skunk-streak in her hair was shaking her head slowly, as if stunned by the horrors the world contained: ‘Dick, that is highly disturbing footage.’
‘It is, Michelle,’ said the anchorman. ‘It is disturbing. And fire experts say it’s a grim reminder of the danger of incendiary devices.’
‘Well,’ said skunk-streak, ‘let’s take one more look . . .’
‘Seen this yet?’ the boil-faced proprietor asked me. ‘They been showin’ it for three days. “Freak accident.” Ask me, freak’s the right word. I’d see ’em all torched.’
‘In a possibly related incident,’ the anchorman said, ‘police are looking for whoever is responsible for the MURDER of a well-known festival performer . . .’
The coffee rushed up my throat and I choked it down, stumbling down the hall to my room. Behind me boil-face said, ‘Hey, your forgot your jo – – ’
For hours I paced the tiny room, trying to figure, trying to plot my next move. I decided to call Munoz and picked up the phone. Then I decided he was the last one to call. I was in the center of some monstrous fuck-up. At least until I understood what was happening I should disappear – get on the road, go north, head to Canada. I got to the parking lot to find the van listing to the left, the front tire dead-flat. I rummaged through the van and found no spares. I went to the counterman and said, ‘I need a tire. I’ll pay you.’
He chewed jerky. ‘Alright, sure,’ he said. ‘I got a buddy. Let me call him.’ He dialed and said into the phone, ‘I got a man here needs a new tire. How fast you figure you can get out here? He’s in the lobby right now. Yeah – right now.’ Then I saw the way he was looking at me and I saw sweat glistening on his boils, and I knew the police would be swarming the lobby in minutes.
They caught me about two miles down the road, on foot.
Which is everything that happened until now, Goins.
PART IV
THE FIX
CHAPTER 27
On the day before my preliminary hearing, Goins walks into the interview room with bags under his eyes, yesterday’s soiled clothes, and a complexion like the scum-bottom of an ashtray.
‘All-nighter,’ he mutters, sounding a little froggy as he opens his briefcase. ‘Now. Good news is, they’re not charging you with the real Gus Miller’s death. Once they thawed him out and cut him open, it was cancer.’ He shakes his head wearily. ‘Sick shit, to carry a war hero’s corpse in your van all that time. Why do you think he did it? Finkel, I mean.’
‘He was filching the dude’s VA checks.’
‘Sure, but why keep the body around? You think he had some kind of perversely sentimental attachment to the man he was impersonating, the man he wanted to be?’
‘Shit, Goins, this isn’t an Edgar Allan Poe story. You’ve seen pictures of that van. He was a packrat. He couldn’t get rid of anything.’
Goins shrugs, removing his yellow notepad from the manila folder labeled California v. Bunt. He’s already filled dozens of pages with notes of our conversations; reading upside-down I can see, as he rifles through the pages to find a fresh one, endless underlinings, double- and triple-circled words, marginal exclamation points, question marks. He writes a few more words and then turns the notebook toward me. It reads:
THEORY: frame-up
MOTIVE: fuck-up
‘Boiled down,’ Goins says, ‘this is where we are. Their theory, as far as I can make it out, is going to be that you were an active participant in this murder-for-hire scheme from day one. Our theory is they’re railroading you because their harebrained plan blew up in their face. They’re covering their asses, because what they did – giving you a gun and trying to follow you to a hit – was highly unorthodox and dangerous. It invited exactly the kind of mess we got.’
‘“Safe as a squirtgun,” he called that fucking piece.’
‘Well, far as I can figure, there are several explanations for what happened. One: even though ballistics says the fatal bullet came from the Smith & Wesson recovered from the tent, the gun you fired wasn’t the one they gave you. Say there was another gun in the tent – maybe Nastahowsky’s or a piece that Gus wasn’t telling you about – that you grabbed in the melee. Of course, if that’s the case, where’s the first gun?
‘Explanation two: the cops gave you a gun they knew was real, knowing you’d pass it to Gus, as a little insurance. If the investigation petered out, if they never found out who Gus wanted to kill, at least they’d be able to bust him as a felon in possession of a firearm and send him away forever. They knew they could count on you to deny giving it to him, if they wanted you to.
‘But what’s most likely, I think, is that this is simply another episode in the teeming annals of police incompetence. Maybe not the most spectacular example I’ve ever seen, in a long career spent observing police botches, but it’s pretty close. Hubris and ineptitude are a very scary mix: a law- enforcement specialty. And they didn’t have to do any of it. They could just have grabbed Gus at the start. This Munoz was after headlines, obviously. A glory move, and you were his pawn.’
‘How are they gonna explain my having a police-issued gun?’
‘They’ll deny they ever gave it to you, which makes it your word versus theirs.’ Goins looks at me silently for a long time before adding, ‘You may have to testify tomorrow.’
‘Okay. I want to tell my story.’
‘Ordinarily I hate to put clients on. It gives the prosecutor a chance to skip rope with your intestines, and the guy they’ve got – Cal Buckhorn – he’s rabid as they come. But I don’t see any other way to get your story into evidence. And you’re a lot brighter than most of my clients. Crazy as your account sounded at first, I think you’ll be able to hold your own up there. You sold me.’
I want to weep into my hands, I’m so grateful to hear this.
‘Anything else I should know, before we go to battle?’ he says. ‘I don’t want to be caught flat-footed.’
I study Goins for a long time, his pallid, puffy face, his tired eyes shining with purpose, and say, ‘I’ve told you everything.’
He starts packing up his briefcase. ‘I need a few hours’ sleep. You’re first on the docket, eight a.m.’
When he
reaches the door I say, ‘What they’re saying doesn’t make any sense. If I’m a for-real hit-man, how did they even get turned on to this thing?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ Goins says. ‘They say they had a snitch, and it wasn’t you.’
CHAPTER 28
Down through the aisle of the Inyo County District Courthouse, felony division three, comes the gray old vampire, gaunt and slinking in ancient snakeskin cowboy boots, an off-the-rack Salvation Army sportscoat, and Chuck Norris crotch-flex jeans agleam at the waist with a bronco-buckle. Looking straight ahead with fanatical concentration, as if an errant glance in such rarefied air might doom him, Telly Grimes marches nervously past the empty visitor gallery, past the lawyers’ oak tables, and pauses before the heavyset clerk, who makes him hold aloft a crabbed, trembling right hand and swear to tell the truth. When he settles himself behind the witness stand, right under the great golden seal of the State of California, his neck emerging like a shrunken ginseng root from the collar of his ill-fitting shirt, I see his eyes flicker over the courtroom, for an instant touching me, his old drinking chum, fellow mole man, pal of a thousand nights in another universe, now planted behind the defense table in a ridiculous robin’s-egg-blue suit Goins has supplied for me from the Public Defender wardrobe closet (crammed hanger after hanger, I imagine, with all the pastels of lamblike innocence). For the second that he looks at me, I think I see the twitch of an involuntary smile in Telly’s otherwise petrified expression: the two of us here in cheap impostors’ clothes playing roles in someone else’s absurd game. He gets to be Judas.
Goins, for his part, is looking earnest, wearing shiny black shoes, a fine blue suit with a patterned tie – no bullshit on game day – and as he sits beside me I can smell his fresh-soaped skin, shampooed hair, and cologne. A public defender, sure, and his voice a little scratchy from a sleepless week preparing my case, but for the first time presenting himself thoroughly as a pro, a gladiator: mine. I like that he detests the prosecutor, since this will make Goins fight hard and nasty.
‘State your name,’ says Assistant District Attorney Cal Buckhorn, a tall, broad-shouldered Aryan with a lipless, unforgiving mouth and an air of corn-fed righteousness.
‘Telly Grimes,’ the witness rasps so quietly and hesitantly you can barely hear him.
‘Lean into the microphone, Mr. Grimes. Speak up,’ says the judge, whose placard reads ‘The Honorable Barbara D. O’Brien.’ She’s in her mid-forties and voluptuous, with an abundance of raven hair flowing over her robed shoulders. To be adjudged innocent by her, I think, would redeem a lifetime.
The prosecutor jabs the air as he asks questions. On one finger he wears a fat college football ring. ‘Isn’t it a fact,’ he asks Telly, ‘that your vocation is that of a fence – someone who buys and sells goods on the black market?’
‘Not anymore, sir,’ Telly says, every syllable squeezed up from his agonized bronchial tubes like marbles through a straw. ‘Because I fell on my face and asked Jesus to help me stop sinning. And since then, sir, I haven’t besmirched the statute book of the great State of California in even the most minuscule way, sir. I see loose change, I put my hand in my pocket. Girls pass, I turn away. Not even a parking beef.’
‘How long ago were you Saved?’
‘Off and on for years, sir, but the big one was a number of weeks ago.’
‘I remind you that you enjoy immunity for the statements you make in this court today. Up until several months ago, you were still engaged in black market activity, were you not?’
‘I did so engage, sir.’
‘And did a man you knew as Gus Miller ask you to procure a gun for him?’
‘Sir, yes.’
‘Did he tell you why he wanted one?’
‘Only that someone needed wasting, sir, and he was getting fifty grand for it.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘I didn’t want anything to do with whatever he had in mind. I got enough on my conscience, sir, without helping to get someone shot up. Killing’s a mortal sin. You go to hell for it. Plus, I didn’t feel like helping such an assh – – such a man.’
‘He tried to yank you through the window of your car once, correct?’
Telly’s lip twitches at the humiliating memory. ‘That was after I told him I wouldn’t get him a gun. I think he did it as a warning, because he was afraid I’d go to the authorities.’
‘And did you?’
‘Not at first, because I thought maybe he was joking, and I thought snitching was wrong, sir. Then after he tried to hurt me, I figured all bets were off. That’s when I realized the greater sin would be to let a murder occur.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I called El Guapo, Detective Al Munoz of the Costa Mesa Police Department. I told him Miller was trying to get a gun, and the authorities would be behooved to keep an eye out.’
‘Why Munoz?’
‘I consider him a personal friend. I gave him information once in a while, and he helped me on some beefs. Some legal violations I’d been accused of, sir.’
The prosecutor suddenly looms over me, his fat ring shining as he points down at me. ‘Are you familiar with the defendant, Benjamin Bunt?’
‘I know Benny, sure. I know Benny.’ He lowers his eyes and coughs violently into his fist. It takes him forever to clear his throat. ‘This isn’t easy for me, because I always considered him a buddy.’
The prosecutor plows on, showing no concern for old Telly’s stricken conscience, no interest in the burdens of friendship or the pang of perpetrating betrayal. ‘Did he do anything unusual around the time Gus Miller was speaking of this contract murder?’
‘Benny, sir, he – he wanted me to get him a new ID. I got him a California license. A really good-looking one. You’d have to look real close to tell it wasn’t bona fide. I remember the name he wanted on it, too: John Romita.’
That hangs in the air forever, and I can hear Goins’s breathing stop.
‘No further questions,’ the prosecutor finally says, folding his big arms across his chest as he sits.
‘Any cross, defense?’ says the judge.
Goins sits there blinking into dead space, his brow clenched, and the judge has to ask the question again. Goins catches himself and bolts to his feet, sputtering, ‘Yes, your honor.’ He looks disoriented as he walks up to the podium. ‘Mr. Grimes,’ he says. ‘Mr. Grimes.’ Goins glares as hard as he can at Telly, breathing like a big starving cat. ‘Isn’t it true . . .’ he begins. ‘Mr. Grimes, you admit to a history of depravity, criminality, and gutter-dwelling treachery, do you not?’
‘Objection, your honor!’ cries the prosecutor. ‘Compound question.’
‘Restate your question, counselor.’
Goins pounds his fist on the podium. ‘You swim in life’s gutter, do you not?’
‘Sir, I would ask that you not judge my past.’
‘Isn’t it true, as the single example of your coldblooded huckster nature that I find it necessary to invoke here, that you once tried to counterfeit the likeness of a beloved Mexican saint on a flour tortilla?’
‘If I did something like that to any beloved likeness, sir, I have no recollection of it.’
‘Are you being paid for your testimony here today?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Are you being given a break on one of your criminal cases?’
‘No, sir. I’m here because of my conscience.’
Goins snorts dramatically, pounds the podium with a sneer, and sits down beside me. Under his breath he snarls, ‘I should have known about the fucking ID, Benny.’
With a look of infinite relief, Telly shuffles his bones down the aisle, breathing with difficulty, and disappears into the hallway.
Next through the door is Detective Al Munoz. As he strides toward the witness box, steely-eyed and beautiful in his crisp short-sleeved black uniform, with its knife-creased slacks and shining badge, there’s no swagger or self-promotion in his step, only noble purpos
e. His walk conveys his absolute conviction that he’s in a holy place, the Temple of the Law to which he’s given his life. His ramrod-straight posture connotes incorruptibility, the fine and unimpeachably American habits of a West Point instructor. As he raises his hand to be sworn in, with those delicate tapering fingers and heroic arms, he looks like a glossy cop-recruitment poster. And when the clerk asks him if he swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, he says, ‘I do,’ in a tone of voice that makes you want to cry with gratitude that God ever made a man so fine. He settles into the witness box. A vein bulges lengthwise down one of his absurd biceps like an IV tube, like a junkie’s dream.
‘After Mr. Grimes contacted you about this murder plot,’ the prosecutor asks, ‘what action did you take?’
‘Because we did not know who the intended target was, we decided to conduct surveillance,’ Munoz says.
‘Your honor,’ says the prosecutor, ‘I’d like to play Exhibit Number One for the court.’
He pops a cassette tape into a player. Out pour the sounds of a dull mechanical hum and crackling static, like a far-away radio station. Voices rise and fall. Through the interference two men who sound vaguely familiar are talking about a gun.
‘Do . . . ladies’ weapon . . .’
‘Auh?’
‘. . . forty-five . . . essentially . . . chick’s gun.’
‘. . . blue-collar, meat-and-potatoes . . . you wanted . . . bazooka.’
One of the voices booms, loud enough to hear clearly: ‘You and me are gonna kill us one motherfucker today. How you feelin’?’
‘I’m feeling really positive about it.’
After a few moments I realize this last voice is my own.
The prosecutor removes the tape and holds it before Munoz. ‘How did you obtain this recording, Detective?’
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