The Straight Man - Roger L Simon

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by Roger L. Simon

"Sure. You live in Los Angeles half your life, you have to know a lot of them."

  "What do you think of them?"

  "As a generalization, I think they have a great life. That's why they bitch about it so much. Who else gets to do what they want—more or less—and is paid a fortune for it?"

  "Guilt provoking," she said. "Some of them give the pleasure principle such free reign, they don't recognize their death wish until it's too late."

  Endogenous depression. Pleasure principle. This woman had done a lot of shrinking. At least she knew the buzz words. "What does this have to do with the subject at hand?"

  "What do you know?"

  "What I read in the L.A. Times. They indicated Mike's career was floundering. Three weeks before, his five-year partnership with Otis King had been dissolved. A week after that, King signed a three-picture pact with Global Pictures for six million dollars plus a percentage of profits. That could drive a man to suicide. At least it was good enough for the police .... Is this accurate?"

  "As far as it goes."

  "What else should I know?"

  "Otis King is an ambulatory schiz with extreme obsessive-compulsive tendencies."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "He's a human time bomb. Into everything—coke, heroin, speedballs, freebase, Methedrine, Percodan, men, women, children, transvestites, and dogs."

  "Sounds uninhibited."

  "He makes Richard Pryor seem like Mother Theresa."

  The doorbell rang.

  "Just a second," I said, and went and looked through the peephole. My thirteen-year-old son, Simon, was standing there grinning at me in a dirty Clash T-shirt and a pair of ratty cutoffs.

  I opened the door a crack and looked at him. "Hey, sport. Good to see you. But come back a little later. It's business hours."

  "I know, Dad. But it's an emergency. I gotta have sixteen dollars. Fast."

  "Sixteen dollars?" I glanced back at Emily, who had discreetly turned the other way. "What in hell for?"

  "Spray paint."

  "What're you gonna do? Hit up on somebody's garage door so I have to bail you out of the sheriff's station like I did two weeks ago?"

  "Nah, we got permission." He nodded behind him where three of his teen-age buddies were leaning against the corridor wall, trying to look like surly gang members but not quite making it. It was his regular crew, the KGB—the Kings of Graffiti Bombing. For a middle-class white kid, Simon was heavily ghetto-identified and spent his time break dancing, practicing black and Chicano slang, or spray painting graffiti. Mostly the latter. The weird thing was, he was very good at it.

  "Look, your mother gets child support for this. Besides, you know the law—if I give you the money, they still can't sell it to you. You need an adult to buy spray paint in California."

  "Yeah, that's why I thought maybe you could come with us."

  That was it. I took him aside. "Listen, schmuck, can't you see I'm busy? I'm working."

  "Dad, I know .. . but you gotta understand. We got special permission to throw a bomb on a wall by the Pan Pacific."

  "Who gave you permission?"

  "The Parks Commission dude. And if we don't do it now, we—"

  "Did your friends try their parents?"

  "They can't find 'em. Dad, graffiti's art. You said so yourself. Besides, this is a contest. The dudes who do the best pieces get beamed up to New York for the nationals!"

  "All right. All right. What a con job! Just wait in the lobby till I'm finished."

  "Thanks, Dad. You're fresh." Simon gave me a big hug and rushed off to join his friends. I turned back to Emily.

  "Sorry. I got a kid with an identity crisis. He thinks he's a member of the Third World."

  But Emily was now sitting back down on the sofa, staring off into space. I walked over to her.

  "So what is it?" I said. "You think Otis King is responsible for his own partner's demise?"

  "l don't know."

  "It doesn't make much sense, considering what's happened to Otis, his good fortune."

  "That may be. But whatever happened, I know it's not suicide. And if I don't do something about it ..." She stopped, biting so hard I could see a drop of blood forming at the top of her lip. " . . . I don't know how I'll answer to Genevieve when she grows up." She looked over toward my bedroom. The little girl had stopped watching television and was standing in the doorway staring straight at us in a macabre, unblinking way that reminded me for an instant of The Exorcist. "How much do you charge, Moses?" But before I could answer she said, "Never mind. I trust you. Just bill me."

  All my clients should be that way, I thought.

  "How do I get to Otis King?" I asked.

  "Not easy. He's trying to kick his drug habit and he's under twenty-four-hour-a-day therapy with Dr. Carl Bannister in the Malibu Colony. Until he's cured, Bannister's keeping him in total isolation. Nobody can get in."

  God. Another shrink.

  3

  "The hidden purpose of psychotherapy is to brainwash people into accepting society as it exists, accommodate them to what is wrong so they can be comfortable with themselves and not want to change things. Isn't that right, Moses?"

  "I have the feeling I'd be uncomfortable in any society."

  "That's because you're so self-involved. If you'd try to contribute to the welfare of others, you wouldn't spend so much time walking along with a face as long as your arm. Think about the freedom fighters in South Africa, El Salvador . . . the new resistance against fascism in Chile . . . the strugglers against Soviet social imperialism in Afghanistan .... By the way—how's your sex life?"

  "About half as alive as the Democratic party."

  I was with my aunt Sonya, driving east from Venice along Pico Boulevard. It wasn't my normal procedure to bring a septuagenarian on casework, but I had broken my last two dates with her, and I knew if I did it a third time, I'd never hear the end of it.

  "And let me add," she said, "that by the welfare of others I do not mean just one particular senior citizen. I mean—"

  "I know. I know. 'The greatest good for the greatest number.' Thank you, Jeremy Bentham."

  "Thank God you still remember something in this narcissistic culture hell-bent on navel contemplation and acquisition of personal possessions."

  "All right. All right." We were pulling up to the valet parking of the Fun Zone. "Is it all right if I give this exploited worker my BMW or should I park it myself?"

  "How else do you expect him to make a living?"

  On the east end of the Sunset Strip, the Fun Zone ("the Omphalos of American Comedy") was your basic L.A. Eighties Trendoid Post-Deco club with a dusty rose and gray tile facade and a brushed stainless steel front door that looked like it was borrowed from the engine room of the Queen Mary. You drove up to it by a side driveway that cut between the club and a recently built piece of work called the Albergo Picasso, a self-described "European-style spa hotel" done on the exterior in a series of multicolored squares said to derive from the master's Cubist Period and on the interior in "harmonious tones" out of his Blue and Rose periods. It was the kind of place my New York friends would once have used for a facile put-down of L.A. but now would rush to stay in, because with its minimalist cuisine, German cars, and diminishing smog, Los Angeles had become, by attrition, the spiritual capital of today's "material world." And that, as the lady sang, was where we lived.

  The heady smell off me, or at least the dream of it, was the driving motif of the Fun Zone itself. The moment you passed through its steel portals you were in a corridor lined with hundreds of autographed photos of aspiring comics who had performed at the club hoping to land two minutes on Johnny or Merv or—who knew?—maybe even a raunchy comedy for Warner Bros. in which they could strut their stuff in this summer's food fight. As if part of a definite hierarchy, the corridor opened onto a larger lobby decorated with oversize portraits of the greats of comedy from Chaplin to Lenny Bruce. At the opposite end of the lobby, in a place of honor just beside the
entrance to the main room (the Fun Zone had three rooms—one for the star attraction, one for the up-and-comers, and a third, called The Combat Zone, for women comics only) was a twelve-foot-high portrait of the God himself, Richard Pryor, the man who had put the club on the map as the place to be in funnyland when he had premiered his first one-man show there almost ten years ago.

  Not far from Pryor, and clearly recently installed, was a lesser photograph of Ptak and King. With Mike's corpse only a week in the ground, there were several people standing around eyeing it curiously when Sonya and I stepped forward.

  "What a marshmallow," she said, staring right in Ptak's face. I had to admit her evaluation of the soft, fleshy blond man with the slight overbite gazing out from the black and white still was not very different from mine. I had seen Ptak perform once, as a guest on the Letterman show, and didn't think he was particularly funny. He seemed to have less talent than most straight men. He couldn't sing, he couldn't dance, and he certainly couldn't tell a joke. In fact, he was sort of an anachronism, the kind of comic foil that didn't seem necessary in this day and age. King, on the other hand, was like a black, street version of Dennis the Menace, all unbridled id, an uptight white man's worst fantasy turned outrageous—a comic mugger. In the photograph he looked as if he were made of wire, all muscle and bone in sneakers, jeans, tank top, and baseball cap turned around backward.

  He had a wide grin on his face that defied you to decide whether it was evil or mischievous and so much energy he vibrated off the photograph. He was so magnetic, within a second you forgot Ptak was even up there with him, like so much instant mashed potatoes vanished down a drain.

  "Now, that's what I call sexy," said Sonya. She wasn't talking about Mike or Otis but about a red-headed woman of about thirty who was visible through the door standing on the stage of The Combat Zone, trying desperately to reach an audience that looked like a combination of bored Vals and tourists from Iowa.

  "So," she was saying, "sometimes I think I'm a minority of one. My cause is so obscure I couldn't get a terrorist to kidnap me if I walked naked through the streets of Damascus."

  There was a slight ripple of laughter and a tinkling of glasses. The woman shrugged as she reached for a water pitcher. "You know why the Canucks call us Pepsis, don't you? We're half flat, bottled up, and grin like idiots when they step on us."

  "What kind of accent is that?" I asked.

  "Her? What are you—an idiot? She's a Pepsi. French-Canadian! Don't you read the papers anymore? René Lévesque stepped down. It's the end of the Parti Québecois, the separatist movement. That's what she's talking about."

  "Oh." No wonder the Vals weren't laughing. I doubted the Iowans found it very funny either.

  I stepped closer to the door and took another look at her. She was dressed elegantly in a simple blue sweater and black leather pants that showed off the kind of slim hips you wanted to slide your arm around and crush into your body. Sonya was right. She was attractive. But right now she didn't look very happy. In fact, she looked like she was laying a first-class El Bombo.

  "What're you doing here, Wine? Amateur Night's Monday."

  I hadn't seen him in about five years, but I didn't have to look to recognize the voice of Art Koontz of homicide. When I did, however, I was surprised at how good he looked—fifteen pounds lighter, with stylish clothes and a haircut out of Gentleman's Quarterly. He used to be a dead ringer for Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. These days everybody was going upscale.

  "I didn't know you were a friend of comedy, Inspector."

  "Everybody likes a few laughs, Wine. Of course, it's hard to keep up with you hippies turned yuppie. You don't know who's driving the BMW these days. Is it true that sushi's out—or have I been misinformed by California magazine?"

  "You don't look like you're doing badly yourself either, Koontz. Nice suit. What is it? Armani?"

  "Gianni Versace."

  I whistled. "The boys in Parker Center'll think you're on the take, you keep wearing duds like that." He frowned, but I smiled back pleasantly. Actually it was kind of nice to see the old bastard after all this time. And it saved me a trip downtown. He could only have been there for one reason, and as I'm sure he knew, the same was true for me.

  "How about a drink?" I pointed to the bar of The Combat Zone where the French-Canadian was still trying gamely to make a dent in her audience. "The Evian's on me. Or do you prefer Pellegrino?"

  "Bourbon. Bourbon with no water."

  I guided him toward the bar before he changed his mind. Sonya was right beside us. Koontz eyed her suspiciously.

  "This is my aunt Sonya Lieberman."

  "Your aunt?" He made a face of disbelief and turned to me directly. "Look, I don't know who your client is—though I could guess. But if you're out to make a murder case, I can tell you straight off the bat, forget it. Ptak did this all by himself."

  I had to agree it certainly looked that way. According to the papers, he had checked into the penthouse suite at six-oh-five that evening and took the elevator directly upstairs.At precisely nine-thirty-two, three hours and twenty-seven minutes later, he was on his way down by the express route. The elevator gave directly onto the suite foyer and the operator, a Mr. Sanchez, insisted he brought no one up or down between those times. Furthermore, the bellhop, a Mr. Nastase, said that, as far as he knew, no one was in the suite when he escorted Mr. Ptak up with one suitcase. And he had made a relatively complete survey of the premises since Ptak wanted a guided tour of all the perks of the suite (projection TV with VCR and quadraphonic stereo, grand piano, bar and gourmet kitchen, billiard table, etc.) and Nastase, the Los Angeles Times reported, was eager to get as large a tip as possible from the show business fat cat. Of course there was the question of the emergency exit, but the fire door to the back stairs of the penthouse had to be opened by a key and all those keys were either in the possession of the hotel management or of Ptak, who had his in his jacket pocket when he plunged to his death.

  Our drinks arrived and I paid for them with my VISA card. "Thanks for the drink, Wine," said Koontz. "I imagine you're being paid well, but do us both a favor and get out of this case. Go get yourself a nice personal injury job, a dentist in a Maserati, and bag this one. The lady—and I know it's a lady—who hired you is just dealing with her own psychological problems, which might be bad, but weren't half as bad as her husband's. There's nothing you can find out for her that will please her in any way, and there are no guilty parties to this crime, if you can call it that, other than the man's own sad life. And I'm sure an educated person like you would agree, each of us has the right to take his own life. Unless you've suddenly gone religious on me."

  "Not me, Koontz. I'm a card-carrying atheist, except for two years with Rajneesh when he was still in the business. But tell me, if this is all so simple, what the hell are you doing here?" I didn't sound as decisive as I wanted to. I was having trouble keeping my eyes off the French-Canadian. Her teeth were crooked and her nose was too big, but there was something about her. Maybe, as the Jungians would say, she touched my anima. Or maybe she was just sexy as hell. Whatever it was, she gave me the kind of knot in my stomach I hadn't felt in years. Unfortunately for her, the audience didn't feel the same way. At this point they were booing her unmercifully. Some wit in the first row was telling her to eat frogs' legs and hop back to Montreal.

  "Well, Wine, I might as well tell you, since an idiot in the DA's office leaked it to the Times this morning anyway: your friend Ptak was wired to the ceiling when he flew out of the window of the Picasso last week. He was so fucked up on speedballs he probably thought he was Captain Marvel .... Sorry, ma'am."

  "I'm aware of speedballs, Inspector," said Sonya sharply. "And not from senior citizens' bowling. Heroin and cocaine. Two parts blow and three parts skag, depending on who's mixing."

  "Yeah, right," Koontz mumbled sheepishly.

  The French-Canadian left the stage to scattered applause, except for mine, and I turned back fullface to
the two of them. "So it's Hollywood-and-drugs time, the big career-maker in L.A. law enforcement. You guys could really get some action out of this, another Belushi case. No wonder the little DA leaked it. What's he after-city council or a judgeship?"

  "There's not going to be another Belushi case," Koontz said icily. "This time we're going to put a stop to this, find the source of this business and stamp it out."

  "Ah, c'mon, Koontz. Don't give me this single source crap. You get drugs in this town twenty-six ways to Brooklyn. You know that better than I do. You worked Rampart for fifteen years. They've got more dealers down there than they've got taco stands."

  "Down there isn't the entertainment industry. And in this case, it's not Brooklyn. It's the Bronx." He held his drink to his chest and leaned closer to me. "We have information that a certain individual on the other side of this country is attempting to corner the drug market on an extremely affluent, indeed unbelievably affluent, sector of our society. And as you know, that sector has immense influence on the minds and morals of our children, indeed on the minds and morals of children all over the world. Now, the presence of a private eye muddying the waters over one measly suicide that's already over and done with can only complicate a crucial investigation. So I ask you as a citizen and as a family man to get out!"

  "I can't get out, Koontz. I promised someone I'd do this."

  "Who?"

  "My shrink."

  "Your shrink? . . . Jesus, you were better off when you were a pinko!"

  He slammed down his drink and marched off.

  4

  I sat there with Sonya for a few minutes, then left her watching a pair of women twin comics (the Non-Identicals) making weird incest jokes and went outside to reconnoiter. Ptak had landed somewhere near the back of the Fun Zone, and I found the remnants of a police circle when I walked around the corner by the stage door. I stared down at the fading chalk, looking from the black asphalt up to the penthouse terrace from which he supposedly jumped. It had a low white stucco wall that looked easy to climb over, even to fall over. I stepped into the center of the ring and tried to reconstruct his movements in my mind's eye, but there was something about suicide that made me recoil from contemplating it. I was wondering whether that was normal behavior or whether that was just me, when I heard what sounded like a dry heave. I turned toward the stage door to see the French-Canadian leaning out with one hand clutching the doorframe. She didn't look embarrassed when she saw me.

 

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