The Asian hit the old woman so hard her dentures popped out and rattled to the street before she did. Then he grabbed one of the leather briefcases out of the car, and was silhouetted beautifully in the Ferret’s sights twenty yards down the alley when the Ferret skidded on those fractured dentures and involuntarily fired a shot into the quickly descending fogbanks. Now the fog had settled when they needed light.
The old lady was still on the ground, yelling “Rodney!” which sounded mushy without her dentures, and the Ferret was limping after the fleeing figure with the briefcase. The chase ended against a chain-link fence around a boatyard full of engines. Inside was a frothing Doberman perfectly willing to eat the Asian, who slammed against the fence, dropped the briefcase, spilled bundles of money, and was about to surrender. But the exhausted Ferret (who would never again drink ten cans of beer on duty) stumbled on the curb and went ass over tennis shoes. And his gun went clattering.
The Asian killer cried out joyfully, picked up the Ferret’s gun, turned, and fired one shot point-blank through the fence into the open mouth of the Doberman, who dropped like a brick, his snarl frozen forever.
Then, while the Ferret started to weep for his mother and wish he’d been an accountant like his father, and had all sorts of incoherent thoughts he would later not remember, the Asian killer pointed the gun at the Ferret’s mouth just as he had at the Doberman’s, and pulled the trigger. And it clicked. The two-inch Smith & Wesson was a five-shot revolver.
The assassin screamed like a gull, picked up the briefcase, and started up the fence, but before he did he pulled a knife from nowhere and slashed at the Ferret, who raised his hand, getting a defense wound across the palm which would later require a dozen stitches. When the killer reached the top of the chain-link fence, the Ferret, weeping now out of fury, snarling like the deceased Doberman, took out his stiletto and threw it at the climbing figure. But since knife throwing only works in movies, the weapon struck the killer in the shoulder, handle first, and dropped harmlessly at the Ferret’s feet. While the bleeding narc roared helplessly and would have given four nipples for one bullet, the limping assassin stepped over the dead dog and made his way through the boatyard to freedom. The Ferret scrambled about on the wrong side of the fence and threw rocks at the assassin with his bloody hand.
By the time the Ferret got back to the would-be corpses, the Weasel had things reasonably well sorted out. The two old geezers were goldbugs from Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles. They had been buying and hoarding gold in their store long before the precious metal went soaring and bouncing up and down on the exchange. Just Plain Bill had sold them a considerable quantity of gold Krugerrands over the last two years, no questions asked. He’d finally set them up for a big buy of bullion from an Oriental “fisherman,” also no questions asked.
The goldbugs were more than a little frightened about a waterfront liaison, but Just Plain Bill was a trusted customer, and one goldbug decided to bring his wife along, feeling certain that the dear old doll would add a measure of safety if there was some kind of double cross planned. Just Plain Bill knew and liked her and would never hurt such a nice old dame. And so forth.
The three never were convinced that the Weasel and the Ferret were correct in their assessment that Just Plain Bill and the gook who boogied were going to cut her, from her sagging gullet right down to her chilly old giz, the second they had the two larcenous goldbugs safely trussed and ripped open like baby hogs, to be dumped into the bay with all the unwanted fetuses, unloved hoodlums, savagely raped runaways, and suicidal wretches of every stripe who ended up there.
In fact, when one of the goldbugs pulled himself together sufficiently to begin thinking about the satchel crammed with $50,000 that the Ferret let get away, he began getting churlish with the lieutenant in charge of the twenty-five policemen who eventually swarmed all over the scene, searching in vain for any clues to the identity of the escaped assassin. (It was apparent that Just Plain Bill was an old pro who was going to do all his talking through a lawyer from one of those Century City law firms with about a hundred names. The Mercedes was registered to him under his true name of William Bozwell.)
While a paramedic was binding the Ferret’s hand and getting ready to transport him to the hospital for suturing, the place was overrun by big-footed bluesuits running amok and trampling any evidence there might be.
The snippier of the two goldbugs turned toward the Ferret and said, “If you just could have gotten the briefcase! I don’t care about the guy getting away! If you just could have gotten the briefcase! Do you know how hard I worked for that money?”
And the Weasel got very worried, because the Ferret’s eyes got that blue agate look to them and started pinwheeling as he said very quietly to the goldbug: “Do you have any friends who would risk their lives for you? No? Well, I just did. And I don’t even know you. And furthermore …”
The Weasel thought it prudent to remove the Ferret before he squashed that goldbug on the spot. But the Weasel wanted to make sure the prisoner and money were being attended to by the pair of uniformed cops who had Just Plain Bill handcuffed and standing off down the alley with his face to the wall in front of the nark ark. One of the bluecoats, a lanky cop with acne, was keeping an eye on the briefcases, which the Weasel had opened and thrown into the back seat of the Toyota along with the four packages of currency the Ferret had retrieved when he nearly got dinged with the Doberman. The cop standing by the Toyota used his flashlight beam to stare in rapture at the contents of the car, while the other one worked out on a wad of gum and kept his shotgun pointed at the back of Just Plain Bill, who was dripping blood from his head, and sweating from the pain of the tight handcuffs. But he wasn’t complaining.
The Ferret was really starting to tremble now, as the image of himself lying dead with the dog began to crystalize. And the more he trembled the more crazed he looked.
When they got near the Toyota the Weasel saw that the tall cop with acne was actually fondling the packages of money in the back seat. Suddenly the tall cop turned, looking temporarily as bughouse as the Ferret, and said: “No one knows how many packages he dropped! No one knows how many you picked up! No one knows …”
He stopped babbling when the Ferret nodded eagerly with his brand-new lunatic smile and said, “That’s right, pal. You got it all figured out.”
Both the tall cop with acne and the Weasel watched in confusion as the Ferret limped over to the other bluesuit who was guarding Just Plain Bill and, before anyone could speak, snatched the shotgun out of the cop’s grasp with his bandaged hand. The Weasel feared that Just Plain Bill was about to lose the need for lawyers and writs and bail bonds and Asian assassins, but instead of blowing Just Plain Bill all over the brick wall of the warehouse, the Ferret spun around and pointed the shotgun at the tall cop with acne and said: “Okay, pus pockets, why don’t you just get over there against the wall? WITH THE OTHER FUCKING THIEF!”
“Maintain, partner, maintain!” the Weasel coaxed, as the tall cop stopped fondling the money and reached for the lowest cloud bank, saying: “I was just jiving ya! Hey, can’t ya take a joke? It was just a joke!”
But the Ferret couldn’t take a joke, not after looking at his own gun in the hands of the ecstatic assassin who heard the Ferret cry for his mommy.
“Main-tain, Ferret! Mellow out!” the Weasel pleaded.
Then the Ferret slowly uncoiled and let the Weasel take the shotgun from his bleeding hand and give it back to the petrified young cop, who had swallowed his gum and had all but forgotten Just Plain Bill, who was hoping to get out of this alive and into a nice safe jail cell.
As the narcs drove off in their Toyota with the loot intact, the tall cop with acne was still saying, “It was just a joke! Can’t ya take a joke?”
Then the television news team showed up, the one that had busted more blue balls of working cops than a whole binful of captains and deputy chiefs. Leading the pack was a well-known Los Angeles television reporter who ha
d, some months earlier, heard that a suspect in a police shooting was shot approximately a dozen times in the lower body by a small-caliber gun. Certain that he had the ultimate story of police brutality, he announced it on the eleven o’clock news, implying that the wounds had been inflicted while the victim was in police custody after he had been wounded during a fight with a shotgun-wielding cop. Which of course had every cop hater in town straining at the leash like the now dead Doberman, until it was later explained that one round of .00 buckshot produces just that many holes.
Tonight, the reporter gave this story one minute of on-screen coverage. A cop got cut up and let a bad guy get away. And they lost $50,000 of the victim’s hard-earned bread. And television shots of the cops made it hard to tell the players without a program, since Just Plain Bill looked like Pat Boone and the narcs looked like Manson Family rejects. It was a boring story.
The Weasel was genuinely sorry for the Ferret’s slashed and painful wound and had a pretty good idea that his partner had aged three or four years during those moments of abject terror when he was calling for his mother and wishing he’d listened to old dad. So he suggested they go to the Fabulous Forum and catch the Lakers’ playoff game. Except they were both broke (after paying at the toll bridge and buying a pint of Scotch to stop their hands from shaking), so the next day they went to the Los Angeles Lakers’ office, badges in hand, and reported that the Department had received a serious threat to detonate a concussion grenade near the Laker bench if the team should beat Dr. J and the Philadelphia 76ers.
The team officials and stadium security placed the two narcs at court-side, where they gassed with all the show biz celebrities. Finally, in the last quarter of the game, the Ferret moved right down on the Laker bench to guard the team from the fictitious Mad Bomber, and during the heat of action he jumped in with a play that he guaranteed would leave Kareem open for a left-handed skyhook, and fake Dr. J and his entire team clear into the parking lot.
No one will ever know if the astonished Laker coach took the advice about Dr. J from the bearded young cop with boozy breath who babbled something about just winning a one-on-one with Dr. D, the grim reaper. But the Weasel and Ferret were convinced that it was the narc’s brilliantly designed play which helped the Lakers win the world championship of professional basketball.
A footnote to the entire evening came when one of the goldbugs was given back his belongings, which the Asian assassin had dropped when the Ferret was blazing away at him on the docks. The goldbug found everything intact: his keys, his wristwatch and rings, his money, his wallet containing credit cards and driver’s license. But there was something else. It must have been dropped by the assassin, who Just Plain Bill said was a stranger he’d hired after a brief meeting in a Hollywood Boulevard massage parlor. (Just Plain Bill denied they were going to harm the old duffers. Just tape them up and leave them on the tarmac for dockworkers to find while washing away the morning gull shit.)
The objects that the goldbug said did not come from his pockets and must have been dropped by the fleeing assassin, were: an ordinary house key, and a scrap of paper bearing the business telephone number of a famous Hollywood movie studio.
7
The Empty Cathedral
It was turning into a very tense and nervous week. The street monsters hadn’t yet figured out where they had heard the name of Nigel St. Claire. The robbery detectives from downtown who were wrapping up Just Plain Bill Bozwell were now learning from the goldbug that the house key and the movie studio phone number didn’t belong to him. Therefore the Hollywood homicide team of Al Mackey and Martin Welborn were making no progress at all and devoting their time to going through the motions with a few other cases in their pending file. A clean-desk policy is bad news in any bureaucracy.
And with Captain Woofer so recently returned to duty after learning that the caterpillars hadn’t really conquered the kingdom, the squadroom was visited by headhunters from Internal Affairs who had been questioning all personnel who might have slipped the load of dope into the captain’s pipe. The suspect list included Gladys Bruckmeyer, who was still on sick leave from the emotional effects of that fateful day. The headhunters were sick and tired of the failure of the Weasel and Ferret to keep appointments for their interrogation, but after the narcs made the big-deal bust of Just Plain Bill Bozwell (who quickly got out on bail) they were station-house celebrities. Even Captain Woofer had excused their failure to keep the dates with Internal Affairs. But Captain Woofer was still monomaniacal, and would have gladly nailed a gold piece to the mast if he thought a reward would harpoon the swine who had been tormenting him so mercilessly.
So, until they either got a break in the Nigel St. Claire case or experienced a major ephiphany whereby it would be revealed how they could turn this one into a suicide, Al Mackey and Martin Welborn decided to dab a little ointment on open sores. One of the most painful to Martin Welborn was the Bonnie Lee Brewster case.
The most efficient and certainly the happiest detectives were able to keep every case apart from themselves and sectioned off, with all fences intact. They worked hardest on the cases that the boss said were most important, collected their paychecks twice a month, and only worried about their own backyards. They got their miniature badges and gold ID cards and enjoyed retirement parties where they all knocked back lots of booze and gossiped about the retired detectives who got those cushy jobs as corporate security chiefs where they took down eighty grand a year.
But Martin Welborn was one of those self-proclaimed fair-to-middling detectives who never constructed fences, and often lost his perspective, and now was in danger of losing his sense of humor as well. Which is why Al Mackey was so tense lately, and had a nearly irresistible urge to go to Marty’s apartment and mix up his paprika and cinnamon, or maybe throw his socks into his underwear drawer just to see if Marty could handle it.
There was something else bothering Al Mackey: the obsessive stops at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral damn near every time they went downtown to the police building. In more than twenty years Al Mackey had never had a partner want to visit a church. It was unnatural.
Martin Welborn knew he shouldn’t stay long. Al would be anxious to get back to Hollywood. It was amazing how quickly time passed in St. Vibiana’s Cathedral. He remembered attending mass here in the early reign of John XXIII, when he would have walked with a sickbed strapped to his back before missing mass. Before the vernacular masses, and guitar masses, and charismatic priests, and the groping and pawing at the end of these secularized services: “Let us offer each other the sign of peace!” When strangers turned with embarrassed or forlorn or beatific faces toward one another, depending upon their degree of intelligence, and shook hands. And Martin Welborn wanted to run away.
How dare they intrude between him and his God? How dare these benighted priests fail to see that by emasculating the ritual and mystery and guilt, they castrated The Faith. All the Catholic Church ever had been was ritual and mystery and guilt. And that was Everything. That was Order. Who could wish for more from God or man? Perfect Order.
It was time to go and he hadn’t found it yet. He stood up to look over the second pew in front of him in the empty cathedral. Then he saw it. It had been left in a different pew today. This was the third visit he’d made this week. He’d even made a visit one evening after work. It was written in pencil on lined notebook paper. The hand that wrote the note was unsteady and light. The note said: “Never Fail Novena. Most Sacred Heart of Jesus be praised and glorified now and forever. Most Sacred Heart of Jesus pray for us. Mother of God, Mary most holy, pray for us. Good Saint Theresa pray for us. Saint Jude, help of the hopeless, pray for us. One Our Father, one Hail Mary, one Glory be. Nine days novena. Leave a copy each day at church. At end of nine days your prayer will be answered.”
Martin Welborn read it twice, was tempted to say the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory be, but didn’t. He hadn’t said a prayer in a long time. He placed the note back on the pew where he found it
and left the cathedral to join Al Mackey.
Before he left, he had a fleeting memory of the old cardinal, now dead so many years. When he was a young policeman in uniform, before the total devastation wrought by Vatican II, he loved to attend the solemn high masses and hear the Gregorian choir. The old cardinal was a rock, but the legacy of Vatican II would have eventually killed him if age hadn’t. Martin Welborn would never forget the majesty of the old man as he chanted the ancient Latin rite. Martin Welborn once got to kneel and kiss the old man’s ring. The cardinal wore lovely crimson slippers.
“You were in there twenty minutes this time,” Al Mackey said when Martin Welborn trotted down the steps of St. Vibiana’s, dodging two sleeping winos who were about to be carried into the big blue drunk wagon which was making its rounds.
“Was I? I couldn’t have been in there that long.”
“I’m telling you, Marty. Twenty minutes. What do you do in there?”
“Nothing. It’s peaceful.”
“Do you pray or what?”
“Not hardly.”
“Then what do you do in there? Burgle the poor box? What?”
“I sit.”
Al Mackey shook his head and sighed and drove up Los Angeles Street onto the Hollywood Freeway. They rode quietly for a few minutes and Al Mackey said, “I don’t know how to say this … You see, I think … Marty, I’d like to talk to you about something.”
“Of course, my son.” Martin Welborn smiled. He looked exceptionally tranquil. He always looked exceptionally tranquil lately. And that’s what was making Al Mackey exceptionally nervous.
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