When Schultz hung up and turned his grizzly shape around in the chair, everyone started shuffling paper, dialing phones, drinking coffee, and generally averting the eyes. Would Gloria La Marr come to Schultz’s retirement party someday? As his date?
Then Schultz took Simon, the Weasel and the Ferret into an interrogation room and closed the door. Which worried the Weasel no end. “I was only joking about Gloria, Gunther!”
“Might not amount to nothing,” Schultz said. “But how would you two like to take down that gook that tried to kill you down there in San Pedro last week?”
“Would I like to take down the gook!” the Ferret cried. “Would I like a broad with four tits?” And he glared knowingly at the Weasel.
“Okay, might not be much, but Gloria La Marr says there’s some queen down in the fruit tank who tricked with your boy Bozwell. Somebody called Violet. Don’t go talk to Violet or Gloria’s gonna get burned. Anyways, Violet saw the picture of Bozwell in the paper. Bozwell was with a dink the night Violet met him and they talked a few words of gook. About gold. That woulda been two nights before he tried to shoot your eyes out, Ferret. Maybe it’s nothing. It’s worth a check, is all. She said the gook went to some restaurant on Melrose near Western. Maybe a Chinese restaurant.”
“Just Plain Bill Bozwell did serve in Vietnam for two years,” the Ferret said. “It was on an old five-ten in his package. Maybe that’s where he learned to cut throats. Old habits?”
“Can’t ya make him a deal if he turns the gook for ya?” Schultz asked.
“He’s saying nothing more,” the Weasel said. “Wouldn’t talk much to the robbery dicks from downtown. Told the dicks from the Harbor to go dance in eel shit. Had enough money to get a lawyer and writ out the next day. Anyway, he just might be telling the truth about not knowing the slope too well. Maybe they did just meet in a massage parlor, and Just Plain Bill started practicing his Vietnamese, and … birds of a feather?”
“Well”—Schultz shrugged—“want me to give it to robbery? After all, they’re handling the case.”
“No, let us check it out,” the Ferret said. “I got a personal interest in finding that boy.” His heart started beating irregularly. Don’t kill me! Mother! “A personal interest.”
“Got any leads at all?” Simon asked.
“Naw,” the Weasel said. “The dink dropped a few things outa his pocket when he was ripping himself up on the fence. A key and piece a paper with a phone number.”
“Where’s the number come back to?”
“Nowhere that means anything. Main switchboard of a big movie studio. Probably five thousand people in and out a those places every day. They even film TV shows there. Probably trying to get on a game show or something.”
“Which studio?” Schultz asked.
“The one where that guy was the boss, the one that got dusted in the bowling alley parking lot.”
“Nigel St. Claire,” Schultz said, looking at Simon. “And how about the key? They make it?”
“Just an ordinary key,” the Ferret said. “Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s a key they use at the movie studio,” Schultz said.
“First thing they checked after they ran the telephone number. Wrong brand a key.”
“Somebody oughtta find the Chinese restaurant and stake it out,” Schultz said. “Somebody has to be you, Ferret. You’re the only one knows what the gook looks like. You’d know him, wouldn’t ya?”
The Ferret remembered him. The bastard grinned when he pulled the trigger. Then the grin disappeared when it clicked. The Ferret remembered him, all right.
“We don’t have much going on anyway,” the Weasel said, knowing how badly the Ferret wanted the assassin.
Although they were still sore about having the murder case taken away from them, Schultz and Simon were policemen enough to report the slim lead to Al Mackey and Martin Welborn.
“The Oriental bandit had the number of the studio? Must be a thousand extensions and private numbers there,” Al Mackey said when he was told.
“Just thought I’d tell ya,” Schultz said. “It’s your case now.”
“That wasn’t by choice.”
“Yeah, I know, I know.”
“Maybe they’re doing another thirty-million-dollar war epic and he wants to play a Vietcong. Maybe …”
“Just thought I’d tell ya,” Schultz said.
“If anything comes of it, I’ll be sure to put in a word for Gloria La Marr,” Al Mackey said, sending Schultz scowling back to his table.
The whole fucking world knew! “Just because the broad’s serving time,” Schultz moaned to Simon when he sat down. “Gordon Liddy did more time and he’s on the talk shows!”
That did it. Gordon Liddy was Simon’s hero. Comparing Gloria La Marr to Gordon Liddy! This was the day to take Schultz up to the police academy and thump him on his noggin and hope it wasn’t too late to get his head all straightened out.
That afternoon while Simon had Schultz on the police academy wrestling mat trying to make Schultz see that he was going bughouse, the Weasel and the Ferret were intently watching the entrance of the only restaurant in the general vicinity described by Violet. It was not Chinese but Thai. They were staked out on the rooftop of a secondhand store on Melrose Avenue, wearing cowboy hats to shade them from the sun while they ate the world’s driest burritos, served by an Arab in a Mexican restaurant owned by a Korean.
Al Mackey and Martin Welborn went about their ordinary business, which involved two aggravated assaults, one domestic shooting, and a lover’s stabbing of a gay. The stabbee ended up with more sympathy for the knife wielder than he had for himself, which was not unusual. The detectives decided to get a rejection of a criminal complaint and let them work it out themselves over wine and linguini.
It was up to the street monsters, Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand, to open the next door into the mysterious murder of Nigel St. Claire.
Buckmore Phipps was mad today because the roller derby and the $1.98 Beauty Contest got preempted by a presidential address. Gibson Hand was irritated because a bunch of celebrity pussies were trying to put his favorite newspaper, The National Enquirer, out of business. There was trouble in their world.
So they were in no mood for bullshit while cruising up La Brea on the way back from Gibson Hand’s favorite barbecue grill, when they spotted two drunks having it out on the sidewalk in the presence of three other winos and a moaning basset hound.
The lackluster combatants, who were pounding each other wearily with a length of two-by-four and a piece of lead pipe, didn’t even notice the cops gliding up in the black-and-white. Finally one of the winos in the gallery saw the street monsters.
“Uh oh,” he said, elbowing the wino who was sitting next to him on the curb, who elbowed the next wino, who elbowed the moaning basset hound and said, “Shut the fuck up, dog.”
When the street fighters finally saw the street monsters, each dropped his weapon and waited meekly for the bracelets. However, Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand were out of their divisional boundaries and full of ribs and black-eyed peas. They weren’t about to get out of their car. The basset hound moaned even louder when all the yelling and fighting ceased.
“Why is that dog groanin like that?” Gibson Hand asked lazily.
“Got hit by a car bout a hour ago,” a wino answered.
“Country dog,” another wino added. “Jist brought him in from a farm. Not used to cars. Jist stood there and watched the car run over hisself.”
“Either shoot him or shut him up,” Gibson Hand said.
“You kin shoot him, you want to,” a wino said. “Course he was jumpin around a minute ago. I think he jist liked the attention he got when he was run over.”
“Why are you two beatin on your heads with that two-by-four and piece a pipe?” Buckmore Phipps asked wearily, as Gibson Hand leaned back on the headrest and picked his teeth with a matchbook.
“Motherfucker went to git some wine and chicken goblets and ate
it all fore he got back,” one fighter said.
The other one made a terrible mistake. He said to the cops, “I know my rights. I ain’t got nothin to say to you.”
Gibson Hand rolled his head slowly toward Buckmore Phipps, wondering if he should take the shotgun out of the rack and turn it into a pistol by busting the stock across the fighter’s noodle, but decided he’d eaten too many ribs for all that.
Buckmore Phipps said “You!” to the fighter who had made the big mistake. “Get in the car. We’re bookin you for ADW.”
“What’s that?”
“Assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Deadly weapon? Shee-it! I on’y hit the motherfucker with a pipe!”
Gibson Hand knew they were not going to book the wino for ADW or anything else, because when the drunk got in the car they headed out of the city and into the jurisdiction of the county sheriff.
Buckmore Phipps, driving leisurely, looked at the surly combatant and said, “Maybe we oughtta just book him for drunk instead?”
“I ain’t drunk either,” the fighter said, adding insult to injury.
“We’re gonna let our sergeant check you,” said Buckmore Phipps. “He’s a qualified expert. Drinks a fifth a day. He says you’re drunk, you’re drunk. He says you ain’t, you ain’t.”
Gibson Hand was getting curious when they pulled up in front of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station. Buckmore Phipps jotted something in laboriously disguised handwriting. He folded it carefully, but the fighter was so bagged he couldn’t have read it anyway, and after sobering up he said he wouldn’t know those two cops from Cheech and Chong.
Buckmore Phipps said, “Take this note and your lead pipe inside and hand the note to the desk officer. If the sergeant thinks you’re sober enough and wants to let you go, it’s up to him. I explained everything on the note as I saw it. We’ll wait here.”
The wino staggered around the sidewalk, tucked his shirt in, zipped up his fly, rehearsed walking a straight line. When he was convinced he could pull it off, he weaved his way up the steps and into the sheriff’s station with his note and lead pipe.
The deputy on the desk was reading a Penthouse magazine and was pissed off at being interrupted. The length of pipe in the asshole’s hand got his attention, however. The fighter handed the deputy the note and said, “Lemme see the sergeant right away.”
The deputy unfolded the note. It said: “This pipe is loaded with plastic explosives. I want twenty thousand dollars, a helicopter, and the Big Sheriff himself as a hostage or I’m blowing this fucking place into the ocean.”
The street monsters waited until they heard the terrified shouts and running feet and frantic deputies whomping on the fighter with sticks before they sped back to Hollywood. It made their day a little more tolerable, all in all.
But while the day of Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand had improved somewhat, the Weasel and the Ferret had nothing to be thankful for except that low brassy clouds made the rooftop more bearable. The Ferret was getting irritated because the Weasel was catching a nap up there, lying on the air-conditioning unit, using his battered cowboy hat as a pillow.
“Goddamn! I gotta wear out my peepers with these freaking binoculars while you sleep,” the Ferret whined.
“I wouldn’t know the dink if I saw him,” the Weasel mumbled. “One of us might as well stack a few Z’s.”
“Least you could do is run down and buy a couple six packs,” the Ferret said.
“Maybe you hadn’t a drank a couple six packs, you wouldn’t a fallen down that night and you’d a put one right in that gook’s ten ring and we wouldn’t be here,” the Weasel said, closing his eyes and rolling over.
Maybe he was right. That grinning face. The Ferret thought about looking for an old Vietcong poster, the kind he carried as a war protestor before he was drafted. He’d pin it to a silhouette on the target range. Maybe he’d practice with a couple of boxes of rounds. The gook grinned when he pulled that trigger in the Ferret’s face.
“Do you suppose they still have any old Ho Chi Minh posters around anywhere?” he asked the Weasel.
“Call Jane Fonda and ask her,” the Weasel mumbled, and within seconds he was snoring.
But the street monsters weren’t snoring. They were about to meet the man who died with his boots on.
It was too close to end of watch to be getting a bullshit radio call about somebody disturbing the peace. Especially at a motel on Sunset Boulevard that everyone knew was alive with pimps and whores, and probably nobody ever spent the whole night there since it was built. Or changed the sheets, for that matter.
When they arrived the ambulance was still twenty blocks away. The motel manager, a seventy-year-old Cambodian hired hand, was guarding a door. His fifteen-year-old grandson was beside him guarding a window. Inside the motel room were two bodies, one very hot and bothered and screaming, the other getting cooler by the minute.
“Okay, what’s the problem?” Buckmore Phipps sighed, as both street monsters emerged lazily from the radio car, leaving their hats but taking their sticks.
“Who’s that screamin?” Gibson Hand wanted to know.
“A lady’s screaming,” the boy said. “We won’t let her out.”
“Why won’t you let her out?” Buckmore Phipps asked, belching up some barbecue. He had to cool it with this soul kitchen safari. His GI tract was getting full of little holes. He belched again.
The boy said something to the old man in Cambodian and then answered, “Because she killed a man in there and we thought you might like to talk to her.”
“SHE WHAT?” Gibson Hand came to life.
“I didn’t kill nobody!” the whore wailed, when they got her quieted down and sitting in the only chair in the motel bedroom.
The walls were mirrored and so was the ceiling. There was a mirrored headboard, and a mirrored door to the closet as well as to the bathroom.
“Talk about a wilderness a mirrors!” Buckmore Phipps exclaimed.
“Ever a good-sized earthquake, you’d be a plate a ground round, is what you’d be,” Gibson Hand noted, looking at the ceiling full of glass.
“I didn’t kill nobody!” the whore screamed.
She was twenty years old, and almost honky white, Gibson Hand noted. She had a medium Afro, very frazzled at the moment, and black mascara streaming from her eyes to her lips to her pips, as Buckmore Phipps noted.
Her pips were hanging there because she was naked to the waist. She didn’t even know her wraparound skirt was the only piece of clothing on her body. The only reason it was still on her body is that the trick had said he liked it better when they “hiked them up.” It reminded him of when he was a kid in the drive-in movies during the ’50s. When the girls always “hiked them up” in case the ushers came along with flashlights. Hiked-up skirts made him as hard as a frozen cod, he had said.
Roland Whipple had aptly selected as his last metaphor a frigid fish, which is what he was starting to resemble. He lay on his back with his dead eyes looking up at the mirrored ceiling that reflected back to his dead eyes a lifeless love muscle, which oddly enough had ceased operation more reluctantly than his overworked heart muscle. When that one stopped banging, so did he. And suddenly. The massive cardiac arrest struck with a seismic jolt. He ran his final mile with a world-class finishing kick. When he convulsed, the whore, who was riding on top, flew two feet off his rigid member and came down on his belly with a squishy plop.
“Talk about a slam dunk!” she exclaimed. “Baby, that was a motherfucking ex-plosion!”
But Roland Whipple never heard the applause. He was creaking like a bellows. The last of his air was wafting up toward his reflection on the ceiling. The mirrored headboard was wet from their thrashing, but Roland Whipple had fogged his last mirror.
“You could say a lot a last words about a guy checking out like that,” Buckmore Phipps said, looking down at Roland Whipple’s corpse.
“Can I go home now?” the whore wailed, still hysterical a
nd unaware that her tits were bobbing around loose, and neither street monster was about to tell her.
The corpse still wore a prophylactic. It was a fancy green one with little red rubber tentacles. He’d bought it in a dirty-book store on Hollywood Boulevard. The girls just loved them, the salesclerk had said.
The whore was about to tell him it felt like she was being screwed with a can opener and she wanted an extra ten bucks for this shit, when he convulsed.
“How do those funny things work?” Buckmore Phipps asked the whore. “I always ride bareback myself. Take a chance my way, though. Lots a …”
“I wanna go home!” wailed the whore. “I didn’t mean to cause a orgasm like that!”
“You have to say that cowboy died with his boots on, so to speak,” Gibson Hand observed.
“Lots a worse ways to go,” Buckmore Phipps clucked. “It ain’t real sad. More like a gunfighter on the streets a Laredo.”
“I didn’t kill him!” wailed the whore.
“Well, in a manner a speakin you did,” Gibson Hand said. “But nobody’s blamin you for it.”
Then the ambulance came and went. The paramedics took one look at the stiff and one of them said, “You have to admit, the man died with his boots on.”
Five minutes later the homicide team had taken charge and the whore was fully dressed, sitting in the back seat of the detective car with Al Mackey while they all waited for the coroner’s meat wagon.
The street monsters were pissed off because Martin Welborn had told them to hang around and try to keep the crowd of curious pimps, whores, tricks and hustlers down to a hundred or so.
The cause of death went unquestioned by the detectives. It was not an uncommon way to die around these parts.
“Okay, give us a phone number where we can reach you,” said Al Mackey, writing a cursory death report. “And I don’t want the number of some other motel or a massage parlor where you don’t work, or the goddamn phone booth on the corner. I want a real phone number where you can be reached if we have any more questions.”
“Okay, okay,” the whore cried. She was pulling everything out of her purse looking for the phone number of her mother, who had two out of three of her kids to raise. The last one she’d hustled off to her aunt.
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