The Glitter Dome

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Staying for a while tonight, eh?” Wing giggled. He pulled his hands from his sleeves and rubbed them together and poured another double.

  “I don’t know how to begin. I need help. I heard you can help guys with my problem.”

  But Wing couldn’t keep from sliding back and forth. Toward the money pile. This had been his longest day.

  “Goddamnit, Wing, pay attention to me,” Al Mackey whined. “I’ll let you steal some money after I get drunk.”

  “How about another double?”

  “I haven’t finished this one. Goddamnit, pay attention!”

  “Okay okay,” Wing said, pulling himself together and smoothing down the antenna hairs on the side of his oily little head. “So I’m listening.”

  “I’ve been having this … problem lately and …”

  “Yes yes,” Wing said. “Yes yes.”

  “Goddamnit, stop with the yes yes! You sound like some Jap I know in a massage parlor.”

  Wing quickly reached below the bar and brought up another glass and poured a second double. Now Al Mackey had two drinks in front of him. “You gotta drink,” Wing explained. “Makes you talk easier.” Then Wing grabbed a ten off the bar and slid to the cash register, where he slipped two ones up his loose emerald sleeve before hopping back with the change.

  “Okay, I’ll drink,” Al Mackey sighed, polishing off the first double of Tullamore Dew and picking up the other one. “I think I need …”

  “Acupuncture? I can fix it up. Cures headaches, bad backs, athlete’s foot, gonorr …”

  “I don’t need any freaking acupuncture! I need a … a broad!”

  “A broad? Is that all? I thought all you detectives fucked left and right?”

  “Wing, I’m not even fucking in and out!” Al Mackey cried. “That’s the problem!”

  “You’re just not getting enough?”

  “None! I got a limp noodle,” he whispered.

  “Absence makes the cock grow harder.” Wing grinned slyly.

  “Stop it with your fortune cookie philosophy! I got a limber whang, Wing! I don’t get straight I might as well become a priest!” Al Mackey took the double down in two gulps. Where was Marty’s old seminary?

  Wing clucked sympathetically and stole two quarters before Al Mackey put the glass back down. “I might be able to help you.”

  “You gotta help me, Wing!”

  “How long’s it been?”

  “Almost four months!”

  “Well, it’s not something you forget,” Wing said, wiping the bar with a towel, sweeping a stray quarter right into the emerald sleeve.

  “I’ve almost forgotten already!”

  “Naw, it’s like painting by numbers. Anybody can do it. Wish there was a chicken or two around tonight. I’d show you.”

  “Chicken! Vulture! Anything! Just take away this fucking albatross!”

  “Okay, I don’t do this for everybody,” Wing said, removing a little ivory box from his pants pocket.

  “That’s the aphrodisiac?” Al Mackey whispered.

  “Keep your voice down,” Wing hissed, glancing quickly at the couple drinking quietly at the end of the bamboo long bar. “You want them to hear us?”

  When Al Mackey turned to look at them, Wing got another quarter into the sleeve. “This never fails,” he said, taking a blue tissue-wrapped bindle from the ivory box. As Al Mackey leaned over the bar, Wing opened the tiny bindle and showed him perhaps a quarter of a gram of pearly powder. Then he folded the tissue carefully.

  “That’ll be fifty bucks. Wholesale because you’re a good customer.”

  “Fifty bucks!” Al Mackey cried.

  “That’s genuine ground-up elk antler. Put it on your Master Charge.”

  “Fifty bucks! Why so much?”

  “You think it’s easy to find a goddamn elk in Chinatown these days?” Wing said testily, palming two quarters while Al Mackey reached for his credit card.

  16

  The Performers

  When Al Mackey drove by Martin Welborn’s apartment to pick him up for work Monday morning, he found Marty waiting in front. As dapper as always, in a gray three-piece worsted and a blue silk tie.

  “Don’t tell me, you had a successful date with Deedra whatser name.”

  “She’s a great cook.” Martin Welborn smiled.

  “A great cook. What time did you get home last night?”

  “I was in bed by eleven-thirty.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mine. What did you do last night?”

  “Went to The Glitter Dome.”

  “Have a nice time?”

  “Don’t ask. I spent almost a hundred bucks.”

  “On what?”

  “Don’t ask. In fact, let’s change the subject.”

  “Okay. On to Nigel St. Claire,” Martin Welborn said. “Let’s do some thinking this morning. I’ve got renewed vigor.”

  “I can see that.”

  “We have to review all our information. And we have to do some calling. I made a mental list on Saturday.”

  “Don’t you ever take a day off?”

  “An idle mind …”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  It was a day to slog through it. Martin Welborn had made a mental list, all right. They called the studio security people and started them checking their logs for three weeks prior to Nigel St. Claire’s death, to get a list of every visitor who signed in with the St. Claire office as his destination. Ditto for Sapphire Productions. All this tedious research was okayed by Herman III, who could think of no one in Trousdale Estates who might be a close friend of Uncle Nigel’s, or who might loan him his house as the need arose.

  Nor could Herman think of anyone in or out of Trousdale who drove a black Bentley. The Beverly Hills P.D. promised to check with all officers of the night shift who worked the six square miles of Trousdale Estates and may have had any calls during the past several weeks reflecting strange comings or goings, or a black Bentley. One officer thought he’d seen a dark-colored Bentley parked by one of the homes on the upper streets of Trousdale, but couldn’t remember which house.

  “If Bozwell’s even connected with the murder,” Al Mackey moaned at two P.M. that day, his finger sore from dialing. “Do you realize we don’t have a shred of evidence connecting Bozwell with Nigel St. Claire? Just speculation, that’s all.”

  “It’s time to sort out the troubling things,” Martin Welborn said after he’d been making notes for more than an hour. He had taken his coat off but otherwise looked as fresh as he had in the morning. Al Mackey, on the other hand, was a wreck, what with all these calls, and paper shuffling, and getting nowhere, and dying to get off duty and down to The Glitter Dome to find some chicken and test the goddamn elk antler potion. If that didn’t work it was acupuncture. After that? He shivered, thinking about the night in the apartment chewing on that off-duty gun.

  “Do you know what troubles me most, Al?” Martin Welborn asked.

  “No.”

  “Lies. I believe Peggy Farrell lied.”

  “Hell, all whores lie. Which lie in particular?”

  “I think a girl like Peggy would keep her eyes open when she was being taken somewhere by a guy she didn’t know. Even if he was in a Bentley. She’s obviously a bright, observant girl.”

  “So?”

  “So, she was too quick to say she couldn’t find the house again. Remember, this is a girl who gets around. By car. By cab. She gives outcall massages, so she can read a map. She knows the West Side pretty well. In fact, she even had a few customers in Trousdale, remember?”

  “Well, she’s not going to tell us if she knows,” Al Mackey shrugged.

  “But why would she not tell us? That’s what bothers me. Unless Lloyd warned her. Or scared her?”

  “Or Mister Silver?”

  “I’m convinced she told part of the truth. As much as she thought was safe to tell.”

  “Speculation,” Al Mackey said.

  “I know someone else who lied
, and it isn’t speculation.”

  “Who?”

  “The old skating flash himself. Griswold Weils.”

  “What did he lie about?”

  “He said he was contacted by mail.”

  “Yeah, a letter was sent to his guild.”

  “The International Photographer’s Union, Local six five nine. But it wasn’t. I called them just to verify they had his address and forwarded his mail. They don’t. He stopped paying dues about the time he got his first pornography bust. They show no forwarding address. He lied about how he was first contacted by Mister Gold.”

  “Why would he lie about that?”

  “I’m sure that’s not all he lied about. If he’d lie about the little things …”

  Al Mackey started rubbing the stubble of beard that was already starting. Hairy. A sure sign of middle age. You get hairy and ugly! “You know, Marty, Peggy said that Mister Silver might have been wearing a wig. Griswold’s bald.”

  “Good lad.” Martin Welborn smiled. “Now we tally debits and credits.”

  “We don’t have a damn thing but speculation.”

  “We have lies,” Martin Welborn said. “Thank God people are such consummate liars or we’d never get things right.”

  “But there’s something still doesn’t make a lick of sense. Why would a man like St. Claire personally contact a loser like Griswold Weils, even if he was up to some kind of kinky filmmaking?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely that he would.”

  “Why would Nigel St. Claire get involved in kiddy porn?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely that he would.”

  “What’re we gonna do now?”

  “Tell me, if Griswold Weils lied, and we know he did, and if he is Mister Silver in a wig, what would he be doing up in that house in Trousdale that night? That Just Plain Bill Bozwell couldn’t do?”

  “Peggy said he was making a deal.”

  “Bozwell, or Lloyd to her, would make the deal. But Griswold Weils can do one thing that Bozwell and the Vietnamese friend can’t do. He can operate a camera. If he was there, it was for that purpose and that purpose only.”

  “Peggy Farrell didn’t say she was photographed.”

  “Exactly. I say she lied. And the last thing that I can’t begin to handle is why the Vietnamese partner? What’s he, a makeup artist? A porn movie stud? A gaffer or grip? A location man? A costume designer?”

  “No, he’s a thug,” said the Ferret, who was sitting at the next table with his bearded chin in his hands, listening to Martin Welborn theorize. “He’s a thug and a hoodlum. That’s all he is.”

  “Okay, Marty,” Al Mackey said. “I think you’re saying I won’t be going to The Glitter Dome tonight. What’re we gonna do?”

  “Us? Nothing.” Martin Welborn smiled. “I was hoping the Ferret and Weasel might do something for us.”

  “Does it have something to do with the gook?” the Ferret asked, raising up.

  “It might.”

  “Count us in,” he said.

  They didn’t have to wait more than thirty minutes after twilight until Griswold Weils skated into the parking lot. Martin Welborn and Al Mackey were inside the office of the bowling alley manager with binoculars and a radio.

  “Another lie.” Martin Welborn grinned. “He said he’d never skate in that parking lot again.”

  “Give him a break, Marty,” Al Mackey said. “What a temptation for a fifty-two-year-old flash. Acres of asphalt, all that.”

  “Six-W-three, go!” Martin Welborn said into the hand radio unit, and Al Mackey used his binoculars to watch as the Ferret, who had exchanged his motorcycle boots for a rented pair of shoe skates with big nylon wheels and rubber stops, went pinwheeling across the parking lot. He looked none too ominous when he got on those skates and skidded and slipped and slid down that parking lot, arms windmill ing, pony tail flying, in the general direction of Griswold Weils, who was skating backwards, his radio headset drowning out all the panicky, frantic cries of the Ferret, who bounced and skidded across the asphalt.

  The Ferret was athletic enough to get the hang of it after ten minutes or so, and then he was at least able to skate forward in a reasonably straight line, while the parking lot filled with after-dark jiving skaters, a cacophony of music blaring from pocket transistors. As Griswold Weils was skating backwards, eyes closed, jiving to Pink Floyd, he dreamed of Thursday night at the rink, when he’d show up in his new skating silks and knock em dead. But suddenly he was jarred so violently that his headset went sailing off his bald head and rattled across the asphalt in three pieces.

  Griswold Weils went flying one way, and the other skater, a bearded longhair, went flying the other way and hit the asphalt with a splat.

  “Ooooowww, my arm’s broke!” the hairy skater wailed. “My fucking arm!”

  A crowd of skaters gathered and two young men helped him up, and Griswold Weils, still dazed, searched for the batteries from his shattered transistor.

  “He did it!” the hairy skater cried. “Not looking where he’s going! My arm! It’s broke!” The arm hung at an odd angle from the elbow and did look broken, but the hairy skater wouldn’t remove his leather jacket for anyone to take a closer look.

  “You skated into me!” Griswold Weils cried.

  “Oooowww!” the skater moaned. “I was going frontwards. You were going backwards. It’s my fault? Oooohhh, my arm!”

  “He better get to a hospital,” somebody said.

  “Who’s gonna take me?” the hairy skater cried.

  “Somebody oughtta call an ambulance,” someone said.

  “I got a car,” the hairy skater moaned. “But I can’t drive like this. Somebody has to drive me.” Then he looked at Griswold Weils. “You better drive me, Mister. I’ll need your name and statement for my insurance.”

  “Insurance?

  “You broke my arm!” the skater moaned. “You don’t wanna let me collect from the insurance company?”

  And then the crowd of skaters turned on Griswold Weils. Not collect from a fucking insurance company! Insurance companies are part of Big Business! The Enemy! Boooooo! Mr. Wheels, a friend of Big Business? Boooooo!

  Ten minutes later, a disgusted Griswold Weils, with his skates in the back seat of the Toyota, was driving the wounded skater in the general direction of Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital when the skater said, “Mister, will you please make a right there in that alley so I can take a leak?”

  “For chrissake!” Griswold Weils whined. “I agree to drive ya to the hospital so ya don’t sue me or something. I suppose with your broken arm I gotta take it out and shake it when you’re through?”

  “Please, Mister. If I don’t take a piss I’m gonna faint!” the hairy skater groaned.

  “For chrissake!” Griswold Weils whined, but he turned into an alley north of Santa Monica Boulevard and stopped.

  And a moment after his passenger alighted and walked around the back of the car, the driver’s door was jerked open and Griswold Weils’ passenger, with both arms working extremely well, had his hand over Griswold Weils’ mouth and a knife pressing his throat.

  “Move and I’ll cut you three ways: wide, deep, and forever,” he whispered, and Griswold Weils froze.

  The skater said, “Turn off the ignition,” and he was obeyed instantly. Then he climbed into the back seat of the Toyota and holding the knife point at the back of Griswold Weils’ neck, said, “Drive toward Griffith Park.”

  “I ain’t got no money,” Griswold Weils sobbed. “I swear I ain’t!”

  “Drive, Mr. Weils,” the hairy skater breathed, and Griswold Weils shut his mouth, started the car, and drove.

  Ten minutes later they were on a dark and lonely road in the park. Griswold Weils looked around frantically. Why was there never a cop when you needed one! Then he spotted a large dark car in the distance. Maybe someone would help him if he leaped out and screamed.

  They got nearer to the car and the headlights went on. The knife relaxed a bit and
the skater said, “Pull over and park.”

  After parking the car, Griswold Weils sat and waited and squinted into the headlights. Then the lights went out and he blinked and saw it was a Rolls-Royce.

  “Get out,” the skater said, and Griswold Weils stepped tentatively from the car. “Lloyd wants to have a talk,” the skater said, and Griswold Weils peered through the night and saw that the big dark car was not a Rolls-Royce. It was a Bentley!

  “I haven’t told nothing!” Griswold Weils said. “What’s wrong with Lloyd? I haven’t told nothing!”

  “Shut your mouth!” the skater whispered, getting a handful of Griswold Weils’ collar and pressing the knife against his ribs.

  They stopped when they were still thirty feet from the car in the darkness. Griswold Weils could see Lloyd’s silhouette behind the steering wheel, the familiar cap and glasses.

  Griswold Weils called out, “Lloyd! I didn’t tell the cops nothing. They came, but I didn’t tell them, Lloyd!”

  The headlights blinked on, off, on. “That’s it. He don’t wanna talk to ya,” the skater said, leading Griswold Weils back to the Toyota.

  “But I didn’t tell the cops nothing!” Griswold Weils sobbed. He was gushing tears now. “Nothing! I swear!”

  Then the passenger door of the Bentley opened and another leather-covered thug emerged and approached Griswold Weils as the Bentley started its engine, backed up, and drove away.

  “Lloyd says to use our own judgment,” the second one said, as Griswold Weils wept and jabbered, “I didn’t tell the cops nothing! Please don’t kill me!”

  “Who said anything about killing ya?” the first thug said.

  “You’re not going to kill me?”

  “No.” The first thug grinned, grabbing Griswold Weils’ neck. “I’m gonna hamstring ya. Only skating you’ll be doing from now on will be on a little square platform on the sidewalk.”

  And then, weeping brokenly, Griswold Weils was grabbed by each arm and led to the Toyota, where he was shoved into the back seat and down on the floor by the first one as the second one drove the Toyota deeper into the bowels of Griffith Park while Griswold Weils began wetting his skating pants but didn’t even notice.

  When it seemed they’d been driving for half an hour, but in reality had only been circling for five minutes, the one driving said, “Goddamnit, I didn’t see that stop sign!”