by John Kaye
“Come on over to the hotel, Loretta.”
“I have to pack.”
“I need you this morning.”
“You need to fuck me.”
“Come on.”
“No.”
“Please . . . please. . . .”
“No.”
When Burk hung up, he could hear a man laughing in the hallway outside his room. “Come on over,” he said, cruelly mimicking Burk’s voice. “I need you this morning. Come on . . . please.”
The cop was wearing mirrored sunglasses and sharply tapered sideburns that were at least an inch longer than regulation. After Burk gave him his license, he turned away, saying, “Keep your hands on the steering wheel where I can see them.”
Burk exhaled slowly while he watched the cop’s long frame recede in the sideview mirror. A yellow jacket buzzed against the windshield, and to the east a hawk circled in the dark sky over Griffith Park.
The police radio popped and crackled and the girl on the bus bench put down her magazine and stared at Burk with a curious, almost cryptic expression on her face. For a moment Burk’s eyes went out of focus and he thought of his son. He imagined Louie in a classroom flooded with sunshine, surrounded by boys and girls eager to be his friends. His smile never seemed brighter.
“Your license has expired,” the cop said to Burk.
“What do you mean?”
“On April thirtieth, your birthday. I’m going to have to take you in,” the cop said, taking a step backward and letting his hand rest on the top of his baton.
Burk didn’t move. The girl on the bus bench said, “What’re you gonna do, arrest him for having an expired license?”
The cop dropped his head so he could see over the top of his shades. “Yes,” he said to the girl. “I am.”
A motorcycle cop pulled around the corner and parked behind Burk. Another patrol car was speeding west on Franklin. A city bus crossed through the intersection and the girl on the bench stood up. “What a waste of taxpayer dollars,” she said, in a snide voice. “No wonder my dad says all cops are jerks.”
The bus was double-parked next to Burk’s Mustang. The driver, a black woman with a dignified face, was smiling through the open door. “I seen him,” she said to the cop, making a circle with her thumb and forefinger. “I seen him driving round and round.”
While Burk was being questioned by detectives at the Hollywood police substation on Cole Street, Bobby Sherwood and Ricky Furlong were standing in front of Max Rheingold’s house on Tigertail Road. On his lawn was a For Sale sign with a red SOLD sticker pasted diagonally across the front.
“Twenty-two twenty-four. That’s where he lives,” Bobby said, consulting a small spiral notebook he was holding.
“That’s where he used to live,” Ricky said. “Tomorrow I’ll call the realtor. I’ll find out where he moved.”
“What if they won’t tell you?”
“I’ll find him, Bobby. Don’t worry.”
“But—”
Ricky put his hand over Bobby’s mouth. “Relax, sweetheart. Just relax.”
On their way back down to Sunset, they stopped in front of a hacienda-style mansion on Carolwood Drive. Parked in the driveway was a maroon Bentley convertible with its top down.
Ricky said, “Frank Sinatra lived here back in the 1950s, before he got divorced. I went to grammar school with his oldest daughter, Nancy.”
“She’s cute,” Bobby said. “And she’s got a cute voice, too.”
“One Saturday she invited me to a birthday party at her house. A circus tent was set up in the backyard, and there were clowns, a magician, and a real cotton candy machine. There was a pony ride, too. And that day a boy named Alex Becker fell out of the saddle and cracked his skull open on a sprinkler head. He was rushed to the hospital and stitched up, but he never came back to the party. Later on I heard that Frank gave the Becker family a ton of money not to file a lawsuit.”
Bobby turned and looked into Ricky’s face. “You were popular in school, weren’t you?”
“Sort of.”
“I wasn’t.”
“That’s okay,” Ricky said, smiling at Bobby in a motherly way, “you’re popular with me.”
From the tennis court on the property next door they could hear the rhythmic thwack of the ball as it was stroked back and forth across the net. The court was built below the main house and was protected from the wind by a green tarp that was attached to a tall chain-link fence.
“I hated school. I was always picked on,” Bobby said, as he cut through the thick larkspur that grew from the sidewalk up to the base of the fence. Through a tear in the canvas he saw a boy and a girl—both teenagers with blond wavy hair—facing each other on opposite sides of the court. The girl was lovely looking, with large freckles on her neck and arms and long narrow legs. Zinc oxide protected her nose from the sun, even though the sky was the color of wet clay. “You have no idea what it was like, Ricky.”
“You’re trespassing,” Ricky said. “Come on back.”
Bobby fastened his fingers on the fence, squeezing the crosshatched squares until the blood drained out of his knuckles. “They chased me and bullied me,” he said, beginning to hear a distant ringing inside his head, a tinkling sound, as if two champagne glasses were brought together in a toast by his ear. “They pushed me down in the schoolyard and kicked me in the side and in the back.”
Ricky walked into the larkspur and stood behind Bobby. The girl on the other side of the fence was walking briskly around the perimeter of the court, gathering up the loose tennis balls, using her racket to spank them into the air.
Bobby made a disagreeable face as the ringing grew louder inside his head. But now the sound was different, like the screams of angry children. Bobby said, “They would chase me and I couldn’t get away, because there was always a fence to stop me, a fence like this one. So I used to climb way up, above their hands, and I would hang there until a teacher on the yard duty would chase them off. Nobody came sometimes, and I would stay up there the whole recess, ducking away from their taunts and the rocks and sticks that were aimed at my head. They said I was mental. The girls even made up a song about me: ‘The boy on the fence without any sense.’”
Bobby closed his eyes. His temples were pounding from the sharp pain that spiraled into his ear. On the court the game had stopped, and the young players were standing by an open gate, trading swallows from a bottle of soda.
Bobby said, “I have to find Max Rheingold.”
“I know you do, Bobby.”
“I have to find him soon.”
Burk walked out of the Hollywood police station just after midnight. The air was damp and cold, the sky pitch black and starless. He’d been interrogated for more than four hours by two vice detectives and Gene’s former partner, Eddie Cornell. “If you weren’t his brother we would’ve locked you up,” Cornell told Burk privately, before he was released.
“For what? I haven’t done anything.”
“You’re pissin’ people off. That’s what you’re doin’. Nobody likes to see someone driving around their neighborhood for hours on end. It makes them feel . . . paranoid.”
“I like to drive.”
“Then find someplace else,” Cornell said. “Drive around Beverly Hills. Drive up to Mulholland, down to the ocean. Just stay the fuck west of La Brea.”
“No,” Burk said, and Cornell gave him a look of unguarded anger. “I belong here.”
On his way out of the station, Burk picked up his wallet and his watch at the booking desk. “Almost forgot,” the sergeant on duty said. He handed Burk a coffee-stained copy of Pledging My Love.
Burk said, “Where did this come from?”
“I guess they found it when they went through your car.”
One of the vice cops who had interrogated Burk was pouring coffee into a paper cup. His hair was tied in a ponytail, and a large gold medallion hung around his neck. “Good read,” he said, looking in Burk’s direction but speakin
g to the booking sergeant. “He’ll get my five bucks.”
Burk walked up Cole to Cahuenga, then followed Cahuenga north to Hollywood Boulevard. The traffic was light, and what pedestrians he saw he heard first by their amplified footsteps. At Selma, a soldier wearing a green beret stood behind a bus bench at parade rest: a silent sentry with a face that could be made out of wax. A black dog with an open wound on its neck trotted along the gutter, pausing to look back once at the soldier before skittering into an alleyway filled with packing crates and a dumpster brimming with foul-smelling garbage.
Burk glanced into the alley and saw a black man lying on a mattress, jacking off, his lengthening penis lit up by the hellish glow of a red lantern. A woman who Burk could not see said, “Come on in and play with us, darling.”
When he came to Hollywood Boulevard, Burk crossed to the north side of the street. A police car with its lights high-beamed followed him for a block, rolling slowly in the right lane. Near Cherokee he passed an empty news peddler’s kiosk and thought quickly of his father, newly arrived in Los Angeles, standing inside a similar shed, shivering in the lonely lamplight.
From somewhere Burk heard the weak sound of a radio and Radio Ray’s voice. He tilted his head back and raised his eyes. In an upper-story window was a woman with false-looking hair and a once-lovely face. She was leaning out, looking down, elbows propped on the wooden ledge. Another face was at her hip, staring with wide child’s eyes. From inside the darkness of this room, an unknown voice on the radio said, “I’ve got the air conditioner on but I’m still sweating. I don’t know what to do.”
“Call a doctor,” Radio Ray suggested, coolly.
“No. I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because when the virus leaves my body, my soul will disappear too.”
“I don’t believe that,” Radio Ray said.
“I can feel my spirit burning like a whip across my back. My fucking skin looks like the inside of a watermelon. But I know that this fever is God’s judgment. His fingerprints are all over my body. I thought he would protect me, but I was wrong.”
Burk followed the old trolley tracks down the boulevard until he reached Gower; then he turned south. After a block he arrived in front of KMPC and peered through the locked double glass door. A tall security guard in light khaki clothes was standing in front of the elevators. He was well over six feet, with blond hair and blond eyelashes. When he saw Burk, he came forward and unlocked the doors. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I want to speak with Ray Moore.”
“He’s on the air.”
“I know that.”
The guard’s jawline seemed to tighten and he rocked back on his heels. “You want to speak to Ray Moore, you have to call him on the telephone. You want to see him in person, you make an appointment during regular business hours.” He turned and pointed. Burk followed his finger to a large clock above the elevator. “See that red second hand? When it crosses the twelve, I don’t want to see your face outside this glass.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” Burk asked him.
The security guard looked at Burk while he bolted the door. His lips twitched just before he spoke: “I don’t know what you are.”
Burk walked east on Sunset, pausing on a freeway overpass, fighting both vertigo and the urge to jump to his death.
He turned and looked to the north: A dome of fog sat over the black hillside like a gray helmet. He heard the sound of weeping. His head did a quick swivel and his eyes fell on a man slumped on a bus bench. A blanket covered his shoulders. The man looked Burk over for several seconds before he whispered, “Set me on fire.” Burk’s eyes shifted to the ground, where a red gas can rested between the man’s feet. “Pour it on me and light me up,” the man said.
A dog barked in the hills. Burk turned in a circle, to make sure he was alone in the street. Then he shook his head and continued walking, stepping around a pile of human stool that sat by the curb.
Just before he reached Western, Burk passed by the entrance to the Bat Cave. Through a slit in the curtain shielding the door, he saw a woman dancing buck naked on a U-shaped stage. She was thin, with spidery limbs and a pussy that was shaved bare. In her right hand she held a thick wedge of chocolate cake.
A man with mascaraed eyes put a five-dollar bill on the stage. The dancer smiled and settled into a crouch that put her private parts in front of his painted face. “Eat me up,” she said, and shoved the cake deep into her thighs.
“Believe I will,” said the man, leaning forward. “Yes, I believe I will.”
Larry Havana rolled his wheelchair through the curtain. A long flashlight rested in his lap. He clicked it on, and a cloud of insects swirled around the beam shining in Burk’s face. “Looks like you’re freezing your ass off,” Havana said, smiling. “Five dollars gets you in.”
Burk backed away from the light. “I’m okay,” he said.
Inside the bar the dancer was massaging the customer’s neck while he tongued globs of cake out of her crotch. “Gonna have to charge you for peeking,” Havana said to Burk. His smile was different now; he was mocking him. “No freebies in the pussy game. Nope. I cannot have any of that.”
“My dad knew your father,” Burk said.
“Yeah? My father knew lots of people.”
“Nate’s News. Nathan Burk. That’s my dad,” Burk said with some pride. “Your father put out dirty magazines that my dad sold underneath the counter.”
A black bouncer came through the curtain carrying a bottle of bourbon and a plastic cup filled with ice. Eyeballing Burk, he said, “Everything cool out here, boss?”
Havana nodded. “Everything’s fine, Clifford.”
“Man be chowin’ down in there.”
“Five dollars a slice is as good as it gets.”
“Best deal in town, boss.”
The bouncer walked back inside the club and Burk said, “When you were a kid, my brother used to push you around Hollywood. His name was Gene. One summer your dad gave him a job selling movie star maps.”
Havana regarded Burk for a moment while he used his hands to squeeze circulation into his thin, crippled legs. “Gene. Yeah. I know him. He became a cop. He got fired, right?”
“He quit.”
“What’s he doin’ now?”
“He helps out my dad. And he’s got a side business collecting old rock-and-roll records.”
“I collect pussy,” Havana said, and he barked out a laugh.
A Lincoln Mark VII with smoked windows rolled up in front of the Bat Cave. It sat idling for several seconds before the window on the passenger side came down, revealing an old man with a crumpled face and light blue eyes. “How late you open?” the old man asked.
“We never close,” Havana replied.
A playful leer passed across the old man’s face, and the big car slid forward, followed by vapors of gray smoke. One taillight was out; the other was reflected in the street, a scarlet eye socket staring up from a lost world.
Burk started walking away. Havana said, “Be seein’ you, Burk.”
“Maybe.”
“Bring your brother by. I’d love to say hello. No peekin’, though. You peek, you pay.”
Burk turned north on Western, ducking into a cold wind. In the middle of the block, a barely pubescent blonde stepped out of a late model Buick. She was wearing a short white diaphanous dress that outlined the silhouette of her naked body. After the driver took off, burning rubber, the girl said, “What are you doin’ up so late? You lookin’ for a date?”
“No.”
“Cruisin’ for guys?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m on my way back to my car. It’s on Franklin.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I feel like it. Put your arm around me,” the girl said, looking back over her shoulder as they started up the street. Burk pulled her close, and she moved his hand so it
covered her breast. “Feels good, huh? I bet you got a rod,” she said. She stopped and pressed her body closer. “Yeah, you do.”
“I’m tired,” Burk said, pulling away.
“Your dick ain’t. I’ll jack you off for three bucks.”
“No.”
“Blow job for seven-fifty.”
“Look—” Burk said, then stopped. The car that dropped her off had circled the block and was now parked across the street. The engine was running and the radio was playing “The Great Pretender,” an oldie by the Platters.
“Is that your pimp?” Burk asked the girl.
“Might be.”
The girl stared at Burk until he met her eyes. She was breathing heavily, her expression both hungry and tender. Burk reached into his pocket and took out a wrinkled ten-dollar bill. He said, “I’ll give you this if you leave me alone.”
The girl shook her head. Now she looked amused. “We gotta do something.”
“I don’t want to do anything,” Burk said, trying not to look or sound frightened.
A voice from the Buick said, “Dance with her.” Burk looked at the girl, wondering if this were a joke or some kind of code. “Dance with her,” the voice said again, and this time the girl stepped forward and slid her arms around Burk’s waist.
The radio was turned up and Tony Williams’s lead voice soared over the street:
Oh, yes, I’m the great pretender,
Pretending that you’re still around. . . .
Burk put his hands on the girl’s hips as she steered him into the middle of the street. He felt awkward, swaying flat-footed, her thighs pushed into his.
After one verse, the girl took Burk’s hand and put it between her thighs. “Dancing makes me so hot,” she said, raising her skirt. “Feel how wet I am.” Burk tried to step away, but the girl pulled him back. “Don’t,” she warned him under her breath. “He’ll get pissed.”
“We have to get out of the street.”
“We will when the record’s over.”