Nazarian took a step backward. Melvin followed, smiling. “You know what happened to Rhonda? You pig. You know what happened? We had to put her down. Put her out of her misery. And you know what we did it with? That’s right. Your golden gun, baby. Your golden gun. With her blood and fluids all over it and your fingerprints right there. We were careful not to disturb them. Thank you, Mr. Hogue, for this beautiful gun. I’ll treasure it always. Why didn’t you just suck his cock while you were at it? You owe me big-time. I should blow your worm-infested head off.”
Oh, flunky, flunky. I have you now. You’re mine. I should blow your worm-infested head off. You flunky cunt. Should blow. Nazarian took a step forward. “Don’t wave that thing around, Melvin. Shoot me.” He took another step toward the gun. “Shoot me, Melvin. Right here.” He opened his mouth, pointed at it. “Shoot me, Melvin. If you’ve got the guts.”
Melvin took a step back, kept his aim. Killing Rhonda and the boys was one thing. Executing the Armenian Pig, a moment of exquisite sweetness, justified ten times over—what it really meant was the end of everything in life he’d come to enjoy. Prison or no prison, Hogue would sunder him like a gangrenous limb.
“Shoot me, Melvin,” urged the pig.
Melvin saw the blue hole in Nazarian’s forehead and watched him topple backward, dead before he hit the ground. He lowered the Glock. The Pig wasn’t worth his life. “You’re not worth it, Eli.”
Nazarian leapt forward in that second, wrenched the weapon from Melvin’s fingers, threw his right elbow into the pimp’s face, hitting him between the eyes. Down went the pimp.
An endorphin cocktail of satisfaction physically rolled over Nazarian’s body. Almost like an orgasm. He was filled with twisted joy. Nazarian cocked the gun, stepped over his adversary. “That’s the difference between you and me, Melvin. I will kill you.”
Melvin held up his hand, squirmed away. Nazarian leaned down, pushed the barrel against the pimp’s expensive teeth. “Suck the gun, Melvin. Suck it.”
Melvin’s mouth worked independently of his will. It was in the back of his throat, gunpowder bitter, metallic, nauseating. He sucked the gun.
Nazarian watched his total domination of another human being. He pulled the gun out, dragged Melvin to his knees by his hair. “Time to suck something else, Melvin.”
Melvin, eyes on the floor, did nothing. Nazarian slapped him roundhouse, again, knocked him down again. Raised him by the hair again. “Open up for Eli, Melvin.” The pain in Nazarian’s face had completely disappeared. “Open up.” He was running on high-octane savage bliss. Zzzzzip.
Melvin closed his eyes. Opened his mouth.
• • •
Nazarian left him in the darkness of the apartment. After a bit Melvin got up. He thought he would be instinctively sick but he wasn’t.
He remembered the taunt from school days. What do you call a man who’s only sucked one tiny little dick in his whole life? Cocksucker.
Certainly, he had participated in the same act a thousand times. Albeit from the different point of view. He had never felt that he had visited an indelible shame on those who pleasured him. It was not abnormal or disgusting. And all those acts had been consensual, more or less.
More or less.
Millions of men had done what he had just done. Thousands would do it this very night. In Los Angeles. In Greater Los Angeles. For the same reasons a woman might. Love, thrill, money, gratitude, inebriation, barter, betrayal, revenge, force. He had been no different.
Then he smelled his own breath and relived the hand knotted in his hair and the bestial gruntings above him. He ran to the bathroom and was sick.
He rose, saw the mirror in front of him, stared into the dead eyes and tangled hair of his reflection. Cocksucker.
The enzymes and compounds and molecules of hatred suffused him, flooded into his brain, and he went down on one knee and retched.
In the medicine cabinet was a bottle of green mouthwash. He drank out of the bottle, gargled until he couldn’t stand the burn. He blew it all over the mirror. It ran down, puddled on the sink.
Nazarian.
Nazarian would die. Nazarian would die. Slowly. Bleeding from the balls that were no longer there.
But how.
How? With the golden gun, of course.
The golden gun would lure him like shit called flies. Then Nazarian, begging, would pay the ultimate price. Melvin Shea, master of life and death, merciless, would be cleansed. Purified in blood.
Who had the gun? Well, the Nazi had seen it. So Devi had it. Or had let the Mystery Man take it. It was that simple.
He’d been easy on Devi. Allowing some of his rage and pain to fade in the rip and roar of life.
But, yea, verily, his attention was distracted no more.
Devi.
The gun.
But how would he get hold of Devi?
Then the solution hit him. Sylvette.
SIXTY-THREE
The Purview of His Expertise
For one aspect of the San Pedro Film Company office setup, I had turned to Myron Ealing for advice. I explained my scenario, that the opening of the safe would trigger surveillance photography. Who did I need, and how much did he cost?
Myron smiled and spread his hands. “I’m your man, Dick, I’m your man. Because what you need is a pyrotechnician.”
“You? You’re a pyrotech?”
“You bet I am.”
Myron went on to describe his career in amateur munitions. Slight of build, then, and unprepossessing by nature, he would’ve been shunted aside in the social milieu at Hollywood High had not he displayed his explosionary skills. After lifting a St. Vincent de Paul box eight hundred feet straight up into the sweet night air during a track meet, he settled in as a popular and necessary man about campus.
“It sounded like God Himself,” chortled Myron. “All I forgot were the Ten Commandments.”
“Sounds like you used a little too much power.”
The big man wiped his eyes. “Earn as you learn, baby.” Then, brow furrowed, he directed his genius to the current situation. “What we need is flash powder,” said Myron, pencil in a scramble. “Six parts potassium permagnate, two parts sulfer, one part powdered aluminum.”
Where do you get these things?
Simple. The nursery and the paint store.
How much do you need?
A couple of tablespoons, altogether. And a sparking device. Frictive or electric.
Myon would go electric, with a nine-volt battery trailing two leads. One lead was attached to the safe door. Opening the door would drag one exposed lead over the stationary exposed lead in the safe, completing the circuit in the flash powder. The mixture would produce more light than sound. There would be some smoke. If there were indeed an intruder, a clear photograph could be obtained.
“Can you assure me this won’t kill anybody, Myron?”
“Look. I’m well within the purview of my expertise.” Myron dug into his barrel of stale cheese-corn.
“Okay,” I said.
SIXTY-FOUR
Fifty Pieces of Silver
Chuck Hames’s call to the Hollywood Professional Building had led to a message carousel. Hames didn’t leave messages. He made a short recon visit, went to the office itself, 317, it was locked. Fine. He would visit later that night.
The building was on the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard, across the street from World Book & News. After hours it was locked, though you could ring upstairs. If you knew someone and wanted to announce yourself. Hames hung around the book stand to see what foot traffic on the boulevard was about. Not too many, not too few. He decided to go in. The entry lock, as he had noted earlier in the afternoon, was a Schlage.
Hames checked his watch, broke out his picks, and began. He was in just inside of eighteen seconds. Public safety was a private joke. The common door lock served only to keep out those who didn’t want to come in.
He silently climbed the stairs in his toed, thin-
soled boots, placing the heel first, rolling forward on the outside of the foot. Step and wait. Step and wait.
Reduced lighting on, but no people seen or heard. He reached 317. Another stupid Schlage. Thirteen seconds. He was in.
• • •
“I’m not a cop,” said the man. “I’m looking for Mr. Algren for a good reason.”
“Then why aren’t you here in broad daylight?”
“Because I won’t find Mr. Algren during daylight hours.”
Which Danny James had to admit was the truth. Dave could be anywhere during the day. But, semireliably, at night, he could be found behind Crowned Heads, a club on Cosmo Street south of Hollywood Boulevard.
The man had approached him with a picture to look at. Danny had shaken his head. “I don’t look at pictures for less than five dollars. My time’s important.” The man had given him ten. And had readily interpreted his reaction to Davis Algren’s photo. Dave was short for Davis. Who would have known?
“So where could I find Mr. Algren?” said the man.
The man was well dressed and physically imposing. Though not by size. Sinuous, latent power. “You’re not a cop?” Danny had asked, though he knew the man wasn’t. He was something else.
He was not a cop. He was here for a good reason. If Davis Algren was the Davis Algren he was looking for, Mr. Algren’s homeless days were over.
“Dave’s come into money?” Danny was happy and envious. You always hoped for deliverance. The shot out of the blue. The deus ex machina in real life that would be abhorred in your fiction.
He and Dave had a long-standing argument. Could a story about deus ex machinas utilize a deus ex machina to extract a character from peril? Dave had known all of the theories of writing, though he had shown Danny nothing of his work.
Danny’s own work had sent him straight to the meth pipe. When that particular, diabolical sublimate was inhaled, his novel, possibly the Great American Novel, appeared softly before the eye of his mind in golden light. Spare, terse, complete, brilliant. There for the taking.
Yet how sneakily the second hit crept up on him. The second hit wished not to work, it wished to celebrate that which, in all ways but one, was already complete. The third hit realized the hard work would be done on the morrow, when hard work would be more appropriate. Today was joy in the moment.
The man smiled at him. From his pocket he withdrew fifty dollars and put it in Danny’s hand. “Take me to Mr. Algren.”
So he had walked the man to Cosmo Street and pointed him down to the Crowned Heads.
Fifty dollars! That meant a vial of pleasure that would last and last. As long as he didn’t share it with those grasping, ambitionless shitheads who’d never worked a day in their fucking lives.
His novel announced itself as he hurried to Pla-Boy Liquor. Spanish Eddie always had the good rock. His novel, at last. It would be called Arc of the Rainbow.
• • •
Later that night he’d heard the terrible news. Dave had been killed. Out behind the Crowned Heads. His throat ripped out. Danny had almost thrown out the little bit that remained of Spanish Eddie’s rock. Eddie had ripped him off. Anyway.
But there was no getting around the facts. He had judased Dave. Fifty pieces of silver. His friends, outraged, drunk, sorrowful, raged on and on. They didn’t recognize Judas in their midst.
Only the sublimate drove out the guilt, but that was on hit five, when the novel had diminished to a distant speck.
Finally a solution presented itself. How had Judas died? He consulted the Bible and found that Judas had died in two different, incompatible ways. In Matthew he had hung himself. In Acts he had fallen headlong and burst asunder, his bowels gushing out.
Maybe humankind was built better today; forty generations later, he’d never heard of anyone bursting.
He considered hanging himself. It was cheap, it was simple. A hook, a rope, a chair. But hanging took time. And most people who hung themselves apparently had second thoughts, clawing at their ropes, going purple. Eyes bulging, their last thought clearly visible: What the fuck did I do this for?
He needed technology. Instantaneous deliverance. A bullet. Okay. Death by cop or his own hand. Maybe. He possessed no gun.
Defenestration. One of his favorite words. No. He was afraid of heights. At thirty-two feet per second per second. Poison. No. Agonizing. He wasn’t into agony.
Electrocution. No. Wasn’t sure how to do that. You didn’t want to blow your balls off and live to tell about it. As you sang soprano in the soup-kitchen Christmas chorale.
But then, as he stood on Hollywood Boulevard, it came to him. In a rush of dieseled air. In the draft of the 217.
The bus. One step and BANGO—the next life. Instantaneous, irrevocable, foolproof. For the next few days, every time he would look to see what bus was running, it would be the 217.
That was no coincidence. The 217 it would be.
He missed Dave terribly. Their long talks about Bukowski, Fante, Factotum, Women, Ask the Dust. If Bukowski had brought it home, while braving three hundred hangovers a year, why couldn’t they? They could! They could! The gray vapor traveled the glass pipe and Cosmo Street wasn’t so bad after all.
The night of his prospective journey approached, then arrived. He was ready. Spiritually, physically, mentally. He mingled with his friends, looked at them, to remember them, to celebrate them.
He walked slowly up toward Hollywood Boulevard. He listened to the cheerful cacophony spilling out of Amoeba Music. He crossed Sunset, smelled the two-for-a-buck tacos at Jack in the Box, of course they weren’t made of meat. Not even rat meat. Rattus rattus. He listened to a busker on the corner with his out-of-tune guitar. Couldn’t play, couldn’t sing. Probably make a fortune.
At Selma he crossed against the light, waved silently at the Spotlight across the street. Cocksmokers. Not his thing, but whatever gets you through the night, ye merry gentlemen. Life is short.
A Rolls-Royce passed, he hoisted the bird. Fuck Thurston Howell III and his liver pâté. At least the rich did not live significantly longer than the poor. Sure, they got another fifteen at the bitter end, in their plaid pants and soft loafers, wearing adult diapers and hearing aids, but they didn’t get an additional, healthful, forty or fifty. The class of ’67 would all pass by 2042 or thereabouts. No way around it. Unless you put your hand on the tiller.
Like he was going to do. He arrived at the bus bench early. The 217 wasn’t due for ten minutes. If life was foreordained, had the final tumbler fallen into place when he sat down? On this particular bench? It was a warm night. He reached into his pocket, removed the three-by-five card.
I killed Dave Algren. I’m sorry.
When they found him, what was left of him, they’d find the card. And his sin would be expiated.
• • •
Hames, with his LED penlight, moved silently around the outer office. It was a setup. There was nothing here. It was a waiting room. A table, a couch, a bookcase, a small stack of trades. Old ones. But no new ones. Maybe from World Book & News. Leftover product they couldn’t move.
The inner office was as spare as the waiting room. And old desk and chair, a safe. A single folder lay on the desk, closed.
Hames opened it. In it was an official police photograph. The man he had terminated sprawled between two Dumpsters. He felt his heartbeat in his eyes. Certainly, it was no coincidence that this one photo should be here. What was the purpose of the San Pedro Film Company? How did they know he was coming? Did they know he was coming?
The San Pedro Film Company knew a lot of things. What they had put together was debatable. They knew where the script came from. They knew the true identities of the characters inside. They knew that Algren had been killed because of someone’s fear of exposure. They would know of Hale Montgomery’s hospitalization. They would know of Wolf’s meltdown at Cabrillo. The fact that he, Hames was here, proved that their opponent was the last man standing—Howard Hogue. What was his own picture he
re to tell him? He was probably being filmed. There were two smoke detectors on the ceiling. Were they phonies?
This wasn’t a real office. There were none of the signs of human habitation. No CDs, no cigarette butts, no trash, no loose pens and pencils. It was a purposeful setup.
He searched the desk. There were five more copies of the incriminating script. He took them though he knew it didn’t matter. The script, by now, existed electronically, available to download when the situation decreed. Hogue would have to make some kind of deal. There was no way around it.
He turned to the safe. Its squat, cast-iron heaviness sang its song to him. It was the chosen endpoint of the entire evolution. What was in the safe?
He studied it. The safe would be open because they wanted him to have what was inside.
But should he open it? How would he explain to Hogue that he had come all this way and not opened it.
He reached for the handle, trying to feel its aura with the open palm of his hand.
His hand rested on the handle. He lifted, it moved, he pulled the door—
When the transit wire crossed the stationary wire, the circuit was closed and the flash powder ignited. Myron, in his office directly overhead, knew instantly he’d again underestimated the power of his materials.
• • •
First Hames was blind, then he was deaf, then he was burned, finally the door almost tore off his hand. But to Hames, everything had occurred at once. He was blown back over the desk to the floor.
Instinct guided him to his feet. Distantly he knew, from combat experience, that he was now undergoing an acute stress reaction. Though his critical thinking would be cloudy, and his ability to prioritize disabled, an abundance of catecholamines at his neuroreceptor sites would facilitate spontaneous or intuitive behaviors. Don’t think. Act.
His eyes had been burned. He could see in excruciating periphery, but directly ahead he was blind.
Angel’s Gate Page 24