Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade

by Edward Bunker

  It was still twilight when I parked at the curb and got out. Flip was perched in the window and fire escape, glass in hand. She saw me and held it up in a salute. When she opened the door and I stepped in, she pulled me close and gave me a wet, sloppy kiss. Then she said, "I'm gonna cook you a big steak and fuck your brains out." She smelt of Scotch and was already drunk. After pouring me a drink and freshening hers, the bottle was empty. "Why don't you go get a pint while I cook," she said. "There's a liquor store right around the corner on Melrose."

  "Sure," I said. The least I could do was get her a pint of whisky if she was going to fuck my brains out. If past is prelude, she was certainly capable of it.

  By the time she finished cooking the steak, long before the potato was done, she was too drunk to move the meat from flying pan to plate. It fell from fork to floor with a splatter of hot grease. She laughed and I joined her.

  When she bent over to retrieve it, she got the fork in and was lifting it; then she lost her balance and fell down. This time the meat flew through the air. If the first mishap was funny, this was hilarious. "I wasn't hungry anyway," I said, reaching for her. She was compliant enough, but I quickly realized that I didn't want her either, not in a drunken near-stupor.

  During the next few days I visited Flip several times, invariably bringing her a pint of Black and White, which is what she liked. Next to getting high, her favorite activity was to talk. She reviled the pimps to whom she had given so much money before they threw her out. From Flip, I learned about the beach house one owned in Hermosa, and the partnership that owned the Regency Club on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. I had a photocopy made of the "book." It was before Xerox and therefore white print on black background instead of black print on white paper. One afternoon we were in a beer joint on Santa Monica Boulevard and she mentioned that Richie owned the jukebox. "Do you know other places he's got them?" I asked.

  "Uh huh. A few."

  "What about cigarette machines?"

  "Yeah ... at least some of them. Why do you want to know anyway?"

  Being young and vain, plus believing she despised them, I told her about my plan. I was unaware of how much she feared them, and had no idea she had told them about me until I pulled into an underground garage off Sunset Boulevard. A pair of goons imported from Las Vegas were waiting. As I got out of the car, one called me to "wait up." Not expecting anything, I waited for them — until they were twenty feet away and I saw one of them slip on a pair of brass knuckles.

  I jumped as if touched by a live wire. I ran between cars; then jumped on hoods and ran on top of cars to a partially open window. The pursuit was half-hearted, their threatening curses ringing in my ears. "Better run, you fuckin' punk," are the words I remember. I knew who they represented. Flip or Sandy had told me the Hollywood pimps were mob-connected in Las Vegas.

  Of course I was frightened at the time. Brass knuckles are terrible weapons. They easily crush facial bones. Once I was out the window and down the street, the fright gave way to a weird excitement. It wasn't anger. It was exhilaration. This was my best game. It was a level of excitement that my metabolism thrived on. My whole life had conditioned me to such situations. They would think they had conjured up a demon.

  I walked to Sherry's, the club at Sunset and Crescent Heights. Among the many underworld characters who frequented Sherry's was a friend of mine, Denis Kanos, Hollywood's first resident drug dealer. He was there. I called him from the pay phone and told him I would be walking east on the south side of Sunset Boulevard. There was a chance the two goons would come to Sherry's.

  I was grinning when Denis pulled to the curb and honked. I got in and we pulled away, east on Sunset toward Hollywood.

  "You bring me a piece?" I asked.

  He pointed toward the glove compartment. "In there."

  "Could they trace it?"

  "Not to us. Did you know Richard Eck?"

  "I met him." Richard Eck had been killed running from a burglary a couple of years earlier.

  "I bought it from him. I think he got it out of a prowl."

  The glove compartment divulged a small automatic with Walther along its barrel. About firearms I knew very little. This looked light enough to carry without disheveling my clothes, but it was small and an automatic, so I had questions.

  "Are you sure it's got enough punch?" I asked.

  "Oh yeah. It's what German officers carried in World War II. They're expensive."

  "I saw somebody shot with a little .25 Beretta and it didn't even slow him down. He beat the shit out of the guy that shot him." Actually I hadn't seen the futile shooting; it was a tale related to me in a Big Yard bullshit session.

  "No, no, it'll stop 'em."

  It fit in my jacket pocket. Good. Nevertheless I would have preferred a .38 or .44 caliber revolver. Automatics were better weapons if one was firing many shots. Simply drop out the magazine and ram another in. It took a couple of seconds. A revolver, on the other hand, had to be reloaded by putting individual bullets in the cylinder. An automatic held eight to a dozen bullets, a revolver five or six. I still preferred the revolver because it was far more dependable. Leave a loaded automatic in a drawer for a couple of years and the springs might weaken and fail to shove a new cartridge into the firing chamber. They tended to jam. I'd been target-shooting with a 7.6 Beretta and it happened on the second shot. I'd never heard of a revolver jamming.

  I remained silent about the pistol preference, grateful for anything at the moment. A few days later I bought a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson and left the German automatic at Flip's apartment. When I confronted her with having warned them, she admitted it and said, "They'd have somebody cut my face up. You're nuts, man. That shit you're talkin' is something out of the movies." It was obvious from her speech patterns that she had spent some time with black men, although her last pimp — and the several who controlled the call girls of the time and place - happened to be white.

  I suppose they thought I would shit in my britches and hide because they had imported some supposedly mob-connected muscle from Vegas. It was they who got their ideas from movies. Instead of hiding, I went hunting. Although I could have used the thousand phone numbers in the book to destroy their business, it would have been a Pyrrhic victory. By hassling the tricks and their wives, I would pull it all down — but then they would have no way to pay me for protection against extortion and so forth.

  I didn't know where they lived, but I did know a trick pad, an apartment on Sweetzer below Sunset used by one pimp's "second store," his number two girl. I knew the routine, too. Call girls, unlike streetwalkers, do most of their business during daytime business hours. Their johns, men able to afford high-priced call girls, were not chained to a desk or a schedule. Nobody raised an eyebrow if they were gone for a couple hours in the afternoon. It was more difficult to get away from a wife at night or on the weekend. Most of the time the call girl finished work by early evening. That was when the pimp came to get his money. All she made belonged to him was the cardinal principle of the relationship between whore and pimp. During the day while she sold herself, he played pool and flashed his Hickey Freeman suits and pinky diamond ring. After another hard day, he picked up his women and took them to dinner at some of the city's best restaurants where they looked like anything but whores and pimps.

  It was at this dinner hour that I jimmied open the apartment's kitchen door and went inside to wait. I used a tiny pen light to navigate into the living room where I sat down to wait for then return, giggling as I envisioned his face when he turned on the lights and saw me seated on his living room sofa.

  Tick tock turned the clock. They seemed gone for a long, long time. I finally found a closet and opened the door. The tiny flashlight revealed empty space; no clothes. Hmmm.

  I swept the pen light around the room and couldn't be sure of what I saw. I flipped the switch beside the door. Sure enough. It was an empty furnished apartment. They had baled out and I had to assume it was because the pimp
had anticipated me.

  For the next few days I spent much of my time on the east side, in Lincoln Heights, East LA, Bell Gardens and other, poorer districts where ex-cons were more likely to be found. I had one ally that I trusted, and heard names of men I knew who were plenty tough, but they were also too wild to control. They would want to rip everything off, including the women, most of whom were far more beautiful than any of the tattooed junkies that were these men's girlfriends. Denis and I discussed burning down the nightclub and bashing in some jukeboxes, but by themselves such things wouldn't accomplish my purpose. Flip had fouled my plan by telling them before I was ready to move.

  Out of nowhere the number one pimp died in an automobile accident between Palm Springs and the Salton Sea. He and his main store (number one girl) went over the middle line and hit a Greyhound head on. Even though it was impossible for it to have been murder, around the Hollywood underworld it was whispered that I had taken them out. All of a sudden it was impossible for movie moguls and others to get a date with a call girl in West Hollywood. The pimps had loaded their women into their Cadillacs and left town. Sandy and Denis thought it was hilarious.

  Around this time I had one of my more bizarre experiences. After midnight during the week, my phone rang. I was living in the apartment on 9th and Detroit. Flip was on the other end. She was drunk. "I have to see you, Eddie?"

  "It's late, baby. I'll see you in the morning." I hung up.

  The phone rang within seconds. I answered.

  "If you don't come, I'll kill myself."

  "I'll be right there, baby." She still had the pistol I'd left with her.

  I drove to her apartment building in the shadow of Paramount and parked on the narrow street in front of it. When I rang the buzzer there was no response. Had she killed herself? I doubted it, but still .. .

  Walking around the building, in the alley I spotted a hallway window open a few inches for ventilation. Beside it was a heavy galvanized drainpipe, strong enough for me to climb up to the window. Once inside, I moved on crepe-soled shoes along the hallway and up the stairs to the third floor.

  Nobody responded to my knock. I didn't want to pound and wake up the buildings. I went downstairs and out the front door, propping it open with a throwaway newspaper. From my car I took a jimmy bar, went back inside and up the stairs to the third floor. At the end of the hallway the window opened onto the fire escape, which extended over a few feet to her kitchen window. A little tap followed by tinkling glass. I reached in and unlatched the window. Through the arch I could see part of the living room. It was flooded in green light, which she liked to use when entertaining.

  I found Flip on the sofa in a rumpled black teddy, passed out and snoring. I shook her and got one eye open. "Where's my pistol?" I asked.

  "Don' hurt Michael."

  "Michael! I'm not gonna hurt Michael."

  "Don' hurt Michael."

  Shit. Then I saw him, also passed out, on the bottom landing of the stairs that led up to the bedroom and bathroom. He was in his skivvies, one of those Italians with a mat of black hair that covers his chest and, to a lesser extent, his shoulders. He was a friend of Johnny Stompanato who had been killed by Lana Turner's daughter. He worked as a bartender in a cocktail lounge, the Playboy, a block away on Melrose. He wore a ducktail with a Tony Curtis curl falling down over his forehead. He fancied himself a ladies' man extraordinaire. Flip had "pussy whipped" him, which she could do if any woman ever could. He was in love with her and, being an Italian stallion and stud, he hated it - that she was a whore and that he loved her was hard for him to handle, especially when she played a mean game of tormenting him. When the phone rang and Michael was there, she would stare at him while telling the trick what she was going to do to him in bed. Michael got drunk and slapped her around. He cried. She loved it, and afterward they had great sex.

  No matter how I protested, she refused to believe I wasn't going to hurt Michael. After I shook her awake a couple of times, I gave up that tactic and decided to find the pistol on my own. How many places could she hide it in such a small apartment?

  The first place I looked was behind the cushions of the sofa where she lay. Reaching down between them, I felt something and pulled it up. A butcher knife. What the hell was it doing there?

  I carried the butcher knife into the kitchen and put it on the table. Then I began to search and in about twenty minutes I found the pistol in a broiler pan inside the oven. I pocketed it and went home.

  I slept until about 11 a.m., and then spent an hour or so taking a bath and getting dressed. Through the window I saw the newspaper boy delivering the afternoon paper, Hearst's Herald Express, to my neighbor. As usual, I opened the door and went out to get the newspaper. I always put it back when I went out for the day sometime in the afternoon.

  At this time Los Angeles was hunting for one of its fairly common serial killers. They have had all kinds of names such as "Night Stalker" and "Freeway Killers." This time the killer was labelled the Hollywood Prowler. He had been invading the apartments of single women around Hollywood and tin- Hollywood Hills, often by cutting a window screen or some similar mode of entry. He had killed at least one, as I recall.

  I carried the newspaper back to my apartment, poured myself a cup of hot coffee and opened it. The big headline across the top read: prowler's fingerprints found. To the right below the headline was a four-column picture of a butcher knife. The ensuing article began: "Latest victim of the Hollywood Prowler, actress/model Yvonne Renee Dillon ..." It was hard to read because my hands shook. It did say that she was alive. Thank God for that.

  Instantly I was at the window, and within a minute I was going down the outdoor back stairs with shirt unbuttoned and shoes in hand. My car was at the curb. I paused, hidden by bushes, trying to see if the place was staked out. It seemed all right. I got in and took off. Where should I go? I headed up Highland Avenue toward the Hollywood Freeway. At a traffic light I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a black and white police car pull up behind me. Either they didn't have the license number or they weren't paying any attention. When the light turned green I accelerated slowly, fighting the urge to stomp the gas pedal. That surely would have gotten undue attention.

  On reaching the freeway, I decided to go east toward El Monte. I had friends out there. The Hollywood Freeway became the San Bernardino. I turned on the radio. The lead story of the spot news was about the prowler's fingerprints being found at his latest crime. It also mentioned that the police wanted to talk to an ex-con. Imagine the sinking feeling in my gut. At least my name wasn't mentioned.

  On Valley Boulevard near Five Points, I checked into a $1.50 a night motel, sans telephone or air conditioning; then walked the half-mile to where Jimmy D. lived with his wife, child and in-laws, including the wife's sister and her two children. Her husband was in San Quentin. Jimmy wasn't there. His wife wasn't sure where he was; she suspected he had gone to the barrio with Japo, the nickname of a Chicano with vaguely Asian features. I'd known Japo since juvenile hall. I didn't tell Jimmy's wife of my situation; fear of her husband getting into trouble might cause her to call the police. "I'll call him," I said; then began my trudge through the afternoon summer heat back toward the motel. As my feet kicked up puffs of powdered dirt with each step, I alternately felt sorry for myself and laughed aloud at the absurdity of the whole thing. The more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that I would be charged as a serial killer or rapist. I even remember thinking that someday I would write about these particular happenings. Proust they were not, but entertaining they had to be.

  Back on Valley Boulevard, I used a gas station pay phone to call Sandy. She answered in her mellifluous call girl voice, but with bemused challenge: "It's your dime," she said.

  "It's me," I said, rightfully confident that she would recognize my voice. I quickly told her of the situation. When I finished she said, "Oh my God! That's crazy!"

  "Do me a favor. Call Flip and find out what happened. Don't
tell her you talked to me. Tell her you read it in the paper. I'll call you back in half an hour."

  When I called back, Sandy had the story. Early in the morning, when Flip and Michael woke up with hangovers, he began to slap her because she was a whore and he was in love with her. She told him, Michael, Michael, after what I went through to protect you. She then showed him the broken window and told him a story of being raped. He reached for the telephone. Now I was a suspected serial rapist and murderer.

  For two days I hid out in El Monte, wondering what I should do. Actually I was less concerned with the possibility of being charged with murder than with the matter getting to my parole officer. I had a good parole officer (that would change soon enough), but something like this could arouse too much heat. After the one headline there were no more newspaper stories. Sandy convinced me to talk to a sleazeball shyster lawyer who was one of her special johns. He called the homicide detectives. All my concern was for nothing. By the afternoon of the first day they knew it was a hoax. Yvonne Renee Dillon had several arrests under a law called "vag addict." It was then a misdemeanor simply to be an addict in California, a law the Supreme Court would soon declare unconstitutional. She also had some prostitution arrests and had been in Camarillo. They didn't even want to talk to me, and nobody had notified the parole department. So the desperate drama had ended not with a bang but a fizzle.

  Other underworld adventures came my way in the next seven or eight months. I recall standing outside the Broadway Department Store at the intersection of Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard, looking in the display window at several TV sets, all of them tuned to a news broadcast, behind which pulsed a dinging sound as the Soviet Union's Sputnik orbited earth, the first man-made object to reach space.

  My friend, Denis, once called me and said he needed help; "and bring a pistol," he added. Unlike most of my friends, he was someone I'd met since getting out. Of Greek descent, he was classically handsome. He was a couple inches shorter than my bare six feet. He had dark hair, aquiline nose, excellent teeth and skin with the hint of an olive tint. In Denver, where his father owned a restaurant, the police had given him a "floater." They told him to permanently vacate Denver or they were going to bury him in prison or a grave, and if they couldn't get him right, they would frame him. He followed Horace Greeley's advice, came west, and set himself up as a drug dealer, which he would remain all the days of his life except when he was in prison.