“Does this have anything to do with some new routine you mentioned earlier?” Elliott said.
“You’re the cameraman,” I said. “Just be the cameraman and do what I tell you and we may just get out of this.”
Elliott nodded as I reached onto the seat next to me and pulled a small lapel microphone from a leather bag and clipped it onto my shirt. I tucked the cord down my shirt. It went nowhere and just hung there against my wet skin. I put a small earpiece into my right ear and tucked the cord down the same place in my shirt as the lapel microphone cord. Elliott reached into the back seat and opened the camera case, pulling the film camera onto his lap. He familiarized himself with where to hold it and where the controls were. If he was going to play the part, he might as well try to be convincing.
The rumbling increased until it became deafening. Suddenly forty or fifty motorcycles caught up with my car. Some stayed behind us while others passed us and still others rode alongside our car. We were surrounded by The Hell’s Angels. The longhaired, greasy, tattooed animals who rode the bikes yelled, waved their middle fingers and swung heavy chains over their heads. On the backs of several of the bikes were women. Well, technically they were women. In their black leathers and colorful bandannas, they looked as tough as some of the guys. What came out of their mouths was nobody’s idea of Sunday school recitations.
The bikes in front of us gradually slowed down, forcing our car to slow with them, and in just a few seconds we’d all come to a complete stop. I picked up my clipboard with the previous day’s shooting schedule attached, tucked a long yellow pencil behind my ear and looked at Elliott. “Show time,” I said. “All right, everybody out.”
Elliott opened the door on his side of the car and stepped out onto the road. He immediately hoisted the huge camera onto his shoulder and began looking through the viewfinder. I stepped out of my own side of the car and walked toward a tall, fat biker with a tattoo of a tear running down his face. He had another tattoo plainly visible on his right forearm. It was a large snake wrapped around a battle-ax. He seemed to be the leader of this clan of Neanderthals. He wore black leather pants and heavy boots and he was coming toward me. His hairy chest peeked through the top of dirty blue denim vest that we wore. From beneath the bottom of his vest, fat oozed out like bread dough rising on the oven door. He looked as though he hadn’t quite finished evolving.
I stood face to face with the huge monster and shook my head. “This is all wrong,” I said, retrieving the pencil and flipping through the pages on my clipboard. “You were supposed to wait until we actually got into town and you were supposed to approach from the other end. Didn’t Carson fill you in on the plot?”
The primitive man in black looked as though his fifth-grade teacher had just called on him with a question and he wasn’t prepared with the answer. “Huh?” he grunted.
I looked back at Elliott, who was beginning to lower the camera from his shoulder. “Keep rolling,” I said, swirling the pencil in the air in small circles. “Maybe we can use some of this.” Elliott nodded and raised the camera again, squinting into the viewfinder and positioning his finger on the trigger.
I put a hand on the biker’s shoulder and stood next to him. Look, uh…what’s your name again?”
The leader of the bikers looked around as if I might be talking to someone else, then he looked the hand I’d rested on his shoulder. I took my hand off it. “Sonny,” the man said in a voice that came from down in a deep well.
“Look, Sonny,” I said, walking with him away from the others, “Here’s the plot. You and your gang are supposed to come riding up this road until…”
Elliott followed us with the camera. Sonny stopped walking and turned toward me. “What the hell are you talking about?” He grabbed me by the arm and lifted. I was up on tiptoes and my arm hurt from the vice-like grip he had on me. I jerked away from him and straightened up, dropping my pencil.
I slowly moved my head back and forth, scanning the roadway from both directions. “You mean you’re not from the studio?” I looked down at the gravel and shook my head. “Jesus. They promised us an authentic motorcycle gang and gave me the authority to give the leader a starring role with a few lines.” I bent down and grabbed the pencil, erasing some of my own handwritten notes and making a quick change on my page.
“I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Sonny said.
Over his shoulder I could see some of the other bikers beginning to surround Elliott. One of the women brushed the palm of her gloved hand across Elliott’s behind. “Nice ass,” she said, smiling at Elliott. Elliott quickly stepped back. Two other bikers stood next to the crude looking woman. The biker on her left had so many piercings on his face with silver rings and stubs sticking out all over, that he looked as though he’d fallen face first into a fisherman’s tackle box. The biker on her right looked out of place among the rest of these apes. Maybe he was Sonny’s cousin, I don’t know. He was thin and wiry and looked like a biker about as much as I looked like a ballet dancer. All he was missing was a pocket protector with six pens and a little white tape holding his Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses together. He could have passed for someone named St. Poindexter, the patron saint of geeks.
I gave Elliott the signal and he lowered the camera off his shoulder. I grabbed my lapel mic and lifted it closer to my mouth. “Camera two, do you read me?” I pressed the earpiece into my ear and pretended to listen. “Camera two,” I repeated, “cut. Cameras three and four, cut.” I pointed off into the distance toward the edge of town. I raised my arms above my head and waved them, crossing them several times.
I looked back at Sonny, who by now was totally confused. “Look, Sonny,” I said. “Do you and your gang want to be in this move or not? It doesn’t pay all that much, but, hey, think of how it will look on the big screen when the other gangs see it. Man, you’ll have the whole territory to yourselves the day after this epic hits the theaters. They even had a cool screen name picked out for you. In this movie you were going to be Samuel Q. Striker. He’s the baddest, the toughest, the most righteous biker in the whole southwest. That’s you, isn’t it? I’ll bet you could play that part quite naturally.”
“What’s the Q stand for?” Sonny asked, his interest beginning to come to a boil.
I rifled through the papers on the clipboard, playing for time and then it came to me. “Quentin,” I said. “Samuel Quentin Striker. But all through this movie the others actors will call you Sam Quentin.” I waited for a reaction from Sonny. Apparently the joke was lost on him because he showed no reaction at all.
I held my palms out toward Sonny and touched my thumbs together, making a frame with my hands. I framed Sonny’s face and nodded approval. “Yeah,” I said approvingly. “That’s the face I want. It has a rugged, primitive look.”
“What’s the name of this movie?” Sonny asked.
I had to think fast and killed a little more time thumbing through the sheets on my clipboard. “It’s going to be called Sometimes The Postman Only Rings Once.”
Sonny went into a mini trance, trying to take in this new information. All he said was, “Oh, yeah. Cool title.”
“Don’t you remember that John Garfield and Lana Turner movie called, The Postman Always Rings Twice? Well, this one is a take-off on that title. Pretty clever, huh? I thought that one up myself as I was writing the script for this movie.” Elliott gave me his silent ‘Oh brother’ look but kept pretending to film.
I could see Sonny trying to absorb what I’d told him. He pursed his lips—what I could see of his lips through the thick salt-and-pepper beard—and thought. “What do I gotta do?” he said, slipping his palms into his back pockets.
“That’s the spirit, Sonny,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulder again. “First, you have to turn your whole caravan around and ride east. You ride east exactly eight miles to the place with the big boulder alongside the road. You know the spot I’m talking about? There’s a bunch of tall cactus plants
on the other side of the road.”
He nodded like a kid eager to please his dad. “Yeah,” he said. “We passed it on our way in.”
“Good,” I said. “You just give me ten minutes from the time you stop at the boulder until you turn your whole gang around and come riding back this way again. That’ll give me enough time to reposition my camera crew and get the full effect of the thunderous sound of forty hogs coming at the camera.”
“Forty-three,” Sonny said, proudly.
“Forty-three,” I repeated. “When the bikes get to this point, I’ll get a close-up of your face. You got a comb? Just comb out your beard a little. You have crumbs all over it.”
Sonny wiped his beard with his hand. I pressed the earpiece with my index finger and pretended to listen again. I held a hand up as I listened. “Uh huh,” I said into the lapel microphone. “Sure. His name’s Sonny and he’s willing to co-operate with us. How’s that? Wait a minute, I’ll ask him.”
I turned toward the burly biker again. “The director wants to know your real name so he can give you a full credit at the end of the movie. You know, where the names scroll past and it says Sam Quentin was played by…and then your name will be up on the screen. See?”
“It’s Sonny,” he said. “Just plain Sonny.”
I repeated the name into my lapel microphone and waited. I looked back at Sonny. “Okay, if you want just Sonny, we’ll list you on the screen as just Sonny. But we’ll need your real name for the royalty checks. You can’t cash them with just a single name.”
Sonny looked around to see if any of his biker gang was within earshot. He leaned over and whispered into my ear and then straightened up again. I nodded and jotted the name down on my clipboard. I motioned to Elliott and he loaded the camera into the back seat of my Olds. I gave Sonny’s hairy hand a few vigorous pumps before climbing back behind the wheel again. I stuck my head out the window and called to Sonny. “Eight miles and ten minutes,” I said, holding my wristwatch out toward him and hiking my thumb over my shoulder. “I’ve got exactly seven fifty-five. You can start now.”
Sonny looked at the watch that sat nestled on a wide leather band around his thick, hairy wrist. He looked back up at me and gave me the thumbs-up. I felt somewhat like Charleton Heston as the sea of motorcycles in front of us opened up to let us pass.
Sonny circled his huge hairy arm overhead, signaling to the rest of the gang, like the wagon master who may have passed by this very spot a hundred and fifty years ago with a wagon train of his own. Sonny and his henchmen hopped onto their hogs and roared east on sixty-two, whooping and screaming and waving their chains overhead.
I was never so glad to see anyone leave in my life. I wasted no time in putting as much distance as possible between us and the gang of bikers. Within a minute we’d reached Twentynine Palms. In another four minutes, the town was behind us. Five more minutes after that we were seven miles west of town.
I looked at my watch. “Sonny and the boys should just about be at the eight-mile mark at the boulder,” I said to Elliott. “They can sit there for another ten minutes while we put another dozen miles between us and them. I’d say we have a good thirty-mile head start on ‘em.”
Elliott looked at the camera in the back seat and then out through the back window. “Suckers,” he said. “Too bad we didn’t have any film in this camera. We might have been able to bring back some interesting footage of that prehistoric tribe.”
“Bring back footage?” I said. “To whom? Those Hollywood studio moguls don’t take unsolicited footage from nobodys like us. You have to have an agent. Like every other aspect of Hollywood, it’s not what you know, but who you know.”
“It could happen,” Elliott said. “Even two camera-totin’ roadies like us should be able to get a foot in the door somehow. This might have been our one shot at the big time.”
“Just thank your lucky stars that we had this stuff along,” I said. “It helped fool Marion and his buddies.”
“Marion?” Elliott said, looking puzzled. “And just who the hell is Marion?”
“Marion Sunnybrook,” I said. “Sonny. He thinks he’s going to see his name on the screen. Let’s just hope he never sees us again or our hides won’t be worth spit. In fact, we’d better stick with the private eye business and leave this kind of work to the studio roadies.”
Elliott snickered. “Marion Sunnybrook. That’s rich. If we ever run into him again we can talk our way out of any trouble just by threatening to tell the rest of the gang his real name.”
“Don’t push your luck, Elliott,” I said. “Next time we’ll take another route.”
“Next time I’m driving,” Elliott said.
I looked over at him and smiled. I handed him the pencil from behind my ear. “Next time.”
62 - Noel
Detective Lieutenant Dean Hollister sat opposite the bank clerk, taking names and making notes on the recent bank robbery suspect who had just held up this branch.
“Would you describe the suspect as best you can?” Dean said to the clerk, his pen poised over his notepad.
“Well,” the bank clerk said, trying to be as helpful as she knew how, “He was about six feet tall and had a long white beard, a big bushy white mustache and rosy cheeks.”
Seagram looked back up at the clerk and said, “What else can you tell me about him? For instance, what was he wearing?”
The clerk looked puzzled, as if it were obvious enough. “He was wearing a red coat with white fur trim on the collar and cuffs,” she said. He had red pants, black boots and a black belt. And, oh yeah, he had a red cap with a white ball hanging down on the end of it.”
Hollister put down his notepad. “Lady, it sounds like you’re describing Santa Claus,” he said.
“I guess I am,” the clerk said. “But that’s what he looked like.” She smiled a nervous smile. “The only thing that didn’t fit the image was the gun that he pointed at me. Santa never carried a gun like that one.”
Hollister let out a sigh of exasperation. “And you say this was at two fifteen?” he said.
“Yes it was,” the clerk said. “Just ten minutes ago.”
“What’d he get?” Hollister said.
“It happened so fast, you see,” the clerk said. “But it only took a minute or so and he only got what was in my drawer.”
“And how much was that,” Hollister said, still writing in his notepad.
“He took twelve-thousand six hundred dollars,” the clerk said.
Seagram jotted down the amount. “Thank you,” he said, stuffing the pad in his lapel pocket and clicking his pen with an unconscious flourish. “We’ll be in touch.”
He rose from his chair and joined his partner, Detective Sergeant Eric Anderson, at the front door. “What did you get?” Hollister said.
Anderson checked his notes. “Description is the same from everyone who was here,” he said. “Santa Claus with a gun, period.”
“Yeah, that’s what I got, too,” Hollister said. “That makes three Santa holdups this week alone. This guy is good. He’s in and out of the bank in less than three minutes and he always disappears into the crowd afterwards. Gees, I’ll be glad when this damned Christmas season is behind us.”
“You and me both,” Anderson said. “It’s getting so you want to frisk every Santa ringing a bell on every street corner. Now how would that look, I ask you? Come on, Dean, let’s go get some coffee.”
Hollister and Anderson drove south on LaCienega Boulevard and turned the corner at Jefferson Boulevard where they parked behind a white panel truck. The coffee shop was on Jefferson just around the corner. It was two thirty-five and Hollister needed his coffee.
He had just taken his first sip when the radio he had placed on the counter next to him squawked. Hollister listened intently before scooping up the radio. “Let’s go,” he said, taking another quick sip. “Santa has struck again.”
Anderson laid a dollar on the counter and followed Seagram out the door. “Where
did he hit this time?” he said.
Hollister squealed away from the curb. “The Beverly Boulevard branch near Vermont Avenue on the other side of town,” he said.
Anderson reached out his window and placed the magnetic, revolving red light on the roof. The car raced through the streets, its siren wailing. Even at the speed the unmarked car was traveling, it still took the two detectives eighteen minutes to reach the Beverly Boulevard branch of the First National Bank. There was a black-and-white on the scene and a small crowd had gathered outside the bank doors.
Hollister held his shield up over his head as he made his way through the crowd. “Police,” he said, shoving past the people. “Stand back, please.” He and Anderson entered the bank and found a uniformed officer talking to a clerk at the nearest window. Hollister showed the officer his badge. “What’s the story here, officer?” Hollister said. “Another Santa Claus holdup?”
The officer straightened up. “Yes sir,” he said, as if awaiting further orders. “It happened just a few minutes ago. Some witnesses said they saw him drive away in an old, beat up car. No description, just beat up.”
“We’ll take it from here, officer…” Hollister paused to look at the nametag on the officer’s jacket. “…Officer Biggens. See if you can keep that crowd outside back away from the doors, would you?”
The officer nodded and exited to the street while Hollister and Anderson continued questioning clerks and customers. One customer thought the man in the Santa Claus suit weighed over two hundred fifty pounds while another was sure she saw the tail of a black and blue plaid shirt hanging out the back of the red suit. One clerk noticed that Santa’s boots weren’t exactly shiny. In fact, they looked like Santa had recently stepped in ankle-high mud with his right boot.
It was three-fifteen when Hollister and Anderson concluded their preliminary investigation and climbed back into their unmarked squad car. “Another thirteen grand from this branch,” Anderson said.
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 178