“I’ll be there.”
“Find Gretchen Rae, Buzz. She’s special.”
Howard’s one saving grace with females is that he keeps falling in love with them — albeit only after viewing Brownie snaps of their lungs. It more or less keeps him busy between crashing airplanes and designing airplanes that don’t fly.
“Right, Boss.”
The limousine’s phone rang. Howard picked it up, listened, and murmured, “Yes. Yes, I’ll tell him.” Hanging up, he said, “The switchboard at the plant. Mickey Cohen wants to see you. Make it brief, you’re on my time now.”
“Yes, sir.”
~ * ~
It was Howard who introduced me to Mickey, right before I got wounded in a dope shootout and took my LAPD pension. I still give him a hand with his drug dealings — unofficial liaison to Narcotics Division, point man for the Narco dicks who skim x number of grams off every ounce of junk confiscated. The LAPD has got an unofficial heroin policy: it is to be sold only to coloreds, only east of Alvarado and south of Jefferson. I don’t think it should be sold anywhere, but as long as it is, I want the 5 percent. I test the shit with a chem kit I stole from the crime lab — no poor hophead is going to croak from a Mickey Cohen bindle bootjacked by Turner “Buzz” Meeks. Dubious morality: I sleep well 90 percent of the time and lay my bet action off with shine bookies, the old exploiter washing the hand that feeds him. Money was right at the top of my brain as I drove to Mickey’s haberdashery on the Strip. I always need cash, and the Mick never calls unless it is in the offing.
I found the man in his back room, surrounded by sycophants and muscle: Johnny Stompanato, guinea spit curl dangling over his handsome face — he of the long-term crush on Lana Turner; Davey Goldman, Mickey’s chief yes-man and the author of his nightclub shticks; and a diffident-looking little guy I recognized as Morris Hornbeck — an accountant and former trigger for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob in Milwaukee. Shaking hands and pulling up a chair, I got ready to make my pitch: You pay me now; I do my job after I run a hot little errand for Howard. I opened my mouth to speak, but Mickey beat me to it. “I want you to find a woman for me.”
I was about to say “What a coincidence,” when Johnny Stomp handed me a snapshot. “Nice gash. Not Lana Turner quality, but USDA choice tail nonetheless.”
Of course, you see it coming. The photo was a nightspot job: compliments of Preston Sturges’s Players Club, Gretchen Rae Shoftel blinking against flashbulb glare, dairy-state pulchritude in a tight black dress. Mickey Cohen was draping an arm around her shoulders, aglow with love. I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “Where was the wife, Mick? Off on one of her Hadassah junkets?”
Mickey grunted. “‘Israel, the New Homeland.’ Ten-day tour with her mahjong club. While the cat is away, the mice will play. Va-va-va-voom. Find her, Buzzchik. A grand.”
I got obstreperous, my usual reaction to being scared. “Two grand, or go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”
Mickey scowled and went into a slow burn; I watched Johnny Stomp savor my bravado, Davey Goldman write down the line for his boss’s shticks, and Morris Hornbeck do queasy double takes like he wasn’t copacetic with the play. When the Mick’s burn stretched to close to a minute, I said, “Silence implies consent. Tell me all you know about the girl, and I’ll take it from there.”
Mickey Cohen smiled at me — his coming-from-hunger minion. “Goyische shitheel. For a twosky I want satisfaction guaranteed within forty-eight hours.”
I already had the money laid off on baseball, the fights, and three-horse parlays. “Forty-seven and change. Go.”
Mickey eyed his boys as he spoke — probably because he was pissed at me and needed a quick intimidation fix. Davey and Johnny Stomp looked away; Morris Hornbeck just twitched, like he was trying to quash a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. “Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I met her at Scrivner’s Drive-in two weeks ago. She told me she’s fresh out of the Minnesota sticks, someplace like that. She —”
I interrupted. “She said ‘Minnesota’ specifically, Mick?”
“Right. Moosebreath, Dogturd, some boonies town — but definitely Minnesota.”
Morris Hornbeck was sweating now; I had myself a hot lead. “Keep going, Mick.”
“Well, we hit it off; I convince Lavonne to see Israel before them dune coons take it back; Gretchen Rae and I get together; we va-va-va-voom; it’s terrific. She plays cagey with me, won’t tell me where she’s staying, and she keeps taking off — says she’s looking for a man — some friend of her father’s back in Antelope Ass or wherever the fuck she comes from. Once she’s gassed on vodka Collinses and gets misty about some hideaway she says she’s got. That —”
I said, “Wrap it up.”
Mickey slammed his knees so hard that Mickey Cohen Jr., asleep in the doorway twenty feet away, woke up and tried to stand on all fours — until the roller skate attached to his wang pulled him back down. “I’ll fucking wrap you up if you don’t find her for me! That’s it! I want her! Find her for me! Do it now!”
I got to my feet wondering how I was going to pull this one off— with the doorman gig at Sid Weinberg’s party thrown smack in the middle of it. I said, “Forty-seven fifty-five and rolling,” and winked at Morris Hornbeck — who just happened to hail from Milwaukee, where Howard told me Gretchen Rae Shoftel told him a dirty old man had snapped her lung shots. Hornbeck tried to wink back; it looked like his eyeball was having a grand mal seizure. Mickey said, “Find her for me. And you gonna be at Sid’s tomorrow night?”
“Keeping autograph hounds at bay. You?”
“Yeah, I’ve got points in Sid’s new picture. I want hot dope by then, Buzzchik. Hot.”
I said, “Scalding,” and took off, almost tripping over Mickey Cohen Jr.’s appendage as I went out the door.
~ * ~
A potential three grand in my kick; Morris Hornbeck’s hinkyness doing a slow simmer in my gourd; an instinct that Gretchen Rae Shoftel’s “hideaway” was Howard Hughes’s fuck pad on South Lucerne — the place where he kept the stash of specially cantilevered bras he designed to spotlight his favorite starlets tits, cleavage gowns for his one-night inamoratas, and the stag film collection he showed to visiting defense contractors — some of them rumored to costar Mickey Cohen Jr. and a bimbo made up to resemble Howard’s personal heroine: Amelia Earhart. But first there was Scrivner’s Drive-in and a routine questioning of Gretchen Rae’s recent coworkers. Fear adrenaline was scorching my soul as I drove there — maybe I’d played my shtick too tight to come out intact.
Scrivner’s was on Sunset three blocks east of Hollywood High School, an eat-in-your-car joint featuring a rocket-ship motif—chromium scoops, dips, and portholes abounding — Jules Verne as seen by a fag set designer scraping the stars on marijuana. The carhops — all zaftig numbers — wore tight space-cadet outfits; the fry cooks wore plastic rocket helmets with clear face shields to protect them from spattering grease. Questioning a half-dozen of them was like enjoying the DTs without benefit of booze. After an hour of talk and chump-change handouts, I knew the following:
That Gretchen Rae Shoftel carhopped there for a month, was often tardy, and during midafternoon lulls tended to abandon her shift. This was tolerated because she was an atom-powered magnet that attracted men by the shitload. She could tote up tabs in her head, deftly computing sales tax — but had a marked tendency toward spilling milkshakes and French fries. When the banana-split-loving Mickey Cohen started snouting around after her, the manager gave her the go-by, no doubt leery of attracting the criminal elements who had made careers out of killing innocent bystanders while trying to kill the Mick. Aside from that I glommed one hard lead plus suppositions to hang it on: Gretchen Rae had persistently questioned the Scrivner’s crew about a recent regular customer —a man with a long German surname who’d been eating at the counter, doing arithmetic tricks with meal tabs, and astounding the locals with five-minute killings of the L.A. Times crossword. He was an old geez with a European accent — a
nd he stopped chowing at Scrivner’s right before Gretchen Rae Shoftel hired on. Mickey told me the quail had spoken of looking for a friend of her father’s; Howard had said she was from Wisconsin; German accents pointed to the dairy state in a big way. And Morris Hornbeck, Mr. Shakes just a few hours before, had been a Milwaukee mob trigger and moneyman. And — the lovely Gretchen Rae had continued carhopping after becoming the consort of two of the richest, most powerful men in Los Angeles — an eye-opener if ever there was one.
~ * ~
I drove to a pay phone and made some calls, straight and collect. An old LAPD pal gave me the lowdown on Morris Hornbeck — he had two California convictions for felony statch rape, both complainants thirteen-year-old girls. A guy on the Milwaukee force that I’d worked liaison with supplied Midwestern skinny: Little Mo was a glorified bookkeeper for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob, run out of town by his boss in ‘47, when he was given excess gambling skim to invest as he saw best and opened a call house specializing in underaged poon dressed up as movie stars — greenhorn girls coiffed, cosmeticized, and gowned to resemble Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Veronica Lake, and the like. The operation was a success, but Jerry Katzenbach, Knights of Columbus family man, considered it bum PR. Adios, Morris — who obviously found an amenable home in L.A.
On Gretchen Rae Shoftel, I got bubbkis; ditto on the geezer with the arithmetic tricks similar to the carhop/vamp. The girl had no criminal record in either California or Wisconsin — but I was willing to bet she’d learned her seduction techniques at Mo Hornbeck’s whorehouse.
I drove to Howard Hughes’s South Lucerne Street fuck pad and let myself in with a key from my fourteen-pound Hughes Enterprises key ring. The house was furnished with leftovers from the RKO prop department, complete with appropriate female accoutrements for each of the six bedrooms. The Moroccan Room featured hammocks and settees from Casbah Nocturne and a rainbow array of low-cut silk lounging pajamas; the Billy the Kid Room — where Howard brought his Jane Russell look-alikes — was four walls of mock-saloon bars with halter-top cowgirl getups and a mattress covered by a Navajo blanket. My favorite was the Zoo Room: taxidermied cougar, bison, moose, and bobcats — shot by Ernest Hemingway — mounted with their eyes leering down on a narrow strip of sheet-covered floor. Big Ernie told me he decimated the critter population of two Montana counties in order to achieve the effect. There was a kitchen stocked with plenty of fresh milk, peanut butter, and jelly to sate teenage taste buds, a room to screen stag movies, and the master bedroom — my bet for where Howard installed Gretchen Rae Shoftel.
I took the back staircase up, walked down the hall, and pushed the door open, expecting the room’s usual state: big white bed and plain white walls — the ironic accompaniment to snatched virginity. I was wrong; what I saw was some sort of testament to squarejohn American homelife.
Mixmasters, cookie sheets, toasters, and matched cutlery sets rested on the bed; the walls were festooned with Currier & Ives calendars and framed Saturday Evening Post covers drawn by Norman Rockwell. A menagerie of stuffed animals was admiring the artwork — pandas and tigers and Disney characters placed against the bed, heads tilted upward. There was a bentwood rocker in a corner next to the room’s one window. The seat held a stack of catalogs. I leafed through them: Motorola radios, Hamilton Beach kitchen goodies, bed quilts from a mailorder place in New Hampshire. In all of them the less-expensive items were check-marked. Strange, since Howard let his master-bedroom poon have anything they wanted — top-of-the-line charge accounts, the magilla.
I checked the closet. It held the standard Hughes wardrobe — low-cut gowns and tight cashmere sweaters, plus a half-dozen Scrivner’s carhop outfits, replete with built-in uplift breastplates, which Gretchen Rae Shoftel didn’t need. Seeing a row of empty hangers, I checked for more catalogs and found a Bullocks Wilshire job under the bed. Flipping through it, I saw tweedy skirts and suits, flannel blazers, and prim and proper wool dresses circled; Howard’s charge account number was scribbled at the top of the back page. Gretchen Rae Shoftel, math whiz, searching for another math whiz, was contemplating making herself over as Miss Upper-Middle-Class Rectitude.
I checked out the rest of the fuck pad — quick eyeball prowls of the other bedrooms, a toss of the downstairs closets. Empty Bullocks boxes were everywhere — Gretchen Rae had accomplished her transformation. Howard liked to keep his girls cash-strapped to ensure their obedience, but I was willing to guess he stretched the rules for this one. Impersonating a police officer, I called the dispatcher’s office at the Yellow and Beacon cab companies. Pay dirt at Beacon: three days ago at 3:10 p.m., a cab was dispatched to 436 South Lucerne; its destination: 2281 South Mariposa.
Big pay dirt.
2281 South Mariposa was a Mickey Cohen hideout, an armed fortress where the Mick’s triggers holed up during their many skirmishes with the Jack Dragna gang. It was steel-reinforced concrete; shitloads of canned goods in the bomb shelter/basement; racks of Tommys and pump shotguns behind fake walls covered by cheesecake pics. Only Mickey’s boys knew about the place — making it conclusive proof that Morris Hornbeck was connected to Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I drove to Jefferson and Mariposa — quicksville.
It was a block of wood-frame houses, small, neatly tended, mostly owned by Japs sprung from the relocation camps, anxious to stick together and assert their independence in new territory. 2281 was as innocuous and sanitary as any pad on the block: Mickey had the best Jap gardener in the area. No cars were in the driveway; the cars parked curbside looked harmless enough, and the nearest local taking the sun was a guy sitting on a porch swing four houses down. I walked up to the front door, punched in a window, reached around to the latch, and let myself in.
The living room — furnished by Mickey’s wife, Lavonne, with sofas and chairs from the Hadassah thrift shop — was tidy and totally silent. I was half-expecting a killer hound to pounce on me before I snapped that Lavonne had forbid the Mick to get a dog because it might whiz on the carpeting. Then I caught the smell.
Decomposition hits you in the tear ducts and gut about simultaneously. I tied my handkerchief over my mouth and nose, grabbed a lamp for a weapon, and walked toward the stink. It was in the right front bedroom, and it was a doozie.
There were two stiffs — a dead man on the floor and another on the bed. The floor man was lying face-down, with a white nightgown still pinned with a Bullocks price tag knotted around his neck. Congealed beef stew covered his face, the flesh cracked and red from scalding. A saucepan was upended a few feet away, holding the caked remains of the goo. Somebody was cooking when the altercation came down.
I laid down the lamp and gave the floor stiff a detailed eyeing. He was fortyish, blond and fat; whoever killed him had tried to burn off his fingerprints — the tips on both hands were scorched black, which meant that the killer was an amateur: the only way to eliminate prints is to do some chopping. A hot plate was tossed in a corner near the bed; I checked it out and saw seared skin stuck to the coils. The bed stiff was right there, so I took a deep breath, tightened my mask, and examined him. He was an old guy, skinny, dressed in clothes too heavy for winter L.A. There was not one mark of any kind on him; his singed-fingered hands had been folded neatly on his chest, rest in peace, like a mortician had done the job. I checked his coat and trouser pockets — goose egg — and gave him a few probes for broken bones. Double gooser. Just then a maggot crawled out of his gaping mouth, doing a spastic little lindy hop on the tip of his tongue.
I walked back into the living room, picked up the phone, and called a man who owes me a big, big favor pertaining to his wife’s association with a Negro nun and a junior congressman from Whittier. The man is a crime-scene technician with the Sheriff’s Department; a med school dropout adept at spot-checking cadavers and guessing causes of death. He promised to be at 2281 South Mariposa within the hour in an unmarked car — ten minutes of forensic expertise in exchange for my erasure of his debt.
I went back to the bedroom, carrying a pot of L
avonne Cohen’s geraniums to help kill the stink. The floor stiff’s pockets had been picked clean; the bed stiff had no bruises on his head, and there were now two maggots doing a tango across his nose. Morris Hornbeck, a pro, probably packed a silencered heater like most Mickey muscle — he looked too scrawny to be a hand-to-hand killer. I was starting to make Gretchen Rae Shoftel for the snuffs — and I was starting to like her.
Lieutenant Kirby Falwell showed up a few minutes later, tap-tap-tap on the window I broke. I let him in, and he lugged his evidence kit into the bedroom, pinching his nose. I left him there to be scientific, staying in the living room so as not to bruise his ego with my inside scoop on his wife. After half an hour he came out and greeted me:
“We’re even, Meeks. The clown on the floor was hit on the head with a flat, blunt object, maybe a frying pan. It probably knocked him silly. Then somebody threw their dinner in his face and gave him second-degree burns. Then they strangled him with that negligee. I’ll give you asphyxiation as ‘cause of death. On Pops, I’d say heart attack—natural causes. I mighta said poison, but his liver isn’t distended. Heart attack, fifty-fifty odds. Both dead about two days. I picked the scabs off both sets of fingers and rolled their prints. I suppose you want a forty-eight-state Teletype on them?”
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 36