Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  Quick produced a small leather notebook from his jacket and flipped it open. “Rick Tarzon. Homicide lieutenant. Widower, wife murdered …”

  “What?” eructed the Fat Man.

  “Murdered,” Quick repeated. “Got zotzed by burglars she surprised on their boat …”

  “Tch.” Baby Jewels wagged his head and popped a lozenge, which he sucked ardently, like kissing a holy relic. “Tch … tch … tch.”

  “One daughter,” Quick went on. “Whereabouts unknown. Remember he mentioned her?” A menacing waggle of lights spurred Quick to get on with it. “Came up through the ranks in San Diego. Transferred here laterally to fill one of the vacancies created by the police corruption probe two years back. Lives alone near the Presidio. No known vices, unless you count two packs of Hav-A-Tampa Jewels a day. Works strictly solo. When he needs backup, uses State Police Tac Squad. Rogue all the way. Word is his superiors wont buck him. Maybe he’s got goods on them …”

  “No,” the doll voice wearily wheezed. “If he had goods, he’d turn them over. They just dont want him to start looking. You just gave the classic profile of the supercop.” The fingers resumed drumming the desk, a miniature bank of neon. “Exactly the kind I didnt want dogging my heels after the Moon. Or am I dogging his?” He wheezed mountainously. “We got anyone in Homicide to copy the Monday file for us? It would help knowing what he knows.”

  Quick twisted his mouth, narrowing dead eyes that awaited only a bullet between them to close. “Homicide aint got her jacket. Tarzon dont trust SFPD. He had the Attorney General flag the Monday case California Security. The jacket’s locked in the State Police barracks vault in Sacramento.”

  “He’s leaving nothing to chance.” Lavender wafted across the desk as it always did when Baby Jewels sucked hard in thought. Then he smiled, pink brow fat swallowing his eyes like snails gulping pebbles. “Maybe he knows we’ve lost the diamond, but he cant know what diamond. If he did, he’d already have braced the shvartze and billed us for zipping his squeezy toy. So we’re still in this hunt.”

  “We’ll beat him, boss.”

  “Tch. Alone he thinks he’s gonna do what all the powers in the state cant—bring me down.”

  “Sick mother’s dreamin.”

  “It’s one dream I cant have come true … Now listen. Supercops like Tarzon always got secrets. Call them chinks in their armor, Achilles heels, whatever. They spend their lives trying to make good for some wrong of their own. They bluff every hand never to show that hole card, reveal their guilt. But you have to know which hand to call or they’ll beat you every time. You got to follow him, Quick. Find his weakness. Study him, feel him …”

  “Check.”

  “But dont try secondguessing him or calling him out. The best cops, just like the best crooks, got crystal balls for brains. A sixth sense. Just tail him, see who he visits. Then you visit them, find out what they told him, only make sure he doesnt find out.”

  This carte blanche for carnage so elated Quick that he forgot his jaw was wired. The sudden smile forking his mouth suck whistled pain through his teeth. Carefully he resheathed the tiny gold pen in its nifty leather scabbard along the notebook’s spine, imagining it was an icepick he was sliding at fortyfive degrees up the base of Tarzon’s skull.

  “You got a line on the chink brothers, what’s their name?” asked the Fat Man.

  “Sing. And that’s just what they’ll do as soon as I strike up the band. Only, ever since we drowned their chemist, they’ve been slippery as hell. Maybe it’s all the eels they eat.”

  “Find them, Quick. Talk to them. You can be so persuasive when you want,” cooed the Fat Man, liquidly as a lovebird.

  This time Quick remembered not to smile.

  Joe sat tracing the crudely engraved outline of a cunt on the gray steel table. It looked like a halved prickly pear. Etched beneath it was the legend PEDRO DE TENTH Y HIDALGO, 203 P.C., 2-10.

  There came over his shoulder a sound like wind rushing through dry weeds: “Those were the good ole days of the indeterminate sentence. Mayhem’s a flat four now. No room for play.”

  He turned; saturnine Whisper Moran, a smile playing in the shadow of his cap, the sourceless glimmer of a cave pool.

  Joe said, “Why dont they paint over these things?”

  Whisper circled the table and sat opposite Joe. Laughter dry as a sack of beans shook in his throat. “Cant paint over them. Dudes write their names on jailhouse walls so they can come back through and read them … Or so the superstition goes.”

  “You dont seem the type to truck with superstition.”

  “Stare at one long enough and it gives up some truth … How about a hand of casino?” Whisper produced a deck of cards from his coveralls’ breast pocket. Fanning them north and south, he sprang a rainbow flourish between his palms, shuffled them twice in midair, and slapped them down for Joe to cut. “Hear you pulled a trey. We’ll be on the same penitentiary chain Monday morning. They violated my parole. That’s Life Without. They want to bury me so far under the pen they’ll have to pump in daylight.” He chuckled, the creaking of a rusty gate, arrchh arrchh. “Unless they can gas me for this fresh homicide … Cut.”

  Tapping the cut deck with his forefinger, Joe started at the thump of a ventilator down the line. The nightmare returned: again he felt the threshing suction, heard the meaty flutter, stared once more into deepset eyes beneath a crooked cross. Maybe telling Whisper of the Sick Bay slaughter would end its terrifying reprises. Edging up to it casually, he said: “I hope I make it inside. Shit comes down I dreamed of, and I’ve been around some corners.”

  “You’ll make it,” Whisper said, his voice like the svelte snicker of the cards he dealt. “Just remember, never take any shit that comes down to the Man.”

  The unexpected enjoinder woke Rooski’s ghost, a guilt tugging Joe’s guts, a need to confess swelling in him with the pressure of orgasm. He asked, “How about another con? One I trust?”

  Whisper shook his head. “Not unless you trust your worst enemy. You dont front off friends with secrets they dont need to know. I seen bocoo dudes shanked for being talked to out of school.” Whisper slapped down the deck, scooped up his hand. “Just remember, homeboy. Do your own time, hold your own mud. It’s simple, just aint always easy.”

  Joe resigned himself to living alone with the horror of Rings’s dismemberment as he must live alone with his own iniquity.

  Through the second hand Whisper schooled Joe on the secondary commandments for staying alive in the penitentiary:

  “Dont fuck with sissies, they’ll put you in a cross every time. Dont gamble, you end up unable to cover your losses and stone cold dead. Same for narcotics, you’ll dig your own grave. Ditto borrowing. I’ve seen dudes gutted for a pack of cigarets paid back a day late. Then, if you’re lucky enough to hit that gate, dont look back …”

  By the time Whisper blitzed him for the third straight hand, Joe suspected the killer was using conversation as a diversion while he dealt seconds. The ironic glimmer in the cap’s shadow when Joe cried uncle, refusing a fourth hand, seemed to confirm it. Whisper boxed the deck and returned it to his breast pocket. He folded his hands and said:

  “There’s one last rule, maybe the most important. I noticed you staring the other day at these …” Whisper touched the tattoos clustered at his throat, the SS runes, the iron cross, the delicate blue butterfly. “Aint no security in clicking up. If you got a problem inside, joining a prison gang only gonna worsen it.”

  “But you—?”

  Whisper laughed like a ripsaw. He swept off the Dodgers cap, smoothed back the pomp, and refitted the Ebbett’s Field relic even lower over his eyes. “Yeah, I’m A.B. A charter member, so to speak. Now General. Head chingaso in the Aryan Brotherhood. But before you get impressed or anything lemme put you wise …”

  The way Whisper ran it down, before the midsixties, th
ere were no racial gangs in California’s penitentiaries. Every joint had its tips for controlling dope and prostitution and gambling. But they weren’t coordinated throughout the system, nor racially based. Yet within prison populations, blacks protected blacks and Hispanics looked after their own. It was an instinct brought out of the ghettos and barrios. The whites, accustomed to their majority in the real world, lacked this instinct. No white stood up for another simply because he was white.

  “That’s the way it was when I first came in on a burglary. They carried me to the Glass House, the old L.A. County jail. The second night they brought in a pretty young whiteboy. Right at the gate, the niggers took his cigarets. He asked the other whiteboys for help, they told him to cover his own ass. When he made the canteen cart, the beaners ripped off his zuuzuus and whamwhams. The rest of the whiteboys just watched. That same night the niggers and chilichokers dragged that boy back to the showers, gagged him with a sock, and ran a train on him all night long. Left him half dead … And what did the other whiteboys do? Pretended to sleep through it. I was a firsttermer, young and scared, but half them guys were career cons … And here’s the kicker. Along about dawn, this Arkie bohunk named Hutchinson actually got up and went back there and helped himself to some of that boy’s butthole. Actually stood in line with niggers and chokes to rape his own kind.

  “Well, I guess you could say the Aryan Brotherhood was born that night in the Glass House. A group of us who’d been there went to Quentin together. Including Hutchinson. We got together, just a bunch of lowlife bikers and white trash, and decided something had to be done. Whites had to start watching white backs. The Black Muslims and Mexican Mafia were already on the line … We caught Hutchinson in the Auto Shop and I run a tie rod through his heart …” Whisper paused. Deep ironbarred shadows leaned through the shallower shade eclipsing his face. “I was a fool kid then. A punk gunsel out for a rep. I put on a big front, but underneath I was scared shitless. You’ll meet the type inside. Brave enough to die but scared of the dark … I didnt give a fuck about protectin whites. I run that tie through Hutchinson to make my bones, to belong. I was too scared to stand alone. I’m tellin you that just in case you think I was bein fuckin noble or something …” The laugh rattled in his throat like dice in a cup. Again he touched the bolts and butterfly. “These tacks. They mark me as A.B. for life. Aint no divorce cept dyin. I’m locked in my role now, too old. If I go back to the pen, I gotta play the role on the Mainline or some punk gunnin for a rep, some punk like that one in the Glass House who killed Hutchinson, is gonna read me for weak and send me to the Clinic with a bellyful of steel …”

  Joe was beginning to see the bolts and butterfly more as marks of Cain than badges of honor. “What do you mean if you go back?” he asked. “I though we were on the same chain Monday morning.”

  Whisper tipped back his head, studying Joe. “Never mind … Just remember, if you join a prison tip or click, you’ll never fit in out there again. You’ll just keep comin back in with more and more time till it runs out on you.”

  Whisper dropped his head, staring down at his folded hands as if they clasped the memory of his lost youth when glory could still be bought on the tip of a prison blade and the time he did was still on his side; and for just that instant Joe imagined the frozen blue tear fell for the Mainline years that couldn’t be turned back like usedcar miles.

  The ganglord sighed then, a sound like wind soughing through ragweed; his shoulders sagged. “I know, you see. My name’s written on every jailhouse wall in the state.”

  ARSE ARTIS

  The plexiglas sign creaking in the cold gritty wind blowing off the docks read, in jagged red letters like lightning bolts, CLIMAX PRODUXIONS. Beneath, studded to the rolling warehouse doors, a placard warned IF YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED, YOU ARE NOT WELCOME. It was signed with an unequivocal skull and crossbones.

  Within the rolling doors, a vestibule furnished with blue vinyl couch, coffee table, and dusty plastic palm. Above the couch a poster of a daisy alongside child’s print proclaiming TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! In the far wall was a locked fire door operated by an electric buzzer, controlled by a receptionist; she was stationed behind a sliding frosted glass panel window, like those found in dental offices. A tightlipped overweight old lady of implacable mien who could have easily been a hatchet murderess or a bingo caller. The electric buzzer admitting one to the inner sanctum whined like a wicked lowspeed drill.

  Through the door and down a passageway between tall black panels; sharp left, angle right, the stream of air blew chiller—out into the looming warehouse interior, a vast hollow darkness swirling with the scents of new rubber, lightly scorched oil, astringent emulsions. Thick black electrical cables snaking everywhere, a muted rockenroll pulse; from somewhere a generator’s insistent hum.

  To a visitor unfamiliar with the Fat Man’s operations, the guillotine standing at the center of the warehouse might be mistaken for a lighting scaffold. The oblique blade was drawn up high in the echoing shadows on runners clustered with klieg lights.

  Today the bluewhite beams were trained on a makeshift schoolroom scene with blackboard and desk. On her back across the desk lay a naked girl. A young man stood over her wearing nothing but a mortarboard. She was giving him an upsidedown blowjob.

  The girl disgorged the long thick penis with a slurp and squalled: “Hey, I’m gettin a crick in my neck awready!”

  Behind the smoking lights a collective groan rose and fell, and the cameras chattered dead. Out strutted a squat figure in leather puttees, jodhpurs, and a maroon beret. He crossed his arms over his chest and flung them wide, crying: “Cut!”

  “Antoine,” whined the starlet. “I’m here to tell ya Muley’s too goddam big to be suckin upside down!” She shook the penis in question.

  “Stella!” brayed the Mule with primal anguish.

  Antoine stared at his star with fresh eyes. “You’d be perfect for Stanley Kowalski!”

  “Yeah! Only a Polack pansy could love this whammer.” Stella flung it aside; it sprang back, slapping her face. Eyes agog, she spread her claws for an allout attack.

  “Sugarpeachespumkinpie,” Antoine wheedled desperately. “We must get this loop into the can. You know how much I need this for my serious film endeavors, projects in which you’ll figure prominently. Remember, we artists must take risks.”

  This shrewd appeal to Stella’s higher muses averted porno mayhem at the last second. She lowered her lacquered claws and took a deep stoic breath which as much as said, “The show must go on.”

  But Antoine pushed his advantage, pettily reminding her, “We need total envelopment, dearie.”

  “I still got my tonsils!”

  “Oh, silly, we could have had Horatio here.”

  She splayed horrified fingers across her breast implants. “Antoine, my contract says no nigras. I don’t … burn … coal. A girl’s gotta stand up for somethin or fall for everything. My agent told me that.” Her face softened, she pouted coquettishly. “Why dint you get the lil midget, lil whosits?”

  Antoine stamped his foot. “Rigoletto! And he’s a dwarf. And he isnt here because your aagent attached a rider to your contract stipulating no more freak fucking. So just hold your breath and take it to the cojones. We havent time to argue, this isnt Hollywood, in case you havent noticed. We’re operating on a tight budget.”

  “Well I’m operatin on a tight neck, Myrtle!”

  “You better behave, we have a visitor,” Antoine said, freighting the word with portent. He rolled his eyes at the guillotine looming behind the set. “So let’s not lose our heads.”

  Stella looked up to the control booth high in the shadows. A faint ruddiness tinted its smoked glass. It was the truth, Antoine wasn’t bluffing. Baby Jewels was on the set this morning. And Stella would rather get a stiff neck for the birdie than a severed one.

  “Awrite, Muley!” she cried, al
l professional trouper. “Lets play some serious hide the salami.”

  Antoine backed away still bowing over clasped hands until he reached the dollied camera. Frantically he waved it forward, yelling, “Action!”

  Above, in the smokedglass combination sound booth and editing room, the Fat Man had eavesdropped on this artistic exchange over wall speakers banked beneath television screens that monitored the simultaneous videotaping for VCR distribution.

  “Tch. She’s getting spoiled, starting to think she can pick and choose the dicks she sucks.”

  Quick Cicero leaned on a panel of meters, gauges, and sliding switches. The blinking electronics underlit his battered features, producing the Spooky Effect. He said, “Next she’ll be wantin a dressingroom.”

  Baby Jewels snorted. “Yeah. To change from nothing to nothing. Call whatever agent she’s yakking about n tell him to back off or he’ll be booking flea circuses …”

  “Check.”

  “And Quick …” Baby Jewels shifted in his custom Stratolounger. “I’ve been thinking. The most likely way Tarzon found out we lost the rock is by one of the guys on our pad telling him. What do you think?”

  Quick shrugged. His brain had absorbed too many subconcussive blows to bother with anything his boss had already thought through.

  “So I want you to tell our boys on the force we found it. Tarzon may believe it and back off. I’d rather it stay lost than have him find it. But we’ll keep on dragging the streets. Anything new there?”

  “Blanks everywhere so far. But it’s just a matter of time. Street punks cant sit on something that big. They gotta try movin it soon.”

  “What about the elusive Sing brothers?”

  “I got a bead on the younger one. I should take him down any time now,” Quick promised thickly, his head bobbing in sync with the bleached one he watched below.

  “Dont just keep promising me the Moon, Quick. Deliver it.”

  The phone built into the Stratolounger’s arm tweeted. Baby Jewels screwed the receiver into his ear and wheezed: “Speak.”