“Shr thing,” Jade by this point was desperate enough to chirp back. Next time, lights-out arriving not a moment too soon, Bambi had brought the price down to half a pack, then, on her knees, much more thoughtful now, she found herself offering to pay Jade. “I guess,” Jade said, “we could call it one token cigarette, though I’m not real comfortable even with— ohh, Bambi . . . ?” By the time they got out of Sybil Brand, they were sharing smokes out of a common stash, and what bookkeeping there was no longer included nicotine. They took a place together in North Hollywood, where they could do what they wanted all day long and all night too, which is the way things usually ran. It was possible to live cheap in those days, and it helped that the landlady had also been inside, and honored sisterly obligations that a more uptight individual might not even have recognized. Soon they had a regular dealer who made house calls, and a cat named Anaïs, and were known up and down the Tujunga Wash as a couple of righteous chicks you could trust in just about any situation. Bambi imagining that she was there to look out for her friend, Jade closer to the edge of misadventure than she knew.
Meantime, on one of these voyages of self-discovery so common at that time, in the most intensely light-bearing complexities of some now half-forgotten acid trip, Ashley/Jade saw something about herself nobody else till then had seen. Of its essence somehow, as Doc had already somehow guessed, was cunnilingus. The era, she couldn’t help noticing, was conveniently providing not only eager girls but also sweetly passive longhaired boys everyplace she looked, eager to devote to her pussy the oral attention it had always deserved.
“Which reminds me, how you doing down there, Denis?”
“Huh? Oh. Well, to begin with . . .”
“Never mind. Just be advised, boys,” she said, “you’ll want to watch your step, ’cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism—lowlifes of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it’ll be them who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol’ pearl herself just goes a-rollin on.”
SPIKE’S FRIEND FARLEY had a darkroom, and when the proof sheets were ready, Doc went by to have a look. Most of the contact prints were blank frames, from Denis leaving the lens cap on, or drastically angled room fragments when he had accidentally tripped the shutter, as well as an embarrassing number of low-angle shots of microskirted groupies, and miscellaneous drug-related lapses into sleep or silliness. The only shot Coy seemed to be in was a Last Supper–type grouping around a long table in the kitchen, with everybody in heated discussion over a number of pizzas. Coy was saturated in a funny vibrant blur that didn’t match any other part of the space, and watching the camera a little too intently, with an expression forever about to unfold into a smile.
“This one here,” Doc said. “Could you make me an enlargement?”
“Sure,” said Farley. “Eight-by-ten glossy okay?”
Reluctant, maybe even a little desperate, Doc figured he had to go visit Bigfoot now. On principle he tried to spend as little time around the Glass House as possible. It creeped him out, the way it just sat there looking so plastic and harmless among the old-time good intentions of all that downtown architecture, no more sinister than a chain motel by the freeway, and yet behind its neutral drapes and far away down its fluorescent corridors it was swarming with all this strange alternate cop history and cop politics—cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good—insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they’d all been given to control, or, as they liked to put it, protect and serve. Bigfoot’s native element, the air he breathed. The big time he’d been so crazy to get away from the beach and be promoted into. At the desk in the lobby at Parker Center, owing no doubt to what he’d been smoking since he hit the freeway, Doc let loose with a long and even to him not always coherent rap about how he usually didn’t spend much time hanging out with elements of the criminal-justice system? mostly getting his information from the L.A. Times? but how about that Leslie van Houten, huh—so cute yet so lethal, and what was the real angle on this Manson trial, ’cause in a strange way wasn’t it something like this postseason the Lakers were having, and did he happen to catch that game with Phoenix—
The sergeant nodded. “That’s 318.”
Upstairs, Bigfoot, strangely jumpy today, seemed about to apologize for not having an office, even a cubicle, of his own, though in fact nobody else at Homicide had one either—everybody milled around in a single oversize room with two long tables and chain-smoked and drank coffee out of paper cups and hollered into phones and sent out for tacos and burgers and fried chicken and so forth, and half of what they threw at the wastebaskets missed, so there was an interesting texture to the floor, which Doc thought might once have included some vinyl tiling.
“Given the semi-public surroundings, I hope this will not be another of these unabridged paranoid hippie monologues I seem increasingly obliged to sit through.”
Quickly as he could, Doc recapped what he knew about Coy Harlingen—the allegedly fatal OD, the mysterious addition to Hope’s bank account, Coy pretending to be an agitator at the Nixon rally. He left out the part about talking to Coy in person.
“Another case of apparent resurrection,” Bigfoot shrugged, “not, at first glance, a matter for Homicide.”
“So . . . who around here would handle resurrections, man?”
“Bunco Squad, usually.”
“Does that mean LAPD officially believes that every return from the dead is some kind of a con?”
“Not always. Could be a mistaken or false ID type of problem.”
“But not—”
“You’re dead, you’re dead. Are we talking philosophy?”
Doc lit up a Kool, reached in his fringe bag and found Denis’s photo of Coy Harlingen.
“What is this? Another rock and roll band? My kids wouldn’t even have this on their wall.”
“That one there is the stiff in question.”
“And . . . just remind me, why do I give a shit, again?”
“He worked for the Department as a snitch, not to mention for some patriotic badasses known as Vigilant California, who might or might not have been in on the raid at Channel View Estates—you remember that place, all ’em cute li’l kids jumpin in the pools and so on?”
“All right.” Bigfoot had another look at the picture. “You know what? I’ll go check into this personally.”
“But, Bigfoot, that isn’t like you,” Doc needled, “it’s a cold case, where’s there any glory in clearin one of them?”
“Sometimes it’s about doing the right thing,” replied Bigfoot, fluttering his eyelashes disingenuously.
He motioned Doc down a back corridor and into a utility room. “Just want to look in the freezer a minute.” It was a corpse-size professional pathologist’s model from some years back, a hand-me-down from the coroner’s office, and Doc, expecting to see homicide-related body parts, was surprised instead to find several hundred frozen chocolate-covered bananas inside.
“Don’t imagine for a minute I’m feeling nostalgic about the beach,” Bigfoot was quick to protest. “It’s an addiction, I used to deny that but my therapist says I’ve made amazing progress. Please, dig in, feel free. I’m told I have to share. We have this system of pneumatic message tubes here, routed all through the building, and I’ve been using it to send these babies everywhere it’ll do some good.”
“Thanks.” Doc reached out a frozen banana. “Gee, Bigfoot, there certainly are a lot of these in here. Don’t tell me the Department’s picking up the tab.”
“Actually,” Bigfoot for the moment unable to look Doc in the eye, “we get them free.”
“When cops say free . . . Why do I get the feeling you’re about to lay some moral dilemma on
me here?”
“Maybe you could give me the hippie point of view, Sportello, it’s been keeping me up nights.”
Bigfoot had been driving around once a week to Kozmik Banana, a frozen-banana shop near the Gordita Beach pier, creeping in by way of the alley in back. It was a classic shakedown. Kevin the owner, instead of throwing away the banana peels, was cashing in on a hippie belief of the moment by converting them to a smoking product he called Yellow Haze. Specially trained crews of speed freaks, kept out of sight nearby in a deserted resort hotel about to be demolished, worked three shifts carefully scraping off the insides of the banana peels and obtaining, after oven-drying and pulverizing it, a powdery black substance they wrapped in plastic bags to sell to the deluded and desperate. Some who smoked it reported psychedelic journeys to other places and times. Others came down with horrible nose, throat, and lung symptoms that lasted for weeks. The belief in psychedelic bananas went on, however, gleefully promoted by underground papers which ran learned articles comparing diagrams of banana molecules to those of LSD and including alleged excerpts from Indonesian professional journals about native cults of the banana and so forth, and Kevin was raking in thousands. Bigfoot saw no reason why law enforcement shouldn’t be cut in for a share of the proceeds.
“What kind of extortion do you call that?” Doc wanted to know. “Ain’t like it’s a real drug, it doesn’t get you loaded, and anyway it’s legal, Bigfoot.”
“Exactly my point. If it’s legal, then so is taking my cut. Especially, see, if it’s in the form of frozen bananas instead of money.”
“But,” Doc said, “no, wait—not logical, Captain . . . something I can’t . . . quite . . .”
He was still trying to figure it out by the time he got back to the beach. He found Spike sitting on the alleyway steps.
“Somethin you might want to look at, Doc. Farley just got it back from the lab.”
They went over to Farley’s place. He had it threaded on a 16-mm projector, all set to screen.
A sunny vista in Ektachrome Commercial of half-built ranchburgers and contractor hardpan is suddenly aswarm with men in matching camo fatigues bought in lots from some local surplus store, also wearing ski masks machine-knit in reindeer and cone-bearing tree motifs. They are packing some weird and heavy shit, among which Spike points out M16s and AK-47s, both original as well as knockoffs from different lands, Heckler & Koch machine guns in both belt- and drum-fed designs, Uzis, and repeating shotguns.
The raiding party splash across the flood-control channel, secure the street bridges and footbridges, and set up a perimeter around the temporary miniplaza whose flagship tenant is Chick Planet Massage. Doc noticed his car parked out in front, but the motorcycles that were there when he arrived had vanished.
The camera tilts up and there, fleeing deeper into the tract or only riding around in circles, are Mickey’s badass brigade on Harleys, Kawasaki Mach IIIs, and, as Spike points out, a Triumph Bonneville T120, with no clear idea of what their mission is anymore. It was weird to Doc watching now, weird beyond easy imagining, that somewhere inside the place, invisible, he was lying unconscious, that with an X-Ray Specs attachment of some kind he could be looking at himself inert, next door to dead, and that viewing this film of an assault that was just about to begin might qualify as what Sortilège liked to call an out-of-body experience.
Suddenly on-screen all hell broke loose. Even though there was no sound track, Doc could hear it. Sort of. The frame started bouncing around as if Farley was trying to get to cover. The old Bell & Howell he was using shot a hundred feet of film at a time, and then the reel had to be changed, so the coverage was a little jumpy. There were also three built-in turret lenses, long, normal, and wide-angle, that could be rotated as needed in front of the gate, often during the shot.
The footage, almost too clearly, showed Glen Charlock getting shot down by one of the masked gunmen. There it was, the money shot—Glen unarmed, moving in some kind of prison-yard crouch trying to look bad when all that really came through was the fear that owned him, and how much he didn’t want to die. The light wasn’t protecting him, not the way it will sometimes protect the actors in a movie, the way moviegoers have gotten used to. This wasn’t studio light, only the indiscriminate L.A. sun, but somehow it was singling out Glen, setting him apart as the one who would not be spared. The shooter was used to handling small arms in the dutiful way of a rifle-range commando—no bravado, no shouting or abuse or firing from the crotch—he took his time, you could see him paying attention to his breath as he sighted Glen, led him, took him down with silent three-shot bursts, though several more than were needed.
“What about your lab?” Doc said, to say something. “They ever watch what they process?”
“Not too likely,” Farley said, “they’re used to me by now, think I’m crazy.”
“Can they run off an extra print? Maybe enlarge a frame or two? I’m wonderin what’s behind those masks.”
“Resolution goes all to hell,” Farley shrugged, “but I guess you could try.”
AROUND LUNCHTIME NEXT DAY the Princess phone started jingling.
“Holy shit, ése, you’re real.”
“At least one day a week. You must’ve lucked out. Who is this?”
“He forgot me already. Sinvergüenza, as my grandma would say.”
“Trick question, Luz, how you been, mi amor?”
“Your strange way of flirting.”
“You’re off today, I hope.”
Close to the office, within walking distance in fact, was a small ex-neighborhood, its houses all condemned for an airport extension which may have existed only as some bureaucratic fantasy. Empty but not deserted exactly. Questionable movies were being shot inside. Drug and weapons drops were being made. Chicano bikers were having furtive noontime trysts with young Anglo executives in tax-deductible toupees that retained in their Dynel thatchwork the smell of bars downtown at lunchtime. Dopers were getting off on the airplanes a couple inches over their heads, and particularly unhappy area residents from PV to Point Dume were out scouting potential suicide sites.
Luz showed up in a red SS396 she kept saying she’d borrowed from her brother, though Doc thought he detected a boyfriend someplace in the subtext. She was wearing cutoff jeans, cowgirl boots, and a tiny T-shirt that matched the car.
They found an empty house and went inside. Luz had brought a bottle of Cuervo. There was a queen-size mattress with cigarette burns in it, a French Provincial floor-model TV with the screen all kicked in, a number of empty five-gallon joint-compound containers that people had been using for picnic furniture.
“I see in the papers that Mickey’s still missing.”
“Even the FBI don’t come around no more, Riggs split again for the desert, and Sloane and me, we’ve become very close.”
“How, ah, close would that be?”
“That bed downstairs Mickey would never fuck me on? That’s ours now.”
“Uhm . . .”
“What’s this I’m lookin at here?”
“Well come on, it’s a interesting thought ain’t it, the two of you . . .”
“You guys and this lesbian thing . . . Why don’t you just get comfortable down there—no, I meant down there—and I’ll tell you all the details.”
Passenger jets came thundering in every couple of minutes. The house shook. Sometimes when Luz parted her legs briefly, Doc thought he could hear landing-gear tires rolling across the roof. The louder it got, the more excited she became. “What happens if one comes in a little too low? We can be dead, right?” She grabbed two handfuls of his hair and pushed his face away from her pussy. “What’s the matter, motherfucker, you can’t hear me?”
Whatever he was going to say would’ve been drowned out in another deafening approach, and anyway what Luz wanted now was to fuck, which is what they did, and after a whi
le they lit up a joint and she was talking about Sloane.
“These English chicks, they get to Califas they don’t know how to behave. They see these people, man, all this money and real estate and none of them with any idea what to do with it. First thing anybody hears when we get across the border—esta gente no sabe nada. So Sloane has all this resentment. Whenever she finds out about any piece of money that’s there to be grabbed, she thinks she’s the one that should have it. For Riggs it’s always more like, not that he should get it, but that some other asshole shouldn’t.”
“What the heat like to call ‘theft.’”
“They might. Sloane likes to call it ‘reallocation.’”
“So what was it, her and Riggs were skimming off Mickey, double-billing his clients, stiffing his contractors, or what?”
Luz shrugged. “Wasn’t my business.”
“Did they just spend their time running different hustles, or did they at least fuck once in a while?”
“Riggs said it wasn’t so much that he got to fuck her as that Mickey didn’t.”
“Uh, huh. What’d Riggs have against her husband?”
“Nothing. They were ol’ compinches. Riggs would have never gone near Sloane’s pussy if Mickey hadt’n encouraged him.”
“Mickey was gay?”
“Mickey fucked other women. He just wanted Sloane to have some fun, too. Him and Riggs worked together on different projects, Riggs stayed at the house when he was in town, couldn’t keep from jerking himself off anytime Sloane was in the room, seemed like a natural choice for Mickey to fix her up with . . . along with the usual selling points, big dick, young, poor enough to keep on some kind of a leash. ’Course, Sloane wasn’t too hot for the idea at first, because she hated to owe Mickey for anything.”
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