It wasn’t long before Doc ran into Jade and the allegedly missing Bambi, lounging in front of an ice-cream store just up the street, speed-jabbering away, gesturing with gigantic cones precariously stacked with multicolored flavors of organic ice cream.
“Why, Doc!” cried Jade with a tiny warning frown, “what are you doing up here?”
“Yeah,” Bambi drawled, “we had you figured for more of a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass person.”
Doc cupped one ear in the direction of the club. “Thought I heard somebody playing ‘This Guy’s in Love with You,’ so I hurried over. No? What am I doing here anyway? How are you girls tonight, everything copacetic?”
“Bambi got us passes for Spotted Dick,” said Jade.
“We’re double-dating,” Bambi said. “Time ol’ Lotus Flower here got fixed up with a class act, and tonight Shiny Mac McNutley is it, baby.”
A snow-white chauffeured Rolls pulled up at the curb, and a voice spoke from within. “All right girls, stay where you are.”
“Oh shit,” Bambi said, “it’s your pimp again, Jade.”
“My pimp, since when?”
“You didn’t forget to sign that letter of intent, did you?”
“You mean all that paper in the bathroom? nah, I wiped my ass with that, it’s long gone by now, why, was it important?”
“Come on you two, quit fucking around and get in the car, we got some business to discuss.”
“Jason I’m not going in that car, it smells like a patchouli factory,” said Bambi.
“Yeah, come on out on the sidewalk—on your feet like a man,” snickered Jade.
“Guess I should be runnin along,” beamed Doc.
“Stick around, Barney,” said Bambi, “enjoy the show, you’re in the entertainment capital of the world here.”
As Jade told it later, this pimp, Jason Velveeta, probably could have used better career counseling when he was younger. Every woman he ever tried to mistreat had handed him his lunch. Some of them, usually ones not on his string, did give him money sometimes because they felt sorry for him, but it was never as much as he thought they owed him.
Reluctantly, in a cloud of patchouli, Jason stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was wearing a white suit, so white it made the Rolls look dingy.
“Need you girls inside the vehicle,” he said, “now.”
“Be seen riding with you? Forget it,” said Jade.
“We can’t afford to lose that much credibility,” Bambi added.
“Ain’t all you stand to lose.”
“We love you, babe,” said Bambi, “but you’re a joke. All up and down the Strip, Hollywood Boulevard—hey, there’s Jason jokes written in lipstick on toilet walls out in West fuckin Covina, man.”
“Where? Where? I know a guy in West Covina with a bulldozer, one word from me he’ll tear every one them shithouses down. Tell me the joke.”
“Don’t know, sweetie,” Bambi pretending to snuggle close and smiling widely at the pedestrian traffic. “You know you’ll only get upset.”
“Ah, come on,” Jason despite himself pleased by the public attention.
“Jade, should we tell him?”
“Your call, Bambi.”
“It says,” Bambi in her most seductive voice, “‘If you’re paying any commission to Jason Velveeta, you can’t shit here. Your asshole is in Hollywood.’”
“Bitch!” screamed Jason, by which point the girls were already running down the street, Jason in pursuit, at least for a step or two till he slipped on a scoop of Organic Rocky Road ice cream, which Jade had thoughtfully positioned on the sidewalk, and fell on his ass.
From somewhere Doc experienced a surge of sympathy. Or maybe something else. “Here, man.”
“What’s that?” said Jason.
“My hand.”
“Man,” creaking to his feet. “Do you know what it’s gonna cost me to clean this suit now?”
“Bummer, really. And they both seemed like such groovy chicks, too.”
“You were looking for company tonight? Believe me, we can do better for you than those two. Come on.” They began to walk, and the Rolls crept along at the same pace. Jason took a withered joint from his pocket and lit up. Doc recognized the smell of inexpensive Mexican produce, and also that somebody had forgotten to remove the seeds and stems. When Jason offered him a hit, he pretended to inhale and after a while handed it back.
“Righteous weed, man.”
“Yeah, just saw my dealer, he charges high but it’s worth it.” They walked up past the Chateau Marmont to Hollywood Boulevard, and every once in a while Jason accosted a young woman in some sub-Playboy idea of an alluring turnout and got insulted, screamed at, punched, run away from, and sometimes mistaken for a potential customer.
“Tough business, huh,” Doc remarked.
“Ahh, lately I been thinking I should just get out of it, you know? What I really want to be is a movie agent.”
“There you go. Ten percent of what some of those stars make—whoo-ee.”
“Ten? That’s all? You sure?” Jason took off his hat, a homburg, also dazzling white, and looked at it reproachfully. “You haven’t got a Darvon on you? maybe some Bufferin? I have this headache. . . .”
“No, but here, try this.” Doc lit and handed over a joint of Colombian commercial proven effective at stimulating conversation, and before Jason knew it he was speed-rapping about Jade, on whom, if Doc was not mistaken, he had a sort of crush.
“She needs somebody watching out for her. She takes too many chances, not just this Hollywood drive-up trade. Like, these Golden Fang people, man—she’s in way too deep with them.”
“Yeah . . . now . . . I’ve heard that name someplace?”
“Indochinese heroin cartel. A vertical package. They finance it, grow it, process it, bring it in, step on it, move it, run Stateside networks of local street dealers, take a separate percentage off of each operation. Brilliant.”
“That sweet young thing is dealing smack?”
“Maybe not, but she was working at a massage place that’s one of the fronts they use to launder money.”
If so, Doc reflected, then Mickey Wolfmann and the Golden Fang might not be all that unconnected.
Shit, man . . .
“Whatever you do,” Jason was saying, maybe more to himself, “keep clear of the Fang. If they even begin to think you might get between them and their money, best you go looking for something else to do. Far away, if possible.”
Doc left Jason Velveeta down on Sunset again, in front of the Sun-Fax Market, and ambled back downhill, thinking, Let’s see—it’s a schooner that smuggles in goods. It’s a shadowy holding company. Now it’s a Southeast Asian heroin cartel. Maybe Mickey’s in on it. Wow, this Golden Fang, man—what they call many things to many folks . . .
Cars drove by with the windows down and you could hear tambourines inside keeping time to whatever was on the radio. Jukeboxes were playing in corner coffee shops, and acoustic guitars and harmonicas in little apartment courtyards. All over this piece of night hillside, there was music. Slowly, ahead of him someplace, Doc became aware of saxophones and a massive percussion section. Something by Antonio Carlos Jobim, which turned out to be coming from a Brazilian bar called O Cangaceiro.
Somebody was taking a tenor sax solo, and Doc, on a hunch, decided to put his head inside, where a sizable crowd were dancing, smoking, drinking, and hustling, as well as respectfully listening to the ensemble, among whom Doc, not too surprised, recognized Coy Harlingen. The change from the morose shadow he’d last seen up at Topanga was striking. Coy stood with his upper body held in an attentive arc around the instrument, sweating, loose-fingered, taken away. The tune was “Desafinado.”
When the set ended, a curious sort of hippie chick approached the piano, h
er hair short and tightly permed, her outfit including a Little Black Dress from the 1950s and interestingly high stiletto heels. In fact, now that Doc looked closer, maybe she wasn’t really a hippie chick after all. She seated herself at the keyboard the way a poker player might at a promising table, ran a couple of A-minor scales up and down, and without much more introduction than that began to sing the Rodgers & Hart lounge classic “It Never Entered My Mind.” Doc was not a great admirer of torch material, had in fact been known to discreetly withdraw to the nearest toilet if he even suspected some might be on the way, but now he sat confounded and turning to Jell-O. Maybe it was this young woman’s voice, her quiet confidence in the material—howsoever, by the second eight bars Doc knew there was no way not to take the lyric personally. He found shades in his pocket and put them on. After an extended piano break and a repeat of the refrain, Doc on some impulse turned, and there was Coy Harlingen at his shoulder, like a parrot in a cartoon, also wearing shades and nodding. “I can sure relate to that lyric, man. Like, you make these choices? you know for sure you’re doing the right thing for everybody, then it all goes belly-up and you see it couldn’t have been more wrong.”
The stylish chanteuse had moved on to Dietz & Schwartz’s “Alone Together,” and Doc bought himself and Coy cachaça with beer chasers. “I’m not asking you to give away secrets. But I think I saw you once on the tube at a rally for Nixon?”
“And your question is, is am I really one of them screamin right-wing nutcases?”
“Somethin like that.”
“I wanted to get clean, and I thought I wanted to do something for my country. Stupid as it sounds. These people were the only ones who were offering me that. It looked like an easy call. But what they really wanted was to control the membership by making us feel like we’re never patriotic enough. My country right or wrong, with Vietnam goin on? that’s just fuckin crazy. Suppose your mom was using smack.”
“My, uh . . .”
“You wouldn’t at least say somethin?”
“Wait, so the U.S. is, like, somebody’s mom you’re sayin . . . and she’s strung out on . . . what, exactly?”
“On sending kids off to die in jungles for no reason. Something wrong and suicidal that she can’t stop.”
“And the Viggies wouldn’t buy that.”
“I never got a chance to bring it up. By then it was too late anyway. I saw what it was. I saw what I’d done.”
Doc sprang for refills. They sat and listened to the rest of the-girl-who-wasn’t-a-hippie-chick’s set.
“Not a bad solo you took back there,” Doc said.
Coy shrugged. “For a borrowed horn, I guess.”
“You still stayin up at Topanga?”
“No choice.”
He waited for Doc to say something, which turned out to be, “Bummer.”
“Tell me. I’m lower than a groupie, fetching weed, opening beers, making sure there’s only aqua jelly beans in the big punch bowl in the parlor. But there I go, complaining again.”
“I do get the feeling,” Doc said tentatively, “you’d rather be someplace else?”
“Back where I was would be nice,” with a small break toward the end that Doc hoped was audible only to PIs who make a habit of wallowing in sentiment. The musicians were filtering back to the stand, and next thing Doc knew, Coy was deep into a complicated head arrangement of “Samba do Avião,” as if this was all he had to put between himself and the way he thought he’d fucked up his life.
Doc ended up sticking around till closing time and watched Coy getting into the sinister Mercury woodie that had chased Doc down the canyon the other night. He walked down to the Arizona Palms and had the All-Nighter Special, then sat through the dawn reading the paper and waited out the morning rush hour at a window with a downhill view into the smoglight, the traffic reduced to streams of reflective trim, twinkling ghostly along the nearer boulevards, soon vanishing into brown bright distance. It wasn’t so much Coy he kept cycling back to as Hope, who believed, with no proof, that her husband hadn’t died, and Amethyst, who ought to have something more than fading Polaroids to go to when she got them little-kid blues.
ELEVEN
WAITING ON DOC’S DOORSILL AT WORK WAS A POSTCARD FROM some island he had never heard of out in the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of vowels in its name. The cancellation was in French and initialed by a local postmaster, along with the notation courrier par lance-coco which as close as he could figure from the Petit Larousse must mean some kind of catapult mail delivery involving coconut shells, maybe as a way of dealing with an unapproachable reef. The message on the card was unsigned, but he knew it was from Shasta.
“I wish you could see these waves. It’s one more of these places a voice from somewhere else tells you you have to be. Remember that day with the Ouija board? I miss those days and I miss you. I wish so many things could be different. . . . Nothing was supposed to happen this way, Doc, I’m so sorry.”
Maybe she was, then again, maybe not. But what about this Ouija board? Doc went stumbling through his city dump of a memory. Oh . . . oh, sure, dimly . . . it had been during one of those prolonged times of no dope, nobody had any, everybody was desperate and suffering lapses of judgment. People were opening up cold capsules and laboriously sorting the thousands of tiny beads inside by color, in the belief that each color stood for a different belladonna alkaloid, which taken in big enough doses would get them loaded. They were snorting nutmeg, drinking cocktails of Visine and inexpensive wine, eating packets of morning-glory seeds despite rumors that the seed companies were coating them with some chemical that would make you throw up. Anything.
One day when Doc and Shasta were over at Sortilège’s house, she mentioned this Ouija board she had. Doc had a brainflash. “Hey! You think it knows where we can score?” Sortilège raised her eyebrows and shrugged, but waved a go-ahead hand at the board. The usual suspicions then arose, like how could you be sure the other person wasn’t deliberately moving the planchette to make it look like some message from beyond, and so on. “Easy as pie,” Sortilège said, “just do it all by yourself.” Following her instructions, Doc breathed himself deeply and carefully into a receptive state, letting the tips of his fingers rest as lightly as possible on the planchette. “Now, make your request, and see what happens.”
“Groovy,” said Doc. “Hey—where can I find some dope, man? a-and, you know, good shit?” The planchette took off like a jackrabbit, spelling out almost faster than Shasta could copy an address down Sunset somewhat east of Vermont, and even throwing in a phone number, which Doc promptly dialed. “Howdy, dopers,” cooed a female voice, “we’ve got whatever you need, and remember—the sooner you get over here, the more there’ll be left for you.”
“Yeah like who’m I talking to? Hello? Hey!” Doc looked at the receiver, puzzled. “She just hung up.”
“Could’ve been a recording,” said Sortilège. “Did you hear what she was screaming at you? ‘Stay away! I am a police trap!’”
“You want to come along, keep us out of trouble?”
She looked doubtful. “I have to advise you at this point that it might not be anything. See, the problem about Ouija boards—”
But Doc and Shasta were already out the door and soon rattling up the chuckholed obstacle course known as Rosecrans Boulevard under a cloudless sky, in the sort of perfect daylight you always saw on TV cop shows, unshaded even by the eucalyptus trees that had recently all been chopped down. KHJ was playing a Tommy James & the Shondells marathon. Commercial-free in fact. What could be more auspicious?
Even before they reached the airport, something about the light had begun to go weird. The sun vanished behind clouds which grew thicker by the minute. Up in the hills among the oil pumps, the first raindrops began to fall, and by the time Doc and Shasta got to La Brea they were in the middle of a sustained cloudburst. This wa
s way too unnatural. Ahead, someplace over Pasadena, black clouds had gathered, not just dark gray but midnight black, tar-pit black, hitherto-unreported-circle-of-Hell black. Lightning bolts had begun to descend across the L.A. Basin singly and in groups, followed by deep, apocalyptic peals of thunder. Everybody had turned their headlights on, though it was midday. Water came rushing down the hillsides of Hollywood, sweeping mud, trees, bushes, and many of the lighter types of vehicle on down into the flatlands. After hours of detouring for landslides and traffic jams and accidents, Doc and Shasta finally located the mystically revealed dope dealer’s address, which turned out to be an empty lot with a gigantic excavation in it, between a laundromat and an Orange Julius–plus–car wash, all of them closed. In the thick mist and lashing rain, you couldn’t even see to the other side of the hole.
“Hey. I thought there was supposed to be a lot of dope around here.”
What Sortilège had tried to point out about Ouija boards, as Doc learned later back at the beach, while wringing out his socks and looking for a hair dryer, was that concentrated around us are always mischievous spirit forces, just past the threshold of human perception, occupying both worlds, and that these critters enjoy nothing better than to mess with those of us still attached to the thick and sorrowful catalogs of human desire. “Sure!” was their attitude, “you want dope? Here’s your dope, you fucking idiot.”
Doc and Shasta sat parked by the edge of the empty swamped rectangle and watched its edges now and then slide in, and then after a while things rotated ninety degrees, and it began to look, to Doc at least, like a doorway, a great wet temple entrance, into someplace else. The rain beat down on the car roof, lightning and thunder from time to time interrupting thoughts of the old namesake river that had once run through this town, long canalized and tapped dry, and crippled into a public and anonymous confession of the deadly sin of greed. . . . He imagined it filling again, up to its concrete rim, and then over, all the water that had not been allowed to flow here for all these years now in unrelenting return, soon beginning to occupy the arroyos and cover the flats, all the swimming pools in the backyards filling up and overflowing and flooding the lots and streets, all this karmic waterscape connecting together, as the rain went on falling and the land vanished, into a sizable inland sea that would presently become an extension of the Pacific.
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