“Okay—the owner of that car? very respectable PV family by the way? she offered me a ride? And the cops never even gave her a ticket? And Dr. Blatnoyd was her friend, not mine?”
“I don’t wish to pry, Sportello, but where have you been tonight? We’ve been trying to call you all evening.”
“I was at the movies.”
“Of course you were, and where was that again?”
“Hermosa Theater.”
“And the film was . . .”
“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” which in fact Doc had been to see while the car was in the shop. “This chick I was with wanted to see the other half of the double feature, so we stuck around for that too, some English jailbait picture whose name I’ll think of in a minute. . . .”
“Ah, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, no doubt, a splendid film for which Maggie Smith richly deserves her Oscar for Best Actress.”
“She was which one again, the blonde with the big tits, right?”
“Not a fan of the British cinema, I take it.”
“More of a Lee Van Cleef person, to be honest, I mean, that Clint Eastwood, he’s okay, but I always end up thinking of him as Rowdy Yates—”
“Yes well there’s an officer here with some evidence bags, and I’ll have to get back to the really amusing part of the evening. Would you mind dropping by Parker Center tomorrow, I’d so like to chat about this fool’s errand you were kind enough to send me off on, this Coy Harlingen case?”
“Yeah, by the way, some friends of Coy’s came around yesterday and trashed my associate’s apartment. So maybe it ain’t such a cold case after all.”
“There’s cold and there’s cold,” said Bigfoot enigmatically, and hung up.
THAT NIGHT DOC dreamed he was a little kid again. He and another kid who resembles his brother Gilroy are sitting in the Arizona Palms in the middle of the afternoon with a woman who is not exactly Elmina, though she is somebody’s mother. A waitress comes over with menus.
“Where’s Shannon?” asks the woman who isn’t exactly Elmina.
“She got murdered. I’m her replacement.”
“Guess it was only a matter of time. Who did it?”
“The husband, who else?”
She brings their food in several trips, each time with some update on the slaying of her co-worker. The weapon, the suggested motives, the pretrial maneuvering. She interrupts banana-cream-pie-à-la-mode discussions with, “Known to happen, somebody kills somebody they’re fucking, even in love with, shrinks and counselors and lawyers can only do so much, you go behind the boulevards and you’re in the badlands again, where these people who always tell you how to behave have no jurisdiction anymore, and all the twenty-four-hour Southland belongs to the bad.”
“Mom,” little Larry wants to know, “when she comes back, will they let her husband out of jail?”
“When who comes back?”
“Shannon.”
“Didn’t you hear what the girl said? Shannon’s dead.”
“That’s only in stories. The real Shannon will come back.”
“Hell she will.”
“She will, Mom.”
“You really believe that stuff.”
“Well what do you think happens to you when you die?”
“You’re dead.”
“You don’t believe you can come back to life?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well what does happen?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Gilroy is watching them with enormous eyes and playing with his food, which annoys the Elmina woman, for whom eating is serious business. “Oh, now you’re playing. Don’t play, eat. And you,” she tells Doc, “someday you’re gonna have to conform.”
“What do you mean?”
“Be like everybody else.” Of course that’s what she means. And now grown-up Doc feels his life surrounded by dead people who do and don’t come back, or who never went, and meantime everybody else understands which is which, but there is something so clear and simple that Doc is failing to see, will always manage not to grasp.
He woke up into this particular season of onshore fogs and the unnatural rumbling of jets taking off and landing at LAX all night long, as if some hand at a control board had pushed the bass to an unexpected level, and he found the Indian bedspread on the couch where he crashed running red and orange dye from what could only be his tears. He walked around well into the morning with a dim paisley pattern across half his face.
THIRTEEN
TIME WAS WHEN DOC USED TO ACTUALLY WORRY ABOUT TURNING into Bigfoot Bjornsen, ending up just one more diligent cop, going only where the leads pointed him, opaque to the light which seemed to be finding everybody else walking around in this regional dream of enlightenment, denied the wide-screen revelations Bigfoot called “hippiphanies,” doomed instead to be accosted by freak after freak drawling, “Let me tell you about my trip, man,” never to be up early enough for what might one day turn out to be a false dawn. Which might have accounted for why, up till last night, he’d always been willing to cut Bigfoot a certain amount of slack, not that he would necessarily want that to get around. But now, according to Art Tweedle, there was Bigfoot’s probable connection to the LAPD’s private army of vigilantes, maybe even (Doc couldn’t help wondering) to the raid at Channel View Estates. By the time he got to Parker Center, he was feeling like some allegorical statue in the park, labeled COMMUNITY DISAPPROVAL.
“Hi, Bigfoot! been out smoking any niggers lately?” No . . . no, he was pretty sure what he’d said out loud was, “Anything new on that Bel Air case?”
“Don’t ask. Well, actually do ask, maybe I need to vent.”
The vibes around Robbery-Homicide Division this morning were as cordial as they ever got, which was hardly at all. Maybe it was Doc, maybe the nature of the work here, but he could have sworn that today Bigfoot’s colleagues were going out of their way to avoid them both.
“Hope you don’t mind if we go take a Code 7 someplace?” Bigfoot reaching under the table and dragging out a Ralph’s shopping bag with what looked like several kilos of paperwork in it, getting up, and heading out the door, motioning Doc to follow. They went downstairs and out to a Japanese greasy spoon around the corner where the Swedish pancakes with lingonberries couldn’t be beat, and which arrived in fact no more than a minute and a half after Bigfoot had put his head in the door.
“Ethnic as always, Bigfoot.”
“I’d share these with you, but then you’d be addicted and it would be something else on my conscience.” Bigfoot started in scarfing.
Those pancakes sure looked good. Maybe Doc could spoil Bigfoot’s appetite or something. He found himself purring maliciously. “Aren’t you ever bitter that you missed being up there on Cielo Drive? Stompin around that famous crime scene with the rest of the high-living heat, wipin out them fingerprints, leavin your own, so forth?”
Having grabbed a second fork from Doc’s setup and eating now with both hands, “Minor concerns, Sportello, that’s only ego and regret. Everybody’s got that—well, everybody who works for a living. But do you want to know the truth?”
“Uhnnh . . . no?”
“Here it is anyway. The truth is . . . right now everybody’s really, fucking, scared.”
“Who—you people? All ’em burrito hounds up in Homicide? Scared of what? Charlie Manson?”
“Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don’t remember and the Watts rioting you do—it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood.
They swim around looking for what’s bleeding, but they don’t find anything, all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each other.”
Doc considered this for a bit. “What’s in ’em lingonberries, Bigfoot?”
“It’s like,” Bigfoot had continued, “there’s this evil subgod who rules over Southern California? who off and on will wake from his slumber and allow the dark forces that are always lying there just out of the sunlight to come forth?”
“Wow, and . . . and you’ve . . . seen him? This ‘evil subgod,’ maybe he . . . he talks to you?”
“Yes and he looks just like a hippie pothead freak! Something, huh?”
Wondering what this was about, Doc, trying to be helpful, said, “Well, what I’ve been noticing since Charlie Manson got popped is a lot less eye contact from the straight world. You folks all used to be like a crowd at the zoo—‘Oh, look, the male one is carrying the baby and the female one is paying for the groceries,’ sorta thing, but now it’s like, ‘Pretend they’re not even there, ’cause maybe they’ll mass murder our ass.’”
“It’s all turned to sick fascination,” opined Bigfoot, “and meantime the whole field of homicide’s being stood on its ear—bye-bye Black Dahlia, rest in peace Tom Ince, yes we’ve seen the last of those good old-time L.A. murder mysteries I’m afraid. We’ve found the gateway to hell, and it’s asking far too much of your L.A. civilian not to want to go crowding on through it, horny and giggling as always, looking for that latest thrill. Lots of overtime for me and the boys I guess, but it brings us all that much closer to the end of the world.”
Bigfoot ran a deep scan of the place from the toilets in back out to the desert light of the street and lifted the Ralph’s bag onto the table. “This Coy Harlingen matter. I didn’t want to discuss it up in the office.” He began to bring out ungainly wads of papers of different sizes, colors, and states of deterioration. “I pulled the tub on this expecting what we technically call zip shit. Imagine my surprise at finding how many of my colleagues, at how many far-flung outposts of law enforcement, not to mention levels of power, have had their lunchhooks all over it. Coy Harlingen not only used multiple aka’s, he also had a number of offices running him, typically at the same time. Among which—I hope I don’t shock or offend—have been unavoidably those elements who wouldn’t mind if Coy really did end up under a granite slab with his final alias carved thereon.”
“Coy’s overdose, or whatever it was—there must be a lot of monthly IPRs on that by now. Any chance of having a look?”
“Except that Brother Noguchi’s shop could never quite bring themselves to call it a homicide, so nobody was ever required to file any progress reports, intra-, extra-, non-, whatever. On the face of it, just one more OD, one less junkie, case cleared.”
Once Doc would have said, “Well, that’s that, can I go now?” But with this new fascist model Bigfoot, the one he’d recently found out maybe he couldn’t trust after all, the old style of needling somehow wasn’t as much fun anymore. “You mean it would be a routine case, except for all this paperwork,” is what he said, carefully, “which even just eyeballing it does seem a little out of proportion. Like the one pink li’l DOA slip would’ve been enough.”
“Ah, you noticed. It’s certainly the kind of documentary attention dead folks don’t see too much of. You would almost think Coy Harlingen was really alive someplace and kicking. Wouldn’t you. Resurrected.”
“So what have you found out?”
“Technically, Sportello, I am not even aware this case exists. Cool with you? Groovy? Why do you think we’re down here and not upstairs?”
“Some Internal Affairs soap opera, I figure, which you’re desperate to keep me away from. Now what could that be?”
“Fair enough. What I want to keep you away from is vast, Sportello, vast. On the other hand, if there is something trivial I can let you in on from time to time, why get too paranoid about it?” He rooted around in the Ralph’s bag and found a long speckled box nearly full of three-by-five index cards. “Why, what have we here? Oh, but you know what these are.”
“Field Interrogation Reports. Souvenirs of everybody you guys ever stopped and hassled. And this sure looks like a lot of them for one junkie saxophone player.”
“Why don’t you just flip through these quickly, see if there’s anything that looks familiar.”
“Evelyn Wood, don’t fail me now.” Doc began to run through the cards, trying to keep alert for one of Bigfoot’s rude surprises. He had met a few close-up magicians and knew about the practice of “forcing” a card on a spectator. He saw no reason for Bigfoot to be above this kind of trickery.
And what do you know. What was this? Doc had nearly half a second to decide if the card he’d caught sight of was worth keeping from Bigfoot, and then he remembered that Bigfoot already knew which one it was. “Here,” he said pointing. “I know I’ve seen that name someplace.”
“Puck Beaverton,” Bigfoot nodded, taking it out of the box. “Excellent choice. One of Mickey Wolfmann’s jailbird praetorians. Let’s see now.” He pretended to read off the card. “Sheriff’s people happen to run into him at the Venice home of the very dealer who sold Coy Harlingen the smack that killed him. Or didn’t kill him, as the case may be.” He pushed the FIR card across the Formica, and Doc scanned it doubtfully. “Subject, unemployed, claims to be a friend of Leonard Jermain Loosemeat, aka El Drano. ‘I just came over to play a couple games of pool.’ Subject seemed unusually nervous in Beaverton’s company. That’s it? What was Puck doing at Coy’s dealer’s place? Do you think.”
Bigfoot shrugged. “Maybe there to buy?”
“Any record of him using?”
“Somebody’d have to look.” Which must have sounded jive-ass even to Bigfoot, because he added, “Puck’s file could be in storage by now, far, far away, someplace like Fontana or beyond. Unless . . .” A hustler’s pause, as if a thought had just struck him.
“Let’s hear it, Bigfoot.”
“I seem to recall that some years ago, just before he went into Folsom, this Beaverton used to work for a loan shark downtown, named Adrian Prussia. And this dealer El Drano also happened to be one of Prussia’s steady customers. Maybe Puck was there on his former employer’s behalf.”
Doc felt uneasy. His nose was beginning to run. “I remember Adrian Prussia from back when I had that skip-tracing job. Fuckin snake, man.”
Bigfoot signaled the counterman. “Chotto, Kenichiro! Dozo, motto panukeiku.”
“You got it, Lieutenant!”
“Not quite like my mother’s, but still a real ‘trip,’” Bigfoot confided, “though what I really go for here is the respect.”
“Didn’t get much of that from your mom, huh?”
Had Doc really said that or only thought it? He waited for Bigfoot to take offense, but the detective only went on, “You probably imagine I have a lot of status up in Robbery-Homicide. Who could blame you for thinking, man goes around like Prince Charles, like they’re going to crown him chief any day . . . The reality, however . . .” He was shaking his head slowly, looking at Doc in this oddly beseeching way. “God help us all. Dentists on trampolines.” But no, that wasn’t it. Not exactly.
“Okay, Bigfoot,” aware of another con job in progress, “I can tell you this—the other night, when we dropped Rudy Blatnoyd off in Bel Air, it was dark, he was giving all these directions, whole lotta turns, I don’t think I could find the way back there even in daylight, or know how this connects to wherever you guys found the body, but it was about eleven P.M.”—scribbling on a napkin—“and here’s the address.”
Bigfoot nodded. “That’s just where we found the body. He was staying there as a houseguest, and this helps a little with the chronology. Thank you, Doc. Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I’ve never thought of you as
any less than professional.”
“Don’t get sentimental on me man, it fucks up your edge.”
“I can be even more emotionally irresponsible than that,” replied Bigfoot. “Listen. There are certain polygraph keys on this case that if I told you what they were, then the only ones who’d know would be Homicide, the killer, and you.”
“Good thing you’re not telling me, then.”
“Suppose I tell you anyway.”
“Why should you?”
“Just so we know where we’re ‘at,’ as you people say.”
“You mean just so you’ll have another reason to run me in. Thanks, Bigfoot. How about if I put my fingers in my ears and scream if you try to tell me?”
“You won’t do that.”
“Really?” Doc genuinely curious. “Why won’t I?”
“Because you’re one of the few hippie potheads in this town who appreciate the distinction between childlike and childish. Besides, this is right up your alley. Listen . . . we’re officially calling it a fatal neck injury—don’t . . . do that!—but more specifically, Dr. Blatnoyd had puncture wounds on his throat, consistent with bites from the canines of a midsize wild animal. That’s what the coroner found. Keep it under your hat.”
“Well now that’s mighty weird, Bigfoot,” Doc said slowly, “because Rudy Blatnoyd was one of the partners in a tax dodge that calls itself, get this, Golden Fang Enterprises. Huh? I don’t suppose you had the SID test out those neck punctures for gold, or nothin like that?”
“I shouldn’t think there’d be much trace. Gold is all but chemically inactive, as you might have learned in chemistry class if you hadn’t been ditching it all the time to score dope.”
“Wait, what happened to Locard’s Exchange Principle, every contact leaves traces? it would sure be ironic, man, is all I’m saying, if it turned out Blatnoyd was bit to death by a golden fang. Or even better, like, two golden fangs.”
“I don’t . . .” Bigfoot tilting his head and hitting it like a swimmer trying to clear water from his ear, “see why . . . anything like that would be especially . . . material?”
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