“You mean why would the fangs have to be gold? Instead of like just some everyday werewolf fangs.”
“Well . . . o . . . kay . . . ?”
“Because it’s the Golden Fang, man.”
“Yes yes the decedent’s tax shelter or whatever. So what.”
“No, not just a tax shelter, Bigfoot. Uh-uh. Much, much more, what you would call, vast.”
“Oh. And this wouldn’t,” patiently enough, “just be some more of your paranoid hippie bullshit, would it, because frankly neither the Department nor, more importantly, I, have the time to waste on these pothead fantasy leads.”
“Then you don’t mind if I just keep lookin into it myself? I mean, there’s no IA issues here I hope, no deliberate LAPD obstruction, nothin like that?”
“Everybody’s time is precious,” philosophized Bigfoot, reaching for his wallet, “in its own way.”
Doc was parked down in Little Tokyo, so he walked Bigfoot to the corner of Third and San Pedro and peeled off there, flashing a peace sign. “Oh and Bigfoot.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have the lab look for traces of copper.”
“What?”
“Not the kind that goes stumbling all over the crime scene contaminating evidence—more like copper, the metal? See, gold teeth are never pure gold, dentists like to alloy it with copper? If you hadn’t ditched forensics class to go steal hubcaps to plant on some innocent hippie, you might have known that.”
DOC CALLED CLANCY CHARLOCK where she tended bar, over in Inglewood. “Hi, how’d it work out with those two bikers the other night?”
“They did a lot of reds and fell asleep, thanks. Listen, have you seen Boris Spivey lately?” There was a skip, not quite a tremor, in her voice. It could’ve been from smoking.
“That’s just what I was gonna ask you! ESP, man!”
“Because it turns out Boris has disappeared. His place is empty, all his stuff is gone, nobody at Knucklehead Jack’s has seen him.”
Doc located a Kool, went to light it, then just sat staring at it instead. Could Bigfoot be right? Was Doc the kiss of death, laying bad karma on everybody he touched?
“Did you scare him or something?” Now she sounded pissed off.
“How would I do that when I can’t reach higher than his knee? Maybe he owes money, maybe it’s old-lady problems—do you know her, by the way? Dawnette? from Pico Rivera?”
“Actually, I tried to call her, but she seems to be missing too.”
“Think they’re together?”
“You have me confused with Ann Landers. What did you want with Boris?”
“The guy I’m really looking for is Puck Beaverton, and I thought Boris might’ve had some line on his whereabouts.”
“That asshole.”
“Almost sounds like you’ve . . . dated ol’ Puck.”
“Both him and his roommate, Einar. Don’t ask me to go into details. The boys have a slightly different idea about what a three-way is. I ended up feeling, let’s say, underused, and made the mistake of telling them so. Puck and Einar just murmured together for a while, and then they kicked me out. Four A.M. in West Hollywood.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Reawaken painful memories, ’course not, it’s okay, just that there’s bein handled and bein handled, and this wasn’t even fun.”
“Boris mentioned that Puck might’ve been headed for Vegas, and I was just trying to narrow that down a little.”
“If Einar’s with him, they’ll be looking for girls to treat like shit, preferably ones who don’t mind too much. Happy hunting.”
“Maybe some tropical evening, we could play some canasta.”
“Sure, bring a friend.”
WAITING AT THE OFFICE when Doc got back from lunch at Wavos was a disheveled girl in a tiny skirt, whose eyes after the style of the times were hugely made up not only with mascara but also with liquid liner and shadow almost the color of the smoke from a faulty head gasket, suggesting to Doc as always a deep, unreachable innocence, all of which sent the throbbing idle of his lecherousness into overdrive.
“Trillium Fortnight,” she introduced herself. “They said you could help me.”
“They did, eh,” suavely waving half a pack of Kools at her, which she declined. “And how many of them were there?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Dawnette and Boris. They said—”
“Whoa.” Dawnette and Boris. “How long ago was this?”
“About a week.”
“You . . . wouldn’t know where they are now.”
She shook her head, it seemed to Doc sadly. “Nobody does.”
“But you talked to them?”
“On the phone. They thought somebody was listening in, so they didn’t stay on long.”
“Did it sound like a local call? You know, like sometimes—”
“It sounded like they were out on the road, a pay phone on a frontage road off some interstate.”
“You could hear that?”
She shrugged. “It was the way the voices combined.” Doc must have been giving her a peculiar look. “Not ‘voices’ voices. Like parts in a musical piece?”
“Serenade for Peterbilt Rig and VW Bus,” Doc guessed.
“Actually, Kenworth and Econoline van, plus a street hemi, a Harley, and some miscellaneous clunkers.” This sensitivity of ear, she went on to explain, had proved useful both in her day job, teaching music theory at UCLA, and also for moonlighting as a woodwind specialist in early-music ensemble gigs. “Anything from a double-quint pommer down to a sopranino shawm, I’m your person.”
Doc had a hardon, and his nose was running. That old cootie food had found him again. Trillium, on the other hand, had dropped into a peculiar silence which, if he’d been in his right mind, he would have recognized as the some-other-guy blues. He found a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad with a long shopping list of junk-food items on it in pencil, and rolled it into the typewriter, just to keep busy.
“So . . . how did Boris and Dawnette think I could help you?”
“Someone I know has disappeared, and I need . . . I’d like to find out what happened to him.”
Doc typed lucky fellow. “We could start with name and last known address.”
“His name is Puck. . . .”
“Puck.” Uh, huh.
“Puck Beaverton . . . last address was in West Hollywood, but I’m not sure of the street. . . .”
Now, two or three angles were occurring to Doc at the same time, displaying themselves in a sort of hyperdimensional pattern across the piece of blank office wall he often used for these exercises. Trillium here might turn out to be some kind of hired heat herself, chasing down Puck on behalf of whoever’d made him afraid enough to split town. Of course, Puck could always be an ancient-music lover and running some kind of illicit market in hot sopranino shawms. Or, much more annoyingly, Trillium might have been deep into some number with Puck and unable to let it go. Doc had learned by now not to second-guess anybody’s choice of romantic object, but who the hell was supposed to be looking out for this kid? How much did she know about her dream boy’s job history? about Einar? Or had she actually, this smoggy-eyed innocent, found the Puck & Einar Experience trippy in a way Clancy hadn’t? And was there any choice, for the moment, but to dummy up about all this? It would’ve almost been more comforting to think of her as a contract killer.
“Boris gave me an address in Las Vegas,” Trillium said.
“You want me to what—check it out?”
“I want you to come along with me to Vegas and help me find him.”
Sucker. Sap. And other old-movie terms that were sure to occur to Doc in a minute. He saw the hustle in progress but as usual was thinking with his dick. Not to mention more sentimentally. Whatever the diffe
rence was. “Sure thing,” he said. “Do you happen to have a picture of this gent?”
Did she. Out of her shoulder bag, she fished one of those plastic accordion things with room for—he lost count—maybe a hundred snapshots of Puck and Trillium, walking on the beach in the sunset, dancing at different mass outdoor gatherings, playing volleyball, running in and out of the surf—it looked like a personals ad in the L.A. Free Press, only longer and with pictures. Doc noticed that Puck had his head shaved and tattooed with a swastika, which might help with ID’ing him, if and when. Also, in at least half the snapshots was a third presence, eyes set close together, one side of his upper lip lifted in discontent, managing usually to squeeze in between Trillium and Puck.
“And this would be . . .”
“Einar. An associate of Puck’s, they met in the penitentiary.”
“All right if I take a couple of these, just to show around?”
“Not at all. When can we leave?”
“Anytime. There’s a shuttle flight out of West Imperial, if that’s cool.”
“Beyond cool,” she said. “Driving freaks me out.”
ACTUALLY, IT WAS FLYING that freaked Doc out, but he kept forgetting why, and didn’t remember this time till the plane was touching down at McCarran. He briefly considered freaking out anyway, just to keep in practice, but then Trillium might wonder why, which could be a hassle to explain, and besides the moment had passed.
After renting a bright red ’69 Camaro, they went looking for someplace to stay, preferably close to the airport, because Doc was hoping for a quick in and out, heading east on Sunset Road to Boulder Highway and cruising a neighborhood of low-end motels and locals’ casinos and bars with live rock ’n’ roll before settling on Ghostflower Court, a collection of bungalows dating from the fifties. They checked into a two-room unit in back with a shake roof—a little run-down maybe, but spacious and comfortable inside, with a fridge, hot plate, air-conditioning, cable TV and two king-size water beds with leopard-print sheets. “Far out,” said Doc, “I wonder if these vibrate.” They didn’t. “Bummer.”
The address Boris had given Trillium was in a neglected trapezoid of streets east of the Strip, between Sahara and Downtown. The street floor was occupied by an antiques seller who introduced himself as Delwyn Quight. “Most of it’s pawnshop consignments, but have a look, half of what’s here I don’t even know about.” He produced a Japanese stash box of black lacquer and mother-of-pearl in a crane-and-willow motif and full of prerolled joints, lit one up, and they passed it around.
“Lot of Wild West stuff here,” it seemed to Doc. He remembered Bigfoot Bjornsen and his hundred pounds of barbed wire. “You got somethin I could bring a bobwire collector? Not a lot understand, maybe a small li’l piece . . .”
“Just sold off the end of my last spool, and it’s all Japanese repros now anyway. But here, you might want to have a look at this—came in yesterday, direct from an archaeological dig in Tombstone.”
It was an ordinary-looking coffee mug with a third of the top covered over except for a small mouth-hole, intended to keep the mustache of the drinker from getting soaked. The cup was decorated on one side with a vivid green saguaro cactus and on the other with a pair of crossed Buntline Specials above the word WYATT in that old-time wanted-poster typeface.
“Trippy,” Doc said, “how much?”
“I might let it go for a thousand.”
“A thousand what?”
“Please. This belonged to Marshal Earp himself.”
“I was thinking more like two bucks?”
They began to discuss this and kept wandering from the subject till Doc noticed something over in the corner, how would you put it, glowing, sort of. “Hey, what’s this?” What it was was a necktie covered with thousands, or hundreds, of magenta and green sequins in a piano-keyboard pattern and accented tastefully all around the edges with rhinestones.
“Now that,” Quight said, “belonged to Liberace—during one of his shows at the Riviera, while playing Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante with one hand, Lee took this tie off with the other and flung it into the audience. Autographed on the back, see?”
Doc tried it on, looked at it in the mirror for a while and how it caught the light and so forth. Quight, still trying to sell the mustache cup, offered to throw the tie in too, and they finally settled on ten dollars for both items. “This always happens,” the dealer banging his head softly but expressively against a seed-feed-and-fertilizer clerk’s desk, circa 1880, “I’m smoking myself out of business.”
“The other thing,” Doc said, “we almost forgot is, is you have tenants upstairs, right?”
“Not at the moment, they moved out last week.” He sighed. “Puck and Einar. A lot of people come and go in this neighborhood, but they were, what’s the word—special.”
“Did he—did they say where they were going?” Trillium’s voice sliding into a darker register Doc was coming to recognize.
“Not really. No one ever does, of course.”
“Anybody else been by looking for them?”
“A couple of gentlemen from the FBI, actually.” Quight looked through the contents of a decorative ashtray from the Sands, said to have been thrown up into once by Joey Bishop, and located a business card, with HUGO BORDERLINE, SPECIAL AGENT printed down in the corner, and a local phone number and extension in ballpoint.
“Shit,” reflected Doc. And had the Special Agent brought his running mate Flatweed along as well, a kind of government busybody twofer? and if so, why weren’t they back in L.A. setting spade revolutionaries at each other’s throats? Las Vegas would seem to offer slim pickings in that direction, unless, like, the Black Nationalist story had been a front all along for something else, something aimed, let’s say, at Organized Crime, which has said to own the Vegas casinos and pretty much to run the place these days. But wait—these feds had been in here inquiring after Puck, and what could Puck’s connection be to any of that? Doc felt a suspicion growing, paranoid as the rapid heartbeat of a midnight awakening, that Puck’s fate was included in Mickey’s, and the question to be asking was what kind of business Mickey might’ve been doing with the Mob—or worse, with the FBI.
“During your chat—was there anything maybe you didn’t share with them?”
“I did think about recommending a bar called Curly’s out on Rampart, but the more they went on, the less it seemed somehow like their sort of place.”
“This was, like, a Puck-and-Einar hangout?”
“Depending on the music policy week to week, that was the impression I got.”
“Let me guess. Country and western.”
“Broadway show tunes,” Trillium said quietly.
“And how,” nodded Quight.
“Puck used to do Ethel Merman,” she recalled.
“They both did. They’d roll in at four A.M. singing ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’ You could hear it coming from blocks away, slowly getting louder? Nobody ever complained.”
Back in the car, Doc said, “Come on, I’ll buy you a enchilada.”
They drove toward a spectacular desert sunset and turned up South Main. El Sombrero looked to be a bit of a wait, with a line of hungry folks spilling out the door of the world-renowned taquería and well down the street, drooling on the sidewalk and so forth. Doc drove on past, and then around a couple more corners to the neon grandiosities of Tex-Mecca, unknown to guidebooks but for a network of hungry dopers and petty criminals all along the U.S.-Mexican border an object of pilgrimage.
Two steps in the door of which, who did Doc catch sight of but FBI Special Agents Borderline and Flatweed, both in the synchronized act of stuffing dimly perplexed Anglo faces with the house’s celebrated Giant Burrito Special. Well, Doc supposed, the FBI did have to eat someplace. He searched his media memory for instances of Inspector Lewis Erskin
e ever eating anything, and came up blank. Before the brown-suited tools of justice recognized him, Doc steered Trillium quickly to a corner table out of their line of sight and hid behind a menu, resolved that not even a downer like feds in the area would get in the way of his appetite.
A waitress came over, and they ordered a lengthy combination of enchiladas, tacos, burritos, tostadas, and tamales for two called El Atómico, whose entry on the menu carried a footnote disclaiming legal responsibility.
“Do you know those men over there?” Trillium said. “They seem to know you.”
Doc leaned to where he could see. The two agents, now heading out the door, kept glaring back his way.
“It’s those federals that Quight was talking about.”
“Is it something to do with Puck? Do you think he’s in trouble with the FBI?”
“Okay, you knew he was a personal bodyguard of Mickey Wolfmann’s, right? and now Mickey is a possible kidnap. So they might have a couple of routine questions for Puck, would be all.”
“He can’t go back to prison, Doc. It would kill him.”
She had that lovelorn look on her face. Doc had already deduced that he could be Mick Jagger, pay fees in the range of six figures per fleeting smile, even give up watching the Lakers, and nothing he did would make the least impression—for this chick it was Puck Beaverton or nobody. Not the first time Doc had run into girl-of-his-dreams unavailability. The thing right now was to be professional if not groovy and try to put her mind at rest.
“So tell me, Trillium—how did you two kids meet?”
Bless her, she thought he really wanted to know. “Well, at UCLA, as it turns out, in Pauley Pavilion.”
“No kidding, hey, weren’t those guys incredible last season? I’m sure gonna miss Kareem and Lucius—”
No, actually, not basketball. The L.A. Philharmonic also happened to play at Pauley Pavilion off and on, a cross-cultural music series with guest artists like Frank Zappa, and sometimes there’d be a last-minute opening for a local reedperson. One afternoon Trillium showed up at a rehearsal with an English horn and feelings of skepticism about the work in question, somebody’s Symphonic Poem for Surf Band and Orchestra, featuring the Boards. Puck happened to be working security for the band. He and Trillium met back in one of the locker rooms, where people kept running in and out during breaks to light up or snort coke. She was bent over a sink, looking down into a compact mirror, felt someone close behind her, and there a little warped through a set of coke lines came looming Puck’s face. He was gazing at her ass in a kind of morose fatality. Before Trillium knew what was happening she found herself in the back seat of a stolen ’62 Bonneville parked in a cul-de-sac off Sunset, being seen to California Department of Corrections style. “Chicks say they don’t like it this way,” Puck explained later, when she had a minute to breathe, “and then before you know it they’re back again, begging. With me it’s just what I got used to.”
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