“Hi, Doc.”
Which of course was all it ever took, and sure enough, would you look at this. Suavely positioning the Book Review over his lap, he grinned as sincerely as possible. “Heard you were back. Got your postcard, thanks.”
One of those little puzzled frowns she may have perfected around kindergarten. “Postcard?”
Well, that’s probably significant too, he thought, and I better write it down or I’ll forget. Ouija-board pranksters at work again, no doubt.
“Thought it was your handwriting, must have been somebody else’s . . . so! where’ve you been?”
“Had to go up north? Family stuff?” Shrug. “Anything been happening down here?”
Bring up Mickey? Don’t bring up Mickey? “Your . . . friend in the construction business . . .”
“Oh, that’s all over.” She didn’t look specially sad about it. Or happy either.
“Maybe I missed something on the news—he isn’t . . . back, by any chance?”
She smiled and shook her head. “I’ve been away.” Around her neck on a piece of thong, she was wearing a seashell, maybe even brought back from a distant Pacific island, whose shape and markings reminded Doc of one of the zomes in Mickey’s now-abandoned project in the desert.
Ensenada Slim came in. “Howdy, Shasta. Hey Doc, Bigfoot’s been looking for you.”
“Oboy. How long ago?”
“Just saw him over to the Brain. Seemed pretty intense about something.”
“Either of you like to finish this?” Doc crept out the back way, only to find Bigfoot lounging in the alley with a peculiar smile.
“Don’t look so nervous. I’m not planning to inflict bodily harm, much as I’d like to. Part of this godforsaken hippie era and its erosion of masculine values I expect. Wyatt Earp would have been using your head for sledgehammer practice by now.”
“Hey, that reminds me—my bag, just going to reach in my bag here, okay? two fingers? slowly?” Doc brought out the antique coffee cup he’d found in Vegas.
“Though one grows hardened in police work,” said Bigfoot, “occasionally one’s sensibilities are profoundly challenged. What is . . . this . . . supposed to be?”
“It’s Wyatt Earp’s personal mustache cup, man. See, it’s got his name on it and everything?”
“May I, without wishing to cause offense, inquire as to the provenance of this . . .” He paused as if groping for the right term.
“Antique dealer in Vegas named Delwyn Quight. Seemed respectable enough.”
Bigfoot nodded bitterly and for some time. “You obviously don’t subscribe to Tombstone Memorabilia Collectors’ Alert. Brother Quight poses for its centerfold at least every other month. The man is a byword of fraudulent Earpiana.”
“Wow.” And worse, what if that also meant the Liberace necktie was a fake, too?
“It’s the thought, isn’t it,” said Bigfoot. “Listen,” and exactly in cadence with Doc saying the same thing, “I’m sorry about last night.” They paused for exactly the same number of pulses, and again in unison said, “You? Why should you be sorry?” This could have gone on all day, but then Doc said, “Weird,” and Bigfoot said, “Extraordinary,” and the spell was broken. They went ambling down the alley in silence till Bigfoot said, “I’m not sure how to tell you this.”
“Oh, shit. Who is it this time?”
“Leonard Jermaine Loosemeat, whom you might recall as a minor-league heroin dealer in Venice. Floater. Found him in one of those canals.”
“El Drano. Coy Harlingen’s dealer.”
“Yes.”
“Funny coincidence.”
“Define ‘funny.’” Doc heard something in his voice and looked over, and thought for a second that Bigfoot had finally arrived at his own long-overdue cop-related nervous breakdown. His lip was trembling, his eyes moist. He caught and held Doc’s gaze. Finally, “You don’t want to be fucking with this, Doc.”
Puck Beaverton had issued the same free advice.
WHICH DIDN’T KEEP Doc from driving up to Venice that evening to see what he could see. Leonard had been living in a bungalow beside a canal with a rowboat tied up at a little pier in the backyard. Periodically a dredge came through, and all the dopers who’d hidden their stashes in the canal could be observed the night before running around frantically trying to remember who’d put what where exactly. Doc happened to arrive in the middle of one of these exercises. In the soft and bath-warm night, half a dozen stereos were going at once out the open windows and sliding glass doors. Low-voltage garden lights glowed through the night foliage, up and down driveways and in the yards. Neighborhood people wandered around with beer bottles or joints in their hands or lounged on the little bridges watching the fuss.
“What? You forgot to put it in something waterproof again?”
“Ups.”
Doc had El Drano’s address from Bigfoot’s field interrogation card. Almost before he had time to knock, the door was opened by a fat guy with thick eyeglasses and a little tiny mustache, holding and chalking a pool cue handsomely inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“What, no camera crew?”
“Actually, I’m here representing HULK, that’s Heroin Users Liberation Kollective? we work out of Sacramento, and we’re basically a lobby in the state assembly for junkie civil rights? May I offer our condolences for your loss.”
“Hi, I’m Pepe, and junkies, in fact dopers in general, are diseased human trash who wouldn’t know what to do with civil rights if it walked up and bit them on the ass, not that civil rights actually does that, understand, oh come on in, by the way, do you happen to play eight ball?”
The walls inside were fiberboard and painted Prison Pink, a shade at that time believed to produce calm among the institutionalized. Every room had a pool table in it, including little bar-size units for the bathrooms and kitchen. There were nearly as many TV sets. Pepe, who appeared to’ve had nobody to talk to, or at, since El Drano’s passing, kept up a monologue into which Doc now and then tried to slip a question.
“. . . not that I begrudged him the money he borrowed or even owed me because I was always the consistently better one in terms of pool playing, but what really annoyed me was the loan sharks, and the thugs they used to send around, if money at high interest was the whole story, well that would have its own integrity I suppose, but they also deal in pain and forgiveness—their forgiveness!—and they traffic with agencies of command and control, who will sooner or later betray all agreements they make because among the invisible powers there is no trust and no respect.”
He had paused briefly in front of one of the TV sets to flip through the channels. Doc took the occasion to ask, “Do you think it could have been one of those loan sharks who killed Leonard?”
“Except that all that was over. For the first time since I knew him, Lenny was free of debt. My impression is that up at some level somebody had decided to forgive everything he owed. But then, in addition, every month a check also started coming for him in the mail. Once or twice I would sneak a look at the amount. Serious money, my friend—what was your name again?”
“Larry. Hi. This money—you think it was from a client?”
“I asked, naturally, and sometimes he’d say operating expenses, and sometimes he called it a retainer fee, but one night—he shouldn’t have been using, but it was the Christmas holidays—he was in this mood, being nice to everybody, putting a little extra weight in the bags—around three in the morning he started freaking out, and that’s when he mentioned ‘blood money,’ and I asked about that later and he pretended he didn’t remember, but I knew his face by then, every pore, and he remembered, all right. Something was corroding him from inside. You’d never know to look at him, but he had a conscience. One of those checks showed up last week and normally Lenny would’ve been out to the bank first thing to deposit it,
but this one he just let sit, he was very upset about something . . . here, look, this is it, no use to me, not like I ever had any power of attorney.”
The check was drawn on the Arbolada Savings and Loan in Ojai—one of Mickey Wolfmann’s, Doc recalled, also used by the Chryskylodon Institute—and signed by a financial officer whose name neither of them could read.
“Worse than a forged prescription,” Pepe said.
“A nice piece of change here, Pepe. There has to be some way you can cash this.”
“Maybe I should just donate it to your organization, in Leonard’s name, of course.”
“I’m not going to pressure you one way or the other, though it might help with our new Save a Rock ’n’ Roller program. You know how many musicians have been overdosing in recent years, it’s an epidemic. I’ve noticed it especially in my own area, surf music. I happen to be a huge fan of the Boards—fact it’s how I got personally involved in overdose prevention, ever since one of their sax players passed away. . . . Remember Coy Harlingen?”
It could’ve been some unexpected side effect from all the dope he’d been smoking, but Doc now felt an ice-cold electric shock blasting through the room—Pepe went rigid, his face, even with all the pink reflection in here, drained suddenly to an alarming white, and Doc saw the pain he must have been in all this time, how much Leonard must have meant to him, how he must have thought all the desperate talking would get him through this . . . but here was something he’d been forbidden to talk about, maybe even suspicions of his own that he could not allow himself to go into, with Coy Harlingen clearly at the heart of it. Pepe’s silence went on, the multiple voices of the TV sets in all the rooms combined in jagged disharmony, till far too late he finally said, “No, that name doesn’t register. But I understand. Too many needless losses. Your people are in a position to do something wonderful, I’m sure.”
If El Drano, on somebody’s orders, had switched the 3-percent shit he’d been selling Coy for something that was sure to kill him, then it seemed clear that nobody had bothered to tell him later about it being a scam, and that Coy was still alive. All this time they’d let him think he was a murderer. Was it finally too much for this conscience Pepe said he had? Was he about to go confess to somebody? Who wouldn’t have wanted him to do that?
On one of the pool tables lay an impossible arrangement of balls ready for some superhero of the sport to address. “One of Lenny’s safety shots,” Pepe said. “It’s been there ever since he stepped out and never came back. I keep meaning to finish the game, I know I could run the table, but somehow . . .”
Doc walked back to his car through a slightly more calmed neighborhood, the dopers were all back indoors heading for the bedding, the uproar had died down, the moon was out, what had been found again was found, what was lost was gone for good except for what some lucky dredgefolks tomorrow would happen across. Lost, and not lost, and what Sauncho called lagan, deliberately lost and found again . . . and there was something now scratching like a rogue chicken at the fringes of the unkempt barnyard that was Doc’s brain, but he couldn’t quite locate it, let alone account for the critter when evening rolled around.
HE THOUGHT HE’D better go discuss Adrian Prussia with Fritz, who’d had more of a history with the loan shark than Doc did. Sparky, who worked the vampire shift, hadn’t come in yet.
“I wouldn’t go near Adrian,” Fritz advised. “He’s no longer the wholesome Chamber of Commerce bigshot we used to know in the olden days, Doc, he’s bad shit anymore.”
“How can he be worse than he was? He’s the reason I quit being a pacifist and started packing.”
“Something happened to him, he made a deal with somebody bigger than him, bigger than anything he was into up till then.”
“I heard something about him along the same lines out in Venice tonight. ‘Agencies of command and control,’ is how it went. Seemed strange at the time. Who’ve you been talking to?”
“State attorney general’s office, they’ve been after him for years. But nobody can touch him, partly because of this interesting portfolio of IOUs he’s holding. The amounts themselves aren’t all that huge, but taken one at a time, it’s always enough to guarantee obedience.”
“Obedience to . . .”
“Commanders. Controllers. Prussia gets the money, plus the vig, and the others get what they want done done.”
“But there’s loan sharks everywhere. Are they all in on this, too?”
“Maybe not. Prussia’s allergic to competition. Anybody started threatening his share, they’d be apt to suddenly wind up in distress.”
“Dead?”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“But the more of that he does—”
“The better his chances of being popped, yeah you’d think. But not if he’s running the ones most apt to do the popping.”
“LAPD?”
“Oh, heaven forfend.”
“And Prussia’s immunity from them would also extend to the people he sends around to collect?”
“How it usually works.”
“Then something here is ungroovy.” Doc ran down Puck Beaverton’s history briefly. “The last time he got popped? I looked it up. One seed they found in his vacuum-cleaner bag, my little nephew who’s five could’ve got him off. But nobody fixed it, he still got arrested and with his record he could’ve been in for a zip six at least.”
“Maybe some cop he offended?”
“Not likely any of the cops who borrowed from Prussia—that was all easy terms and friendly relations. But, just about the only one of Prussia’s people that ever got run in was Puck.”
“So it was really personal.”
“Bummer. Means I have to talk to Bigfoot again.”
“You should know how to do that by now.”
“No, I mean human to human.”
“Jesus. Don’t tell me how that comes out.”
DOC FIGURED HE’D be likely to run into Bigfoot out at the Waste-a-Perp Target Range down off South La Brea. For some reason Bigfoot liked to use civilian ranges. Had the LAPD 86’d him from cop facilities? Were there too many colleagues looking to shoot him down and pretend it was an accident? Doc wasn’t about to ask why.
He went out to the range after suppertime, as soon as it got dark. He knew that Bigfoot preferred the Urban, Gang-related and Hippie (UGH) section, where full-length plastic images of black, Chicano, and longhaired menaces to society came lurching at you on a 3-D shooting-gallery-type arrangement while you blew the ’suckers to shreds. Doc himself liked to spend most of his time on the low-light part of the range. Lately he’d come to regard these visits as not so much about exercising night vision as John Garfield dead in the gutter, and dead from real-world Hollywood betrayal and persecution, and the controlling order under which outcomes like this were unavoidable, because they ran off of cold will and muzzle velocity and rounds discharged in the dark.
Sure enough, there was Bigfoot at the cash register, just settling up.
“Need to talk,” Doc said.
“I was headed for the Raincheck Room.”
This esteemed West Hollywood saloon was known in those days for a thrifty approach to light bills. Doc and Bigfoot found a booth in back.
“Mrs. Bjornsen sends her regards, by the way.”
“What’re you talking about, she hates me.”
“No actually you quite intrigue her now. If I weren’t so confident in my marriage, I’d almost be jealous.”
Doc tried to remove all sympathy from his face while thinking, ah you poor Swedish Fish, and I hope you’re keeping that service .38 out of everybody’s reach. Far as Doc could see, the woman was dangerously unbalanced, and he estimated a week and a half before apocalypse descended upon the Bjornsens. “Well sure, tell her howdy.”
“Anything else I can do for you
this evening?”
“Correct me if I’m mistaken here, Bigfoot, but it’s been clear to me for some time that you’re desperate to have a word with Puck Beaverton but can’t let on, because otherwise you’re in deep shit with powers unnamed, so instead you keep putting me out there on point for all ’em AKs in the jungle to open up on—have I got that more or less right so far?”
“We’re in sensitive territory here, Sportello.”
“Yes, I know all that man, but somebody’s gonna have to be less sensitive for a minute and just wipe off their chin and stand up and deal with it, ’cause I’m tired of this bein jacked around all the time, if there’s something you need just come on out and say it, how hard can that be?”
With Doc this passed for an outburst, and Bigfoot gazed back in what, with him, passed for astonishment. He nodded at Doc’s shirtpocket. “Mind if I have one of those?”
“You don’t want to start smoking, Bigfoot, smokin’s bad for your ass.”
“Yes well I wasn’t planning to smoke it in my ass, was I?”
“How I’m spoze to know that?”
Bigfoot lit up, puffed without inhaling in a way Doc found annoying, and said, “Among certain of my colleagues, Puck Beaverton—for a felony offender with conspicuous impulse-control issues and a swastika on his head—was always considered rather a charming fellow, really.” He took half a beat. “For any number of reasons.”
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