“And now I’m supposed to say—”
“Throwing you a cue. I’m sorry. It’s a habit.”
“Like smoking.”
“All right.” Bigfoot squashed out the cigarette irritably and glared at Doc, who by reflex was already looking covetously at the lengthy butt. “Puck’s former employer, AP Finance, did regular business with many officers in the Department, all of it friendly and as far as I know aboveboard. Perhaps with one unhappy exception.”
A name which must not be spoken aloud. Doc shrugged. “Part of that IA hangup you keep mentioning.” Breezily enough, he hoped.
“Please understand, without a preeminent need to know . . .”
“Groovy with me, Bigfoot. And this unnamable cop—how did Puck happen to feel about him?”
“Hated him, and the hatred was mutual. For—” Dropping then into second thoughts.
“For good reason. But you have an Eleventh Commandment about criticizing a fellow flatfoot, I can dig that.” Doc then had a thought. “Is it okay to ask if this party is still on the job?”
“He’s—” The silence was as clear as the word withheld. “His status is Inactive.”
“File’s unavailable too, I bet.”
“The IA’s locked it all down till the year 2000.”
“Don’t sound like it was natural causes somehow. Uh who do you thank, as Elvis always sez, when you have such luck?”
“Aside from the obvious, you mean.”
“Puck, sure, it could’ve been him. But tell me now, this cop—what do we call him?—Officer X?”
“Detective.”
“Okay, let’s say this mystery cop was actually the one who arrested Puck on that chickenshit dope-seed charge, hoping with his record he’d be put back in Folsom for a while. If it wasn’t Puck who did him, then let’s see, who else . . . oh! how about Adrian Prussia, who can’t afford to look bad in front of the community, if even one of his former people gets arrested, maybe convicted. That’s a shot somebody’s taking not just at Puck but at him. Almost as bad as some deadbeat refusing to pay back a loan. What happens in those cases again. I forget.”
“You begin to see?” Bigfoot glumly nodding. “You think it’s all one big monolithic funfest at the LAPD, don’t you, nothing to do all day but figure out new ways to persecute you hippie scum. Instead it might as well be the yard at San Quentin. Gangs, addicts, butches and bitches and snitches, and everybody’s packing.”
“Can I say something out loud? Is anybody listening?”
“Everybody. Nobody. Does it matter?”
“Say Adrian Prussia iced this Detective X, or had it done. And what happens? nothing. Maybe everybody in LAPD knows he did the deed, but there’s no back-channel outcries in the paper, no vigilante revenge by horrified fellow officers. . . . No, instead IA locks it all up tight for the next thirty years, everybody pretending it’s another cop hero fallen in the line of duty. Forget about decency, or respecting the memories of all the real dead-cop heroes—how can you people be that fuckin unprofessional?”
“It gets even worse,” Bigfoot said in a slowly stifled way, as if trying in vain to call to Doc out of years of history forbidden to civilians. “Prussia has been prime suspect in . . . let’s say a number of homicides—and each time, upon intervention from the highest levels, he’s walked.”
“And you’re saying what? ‘Ain’t it awful’?”
“I’m saying there’s a reason for everything, Doc, and before you get too indignant you might want to look at why Internal Affairs should even be duked into this in the first place, let alone be the office that’s sitting on the story.”
“I give up. Why?”
“Figure it out. Use what’s left of your brain. The trouble with you people is you never know when somebody’s doing you a favor. You think whatever it is, you’re entitled because you’re cute or something.” He got up, dropped a handful of shrapnel on the table, tossed a disgruntled salute to the barkeep, and prepared to step out into the street. “Go look in a mirror sometime. ‘Dig’ yourself, ‘man,’ till you understand that nobody owes you anything. Then get back to me.” Doc had seen Bigfoot out of sorts now and then, but this was getting downright emotional.
They stood on the corner of Santa Monica and Sweetzer. “Where were you parked?” said Bigfoot.
“Off of Fairfax.”
“My direction as well. Walk with me, Sportello, I’ll show you something.” They begin to stroll along Santa Monica. Hippies were thumbing rides up and down the street. Rock ’n’ roll was blasting from car radios. Musicians who’d just come awake were drifting out of the Tropicana looking for evening breakfast. Reefer smoke hung in pockets up and down the street, waiting to ambush the unwary pedestrian. Men were murmuring to each other in doorways. After a few blocks, Bigfoot turned right and ambled down toward Melrose. “This looking familiar yet?”
Doc had an intuition. “It’s Puck’s old neighborhood.” He started looking for the overgrown courtyard complex Trillium had told him about. His nose began to run and his clavicles to shiver, and he wondered if somehow one or all of the happy threesome were about to appear, to what Sortilège liked to call manifest, and from the corner of his eye he noticed Bigfoot watching him closely. Yes and who says there can’t be time travel, or that places with real-world addresses can’t be haunted, not only by the dead but by the living as well? It helps to smoke a lot of weed and to do acid off and on, but sometimes even a literal-minded natchmeister like Bigfoot could manage it.
They approached a courtyard apartment building nearly dissolved in the evening. “Go have a look around, Sportello. Sit out by that pool there under the New Zealand tree ferns. Experience the night.” He made a show of looking at his watch. “Regretfully, I have to be moving along. The missus will be expecting me.”
“One special lady for sure. Pass on my regards.”
No lights, either incandescent or cathode-ray, showed in any of the apartment windows. The whole place might have been deserted. The traffic on Santa Monica was scarcely audible. The moon rose. Small critters went running around in the undergrowth. What came creeping out of the shrubbery after a while actually were not ghosts but logical conclusions.
If Internal Affairs was hushing up the murder of an LAPD detective, then somebody in the Department must have wanted him dead. If they were unwilling to do it themselves, then they were hiring contract specialists, and the list plausibly could’ve included Adrian Prussia. It would be interesting to look into the other murder raps Bigfoot claimed that Prussia had beaten. But even on the remote chance Bigfoot had access to it, there might be no direct way for him to get the information to Doc. Which might explain why it looked so much like he’d been hustling Doc, from the jump, into discovering some other way into the loan shark’s history.
Doc wondered what way that might be. Fritz’s ARPAnet would be too much of a crap shoot—according to Fritz, you never knew from one day to the next what you’d find on it, or wouldn’t find. Which left Penny. Who had already shopped him to los federales and might have little if any problem reshopping him to the LAPD. Penny who might not even want to see him anymore. That Penny.
SIXTEEN
DOC HAD NEVER KEPT COUNT, BUT HE’D PROBABLY SPENT WAY more time in the Hall of Justice on the upper floors, in the men’s lockup, than downstairs on the other side of the law. The elevators were run by a squad of uniformed women commanded and terrified by a large, jail-matronly lady with an Afro who stood in the lobby with a pair of castanets dispatching the individual cars with different signals. Tkk-trrrrrkk-tk-tk might mean, for example, “Elevator Two’s up next, that’s forty-five seconds in and out, let’s be movin it,” and so forth. She gave Doc a serious once-over before letting him aboard.
Penny shared her cubicle with another deputy DA named Rhus Frothingham. When Doc put his head in the door, Penny did not
exactly gasp but did start hiccupping uncontrollably. “Are you all right?” said Rhus.
Between hiccups Penny explained, though all Doc could make out was “. . . the one I was telling you about . . .”
“Should I call Security?”
Penny threw Doc an inquiring look, like, so, should she? It might as well be stewardii out at the beach around here. Rhus sat rigidly at her desk, pretending to read through a file. Penny excused herself and headed for the ladies’ lounge, leaving Doc immersed in Rhus’s glare like an old car radiator in an acid bath. After a while he got up and ankled his way down the corridor and met Penny coming out of the toilet. “Only wondering when you’d be free for dinner. Didn’t mean to freak you out. I’ll even spring for it.”
That sideways look. “Thought you’d never want to speak to me again.”
“The FBI has actually been fantastically stimulating company, so I figure at least I owe you some ribs or somethin.”
What it turned out to be was a recently opened gourmet health-food joint off Melrose called The Price of Wisdom, which Doc had heard about from Denis, who’d given it a rave. It was upstairs from a dilapidated bar where Doc remembered hanging out during one of his seedier phases, he forgot which. Penny looked up at the flickering red neon sign and frowned. “Ruby’s Lounge, uh-huh, I remember it well, it used to be good for at least one felony arrest per week.”
“Groovy cheeseburgers as I recall.”
“Voted unanimously by local food critics the Southland’s Most Toxic.”
“Sure, but it kept down the health-code violations, all those mice and roaches every morning with their li’l feet in the air, stone dead next to the burgers that done the deed?”
“Getting hungrier by the minute.” Directed by a hand-lettered sign reading, THE PRICE OF WISDOM IS ABOVE RUBY’S, JOB 28:18, Doc and Penny ascended into a room full of ferns, exposed bricks, stained glass, tablecloths on the tables and Vivaldi on the sound system, none of these for Doc too promising. Waiting for a table, he eyeballed the clientele, many of whom seemed to have fitness issues, gazing at each other over and around salads detailed as the miniature mountains in Zen gardens, trying to identify various soybean-derived objects with the aid of pocket flashlights or magnifying lenses, sitting with knife and fork gripped in either fist regarding platters of Eggplant Wellington or rhomboids of vivid green kale loaf on plates too big for them by an order of magnitude.
Doc began to wonder, too late, just how stoned Denis had been when he came in here. It didn’t get any more encouraging when the menus finally arrived. “Can you read any of this?” Doc said after a while. “I can’t read this, is it me, or some foreign language thing?”
She gave him a smile he had learned not to trust too heavily. “Yes, so clear something up for me, Doc, because taking me out to a place like this could be construed as a hostile act—are you pissed off at me? Not pissed off?”
“That’s the choice? Well, give me a minute. . . .”
“Those federal guys helped me out with something once. This seemed like an easy way to return the favor.”
“That’s me,” said Doc. “Always easy.”
“You are pissed off.”
“I’m over it. But you didn’t ask me beforehand.”
“You would’ve said no. You people all hate the FBI.”
“What are you talking about, us people? I was a Dick Tracy Junior G-Man, sent away for this kit? Learned how to snoop on all the neighbors, fingerprinted everybody in first grade, got the ink all over everything, they sent me to the principal’s office—‘But I’m a Junior G-Man! They know about me in Washington, D.C.!’ I had to stay after school for a month, but it was Mrs. Keeley and I got to look up her dress now and then, so that was cool.”
“What a horrible little boy.”
“See, it was way before they invented miniskirts—”
“Listen, Doc, the feds really want to know what you were doing in Vegas.”
“Hanging with Frank and the gang, playing a little baccarat, more important, what were your two cheap-suit idiot friends doing there getting in my face?”
“Please. They can subpoena you. They have permanent grand juries that have been known to indict a bean burrito. They can put you in a world of heartache.”
“Just to find out why I went to Vegas? That sounds really cost-effective.”
“Or you can tell me, and I’ll tell them.”
“As one Junior G-Person to another, Penny, what are you getting out of this?”
She grew solemn. “Maybe you don’t want to know.”
“Let me guess. It isn’t something nice they’ll do for you, it’s something shitty they won’t do to you.”
She touched his hand, as if she did it so seldom she wasn’t sure of how. “If I could believe for one second . . .”
“That I could protect you.”
“At this point even a practical idea would help.”
Midnight, pitch dark, can’t remember whether they drained the pool or not, hey, what the fuck’s it matter? He bounced once, twice, then off the end of the board and down in a blind cannonball. “You probably know your pals have Mickey Wolfmann.”
“The FBI.” There might’ve been a question mark on the end, but Doc didn’t hear it. Her eyes narrowed, and he noticed enough of a pulse in her temple to make one of her drop earrings begin to flash like a warning light. “We’ve suspected, but can’t prove anything. Can you?”
“I saw him in their custody.”
“You saw him.” She thought for a few seconds, tapping a high-school marching-band beat on the tablecloth. “Would you be willing to depone for me?”
“Sure babe, you bet! . . . Uh wait a minute, what does that mean?”
“You, me, a tape machine, maybe another DDA to witness it?”
“Wow, I’ll even throw in a few bars of ‘That’s Amore.’ Only thing is . . .”
“All right, what is it you want.”
“I need to look at somebody’s jacket. Ancient history, but it’s still under seal. Like till 2000?”
“That’s it? No big thing, we do that all the time.”
“What, break into officially sealed records? And here I had such faith in the system.”
“At this rate you’ll be ready for your bar exam any day now. Listen, would you mind if we just went back to my place?” and immediately Doc—though he would have wagered against it—got a hardon. As if she’d noticed it, she added, “And we can pick up a pizza on the way.”
There was a time, back in his period of impulse-control deficit, when Doc’s reply would’ve had to be, “Marry me.” What he said now was, “Your hair’s different.”
“Somebody talked me into seeing this hotshot on Rodeo Drive. He puts in these streaks, see?”
“Groovy. Looks like you’ve been living at the beach for a while.”
“They were promoting a Surfer Chick Special.”
“Just for me, huh?”
“Who else, Doc.”
Back at Penny’s place it took maybe a minute and a half to deal with the pizza. Both of them reached at the same time for the last slice. “I believe this is mine,” said Doc.
Penny let go of the pizza and slid her hand down, took hold of his penis, and gave it a squeeze. “And this, I believe . . .” She reached over a stash box with some Asian buds in it he’d been smelling since he came in the room. “Roll us one while I go find an appropriate outfit.” He was just twisting the ends of the joint when she came back wearing nothing at all.
“There you go.”
“Now, you’re sure you’re not pissed off.”
“Me? pissed off, what’s that?”
“You know, if somebody I cared about, even in a casual-sex sort of way, had shopped me to the FBI? I’d certainly think twice. . . .” Doc lit up a
nd passed her the joint. “I mean,” she added thoughtfully when next she exhaled, “if it was my dick? and some self-satisfied lady prosecutor thought she was getting away with something?”
“Oh,” said Doc. “Well, you’ve got a point. . . . Here, let me. . . .”
“Just try it,” she cried, “you drug-crazed hippie freak, get your hand out of there, who said you could do that, let go of my, what do you think you’re—” By which time they were fucking, you could say, energetically. It was quick, not too quick, it was mean and nasty enough, it was great stoned fun, and in fact for an untimably short moment Doc believed it was somehow never going to be over, though he managed not to get panicked about that.
Normally Penny would’ve jumped right up again and gotten reimmersed in some straight-world activity, and Doc would have found his way to the TV set on some chance the playoffs, even though it was Eastern Division tonight, might still be on. But instead, as if both appreciated the importance of silence and embrace, they just lay there and lit up again and took time to finish the joint, which owing to its high resin content had considerately gone out the instant it hit the ashtray. Too soon, however, like Reality marching into the room, flipping on the lights, taking a gander, and going “Hrrumph!” it was time for the eleven-o’clock news, taken up, as always and for Penny more and more annoyingly, by developments in the Manson case, about to go to trial.
“Give it a rest, Bugliosi,” she snarled at the screen while the lead prosecutor was having his nightly couple of minutes with the cameras.
“Would’ve thought all this pretrial stuff’d be right up your alley,” Doc said.
“It was, for a while. They let me get in on a couple of depositions, but it’s too much like boys up in a tree house. The only part I enjoy anymore is hearing how all these hippie chicks did everything Manson told them to do. That master-slave thing, you know, it’s kind of cute?”
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