“Oh yeah? you never told me you were into that, Penny, you mean all this time we could’ve been—”
“With you? forget it, Doc.”
“What.”
“Well . . .” Was that what they call a mischievous gleam in her eye? “You’re almost short enough. I guess. But, see, it isn’t only the hypnotic stare, Charlie’s big appeal is that he’s down there eyeball to eyeball with the ladies he’s ordering around. It might be about fucking Daddy, but the really perverse thrill is that Daddy’s only five foot two.”
“Wow man, well . . . I could work on that?”
“Keep me up to date, anyway.”
A promo came on for the late movie, which tonight happened to be Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964).
“Hey Penny, were you going in tomorrow?”
“Maybe around midday. Unless you have a better idea, I’m just going to go crash, I think.”
“No wait a minute, here’s something you might really like.” He tried to explain that this Japanese monster movie was actually a remake of the classic chick flick Roman Holiday (1953), both movies featuring a stylish princess visiting another country who meets a working-class protag who becomes sweet on her, although, despite having some adventures together, the two at the end must part, but somewhere in the middle of this review, Penny having slid gracefully to her knees and begun sucking his cock, next thing either of them knew, there they were fucking again. Afterward, as they were sitting on the couch, the movie came on. Doc must have drifted away somewhere in the middle, but toward the end he woke up to find Penny sniffling into a Kleenex, transfixed by the human or romantic part of the plotline after all.
NEXT DAY WAS as they say another day, and by the time Doc found himself in the Hall of Justice again sitting on a chair from some long-ago yard sale in front of a tape recorder mike back in a neglected cubicle among brooms, mops, cleaning supplies, and an antique floor-waxing machine which may have been assembled from WWII tank parts, he’d begun to wonder if the affectionate Penny of last night hadn’t just been another wishful hallucination. She kept calling him Larry, for one thing, and avoiding eye contact. The witness she brought along naturally turned out to be her cubicle-mate Rhus, whose glare had intensified overnight from suspicion to loathing.
Doc ran through for them what he’d seen in Vegas, having stopped by his office earlier to pick up a logbook, a sign not so much of professionalism as of Doper’s Memory. There was uncommon interest in Mickey’s white suit, for some reason. Lapel-notch location and so forth. Ready-made or bespoke. And how was his attitude? they wanted to know. Who was present besides the FBI? Who appeared to be in charge?
“No way to tell. There was casino security, and all kinds of civilians in suits moving around, but in terms of Mob folks, if that’s what you’re getting at, were they wearing black fedoras, making with Eddie Robinson remarks? no, not that I know of?”
This county-DA exercise really looked to Doc like pissants versus elephants. You could catch the FBI in the act of sodomizing the president in the Lincoln Memorial at high noon and local law enforcement would still just have to stand around and watch, getting more or less nauseated depending which president.
On the other hand, nobody asked about Puck Beaverton, and Doc didn’t volunteer anything. Now and then he caught the two deputy DAs giving each other significant looks. What about, he had no idea. Finally the tape ran out and Penny said, “I think we’re done here. On behalf of the DA’s office, Mr. Sportello, thank you so much for your cooperation.”
“And thank you, Miss Kimball, for not thanking me while the tape was on. And Miss Frothingham, may I add, that skirt length on you today is especially attractive.”
Rhus screamed and picking up a galvanized trash can prepared to throw it at Doc’s head, but Penny intervened and coaxed her out the door. Just before she disappeared herself, she looked back at Doc and pointed at the phone, making phone-call gestures. Who was supposed to call whom was less clear.
The clock up on the wall, which reminded Doc of elementary school back in the San Joaquin, read some hour that it could not possibly be. Doc waited for the hands to move, but they didn’t, from which he deduced that the clock was broken and maybe had been for years. Which was groovy however because long ago Sortilège had taught him the esoteric skill of telling time from a broken clock. The first thing you had to do was light a joint, which in the Hall of Justice might seem odd, but surely not way back here—who knew, maybe even outside the jurisdiction of local drug enforcement—though just to be on the safe side he also lit a De Nobili cigar and filled the room with a precautionary cloud of smoke from the classic Mafia favorite. After inhaling potsmoke for a while, he glanced up at the clock, and sure enough, it showed a different time now, though this could also be from Doc having forgotten where the hands were to begin with.
The phone rang, he picked up and heard Penny say, “Come down to my cubicle, there’ll be a package waiting for you.” No hello or nothing.
“Will you be there?”
“No.”
“How about what’s-her-name?”
“Nobody’ll be there but you. Take all the time you need.”
“Thanks babe, oh hey and by the way I was wondering, if I could find you a Manson-chick type wig to wear? would it be, like, a problem”—the change in sound ambience as she hung up echoed for a while—“I was thinking in terms of Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, you know, sort of long and curled at the same time, and—Oh. Uhm . . . Penny?”
DOWNSTAIRS IN PENNY’S cubicle, waiting for Doc on a beat-up old wood table and decorated with all kinds of top-secret stickers, sat the record of Adrian Prussia’s strange history with the California Public Code, including his numerous escapes from punishment for murder one. Doc lit a Kool, opened the folder, and started reading, and it was clear right away why the Department didn’t want any of this known. His first thought was how much danger Penny might’ve put herself in the way of for unsealing this—maybe not even aware of how much. For her it was just more ancient history.
Detective X’s name turned out to be Vincent Indelicato. Adrian’s lawyers had argued justifiable homicide. Their client Mr. Prussia, a widely respected businessman, believing someone was breaking in to his beach apartment on Gummo Marx Way, had mistaken the decedent for the irate husband of a female acquaintance and, swearing further that he’d seen a gun, thereupon fired his own. No one was more upset than Mr. Prussia to find he’d plugged an LAPD detective, one he had even in fact met occasionally in the course of his normal day’s business.
The body was identified by the arresting officer, Detective Indelicato’s partner of many years, Lieutenant Christian F. Bjornsen.
“What,” Doc wondered aloud, “the fuck, is going on here?”
Bigfoot’s partner. The one he didn’t ride with these days, or talk about, or even mention by name. Bigfoot’s air of possessed melancholy now began to make sense. This was mourning all right, and it was deep.
And where else could the events have taken place but Gummo Marx Way—GMW, as it was known locally, the hard-luck boulevard everybody living along Doc’s piece of shoreline sooner or later ended up on, though nobody Doc knew had ever lived there, or knew anybody else who did. Yet somehow there it always lay, between the populations of the South Bay beach towns and other places they thought at some point in their lives they needed to be. The home of a girlfriend whose psychopathic parents wanted her back before curfew. A dealer shifty as a rat up a palm tree, whose less-wary clients found themselves putting oregano and Bisquick to uses they were never meant for. A pay phone in a bar that a friend of a friend, in peril and without resources, had called you from, the hope in his voice already fading, too late at night.
“Okay, wait a minute,” Doc muttered, maybe out loud, “is what this is now, is . . .” Bigfoot’s partner is murdered by Adrian Prussia, with the apparent collaboration o
f elements in the department. How does Bigfoot react? Does he check out an appropriate-size cannon and some extra clips and go looking for Adrian? Does he plant a bomb in the loan shark’s car? Does he keep it all inside the LAPD and embark on a nonviolent and lonely crusade for justice? No, none of the above, instead what Bigfoot does is, is he finds some dumb-ass sucker of a civilian PI who’ll keep nosing on into the case, maybe even clumsily enough to call some attention.
And then what? What did Bigfoot expect to happen? Somebody would decide to come after Doc? Groovy. And where’d be the nameless, unspoken-of partner to watch Doc’s back for him?
As if looking for something he knew he didn’t want to find, Doc leafed quickly through the other arrests in the folder. It became clear as vodka you keep in the icebox that whatever the connection was between the LAPD and Adrian Prussia, he might as well have been working for them as a contract killer. Time after time he was pulled in, questioned, arraigned, indicted, no matter—somehow the cases never quite got to trial, each being bargained down in the interests of justice, not to mention of Adrian, who invariably walked. The thought did flit on fragile mothlike wings in and out of Doc’s consciousness that the DA’s office had to be aware of all this, if not outright complicit. Sometimes there wouldn’t be enough evidence for a case, or what there was would be inadmissible, or too circumstantial, or the body couldn’t be found, or sometimes a third party would come forward and plead to some make-believe offense like voluntary manslaughter. One of these thoughtful patsies in particular caught Doc’s attention, turning out to be who but his old parking-lot Q&A buddy Boris Spivey, currently on the run out in the U.S. someplace with his fiancée Dawnette. From Pico Rivera. Curiously, after pulling reduced time on the Semi-Honor Block at San Quentin, Boris had then been cut loose to go directly to work for Mickey Wolfmann. Making him, along with Puck, the second AP Finance alumnus Doc knew of who’d hired on with Mickey. Was Adrian Prussia also running a talent agency?
Doc was about to shut the folder and go looking for a cigarette machine when something more recent caught his eye. It was a brightly lit photograph which didn’t look attached to anything else, as if it had been tossed in in some miscellaneous way. It showed a group of men standing on a pier next to an open box about the size of a coffin, full of U.S. currency. Among them was Adrian Prussia in some idea of a yachting costume, holding up one of the bills and making with the shit-eating grin which had endeared him to so many. The bill was a twenty and looked strangely familiar. Doc rooted around in his fringe bag till he found a Coddington lens and squinted through it at the picture. “Aha!” Just as he thought. It was that CIA Nixonhead funnymoney again, like the bills Sauncho and his pals had fished out of the drink. And in the background, riding calmly at anchor in some nameless harbor, slightly out of focus as if through the veils of the next world, the schooner Golden Fang. There was a date on the back of the photo. Less than a year ago.
ON THE WAY back to the beach, Doc looked in at the offices of Hardy, Gridley & Chatfield. Sauncho was there, but mentally for the moment not available, having the other night happened to watch The Wizard of Oz (1939) for the first time on a color TV set.
“Did you know it starts off in black and white,” he informed Doc with some anxiety, “but it changes to color! Do you realize what that means?”
“Saunch . . .”
No use. “—the world we see Dorothy living in at the beginning of the picture is black, actually brown, and white, only she thinks she’s seeing it all in color—the same normal everyday color we see our lives in. Then the cyclone picks her up, dumps her in Munchkin Land, and she walks out the door, and suddenly we see the brown and white shift into Technicolor. But if that’s what we see, what’s happening with Dorothy? What’s her ‘normal’ Kansas color changing into? Huh? What very weird hypercolor? as far beyond our everyday color as Technicolor is beyond black and white—” and so on.
“I know I should . . . be worried about this, Saunch, but . . .”
“The network ought to’ve at least run a disclaimer,” Sauncho by now quite indignant. “Munchkin Land is strange enough, isn’t it, without adding to the viewer’s mental confusion, and in fact I think there’s a pretty good class-action suit here against MGM itself, so I’m gonna bring it up at the firm’s next weekly get-together.”
“Well, can I ask you something that’s sort of related?”
“You mean about Dorothy and the—”
“Y—sort of. You recall that stash of Nixon bills you guys hauled out of the drink. I just ran across a photo of a loan shark named Adrian Prussia posed next to a box full of the stuff. Maybe from the same batch you found, maybe not. Did anybody keep a record of what happened to it after you hauled it in?”
“I’d certainly like to think most of it’s safe and sound in a federal evidence room someplace.”
“You’d like to, but . . .”
“Well, for a while out on deck there, it all got into a happy-go-lucky type atmosphere. . . . Federals are like everybody else, you can’t expect them to live on their salaries.”
“Thing about this picture is, is they all look like they just got off, or were maybe about to get on, the Golden Fang.”
“Swell. So how does this relate again to Dorothy Gale and her color-vision situation?”
“What?”
“You said this photo you saw was ‘sort of’ related.”
“Oh. Oh, well it was in this, this strange color process? Yeah. Colors looked like they do on acid?”
“Nice try, Doc.”
FIGURING TO CHECK in at his office, Doc left the Marina by way of Lincoln Boulevard, slid across the creek and down Culver to Vista del Mar. Even in the parking lot, he felt something was strange, not only in the afternoon hush of the building but also in Petunia’s demeanor. “Oh Doc, do you really have to go upstairs right away? It’s been ages since we had one of our interesting chats.” She was perched attractively on a sort of high barstool next to her check-in station, and Doc couldn’t help noticing that her lilac turnout today didn’t seem to include matching, or in fact any, underwear. Good thing he was wearing shades, which allowed him to gaze for longer than usual. “Um, Petunia, are you trying to tell me I have visitors waiting?”
She lowered her gaze and voice. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly visitors?”
“Not exactly waiting?”
The door upstairs was unlocked and slightly ajar. Doc stooped and reached the little snub-nose Magnum out of his ankle rig, though it did not take a sharp ear to identify what was going on inside. He eased through the door, and the first thing he saw was Clancy Charlock and Tariq Khalil down on his office floor, fucking.
After a while Tariq looked up. “Hey. Doctor Sportello, my man. This is all right, isn’t it?”
Doc raised his sunglasses and pretended to scrutinize the scene. “Looks all right to me, but you’d know better’n I would. . . .”
“What he means is,” Clancy, from somewhere underneath, clarified, “is it all right that we’re using your office.” Seems while Doc was in Vegas, they had showed up here separately one day looking for him, and Petunia decided they were a cute couple, so she gave them a spare key. Doc excused himself and headed back downstairs to have a word with Petunia, the particular word on his mind being “cute.”
“I know you have the soul of a matchmaker, Petunia, and normally I’m groovy with intimacy of all kinds, but not between elements in a case I’m workin on. Too much information I end up never seeing. . . .”
And so on. Fat lot of good this did against the perhaps-insane sparkle in her eyes. “But it’s too late, can’t you see? they’re in love! I’m just the karmic facilitator, I really have the gift for knowing who’s supposed to be together and who’s not, and I’m never wrong. I’ve even been staying up late night after night, studying for my degree in Relationship Counseling so I can make some contri
bution no matter how tiny to the total amount of love in the world.”
“The total what?”
“Oh, Doc. Love is the only thing that will ever save us.”
“Who?”
“Everybody.”
“Petun-ya?” screamed Dr. Tubeside from some back region of the suite.
“Well, maybe not him.”
“I think I’m gonna go back upstairs now and see if they’re really there. . . .”
After a couple of careful taps on his office door, Doc put his head gingerly around the edge of it and this time observed Tariq and Clancy with their clothes back on, playing a quiet game of gin rummy and listening to a Bonzo Dog Band album which to his knowledge Doc didn’t own. Obviously hallucination wasn’t out of the question here, but then again if it really was happening, all the average pothead had to do was look at them to see that their common element, Glen Charlock, had been gathering presence and energy, like a ghost slowly becoming visible.
Clancy noticed Doc and whispered something to Tariq. They put down their cards and Tariq said, “Figured on you showin up sometime, man.”
Doc headed for the electric coffeepot and started in making coffee. “I had to go to Las Vegas,” he said. “I thought I was looking for Puck Beaverton.”
“Clancy mentioned something. Any luck?”
“Nothin but,” Doc shrugged. “It was Vegas.”
“He’s pissed off,” Clancy said.
“Am not.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Glen,” Tariq said.
“So did I,” added Clancy.
Doc nodded, looked in his shirt for a cigarette, came up empty-fingered.
“Here,” said Clancy.
“Virginia Slims? what is this?” But Clancy was holding out her lighter like the Statue of Liberty or something. “All right,” Doc said, “it’s menthol at least.”
“I should’ve told you the whole thing,” Tariq said. “Too late now, but I still could’ve trusted you more.”
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