Inherent Vice (49 page)

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 Petunias 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, clari
fied, “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 contribution 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 gin
gerly 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 gath
ering 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.”

“Some white detective you never met before, and you didn’t trust me?
Wow, now I
am
pissed off.”

“You need to tell him,” Clancy pointed out to Tariq.

“But—” Doc went to supervise the coffeemaker. “Wait a minute man,
didn’t you say you had to take some oath of silence about that?”

“That don’t count,” Tariq said. “I thought it did once, but Puck and them other Nazis took a oath too, to watch each other’s back no matter what, and look how much good it did Glen. Am I
,
uh
,
spoze to respect
that
shit? I’m off the hook now. They don’t like it, they can see how far they get with it.”

“Okay. So what was it Glen owed you, exactly?”

“First you got to take a oath.”

“What? You just said that was bullshit.”

“Yeah, but you a honky. You got to sign off in blood, Blood, that you
won’t ever tell
nobody?

“Blood?”

“Clancy did.”

“I’m in the middle of my period, darlin,” she pointed out.

“So
...
could I borrow some of yours?” Doc wondered.

“Hey, fuck this,” Tariq heading for the door.

“Emotional, ain’t he?” Doc going over to the file cabinet and retriev
ing his emergency stash. Like, if this wasn’t an emergency...

Around the second or possibly third joint, everybody began to relax. Tariq got into the business he and Glen had done together while inside.

It was complicated. The original beef was between two Chicano fac
tions, Nuestra Familia, who were based out of Northern California, and the Sure
ñ
os, who were from down south here. At that moment among the prison population, there had been
active a snitch known as El Hue
voncito, who had brought grief to many inmates, black and white as well as Chicano. Everybody hated this little rat, everybody knew he’d have to
be dealt with, but for reasons of gang history, which grew very tangled especially when you were smoking weed, none of the Chicano population north or south could convenient
ly do the deed, so they finally
subbed it out to the Aryan Brothers, who just then also happened to have
an opening for a new member and were trying to recruit Glen Charlock for the slot. Part of the initiation being that you had to kill somebody. Sometimes giving them a cut on the face was enough, but then that meant they’d eventually have to come after you looking for payback, so it was better, Tariq explained, to just kill they ass and get it over with.

Glen wanted to be in the Brotherhood but didn’t want to kill anybody. He knew he would fuck up somehow and get caught, because somehow he always did, and if he wasn’t killed on the spot by associates of El Huevoncito, he’d either get a trip upstate to the San Quentin Green Room or be kept in the joint forever, when all he really wanted, sometimes desperately, was to be outside. On the other hand, the Broth
ers were being really pains in the ass about it. So Glen went looking for a
way to sub-subcontract the hit, take credit for it among the Brothers, but escape retaliation from anybody else.

Tariq enjoyed a reputation as a shank artist who never got caught, but approaching him took almost more caution than Glen knew how to use. Black and white did not routinely mix, nor were they encouraged to. “Sounds like fun,” Tariq admitted, “but it’ll cost a lot. ‘Less I’m mistaken, more than you got or be likely to have.”

True as far as it went, except that Glen had some unusual connections
on the outside, though he’d been careful not to share this information unless he had to. Now it looked like he had to.

“How would you be wanting payment? in cash? Dope? Pussy?” Tariq
just stared back. “Help me out. Watermelons?”

Tariq thought about taking offense, shrugged, and made a minimal gesture with his trigger finger, to indicate firearms.

“What do you know. My friends just happen to specialize in that area. What kind of weight we be talking about?”

“Oh, enough for somewhere between a platoon of niggers and a company.”

Glen looked around for eavesdroppers. “You don’t mean for in
here,
man?

“Shit no, I’m bad, not stupid. But we all got friends outside, and mine,
that’s what they could use right now.”

“How soon?”

“How soon you want them woods suckin all on you dick in gratitude?”

A blur, a shadow, passed, and neither Tariq nor Glen was sure
what they saw, but they knew who it was. “Some rat runnin for his hole,”
Glen said.

“Means we been walkin and talkin too long. Better from here on we keep it short.”

By and by, El Huevoncito, rest his soul, was found mysteriously
deceased after an early-morning shake-and-bake on Tariq’s block, which
gave Tariq a perfect alibi and never got traced to him. Glen, with his time also accounted for, was likewise in the clear, though he made a
point of asking for brotherly assistance in disposing of a mess-hall shank
he’d first put some of his own blood on. He was accepted into the Aryan
Brotherhood and shortly after Tariq’s release found himself also on the outside, with a job offer from Mickey Wolfmann.

As it turned out, because of the logistics, Tariq’s people, Warriors Against the Man Black Armed Militia (WAMBAM) had had to wait awhile for Glen to set up the small-arms part of the deal and by now were growing fretful.

“Which is about the time I come to see you,” Tariq said.

“I can dig why you didn’t want to get too specific,” Doc said. “Maybe
I
should’ve
took that oath.”

“I understand you been gettin some shit from the local FBI, Brother Karenga’s bed buddies.”

“Yeah but I couldn’t tell them much cause I didn’t know all this. Now I guess I’ll have to start worryin about the Red Squad and the P-DIDdies, too.”

“How’s that?”

“See technically, it’s black armed rebellion, ain’t it, gets us into heavy
Charles Manson fantasy material, a
nd there’s idiots enough in the
LAPD who take ol’ Charlie seriously when he starts in screamin about all that.”

“Yeah over at the WAMBAM office too, I been seein these T-shirts and shit? Like Manson’s mug shots with Afros airbrushed onto them, that’s real popular.”

“How about Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme?”

“Yeah, ain’t
she
some righteous-ass bitch.”

“No I meant, like Squeaky T-shirts, where she has a Afro?”

“Oh
...
not that I know of. You want me look around for one?”

“Actually maybe Leslie van Houten, too, what do you think?”

“Fellas,” muttered Clancy.

“Right,” Doc said, “then ... I guess what I really need to know from you is who these ‘friends’ of Glen’s were, that were arranging this arms deal.”

“Some bunch of honky dentists out on lower Sunset. Worked out of some weird-ass building look like a big tooth?”

“Uh-huh,” Doc trying not to betray the hollowness of soul that hit him now. “Well. Maybe I can think of one or two places to look.”

Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.
If Glen all along had had “friends” in the Golden Fang, what was he even doing in the pen? Was he taking the fall for somebody else, some higher-level figure in the Fang organization? Had they put him in there as a deliberate plant, the Fang’s man on the inside, as if they had a master scheme to station their agents in all areas of public life? And how deeply implicated did that make the Fang in Glen’s murder? Was Glen another Rudy Blatnoyd, had he touched some acupressure point forever uncharted on the mysterious body of the Golden Fang so uncomfortably he had to be dealt with?

And would this be multiple choice?

By now it was dark and they were all hungry, and somehow they ended up at the Plastic Nickel on Sepulveda. Inside, the walls were decorated with silvery plastic reproductions of the heads side of a U.S. five-cent coin, each about the size of a g
iant pizza. An artificial hedge
about two feet high, very green and also of plastic, separated the rows
of booths. Crews of unknown hedge-assembly specialists had carefully
fitted together thousands of small modular leafy twig imitations plug-
and jackwise in nearly infinite complexity to produce this strangely entertaining shrubbery. Over time all manner of small articles got lost
down inside of it, including roach clips and roaches and hash pipes,
loose change, car keys, earrings, contact lenses, tiny glassine packets of
coke and heroin and so forth. Life below, say, one gram. Customers had
been known to spend hours while their coffee got cold, carefully going
through the hedge inch by inch, especially when on speed. Now and
then, late at night, they would be interrupted by one of the plastic images
up on the wall, as Thomas Jefferson turned from left profile to full face, unfastened the ribbon that held his hair back, shook everything out into a full-color redheaded freak halo, and spoke to selected dopers, usually
quoting from the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights,
which had actually been of great help with many legal defenses focusing on search-and-seizure issues in particular. Tonight he waited till Clancy
and Tariq had both headed back to the toilets, turned quickly to Doc,
and said, “So! the Golden Fang not only traffick in Enslavement, they
peddle the implements of Liberation as well.”