James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (14 page)

The phone rang. Dr. Fred picked up, mumbled and listened. Dwight heard
scree-scree
noise. It sounded like a Bureau patch call.

Dr. Fred nodded. Dwight grabbed the phone. The
scree-scree
s faded to an Okie twang. The caller said, “Dwight, it's Buddy Fritsch. I got me a cluster fuck here, and you better come.”

A puddle jumper got him into McCarran. He cabbed downtown to LVPD. Buddy was holed up in his office. He was half-tanked. He was pacing. Three cigarettes burned in one ashtray.

Dwight shut the door and locked it. Buddy quit pacing and noticed him.

“I got this AG's man squeezing me. He's got a print on Janice, and he's rolling the dice. Okay, he offered me money, but I still can't see no way out, except to hand up Wayne and—”

Dwight grabbed him. Dwight threw him over the desk and dumped a file cabinet on him. Dwight pulled the air conditioner off the wall and dropped it on his back. Dwight kicked him in the balls three times.

“You get me a freak to hand up for Wayne Senior, and you do it now.”

(Miami, 8/8/68)

B
ug work:

The wires, the pliers, the screwdrivers. The drills, the mounts, the baseboard dust. Butterfingers: sweaty hands on gnat-size devices.

The Eden Roc Hotel. Drill job: suite 1206 into suite 1207. Crutch worked with Freddy Turentine. Freddy was the “Bug King.” Freddy's bug résumé astounded. Freddy was on loan to Clyde Duber Associates. Freddy usually worked for “Shakedown King” Fred Otash.

They drilled. 1206 was their listening post. Farlan Brown was due in 1207 shortly. Time clock: the Find Gretchen Farr gig was moving way into five figures.

They drilled. They bored through to 1207 and pushed wires in. Crutch picked the door lock. They got full-suite access. They miked up the bedroom lamp shades. They tapped the two phones. They Spackle-covered the wall wires and applied touch-up paint. They stuffed baffling in the bore-through holes and sanded the rough spots down smooth. They swept up all the baseboard dust and zoomed back to 1206.

Finger-cramping drudge work—four full hours. Crutch was grit-encrusted. His fingers hurt. He had Spackle dust in his ears, eyes and nasal nooks. He took a shower and cleaned up. Freddy went to his room to snooze. Crutch turned the living room TV on and put the sound low. The screen faced the bug-tap receiver. He grabbed a chair, hooked on headphones and listened to dead air next door.

The TV half-ass absorbed him. Nixon got the nod, first ballot, yawn/snore/soporific. Nixon emitted stupe vibes. He did that V-for-victory
thing and looked like a rube robot. The news cut to riot footage. The Miami Congo blazed. It derived from a spook housing-project brouhaha. Spooks were stoning and sniping white motorists. Nigger mobs, arson, looting. Hot-weather action. Groovy footage.

Crutch yawned. He was running on six-week sleep deficit, all per HIS CASE.

HIS
case. Not Clyde or Buzz Duber's.
HIS
side deal with Dr. Fred.
HIS
shot at the million-dollar Hughes deal.
HIS
side deal side deal: Gretchen Farr as Celia Reyes. Add the knife-scar woman. Add the house with the door markings and the body parts in the kitchen.

HIS CASE
.

Farlan Brown was Miami-bound. Wayne Tedrow Jr. was here already. Junior had Senior's hate-mail stash. Dr. Fred wanted it. Junior worked for Farlan Brown and Dracula Hughes. Dr. Fred wanted to sell Drac his racial-purity plan. Crazy shit—sure. But crazy shit with dollar signs attached.

$$$$$$$$$—

He's hoarded his secret knowledge. He's held it back from Clyde, Buzz and Dr. Fred. They don't know about Gretchen as Celia. They don't know about the knife-scar woman or the Horror House on North Tamarind.

HIS CASE
—now six weeks in.

His pad was file-crammed already. His mother's file ate up most of his floor and shelf space. He rented a second file pad downtown. The Elm Hotel—twelve scoots a week. A piss-in-the-sink dive for rum-dum pensioners. He laid in some file boxes and reams of file paper. He's on the job full-time.

Filework: lead file, car file, forensic file, file on 2216 North Tamarind.

He researched the Horror House. It was
not
an Arnie Moffett party-rental crib. It was
near
the Gretchen/Celia-rented house and the other party cribs. Proximity did not equal connection. Yeah, but—the weird thrust of that night made
everything
seem connected. It was like a dream state. Gretchen/Celia and the knife-scar woman kiss—and his world re-situates.

House research. Paydirt: the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce owned Horror House and used it for fund-raisers. It stood unoccupied since mid-'67. He snuck in again and rolled every goddamn room for prints. He got nothing but smudges and bullshit partials. The Chamber let him look at their fund-raiser file. Groups were listed, guest lists were not.
There was no way to know who had been in the house
. The girl at the Chamber told him one blood-churning thing: sleazoid hippies broke in and squatted there sometimes. Question: what were Gretchen/Celia and the knife-scar woman
still
doing in the Moffett house? Easy answer: squatting rent-free after their real rent expired. Question: who bought Phil Irwin off
the Find Gretchen gig? Possible answer: Farlan Brown, via Hughes Tool Co. Brown got wind of the gig. Brown wanted Gretchie un–fucked with. His motive? Who fucking knows?

House file to car file.

He bribed a clerk at Hertz Rent a Car. Gretchen/Celia returned the '66 Comet with the radiator blown. That mandated a no-rental stint. Thus, the Comet stayed untouched since the drop-off night. Crutch re-bribed the Hertz guy and got two hours alone with the Comet. He print-wiped and got one latent. He spent five weeks hand-checking female print cards at the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and LAPD. So far, no match.

Car file to forensic file.

Clyde had dirt on the county coroner, “Tojo” Tom Takahashi. Tojo Tom was a jailbait Johnny with a yen for young Jap cooze. Crutch leaned on him and told him to keep mum with Clyde on all this. Tojo Tom agreed. Crutch waltzed him into Horror House two nights after his first entry. They split a pint of Jim Beam and tamped down their nerves. They worked by Coleman lantern light. Crutch took photos. Tojo Tom examined and bagged the body parts and took blood and tissue samples. Crutch got pix of the tattoo on the arm and the geometric wall markings. Tojo Tom removed the crumbled green stones from the arm gouge and separately bagged them.

It took hours. The smell was foul. Crutch held the lantern while Tojo Tom brushed maggots off. Tojo Tom called it an “evisceration snuff.” The victim was a young Latin woman. He had her blood analyzed and called Crutch with the results. It was type O+, very common, no outstanding characteristics. He found odd powder fragments in the gouged tissue and had them analyzed. Very odd: there was no toxicology make. Crutch had a gemologist analyze the green stone fragments. Emeralds? No, just green glass.

Forensic file to tattoo file. Canvassing from there.

Crutch hit a total of forty-seven tattoo parlors in and around L.A. He showed his photo of the partial tattoo to endless tattoo freaks. So far, no make. Tattoo file to lead file. He hit LAPD and Sheriff's R&I again. He checked mug books, teletypes and occurrence-field interrogation files for mentions of Gretchen/Celia and got zero. Cop files to INS files. He scanned photo sheets for every female immigrant from every Latin American country extant and got zero on Gretchen/Celia. He remembered Bev's Switchboard. Gretchen/Celia got calls from three foreign consulates: Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic. He called all three and got three more zeros: no records of calls to Gretchen/Celia. Her Dominican driver's license turned out to be a phony. The Dominican national DMV had no listing. That bootleg-number call to Bev's Switchboard? No make on it yet.

$$$ to ??? and back again—dollar signs, question marks and zeros.

The kiss. The shadows in and out of his vision. The knife-scar woman's gray-streaked hair. She didn't have a name. Gretchen/Celia had two.
He wanted to know that woman's name
. He drew pictures of her and papered his walls with them. He gave her her own real features, not Dana Lund's.

Their talk—“Grapevine,” “Tommy,” “plant”—what did it mean? He checked city directories nationwide. He found listings for 216 Grapevine restaurants, hotels, motels and bars. He didn't know where he should start checking or
if
he should start checking or if it meant anything.

So, Gretchen/Celia fucked men and stole their money. “Al,” “Chuck,” “Lew,” Dr. Fred, Farlan Brown potentially. Sal Mineo spilled all that
he
knew. Gretchen/Celia was allegedly left-wing. What did
that
mean? She wanted to “get next to” Farlan Brown—say what? on that. The knife-scar woman—how did
she
play in? The dead woman in the Horror House—was
she
connected?

Crutch brain-looped and watched TV. He got nigger-riot visuals and headphone fuzz next door.
Dead
air—Farlan Brown's suite was still still.

Avco Jewelers. Gretchen/Celia gets advice on re-cutting emeralds. The green glass shards in the dead woman's arm.

Question marks, dollar signs—

He looped through Las Vegas six times. He spot-tailed Farlan Brown and Wayne Tedrow Jr. He saw them at the D.I. They took the private elevator up to Dracula's lair. Brown has
not
seen Gretchen/Celia in Vegas. He's sure of it. Maybe she never hooked up with him. Maybe she ripped him off in L.A. and split. He ran a Miami phone book/airline check on the names Gretchen Farr and Celia Reyes. He got zero Gretchens. He got nine Celias and ran driver's license checks on them all. None of them were
her
.

He ran a Miami-airline check on Wayne Tedrow Jr. and hit positive. He ran a hotel check and located him at the Doral. He tailed Wayne Junior three times. Wayne Junior might have tail-spotted him. The Clark County D.A. passed a Vegas rumor on to Clyde Duber: Wayne Junior might have offed Wayne Senior in June.

It was all dizzying. It was re-situating, re-wire-all-your-circuits shit.

The tails went A-OK. Wayne Junior met a black-clad, foreign-looking guy twice. Crutch hit his rooming house and records-checked him. Jean-Philippe Mesplede, French merc, age forty-five. Mesplede and Wayne Junior combed Little Havana twice. Crutch followed up. The deal: they were looking for two Cuban men named Gaspar Fuentes and Miguel Díaz Arredondo.

The nigger riot heated up. The TV screen almost throbbed. Spooks lobbed Molotov cocktails. Spooks chased honkies with two-by-fours. Crutch heard movement next door.

Yeah, it's Farlan Brown's voice. That's him tipping the bellman. There's the door again. The bellman's gone. There's phone-dial noise. Yawn—there's Brown on the horn with his wife.

Blah, blah—the kids are fine, the dog has fleas, I love you, too. Hang-up noise. Door-opening noise. A young woman's voice.

Yeah, dig it
—

They negotiated—fifty for French, a yard for half and half. Brown took the latter. The bed was by the wall unit. Air hum drowned out most of the trick. The climax came in fuzzy.

Brown bragged post-coital: I'm a big cheese with Howard Hughes. The call girl said, “Is that so?” Brown blathered. I'm hip, I'm cool, I swing. I run Hughes Airways. I'll be running Hughes charter flights to some rocking new mob resorts.

The call girl stifles a yawn. The bedsprings creak. A zipper threads. Bye, bye, baby—she's out the door.

Brown got back on the horn. Crutch hit console buttons and activated the tap line. He got garbles and a dial tone. He heard a gruff “Hel-lo.”

Brown said, “Freddy, it's Farlan.” A man said, “What's happening,
paisan
?” Crutch made the voice: Shakedown Fred O.

He hit his tape feed. The spool turned. He got garbles and voices verbatim.

Two hang-up clicks—Miami and Vegas. Crutch switched to the bug line. There: yawns, bed creaks, silence and snores.

He hit switches and shut down the feed lines. It was 1:14 a.m. His stomach growled. He'd surveilled his way through dinnertime and then some. He called Freddy Turentine's room and roused Freddy. He said they had a bug job in Vegas—a hotel suite by August 22. Freddy said, “Remind me tomorrow,” and hung up.