The Big Nowhere (11 page)

Bagman time.

His first stop was Variety International, where Herman Gerstein gave him a five-minute lecture on the evils of Communism and handed him a fat envelope stuffed with C-notes; stop two was a short stroll through the Teamster and UAES picket lines over to Hollywood Prestige National Pictures, where Wally Voldrich, the head of Security, kicked loose with a doughnut box full of fifties dusted with powdered sugar and chocolate sprinkles. Howard’s ten thou was already in his pocket; Mickey C.’s contribution to the Friends of the American Way in Motion Pictures would be his last pickup of the morning.

Buzz took Sunset out to Santa Monica Canyon, to the bungalow hideaway where Mickey palled with his stooges, entertained poon and hid out from his wife. The money in his pocket had him feeling brash: if Mal Considine was around when he dropped the bag with Ellis Loew, he’d rattle his cage to see what the four years since Laura had done to his balls. If it felt right, he’d tell Howard he’d sign on to fight Communism—Leotis Dineen was pressing him for a grand and a half, and he was a bad jigaboo to fuck with.

Cohen’s bungalow was a bamboo job surrounded by specially landscaped tropical foliage, camouflage for his triggermen when the Mick and Jack Dragna were skirmishing. Buzz parked in the driveway behind a white Packard ragtop, wondering where Mickey’s bulletproofed Caddy was and who’d be around to hand him his envelope. He walked up to the door and rang the buzzer; a woman’s deep-South voice drifted out a window screen. “Come in.”

Buzz opened the door and saw Audrey Anders sitting at a living room table, hitting the keys of an adding machine. No makeup, dungarees and one of Mickey’s monogrammed dress shirts didn’t dent her beauty at all; she actually looked better than she did New Year’s morning, pink party dress and high heels, kicking Tommy Sifakis in the balls. “Hello, Miss Anders.”

Audrey pointed to a Chinese lacquered coffee table; a roll of bills secured by a rubber band was resting smack in the middle. “Mickey said to tell you mazel tov, which I guess means he’s glad you’re in with this grand jury thing.”

Buzz sat down in an easy chair and put his feet up, his signal that he meant to stay and look awhile. “Mickey takin’ advantage of that master’s degree of yours?”

Audrey tapped out a transaction, checked the paper the machine expelled and wrote on a pad, all very slowly. She said, “You believe the program notes at the El Rancho Burlesque?”

“No, I just made you for the brains.”

“The brains to keep books for a lending operation?”

“Loan shark’s more the word, but I meant brains in general.”

Audrey pointed to Buzz’s feet. “Planning to stay awhile?”

“Not long. You really got a master’s degree?”

“Jesus, we keep asking each other these questions. No, I do not have a master’s degree, but I do have a certificate in accounting from a second-rate teachers college in Jackson, Mississippi. Satisfied?”

Buzz didn’t know if the woman wanted him out the door pronto or if she welcomed the interruption—totalling shark vig on a fine winter day was his idea of hunger. He played his only ace, his one opening to see what she thought of him. “Lucy Whitehall okay?”

Audrey lit a cigarette and blew two perfect smoke rings. “Yes. Sol Gelfman has her tucked away at his place in Palm Springs, and Mickey had some friend of his on the Sheriff’s Department issue something called a restraining order. If Tommy bothers Lucy, the police will arrest him. She told me she’s grateful for what you did. I didn’t tell her you did it for money.”

Buzz ignored the jibe and smiled. “Tell Lucy hi for me. Tell her she’s so pretty I might’ve done it for free.”

Audrey laughed. “In a pig’s eye you would. Meeks, what is between you and Mickey?”

“I’ll answer that one with a question. Why you wanta know?”

Audrey blew two more rings and ground out her cigarette. “Because he talked about you for an hour straight last night. Because he said he can’t figure out if you’re the stupidest smart man or the smartest stupid man he ever met, and he can’t figure out why you blow all your money with colored bookies when you could bet with him for no vig. He said that only stupid men love danger, but you love danger and you’re not stupid. He said he can’t figure out whether you’re brave or crazy. Does any of this make sense to you?”

Buzz saw the words inscribed on his tombstone, all crimped together so they’d fit. He answered straight, not caring who Audrey told. “Miss Anders, I take the risks Mickey’s afraid to, so I make him feel safe. He’s a little guy and I’m a little guy, and maybe I’m just a tad better with my hands and that baton of mine. Mickey’s got more to lose than me, so he runs scared more than me. And if I’m crazy, it means he’s smart. You know what surprises me about this talk we’re havin’, Miss Anders?”

The question interrupted Audrey starting to smile—a big beam that showed off two slightly crooked teeth and a cold sore on her lower lip. “No, what?”

“That Mickey thinks enough of you to talk to you about stuff like that. That surely does surprise me.”

Audrey’s smile fizzled out. “He loves me.”

“You mean he appreciates the favors you do him. Like when I was a cop, I skimmed that good old white powder and sold it to Mickey, not Jack D. We got to be as friendly as anybody and Mickey can be ’cause of that. I’m just surprised he plays it that close with a woman is all.”

Audrey lit another cigarette; Buzz saw it as cover for bad thoughts, good banter flushed down the toilet. He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so personal.”

Audrey’s eyes ignited. “Oh yes you did, Meeks. You
surely
did.”

Buzz got up and walked around the room, checking out the strange chink furnishings, wondering who’d picked them out, Mickey’s wife or this ex-stripper/bookkeeper who was making him feel jumpy, like a gun would go off if he said the wrong thing. He tried small talk. “Nice stuff. Hate to see Jack D. put bullet holes in it.”

Audrey’s voice was shaky. “Mickey and Jack are talking about burying the hatchet. Jack wants to go in on a deal with him. Maybe dope, maybe a casino in Vegas. Meeks, I love Mickey and he loves me.”

Buzz heard the last words as bang, bang, bang, bang. He picked up the cash roll, stuffed it in his pocket and said, “Yeah, he loves takin’ you to the Troc and the Mocambo, cause he knows every man there is droolin’ for you and afraid of him. Then it’s an hour at your place and back to the wife. It’s real nice the two of you talk every once in awhile, but as far as I’m concerned you’re gettin’ short shrift from a Jewboy who ain’t got the brains to know what he’s got.”

Audrey’s jaw dropped; her cigarette fell into her lap. She picked it up and stubbed it out. “Are you
this
crazy or
that
stupid?”

Bang, bang, bang, bang—cannon loud. Buzz said, “Maybe I just trust you,” walked over and kissed Audrey Anders full on the lips, one hand holding her head, cradling it. She didn’t open her mouth and she didn’t embrace him back and she didn’t push him away. When Buzz snapped that it was all he was going to get, he broke the clinch and floated to the car with quicksand under his feet.

It was bang, bang, bang, bang on the drive downtown, ricochets, old dumb moves kicked around to see how they stood up next to this doozie.

In ’33 he’d charged six picket bulls outside MGM, caught nail-studded baseball bats upside his arms, took the boys out with his baton and caught tetanus—stupid, but the audaciousness helped get him his LAPD appointment.

Early in ’42 he worked with the Alien Squad, rounding up Japs and relocating them to the horse paddocks at Santa Anita Racetrack. He grabbed a wiseacre kid named Bob Takahashi just as he was en route to get his ashes hauled for the first time, felt sorry for him and took him on a six-day toot in Tijuana—booze, whores, the dog track and a teary farewell at the border—bad Bob hightailing it south, a slant-eyed stranger in a round-eyed land. Very stupid—but he covered his absent ass by shaking down a suspicious-looking car outside San Diego, busting four grasshoppers transporting a pound of premium maryjane. The punks had a total of nineteen outstanding LA City warrants between them; he got a commendation letter and four felony notches on his gun. Another shit play turned into clover.

But the granddaddy was his brother Fud. Three days out of the Texas State Pen, Fud shows up at the door of then Detective-Sergeant Turner Meeks, informs him that he just stuck up a liquor store in Hermosa Beach, pistol-whipped the proprietor and intended to pay Buzz back the six yards he owed him with the proceeds. Just as Fud was digging through his blood-soaked paper bag, there was a knock at the door. Buzz looked through the spy hole, saw two blue uniforms, tagged blood as thicker than water and fired his own service revolver into the living room wall four times. The bluesuits started knocking down the door; Buzz hustled Fud to the cellar, locked him in, smashed the window leading to the back porch and trampled his landlady’s prize petunias. When the patrolmen made it inside, Buzz told them he was LAPD and the perpetrator was a hophead he’d sent to Big Q—Davis Haskins—in reality a recent overdose in Billings, Montana; he’d picked up the info working an extradition job. The blues fanned out, called for backup and surrounded the neighborhood until dawn; Davis Haskins made the front page of the
Mirror
and
Daily News
; Buzz shat bricks for a week and kept Fud docile in the cellar with whiskey, baloney sandwiches and smut mags swiped from the Central Vice squadroom. And he walked on the caper, white trash chutzpah carrying him through, no one informing the police powers that be that a dead man robbed the Happy Time Liquor Store, drove a stolen La Salle up to the front door of Sergeant Turner “Buzz” Meeks, then shot out his living room wall and escaped on foot. When Fud bought it a year later at Guadalcanal, his squad leader sent Buzz a letter; baby brother’s last words were something like, “Tell Turner thanks for the fur books and sandwiches.”

Stupid, crazy, sentimental, lunatic dumb.

But kissing Audrey Anders was worse.

Buzz parked in the City Hall lot, transferred all the cash to his doughnut box and took it upstairs to Ellis Loew’s office. Going in the door, he saw Loew, Big Dudley Smith and Mal Considine sitting around a table, all of them talking at once, garbled stuff about cop decoys. No one glanced up; Buzz eyeballed Considine four years after he gave him the cuckold’s horns. The man still looked more like a lawyer than a cop; his blond hair was going gray; there was something nervous and raggedy-assed about him.

Buzz rapped on the door and tossed the box onto the chair holding it open. The three looked over; he fixed his eyes on Considine. Ellis Loew nodded, all business; Dudley Smith said, “Hello, Turner, old colleague,” all blarney; Considine eyed him back, all curiosity, like he was examining a reptile specimen he’d never seen before.

They held the look. Buzz said, “Hello, Mal.”

Mal Considine said, “Nice tie, Meeks. Who’d you roll for it?”

Buzz laughed. “How’s the ex, Lieutenant? She still wearin’ crotchless panties?”

Considine stared, his mouth twitching. Buzz stared back, his mouth dry.

Mexican standoff.

50-50, Considine or Dragna.

Maybe he’d hold off just a tad, cut the Red Menace just a bit more slack before he signed on.

It was two nights of bad dreams and a day’s worth of dead ends that had him making the run to Malibu Canyon.

Driving northbound on Pacific Coast Highway, Danny chalked it up as an elimination job: talk to the men on the list of fighting dog breeders he’d gotten from Sheriff’s Central Vice, make nice with them and get educated confirmations or denials on Doc Layman’s animal-aided killing/blood bait thesis. No such beast existed in the County Homicide files or with City R&I; if the breeders, men who would know if anyone did, laughed the theory off as nonsense, then maybe tonight he could sleep without the company of snapping hounds, entrails and screechy jazz.

It started this way:

After the Moonglow Lounge and Janice Modine’s pass, he’d gotten an idea—build his own file on the Goines snuff, write down every shred of information, glom carbons of the autopsy and print reports, stick Dietrich with lackluster summaries and concentrate on
his
paperwork,
his
case—the 187 he’d follow up even if he didn’t nail the bastard before the skipper pulled the plug. He drove to the Hollywood Ranch Market then, grabbed a stack of cardboard cartons, bought manila folders, colored side tabs, yellow legal pads, typing and carbon paper and drove home with them—allowing himself two extra shots of I.W. Harper as a reward for his dedication. The booze put him out on the couch—and it got hairy.

Goines’ mutilations in wraparound Technicolor. Guts and big bruised penises, so close up that at first he couldn’t tell what they were. Dogs rooting in the gore, him right there, Man Camera filming it until he joined the brood and started biting.

Two nights of it.

With a day of shit in between.

He put the first night’s dream off as scare stuff caused by a frustrating case and no food in his system. In the morning he got double bacon, eggs, hash browns, toast and sweet rolls at the Wilshire Derby, drove downtown to the Sheriff’s Central Bureau and scanned Homicide files. No animal-aided murders were on record; the only homosexual slashings even remotely similar to Marty Goines’ were open-and-shut jobs—lovers’ spats where the perpetrator was captured, still serving time or executed by the State of California.

Shitwork was next.

He called Karen Hiltscher at the Station and sweet-talked her into making phone queries of other musician’s locals that might have sent Marty Goines out on gigs, and LA area jazz clubs that might have hired his trombone independently. He told her to ring the other LASD station houses and solicit run-throughs of their burglary files: paper scans for jazz musician/burglars who might prove to be known associates of Goines. The girl reluctantly agreed; he blew kisses into the phone, promised to call for results later and drove back to Local 3126.

There, the counterwoman gave him another look at the Horn of Plenty’s employment record, and Danny copied down club and roadhouse addresses going back to Mad Marty’s first gig in ’36. He spent the rest of the day driving by jazz spots that were now laundromats and hamburger joints; jazz spots that had changed hands a half dozen times; jazz spots that had retained the same owner for years. And he got the same response across the board: a shrug at Goines’ mugshot strip, the words “Marty who?”, a deadpan on the topics of jazzbo burglars and the longshot of a burglar kid with his face bandaged up.

At dusk, he called Karen for her results. Goose egg: more “Marty who?”, the burglar files yielding eleven names—seven Negroes, two Mexicans, two white men whose jail records revealed AB+ and O- blood. Pure undiluted shit.

He remembered his promise to Janice Modine then, called the San Dimas Substation and talked to the boss of the Auto Theft Detail. John Lembeck was still in custody there, being sweated over a series of GTAs. Danny told the man his snitch story, stressing the angle that Lembeck was dead meat if he made it to the County jail. The squad boss agreed to roll him up for release; Danny could tell Jungle John was in for a severe thumping first—but not half as bad as he was going to give him.

Then it was back to his apartment, four shots of I.W. and work on the file, side tabs labeled and stuck to folders—“Interviews,” “Eliminations,” “Chronology,” “Canvassing,” “Physical Evidence,” “Background.” One thought burned throughout the writing of a detailed summary: where was Marty Goines living between the time of his release from Lexington State and his death? The thought led to a phone call—the night switchboard at the hospital for a list of other men released to California around the same time as Goines. The answer, after holding the line long distance for twenty minutes—
none
.

Exhaustion, writer’s cramp and no sleep followed. Four bonus shots and a sheet-thrashing roll on the bed got him unconsciousness and the dogs again, the Man Camera with teeth—his—biting at a whole morgueful of O+ stiffs lined up on gurneys. Morning and another big breakfast convinced him to make the elimination; he called Central Vice, got the list of breeders and was warned to go easy: the dog farms in Malibu Canyon were run by cracker strongarms, cousins from the Tennessee sticks. They bred their pit bulls there, which was not against the law; they only fought them in South LA, and none of the men had been convicted of dog fighting since the war.

Danny turned off Pacific Coast Highway at the Canyon Road and climbed inland through scrub-covered hills laced with little streams and valleys. The road was a narrow two-laner, the left side featuring kiddie camps, stables and occasional nightclubs, the right a wood retaining wall and a long drop into green-brown bush forest. Signs pointing into the scrub indicated clearings and houses and people; Danny saw the roofs of villas, Tudor steeples, the chimneys of extravagant log cabins. Gradually, the quality of the real estate declined—no ocean view, no sea breeze, the scrub thicker and thicker, no dwellings at all. When he hit the top of Malibu Ridge and started rolling downhill, he knew the dog farms had to be nearby—his vista was now dotted with tar-papered shacks and the heat was zooming up as the shade-producing foliage thinned out.

The Vice officer he’d talked to had the three farms tagged as a mile in on a dirt access road marked by a sign: PIT PUPS—AUTO PARTS. Danny found the sign just as the two-lane leveled off into a long, flat stretch, the San Fernando Valley in the distance. He swung onto it and wracked his Chevy’s undercarriage for three-quarters of a mile, sharecropper-like shacks on both sides of him. Then he saw them—three cinderblock huts encircled by a barbed-wire fence; three dirt yards littered with axles, drive shafts and cylinder blocks; three individually penned broods of squat, muscular dogs.

Danny pulled up to the fence, pinned his badge to his jacket front and tapped the horn—a little courtesy to the hut dwellers. The dogs barked at the noise; Danny walked over to the nearest stretch of wire and looked at them.

They weren’t the dogs from his dreams—black and sleek with flashing white teeth—they were brindle and tan and speckled terriers, barrel-chested, jaw-heavy and all muscle. They didn’t have the outsized genitalia of his dogs; their barks weren’t death snaps; they weren’t ugly—they were just animals bred for a mean utility. Danny eyed the ones penned up closest to him, wondering what they’d do if he gave them a pat on the head, then told them he was glad they didn’t look like some other dogs he knew.

“Rape-o, Hacksaw and Night Train. Them dogs won sixteen altogether. Southern California record for one man’s stable.”

Danny turned to face the voice. A very fat man in overalls was standing in the doorway of the shack just off to his left; he was wearing thick glasses and probably couldn’t see too well. Danny unpinned his badge and slipped it in his pocket, thinking the man was garrulous and ripe for an insurance agent ploy. “Can I talk to you for a second about your dogs?”

The man ambled to the fence, squinting and blinking. He said, “Booth Conklin. You in the market for a good pit hound?”

Danny looked into Booth Conklin’s eyes, one a free-floating waller, the other cloudy and pocked with cataracts. “Dan Up-shaw. You could start me off with some information on them.”

Conklin said, “I kin do better than that,” waddled to a speckled dog’s pen and flipped the latch. The beast made a dash, hit the fence with his front paws and started licking the wire. Danny knelt and scratched his snout, a slick pink tongue sliding over his fingers. He said, “Good boy, good fellow,” putting off Doc Layman’s theories as long longshots then and there.

Booth Conklin waddled back, holding a long piece of wood. “First lesson with pits is don’t talk baby talk to ’em or they won’t respect you. Rape-o here’s a leg pumper, just wants to get your trousers wet. My cousin Wallace named him Rape-o ’cause he’ll mount anything with bad intentions. Down, Rape-o, down!”

The pit bull kept nuzzling Danny’s fingers; Booth Conklin whacked him in the ass with his stick. Rape-o let out a shrill yowl, cowered away and started rubbing his backside in the dirt, all fours up and treading air. Danny felt his fists clenching; Conklin stuck the stick in Rape-o’s mouth. The dog clamped down his jaws; Conklin lifted him up and held him out at arm’s length. Danny gasped at the feat of strength.

Conklin spoke calmly, like holding seventy pounds of dog at the end of a stick was everyday stuff. “Pits dish it out, so they gotta be able to take it. I won’t sell you no dog if you gonna coddle it.”

Rape-o was hanging stock-still, groans vibrating from his throat. Every muscle was perfectly outlined; Danny thought that the animal was perfect mean beauty. He said, “I live in an apartment, so I can’t have a dog.”

“You just come out to look and jaw?”

Rape-o’s groans were getting deeper and more pleasured; his balls constricted and he popped an erection. Danny looked away. “Questions more than anything else.”

Conklin squinted, his eyes slits behind coke bottle glasses. “You ain’t a policeman, are you?”

“No, I’m an insurance investigator. I’m working a death claim and I thought you could help me with some questions.”

Conklin said, “I’m the helpful type, ain’t I, Rape-o,” moving the stick up and down, wrist flicks while the dog humped the air. Rape-o yowled, yipped and whimpered; Danny knew what was happening and fixed on the fat man’s coke bottles. Rape-o let out a final yowl/yip/groan, let go and fell to the dirt. Conklin laughed. “You ain’t got the sense of humor for pits, I can tell. Ask your questions, boy. I got a cousin who’s an insurance man, so I’m prone to the breed.”

Rape-o slinked over to the fence and tried to rub his snout up against Danny’s knee; Danny took a step backward. “It’s a murder claim. We know the victim was killed by a man, but the coroner thinks he may have let a dog or coyote or wolf at him after he was dead. What do you think of the idea?”

Conklin stuck a toothpick in his mouth and worked his words around it. “Mister, I know the canine family real good, and coyotes and wolves is out—’less the killer captured and starved them and left the dead guy out for them to pick clean someplace amenable. What kind of damage on your victim?”

Danny watched Rape-o curl up in the dirt and go to sleep, sated, his muscles slack. “Localized. Teeth marks on the stomach, the intestines bitten and sucked on. It had to have happened someplace inside, because the body was clean when the police found it.”

Conklin snickered. “Then you rule out coyotes and wolves—they’d go crazy and eat the fucker whole, and you can’t exactly keep them inside the house. You thinkin’ pits? Dogs?”

“If anything, yes.”

“You sure them teeth marks ain’t human?”

“No, we’re not sure.”

Booth Conklin pointed to his pit pens. “Mister, I run these three farms for my cousins, and I know how to get what I want from dogs, and if I was crazy enough to want one of my pups to eat a man’s guts, I imagine I could think up a way for him to do it. I’ll tell you though, I’ve got a real taste for blood sport, and I couldn’t imagine any human being doin’ what you just told me.”

Danny said, “If you wanted to, how would you do it?”

Conklin petted Rape-o’s hindquarters; the dog lazily wagged its tail. “I’d starve him and pen him and let bitch dogs in heat parade around in front of his cage and make him crazy. I’d muzzle him and bind his legs and put a restrainer around his dick so he couldn’t get himself off. I’d get me a rubber glove and tweak his dick till he just about got there, then I’d clamp his balls so he couldn’t shoot. I’d get me some doggie menstrual blood and spray it in his eyes and nose for a week or so, till he came to think of it as food and love. Then, when I had me that dead man, I’d spread a big puddle of pussy blood right where I wanted him to bite. And, mister? I’d have a gun handy in case that tormented old dog decided to eat
me
. That answer satisfy you?”

Danny thought: No animals, it just isn’t
right
. But—have Doc Layman do organ taps on Goines, his body parts near the mutilations, tests for a second, nonhuman, blood type. He threw Booth Conklin a long-shot question. “What kind of people buy dogs from you?”

“Boys who love blood sport, and I ain’t talkin’ ’bout your crazy shit either.”

“Isn’t dog fighting against the law?”

“You know who to grease, then there ain’t no law. You sure you ain’t a policeman?”

Danny shook his head. “Amalgamated Insurance. Look, do you remember selling a dog to a tall, gray-haired man, middle-aged, within the past six months or so?”

Conklin gave Rape-o a gentle kick; the dog stirred, got up and trotted back to his pen. “Mister, my customers are young studs in pickup trucks and niggers lookin’ to have the toughest dog on the block.”

“Do any of your customers stand out as different than that? Unusual?”

Booth Conklin laughed so hard he almost swallowed his toothpick. “Back durin’ the war, these movie types saw my sign, came by and said they wanted to make a little home movie, two dogs dressed up with masks and costumes fightin’ to the death. I sold them boys two twenty-dollar dogs for a C-note apiece.”

“Did they make their movie?”

“I ain’t seen it advertised at Grauman’s Chinese, so how should I know? There’s this sanitarium over on the beach side of the Canyon, dryout place for all the Hollywood types. I figured they were visitin’ there and headin’ to the Valley when they saw my sign.”