The Big Nowhere (47 page)

Coleman went to his room and got the Reynolds gray wig and makeup kit he’d brought. He fashioned a zoot stick from a plank he found in the garbage and a Gillette five-pack. He snapped that UAES was holding a party/meeting that night, copped four H bindles and a hypo from his old source Roland Navarette, pegged an unlocked Buick on 67th as his wheels, played his last gig at the Zombie, walked into the men’s can at the Texaco Station on 68th as Coleman, walked out as Daddy.

Marty was right on time, but drunk—he didn’t even blink at Coleman’s disguise. Coleman coldcocked him on the sidewalk, slung him against his shoulder like a boozed-out buddy, got him into the Buick and hot-wired it. He geezed Marty up with a heavy junk load, drove him to his crib in Hollywood, shot him with the other three bindles and stuffed the hood of a terrycloth robe in his mouth so he wouldn’t vomit blood on him when his cardiac arteries burst. Marty’s heart popped big; Coleman strangled the rest of his life out, zoot slashed his back, pulled out his eyes like he tried to with the coin collection man back at Sleepy Lagoon. He raped those bare sockets; he put on his wolverine teeth and feasted, spraying blood on the walls to wild alto riffs in his head. When he was finished he left the eyeballs in the Frigidaire, dressed Goines in the white terry robe, carried him downstairs and propped him up in the back seat of the Buick. He adjusted the rear-view mirror so he could watch Marty with his eyeless head lolling; he drove to Sunset Strip in the rain, thinking of Daddy and Claire reamed to their teeth in every orifice. He deposited Marty nude in a vacant lot on Allegro, prime fruit territory, a corpse on display like the Black Dahlia. If he was lucky, victim number one would get just as much ink.

Coleman went back to his music, his other life. The Goines kill did not reap the publicity he hoped it would—the Dahlia was a beautiful woman, Marty an anonymous transient. Coleman rented U-Drive cars and patrolled 2307 Tamarind at odd times; no cops showed up—he could use the place again. He got George Wiltsie’s address from the phone book and decided that Wiltsie would be victim number two. He spent nights cruising queer bars near the pad, saw Wiltsie at the dives, but always in the company of his squeeze, a guy he called “Duane.” He almost decided to let the bastard live—but thinking of the possibilities a duo kill presented made him tingly and reminded him of Delores and the man going 69. Then Duane mentioned to a barman that he worked at Variety International—old Daddy turf.

Providence.

Coleman approached George and Duane, carrying a little kill kit he’d concocted: secobarbital caps bought from Roland Navarette, and strychnine from the drugstore. Two to one, barbiturate to poison—pinprinks on the capsules for a quick effect. Coleman suggested a party at “his place” in Hollywood; George and Duane accepted. On the ride over in his U-Drive, he gave them a pint of rye to slug from. When they were half gassed, he asked them if they’d like to try some real Spanish Fly. Both men eagerly swallowed death pills; by the time they got to Marty’s dump they were so woozy Coleman had to help them upstairs. Lindenaur was DOA, Wiltsie in a deep slumber. Coleman undressed them and went to work zooting the dead guy.

Wiltsie woke up and fought to live. Coleman slashed one of the fruiter’s fingers off defending himself and killed him with a knife thrust to the throat. With both men dead, he zooted, wolverined, raped the standard way and drew music pictures and a trademark W on the walls. He put Wiltsie’s digit in the icebox; he showered Duane and George free of blood, wrapped them in spare blankets, carried them down and drove to Griffith Park, his old sax-honking territory. He stripped them and carried them up to the hiking trail; he 69’d them for the world to see. If
he
was seen, he was seen as his father.

Two events coincided.

Dr. Saul Lesnick, near death and wanting to somehow recoup his moral losses, read a scandal tabloid account of the Wiltsie/Lindenaur murders. He recalled Wiltsie as a name bandied in a Reynolds Loftis psychiatric session years before; the zoot slashing reminded him of Coleman’s fantasies regarding the Scotch Voice Man and the weapons at Terry Lux’s hatchery. What finally convinced him that Coleman was the killer was the hunger behind the obliquely described bite marks. Coleman was hunger personified. Coleman wanted to be the most vicious, insatiable animal on earth, and now he was proving that he was.

Lesnick knew the police would kill Coleman if they caught him. Lesnick knew he had to try to get him to a locked-ward institution before he killed anyone else or took it in mind to go after Reynolds and Claire. He knew Coleman had to be close to the music, and found him playing at a club on Central Avenue. He regained Coleman’s confidence as the one person who had never hurt him, secured him a cheap apartment in Compton and talked, talked, talked to him, hiding with him when a friend in the leftist community told him Reynolds and Claire were also seeking Coleman out. Coleman was experiencing moments of clarity—a classic behavior pattern in sexual psychopaths who had succumbed to murder to satisfy their lusts. He poured out the story of his first three killings; Lesnick knew that chauffeuring a dead man in the back seat and the second two victims brought to Tamarind Street were a pure subconscious attempt to be caught. Psychological craters existed for a skilled psychologist to drive wedges into—Saul Lesnick’s redemption for ten years of informing on people he loved.

Coleman was fighting his urges inchoately, with music. He was working on a long solo piece filled with eerie silences to signify lies and duplicities. The riffs would spotlight the unique high sounds he got with his sax, loud at first, then getting softer, with longer intervals of silence. The piece would end on a scale of diminishing notes, then unbroken quiet—which Coleman saw as being louder than any noise he could produce. He wanted to call his composition The Big Nowhere. Lesnick told him that if he got to a hospital, he would survive to perform it. The doctor saw Coleman faltering, clarity gaining. Then Coleman told him about Danny Upshaw.

He’d met Upshaw the night after he killed Marty Goines. The detective was on a routine canvassing assignment, and Coleman brazened him out with his “I was in plain view all night” alibi, knowing Upshaw believed it. That belief meant Goines had kept mum about meeting him, and Coleman took the opportunity to lie about Marty being fruit and drop clues on tall, gray Daddy. He put Upshaw out of his mind and went on with his plan, killing Wiltsie and Lindenaur, wavering between Augie Duarte or another Daddy squeeze he knew as victim number four. But he’d started having dreams about the young detective, steamy stuff that said he really was what Daddy tried to make him. Coleman made a decision to murder Reynolds and Claire if he couldn’t smear Daddy to the rafters—he thought that potential added blood to his stew would spice him up and make him dream about the women he once loved.

The plan didn’t work. Coleman had more Upshaw dreams, more Upshaw fantasies. He was Daddy-garbed and in the process of staking out Felix Gordean’s office for leads on old Reynolds lovers when he spotted Upshaw holding down his own surveillance; he was nearby when Upshaw phoned the DMV Police Information Line. He caught the gist of his talk, and tailed Upshaw in the Pontiac he’d stolen—just to get close to him. Upshaw spotted the tail; a chase followed; Coleman got away, stole another car, called the DMV and pretended to be the deputy’s partner. One of the names the clerk read back to him was Augie Duarte; Coleman decided it was providence again and settled on him as victim four then and there. He drove to Gordean’s beach house, spotted Upshaw’s car, hid and listened to Gordean and one of his musclemen talking. The pimp/queer expert said, “That policeman is coming out of the closet. I know it.”

The next day, Coleman let himself into Upshaw’s apartment and savored it. He saw no mementoes of women, nothing but a too-tidy, impersonal pad. Coleman
knew
then, and began to feel a complete identification with Upshaw, a symbiosis. That night, Lesnick left the apartment to get medicine at County General, thinking Coleman’s Upshaw fixation would break him down on his homosexuality, stymie and stalemate him. He was wrong. Coleman picked up Augie Duarte at a downtown bar, sedated him and took him to an abandoned garage in Lincoln Heights. He strangled him and hacked him and ate him and emasculated him like Daddy and all the others had tried to do to him. He left the body in the LA River wash, drove back to Compton and told Lesnick he had finally put Upshaw in perspective. He was going to compete with the man, killer against detective. Saul Lesnick left the apartment and took a cab back to his rest home, knowing Coleman Healy would wreak slaughter until he was slaughtered himself. And the frail old headshrinker had been trying to get up the guts for a mercy killing ever since.

Lesnick ended his narrative with a deft storyteller’s flourish, pulling a revolver from the folds of his robe. He said, “I saw Coleman one more time. He had read that Upshaw died accidentally and was very disturbed by it. He had just purchased opiates from Navarette and was going to kill another man, a man who had been an extra on one of Reynolds’ films, an opium dabbler. The man had had a brief fling with Reynolds and Coleman was going to kill him. He told me, like he thought I would do nothing to stop it. I bought this gun at a pawn shop in Watts. I was going to kill Coleman that night, but you and Captain Considine got to him first.”

Buzz looked at the piece. It was old and rusted and would probably misfire, like the shrinker’s nutso take on Sleepy Lagoon as a fantasy. Coleman would have slapped it out of his bony hand before Pops could pull the trigger. “You pleased the way it turned out, Doc?”

“No. I am sorry for Reynolds.”

Buzz thought of Mal shooting straight at Daddy—wanting Coleman alive for his career and maybe something to do with his own kid. “I’ve got a cop question, Doc.”

Lesnick said, “Please. Ask me.”

“Well, I thought Terry Lux hipped Gordean to all the stuff Gordean blackmailed Loftis with. Your story makes me think Chaz Minear told Felix some details, details that he put together when he blackmailed Loftis a second time just lately. Stuff that made him think Coleman was killin’ people.”

Lesnick smiled. “Yes, Chaz told Felix Gordean many things about Coleman’s clinic stay that could be construed as clues when put together with newspaper facts. I read that Gordean was murdered. Was it Chaz?”

“Yeah. Does that please you?”

“It’s a small happy ending, yes.”

“Any thoughts on Claire?”

“Yes. She’ll survive your grand jury pogrom like a Tigress. She’ll find another weak man to protect and other causes to champion. She’ll do good for people who deserve good done for them, and I will not comment on her character.”

Buzz said, “Before things got out of control, it looked like the UAES had some kind of extortion scheme brewin’ against the studios. Were you playin’ both ends? Holdin’ back stuff you heard as a psychiatrist to help the union?”

Lesnick coughed and said, “Who wants to know?”

“Two dead men and me.”

“And who else will hear?”

“Just me.”

“I believe you. Why, I don’t know.”

“Dead men got no reason to lie. Come on, Doc. Spill.”

Lesnick fondled his pawnshop piece. “I have verified information on Mr. Howard Hughes and his penchant for underaged girls, and much information on various RKO and Variety International actors and the narcotics cures they periodically undergo. I have information on the underworld associations of many studio executives, including one RKO gentleman who ran down a family of four in his car and killed them. The arrest was fixed, and it never went to trial, but that allegation by itself would be most embarrassing. So the UAES is not without weapons, you see.”

Buzz said, “Boss, I pimped them girls to Howard and fixed up most of them dope cures. I got that RKO guy off the hook and ran the payoff to the judge that woulda arraigned him. Doc, the papers would never print what you got and the radio would never put it on the air. Howard Hughes and Herman Gerstein would laugh your extortion right back in your face. I’m the best fixer this town ever saw, and believe me the UAES is crucified.”

Saul Lesnick got to his feet, wobbled, but stayed standing. He said, “And how will you fix that?”

Buzz walked on the question.

When he got back to his motel, there was a note from the manager on the door: “Call Johnny S.” Buzz went to the pay phone and dialed Stompanato’s number.

“Talk to me.”

“It’s Meeks. What’s up?”

“Your number, but hopefully not my money. I just got a lead, through a friend of Mickey’s. LAPD did a routine ballistics run-through on that jazz club shootout you were in. That hotshot coroner Layman examined the report on the pills they took out of that rat guy you told me about. It looked familiar, so he checked back. Bullets from your gun matched the pills they took out of Gene Niles. LAPD makes you for the Niles snuff, and they’re out to get you in force. Shoot to kill. And I hate to mention it, but you owe me a lot of money.”

Buzz sighed. “Johnny, you’re a rich man.”

“What?”

Buzz said, “Meet me here tomorrow at noon,” and hung up. He dialed an East LA number and got, “Quien? Quien es?”

“Speak English, Chico, it’s Meeks.”

“Buzz! My Padrone!”

“I’m changin’ my order, Chico. No thirty-thirty, make it a sawed-off.”

“.12 gauge, Padrone?”

“Bigger, Chico. The biggest you got.”

The shotgun was a .10 gauge pump with a foot-long barrel. The slugs held triple-aught buckshot. The five rounds in the breech were enough to turn Mickey Cohen’s haberdashery and the dope summit personnel into dog food. Buzz was carrying the weapon in a venetian blind container covered with Christmas wrapping paper.

His U-Drive clunker was at the curb a half block south of Sunset. The haberdashery lot was packed with Jew canoes and guinea gunboats; one sentry was stationed by the front door shooing away customers; the man by the back door looked half asleep, sitting in a chair catching a full blast of late-morning sun. Two neutral triggers accounted for—Dudley and the fourth man had to be inside with the action.

Buzz waved at the guy up on the corner—his prepaid accomplice recruited from a wine bar. The guy walked into the lot looking furtive, trying Caddy and Lincoln door handles, skirting the last row of cars by the fence. Buzz eased up slowly, waiting for the sentry to take note and pounce.

It took the sunbird almost half a minute to stir, get wise and tread over, a hand inside his jacket pocket. Buzz ran full speed, fat lightning on sneakered feet.

The sentry turned around at the last second; Buzz swung the Christmas box in his face and knocked him against the hood of a ’49 Continental. The man pulled his gun; Buzz kneed him in the nards, popped his nose with a flat palm and watched the .45 auto hit the blacktop. Another knee spear put him down and keening; Buzz kicked the gun away, whipped off the box and used the butt of his sawed-off to beat him quiet.

The accomplice was gone; the sentry was bleeding at the mouth and nose, deep off in dreamland—maybe for keeps. Buzz pocketed the loose cannon, walked over to the back door and let himself in.

Laughter and hail-fellow dialogue booming; a short corridor lined with dressing rooms. Buzz inched up to a curtain, pulled a corner back and looked.

The summit was in full swing. Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna were glad-handing each other, standing by a table laid out with cold cuts, bottles of beer and liquor. Davey Goldman, Mo Jahelka and Dudley Smith were knocking back highballs; a line of Dragna humps was standing by the front window curtains. Johnny Stompanato was nowhere to be seen because Johnny Stompanato was probably halfway to Pedro by now, hoping a certain fat man survived the morning. Over by the left wall, the real business was happening: two Mex National types counting a suitcase full of money while one Mickey guy and one Jack guy taste-tested the white-brown powder stuffed into reinforced paper bags in another suitcase. Their smiles said the stuff tasted good.

Buzz pulled the curtain aside and joined the party, sliding a round into the chamber to get some attention. The noise caused heads to turn, drinks and plates of food to drop; Dudley Smith smiled; Jack Dragna eyed the barrel. Buzz saw a cop type by the Mexes. Twenty to one he and Dudley were the only ones heeled; Dud was much too smart to try something. Mickey Cohen looked hurt. He said, “As God is my witness I will do you worse than I did the guy who did Hooky Rothman.”

Buzz felt his whole body floating away from him. The Mexes were starting to look scared; a rap on the window would bring the outside man. He stepped over to where he could see every face in the room and trained his muzzle for a blast spread: Jack and Mickey vaporized the second he pulled the trigger. “The money and the dope in one of your garment bags, Mick. Now and slow.”

Mickey said, “Davey, he’ll shoot.
Do it
.”

Buzz saw Davey Goldman cross his vision and start talking low Spanish to the Mexes. He caught a slant view of paper sacks and greenbacks being ladled into a zippered hanger bag, tan canvas with red piping and Mickey Cohen’s face embossed on the front. Mickey said, “If you send Audrey back to me I will not harm a hair on her head and I will not do you slow. If I find her with you, mercy I cannot promise. Send her back to me.”

A million-dollar deal blown—and all Mickey Cohen could think of was a woman. “No.”

The bag was zipped up; Goldman walked it over extra slow. Buzz held his left arm out straight; Mickey was shaking like a hophead dying for a fix. Buzz wondered what he’d say next; the little big man said, “
Please
.”

The garment bag settled; Buzz felt his arm buckling. Dudley Smith winked. Buzz said, “I’ll be back for you, lad. Diaz and Hartshorn.”

Dudley laughed. “You won’t live the day.”

Buzz backed into the curtains. “Don’t go out the rear door, it’s booby-trapped.”

Mickey Cohen said, “
Please
. You can’t run with her. Not a hair on her head will I hurt.”

Buzz getawayed.

Johnny Stompanato was waiting for him at the motel, lying on the bed listening to an opera on the radio. Buzz dropped the garment bag, unzipped it and pulled out ten ten-thousand-dollar bank stacks. Johnny’s jaw dropped; his cigarette hit his chest and burned a hole in his shirt. He snuffed the butt with a pillow and said, “You did it.”

Buzz threw the money on the bed. “Fifty for you, fifty for Mrs. Celeste Considine, 641 South Gramercy, LA. You make the delivery, and tell her it’s for the kid’s education.”

Stompanato hoarded the money into a tight little pile and gloated over it. “How do you know I won’t keep it all?”

“You like my style too much to fuck me.”

Buzz drove up to Ventura, parked in front of Deputy Dave Kleckner’s house and rang the bell. Audrey answered. She was wearing an old Mickey shirt and dungarees, just like she was the first time he kissed her. She looked at the garment bag and said, “Planning to stay awhile?”

“Maybe. You look tired.”

“I was up all night thinking.”

Buzz put his hands to her face, smoothing a wisp of stray hair. “Dave home?”

“Dave’s on duty until late, and I think he’s in love with me.”

“Everybody’s in love with you.”

“Why?”

“Because you make them afraid to be alone.”

“Does that include you?”

“Me especially.”

Audrey jumped into his arms. Buzz let go of the garment bag and kicked it for luck. He carried his lioness into the front bedroom and made a swipe at the light switch; Audrey grabbed his hand. “Leave it on. I want to see you.”

Buzz got out of his clothes and sat on the edge of the bed; Audrey slow-grinded herself naked and leaped on him. They kissed ten times as long as they usually did and strung out everything else they’d ever done together. Buzz went into her fast, but moved extra slow; she pushed up with her hips harder than she did their first time. He couldn’t hold it and didn’t want to; she went crazy when he did. Like the first time, they thrashed the sheets off the bed and held each other, sweating. Buzz remembered how he’d hooked a finger around Audrey’s wrist so they’d still be touching while he caught his breath. He did it again, but this time she squeezed his whole hand like she didn’t know what the gesture meant.

They curled up, Audrey nuzzling. Buzz looked around the strange bedroom. Passport applications and stacks of South American tourist brochures were resting on the nightstand and boxes of women’s clothing were arrayed by the door next to a brand-new suitcase. Audrey yawned, kissed his chest like it was sleep time and yawned again. Buzz said, “Sweetie, did Mickey ever hit you?”

A drowsy head shake in answer. “Talk later.
Lots
of talk later.”

“Did he ever?”

“No, only men.” Another yawn. “No Mickey talk, remember our deal?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

Audrey gave him a squeeze and settled into sleep. Buzz picked up the brochure closest to him, a huckster job for Rio de Janeiro. He flipped pages, saw that Audrey had circled listings for guest cottages offering newlywed rates and tried to picture an on-the-lam cop-killer and a thirty-seven-year-old ex-stripper basking in the South American sun. He couldn’t. He tried to picture Audrey waiting for him while he attempted to lay off twenty-five pounds of heroin to some renegade mob guy who hadn’t already heard of the heist and the contract that went with it. He couldn’t. He tried to picture Audrey with him when the LAPD closed in, hard-on glory cops holding their fire because the killer was with a woman. He couldn’t. He thought of Icepick Fritzie finding them together, going icepick crazy on Audrey’s face—and that picture was easy. Mickey saying “Please” and going mushy with forgiveness was even easier.

Buzz listened to Audrey’s breath; he felt her sweaty skin cooling. He tried to picture her getting some kind of bookkeeper’s job, going home to Mobile, Alabama, and meeting a nice insurance man looking for a Southern belle. He couldn’t. He made a big last try at the two of them buying their way out of the country with a nationwide cop-killer APB on his head. He tried extra, extra hard on that one—and couldn’t find a way to make it stick.

Audrey stirred and rolled away from him. Buzz saw Mickey tired of her in a few years, cutting her loose for some younger stuff, a nice cash money separation gift. He saw Sheriff’s, City cops, Feds and Cohen goons chasing his okie ass to the moon. He saw Ellis Loew and Ed Satterlee on easy street and old Doc Lesnick hounding him with, “And how will you fix that?”

Lesnick was the kicker. Buzz got up, walked into the living room, grabbed the phone and had the operator get him Los Angeles CR-4619. A voice answered, “Yeah?”

It was Mickey. Buzz said, “She’s at 1006 Montebello Drive in Ventura. You hurt her and I’ll do you slower than you ever thought of doin’ me.”

Mickey said, “Mazel tov. My friend, you are still dead, but you are dead very fast.”

Buzz let the receiver down gently, went back to the bedroom and dressed. Audrey was in the same position, her head buried in the pillow, no way to see her face. Buzz said, “You were the one,” and turned off the light. He grabbed his garment bag on the way out and left the door unlocked.

Dawdling on back roads got him to the San Fernando Valley just after 7:30—full evening, black and starry. Ellis Loew’s house was dark and there were no cars parked out front.

Buzz walked around to the garage, broke a clasp on the door and pushed it open. Moonlight picked out a roof bulb at the end of a string. He pulled the cord and saw what he wanted on a low shelf: two double-gallon cans of gasoline. He picked them up, found them near full, carried them to the front door and let himself in with his special-investigator’s key.

A flick of the overhead light; the living room jarring white—walls, tables, cartons, shelves and odd mounds of paper—Loew and company’s once-in-a-lifetime shot at the political moon. Graphs and charts and thousands of pages of coerced testimony. Boxes of photographs with linked faces to prove treason. A big fuckload of lies glued together to prove a single theory that was easy to believe because believing was easier than wading through the glut of horseshit to say, “Wrong.”

Buzz doused the walls and shelves and tables and stacks of paper with gasoline. He soaked the Sleepy Lagoon Committee photos. He ripped down Ed Satterlee’s graphs, emptied the cans on the floor and made a gas trail out to the porch. He lit a match, dropped it and watched the white whoosh into red and explode.

The fire spread back and upward; the house became a giant sheet of flame. Buzz got in his car and drove away, red glow lighting up the windshield. He took back streets northbound until the glow disappeared and he heard sirens whirring in the opposite direction. When the noise died, he was climbing into the foothills, Los Angeles just a neon smear in his rear-view mirror. He touched his future there on the seat: sawed-off, heroin, a hundred and fifty grand. It didn’t feel right, so he turned on the radio and found a hillbilly station. The music was too soft and too sad, like a lament for a time when it all came cheap. He listened anyway. The songs made him think of himself and Mal and poor Danny Upshaw. Hardcases, rogue cops and Red chasers. Three dangerous men gone for parts unknown.