The Black Marble (5 page)

Before he changed his sweaty pajamas, Philo Skinner lit his seventy-fourth cigarette of a very long day. He lay in the darkness, smiling. He was betting seven thousand dollars on the Minnesota Vikings. And they were going to lose. And then he would
have
to do it. And he would be rich. And free! He knew a former handler who had become a Mexican national and was doing all right as a partner in a Mexican hotel. Puerto Vallarta. Margaritas at sunset. White teeth. Brown bodies.
All
willing. Seventy thousand tax-free American dollars. Good-bye, Mavis. Good-bye to
all
the dogs.

He thought of the feisty Minnesota quarterback. Fran Tarkenton, I hope they break your fucking arm.

4

The Rabbit

Valnikov slept in the yellow rubber raincoat. He slept crossways on the daybed, one shoe on, one shoe off. He slept on his back, head tilted, face florid. His eyes were almost stuck shut from sour vomitus belches.

Valnikov snored and wheezed, and as usual, dreamed of the rabbit. He cried out in his sleep and awoke when the hunter cut the rabbit's throat, broke the rabbit's jaws, and began peeling the skin back over the rabbit's face. The tearing muscle hissed and jawbones crackled in the powerful hands.

“Lord God!” he sobbed and awoke himself.

It was hard to tell where he hurt most. His head felt like a huge festering sponge. His back felt hinged. If he tried to straighten, the crusted rusty hinges would scream.

He almost screamed when he stood. Now at least he knew what hurt most: the festering sponge. His head was mushy. Lord God, have mercy. He fell back on the bed, moaning. Then Misha said, “
Gavno.
”

“Please, Misha,” Valnikov pleaded. “Oh, my head!”

But Misha repeated, “
Gavno, gavno, gavno.
”

Misha only knew one Russian word and it meant
shit.
In fact, it was the only
human
word he could say.

Valnikov glared with one blazing eye and saw that Misha was standing on Grisha's head. Misha twittered and chirped and sang for his master, who held his ears and cried: “Please, Misha, please. Noise
hurts.
”

But Misha just tossed his lovely emerald head, preened, and said: “
Gavno.
”

Shit.

Then Valnikov became aware that he was soaked by the perspiration from the oppressive rubber raincoat, and by the dream of the rabbit, which always brought night sweats.

Misha yelled: “
Gavno!
” like a challenge and through the agonizing mist of the vodka hangover Valnikov was amazed to see that Misha had just crapped on Grisha's head. As though he truly understood what the word meant! Well maybe he did. Who could say what a bird or a man understood.

It wasn't the shit, it was the noisy “
gavno
” which angered Grisha. The little rodent lunged at Misha, who squawked and flew to the trapeze at the top of the seven-foot cage. The furious little animal then sulked around the floor of the enormous cage until he found a comfortable place to settle down again. His head was covered with
gavno.

The furnished bachelor apartment on Franklin Avenue was crisscrossed with clothesline which ran from the top of the giant animal cage to a nail pounded over the bathroom door frame. Three pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks were hung on that indoor clothesline, thanks to the endless queue of women at the apartment building's coin-operated clothes dryer.

There were unwashed glasses and dishes and empty vodka bottles on the formica table, on the plastic chairs, on the kitchen sink, in the kitchen sink.

Stacked higher than the dishes and glasses was a vast collection of recordings, in and out of album covers. The records were on the kitchen table, on the chairs, on the sink. And two were
in
the sink—which puzzled him this morning. At least they weren't damaged by water since he only washed dishes one at a time when necessary.

The tiny cluttered apartment boasted one great luxury, aside from the large record collection: a Micro Seike turntable and two Epicure speakers worth a thousand dollars each, capable of making the whole apartment house thump and vibrate.

Valnikov stood, stripped off the rubber raincoat and all of his wet outer clothing. He forced himself to march to the bathroom and showered in icy water, unaware for the moment that he had forgotten to remove his underwear and one sock.

His broad red face was bleeding in three places after he shaved. He spilled tea on his blue necktie when he drank, unable to hold the shaking glass of tea with both hands. Then he put the gerbil's food in Misha's dish and the parakeet's food in Grisha's dish. He was halfway out the door before he thought that he had possibly made a mistake. He returned and saw that he had.

He groaned, and shooed Misha away from the rodent's dish.

“Please, Misha, eat your own food.”

His voice thundered in his ears, through the flaming mush of his brain, through the infected tissue.

“Oh, never mind,” he said. “Go ahead and eat Grisha's food. Grisha, you eat Misha's food today.”

He hobbled toward the door again, looking at his watch, listing from side to side. Then he realized that a burrowing rodent from southern Russia could never jump high enough to eat a parakeet's food in a feeding tray five feet above his head.

Valnikov managed to switch the food. Corn and barley for the gerbil, gravel and seed for the parakeet. Then he gave the little creatures water and looked at them.

“Are you two even slightly appreciative,” he moaned, “of the pain this is giving me?”

Misha answered him. The parakeet had been swinging on his trapeze, his back to Valnikov. The emerald bird did a deliberate forward fall, gripping the tiny bar in his claws. When he was hanging upside down, staring directly into Valnikov's wet fiery eyes, Misha said: “
Gavno.
”

Fifteen minutes later, Valnikov had parked his car and was weaving painfully toward the front door of Hollywood Police Station.

The caseload for business burglary was never too bad on Friday. Monday, after the channel-lock and pry-bar thieves had plundered during the two days businesses were closed, Valnikov would have his table littered with burglary reports. But today would be all right. Except for the merciless throbbing in his skull.

Two youngish homicide investigators the others called Frick and Frack were amusing themselves by telling ghoul stories to Irma Thebes, the foxy little investigator who worked the sex detail.

“Irma,” Frick grinned, “take a look at this suicide report.”

Irma grimaced, pretending she wasn't interested, but as always she read the report with abandon.

“Dude severed both wrists, then turned on the gas jets in his walk-up, then hit himself in the head three times with a hatchet. The third time he managed to pierce his skull.”

“That ain't nothing,” Frack said, leaning over her desk. “I had a broad last month cuts both wrists, then drinks D.D.T., then, get this, she tried to
choke
herself with a nylon stocking, using a wooden spoon for a tourniquet!”

“Awful, that's awful,” Irma grimaced, dying for more.

Their unsmiling lieutenant, Woodenlips Mockett, interrupted by saying: “How's that murder from over on La Brea? Any progress?”

“Naw, the victim ain't talking,” Frick said, wanting to continue the game of Can You Top This for Irma Thebes.

“What is this, amateur night?” Woodenlips Mockett snarled. “You getting anywhere or not?” Then he looked at Irma. “I mean on the
murder case.
”

“Well no, Lieutenant,” the young detective said. “But that dude's a black militant and an ex-con. I think we find the guy done it we oughtta give him an ecology award.”

Dudley Knebel, a robbery detective, then said, “Got a suspect? I got a victim who'll I.D. anybody I show him. Owns the burrito stand over on Western.”

“
That
dingaling!” said a burglary dick they called Montezuma Montez. “Him and his wife, Hamhocks Hilda, they'll pick your
partner
out of a lineup, give them a chance.”

“Hey, is it true about Hamhocks Hilda, the way she makes hamburgers?” asked Frick.

“It
is
the gospel, Jack,” Montezuma Montez answered, grinning. “Captain Hooker
seen
it.”

“What's true?” asked Woodenlips Mockett, nervously.

“Well, she's
always
pissed off at cops,” Frick said. “Cause she gets robbed, oh, two, three times a month. And we never catch nobody. So you order a hamburger, she takes the meat and mashes it right up between her legs, right up on her greasy old Brillo pad.”

“I don't believe that!” cried Woodenlips Mockett, who had mooched two burgers from Hamhocks Hilda just the day before.

“I swear, Lieutenant,” Frack said. “When I busted her old man that time he went upside her head with a meat mallet, he told me what you gotta do is, you gotta always check the hamburger patty. See there's any little black curly hairs sticking out.”

“Well, that ain't no big thing,” said Clarence Cromwell, one of two black detectives at Hollywood. “She
cooks
it, don't she? Ain't so bad anyways, less he tuned Hilda's greasy old organ
jist
before she made your burger, Lieutenant.”

Woodenlips Mockett waited a decent interval before hurrying out of the office to check with Captain Hooker to see if the men were lying to him again.

Then a voice boomed through the slightly open door of the interrogation room. Nate Farmer, the other black detective unwillingly transferred to the sex detail from auto theft, was interviewing a rape victim who lacked credibility.

She too was black. So was the alleged suspect. Blacks robbed, raped and murdered other blacks, more often than not. Same with whites. Hoodlums rarely bothered to discriminate.

His voice thundered through the room: “So he's been takin a piece for six months, and you been enjoyin it, and now all of a sudden you find your little belly gettin big and you're all of a sudden a
child
a seventeen, and your social worker says the county'll pay for your little whelp if you put your boyfriend in jail for rape! Well I ain't gonna go for it!”

“Last rape victim I handled turned out to be a call girl with twenty-two arrests,” Irma Thebes observed.

“Didn't know she was raped till the check bounced, huh?” said Frick.

A Cuban boy, eleven years of age, was sitting in the squad room listening wide-eyed to the raging black detective. The boy was a renowned Hollywood bicycle thief. They called him Earl Scheib Lopez, in honor of the auto painter who could paint any car for $49.95. Earl Scheib Lopez boasted that he could paint any hot bike for a buck and a quarter, in
ten
minutes, and have enough sniffable paint left to get three of his pals loaded.

Earl Scheib Lopez always had his jeans stuffed with coins and he was now playing nickel-dime blackjack with Fuzzy Spinks, of auto theft, who could tolerate the little bike bandit ever since the day he rolled over (for a fifty-buck snitch fee) on a Cuban gang who had hijacked a load of Ferraris, and Fuzzy got a leg up toward Investigator III. Earl Scheib Lopez used the fifty scoots to buy two cases of aerosol paint cans and there were three hundred bikes stolen in Hollywood in the next two weeks.

His latest arrest was for a bit of derring-do: On a whim, the little crook had jumped on a display bike in a department store downtown, ridden it through five screaming sales clerks, down the
escalator
, and out on the street making a getaway clear to Hollywood in twenty minutes. But he had underestimated his fame. The Central Division investigators had no trouble identifying the bike bandit: only Earl Scheib Lopez was
that
kind of swashbuckler.

But he wasn't swashbuckling now. He was playing blackjack very quietly with Fuzzy Spinks, who was baby-sitting him until they could release him to grandma, who was getting sick and tired of taking a bus to police stations and courtrooms for Earl Scheib Lopez. One day, after his third arrest in one month, she had made an extra bus trip. This one to the “Glass House,” Parker Center downtown, to the office of the chief of police. The old woman waited patiently for two hours to see the chief's adjutant and then explained through an interpreter in polite and formal Spanish that she had come to sign the necessary American documents—to put Earl Scheib Lopez in the gas chamber.

Fuzzy could see that the little thug was very anxiously listening to the mean-looking black detective yelling at his “rape victim.”

“You ever pull any rapes yet, Earl?” Fuzzy asked, peering at the boy over his bifocals, actually trying to get a peek at Earl's cards because the ante was up to thirty-five cents.

“No way!” Earl said, staying on fourteen while Fuzzy busted.

“Yeah, well don't ever try it. These detectives here can look right up a broad's unit and check her lands and grooves. Just like the muzzle of a gun. Understand?”

“Yeah?” Earl Scheib Lopez said, pretty damned impressed for once.

“They match em up with the marks on
your
rape tool, and you get twenty goddamn years. Get me?”

“Yes,
sir!
” Earl Scheib Lopez said. He was showing a king of diamonds.

“You hitting?” the old cop asked hopefully, since he had to hit sixteen and was down to his last ninety cents.

“Damn it!” Max Haffenkamp, from residential burglary, slammed the phone down. “Hollywood's turned into a frigging ghetto! People're so evasive they won't even say hello, they think it's a cop.”

“Tell em you found their welfare check,” Clarence Cromwell said. “
Then
they'll talk to you honkies.”

“Lord, I hope there's a gang killing tonight,” said Frick. “I need some overtime, make my car payment.”

“I'm losing weight, Irma,” Frack leered, sucking in his chest. “Stomach like a washboard. You could wash your lace underwear on my tummy. Anytime.”