The Delta Star (29 page)

The “medicine” that the scientist gave him was causing him to see things differently, like a drop of water glistening on the petal of a camellia, sun-splashed among mottled shadows. He saw a hawk hanging like doom directly overhead and he feared for the carefree squirrels. He dozed and awoke days or seconds later. He watched students come and go, and they all walked lightly on cat’s feet or floated before his eyes like The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

Gradually things assumed more familiar essences and he was left with a residue of unaccustomed energy. He was a man, he thought, who had been a consummate failure up to this moment in his life. He was, he thought, without the love of a single human being on earth, and had had not a moment in forty-two years of which to be particularly proud. And his mortal machinery was now taking him frighteningly fast toward the last end-of-watch.

He decided that for once in his life, for whatever reason, he was going to seek the answer for the sake of knowing. And he’d have to be far better than himself in order to do it. He also realized that unless life imitated soap opera, no one was going to run up to him and confess to being the man he sought, and without an admission of guilt he had absolutely no chance of arrest and conviction.

Still, it seemed that for the first time in his life he felt an exquisitely urgent need to know. For the sake of knowing.

When he tried to stand, his back sent a shaft of pain straight down his right leg all the way to the knee. He walked apelike until the back permitted him to walk like a human being.

He thought it the greatest of ironies when, upon entering
Millikan Library, he saw the man in the pinstripe suit. Even on a weekend Professor Richard Feldman wore a suit and tie. He was a refined, well-tailored man. Nothing like the scientists the detective had seen in the basement pub. Nothing like Ignacio Mendoza.

He couldn’t help noticing that Professor Feldman’s graceful fingers were unmarred. He would have given a great deal if another scientist had walked into the library with a bandaged left hand from punching plaster walls in the night.

The library on weekends was open only to faculty and students. A student was on duty to check identification and was impressed when the detective showed his badge. The boy eagerly helped the detective find what he wanted.

Mario Villalobos read all that he could absorb about the Nobel Prize. He read old Caltech newspapers with accounts of the ceremonies in the Stockholm concert hall. It appeared that the whole country closed down to entertain the Nobel laureates. The detective paid particular attention to whatever news items he could find on American chemists who had traveled to Sweden for the festivities, and there were many. He saw pictures of some from Caltech in the concert hall in Stockholm, dressed in white tie and tails for an event that was sold out ten years in advance.

He could see that most of the chemistry prizes were given to Americans, and he read of complaints that other nations had tried to exert national pressure on the committee to bridle the American race for prizes. And that some scientists believed Japan had been recently successful in exerting national pressure.

One of the articles showed a map of Sweden and told of the tour of a group from Caltech, Stanford, Harvard and M. I. T. The tour took place during the Nobel festivities of 1981, just a few weeks after a Soviet sub ran aground near the Karlskrona naval base and shocked the nation.

The detective looked at the map and considered the Swedish navy at Karlskrona facing the Soviet colossus directly across the Baltic in Kaliningrad. And of course he could not help but think of a coked-out street whore from Normandie and Santa Monica who months later was reading of an event which all but the Swedes had nearly forgotten.

He had not slept for thirty-five hours. He read until the print started to blur and it became impossible to continue. He politely thanked the student and went out to his car and drove toward the Pasadena Freeway and home. He tried not to think of how pathetic and dreary his life’s work had been when seen in light of delta to delta-star.

Chapter F
ourteen
THE GOONED-OUT VICE COP

Mario
V
illalobos was able to sleep for th
ree hours. He awoke in pain. H
e had been grinding his teeth as he slept and had bitten the inside of his cheek. His hands were trembling and he was instantly alert. When he sat up, his head hurt. He walked to the window of his apartment and looked out at the smog-shrouded streets of the Los Feliz district. It was dusk and the sun was fiery copper against a mauve and redolent sky.

He looked at his swollen eyes in the mirror. The eyes looked dead and gutted. The marbled flesh was precisely the color of the Los Angeles smog-layered sky at dusk. He went into the kitchen in his undershorts and took one of his week’s supply of TV dinners from the refrigerator. He smoked a cigarette and stared at the tinfoil tray for a moment and put it back. Instead, he poured himself a very large glass of orange juice and whipped three eggs into it.

He drank it, and smoked, and listened to “Stella by Starlight” on his favorite radio station, and experienced what he supposed was an unconscious pathetic try for a creative moment. He got dizzy, or rather, light-headed with occasional dizziness. He felt alternately as though he were going to have a coronary, faint or vomit. He was so weak that his knees actually buckled as he paced the kitchen. He knew that he was too tired to sleep without drugging himself with alcohol. He sensed that while asleep his brain had been working at capacity, thus allowing him little rest.

“I can’t!” he actually cried aloud.

Mario Villalobos believed that if he kept this up he’d blow his usually desensitized neurons right through his marinated brain matter. Delta to delta-star might be very injurious to what was left of his health.

Mario Villalobos concluded that he could not be better than himself. He could not imitate the excited state of an electron gone mad. Not with his slaughtered senses. The future and past were one. He showered, shaved, dressed in casual clothes and went to The House of Misery to get drunk.

They were all there, in that it was Saturday night. Even Rumpled Ronald was back, getting lots of attention and sympathy for his broken ribs and, of course, loving it. The Bad Czech and Hans had already informed them of the Caltech experience, and Mario Villalobos was spared explanations of why he looked worse than Gerry Cooney after Larry Holmes beat him up for thirteen rounds.

Ludwig was sitting beside Hans at their end of the bar, looking cranky because he wanted to sleep, and the hyper hot dogs, Stanley and Leech, were playing a game of nine-ball on his bed.

A groupie with a face like tapioca pudding was draped around Hans, who wasn’t looking too happy since he’d gotten nothing from the hotshot chemist at Caltech but advice to shellac it.

Jane Wayne was tugging on the eyebrows of The Bad Czech, who was reading the Los Angeles Times and howling from time to time, which would set off Ludwig into louder howling and make everyone get cranky and start yelling at each other to shut up.

Dilford and Dolly were sitting together and commenting on one of the town crier’s editorials. Cecil Higgins was staring into the bottom of his glass, and Leery was setting them up for all he was worth, playing a sonata on the cash register while he sucked his teeth and leered happily.

Mario Villalobos just nodded when Leery said, “Whatcha having, Mario, a very dry vodka martini?”

The detective hadn’t taken his first sip when the door opened and through the smoke and gloom floated a young man with shoulder-length hair and a delicate face. He took his place before the broken spider web of mirror and signaled for bar whiskey.

Before everyone got a chance to quiet down and get unaccountably edgy in the presence of The Gooned-out Vice Cop, the hyper hot dogs, Stanley and Leech, finished their nine-ball game and came swaggering into the bar for more beer.

“Look who’s here!” Stanley said to Leech. “Hey, Bartholomew!”

The Gooned-out Vice Cop was moving his face from side to side, making the ghastly neon illuminate various shards of mirror in his Cubist self-portrait. He didn’t seem to hear.

“Hey, Bartholomew!” Leech yelled, and both hyper hot dogs charged down to the end of the bar and clapped The Gooned-out Vice Cop on the shoulder.

“Haven’t seen you since the academy!” Stanley cried.

“How’s it hanging?” Leech cried.

“Just kicking back lately,” The Gooncd-out Vice Cop said, turning and smiling placidly at the hyper hot dogs.

“Man, that was all-time what I read about you in the paper last January! All-time!” Leech said.

“You did the right thing on that one!” Stanley said, winking at The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

And of course all the cops in the barroom knew that “the right thing” in police jargon means that one has blown some pukebag into eternity.

“Musta scared the shit outa ya, that scuzzball leaping out with a knife when you’re creeping through a backyard on a little gambling raid.”

“So what if he was sixteen? He tried to do a little East Hollywood surgery on ya, didn’t he? Bet he was surprised when he was looking outa two more eyes on each side of his nose. How many rounds did ya fire? Any misses?”

The Gooned-out Vice Cop continued to smile serenely and did not reply, but there was seldom need to reply to hyper hot dogs like Stanley and Leech.

“You guys hear about his shooting?” Leech asked, giving no one a chance to answer. “Big deal on TV when the little puke’s Cuban mama says how her little boy was out playing with his pigeons in the yard and gets killed by a trigger-happy vice cop. Sure. With a goddamn knife in her baby’s hand and PCP in his pocket.”

“Did they find any angel dust in the autopsy, Bartholomew?” Stanley asked.

“Bartholomew made a good Cuban outa him before he had a chance to get dusted out,” Leech answered.

“Garbage. All garbage,” Stanley said.

The Gooned-out Vice Cop continued to smile until the hyper hot dogs got tired asking and answering their questions. He shook his head when they tried to buy him a drink, and they returned to their nine-ball game.

Except that Ludwig had established his idea of eminent domain and was lying on the pool table with his head on the rail, slobbering all over the felt by the corner pocket.

“Hey! Get that fucking dog off the table!” Stanley said to Hans, who was moving on his groupie, worrying about doing it without shellac, and feeling generally grumpy from listening to the two hot dogs babble.

” You get him off,” Hans said.

“Get the fuck off that table, asshole!” Leech said to Ludwig, and banged on the table with his cue stick.

This time Ludwig did not come up with a roar. He barely raised his head. But despite stories about animals avoiding eye contact, this animal looked directly into the eyes of the young hot dog. Ludwig’s goatlike eyes were amber yellow and the whites were red-webbed from the smoke in the saloon and the beer he’d consumed. It did not become a roar, nor was it interrupted by breathing. It was a primordial growl, from the neighborhood of the La Brea tar pits where saber-toothed tigers lay interred. And except for Leery, Hans and The Gooned-out Vice Cop, every human being in that bar reached slowly toward a gun.

Leech never broke eye contact when he put his cue stick against the wall, very carefully. He didn’t break eye contact when he ever so slowly backed out of the pool table area into the main barroom. He didn’t even break eye contact when he paid Leery and said, “Come on, Stanley. If they’re gonna permit animals in this place, we’ll just drink somewhere else.”

“Don’t be hasty, boys!” Leery yelled anxiously as the hyper hot dogs scooted toward the door. “Come back! You can drink down at the other end of the bar!” Then he turned to the K-9 cop and said, “Goddamnit, Hans, Ludwig’s gonna ruin my business yet! Get that freaking dog off the pool table!”

But Hans, who was half bagged, just giggled and drank his beer and whispered something lewd into his groupie’s ear.

Then for the first time, The Gooned-out Vice Cop uttered an unsolicited comment. He said, “Here’s a syllogism: people are nothing more than garbage. I’m a person. What am I, finally?”

The Gooned-out Vice Cop looked around the bar and no one could answer for a moment.

The Bad Czech spoke first. He said to The Gooned-out Vice Cop: “Them two bigmouthed hot dogs gimme a pain in the ass. Maybe you’d like to get acquainted with us here?”

The Gooned-out Vice Cop said, “What if once you got real scared. You ever do a job every day and suddenly one day you get scared? For no reason?”

“I can understand that,” Mario Villalobos said to The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

“Did you ever see a kid get shot in the face?” The Gooned-out Vice Cop asked.

Cecil Higgins said, “A sixteen-year-old jumps out in the dark with a knife? I mean nobody can blame …”

“What if he didn’t have a knife?” The Gooned-out Vice Cop asked. “What if someone panicked? What if someone then planted some dust and a throwaway knife to cover it? Have you ever been absolutely positive your heart was going to bang a hole in itself and bleed all over the inside of your belly? Have you ever been that scared?”

But it was too late for anyone to formulate answers. The Gooned-out Vice Cop took one last look at his image in the broken glitter of glass. At his mirror image in black shadow and ghastly neon green. Then he was off the stool moving on a vice cop’s cat feet toward the door.

He turned for an instant and smiled serenely at them, with eyes like bullet holes.

“Hey! He didn’t pay for his drink!” Leery said. “Hey!”

“I’ll pay for his freaking drink!” The Bad Czech said, and that made Leery quiet down and go back to leering happily at the amount he’d taken in so far.

Then the cops began talking about The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

“I was sorta scared of him before,” Dilford confessed.

“I sorta thought he looked like me sometimes,” Hans confessed.

“I had eyes like that when we found the paws in the petunias,” Jane Wayne confessed.

“I thought he might not be real,” The Bad Czech confessed.

“I thought he might be a devil,” Rumpled Ronald confessed.

“If he was a devil, he wouldn’t be here,” Cecil Higgins said into the bottom of his glass. “This place ain’t got enough class to be hell. Purgatory, maybe.”

“Well, he’s not so spooky anymore,” Mario Villalobos said, feeling an overwhelming desire to survive. “Next time he comes in, somebody should buy him a drink and talk to him.”

And with that, Mario Villalobos picked up his bar change and got off the stool. Everyone was utterly dumbfounded. Mario Villalobos hadn’t even touched his drink!

“You ain’t leaving, Mario?” Leery cried.

“Catch you later,” Mario Villalobos said.

“It’s the shank of the night!” Leery cried.

“Was it something I said?” Dilford wondered, remembering The Madonna of the Wogs. “I seem to alienate people.”

“Have to see someone,” Mario Villalobos explained.

As he was going out the door he could hear Leery screaming, “It’s your fault, Hans! You and that goddamn dog! He scares off all my customers!”