The Glitter Dome (10 page)

Then they got down to business. Two of the sculptors, one a Greek, the other a Turk, naturally blamed each other for the errant clay ball that had knocked Buckmore Phipps' hat into the gutter. Buckmore Phipps asked Gibson Hand which one they should book.

“I don't give a shit,” he shrugged. “They're both greaseballs, ain't they?”

They were about to drag
both
greaseballs down the steps while they tried to figure out a booking charge when Gladstone Cooley said, “Sir, I hope you don't have to report me to my commanding officer or anything.”

“Lemme see your marine ID card,” Gibson Hand said impulsively.

Buckmore Phipps scowled at the Pfc. and said, “If they had jarheads like you back in the big war, they'd a had to take that flag and suck it or fuck it
to get it up
on Iwo Jima.”

And when Gibson Hand snatched the marine liberty card from Gladstone Cooley, a scrap of paper came with it.

“This name's familiar, Buckmore,” he said, looking at the paper. “I can't remember where I heard it, but I heard it somewheres.”

Buckmore Phipps read the note, which said “Nigel St. Claire” and gave a phone number. “Yeah, I heard that name somewheres lately. Who is this?” he asked the marine.

But then a vagary of fortune not only saved the Greek and the Turk from bunking in the slam, but prompted an incident which made Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand not police legends as they'd always dreamed, but police laughingstocks.

They heard a burglar alarm ringing loud and clear from outside the artists' studio. Buckmore Phipps looked at Gibson Hand and at his watch and said, “It's only three o'clock. Somebody's testin his burglar alarm, is all.”

“Pardon me, Officers,” said the Greek, who certainly didn't want to share accommodations at the graybar hotel with a Turk. “If you'll just look out the back window, it might be the Batbite Specialty Shop. He closed at noon today. I happened to be there and …”

Gibson Hand strolled to the window, peeked out into the back alley, and saw the rear door of the Batbite Specialty Shop kicked off the hinges.

“It's a four-five-nine in progress, Buckmore! Let's hit it!”

So the sculpting class breathed a collective sigh of relief and pushed on out of there, along with Pfc. Gladstone Cooley, who was hastily handed his papers by the snarling black cop. The street monsters were already thundering down the rear stairway, about to catch a burglar with his mitts in the candy.

Except that they didn't sell candy at the Batbite Specialty Shop. They sold leather masks for slaves, ventilated leather paddles for masters, police nightsticks for slaves
and
masters. They sold handcuffs, scourges, and even iron maidens (it costs big bucks for
some
pleasures), and assorted other instruments which Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand had to admit would come in handy during some of their back alley interrogations.

They caught a horsed-out junkie named Jukebox Johnson—a former disc jockey fallen on hard times—with a load of sadomasochistic magazines, making his second trip to a junkyard Chevy. Jukebox Johnson was one of those unfortunate thieves who always ran from the cops, even though he couldn't run that fast, even when he was facing drawn weapons and spotlights in the darkness. He'd been shot five times by cops over a fifteen-year span of unsuccessful burglaries.

He was one of those crooks the cops talked about: “You know old Jukebox?”

“Oh, sure, I shot him a couple times.”

But today there was no need to shoot Jukebox Johnson. He was traveling at slow motion speed and thought he was highballing it. He had decided to pull the job
after
he got mellowed out on two grams of good heroin, and he was seeing flying giraffes and big colored bugs eating each other, when Gibson Hand picked him off the ground by the collar.

“Jukebox, what in the fuck are you doin?” Buckmore Phipps said disgustedly. “I mean, this is broad fuckin daylight!”

“Hi, Buckmore. Hi, Gibson.” Jukebox Johnson smiled sheepishly through a row of crooked black stumps. “I can explain. See, I met up with these S and M freaks. They carry a huge stick. Call it their board of education. The big one beats on his boyfriend all the time whether he needs it or not. They seem like a nice couple, though. They commissioned me to do this job. Told me they needed some more equipment for a party tonight. Offered me a whole piece of unstepped-on China white. What could I say?”

“Damn! In broad daylight? I oughtta let you run down the alley and shoot you a couple times,” Gibson Hand said disgustedly.

“What's the trouble, Officers?” a man said, hurrying toward them from a Lincoln he'd just parked in the alley.

“I'm sorry I did it, Buckmore,” Jukebox Johnson whined. “I get nervous around these freaks with all their whips and stuff. I been thinking about working for these
other
guys who're into mugging and stickups, just to get my head straightened out.”

“I'm Harvey H. Fairchild,” the man announced, presenting Gibson Hand with his business card. “One of my fellow shopkeepers told me the alarm had been set off and I got here as fast as I could.”

So, while Gibson Hand kept the handcuffed Jukebox Johnson near their radio car, Buckmore Phipps took a burglary report from Harvey H. Fairchild and helped turn off the burglar alarm. Harvey H. Fairchild was friendly and pink, shaped like a teardrop. He sported lots of jewelry and a silk suit that Buckmore Phipps wouldn't mind owning for his big nights at The Glitter Dome. Harvey H. Fairchild told Buckmore Phipps that he found selling the S&M toys lucrative but disgusting, and vowed that just as soon as he had a nest egg he was cutting out for a chicken ranch in Saugus.

He was really a swell guy, all in all. He smoked real Cuban cigars and gave Buckmore Phipps one when the cops left him to secure his broken door.

Except that it wasn't
his
door. It wasn't his shop. As far as the detectives could piece it together, after entering through the broken rear roor of the Batbite Specialty Shop, he eventually tunneled through the wall into the neighboring jewelry store, and made off with $275,000 in watches, rings and necklaces.

When the
real
owner of the Batbite Specialty Shop showed up at the police station along with the jewelry store proprietor, both screaming and yelling about the mentality of cops, and when Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand were called code-two into the detective bureau with their worthless business card belonging to a pretty good tunnel man, the street monsters figured out right away that Jukebox Johnson had been in cahoots with Harvey H. Fairchild. It was all the detectives could do to keep the two street monsters from breaking into Jukebox Johnson's cell and lynching the little traitor on the spot, except that he had already been writted out of jail by a lawyer who said he was retained by one Jules P. Laidlaw, a fat pink guy with lots of jewelry and a groovy silk suit.

So it was woe to the boulevard denizens for the next few weeks while Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand worked at exorcising the memory of their Waterloo at the hands of Jukebox Johnson and a future corpse who called himself Harvey H. Fairchild and Jules P. Laidlaw. During those humiliating days Buckmore Phipps broke two molars grinding his teeth in frustration, and Gibson Hand accidentally snapped a police nightstick in two, whacking a telephone pole. There was scarcely a word passed between the two street monsters on their fruitless manhunt. Instead of asking each other whether one wanted to drive or write reports, Buckmore Phipps or Gibson Hand would turn a rabid face toward another rabid face and say: “How about today you write and I
fight
.”

So, knowing that Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand were cutting a swath across Hollywood not seen since the Hillside Strangler manhunt (like rogue elephants they foraged through every addict haunt and hole-in-the-wall for the needle-scarred carcass of Jukebox Johnson), the little junkie decided it was time to take a Greyhound with part of his score from Harvey H. Fairchild's tunnel job, and head on back to Little Rock for a permanent family reunion. Jukebox Johnson knew full well that life was harder for ex-disc-jockey, junkie burglars in Little Rock, but he also knew that as far as
he
was concerned, Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand just weren't about to be taking any prisoners.

6

Just Plain Bill

“I've thrown more freaking passes the last two days than Roger Staubach threw in his whole career,” the Ferret moaned.

“Then take a little off them,” the Weasel complained. “My ribs look like I just fought ten rounds with Larry Holmes.”

“I start lobbing the ball to you and I'll lose control and bust another window. That's all we need. Screw it, let's take a break.”

So the two narcs, dressed today in sweat shirts and jeans and tennis shoes instead of leather jackets and boots, took their football and retreated half a block down Oxford Avenue to the green Toyota where they kept their other props.

They'd been street football jocks the last two days while watching a certain house south of Los Feliz Boulevard. Two days before that they were gardeners, after having been lucky enough to find a house on the street with the residents on vacation. The Ferret mowed the lawn seven times. The Weasel dug up all the crabgrass, pruned the roses, snipped back the ivy, and when they'd run out of things to do, started all over again. It gave them a splendid vantage point from which to observe the house in question, but after two days of overzealous gardening there wasn't enough left for a hungry snail. They packed up their gardening tools after it looked like a horde of locusts had hit the yard. Then they started playing the endless game of catch football.

The resident of the house under surveillance was, according to a usually reliable snitch named Sox Wilson, dealing chunks of hash as big as cucumbers, and had bragged that this very week he was going to wheel his silver Mercedes 450SL out of his garage and make a fresh buy from his Asian connection on the waterfronts of San Pedro.

The county recorder's office showed the property deed to belong to a Randolph Waterman, who had leased the house to a vacationing couple, who had subleased the property, apparently to the hash dealer or one of his friends. The narcs couldn't find out the name of the dealer except that everyone called him Bill.

“Bill what, for chrissake?” the Weasel demanded of Sox Wilson.

“I dunno, I dunno, Weasel,” Sox Wilson whined. “If I'm lyin, I'm flyin.”

“If you're lyin, you're fryin,” the Weasel corrected him.

“If you're lyin, you're dyin,” the Ferret corrected them both, cleaning his fingernails with his stiletto.

“They call him Bill,” Sox Wilson pleaded. “Just plain Bill.”

It wasn't that a hash bust was worth mowing blisters on your hands, or facing heat exhaustion from throwing footballs all day, but Captain Woofer happened to
live
on this street, and when he heard that dope was being dealt there (Weasel's dumb mistake in
telling
him) he ordered the two narcs to crawl out of all their leather, look as respectable as they were capable of looking without cutting their beards and ponytails, and get that son of a bitch who
dared
to sully the street where the captain had resided for twenty-three years. It was almost the only investigation going on at present that Captain Woofer gave a damn about except the one involving Nigel St. Claire. The Weasel and the Ferret expected to get their balls whacked good if they didn't nail Just Plain Bill in the next few days.

There
was
another investigation going on which concerned Captain Woofer more than Just Plain Bill and Nigel St. Claire put together. It was an ultra-secret investigation being conducted by Internal Affairs Division. The fact was that someone was trying to drive Captain Woofer bonzo. It had been going on for over three months. Although neither Captain Woofer nor the Internal Affairs headhunters had been able to put it together, it all began the morning after a local television showing of
Gaslight
, where Charles Boyer tried to drive Ingrid Bergman bonzo and nearly succeeded.

As all policemen learn: Life imitates not art but melodrama.

During the month of February, when the captain and his wife, Sybil, went for a weekend fishing trip in San Diego, someone listed their home with a local realtor for such a ridiculously low price that it was sold before the Woofers returned from the holiday. The listing party's description could have fit a thousand sleazeballs from the boulevard. Captain Woofer looked at over five hundred mug shots of known confidence men to no avail. The Woofers got sick and tired of realtors showing up with prospective buyers for the next two weeks, and finally put a
Not
For Sale sign in the front yard. The transaction was nullified and the whole incident was dismissed by bunco detectives as an obvious prank.

The investigation was revived and Internal Affairs Division was brought into the picture when, three weeks later, the license number of Captain Woofer's family car was plugged into the statewide computer as a stolen vehicle containing armed and dangerous occupants. It wasn't a damn bit funny when Sybil Woofer and her best friend, Mrs. Commander Peterson, were jacked-up by two cops with shotguns and ordered out of the “stolen” station wagon in front of the Hermès store in Beverly Hills.

While the two women screamed and cried, with their hands planted firmly on top of their coiffured blue hair, a crowd of ogling Arabs, Iranians, Texans and other wogs quickly gathered and shook their heads and spoke to each other in their exotic tongues about the anarchy in California where female desperadoes disguised themselves to look like window-shoppers from Van Nuys.

The most despicable incident had occurred one week before Al Mackey and Martin Welborn were given the Nigel St. Claire case. It happened when Captain Woofer, echoing Deputy Chief Julian Francis' call for better police relations with the swelling tide of ethnic minorities in Los Angeles, mentioned to the squad-room full of bored detectives that he too had always been
kind to Negroes
. Which caused the Weasel and Ferret to exchange knowing looks. Within a week, two things happened: First, someone forged Captain Woofer's signature on a payroll deduction card requesting that five percent of Captain Woofer's police salary be deducted and sent as a charitable contribution to the United Negro College Fund. Second, an ad appeared the following Monday in the classifieds of Los Angeles' largest underground newspaper. It said: “Male, white, 59 years old, pipesmoker, neat, obedient, always kind to Negroes, seeks young virile Negro with whom to
be
kind. Willing to pay handsomely if pipestem exceeds seven inches.” The deplorable ad listed Captain Woofer's home telephone number, which began ringing every three and a half minutes, erasing any doubt in the minds of the headhunters from Internal Affairs Division that the swine who was trying (with some success) to drive Captain Woofer bonzo had to be an insider. The girl who took the ad from the cash customer was unable to provide any kind of helpful description. The man who placed the ad had worn a scuba diving mask and a wet suit when he strolled into the office.