The Glitter Dome (15 page)

But Martin Welborn just chuckled in his good-humored way, and Al Mackey looked at his partner's smooth boyish jaw and barely graying hair and dry steady hands, and realized that Marty looked maybe ten years younger than
he
did. And maybe it was he, not Marty, who was going to end up in Laurel Canyon with his saffron nightgown and his hair full of forget-me-nots. Christ, he and Marty were turning into the yin and yang of mental health!

The buildings hung against the sky in what looked like lovely storm light. But it was only the deadly silver particles of smog. Martin Welborn paced off the bowling alley parking lot, taking copious notes, pausing to examine cars, pedestrians, traffic volume, while Al Mackey dodged the flying squads of roller skaters who float about the streets of Hollywood like the ghosts in Auntie Rosa's visions. Some of the skaters wore transistor headsets and boogied to new-wave or punk rock. In fact, some of the skaters were dressing punk. A young man with an earphone radio wore satin skating shorts and his torso gleamed with play knife-wounds that must have taken hours of makeup work. He flew across the parking lot, disco skating with a partner who wasn't there. The young man wore nothing on his upper body except feathers and a leather bra.

Another skater, this one a woman, suddenly appeared from the west side of the parking lot, a shaggy blur in the sunlight, and jumped over a Suzuki motorbike that was chained to the perimeter fence. Of course, the skateboarders around town did all kinds of leaping tricks, but Al Mackey had not thought it possible to make those leaps with heavy shoe skates. She wore a leotard with one leg zebra-striped and the other hot pink. Her top, a see-through plastic that made her sweat like a pig, had two daisy-shaped pasties over her nipples, making her one of the more modestly attired of the parking lot new-wave skaters.

Al Mackey was starting to get hunger pangs when he noticed that fifty yards away across the vast parking lot Marty was talking to a group of more conventional skaters. The conversation lasted a surprisingly long time and several others joined the group to talk with Marty.

Al Mackey had never particularly understood his partner in the years they'd worked together. But before Marty's separation from Paula they had seen each other socially at least once a week.

Since he had never had children with either ex-wife, Al Mackey realized that now, in early middle age (God, he hated the sound of it), Martin Welborn was probably the only person in the world he gave a damn about. Marty was one of those people you could never imagine anyone
not
liking. Even Marty's ex-wife, Paula, must have cared for him at one time. Paula Welborn was an intelligent, handsome woman. Al Mackey hated her guts.

Al Mackey saw Paula Welborn as one of those cunts who figured she'd married beneath her, finding herself as she did with a diffident young cop who was overtrained by Jesuits in dead languages, mummified philosophy, and dying theology, all stirred into a nice steaming mulch. Water it daily with a cauldron of guilt and let's see what grows in God's Garden.

Of course, if Paula had grown up in Plains, Georgia, and managed to hook up with old Teeth and Prayers himself, she'd still have thought that she'd married beneath her. She was that kind of bitch.

Al Mackey sweltered in the sunshine, and wiped his smog-inflamed eyes, and thought that Paula Welborn was one of those broads who flirted with half the men at a cocktail party (never with Al Mackey—is
that
why he hated her from the start?) and then, when a drunken lieutenant or captain or commander made a play (she seldom wasted time turning sergeants' dicks hard), would run to Marty and cuddle up next to him like a big cat, and show the gang that they may as well go to The Glitter Dome or settle for their momma's old bones.

She was also one of those who, on infrequent nights between Al Mackey's first divorce and his oh-so-brief marriage number two —when Al Mackey was a tetherball of rage and confusion getting slapped around the financial maypole by lawyers—would
concede
to Marty's dinner invitations to Al Mackey. And she'd make the concession clear enough at some point during the night when Marty was out of the room tending to the homework problems of their teenaged daughters, Babs and Sally.

And even though she made sure Al Mackey knew how she felt about Marty's invitations, wouldn't she often have to go to the john, and start unzipping her jeans in front of Al as she walked out of the room? She was just that kind of bitch, all right. But, on the rare occasions he even mentioned her, Marty claimed they were relatively happy until her mid-life crisis blew the ship of wedlock right out of the freaking water.

And there was the other thing: Marty's religious crisis, which Al Mackey could only guess at. Marty had left the seminary three years before he would have been ordained, but he never talked about it and he never talked about his mother's response to the Quantum Leap over the wall. In fact, he never talked about religion, although Al Mackey's parents were from Ireland and he had some curiosity about The Faith. Thankfully, they were from the North. He hated priests. Imagine if he was a guilt-ridden mick, what with a genetic enzyme dysfunction that made all Celts latent alcoholics. Al Mackey had recently become involved in morbid studies of
that
disease.

Marty would never talk about those bad old days with the Jesuits and resisted any efforts on Al Mackey's part to learn about his past. Al Mackey might broach the subject by saying, “You know I like the way this new Pope carries himself. He's the first priest I haven't figured to be a rest-area Romeo.”

And Marty would smile and say, “He has a moosh that belongs on a leg-breaker, all right.”

And Al Mackey would say, “Yeah, and he's in direct line with Jesus Christ.”

And Marty would say, “Yeah, and he's
Polish
.”

And that was all. There would be no more talk of the Pope's moosh, or Marty's religious crisis, which Al Mackey guessed was severe. And only once did Martin Welborn refer to his family in Ohio. It was on Mother's Day, and Al Mackey was just finishing up the second oh-so-quick marriage to that cunt who not only busted his balls but jumped up and down on them with cleats, leaving him as bankrupt as Chrysler Corporation.

Al Mackey brought a bouquet of carnations to the Welborns that day and explained to Paula that it was customary to wear a pink one in your lapel if your mother is alive. If she's dead, you wear white. Al Mackey would never forget that day, because when he and Marty were waiting for Paula and the two girls to get ready for their big Mother's Day outing on Restaurant Row, Al Mackey broke a pink carnation from the bouquet and offered it to Marty. Al Mackey knew that Marty's mother was alive and well in Ohio, yet Marty looked at him with those long brown eyes just for an instant, and Marty broke off a white carnation and pinned it to the lapel of his suit coat.

Al Mackey never asked another question about Martin Welborn's mother.

Marty seemed to be finishing his talk with the skaters. He waved to Al Mackey, who was leaning against the fence on the other side of the parking lot watching a black kid skate between the rows of parked cars.
Backwards
.

Martin Welborn started toward his partner, but another skater whizzed by behind him and he only caught a glimpse peripherally as the boy disappeared below the roof line of the cars. He was smaller and younger than the rest. He was blond, and Martin Welborn found himself running around the car for a look. The boy was gone. The boy looked like Danny Meadows.

Danny Meadows called him Daddy. He said: Daddy? It was the only word Danny Meadows ever spoke to him: Daddy?

Babs still called him Daddy. Sally would call him Daddy forever. He was sure of that. Although she was older than Babs, she would never call him Dad. She would never call him Father
.

No one would ever call him Father. It was unthinkable: Father Welborn. But clergymen had the lowest suicide rate in the nation, along with social workers. Doing good deeds apparently keeps people from chewing on guns. Policemen and doctors had the highest rate. Apparently being as useless as policemen and physicians is not good for longevity. Ninety percent of suicidal policemen use guns. Doctors use their own familiar weapons. To each his own. Most policemen who did it were passive men with inadequate personalities, they said. It seemed strange because police work does not attract passive men. He didn't know about the inadequate personalities
.

Martin Welborn had known three Los Angeles policewomen who did it. All three policewomen went out like real guys. They ate their gun muzzles. They proved their machismo at the end
.

One of the most ironic things about those few older officers— those very few who survived their attempts, those failures who survived and therefore were exceptionally inadequate policemen, because no adequate policeman should ever survive a manly attempt—those survivors invariably stated that they experienced a strange and overwhelming anxiety. The anxiety was that at any moment one might have to deal with unknown or terrible situations. It was most ironic because it was the thrill of meeting the unknown which drew young men to the job. Yet it was the thing that most terrified the older policemen when they were well on their way to a dreadful destiny. It was very ironic
.

One of the policewomen who did it was a former partner of Martin Welborn. She was a passive personality, now that he thought of it. She was shy and beautiful. She had enormous eyes. Just like Danny Meadows
.

“Will you snap out of it, Marty, for chrissake,” Al Mackey said to him. “Marty!”

“Huh?”

A skater brazenly sailed between them, saying, “Hop back, Jack.”

“I'm starving to death,” Al Mackey said. “Let's go get something to eat. Jesus, you were just standing there with that thousand-yard stare again. You don't even
hear
anybody when they're talking to you. Jesus Christ, Marty!”

“I'm sorry, Al,” Martin Welborn said. “I was just thinking …”

“Lemme guess. You figured out how I can turn this Nigel St. Claire ballbreaker into a suicide. Tell me, quick. How?”

“That's not at all what I was thinking.” Martin Welborn smiled. “Those skaters told me something interesting.”

“I like the guy with the checkerboard hair the best.” Al Mackey snorted. “I saw him on
Batman
once.”

“They told me some things,” Martin Welborn said. “Al, there's someone who might know what Nigel St. Claire was
doing
in this parking lot the night he died.”

8

Gloria La Marr

Poor old Cal Greenberg was doing everyone's work today. Just his luck to come in the squadroom when everybody was out jerking off. All the brass was at some goddamn retirement luncheon for a commander in the valley. The sex detail, Ozzie Moon and Thelma Bernbaum, get sick on the same day and have to go home. (A likely frigging story!) Everyone but the chief of police and Walter Cronkite knew that Ozzie and Thelma spent more time together wrestling with her panty girdle in Griffith Park than they
ever
spent working on their cases. Some sex detail. They were qualified experts, all right.

And then two bluesuits had to go and bring in a bubblegummer. “I ain't no kiddy cop,” poor old Cal Greenberg moaned. “Can't you put him somewheres till somebody
else
comes in?”

“Sure, Sarge,” said Buckmore Phipps. “I can drop the little turd off the Capitol Records Building, you want me to.”

“I can dump the little turd on the Hollywood Freeway, you want me to,” said Gibson Hand.

Meanwhile the little turd, a twelve-year-old cookie bandit named Zorro Garcia, sat down and decided it was a toss-up between the big white cop and the big black cop as to which one would be likely to keep the vow they both made to grind him up in the big cement mixer over by the Cahuenga Hardware Store.

But it became readily apparent to Zorro Garcia that the detective had more authority than the two street monsters and that he had more or less slid in safe at home. Zorro Garcia was a peewee member of the Black Spider Gang. When he was old enough he hoped to be a
cherry
, then a
cutdown
, then finally, after he'd been shot and stabbed ten times and was too old to fight, a
veterano
.

As with many barrio youngsters, his buzzword was
barely
. Zorro Garcia decided to flex his macho little muscles with an opening statement to poor old Cal Greenberg: “Sir, these officers barely advised me of my rights. And I barely had time to pay for the Life Savers. And I barely got in the store when this dude started hassling me. And he barely gimme a chance to talk. I couldn't barely say nothing. I don't think the dude likes Met-sicans. Cause I go to him, I go: ‘Do you like Met-sicans?' And he goes, ‘Not too much.' So then I just barely made up my mind.”

Poor old Cal Greenberg sighed and leaned forward over the table, stretching his suspenders, and said, “What, may I ask, did you just
barely
decide to do?”

“I barely decided to file a class action lawsuit for all Met-sicans in the Black Spiders against that store and against the Los Angeles Police Department.”

“How old are you?” poor old Cal Greenberg asked.

“Twelve. Barely.”

“Why are you a cookie bandit?” poor old Cal Greenberg asked. “Are you hungry?”

“I was. I ain't now.”

Buckmore Phipps sat down at the vacant table of the sex detail and absently leafed through a book of photographs, hoping to find some shots of naked women.

Gibson Hand stuck three sticks of gum in his mouth and said, “Zorro goes in the gud-damn market every day and pulls the same scam.” Then Gibson Hand produced a beer opener and a tablespoon which he had confiscated from the cookie bandit. “He roams through that store and eats about a thousand bucks worth a cupcakes and ice cream, and especially Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies cause he's got expensive tastes. And then he washes it down with about two cases a Seven-Up and then comes burpin and fartin through the checkstand with his little belly poochin out and spends a few dimes on some Life Savers.”