The Glitter Dome (27 page)

“Nope. Twenty dollar,” she said, picking up her towel as Al Mackey's semi died aborning.

“Do you take Master Charge?”

“Cash money.”

Christ, he had a thirty-dollar Timex! “Listen, I'll come back and pay you … tomorrow! You be here with Jackin Jill and I promise I'll give you a hundred dollars for a double massage.”

“You no have twenty now. You have hundred tomorrow. Yes yes.”

“Look, I don't carry cash on the Strip. All these hooligans running around.”

“Okay, I give you super, but you owe Juicy Rucy.”

“All
right
!” Al Mackey sighed, lying back down. The Super!

“Now,” she whispered, “I show you where Jackin Jill learn her trick.” She leaned over and kissed Al Mackey on the cheek.
Kissed
him. That he didn't expect. “Oooohhh,” he sighed. My little cherry blossom! Then she started tickling his buttocks and thighs. He felt the hair on his legs stirring. He could hardly feel her hands. Was she going to knead his balls like bread dough? What?

She then tickled him lightly along the spine. She purred and whispered to him in Japanese. She was probably calling him a stinking disgusting round-eyed degenerate, but he didn't care.

“It good?”

“It good!” he sighed.

So far she had not touched his genitals. When she did he was going to inflate like a goddamn life raft. He was ready. Then he felt just
one
fingernail touch the hair on his balls.

“Oh, my God, it's been such a long time!” he cried.

She put two fingers down there and began tickling not just the hair, but the sacs themselves.

Get ready, Lucy-san. Al Mackey's going up like a rocket!

Except that he didn't. She touched them for perhaps ten seconds. She had never even gotten to his cock. He felt something warm and wet on his stomach.

“My God!” he yelled in despair.

“What?” the startled masseuse cried.

Al Mackey turned over and sat up. The telltale deposit told all. She took his semi-limp member and shook it disgustedly. “This not my fault. This
you
fault.”

“Oh, God!” he cried. Misfires were one thing! But premature ejaculation? Was there no end to the humiliation!

“I earn money. I try to do best.” She gave the drooping whanger another sneering shake. “This not my fault. This
you
fault.”

“I know, I know!” Al Mackey cried. “God, I know!”

Al Mackey let himself be led to a prefab plastic shower stall where the masseuse scrubbed the oil off him and sprayed him down with a jet of lukewarm water. So much for the Japanese bath. At least she tried to dry him off, but he took the towel and did it himself. He tried to get back to business despite his desperate depression.

“I meant it about tomorrow night,” he said. “I'll be here at eight o'clock. I want to see Jill.”

“And me,” she reminded him.

“Right.”

“Hundred dollar.”

“Right, right.” He nodded.

“You have this …
thing
go wrong with Jackin Jill?” Juicy Lucy asked, while Al Mackey slipped his necktie over his head and zipped his fly.

“Look, I've
never
had trouble with sex in my life!” he said. “Everything works right!”

“Yes yes,” she said.

Maybe it was the kiss, he thought, as he waited at the traffic signal to cross Sunset with some wired-up Brooke Shields clones. She had blindsided him with that kiss. It was the
last
thing he expected. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been kissed tenderly.

The light turned green and he crossed with the chattering bubblegummers. He felt so old. Maybe sex was over for him. Who needs sex? Does Jerry Brown need it? He's only the fucking
governor
. G
OD, IT'S ALL OVER
!

“Well, all your little muscles relaxed?” Martin Welborn grinned when Al Mackey got in the car.

“You don't know the half of it,” Al Mackey said sourly. “And you aren't
going
to. Jill might be there tomorrow night. I didn't want to push it too far, but I think I have a date with her and Juicy Lucy at eight o'clock.”

“Who's Juicy Lucy?”

“Do you have enough change left to buy me a cup of coffee? I need a cup of coffee.”

“You spent it
all
?”

“Massages aren't what they used to be,” Al Mackey said. “Nothing is.”

13

The Burbank Bomber

The homicide team was twenty minutes late the next morning. Luckily, Captain Woofer was at a coffee klatch with the Chamber of Commerce and wasn't there to catch Al Mackey and Martin Welborn dragging in.

Al Mackey was horribly hung over from an evening of Tullamore Dew and a furious dream-chase of a giggling Japanese masseuse who knew the Truth. After kicking the cat off the bed three times, Al Mackey awoke in the morning to find it had clawed to shreds the underwear he had dropped on the floor. He was forced to admire an animal who could punish with such inspiration. The vicious bastard was better than a set of thumbscrews.

Martin Welborn hadn't chased his ghosts. He'd been chased by them. He had dreamed of Elliott Robles. It was fragmented.

You took my business out on the street, Sergeant Welborn! Where can I go?

The dream awoke him at three
A.M.
He managed to go back to sleep after an hour of night sweats. He dreamed about Danny Meadows. He awoke crying out. He did not go back to sleep at all after that.

Their morning coffee hadn't yet been touched when they were surrounded by the Weasel and Ferret on one side, Schultz and Simon on the other.

“Okay, Winkie and Blinky, you two got your little peepers open yet?” the Ferret asked. “We got a few transmissions for ya, somewhat garbled but maybe you can figure em out. A whore named Jill? She's the seventeen-year-old daughter of a nickel-dime bookie owns a restaurant on Sunset. Her real name's Peggy Farrell and we already pulled her juvie package this morning while you two were laying in bed playing with pee pees.”

“Both our mommas went south,” Al Mackey said, grimacing from the squadroom coffee. “No pee pees.”

“Peggy Farrell has two busts for runaway,” the Weasel said. “Both times released to her daddy, Flameout Farrell, the world's crummiest cook and bummed-out bookie. But get
this!
She's been seen with this dude in the black Bentley at her daddy's place! And dad-o says Lloyd-of-the-Bentley keeps coming back, supposedly to get down on a horse but really to find out where the hell's Jill.”

“I know it ain't our case,” said Simon, “but we made some calls this morning and found that Just Plain Bill Bozwell moved out, with no forwarding address. And there's nothing in his package about any gook associates.”

“We already knew that.” Al Mackey nodded.

“It's anybody's case,” Martin Welborn said. “We want you to work on it as much as you care to. We appreciate it.”

“There ain't an F.I. in this department on Bozwell. None at the Sheriff's Office either,” Simon said. “Maybe he just hired the slopehead for the night, like he claims. Maybe you just should forget him, concentrate on the others?”

“We'll take a crack at him when he shows up for his preliminary hearing,” Martin Welborn said.

“Oh yeah, robbery called and said the preliminary's been continued,” the Weasel said. “The defense needs two weeks to prepare the case more
adequately
. Sure. Probably try to scare off the goldbugs, something like that. Well, that's robbery's problem.”

“The gook is
my
problem,” the Ferret said, flexing his bandaged hand. “His case ain't closed in
my
book.”

“
Two
weeks,” Al Mackey said, as the coffee burned his tongue and woke him up a bit. “Okay, we may as well forget about talking to Just Plain Bill Bozwell.”

“You start on the Bentley yet?” Schultz asked.

“We're getting ready to.” Al Mackey sighed. “Must be a fleet of them around here.”

“If we help solve the murder of a big shot, do we get interviewed on television?” the Ferret wondered.

“I guarantee it,” Al Mackey said. Young cops. A sporting event. A
game
. Hi, Mom, it's me!

“We ain't got much these days. Couple chickenshit domestic shootings. Want some, help?” Simon offered.

“
Do
we?” Al Mackey said, showing the first painful smile of the hung-over morning.

“We're going back to that Thai restaurant and stake it out for a few hours this afternoon,” the Ferret said.

“I thought you were supposed to be destroying all the dopers on Hollywood Boulevard,” said Schultz.

“We'll tell Whipdick Woofer the gook's been positively snitched off by our number one anonymous informant as being the kingpin importer of China white straight down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Or some fantasy like that. He don't think too clear anyway since somebody loaded his pipe.”

The smog roared. The sun screamed. For a hangover victim it was a
long
ride to Oceanside, and neither of them had had three uninterrupted hours of sleep the night before. Loading up on aspirin, Al Mackey had at least quelled the thundering headache. He snoozed for half an hour while Martin Welborn drove to Camp Pendleton, the world's second largest marine base.

A telephone call made before leaving Hollywood had Pfc. Gladstone Cooley cooling his heels in the provost marshal's office before the detectives arrived. He was wearing starched Marine Corps dungarees, bloused over his boots. His T-shirt was dead white against his golden unflawed skin. He was a recruiting poster marine.

After the introduction to the lieutenant on duty the detectives were given private use of Pfc. Cooley, who was literally shaking in those spit-shined boots, not so much in fear of the cops as of the MPs, who didn't cotton to any hint of entanglement with the civilian authorities, and figured they
owned
these young men, who were invariably guilty until proven innocent.

“Is there anything we can get you, son?” Martin Welborn asked, “A cigarette? Something to drink?”

“No, thank you, sir,” Gladstone Cooley said, sitting at rigid attention, his starched dungaree cap in his lap.

“Do you think you could sit at ease?” Martin Welborn asked. “You're not in any trouble, you know.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Gladstone Cooley said, opening his knees six inches.

“Do you remember the day the two big uniformed cops came in the modeling studio?” Al Mackey began, as the kid's cobalt-blue eyes roamed around the spartan military office. He settled on a file cabinet upon which rested an MP's helmet, webbed belt and stick.

“I remember the day, yes, sir.”

“You gave the policeman your ID and liberty card, and you also gave him a piece of paper. It had a telephone number on it. Do you remember that number?”

“Number? I usually have a few numbers with me, sir.” The young marine's mouth was so dry he was clicking on all his consonants.

“Would you like some water?” Martin Welborn asked.

“No, sir,” Gladstone Cooley said. “I'm not sure which number, sir. I was
real
scared a those policemen, sir.”

“Well, it was a number of a movie studio,” Al Mackey said. “Does that help?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I remember now. Those policemen were … monsters, sir.”

“Do you still have that piece of paper?”

“No, sir. I think the black policeman dropped it when they ran out the back door. Then I ran out the front door. So did all the artists. Those policemen looked like … like they should have spikes sticking out the sides a their necks. They were
monsters
, sir!”

“Yes, yes, we know,” Al Mackey said. “Was that phone number written by you?”

“No, sir. It was written down by some man I met. He gave it to me and asked if I had any interest in an acting job.”

“Who was the man?”

“I don't know his name. He came to the modeling studio one day. I model sometimes at a different studio on Sunset. It was a similar kind a job. He just came in and saw me and asked me.”

“What's the name of the studio?”

“I forget. Some gay guy named Malcolm owns it. Near Genesee.”

“Gay guy?”

“Yes, sir. But
I'm
not!”

“Did the man say what kind of acting job it was?” Martin Welborn asked.

“No, he just said it was a movie they was gonna start shooting in June. And they wanted to give me an audition and see was I suitable.”

“Where was the movie being shot?”

“I don't know.”

“What was it about?”

“I don't know.”

“Was it a porn flick?”

“That's what I figgered. I mean, there I was, a … model and all and …”

“A gay porn flick?”

“That's what I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said it was absolutely not a gay porn flick.”

“Did you ask him if it was a hetero porn flick?”

“I tried to find out things like that and how much they paid and all, but he told me just to call that number and I'd get the details. He said it was big money for three days' work. He asked if I could get a few days' liberty during the week and I said yes.”

“And what was the name of the man you were supposed to call at that number?” Martin Welborn asked.

“I forget,” the kid said. The marine was winding down, flipping his cap around his hand. “Let's see, it was a Mister … Mister … I forget now. Fact is, I wasn't sure about calling, more I thought about it. I don't mind posing and all but I didn't wanna be seen in some movie like that back in Minneapolis.”

“Was the name Nigel St. Claire?” Al Mackey asked.

“No, that wasn't the name,” the kid answered.