The Glitter Dome (19 page)

“What's your guild called?”

“The International Photographer's Union, local six five nine.”

“Did you save the letter?” Al Mackey asked.

“No, then … let's see, the call came about three days later. I was here in the afternoon when
someone
called. He said he had a job for me. He told me that my work was the finest he'd seen in over forty years in the business. He said he was Mister Gold.”

“You said you once heard Nigel St. Claire's voice five years ago,” Martin Welborn said.

“Yeah, at the wrap party for that one show I shot at his studio. No way I can say if his voice sounded like Mister Gold. Five years?”

“What else did he say?”

“He said he heard I had some hard times and he talked about the hard times.”

“What did he say
exactly
?” Martin Welborn asked.

Griswold Weils had stopped the blinking and biting, but he was still squirming around on the clammy day bed, sliding in and out of his ragged bedroom slippers. “He talked about, you know, hearing I had some troubles with booze and that he hoped I licked it and I told him yes. And then he mentioned, you know, the troubles I had with the law.”

“He talked about your arrests for making kiddy porn,” Al Mackey said.

“He knew. Course, lots a people knew. It was in the papers. Kept me from getting some jobs. I was drinking so much then I didn't know anamorphic from anaconda. Fact, I think I
saw
a few snakes one time looking through a lens. Roller skating saved my life.”

“What was the job he had for you?” Al Mackey asked.

“He never did say. He said he wanted to talk to me about it in person. Okay, I figured it
might
be kiddy porn but I can't even pay my rent!”

“Did he give you an appointment?”

“No, he said he'd meet me somewhere and talk about it.”

“Where?”

“I told him my address but he said he didn't want to come here. Then I … I told him, let's meet in the bowling alley parking lot across the street where I skate most every night.”

“You met the night that Nigel St. Claire was found dead,” Martin Welborn said, and there was no concealing the excitement now. Even Al Mackey was catching it.

“I
swear
to you I never saw nobody! I showed up just like the telephone voice said, after the bowling alley closed. I skated in and nobody was there. Living or dead, nobody was there. There was no car there. I listened to my radio and skated, oh, maybe half an hour and nobody showed up. I thought maybe it was some kind a sick joke. I just figured some prick was playing a sick joke and kicking me when I was down.”

“Who would kick you when you were down?” Martin Welborn asked.

“Nobody I can think of,” Griswold Weils said. “I thought maybe Pete Flowers, the guy I shot the porn shows for. I go to jail and
he
gets mad about it cause he lost some money. But that don't make sense. Pete ain't been around for a while. And then Mister St. Claire's body is found the next day! And I figure, my God! what if it was Nigel St. Claire on the phone who made that date with me? Or what if he was with the guy who called? But I thought the best thing for me is to shut up and mind my own business cause I don't know nothing about it anyway, and I'm just getting my chance to get back in The Business. I might get to shoot a commercial next month, everything works out right.”

“Would Nigel St. Claire be involved in kiddy porn?”

“No way!” Griswold Weils said. “For what? Mister St. Claire is a big man. A millionaire! What's he need with those kind a problems? He could buy a whole boatload a kiddy porn he wanted it for himself. Is a man like Mister St. Claire gonna risk his position to make a few bucks in kiddy porn? You believe that, how about him dealing dope? Maybe he's gonna start running opium outa Pakistan? Mister St. Claire? Does it make sense?”

“Not much,” Martin Welborn agreed. “So what do you suppose he was doing in the parking lot?”

“I
can't
figure it!” Griswold Weils cried. “All I can do is shoot movies and skate! He wanted skating lessons, he could buy his own rink! I can't figure it. So I decided to stay out of it. I never been involved in anything like this and I'm too old to start. But you know what? I
never
went back to that bowling alley parking lot to skate. I just can't go there and think about Mister St. Claire laying there like they described it in the papers. And whoever killed him, I don't want to know nothing about, or have him know about me. Please don't let anybody know I talked to you!”

“You must be curious to know what Mister Gold wanted,” Al Mackey said.

“Not that curious,” Griswold Weils said. “But I'm curious who the witness is that said I was connected with Mister St. Claire's dead body. Who told you I was there that night?”

“Tell me,” said Martin Welborn, “when you got in trouble making the kiddy porn …”

“They were
seventeen
years old, for chrissake!” Griswold Weils said. “One a those sluts looked thirty! Kiddies, my …”

“When you got arrested,” Martin Welborn continued, “who did the technical work with you? I mean, when you make films don't you need lighting men and so forth?”

“A gaffer. I used to be a gaffer before I got into photography. Then I was a focus puller, then a camera operator. I was even a grip for a while in the old days. Hell, you don't need a real crew to make the kind a shit that got me busted. I did everything. We just rented the camera and lights. The so-called director was a pimp. My hands were shaking so much from the booze you could see the boom mike in every frame. I did terrible work. I'm glad they busted me both times, tell you the truth. Even without my real name on the credits I wouldn't want anybody to see that kind a bad photography. If I shot
real
kiddy porn I'd want it to be right. I'm an artist. First, last, always.”

“An artist,” Al Mackey said.

“And that's all I know about Mister St. Claire's death. Now can I turn the movie back on? I used to work with the director of photography who shot it. I'm making a comeback in The Business, I can promise you. I'm coming
back
.”

“On roller skates,” Al Mackey said.

And when both detectives got ready to leave, Griswold Weils said, “Am I ordered not to leave town?” which caused Al Mackey and Martin Welborn to look painfully at each other.

“How much money do you have, Griswold?” Al Mackey asked.

“Now? Oh, three or four bucks, I guess. Unemployment check comes next week.”

“Well, unless you take a bus, I guess that wouldn't get you past the city limits, would it?” Al Mackey said.

Martin Welborn, ever the more compassionate soul, satisfied the cinematographer's B-movie needs: “Griswold, we'd like to advise you not to leave town,” he said, and Griswold Weils nodded grimly.

At last, Al Mackey thought, he was going to get to The Glitter Dome after all. He hoped Amazing Grace wasn't there. She might tell everyone about his miserable performance, unworthy of even a B movie. Maybe
he
should take up roller skating and try for a comeback.

The call, which would make the coming weekend the worst in Martin Welborn's life since Paula Welborn walked out for good, was waiting at the desk when the detectives started toward the deserted squadroom. The young uniformed policeman at the desk said, “Sergeant Welborn, I got a message for you.”

The message was from Sgt. Hal Dickey of Wilshire Detectives. It simply said, “Call me as soon as you can. Dickey.”

“Wonder what Hal Dickey has for us?” Martin Welborn said.

“Let's split,” Al Mackey said. “Call him Monday.”

“It says to call as soon as I can. Maybe it's urgent.”

“Okay, okay, you sign us out. I'll call Dickey.”

“All right, my lad,” Martin Welborn said. “You'll get to The Glitter Dome before it closes. Stop worrying.”

But Martin Welborn was dead wrong. And Elliott Robles was just dead.

Al Mackey used the desk phone and talked a few moments to Hal Dickey while Martin Welborn was upstairs in the squadroom. After he hung up, Al Mackey started pacing the corridor of Hollywood Station, showing more tension than Griswold Weils. He didn't know whether to go upstairs and tell Marty there or wait for him to come down. He thought about not telling him at all. That was crazy. Marty would find out soon enough. He thought about
how
to tell him.

Elliott Robles was a snitch. Not a very good snitch, but a snitch nonetheless. He was a former heroin addict whom they cured at an addiction center by introducing him to methadone. Now he was a meth head, totally addicted to that drug.

He was a comical little twenty-seven-year-old Mexican with an Anglo name. He loved being the only Chicano in Hollywood with such an unlikely name: Elliott. He probably dreamed up the name the first time he was booked and it stayed in the computer as his “key name.” Al Mackey never bothered to find out. He was a snitch and gave them information leading to the clearance of two gang killings, so they didn't want to know too much about him for fear he'd be burned as a material witness at a murder trial. Know as little as possible and one can truthfully say “I don't know” to the relentless questions of defense counsel who want to identify and impeach one's “anonymous” informants.

They'd paid Elliott Robles no more than two hundred dollars in the six months they'd known him. He'd showed them his tattoos. The Virgin of Guadalupe on one inner arm, The Sacred Heart of Jesus on the other.
Both
were covered with old and new scar tissue from his thousands of drug injections. He said he'd decided to become a paid informant to get enough money to have skin grafts. He'd converted, and was now a Jehovah's Witness, and didn't like the tattoos anymore. Al Mackey had promised to introduce him to some Feds in case Elliott came up with some big-time narcotics dealer he could turn for enough money to get the skin grafts. But Elliott Robles never came up with a big-time anything. Even his death was very small-time, and Al Mackey didn't know how to tell Martin Welborn.

When Elliott Robles snitched off the trigger man in a lowrider, drive-by gang shooting, Martin Welborn had interrogated the killer, Chuey Verdugo, while Al Mackey booked the .22-caliber rifle that the young man had used to shoot down a sixteen-year-old paperboy making an early morning delivery on the wrong gang turf during wartime. (Any blood will avenge the honor, just so it's spilled in the right place.) Elliott Robles, in his zeal to earn some money for turning the shooter, had told everything he knew and everything he'd heard about the shooter, hoping to impress the cops to the tune of a hundred scoots, at least. Among other things, he told Martin Welborn that the shooter was wanted for a hit-and-run killing in Tucson, where he ran over some dude who raped his girlfriend.

And Martin Welborn, perhaps because that was the week prior to Paula's leaving, perhaps because they'd been working forty-two hours without sleep on the drive-by shootings, perhaps because he just got sloppy during the interrogation, ran a very careless bluff and said to the shooter: “Now let's talk about the guy you ran down in Tucson. Did you know the cops there have information about you?”

And the shooter looked at him quizzically for a moment. And took off his black woolen watch cap and wiped the sweat from his face with it, and drew very deeply on the cigarette Martin Welborn had given him, and began to
think
. And it came to him. Chuey Verdugo scratched his scraggly goatee and smoothed his Fu Manchu and dropped his head and started to shake.

It took a few seconds for Martin Welborn to realize that he wasn't shaking from fear. It was laughter. It began like heavy breathing, and grew into a chuckle, and finally the young man, who had just fired a shot through the head of a paperboy who happened to be on the wrong side of an imaginary line in East Hollywood, was roaring, and Al Mackey ran into the interrogation room.

“You gotta tell me that one, Marty,” Al Mackey said. “Is it the one about the whore and the peanut?”

Martin Welborn shrugged, and both detectives waited until the shooter settled down and wiped the tears from his eyes with the watch cap, and when he was finished he said, “I never ran over nobody in Tucson. I never even drove a car in Tucson. But one night when I was talking to this Mexican with the funny name a Elliott, I
told
him I ran over a dude in Tucson. He was passing out joints in the poolroom and wanted to hear some bad talk, so I made some up.” Chuey Verdugo wet his chops and laughed again and said, “
Now
I know who told you I shot the paperboy.”

And for several months, whenever the subject arose, Al Mackey would try to reassure Martin Welborn that anyone could make a mistake during an interrogation, and that if he'd been in that room he would've said the same thing, and the shooter was going to be in jail for a long time in any case, and Elliott Robles had been warned that Martin Welborn had made the mistake.

Elliott Robles was burned. Al Mackey told him that he should think about moving out of town. But the Mexican with the funny name had just looked at Martin Welborn and said, “You took my business out on the street, Sergeant! Where would I go? How far is El Monte?”

“About twenty miles,” Martin Welborn told him.

“I never been further away from my barrio than twenty miles,” Elliott Robles said.

And that was it. Elliott Robles quite understandably went out of the snitch business and contented himself with stealing car stereos, although that was getting tough in his part of town, what with everyone taking their stereos out of their cars at night. And finally he got nailed on a daytime residential burglary and did ninety days in the county jail, where he was safe enough. But eventually Elliott got out, and received the biggest surprise of his life when he learned that Chuey Verdugo had won an appeal and had been ordered released from custody on his
own recognizance
when his mother pleaded to the court that she desperately needed the boy to support her and the other eight children, which, of course, he'd never done even before he went to the California Youth Authority penal camp.