The Glitter Dome (24 page)

“Murder case,” Buckmore Phipps snorted. Sure. He figured the two detectives were just trying to line up a hot head job with the foxy little chippie.

Gibson Hand didn't believe the likely story either.

“What's the big murder case, Sarge?” he challenged.

“The one where the movie big shot got murdered,” Martin Welborn said. “Nigel St. Claire.”

“Nigel St. Claire!” Both street monsters exclaimed simultaneously.

“That's the name!” Buckmore Phipps said.

“I had it on the tip a my motherfuckin tongue all the time!” Gibson Hand said.

“What do you know about Nigel St. Claire?” Martin Welborn asked quickly.

“Nothin,” Gibson Hand said. “It's jist the name on a note we found on a marine last week. Don't mean nothin. It's jist we
both
knew we heard the name somewheres and we couldn't remember.”

“What about Nigel St. Claire?” Al Mackey asked, jumping out of the detective car.

“Nothin. It's nothin,” Buckmore Phipps said. “Damn, it's gettin dark. I got a hotter date than Gibson's got. Come on, Mackey!”

“Who had his name?” Martin Welborn demanded, and suddenly the street monsters realized the dicks meant business.

“Jist some nudie gy-rene,” Gibson Hand said.

“Jist some fruit-hustler from Camp Pendleton,” Buckmore Phipps added. “He had a phone number with it.”

“You can go now,” Martin Welborn said to the now happy hooker. Then he turned to the street monsters and said, “I hate to disappoint your dates, but let's go back to the office and hear
all
about your nude marine.”

“
She
balls a guy into the grave and gits to go home,” Gibson Hand moaned. “I ain't had so much as a hand job in a week and I gotta work overtime!”

While the disgruntled street monsters were telling Al Mackey and Martin Welborn all they knew about the marine, the Weasel and the Ferret were about to have their first serious altercation during a two-year partnership.

“We are three fucking
hours
overtime!” the Weasel yelled as the sun was falling into the Pacific Ocean, which they couldn't have seen if they were fifty floors in the air instead of two, given the natural overcast and unnatural smog in the Los Angeles twilight.

“I wanna stay a little longer,” the Ferret said. “That slope's gonna go in that restaurant. I can
feel
it.”

“You can feel it. Feel it! What the fuck are you now, a Sunset Strip swami?”

“You got a feeling, you go for it. I don't know how to explain it. The karma's right.”

“The karma! The karma!” The Weasel stomped around the rooftop in his motorcycle boots, kicking at any lazy pigeons too dumb to get out of his way. “Why don't you go out to Malibu and join one a those cults that pray to fat little Indian kids in leisure suits and white shoes. Karma!”

“You can go. I'm staying,” the Ferret said.

“Should I take a cab, maybe?”

“Take the Toyota.”

“How you getting back to the station?”

“I'll take a cab. I'll hitchhike. I'll walk.”

“First place, you ain't got money for a cab. Second place, nobody would pick up anybody as barfy-looking as you. Third place, you ain't walked since Judas flimflammed Jesus fuckin Christ!”

“Get off my roof,” the Ferret said. “I don't need you.”

“I ain't leaving you alone on this roof,” the Weasel said.

“You gonna
carry
me away?” the Ferret said, and now things were getting very tense.

The ball was in the Weasel's court. There was a semi-pregnant pause, and he said, “I think I know how you feel. That guy sticking your own piece in your face. This ain't Nam. This is
your
town. It's one thing to be dinged in war. It's one thing to buy it on the freeway. But it's something different when a guy in your own home town is up there against your belly. What I mean is, it's a rotten mean lowlife thing to be
murdered
. Is that how you feel? Something like that?”

The Ferret turned his back to the Weasel and looked down at the Thai restaurant. There was a little man going in. He wore a seersucker suit with black-and-white patents. He was not the assassin. The Ferret kept his back to the Weasel and said, “I
dream
about him. This was …
personal
. In Nam I never wanted to ding somebody
personally
. I'm gonna tell you something cause I know you won't tell. When I went home that night I …
cried
. It's the first time in my life I ever realized what a
sorrowful
thing it is to be murdered.”

The Weasel was silent for a moment and then he said, “I got six bucks hideout money stashed in my boot. I'm gonna buy some beer. Shit, I ain't got nothing to do tonight but watch
Dallas
anyways.”

The Ferret nodded and the Weasel left the rooftop. Another man who was exactly the right size got out of a Ford and walked into the light from the Thai restaurant. He turned toward the street. The binoculars pierced the gloom, and the Ferret could see him perfectly. He was not the assassin.

12

Jackin Jill

Even the Ferret was willing to come down from the roof after dark. His eyes hurt and he was exhausted. He felt like going home and falling in bed without his TV dinner. One thing about his ex-wife, she could cook. Tomato soup and cheese sandwiches for tonight's gourmet treat?

“I don't have enough energy to fart,” he said on their drive back to the station.

“I'm certainly glad to hear that,” the Weasel said.

“I think I'll sleep in my clothes like a freaking fireman,” the Ferret said. “I bet I couldn't make a move if you set fire to my beard.”

Nothing
could arouse him tonight, he thought. Except that, in just over an hour, he was going to be darting down Hollywood Boulevard breaking windows and sounding an alarm: The Mafia's coming!

Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand had just about wrapped up their story of Gladstone Cooley when the Weasel and the Ferret got back to the squadroom, surprised to see the street monsters and the homicide team in the office at this hour.

“All you gotta do is phone Camp Pendleton tomorra,” Gibson Hand said. “Pfc. Cooley. Huh! That's what's wrong with this fuckin country. Marines in black skivvies. Shit, gimme a hunnerd-pound gang kid with a twenny-two rifle, we'll shoot the fuck outa a whole battalion a marines like
that
one. One scrawny spic with his Mexican Mauser. And me!”

“Wasn't no grunts like that when
I
was in the Corps,” Buckmore Phipps said. “He's just part a today's youth. It's the Democrats. Any more Democrats runnin this country and the Libyan navy might decide to capture New York.”

“We'll talk to our young marine tomorrow,” Martin Welborn said. “And I want to thank you guys for helping out.”

“Whatcha got, big homicide?” the Weasel asked, while the Ferret yawned and made the last log entries of the day.

“Jist a gunfighter died with his boots on,” Gibson Hand said.

“Keep in mind that name and description of the whore they call Jill,” Martin Welborn said to the street monsters. “The phone number is turning up too often.” Then he turned to the Weasel and Ferret and said, “I was going to tell you tomorrow, the phone number surfaced again, the number your suspect dropped the night you busted Bozwell.”

“That number of the movie studio?”

“That one,” Al Mackey said. “Lots of street folks seem to be carrying that number these days.”

As the street monsters were starting out the door Al Mackey said, as an afterthought, “You might keep an eye out for a high-roller in a black Bentley.”

Which made the Ferret's droopy lids flicker a bit. “What black Bentley?” he asked the homicide detectives.

“Some guy in a Bentley gave the phone number to a little blond whore named Jill who gave it to another whore who screwed a guy to death in a motel tonight,” Al Mackey explained. “This is getting complicated. See, it's the number Buckmore's marine was carrying. It's the same …”

“A black Bentley?” the Weasel said to the Ferret. “Tuna Can Tommy's friend?”

“… number your gook was carrying,” Al Mackey continued.

“We know about a horseplayer drives a black Bentley,” the Ferret said, wide awake now. “Might be a coke dealer too, but that's probably bullshit. Yet there ain't
that
many black Bentleys screwing around the boulevard. They don't like to drive them outa Beverly Hills without an armored escort.”

“
Might
be the same guy,” the Weasel said.

“Well, we're goin home,” Buckmore Phipps announced. “You get a line on this gook, give us a chance to ride along. Gibson ain't killed no one for two, three weeks now, since they kicked him out of surveillance.”

“We'll let you know,” Al Mackey promised.

“I think that people that drive Bentleys are show-offs,” Buck-more Phipps observed to his partner as they exited.

“A course, Buckmore! That's what life's all
about!
” Gibson Hand said. “Lemme explain it all to ya …”

“You think the guy in the black Bentley might be connected with the slope that tried to waste me the other night?” the Ferret asked Martin Welborn.

“I don't know,” Martin Welborn said. “All we know is everyone keeps popping up with that movie studio phone number. A whore named Jill who got it from the man in the Bentley. A marine male model from Camp Pendleton had the number and
name
of our victim. Your Vietnamese rob-and-cut man had the same number. And another guy who likes to skate was given a mysterious appointment where our victim died. Since we know about
this
many, there might be dozens more carrying that number around. Why
that
studio? What's it got to do with our victim? I'd like to find Jill and the guy in the Bentley for starters.”

“Jill we can't help you with,” said the Ferret. “But we might be able to find a guy named Lloyd, drives a black Bentley around the boulevard.”

“We just can't stroll into Flameout Farrell's restaurant and ask the bookie to give us a client list,” the Weasel said.

The Ferret got up and started pacing back and forth in the squadroom. He looked at Al Mackey and Martin Welborn. He looked at the Weasel. Then he grinned darkly. “If this black Bentley leads to the dink, all I want is to
be
there when you take him down. You gotta promise.”

Al Mackey shrugged and said, “Gibson and Buckmore wanna be there, you two wanna be there. I'd say that gook has about as much chance of being taken alive as Custer's bugler.”

“You promise?” the Ferret demanded. “Day or night?”

“We promise,” Martin Welborn said.

“Let's go, Weasel!” the Ferret said. “I'm cooking!”

“Should we know where you're going?” Al Mackey asked.

“Better you don't,” the Ferret assured him. “When you come in tomorrow morning, we're gonna have you a name to connect with a black Bentley. I only hope it's the right Bentley.”

“Good night, fellas,” Al Mackey said. It was best not to ask too many questions of the Ferrets and Weasels of this world. There was less to deny when the headhunters put you on a polygraph.

“I don't know about this,” the Weasel said as the Ferret careened down Hollywood Boulevard toward the little restaurant owned by the bookmaker Flameout Farrell.

“It'll work, goddamnit,” the Ferret said. “Don't be a pussy.”

“I don't know.”

“Look, you saw how dumb Tuna Can Tommy was. You think a geek like that is gonna have a
smart
bookie? A smart bookie ain't gonna work outa some greasy spoon on the boulevard in the first place, is he? The damn street's crawling with heat!”

“Maybe we just oughtta go see Tuna Can Tommy. Maybe he could find out Lloyd's last name and address for us. After all, we
did
make him a secret agent.”

“Puh-leeze,” the Ferret said. “I can see it now. Tommy in his Columbo raincoat and cowboy boots sneaking around a horse parlor? Bet he'd be naked under the coat. Show his stubby putz to every broad he passed on the way. Puh-leeze, Weasel. This'll work, we do it
my
way.”

Doing it the Ferret's way entailed the Toyota being parked on Wilton Place, with all further action on foot.

They operated without flashlights and it was risky climbing the ten-foot fence surrounding the film-processing plant next to the restaurant. Chain-link fences often meant guard dogs, but there was no dog shit close by so they risked it. The problem would be going back over that fence and doing it quickly after they were through with step one. Especially if some Hollywood radio car just happened by and saw two leather-covered thugs climbing fences in the darkness, and let go a couple of rounds from the Ithaca, leaving their bodies draped over the top of the fence. Very few of the Hollywood patrol officers knew the two narcs and there would be no time to get acquainted if they were spotted fleeing at night. But it was all part of it. Even the Weasel, after he resigned himself to the Ferret's dopy plot, was starting to get stoked up.

They crept down the walkway between Flameout Farrell's little restaurant and the film-processing plant. They jumped back into shadows when an old woman in a baseball cap passed by on a bicycle with a raucous white duck riding passenger in the basket. The Ferret looked at the Weasel. The duck wore a yellow sweater. Hollywood.

When the Weasel got near the sidewalk he glanced inside Flameout Farrell's Fancy Eatery and saw a sad pensioner gagging back a fat-laden ham sandwich while a faded little guy in a T-shirt, presumably Flameout himself, was counting the day's take from the cash register. A cigarette with an ash longer than the butt hung from his lower lip and accounted for the argument he'd had with the pensioner when he gave him his ham on white.