Gat Heat (24 page)

I was laying it on too much now—and maybe earlier as well—but I couldn't stop. A kind of verbal diarrhea was afflicting me, and besides, I couldn't backtrack after laying it on my jolly friends so heavily. Jolly friends—they were certainly jolly now.

“Come on, Shell,” Rawlins said, getting back onto his chair. “Let's see the rest. Maybe we'll enjoy the main feature more now we've had the short subject. Get it—
short
subject—”

I quickly flipped the projector on again before my moment of triumph could become a shambles. I'd forgotten shooting that brief bit of the little kid. I should have remembered taking a shot or two that day at Laguna Beach, when Tootsie and I had …

Ye Gods! Tootsie!

But once again I was in the midst of howling, hoots, and whistles. Tootsie was already on the screen, doing a little dance for the camera. Behind her, as in the poem, the lone and level sands stretched far away. There wasn't even a seagull in sight, not another living thing.

But Tootsie was a living thing. She was five-feet-eight living inches tall, with a thirty-eight bust, twenty-four waist, and thirty-seven hips, not a little girl. No, there was a lot of Tootsie, and she was wearing a striped bikini over only a little of it.

That is, she would be for about another three seconds. But then—

I lunged for the projector.

Too late.

Rawlins grabbed my right wrist, yelping with glee, and as I pulled back my left to sock him somebody on the other side got that one. Pretty quick two more thugs had me in several viselike grips. Don't let any of this contemporary jazz about cops fool you. There's a lot of bad in some of them.

Helplessly, I watched the dancing tomato dance, first in the top and bottom of her bikini, and then only in her bikini bottom, realizing once again that there was much less bikini than bottom.

But nobody had grabbed my mouth, and just before the top half of the bikini came off I yelled, “Listen, you—you fuzz. This isn't what you want to see. We want to see
hoods
. That's only Titsie—Titty—Tootsie!”

Hell, it could have happened to anybody. I was watching the screen and it was right after I yelled “
hoods
” that the bikini bra flew off. Anybody might have got a little tongue-tied.

I felt sick.

But not these slobs. If laughter is good for the health, none of these guys was going to be sick for a couple years.

My swell film of the four hoods was on the screen now, but even though they truly did look quite fierce—and jerky because of the two-times-normal speed of the action—and you could see the guns, and there was even one fine shot of English 'Arry firing at something unseen up ahead, the impact of their initial appearance was lost entirely.

Because guys in the room were still whooping and yelling things like: “Yoo-hoo, Titty!” and, “Ba-haybee, be
my
Titsie Titty Tootsie!” and, “Oh, my hotsy-totsy Tootsie,” and a lot of other dumb junk.

I just waited, sourness gathering in my bloodstream. It was awful. I had to live with these guys, and this was ruining me. But there was plenty of time for the men to calm down, because there was quite a while after the hoods went by the camera when nothing happened.

Absolutely nothing.

We performers were all running around in a circle, to be sure, but all the camera caught was a bunch of trees growing. You could not, of course, tell they were growing. Nothing stirred. There wasn't even one of those little birds hopping from branch to twig.

It was excruciatingly boring. But the men did quiet down except for an occasional chuckle.

And there was, as well, time enough for me to sort of gather my strength again, to spring back. I realize, crude fun or not, the salient—and actually reasonably important—part of the film was yet to come. And certainly there could be nothing funny in four guys trying to kill another guy. Especially when I was the other guy. I even began looking forward to my own appearance on the screen.

I knew, naturally, that it wasn't going to be
quite
as dramatic as my build-up. But, still, it was bound to be fairly gripping, especially to these men who knew Fleck and Little Phil and the others, knew them and their records of thievery, violence, and mayhem.

I was almost smiling in anticipation, feeling pretty good again and certainly less down-in-the-mouth than when it started. Because I remembered, because I had
been
there, and because it began so suddenly, the start of it damn near lifted me up off my seat.

There I came! Yes, there I was! This was keen.

I came speeding around the curve in the path, way up ahead there, turning and sprinting …

No, I wasn't turning.

What was happening? Who was that creep? Whoever he was, he looked even from way off like those cartoons of guys lost in parched deserts.

He wasn't turning; he was just running—well, sort of lunging staggeringly—right off into the woods. Wait—there was a pretty-good-sized tree smack in front of him, and the imbecile was staggering lungingly straight at it.

This wasn't the way I remembered it.

Yeah, I did recall smacking into a tree about there. But it had been just a little tree, more of a branch, as I recalled; I'd snapped it right in two. But that thing on the screen looked maybe six inches—oh!

He—I—some idiot—smacked right into it with a tremendous wallop. The tree bent over, and maybe cracked, but didn't go down. The guy did, though. Only not immediately.

He sort of reeled back into the path and stood there, arms held rigidly out and angled down from his sides at about a forty-five-degree angle. Then his legs began moving stiffly and jerkily as he moved right, left, forward a bit, left, right. He looked like nothing so much as those comics who do imitations of Frankenstein's monster.

It was bad enough any way you looked at it, but since the film had been taken at only eight frames a second the action was speeded up tremendously. Somehow that made it quite a lot worse.

Then—there he went.

He flopped down onto the ground and lay as one dead. No, he was still twitching. Ah, there, he was getting up. Crawling forward. Staggering to his feet. Flopping as one dead again. Up, on his feet, running, weaving. Close to the camera now.

Close enough for individual features to be seen—and now behind him came the first hood. Big Fleck. Tearing along like a goddamn machine. Didn't look like he was even breathing hard. But the other one, the guy now reaching out with one hand toward the camera,
he
was breathing hard.

His mouth was stretched into a caricature of the theater's mask of tragedy, with his tongue projecting astonishingly from the middle of it. He was reaching, reaching, for the camera. Reaching while still at least fifteen feet away from it. Then he disappeared. Just fell down out of sight.

That at least left the field of vision clear—and, mercifully, removed that contorted face from view—and now behind Fleck could be seen two more men, then another, the last of the four pursuers. It was evident that one or two of them were shooting at something near the camera. Something—there he was. I had to face it: There I was.

Now, this was pretty serious business, make no mistake about it. Those were real hoods out there, with real guns, and they were shooting those real guns at me. But from the noises and near-screams these dumb cops all around me were making, would you have thought it pretty serious business? No, you would not.

The dump cops were cracking up, laughing and howling and hammering on their thighs and heads and even on other dumb cops.

Part of it, surely, was the fast-action, the jerky Keystone-Kops-pursuing-the-bandits effect. But, to tell it true, another part had to be the not entirely dashing and devil-may-care picture which I myself presented. I, and the rather astonishing—and all horrified—expressions playing over my chops.

I was up again, heading for the camera, bound and determined to get that bloody camera, chin stuck forward so far it appeared to be sliding out from under my face like the drawer in a cash register, lower lip peeled down to expose lots of teeth and even gums. Every once in a while my eyes squeezed shut and simultaneously my tongue stuck out and then popped back inside. If I'd been a lizard you'd have sworn I was catching flies.

The Homicide squad room was in an uproar; it was bedlam; it was a goddamn lunatic asylum. It was now clear as could be that those four hoods were Fleck, English 'Arry, Little Phil, and another creep who now could easily be identified, that each of them carried a pistol, and that two of them were at the moment employing their pistols feloniously in an attempted assassination.

But did the assembled forces of the law give a hoot? They did not. Not that kind of hoot, anyhow.

It had to end. At last, I had grabbed the camera. There was a big hand blocking out everything, then swirling earth, trees, sky. All over, at last. All over … All …

Nope.

The worst, in some ways, was yet to come.

There had been that final moment when I thought I'd been shot. The simple truth was that I had merely yanked up my hands—clutching the still-filming Bolex—and clanked myself on the chin. But the last few frames had captured me—since the camera was held in my hands and the lens had been aimed, as though by Satan himself, smack up at my chops—looking down the path at those lumbering, thundering, too-speedily-approaching hoods. It was not to be expected, then, that my expression would resemble that of a man completely unconcerned.

It didn't.

In the first of these final two shots my mouth was again open, though not more than nine inches, and my tongue was sticking out to what surely must have been its utmost length and a little bir more, and my eyes appeared literally to be popping from their sockets like corks from broken champagne bottles.

The second shot of my face was the same, except that it had been taken from much closer, as I'd yanked up the camera. Naturally in the extreme close-up my image was out of focus and quite fuzzy, which helped a lot. It merely made me appear to have a long, fuzzy tongue and hairy eyeballs.

When at last the sounds of great festivity ceased ululating from the now brightly-lighted Homicide squad room and echoing throughout the L.A. Police Building, and conceivably three-fourths of Los Angeles, Rawlins wheezed and choked and sighed a bit more, then got control of himself.

“You want us to pick 'em up, Shell—or do you want to go get 'em yourself?”

“I have
nothing
to say,” I said loftily.

And he was off again.

Ah, nuts, I thought. How am I going to get help from the Los Angeles Police Department when all the cops are batty? I
will
do it myself. That's the ticket. Like the old saw, if you want something done yourself, do it right. I'll do it myself, whatever it is—I didn't remember at the moment. I was in a kind of daze.

Even Samson, my buddy, kindly old Sam, turned against me.

With his eyes still streaming he said, “Shell, I
wanted
to use your murder movie as an excuse to try tagging Violet. But I can't do that now. Who—who—” he was choking up again.

“I'll do it myself,” I said. “I'll go out and see Jimmy, and … something.”

“Something, yeah. They'll kill you half a dozen times.”

“So? What have I got to live for?”

“Well, you can't expect the police to go there, not merely on this … this—” he started to strangle and tee-hee some more—“this evidence. Can't show this to anybody; nobody'd believe it. Especially not in
Hollywood,
the film capital of the
land
.”

Samson was only kidding of course. The fact is, he seized the film as evidence. Anyway, he seized it for something.

I got up to leave. Then I sank down in my chair again, only now beginning to realize what long, lonely days lay ahead of me. In through the door had walked—or maybe wiggled is a better word—that burly, six-four police sergeant named Mac-Craig. Ordinarily, he was bald, but now he had on a woman's wig, undoubtedly borrowed from a police woman. He had his pants on, but no shirt, and around his bare chest—in front, at least, there was a string extension in back so it would fit—was a paper-stuffed brassiere of rather remarkable dimensions. Looked like it had the whole
New York Times
in it. In one big hand dangled a submachine gun. In the other was a pair of white Jockey shorts.

No initials on the shorts. No name. Nothing on the gun, either. Nothing was needed. It seemed evident that Rawlins had spilled his guts about
everything
he knew and some things he'd only guessed.

I sat there, gazing in ill-concealed disgust at the disgustingly ill-concealed exhibition MacCraig was making of himself. Cops have a very crude sense of humor. They're very crude human beings. What more can you expect when they're all the time around slobs and jerks and crude things? Actually, they don't have much of a sense of humor at all. They laugh at things like people getting caught in undertows and old ladies getting snagged in power mowers.

I stood up. “Well,” I said to MacCraig. “That's a pretty dumb exhibition.” The cops were having a screaming good time. Laughing at Mac Craig, I supposed. “What's so funny?” I asked them. “You guys must be sick.
I
can't see anything so funny—”

I don't know why, but that set them off as much as anything else so far. Dumb—boy, you think of a better word, use it.

“That's pretty dumb,” I said again, unable to think of a better word. “We need men like you, MacCraig. In the Sanitation Department. Or possibly you could give enemas in the zoo, or to restaurant oysters.”

I couldn't win. Just didn't have it any more. I had lost, lost, I thought, sourness bubbling in my bubblers.

I gathered up all the dignity I could find to gather, which was approximately as much as you could insert into a gnat's—oh, a gnat's ear. I walked to the door, turned and, smiling like a man with rabies, surveyed the howling loonies whom I now thought of as the L.A. Fuzz Department.