Golden Orange (6 page)

“What's wrong with
you
?” Spoon mumbled to Winnie, who paid his tab and listed unsteadily, still rubbing his chest.

“I don't feel so good. My pump. It's like, missing beats!” Winnie said. “That's scarier than Dan Quayle!”

“Well, I can't help you with that,” Spoon said, droning. “I'm busy as the beach master on D-Day. I can't be worryin about turtles gettin boffed and I can't fix bum tickers, okay? Do you understand what I'm sayin?”

Guppy, whom one of the snooker-playing cops had outlined in chalk while she snoozed on the bartop, suddenly lifted her head from her arms and cried: “Of
course
there's something wrong, Winnie! You're
drunk
, you dummy!”

Spoon decided to pop for a musical freebie and actually put a quarter of his own into the ancient Wurlitzer, beating out a spoon-fed accompaniment to Bobby Darin's “Beyond the Sea.”

When Winnie lurched out of the saloon that night, he heard Guppy cry out to the sleeping she-turtle: “I got boffed and left on the beach! I know what it's like! How was it for you? Did the earth move or what?
Did
it, Irma?”

5

Star-crossed Lovers

T
he invitation to “The Champagne Brunch and Fashion Show” carried a suggestion of “Big Apple attire.” The Big Apple had come to The Golden Orange! Which meant that there were a lot of women wearing red or black, and everybody hoped to be described as either chic or sophisticated, this on the southwestern edge of North America, where, despite some of the most expensive residential property in the nation, only a few of the most chic and sophisticated restaurants
suggested
jackets for gentlemen. At its
most
formal, The Golden Orange dress code mirrored the Costa del Sol in summer, but ordinarily, Pago Pago casual was okay. The gentlemen's dress code just about anyplace on the Gold Coast was: shoes, and a shirt with a collar. The salespeople in shops and department stores pay no attention whatsoever to how a customer is dressed. But they can spot a $10,000 Swiss watch faster than anyone this side of Zurich. They address themselves to a customer's wrist.

The afternoon fund-raiser suggesting the Big Apple duds had Tess Binder agonizing, but she settled on a persimmon and white nautical jacket with braided trim and brass buttons, over a white skirt. She'd worn the outfit two or three times and hoped anyone who'd be there wouldn't have seen her in it. She couldn't remember where she'd worn it last and worried that it made her look heavier. Tess wore only a size six, but there was a time when she wore a four. The years were tumbling by so fast, Tess couldn't even remember when the hell it was that she
went
to a six! She'd begun perspiring even before putting on the jacket. Oddly enough, when she thought of Win Farlowe it calmed her.

Tess got stuck in a traffic jam on MacArthur Boulevard, caused by a two-car fender bender. Traffic in this, the fastest-growing area in America, was increasing at a terrifying clip. And everywhere Tess looked there were brand-new high-rise towers of tinted glass and steel. Tess Binder was surrounded by unimaginable wealth and awesome economic power. Driving to the brunch, she felt lost in a wilderness of looming dark towers.

The fashion show raised a good deal of money that afternoon, but for Tess it was a disaster. She
lusted
for the pantsuits and capes, and the “little dresses with big impact,” but prices for virtually nothing were starting at about $1,000, and one jacket she adored went for $15,000.

The women looked thinner because so many were wearing black. Fuller lips were definitely in: big swollen pouters, sometimes obtained by collagen injections or even fat cell transplants for more permanence. The fat cells were often siphoned from the fanny and funneled into the lips, which seemed ironically appropriate to the Gold Coast daddies who footed the bill. Most of the women just got the bee-stung effect by applying lipstick liner and matching lipstick, set by matte brushed powder, thus making themselves look poutier than John McEnroe. What with all the Manhattan black and blood-puddle red and swollen lips, the hot mommas resembled a coven of vampires.

At table number one were the Woodcrests. Morton Wood-crest wasn't just “seven-one-four” rich—the dialing code for Orange County and title of a name-dropping local publication—he was “F.F.H.” rich, 292nd in
Forbes
' 400. Tess thought that his wife, Zoe, was no longer just willowy, but so emaciated her spine jutted into her dress like a string of beads. Before Morton settled on his fifth wife, half the hot mommas at the club looked like Cambodian refugees because Morton liked them
thin.

The brunch itself was so uninspired, everyone was bitching. The Arts Society had the gall to serve Belgian waffles, which anyone could get at Denny's all day. The fact that these waffles were served with strawberries and cream and cold curried chicken made matters
worse.
That combination had been déclassé for ten years. And the domestic champagne was simply undrinkable.

Everyone just knew that something as trite as Norwegian salmon poached in a tarragon
beurre blanc
would be next, and they were right! They could at least have served something simple and light, maybe some grilled trout with braised fennel. The Golden Orange hadn't seen such sneers and eye rolling since a consortium headed by eastern Jews had moved in on the biggest land development in the area.

The whispered reminder that the proceeds from the fashion show and champagne brunch were for “the arts” impressed no one. When you're limited to a thousand calories a day, you'd better be offered more than waffles and lox. Most of the hot mommas managed only a few forkfuls of watercress and shiitake mushrooms.

There were, however, a lot of happy Mexican busboys and dishwashers who later loaded up on leftovers and guzzled champagne from opened bottles. Though most of them agreed with the hot mommas that the bubbly wasn't much. Couldn't touch Dos Equis, Corona, or any beer from Baja.

After Tess got home that afternoon, she poured herself a diet cola and sat barefoot on her patio, on the ghetto side of the island, facing Pacific Coast Highway. She promised herself she'd never go to another fashion show unless she could afford any silly goddamn piece of New York or Paris or Tokyo trash that struck her fancy. Tess Binder had never felt so
poor.

Valium calmed her sufficiently to pick up the telephone.

The ten o'clock news had already dealt with the shoot-out in Laguna Beach by the time Buster Wiles arrived at Spoon's Landing. It was the first fatal shooting involving Newport Beach policemen in more than ten years.

Guppy Stover lifted her old gray head from her folded arms and greeted him with, “Hey, I saw you on TV. Goddamn killer!” Then she yawned and shut her eyes.

Knowing how Buster counted calories, Spoon put a glass of light beer on the bar, but Buster said, “We been shootin people all day and whadda I get? Light beer?” Buster was trying to look jaunty but his hands were shaking. “Gimme a Wild Turkey,” he said. “Neat.”

Winnie Farlowe spotted Buster from his table across the saloon where he'd been watching the Lakers on the big screen. Winnie got up and joined the big cop at the bar.

“Saw your little trauma drama on the news,” Winnie said. “What the hell you doing down there in Laguna anyways?”

“Man, you got off the job
just
in time,” Buster said. “Guy had an Uzi! I was looking up at
death
!”

Guppy Stover popped up again, smoothing her trademark evening gloves and adjusting her red velvet hair ribbon. “What'd it look like?” she asked Buster. “Death?”

“An Uzi,” Buster said to his drink. “Looks like an Uzi.”

Unable to visualize an Uzi, Guppy closed her eyes again. Bored and drunk.

Buster Wiles bared his shockingly white teeth and squinted through one heavily lashed violet eye when he held Spoon's bucket glass up to the light. Satisfied that it was moderately clean, he settled onto the barstool and reached under his L.A. Raiders warm-up jacket to adjust the ride of his shoulder holster.

He was forty-four, but still had the iron-pumping build he'd cultivated when he won the surfing competition in Huntington Beach in 1966 before going to Nam. And he'd lost very little of his coppery mane to middle age. The present-day surfers said that Buster wasn't too hot on a board anymore, but he still had pick-of-the-litter when he felt like making an appearance at any of the surfing events in Orange County. One of the reasons the department had taken Buster off motors, according to police scuttlebutt, was because in a uniform with helmet and boots, he had women of all ages
intentionally
cruising through red lights just to get stopped by the hunk with violet eyes. They called him “Gideon” Wiles, he'd been in so many hotel rooms.

“So what happened down there, Buster?” asked Winnie.

Buster let out a vaporous sigh that seemed to enervate his mean-looking body. Then he said, “Soledad Sam, ever run into him when you were on the job?”

Winnie shook his head and Buster said, “Call him Soledad 'cause he's got this tattoo of Soledad Prison on his shoulder. Anyways, he's this little speed tweaker, like our snitch. Spends his time in low-life meth labs breathin more ether fumes than all the patients at Hoag Hospital put together. Uses meth and other dirtbag drugs. But our snitch tells us Soledad Sam's been hired to transport a key of cocaine from this apartment house in Laguna Beach to a hotel up by John Wayne Airport. I mean, this little ratfucker's gonna be trusted with a
key
!”

“How much is a key these days?” Winnie asked.

“Thirteen gee per key. And this little germ never had more than a couple twenty-dollar rocks in his life before. So me 'n Novak, we don't really believe our snitch too much, but we stake out the apartment with a couple guys from Laguna P.D., who didn't have to go to their tanning salon today or whatever they do down there. And jist as we're tryin to figure out where our little dildo is at, he comes outta the apartment with something tucked inside his pants that's either the world's biggest hernia or a key of first-class blow.”

“Get to the Uzi,” Guppy Stover said belligerently, the first time Buster was aware that the old woman was listening.

Buster turned away from Guppy and continued in a lower voice. “Anyways, we take down the chump and sure enough he's got the key! Says he got five ohs for takin on the transportation job and four more when he makes the delivery. He starts rollin over on everybody. Says he's a balls-up dude and if we talk to the D.A. and his parole officer he'll even testify for us.”

“There's no business like snow business,” Winnie observed.

“So we strike a deal, sort of, when he says there's still maybe another key inside with these two outta-work musicians that share the place. We hook up Sal and go chargin back inside, based on his information. We bust
one
guy and find a few lines of blow on the table in the kitchen, but no keys.”

“
One
guy?”

“I'm gettin to that,” said Buster. “Now it ain't a big apartment, so we figure he jumped out the window when he heard us comin up the steps. So me 'n Novak, we're searchin the bedroom when I see this mangy tomcat that stops lickin his balls long enough to mosey over to this big overstuffed chair, and the cat goes behind it to this slit in the upholstery and sticks his paw inside. And I says, ‘Aha!'”

“Wake me up when you get to the Uzi part,” Guppy mumbled to her drink.

“So I go over and shove the tomcat outta the way and I stick my arm inside the chair. And all hell breaks loose!”

Buster paused when three off-duty cops, including Novak the narc, came through the door and headed straight for the snooker table in the adjoining room.

Novak yelled, “Draft beer, Spoon. And keep it comin!”

“Right on cue,” Winnie said, nodding in the direction of Novak the narc, who was sighting down the shaft of a snooker cue as though it were a rifle.