The Big Nowhere (9 page)

Celeste’s whoremaster officer had escaped before Buchenwald was liberated; just as Mal was about to take his discharge, he was captured in Kraków and held at the MP barracks there. Mal went to Kraków just to see him; the stockade duty officer showed him the Nazi’s confiscated property, which included unmistakable locks of Celeste’s hair. Mal walked back to Franz Kempflerr’s cell and emptied his sidearm into the man’s face.

A tight net was thrown over the incident; the military governor, an Army one-star, liked Mal’s style. Mal took an honorable discharge, brought Celeste and Stefan to America, returned to his LAPD sergeantcy and divorced Laura. Of his two cuckolders, Buzz Meeks was wounded in a shootout and pensioned off to civilian life; Jerry Dunleavy stayed on the job—but out of his way. Rumor had it that Meeks thought Mal was behind the shooting—revenge for the affair with Laura. Mal let the talk simmer: it played a good counterpoint to the coward innuendo he’d inspired in Watts. Word leaked out here and there on the gas man; Ellis Loew, DA’s comer, Jew, draft dodger, took an interest in him and offered to swing some gravy his way once he aced the lieutenant’s exam. In ’47 he made lieutenant and transferred to the DA’s Bureau of Investigations, cop protégé to the most ambitious Deputy District Attorney the City of Los Angeles ever saw. He married Celeste and settled into family life, a ready-made child part of the deal. And the closer father and son became, the more mother resented it; and the more he pressed to formally adopt the boy the more she refused—and tried to mold Stefan in the manner of the old Czech aristocracy that was yanked out from under her by the Nazis—language lessons and European culture and customs, Celeste oblivious to the memories they’d uprooted.

“To the mother the child belongs. Even a failed lawyer like you should know that maxim.”

Mal listened to Celeste’s sewing machine, Stefan’s toy soldiers hitting the door. He came up with his own epigraph: saving a woman’s life only induces gratitude if the woman has something to live for. All Celeste had was memories and a hated existence as a cop’s hausfrau. All she wanted was to take Stefan back to the time of his horror and make him part of the memories. His final epigraph: he wouldn’t let her.

Mal walked back in the house to read the Commie snitch’s files: his glory grand jury and all it would reap.

Juice
.

The two picket lines moved slowly down Gower, past the entrances of the Poverty Row studios. The UAES hugged the inside, displaying banners stapled to plywood strips: FAIR PAY FOR LONG HOURS, CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS
NOW
! PROFIT SHARES FOR ALL WORKERS. The Teamsters paced beside them, a strip of sidewalk open, their signs—REDS OUT! NO CONTRACTS FOR COMMUNISTS—atop friction-taped two-by-four’s. Talk between the factions was constant; every few seconds, “Fuck” or “Shit” or “Traitor” or “Scum” would be shouted, a wave of garbled obscenities following. Across the street, reporters stood around, smoking and playing rummy on the hoods of their cars.

Buzz Meeks watched from the walkway outside Variety International Pictures’ executive offices—three stories up, a balcony view. He remembered busting union heads back in the ’30s; he sized up the Teamsters versus the UAES and saw a bout to rival Louis and Schmeling Number Two.

Easy: the Teamsters were sharks and the UAES were minnows. The Teamster line featured Mickey Cohen goons, union muscle and hard boys hired out of the day labor joints downtown; the UAES was old leftie types, stagehands past their prime, skinny Mexicans and a woman. If push came to shove, no cameras around, the Teamsters would use their two-by-four’s as battering rams and charge—brass knuckle work in close, blood, teeth and nose cartilage on the sidewalk, maybe a few ears ripped off of heads. Then vamoose before the lackluster LAPD Riot Squad made the scene.
Easy
.

Buzz checked his watch. 4:45; Howard Hughes was forty-five minutes late. It was a cool January day, light blue sky mixed with rain clouds over the Hollywood Hills. Howard got sex crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab’s Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty’s yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes’s—one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes Enterprises’ fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself. Hopefully, bonus money was involved: he was still in hock to a bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison.

Buzz heard a door opening behind him; a woman’s voice called out, “Mr. Hughes will see you now, Mr. Meeks.”

The woman had stuck her head out of Herman Gerstein’s doorway; if the Variety International boss was involved, then bonus dough was a possible. Buzz ambled over; Hughes was seated behind Gerstein’s desk, scanning the pictures on the walls: semicheesecake shots of Gower Gulch starlets going nowhere. He was dressed in his usual chalk stripe business suit, sporting his usual scars—facial wounds from his latest airplane crash. The big guy cultivated them with moisturizing lotion—he thought they gave him a certain panache.

And no Herman Gerstein; and no Gerstein’s secretary. Buzz dropped the formalities that Hughes required when other people were present. “Getting any, Howard?”

Hughes pointed to a chair. “You’re my bird dog, you should know. Sit, Buzz. This is important.”

Buzz sat down and made a gesture that took in the whole office: cheesecake, rococo wall tapestries and a knight’s suit of armor hatrack. “Why here, boss? Herman got a job for me?”

Hughes ignored the question. “Buzz, how long have we been colleagues?”

“Goin’ on five years, Howard.”

“And you’ve worked for me in various capacities?”

Buzz thought: fixer, bagman, pimp. “That’s right.”

“And during those five years have I given you profitable referrals to other people in need of your talents?”

“You surely have.”

Hughes cocked two finger pistols, his thumbs the hammers. “Remember the premiere of
Billy the Kid
? The Legion of Decency was outside Grauman’s shouting ‘Whoremonger’ at me and little old ladies from Pasadena were throwing tomatoes at Jane Russell. Death threats, the whole megillah.”

Buzz crossed his legs and picked lint off a trouser cuff. “I was there, boss.”

Hughes blew imaginary smoke off his fingertips. “Buzz, that was a dicey evening, but did I ever describe it as dangerous, or
big
?”

“No, boss. You surely didn’t.”

“When Bob Mitchum was arrested for those marijuana cigarettes and I called you in to help with the evidence, did I describe
that
as dangerous or big?”

“No.”

“And when
Confidential Magazine
was getting ready to publish that article that alleged that I like well-endowed underage girls, and you took your billy club down to the office to reason with the editor, did I describe
that
as dangerous or big?”

Buzz winced. It was late ’47, the fuck pads were at full capacity, Howard was a pork-pouring dervish and was filming his teenaged conquests’ endorsing his prowess—a ploy aimed at getting him a date with Ava Gardner. One of the film cans was snatched out of the RKO editing department and ended up at
Confidential
; he broke three sets of scandal mag fingers quashing the story—then blew Hughes’ bonus betting stupid on the Louis-Walcott fight. “No, Howard. You didn’t.”

Hughes shot Buzz with his finger guns. “Pow! Pow! Pow! Turner. I am telling you that that seditious spectacle down on the street is both dangerous
and
big, and
that
is why I called you here.”

Buzz looked at the pilot/inventor/mogul, exhausted by his theatrics, wanting to get to it. “Howard, is there any cash money involved in all this big danger? And if you’re askin’ me to break some union heads, take another think, ’cause I am too old and too fat.”

Hughes laughed. “Solly Gelfman wouldn’t say that.”

“Solly Gelfman is too goddamned kind. Howard, what do you want?”

Hughes draped his long legs over over Herman Gerstein’s desk. “What’s your opinion of Communism, Buzz?”

“I think it stinks. Why?”

“The UAES down there, they’re all Commies and Pinkos and fellow travelers. The City of Los Angeles is getting a grand jury together to investigate Communist influence in Hollywood, concentrating on the UAES. A bunch of studio heads—myself, Herman and some others—have formed a group called ‘Friends of the American Way in Motion Pictures’ to help the City out. I’ve contributed to the kitty, so has Herman. We thought you’d like to help out, too.”

Buzz laughed. “With a contribution out of my meager salary?”

Hughes aped the laugh, putting an exaggerated okie twang on it. “I knew appealing to your sense of patriotism was a long shot.”

“Howard, you’re only loyal to money, pussy and airplanes, and I buy you as a good buddy of the American Way like I buy Dracula turning down a job at a blood bank. So this grand jury thing is one of the three, and my money’s on money.”

Hughes flushed and fingered his favorite plane crash scar, the one a girl from the Wisconsin boonies was in love with. “Brass tacks then, Turner?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hughes said, “The UAES is in at Variety International, RKO, three others here on Gower and two of the majors. Their contract is ironclad and has five more years to run. That contract is costly, and escalation clauses will cost us a fortune over the next several years. Now the goddamn union is picketing for extras: bonuses, medical coverage and profit points. Totally unacceptable.
Totally
.”

Buzz locked eyes with Hughes. “So don’t renew their god-damned contract or let them strike.”

“Not good enough. The escalation clauses are too costly, and they won’t strike—they’ll pull very subtle slow dances. When we signed with UAES in ’45, no one knew how big television was going to get. We’re getting reamed at the box office, and we want the Teamsters in—despite the goddamned Pinko UAES and their goddamned ironclad contract.”

“How you gonna get around that contract?’

Hughes winked; scars and all, the act made him look like a big kid. “There’s a fine-print clause in the contract that states the UAES can be ousted if criminal malfeasance—and that includes treason—can be proved against them. And the Teamsters will work much cheaper, if certain payments are made to certain silent partners.”

Buzz winked. “Like Mickey Cohen?”

“I can’t shit a shitter.”

Buzz put his feet on Gerstein’s desk, wishing he had a cigar to light up. “So you want the UAES smeared, before the grand jury convenes or sometime during the proceedings. That way you can boot them on the malfeasance clause and put in Mickey’s boys without them Commies suin’ you—for fear of gettin’ in more shit.”

Hughes nudged Buzz’s feet off the desk with his own immaculate wing tips. “ ‘Smeared’ is a misnomer. In this case we’re talking about patriotism as the handmaid to good business. Because the UAES are a bunch of card-carrying Pinko subversives.”

“And you’ll give me a cash money bonus to—”

“And I’ll give you a leave of absence from your duties at the plant and a cash bonus to help the grand jury investigating team out. They’ve already got two cops as political interrogators, and the Deputy DA who’s running the show wants a third man to rattle for criminal skeletons and make money pickups. Buzz, there’s two things you know exceedingly well: Hollywood and our fair city’s criminal elements. You can be very valuable to this operation. Can I count you in?”

Dollar signs danced in Buzz’s head. “Who’s the DA?”

“A man named Ellis Loew. He ran for his boss’s job in ’48 and lost.”

Jewboy Loew, he of the colossal hard-on for the State of California. “Ellis is a sweetheart. The two cops?”

“An LAPD detective named Smith and a DA’s Bureau man named Considine. Buzz, are you in?”

The old odds: 50-50, either Jack Dragna or Mal Considine set up the shooting that got him two in the shoulder, one in the arm and one through the left cheek of his ass. “I don’t know, boss. There’s bad blood between me and that guy Considine. Cherchez la femme, if you follow my drift. I might have to need money
really
bad before I say yes.”

“Then I’m not worried. You’ll get yourself into a bind—you always do.”

Captain Al Dietrich said, “I got four phone calls about your little escapades in City territory night before last. At home yesterday.
On my day off
.”

Danny Upshaw stood at parade rest in front of the station commander’s desk, ready to deliver an oral rundown on the Goines homicide—a memorized pitch, to end in a plea for more Sheriff’s manpower and an LAPD liaison. While Dietrich fumed, he scotched the ending and concentrated on making his evidence compelling enough so that the old man would let him work the snuff exclusively for at least two more weeks.

“…and if you wanted information on heroin pushers, you should have had
our
Narco guys contact
theirs
. You don’t beat up the pushers, colored or otherwise. And the manager of Bido Lito’s runs another club inside the County, and he’s very simpatico with the watch sergeant at Firestone. And you were seen drinking on duty, which I do myself, but under more discreet circumstances. Follow my drift?”

Danny tried to look sheepish—a little trick he’d taught himself—eyes lowered, face scrunched up. “Yes, sir.”

Dietrich lit a cigarette. “Whenever you call me sir, I know you’re jerking my chain. You’re very lucky I like you, Deputy. You’re very lucky I think your gifts exceed your arrogance. Report on your homicide. Omit Dr. Layman’s findings, I read your summary and I don’t like gore this early in the morning.”

Danny drew himself ramrod stiff in reflex—he’d wanted to play up the horror aspects to impress Dietrich. “Captain, so far I’ve got two half-assed eyewitness descriptions of the killer—tall, gray-haired, middle-aged. O+ blood typed from his semen—very common among white people. I don’t think either witness could ID the man from mugs—those jazz clubs are dark and have distorted lighting. The print man who dusted the transport car got no latents except those belonging to the owner and his girlfriend. He did eliminations based on Civil Defense records—both Albanese and the girlfriend had CD jobs during the war. I checked taxi logs around the time the body was dumped and the car abandoned, and nothing but couples leaving the after-hours clubs on the Strip were picked up. Albanese’s story of going back to darktown to look for his car has been verified by cab records, which eliminates him as a suspect. I spent all day yesterday and most of the evening recanvassing Central Avenue, and I couldn’t find any other eyewitnesses who saw Goines with the tall, gray-haired man. I looked for the two eyewitnesses I talked to before, thinking I’d try to get some kind of composite drawing out of them, but they were gone—apparently these jazz types are mostly fly-by-nights.”

Dietrich stubbed out his cigarette. “What’s your next move?”

“Captain, this is a fag killing. The better of my two eyewitnesses pegged Goines as a deviant, and the mutilations back it up. Goines was killed with a heroin OD. I want to run mugshots of known homos by Otis Jackson and other local pushers. I want—”

Dietrich was already shaking his head. “No, you cannot go back to City territory and question the man you pistol-whipped, and LAPD Narco will never cooperate with a list of local pushers—thanks to your escapades.” He picked a copy of the
Herald
off his desk, folded it over and pointed to a one-column piece: “Vagrant’s Body Found Dumped Off Sunset Strip New Year’s Eve.” “Let’s keep it at this—low-key, no name on the victim. We’ve got great duty here at this division, we thrive on tourism, and I don’t want it bollixed up because some queer slashed another queer hophead trombone player. Comprende?”

Danny twisted his fingers together behind his back, then shot his CO a Vollmer maxim. “Uniform codes of investigation are the moral foundation of criminology.”

Captain Al Dietrich said, “Human garbage is human garbage. Go to work, Deputy Upshaw.”

Danny went back to the squadroom and brainstormed in his cubicle, partition walls bracketing him, the station’s other three detectives—all at least ten years his senior—typing and jabbering into phones, the noise coming at him like gangbusters, then subsiding into a lull that was like no sound at all.

A mug blowup of Harlan “Buddy” Jastrow, Kern County axe murderer and the jolt that made him a cop, glared from the wall above his desk; some deputy who’d heard about his all-point want on the man had drawn a Hitler mustache on him, a speech balloon extending from his mouth: “Hi! I’m Deputy Upshaw’s nemesis! He wants to fry my ass, but he won’t tell anybody why! Watch out for Upshaw! He’s a college boy prima donna and he thinks his shit don’t stink!” Captain Dietrich had discovered the artwork; he suggested that Danny leave it there as a reminder to hold on to his temper and not high-hat the other men. Danny agreed; word got back to him that his fellow detectives liked the touch—it made them think he had a sense of humor that he didn’t have—and it made him angry and somehow able to brainstorm better.

So far, two and a half days in, he had the basics covered. The Central Avenue jazz strip had been canvassed around the clock; every bartender, bouncer, musician and general hepcat on the block had been braced—ditto the area where the body was dumped. Karen Hiltscher had called San Quentin and Lexington State Hospital for information on Goines and his buddies, if any, there; they were waiting the results of those queries. Rousting H pushers inside City confines was out for the time being, but he could put in a memo to Sheriff’s Narco for a list of dinks dealing in the County, press on that and see if he got any crossover leads back to LAPD turf. Goines’ musicians’ union would be reopening after the holiday this morning, and for now he had nothing but his instincts—what was true, what wasn’t true, what was too farfetched to be true and so horrible that it
had
to be true. Going eyeball to eyeball with Buddy Jastrow, Danny reconstructed the crime.

The killer meets Goines somewhere on the jazz block and talks him into geezing up—despite Marty’s recent dope cure. He’s got the Buick already staked out, door jimmied open or unlocked, wires unhooked and ready to be juiced together for a quick start. They drive someplace quiet, someplace equidistant from darktown and the Sunset Strip. The killer jacks enough horse into a vein near Goines’ spine to pop his heart arteries, a terrycloth towel right there to shove into his mouth and keep blood from drenching him. Figure, by the Zombie barman’s estimate, that the killer and Goines left Central Avenue around 12:15 to 12:45 A.M., took a half hour to drive to the destination, ten minutes to set the snuff up and accomplish it.

1:00 to 1:30 A.M.

The killer throttles his victim postmortem; fondles his genitals until they bruise, slashes his backside with the razor blade device, pulls out his eyes, screws him in the sockets at least twice, bites—or has an animal bite—through his stomach to the intestines, then cleans him up and drives him to Allegro Street, a rainy night, no moisture atop the body, the rain having stopped shortly after 3:00, the stiff discovered at 4:00 A.M.

An hour to an hour and forty-five minutes to mutilate the body, depending on the location of the killing ground.

The killer so sex-crazed that he ejaculates twice during that time.

The killer—maybe—taking a circuitous route to the Strip, rearview mirror hooked backward so he can view the corpse he is chauffeuring.

Flaw in the reconstruction so far: Doc Layman’s tenuous “blood bait” theory doesn’t fit. Well-trained vicious dogs did not jibe with the scenario—they would be too difficult to deal with, a nuisance, a mess, too noisy at a murder scene, too hard to contain during moments of psychotic duress. Which meant that the teeth marks on the torso had to be human, even though the mouth imprints were too large to have been made by a human being biting down.

Which meant that the killer bit and gnawed and swiveled and gnashed his teeth to get a purchase on his victim’s entrails, sucking the flesh upward to leave inflamed borders as he ravaged—

Danny bolted out of his cubicle and back to the records alcove adjoining the squadroom. One battered cabinet held the division’s Vice and sex offender files—West Hollywood crime reports, complaint reports, arrest reports and trouble call sheets dating back to the station’s opening in ’37. Some of the folders were filled alphabetically under “Arrestee”; some under “Complainant”; some numerically by “Address of Occurrence.” Some held mugshots, some didn’t; gaps in the “Arrestee” folders indicated that the arrested parties had bribed deputies into stealing reports that might prove embarrassing to them—and West Hollywood was only a small fraction of County territory.

Danny spent an hour scanning “Arrestee” reports, looking for tall, gray-haired, middle-aged men with violence in their MOs, knowing it was a long shot to keep him busy until Musician’s Local 3126 opened at 10:30. The slipshod paperwork—rife with misspellings, smudged carbons and near illiterate recountings of sex crimes—had him to the point of screaming at LASD incompetence; turgid accounts of toilet liaisons and high school boys bribed into back seat blow jobs kept his stomach churning with a bile that tasted like fried coffee grounds and last night’s six shots of bonded. The time got him four possibles—men aged forty-three to fifty-five, 6′1″ to 6′4″, with a total of twenty-one sodomy convictions among them—most of the beefs stemming from fruit tank punkings—jailhouse coitus interruptus that resulted in additional County charges being filed. At 10:20, he took the folders up to the dispatcher’s office and Karen Hiltscher, sweaty, his clothes wilted before the day had hardly started.

Karen was working the switchboard, plugging in calls, a headset attached to her Veronica Lake hairdo. The girl was nineteen, bottle blonde and busty—a civilian LASD employee flagged for the next woman’s opening at the Sheriff’s Academy. Danny pegged her as bad cop stuff: the Department’s mandatory eighteen-month jail tour would probably send her off the deep end and into the arms of the first male cop who promised to take her away from dyke matrons, Mex gang putas and white trash mothers in for child abuse. The heartthrob of the West Hollywood Substation wouldn’t last two weeks as a policewoman.

Danny straightened his tie and smoothed his shirtfront, his beefcake prelude to begging favors. “Karen? You busy, sweet-heart?”

The girl noticed him and took off her headset. She looked pouty; Danny wondered if he should lube her with another dinner date. “Hi, Deputy Upshaw.”

Danny placed the sex offender files up against the switchboard. “What happened to ‘Hi, Danny’?”

Karen lit a cigarette à la Veronica Lake and coughed—she only smoked when she was trying to vamp the cops working day watch. “Sergeant Norris heard me call Eddie Edwards ‘Eddie’ and said I should call him Deputy Edwards, that I shouldn’t be so familiar until I get rank.”

“You tell Norris I said you can call me Danny.”

Karen made a face. “Daniel Thomas Upshaw is a nice name. I told my mother, and she said it was a really nice name, too.”

“What else did you tell her about me?”

“That you’re really sweet and handsome, but you’re playing hard to get. What’s in those files?”

“Sex offender reports.”

“For that homicide you’re working?”

Danny nodded. “Sweet, did Lex and Quentin call back on my Marty Goines queries?”

Karen made another face—half vixen, half coquette. “I would have told you. Why did you give me those reports?”

Danny leaned over the switchboard and winked. “I was thinking of dinner at Mike Lyman’s once I get some work cleared up. Feel like giving me a hand?”

Karen Hiltscher tried to return the wink, but her false eyelash stuck to the ridge below her eye, and she had to fumble her cigarette into a ashtray and pull it free. Danny looked away, disgusted; Karen pouted, “What do you want on those reports?”

Danny stared at the muster room wall so Karen couldn’t read his face. “Call Records at the Hall of Justice Jail and get the blood types for all four men. If you get anything other than O+ for them, drop it. On the O+’s, call County Parole for their last known addresses, rap sheets and parole disposition reports. Got it?”

Karen said, “Got it.”

Danny turned around and looked at his cut-rate Veronica Lake, her left eyelash plastered to her plucked left eyebrow. “You’re a doll. Lyman’s when I clear this job.”

Musician’s Local 3126 was on Vine Street just north of Melrose, a tan Quonset hut sandwiched between a doughnut stand and a liquor store. Hepcat types were lounging around the front door, scarfing crullers and coffee, half pints and short dogs of muscatel.

Danny parked and walked in, a group of wine guzzlers scattering to let him through. The hut’s interior was dank: folding chairs aligned in uneven rows, cigarette butts dotting a chipped linoleum floor, pictures from
Downbeat
and
Metronome
scotch-taped to the walls—half white guys, half Negroes, like the management was trying to establish jazzbo parity. The left wall held a built-in counter, file cabinets in back of it, a haggard white woman standing guard. Danny walked over, badge and Marty Goines mugshot strip out.

The woman ignored the badge and squinted at the strip. “This guy play trombone?”

“That’s right. Martin Mitchell Goines. You sent him down to Bido Lito’s around Christmas.”

The woman squinted harder. “He’s got trombone lips. What did he do you for?”

Danny lied discreetly. “Parole violation.”

The slattern tapped the strip with a long red nail. “The same old same old. What can I do you for?”

Danny pointed to the filing cabinets. “His employment record, as far back as it goes.”

The woman about-faced, opened and shut drawers, leafed through folders, yanked one and gave the top page a quick scrutiny. Laying it down on the counter, she said, “A nowhere horn. From Squaresville.”

Danny opened the folder and read through it, picking up two gaps right away: ’38 to ’40—Goines’ County jolt for marijuana possession: ’44 to ’48—his Quentin time for the same offense. Since ’48 the entries had been sporadic: occasional two-week engagements at Gardena pokerino lounges and his fatal gig at Bido Lito’s. Prior to Goines’ first jail sentence he got only
very
occasional work—Hollywood roadhouse stints in ’36 and ’37. It was the early ’40s when Marty Goines was a trombone-playing fool.