The Straight Man - Roger L Simon (3 page)

The heady smell off me, or at least the dream of it,
was the driving motif of the Fun Zone itself. The moment you passed
through its steel portals you were in a corridor lined with hundreds
of autographed photos of aspiring comics who had performed at the
club hoping to land two minutes on Johnny or Merv or—who
knew?—maybe even a raunchy comedy for Warner Bros. in which they
could strut their stuff in this summer's food fight. As if part of a
definite hierarchy, the corridor opened onto a larger lobby decorated
with oversize portraits of the greats of comedy from Chaplin to Lenny
Bruce. At the opposite end of the lobby, in a place of honor just
beside the entrance to the main room (the Fun Zone had three
rooms—one for the star attraction, one for the up-and-comers, and a
third, called The Combat Zone, for women comics only) was a
twelve-foot-high portrait of the God himself, Richard Pryor, the man
who had put the club on the map as the place to be in funnyland when
he had premiered his first one-man show there almost ten years ago.

Not far from Pryor, and clearly recently installed,
was a lesser photograph of Ptak and King. With Mike's corpse only a
week in the ground, there were several people standing around eyeing
it curiously when Sonya and I stepped forward.

"What a marshmallow," she said, staring
right in Ptak's face. I had to admit her evaluation of the soft,
fleshy blond man with the slight overbite gazing out from the black
and white still was not very different from mine. I had seen Ptak
perform once, as a guest on the Letterman show, and didn't think he
was particularly funny. He seemed to have less talent than most
straight men. He couldn't sing, he couldn't dance, and he certainly
couldn't tell a joke. In fact, he was sort of an anachronism, the
kind of comic foil that didn't seem necessary in this day and age.
King, on the other hand, was like a black, street version of Dennis
the Menace, all unbridled id, an uptight white man's worst fantasy
turned outrageous—a comic mugger. In the photograph he looked as if
he were made of wire, all muscle and bone in sneakers, jeans, tank
top, and baseball cap turned around backward.

He had a wide grin on his face that defied you to
decide whether it was evil or mischievous and so much energy he
vibrated off the photograph. He was so magnetic, within a second you
forgot Ptak was even up there with him, like so much instant mashed
potatoes vanished down a drain.

"
Now, that's what I call sexy," said Sonya.
She wasn't talking about Mike or Otis but about a red-headed woman of
about thirty who was visible through the door standing on the stage
of The Combat Zone, trying desperately to reach an audience that
looked like a combination of bored Vals and tourists from Iowa.

"So," she was saying, "sometimes I
think I'm a minority of one. My cause is so obscure I couldn't get a
terrorist to kidnap me if I walked naked through the streets of
Damascus."

There was a slight ripple of laughter and a tinkling
of glasses. The woman shrugged as she reached for a water pitcher.
"You know why the Canucks call us Pepsis, don't you? We're half
flat, bottled up, and grin like idiots when they step on us."

"What kind of accent is that?" I asked.

"Her? What are you—an idiot? She's a Pepsi.
French-Canadian! Don't you read the papers anymore? René Lévesque
stepped down. It's the end of the Parti Québecois, the separatist
movement. That's what she's talking about."

"Oh." No wonder the Vals weren't laughing.
I doubted the Iowans found it very funny either.

I stepped closer to the door and took another look at
her. She was dressed elegantly in a simple blue sweater and black
leather pants that showed off the kind of slim hips you wanted to
slide your arm around and crush into your body. Sonya was right. She
was attractive. But right now she didn't look very happy. In fact,
she looked like she was laying a first-class El Bombo.

"What're you doing here, Wine? Amateur Night's
Monday."

I hadn't seen him in about five years, but I didn't
have to look to recognize the voice of Art Koontz of homicide. When I
did, however, I was surprised at how good he looked—fifteen pounds
lighter, with stylish clothes and a haircut out of Gentleman's
Quarterly. He used to be a dead ringer for Popeye Doyle in The French
Connection. These days everybody was going upscale.

"
I didn't know you were a friend of comedy,
Inspector."

"
Everybody likes a few laughs, Wine. Of course,
it's hard to keep up with you hippies turned yuppie. You don't know
who's driving the BMW these days. Is it true that sushi's out—or
have I been misinformed by California magazine?"

"
You don't look like you're doing badly yourself
either, Koontz. Nice suit. What is it? Armani?"

"Gianni Versace."

I whistled. "The boys in Parker Center'll think
you're on the take, you keep wearing duds like that." He
frowned, but I smiled back pleasantly. Actually it was kind of nice
to see the old bastard after all this time. And it saved me a trip
downtown. He could only have been there for one reason, and as I'm
sure he knew, the same was true for me.

"How about a drink?" I pointed to the bar
of The Combat Zone where the French-Canadian was still trying gamely
to make a dent in her audience. "The Evian's on me. Or do you
prefer Pellegrino?"

"Bourbon. Bourbon with no water."

I guided him toward the bar before he changed his
mind. Sonya was right beside us. Koontz eyed her suspiciously.

"This is my aunt Sonya Lieberman."

"Your aunt?" He made a face of disbelief
and turned to me directly. "Look, I don't know who your client
is—though I could guess. But if you're out to make a murder case, I
can tell you straight off the bat, forget it. Ptak did this all by
himself."

I had to agree it certainly looked that way.
According to the papers, he had checked into the penthouse suite at
six-oh-five that evening and took the elevator directly upstairs.At
precisely nine-thirty-two, three hours and twenty-seven minutes
later, he was on his way down by the express route. The elevator gave
directly onto the suite foyer and the operator, a Mr. Sanchez,
insisted he brought no one up or down between those times.
Furthermore, the  bellhop, a Mr. Nastase, said that, as far as
he knew, no one was in the suite when he escorted Mr. Ptak up with
one suitcase. And he had made a relatively complete survey of the
premises since Ptak wanted a guided tour of all the perks of the
suite (projection TV with VCR and quadraphonic stereo, grand piano,
bar and gourmet kitchen, billiard table, etc.) and Nastase, the Los
Angeles Times reported, was eager to get as large a tip as possible
from the show business fat cat. Of course there was the question of
the emergency exit, but the fire door to the back stairs of the
penthouse had to be opened by a key and all those keys were either in
the possession of the hotel management or of Ptak, who had his in his
jacket pocket when he plunged to his death.

Our drinks arrived and I paid for them with my VISA
card. "Thanks for the drink, Wine," said Koontz. "I
imagine you're being paid well, but do us both a favor and get out of
this case. Go get yourself a nice personal injury job, a dentist in a
Maserati, and bag this one. The lady—and I know it's a lady—who
hired you is just dealing with her own psychological problems, which
might be bad, but weren't half as bad as her husband's. There's
nothing you can find out for her that will please her in any way, and
there are no guilty parties to this crime, if you can call it that,
other than the man's own sad life. And I'm sure an educated person
like you would agree, each of us has the right to take his own life.
Unless you've suddenly gone religious on me."

"
Not me, Koontz. I'm a card-carrying atheist,
except for two years with Rajneesh when he was still in the business.
But tell me, if this is all so simple, what the hell are you doing
here?" I didn't sound as decisive as I wanted to. I was having
trouble keeping my eyes off the French-Canadian. Her teeth were
crooked and her nose was too big, but there was something about her.
Maybe, as the Jungians would say, she touched my anima. Or maybe she
was just sexy as hell. Whatever it was, she gave me the kind of knot
in my stomach I hadn't felt in years. Unfortunately for her, the
audience didn't feel the same way. At this point they were booing her
unmercifully. Some wit in the first row was telling her to eat frogs'
legs and hop back to Montreal.

"Well, Wine, I might as well tell you, since an
idiot in the DA's office leaked it to the Times this morning anyway:
your friend Ptak was wired to the ceiling when he flew out of the
window of the Picasso last week. He was so fucked up on speedballs he
probably thought he was Captain Marvel .... Sorry, ma'am."

"I'm aware of speedballs, Inspector," said
Sonya sharply. "And not from senior citizens' bowling. Heroin
and cocaine. Two parts blow and three parts skag, depending on who's
mixing."

"Yeah, right," Koontz mumbled sheepishly.

The French-Canadian left the stage to scattered
applause, except for mine, and I turned back fullface to the two of
them. "So it's Hollywood-and-drugs time, the big career-maker in
L.A. law enforcement. You guys could really get some action out of
this, another Belushi case. No wonder the little DA leaked it. What's
he after-city council or a judgeship?"

"There's not going to be another Belushi case,"
Koontz said icily. "This time we're going to put a stop to this,
find the source of this business and stamp it out."

"Ah, c'mon, Koontz. Don't give me this single
source crap. You get drugs in this town twenty-six ways to Brooklyn.
You know that better than I do. You worked Rampart for fifteen years.
They've got more dealers down there than they've got taco stands."

"Down there isn't the entertainment industry.
And in this case, it's not Brooklyn. It's the Bronx." He held
his drink to his chest and leaned closer to me. "We have
information that a certain individual on the other side of this
country is attempting to corner the drug market on an extremely
affluent, indeed unbelievably affluent, sector of our society. And as
you know, that sector has immense influence on the minds and morals
of our children, indeed on the minds and morals of children all over
the world. Now, the presence of a private eye muddying the waters
over one measly suicide that's already over and done with can only
complicate a crucial investigation. So I ask you as a citizen and as
a family man to get out!"

"
I can't get out, Koontz. I promised someone I'd
do this."

"Who?"

"My shrink."

"Your shrink? . . . Jesus, you were better off
when you were a pinko!"

He slammed down his drink and marched off.

4

I sat there with Sonya for a few minutes, then left
her watching a pair of women twin comics (the Non-Identicals) making
weird incest jokes and went outside to reconnoiter. Ptak had landed
somewhere near the back of the Fun Zone, and I found the remnants of
a police circle when I walked around the corner by the stage door. I
stared down at the fading chalk, looking from the black asphalt up to
the penthouse terrace from which he supposedly jumped. It had a low
white stucco wall that looked easy to climb over, even to fall over.
I stepped into the center of the ring and tried to reconstruct his
movements in my mind's eye, but there was something about suicide
that made me recoil from contemplating it. I was wondering whether
that was normal behavior or whether that was just me, when I heard
what sounded like a dry heave. I turned toward the stage door to see
the French-Canadian leaning out with one hand clutching the
doorframe. She didn't look embarrassed when she saw me.

"
It was a disaster," she said.

I nodded sympathetically.

"Worse. A catastrophe. I'm quitting right now.
It's all over. Never again. Only a self-destructive moron does
something they're no good at. Did you know I used to be a laboratory
technician? I was once a photographer. Also a disc jockey in Gaspé.
Why I decided to be a comedian, I'll never know."

Then she bent over and tried to throw up again, but
nothing came out. "Jesus, do you have a Certs or something?"

"Sorry, I-"

"
Don't worry about it .... God, you're standing
in the bull's-eye. Another depressed comic bites the dust. I'm not
superstitious or anything, but if I were you, I'd get the hell out of
there." I stepped out of the circle toward her. "What a
mess!" she continued. Her accent was much fainter offstage, but
she had the same slim hips and gorgeous red hair.

"Comedians really are total nut cases. They'd be
pathetic if they weren't such clichés. It's just like Pagliacci.
'
Ridi del dual che t'avvelena il c0r!'
"

"
What's that mean?"

" '
Laugh at the sorrow which is poisoning your
heart!' I told you I was a disc jockey. What a job that was—midnight
to four A.M. playing opera for lumberjacks. Maybe I just don't stick
to things."

"Maybe you're restless."

"You know what I should be?" She nodded
with conviction. "A private detective."