Zoot-Suit Murders (14 page)

“You used to have to go by the old Krotona Palace to get to Holly woodland, in the old days.” The man spoke quickly in a strong voice, determined that his history of the past could help Younger to reach his destination more easily. “Of course, brother, they’ve torn down the palace now, ripped out the gardens and fountains. Made the entire place into another one of those cancerous apartment complexes. The Krotona was like a classical apparition from India magically transmigrated to the once lovely hills of Hollywood. I heard the master, Krishnamurti, there for the first time, in the early twenties I think. What a boy! So beautiful. So godlike. So honest and direct. The true Star of the East. He was brought to America by that Theosophical woman. What was her name? Yes! Besant, Annie Besant. Very rich she was. Rich and dogmatic, a spiritual didact.”

“Here we are at the corner.” Younger nearly pulled the man into the intersection of honking cars. “Now, where is it?”

“There.” The old man swung his arm up like Moses pointing to the burning bush. “Mack Sennett, you know, the Jewish comedic genius who invented the Keystone Kops, it’s his old real estate development. It was supposed to be the new Beverly Hills. But old Mack was hoodwinked by the duplicity of Hollywood city fathers. The august city fathers wouldn’t allow Mack to suck off their main water line.”

Younger followed the direction of the old man’s arm, the tips of his fingers waving toward the Hollywood Hills in the absolute last light of day. “Where? What are you talking about? There’s five square miles of houses and apartments up there.”

The old man raised his arm higher. “Way up, almost to the top, below the flashing red light of the RKO radio tower. Don’t you see it, brother? Way up on top of Mount Lee.”

Younger saw it. A huge sign rolling through clumps of sage and spikes of yucca near the mountaintop. Nine wooden letters, each high as four men atop one another’s shoulders, each letter painted white, sprawled improbably across the natural shoulder
of the mountain. The letters seemed a tenuous but monstrous joke that could blow down in any retributary wind. But there they stood, naked as the last advertisement for a feeble civilization, dwarfing the simple beauty of the natural terrain, idiotic and splendid, washed in the ethereal glow of the dying sun sinking blood red into the ocean to the west:

Younger was familiar with the letters. From the top of Mount Lee they dominated the city of Hollywood below. “You sure that’s it?”

“Most certainly, brother.” The old man dropped his arm and sighed. “At one time in history it spelled out in full HOLLYWOODLAND. Now it is just decomposing and falling apart, like everything else temporal and carnal glamorized around here. The last four letters have fallen down, but you can still see them if you get up close. The whole business is ready to topple over any day, surrendering to time and the elements, nature claiming her own. That’s all that’s left standing of an expensive dream, HOLLYWOODLAND.” Cars were honking furiously around the old man. He shook his long gray hair sadly as Younger ran down the dark sidewalk and jumped into the waiting cab without looking back.

“Turn right at the next block and head up into the hills!” Younger shouted over the whining of the cab engine as it lurched into the bright lights of evening traffic, squealing around the corner and racing toward Hollywood Boulevard, then slamming to a dead stop before a blockade of police cars. “This is crazy.” Younger pushed his gun deep beneath his belt as police ran from all directions, surrounding the cab.

The cab driver furiously cranked up his window to shut out the unexpected and seal himself protected into the castle of his cab. He looked into the rearview mirror and snarled at Younger, his face sweating anxiously. “What are you? An escaped convict? My wife told me not to work that Mexican area downtown. She warned me something like this would happen if I cruised
fares in the Barrio. I should of stayed out at Wilshire Center like she said.”

“I don’t know what’s going on! I swear it!” Younger slid down in his seat as one of the policemen banged the butt of a billyclub on the glass of the driver’s window.

“Roll the window down in there!”

The driver obeyed the command cautiously. He lowered the window slowly. “Yes, sir, officer. Whatever you say. Would you like to see my driver’s license?” The driver held his hand nervously on the window crank; if the blue-uniformed man tried to jump into the cab, the driver was ready to roll the window back up and catch him in it.

“No, no need for that.” The officer smiled, tipping the thick vinyl visor of his cap. “No need for your license. You’ll just have to back up and go around. Detour.”

“What’s the trouble, officer?” Younger leaned on the back of the front seat, his body almost doubled over so the gun was impossible to see.

The officer pointed his club up Hollywood Boulevard, toward brilliant mile-long beams shooting into the air from cannon-sized klieg lights. “Barbara Carr. They’re premiering one of her movies here tonight. It’s her first picture since she was involved in those Zoot-suit murders last summer. We’ve got the boulevard blocked for ten blocks. George Raft is going to be here and everything; the fans are going wild. Sorry, you’ll have to turn around and go back the way you came.”

“Sure thing.” The driver saluted the officer like he’d just received instructions to drive a tank over a mine field. He jammed the cab into reverse and backed his way slowly around the line of cars stalled behind him.

Younger leaned farther over the front seat as the cab backed up, catching a glimpse up the boulevard of two neon signs hanging from the soaring sweep of a green-tiled pagoda roof over a surging crowd on the sidewalk: GRAUMAN’S CHINESE. The neon signs impressed their colorful glare on empty pavement in the middle of the boulevard reserved for a long line of limousines
inching slowly between cheers and flashing camera bulbs. One of the women, her blond hair cascading as she stepped from a limousine and waved a sequin-gloved hand to jubilant fans, looked like Barbara Carr. He dropped two bills on the seat next to the driver. “Here’s another ten bucks. I’ll tell you exactly how to go, just get out of here fast as you can.”

“That’s fine with me, champ.” The driver jerked the cab back into the flow of traffic on Sunset. “The faster the better. I’ve had some real pills want me to take them to Hollywood, but you and your little fairyland place you want me to take you to, you’re the biggest pill yet.”

At the end of steep short streets running blindly into one another, then looping back through darkness and spiraling along the unrailed edge of sheer cliffs, dropping like a series of unending soundless waterfalls down to the swift running currents of electric lights sparkling up from distant Hollywood, Younger had the driver let him out. He followed the road until it dead-ended, the pavement giving way to hard gravel. His crunching steps echoed around him off the barren hillsides. He slipped the gun from under his belt, holding it before him like a flashlight with a dead battery. In the darkness the gravel road narrowed, a path of soft dirt starting beneath his shoes. He never took his eyes from the guiding light high on the distant ridge, incessant red blinking at the needle point of the steel-strutted RKO radio tower. He followed the red light faithfully, even when the trail narrowed, running off through thick dry clumps of ragweed in a hundred paths no wider than a rabbit. The soft dirt gave way entirely underneath him and he slipped. It felt like he was on the edge of a cliff, hanging only by the luck of the grass tufts clenched in his hands as he tried to keep his grasping fingers away from the gun’s trigger. The lights of Hollywood twinkling below seemed to beckon him; the powerful beams of klieg lights fingered furtively from the faraway city, as if searching him out. Sprawled on the mountainside in darkness, dangling like a man from a thirty-story-high window, he felt like a fool. He pulled himself steadily up, regaining his footing on the steep incline.
The howl of a coyote came, startling, like the cry of an abandoned or beaten child. The cry of the coyote carried away from the cliff, far beyond the bright lights of Hollywood and the glimmering ocean of Los Angeles lights, all the way west to Santa Monica and the infinity of a real ocean beyond. Younger held his breath, turning an ear up to the mountaintop, trying to hear the coyote walking. He heard nothing until the cry came again, louder, anguished, a snaking lament carried way out over the city lights and crushed by the far-off metallic rumbling of traffic. “Cruz.” The name came out in an involuntary hoarse whisper, as if in answer to the coyote. “Cruz?” There was no answer. Younger felt his way farther, slowly, deliberately, inching toward the sign looming large and barely distinguishable, propped up from the sheer mountainside on soaring poles crisscrossed and strutted behind each letter, spelling out in the darkness

“Cruz?” Younger waited for an answer. Cruz could be hiding behind any one of the twenty-foot-high letters, the shape of his body not penetrating from dark shadows of the supporting poles. Younger sat wearily on the earth gone cold in the night air. Above his head the radio tower light rhythmically sprinkled the slightest glimmer of red across the enormous letters soaring out before him. He was afraid to go any farther. Anyone could be lurking in the shadows of the letters. He controlled the single access to the sign. He would wait for the light of morning, wait until the letters were exposed and he was certain no one was hiding there, or until someone came up the trail. He heard the anguished cry of the coyote and aimed the gun in its direction, holding off the unseen, the unknown. Even in his dreams, after he went to sleep at the foot of the giant sign and the coyote had long since ceased its solemn lament, and the rising sun stunned the vastness of the distant Pacific Ocean holding back the sprawl of highways clawing concretely out from the heart of Los Angeles, even then he did not know what he expected to find up there.

T
he island of Catalina came up out of the sea rearing and blowing like a humpback whale on the blue horizon. A strong Santa Ana wind whipped the sea into a frenzy of spray around the sudden heights of the island’s barren cliffs. Beneath the bright flutter and rip of a hundred maritime flags strung from the S.S.
Catalina
’s three steel masts people crowded along the edges of the sleek white ship’s four passenger decks. They cheered the sight of the island like castaways abandoned to a cruel sea who hadn’t sighted land for days, rather than only several hours since leaving San Pedro. Younger didn’t care about the island. He was intrigued by the red of Kathleen’s hair whipping and snarling in the wind as she leaned precariously out from the perch of the upper deck’s railings. Kathleen was so
thin and vulnerable, he feared she might blow away in the strong warm gusts swirling about the ship as it eased into the open sweep of Avalon harbor, or she might suddenly be swooped into the air by circling clouds of seagulls dipping and diving over the big white steamer like it was a giant iron-fin marlin to be feasted upon by the most tenacious and fortunate. Younger stood behind Kathleen, closing his arms around her on both sides and locking his hands over hers on the railing. If a sudden wind was to spirit her away, it would have to take them both.

“Look! Look out there! Do you see them?” Kathleen’s arm came up and she leaned back against Younger, pointing in the direction of the island’s curving harbor, all the way out to its end, a spit of land dominated by the five-story-high white dome of the Avalon Ballroom, perched improbably between land and sea like a sheik’s stretched tent on the desert.

Younger followed the line of Kathleen’s arm across the water. Palms and flags fluttered around the dome of the ballroom. The small town of Avalon rose behind the ballroom, climbing steeply up the fall of cliffs protruding abruptly from the sea, then surrendering to steep terrain, a straggle of brave houses perched on poles eight hundred feet up the mountainside, as if prepared for the ocean to one day lap at their front doors. “What am I looking for?”

“You’re looking too far, Nathan. Not all the way to the town. Out there, on the water.” Kathleen placed her hand gently against Younger’s cheek, guiding his gaze to the sight the people on the observation deck above were screaming and shouting about. “Flying fish!”

Younger saw them. Skimming over the white frothing tongues of the ocean’s chopping waves, the fish were actually flying, sailing through the spray in a display of dazzling acrobatics, creatures not of land or sky, but wedded in breathtaking moments to a realm all their own, unique, without parallel. Younger felt the slightness of Kathleen’s body pressed against him, trembling with excitement at the fish flying by, freeing themselves from the depths of the sea, bounding from the ocean’s floor, sailing
toward the sun in a fabulous pursuit of freedom. He slipped his arms around Kathleen’s waist. She did not object. All the way into the harbor he held her tightly, feeling himself tremble, trembling from fear of the unknown within her, the questions he knew must be asked, the answers he didn’t want to hear. He held on to her as if it was for life, afraid she might escape the few moments they had together, like the flying fish long left behind in the wake of the steaming ship, living between two worlds, never questioning the impossibility of their existence, never testing the improbability of their realm, sailing forever through water and air.

In the Avalon Ballroom beneath banners of a thousand balloons Younger thought Kathleen died in his arms. For hours he held her, breathless, dance after dance, the big trumpeting sound of Harry James’s band breaking over them like stormy brassy waves. Everywhere sailors and soldiers laughed and shouted, hoisting their girls into the air like proud prizes just won at a carnival, offerings to be displayed on the altar of good times. The war was a million miles away in the ballroom. The packed swirling dancers made the vast domed building spin like a private planet, a reserved place in space where romance reigned, red lips of young women pressed against the faces of eternal partners. Drums, trombones, and trumpets of the band fired thundering rockets of sound, coursing through the blood of every tribal foot stomping on the dance floor. Against Younger’s cheek the slightest breath escaped from Kathleen’s lips, a high whistling sound, almost a wheeze, her red hair covering her eyes, the dampness of her skin welding the two of them together, offering a physical promise far beyond a simple fusing of their flesh. For hours the balloons spun above their heads. The weaker Kathleen grew in his arms, the stronger Younger became, until finally he carried her from the ballroom, spent and exhausted, the red curls framing the radiant smile of happiness on her face. He walked her slowly along the tiled promenade of the harbor. The sea had become gentle inside the island’s protective arms, its soft rocking barely disturbing the
rows of small anchored boats. Kathleen’s body swayed beneath Younger’s tight hold around her waist as they passed lovers crowded together on concrete benches, holding hands, anxious to make plans for a future never to be. At the end of the promenade Younger took Kathleen up a narrow dirt road winding above the last houses of the town and dropping suddenly into a purple canyon, hidden from the sea and blaring music of the ballroom below.

“What are those?” Kathleen pointed to a clump of rough spiked plants tall as a man, long tongues of pearlescent flowers blooming from the cluster of their sharp green fingers.

“It’s a type of yucca, a yucca whipplei. The Spanish explorers named it the Lord’s candle. Here on the island it blooms those thousands of little blossoms in the spring.” Younger took Kathleen’s hand and led her along a steep trail descending into the canyon. “But that is not what will help your asthma. What we’re searching for is
cyanothus americanus.
”

“What?”

“The plant I told you about, remember? The plant we came here to find, the one the Mexican
brujas
make a tea from and believe will clear the lungs, help you to breathe easier. Better than your marijuana cure.”

“What’s a
bruja
? You never told me.”

“A witch.”

Kathleen stopped, stretching out her hand to stroke the blossomed tongue of a spiked yucca next to the trail. “This plant of yours, do you really think it could help me? I’d try anything, even a witch’s brew, if I thought it would help me to breathe easier. I’m so dispirited taking medicines all the time.”

“It’s worth a try, Kathleen. Anything’s worth a try. The Indians who lived here boiled poison oak leaves and drank the broth, believing it made them immune to poison oak rashes.” Younger waded off down the trail into thigh-high brush. “There are two varieties of the plant we’re looking for. One has a blue flower, the other white. I just hope we can find the right one, since it’s not in bloom now and won’t have any flowers.”

Kathleen plucked teardrop-size yucca blossoms and studied them in her palm, calling to Younger as he went deeper into the canyon. “How come you know so much about this island?”

“Because”—Younger pushed his way through a thorn bush grabbing at his flapping sport coat—“when I brought my CYO boys over here last summer I decided to study up on the place. This is the only nature lots of those kids will ever see. I like to be able to answer their questions, leave them with a feel for the specialness of a place. Most people don’t know it but this island is more than twenty centuries older than the mainland of California, just twenty-six miles away, a freak of nature. There are plants here that exist nowhere else in the world. Ask me about the firewood trees on the way back and I’ll—” Younger stopped. Before him a broad hardwood bush that appeared to be dying from lack of water came up out of the ground in a swirl of stiff branches blocking his passage. He snapped off the brittle tip of a branch, a strong scent of resin racing up his nostrils, a scent so powerful it seemed like he had just uncapped a can of ether. Younger plucked off the tips of more branches until his coat pockets bulged with them, then made his way back up the steep trail to Kathleen.

“Did you find it, Nathan?”

“Smell.” Younger reached into his pocket and held out a handful of twigs beneath Kathleen’s nose. She pulled back suddenly and shook her head as if getting a whiff of smelling salts.

Younger laughed, slipping the twigs gently back into his pocket, like they were eggs about to be hatched. “I’m not promising we have the right variety. Like I said,
cyanothus
is dormant this time of year, so it’s impossible to tell whether we have the blue or white one. Come on, we better go back.” He took Kathleen’s outstretched hand and led her up the trail. “But it really doesn’t make any difference which variety we have, because to be honest I don’t know which one will do the trick for you.”

“You actually expect me to drink that? It smells like gasoline.”

“Or ether. You said you would try anything.”

Kathleen stopped at the top of the canyon, the dome of the ballroom in sight against the calm sea below. “I will try it on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

The shuddering boarding blast from the steam whistle of the S.S.
Catalina
hauling anchor in the harbor drowned out the first part of Kathleen’s words. “And besides that, you must promise to drink some with me.”

“It’s a deal.” Younger shook her hand solemnly. “We’ll drink it together, then if it’s hemlock we’ll die side by side.”

“Oh, Nathan, that’s funny, the two of us dying in each other’s arms like in some sad Greek tragedy. Come on, we have to hurry or the ship is going back to San Pedro without us.” Kathleen put her arm around Younger’s waist for support as they ran down the steep road toward the harbor, all the while her strange breathless laughter ringing in his ears.