The Big Nowhere (10 page)

Under his self-proclaimed banner, “Mad Marty Goines & His Horn of Plenty,” he’d gigged briefly with Stan Kenton; in 1941, he pulled a tour with Wild Willie Monroe. There were a whole stack of pages detailing pickup band duty in ’42, ’43 and early ’44—one-night stands with six- and eight-man combos playing dives in the San Fernando Valley. Only the bandleaders and/or club managers who did the hiring were listed on the employment sheets—there was no mention of other musicians.

Danny closed the folder; the woman said, “Bubkis, am I right?”

“You’re right. Look, do you think any of these guys around here might have known—I mean know—Marty Goines?”

“I can ask.”

“Do it. Would you mind?”

The woman rolled her eyes up to heaven, drew a dollar sign in the air and pointed to her cleavage. Danny felt his hands clenching the edge of the counter and smelled last night’s liquor oozing out of his skin. He was about to come on strong when he remembered he was on City ground and his CO’s shit list. He fished in his pockets for cash, came up with a five and slapped it down. “Do it now.”

The slattern snapped up the bill and disappeared behind the filing cabinets. Danny saw her out on the sidewalk a few seconds later, talking to the bottle gang, then moving to the doughnut and coffee crowd. She zeroed in on a tall Negro guy holding a bass case, grabbed his arm and led him inside. Danny smelled stale sweat, leaves and mouthwash on the man, like the knee-length overcoat he was wearing was his permanent address. The woman said, “This is Chester Brown. He knows Marty Goines.”

Danny pointed Brown to the nearest row of chairs. Miss Hepcat went back to her counter and the bass man shuffled over, plopped down and whipped out a bottle of Listerine. He said, “Breakfast of champions,” gulped, gargled and swallowed; Danny sat two chairs over, close enough to hear, far away enough to defuse the stink. “Do you know Marty Goines, Chester?”

Brown burped and said, “Why should I tell you?”

Danny handed him a dollar. “Lunch of champions.”

“I feed three times a day, officer. Snitching gives me an appetite.”

Danny forked over another single; Chester Brown palmed it, chugalugged and patted the Listerine bottle. “Helps the memory. And since I ain’t seen Marty since the war, you gonna need that memory.”

Danny got out his pen and notepad. “Shoot.”

The bass man took a deep breath. “I gigged pickup with Marty, back when he called himself the Horn of Plenty. Hunger huts out in the Valley when Ventura Boulevard was a fuckin’ beanfield. Half the boys toked sweet lucy, half took the needle route. Marty was strung like a fuckin’ dog.”

So far, his seven-dollar story was running true—based on Goines’ union jacket and what he knew of his criminal record. “Keep going, Chester.”

“Weeell, Marty pushed reefers—not too good, since I heard he did time for it, and he was a righteous boss mothafuckin’ burglar. All the pickup boys that was strung was doin’ it. They’d grab purses off of barstools and tables, get the people’s addresses and swipe their house keys while the bartender kept them drinkin’. One set you’d have no drummer, one set no trumpet, and so forth, ‘cause they was utilizizin’ their inside skinny to be burglarizizin’ the local patrons. Marty did lots of that, solo stuff, steal a car during his break, burglarizize, then be back for his next set. Like I tol’ you, he was a righteous boss mothafuckin’ burglar.”

Righteous new stuff—even to an ex-car thief cop who thought he knew most of the angles. “What years are you talking about, Chester? Think hard.”

Brown consulted his Listerine. “I’d say this was goin’ on from summer of ’43 to maybe sometime in ’44.”

Goines copped his second marijuana beef in April of ’44. “Did he work alone?”

“You mean on the burglarizizin’?”

“Right. And did he have running partners in general?”

Chester Brown said, “ ’Cept for this one kid, the Horn of Plenty was a righteous loner. He had this sidekick, though—a white blondy kid, tall and shy, loved jazz but couldn’t learn to play no instrument. He’d been in a fire and his face was all covered up in bandages like he was the fuckin’ mummy. Just a fuckin’ kid—maybe nineteen, twenty years old. Him and Marty pulled a righteous fuckin’ fuckload of burglaries together.”

Danny’s skin was tingling—even though the kid couldn’t be the killer—a youth in ’43–’44 wouldn’t be gray and middle-aged in ’50. “What happened to the sidekick, Chester?”

“I dunno, but you sure askin’ a lot of questions for a parole violation, and you ain’t asked me where I think Marty might be stayin’.”

“I was getting to that. You got any ideas?”

Brown shook his head. “Marty always stayed to himself. Never socializized with the boys out of the club.”

Danny dry-swallowed. “Is Goines a homosexual?”

“Say what?”

“Queer, fruit, homo! Did he fucking like boys!”

Brown killed the bottle of Listerine and wiped his lips. “You don’t gots to shout, and that’s a nasty thing to say about somebody never did you harm.”

Danny said, “Then answer my question.”

The bass man opened his instrument case. There was no fiddle inside, only bottles of Listerine Mouthwash. Chester Brown cracked the cap on one and took a long, slow drink. He said, “That’s for Marty, ‘cause I ain’t the fool you think I am, and I know he’s dead. And he wasn’t no queer. He may not have been much for trim, but he sure as fuck wasn’t no fuckin’ fruitfly.”

Danny took Chester Brown’s old news and rolled with it to a pay phone. First he called City/County R&I, learned that Martin Mitchell Goines had no detainments on suspicion of B&E and that no blond youths were listed as accomplices on his two marijuana rousts; no blond youths with distinguishing burn marks were arrested for burglary or narcotics violations anywhere in the San Fernando Valley circa 1942–1945. The call was a fishing expedition that went nowhere.

A buzz to the West Hollywood Station switchboard got him a pouty conversation with Karen Hiltscher, who said that the four long shots from the sex offender files proved to be just that—a toss of their jail records revealed that none of the men had O+ blood. Administrators had called in from both San Quentin and Lexington State Hospital; they said that Marty Goines was an institutional loner, and his counselor at Lex stated that he was assigned a Fed case worker in LA—but hadn’t reported to him yet, and left no word about where he would be staying when he got to Los Angeles. Even though the lead was probably a big nothing, Danny told Karen to check the station’s burglary file for B&E men with jazz musician backgrounds and for mention of a burned-face burglar boy—a jazz aficionado. Rankling, the girl agreed; Danny hung up thinking he should raise the dreaded dinner ante from Mike Lyman’s to the Coconut Grove to keep her happy.

At just after 1:00 P.M. there was nothing he could do but pound familiar pavement one more time. Danny drove to darktown and widened his canvassing area, talking Goines and the gray-haired man to locals on the side streets adjoining Central Avenue, getting four solid hours of nothing; at dusk he drove back to West Hollywood, parked on Sunset and Doheny and walked the Strip, west to east, east to west, residential streets north into the hills, south to Santa Monica Boulevard, wondering the whole time why the killer picked Allegro Street as his place to dump the body. He wondered if the killer lived nearby, desecrated Goines’ corpse for that much more time and chose Allegro so he could gloat over the police and their efforts to nail him—the abandoned car a partial ruse to convince them he lived elsewhere. That theory played with led to others—subjective thinking—a Hans Maslick fundamental. Danny thought of the killer with his real car parked nearby for a quick getaway; the killer walking the Strip New Year’s morning, sheltered by swarms of revelers, depleted from his awful back-to-back explosions. And that was when it got scary.

In a famous essay, Maslick described a technique he had developed while undergoing analysis with Sigmund Freud. It was called Man Camera, and involved screening details from the perpetrator’s viewpoint. Actual camera angles and tricks were employed; the investigator’s eyes became a lens capable of zooming in and out, freezing close-ups, selecting background motifs to interpret crime-scene evidence in an aesthetic light. Danny was crossing Sunset and Horn when the idea struck him—transpose 3:45 New Year’s morning to now, himself as a sex slasher, walking home or to his car or to an all-night market to get calm again. But he didn’t see the other people strolling the Strip or lining up to get in the Mocambo or sitting at the counter at Jack’s Drive Inn. He went straight for Marty Goines’ eyes and guts and groin, an ultra close-up in Technicolor, his preautopsy prep magnified ten million times. A car swerved in front of him then; he twitched with heebie-jeebies, saw a kaleidoscope of Coleman the alto man, his look-alike from the movie with Karen, Tim. When he pointed his Man Camera at the passersby he was supposed to be viewing, they were all gargoyles, all wrong.

It took long moments for him to calm down, to get it right. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday; he’d postponed his bourbon ration in order to tread the Strip clear-headed. Hitting late-night clubs and restaurants with questions on a tall, gray-haired man New Year’s would be straightforward police work to keep him chilled.

He did it.

And got more nothing.

Two hours’ worth.

The same accounts at Cyrano’s, Dave’s Blue Room, Ciro’s, the Mocambo, La Rue, Coffee Bob’s, Sherry’s, Bruno’s Hideaway and the Movieland Diner: every single place was packed until dawn New Year’s. No one remembered a solitary, tall, gray-haired man.

At midnight, Danny retrieved his car and drove to the Moon-glow Lounge for his four shots. Janice Modine, his favorite snitch, was hawking cigarettes to a thin weeknight crowd: lovebirds necking in wraparound booths, dancers necking while they slow-grinded to jukebox ballads. Danny took a booth that faced away from the bandstand; Janice showed up a minute later, holding a tray with four shot glasses and an ice water backup.

Danny knocked the drinks back—bam, bam, bam, bam, eyes away from Janice so she’d take the hint and leave him alone—no gratitude for the prostie beefs he’d saved her from, no overheard skinny on Mickey C.—useless because West Hollywood Division’s most auspicious criminal was greasing most of West Hollywood’s finest. The ploy didn’t work; the girl squirmed in front of him, one spaghetti strap sliding off her shoulder, then the other. Danny waited for the first blast of heat, got it and saw all the colors in the lounge go from slightly wrong to right. He said, “Sit down and tell me what you want before your dress falls off.”

Janice hunched into her straps and sat across the table from him. “It’s about John, Mr. Upshaw. He was arrested again.”

John Lembeck was Janice’s lover/pimp, a car thief specializing in custom orders: stolen chassis for the basic vehicle, parts stolen to exact specifications. He was a San Berdoo native like Danny, knew from the grapevine that a County plainclothes comer used to clout cars all over Kern and Visalia and kept his mouth shut about it when he got rousted on suspicion of grand theft auto. Danny said, “Parts or a whole goddamn car?”

Janice pulled a Kleenex out of her neckline and fretted it. “Upholstery.”

“City or County?”

“I—I think County. San Dimas Substation?”

Danny winced. San Dimas had the most rowdy detective squad in the Department; in ’46 the daywatch boss, jacked on turpen hydrate, beat a wetback fruit picker to death. “That’s the County. What’s his bail?”

“No bail, because of John’s last GTA. See, it’s a parole violation, Mr. Upshaw. John’s scared because he says the policemen there are really mean, and they made him sign a confession on all these cars he didn’t really steal. John said I should tell you a San Berdoo homeboy who loves cars should go to bat for another San Berdoo homey who loves cars. He didn’t say what it meant, but he said I should tell you.”

Pull strings to save his career from its first hint of dirt: call the San Dimas bulls, tell them John Lembeck was his trusted snitch and that a nigger hot car gang had a jail bid out on him, shiv time if the stupid shit ever made it to a County lockup. If Lembeck was docile at the holding tank, they’d let him off with a beating. “Tell John I’ll get on it in the morning.”

Janice had pinched her Kleenex into little wispy shreds. “Thanks, Mr. Upshaw. John also said I should be nice to you.”

Danny stood up, feeling warm and loose, wondering if he should muscle Lembeck for going cuntish on him. “You’re always nice to me, sweetheart. That’s why I have my nightcap here.”

Janice vamped him with wide baby blues. “He said I should be
really
nice to you.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I mean, like really
extra
nice.”

Danny said, “It’s wrong,” and placed his usual dollar tip on the table.

Mal was in his office, on his twelfth full reading of Dr. Saul Lesnick’s psychiatric files.

It was just after 1:00 A.M.; the DA’s Bureau was a string of dark cubicles, illuminated only by Mal’s wall light. The files were spread over his desk, interspersed with pages of notes splashed with coffee. Celeste would be asleep soon—he could go home and sleep in the den without her pestering him, sex offers because at this time of the morning he was her only friend, and giving him her mouth meant they could talk until one of them provoked a fight. Offers he’d accept tonight: the dirt in the files had him riled up like back in the Ad Vice days, when he put surveillance on the girls before they took down a whorehouse—the more you knew about who they were the better chance you had to get them to finger their pimps and money men. And after forty-eight hours of paper prowling, he felt like he had a pulse on the Reds in the UAES.

Deluded.

Traitorous.

Perverse.

Cliché shouters, sloganeers, fashion-conscious pseudoidealists. Locusts attacking social causes with the wrong information and bogus solutions, their one legit gripe—the Sleepy Lagoon case—almost blown through guilt by association: fellow travelers soliciting actual Party members for picketing and leaflet distribution, nearly discrediting everything the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee said and did. Hollywood writers and actors and hangers-on spouting cheap trauma, Pinko platitudes and guilt over raking in big money during the Depression, then penancing the bucks out to spurious leftist causes. People led to Lesnick’s couch by their promiscuity and dipshit politics.

Deluded.

Stupid.

Selfish.

Mal took a belt of coffee and ran a mental overview of the files, a last paraphrase before getting down to tagging the individual brain trusters he and Dudley Smith should be interrogating and the ones who should be singled out for their as yet unfound operative: Loew’s projected possibility, his favored tool already. What he got was a lot of people with too much money and too little brains pratfalling through the late ’30s and ’40s—betraying themselves, their lovers, their country and their own ideals, two events galvanizing their lunacy, spinning them out of their orbit of parties, meetings and sleeping around:

The Sleepy Lagoon case.

The 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee probe into Communist influence in the entertainment industry.

And the funny thing was—the two events gave the Pinkos some credibility, some vindication.

In August of 1942 a Mexican youth named José Diaz was beaten to death and run over with a car out at the Sleepy Lagoon—a grass-knolled meeting place for gang members in the Williams Ranch area of Central LA. The incident was allegedly sparked by Diaz being ejected from a nearby party earlier that night; he had allegedly insulted several members of a rival youth gang, and seventeen of them hauled him out to the Lagoon and snuffed him. Evidence against them was scant; the LAPD investigation and trial were conducted in an atmosphere of hysteria: the ’42–’43 zoot suit riots had produced a huge wave of anti-Mexican sentiment throughout Los Angeles. All seventeen boys received life sentences, and the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee—UAES brain trusters, Communist Party members, leftists and straight citizens—held rallies, circulated petitions and raised funds to employ a legal team—which ultimately got all seventeen pardoned. Hypocrisy within the idealism: Lesnick’s male patients, hearts bleeding over the poor railroaded Mexicans, complained to him of Communist Party white women screwing “proletariat” taco benders—then assailed themselves as rabid bigots moments later.

Mal made a mental note to talk to Ellis Loew about the Sleepy Lagoon angle: Ed Satterlee wanted to procure SLDC rally pictures from the Feds—but since the kids were exonerated, it might backfire. Ditto the info the shrinkees poured out over ’47 HUAC. Better for him and Dudley to keep it sub rosa, not jeopardize Lesnick’s complicity and use the info only by implication: to squeeze the UAESers’ suspected weak points. Going with the HUAC stuff full-bore might jeopardize their grand jury: J. Parnell Thomas, the Committee’s chairman, was currently doing time on bribery charges; hotshot Hollywood stars had protested HUAC’s methods and Lesnick’s files were rife with nonpetty trauma deriving from the spring of ’47—suicides, attempted suicides, frantic betrayals of friendship, booze and sex to kill the pain. If the ’50 LA City grand jury team attempted to use the juice of ’47 HUAC—
their first precedent
—they might engender sympathy for UAES members and subsidiary hostile witnesses. Better not to dip into old HUAC testimony for conspiracy evidence; imperative that the lefties be denied a chance to boo-hoo the grand jury’s tactics to the press.

Mal felt his overview sink in as solid: good evidence, good thoughts on what to use, what to hold back. He killed his coffee and went to the individuals—the half dozen of the twenty-two most ripe for interrogation and operation.

His first was a maybe. Morton Ziffkin: UAES member, CP member, member of eleven other organizations classified as Commie fronts. Family man—a wife and two grown daughters. A highly paid screenwriter—100 thou a year until he told HUAC to fuck off—now working for peanuts as a film splicer. Underwent analysis with Doc Lesnick out of a stated desire to “explore Freudian thought” and allay his impulses to cheat on his wife with an onslaught of CP women “out for my gelt—not my body.” A rabid, bad-tempered Marxist ideologue—a good man to bait on the witness stand—but he’d probably never snitch on his fellow Pinks. He sounded intelligent enough to make Ellis Loew seem like a fool, and his HUAC stint gave him an air of martyrdom. A maybe.

Mondo Lopez, Juan Duarte and Sammy Benavides, former Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee bigshots, recruited out of the Sinarquistas—a zoot suit gang given to sporting Nazi regalia—by CP bosses. Now token ethnics in the UAES hierarchy, the three spent the ’40s throwing it to condescending white lefty women—enraged over their airs, but grateful for the action; more enraged at being told by their “puto” cell leader to “explore” that rage by seeing a psychiatrist. Benavides, Duarte and Lopez were currently working at Variety International Pictures, half the time as stagehands, half the time playing Indians in cheapy cowboy pictures. They were also serving as picket bosses on Gower Gulch—the closest thing the UAES had to muscle—pitiful when compared to the Mickey Cohen goons the Teamsters were employing. Mal pegged them as pussy hounds who fell into clover, the Sleepy Lagoon job their only real political concern. The three probably had criminal records and connections stemming from their zoot suit days, a good approach for the team’s troubleshooter—if Ellis Loew ever found one.

Now the brain trust got ugly.

Reynolds Loftis, movie character actor, snitched to HUAC by his former homo lover Chaz Minear, a Hollywood script hack. Loftis did not suspect that Minear ratted him, and in no way reciprocated the finking. Both men were still with the UAES, still friendly at their meetings and at other political functions they attended. Minear, guilt-crazed over his fink duty, had said to Doc Lesnick: “If you knew who he left me for, you’d understand why I did it.” Mal had scanned both Loftis’ and Minear’s files for more mention of “he” and came up empty; there was a large gap in Lesnick’s Loftis transcripts—from the years ’42 to ’44—and Minear’s pages bore no other mention of the third edge of the triangle. Mal recalled Loftis from westerns he’d taken Stefan to: a tall, lanky, silver-haired man, handsome like your idealized U.S. senator. And a Communist, and a subversive, and a hostile HUAC witness and self-described switch-hitter. A potential friendly witness par excellence—next to Chaz Minear, the Red with the most closeted skeletons.

And finally the Red Queen.

Claire De Haven did not possess a file, and several of the men had described her as too smart, strong and good to need a psychiatrist. She also screwed half her CP cell and all the SLDC bigwigs, including Benavides, Lopez and Duarte, who worshiped her. Chaz Minear was in her thrall, despite his homosexuality; Reynolds Loftis spoke of her as the “only woman I’ve ever really loved.” Mal picked up on her smarts secondhand: Claire moved behind the scenes, tended not to shout slogans and retained the political and legal connections of her late father, a stolid right-wing counsel to the LA business establishment. Minear speculated to Doc Lesnick that her old man’s political juice kept her from being subpoenaed by HUAC in ’47—and not one other witness mentioned her name. Claire De Haven screwed like a rabbit, but didn’t come off as a slut; she inspired the loyalty of homosexual screenwriters, switch-hitter actors, Mexican stagehands and Commies of all stripes.

Mal turned off his light, reminding himself to write Doc Lesnick a memo: all the files ended in the summer of ’49—five months ago. Why? Walking out to the elevator, he wondered what Claire De Haven looked like, where he could get a picture, if he could get his decoy to operate her out of her lust—politics and sex to nail the woman as a friendly witness, the Red Queen squeezed like a Chinatown whore, captain’s bars dancing his way at the end of a stag movie.