The Big Fix
Page 1
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Afterword
A MOSES WINE MYSTERY
THE BIG FIX
Ever restless, ROGER L. SIMON has spent his life moving between books and movies, gaining distinction in both. In books, he is best known for the seven Moses Wine detective novels, which have won prizes in the U.S. and Great Britain and been published in over a dozen languages. In film, most prominent among his six produced screenplays–including his adaptation of The Big Fix–is Enemies, A Love Story, for which Simon was nominated for an Academy Award. Recently, he has turned to directing, filming the independent Prague Duet, which he co-wrote with his wife, Sheryl Longin, and which was a Romance Classics Premiere in 1999. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
For
Lance Richbourg,
In the American Grain
Richard Dreyfuss as Moses Wine in the 1978 production of The Big Fix.
INTRODUCTION
by
RICHARD DREYFUSS
The ‘60s have taken a beating, haven’t they?
And it’s not just George Will and Patrick Buchanan. Oh no, throw a rock in any direction and you hit someone making fun, criticizing, shaking their heads in collective disapproval—of what? A decade, fuhcrissake! Get a life, people! Leave my ‘60s alone.
There, I said it: My ‘60s. I said it, and I’m glad.
Not the tasteless ‘70s, with everyone looking like barbers in Flatbush, or the cheery, sensitive ‘80s, with their GETOUTOFMYWAYYOULOSER serenity. And, need it be said, not the ‘90s, with their ever plummeting level of crassness and smallness of spirit. With all its bad rep, the ‘60s were the last gasp of principle and passion that we’ve had in this sorry excuse for a century.
Yeah, drugs. Bad. Definitely bad, no argument. Yeah, naiveté, in spades, and personally, I think the tie-die thing was silly. But ending a bad war was a good thing, and you can revise history all you want, but that happened, and we did it, and I’ll always be proud of it. It was a real Frank Capra moment, big and important and dangerous.
It’s fashionable today to scorn the values held up in the ‘60s, but we were experimenting with a lot of things, not just drugs. We thought for a moment that we and the world could handle a lot more love, and many of us tried to practice it. We thought that America—the America we learned about in 7th and 8th grade history classes, where the propaganda was effective and we all fell in love with our country—could be a real part of our lives. There certainly wasn’t a lot of support for the effort, and it did go awry sometimes, but not always, not always . . .
They say (and it was the ‘60s generation who was the first to point a finger at Them) that we were irresponsibly tearing things down in those days—the country, the family, the ties that bound . . .
Bullshit.
We were building up America, asking that it reflect what it had said it was, asking the nation to reflect what it talked about on the 4th of July.
If you wanted to put words to the ‘60s, one of those words would have to be “learning.” Some people—mostly young, but not always—learned some profound things, in beds, in homes, in the streets, even, God help us, in their drugged-out brains.
Moses Wine knew this. Moses was a Shamus. Remember how all the great detectives had a code, a lonely code? Well, Moses’ code was based in the ‘60s, and he was alone with it, and a knight errant, just the same. He survived the ‘60s, and probably felt guilty about that, and he took into the rest of his life the feelings of nobility reached for, and honor, and love of Country, and he hid them behind his cynical armor and took them out only when he was alone or with his kids. And Roger Simon knew that, and wrote better about it than just about anyone, hiding his affection and regard and insights under the guise of a simple detective series.
I loved playing Moses Wine, and I will always regret that we couldn’t make one or two or ten sequels. I would have loved making a fortune playing him, and I would have loved playing him for his rightness of character. I would have loved giving Roger that gift, but, like we learned in the ‘60s and every other decade I’m aware of, Life Is Not Fair. As it is, Roger can know that he got “It” right, and I don’t think anyone else really has—not all the Bill Bennett tyoes, with all his scrutiny and moralizing.
The ‘60s were not a time of license and riot; not really. They were our Spanish Civil War, our test, our moment where our reach for something fine exceeded our grasp.
But reach we did, and we haven’t reached at all, since, to our collective shame.
Richard Dreyfuss
Los Angeles, CA
THE
BIG FIX
1
THE LAST TIME I was with Lila Shea we were making love in the back of a 1952 Chrysler hearse parked across the street from the Oakland Induction Center. Tear gas was seeping through the floorboards and the crack of police truncheons was in our ears. I could barely hear her little cries over the wail of sirens. That was the fall of ’67—the October Days of Protest—and just a few moments after we finished, she bounced off my chest over the Army surplus air mattress, pulled on her cotton panties and disappeared into the night without so much as a see-you-later.
Lila had always been like that—one of those intense people who went through the sixties like a wine taster, sampling each vintage and moving on. FSM, SDS, shooting pads in the Haight, the Hell’s Angels, bus trips with Kesey’s Pranksters, sunshine at the Fillmore, communes in Taos—she did it all. The first time I met her we were being fire-hosed down the steps of San Francisco City Hall at the HUAC protest in May 1960. Even then she was more into it than I, taking a policeman down into the wet cement with her and giving him a quick knee to the groin.
I’m not sure what made Lila that way. Maybe it was her proper Bostonian background, the old shipping family back on Lewisberg Square. She went around Berkeley like a barefoot Grace Kelly with long blonde hair flowing over her olive sweater and willowy legs stretching through a pair of corduroy hip-huggers. Everyone I knew wanted to nail her, whether he said it or not. But I thought she was something special. And our last night together in 1967 I was hoping for more than a quick fuck before the demonstration.
It didn’t happen.
I left the Bay Area a few weeks later and though I thought about her all the time, I can’t remember seeing Lila until one quiet evening last May:
I was at home playing solitaire Clue, trying to get a hit on my crusty hash pipe. My token was in the study. I rolled the die and advanced five spaces into the dining room. I sat back to consider the possibilities—Mr. Green had eliminated himself and Professor Plum had a foolproof alibi. He was in the conservatory with Miss Scarlet for the entire afternoon. And doubtless Mr. White would not take his life with his own hands.
So Colonel Mustard or Mrs. Peacock. But which one? Which one?
I drew on the pipe again and rolled the die.
Four.
That would do perfectly, take me right into the hall to break this case wide open. I picked up my token. But just as I began to count off the spaces, I heard a knock on the door. Or thought I did. The stereo was up and I was wearing headphones. But someone was being insistent. Th
e rap of knuckles on frosted glass came piercing right through Stevie Wonder.
I pulled off the phones and checked my watch. It was twenty-eight past eleven, pretty late for visitors. I slipped on some pajama bottoms and walked to the door. Switching on the porch light, I could see the silhouette of a woman against the glass.
“Who is it?” I asked, leaving on the chain.
“A volunteer for Senator Miles Hawthorne. As you may know, Senator Hawthorne is running in the Democratic Presidential Primary next month.” The voice was thin, mechanical. I peered out through the crack but the face was shrouded in darkness. “We would like to know where you rate the Senator on a scale of four: 1—favorable . . . 2—somewhat favorable . . . 3—undecided and 4—very unfavorable.”
“I’ll probably support him.” Hawthorne volunteers had been combing our neighborhood for days. I had seen them climbing the hills in their Volkswagens and Datsuns, a lilliputian army of college students and suburban matrons. But they never came at night.
“Would that be one, then?”
“Yeah.”
She paused as a motorcycle roared down Echo Park Boulevard.
“We welcome your support for Senator Hawthorne. Every voter in California is important to the campaign. Will you be needing an absentee ballot or transportation to the polls on the day of the primary?”
“Not if I can help it.”
I began to close the door but she blocked it with her foot.
“Would you mind answering a few questions for our voter preference survey?”
“At this hour?”
“We’re pressed for time, Mr. . . .er . . . Wine. And there are so many voters to cover.”
I released the chain to get a better look at her. The light came through from the living room and I could see an attractive leggy young woman with short blonde hair and sharp, almost thrusting green eyes. She was wearing a simple Mexican shift with yellow and blue stitching and a large HAWTHORNE button between her breasts. In her left hand she held a pair of granny glasses and in her right a clipboard with a computer print-out and some campaign literature. The top sheet read “Hawthorne Speaks Out on the Aged.”
“The preference survey only takes three to six minutes. May I come in, please?”
I backed up and let her pass. She walked into my living room and sat on the sofa, pausing to stare for a moment at the hash pipe propped against the top of the Clue set. Between the revolver and the rope were two joints of Michoacan grass. Normally I wouldn’t leave them out in front of a complete stranger, but Hawthorne was said to favor decriminalization. He was said to favor a lot of things, like guaranteed minimum income and national health insurance. But then he was a Democratic politician at campaign time.
“Have you ever considered working for Senator Hawthorne?” she asked.
“No, not really.”
“But you do support him.”
“I said I did.”
I sat down opposite her and waited for the voter preference survey. But it didn’t come. She didn’t say a word. Instead she put on her granny glasses and examined me at close range, then she turned to take in the rest of the room. The bed was unmade, the dirty dishes stacked in the sink. The stereo was on the floor by the closet with a few records scattered in front. The poster of Lenny Bruce tacked to the bathroom door had a long rip down the center.
“That’s all there is,” I said. “Outside there’s a ’47 Buick which some people might call a classic but I swear is a heap.”
She didn’t smile.
I took a closer look at her. She had freckles on her face and legs and a tiny mole on her left chin. It was then that I recognized Lila.
“Hello, Moses. Do I look very different?”
“Not at all. But you sounded so solemn . . . like a canvasser for the Watchtower or something.”
“Sorry about that, but I was told to make certain you supported the Senator before I invited you.”
“Invited me to what?”
She didn’t answer right away. She stood and walked over toward me, removing her granny glasses. She had changed. The hair was different and her bearing was more mature, more self-assured. In her late twenties she was far prettier than I had remembered her. I wondered what she thought of me.
“Some people at Hawthorne headquarters are waiting to speak with you,” she said. “Important people.”
“About what?”
She shrugged and looked down at the coffee table, pushing Colonel Mustard three spaces forward with her left hand, up to the entrance of the library.
“Do what they ask you, Moses, for the sake of Senator Hawthorne.”
“Senator Hawthorne?”
“Well, then for me. For the old days at Berkeley when we sat all night on the terrace talking about Camus.”
She watched my response. For a moment it was as real as the table in front of us—Lila riding through Sather Gate on a Raleigh with a green bookbag over her shoulder; me, standing in the quadrangle watching her with a copy of Dissent in my hand, twenty years old.
“I’ll try it,” I said.
Lila seemed pleased.
2
ALTHOUGH THE LIGHTS were on in the reception room, Hawthorne’s headquarters appeared deserted when we arrived twenty minutes later. Lila Shea tapped on the window. I could hear voices and footsteps from a rear corridor. Somebody shouted and then there was a loud thud like a sack of fertilizer landing at the bottom of a chute.
“What was that?” I asked.
She shook her head. A Ford pickup screeched around the block. A dark figure was slumped over in the front seat between two others. Seconds later they had disappeared down Wilshire.
Lila and I exchanged looks. She tapped on the window again. A plump young man in a batik tie poked his head through one of the doors. As soon as he saw who it was, he came out and opened the lock for us. We were introduced and he told me his name was Nate Sugars in a phony basso which indicated he expected me to be impressed. I wasn’t at first, then remembered an article in Newsweek about an Ivy League computer whiz kid working for Hawthorne’s campaign. I took a better look at him. He couldn’t have been much more than nineteen. Most of the lard around his middle still looked like baby fat. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he had a sharp blue pencil behind his ear.
“What was that noise?” Lila asked him.
“Some nut trying to break in. Sebastian took care of him.”
Sugars and Lila Shea guided me through the dimly lit corridors past the rows of files and long bank of phones to the rear conference room where the smoke curled up from a tight little circle of cigars. It looked like an old Edward G. Robinson movie.
“Moses Wine.” A dark, angular man in his mid-thirties shot his hand out to me. “I’m Sam Sebastian. Senator Hawthorne’s L.A. County Coordinator.” He wore an expensive voile shirt under a reindeer-patterned sweater vest.
A couple of older pols in shirtsleeves and wide regimental ties turned toward me with bleary-eyed expressions. Sebastian signalled them to leave with Sugars and Lila Shea. The county coordinator then walked around me and shut the door, locking it with a bolt and chain. “Can’t be too careful,” he explained.
“So I’ve seen.” He seemed confused by my reference. “Those characters peeling out in the Ford pickup,” I explained.
“Oh, that. Nothing.” He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “We get them all the time. There’re a lot of messed-up people in this country. Their parents expect too much of them.”
Sebastian motioned for me to sit down. On the blackboard behind him was a minute-by-minute of the Senator’s campaign stops for tomorrow. At 10:15 in the morning he would dedicate a swimming pool in Watts.
“Steak kew from Wong’s.” Sebastian held up a white container. “A little heavy on the cornstarch.”
I shook my head and he nodded, taking a seat opposite me. His eyes were black and motionless. His lips were thin and he had a habit of moistening them every few seconds with the tip of his tongue.
“Start what?”
“Helping Senator Hawthorne make this country into something worthwhile . . . what we’re all here for.”
“Oh,” I said.
The county coordinator continued to study me openly. “Suspicious of working within the system?” he asked without waiting for a reply. “I was too. Eight, nine months ago I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be working for an establishment politician. Now . . . ” He picked up a coffee stirrer for emphasis. “Extreme times demand flexible approaches.”
“Get to the point, Sebastian.”
“California is the crucial test. The nomination hinges on it. Everybody knows that. Right now it couldn’t be closer. Anything we do could turn it around. The slightest rumor, innuendo. We guard against any eventuality, but then this sonofabitch comes along.” He threw open his palms like a trial lawyer or a minister who had just revealed some self-evident truth.
“What sonofabitch?” I asked.
“Eppis.”
“Eppis?”
“Howard Eppis, chairman of the Free Amerika Party, author of Rip It Off.”
Mindless drivel, I thought. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He endorsed us.”
I started to laugh. The whole thing was very funny. “Come on, Sebastian. I thought you and your senator were great progressives. One lousy radical hops on the bandwagon and it’s panic city.”
Sebastian wasn’t amused. He wrinkled his brow sternly and hitched up his double-knit slacks. “Eppis isn’t the only radical who’s backed our campaign. A lot of them have. We encourage everyone to work within the system for change . . . as long as they stay inside realistic guidelines.” Sebastian paused for a moment, then leaned forward as if to share a confidence. “But Eppis is different. We could never contact him. Still can’t. He never answers our calls or letters. Finally we tried to visit him in person. No dice. He wasn’t in. No one knows where he is. He just seems to have vanished. . . .Then, a couple of days ago, these started arriving at the homes of selected Democratic registrants in the San Gabriel Valley.”