9
THE NEXT MORNING a man I hadn’t seen before drove me back to El Mercado. He talked a blue streak about the boxing at the Olympic Auditorium. It seemed this Filipino had beat the shit out of the Nigerian champ in the bantam weights only the week before. The crowd was going wild. But wait until this guy met Jorge Orantes . . . fast, por supuesto, and born right here in the Barrio. Kick his ass.
We turned into the lot of El Mercado and I pointed out the Buick.
“That your short, man? . . . sheet!” We drove up and I got out. “You lucky to make it outta the lot.”
“Thanks for the ride. Are you a member of the Teatro Comunal de Aztlan?”
“Hell no, man. Do I look like one of them actors? . . . Maricones! They jus’ pay me a dollar to drive you over here.”
“What happened to them?”
“They left for the campo . . . six o’clock this morning. . . .They do actos . . . little plays . . . for the people on the farm.”
“I heard.”
The driver backed his car, but stopped when his car came parallel to mine and rolled down the window. He had a pair of yellow tickets in his hand.
“Good seats, man. Third row. Orantes against that Filipino bastard. Gonna bust him good.”
I shook my head.
Driving off, I turned on the radio to find out what day it was. Less than twenty-four hours had passed, but I had lost immeasurable time, gone up a false trail or at best a tangential one. The disappearance of Luis Vazquez seemed to have nothing to do with Howard Eppis on the face of it. And yet . . . Howard’s path shouldn’t have been that elusive. I was annoyed at my inability to track him down. Was it an omen that I shouldn’t be looking in the first place or a sign hidden not far below the surface that I didn’t really want to? I had phoned a few old political contacts but there were lots more I could have called. Was it just that I was ashamed to tell them that I was, in Sebastian’s words, working within the system, supporting an Establishment politician? But they probably didn’t care much for Eppis either. It was hard to figure.
When I reached my house, the phone was ringing. I ran to the door, but it had stopped before I entered and I continued on into the bathroom, stooping over the sink to wash. I peeled off the gauze Alora had taped to my cheeks and cleansed the bruises with rubbing alcohol while taking a long look at myself in the mirror. What a mess. I had barely crested thirty and my face already looked like the fag end of an Italian salami. The skin on my neck was ripped around the collar and dark purple bloodstains were spattered all over the front of my denim jacket. The plumbing in my house hadn’t worked for months and I couldn’t deposit the lousy three hundred bucks from the Hawthorne campaign for fear my creditors would attach my bank account. I closed my eyes. The throbbing had not gone away. If I had only stayed in law school I wouldn’t be in this absurd condition. I’d be a nice young Jewish lawyer with a Matisse drawing on the office wall and twenty young draft dodgers as admirers. My wife wouldn’t have walked out on me for some dimwit who can stick his right toe behind his left ear and my two boys would be right down the hall every night instead of in a canyon some three freeways away. I leaned down and spit in the sink.
The phone rang again. I wiped my hands on a towel and walked over to pick it up.
“Hello.”
“Hello . . . Moses Wine?”
“Yes.”
“This is Howard Eppis.”
“Hello, Howard.”
“I hear you wanted to talk with me.”
The accent was nasal and New Yorky, the voice scratchy as if it were on a long distance line. But I couldn’t be certain. Sometimes the corner druggist sounded like he was calling from Singapore.
“Are you close by?”
“Forget it, Wine. Say what you have to say over the phone or not at all.”
I sat down on the couch, holding the telephone in my lap. The receiver felt clammy in my hand.
“Howard, do you want Hawthorne to win?”
“Sure.”
“Some of his people don’t think so.”
“How’s that?”
“Identifying a candidate with Mao and Lenin is worse than saying he had sodomy with the Pope. You don’t need Gallup to tell you that.”
“So what do they want me to do about it? Go play on the beach?”
“Stop sending those flyers, Howard.”
A long silence from his end, then, “Not a chance!”
“You want to see Dillworthy win?”
Eppis laughed. “I didn’t know Moses Wine was so concerned with the welfare of the Democratic Party.”
He knew how to hurt.
“Look, Howard, why are you doing this? If you tell me your reasons, maybe we can work something out.”
“I’ve my reasons for doing what I’m doing, Wine, and they’re no concern of yours.”
“What about Lila Shea?”
“Who?”
“Lila Shea.”
“I haven’t seen Lila in years.”
“You won’t have to. She went flying over the cliff on Cerro Gordo the other night.”
A long pause. I stared into the mouthpiece of the phone, imagining Howard’s grinning visage gone sour, his electric hair spraying out like a Medusa with a head full of Slinkys.
“You sure about that?” The voice was suddenly more timorous.
“Tell me your address and I’ll send you the pictures.”
“Jesus.”
“You’re being fucked over, Howard, by forces bigger than you.”
“Her death didn’t have anything to do with me.”
“If I can prove it, will you stop what you’re doing?”
“Go ahead and try, Moishe . . . but just warn your liberal pals over at Hawthorne Headquarters that the Free Amerika Party is going to be expressing its support for their candidate on a broad front and they better be prepared!”
“Where can I get ahold of you, Howard?”
“23 Columbia Drive.”
He snickered and hung up.
Why had he called? I couldn’t figure it, unless he was using me to put the knife to the Hawthorne people, possibly even set them up for some kind of blackmail. I decided to deliver the news to Sebastian in person. But on my way down Echo Park Boulevard, a squad car appeared in my rearview mirror. Within seconds the roof rotary was flashing. I pulled over into the discount gas station on the corner of Elmwood. A young Japanese cop got out of the car looking very businesslike.
“I know,” I said. “The left-turn signal’s not working.”
He didn’t respond, checking some information on a clipboard instead. “Moses Wine?” I nodded. “Follow me, please?”
“What’s this about, officer?”
“Detective Koontz of the Rampart Division wants to speak with you.”
“Oh, yeah. And suppose I don’t want to speak with him?”
“Then a warrant will be issued.”
Simple enough.
The cop got back in his squad car and I followed him down to Alvarado, turning right on Temple Street to the Rampart Division, a depressing edifice squatting between a Cuban restaurant and a laundromat. The facade was an endless slab of grey cement surrounding an equally endless collection of grey minds. I parked in a slot marked visitors and went up the steps to the main lobby. Koontz was waiting for me in a back office with a stenographer. He was in bad need of a shave and his shirt looked like it just came from a steam pressing in the tail pipe of a garbage truck. As usual, his panama hat was so bashed in you couldn’t tell whether it was upside down or not.
“Call off your goons, Koontz.” I pointed to the stenographer. “This isn’t the line-up.”
“I thought you might want to make a statement.”
“About what?”
“About the so-called accident on Cerro Gordo.”
“What accident?”
“The one in which a twenty-eight-year-old woman went over a cliff.”
“You’re wasting your time, Koontz. You should be out t
here doing something constructive like collecting graft or shaking down a homosexual.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said, sounding cocky. He reached inside his desk and brought out a file labelled WINE, Moses S. The name had a familiar ring to it. “Do you know a Miss—or should I say Ms.—Lila Shea?”
The stenographer began to copy the question at a furious clip. “Get him out of here,” I said. “Or I’ll have to call my lawyer. You know us Jews, Koontz. We all have smart lawyers with big vocabularies.”
Koontz didn’t smile. But he beckoned with his head to the stenographer, who got up and left. Then he opened my file and began to thumb through it. It appeared to have grown since the last time I was there.
“Do you know a Lila Shea?” he repeated.
“I couldn’t say.”
“What do you mean, you couldn’t say?” He waited a split second for a reaction. “She was the one who went off Cerro Gordo at 1:45 the morning of May 24, precisely .07 miles from your house. . . . Does that refresh your memory?”
“Interesting.”
“Is that all?” He was beginning to smirk. He removed the top sheet from my folder and placed it beside the active file to his right, reading from the top, “Item—Lila Shea. UC Berkeley, 1964, BA in English. Item—Moses S. Wine. UC Berkeley, 1963, BA in English.”
“Two English majors . . . remarkable.”
“Item—Lila Shea: member, Fair Play for Cuba Committee; member, Committee to Free Caryl Chessman. Item—Moses S. Wine: member, Fair Play for Cuba Committee; member, Committee to Free Caryl Chessman.”
“Fascinating coincidence. . . .”
He held up a photograph. “Item-Lila Shea and Moses Wine. Bay Area March to Ban the Bomb, March 1962.”
I looked at the picture. The framing wasn’t bad but the focus was lousy. Lila and I were circled with a grease pencil. There were about six demonstrators between us.
“Do you deny you know Lila Shea?”
“I don’t deny it.” I looked out the window hoping flying saucer would swoop down on Temple Street and carry me off to a distant planet. But that only happened in Vonnegut novels. ‘I don’t confirm it, either.”
“You wouldn’t.” He replaced the documents in my file and leaned back, staring at me for a minute. “What happened to your face, Wine? You look like you fell off a cliff yourself.”
“I got into a fast poker game with three Arabs and a Greek. They wouldn’t believe it when I drew four kings.”
He sat up straight. “All right. Cut the shit. Who is she? Who’re you working for and what’re you doing?”
I preened my hair.
“Get smart, Wiener. I’ve got enough on you to drop your license in a vat of sulphuric acid and throw away the rubber gloves. I could drive up to your house right now and bust you for enough drugs to send you to Soledad until the mid 1980’s. Now who’re you working for and what’s going on?”
“You should know that, Koontz.”
“What do you mean, I should know?!”
“You’ve got my whole life on file. You probably were tapping my mother’s phone when she called her sister from the maternity ward.”
“Are you going to cooperate, or . . . ”
“And violate my client’s confidence? What do you think?”
“Get lost,” he said. I stood to leave but he stopped me at the door. “Just remember one thing, peeper. Our informant tells us he saw you with Miss Shea on the night of her death. That makes you our only suspect.”
“Tell your informant he’s a creep.” I opened the door and left.
10
I DROVE HOME wondering who his informant was and how he or she fit into the puzzle with Alora, Eppis and Lila Shea. Or if there was a puzzle . . . if, indeed, they were all related. And what of Luis Vazquez. This whole affair was turning into one dense sea of missing persons and I was about as close to the bottom of it as a scuba diver at the edge of the Barrier Reef. And now with Koontz sticking his stuffy nose into things. . . .
When I got home, I went directly to the closet. The hash was still in its place hidden in the toes of my smelly tennis sneakers and the Michoacan remained unmolested in the canister labelled Dunhill My Mixture No. 1275. I thought of throwing it all down the toilet but then life is short and what’s a few years in the cooler for possession. I’d miss the boys but at least I’d never have to lay eyes on that jerk Madas again.
I sat down at the Clue set for a while and fiddled with the pieces. But real life had taken over from the game and the evil doings of Colonel Mustard & Co. just didn’t seem interesting. I picked up the list of delegates again, flipping through it for inspiration. Then I rifled the pages of Rip It Off. Nothing. I lay back and had one of my least favorite fantasies—that private investigation was an imbecile’s job and anybody could do it. Things that got solved, got solved. And things that didn’t, didn’t. Either information floated to the surface or it never came. All you needed was a fool there who could catch it.
I walked over to the refrigerator, and made myself three tuna fish sandwiches on rye, a homage of sorts to the memory of Lila Shea. Then I ate a couple of tortillas with butter and salt, a salute to Alora. Maybe I’d see her again some time. I checked the clock: 4:15. Still early enough to get down to Hawthorne Headquarters and report Eppis’ words to Sebastian. It was, after all, what they paid me for.
As a precaution against police surveillance, I did not head directly for the headquarters but drove down to Sunset and parked in the lot of Anchors Away!, a schlock import store of maddening proportions. Milling with the crowds of bargain-hunters, I entered the store and headed for the rear exit, slipping out behind a man carrying a pair of rattan bar stools from Mali and a large bolt of sackcloth from a Micronesian island with an unpronounceable name. I continued on foot for several blocks to Vermont and took a bus from there to Hawthorne Headquarters. When I arrived, the precinct workers were returning from their rounds. I watched them deliver their portfolios to a tall black woman who inspected the computer read-outs, checking off their names on a legal-sized pad. The volunteers compared notes and swapped stories of their various assignments with a feeling of camaraderie.
“Five times I knocked,” a college kid was saying. “Finally this bastard opens the louvres and shoves a shotgun right in my ear. . . . I put him down as 4, very unfavorable.”
I edged my way around the receptionist’s desk but was stopped by a hand on my shoulder. It was Sugars. He was in his shirtsleeves with hair hanging over his forehead in a contrived Bobby Kennedy style.
“What’re you doing here?” He greeted me like an escapee from a leper colony.
“I’ve got to talk with Sebastian. It’s important.”
“Sebastian’s not here.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“A couple of days. I sent him down to Bakersfield to do some advance work.”
“You?”
“I’m with the national campaign. He’s with the state campaign. That gives me seniority.”
The elevator opened and he moved toward it, a man on his way to important meetings in the executive suites. I moved fast to keep up with him.
“Eppis called,” I told him.
Sugars didn’t respond.
“He may be trying to set you up. Blackmail of some sort.”
He reached the elevator and stopped, blocking the door with his foot.
“Look, Wine, do yourself a favor. If you want to stay on the payroll, keep far away from here. There’s nothing Eppis can do to us now. He’s not big enough. But the police already have your name in connection with a murder and you can smear us good.”
He ducked inside the elevator and pressed the button. In a moment the door closed about his corpulent body. I turned around and stared at a large bulletin board. It contained a bar graph showing the relative strength of the candidates over the last few months according to an unspecified poll. Hawthorne’s popularity was soaring. There was no doubt he would smash Dillworthy. They couldn’t stop him
now, not even if a CBS mobile unit caught him jacking off on the roof of the Union Bank Building with an old Brownie shot of Pat Nixon. Or so it seemed.
I walked back through the reception room past walls papered with ecology symbols in pastel colors. The Osmond Brothers came from a loudspeaker at a discreet volume. On my left, the volunteers were seated at long camp tables as busy as ants in one of those glassed-in colonies you buy on television. Strolling idly through the room, I felt out of place, at odds with my environment, the last hold-out for alienation in a world of engaged men.
“Hey . . . just a minute!” A girl stopped me as I tried to walk into the corridor between the county and state headquarters. “You can’t go in there without a pass!”
“Right arm,” I said, holding up my palm like Dave Garroway on the Today show years ago, and walked out of the building.
It was still light when I got back to my car at the Anchors Away! parking lot. I drove out onto Sunset and headed for Venice to have another look at 23 Columbia Drive. Perhaps Eppis’ last words to me were no more than frivolity, but I didn’t have enough leads to be choosy.
I reached the cul-de-sac just as the sky turned pitch dark. Driving around the loop, I was surprised to find that number 23 had been leveled in its entirety. The faded Victorian mansion had disappeared, leaving only a vacant lot with a new sign from Pacific Properties listing its dimensions, 175’ X 115’. I parked around the corer and got out, pausing only to pick my flashlight out of the glove compartment. The street was empty except for the abandoned shell of a Chevy convertible at the far end. Over on the next block I could see the neon sign of a soul food restaurant flashing on and off.
I crossed the street quickly, continuing along the sidewalk past the now-vacant lot to the house with the Venetian blinds. It was pink stucco with a red tile roof and a large metal alarm box that any self-respecting burglar would know was a phony. I rang the buzzer. In a few seconds a dark brown eye appeared in the peephole.
The Big Fix Page 6
