The Big Fix

by Roger L. Simon

  Klieg lights over Wilshire Boulevard. Traffic stacked up along the Miracle Mile. Television cameras. Scaffolding. Dignitaries. Crowds. The fetid stench of bigtime politics.

  I stood in the entryway of a garage opposite Hawthorne Headquarters where Sugars had told me to wait. Not to leave under any circumstances. He was busy now, but he wanted to talk with me. Definitely. After they had seen the Candidate. . . .

  I leaned against the wall and watched the show. A well-scrubbed black group called the Incredibles was singing about Hawthorne as if he were God descended from the machine. They wore cardigan sweaters emblazoned with the Democratic donkey and red, white and blue straw hats perched on their discreet naturals. An Oriental girl in a miniskirt danced a restrained go-go in front of them just below a trio of Secret Service agents surveying the scene from the headquarters roof. The crowd was large, stretching down Wilshire as far as Commonwealth Avenue and around the corner to Sixth. It seemed like everybody and his brother were backing Hawthorne that night.

  The group sang a soul version of “This Land Is Your Land” and the candidate emerged, flanked by his wife, a city councilman and a local black football star. It was the first time I had seen Hawthorne in the flesh, and I studied him carefully. He seemed diffident for such a rabble rouser. Under normal conditions he would have been about as charismatic as my Uncle Sid, a retired insurance agent in Larchmont, New York; but something about all the attention he was getting, the television and the lights, had elevated this mundane-looking man into a superstar. It was as if, for the moment, the dull and the bland had become the sine qua non of personal appearance. The football star standing next to him looked gauche, almost childish, in his long sideburns and velour sports jacket.

  The group finished the song and a fanfare was played. As the candidate stepped to the microphone, Sugars rushed to my side. The whiz kid was livid, muttering and smashing his fist into his palm.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  We walked through the garage to the service elevator and up to the second floor, continuing down a corridor to the main office area. The rooms were empty. Everyone had gone down to hear the candidate. Cigarettes were still burning in ashtrays. Papers were strewn over the tables with pencils and crayons on top of them. Everything left midway.

  At the far end Sugars took out a set of keys and unlocked an office door, swinging it open for me. Unlike the other rooms, it was completely empty as if swept clean with a heavy-duty vacuum.

  “Vanished,” he said.

  “Since when?”

  “Since yesterday.” Sugars pulled open the desk drawers. They were empty. The bulletin board was stripped. “Nothing. Cleaned out. We tried his house, everywhere. No one can locate him. . . .Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure.”

  “He’s a spy for Dillworthy, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?! Jesus.”

  I turned to look through the window. The view from this office provided a superb view of the candidate, halfway between the window and the street. It seemed as if we could reach out and touch his shoulder. Hawthorne was raising his hands to quiet the cheers of his supporters, but they wouldn’t let him. The chorus began again: “We want Hawthorne! We want Hawthorne!” alternating with “Peace Now! Peace Now!” Sugars tugged at my sleeve.

  “Can you find him?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure? That’s your business, isn’t it? Being a detective and finding people?”

  “I thought it was your business to screen people for important positions in this campaign. I don’t know how he got to be L.A. County Coordinator in the first place.”

  “There’s a lot of work to do. You can’t check everything.”

  “That doesn’t tell me much.”

  The whiz kid shrugged. “Nine months ago he walked into our Hollywood office. Hawthorne was nobody then. We needed all the aid we could get. And he worked like a demon. Day and night.”

  “Who’d he say he was?”

  “An ex-social worker from Springfield, Missouri. Got sick of the Midwest and came out here to help the campaign. We checked that out. There’s a Sam Sebastian from Springfield.”

  “Was.”

  “Was?”

  “An old con game. The simplest way to take on a new identity. Find out about someone who recently died with your basic description—hair, eyes, height, age. Get a photocopy of his birth certificate from his hometown. Get a job with that and then get a social security card and anything else you need.”

  Sugars stroked his fat cheeks. “If he’s not Sebastian, who is he?”

  “He could be a man named Oscar Procari, Jr. At least it looks that way.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A Satanist who flunked out of Yale in his senior year.”

  “A what? . . . I thought you were looking for Howard Eppis.”

  “Of course, I’m not positive. But if he’s not Procari he must be connected with him somehow.”

  “And what about the smear? Is that for real?”

  “It could be. According to a letter Sebastian—or Procari—showed me, Eppis is going to blow up a freeway on May 31 to show his undying love for Senator Hawthorne.”

  “That’s the day after tomorrow.”

  I nodded.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Sugars slumped into the padded desk chair. “I didn’t know he was planning to blow a freeway.” He stuck one of his fancy cigars in his mouth and tried to light it, but his lighter wouldn’t work. “Shit! . . . I don’t understand this. How come Sebastian showed you the letter? Why would he do something like that if he’s involved with the plot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think we should call the police?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Jesus.” He tried to light the cigar again, then tossed it in the wastebasket in disgust. In the reflection of a fluorescent bulb he looked young. Very young. Nineteen years old. Behind him, Hawthorne had begun a speech about welfare reform, his voice penetrating the window glass. The talk wasn’t generating much enthusiasm although his proposals were sound. Sugars opened and closed a drawer, then spoke again. “We could call them . . . we could call the police, but one way or the other the story would leak. Radical saboteurs in Hawthorne’s campaign. Think what the press would do with that. And that’s assuming the police could stop them from acting in the first place.” He stood up and marched over to the wastebasket, picking out a piece of scrap paper. It was blank. “The candidate’s credibility would be ruined. It’d be all over, unless . . . unless we could pin it all on Dillworthy.” The whiz kid smiled at having come up with a possible solution but my frown discouraged him. “What do you think we should do?” he asked, his voice suddenly weak and childlike. I felt uneasy in this position of power, uneasy to be part of the fate of a man as important as Hawthorne, whatever I thought of him.

  I looked over at him. From the back the candidate’s gestures were awkward. His movements appeared forced, as if copied at the mirror from a book of rhetoric. He accented passages of his speech with the programmed emphasis of a high school debater.

  “What can we do?” Sugars repeated, but I put a finger to my lips. Someone was walking through the front room. The footsteps approached Sebastian’s office. A man in a bulging overcoat appeared at the door. He pulled out a Smith & Wesson, training it on us with one straight arm and simultaneously reaching for his wallet with his other hand.

  “Secret Service. What’re you guys doing here?”

  “Hey, put that thing away!” said Sugars. “We’re with the campaign.”

  The agent looked suspicious. “Oh yeah. Let’s see some identification.” He went up and down, frisking us for weapons. Then he walked over to the window. “You realize from this angle you could assassinate the candidate with a pea shooter.” He pointed his gun at the back of Hawthorne’s neck and for a moment it looked as if
he might do it himself.

  Sugars threw his identification on the desk. “Nate Sugars. Director of Public Opinion. Hawthorne-for-President.” The Secret Service man leaned over, examining Sugars’ photograph on the card.

  “Who’s he?” he asked, nodding toward me.

  “He’s all right,” said Sugars. “He’s working with me.”

  The agent grunted and headed for the door. “Stay away from the window.”

  18

  JONAS,” I SAID. “Phil Jonas.”

  It was close to twelve and I was standing in a phone booth opposite Ralph’s Market on the corner of Vermont and Third.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. . . .Why’d you have to call me at this time of night, Moses?”

  “Because there isn’t any time. Think: Jonas. Phil Jonas.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  I drummed my fingers on the booth wall.

  “ . . . but I’m not coming up with much.”

  “I thought you knew every hood in Nevada.”

  “Look, Moses, I’ll call you tomorrow. Let me have the morning to search this thing out.”

  “I’ll give you an hour, Katz. Call me back at my home. 957-0745.”

  I hung up and drove home.

  Sitting on the edge of my bed, I listened to the Voices of Dissent, first Luis Vazquez and then Howard Eppis. Then over again. Vazquez spoke quietly of the life of the migrant worker camps and the birth of his theater, the first tour to Tierra Amarilla and to San Jose for La Fiesta de las Rosas. He seemed like a good man but distant, unreachable on the one-to-one level, like many authentic revolutionaries. A mass movement was more important than a personal interchange.

  But it was Eppis’ voice that fascinated me. His pitch appeared to have changed in the last four years, to have lowered. The intonation was the same, almost identical, but his voice was an octave deeper—or at least a fifth. Maybe it had only been the telephone. The poor fidelity had done something to his voice. Or perhaps Earl had altered it, back then, for some reason that wasn’t entirely clear to me.

  I listened again.

  Howard’s speech was becoming maudlin. The content was thin and there was nothing very shocking about a lot of four-letter words. Not even back in 1968. It sounded as if he had constructed his remarks for no other purpose than to irritate his grandmother. But the voice was different. Shrill and excited, a cross between Smokey Robinson and Leon Trotsky with a touch of Eddie Cantor thrown in.

  The phone rang and I took the record off. It was Marty Katz, my friend at the Vegas public defender’s office.

  “You really put me on the Nevada shit list, I want you to know.”

  “Sorry.”

  “This may be an all-night town but you can’t call around everywhere at one in the morning without causing more coitus interruptus than the last two Popes combined.”

  “A shame,” I said.

  “Damn right it is. Now what’d you say the name of that joker you wanted was?”

  “Jonas, Phil Jonas.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  A long silence. “Come on, what about it?” I said.

  “There are two hoods named Phil Jonas in this state. One of them’s in gambling and prostitution and the other one’s in prostitution and gambling. Also they’re both blonds in their mid-thirties.”

  “What color eyes?”

  “Jumping Jehosophat, Wine. I was waking people up right and left. Do you think I asked them for particulars? Does he have a mole on his chin? Does he have a strawberry mark on his left butt?”

  “My man has blue eyes.”

  “Well, shiver my timbers! So does every topless dancer in Reno. Look, come down here and find out for yourself. The man to see is Alfred Craw at the Palm Casino in Tonopah.”

  “Tonopah?”

  “That’s right. Tonopah. Just don’t tell them who sent you.”

  “All right.” I started to hang up.

  “Oh, and, er, Wine . . . that stuff I told you about the two Phil Jonases—it’s bullshit! There’s only one and I hear he’s murder.”

  The Palm Casino in Tonopah. I remembered that pisspot town, plopped down in the middle of the state about three hundred miles due east of San Francisco in the old silver mining district, a couple of gas stations, a bar, and a Sears mail-order outlet store. It couldn’t have had a population of more than two thousand although it was the main truck stop between Vegas and Reno. But then nobody lived in Nevada outside the gambling centers except for a few cowboys and some nuclear physicists. The Palm Casino in Tonopah. Nine hours’ drive if I took the usual route over Barstow, maybe seven hours if I went up 395 through Lone Pine and Bishop. Quite a ways to go. A ridiculous trip, in fact.

  I swilled some coffee and walked outside. It was nearly 2:00 A.M. and dark clouds had obscured the moon. The Buick was parked at the end of the driveway by Jacob’s red wagon. I stood on the running board and wiped the moisture from the rear window. Then I got in and turned the ignition. The transmission growled for a while after she kicked over.

  Four hours later I was at the bottom of an alkali sink driving into a desert dawn. I had already crossed the state line. Heading due east, my eyes squinted at the orange sun rising behind the piñon trees. I flipped down the visor and started up the side of a mesa, pushing the old car up to eighty. I twisted the radio dial, trying to find something decent besides farm reports and early morning sermons. For $5.95 I could get a guaranteed long-playing album of Reverend Arthur C. T. Stevens reciting selections of the Gospel accompanied by the South Utah State Pentecostal Choir. A station from Castroville, California, let on that the price of avocados was going down again to $4.87 a bushel. I turned off the radio and floored the gas pedal at the top of the mesa. Maybe I could squeeze out an extra five mph.

  At exactly 8:30 I pulled into Carter’s Chevron at the intersection of 6 and 266 in Tonopah. My back ached and my eyelids were coated with dust. I let myself slump down in the driver’s seat for a moment before I shook myself and walked into the office. The attendant gave me an odd look as I crossed past him and took the restroom key from the hook on the wall. In the bathroom mirror I realized how strange I must look in Tonopah. My hair was too long and the red stitching on my denim collar would have been out of place at a rodeo. I slicked down my hair with a ten-cent comb and some Wildroot from the dispenser, then I walked onto the main street. There were about a dozen buildings on the block but none of them resembled a casino, so I started across the street to Thompson’s Cafe for a country breakfast. The air smelled clean and fresh. Off in the distance I could see the wreck of an abandoned mine jutting out from the side of the mountain.

  Thompson’s Cafe was a plain stone building with a wall made of empty beer bottles cemented together in the desert manner. A silver-plated horseshoe was hammered to the door. When I went inside, a cowboy was getting some flapjacks from a broad-shouldered Indian woman in a gingham dress. A slot machine stood in the corner next to a jukebox which was playing Ferlin Husky. I sat down at the end of the counter and ordered coffee. The woman brought it to me in a mug with a bran muffin.

  “From L.A.?” she asked, studying me.

  “Yeah.”

  “I could tell. What part you from?”

  “Near downtown.”

  “Downtown? I used to live in Lincoln Heights. You know Lincoln Heights?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “Thompson’s been everywhere,” said the cowboy. “She’s from Alaska. She’s been to England, too. Been to England, ain’t you, Thompson?”

  “That’s right, Charlie.”

  “Married to an Englishman,” the cowboy continued. He reminded me of Neal Cassady. “First time I ever heard of that,” he added. “An Englishman married to an Indian woman. Kind of makes you think.”

  “I’m looking for a place called the Palm Casino. It doesn’t seem to be on the main street.”

  “Oh, it’s on the main street all right.”

  The cowboy smiled up at Thompson. One of his front teeth was mis
sing. She reached beneath the counter and flicked on a green neon sign with the words Palm Casino written in script. It was attached to the wall above the door by a metal rod. The “P” and the “C” were formed out of palm fronds. “This is it,” she said, “between nine and three in the morning. Once in a while anyway. Daytimes it’s Thompson’s Cafe.”

  “They put a sign on the front door too,” said the cowboy.

  “What kind of games do they play? Craps? Blackjack?”

  The cowboy laughed. “Hell, no. I ain’t never seen a craps table in here ever. Did you, Thompson?”

  The Indian woman shook her head.

  “Thompson and me don’t come around nights much. You gotta have a Rolls-Royce for that.”

  “Rich, are they?”

  “Phew!” The cowboy tugged on his Stetson for emphasis. “Coupla dudes came down in a helicopter once. Remember that, Thompson?”

  “Yup.”

  “Scared the shit out of Michaelson’s cattle herd . . . ’scuse the French.” The cowboy sliced his way through a piece of ham, covering it with Worcestershire sauce.

  “What’d they do? Bring in their own roulette wheels? Play poker?”

  “None of that stuff. They used to bet real weird things, far as I could tell. You know how rich people are.” The cowboy went over to the window and took a peek at my car. “No, maybe you don’t. Anyway, they’d bet on anything. You name it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the Florida Little League Championship. I saw two guys bet a hundred thousand dollars on that . . . or remember that civil war in Africa? . . . Where was it, Thompson?”

  “Nigeria.”

  “That’s right, Nigeria. They bet around a half million on who’d come out of that one on top—giving odds, of course. But like I said, me and Thompson never went around much. They didn’t want us to.”

  “Who didn’t want you to? Alfred Craw?”

  “Damn right. Worst snob I ever met. Thank God we don’t have to put up with them much.”

  “You mean they’re not here?”

  “Goddamn, I thought you knew. They haven’t been around here in twelve, thirteen weeks. . . . Isn’t that right, Thompson?”