by James Ellroy
“How’d you guess? I don’t care what it looks like, all I want is something with legit registration that runs. Deal?”
Louie walked to the back wall and lifted up a framed Playboy centerfold, then twirled the dial of the safe and opened it. He pulled out two bank packets and tossed them to Rice. “Deal. The car is ugly, but it runs. Remember this number: 628-1192. Got it?”
Rice said, “Got it,” and stuck the money in his pocket. “I also heard you were dealing guns.”
Louie’s eyes became cold brown slits. “You wanta tell me who told you that?”
“Sure. A guy at the County. Big blonde guy on the Quentin chain.”
“Randy Simpson, fat-mouthed motherfucker. Yeah, I’ve been trying to deal guns, but I can’t find no shooters who want my product. I bought these big, heavy-ass army .45 automatics from this strung-out quartermaster lieutenant. He threw in these tranquilizer dart guns, too. A bullshit deal. The shooters want the lightweight Italian pieces, and nobody wants the dart guns. I gave my son one of the dart jobs, took the firing pin out so he couldn’t hurt himself. Why? You going cowboy, Duane-o?”
Rice shook his head. “I don’t know. I heard about a deal, but it might not float. I’ll have to check it out.”
“What are you gonna do for a living?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Work on making a few scores, then work on Vandy’s career. She split, but I—”
Rice stopped when he saw Louie’s face cloud over. He shook his head to blot out the sound of Vandy’s “But Duane wouldn’t want me to,” then said,
“What is it? Don’t hold back on me.”
Louie drained his beer in one gulp. “I was going to tell you, I was just waiting for the right time. A friend of mine saw Vandy, sometime last week. She was walking out of this outcall service place on the Strip, you know, by the All-American Burger. He said at first he didn’t recognize her with all this makeup on, but then he was sure. I’m sorry, man.”
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Rice stood up. Louie saw the look in his eyes and said, “Maybe it don’t mean that.”
“It means I have to find her,” Rice said. “Go get me my car.”
*
*
*
Duane Rice drove his “new” ’69 Pontiac to the east end of the Sunset Strip, hugging the right-hand lane in order to check out the hookers clustered by bus benches, searching for Vandy’s aristocratic features wasted by makeup and dope. Every face he saw burned itself into his brain, where it was superimposed against a reflex image of Gordon Meyers and preppy Anne Atwater Vanderlinden. But none of the faces was her, and when he saw three solid blocks of massage parlors, fuck pads and outcall services looming in front of him, he gnawed his lips until he tasted blood. Rice parked in the All-American Burger lot and walked slowly west on the south side of Sunset. All the streetwalkers now were black, so he kept his eyes glued to the shabby storefronts and their flashing neon signs. He passed Wet Teenagers Outcall and Soul Sisters Mud Wrestling; New Yokohama Oriental Massage and the 4-H Club—“Hot, Handsome, Horny and Hung.”
After a block, the obscenities blurred together so that he couldn’t read individual names, and he stared at front doors waiting for her to come out. When he saw that guilty-looking men were the only ones entering and leaving, he started to see red and walked to a curbside bus bench and braced his hands against it in an isometric press. With his eyes closed, he forced himself to think. Finally he remembered the snapshot of Vandy he’d carried through jail. He reached for his wallet and pulled it from its plastic holder, then turned around and again confronted the flashing beacons. Nuclear Nookie Outcall; Wet and Woolly Massage; Satan’s House of Sin. This time the words didn’t blur. He pulled out a handful of Louie Calderon’s twenties and walked through the nearest door. A bored black man behind a desk looked up as he entered and said, “Yeah?”
Rice held the photo of Vandy and a double saw under the man’s nose.
“Have you seen this woman?”
The man put down his copy of the Watchtower, grabbed the twenty and looked at the snapshot. “No, too good-lookin’ for this jive place. If you want to pork this kinda chick, I can fix you up with a cut-rate version who gives mean head.”
Rice breathed out slowly; the red trapdoor behind his eyes eased shut.
“No thanks, I want her. Got any ideas?”
The man stuck the twenty in his shirt pocket. “I don’t know what places got
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what quality pussy, but I know this jive place ain’t got nothin’ but woof-woofs. You just keep walkin’ and whippin’ out that green, maybe you find her.”
Rice took the man’s advice and walked east. He showed the snapshot to every doorman and bouncer at every sex joint on the row, handing out over three hundred dollars, getting nothing but negative head shakes and a consensus that Vandy was too foxy to be doing either Strip outcall or street hooking. After four straight hours of breathing nothing but sleaze, he got coffee at the All-American Burger and sat down at an outside table to think. He came up with facts that he trusted. Louie and his friends were solid; if one of them saw Vandy out here in whore makeup, it was probably true—
without him to look after her she was a stone self-destructor. None of the massage and outcall slimebags he’d talked to had I.D.’d her—and it was to their financial advantage to do so. Louie’s friend had seen her sometime last week, probably right after she visited him and cleaned out the pad. It all felt right.
Rice looked at his watch: 3:30, the whores thinning out as the traffic on Sunset dwindled. The only hookers still working were black, and unlikely to have info on Vandy—she avoided all jigs like the plague. Draining his coffee, he stood up and started for the car. Then he saw an incredible redhead walk over to the curb and stick out her thumb. Rice moved fast, running to his car and pulling up in front of the girl, cutting off a slow-trawling Mercedes. The redhead looked in the passenger window distastefully, then back at the status car. Rice yelled, “A C-note for ten minutes,” and the girl hesitated, then opened the door and got in. Rice handed her a wad of twenties as the driver of the Mercedes accelerated and flipped them the bird.
The redhead stuffed the money into her purse and poked a finger at the tufts of foam sticking out of the seat. “This car sucks. Can we go to a motel or something?”
Rice turned around the corner, then pulled over to the curb and flicked on the dashboard light. “I don’t want to get laid, I just had a feeling you could help me find this woman.” He handed her the photo of Vandy and watched as she examined it, then shook her head.
“No, never. Your chick?”
“That’s right.”
“She a working girl?”
Rice swallowed a wave of anger. “Yeah. I’ve heard she’s been doing outcall around here, but nobody recognizes her, and I believe them.”
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The redhead scrutinized the snapshot, then said, “She’s real cute. Too classy for most of the places around here.”
“What do you mean, ‘most’?”
“Well, there’s this high-line place a couple of blocks from here, off the Strip. They run only really foxy chicks, to these movies and rock big shots. I worked out of there for a week or so, then I quit. Too much of a drug scene. I’m into health food.”
Rice felt his skin prickle. “What’s the name of the place?”
“Silver Foxes. No ‘outcall,’ just ‘Silver Foxes.’ ”
“What’s the address?”
“Gardner, just off the Strip. Lavender building, you can’t miss it. But they only send chicks out on referrals, you know, it’s real exclusive.”
“Phone number?”
The girl hesitated. Rice dug in his pocket for more money, then handed it to her. “Tell me, goddammit.”
She grabbed the door handle. “You won’t tell where you got it?”
“No.”
“658-4371.” The girl dar
ted out of the car. Rice watched her counting her money as she walked back to the Strip.
It took him less than ten minutes to find the lavender apartment building. It stood just south of Sunset in the glow of a streetlamp, a plain Spanish-style four-flat with no lights burning. Rice parked and walked across the lawn to the cement porch. Four doors were recessed in the entranceway, illuminated only by mailbox lights. He squinted and saw that three of the apartments belonged to individuals, while the last box was embossed with a raised metal insignia of a fox in a mink coat winking seductively. There was a buzzer beneath the words “Silver Foxes.” Rice pressed it three times and heard its echo. No lights went on and no sounds of movement answered the buzzing. He reached into the mailbox and found it empty, then stood back on the lawn so he could eyeball the whole building. Still nothing but darkness and silence. Rice drove to a pay hone and dialed 658-4371. A recorded woman’s voice answered: “Hi, this is Silver Foxes, foxes of every persuasion for every occasion. If you’re already registered with us, leave your code number and let us know what you want; we’ll get back to you soon. If you’re a new friend, let us know who you know, and give us their code numbers and your phone number. We’ll get in touch soon.”
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There was an interval of soft disco music, then a beep. Rice slammed down the receiver and drove back to outcall row.
Only the dregs of the hookers were still out, garishly made-up junkies who stepped into the street and lifted their skirts as cars passed by. Rice sat at a table inside the All-American Burger and drank coffee while he scanned women on both sides of Sunset. Every face he glimpsed looked ravaged; every body bloated or emaciated. Toward dawn, the neon lights on the outcall offices and massage parlors started going off. When streetsweeping machines pushed the few remaining hookers back onto the sidewalk, he took it as his cue to leave and check out business. Rice drove across Laurel Canyon, coming down into the Valley just as full daylight hit. When he reached Ventura Boulevard, he recalled verbatim the facts he’d heard through the ventilator shaft: “Kling and Valley View, pink apartment house”; “Christine something, Studio City, house on the corner of Hildebrand and Gage.” Truth, half-truth or bullshit?
At Hildebrand and Gage he got his first validation. The mailbox of the northeast corner house was tagged with the name “Christine Confrey.”
That fact gave him a feeling of destiny that built up harder and harder as he drove west to Encino. When he got to Kling and Valley View and saw a faded pink apartment house on the corner, with an out-of-place Cadillac parked in front, the feeling exploded. Rice kept it at a low roar by calculating odds: five to one that the info was correct, making the heists possible. Checking the mailboxes of the six-unit building, he saw that only one single woman lived there—Sally Issler in #2. He found a door designated 2
on the ground-floor street side, with a high hedge fronting the apartment’s large picture window. Rice squatted behind the hedge, waiting for the owner of the Caddy to cut the odds down to zero.
He waited an hour and a half before a door opened and two voices, one male, one female, gave him pay dirt:
“My wife gets back tomorrow. No overnighters for a while.”
“Matinees? You know, like the song—‘Afternoon Delight’?”
The man laughed. “We can hit Hot Tub Fever during your lunch hour.”
“Sounds good, but I read in Cosmo that those hot tub places all have herpes germs in the water.”
“Don’t believe everything you read. Call me at the bank?”
“Yeah.”
Rice heard sounds of kissing, followed by a door slamming. He counted 472
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to ten, then stood up and peered around the hedge. The Cadillac was just taking off. He ran for his car and pursued it.
It led him to a Bank of America branch on Woodman and Ventura. Rice sized up the man who got out. Tall, broad-hipped, sunken-chested. A wimp whose sex appeal was his money.
The man walked up to the front doors. Rice followed from a safe distance, passing him as he stepped inside. When the manager locked the doors behind him, Rice counted to ten, then peered through the plate-glass window and smiled.
The manager was alone inside the bank, and the surveillance cameras were fixed-focused at the floor. The tellers stations were visible from the street only if a passerby was willing to stand on his tiptoes and crane his neck. Rice watched the manager walk directly to the teller area and take a key from his pocket, then open drawers and transfer cash to his briefcase, leaving pieces of paper in the money’s place—probably doctored tally slips. The odds zoomed to perfection. Rice ran to his car, then drove to a pay phone and called Louie Calderon at his message drop number.
“Speak.”
“Louie, it’s Duane.”
“Already? Don’t tell me, the car broke down and you’re pissed.”
“Nothing like that.”
“Another favor?”
“Yeah. I want three .45s and one of those dart guns. You’ve got darts, too?”
“Yeah. Before we go any further, I don’t wanna know what you got in mind. You got that?”
“Right. Silencers?”
“I can get them, but they cut down the range to practically zilch.”
“They’ll never be fired; it’s just an extra precaution.”
“Mr. Smooth. Seven bills for the whole shot. Deal?”
“Deal. One more thing. I need two men, smart, with balls, who want to make money. No niggers, no dopers, no trashy gangster types, nobody with robbery convictions.”
Louie whistled, then laughed. “You want a lot, you know that? Well, today’s your lucky day. I know two Chicano dudes, brothers, who’re looking for work. Smart—one righteous vato, one tagalong. Pulled hundreds of burglaries, only got popped once. Righteous burglars, righteous con men. They just hung up this phone rip-off gig and they’re hurtin’ for cash.”
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“You vouch for them?”
“I fenced their stuff for seven or eight years. When they got busted, they didn’t snitch me off. What more you want?”
“Any strong-arm experience?”
“No, but one of them is downright mean, and I’ll bet he’d dig it. Used to fight welterweight, ten, twelve years ago. All the top locals stomped on him.”
“Can you set up a meet?”
“Sure. But I’m tellin’ them and I’m tellin’ you: I don’t want to know nothin’ about your plans. Comprende? ”
“Comprende. ”
“Good. I’ll call Bobby and set it up. When you meet him, tell him how you saw him knock Little Red Lopez through the ropes with a right cross. He’ll eat it up.”
The phone went dead. Rice walked back to his car. When he stuck the key in the ignition, he was trembling. It felt good. 5
Even as the dream unfolded, he knew that it was just a dream, one of the stock nightmares that owned him, and if he didn’t panic, it would run its course and he would wake up safe.
Sometime back in ’67 or ’68, when he was working Hollywood Patrol, he and his partner Flanders got an unknown trouble call directing their unit to an old house in a cul-de-sac off the Cahuenga Pass, a block of ramshackle pads rented out dirt cheap because noise from the freeway overpass made living there intolerable.
When no one answered their knocks and shouted “Police officers, open up!” he and Flanders kicked in the door, only to be driven back outside by the stench of stale cordite and decomposing flesh. While Flanders radioed for backup units, he drew his service revolver and prowled the pad, discovering the five headless bodies, brain-spattered walls, expended shotgun rounds and the note taped to the TV set: “I keep hearing these voices thru 474
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the freeway noise telling Peg and the kids about me and Billy. It’s a lie, but they won’t believe it was just one time when we was drunk, and that don’t count. This way nobody’s going to know except Billy, and he don’
t care.”
The man who wrote the note was slumped by the TV set. He had jammed the sawed-off .10 gauge into his crotch and blown himself in two. The shotgun lay beside him in a pile of congealed viscera. Then the dream speeded up, and he wasn’t sure if it was happening or not.
Flanders came back inside and yelled, “Backup, detectives and M.E. on their way, Hoppy.” He saw him reach for a cigarette to kill the awful stink, and was about to scream about gas escaping from stiffs, but knew Flanders would call it college boy bullshit. He ran toward him anyway, just as the match was struck and the little boy’s stomach exploded and Flanders ran out the door with his face on fire. Then he was screaming, and ambulances were screaming, and he knew it wasn’t a dream, it was the telephone. Lloyd rolled over and reached for it, surprised to find that he had fallen asleep fully clothed. “Yes? Who is it?”
A familiar voice came on the line. “Dutch, Lloyd. You all right?”
“You woke me up.”
“Sorry, kid.”
“Don’t be; you did me a favor.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. What is it, Dutch?”
When there was a long silence on the L.A. end of the line, Lloyd tensed and shook off the last remnants of sleep. He heard the bustle of Hollywood Station going on in the background, and pictured his best friend getting up the guts to tell him something very bad.
“Goddammit, Dutch, tell me!”
Dutch Peltz said, “So far it’s just a rumor, but it’s an informed rumor, and I credit it. That shrink you saw last month recommended you be given early retirement. You know, emotional disability incurred in the line of service, full pension, that kind of thing. I’ve heard that Braverton and McManus are behind it, and that if you don’t accept the plan, you’ll be given a trial board for dereliction of duty. Lloyd, they mean it. If the trial board finds you guilty, you’ll be kicked off the Department.”
A kaleidoscope of memories flashed in front of Lloyd’s eyes, and for long moments he didn’t know if he was back in a dream or not. “No, Dutch. They wouldn’t do that to me.”
