by Bill Bernico
“And just how far do I have to go to track down this Hogan character?” I said.
“He’s not going anywhere, Mr. Cooper,” Petie said. “You can find him at Q. He’s doin’ seven to ten for passing his artwork off as money.”
I held the sawbuck within Petie’s reach and he snatched it up. “Thanks, Petie.” I continued up the stairs but stopped halfway. I turned around to ask him one more question but the stairwell was empty and the front door was just closing.
I sat across the table from Lester Hogan. A short partition separated us. Lester leaned close and I leaned in to listen.
“Yeah, I know Baxter,” he said, trying to sound tough. “So what?”
“Where can I find him?” I got right to the point and waited.
“What’s in this for me?” he said.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Out!”
“Can’t help you there, Lester, but if there’s something I can do for you on the outside...”
Lester thought for a moment, smiled a half-hearted smile and then straightened up in his chair, looking around to see if any other inmates had noticed him. They were all too busy with their own visitors to care.
I leaned down again and said in a low tone, “what about Frank Baxter? How’s he tie into all this?”
“Baxter’s the reason I’m in this rat hole,” he said. “I learned the trade from him and I was good—too good. He must have figured he’d be obsolete if I got any better.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Couple of months ago,” he said, “Baxter and me was downtown and I bought a pack of razor blades at the drug store and gave the guy a twenty. He says he has to get change from in back and before I know it, there’s two cops draggin’ me outta that place. They got there too damned fast. I found out later that it was Baxter that set me up.”
“So where is he now?” I said.
“Last I heard he was holed up in some dive on Hollywood and Western. Place called the Hotel Rector. Least that’s where he was two days ago.”
“Now how would you know that?” I said.
“Hey,” he said, “just ‘cause I’m locked up don’t mean there ain’t a news service in here. We got our sources.”
I retrieved my notebook and pencil and flipped open to a blank page in the middle. “What’s this Baxter look like?”
“Tall,” he said. “I’d say six-one, six-two, dark, heavy eyebrows, dark hair. Heavy set, about two-thirty, maybe two thirty-five. Has a scar on his right forearm. Looks almost like a lightning bolt. He kinda looks like Edward G. Robinson, only taller.”
“Thanks, Lester,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.” I got up to go.
I hotfooted it to Highland and Melrose and stopped. The gas station on the corner had once belonged to Rudolpho Maguera. Rudy was my friend and I spent quite a few hours hanging around this station. He was dead now and the station sported a new name, but the place still sent shivers down my back.
I pulled in and rode over the air hose in the driveway. The bell dinged twice and a guy in dirty overalls and an engineer’s cap came out. “Fill ‘er up?”
The Hotel Rector was everything I thought it would be—and less. It must have been a grand place when it opened in 1903, as the cornerstone suggested, but now, forty-four years later it was a dive for transients. The once elegant foyer now reeked of urine and the closeness of unclean humans. What was once a grand stairway now looked like it could fall over at the slightest suggestion.
Donning my window-glass spectacles, I walked up to the front desk and looked behind it for a clerk. There was no one. I slammed my hand down on the bell several times before the grimy curtain behind the desk parted and a fat, bald man emerged in a gray, strapped T-shirt.
“I ain’t deaf,” he said. “I heard you the first time. Gees, can’t a guy even take a leak any more without someone gettin’ all antsy? Whaddya want?”
“Looking for a guy named Baxter,” I said. “I was told I could find him here.”
“Yeah? Who wants to know?” the clerk asked warily.
I pulled one of my many different business cards from inside my jacket and handed it to him. He read it and then looked back up at me.
“Insurance, eh?” he said. “What you want with a guy like Baxter anyway? He can’t afford none.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to sell him any. I’m here to give him a check for three hundred fifty-seven dollars. Hate to see the state get it if I can’t find him.” I turned to leave, shaking my head as if I was really concerned about Frank Baxter getting any money.
“Wait,” the clerk said, wiping his hand on his already dirty shirt. “He’s in 207, upstairs around the back.”
The clerk gave me another once-over before disappearing behind the dirty curtain again. Returning my prop glasses to my pocket, I made my way up the stairs and scanned the doors for number 207. It was the last door on the left at the end of the dark hall.
I knocked, gently at first. No answer. I knocked a little harder and still no response, though I could hear someone moving around inside. I pounded on the door with my fist and listened. I heard the sound of a sash being thrown open and the rapid exit of the occupant of room 207 on the fire escape.
I hurried to the end of the hall and down the foyer steps into the lobby. I was on the street and headed for the alley when a man emerged, running full speed. He grasped something in his right hand.
The man skidded to a halt just short of the street and looked both ways. When he saw me he ran east on Hollywood Boulevard. I was right behind him and closing fast when he made a sudden dash for the street.
He’d been busy looking at me when he should have been looking ahead at the traffic. The black Buick sedan’s right front fender caught him square in his left hip and sent him sailing upward. He bounced off a parked car and came to rest in the westbound lane.
The driver of the Buick slammed on his brakes and just sat there behind the wheel, pale as a ghost and shaking. I knelt beside the man on the pavement. His right hand still clutched what he’d been carrying when I gave chase. It was a stack of new one hundred dollar bills, perhaps thirty or forty. They were wrinkled now and stained with the blood that had run down his arm and into his hand.
He opened his eyes briefly and looked at me, trying to talk. His mouth tried to form words but no sound came out. His lips came together as if trying to form the letter B, but before he could utter a sound his eyes rolled back and his head flopped to one side.
In a matter of minutes two patrol cars appeared on the scene. One officer directed traffic away while the other stood next to me looking down at the twisted mess that was once a man. The officer next to me was Jerry Burns, Sergeant Hollister’s frequent partner. He knelt beside the corpse for a closer look and then stood again next to me.
“What happened here, Matt?” he said.
I nodded down at the man lying at our feet. “I came to see him at the Hotel Rector just down the street and he lit out on me. I chased him this far and he ran in front of that Buick.”
There was a third officer now taking statements from people who lined the street and a fourth comforting the driver of the Buick. Officer Burns pulled out his note pad and pencil. “Know him?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think his name is Frank Baxter. I was following a lead on a case I’m working on for Hollister and it lead to him.”
As he made his notes a police photographer arrived and began flashing from different angles. “Get a close-up of that wad in his fist, Hank. And another one of his face.”
After the photog had finished, the Burns knelt again and retrieved the crumpled stack of hundreds. He counted them and slid them into a manila envelope. “Forty-eight hundred dollars,” Burns said. “Who carries that kind of cash around in his fist? That’s an awful lot to lose.”
“Not if it’s phony,” I said. “He could afford to lose that stuff all day and not feel the pinch.”
Burns opened the e
nvelope and pulled out one of the bills. “You mean this stuff is...”
“Yup. It’s bogus,” I said, “but it’s a real work of art, wouldn’t you say?”
“Gees, I guess.” Burns returned the bill to the envelope and turned his attentions back to me. “You say you were chasing him?”
“Yeah.”
“From where?”
I pointed to the brown building on the corner. “The Rector.”
“Let’s go.” Burns said.
I followed Burns back to the Rector and up to room 207. It was no surprise to find the condition of the room up to snuff with the rest of the place. There was a lone sink standing in one corner, its faucet beating out a steady drip onto a rust-colored trail that led down the drain. The single bed had what passed for a sheet and one army surplus blanket, olive drab.
There was a single light bulb on a string hanging above the middle of the floor. A four-drawer dresser stood opposite the bed and one of the drawers was hanging open. It was empty, but alongside the dresser there were another eighteen one-hundred-dollar bills strewn on the floor. This guy had made a hasty retreat and didn’t care that he’d dropped a year’s wages on his way out.
Within minutes the photographer and two other officers found their way up to room 207 and were sifting through the debris.
“Tell Dan I’ll stop and see him later,” I said, exiting the way I’d come.
I went back downstairs and rang the bell on the front desk again. The same greasy clerk emerged and looked me over. “Now what do you want?”
I pulled out my shield and I.D. and held it in the man’s face. I quickly flipped it closed before he could notice that I was a private investigator. “Name’s Cooper. We’re checking on Frank Baxter and...”
“I already told you he’s in 207, now beat it,” he said.
“No he’s not,” I said. “He’s lying out in the street, dead and I want answers.”
The clerk wiped both hands on his shirt and nervously looked around. “I don’t know nothin’. I just work here, see?”
“How long’s Baxter been here?” I said.
“Three, maybe four weeks,” he said. “I dunno. He always comes in before I get here. I only seen him twice.”
“Seen anyone else with him?” I said.
He hesitated and looked around again as if someone was watching him. “Look, I mind my own business. Why don’t you do the same?”
I lifted the hinged counter top and went behind the counter, grabbing the man by his arm. “Let’s go,” I said.
“Wait,” he said, pulling away from my grasp. He walked back toward the curtain that separated the counter area from the back room. He looked back at me and motioned for me to follow. “Back here.”
I followed him back behind the curtain. The room was dark and dingy, like the rest of the hotel. A swayback cot stood in the corner with a single blanket on it. Next to the bed stood a small end table with a half-empty bottle of rye and an ashtray overflowing with butts. Across from the cot was a chair. I sat on the chair and the clerk sat down on the edge of the cot.
I pulled my note pad from my jacket pocket and looked at the clerk. “Whaddya got?”
“There was one guy here just day before yesterday,” the clerk began. “He didn’t stop at the desk but I saw him go upstairs and a few minutes later him and Baxter came down and left together.”
“What’d he look like, this other guy?”
“I dunno,” he said. “Kinda average, I guess. Maybe thirty-five, forty years old. Ya know.”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me? What was he wearing? How tall, how heavy, eyes, hair. Come on, give me something I can use.” I stared into the clerk’s eyes and I could see he was nervous.
“He sure didn’t look like he belonged here,” he said. “Dressed too good to be from around here.”
“What do you mean? What’d he have on?”
“Some fancy overcoat and hat, shiny shoes, ya know—the works,” he said. “He’d stick out anywhere, that guy. Musta been six-five or six-six, more than two hundred pounds. A real brute.”
“Did you hear any names?” I said.
“Nope,” he said. “The big guy walked ahead of the other guy.”
“Baxter?” I said.
“I guess that was the guy,” he said. “Anyway, they went out the front door and I seen ‘em get into some big, black car at the curb. Man, what a car!”
“A Packard?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I don’t know cars that well. Mighta been. They drove away and I ain’t seen neither one of ‘em since.”
“You better be on the level about this,” I added before rising from the chair. “Better give me your name. We may need to talk to you again.”
He told me his name was Louis DaMato, age forty-nine, no family, no permanent address aside form the back room at the Rector. I made a note of it and left.
I left The Rector feeling like I needed a shower and a change of clothes. There wasn’t much to go on but from what DaMato told me it looked like Baxter was tied in to Emil Becker’s man, Ike. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
I turned south on Western and headed downtown. The sun was beginning to drop in the sky and an orange haze fell over the city. I noticed a car in my rear-view mirror, a large sedan. There were lots of large sedans in L.A. and I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. I turned west on Wilshire and waited. The sedan stayed with me. I continued west for four blocks before making a last-minute turn north again on Wilton. The sedan was still behind me. Any thoughts of a coincidence vanished as I floored the Olds and made a series of right-left-right turns. The sedan managed the same maneuvers with ease and was closing on me.
A large moving van was coming toward me as I approached another corner. I quickly turned in front of it and made the corner. He slammed on his brakes and blocked the intersection just as the large sedan was about to make that same turn. There wasn’t enough room and the sedan screeched to a halt, its horn blaring.
The van driver honked back his angry protest but by then I was a block away, turning left three more times and coming up behind the dark sedan. The driver continued for another two blocks before he noticed the change in our positions. I was “it” and it was his turn to run.
The sedan slowed down and suddenly a figure appeared out the driver’s side rear window. I knew that position well and swerved just as the first bullets cracked out of the figure’s gun. The first shot hit my windshield on the passenger’s side and the other three missed altogether.
I sped up and rammed the back of the sedan. It was a Packard. You couldn’t miss it from that close. I fired back and the rear window shattered with the impact of my .45 slugs. Now two figures appeared from the glass-ridden frame and both opened fire.
I slammed on the brakes and laid on the front seat a split second before three slugs destroyed the rest of my windshield and ripped the upholstery where my body had been. The Packard sped away as I sat up. It was Becker’s Packard. I must be getting close—too close.
It was only a matter of minutes before a patrol car rolled up behind me with its red light flashing and its spotlight illuminating the inside of my car. A second light from the officer’s flashlight hit my face and I squinted, trying to make out the face of the man holding the flash.
“Step out of the car with your hands where I can see ‘em,” the voice said.
I carefully opened the driver’s door and stepped out onto shaky legs. Just then I heard the slam of another car door behind the patrol car and soon after the familiar voice of Dan Hollister.
“Matt, you okay?” Dan said.
I put my hands down and sat on the edge of my car seat. “Ever have one of those days, Dan? You know, where nothing goes right? Ya get up and break a shoelace, bust a button, have a flat tire, and get your car shot up. Same ol’ same ol’.”
“What the hell’s going on here, Cooper?”
I lit up my last cigarette and shrugged my shoulders. “I d
on’t know. Some nut must have thought I cut him off in traffic or something. I never saw the guy before.”
“Cooper,” he said, “L.A. does have its share of assholes on the road, but I never heard of anyone blasting another car for cutting it off in traffic. Come on, give.”
“Dan,” I said, “I didn’t recognize anyone. For all I know some other schmuck drives a Olds and they thought I was him.”
Dan wasn’t buying my story. “Get outta here, Matt. You’re makin’ me gray before my time. Just don’t come running to me when these guys catch up with you again. And they will, believe me.” Dan turned to Officer Burns at his side, “let’s go.”
I drove back to my office and flopped down in my overstuffed leather chair. I reached for my pack of cigarettes and found that pocket empty. “Shit”, I muttered, rising from my chair and stepping over to my desk.
The ashtray had six or seven butts in it and I found what appeared to be the best of the bunch, straightened it out, wiped it off and put it in my mouth. It tasted like an ashtray, but I was in no position to be choosy and lit it, savoring the two puffs it provided before snuffing it out again.
The phone rang as I stood there exhaling my last puff. “Cooper”, I said, taking a seat behind my desk.
“You’re dead, Cooper,” a voice on the other end said.
“Think so?” I said, not sounding surprised. I had a good idea who the voice belonged to.
“Count on it.”
The dial tone rung in my ear as I hung up the phone and looked out my window. The night was quiet and eerie like the calm before a storm. I pulled my bottom desk drawer open and retrieved my ankle holster with the .25 automatic. I strapped it on and covered it with my pant leg. I made sure I had a full clip in my .45 and a spare clip in my jacket pocket before leaving the office.
The drive back home seemed unusually long. Every car behind me seemed to be following me. Every bush along the way had a figure lurking behind it. I was jumpy, I admit, and rightly so.
I parked my Olds in the driveway and cautiously made my way to the front door without a hitch. Once inside, I holstered my .45 and locked the door behind me. I closed the drapes and turned on the living room light.
