The Black Marble

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Never one to avoid a cliché, William Allen Livingston yelled again. He said: “I’m coming out coppers and I’m taking some of you with me!”

  “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Valnikov yelled back. “Let’s talk about it. Let me come in and talk to you. I’m sure there’s something we can …”

  When the door flew open, Valnikov threw his heavy body across Natalie Zimmerman. William Allen Livingston lost several ounces of urine and defecation when the fusillade of .38 caliber and .00 buckshot devastated him, but, considering he was struck with twenty-seven lead projectiles, his total weight was increased considerably. The homicide detectives discovered later that the gun he died with was unloaded. He had obviously decided not to take anybody with him. But at least he got one wish. Even though he hadn’t shot a cop and didn’t rate any more than page thirteen, the siege was so grandiose that it was on the inside front page the next morning.

  It made a hell of a flaming explosion, that last volley. One continuous roar in fact, which stayed with Natalie Zimmerman through it all, even while Valnikov, arms around her, led her down the back stairway, through the throngs of policemen, past the reporters, by the command post where Deputy Chief Digby Bates, wearing a flak jacket, was already preparing his statement, his good side facing the television camera crew across the street. Luckily, the detective car was not boxed in by the crowds of laughing, jeering, cheering, Hollywood onlookers who were having a whale of a good time.

  There was a Good Humor man double parked beside their detective car selling frozen bananas. He’d busted two stoplights when he heard about the seige on the radio. Last time there was a big deal like this he’d been lucky enough to be there when a young rock singer leaped eight stories from the penthouse suite of a record company that wouldn’t publish his music. The Good Humor man had strolled through the crowd and made thirty-two bucks selling ice cream and soda pop to all the folks with throats parched from yelling: “Jump, you chickenshit!”

  Valnikov waited until the Good Humor man made a triple sale to a guy with two kids. One child sat on daddy’s shoulders to see the body better when it was removed.

  Natalie got in the car, lit a cigarette and smoked shakily. She couldn’t keep her legs still. Nor her chin.

  Finally Valnikov said, “Move that ice cream truck. I’ve got to get out.”

  “Fuck you, Jack,” said the Good Humor man, not knowing Valnikov was a cop. “I’m selling ice cream.”

  Then Valnikov drew the revolver from his waist holster, pointed it at the astonished ice cream vendor who was holding an ice cream bar in one hand and a fistful of currency in the other.

  “If you don’t move that truck, I’ll put a hole right through your Fudgsicle,” Valnikov said.

  While the ice cream truck clanked across a driveway with its driver yelling to the bluecoats that he’d found another madman with a gun, Valnikov was driving Natalie Zimmerman back toward Hollywood Station.

  Finally she said, “Valnikov, where’re we going?”

  “We’re going end-of-watch,” he said. “We’ve had a very long day.”

  “We’ve got to go back! We were witnesses! We’ve got to give our statements!”

  Valnikov shook his head and said persuasively: “There were so many policemen, nobody’ll even remember us. Besides, what can we say? We didn’t fire any shots. Our story isn’t important or relevant. A man committed suicide. A dozen policemen witnessed it and helped him do it.”

  “But …”

  “Somebody might find out we were at the scene and ask us some questions later. We didn’t take part in the man’s suicide. Why should we sit up all night while the shooting team interviews and reinterviews, and draws diagrams and takes pictures and … well, I think I’m too tired for all that nonsense so I’d just as soon go home, Natalie.”

  It was a very dark night in Hollywood. For a Friday, the car traffic was not particularly heavy. Of course Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard were a mess thanks to the tourists, but Valnikov took the side streets. He drove, as always, ten miles an hour.

  Natalie said, “Valnikov.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry I browbeat you into driving to that call.”

  “Browbeat me?”

  “Well … we didn’t … I didn’t … well … you were …”

  “Natalie, would you like to go to a movie? Not tonight, of course. Maybe next week? Or in two weeks? Maybe you could pick a first-run movie you’d like to see? I haven’t been to a movie in … I don’t know how long.”

  “Several years,” she said, steadying her trembling knees as she smoked. “Since Nicholas and Alexandra.”

  Then they were on Wilcox, nearing the station. She knew the day-watch crew would be gone home except for the homicide team, there because of William Allen Livingston, deceased. Certainly Hipless Hooker would be gone to get ready for his goddamn voyage with Sin-bad Cromwell tomorrow. Even if Captain Hooker were there she couldn’t brace him with it tonight. Not now.

  Of course, she couldn’t go on working with a doper. But she couldn’t help thinking of him leading her out through all that horror and chaos when her legs were shaking like … and she could not forget his heavy body shielding her from the Big Explosion. He had just thrown himself on her. And never mentioned it. She’d bet the dopey bastard didn’t even know he did it. But she knew.

  She couldn’t tell Hooker tonight. She would have to think about it over the weekend. Tell him thoughtfully, carefully, that Valnikov was unfit for street duty. That perhaps they should make him submit to a search. A terrible, humiliating, degrading search, and find the drug, whatever it was making him behave so … so …

  “Well, I think I’ll go home and make myself a Christmas dinner,” Valnikov said cheerfully, when they parked at Hollywood Station. “Would you please sign me out, Natalie?”

  So … crazy!

  “But Valnikov, it’s January seventh!” Crazy! That’s it! Crazy!

  “My mother used to bake delicious sweets on Christmas,” Valnikov smiled, shambling off in the darkness.

  Merry Christmas, she thought. On January 7th. Crazy.

  7

  The Tragic Muse

  On Saturday, January 8th, Madeline Whitfield did something she had never done before: She visited the Huntington Library on a crowded weekend day. She had to do something. It was impossible to sit at home and watch Chester doing his last-minute work with Vickie. She had been over the hill on Friday, prowling through the boutiques, so Beverly Hills was out. It wasn’t ladies’ day at the Country Club, so golf was out. She had old friends she could visit, but most of their children were home from prep school on weekends and it was … awkward. It was always awkward for a single woman. As repugnant as it sounded, she thought about going to the Valley Hunt Club to play some mixed doubles. But no, Saturday the men dominated the courts. A single woman. Discomfiture.

  Or she could go to the Hunt Room and drink. She opted for the Huntington Library. If only she could have remained thirty-nine forever. If only the Junior League would raise the age limit for active members. There had always been something to occupy her there. Dozens of fund-raising projects for everything from planned parenthood to alcoholic rehabilitation.

  The library grounds were overrun, not just by the regular crush of tourists and weekend visitors, but by two busloads of children on charter buses. Madeline had to park three blocks away and walk to the gates.

  At least the “sustainers” of the Junior League could still be docents at the Huntington Library. Madeline adored taking tenth graders through the art gallery to point out the magnificent collection of French and English works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She loved to escort even younger children through on the rare occasions it was permitted, children from barrios and ghettos, seeing for the first time idyllic cherubic portraits of children from another time. The Beck-ford Children by Romney. The Young Fortune Teller by Reynolds. Children dressed and posed out of period by English artists copying the extrav
agant whimsical style of seventeenth-century Italians.

  The boys and girls from the barrios and ghetto would look at the priceless works of art and follow Madeline through the former mansion of Henry and Arabella Huntington, past Houdon’s great bronze, Diana, who always disappointed them because the naked woman wasn’t built much better than the broad leading them, and what kinda jive-ass bullshit is this when that twat on the statue don’t look like no twat I ever seen. And past Venus, by Giovanni Bologna (same complaint: nice ass, no twat). Through the main gallery where, voice trembling with emotion, Madeline would show the scruffy band of children the library’s most famous painting, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.

  “A ass-twitchin sissy if ever I seen one,” said a young basketball star in a green and yellow apple hat.

  Then to Madeline Whitfield’s personal favorite, the greatest work of Reynolds and an eternal tribute to the leading actress of the English stage: Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. Madeline would explain to the children in great detail how Reynolds applied his paint to probe and penetrate and reveal the very soul of the great actress. Madeline would turn in three-quarter profile when she pointed out the dignity, the nobility in that famous face. Mrs. Siddons staring off with sad dreamy eyes, and pouting lips, and yes, children, some people have even said that if I turn like this, well (Madeline always blushed), that I bear a slight resemblance to the lady.

  “I kin dig it,” the stringbean in the apple hat nodded. “She do look somethin like that dumpy consti-pated broad in the pitcher.”

  But there’d be no docent tours for Madeline today.

  Just a leisurely stroll about the grounds where Henry and Arabella Huntington once lived so sumptuously. Just to make this day pass. Just to avoid thinking about tomorrow, when Vickie would become a champion.

  Madeline strolled first through the cactus garden where some 2500 species never failed to surprise her though she had come this way perhaps a thousand times. Spined cactus, spineless cactus, giant cactus, creeping cactus. Cactus which flowered at night. Easter Echinopsis, with night flowers like trumpets. Living rock, a spineless variety which protects through camouflage. Milk barrel, Cow’s horns, the shaggy Desert fans, the massive Golden barrel as old as Madeline. The magnificent yuccas, over twenty feet tall.

  There was no natural landscape on earth as quixotic as this. An alien landscape. As a child she imagined it as a garden on the moon.

  It was too other-worldly today. She even passed the Japanese Gardens, wanting to avoid the exotic. She wanted to feel comfortable today. To belong. She headed for the Shakespeare Garden. Madeline needed the reassurance of Elizabethan flowers and the forest of azalea and camellia surrounding the north vista.

  Here she felt safe. She’d played hide-and-seek through every path as a little girl, breaking the rules to pluck a pink camellia and pin it in her hair. She could run splashing in the Italian fountain in those days, able to see clear to Mount Baldy every day of the year. That was how she always wanted to remember Old Pasadena: a child doing cartwheels in the grass, surrounded by azalea and camellia, the mountain-tops snowy and smog-free and as reassuring as Old Pasadena itself. Before the decline.

  There was no place to sit today. Tourists occupied every bench. But there was an escape: Few tourists bothered to walk north by the orange and avocado groves. There wasn’t much up there, just the mausoleum, the last vain act of Henry and Arabella Huntington.

  Five Japanese tourists were there, taking pictures. She sat on the cool marble bench. It was always cool, the marble of the mausoleum, even in summer. She waited until the tourists left, then climbed the few steps and imagined the pinched dour face of Arabella Huntington, glaring at the world through bottle spectacles, swathed in black, hiding under a black hat anchored by a dozen glinting hat pins. Madeline could imagine Arabella walking these grounds. The incredible story went that she never wanted to see a gardener or servant as she walked, preferring to dream that all the beauty around her was manicured by God. When the hell did they work? As she slept? And there you lie, Arabella. And do you give a damn whether or not Victoria Regina of Pasadena is a champion tomorrow?

  Then Madeline Whitfield sat on the mausoleum steps and wiped her eyes because those ghetto and barrio children didn’t see a whit of beauty in Lawrence’s Pinkie. Not a whit. And what would they say if they knew that she would not sleep this night with or without sixty milligrams of sedative, because of an honor to befall a dog. Well, it might just make more sense to those children than the Gainsborough or Reynolds or Romney she showed them.

  They said that Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral and View on the Stour was only the way some old dead white punk wanted things to look like, but you know nothin ain’t never looked like that

  Would her dream for Vickie make any less sense to a group of ghetto schoolchildren than Constable’s dream? Or Turner’s? Or Arabella Huntington’s?

  Don’t laugh at my dream, and I won’t laugh at yours, Arabella.

  On Saturday, January 8th, Philo Skinner spent a frantic, destructive, furtive day at his kennel grooming Tutu and working with her, trying desperately to prepare her in a single afternoon, having to run to the toilet every time the phone rang. No, Mavis, I won’t be home early. No, goddamnit, there are no little birds here. Call every goddamn one of them. Call Pattie Mae’s house if you think I have her here. Call every kidthat ever worked for us. Call the fucking chief of police … No, wait, just don’t call anybody. Jesus Christ! I am here alone catching up on the book work! And cleaning the shitty kennel because we can’t afford Saturday help, and … no, don’t come, I don’t need any help. I’ll see you tonight. What do I have to do, lay you to prove I wasn’t screwing around this afternoon! Yeah, that’s right, I couldn’t do it twice in one day! Bang went the phone on the cradle. He needed an Alka-Seltzer. That cunt! Tongue like a stripping knife. Philo Skinner lit his forty-ninth cigarette of the day and began coughing.

  They say the streets of Puerto Vallarta are cobblestone. And that you can see a flower-covered bridge where Richard used to sneak across at night to see Liz when he was still married to the other woman. They say a gringo can live down there like a sultan with a houseful of whores for $200 a month.

  “How many months can I live like a sultan, Tutu, with seventy thousand bucks?”

  The little dog wagged and whimpered every time he spoke to her.

  “I’ll tell you, Tutu,” he said, trimming her leg furnishings. “Hold still, sweetheart, that’s it. I’ll tell you, sweetheart, a man can’t live long enough to spend seventy thousand tax-free American greenbacks. That’s how long.”

  Then he put down the shears and held Tutu’s face in his tobacco stained fingers and said, “I’d take you with me if I could, you know I would.”

  Then he broke out in a coughing spasm and went to the sink to spit up a massive wad of phlegm. The little schnauzer cried mournfully when he left her side even for a moment. Tutu was the only creature on the face of the earth who loved Philo Skinner.

  On Saturday, January 8th, Valnikov got blind drunk on Stolichnaya vodka. And sat for the better part of the day and night in front of his stereo set listening to Feodor Chaliapin singing the farewell from Boris Godunov. When he got too drunk to understand the words he listened to the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra. When he got tired of that he did what he always did before falling unconscious. He listened to heartbreaking Russian Gypsy songs.

  Then he lapsed into a deep drunken slumber and dreamed about the rabbit hopping through the snow. He knew there was no escaping the hunter. He knew the hunter would kill the rabbit and cut his throat, and break his jaws, and peel the face back away from the skull with the muscle hissing as it tore in the powerful hands of the hunter. As always, he sobbed while he dreamed.

  8

  The Cathedral

  In many ways the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena was not unlike the Russian Orthodox cathedral on Sunday morning, January 9th. Thirty men were crawling all over the arena floor laying a thousand square yards of
vivid red carpet and placing stanchions joined by yellow ribbon. Sprays of chrysanthemum and bouquets of carnation and Black Swan gladiolus were for this ceremony as well. Only the incense was lacking. The ikons were certainly there—by the thousands.

  The ikons wore the faces of Alaskan malamutes, Belgian sheepdogs, Welsh terriers, dachshunds, beagles, Samoyeds, chow chows, pugs and Pekingese.

  In addition to ikons there were medals and medallions with the faces of Pomeranians, Dobermans, boxers and Basenjis. Added to ikon and medallion were more secular objects, such as letter openers bearing the likenesses of Vizslas and Brittany spaniels. There were paintings, posters, plaques of bloodhounds, coonhounds, Akitas and bull mastiffs. There were T-shirts, pin-up posters, glow-in-the-dark key chains, cups and plates bearing the faces of collies, poodles, St. Bernards.

  The concessionaires were ready for action, all right. One tasteless concessionaire experimenting with plastic rosary beads actually sold several before the sponsors closed him down and banished him. That very day, there were two prayerful exhibitors with those beads, fingering the likeness of a plastic Italian greyhound.

  There, in the cathedral of the West Coast dog world, before the light of dawn, with a thousand other souls, was a man infinitely more tense than any dog owner, or any member of the Oakland Raiders or Minnesota Vikings. Philo Skinner had already smoked 13 of what would be a record 105 cigarettes that day.

  Philo had been one of the first in line during those brisk predawn hours. But within ten minutes of his arrival, the campers, vans, and motor homes were backed up in a queue of headlights which extended from the west side of the arena to Santa Barbara Avenue. Some of those dog handlers in the trucks chatted breezily on C.B.’s, some sat in the back of their vehicles and drank coffee, read the Sunday Times, readied themselves for what would be a long long day for hundreds of people and well over two thousand beasts.