by Peter Plate
Kulak’s eyes were trained on a spot three inches to the left of his visitor’s chin. His jasmine oil-scented toupee was swept back from his extinct hairline, highlighting his sunburned elfin ears. He wore his contempt for Durrutti like a pimple on his nose, daring him to pop it. He replied, “You’re in serious trouble. You keep lying about Jimmy Ramirez, it’ll get ugly. I’ll become a stick up your ass. Now don’t give me any more crap ... tell me where he is. I’m sick of this stalling around.”
Durrutti was more tired than angry. He was faint and heard a pinging in his head. Maybe he had a brain tumor. He could only hope so. He was sleepy with the roller-coaster sensation you get when everything is going tremendously wrong. “Fuck you. I ain’t done nothing.”
Kulak fondled the wattles under his chin with gusto. “No, Durrutti ... fuck you. Every day we can’t find Jimmy Ramirez and every day we can’t locate the gun that killed the cop, the problem leads back to you, Jew boy. Right up your ass like a torpedo.”
The newspapers reported Chamorro’s death was being investigated hush-hush. His widow was quoted at a press conference as saying she’d received death threats on the telephone. Unidentified callers stated if her family was stupid enough to hold a public funeral for the deceased narc, there would be another shooting.
The back of Durrutti’s throat was dry from anxiety. He wanted a drink, a stiff one, to wash away the smoke in his mouth. Something to kill the pain. Better yet would be a one-way ticket on a rocketship to another galaxy. Kulak was treading on ground that would require him to have a lawyer present. The policeman knew it and inexplicably switched gears, changing the topic to something less delicate and far less incriminating.
“What do you know about two dealers?” He lifted one of his haunches and farted, evincing no self-consciousness. “A pair of queens named Jackie and Arlo.”
He wasn’t keen on answering and was wary of the shift in Kulak’s line of questioning—the cop was getting crazy, and he didn’t like it. Crazy people reminded him of his parents. He said feebly, “I don’t know them.”
“You don’t?”
“Never seen them in my fucking life.”
The first time he had been with Jackie and Arlo had been in the Sunrest Bar celebrating their wedding. They were drunk and throwing their general assistance welfare check money around like it was confetti. Arlo had on a white wedding gown and Jackie was in a rented velveteen tuxedo. They’d just gotten hitched at Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin. Arlo had paid for the ceremony with her food stamps.
The G-man’s gimlet eyes bored into Durrutti like the twin barrels of a sawed-off Remington shotgun. He said, “You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you? Now how about Paul Stevens?”
Durrutti stiffened in the chair, getting prickly. He hated it when people repeated themselves. “Haven’t we been through this already? I told you I didn’t know the fucker. I don’t know anything about the guy, okay? Quit bugging me with that.”
“You’re not being honest with me.”
“I ain’t saying shit because there ain’t shit to speak of. Don’t push me. What’s it going to get you?”
“You’re covering for him. I can smell it on you, you fucking queer. I’d like to know why.”
He gave the cop a one-eyed glare. “I’m not protecting anybody.”
How true it was. He couldn’t do Paul Stevens any harm. Nobody could. Paul was out of danger. He was six feet under in a potter’s field. Dead and resting for eternity. A likeness of Paul swinging out of K&H Liquors in his hound’s-tooth check coat with the wind feathering his salt and pepper hair as he reached into his pocket for a cigarette floated before his eyes like a daydream.
He said to Kulak, exhausted by the interplay, “Listen, I don’t know the dude. I’ve never heard of him, all right? Just because I live around here doesn’t mean I know everybody.”
When a cop poses a question, it isn’t so much what he’s asking as what’s not being said. The invisible power of things left unspoken was the interrogator’s greatest strength. Durrutti’s own strength was ebbing; aware of this, he focused on keeping his lies in order.
Kulak said, “You’re a link in this shit and I’m gonna find out how.”
Hearing this, Durrutti succumbed to self-induced paranoia. He didn’t like the staunch tenacity in the cop’s voice. Some people’s paranoia is delicious; it makes you giddy, like drinking liquor. Kulak’s stripe of paranoia was wreaking havoc on Durrutti’s nervous system. The Fed had opened a door in his brain by going on about Paul Stevens. Along with everything else, fear came flying out. Fear of the dead. Fear of the living. Fear he wouldn’t get through this ordeal unscathed. He looked at his shoes: they had witnessed each and every one of his triumphs, sorrows and defeats.
Kulak said, “You won’t talk?”
“You must be kidding,” Durrutti joshed. “What’s in it for me? You’ve got me in a corner and you want me to bend over so you can fuck me? No, I won’t talk. One, because I don’t know anything. And two, I wouldn’t even if I did. With or without a lawyer.”
“Why not? People are getting killed.”
“Correction. Your people, not my people. I heard Chamorro was crooked.”
His opinion, offered without invitation, angered Kulak. The agent’s face simmered in the fires of his own tension, turning beet red enough to have a heart attack. He gripped the edge of his desk with both hands, bent forward a few inches and tried to strangle Durrutti with his eyes. “You heard wrong. He took some chances and made a tactical error. He was only doing his job.”
“And it got him killed.”
“You don’t care if men die?”
Durrutti let some seconds go by before he answered him. He was walking on a tightrope. The cadence in his reply was deliberate, each vowel and consonant was distinct from its predecessor. “I ain’t being cold, but this murder don’t got nothing to do with me.”
The defiance in his response was laughable. Denying the trouble he was in didn’t make it go away. He knew what Kulak was saying: everyday the police didn’t find the shooter who’d murdered the cop on Mission Street, Durrutti was a giant step closer to San Quentin Prison.
They didn’t use the gas chamber in San Quentin anymore. Death row inmates were iced via lethal injection, like they were in the dog pound at the SPCA. More humane, the authorities said. The last guy executed went into convulsions and tried to break out of the restraining straps. It took him eight minutes to kick the bucket.
A vein was doing pushups on Kulak’s forehead. He put his hand on Durrutti’s wrist, the two of them sitting close together at the desk. The sun came through a window; dust motes flitted in the unventilated air. Kulak’s hand was fleshy and covered with black hairs. The weight of it gave Durrutti a headache and he said, “Would you mind getting that fucking thing off me?”
Kulak removed his hand and lavished a less than heartwarming smile on him. Watching that smile Durrutti knew his job was to steer clear of the wall of fire the cop was putting in his path. Certain people could help him do that. Jimmy Ramirez was one of them.
Durrutti had a queasy feeling he’d never see Jimmy again.
Chapter Eleven
The hotels on Mission Street were a coda for the seventh ring of oblivion. An underworld where landlords evicted tenants by setting their rooms on fire. The tête-a-tête with Kulak at the Federal Building left Durrutti unsettled. He couldn’t stop trembling; his left arm shook uncontrollably. Lounging in his room at the El Capitán didn’t make things any easier.
He went to see Jackie and Arlo, thinking they might soothe him. The door to their room was ajar when he knocked on it. Arlo was pulling on a pair of white silk stockings over her pale unshaved legs. She looked up at Durrutti with eyes that were soaked in barbiturates and whinnied, “Hey, baby cakes. Where have you been keeping yourself? Come in, come in. I ain’t seen you in ages.”
Durrutti hesitated. Jackie was behind the door with a .38 Ruger semi-automatic in her hand. Her hair was q
uarantined under a row of plastic curlers. Her face was slathered with vaseline. A silk bathrobe hung undone, exposing her mammoth belly, and beneath it her cock, which she had tied back with a baby blue thong. She said, miffed by the intrusion, “Shit, it’s Ricky Durrutti. What do you need, man?”
He wasn’t sure. He walked into the room and over to the bed, tested the mattress with his hand, scattering the silverfish, then sat down on a hill of soiled red satin sheets and looked around him. Arlo had covered the walls and ceiling with Indian fabric. Durrutti answered Jackie, saying, “Ah, I don’t know. I just want something to take the edge off things. I need to fucking mellow out. I’m losing it.”
Arlo was quick to fathom Durrutti. She minced toward him with one silk stocking dangling from her hand; the rest of her was stark naked. Her thin hairless concave chest was postmortem white and her penis was jet black. Her hair, wet from a shower, was parted down the middle and hung in two wings to her shoulders. She asked, “What’s wrong? You tripping? Shit bugging you? You can tell mama, can’t you?”
Arlo’s high lilting voice was designed to do two things in life. To make Jackie jealous and to flirt with other men. While Durrutti basked in the warmth of Arlo’s mock solicitude, he didn’t want to tangle with her spouse. Nor did he want to talk about his recent visit to Kulak. Disclosure would be premature. He replied, “You guys seen Jimmy Ramirez yet?”
Jackie fumed as she pointed the Ruger at Durrutti’s head, unconscious of what she was doing. Her torso was marked with faded tattoos from her stint in the Marines. Her cock drooped like fruit under her open robe. “Jimmy is gonna get his ass kicked. I fronted him some sherms to sell for me. And do you know what he did? He smoked them. Then he told me he lost the money. That liar is gonna come to no good.”
The revelation didn’t shock Durrutti. The Mexican’s reputation was on the skids in every quarter. He was becoming the prince of unpopularity. “Yeah, well, if you hear anything about him, tell me.”
“You still looking for him?” Jackie asked.
Durrutti was noncommittal. “Yeah.”
“How come?”
He didn’t know how much he could trust Arlo and Jackie. They didn’t like pressure. If they knew Kulak was asking about them, they might turn on him. Like most dope dealers, they’d snitch on anyone who compromised their safety and their enterprise. Durrutti was not exempt. Recognition of this sobered him and he said, “It ain’t nothing. Speaking of Jimmy, you got any more sherms?”
Arlo changed voices, trading in her street whore dialect for the prim and efficient clucking of a retail clerk at Woolworth’s. “Sure do, darling. You want a two dollar joint or the five dollar kind?”
“Give me a five dollar one, please.”
Jackie plucked a two paper joint from a pocket in her bathrobe and handed it to Durrutti. The misshapen sherm stank of parsley and was warm from having nestled against Jackie’s groin. Durrutti threw a handful of one-dollar bills on the bed sheets and pocketed the thing, asking Arlo, “This shit decent?”
Arlo stepped into a Vivienne Westwood shift, a prize from the Goodwill box in Pacific Heights, and trilled for Durrutti’s benefit, fabricating an assertion that was part sales pitch and part religious zeal. “Honey, it ain’t just good. We’re talking about a whole other dimension here. This here angel dust is pharmaceutical. It’s gonna tear your brain apart.”
Arlo’s enthusiasm echoed in his ears when Durrutti sat down on the floor in his room. The angel dust was going to take him to a higher ground, money-back guaranteed. He put an ashtray beside him on the rug, then lit the sherm and took a drag. Five seconds passed. Ten more seconds went by and the room began to spin.
Before he could exhale a parade of hallucinations began their attack on his brain. His face ran down his chest in a sheet of melting skin, bubbling like molten taffy. He thought to himself, Thank the Lord I don’t have a mirror around.
The doorframe bulged as if someone was going to pop through it. The unlocked door gaped wide—and Lonely Boy stepped inside. “I came to see you, homes.”
The vato loco was unarmed and alone. He gave the room a haunted glance, looked in the armoire and under the piss-stained porcelain sink. He got down on his knees and checked under the bed, sneezing on the dust balls. Convinced he was safe from ambush, Lonely Boy then padded over to the window and peeked out from behind the chintz curtains at Mission Street.
He stood there for a long while, staring at the sidewalk. The sun had passed over the building and the street was bathed in shade, cooling the air. He watched the hookers, the school kids and the fishmongers with the scrutiny of a mad scientist—Mission Street was his laboratory. His grand experiment. His final stand. Satisfied his cosmos was in order, Lonely Boy closed the curtains and sat down on the floor next to Durrutti.
His freshly sunburned open face had a large suppurating zit on his right cheek. He was wearing a black Hanes T-shirt, a pair of blue Dickies cut off two inches below the knees and white Nike trainers. He stretched out his legs and clasped his hands behind his neck and inspected the room again. “So this is your crib, huh? Stark, ain’t it? I guess you don’t believe in furniture.”
It took everything Durrutti had to get his tongue to work. The struggle to do it made him sweat. The yield was marginal. “Yeah.”
“You ain’t got much, do you?”
“Nope.”
Lonely Boy was full of opinions. “You look goofy, dude.” His voice resembled a bullfrog on helium. “You loaded?”
Durrutti let the words roll out of his mouth like fresh cement. “Well ... uh, I’m wasted. You want to smoke some sherms?”
“No, homie, I don’t do that stuff no more. It’s bad for my lungs. I’ve got to think of my future.”
Lonely Boy helped himself to one of Durrutti’s Marlboros and puffed on it, lost in contemplation. He had burdens all up and down the hemisphere. His family depended on him to become a success for them in America. They wanted him to go to school and get an education. His homeboys needed him to fight the Sureños and the Norteños and the cops. Lonely Boy wanted to do it all.
He looked older than his years with his clean shaven scalp, the two tattooed teardrops under his left eye that signified time served in the California Youth Authority system, and the tattoo with his mother’s name on his forearm. He poked at the zit on his cheek, letting his eyes go faraway, as he said, “You know mi ruca?”
That was Spooky from Shotwell Street, a tiny girl who wore her hair in a foot-high bouffant girded by a blue bandanna. A huera with vivid black eyes. She worked at Whiz Burger, an easy walk from her house. Tattooed in old-school gothic script on her neck was the phrase: mi amor por vida—Lonely Boy.
“Your girlfriend?” Durrutti asked. “How is she?”
“She’s cool, man. Me and her, we’ve been together for two years. We been to jail together and all over the place, you know? We’ve seen a lot and yeah, she’s knocked up.”
“She’s pregnant? Jesus Christ.”
“You know it. Three months now. First of the new year, she’s gonna bring me a big strong hijo.”
The angel dust had left Durrutti color blind and effusive. “That’s great. Congratulations.”
“Ain’t no thing. It was easy. I could do it every day if I had to. You know what else?”
“What’s that?”
Lonely Boy hotboxed the cigarette and exhaled three perfectly symmetrical smoke rings, working his jaw like a locomotive to execute the trick. “I told you I knew who killed the cop on Mission Street, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“No? Don’t bullshit me,” Lonely Boy said. “I didn’t? Well, fuck me. I thought I did. But you know Chamorro had to go, don’t you? The backstabbing motherfucker. It’s like he forgot his arithmetic, that if he tried to rip us off, we wouldn’t do anything to retaliate. He was stupid, that’s for sure. He fucked up and when you do that, you don’t get no second chances.”
Lonely Boy jiggled his head up and down, his eyes
brooding and hooded, his jug-handled ears flushed scarlet. He seemed distant and slightly vacant. What he’d confessed made Durrutti cringe as if a furry long-legged tarantula was walking on his face. He didn’t want to be the recipient of information like that. On the other hand, his survival depended on it. The paradox was making him crazy. The angel dust made him even crazier. He asked him, “Who did the shooting?”
Lonely Boy whispered with sadness, a tad offended, “You think I’m going to tell you? No way, cabron. This ain’t about you. This is about me and that shit is confidential.”
“But the cops are fucking with me.”
“So? What can I do about that? Clap my hands and make them go away? If it were only that easy, I would have done it yesterday.”
“I need your help.”
“What do you want, charity? Ain’t nothing for free.”
“No, I don’t want your goddamn charity. I need advice.”
“Don’t be asking me. This ain’t no welfare office. Figure it out for yourself. Be a man.”
He made a quarterturn and stared at Durrutti. The angel dust was taking apart his face. There was a swirling maw where Lonely Boy’s mouth should have been. His eyes evaporated into viscous steam. His head went up in a column of smoke. The rest of him disintegrated geometrically; first his arms, then his legs. His dimmed voice crackled. “It’s all uphill from here, so you better watch your shit.”
He got to his feet and walked out of the room.
The next thing Durrutti knew the sky was black and it was raining, unusual for the summer months. Sheets of ocean-driven water washed over Mission Street, drowning the sidewalks. He went to the window, cranked it open and stuck his neck outside; a pre-autumnal wind whipped across his face, plastering his hair to his scalp. The traffic lights, a red line of them, blinked on and off like fireflies. An unerring flow of people scurried down the street with newspapers held over their heads, looking lost in the rain. But that was only the beginning; the weather was going to get a lot worse before it got any better.
