“Un cementerio, a cemetery. One good horse,” he snapped his fingers, “and you watch my ass go out the door. Sit here all day, talk to the flies.” He whirled an index finger about his temple. “Go completamente loco.”
“My office is like that sometimes. In New York. Just me and the dust.”
“Then we’re both loco,” he told me and smiled.
One of the men at the bar woke up and promptly fell off his stool.
“Madre de Dios,” said the bartender, getting up to help.
I parked the Chrysler on Thirty-fifth Avenue, an uphill street that dead-ended into The Paseo, and began walking up to Perillo’s house. It was past dusk now and the brown and white faces arrayed on the porches regarded me with mild curiosity. A few folks nodded in greeting and I returned the favor. They were no more suspicious of me than I of them, yet a person traveling on foot anywhere in Los Angeles was to be viewed as a pleasant oddity, an amusement of the evening.
By the time I reached Number 3410 I was slightly out of breath—and I was still only half-way to Perillo’s house. The smallish cottage was perched on a plot located about fifty yards up a steep hill studded with avocado and palm trees. Cracked stone slabs, sprouting hardy weeds and wildflowers, served as a roundabout staircase to the top, but a pick and rope would have been appropriate. It was the perfect setting for someone who wished to discourage visitors, or wanted a long look at them before they got to the door.
I climbed the stairs. The evening air was damp and my shirt was pretty well soaked when I reached the top. I mopped my brow with a hanky and rang Perillo’s bell, twice. When no one answered, I tried the door and was not surprised to find it locked.
So I walked around to the back, where I would be safely out of view, Perillo’s neighbors being vacant lots. The back contained a small, unkempt yard, perhaps four hundred square feet of brown and dusty grass. In its center stood a rusted, sagging swing and seesaw apparatus, looking as ancient and splay-footed as the skeleton of an infant dinosaur. I didn’t figure Perillo to use the swing with any regularity at all. There were some fruit trees and beneath them sweet, rotten droppings of oranges and avocados. Two metal chairs faced each other beneath the trees, their seats shiny with stagnant water.
A few bright stars had appeared and the crickets and katydids had begun their electric evening music. I walked toward the rear of the house and found another door. Another locked door. I tried a few old hotel keys, but I could have used my pecker for all the good they did. Perspiring like a Sicilian road-builder, I continued my stealthy, counterclockwise encirclement of the house, finally coming upon a locked but flimsy window. It could be raised about an inch and a half above the sill, and that was all I really needed. I hunted down a fallen tree limb and jammed it into the window as a wedge, then pressed down hard upon it. The lock loosened but didn’t give. Awash with sweat, I leaned against the tree limb with my full weight. The lock buckled and broke, the window flew upward, and I fell down upon a half-dozen mushy avocados.
I tossed the tree limb back where I had found it and climbed into a small and musty room, a bedroom, then shut the window and returned the lock so that it appeared to be in place.
The bedroom was sparsely furnished, neat, and looked rarely used. There was a single bed, a night stand and lamp, a battered chest of drawers, a canvas chair, and bookshelves constructed of varnished pine boards. The books—complete works of Marx and Engels, volumes by Michael Bakunin, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, by Americans like William Z. Foster, Michael Gold, and John Howard Lawson—were arranged alphabetically. Very few of them looked to have been read; the pages were white and unsmudged, the bindings still cracked.
I went through the chest of drawers, quickly and lightly of hand, coming up empty. Perillo favored white socks, white boxer shorts, and white short-sleeved shirts. There was a jar of pennies in one drawer, a cigar box full of tie clips and cuff links—uninscribed, unmarked, and uninteresting—in another. The taste and style were those of a man with twenty years at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles beneath his belt.
I opened a closet. Two brown sports jackets hung in dank silence and back issues of The New Masses had been piled in a rear corner, making room for the Perillo shoe collection, basic black with airholes. A damp pair of work-boots attracted my attention; I picked them up and observed that the soles were lightly breaded with sand. I put the boots back down, remembering Santa Monica and two bored thugs waiting for their boss. Then I headed for the living room.
It was down a brief, blank hallway and was dominated by two huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin, staring at each other across an ersatz fireplace. Mustachioed Stalin had been given the beatific smile and polished cheeks of a people’s saint, while bearded Lenin exhibited the fierce and messianic urgency of the true believer. They loomed like godheads over a living room furnished in the scuffed and orphaned style of the Salvation Army: a yellow convertible sofa, an “easy” chair, a rocking chair, a glass-topped coffee table, a shovel and iron for the nonexistent fireplace, and a throw rug. That was it. I looked through the cushions of the sofa but searching this near-vacant room was as pointless as it was simple.
Then there was a study, the only room in the joint with the clutter commonly associated with human habitation. It was more an alcove, really, six by eight or so, located off the “dining room” (a bridge table) and fashioned into a separate room by the installation of sliding doors. Perillo, after all, was a carpenter.
I entered the study and went straight to a column of wooden file drawers, unmarked and brass-handled. They stood across from a small desk on which a Remington typewriter stood uncovered. It occurred to me to take a sample off the typewriter and I reached for a sheet of paper.
Which is when I heard the footsteps.
Someone was coming up the stairs; there was no mistaking the methodical beat of shoe on stone. I backed out of the study and went to the living room, which had a window that faced front. The steps grew more distinct, stopped for the pause to catch breath, then resumed. I watched, tense and fascinated, as the top bristles of Henry Perillo’s crewcut came into view. For a few seconds I stood cemented to the floor, but as he slowly came around the next-to-last “S” curve and his forehead appeared, I dashed to the bedroom and crawled beneath the bed, like any other schmuck caught in the right place at the wrong time.
Getting beneath the bed was not as easy as it looked. The frame was close to the dusty floor and it was a single, which didn’t leave much slack space for someone six feet, two hundred pounds in size. Someone like me, for instance. Add to that the fact that the bedspread did not reach to the floor, despite my tugging, and I was all too visible.
I heard Perillo unlock the front door and enter. He was whistling the Marine Corps Hymn, an odd selection, I thought, and no particular favorite of Stalin’s. Water began running in the bathroom: Perillo gargled and rinsed, then shut the faucet off. His footsteps clattered on the kitchen linoleum. He blew his nose. He opened the refrigerator door, closed it, then uncapped a bottle. From the nearly inaudible hiss that followed the pouring of the bottle’s contents into a glass, the trained LeVine ear determined that Perillo was having himself a beer. Flat on my back, surrounded by tufted swirls of hair and dust, the sound of the gushing cold brew forced me to swallow reflexively.
While I lay there contemplating my need for a Blatz, Perillo went into the study and began typing. I listened to his careful pecking; he was a two-finger man. After a few minutes, his telephone rang. It rang twice, then stopped. It rang once again, and stopped. When it rang again, Perillo instantly picked up. His words were music to my ears.
“White. Yes, Chuck, I’m typing the report up now…. In a half-hour or so, maybe less. Probably less, in fact … yes … I’ll be leaving for the studio as soon as I finish, so figure an hour from now should be about right … check … fine … yes, the ring is tightening and I think we’ve got them on the run … right.”
Clarence Depew White, alias
Henry Perillo, hung up and resumed typing, while I commenced thinking about possible ways to get out of the house before he did. It was an awkward problem because the house was so small; any noise would get the FBI man flying out of his chair. I could always wait until he left and then drive furiously over to Warner Brothers, assuming that was the “studio” he was talking about “leaving for.” But if another studio was involved, then I would have blown two unique opportunities: to observe White’s modus operandi and to gain access to the memo he was typing at that very moment. I fully intended to glom that vital piece of paper by any means save murder.
So I had to make a break for it, as cautious and circumspect a break as I could fashion. No fireworks, no heroics; just a mild-mannered attempt at leaving the house without getting my throat slit.
I removed my Colt and began wiggling sideways, like an aging belly dancer, slowly and without much rhythm, cutting a broad swath through the dust. Proceeding at an arthritic pace, I managed to shimmy from beneath the bed in just under five minutes. The typewriter clacked away uninterrupted, reassuring background music to my planned exit.
I arose from the floor very delicately, a prima ballerina doing “Sleeping Beauty” before a packed house, and started quietly toward the window. A fly hummed past my nose, but I stoically withheld the potentially fatal sneeze. I reached the window, easily removed the broken lock, and grasped the twin handles attached to the white moulding.
White stopped typing.
I froze, freedom before me, and waited for the typewriter to resume. When it didn’t, I returned the lock, stepped from the window, and ducked down beside the bed, where I said my rosary and held my bad breath. White’s ill-oiled chair shrieked as he got up, then I heard the FBI undercover agent yawn.
He walked into the bathroom and pissed up a storm, leaving the door open, as one does when alone. He stopped pissing. I heard the short metallic buzz of a closing zipper, then White hawked up a mouthful and spat into the standing urine. He flushed the toilet. Each sound echoed like thunder through the empty house.
White strolled into the kitchen and pulled another beer from the igloo, then returned to the study. I listened for his chair to creak. It did. White coughed and began typing again.
Confidently but carefully, I got to my feet and slipped over to the window. Once more I removed the lock and gripped the handles on the frame. I pulled upwards. The window arose as easily and silently as smoke but, its lock ruined, would not stay up by itself. So, one hand pressed flat against the raised frame, I extended my leg out over the sill, saw my pants leg impaled upon a nail for a panicky eternity of three seconds, and vaulted outside.
I let the window drop nice and easy and ducked down against the house, protected by the darkness. I sighed and felt a queasy chill as the evening air met my sweat-soaked clothes, then crouched away from the house, standing up as I crossed over the warped and swaybacked fence that separated Perillo’s grounds from the bordering lot.
Stumbling over rocks, I bounded down the hill at an awkward trot, gathering speed as I reached the bottom, landing on the street with the breathless grace of a kid in mid-Saturday romp. A dog and a chicken, wandering up The Paseo, watched me with polite interest. I told them I thought the Adrian case was finally coming to a head. The dog wagged his tail, but I don’t think the chicken knew what the hell I was talking about.
Clarence White came out of the house fifteen minutes later and quickly descended the winding steps. I was seated in the Chrysler, watching his house from the rear-view mirror and nervously blowing a Lucky. Could he leave the house without my seeing? Was there a hidden garage, a second car?
But no, here he was, brown-suited and white-shirted, looking up and down the street before entering and starting his car, a blue Nash. I slid down in my seat as he rolled slowly down Thirty-fifth Avenue, and didn’t even turn the ignition key until the FBI man had come to a full stop and turned right onto Verdugo.
I tried to stay way back of him in the sparse nighttime traffic, but it wasn’t easy: White rarely went over forty-five and drove as erratically as a hophead in a Coney Island bumper car. He switched lanes, braked for no apparent reason, slowed near green lights and sailed absent-mindedly through red ones. I began to fear that he might have picked me up; a man who did undercover work was apt to suspect he was being followed while taking his morning crap. Add his police experience and you had a person with all the professional tools to discover and lose a tail in a matter of minutes.
When the Nash turned down Barham Boulevard, twenty frustrating minutes later, I knew that unless White was decoying me, he was headed for the Warners lot. Traffic was extremely thin and I did not wish to be discovered at this late stage of the game, so I pulled into a drive-in called Mister Taco, on Cahuenga, and let him get out of range.
A slim high-school girl in a sombrero, white silk blouse, and black pants came to the car and asked what I was having.
“I’m waiting for a friend,” I told her.
“You can’t wait here.”
“Why not?”
The girl shrugged in the direction of a small, dark man working behind the counter.
“It’s his rule.”
“That Mister Taco himself?”
She lowered her head and managed a shy smile.
“No-oooo, silly. He’s just the manager.”
“And he doesn’t like guys hanging around.”
“It’s mainly for school kids, the rule. They stay till closing otherwise. You could just order a Coke.”
“Fine. A small Coke.” I handed the girl a quarter. “No ice in that, and no Coke. And forget about the cup and keep the change.”
She pocketed the quarter and grinned.
“You’re pretty neat,” she told me.
“I’ll come by next year and give you another quarter. Consider it a fixed income.”
A stripped-down prewar Chevvy roared in beside us and began honking. The girl in the sombrero turned and squealed in delight as a half-dozen young boys leaned out the windows. California was another planet altogether. I backed out of Mister Taco and drove straight to Warner Brothers.
There was a little trouble at the main gate, involving the exact purpose of my visit. It took a few minutes of heated explanation—investigating Adrian’s death, New York City detective, urgent, you have any questions call Parker—to gain admission to the lot. The irritable, gray-haired gateman finally waved me through with a final “next time you’ll have to bring a signed permit.” I barreled up the main drag, headlights off, and parked the Chrysler between a bulldozer and the north wall of the commissary, safely out of sight.
Then I headed for the Western Street.
Call it instinct, sixth sense, or a bloodhound’s red-eyed judgment, but if White wasn’t in the vicinity of that fantasy frontier village, then I’d hang up the gumshoes and go into the junior sportswear line. All the activity in the Adrian case that centered around the Warners lot—Walter’s murder and the attempt on my life—had occurred on the Western Street. More particularly, it had occurred in the narrow area defined by the gallows and the jailhouse. If Clarence White was on the lot, the odds seemed very good that he’d be operating in that vicinity.
I cut back to the frontier town through the friendly white houses of Small-Town America, and crept up to the back entrance of the saloon. The room was empty. On tip-toe, hand on gun, I entered the saloon and slipped along the wall until I could peek over the tops of the swinging doors.
The blue Nash was parked across the street, in front of the jailhouse.
I congratulated myself and waited, wondering whether it might make sense to rush over and surprise White. But surprise him doing what? As Perillo, he worked at Warners. He had excuses for being here. I didn’t.
A minute or two into my vacillating, White stepped from the dark jailhouse and cast a long, anxious look around before shutting the door. I flattened myself against the saloon wall and listened as he started the Nash and drove hurriedly away.
I poked my head out the swinging doors and saw the sheets of dust rising as the Nash disappeared from view. I stood my ground for a minute or two, eyes darting from street to watch, until I convinced myself that White had actually driven away and was not hovering outside with an ice pick clenched in his fist. I pushed the doors open and raced across the empty street, gun drawn, every bit as relaxed as a circus aerialist with hemorrhoids.
The jailhouse door opened with a horror-matinee creak. I cautiously stepped through the low, narrow doorway and immediately kicked over a brass spittoon; it rolled noisily to the far side of the room before smacking into the wooden wall. I listened attentively to its diminishing vibrations, feeling the slightest bit foolish, then finally pocketed my Colt and whipped out a pencil flashlight.
I scanned the room with the concentrated beam. The jailhouse was in good repair, with a minimum of candy wrappers and technical debris on the wooden floor. There was a set of jail cells, a large rolltop desk over which hung the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, a table and chairs, a pot-bellied stove, and a hat rack. The room was damp and chilly; in darkness, one might have thought he was wandering about a cave.
My watch read eight-fifteen. White had told his telephone contact to “figure an hour from now” at seven-thirty; the person or persons would be arriving in fifteen minutes or so, presumably to pick up the typed memorandum. I didn’t have any time at all and began going through the room like a dervish, checking off the most obvious spots for concealment: within the stove, behind the Washington portrait, inside the desk drawers, beneath the bunks in the jail cells. It took only five minutes but I came up with nothing, and even for five minutes’ work that’s not much.
The next strategic assault had me tapping against areas of wall, listening for the tell-tale hollow thump of a hidden compartment. Another five minutes vanished and the net result was that my knuckles hurt. Eight-twenty-five. I should have been making my exit but an ambitious brain cell suddenly dropped before my eyes a card reading, Hey putz, White’s a carpenter. The only substantial wooden piece in the room was the desk. I sped over to where it stood and dove for the floor.
Hollywood and Levine Page 17
