“We’ve been partners a long time, Marty. I got the right.”
“What right, Al?”
“I got the right to jam into your business.”
“Jam away.”
“I, uh, I have an opinion. I’m not pretending to be an expert, but I have an opinion. My opinion is that you oughtta go talk to somebody.”
“Somebody?”
“A doctor, maybe. Like that doctor we met on that Simpson case. He was a nice guy.”
“The psychiatrist?”
“Yeah. Somebody like that.”
“What would I tell a psychiatrist?”
“Goddamn it, Marty, I don’t know!” Al Mackey had to hit the brakes as the freeway motorists slowed to ogle some poor bastard getting a speeding ticket. Better him than me!
“I wouldn’t know either, Al,” Martin Welborn said serenely.
“Okay, you could start by telling him why you like to hang upside down like a freaking dead fish!”
“I have a sore back, Al. I’ve had a whiplash injury, remember?”
“Okay, then tell him why you go to church more than the Pope, why don’t you?”
“It’s peculiar to make occasional visits to a church? I told you I don’t pray, if that’s troubling you. I like the architecture. I wanted to be married there but we couldn’t arrange it.”
“Okay, then talk to him about your marriage. Tell him how hard you took it when Paula walked out. Talk about how tough the separation has been for you.”
“Haven’t both your divorces been tough on you, Al? Separation? Isn’t it tough on everybody? Remorse. Guilt. Recriminations. Rather common, wouldn’t you say?”
Al Mackey was losing patience with the stalled traffic and started blasting the horn. “Why don’t you write a letter?” he yelled out the window at the car in front.
“Calm yourself, my lad,” Martin Welborn chuckled. “Maybe you should visit the good doctor.” Martin Welborn looked at an ancient Filipino with an aluminum walker, moving down Temple Street at a rate of six inches per step. “Imagine how it is to go back up,” he said.
Al Mackey took a deep breath, wiped his brow with his hand, and looked at the surprising amount of moisture he found there. Then he said, “Okay, Marty, I’ve got something you can discuss with the shrink. You can discuss the fact that your drinking glasses are lined up like a goddamn chess game. And your spice cabinet looks like three rows of checkers. And your socks and underwear and shirts look like you’re waiting for the inspector general.”
“Is there something wrong with being neat?”
“You were never that neat. Nobody was ever that neat. You’ve just been getting a bit … too neat lately.”
“I’ll try to be a little sloppier if it’ll make you happier, Al,” Martin Welborn said good-naturedly.
“Oh, screw it!” Al Mackey said.
“Let’s make another follow-up on Bonnie Lee Brewster, Al,” Martin Welborn said. “Just one more time.”
Just one more time. It had been just one more time at least once a week for the past three months. That was another thing he’d like Marty to talk to the shrink about, Bonnie Lee Brewster and these crazy “follow-ups” that Marty insisted on making to that psycho old woman, Auntie Rosa.
She lived up above Franklin Avenue in one of those spooky old houses that suited her style and business. Palm reading and crystal gazing and looking into one’s past was legal enough in the city of Los Angeles and one could even get paid for it, but the second a psychic or medium took one step into the future and made a prediction for money, the medium or psychic would be wearing bracelets of steel instead of gold, and find herself charged with a bunco crime. Auntie Rosa broke the law from time to time, but the police had pretty much let her be since she had come in very handy on a few cases involving missing and murdered children. So far, she wasn’t hitting the mark on ten-year-old Bonnie Lee Brewster, but she called Martin Welborn regularly. Sometimes she wept during the calls. It was right there, swimming in a mist over her bed, the figure of Bonnie Lee Brewster in a blue dress with white knee socks and a yellow Snoopy pin on her white collar. And no one told Auntie Rosa. The press didn’t know because there was an incorrect clothing description broadcast on the police frequencies the day Bonnie Lee Brewster disappeared. The child had changed clothes and her mother didn’t even know it for twenty-four hours. But Auntie Rosa called Hollywood Detectives and talked to Martin Welborn and she knew.
The little girl was last seen talking to a man two blocks from her home on Ivar Avenue. There was blood found near the alley. There was no ransom demand. Nothing. In the past Auntie Rosa had “found” the sodomized, butchered body of an eleven-year-old boy in a culvert near the Los Angeles River. On another occasion, she “heard” a five-year-old girl crying out for help in the attic of a stucco cottage in Eagle Rock. Auntie Rosa described the house and street so minutely that police found the house and the lunatic child chained in the attic by her parents.
So, even though cops are generally skeptics, not many laughed overtly at Auntie Rosa, and nobody was tossing her in the hoosegow for occasionally making a few bucks by looking into the future of the ladies of the neighborhood.
Al Mackey couldn’t stand the smell of the sniffling old hag. She smelled like fish and garlic and onions and cats. Al Mackey thought she must have a hundred cats, and he started his psychosomatic sneezing when they got within a block of the corny old house with all the theatrical trappings.
Martin Welborn was very respectful of Auntie Rosa and she was always glad to see them. She had a goiter hanging from her neck and limped painfully on thick wrapped legs. Auntie Rosa was ageless, and they were never certain whether or not she was a Caucasian. Al Mackey suspected she was some kind of Eurasian, but with a blue-black dye job and double face-lift it was hard to tell.
“You know, Sergeant Welborn,” the old woman said, when they sat down in the musty parlor, “I saw Bonnie very clearly Tuesday night. I cried myself to sleep. She was calling for me, my darling Bonnie.”
Auntie Rosa always referred to missing children as her darlings.
“That child’s dead,” Al Mackey said. “There was blood.”
“She’s not, Sergeant Mackey! Oh, she’s not!” Auntie Rosa cried, and her head began a palsied bounce, a legacy of her last stroke. The goiter danced and bobbed.
“Now, now, Auntie Rosa, I agree with you,” Martin Welborn said. “I think Bonnie’s alive somewhere.”
“She is, Sergeant Welborn! She’s alive and she knows we’re searching for her!”
As she said it a cat chased a kitten across Al Mackey’s feet, making him shiver. Goddamn spooky old dame!
“Is she … being harmed, Auntie Rosa?” Martin Welborn asked quietly.
Then the old woman started to cry. She wheezed and sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I believe she’s being harmed, Sergeant Welborn. She calls, but it’s like a very strange siren’s song. Like … like she wants us to come, but there’s danger all around her. Like there’s a breathing burning force that lurks. That waits for us, Sergeant Welborn!”
“That child’s dead,” Al Mackey said, but they didn’t seem to hear.
“Now, now, Auntie Rosa,” Martin Welborn said, when the old woman’s palsy got so violent she started spilling her tea.
“The devil is a raging lion, Sergeant Welborn!”
“I don’t know, Auntie Rosa,” Martin Welborn said soothingly, as he patted her liver-spotted hand. “I think he may just be a dumb little coyote. If he exists at all.”
“Oh, he’s real, Sergeant Welborn. He’s real!”
“Let’s hope so,” Martin Welborn said, still patting the old woman’s hand. “Life would be unbearable if we didn’t have the devil, now wouldn’t it?”
The old woman oozed a raspy wheeze of a laugh, and said, “You’re absolutely right, Sergeant Welborn. Life would be hell without the devil.”
“If you hear or see anything, just anything of Bonnie Lee Brewster, you call me, Auntie R
osa. At the station or at home. Day or night. Anytime.”
“You’re a fine boy, Sergeant Welborn,” Auntie Rosa said. The palsy diminished as the detectives rose to leave.
“Thanks, but I’m just a fair-to-middling detective. I need your help.”
“We’ll find Bonnie, Sergeant Welborn,” Auntie Rosa said, her goiter buttery in the lamplight. “No … she’ll find us!”
When they were driving back toward the station, Al Mackey said, “Anyplace else you’d like to go now, Marty? The ding ward at the Veterans’ Hospital, maybe? Course even there we might not find anybody as nutty as Auntie Rosa to talk to. Maybe we should see an astrologer? How about we go on The Gong Show?”
“I’d like to go to the bowling alley parking lot one more time, Al. I want to pace it off. I want to talk to the employees.”
“The employees? They’ve been interviewed and reinterviewed. They closed early. They saw nothing, Marty. Nigel St. Claire didn’t know bowling balls from elephant’s nuts, for chrissake!”
“Okay, let’s just pace off the parking lot. Let’s just … get a smell of the area.”
And that’s the kind of detective Marty had become, and that was exactly the wrong kind of detective to be, in Al Mackey’s opinion. He said, “Marty, deductive thinkers solve crimes. You and Basil Rathbone always agreed on that. Mystics belong in dark bedrooms up in Laurel Canyon floating in homemade tanks of Jello with all those out-of-work actors looking for their life force. The only cop I know that solves crimes sniffing the air works with the airport detail and has four legs, a bushy tail, and bad breath.”
But Martin Welborn just chuckled in his good-humored way, and Al Mackey looked at his partner’s smooth boyish jaw and barely graying hair and dry steady hands, and realized that Marty looked maybe ten years younger than he did. And maybe it was he, not Marty, who was going to end up in Laurel Canyon with his saffron nightgown and his hair full of forget-me-nots. Christ, he and Marty were turning into the yin and yang of mental health!
The buildings hung against the sky in what looked like lovely storm light. But it was only the deadly silver particles of smog. Martin Welborn paced off the bowling alley parking lot, taking copious notes, pausing to examine cars, pedestrians, traffic volume, while Al Mackey dodged the flying squads of roller skaters who float about the streets of Hollywood like the ghosts in Auntie Rosa’s visions. Some of the skaters wore transistor headsets and boogied to new-wave or punk rock. In fact, some of the skaters were dressing punk. A young man with an earphone radio wore satin skating shorts and his torso gleamed with play knife-wounds that must have taken hours of makeup work. He flew across the parking lot, disco skating with a partner who wasn’t there. The young man wore nothing on his upper body except feathers and a leather bra.
Another skater, this one a woman, suddenly appeared from the west side of the parking lot, a shaggy blur in the sunlight, and jumped over a Suzuki motorbike that was chained to the perimeter fence. Of course, the skateboarders around town did all kinds of leaping tricks, but Al Mackey had not thought it possible to make those leaps with heavy shoe skates. She wore a leotard with one leg zebra-striped and the other hot pink. Her top, a see-through plastic that made her sweat like a pig, had two daisy-shaped pasties over her nipples, making her one of the more modestly attired of the parking lot new-wave skaters.
Al Mackey was starting to get hunger pangs when he noticed that fifty yards away across the vast parking lot Marty was talking to a group of more conventional skaters. The conversation lasted a surprisingly long time and several others joined the group to talk with Marty.
Al Mackey had never particularly understood his partner in the years they’d worked together. But before Marty’s separation from Paula they had seen each other socially at least once a week.
Since he had never had children with either ex-wife, Al Mackey realized that now, in early middle age (God, he hated the sound of it), Martin Welborn was probably the only person in the world he gave a damn about. Marty was one of those people you could never imagine anyone not liking. Even Marty’s ex-wife, Paula, must have cared for him at one time. Paula Welborn was an intelligent, handsome woman. Al Mackey hated her guts.
Al Mackey saw Paula Welborn as one of those cunts who figured she’d married beneath her, finding herself as she did with a diffident young cop who was overtrained by Jesuits in dead languages, mummified philosophy, and dying theology, all stirred into a nice steaming mulch. Water it daily with a cauldron of guilt and let’s see what grows in God’s Garden.
Of course, if Paula had grown up in Plains, Georgia, and managed to hook up with old Teeth and Prayers himself, she’d still have thought that she’d married beneath her. She was that kind of bitch.
Al Mackey sweltered in the sunshine, and wiped his smog-inflamed eyes, and thought that Paula Welborn was one of those broads who flirted with half the men at a cocktail party (never with Al Mackey—is that why he hated her from the start?) and then, when a drunken lieutenant or captain or commander made a play (she seldom wasted time turning sergeants’ dicks hard), would run to Marty and cuddle up next to him like a big cat, and show the gang that they may as well go to The Glitter Dome or settle for their momma’s old bones.
She was also one of those who, on infrequent nights between Al Mackey’s first divorce and his oh-so-brief marriage number two —when Al Mackey was a tetherball of rage and confusion getting slapped around the financial maypole by lawyers—would concede to Marty’s dinner invitations to Al Mackey. And she’d make the concession clear enough at some point during the night when Marty was out of the room tending to the homework problems of their teenaged daughters, Babs and Sally.
And even though she made sure Al Mackey knew how she felt about Marty’s invitations, wouldn’t she often have to go to the john, and start unzipping her jeans in front of Al as she walked out of the room? She was just that kind of bitch, all right. But, on the rare occasions he even mentioned her, Marty claimed they were relatively happy until her mid-life crisis blew the ship of wedlock right out of the freaking water.
And there was the other thing: Marty’s religious crisis, which Al Mackey could only guess at. Marty had left the seminary three years before he would have been ordained, but he never talked about it and he never talked about his mother’s response to the Quantum Leap over the wall. In fact, he never talked about religion, although Al Mackey’s parents were from Ireland and he had some curiosity about The Faith. Thankfully, they were from the North. He hated priests. Imagine if he was a guilt-ridden mick, what with a genetic enzyme dysfunction that made all Celts latent alcoholics. Al Mackey had recently become involved in morbid studies of that disease.
Marty would never talk about those bad old days with the Jesuits and resisted any efforts on Al Mackey’s part to learn about his past. Al Mackey might broach the subject by saying, “You know I like the way this new Pope carries himself. He’s the first priest I haven’t figured to be a rest-area Romeo.”
And Marty would smile and say, “He has a moosh that belongs on a leg-breaker, all right.”
And Al Mackey would say, “Yeah, and he’s in direct line with Jesus Christ.”
And Marty would say, “Yeah, and he’s Polish.”
And that was all. There would be no more talk of the Pope’s moosh, or Marty’s religious crisis, which Al Mackey guessed was severe. And only once did Martin Welborn refer to his family in Ohio. It was on Mother’s Day, and Al Mackey was just finishing up the second oh-so-quick marriage to that cunt who not only busted his balls but jumped up and down on them with cleats, leaving him as bankrupt as Chrysler Corporation.
Al Mackey brought a bouquet of carnations to the Welborns that day and explained to Paula that it was customary to wear a pink one in your lapel if your mother is alive. If she’s dead, you wear white. Al Mackey would never forget that day, because when he and Marty were waiting for Paula and the two girls to get ready for their big Mother’s Day outing on Restaurant Row, Al Mackey broke a pink carnation fr
om the bouquet and offered it to Marty. Al Mackey knew that Marty’s mother was alive and well in Ohio, yet Marty looked at him with those long brown eyes just for an instant, and Marty broke off a white carnation and pinned it to the lapel of his suit coat.
Al Mackey never asked another question about Martin Welborn’s mother.
Marty seemed to be finishing his talk with the skaters. He waved to Al Mackey, who was leaning against the fence on the other side of the parking lot watching a black kid skate between the rows of parked cars. Backwards.
Martin Welborn started toward his partner, but another skater whizzed by behind him and he only caught a glimpse peripherally as the boy disappeared below the roof line of the cars. He was smaller and younger than the rest. He was blond, and Martin Welborn found himself running around the car for a look. The boy was gone. The boy looked like Danny Meadows.
Danny Meadows called him Daddy. He said: Daddy? It was the only word Danny Meadows ever spoke to him: Daddy?
Babs still called him Daddy. Sally would call him Daddy forever. He was sure of that. Although she was older than Babs, she would never call him Dad. She would never call him Father.
No one would ever call him Father. It was unthinkable: Father Welborn. But clergymen had the lowest suicide rate in the nation, along with social workers. Doing good deeds apparently keeps people from chewing on guns. Policemen and doctors had the highest rate. Apparently being as useless as policemen and physicians is not good for longevity. Ninety percent of suicidal policemen use guns. Doctors use their own familiar weapons. To each his own. Most policemen who did it were passive men with inadequate personalities, they said. It seemed strange because police work does not attract passive men. He didn’t know about the inadequate personalities.
Martin Welborn had known three Los Angeles policewomen who did it. All three policewomen went out like real guys. They ate their gun muzzles. They proved their machismo at the end.
One of the most ironic things about those few older officers— those very few who survived their attempts, those failures who survived and therefore were exceptionally inadequate policemen, because no adequate policeman should ever survive a manly attempt—those survivors invariably stated that they experienced a strange and overwhelming anxiety. The anxiety was that at any moment one might have to deal with unknown or terrible situations. It was most ironic because it was the thrill of meeting the unknown which drew young men to the job. Yet it was the thing that most terrified the older policemen when they were well on their way to a dreadful destiny. It was very ironic.
The Glitter Dome Page 11
