by Tim Baker
There was the whistle of velocity as his body careened out of control, speeding through space like a comet, smashing into the sky. Then the world tipped upside down and he was compelled by the arrogance of gravity; crushed by it and sent crashing back to earth. His legs showered down after him, battering against wood. Pain erupted between his ears. The sky had become the earth. And the earth had become his tormentor, stepping on his bones.
He was of no further use to them. It was already the endgame. This was it. The Long Goodbye. Crisscross. Another line drawn through an already deleted name. All that was left were the practical details. He was interested in a detached way in what was going to happen next. What sorrowful grave were they preparing for him? The noble boom of sea surf or the hollow flop of wet cement? Maybe a pig-iron furnace in an off-hours foundry down south. Or the hog farm of some Okie. Or would they simply leave him in the desert to be picked over by the blazing sun? By ravenous wildlife. Too lazy to even shovel out a shallow grave.
CHAPTER 38
Los Angeles 1960
Barnsley hauls me out of the car, thrusts me towards a house. Schiller turns, swearing when he sees me. ‘Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph, what happened to Alston?’
‘Resisting arrest.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Grand theft auto.’
Schiller palms Barnsley in the chest, almost toppling him. ‘Get those cuffs off him, you moron.’ He tugs me after him when I’m free. ‘Can you still think?’
‘Arithmetic is out . . . ’
‘At least you can talk . . . ’ He yanks me to the front door. ‘Because you’re going to have plenty to say about this.’ A young man in his early twenties looks at me with surprise and some shock. He turns to Schiller. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He fell over your doorstep . . . ’ Schiller leads me inside, sits me down at a laminated kitchen table. On a counter opposite, a television shows images of the Bannister Estate, the sound turned down. ‘Alston, meet Nelson Archer . . . ’
I stare at him. How is it possible? He puts a glass of water down in front of me. ‘Let me take a look at that wound . . . ’ He looks up at Schiller. ‘Captain, I should file a complaint . . . ’ He walks over to a counter. ‘Police brutality.’
‘Give it a rest, he’s not even one of you people.’
You people. Archer unsnaps a black case, takes out medical equipment. He puts two tablets down before me, then fills a kidney-shaped metal dish with cotton wool. He squeezes something on my temple. ‘Ouch!’
Schiller laughs. ‘Tough guy, my ass . . . So what is a doctor doing driving ambulances?’
‘I’m a third-year med student at Meharry . . . I’ve taken a sabbatical.’
Schiller growls, the way he does when he doesn’t like what he hears, but knows someone is telling the truth anyway.
‘That means a break, Schiller . . . ’
‘Shut up and take your pills.’ He peers into Archer’s medical bag. ‘So why’d you come all the way to LA, doc?’
‘To earn some bread . . . ’ He sticks something else on my head that hurts like hell. ‘There’s not much work in Nashville these days.’ He suddenly grabs my hand, turning it over. ‘When did this happen?’
‘The bite . . . ? This morning.’
‘It’s already turned septic.’
He douses it with something that burns like the blazes. I let out a cry. Schiller laughs. ‘Let him have it, doc.’
Archer runs his fingers along the base of my jaw, then under and behind my ears. ‘What’s this?’
‘How do I know, it’s on the back of my head.’
‘A contusion . . . ’ More wet sting. High bite; low burn. He pushes hard on my temple, the heartbeat throbbing giving way to a slower, less painful tightness. ‘That’ll do for the moment, but it’ll need stitches. You should also get a course of penicillin and a tetanus shot for the hand.’
‘Rabies, more like it . . . ’
A light shines in my eyes. ‘Mild concussion.’ He steps back, looking at my torn jacket. ‘Mister, you’re a mess.’
Schiller thumps me on the back. ‘It’s official.’
‘Thanks for the diagnosis. Listen, Archer, did you or did you not collect a young Latino male from Laverne Terrace this morning?’
Archer shakes his head. ‘They don’t send me to that part of town. They prefer to keep me over on South Central.’
Schiller nods. ‘With your own kind . . . ’
Archer gazes up at Schiller not so much with reproach, but worse, with sad confirmation. If the world starts going to hell, I can’t imagine Nelson Archer telephoning LAPD for help. ‘So why did one of your colleagues finger you as the driver of Felix Hidalgo?’
‘Colleagues?’ The laugh’s a bite. ‘I can only imagine that was Huston.’
Archer’s bright. ‘Why do you say that?’
His eyes glance up at Schiller. ‘Let’s just say he doesn’t like people of “my kind” . . . ’
Schiller clears his throat. Guilty as charged.
‘Listen, Archer, I’m looking for an ambulance driver. Grey-faced, sweaty. Nasty-temper. With eyes . . . ’
‘ . . . Like you’d find in an ancient skull? That’d be Deckard.’
‘Know where he lives?’
‘As far away from me as possible . . . ’ He is about to say something, then stops.
‘What?’ He shakes his head. I nod to the TV. ‘Listen, this is about that kidnapped kid . . . ’
He hesitates. ‘Okay. I’ve heard rumours that he works for people involved in . . . Black magic. Necrophilia. Shit like that. I mentioned it to our supervisor. Next thing you know I’m being accused of taking unauthorized coffee breaks and making excessive overtime claims.’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t need sheet music to know the score.’
‘So someone’s protecting Deckard.’
He snaps his medical bag shut. ‘You said it, not me . . . ’
‘Wait a minute.’ Schiller rushes over to the television, nearly tripping over an electrical cord as he turns the sound up. Archer and I crowd around the screen. A reporter stands outside the gates of High Sierra as a hearse pulls out, followed by a Rolls-Royce. The reporter says that following the positive identification of the remains of Ronald Bannister, the only child of . . .
‘What the . . . ? That’s impossible.’ Unless Old Man Bannister has been in on the kidnapping from the very beginning . . . ‘Where’s your phone?’ Archer points to the hallway.
Schiller crowds behind me as I dial. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘Deckard is the key. I’m getting his address.’
‘But the Old Man said . . . ’
‘Fuck what the Old Man said. We can’t save the kid, but we can nail his killers. Meet me outside with a car . . . Hello, operator?’
The operator’s voice whispers in my ear—distant and séance spooky, my hand obediently scribbling letters as though controlled by a Ouija board planchette. Deckard provided the poor kid’s body. He was the flypaper that would stick this rap to Roselli. And with any luck, there’d be enough glue left over to catch the biggest bug of all.
‘Mister? Are you alright?’
I come back to reality: standing with a dead phone in my hand in a dump in El Monte. I turn from Archer down to the scrap of paper, my scrawl slowly focusing back into something I can actually read. Deckard lives at the Sea Slums. It figured. A sewer rat like him.
I pull a card out of my wallet and hand it to Archer. He turns it suspiciously, as though expecting it to sting him, then reads the name on the front. ‘James L. Tolbert, Attorney-at-Law . . . ?’ He looks up at me questioningly.
‘I didn’t mean to get you involved in any of this, but now you are, there’s nothing I can do.’
‘But I didn’t do anything . . . ’
‘Sorry, Archer, but in thi
s city that doesn’t mean shit. If you need a lawyer, call him. He’s a good man.’
Outside a squad car is waiting. Fucking Gillis is driving. Schiller sticks his head out of the passenger-seat window. ‘What did you find?’
I stumble to the car, reading the address from the paper. ‘Deckard. He lives at Windward Avenue, Venice.’
I get in the back of the squad car. Gillis avoids my eyes in the rearview mirror.
‘You figure this Deckard is dangerous?’
‘Sick is what he is . . . ’
‘Maybe we need backup?’
‘With a hero like Gillis on board, we’ll be able to handle a crumb like Deckard.’ I slap Gillis across the crown.
He shakes his head, smooths down the Brylcreem cemetery of his hair. The car surges forward angrily, Gillis taking it up into top, grinding the accelerator into the floor as though it were my face.
The streetlights flicker chaotically as they come on all around us, like an amateur band warming up, tuning the whole city for the big event: sunset. A band of gold arcs across the sky, a red harvest of emotions that will soon swell, gutter and die. Like the love in our lives. Like our lives themselves. Birth. Then Lucky Break or Unlucky Break. Then Death. It’s a simple as that: one, two, three. That’s all it takes; just three steps up to the scaffold.
CHAPTER 39
Los Angeles 1960
The address is a broken-down boardinghouse. Punks like Deckard don’t know how to be original. The criminal mind. It’s like wildlife migration or summer forest fires. A predictable force of nature. It would be so easy to snuff it out if it weren’t for another wholly foreseeable and recurrent event. The Police mind.
Cops and Robbers.
Celestial Harmony.
Like the Drinking Bird’s head and tail, the two are dependent on each other, kept apart but moving in concert, sometimes up, sometimes down; but always connected by the common interest of motion, the shared desire to maintain the status quo, and the compelling logic not of morals but of physics.
That’s why PIs get results. They’re outside this construct. They’re free radicals. They fuck up all the cosy arrangements.
I kick the door in with the first attempt, the wood flying off its hinges, Deckard sitting on his bed in his underwear, looking up from the mini maze puzzle he’s holding in his hands. He drops the toy, the glass shattering, the tiny balls hitting the floor and scattering for cover, clicking down cracks; Deckard crossing fast to where a .45 lies beside an open pot of glue. I feel the pop of his cheekbone as it cracks, then the flutter in my knuckles I always get before the simmer of bruising sets in, Deckard lying crumpled on the floor.
Schiller hoists him up and ham-hocks him in the face then drags him back up off the floor. ‘I ain’t asking but one more time.’
Deckard backs away, one eye already closed, blood sheeting out of his broken nose. ‘What’s the fucking question?’
Schiller looks at me for support. He doesn’t know what the question is either. ‘The kid that you stole for Roselli . . . ’
Deckard throws his body against the wall, hammering the back of his head on the mould-stained wallpaper. ‘I didn’t kill the kid—he was dead already.’ As if that made it okay to steal his body and chop it up. ‘You gotta believe me.’
‘Was Roselli behind the kidnapping?’
Deckard looks up at me, snot bubbling out of his bleeding nose. ‘Please . . . they’ll kill me.’
‘And you think we won’t?’ Schiller pistons him in the guts. Deckard drops to his knees. ‘Answer the question.’
Deckard’s on his hands and knees. Clinging to the floorboards, as though they were a raft in a heaving sea. He tries to speak but breaks down into sobs, muttering something. Schiller treads on one of his hands. ‘Speak up.’
Deckard painfully tugs his hand out of the mousetrap of Schiller’s fireman-size shoe. ‘Please don’t hit me. I forgot what the question was . . . ’
‘Was Roselli behind the kidnapping?’
He clutches his crushed hand as though it were a magic ticket that would get him out of this fix. Would change his destiny; turn him into someone else. Someone who didn’t rob graves for a living. A human being. ‘Roselli saw an opportunity and he took it. I mean, who wouldn’t? Can the Old Man talk? I don’t think so. He wasn’t born yesterday, no sir, not with everything lined up like that . . . ’
Question: what the fuck is he talking about?
Answer: nod to Schiller and we’ll find out.
He throws him across the room. Deckard lands on the bed and trampolines off it. The shatter of a shitty lamp, shards in Deckard’s hair.
‘What opportunity? Answer or he throws you through the fucking window.’
‘Roselli knew.’
‘Knew what, goddamn it?’
‘He knew the kid wasn’t really kidnapped. Roselli’s smart. All he needed was . . . Was . . . ’
The putter of a puny voice, silenced by its sins. All Roselli needed was a body. All Roselli needed was to threaten to expose the Old Man as a liar. Roselli was an old-school shakedown artist and his mark was the richest man in the world. But there’s still something I don’t understand and it’s fundamental: why did the Old Man lie about the body being his son’s? I pick up the glue and smash it against the wall. Deckard flinches. ‘You better clear that head of yours, because you’re not making sense. Was there ever even a kid to kidnap?’
Deckard gazes at me, tears puckering the grime on his face. ‘What?’
I can feel the big heat surging beside me as Schiller steps forward to harm. I can barely hold him back, like a jockey at the starting gate. ‘Last chance, loser, so you better answer me. Did the Bannister kid ever exist?’
Schiller turns to me, his jaw hanging in surprise at the question.
‘Sure, there’s a Bannister kid, only he ain’t kidnapped . . . ’ Deckard starts to shake, looking at the glue from the broken pot quivering on the floor, knowing he’s already said too much. ‘Please . . . Leave me alone.’
‘Can it with that Garbo stuff. Roselli knew who the real father of the Bannister kid was. So do you . . . ’
‘I don’t, honest . . . ’
Schiller picks up the bed, rams it into Deckard. It doesn’t really hurt him. But the way Schiller just picks it up. The simple ease of his strength scares the living daylights out of him.
‘Who was he?’
‘Please . . . ’
Schiller grabs Deckard and runs his head through the wall. Shrieks and shouts from the room next door. Schiller pops Deckard’s head out of the hole, like a goddamn wine cork. His ears hum red with blood. He mouths a single word: Please.
I snatch the .45 from the table. ‘Listen, you sorry piece of shit. You tell us who the father is, or I’m pulling the trigger . . . ’
Tears twist through the white plaster on his face, his blood turning him into a garish clown. ‘I’m dead if I tell you.’
‘What are you now?’ Schiller says. There is the glint of a lighter and then the whoosh of a curtain on fire. Schiller yanks it free from the window, flames twisting at arm’s length. ‘Talk or I’m shoving this down your fucking throat . . . ’
‘Howard Hughes! Please. It was Howard Hughes.’
Schiller throws the fireball on the floor, stomps the life out of it as though it were a roach.
‘The bodies. Where did you get them from?’
‘Everywhere. City Morgue, until Curphey got wise. There’s a funeral home in San Diego and one in ’Frisco. Mainly for parts, understand? And West Hollywood and Echo Park for the, well . . . Young ladies.’ He shrugs helplessly.
Schiller stares into Deckard’s dissolving face. The cuffs come out.
There’s someone at the door. Correction. At the hole where the door used to be. ‘Who’s paying for this mess?’ Schiller exhibits Deckard like a crow displaying a
broken egg. ‘Bullshit. He owes six weeks’ rent.’
‘Well, ain’t you the dumb fuck?’ Schiller shoves a passage through a crowd of hostile bystanders: junkies, hookers, johns and hustlers: the usual suspects along the polluted canals of Venice. Gillis opens the back door of the car, careful not to touch the plaster-powdered, bloody welt that passes for Deckard.
‘He rides up front.’ Schiller bellows. ‘I don’t want to let him out of my sight.’
Car doors close fast, like window shutters in front of an approaching lynch mob. Gillis pulls out recklessly, accelerating with a hot-rod hooligan shriek, almost hitting three rummies swaying across the street. He slams on the brakes, all of us lurching forward. There is the crack of Deckard’s head against the dash and the click of metal coming from under the passenger seat. I’d completely forgotten. The knives. The ammo.
My gun.
Too late.
Gillis sees it and swears.
There is an atomic flash: yellow, then white. Heat bursts as the shot erupts inside the contained coffin of the car. The thunder of Zeus.
And then the hollow patter of broken glass. The cordite cloud lifts and Schiller and I sit up slowly, our heads rising through the shimmer and the smoke, our ears ringing.
The passenger door is wide open. Deckard is gone.
Gillis is slumped against the steering wheel. Schiller jerks his body back. ‘Are you hit?’
Gillis opens his eyes, his voice at the other end of a long tunnel. ‘I don’t think so . . . ’
‘You’d know it if you were.’ Schiller follows me out of the car. ‘Trust a fucking glue head to miss at point-blank. Where’d he go?’
A woman hanging out of a second-floor window points into the canal. ‘He jumped! Right there.’
We stand on the bank of the canal, gazing into the oil-tarnished surface of the water. The last of Deckard’s bubbles burst like afterthoughts on the surface. ‘And him still cuffed!’
I head back to the car, picking up the revolver that Deckard tossed in his mad dash to escape by drowning, and then I retrieve the rest of my arsenal from under the seat, trying to ignore the sobs of Gillis.
