Delta Star

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Oliver Rigby answered: “Hello, Wonderland.”

  “It’s Sergeant Villalobos,” the detective said. “Did you call?”

  “Yeah,” Oliver Rigby whispered.

  The detective could imagine him peering around the lobby and cupping his hand over the mouthpiece. “Why didn’t you leave your name?”

  “It’s too urgent!” Oliver Rigby whispered. “Some guy came in here. He was askin about Missy! He looked like he was gonna have a heart attack and die in the lobby. He asked did she jump. He kept askin, did she jump? Or did somebody help her jump?”

  “You get his name?”

  “He wouldn’t give it,” Oliver Rigby said. “Then I told him you was workin on the case and he should call you. I wrote down your name and telephone number. Did he call?”

  “No, yours is the only call I’ve got on my desk,” Mario Villalobos said.

  “Did she jump? Did somebody help her jump? That’s what he kept sayin! I thought about grabbin him and callin the cops.”

  “What’d he look like, Oliver?”

  “Look like? Like a screamin fruit is what he looked like,” Oliver Rigby said. “He looked like a peroxided limpwrist from Santa Monica Boulevard is what he looked like. Do I get a reward if he’s the killer?”

  After getting a more detailed description of Oliver Rigby’s visitor, Mario Villalobos sat smoking at the homicide table long after most of the others had gone home. The Bad Czech didn’t hate mysteries any more than Mario Villalobos did.

  He was almost out the door when the call came. The lieutenant said, “For you, Mario.”

  The male voice was falsetto, so he figured who it was. The voice said, “Sergeant, I’ve been told that you’re investigating the death of Missy Moonbeam.”

  “That’s right,” Mario Villalobos said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I gotta know something first. Did she jump? Or was she, like … murdered?”

  “First, let me have your name and …”

  “I have some important information for you, Sergeant,” the voice lisped, rising an octave. “Extra important!”

  “Yeah, but I’d like to know who I’m talking to and …”

  “Listen to me!” the telephone voice cried. “It’s more than Missy. It’s … first, ya gotta tell me, was she murdered?”

  In that the caller was getting hysterical, the detective said, “I believe she was thrown from the roof.”

  The caller was silent for a moment and Mario Villalobos could hear him beginning to hyperventilate. Then the voice disappeared from the phone.

  “Are you there?” Mario Villalobos asked. “Are you there?”

  “I … can’t … I … can’t get my breath!” the voice said.

  “Get a paper bag,” Mario Villalobos said. “Breathe into it. Try to relax. You’re okay.”

  The telephone was put down for a few more minutes. Mario Villalobos smoked and looked at his watch. Then the voice came back and said, “I’m all right now.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “I’m real scared,” the caller said. “I think I’m the next to die!”

  “I can come and see you,” Mario Villalobos said. “Tell me where.”

  “I’m … I’m too confused!” the caller said. “I’ll call ya at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Will ya be there?”

  “I’ll be here waiting for your call,” Mario Villalobos said. “But can’t you tell me …”

  “I can tell ya one thing, Sergeant,” the caller said. “This is probably the most important case ya ever worked on. I don’t know who killed Missy Moonbeam, but I know what he was!”

  And then Mario Villalobos figured that his caller was as goofy as a waltzing mouse. As loopy as a laughing loon. As crazy as The Bad Czech. In a breathy voice full of melodrama, but also full of fear, the caller said, “Her killer was a Russian spy!” And then he hung up.

  A few hours later, Mario Villalobos was watching the Angels getting themselves beaten by the New York Yankees. Mario Villalobos could sometimes get a complimentary ticket at Dodger Stadium because he moonlighted doing stadium security. But tonight the Dodgers were on the road, so he drove to Angel Stadium and paid.

  He ate hot dogs and ice cream and drank beer and didn’t give much of a thought to Missy Moonbeam or Lester Beemer, because with that call it had gotten out of control. Even before having grown as tired as dust, Mario Villalobos had been a logical, methodical, if sometimes compulsive investigator. And Russian spies spelled fruitcake, and fruitcake investigations produced nothing but more fruitcake.

  Maybe he should turn this one over to the shoulder holster kids. He thought about announcing it tomorrow: “Chip, Melody, I’ve got a case for you to work in your spare time. It involves a murder by a spy. The Russians are coming!”

  He would have laughed except that Goose Gossage was just brought in to fire tracers at the Angel hitters, and that wasn’t funny.

  Δ Δ Δ

  As usual, the ventilating was started by The Bad Czech who sat at the bar very nervously. The television news team had promised him that his interview segment would be on the five o’clock news. It wasn’t.

  Leery switched off the TV when The Bad Czech called the station and was told that extra coverage of the Middle East had preempted him.

  “Sure,” The Bad Czech complained to the losers at Leery’s. “Mideast war. Arabs and Jews been killin each other since Christine Jorgensen had nuts. But how many times you seen an interview of a policeman that tried to save the life of a scum-suckin piece a slime like Earl Rimms? There ain’t that many cops around with kindness in their hearts. Goddamnit, I better be on the eleven o’clock news or I’ll firebomb that fuckin TV station!”

  “Settle, Czech, settle,” Jane Wayne said, standing behind the monster cop, tugging on his eyebrows.

  “Well, whaddaya expect?” The Bad Czech said, picking up his newspaper. “Nobody cares about real news anyways. Listen to this. It says here that the no-nuke demonstration attracted the usual locals. There was the National Association a Social Workers. There was the Lesbian and Gay Democratic Club. I wonder why they have to stick ‘Democratic’ in there? It goes without sayin. There was the revolutionary Communist Party. The ACLU. The Catholic Workers. The Radical Fairies to Heal the Earth. There was women dressed in nuns’ clothes with skeleton faces. There was paper helicopters piloted by Ronald Reagan dolls. And get this: about thirteen pages later there’s a tiny article about a family a six gettin slaughtered out near Riverside. Kin ya dig it? Mass murder is about as important as the classified ads. Nobody kin tell the Hillside Strangler from the Freeway Killer without a program. A no-nuke march gets the press. So who cares about a cop doin a humane act, for chrissake!”

  “Settle, Czech, settle,” Jane Wayne said to the street monster, who was starting to froth like Ludwig. He was making everyone extremely nervous. The Bad Czech’s face was scratched and bruised from the foot pursuit and his demented eyes were pinwheeling tonight.

  “The Bad Czech looks like he’s been chasing parked cars,” Dolly whispered.

  “The Bad Czech looks like he’s been blocking punts,” Dilford whispered.

  “How da ya like my new political poster, Czech?” Leery asked, trying to change the subject and console the rabid beat cop. Up on the wall was a homemade sign which said JERRY BROWN USES VASELINE. GORE VIDAL USES POLYGRIP. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE IS AGE. VOTE STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN.

  “I better be on the eleven o’clock news, that’s all I gotta say.” The Bad Czech was too cranky to be diverted by politics.

  “At eleven o’clock I’ll only be sixty-one minutes from my pension!” Rumpled Ronald announced. “It looks like I might make it! Except that my heart’s starting to skip beats. Wouldn’t that be one for the book? Heart attack at five minutes to twelve? Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “The Czech’s about as cranky as the bus driver we busted today,” Dilford said to Cecil Higgins. “He beat the crap outa this sixty-three-year-old blind man who started bitching
at the driver for missing his bus stop. Driver didn’t have an excuse except he was tired of unsatisfied customers.”

  “L.A. wasn’t always like this,” Cecil Higgins felt obliged to tell the younger cops.

  “The world wasn’t always like this,” Rumpled Ronald said, taking his pulse. “I just wanna get outa this world alive!”

  Things suddenly became subdued at The House of Misery. A group of ten civilians came roaring in and took over the dance floor. There were six young men and four young women, members of an insurance adjustors’ softball league. They had some weeks earlier found Leery’s Saloon after a game at Dodger Stadium and now came in from time to time after softball games.

  They had been drinking beer and eating Cracker Jacks and were all wearing their team shirts and baseball hats. They put ten quarters in the jukebox and started some play-punk dancing to the Circle Jerks. They were genuinely having such good clean fun that the cops, who usually evinced only about as much paranoia and xenophobia as the Kremlin, were plunged into utter depression and started drinking with a vengeance.

  Rumpled Ronald even forgot to count the minutes, so despondent was he after watching the young people. “Can you remember when you could have fun like that?” he asked Cecil Higgins, who just stared into the bottom of his glass.

  “I can’t remember back that far,” Cecil Higgins said.

  “It’s really something to see … regular people having fun,” Dilford said wistfully, as one pretty young woman jumped up on a chair and started dancing soft rock while the others whistled and cheered.

  Even The Bad Czech was captured by the sight of the young people dancing and singing and offering to buy beer for the clutch of jaded strangers who had moved to one end of the barroom and were watching them with eyes full of suspicion.

  Jane Wayne said, “It seems like a lifetime ago that I could feel like that. They don’t know how … it really is.”

  “How what is?” Dolly asked.

  “All of it,” Jane Wayne said. “They don’t know about … paws in petunias and other things.”

  “I used to be like that girl,” Dolly said to Dilford, never taking her eyes from the carefree blonde dancing on the chair in her team shirt with her baseball hat turned around backward. “I sometimes think I’d like to try to be like that again. I date civilians but it just never works out when they learn about me. They get intimidated by a girl that carries a gun. Emasculated, I guess. They know we see things. That we’re … different.”

  “I stopped being a girl more than a year ago,” Jane Wayne said, still watching the pretty girl dancing.

  “Me too,” Dolly said. “I’m a cop now. And that’s all.”

  They turned away from the pretty girl and went back to their drinks, nostalgia dissolved. They hardly noticed when the young softball players finished their beers and waved cheerful goodbyes to Leery and breezed out the door singing, “We are the champions.”

  “They just don’t know,” Jane Wayne said. “Another Scotch, Leery. A double.”

  “They’re children,” Dolly said. “Another bourbon, Leery. A double.”

  They didn’t envy the young people. The moment had passed. Jane Wayne turned a cynical smile to Dolly’s cynical smile and they gave each other a nod of understanding. And drank. They were both twenty-three years old.

  With the civilians gone, the cops spread out to their usual places at the long bar and resumed what they did best at this time of night: bitching.

  “I hear some detective from West L.A. smoked it,” Cecil Higgins announced, and that quieted even The Bad Czech.

  “Another victim of U.C.A.,” Dilford said, which is how he referred to the Ultimate Cop Affliction.

  “Right in the mouth as usual,” Cecil Higgins sighed.

  “Change the subject,” Dolly said. “It’s one thing to have to wear that thirty-eight-caliber crucifix, without worrying about eating it.”

  “Whatcha gonna do with that pension, Ronald?” Leery asked, halfheartedly wiping a beer mug which he’d halfheartedly washed.

  “Do with it? I ain’t doing nothing with it. You think I can afford to retire and live on forty percent a my salary?”

  “Well why all the worry about living till midnight?” Leery wanted to know.

  “Jesus Christ, Leery!” Rumpled Ronald said. “Because I got it then. No matter what. If I ended up in prison some day, it don’t matter. It’s mine. They’d have to send my monthly pension checks to San Quentin.”

  “Any cop goes to San Quentin, it don’t matter he’s gettin a pension or not,” Cecil Higgins said, looking at The Bad Czech. “You’d be the richest con in the joint but your asshole’d still be big enough to accommodate four monkeys on mopeds and the Soap Box Derby.”

  “I don’t care,” Rumpled Ronald said, scratching his rumpled belly, rubbing his rumpled face, which was starting to get numb from the booze. “I just wanna own myself. If my old lady kicks me out, I won’t have to get an old wino dog and some newspapers for blankets and settle down on skid row. At least I won’t have to do that.”

  “My ex-wife threw me right out in the street,” Dilford cried out suddenly, and the others noticed that he was pretty bombed and feeling extra sorry for himself.

  “And after you did the manly thing,” Dolly said sarcastically. “Got her replumbed instead of facing the knife yourself.”

  “I got a vasectomy. You know I did!” Dilford said boozily.

  “Sure, after you were single again,” Dolly said, more sarcastically. “So you wouldn’t knock up some groupie.”

  “Go ahead, stick up for a woman you don’t even know,” Dilford said. “Never mind sticking up for your partner. She threw me right in the street, my ex-wife did. Right in the street!”

  “Was that the time you was gone on a three-day binge with that typist from the police commission?” Cecil Higgins wanted to know. “They say you banged that little homewrecker right on Leery’s pool table, Dilford.”

  “I’d still like to know what happened to my cue ball,” Leery said, considering the possibility.

  “And after you got that pansy nurse at the hospital to bandage your head and give you a room and pose as a doctor, and tell your wife you’d been in a traffic accident and had amnesia. You went to lots a trouble for your wife, Dilford,” Rumpled Ronald said sympathetically, starting to get numb in the fingers.

  “I even had to wreck in the side a my pickup truck to make it look good,” Dilford whined. “That truck’s had three face-lifts! And still she kicked me out! The heartless bitch. They’re all heartless bitches!”

  “My first wife was always kickin me out,” Cecil Higgins said. “She had a habit a throwin my clothes out in the driveway. I wore out more clothes by runnin over them than I ever did wearin them. Least she wasn’t ugly like the one I’m married to now. And this one’s into pain. Mine.”

  It was ten-thirty when Hans and Ludwig came in, without a single groupie from Chinatown. Hans was morosely drunk. Ludwig was apparently sober, but did not get up on the bar.

  “Ludwig understands that Gertie’s dead,” Hans said, in his lachrymose singsong voice.

  “Bullshit,” The Bad Czech said, as they watched Ludwig lumber over to the three-coffin dance floor and lie down.

  “See that?” Hans said. “He didn’t even get up on the pool table. When he saw Gertie laying dead he understood perfectly. I can’t cheer him up.”

  “That’s crazy,” The Bad Czech said. “Dogs ain’t got brains like that.”

  “He wouldn’t have a single beer tonight,” Hans said. “I tell you he knows. He saw Gertie all busted up and covered with blood and he knows his pal’s gone for good.”

  “I don’t doubt nothin no more,” Cecil Higgins said. “You tell me Ludwig knows, I believe it. You tell me Ludwig wants a stress pension, I believe it. I don’t know what’s real and what ain’t real no more.”

  “It makes me sad to see Ludwig sleeping on the floor,” Jane Wayne said. “Make him get on the pool table, Hans.”


  “Might as well,” Leery shrugged. “Many jizz stains as there are now, a few more ain’t gonna hurt nothing. Maybe I oughtta just pour a bowl full a beer for Ludwig,” Leery mused. He thought it over and said, “Naw, if he is able to think about Gertie, it wouldn’t be good for his head.”

  “What a relief!” Cecil Higgins cried. “For a second I thought you was gonna give away a free drink, Leery! I thought for a second I really had lost my mind!”

  The eleven o’clock news came and went. The Bad Czech couldn’t believe it. They had not used his interview segment.

  When Mario Villalobos showed up at 11:30 for a nightcap, a terrified drunk who had roamed into the bar three minutes earlier was running out onto Sunset Boulevard, hysterical.

  “Don’t go in that place, mister!” he warned Mario Villalobos. “There’s a giant madman throwing beer glasses at the television set! And a woman in a black fur coat looks like she’s dead on the pool table!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MARIO VILLALOBOS thought it advisable not to tell his colleagues in the squadroom that the Russians were coming. At least not until he’d heard from his breathless caller at ten o’clock. That is, if he did call, and if the fruitcake caller had some information about Missy Moonbeam, and if he was able to keep his head clear enough of Russian spies to talk coherently. Fruitcake and caviar. It was a first for Mario Villalobos, since foreign agents usually didn’t find Hollywood street whores of strategic interest. Nevertheless he was awaiting the call, proving that even homicide detectives are not immune to soap opera.

  Meanwhile, Rumpled Ronald had been awarded a gold watch at roll call for having successfully completed twenty years’ police service. The watch was made of chocolate candy, wrapped in foil. Rumpled Ronald told Jane Wayne that she could stop painting the no-bite medicine on his fingernails because he didn’t think he’d be biting them anymore. Rumpled Ronald stood and took a bow and ate the gold watch and made a little speech which indicated that his pension made him more or less immortal, and that nothing could hurt him now.