Delta Star

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Bartholomew made a good Cuban outa him before he had a chance to get dusted out,” Leech answered.

  “Garbage. All garbage,” Stanley said.

  The Gooned-out Vice Cop continued to smile until the hyper hot dogs got tired asking and answering their questions. He shook his head when they tried to buy him a drink, and they returned to their nine-ball game.

  Except that Ludwig had established his idea of eminent domain and was lying on the pool table with his head on the rail, slobbering all over the felt by the corner pocket.

  “Hey! Get that fucking dog off the table!” Stanley said to Hans, who was moving on his groupie, worrying about doing it without shellac, and feeling generally grumpy from listening to the two hot dogs babble.

  “You get him off,” Hans said.

  “Get the fuck off that table, asshole!” Leech said to Ludwig, and banged on the table with his cue stick.

  This time Ludwig did not come up with a roar. He barely raised his head. But despite stories about animals avoiding eye contact, this animal looked directly into the eyes of the young hot dog. Ludwig’s goatlike eyes were amber yellow and the whites were red-webbed from the smoke in the saloon and the beer he’d consumed. It did not become a roar, nor was it interrupted by breathing. It was a primordial growl, from the neighborhood of the La Brea tar pits where saber-toothed tigers lay interred. And except for Leery, Hans and The Gooned-out Vice Cop, every human being in that bar reached slowly toward a gun.

  Leech never broke eye contact when he put his cue stick against the wall, very carefully. He didn’t break eye contact when he ever so slowly backed out of the pool table area into the main barroom. He didn’t even break eye contact when he paid Leery and said, “Come on, Stanley. If they’re gonna permit animals in this place, we’ll just drink somewhere else.”

  “Don’t be hasty, boys!” Leery yelled anxiously as the hyper hot dogs scooted toward the door. “Come back! You can drink down at the other end of the bar!” Then he turned to the K-9 cop and said, “Goddamnit, Hans, Ludwig’s gonna ruin my business yet! Get that freaking dog off the pool table!”

  But Hans, who was half bagged, just giggled and drank his beer and whispered something lewd into his groupie’s ear.

  Then for the first time, The Gooned-out Vice Cop uttered an unsolicited comment. He said, “Here’s a syllogism: people are nothing more than garbage. I’m a person. What am I, finally?”

  The Gooned-out Vice Cop looked around the bar and no one could answer for a moment.

  The Bad Czech spoke first. He said to The Gooned-out Vice Cop: “Them two bigmouthed hot dogs gimme a pain in the ass. Maybe you’d like to get acquainted with us here?”

  The Gooned-out Vice Cop said, “What if once you got real scared. You ever do a job every day and suddenly one day you get scared? For no reason?”

  “I can understand that,” Mario Villalobos said to The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

  “Did you ever see a kid get shot in the face?” The Gooned-out Vice Cop asked.

  Cecil Higgins said, “A sixteen-year-old jumps out in the dark with a knife? I mean nobody can blame …”

  “What if he didn’t have a knife?” The Gooned-out Vice Cop asked. “What if someone panicked? What if someone then planted some dust and a throw away knife to cover it? Have you ever been absolutely positive your heart was going to bang a hole in itself and bleed all over the inside of your belly? Have you ever been that scared?”

  But it was too late for anyone to formulate answers. The Gooned-out Vice Cop took one last look at his image in the broken glitter of glass. At his mirror image in black shadow and ghastly neon green. Then he was off the stool moving on a vice cop’s cat feet toward the door.

  He turned for an instant and smiled serenely at them, with eyes like bullet holes.

  “Hey! He didn’t pay for his drink!” Leery said. “Hey!”

  “I’ll pay for his freaking drink!” The Bad Czech said, and that made Leery quiet down and go back to leering happily at the amount he’d taken in so far.

  Then the cops began talking about The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

  “I was sorta scared of him before,” Dilford confessed.

  “I sorta thought he looked like me sometimes,” Hans confessed.

  “I had eyes like that when we found the paws in the petunias,” Jane Wayne confessed.

  “I thought he might not be real,” The Bad Czech confessed.

  “I thought he might be a devil,” Rumpled Ronald confessed.

  “If he was a devil, he wouldn’t be here,” Cecil Higgins said into the bottom of his glass. “This place ain’t got enough class to be hell. Purgatory, maybe.”

  “Well, he’s not so spooky anymore,” Mario Villalobos said, feeling an overwhelming desire to survive. “Next time he comes in, somebody should buy him a drink and talk to him.”

  And with that, Mario Villalobos picked up his bar change and got off the stool. Everyone was utterly dumbfounded. Mario Villalobos hadn’t even touched his drink!

  “You ain’t leaving, Mario?” Leery cried.

  “Catch you later,” Mario Villalobos said.

  “It’s the shank of the night!” Leery cried.

  “Was it something I said?” Dilford wondered, remembering The Madonna of the Wogs. “I seem to alienate people.”

  “Have to see someone,” Mario Villalobos explained.

  As he was going out the door he could hear Leery screaming, “It’s your fault, Hans! You and that goddamn dog! He scares off all my customers!”

  Δ Δ Δ

  Later that evening Lupe Luna opened the door and gasped in shock when she saw the detective’s battered and swollen face.

  “Don’t make me explain it,” he said. “Just a little police problem.”

  “Maybe you should go into some other line of work,” Lupe Luna said, admitting the detective into a feminine and cozy three-bedroom house in South Pasadena.

  “I can’t. I don’t know anything else and I don’t know any better.”

  “When you called it was like you were reading my thoughts,” she said. “When my daughter went to spend the weekend with her dad, I started thinking about calling you.”

  “Got a record player?” Mario Villalobos asked.

  “Sure. Why?”

  Mario Villalobos opened the paper bag he was carrying. In it was a bouquet of white carnations, a bottle of good California Zinfandel, and a record album he’d brought from home.

  “Moldy oldies,” he said, putting the record on the turntable.

  Lupe Luna picked up the album and said, “Oh, Mario! ‘Stardust’? Is this what you listen to?”

  “I just came from a bunch of confessors,” he said. “I may as well confess too. That’s what I listen to. I’m from another time and I’m going to hell in a hurry. I love your new sporty haircut. You’re a knockout, kid.”

  “You look like you’ve been knocked out enough lately,” she said, as the Hoagy Carmichael classic melted out of the dual speakers.

  “Wanna dance?” Mario Villalobos asked.

  “Oh, Mario,” she said, shaking her head incredulously.

  But she moved into his arms and put her head on his chest and they danced in the living room of the little house. She said, “You’re the most peculiar guy I’ve met in quite a while.”

  “If only I could find some Stardust. Just once. Maybe I could go for it,” he said.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “If only I could be like an electron gone mad. Just for a moment.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe the excited state of delta to delta-star.”

  They were barely moving, only swaying when she kissed him, slant-eyed, heavy-lashed, smoldering, her glistening overbite white in the glow from the lamp.

  “Come on,” she said, taking his hand and leading him through a hallway to her bedroom.

  “I didn’t come here for this, believe it or not,” he said, feeling a sudden drumm
ing in his blood. “I only wanted to dance to ‘Stardust.’”

  “I don’t care why you came here,” she said, pulling his jacket off his shoulders. “Since meeting you I’ve been in my own excited state.” Then she said, “Get in that bed, Mexican.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE DETECTIVE didn’t get back to his apartment until 4:00 A.M. Lupe Luna couldn’t persuade him to stay the night. He didn’t know why he had to spend the rest of the dark hours alone, but he had to. A feeling was coming over him. It thrilled and frightened him. He was light-headed, unsure of whether he might faint, vomit or have a coronary.

  Something was generating a kind of energy. His neurons were being bombarded with sensations. He lay in the dark, neither awake nor asleep. He watched sparkling images on his eyelids: Lupe Luna. Black matted lashes. Nipples like berries in buttercup. Then in whiter light like pale cherries in alabaster.

  He opened his eyes to watch the black sky through his bedroom window. A dark star showed faintly through the smog. He closed his eyes for seconds or days. When he opened them the star had flared to life! It was spinning in the blackness like an electron gone mad. The star as huge as the sun powered upward in stellar fire. An instant of cosmic excitement!

  Then, rising silence. Silver starlight and rain. Cumulus as white as lace. Moonset.

  At 5:30 A.M. in a river of sweat he came up out of bed like Ludwig off the pool table. If he could have managed the Rottweiler’s roar, he might have. At 5:35 A.M. Ignacio Mendoza was cursing into his telephone in Spanish.

  Mario Villalobos, his eyes bulging and pulsating, said, “Please, Professor, try to understand that I wouldn’t wake you if it wasn’t urgent! Now let me repeat the question: Who’s the Soviet chemist most likely to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize?”

  “Estúpido!” Ignacio Mendoza thundered, causing the detective to hold the phone a foot from his ear. “I told you that the best work ees done een America! With some een West Germany and Britain! Not Russia! You wake me for a Meeckey Mouse cop question?”

  “Please don’t hang up, Professor!” Mario Villalobos pleaded. “I think I’ve been into the excited state of delta to delta-star.”

  Ignacio Mendoza quieted down and after a few seconds said, “Anatoly Rozlov. He works een Dubna, the Soviet version of Los Alamos. He would be the only possibility, but eet ees so remote that …”

  “In what area has he done the most notable work?” Mario Villalobos asked.

  “Organometallic diradical chemistry, to be sure,” the Peruvian answered. “Specifically, een studying diradical species as catalytic intermediates. The importance ees een the development of cheap synthetic fuels.”

  “Okay, now give me the name of the Caltech scientist who has done the most notable work in exactly the same area of diradical chemistry. I’m referring to a man who’s made similar discoveries, if not identical discoveries.”

  “Noah Fisher,” Ignacio Mendoza said immediately.

  “Is he a candidate for the prize?”

  “You don’t understand, Sergeant!” the chemist cried in exasperation. “Chemistry ees not the kind of science where a piece of work has instantly recognizable and far-reaching implications! We don’t make fundamental discoveries as een physics or biology. Eet’s the body of a man’s work, a package of science. I believe that the work of Noah Fisher needs at least five more years to …”

  “But his achievements pretty well mirror the best work of Anatoly Rozlov?”

  “They have done a lot of separate but identical work.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Mendoza,” Mario Villalobos said. “I’ll stay in touch.”

  The detective’s hands were shaking when he whipped the eggs into the orange juice. He almost gagged it back up when it splashed into his empty fluttering stomach, but he concentrated on holding it down.

  He showered, shaved, and dressed just as he would for duty, except that he wore his best suit and a new necktie. He dropped the keys trying to unlock the door to his BMW and had to pause for a moment to get his nerves quieted. He drove straight to the Hollywood Freeway and fairly raced around the ramp to the Pasadena Freeway north.

  It was 8:00 A.M. before the detective was able to locate the home of Noah Fisher in northwest Pasadena. It was a very nice house on a very nice street lined with flowering trees which shed white and purple blossoms from curb to curb. The woman who answered the door was about the detective’s age.

  Mario Villalobos decided not to identify himself. He said, “May I speak to Dr. Fisher?”

  “He’s not here. I’m Mrs. Fisher. Can I help you?”

  “I’m a friend of Lester Beemer’s,” the detective said. “And I was told that he left some property of mine with Dr. Fisher.”

  “Lester Beemer? I don’t think I know him,” she said.

  “He passed away,” Mario Villalobos said. “Lester? Did your husband know a man named Lester?”

  “Lester?” she said. “Is that the Lester he played golf with at Altadena Country Club?”

  “Might’ve been,” Mario Villalobos said. “A few months ago?”

  “He called for golf dates. He died?”

  “Yes, and as a matter of fact he left a pair of golf shoes in your husband’s car. They belong to me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. It must be an oversight. I wonder if Noah knows the man died?”

  “I think he knows,” Mario Villalobos said. “Is he in his laboratory this morning?”

  “He’s at the track,” she said. “He likes to lift weights and jog at the Caltech track.”

  Mario Villalobos sat anxiously in the second row of bleachers on the south side of the quarter-mile dirt track. The San Gabriels loomed to the north and were still snow-capped despite the heat in the valley. He would have taken his suit coat off were it not for the gun and handcuffs. He watched four sweating men making labored trips around the track. One appeared to be eighty years old and shuffled on legs veiny and bowed. But still he shuffled, and did not stop until he’d covered a mile.

  There were three other men lifting free weights to the north of the track near the university swimming pool, but they were young men. Two women suddenly appeared from the direction of the basketball courts and started to jog slowly around the track. They turned to wave to a man some distance behind. They encouraged him to hurry. He feigned exhaustion and pretended to stagger with his tongue hanging out, and the women laughed and waited.

  He was about six feet tall and in excellent condition. He wore a gray sweat shirt cut off at his bruising shoulders and was very bald with only a black fringe around the ears. His legs were hairless and well developed, with the large calves of a tennis player. He didn’t notice Mario Villalobos in the bleachers on his first pass around the track.

  The detective guessed him to be in his early fifties, and also guessed that he was very lucky that the scientist hadn’t had a better chance to overpower an out-of-shape detective and stick that syringe full of sodium cyanide right where he lived. The detective could see that the man intended to continue jogging with the two women in warm-up suits. On his second pass by the bleachers, the detective clearly saw the abrasions on his left fist, and he yelled, “Hey, Dr. Fisher! I’m Lester Beemer’s friend!”

  The two women smiled up at Mario Villalobos and both looked to Noah Fisher for a response. He slowed his jogging pace and stared up at the detective in consummate disbelief.

  The detective smiled grimly and sat back down.

  On Noah Fisher’s next pass around the track, his breathing was far more labored than it should have been. He waved the women on, and stopped. He held his hands on his hips and looked up at the man in the bleachers as though it were a dream. Then he began jogging again, his face dead-white when he passed those bleachers alone.

  “I want to talk to you about my friend Missy Moonbeam!” Mario Villalobos said.

  Noah Fisher could only gape at the man in the bleachers as though he were dumbstruck. Then he resumed jogging as before. He quickened his pace. He began sprinti
ng, as if he could outrun this specter in the bleacher seats. He passed everyone on the track.

  When he got to the opposite side of the track he stopped and held his hands on his knees until he got his breath. Then he stared across the track at the man in the bleachers. He turned and began walking to the gymnasium locker room. When he got near the door he turned again.

  Mario Villalobos was standing. He’d moved down to the front row of bleacher seats. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “I’ll call you at home!”

  Noah Fisher turned and entered the locker room without ever uttering a word.

  The detective called the residence of Professor Noah Fisher twice that Sunday afternoon. Each time, the chemist’s worried wife informed Mario Villalobos that her husband had not returned from his workout and that she was concerned.

  He made another visit to Millikan Library, found the same student on weekend duty, and spent hours reading journals, magazines and newspapers, for biographical data. He learned that Anatoly Rozlov was seventy-seven years old, suffering from a serious undisclosed illness. He learned from a newspaper story that Noah Fisher had three handsome sons, and a mentally gifted daughter at the University of California at Berkeley. And of course he read more on the Nobel Prize.

  At dusk Mario Villalobos was wandering around the nearly deserted Caltech campus. He saw that there were some chemists coming and going from one of the laboratory buildings, where Ignacio Mendoza had his office. Mario Villalobos was considering another call to Noah Fisher, but instead walked impulsively into the building when he saw that they had left the door unlocked.

  He strolled through the halls and heard voices from one of the chemistry labs where half a dozen young men and women were laughing and working alongside an older man who seemed to be in charge of the research group. He continued unhurriedly down the deserted corridor and found himself near the lecture hall where Ignacio Mendoza had first told him about delta to delta-star.

  The detective entered the darkened lecture hall and lit a match until he found the light switches. He turned on the light over the lecture platform, and sat in the upper tier of seats looking down at the lighted stage below him. He sat like this for fifteen minutes. Then he got up and walked down to the lighted platform and found the switch under the chalkboard tray. The green chalkboards, which rose twenty feet up the wall, were set into motion and reversed their positions. The detective played with the switch for a moment and watched the giant chalkboards rise and descend on the metal slides.