The Best American Noir of the Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Which, of course, he didn’t. According to Mo, Gretch told him Voyteck Kirnipaski had given her a list of financial-district sharks who might be interested in her Hughes Enterprises graphs: when to buy and sell shares in Toolco, Hughes Aircraft, and its myriad subsidiaries — based on her new knowledge of upcoming defense contracts and her assessment of probable stock price fluctuations. Mo stressed that was why Gretchy raped the Bullocks catalog — she wanted to look like a businesswoman, not a seductress/killer.

  So we slow-lane trawled downtown, circuiting the Spring Street financial district, hoping to catch a streetside glimpse of Gretchen Rae as she made her office calls. I’d won Mo partially over with kind words and a promise to plant Janet in a ritzy West L.A. pet cemetery, but I could still tell he didn’t trust me — I was too close to Mickey for too long. He gave me a steady sidelong fisheye and only acknowledged my attempts at conversation with grunts.

  The morning came and went; the afternoon followed. Mo had no leads on Gretchen Rae’s home calls, so we kept circling Spring Street — Third to Sixth and back again — over and over, taking piss stops at the Pig & Whistle on Fourth and Broadway every two hours. Dusk came on, and I started getting scared: my Other Guy Routine would work to perfection only if I brought Gretchy to Sid Weinberg’s party right on time.

  6:00.

  6:30.

  7:00.

  7:09. I was turning the corner onto Sixth Street when Mo grabbed my arm and pointed out the window at a sharkskin-clad secretary type perusing papers by the newsstand. “There. That’s my baby.”

  I pulled over; Mo stuck his head out the door and waved, then shouted, “No! Gretchen!”

  I was setting the hand brake when I saw the girl — Gretch with her hair in a bun — notice a man on the street and start running. Mo piled out of the car and headed toward the guy; he pulled a monster hand-cannon, aimed, and fired twice. Mo fell dead on the sidewalk, half his face blown off; the man pursued Gretchen Rae; I pursued him.

  The girl ran inside an office building, the gunman close behind. I caught up, peered in, and saw him at the top of the second-floor landing. I slammed the door and stepped back; the act coaxed two wasted shots out of the killer, glass and wood exploding all around me. Four rounds gone, two to go.

  Screams on the street; two sets of footsteps scurrying upstairs; sirens in the distance. I ran to the landing and shouted, “Police!” The word drew two ricocheting bang-bangs. I hauled my fat ass up to floor 3 like a flabby dervish.

  The gunman was fumbling with a pocketful of loose shells; he saw me just as he flicked his pieces cylinder open. I was within three stairs of him. Not having time to load and fire, he kicked. I grabbed his ankle and pulled him down the stairs; we fell together in a tangle of arms and legs, hitting the landing next to an open window.

  We swung at each other, two octopuses, blows and gouges that never really connected. Finally he got a chokehold on my neck; I reached up through his arms and jammed my thumbs hard in his eyes. The bastard let go just long enough for me to knee his balls, squirm away, and grab him by the scalp. Blinded now, he flailed for me. I yanked him out the window head first, pushing his feet after him. He hit the pavement spread-eagled, and even from three stories up I could hear his skull crack like a giant eggshell.

  I got some more breath, hauled up to the roof, and pushed the door open. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was sitting on a roll of tarpaper, smoking a cigarette, two long single tears rolling down her cheeks. She said, “Did you come to take me back to Milwaukee?”

  All I could think of to say was “No.”

  Gretchen reached behind the tarpaper and picked up a briefcase — brand-new, Bullocks Wilshire quality. The sirens downstairs were dying out; two bodies gave lots of cops lots to do. I said, “Mickey or Howard, Miss Shoftel? You got a choice.”

  Gretch stubbed out her cigarette. “They both stink.” She hooked a thumb over the roof in the direction of the dead gunman. “I’ll take my chances with Jerry Katzenbach and his friends. Daddy went down tough. So will I.”

  I said, “You’re not that stupid.”

  Gretchen Rae said, “You play the market?”

  I said, “Want to meet a nice rich man who needs a friend?”

  Gretchen Rae pointed to a ladder that connected the roof to the fire escape of the adjoining building. “If it’s now, I’ll take it.”

  ~ * ~

  In the cab to Beverly Hills I filled Gretchy in on the play, promising all kinds of bonuses I couldn’t deliver, like the Morris Hornbeck Scholarship for impoverished Marquette University Business School students. Pulling up to Sid Weinberg’s Tudor mansion, the girl had her hair down, makeup on, and was ready to do the save-my-ass tango.

  At 8:03 the manse was lit up like a Christmas tree — extras in green rubber monster costumes handing out drinks on the front lawn and loudspeakers on the roof blasting the love theme from a previous Weinberg tuna, Attack of the Atomic Gargoyles. Mickey and Howard always arrived at parties late in order not to appear too eager, so I figured there was time to set things up.

  I led Gretchen Rae inside, into an incredible scene: Hollywood’s great, near-great, and non-great boogie-woogieing with scads of chorus boys and chorus girls dressed like surf monsters, atomic gargoyles, and giant rodents from Mars; bartenders sucking punch out of punchbowls with ray-gun-like siphons; tables of cold cuts dyed surf-monster green — passed up by the guests en masse in favor of good old booze — the line for which stood twenty deep. Beautiful gash was abounding, but Gretchen Rae, hair down like Sid Weinberg’s old love Glenda Jensen, was getting the lion’s share of the wolf stares. I stood with her by the open front door, and when Howard Hughes’s limousine pulled up, I whispered, “Now.”

  Gretchen slinked back to Sid Weinberg’s glass-fronted private office in slow, slow motion; Howard, tall and handsome in a tailored tux, walked in the door, nodding to me, his loyal underling. I said, “Good evening, Mr. Hughes” out loud; under my breath, “You owe me a grand.”

  I pointed to Sid’s office; Howard followed. We got there just as Gretchen Rae Shoftel/Glenda Jensen and Sid Weinberg went into a big open-mouthed clinch. I said, “I’ll lean on Sid, boss. Kosher is kosher. He’ll listen to reason. Trust me.”

  Inside of six seconds I saw the fourth-richest man in America go from heartsick puppy dog to hard-case robber baron and back at least a dozen times. Finally he jammed his hands in his pockets, fished out a wad of C-notes, and handed them to me. He said, “Find me another one just like her,” and walked back to his limo.

  I worked the door for the next few hours, chasing crashers and autograph hounds away, watching Gretchen/Glenda and Sid Weinberg work the crowd, instant velvet for the girl, youth recaptured for the sad old man. Gretchy laughed, and I could tell she did it to hold back tears; when she squeezed Sid’s hand I knew she didn’t know who it belonged to. I kept wishing I could be there when her tears broke for real, when she became a real little girl for a while, before going back to being a stock maven and a whore. Mickey showed up just as the movie was starting. Davey Goldman told me he was pissed: Mo Hornbeck got himself bumped off by a Kraut trigger from Milwaukee who later nosedived out a window; the Mariposa Street hideout had been burglarized, and Lavonne Cohen was back from Israel three days early and henpecking the shit out of the Mick. I barely heard the words. Gretchy and Sid were cooing at each other by the cold cuts table — and Mickey was headed straight toward them.

  I couldn’t hear their words, but I could read the three faces. Mickey was taken aback, but paid gracious respect to his beaming host; Gretch was twitching with the aftershocks of her old man’s death. L.A.’s number one hoodlum bowed away, walked up to me, and flicked my necktie in my face. “All you get is a grand, you hump. You shoulda found her quicker.”

  ~ * ~

  So it worked out. Nobody made me for snuffing the Milwaukee shooter; Gretchy walked on the Steinkamp killing and her complicity in Voyteck Kirnipaski’s demise — the chemical-sizzled stiffs, of course, were never
discovered. Mo Hornbeck got a plot at Mount Sinai Cemetery, and Davey Goldman and I stuffed Janet into the casket with him at the mortuary— I gave the rabbi a hot tip on the trotters, and he left the room to call his bookie. I paid off Leotis Dineen and promptly went back into hock with him; Mickey took up with a stripper named Audrey Anders; Howard made a bundle off airplane parts for the Korean War and cavorted with the dozen or so Gretchen Rae Shoftel look-alikes I found him. Gretchy and Sid Weinberg fell in love, which just about broke the poor pilot-mogul’s heart.

  Gretchen Rae and Sid.

  She did her light dusting —and must have thrown him a lot on the side. She also became Sid’s personal investment banker, and made him a giant bundle, of which she took a substantial percentage cut, invested it in slum property, and watched it grow, grow, grow. Slumlord Gretch also starred in the only Sid Weinberg vehicle ever to lose money, a tear-jerker called Glenda about a movie producer who falls in love with a starlet who disappears off the face of the earth. The critical consensus was that Gretchen Rae Shoftel was a lousy actress, but had great lungs. Howard Hughes was rumored to have seen the movie over a hundred times.

  In 1950 I got involved in a grand jury investigation that went bad in an enormous way, and I ended up taking it on the road permanently, Mr. Anonymous in a thousand small towns. Mickey Cohen did a couple of fed jolts for income tax evasion, got paroled as an old man, and settled back into L.A. as a much-appreciated local character, a reminder of the colorful old days. Howard Hughes ultimately went squirrelshit with drugs and religion, and a biography that I read said that he carried a torch for a blond whore straight off into the deep end. He’d spend hours at the Bel Air Hotel looking at her picture, playing a torchy rendition of “Since I Don’t Have You” over and over. I know better: it was probably scads of different pictures, lung shots all, the music a lament for a time when love came cheap. Gretchy was special to him, though. I still believe that.

  I miss Howard and Mickey, and writing this story about them has only made it worse. It’s tough being a dangerous old man by yourself — you’ve got nothing but memories and no one with the balls to understand them.

  <>

  * * * *

  1991

  JAMES LEE BURKE

  * * *

  TEXAS CITY, 1947

  James Lee Burke (1936-) was born in Houston but grew up on the Texas-Louisiana coast, where so much of his fiction is based. After attending the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he received his BA and MA from the University of Missouri at Columbia. After three critically praised mainstream novels, his fourth received more than a hundred rejections over more than a decade, until the University of Louisiana Press published The Lost Get-Back Boogie in 1986; it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

  His first crime novel, The Neon Rain (1987), featured David Robicheaux, a Vietnam veteran and homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. He has been described by his creator as “Everyman from the morality plays of the Renaissance. He tries to give voice to those who have none.” After stepping on too many toes in that first book, Robicheaux leaves to work on the police force in New Iberia Parish. Always present is a sidekick, Clete Purcel, also a former NOPD officer, who is now a private eye. The second novel in the series, Heaven’s Prisoners (1988), was filmed in 1996, starring Eric Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Lynch, and Teri Hatcher. The third book, Black Cherry Blues (1989), won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best novel of the year. Burke won a second Edgar for Cimarron Rose (1997), which introduced Billy Bob Holland, a Texas Ranger turned lawyer in Missoula, Montana. MWA named Burke a Grand Master for lifetime achievement in 2009.

  “Texas City, 1947,” often described as Burke’s finest short work of fiction, is a dark coming-of-age story that was first published in the Southern Review in 1991. It’s first book appearance was in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best (1992). It was later collected in the author’s Jesus Out to Sea (2007).

  ~ * ~

  R

  ight after World War II everybody in southern Louisiana thought he was going to get rich in the oil business. My father convinced himself that all his marginal jobs in the oil fields would one day give him the capital to become an independent wildcatter, perhaps even a legendary figure like Houston’s Glenn McCarthy, and he would successfully hammer together a drilling operation out of wooden towers and rusted junk, punch through the top of a geological dome, and blow salt water, sand, chains, pipe casing, and oil into the next parish.

  So he worked on as a roughneck on drilling rigs and as a jug-hustler with a seismograph outfit, then began contracting to build board roads in the marsh for the Texaco company. By mid-1946, he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya Basin and over in East Texas. But that was also the year that I developed rheumatic fever and he drove my mother off and brought Mattie home to live with us.

  I remember the terrible fight they had the day she left. My mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on that burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink dress with the white piping on the collar and pockets, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard and shucking off their feathers in a big iron cauldron of scalding water. My father came home later than he should have, parked his pickup truck by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded-up shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi’s. He was a dark Cajun, and his shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with black hair. He wore cowboy boots, a red sweat handkerchief tied around his neck, and a rakish straw hat that had an imitation snakeskin band around the crown.

  Headless chickens were flopping all over the grass, and my mother’s forearms were covered with wet chicken feathers. “I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint,” she said, without looking up from where she sat with her knees apart on a wood chair in front of the steaming cauldron.

  “I ain’t been with nobody,” he said, “except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh.”

  “You said you’d leave her alone.”

  “You children go inside,” my father said.

  “That gonna make your conscience right ‘cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise.”

  “I ain’t seen her.”

  “You son of a bitch, I smell her on you,” my mother said, and she swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across my father’s chest and Levi’s.

  “You ain’t gonna act like that in front of my children, you,” he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. “Y’all get inside. You ain’t got no business listening to this. This is between me and her.”

  My two older brothers, Weldon and Lyle, were used to our parents’ quarrels, and they went inside sullenly and let the back screen slam behind them. But my little sister, Drew, whom my mother nicknamed Little Britches, stood mute and fearful and alone under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.

  “Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We’re gonna play with the Monopoly game,” I said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.

  Then I saw my father’s large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of my mother’s face, heard the sound of her weeping, as I tried to step into Drew’s line of vision and hold her and her cat against my body, hold the three of us tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of my mother’s weeping.

  Three hours later, her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. I dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble rose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface, her drowned breath stuck against my face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.

  ~ * ~

  That fall I began to feel sick all the time, as though a gray cloud of mosquitoes were feeding at my heart. During recess at school I
didn’t play with the other children and instead hung about on the edges of the dusty playground or, when Brother Daniel wasn’t looking, slipped around the side of the old red-brick cathedral and sat by myself on a stone bench in a bamboo-enclosed, oak-shaded garden where a statue of Mary rested in a grotto and camellia petals floated in a big goldfish pond. Sometimes Sister Roberta was there saying her rosary.

  She was built like a fire hydrant. Were it not for the additional size that the swirl of her black habit and the wings of her veil gave her, she would not have been much larger than the students in her fifth-grade class. She didn’t yell at us or hit our knuckles with rulers like the other nuns did, and in fact she always called us “little people” rather than children. But sometimes her round face would flare with anger below her white, starched wimple at issues which to us, in our small parochial world, seemed of little importance. She told our class once that criminals and corrupt local politicians were responsible for the slot and racehorse machines that were in every drugstore, bar, and hotel lobby in New Iberia, and another time she flung an apple core at a carload of teenagers who were baiting the Negro janitor out by the school incinerator.