Beginning on Artesia, signs directed Doc to Channel View Estates, A Michael Wolfmann Concept. There were the expected local couples who couldn’t wait to have a look at the next OPPOS, as Aunt Reet tended to call most tract houses of her acquaintance. Now and then at the edges of the windshield, Doc spotted black pedestrians, bewildered as Tariq must have been, maybe also looking for the old neighborhood, for rooms lived in day after day, solid as the axes of space, now taken away into commotion and ruin.
The development stretched into the haze and the soft smell of the fog component of smog, and of desert beneath the pavement—model units nearer the road, finished homes farther in, and just visible beyond them the skeletons of new construction, expanding into the unincorporated wastes. Doc drove past the gate till he got to a patch of empty contractor hardpan with street signs already in but the streets not yet paved. He parked at what would be the corner of Kaufman and Broad and walked back.
Commanding filtered views of an all-but-neglected branch of the Dominguez Flood Control Channel forgotten and cut off by miles of fill, regrading, trash of industrial ventures that had either won or failed, these homes were more or less Spanish Colonial with not-necessarily-load-bearing little balconies and red-tile roofs, meant to suggest higher-priced towns like San Clemente or Santa Barbara, though so far there wasn’t a shade tree in sight.
Close to what would be the front gate of Channel View Estates, Doc found a makeshift miniplaza put there basically for the construction folks, with a liquor store, a take-out sandwich place with a lunch counter, a beer bar where you could shoot some pool, and a massage parlor called Chick Planet, in front of which he saw a row of carefully looked-after motorcycles, parked with military precision. This seemed the most likely place for him to find a cadre of badasses. Plus, if they were all here at the moment, then chances were Mickey was, too. On the further assumption that the owners of these bikes were here for recreation and not waiting inside drawn up in formation prepared to kick Doc’s ass, he breathed deeply, surrounded himself with a white light, and stepped in the front door.
“Hi, I’m Jade?” A bubbly young Asian lady in a turquoise cheongsam handed him a laminated menu of services. “And please take note of today’s Pussy-Eater’s Special, which is good all day till closing time?”
“Mmm, not that $14.95 ain’t a totally groovy price, but I’m really trying to locate this guy who works for Mr. Wolfmann?”
“Far out. Does he eat pussy?”
“Well, Jade, you’d know better’n me, fella named Glen?”
“Oh sure, Glen comes in here, they all do. You got a cigarette for me?” He tapped her out an unfiltered Kool. “Ooh, lockup style. Not much eating pussy in there, huh?”
“Glen and I were both in Chino around the same time. Have you seen him today?”
“Till about one minute ago, when everybody suddenly split. Is there something weird going on? Are you a cop?”
“Let’s see.” Doc inspected his feet. “Nah . . . wrong shoes.”
“Reason I ask is, is if you were a cop, you’d be entitled to a free preview of our Pussy-Eater’s Special?”
“How about a licensed PI? Would that—”
“Hey, Bambi!” Out through the bead curtains, as if on a time-out from a beach volleyball game, strode this blonde in a turquoise and orange Day-Glo bikini.
“Oboy,” Doc said. “Where do we—”
“Not you, Bong Brain,” Bambi muttered. Jade was already reaching for that bikini.
“Oh,” he said. “Huh . . . see, is what I thought is, here? where it says ‘Pussy-Eater’s Special’? is what that means is, is that—”
Well . . . neither girl seemed to be paying him much attention anymore, though out of politeness Doc thought he should keep watching for a while, till finally they disappeared down behind the reception desk, and he wandered away figuring to have a look around. Out into the hallway, from someplace ahead, seeped indigo light and frequencies even darker, along with string-heavy music from half a generation ago from LPs compiled to accompany bachelor-pad fucking.
Nobody was around. It felt like maybe there had been, till Doc showed up. The place was also turning out to be bigger inside than out. There were black-light suites with fluorescent rock ’n’ roll posters and mirrored ceilings and vibrating water beds. Strobe lights blinked, incense cones sent ribbons of musk-scented smoke ceilingward, and carpeting of artificial angora shag in a variety of tones including oxblood and teal, not always limited to floor surfaces, beckoned alluringly.
As he neared the back of the establishment, Doc began to hear a lot of screaming from outside, along with a massed thundering of Harleys. “Uh-oh. What’s this?”
He didn’t find out. Maybe it was all the exotic sensory input that caused Doc about then to swoon abruptly and lose an unknown amount of his day. Perhaps striking some ordinary object on the way down accounted for the painful lump he found on his head when at length he awoke. Faster, anyhow, than the staff on Medical Center can say “subdural hematoma,” Doc dug how the unhip Muzak was silent, plus no Jade, no Bambi, and he was lying on the cement floor of a space he didn’t recognize, though the same could not be said for what he now ID’d, far overhead, like a bad-luck planet in today’s horoscope, as the evilly twinkling face of Detective Lieutenant Bigfoot Bjornsen, LAPD.
“CONGRATULATIONS, HIPPIE SCUM,” Bigfoot greeted Doc in his all-too-familiar 30-weight voice, “and welcome to a world of inconvenience. Yes, this time it appears you have finally managed to stumble into something too real and deep to hallucinate your worthless hippie ass out of.” He was holding, and now and then taking bites from, his trademark chocolate-covered frozen banana.
“Howdy, Bigfoot. Can I have a bite?”
“Sure can, but you’ll have to wait, we left the rottweiler back at the station.”
“No rush. And . . . and where are we at the moment, again?”
“At Channel View Estates, on a future homesite where elements of some wholesome family will quite soon be gathering night after night, to gaze tubeward, gobble their nutritious snacks, perhaps after the kids are in bed even attempt some procreational foreplay, little appreciating that once, on this very spot, an infamous perpetrator lay in a drugged stupor, babbling incoherently at the homicide detective, since risen to eminence, who apprehended him.”
They were still within sight of the front gate. Through a maze of stapled-together framing, Doc made out in the afternoon light a blurry vista of streets full of newly poured foundations awaiting houses to go on top of them, trenches for sewer and utility lines, sawhorse barricades with lights blinking even in the daytime, precast storm drains, piles of fill, bulldozers and backhoes.
“Without wishing to seem impatient,” the Lieutenant continued, “any time you feel you’d like to join us, we would so like to chat.” Uniformed toadies crept about, chuckling in appreciation.
“Bigfoot, I don’t know what happened. Last I recall I was in that massage parlor over there? Asian chick named Jade? and her Anglo friend Bambi?”
“Wishful figments of a brain pickled in cannabis fumes, no doubt,” theorized Detective Bjornsen.
“But, like, I didn’t do it? Whatever it is?”
“Sure.” Bigfoot stared, snacking amusedly on his frozen banana, as Doc went through the wearisome chore of getting vertical again, followed by details to be worked out such as remaining that way, trying to walk, so forth. Which was about when he caught sight of a medical examiner’s crew with a bloodstreaked human body supine on a gurney, settled into itself like an uncooked holiday turkey, face covered with a cheap cop-issue blanket. Things kept falling out of its pants pockets. Cops had to go scramble in the dirt to retrieve them. Doc found himself freaking out, in terms of his stomach and whatever.
Bigfoot Bjornsen smirked. “Yes, I can almost pity your civilian distress—though if you had been more of a man and l
ess of a ball-less hippie draft dodger, who knows, you might have seen enough over in the ’Nam to share even my own sense of professional ennui at the sight of one more, what we call, stiff, to be dealt with.”
“Who is it?” Doc nodding at the corpse.
“Was, Sportello. Here on Earth we say ‘was.’ Meet Glen Charlock, whom you were asking for by name only hours ago, witnesses will swear to that. Forgetful dope fiends should be more cautious about whom they choose to act out their wacko fantasies upon. Furthermore, on the face of it, you have chosen to ice a personal bodyguard of the rather well-connected Mickey Wolfmann. Name ring a bell? or in your case shake a tambourine? Ah, but here’s our ride.”
“Hey—my car . . .”
“Like its owner, well on the way to impoundment.”
“Pretty cold, Bigfoot, even for you.”
“Come come, Sportello, you know we’ll be more than happy to give you a lift. Watch your head.”
“Watch my . . . How ’m I spoze to do that, man?”
THEY DIDN’T GO downtown but, for reasons of cop protocol forever obscure to Doc, only as far as the Compton station, where they pulled in to the lot and paused next to a battered ’68 El Camino. Bigfoot got out of the black-and-white and went back and opened the trunk. “Here, Sportello—come and give me a hand with this.”
“What, excuse me, the fuck,” Doc inquired, “is it?”
“Bobwire,” replied Bigfoot. “An eighty-rod spool of authenticated Glidden four-point galvanized. You want to take that side?”
Thing weighed about a hundred pounds. The cop who’d been driving sat and watched them lift it out of the trunk and stash it in the bed of the El Camino, which Doc recalled was Bigfoot’s ride.
“Livestock problems out where you live, Bigfoot?”
“Oh, you’d never use this wire for actual fence, are you crazy, this is seventy years old, mint condition—”
“Wait. You . . . collect . . . barbed wire.”
Well yes, as it turned out, along with spurs, harness, cowboy sombreros, saloon paintings, sheriffs’ stars, bullet molds, all kinds of Wild West paraphernalia. “That is, if you don’t object, Sportello.”
“Whoa easy there Jolly Rancher, ain’t looking for no drawdown ’th no bobwire collector, man’s own business what he puts in his pickup ain’t it.”
“I should hope so,” Bigfoot sniffed. “Come on, let’s go inside and see if there’s a cubicle open.”
Doc’s history with Bigfoot, beginning with minor drug episodes, stop-and-frisks up and down Sepulveda, and repeated front-door repairs, had escalated a couple of years ago with the Lunchwater case, one more of the squalid matrimonials that were occupying Doc’s time back then. The husband, a tax accountant who thought he’d score some quality surveillance on the cheap, had hired Doc to keep an eye on his wife. After a couple days of stakeouts at the boyfriend’s house Doc decided to go up on the roof and have a closer look through a skylight at the bedroom below, where the activities proved to be so routine—hanky maybe, not much panky—that he decided to light a joint to pass the time, taking one from his pocket, in the dark, more soporific than he had intended. Before long he had fallen asleep and half rolled, half slid down the shallow pitch of the red-tile roof, coming to rest with his head in the gutter, where he then managed to sleep through the events which followed, including hubby’s arrival, considerable screaming, and gunfire loud enough to get the neighbors to call the police. Bigfoot, who happened to be out in a prowl car nearby, showed up to find the husband and the b.f. slain and the wife attractively tousled and sobbing, and gazing at the .22 in her hand as if it was the first time she’d seen one. Doc, up on the roof, was still snoring away.
Fast-forward to Compton, the present day. “What concerns us,” Bigfoot was trying to explain, “is this, what we in Homicide like to call, ‘pattern’? Here’s the second time we know of that you’ve been discovered sleeping at the scene of a major crime and unable—dare I suggest ‘unwilling’?—to furnish us any details.”
“Lot of leaves and twigs and shit in my hair,” Doc seemed to recall. Bigfoot nodded encouragingly. “And . . . there was a fire truck with a ladder? which is how I must’ve got down off the roof?” They looked at each other for a while.
“I was thinking more like earlier today,” Bigfoot with a touch of impatience. “Channel View Estates, Chick Planet Massage, sort of thing.”
“Oh. Well, I was unconscious, man.”
“Yes. Yes but before that, when you and Glen Charlock had your fatal encounter . . . when would you say that was, exactly, in the sequence of events?”
“I told you, the first time I ever saw him, is he was dead.”
“His associates, then. How many of them were you already acquainted with?”
“Not normally guys I’d hang with, totally wrong drug profile, too many reds, too much speed.”
“Potheads, you’re so exclusive. Would you say you took offense at Glen’s preference for barbiturates and amphetamines?”
“Yeah, I was planning to report him to the Dope Fiend Standards and Ethics Committee.”
“Yes, now your ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth is a known intimate of Glen’s employer, Mickey Wolfmann. Do you think Glen and Shasta were . . . you know . . .” He made a loose fist and slid the middle finger of his other hand back and forth in it for what seemed to Doc way too long. “How did that make you feel, here you are still carrying the torch, and there she is in the company of all those Nazi lowlifes?”
“Do that some more Bigfoot, I think I’m gettin a hardon.”
“Tough little wop monkey, as my man Fatso Judson always sez.”
“Case you forgot, Lieutenant, you and me are almost in the same business, except I don’t get that free pass to shoot people all the time and so forth. But if it was me over there in your seat, I guess I’d be acting the same way, maybe start in next with remarks about my mother. Or I guess your mother, because you’d be me. . . . Have I got that right?”
It wasn’t till the middle of rush hour that they let Doc call his lawyer, Sauncho Smilax. Actually Sauncho worked for a maritime law firm over at the Marina called Hardy, Gridley, & Chatfield, and his résumé fell a little short in the criminal area. He and Doc had met by accident one night at the Food Giant up on Sepulveda. Sauncho, then a novice doper who’d just learned about removing seeds and stems, was about to buy a flour sifter when he flashed that the people at the checkout would all know what he wanted the sifter for and call the police. He went into a kind of paranoid freeze, which was when Doc, having an attack of midnight chocolate deficiency, came zooming out of a snack-food aisle and crashed his cart into Sauncho’s.
With the collision, legal reflexes reawakened. “Hey, would it be okay if I put this sifter in with your stuff there, like, for a cover?”
“Sure,” Doc said, “but if you’re gonna be paranoid, how about all this chocolate, man . . . ?”
“Oh. Then . . . maybe we’d better put in a few more, you know, like, innocent-looking items. . . .”
By the time they got to the checkout, they had somehow acquired an extra hundred dollars’ worth of goods, including half a dozen obligatory boxes of cake mix, a gallon of guacamole and several giant sacks of tortilla chips, a case of store-brand boysenberry soda, most of what was in the Sara Lee frozen-dessert case, lightbulbs and laundry detergent for straight-world cred, and, after what seemed like hours in the International Section, a variety of shrink-wrapped Japanese pickles that looked cool. At some point in this, Sauncho mentioned that he was a lawyer.
“Far out. People are always telling me I need a ‘criminal lawyer,’ which, nothing personal, understand, but—”
“Actually I’m a marine lawyer.”
Doc thought about this. “You’re . . . a Marine who practices law? No, wait—you’re a lawyer who only represents Marines. . . .”
In the course of getting this all straight, Doc also learned that Sauncho was just out of law school at SC and, like many ex-collegians unable to let go of the old fraternity life, living at the beach—not far from Doc, as a matter of fact.
“Maybe you better give me your card,” Doc said. “Can’t ever tell. Boat hassles, oil spills, something.”
Sauncho never officially went on retainer, but after a few late-night panic calls from Doc he did begin to reveal an unexpected talent for dealing with bail bondsmen and deskfolk at cop stations around the Southland, and one day they both realized that he’d become, what they call de facto, Doc’s lawyer.
Sauncho now answered the phone in some agitation.
“Doc! Have you got the tube on?”
“All’s I get here’s a three-minute call, Saunch, they’ve got me in Compton, and it’s Bigfoot again.”
“Yeah well, I’m watching cartoons here, okay? and this Donald Duck one is really been freaking me out?” Sauncho didn’t have that many people in his life to talk to and had always had Doc figured for an easy mark.
“You have a pen, Saunch? Here’s the processing number, prepare to copy—” Doc started reading him the number, real slowly.
“It’s like Donald and Goofy, right, and they’re out in a life raft, adrift at sea? for what looks like weeks? and what you start noticing after a while, in Donald’s close-ups, is that he has this whisker stubble? like, growing out of his beak? You get the significance of that?”
Inherent Vice Page 3
