“If I find a minute to think about it, Saunch, but meantime here comes Bigfoot and he’s got that look, so if you could repeat the number back, OK, and—”
“We’ve always had this image of Donald Duck, we assume it’s how he looks all the time in his normal life, but in fact he’s always had to go in every day and shave his beak. The way I figure, it has to be Daisy. You know, which means, what other grooming demands is that chick laying on him, right?”
Bigfoot stood there whistling some country-western tune through his teeth till Doc, not feeling real hopeful, got off the phone.
“Now then, where were we,” Bigfoot pretending to look through some notes. “While suspect—that’s you—is having his alleged midday nap, so necessary to the hippie lifestyle, some sort of incident occurs in the vicinity of Channel View Estates. Firearms are discharged. When the dust settles, we find one Glen Charlock deceased. More compellingly for LAPD, the man Charlock was supposed to be guarding, Michael Z. Wolfmann, has vanished, giving local law enforcement less than twenty-four hours before the feds call it a kidnapping and come in to fuck everything up. Perhaps, Sportello, you could help to forestall this by providing the names of the other members of your cult? That would be ever so helpful to us here in Homicide, as well as the chance of a break for you when that ol’ trial date rolls around?”
“Cult.”
“The L.A. Times has referred to me more than once as a Renaissance detective,” said Bigfoot modestly, “which means that I am many things—but one thing I am not is stupid, and purely out of noblesse oblige I now extend this assumption to cover you as well. No one, in fact, would ever have been stupid enough to try this alone. Which therefore suggests some kind of a Mansonoid conspiracy, wouldn’t you agree?”
After no more than an hour of this sort of thing, to Doc’s surprise, Sauncho actually showed up at the door and started right in with Bigfoot.
“Lieutenant, you know you don’t have any case here, so if you’re going to charge him, you better. Otherwise—”
“Sauncho,” Doc hollered, “will you dummy up, remember who this is, how sensitive he gets— Bigfoot, don’t mind him, he watches too many courtroom dramas—”
“As a matter of fact,” Detective Bjornsen with the fixed and sinister stare he used to express geniality, “we probably could take this all the way to trial, but with our luck the jury pool’d be ninety-nine percent hippie freaks, plus some longhair sympathizer of a DDA who’d go and fuck the case all up anyway.”
“Sure, unless you could get the venue changed,” mused Sauncho, “like, Orange County might be—”
“Saunch, which one of us are you working for, again?”
“I wouldn’t call it work, Doc, clients pay me for work.”
“We’re only detaining him for his own good,” Bigfoot explained. “He’s closely connected with a high-profile homicide and possible kidnapping, and who’s to say he himself won’t be next? Maybe this’ll turn out to be one of those perpetrators who specially like to murder hippies, though if Sportello’s on their list, I might have a conflict of interest.”
“Aww, Bigfoot, you don’t mean that. . . . If I got knocked off? think of all your time and trouble finding somebody else to hassle.”
“What trouble? I go out the door, get in the unit, head up any block, before I know it, I’m driving through some giant damn herd of you hippie freaks, each more roustable than the last.”
“This is embarrassing,” said Sauncho. “Maybe you two should find somewhere besides an interrogation cubicle.”
The local news came on and everybody went out to the squad room to watch. There on the screen was Channel View Estates—a forlorn-looking view of the miniplaza, occupied by an armored division’s worth of cop vehicles parked every which way with their lights all going, and cops sitting on fenders drinking coffee, and, in close-up, Bigfoot Bjornsen, hair Aqua-Netted against the Santa Anas, explaining, “. . . apparently a party of civilians, on some training exercise in anti-guerrilla warfare. They may have assumed that this construction site, not yet being open for occupancy, was deserted enough to provide a realistic setting for what we must assume was only a harmless patriotic scenario.” The Japanese-American cutie with the microphone turned fullface to the camera and continued, “Tragically, however, live ammunition somehow found its way into these war games, and tonight one ex–prison inmate lies slain while prominent construction mogul Michael Wolfmann has mysteriously vanished. Police have detained a number of suspects for questioning.”
Break for commercial. “Wait a minute,” said Detective Bjornsen, as if to himself. “This has just given me an idea. Sportello, I believe I shall kick you after all.” Doc flinched, but then remembered this was also cop slang for “release.” Bigfoot’s thinking on this being that, if he cut Doc loose, it might attract the attention of the real perpetrators. Plus giving him an excuse to keep tailing Doc in case there was something Doc wasn’t telling him.
“Come along, Sportello, let’s take a ride.”
“I’m gonna watch the tube here for a while,” Sauncho said. “Remember, Doc, this was like fifteen billable minutes.”
“Thanks, Saunch. Put it on my tab?”
Bigfoot checked out a semi-obvious Plymouth with little E-for-Exempt symbols on the plates, and they went blasting through the remnants of rush hour up to the Hollywood Freeway and presently over the Cahuenga Pass and down into the Valley.
“What’s this?” Doc said after a while.
“As a courtesy I’m taking you out to the impound garage to get your vehicle. We’ve been over it with the best tools available to forensic science, and except for enough cannabis debris to keep an average family of four stoned for a year, you’re clean. No blood or impact evidence we can use. Congratulations.”
Doc’s general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything, but when it was his ride in question, California reflexes kicked in. “Congratulate this, Bigfoot.”
“I’ve upset you.”
“Nobody calls my car a murderer, man?”
“I’m sorry, your car is some kind of . . . what, pacifist vegetarian? When bugs come crashing fatally into its windshield, it . . . it feels remorse? Look, we found it almost on top of Charlock’s body, idling, and tried not to jump to any obvious conclusions. Maybe it intended to give the victim mouth-to-mouth.”
“I thought he was shot.”
“Whatever, be happy your car’s in the clear, Benzidine doesn’t lie.”
“Well yeah . . . does make me kind of jumpy though, how about you?”
“Not the one with the r in it”—Bigfoot fell for this every time—“oh, but here’s Canoga Park coming up in a few exits, let me just show you something for a minute.”
Off the exit ramp, Bigfoot hooked a U-turn without signaling, went back under the freeway and began to climb up into the hills, presently pulling in at a secluded spot that had Shot While Trying to Escape written all over it. Doc began to get nervous, but what Bigfoot had on his mind, it seemed, was job recruitment.
“Nobody can predict a year or two hence, but right now Nixon has the combination to the safe and he’s throwing fistfuls of greenbacks at anything that even looks like local law enforcement. Federal funding beyond the highest number you can think of, which for most hippies is not much further than the number of ounces in a kilo.”
“Thirty-five . . . point . . . something, everybody knows that— Wait. You, you mean like, Mod Squad, Bigfoot? rat on everybody I ever met, how far back do we go and you still don’t know me any better’n ’at?”
“You’d be surprised how many in your own hippie freak community have found our Special Employee disbursements useful. Toward the end of the month in particular.”
Doc took a close look at Bigfoot. Jive-ass sideburns, stupid mustache, haircut from a barber college out somewhere on a desolate boulevard fa
r from any current definition of hipness. Right out of the background of some Adam-12 episode, a show which Bigfoot had in fact moonlighted on once or twice. In theory Doc knew that if, for some reason he couldn’t imagine right away, he wanted to see any other Bigfoot, off camera, off duty—even married with kids for all Doc knew, he’d have to look in through and past all that depressing detail. “You married, Bigfoot?”
“Sorry, you’re not my type.” He held up his left hand to display a wedding ring. “Know what this is, or don’t they exist on Planet Hippie.”
“A-and, you have like, kids?”
“I hope this isn’t some kind of veiled hippie threat.”
“Only that . . . wow, Bigfoot! isn’t it strange, here we both are with this mysterious power to ruin each other’s day, and we don’t even know anything about each other?”
“Really profound, Sportello. Aimless doper’s driveling to be sure, and yet, why, you have just defined the very essence of law enforcement! Well done! I always knew you had potential. So! how about it?”
“Nothing personal, but yours is the last wallet I’d ever want money out of.”
“Hey! wake up, it only looks like Happy and Dopey and them skipping around the Magic Kingdom here, what it really is is what we call . . . ‘Reality’?”
Well, Doc didn’t have the beard, but he was wearing some tire-tread huaraches from south of the border that could pass for biblical, and he began to wonder now how many other innocent brothers and sisters the satanic Detective Bjornsen might’ve led to this high place, his own scenic overlook here, and swept his arm out across the light-stunned city, and offered them everything in it that money could buy. “Don’t tell me you can’t use it. I am aware of the Freak Brothers’ dictum that dope will get you through times of no money better than vice versa, and we could certainly offer compensation in a more, how to put it, inhalable form.”
“You mean . . .”
“Sportello. Try to drag your consciousness out of that old-time hard-boiled dick era, this is the Glass House wave of the future we’re in now. All those downtown evidence rooms got filled up ages ago, now about once every month Property Section has to rent more warehouse space out in deep unincorporated county, bricks and bricks of shit stacked to the roof and spilling out in the parking lot, Acapulco Gold! Panama Red! Michoacán Icepack! numberless kilos of righteous weed, name your figure, just for trivial information we already have anyway. And what you don’t smoke—improbable as that seems—you could always sell.”
“Good thing you’re not recruiting for the NCAA, Bigfoot, you’d be in some deep shit.”
AT THE OFFICE NEXT DAY, Doc was listening to the stereo with his head between the speakers and almost missed the diffident ring of the Princess phone he’d found at a swap meet in Culver City. It was Tariq Khalil.
“I didn’t do it!”
“It’s okay.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Nobody said you did, fact they thought for a while it was me. Man, I’m really sorry about Glen.”
Tariq was quiet for so long that Doc thought he’d hung up. “I will be, too,” he said finally, “when I get a minute to think about it. Right now I’m conveying my ass out of the area. If Glen was a target, then so am I, I would say in spades, but you folks do get offended so easy.”
“Is there someplace I can—”
“Better not be in no contact. This is not some bunch of fools like the LAPD, this is some heavy-ass motherfuckers. And if you don’t mind a piece of free advice—”
“Yeah, care in motion, as Sidney Omarr always sez in the paper. Well, you too.”
“Hasta luego, white man.”
Doc rolled a number and was just about to light up when the phone rang again. This time it was Bigfoot. “So we send some Police Academy hotshot over to the last known address of Shasta Fay Hepworth, just a routine visit, and guess what.”
Ah, fuck no. Not this.
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I upsetting you? Relax, all we know at this point is that she’s disappeared too, yes just like her boyfriend Mickey. Isn’t that odd? Do you think there could be a connection? Like maybe they ran off together?”
“Bigfoot, can we at least try to be professional here? So I don’t have to start callin you names, like, I don’t know, mean-spirited little shit, somethin like that?”
“You’re right—it’s the federals I’m really annoyed with, and I’m taking it out on you.”
“You’re apologizing, Bigfoot?”
“Ever known me to?”
“Uhhm . . .”
“If anything does occur to you about where they—so sorry, she—might’ve gone, you will share that, won’t you?”
There was an ancient superstition at the beach, something like the surfer belief that burning your board will bring awesome waves, and it went like this—take a Zig-Zag paper and write on it your dearest wish, and then use it to roll a joint of the best dope you can find, and smoke it all up, and your wish would be granted. Attention and concentration were also said to be important, but most of the dopers Doc knew tended to ignore that part.
The wish was simple, just that Shasta Fay be safe. The dope was some Hawaiian product Doc had been saving, although at the moment he couldn’t remember for what. He lit up. About the time he was ready to transfer the roach to a roach clip, the phone rang again, and he had one of those brief lapses where you forget how to pick up the receiver.
“Hello?” said a young woman’s voice after a while.
“Oh. Did I forget to say that first? Sorry. This isn’t . . . no, of course it wouldn’t be.”
“I got your number from Ensenada Slim, at that head shop in Gordita Beach? It’s about my husband. He used to be close to a friend of yours, Shasta Fay Hepworth?”
All right. “And you’re . . .”
“Hope Harlingen. I was wondering how your caseload’s looking at the moment.”
“My . . . oh.” Professional term. “Sure, where are you?”
It turned out to be an address in outer Torrance, between Walteria and the airfield, a split-level with a pepper tree by the driveway and a eucalyptus out back and a distant view of thousands of small Japanese sedans, overflowed from the main lot on Terminal Island, obsessively arranged on vast expanses of blacktop and destined for auto agencies across the desert Southwest. TVs and stereos spoke from up and down the streets. The trees of the neighborhood sifted the air green. Small airplanes went purring overhead. In the kitchen hung a creeping fig in a plastic pot, vegetable stock simmered on the stove, hummingbirds out on the patio poised vibrating in the air with their beaks up inside the bougainvillea and honeysuckle blossoms.
Doc, who had a chronic problem telling one California blonde from another, found an almost 100-percent classic specimen—hair, tan, athletic grace, everything but the world-famous insincere smile, owing to a set of store-bought choppers which, though technically “false,” invited those she now and then did smile at to consider what real and unamusing history might’ve put them there.
Noticing Doc’s stare, “Heroin,” she pretended to explain. “Sucks the calcium out of your system like a vampire, use it any length of time and your teeth go all to hell. Flower child to wasted derelict, zap, like magic. And that’s the good part. Keep it up long enough . . . Well.”
She got up and started pacing. She was not a weeper, but she was a pacer, which Doc appreciated, it kept the information coming, there was a beat to it. A few months back, according to Hope, her husband, Coy Harlingen, had OD’d on heroin. As well as he could with a doper’s memory, Doc recalled the name, and even some story in the papers. Coy had played with the Boards, a surf band who’d been together since the early sixties, now considered pioneers of electric surf music and more recently working in a subgenre they liked to call “surfadelic,” which featured dissonant guitar tunings, peculiar modalitie
s such as post–Dick Dale hijaz kar, incomprehensibly screamed references to the sport, and the radical sound effects surf music has always been known for, vocal noises as well as feedback from guitars and wind instruments. Rolling Stone commented, “The Boards’ new album will make Jimi Hendrix want to listen to surf music again.”
Coy’s own contribution to what the Boards’ producers had modestly termed their “Makaha of Sound” had been to hum through the reed of a tenor or sometimes alto sax a harmony part alongside whatever melody he was playing, as if the instrument was some giant kazoo, this then being enhanced by Barcus-Berry pickups and amplifiers. His influences, according to rock critics who’d noticed, included Earl Bostic, Stan Getz, and legendary New Orleans studio tenor Lee Allen. “Inside the surf-sax category,” Hope shrugged, “Coy passed for a towering figure, because he actually improvised once in a while, instead of the way second and even third choruses usually get repeated note for note?”
Doc nodded uncomfortably. “Don’t get me wrong, I love surf music, I’m from its native land, I still have all these old beat-up singles, the Chantays, the Trashmen, the Halibuts, but you’re right, some of the worst blues work ever recorded will be showing up on the karmic rap sheets of surf-sax players.”
“It was never his work that I was in love with.” She said it so matter-of-factly that Doc risked a quick scan for eyeball shine, but this one was not about to start in with the faucets of widowhood, or not yet. Meantime she was running through some history. “Coy and I should’ve met cute, with cuteness everywhere back then and all of it up for sale, but actually we met squalid, down at Oscar’s in San Ysidro—”
“Oh boy.” Doc once or twice had been in—and through the mercy of God, out of—the notorious Oscar’s, right across the border from Tijuana, where the toilets were seething round the clock with junkies new and old who’d just scored in Mexico, put the product inside rubber balloons and swallowed them, then crossed back into the U.S. to vomit them back up again.
“I had just gone running into this one toilet stall without checking first, had my finger already down my throat, and there Coy sat, gringo digestion, about to take a gigantic shit. We both let go at about the same time, barf and shit all over the place, me with my face in his lap and to complicate things of course he had this hardon.
Inherent Vice Page 4
