by James Ellroy
“Wake up, boy. I been doin’ police work while you been beauty sleepin’.”
In a split second it all came back. I groaned, felt the cot beneath me and looked around at the cramped interior of the guard hut. “Oh shit.”
Davis handed me a wet towel. “On a stick. I made me some phone calls. Pal of mine at the Ventura courthouse said he logged twenty-one hundred sixty-six beans of the ransom money into the evidence locker. What you think of that?”
I stood up and tried my legs. They wobbled, but held. “Miller and Leroy spread eight or nine grand around the town,” I said. “Leaving close to ninety out there. It’s got to be the Ventura cops.”
Davis shook his head. “Uh-uh. That was a legit dispatch that came into town and shot down Harwell. They saw that wreck of ours on the detour road and came lookin’ for survivors. See, I called R & I and Robbery for a list of Miller’s known associates from his old rousts. Got six names from his jacket, and the records clerk told me a Ventura fed called in a few hours before, got the same information. You think that ain’t sweet?”
I thought of Stensland, the all-gray federal man with the big tax-free pension—if he could kibosh the fact that the snatchers glommed only chump change. “Let’s go get him.”
“That mother dog gonna pay for hurtin’ my Buick.”
“Get a car from the duty officer. And this time I’ll drive.”
* * *
—
Back in familiar, if not safe-and-sane L.A., we formed an itinerary out of the six names and last-known addresses from Miller Treadwell’s K.A. file. Davis took the wheel again, and I picked and poked at my various cuts, lacerations, and bruises as we prowled the south-central part of the city—home to our first three possibles.
Number one’s wife told us her husband was back in Quentin; the apartment house of the number two man had been torn down and was now an amusement arcade frequented by Mexican youths wearing zoot suits; number three had gotten religion and praised Jesus as we searched his pad. He told us he hadn’t seen Miller Treadwell since their last job together in ’41, damned him as a fornicating whoremonger, and handed us leaflets that cogently explained that Jesus Christ was an Aryan, not a Jew, and that Mein Kampf was the lost book of the Bible. Davis’s response to the man was the longest “Wooooooo” I’d ever heard him emit, and we drove across town to Hollywood and K.A. number four, debating the pros and cons of parole violation on grounds of mental bankruptcy.
Number four—“Jungle” John Lembeck, white male, age thirty-four, two-time convicted strong-arm heister, lived in a bungalow court on Serrano just off the Boulevard. Giving the address a rolling once-over, Davis and I said “Bingo” simultaneously, and I added, “The Auburn with a bad black paint-job. Right by that streetlight.”
Davis blurted, “What?” slowed the car, and squinted out at the dark street. Noticing the dream-mobile, he said, “Double bingo. There’s a fed sled three cars down. If it’s got Ventura tags, this is grief.”
I got out and walked back to check; Davis continued on to the corner and parked. Squatting down, I squinted at the steel gray Plymouth’s rear license plate. Triple bingo: five-digit federal vehicle designation, 1945 Ventura County tags. Grief on a popsicle stick.
Davis trotted over, and we circled the bungalows in a flanking movement. They were individual stucco huts arranged around a cement courtyard, and John Lembeck’s file placed him in unit three. Alleys separated the court from the adjoining apartment buildings, and I took the one on the left.
The night was deep blue and cloudless, and I crept through the alleyway helped by light from apartment windows. The first two huts had drawn curtains, but the third one back was cracked for air, the venetian blinds down to just above the narrow open space. I drew my gun, put my eyes to the slice of light, and looked in.
Quadruple bingo—and then some.
The man who had to be Miller Treadwell was sitting in an overstuffed chair, his pants down, moaning, “Guddamn, guddamn.” I could see a woman’s left hand bracing the chair arm, but nothing more of the woman herself. Agent Stensland was trussed up, lying on his side on the floor, next to the entranceway into the front room. He was working his wrist bonds against a wall grate, his breath expanding and contracting against the fabric tape crisscrossing his mouth.
Miller moaned with his eyes shut, then a pretty blonde head popped up and spoke to him: “Sugar, let me talk to you for a sec.”
“Guddamn, girl, don’t stop.”
“Miller, you have to make him tell you where he put the money.”
“We got ours, girl. He ain’t gonna tell us; he knows I’ll kill him if he does. We got ours, and we can trade you again.”
“Daddy’s too cheap to pay more. We could have twice as much, Sugar. We could go away and be together and just forget about Daddy.”
“Sugar, don’t talk nonsense. We got plenty, your papa’s got plenty more, and I ain’t able to talk so good in this state you got me in. You wanta…”
The head disappeared again; Miller went back to moaning. I wondered where Evans was and watched Stensland move his bound wrists against the grate. The kidnapper-killer’s ecstacy was reaching a crescendo when I saw my partner, inside the pad, tiptoeing over to the entranceway. He was just a few feet in back of Stensland when the G-man got his hands free and ripped the tape from his mouth. He went flush at the pain, and I followed his eyes to a .45 automatic on the armrest beside Miller’s right hand.
Pawing at his leg restraints, racing against the Okie’s release, Stensland banged his elbow on the grate. Miller jerked out of heaven and aimed the .45 at him just as I wedged my gun through the window crack. He fired at the fed; I fired at him; Davis emptied his piece at the chair. There must have been a dozen explosions, and then it was all over except for Jane Mackenzie Viertel’s record-length scream.
* * *
—
A shitload of Hollywood division black-and-whites showed up, and the meat wagon removed Miller Treadwell and Special Agent Norris Stensland, D.O.A. A detective lieutenant told Davis and me he wanted a full report before he contacted the feds. We kept the Viertel girl in handcuffs on general principles, and when the commotion wound down and the crowd of rubberneckers dispersed, we braced her on the front lawn of the courtyard.
Unlocking her cuffs, I said, “Come clean on the money. What happened? Where’s the dough Miller was talking about?”
Jane Viertel, backlighted by a street lamp, rubbed her wrists. “The money was in two packages. When it got crazy, they were dropped. Miller and Leroy got one, and it ripped open. The FBI man dropped his and Leroy ran with me, then Miller took off. The FBI man took Harwell to his car, then came back and grabbed the last package so Harwell wouldn’t know he had it. But Miller saw him. He had some loose bills he picked up, and he hid the rest of the money from Leroy. Miller and Leroy gave the loose money to these dreadful slobs to hide us out, and Leroy thought that was all there was. Then Miller and I got cozy, and he told me there was forty thousand for us.”
I looked at the girl, nineteen-year-old pulchritude with whorehouse smarts. “Where’s Miller’s money?”
Jane watched Davis lovingly eye the Auburn speedster. “Why should I tell you? You’d just give it back to that cheapskate father of mine.”
“He paid a hundred grand to save your life.”
The girl shrugged and lit a cigarette. “He probably used the interest from Mother’s trust fund. What’s wrong with fatso? Is he queer for cars or something?”
Davis walked over to us. “She needs a complete paint strip, new paint job, new upholstery and some whitewalls. Then she’s a peach.” Winking at Jane Viertel, he said, “What’s your goal in life, Sweetheart? Pussy whipping killers?”
Jane smiled, walked to the car, and unscrewed the gas cap. She dropped in her cigarette and started running. Davis and I hit the ground and ate grass. The gas tank exploded and
the car went up in flames. The girl stood up and curtsied, then walked to us and said, “Miller’s money was in the trunk. Too bad, Daddy. Maybe you can tell Mother it’s a tax write-off.”
I recuffed Jane Viertel; the flames sent flickers of light over Davis Evans’s bereaved face. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled them out empty, and said to me, “You got a couple dimes, partner? AX6-400’s a toll call. I need me a peach like a mother dog.”
SINCE I DON’T HAVE YOU
During the post-war years I served two masters—running interference and hauling dirty laundry for the two men who defined LA at that time better than anyone else. To Howard Hughes I was security boss at his aircraft plant, pimp, and troubleshooter for RKO Pictures—the ex-cop who could kibosh blackmail squeezes, fix drunk drivings, and arrange abortions and dope cures. To Mickey Cohen—rackets overlord and would-be nightclub shtickster—I was a bagman to the LAPD, the former Narco detective who skimmed junk off niggertown dope rousts, allowing his Southside boys to sell it back to the hordes of schwartzes eager to fly White Powder Airlines. Big Howard: always in the news for crashing an airplane someplace inappropriate, stubbing his face on the control panel in some hicktown beanfield, then showing up at Romanoff’s bandaged like the Mummy with Ava Gardner on his arm; Mickey C.: also a pussy hound par excellence, pub crawling with an entourage of psychopathic killers, press agents, gag writers, and his bulldog Mickey Cohen, Jr.,—a flatulent beast with a schlong so large that the Mick’s stooges strapped it to a roller skate so it wouldn’t drag on the ground.
Howard Hughes. Mickey Cohen. And me—Turner “Buzz” Meeks, Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, armadillo poacher; strikebreaker goon; cop; fixer, and keeper of the secret key to his masters’ psyches: they were both cowards mano a mano; airplanes and lunatic factotums their go-betweens—while I would go anywhere, anyplace—gun or billy club first, courting a front-page death to avenge my second-banana life. And the two of them courted me because I put their lack of balls in perspective: it was irrational, meshugah, bad business—a Forest Lawn crypt years before my time. But I got the last laugh there: I always knew that when faced with the grave I’d pull a smart segue to keep kicking—and I write this memoir as an old, old man—while Howard and Mickey stuff caskets, bullshit biographies their only legacy.
Howard. Mickey. Me.
Sooner or later, my work for the two of them had to produce what the yuppie lawyer kids today call “conflict of interest.” Of course, it was over a woman—and, of course, being a suicidal Okie shitkicker, forty-one years old and getting tired, I decided to play both ends against the middle. A thought just hit me: that I’m writing this story because I miss Howard and Mickey, and telling it gives me a chance to be with them again. Keep that in mind—that I loved them—even though they were both world-class shitheels.
* * *
—
January 15, 1949.
It was cold and clear in Los Angeles, and the papers were playing up the two-year anniversary of the Black Dahlia murder case—still unsolved, still speculated on. Mickey was still mourning Hooky Rothman’s death—he French kissed a sawed-off shotgun held by an unknown perpetrator—and Howard was still pissed at me over the Bob Mitchum reefer roust: he figured that my connections with Narco Division were still so solid that I should have seen it coming. I’d been shuttling back and forth between Howard and Mickey since New Years. The Mick’s signature fruit baskets stuffed with C-notes had to be distributed to cops, judges, and City Council members he wanted to grease, and the pilot/mogul had me out bird-dogging quiff: prowling bus depots and train stations for buxom young girls who’d fall prey to RKO contracts in exchange for frequent nighttime visits. I’d been having a good run: a half dozen midwestern farm maidens were now ensconced in Howard’s fuck pads—strategically located apartments tucked all over LA. And I was deep in hock to a darktown bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison. I was sitting in my quonset hut office at Hughes Aircraft when the phone rang.
“That you, Howard?”
Howard Hughes sighed. “What happened to ‘Security, may I help you’?”
“You’re the only one calls this early, Boss.”
“And you’re alone?”
“Right. Per your instructions to call you Mr. Hughes in the presence of others. What’s up?”
“Breakfast is up. Meet me at the corner of Melrose and La Brea in half an hour.”
“Right, Boss.”
“Two or three, Buzz? I’m hungry and having four.”
Howard was on his all chili dog diet; Pink’s Dogs at Melrose and La Brea was his current in-spot. I knew for a fact that their chili was made from horse-meat air freighted up daily from Tijuana. “One kraut, no chili.”
“Heathen. Pink’s chili is better than Chasen’s.”
“I had a pony when I was a boy.”
“So? I had a governess. You think I wouldn’t eat—”
I said, “Half an hour,” and hung up. I figured if I got there five minutes late I wouldn’t have to watch the fourth richest man in America eat.
* * *
—
Howard was picking strands of sauerkraut off his chin when I climbed in the backseat of his limousine. He said, “You didn’t really want it, did you?”
I pressed the button that sent up the screen that shielded us from the driver. “No, coffee and doughnuts are more my style.”
Howard gave me a long, slow eyeballing—a bit ill at ease because sitting down we were the same height, while standing I came up to his shoulders. “Do you need money, Buzz?”
I thought of Leotis Dineen. “Can niggers dance?”
“They certainly can. But call them colored, you never know when one might be listening.”
Larry the chauffeur was Chinese; Howard’s comment made me wonder if his last plane crash had dented his cabeza. I tried my standard opening line. “Getting any, Boss?”
Hughes smiled and burped; horse grease wafted through the backseat. He dug into a pile of papers beside him—blueprints, graphs, and scraps covered with airplane doodles, pulling out a snapshot of a blonde girl naked from the waist up. He handed it to me and said, “Gretchen Rae Shoftel, age nineteen. Born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, July 26, 1929. She was staying at the place on South Lucerne—the screening house. This is the woman, Buzz. I think I want to marry her. And she’s gone—she flew the coop on the contract, me, all of it.”
I examined the picture. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was prodigiously lunged—no surprise—with a blonde pageboy and smarts in her eyes, like she knew Mr. Hughes’s two-second screen test was strictly an audition for the sack and an occasional one-liner in some RKO turkey. “Who found her for you, Boss? It wasn’t me—I’d have remembered.”
Howard belched again—my hijacked sauerkraut this time. “I got the picture in the mail at the studio, along with an offer—a thousand dollars cash to a PO box in exchange for the girl’s address. I did it, and met Gretchen Rae at her hotel downtown. She told me she posed for some dirty old man back in Milwaukee, that he must have pulled the routine for the thousand. Gretchen Rae and I got to be friends, and, well….”
“And you’ll give me a bonus to find her?”
“A thousand, Buzz. Cash, off the payroll.”
My debt to Leotis Dineen was eight hundred and change; I could get clean and get even on minor league baseball—the San Diego Seals were starting their pre-season games next week. “It’s a deal. What else have you got on the girl?”
“She was car hopping at Scrivner’s Drive-In. I know that.”
“Friends, known associates, relatives here in LA?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
I took a deep breath to let Howard know a tricky question was coming. “Boss, you think maybe this girl is working an angle on you? I mean, the picture out of nowhere, the thousand to a PO box?”<
br />
Howard Hughes harumphed. “It had to be that piece in Confidential, the one that alleged my talent scouts take topless photographs and that I like my women endowed.”
“Alleged, Boss?”
“I’m practicing coming off as irate in case I sue Confidential somewhere down the line. You’ll get on this right away?”
“Rapidamente.”
“Outstanding. And don’t forget Sid Weinberg’s party tomorrow night. He’s got a new horror picture coming out from the studio, and I need you there to keep the autograph hounds from going crazy. Eight, Sid’s house.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Find Gretchen Rae, Buzz. She’s special.”
Howard’s one saving grace with females is that he keeps falling in love with them—albeit only after viewing Brownie snaps of their lungs. It more or less keeps him busy between crashing airplanes and designing airplanes that don’t fly.
“Right, Boss.”
The limousine’s phone rang. Howard picked it up, listened and murmured, “Yes. Yes, I’ll tell him.” Hanging up, he said, “The switchboard at the plant. Mickey Cohen wants to see you. Make it brief, you’re on my time now.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
—
It was Howard who introduced me to Mickey, right before I got wounded in a dope shoot-out and took my LAPD pension. I still give him a hand with his drug dealings—unofficial liaison to Narcotics Division, point man for the Narco dicks who skim x number of grams off every ounce of junk confiscated. The LAPD has got an unofficial heroin policy: it is to be sold only to coloreds, only east of Alvarado and south of Jefferson. I don’t think it should be sold anywhere, but as long as it is, I want the five percent. I test the shit with a chem kit I stole from the crime lab—no poor hophead is going to croak from a Mickey Cohen bindle bootjacked by Turner “Buzz” Meeks. Dubious morality: I sleep well ninety percent of the time and lay my bet action off with shine bookies, the old exploiter washing the hand that feeds him. Money was right at the top of my brain as I drove to Mickey’s haberdashery on the Strip. I always need cash, and the Mick never calls unless it is in the offing.
