Hollywood Nocturnes

by James Ellroy

  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 three like a flabby dervish.

  The gunman was fumbling with a pocketful of loose shells; he saw me just as he flicked his piece’s 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 choke hold 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 tar paper, 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 tar paper 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, make up 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 lions’ 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 hardcase 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 nose dived 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 cut 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. LA’s #1 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 LA 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 blonde 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.

  GR
AVY TRAIN

  Out of the Honor Farm and into the work force: managing the maintenance crew at a Toyota dealership in Koreatown. Jap run, a gook clientele, boogies for the shitwork and me, Stan “The Man” Klein, to crack the whip and keep on-duty loafing at a minimum. My probation officer got me the gig: Liz Trent, skinny and stacked, four useless Masters degrees, a bum marriage to a guy on methadone maintenance and the hots for yours truly. She knew I got off easy: three convictions resulting from the scams I worked with Phil Turkel—a phone sales racket that involved the deployment of hard core loops synced to rock songs and naugahyde bibles embossed with glow-in-the-dark pictures of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.—a hot item with the shvartzes. We ran a drug recovery crashpad as a front, subhorned teenyboppers into prostitution, coerced male patients into phone sales duty and kept them motivated with Benzedrine-laced espresso—all of which peaked at twenty-four grand jury bills busted down to three indictments apiece. Phil had no prior record, was strung out on cocaine and got diverted to a drug rehab; I had two G.T.A. convictions and no chemical rationalizations—bingo on a year County time, Wayside Honor Rancho, where my reputation as a lackluster heavyweight contender got me a dorm boss job. My attorney, Miller Waxman, assured me a sentence reduction was in the works; he was wrong—counting “good time” and “work time” I did the whole nine and a half months. My consolation prize: Lizzie Trent, Waxman’s ex-wife, for my P.O.—guaranteed to cut me a long leash, get me soft legitimate work and give me head before my probationary term was a month old. I took two out of three: Lizzie had sharp teeth and an overbite, so I didn’t trust her on the trifecta. I was at my desk, watching my slaves wash cars, when the phone rang.

  I picked up. “Yellow Empire Imports, Klein speaking.”

  “Miller Waxman here.”

  “Wax, how’s it hangin’?”

  “A hard yard—and you still owe me money on my fee. Seriously, I need it. I lent Liz some heavy coin to get her teeth capped.”

  The trifecta loomed, “Are you dunning me?”

  “No, I’m a Greek bearing gifts at 10% interest.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as this: a grand a week cash and three hots and a cot at a Beverly Hills mansion, all legit. I take a tensky off the top to cover your bill. The clock’s ticking, so yes or no?”

  I said, “Legit?”

  “If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’. My office in an hour?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  —

  Wax worked out of a storefront on Beverly and Alvarado—close to his clientele—dope dealers and wetbacks hot to bring the family up from Calexico. I doubleparked, put a “Clergyman on Call” sign on my windshield and walked in.

  Miller was in his office, slipping envelopes to a couple of Immigration Service goons—big guys with that hinky look indigenous to bagmen worldwide. They walked out thumbing C-notes; Wax said, “Do you like dogs?”

  I took a chair uninvited. “Well enough. Why?”

  “Why? Because Phil feels bad about lounging around up at the Betty Ford Clinic while you went inside. He wants to play catch up, and he asked me if I had ideas. A plum fell into my lap and I thought of you.”

  Weird Phil: facial scars and a line of shit that could make the Pope go Protestant. “How’s Phil doing these days?”

  “Not bad. Do you like dogs?”

  “Like I said before, well enough. Why?”

  Wax pointed to his clients’ wall of fame—scads of framed mugshots. Included: Leroy Washington, the “Crack King” of Watts; Chester Hardell, a TV preacher indicted for unnatural acts against cats; the murderous Sanchez family—scores of inbred cousins foisted on L.A. as the result of Waxie’s green card machinations. In a prominent spot: Richie “The Sicko” Sicora and Chick Ottens, the 7-11 Slayers, still at large. Picaresque: Sicora and Ottens heisted a convenience store in Pacoima and hid the salesgirl behind an upended Slurpee machine to facilitate their escape. The machine disgorged its contents: ice, sugar and carcinogenic food coloring; the girl, a diabetic, passed out, sucked in the goo, went into sugar shock and kicked. Sicora and Ottens jumped bail for parts unknown—and Wax got a commendation letter from the ACLU, citing his tenacity in defending the L.A. underclass.

  I said, “You’ve been pointing for five minutes. Want to narrow it down?”

  Wax brushed dandruff off his lapels. “I was illustrating a point, the point being that my largest client is not on that wall because he was never arrested.”

  I feigned shock. “No shit, Dick Tracy?”

  “No shit, Sherlock. I’m referring, of course, to Sol Bendish, entrepreneur, bail bondsman supreme, heir to the late great Mickey Cohen’s vice kingdom. Sol passed on recently, and I’m handling his estate.”

  I sighed. “And the punch line?”

  Wax tossed me a keyring. “He left a twenty-five million dollar estate to his dog. It’s legally inviolate and so well safeguarded that I can’t contest it or scam it. You’re the dog’s new keeper.”

  * * *

  —

  My list of duties ran seven pages. I drove to Beverly Hills wishing I’d been born canine.

  “Basko” lived in a mansion north of Sunset; Basko wore cashmere sweaters and a custom-designed flea collar that emitted minute amounts of nuclear radiation guaranteed not to harm dogs—a physicist spent three years developing the product. Basko ate prime steak, Beluga caviar, Häagen-Dazs ice cream and Fritos soaked in ketchup. Rats were brought in to sate his blood lust: rodent mayhem every Tuesday morning, a hundred of them let loose in the back yard for Basko to hunt down and destroy. Basko suffered from insomnia and required a unique sedative: a slice of Velveeta cheese melted in a cup of hundred-year-old brandy.

  I almost shit when I saw the pad; going in the door my knees went weak. Stan Klein enters the white-trash comfort zone to which he had so long aspired.

  Deep pile purple rugs everywhere.

  A three-story amphitheatre to accommodate a gigantic satellite dish that brought in four hundred TV channels.

  Big screen TVs in every room and a comprehensive library of porn flicks.

  A huge kitchen featuring two walk-in refrigerators: one for Basko, one for me. Wax must have stocked mine—it was packed with the high-sodium, high-cholesterol stuff I thrive on. Rooms and rooms full of the swag of my dreams—I felt like Fulgencio Batista back from exile.

  The I met the dog.

  I found him in the pool, floating on a cushion. He was munching a cat carcass, his rear paws in the water. I did not yet know that it was the pivotal moment of my life.

  I observed the beast from a distance.

  He was a white bull terrier—muscular, compact, deep in the chest, bow-legged. His short-haired coat gleamed in the sunlight; he was so heavily muscled that flea-nipping required a great effort. His head was perfect good-natured misanthropy: a sloping wedge of a snout, close-set beady eyes, sharp teeth and a furrowed brow that gave him the look of a teenaged kid scheming trouble. His left ear was brindled—I sighed as the realization hit me, an epiphany—like the time I figured out Annie “Wild Thing” Behringer dyed her pubic hair.

  Our eyes met.

  Basko hit the water, swam and ran to me and rooted at my crotch. Looking back, I recall those moments in slow motion, gooey music on the sound track of my life, like those frenchy films where the lovers never talk, just smoke cigarettes, gaze at each other and bang away.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next week we established a routine.

  Up early, roadwork by the Beverly Hills Hotel, Basko’s A.M. dump on an Arab sheik’s front lawn. Breakfast, Basko’s morning nap; he kept his head on my lap while I watched porno films and read sci-fi novels. Lunch: blood-rare fillets, then a float in the pool on adjoining cushions. Another walk; an eyeball on the foxy redhead who strolled her Lab at the same time each day—I figured
I’d bide my time and propose a double date: us, Basko and the bitch. Evenings went to introspection: I screened films of my old fights, Stan “The Man” Klein, feather-fisted, cannon fodder for hungry schmucks looking to pad their records. There I was: six-pointed star on my trunks, my back dusted with Clearasil to hide my zits. A film editor buddy spliced me in with some stock footage of the greats; movie magic had me kicking the shit out of Ali, Marciano and Tyson. Wistful might-have-been stuff accompanied by Basko’s beady browns darting from the screen to me. Soon I was telling the dog the secrets I always hid from women.

  When I shifted into a confessional mode, Basko would scrunch up his brow and cock his head; my cue to shut up was one of his gigantic mouth-stretching yawns. When he started dozing, I carried him upstairs and tucked him in. A little Velveeta and brandy, a little goodnight story—Basko seemed to enjoy accounts of my sexual exploits best. And he always fell asleep just as I began to exaggerate.

  I could never sync my sleep to Basko’s: his warm presence got me hopped up, thinking of all the good deals I’d blown, thinking that he was only good for another ten years on earth and then I’d be fifty-one with no good buddy to look after and no pot to piss in. Prowling the pad buttressed my sense that this incredible gravy train was tangible and would last—so I prowled with a vengeance.

  Sol Bendish dressed antithetical to his Vegas-style crib: tweedy sports jackets, slacks with cuffs, Oxford cloth shirts, wingtips and white bucks. He left three closets stuffed with Ivy League threads just about my size. While my canine charge slept, I transformed myself into his sartorial image. Jewboy Klein became Jewboy Bendish, wealthy contributor to the U.J.Α., the man with the class to love a dog of supreme blunt efficacy. I’d stand before the mirror in Bendish’s clothes—and my years as a pimp, burglar, car thief and scam artist would melt away—replaced by a thrilling and fatuous notion: finding the woman to compliment my new persona….