“Nothing of the sort,” Jack said.
“Good thing. That’s a popular little scene already. A stag party here last night watched it three times.”
This struck Jack as a lie. He’d left that clip joint too late in the evening for a stag party to come in and watch movies. At that hour, stags stop watching movies and either get a girl or go home. Even so, Jack felt his face heat a little at the suggestion. He tried to stay focused. He said, “I have a package for you, if you want it. It’s called Herbert Parker.”
“What’s a Herbert Parker? How big is his package?”
If the lightness of her tone was a put-on, this old broad was a hell of an actress. Jack cast the darkness. “Herbert Parker is a corpse right now. I think you sent him to make me one.”
“Make you one what?”
“A corpse.”
“Wait a minute,” the woman said. “Let me see if I’m getting this straight. Someone named Herbert Parker tried to kill you?”
“That’s right.”
“And you killed him first?”
“Right.”
“And you think I sent this guy to kill you?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“Oh, sweetie. You are the worst detective I’ve ever known.” She let slide a little laugh. “First off, if I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of getting that blackmail material on you. I would’ve just killed you last night when you were up here. Second off, if I sent someone to kill you and you killed him first, and then you called me to brag about it, I’d know right away to send a few more someones to get the job done right.” She paused. Jack could hear her take a long steady inhale followed by a beat and a long steady exhale: the familiar sound of a smoker taking a drag. “Does that make sense to you?”
Jack didn’t respond. His breath got short, like someone had pinched his nose and stuffed a wet rag in his mouth. He covered the mouthpiece and gasped for air. He felt himself grow dizzy, lightheaded.
While this happened, the broad in charge’s voice came through the earpiece like she were planets removed from Jack. She said, “Take it from me, sweetie. You need to find another line of work.”
Jack hung up the phone. He stayed in the chair, shaking and sweating and gasping for breath. The black-eyed peas and corn bread and greens wrestled with each other in his stomach until they all came racing out and splattered into a pile on Jack’s mother’s old area rug.
When it was all out, Jack took the chairs and end table off the rug. He rolled it up and carried it to the backyard. A scrub jay perched in the avocado tree sang a song to the afternoon. A passenger jet flew across the blue sky above. Gentle breezes blew through a honeysuckle bush not yet in bloom. Jack flopped the rug over his clothesline. He unraveled his hose and rinsed off the vomit. He washed himself while he was at it, pouring the cool water onto his face and hair. The wet pomade dripped down onto his collar.
He sipped the cool water. It tasted like rubber.
This break was enough for him to pull it together a bit. He went back inside, toweled off, changed into a clean shirt, combed his hair, and sat again in his armchair by the phone.
“What do you know, Jack?” he asked himself. Sometimes speaking aloud, even if only to himself, helped.
“You know big shit is happening here. It’s big enough to bury Wilma’s murder and hire out yours. You know that you don’t know enough to be careful. You know there’s a weird little motor court in Oxnard that could be involved but probably isn’t. You know Hammond won’t make with the information you need.”
Jack took another drag and lingered in the pause. He answered his own answer. “In other words, you don’t know anything.”
He shrugged. As lousy a detective as he was, he felt pretty confident that it would be smarter to report this murder than to hide it. He picked up the phone and rang the York station. Homicide. As luck would have it, Detective Winston picked up the call.
“Hey, Frenchy. It’s Jack Chesley.”
“Jackie. I heard you were among the living.”
“I am,” Jack said. “But I got a problem with someone who isn’t. He’s lying here in my living room, bleeding all over the floor.”
“Dead, you say?”
“From here on out.”
“Murdered.”
“Shot dead, anyway.”
“Know who did it?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I did it.”
Winston laughed. “All right, kid. I’ll be right over.”
“I’m at the old man’s house,” Jack said. “On the corner of Meridian and Avenue 52.”
“I know where you are.”
Not five minutes later, Winston walked up the front steps. He wore a wartime suit of tweed cut close across the jacket, no extra material for pleats on the pants. Years of dropped cigar ashes colored the thighs of his slacks. Hair oil and sweat carved a ring around his hatband. Maybe it was just the afternoon sun sneaking below the hat brim, but Winston looked like the years were catching up with him. His skin had grown slack and sallow since Jack had seen him last. Jack thought, this must be how my old man looked in his last days.
Jack met Winston on the porch. The two shook hands. Jack led him through the open doorway. He sidestepped a puddle of blood. Winston followed suit. He took a glimpse at the floor. “Jesus, Jack. That’s a lot of daylight coming into the back of this guy’s head.”
Jack nodded, searched his brain for a thought and said the best one that came to him. “Yep.”
Winston knelt beside the shooter. “What happened here?”
Jack stuck with the truth. “Looks like this guy picked his way in through my dining room window, then waited for me to get home. When I opened the door, a bullet buzzed by my ear. I didn’t wait to ask questions. I put one in his eye and another in his brain.”
Winston grabbed the shooter’s head and lifted. One bullet hole carried through the floorboards. Sticky blood dripped down it. “So you won the gunfight, then finished the job.”
“How do you win without finishing the job? I thought all gunfights were to the death.”
Winston dropped the head back down. He snagged the shooter’s silk handkerchief and wiped the blood off his hands with it. He patted all the pockets, reached under the shooter, found nothing, then stood. “You got his wallet?”
Jack nodded. He picked it up off the end table and tossed it to Winston. It flapped and spun through the air. Winston caught it.
He said, “Come on, Jackie. Let’s figure this out somewhere else.”
Winston took a seat at the linoleum kitchen table. Jack grazed his hand over the coffee maker and reconsidered. He dug a bottle of the old man’s rye out of a high cabinet. He grabbed a couple of glasses better suited for lemonade. “Have a drink with me, Frenchy?”
Winston waved him over. Jack set the glasses on the table. He poured himself five fingers of rye, drank it down, and refilled his glass. He pushed the bottle and empty glass toward Winston. Winston poured a smaller belt. He kept his right hand on the alligator skin wallet. His fore and middle fingers tapped on it arrhythmically. “Did you know Parker?”
“The stiff?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
Winston kept his fingers going. “But you knew him well enough to know that was his name?”
“No,” Jack said. “I read his driver’s license, just like you did.”
Winston shook his head. “I didn’t read his license. I haven’t opened the wallet yet. I just know old Herb.”
Jack felt his breath getting tight again. He’d slid into the bad habit of trusting his father’s friends—Hammond, Winston—when even the old man didn’t trust them. And his time in the prison camp should’ve taught him to trust no one. Damn it. He was a lousy detective. He hadn’t even noticed that Winston had kept the wallet closed the whole time, hadn’t even considered that the shooter could’ve been LAPD related.
Jack threw a little more whiskey at the panic.
; Winston said, “He was a shamus. Like your pop.”
“The old man was never a shamus like that. Did you get a load of that guy’s shiny Luger and bespoke suit?”
“Parker traveled in more well-heeled circles. Hollywood, mostly. The studios. Almost exclusively.”
A studio dick? Jack needed a few seconds with this information. He pulled out his tobacco and rolled a cigarette. He offered it to Winston.
Winston shook his head. “I have store-bought.”
Jack bit the end and lit up. Since all of this brought no bright ideas, he just asked. “I don’t get it. Why would the studios send someone to kill me?”
“That’s the thing, Jackie. Herb isn’t a hit man. He’s on the up and up as much as any of us.”
Jack looked as far down the hallway as he could see from the kitchen table, which wasn’t particularly far. The body was snug in the other room, but also lodged in Jack’s mind’s eye. “You call breaking into my house and taking a shot at me square?”
“I didn’t say he was square. I just said he was on the up and up as much as any of us. Anyway, I don’t think he meant to hit you.”
Jack felt the heat rise inside him. “What is this? Gentlemanly gunfights and warning shots? I just got back from a war, Frenchy.”
Winston got hold of his whiskey then, tossed it down his gullet. He nodded. “Fair enough, kid. Parker picked the wrong playmate today. We’ll chalk it up to that.”
“But why? Why was he coming to get me?”
Winston dug a dirty fingernail into a chip in the linoleum tabletop. “I was about to ask you the same damn thing.”
WILMA, 1943
THE BATH INSPIRED Wilma. The old skin was gone. New skin could grow. She could be reborn.
She dressed, walked down Figueroa to a little stationery store, and picked up a ream of white typing paper. She stopped at the little market, too, and picked up some basic groceries: bread, peanut butter, honey, fruit, eggs, milk, cereal. It would be enough to keep her going for days. In another moment of inspiration, she ducked into the drugstore on her way home. She picked up a handful of sinus inhalers.
When she got home, she cracked open an inhaler. She popped the gooey inhaler tab into her mouth. It tasted awful. She washed it down with a gulp of milk. That coated her mouth with a sour, rotten taste. She stashed the groceries and brushed her teeth. By the time she was finished, the inhaler had done its job. Her heart raced. The blood in her veins felt like the water that had flooded this side of the city back in ’38: tumbling over itself, washing away everything in its path.
Wilma slid a piece of paper into the typewriter and started banging away. She’d let everyone know what was going on up there in Camarillo, how a woman could get trapped there if her husband or father or even her son-of-a-bitch ex-father-in-law wanted to get her out of the way, and how the patients were indentured. She’d tell all about the dirty dealings from the staff—the hydro, the electroshock, the TB ward, the rumors of the mass grave just beyond the southernmost housing units, and the pipeline to brothels like the Hitching Post.
She wrote with fire and anger, channeling her best Upton Sinclair. At times she even paused and thought about Sinclair living right up the road in Pasadena. Maybe he could help her get this thing published.
Wilma didn’t sleep for four days. She didn’t leave the bungalow. Save a quick conversation with Gertie, who checked in every day after work, Wilma talked to no one. She popped inhaler tabs and ate peanut butter honey sandwiches and grapes by the bushel and typed her manifesto. She felt the soapbox grow under her feet.
On the fourth day, the Hitching Post came calling.
Wilma didn’t answer the knock on the door. She kept typing. The knock lasted for a couple of minutes. When it stopped, Wilma could hear a knife working its way between the doorjamb and lock. Her friends would’ve called her name. Her landlord would’ve used a key. Wilma grabbed a pair of scissors and raced toward the door just as it swung open. She didn’t recognize the punk busting through her doorway. She jabbed her scissors into his midsection. They hit a button on his sportcoat and glanced to the side, harmless. The punk grabbed her by the lapels of her robe and flung her backwards into the arm of her loveseat. She flopped over it and landed sprawling on her area rug. The punk stepped outside, grabbed a bulky cube of a suitcase, and came back in.
“Stay down and shut up, Wilma,” he said.
Wilma propped herself up on her elbows but didn’t try to stand. The punk stepped over her. He pulled the coffee table to the side a couple of feet, set the bulky cube on it, unlatched the buckles, and took a small film projector out. “Ma Breedlove sent me,” he said.
“Who’s Ma Breedlove?”
The sharper jabbed the pointy toe of his wingtip into the soft flesh below Wilma’s ribs. “Don’t play dumb with me. Get your ass off the floor and take a seat. Face that wall.”
Wilma climbed onto her loveseat and took a mental inventory of her bungalow. She had a few knives in the kitchen, a baseball bat beside her bed, and a few glass ashtrays that could do some damage if she threw them the right way. This punk had a piece jutting out of the back of his pants. No weapon she had was any match for that. She could never get under his coat and grab that gun herself. She sat and waited to find out who Ma Breedlove was and why she sent this flat-nosed middleweight to find Wilma.
The punk clicked the full reel on the front arm and the empty reel on the back and strung film through the camera. Wilma didn’t move. The punk circled the bungalow, closing all the curtains. When it was sufficiently dark, he flipped on the projector.
The flickering images on her bare plaster wall brought to life the bedroom of the ground floor penthouse at the Hitching Post. Four men carried a naked and unconscious Wilma onto the bed. Two men stood at the foot of the bed. The film had no sound. Black shadows haunted the edges. The middle of the picture came in clear. A group of men gathered around a passed-out Wilma. One of them spread her legs wide.
Even with a system full of inhaler tabs, Wilma’s heart rate doubled. Her blood caught fire. The punk watched Wilma instead of the movie on her wall. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re such a fucking whore.”
Wilma gathered a mouthful of spit and sent it into the punk’s face. He smiled.
Two men on the film argued over Wilma’s prone body. The camera panned behind them. A line formed. One of the arguing men pulled his shirt off.
The punk wiped the spit off his face and smeared it onto Wilma’s robe. Wilma shot him a look from the side of her eyes. He slapped her. “Watch the film.”
On the wall, the line of men had been interrupted by the ex-heartthrob. He whipped off his sportcoat and pushed aside the shirtless guy, who was at the front of the line. The shirtless guy stumbled.
Wilma closed her eyes. The punk slapped her again. “Watch this,” he said. She kept her eyes closed. He slapped her again. She started to scream. Raw. Guttural. Tearing her throat. The punk didn’t do anything until she paused for breath. He whispered, “Scream all you want, Toots. No one is coming to save you.”
This just made her cry. While she did, the punk whispered a play-by-play from the film on her wall, explaining exactly what was happening, down to the tiniest detail, pausing occasionally to lick a tear off her cheek.
Finally, through watery eyes, Wilma saw the film go black.
“Okay,” the punk said, turning to face Wilma. “Ma Breedlove wants you to come back and work for her. You still have a debt to pay her and Giroux. You come back, we’ll forget all about you running away.”
“And if I don’t come back?”
The punk shrugged. “We call up Camarillo. You finish your sentence there. Plus time added for your escape. You’ll spend the rest of your life up there, cleaning lungers’ bedpans and spittoons. Your choice.” The punk walked past Wilma and opened the door. A gash of midday sunlight cut across the bungalow. “We’ll give you a week to decide. Bring the camera and film with you when you come back.”
JACK, 1946<
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AFTER FRENCHY had cleared out and the coroner picked up the body and Jack had scrubbed all the blood off his floor, he decided to take a break from the case. He piled furniture in front of his windows and doors so no one could come in. He found a warm and welcoming bottle and buried himself in it for a few days.
The whiskey was harsh and plentiful. The days were dark inside the house. Jack drank until he passed out. Whenever he came back around, he stayed conscious only long enough to throw booze at that problem.
Something like this had happened in Germany, only without the rye. Just after dropping its payload onto a small German city, Jack’s plane had been shot and was going down. The crew gathered their packs and kits and bailed while they could. Because of his position in the plane and his bizarre politeness in a moment of crisis, Jack was the last to get out. He parachuted down into enemy territory—territory he had just bombed. He could see the survivors of the town chasing the parachutes. He expected gunshots, but these poor bastards didn’t have guns. As he got closer to the ground, he saw they had pitchforks and shovels and pickaxes and fence posts and kitchen knives and whatever else they could pick up. It was enough. As soon as each member of the crew landed, they swarmed him. From Jack’s vantage point, these weren’t swarms humans could survive.
Jack fumbled through his kit and dug out the .45. He floated down toward a waiting mob. One woman in particular seemed to be leading the group coming after Jack. She was a sturdy broad. Wide shoulders. Wide hips. Greasy overalls. More of a factory foreman than a housewife. She waved a cleaver at Jack. Jack picked her, first. He took careful aim and fired. He’d been doing this all war: picking a target from above and firing down. Killing from the air. His aim was true again. The woman dropped. A boy, maybe fifteen on the old end, picked up the cleaver and kept running for Jack’s landing space. Jack took aim again. Dropped the kid.
Dead Extra Page 11
