Hollywood Nocturnes (15 page)

  Scrivner's was on Sunset three blocks east of Hollywood High School, an eat-in-your-car joint featuring a rocket ship motif-- chromium scoops, dips, and portholes abounding--Jules Verne as seen by a fag set designer scraping the stars on marijuana. The carhops--all zoftig numbers--wore tight space-cadet outfits; the fry cooks wore plastic rocket helmets with clear face shields to protect them from spattering grease. Questioning a half dozen of them was like enjoying the DT's without benefit of booze. After an hour of talk and chump-change handouts, I knew the following:

  That Gretchen Rae Shoftel car hopped there for a month, was often tardy, and during mid-afternoon lulls tended to abandon her shift. This was tolerated because she was an atom-powered magnet that attracted men by the shitload. She could tote up tabs in her head, deftly computing sales tax--but had a marked tendency toward spilling milkshakes and french fries. When the banana-split loving Mickey Cohen started snouting around after her, the manager gave her the go by, no doubt leery of attracting the criminal elements who had made careers out of killing innocent bystanders while trying to kill the Mick. Aside from that I glommed one hard lead plus suppositions to hang it on: Gretchen Rae had persistently questioned the Scrivner's crew about a recent regular customer--a man with a long German surname who'd been eating at the counter, doing arithmetic tricks with meal tabs and astounding the locals with five-minute killings of the _LA Times_ crossword. He was an old geez with a European accent--and he stopped chowing at Scrivner's right before Gretchen Rae Shoftel hired on. Mickey told me the quail had spoken of looking for a friend of her father's; Howard had said she was from Wisconsin; German accents pointed to the dairy state in a big way. And Morris Hornbeck, Mr. Shakes just a few hours before, had been a Milwaukee mob trigger and money man. And--the lovely Gretchen Rae had continued car hopping after becoming the consort of two of the richest, most powerful men in Los Angeles--an eye-opener if ever there was one.

  *   *   *

          I drove to a pay phone and made some calls, straight and collect. An old LAPD pal gave me the lowdown on Morris Hornbeck-- he had two California convictions for felony statch rape, both complainants thirteen-year-old girls. A guy on the Milwaukee force that I'd worked liaison with supplied Midwestern skinny: Little Mo was a glorified bookkeeper for Jerry Katzenbach's mob, run out of town by his boss in '47, when he was given excess gambling skim to invest as he saw best and opened a call house specializing in underaged poon dressed up as movie stars-- greenhorn girls coiffed, cosmeticed, and gowned to resemble Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Veronica Lake and the like. The operation was a success, but Jerry Katzenbach, Knights-of-Columbus family man, considered it bum PR. Adios, Morris--who obviously found an amenable home in LA.

  On Gretchen Rae Shoftel, I got bubbkis; ditto on the geezer with the arithmetic tricks similar to the carhop/vamp. The girl had no criminal record in either California or Wisconsin--but I was willing to bet she'd learned her seduction techniques at Mo Hornbeck's whorehouse.

  I drove to Howard Hughes's South Lucerne Street fuck pad and let myself in with a key from my fourteen-pound Hughes Enterprises key ring. The house was furnished with leftovers from the RKO prop department, complete with appropriate female accoutrements for each of the six bedrooms. The Moroccan Room featured hammocks and settees from _Casbah Nocturne_ and a rainbow array of low-cut silk lounging pajamas; the _Billy the Kid_ room--where Howard brought his Jane Russell look-alikes--was four walls of mock-saloon bars with halter-top cowgirl getups and a mattress covered by a Navajo blanket. My favorite was the Zoo Room: taxidermied cougar, bison, moose, and bobcats--shot by Ernest Hemingway--mounted with their eyes leering down on a narrow strip of sheet-covered floor. Big Ernie told me he decimated the critter population of two Montana counties in order to achieve the effect. There was a kitchen stocked with plenty of fresh milk, peanut butter, and jelly to sate teenage tastebuds, a room to screen stag movies, and the master bedroom--my bet for where Howard installed Gretchen Rae Shoftel.

  I took the back staircase up, walked down the hall, and pushed the door open, expecting the room's usual state: big white bed and plain white walls--the ironic accompaniment to snatched virginity. I was wrong; what I saw was some sort of testament to squarejohn American homelife.

  Mixmasters, cookie sheets, toasters, and matched cutlery sets rested on the bed; the walls were festooned with Currier & Ives calendars and framed _Saturday Evening Post_ covers drawn by Norman Rockwell. A menagerie of stuffed animals was admiring the artwork--pandas and tigers and Disney characters placed against the bed, heads tilted upward. There was a bentwood rocker in a corner next to the room's one window. The seat held a stack of catalogs. I leafed through them: Motorola radios, Hamilton Beach kitchen goodies, bed quilts from a mail-order place in New Hampshire. In all of them the less expensive items were checkmarked. Strange, since Howard let his master bedroom poon have anything they wanted--top of the line charge accounts, the magilla.

  I checked the closet. It held the standard Hughes wardrobe-- low-cut gowns and tight cashmere sweaters, plus a half-dozen Scrivner's carhop outfits, replete with built-in uplift breastplates, which Gretchen Rae Shoftel didn't need. Seeing a row of empty hangers, I checked for more catalogs and found a Bullocks Wilshire job under the bed. Flipping through it, I saw tweedy skirts and suits, flannel blazers, and prim and proper wool dresses circled; Howard's charge account number was scribbled at the top of the back page. Gretchen Rae Shoftel, math whiz, searching for another math whiz, was contemplating making herself over as Miss Upper-Middle-Class Rectitude.

  I checked out the rest of the fuck pad--quick eyeball prowls of the other bedrooms, a toss of the downstairs closets. Empty Bullocks boxes were everywhere--Gretchen Rae had accomplished her transformation. Howard liked to keep his girls cash strapped to insure their obedience, but I was willing to guess he stretched the rules for this one. Impersonating a police officer, I called the dispatcher's office at the Yellow and Beacon cab companies. Paydirt at Beacon: three days ago at 3:10 P.M., a cab was dispatched to 436 South Lucerne; its destination: 2281 South Mariposa.

  Big paydirt.

  2281 South Mariposa was a Mickey Cohen hideout, an armed fortress where the Mick's triggers holed up during their many skirmishes with the Jack Dragna gang. It was steel-reinforced concrete; shitloads of canned goods in the bomb shelter/basement; racks of Tommys and pump shotguns behind fake walls covered by cheesecake pics. Only Mickey's boys knew about the place--making it conclusive proof that Morris Hornbeck was connected to Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I drove to Jefferson and Mariposa--quicksville.

  It was a block of wood frame houses, small, neatly tended, mostly owned by Japs sprung from the relocation camps, anxious to stick together and assert their independence in new territory. 2281 was as innocuous and sanitary as any pad on the block: Mickey had the best Jap gardener in the area. No cars were in the driveway; the cars parked curbside looked harmless enough, and the nearest local taking the sun was a guy sitting on a porch swing four houses down. I walked up to the front door, punched in a window, reached around to the latch and let myself in.

  The living room--furnished by Mickey's wife, Lavonne, with sofas and chairs from the Hadassah thrift shop--was tidy and totally silent. I was half expecting a killer hound to pounce on me before I snapped that Lavonne had forbid the Mick to get a dog because it might whiz on the carpeting. Then I caught the smell.

  Decomposition hits you in the tear ducts and gut about simultaneously. I tied my handkerchief over my mouth and nose, grabbed a lamp for a weapon, and walked toward the stink. It was in the right front bedroom, and it was a doozie.

  There were two stiffs--a dead man on the floor and another on the bed. The floor man was lying face down, with a white nightgown still pinned with a Bullocks price tag knotted around his neck. Congealed beef stew covered his face, the flesh cracked and red from scalding. A saucepan was upended a few feet away, holding the caked remains of the goo. Somebody was cooking when the altercation came down.

  I laid down the lamp and gave the floor stiff a detailed eyeing. He was fortyish, blond and fat; whoever killed him had tried to burn off his fingerprints--the tips on both hands were scorched black, which meant that the killer was an amateur: the only way to eliminate prints is to do some chopping. A hot plate was tossed in a corner near the bed; I checked it out and saw seared skin stuck to the coils. The bed stiff was right there, so I took a deep breath, tightened my mask and examined him. He was an old guy, skinny, dressed in clothes too heavy for winter LA. There was not one mark of any kind on him; his singed-fingered hands had been folded neatly on his chest, rest in peace, like a mortician had done the job. I checked his coat and trouser pockets-- goose egg--and gave him a few probes for broken bones. Double gooser. Just then a maggot crawled out of his gaping mouth, doing a spastic little Lindy Hop on the tip of his tongue.

  I walked back into the living room, picked up the phone and called a man who owes me a big, big favor pertaining to his wife's association with a Negro nun and a junior congressman from Whittier. The man is a crime-scene technician with the Sheriff's Department; a med school dropout adept at spotchecking cadavers and guessing causes of death. He promised to be at 2281 South Mariposa within the hour in an unmarked car--ten minutes of forensic expertise in exchange for my erasure of his debt.

  I went back to the bedroom, carrying a pot of Lavonne Cohen's geraniums to help kill the stink. The floor stiff's pockets had been picked clean; the bed stiff had no bruises on his head, and there were now two maggots doing a Tango across his nose. Morris Hornbeck, a pro, probably packed a silencered heater like most Mickey muscle--he looked too scrawny to be a hand-tohand killer. I was starting to make Gretchen Rae Shoftel for the snuffs--and I was starting to like her.

  Lieutenant Kirby Falwell showed up a few minutes later, tap-tap-tap on the window I broke. I let him in, and he lugged his evidence kit into the bedroom, pinching his nose. I left him there to be scientific, staying in the living room so as not to bruise his ego with my inside scoop on his wife. After half an hour he came out and greeted me:

  "We're even, Meeks. The clown on the floor was hit on the head with a flat, blunt object, maybe a frying pan. It probably knocked him silly. Then somebody threw their dinner in his face and gave him second-degree burns. Then they strangled him with that negligee. I'll give you asphyxiation as cause of death. On Pops, I'd say heart attack--natural causes. I mighta said poison, but his liver isn't distended. Heart attack, fifty-fifty odds. Both dead about two days. I picked the scabs off both sets of fingers and rolled their prints. I suppose you want a forty-eight-state teletype on them?"

  I shook my head. "California and Wisconsin--but quick."

  "Inside four hours. We're even, Meeks."

  "Take the nightgown home to the wife, Kirby. She'll find a use for it."

  "Fuck you, Meeks."

  "Adios, Lieutenant."

  *   *   *

          I settled in, the lights off, figuring if Mo Hornbeck and Gretchen Rae were some kind of partners, he would be by to dump the stiffs, or she would be, or someone would drop in to say hello. I sat in a chair by the front door, the lamp in my hand ready to swing if it came to that kind of play. Danger juice was keeping me edgy; my brain fluids were roiling, trying to figure a way out of the parlay--my two benefactors hiring me to glom one woman for their exclusive use, two corpses thrown in. As hard as I brainstormed, I couldn't think up squat. With half an hour to kill before I called Kirby Falwell, I gave up and tried the Other Guy Routine.

  The Other Guy Routine dates back to my days as a youth in Oklahoma, when my old man would beat the shit out of my old lady, and I'd haul a mattress out into the scrub woods so I wouldn't have to listen. I'd set my armadillo traps down, and every once in a while I'd hear a snap-squeak as some stupid 'dillo ate my bait and got his spine crunched for his trouble. When I finally fell asleep, I'd usually wake up to screeches--men hurting women--always just wind playing havoc with the scrub pines. I'd start thinking then: ways to get the old man off the old lady's back without consulting my brother Fud--in the Texas Pen for armed robbery and grievous aggravated assault. I knew I didn't have the guts to confront Pop myself, so I started thinking about other people just to get him off my mind. And that always let me develop a play: some church woman conned into dropping off a pie and religious tracts to calm the old man down; steering some local slick who thought Mom was a beauty in her direction, knowing Pop was a coward with other men and would love up the old girl for weeks and weeks just to keep her. That last play stood all of us good at the end--it was right before the old lady caught typhus. She took to bed with a fever, and the old man got in with her to keep her warm. He caught it himself--and died-- sixteen days after she did. Under the circumstances, you have to believe there was nothing but love between them--right up to curtains.

  So the Other Guy Routine gets you out of the hole and makes some other poor fuck feel good in the process. I worked it in niggertown as a cop: let some pathetic grasshopper slide, send him a Mickey fruit basket at Christmas, get him to snitch a horse pusher and skim five percent full of yuletide cheer. The only trouble with it this time is that I was locked on the horns of a jumbo dilemma: Mickey, Howard--two patrons, only one woman. And claiming failure with either man was against my religion.

  I gave up thinking and called Kirby Falwell at the Sheriff's Bureau. His two-state teletype yielded heat:

  The floor stiff was Fritz Steinkamp, Chicago-Milwaukee gunsel, one conviction for attempted murder, currently on parole and believed to be a Jerry Katzenbach torpedo. Mr. Heart Attack was Voyteck Kirnipaski, three-time loser, also a known Katzenbach associate, his falls for extortion and grand larceny--specifically stock swindles. The picture getting a little less hazy, I called Howard Hughes at his flop at the Bel Air Hotel. Two rings, hang up, three rings--so he'd know it's not some gossip columnist.