Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

Malloy was called in. He developed a theory: one of the eyewitnesses was in on the robbery; the heisters glommed the addresses of the other witnesses and decided to bump them to camouflage their guy. Malloy threw a net around the three remaining witnesses; two square johns named Dan Doherty and Bob Roscomere — working stiffs with no known criminal associates — and Maggie Cordova — a nightclub singer who’d taken two falls for possession and sale of marijuana.

Maggie C. loomed as the prime suspect: she toked big H and maryjane, was rumoured to have financed her way through music school by pulling gang bangs, and played it hardcase during her two-year jolt at Tehachapi. Doherty and Roscomere were put out as bait, not warned of the danger they were in, carrying DA’s Bureau tails wherever they went. Malloy figured my still-simmering torch for Lorna K. gave me added insight into the ways of errant songbirds and sent me out to keep loose track of Maggie, hoping she’d draw unfriendly fire if she wasn’t the finger woman or lead me to the heisters if she was.

I found Maggie pronto — a call to a booking agent who owed me — and an hour later I was sipping rye and soda in the lounge of a Gardena pokerino parlour. The woman was a dumpy ash blonde in a spangly gown, long-sleeved, probably to hide her needle tracks. She looked vaguely familiar, like a stag film actress you were hard for in your youth. Her eyes were flat and droopy and her microphone gestures were spastic. She looked like a hophead who’d spent her best years on cloud nine and would never adjust to life on earth.

I listened to Maggie butcher ‘I Can’t Get Started’, ‘The Way You Look Tonight,’ and ‘Blue Moon’; she bumped the mike stand with her crotch and nobody whistled. She sang ‘Serenade in Blue’ off-key and a clown a couple of tables over threw a handful of martini olives at her. She flipped the audience the finger, got a round of applause, and belted the beginning of ‘Prison of Love’.

I sat there, transfixed. I closed my eyes and pretended it was Lorna. I forced myself not to wonder how this pathetic no-talent dopester got hold of a song written exclusively for me. Maggie sang her way through all five verses, the material almost transforming her voice into something good. I was ripping off Lorna’s snow-white gown and plunging myself into her when the music stopped and the lights went on.

And Maggie was ixnay, splitsville, off to Gone City. I tried her dressing room, the bar, the casino. I got her vehicle stats from the DMV and got nowhere with them. I slapped around a croupier with a junkie look, got Maggie’s address, and found her dump cleaned out lock, stock and barrel. I became a pistol-whipping, rabbit-punching, brass-knuckle-wielding dervish then, tearing up the Gardena Strip. I got a half decent lead on a ginch Maggie used to whore with; the woman got me jacked on laudanum, picked my pocket, and left me in Gone City, ripe prey for a set of strong-arm bulls from the Gardena PD. When I came off cloud ten in a puke-smelling drunk tank, Bill Malloy was standing over me with glad tidings: I’d been charged with six counts of aggravated assault, one count of felonious battery, and two counts of breaking and entering. Maggie Cordova was nowhere to be found; the other eyewitnesses were in protective custody. Bill himself was off the bank job, on temporary assignment to the Alien Squad, set to rustle Japs, the big cattle drive that wouldn’t end until Uncle Sam gave Hirohito the big one where it hurt the most. My services were no longer required by the DA’s office, and my night curfew waiver was revoked until somebody figured a way to chill out the nine felony charges accumulated against me...

I heard a knock at the door, looked out the window and saw a prowl car at the kerb, red lights blinking. I took my time turning on lamps, wondering if it was warrants and handcuffs or maybe somebody who wanted to talk dealsky. More knocks — a familiar cadence. Bill Malloy at midnight.

I opened the door. Malloy was backstopped by a muscle cop who looked like a refugee from the wrong side of a Mississippi chain gang: big ears, blond flat-top, pig eyes, and a too-small suit-coat framing the kind of body you expect to see on convicts who haul cotton bales all day. Bill said, ‘You want out of your grief, Hearns? I came to give you an out.’

I pointed to the man-monster. ‘Expecting trouble you can’t handle?’

‘Policemen come in pairs. Easier to give trouble, easier to avoid it. Sergeant Jenks, Mr Hearns.’

The big man nodded; an Adam’s apple the size of a baseball bobbed up and down. Bill Malloy stepped inside and said, ‘If you want those charges dropped and your curfew waiver back, raise your right hand.’

I did it. Sergeant Jenks closed the door behind him and read from a little card he’d pulled from his pocket. ‘Do you, Spade Hearns, promise to uphold the laws of the United States Government pertaining to executive order number nine-oh-five-five and obey all other federal and municipal statutes while temporarily serving as an internment agent?’

I said, ‘Yeah.’

Bill handed me a fresh curfew pass and an LAPD rap sheet with a mugshot strip attached. ‘Robert no middle name Murikami. He’s a lamster Jap, he’s a youth gang member, he did a deuce for B and E and when last seen he was passing out anti-American leaflets. We’ve got his known associates on this sheet, last known address, the magilla. We’re swamped and taking in semipros like you to help. Usually we pay fifteen dollars a day, but you’re in no position to demand a salary.’

I took the sheet and scanned the mugshots. Robert NMN Murikami was a stolid-looking youth — a samurai in a skivvy shirt and duck’s ass haircut. I said. ‘If this kid’s so wicked, why are you giving me the job?’

Jenks bored into me with his little pig eyes; Bill smiled. ‘I trust you not to make the same mistake twice.’

I sighed. ‘What’s the punch line?’

‘The punch line is that this punk is pals with Maggie Cordova — we got complete paper on him, including his bail reports. The Cordova cooze put up the jack for Tojo’s last juvie beef. Get him, Hearns. All will be forgiven and maybe you’ll get to roll in the gutter with another second-rate saloon girl.’

I settled in to read the junior kamikaze’s rap sheet. There wasn’t much: the names and addresses of a half dozen Jap cohorts — tough boys probably doing the Manzanar shuffle by now — carbons of the kid’s arrest reports, and letters to the judge who presided over the B&E trial that netted Murikami his two-spot at Preston. If you read between the lines, you could see a metamorphosis: Little Tojo started out as a pad prowler out for cash and a few sniffs of ladies’ undergarments and ended up a juvie gang honcho: zoot suits, chains and knives, boogie-woogie rituals with his fellow members of the ‘Rising Sons’. At the bottom of the rap sheet there was a house key attached to the page with Scotch tape, an address printed beside it: 1746¼, North Avenue 46, Lincoln Heights. I pocketed the key and drove there, thinking of a Maggie-to-Lorna reunion parlay — cool silk sheets and a sleek tanned body soundtracked by the torch song supreme.

The address turned out to be a subdivided house on a terraced hillside overlooking the Lucky Lager Brewery. The drive over was eerie: streetlights and traffic signals were the only illumination and Lorna was all but there with me in the car, murmuring what she’d give me if I took down slant Bobby. I parked at the kerb and climbed up the front steps, counting numbers embossed on doorways: 1744, 1744½, 1746, 1746½. 1746¼ materialised; I fumbled the key towards the lock. Then I saw a narrow strip of light through the adjoining window — the unmistakable glint of a penflash probing. I pulled my gun, eased the key in the hole, watched the light flutter back towards the rear of the pad, and opened the door slower than slow.