Джеймс Эллрой - Widespread Panic

We pulled chairs up to the consoles. We plugged in. We donned headphones. Lance noshed pizza crusts and crapped out on the floor.

I sat close to Stretch. We played kneesies and lazy-linked hands. I got two hours of dead air. Some unknown male called Steve the Stud at 8:19 p.m. Steve called him “Cal.” They schmoozed Private Hell 36. Steve dished Howard Duff and wife Ida Lupino. Duff was a souse. La Lupino was a snout trout. She blew him behind the food truck. Dorothy Malone sizzled. “I’ve got this celebrity smut angle I’m working on. She’d be a prime candidate.”

Bingo!!! — Celeb Smut Lead #1/8:27 p.m.

The call capped at 8:33. Dead air dinged in its weary wake. I watched Stretch work the lez line. Her headset was clamped tight. She notched notes in her fone log. She evinced deep delight and entrenched ennui.

Boredom banged me. I snagged Claire Klein’s buff shot and dossier off the corkboard and sat back down. Stretch snatched the buff shot and studied it. She winked and went Oooh-la-la. She said, “Rock should marry her. ”

I winked back. Claire was boss-built and credibly credentialed. Born: New York City, 8/11/21. World War II Wave lieutenant. Court-martialed and DD’d on a pandering beef. Emigrated to Palestine, ’47. Seduced and tortured Arab spies for the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Shit — the A -rabs are my put-upon people!!!!!

Claire hits America. She moves to L.A. and gets a California teaching credential. She teaches algebra at Le Conte Junior High. She gets part-time studio work. Claire’s a climber. She takes scalps and moves on. Bob Aldrich, Otto Preminger, Henry Hathaway, Willy Wyler. She visits Burt Lancaster’s torture den. Burt wants to spin her on his wall-mounted dartboard and toss darts at her legs. Claire won’t play. Burt comes on coercive. Claire shows him the shiv strapped to her left leg. Burt amps up the ante. Claire drops names.

Mickey Cohen, Lou Rothkopf, Sammy Dorfman, Baldy Stein. The kosher kowboys in the L.A. rackets. All zany Zionists. All demented and dyspeptic. Burt backs off — Claire’s bad to the bone and calamitously connected.

Steve the Stud’s phone rang. Log it — 10:21 p.m.

Steve picked up. Unknown Male #2 jabbered. Steve called him “Fritz.” They schmoozed the Jap sword and Jap-shrunken-head market. Fritz called it “a growth industry.” Biz was up, up. Biz was bullish per Nazi-knife cutlery, all swastika-embossed. Plus Nazi helmets recut into chafing dishes and soup tureens.

Steve said, “I’m moving out of my kraut phase, Fritzie. Find me some Makarov pistols and some NKVD memorabilia. I wouldn’t say no to daggers from some Ivan’s Lubyanka stash.”

The call droned on. I exhumed Bondage Bob’s dish: “Cochran leans left, if anything.”

The call capped out — 10:42 p.m. Dead air doused me and slid me into sleep. I went someplace safe and soft. I snored in sync with Lance the Leopard, laid out at my feet.

Time ticked. Safe and soft became wet and warm. I swam in the River Styx. Joan Horvath rebaptized me. She wore a Nazi-print bikini and swim fins. Stretch jerked off my headset. Such innocence, such glee.

“Dig this, Uncle Freddy. The dots connect. Claire Klein’s hooking, part-time. She tricked with that Communist Party cultural guy V. J. Jerome, who’s supposedly infiltrating Hollywood, and the third spoke of the wheel was Babs Payton, who’s been on the skids since she dumped Franchot Tone, according to the fan mags my mom reads. They went at it for two hours straight, and then they drank vodka and slurped borscht.”

Wilshire and Serrano

2/18/54

We drank lunch. My appetite was up, up. I kicked assiduous ass all morning. Morty Bendish at the Mirror. The Transom and Whisper guys. I told them Rock Hudson was my gig, X-clusive. They kvetched, moped, and moaned. Blood bloomed on my beavertail sap. I sacked their civil contracts and ratched their rights of free speech.

Harry badged our waiter. He slipped us a jug at the PD’s stock half price. Old Crow and Dexedrine — va-va-voom!!!!!

“Let’s get to it. You want in on the Joan Horvath snuff. You’ve been waxing sentimental on that nutty broad for years. The price is five yards to buy in, and a yard a pop for special favors.”

I flashed my flash roll and peeled off ten C-notes. Frazzled Freddy always comes flush. Harry cadged the cash and smiled smug.

“It looks like a hot-prowl 459, gone way bad. The guy came in a cracked window and left rubber-glove prints on the sill. He had Joanie’s purse in his hands when she woke up and fought him. She scratched him, and we took AB-negative blood spill and dark and coarse beard fragments out from under her nails. That’s good, so far. But there wasn’t enough blood to run individual comparisons on. In this case, that means that blood type can exonerate, but it can’t convict.”

I gargled Old Crow. “Go on, and tell me why you called Joan a ‘nutty broad.’ ”

Harry made the jack-off sign. “One, she married Ralphie Horvath, had two kids with him, and stuck with him. Two, she was overqualified for a low-life thief and punk like Ralphie. She had some big education, and was some kind of Russian-history scholar, but all she did was stay at home and tend to her snot-nosed kids.”

I lit a cigarette. “Here’s the big question. Did George Collier Akin do the job?”

Harry shook his head. “I’m not so sure. Bill Parker’s convinced himself, he’s convinced the Hats, and you know what that means. Parker saw the hospital pix of that girl that Akin, Brown, and Dulange abducted, and now he’s running hot, with a thermometer so far up his ass that it hurts. He wants Akin dead, the Hats want to kill him, and it’s true that Akin broke with Brown and Dulange when they wouldn’t agree to snuff the girl. Okay, we can assume that Akin — who’s a hot-prowl man from way back — is off working solo, and most likely in L.A. city. So far, so good — but I go back to ’43 with this evil cocksucker — and the Horvath caper doesn’t look like his kind of deal.”

I stubbed out my cigarette. “How so?”

Harry said, “Okay. He’s got dark and coarse facial hair, so that matches. I checked his Quentin file, and he’s got AB-negative blood, so that matches, and it’s pretty rare. But I popped Akin for eight hot prowls in ’43, and he always wore a rubber red devil mask, cut down low on his neck, to protect him from scratching and gouging, and to further terrorize his victims — because he is the most sadistic son of a whore I’ve ever met — so if the Hats want to put him down, who am I to raise a stink?”

I gargled Old Crow. It rerouted my dexie surge, molto bene.

“He wanted to kill the cheerleader girl, but he’s never killed any women, prior to that, that you know of.”

Harry twirled his glass. “Never. He spent ’43 to ’51 in Quentin. He paroled out in November, hung up his parole, and went rogue. We’ve had six more hot-prowl/assaults possibly attributable to the Red Devil Bandit since then — all with grievous bodily harm short of murder. Then this fuck hooks up with Brown and Dulange, and it’s the BHPD’s grief from that point on.”

I said, “He split from Brown and Dulange two weeks ago. You ‘assume’ that he’s working solo, but you’re ‘implying’ that he’s not strictly adhering to his Red Devil Bandit MO, and you’ve got no reported hot prowls that you’re sure he’s good for.”

Harry sighed. “You nailed it. Never let it be known that the infamous Freddy O. drew a dumb breath.”

I chained cigarettes. “What else? Describe the crime scene.”