Hollywood Nocturnes

Torch Number

Before Pearl Harbor and the Jap scare, my living room window offered a great night view: Hollywood Boulevard lit with neon, dark hillsides, movie spots crisscrossing the sky announcing the latest opening at Grauman’s and the Pantages. Now, three months after the day of infamy — blackouts in effect and squadrons of Jap Zeros half expected any moment — all I could see were building shapes and the cherry lamps of occasional prowl cars. The ten P.M. curfew kept night divorce work off my plate, and blowing my last assignment with Bill Malloy of the D.A.’s Bureau made a special deputy’s curfew waiver out of the question. Work was down, bills were up, and my botched surveillance of Maggie Cordova had me thinking of Lorna all the time, wearing the grooves on her recording of “Prison of Love” down to sandpaper.

I mixed another rye and soda and started the record over. Through a part in the curtains, I eyeballed the street; I thought of Lorna and Maggie Cordova until their stories melded.

Lorna Kafesjian.

Second-rate bistro chanteuse — first-rate lungs, third-rate club gigs because she insisted on performing her own tunes. I met her when she hired me to rebuff the persistent passes of a rich bull dagger who’d been voyeur perving on her out at Malibu Beach — Lorna with her swimsuit stripped to the waist, chest exposed for a deep cleavage tan to offset the white gowns she always wore on stage. The dyke was sending Lor a hundred long-stemmed red roses a day, along with mash notes bearing her nom de plume d’amour: “Your Tongue of Fire.” I kiboshed the pursuit quicksville, glomming the tongue’s Vice jacket, shooting the dope to Louella Parsons — a socially connected, prominently married carpet muncher with a yen for nightclub canaries was prime meat for the four-star Herald. I told Louella: She desists, you don’t publish; she persists, you do. The Tongue and I had a little chat; I strong-armed her nigger bodyguard when he got persistent. Lorna was grateful, wrote me the torch number to torch all torch numbers — and I got persistent.

The flame burned both ways for about four months — from January to May of ’38 I was Mr. Ringside Swain as Lorna gigged the Katydid Klub, Bido Lito’s, Malloy’s Nest, and a host of dives on the edge of jigtown. Two A.M. closers, then back to her place; long mornings and afternoons in bed, my business neglected, clients left dangling while I lived the title of a Duke Ellington number: “I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good.” Lorna came out of the spell first; she saw that I was willing to trash my life to be with her. That scared her; she pushed me away; I played stage door Johnny until I got disgusted with myself and she blew town for fuck knows where, leaving me a legacy of soft contralto warbles on hot black wax.

Lorna.

Lorna to Maggie.

Maggie happened this way:

Two weeks ago Malloy co-opted me to the D.A.’s Bureau — the aftermath of the bank job was running helter-skelter, he needed a man good at rolling stakeouts, and a citizens committee had posted extra reward gelt. The B of A on North Broadway and Alpine got knocked off; two shitbirds — Caucasians, one with outré facial scars — snuffed three armed guards and got away clean. A score of eyeball witnesses gave descriptions of the robbers, then — blam! — the next day a witness, a seventy-three-year-old Jap granny set for internment pickup, got plugged — double blam! — as she was walking her pooch to the corner market. LAPD Ballistics compared the slugs to the pills extracted from the stiffs at the bank scene: match-up, straight across.

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 rumored 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 D.A.’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 parlor. 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 P.D. 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 D.A.’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 curb, 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 flattop, 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 curb and climbed up the front steps, counting numbers embossed on doorways: 1744, 1744½, 1746, 1746½ 1746¼ materialized; I fumbled the key toward the lock. Then I saw a narrow strip of light through the adjoining window — the unmistakable glint of a pen flash probing. I pulled my gun, eased the key in the hole, watched the light flutter back toward the rear of the pad, and opened the door slower than slow.

No movement inside, no light coming toward me. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” echoed from a back room; a switch dropped and big light took over. And there was my target: a tall, skinny man bending over a chest of drawers, a penflash clamped in his teeth.

I let him start rifling, then tiptoed over. When he had both hands braced on the dresser and his legs spread, I gave him the Big Fungoo.

I hooked his left leg back; Prowler collapsed on the dresser, penflash cracking teeth as his head hit the wall. I swung him around, shot him a pistol butt blow to the gut, caught a flailing right hand, jammed the fingers into the top drawer space, slammed the drawer shut, and held it there with my knee until I heard fingers cracking. Prowler screamed; I found a pair of jockey shorts on the counter, shoved them in his mouth, and kept applying pressure with my knee. More bone crack; amputation coming up. I eased off and let the man collapse on his knees.

The shitbird was stone cold out. I kicked him in the face to keep him that way, turned on the wall light, and prowled myself.

It was just a crummy bedroom, but the interior decorating was très outré: Jap nationalist posters on the walls — racy shit that showed Jap Zeros buzz-bombing a girl’s dormitory, buxom white gash in peignoirs running in terror. The one table held a stack of Maggie Cordova phonograph records — Maggie scantily attired on the jackets, stretch marks, flab, and chipped nail polish on display. I examined them up close — no record company was listed. They were obvious vanity jobs — fat Maggie preserving her own sad warbles.

Shitbird was stirring; I kicked him in the noggin again and trashed the place upside down. I got:

A stash of women’s undies, no doubt Bad Bob’s B&E booty; a stash of his clothes; assorted switchblades, dildoes, french ticklers, tracts explaining that a Jew-Communist conspiracy was out to destroy the world of true peace the German and Japanese brotherhood had sought to establish through peaceful means and — under the mattress — seventeen bankbooks: various banks, the accounts fat with cash, lots of juicy recent deposits.

It was time to make Shitbird sing. I gave him a waistband frisk, pulling out a .45 auto, handcuffs, and — mother dog! — an L.A. sheriff’s badge and I.D. holder. Shitbird’s real monicker was Deputy Walter T. Koenig, currently on loan to the County Alien Squad.

That got me thinking. I found the kitchen, grabbed a quart of beer from the icebox, came back and gave Deputy Bird an eye-opener — Lucky Lager on the cabeza. Koenig sputtered and spat out his gag; I squatted beside him and leveled my gun at his nose. “No dealsky, no tickee, no washee. Tell me about Murikami and the bankbooks or I’ll kill you.”

Koenig spat blood; his foggy eyes honed in on my roscoe. He licked beer off his lips; I could tell his foggy brain was trying to unfog an angle. I cocked my .38 for emphasis. “Talk, Shitbird.”

“Zeck — zeck — order.”

I spun the .38’s cylinder — more emphasis. “You mean the executive order on the Japs?”

Koenig spat a few loose canines and some gum flaps. “Zat’s right.”

“Keep going. A snitch jacket looks good on you.”

Shitbird held a stare on me; I threw him back some of his manhood to facilitate a speedy confession. “Look, you spill and I won’t rat you. This is just a money gig for me.”

His eyes told me he bought it. Koenig got out his first unslurred words. “I been doin’ a grift with the Japs. The government’s holdin’ their bank dough till the internment ends. I was gonna cash out for Murikami and some others, for a cut. You know, bring ‘em to the bank in bracelets, carry some official-lookin’ papers. Japs are smart, I’ll give ‘em that. They know they’re goin’ bye-bye, and they want more than bank interest.”

I didn’t quite buy it; on reflex I gave Koenig’s jacket pockets a toss. All I got was some women’s pancake makeup — pad and bottle. The anomaly tweaked me; I pulled Koenig to his feet and cuffed him behind his back with his own bracelets. “Where’s Murikami hiding out?”

“Fourteen-eleven Wabash, East L.A., apartment three-eleven. Bunch of Japs holing up there. What are you gonna—”

“I’m going to toss your car and cut you loose. It’s my grift now, Walter.”

Koenig nodded, trying not to look grateful; I unloaded his piece and stuck it in his holster, gave him back his badge kit, rounded up the bankbooks, and shoved him toward the front door, thinking of Lorna accompanied by Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller, the two of us enjoying Acapulco vacations financed by Axis cash. I pushed Koenig down the steps ahead of me; he nodded toward a Ford roadster parked across the street. “There, that’s mine. But you ain’t—”

Shots cut the air; Koenig pitched forward, backward, forward. I hit the pavement, not knowing which direction to fire. Koenig slumped into the gutter; a car sped by sans headlights. I squeezed off five shots and heard them ding metal; lights went on in windows — they gave me a perfect shot of a once-rogue cop with his face blasted away. I stumbled over to the Ford, used my pistol butt to smash in a window, popped the glove compartment, and tore through it. Odd papers, no bankbooks, my hands brushing a long piece of slimy rubber. I held it up and flicked on the dash light and saw a paste-on scar — outré — just like the one eyewitnesses at the bank job said one of the heisters had.

I heard sirens descending, blasting like portents of doomsday. I ran to my car and highballed it the fuck away.

My apartment was in the wrong direction — away from leads on Maggie into Lorna. I drove to 1411 Wabash, found it postmidnight still, blackout black — a six-story walk-up with every single window covered. The joint was stone quiet. I ditched my car in the alley, stood on the hood, jumped up, and caught the bottom rung of the fire escape.

The climb was tough going; mist made the handrails wet and slippery, and my shoes kept slipping. I made it to the third-floor landing, pushed the connecting door open, padded down the empty hallway to 311, put my ear to the door and listened.

Voices in Jap, voices in Jap-accented English, then pure Americanese, loud and clear. “You’re paying me for a hideout, not chow at two-fucking-A.M. But I’ll do it — this time.”

More voices; footsteps heading toward the hall. I pulled my gun, pinned myself to the wall, and let the door open in my face. I hid behind it for a split second; it was shut, and caucasian-san hotfooted it over to the elevator. On tippy-toes, I was right behind him.

I cold-cocked him clean — wham! — grabbed his pocket piece while he hit the carpet and dreamsville, stuffed my display handkerchief in his mouth, and dragged him over to a broom closet and locked him in. Two-gun armed, I walked back to the door of 311 and rapped gently.

“Yes?” — a Jap voice — from the other side. I said, “It’s me,” deliberately muffled. Mutters, the door opening, a jumbo Buddhahead filling the doorway. I kicked him in the balls, caught his belt mid-jackknife, pulled forward and smashed his head into the doorjamb. He sunk down gonesville; I waved the automatic I’d taken off the white punk at the rest of the room.

What a room.

A dozen slants staring at me with tiny black eyes like Jap Zero insignias, Bob Murikami smack in the middle. Arkansas toad stabbers drawn and pointed square at my middle. A Mexican standoff or the sequel to Pearl Harbor. Kamikaze was the only way to play it.

I smiled, ejected the chambered round from my pilfered piece, popped the clip, and tossed both at the far wall. Jumbo was stirring at my feet; I helped him up, one hand on his carotid artery in case he got uppity. With my free hand, I broke the cylinder on my gun, showing him the one bullet left from my shoot-out with Walter Koenig’s killers. Jumbo nodded his head, getting the picture; I spun the chamber, put the muzzle to his forehead, and addressed the assembled Axis powers. “This is about bankbooks, Maggie Cordova, Alien Squad grifts, and that big heist at the Japtown B of A. Bob Murikami’s the only guy I want to talk to. Yes or no.”

Nobody moved a muscle or said a word. I pulled the trigger, clicked an empty chamber, and watched Jumbo shake head to toe — bad heebie-jeebies. I said, “Sayonara, Shitbird,” and pulled the trigger again; another hollow click, Jumbo twitching like a hophead going into cold turkey overdrive.

Five to one down to three to one; I could see Lorna, nude, waving bye-bye Hearns, heading toward Stormin’ Norman Killebrew, jazz trombone, rumored to have close to a hard half yard and the only man Lorna implied gave it to her better than me. I pulled the trigger twice — twin empties — shit stink taking over the room as Jumbo evacuated his bowels.

One to one, seven come eleven, the Japs looking uncharacteristically piqued. Now I saw my own funeral cortege, “Prison of Love” blasting as they lowered me into the grave.

“No! I’ll talk!”

I had the trigger at half pull when Bob Murikami’s voice registered. I let go of Jumbo and drew a bead on Bad Bob; he walked over and bowed, supplicant samurai style, at my gun muzzle. Jumbo collapsed; I waved the rest of the group into a tight little circle and said, “Kick the clip and the roscoe over.”

A weasel-faced guy complied; I popped one into the chamber and tucked my Russki roulette piece in my belt. Murikami pointed to a side door; I followed him over, a straight-arm bead on the others.

The door opened into a small bedroom lined with cots — the Underground Railway, 1942 version. I sat down on the cleanest one available and pointed Murikami to a cot a few yards over, well within splatter range. I said, “Spill. Put it together, slow and from the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”

Bad Bob Murikami was silent, like he was mustering his thoughts and wondering how much horseshit he could feed me. His face was hard set; he looked tough beyond his years. I smelled musk in the room — a rare combo of blood and Lorna’s “Cougar Woman” perfume. “You can’t lie, Bob. And I won’t hand you up to the Alien Squad.”

Murikami snickered. “You won’t?”

I snickered back. “You people mow a mean lawn and trim a mean shrub. When my ship comes in, I’ll be needing a good gardener.”

Murikami double-snickered — and a smile started to catch at the corners of his mouth. “What’s your name?”

“Spade Hearns.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

“I thought private eyes were sensitive guys with a code of honor.”

“Only in the pulps.”

“That’s rich. If you don’t have a code of honor, how do I know you won’t cross me?”

“I’m in too deep now, Tojo. Crossing you’s against my own best interest.”

“Why?”

I pulled out a handful of bankbooks; Murikami’s slant eyes bugged out until he almost looked like a fright-wig nigger. “I killed Walt Koenig for these, and you need a white man to tap the cash. I don’t like witnesses and there’s too many of you guys to kill, even though I’m hopped up on blood bad. Spiel me, papa-san. Make it an epic.”

Murikami spieled for a straight hour. His story was the night train to Far Gonesville.

It started when three Japs, bank building maintenance workers pissed over their imminent internment, cooked up a plot with rogue cop Walt Koenig and a cop buddy of his — Murikami didn’t know the guy’s name. The plot was a straight bank robbery with a no-violence proviso — Koenig and pal taking down the B of A based on inside info, the Japs getting a percentage cut of the getaway loot for the young firebrands stupid enough to think they could hot-foot it to Mexico and stay free, plus Koenig’s safeguarding of confiscated Jap property until the internment ended. But the caper went blood simple: guards snuffed, stray bullets flying. Mrs. Lena Sakimoto, the old dame shot on the street the next day, was the finger woman — she was in the bank pretending to be waiting in line, but her real errand was to pass the word to Koenig and buddy — the split second the vault cash was distributed to the tellers. She was rubbed out because the heisters figured her for a potential snitch.

Double-cross.

Bad Bob and his pals had been given the bank money to hold. Enraged over the deaths, they shoved it into Jap bank accounts, figured the two whiteys couldn’t glom it, that the swag would accumulate interest until the internment was adios. Bob stashed the bankbooks at his crib and was soon to send the white boy fronting the getaway pad over to get them — but he got word a friend of his got greedy.

The friend’s name was George Hayakawa, a vice-warlord in the Rising Sons. He went to Walt Koenig with a deal: He’d get the cash for a fifty-fifty cut. Koenig said no dealsky, tortured the location of the bankbooks and the address of the hideout out of Hayakawa, snuffed him, chopped off his dick, and sent it over in a pizza delivery box. A warning — don’t fuck with the White Peril.

I pressed Murikami on Maggie Cordova — how did she fit in? The epic took on perv-o overtones.

Maggie was Bad Bob’s sister’s squeeze — the femme half of a dyke duo. She was the co-finger woman inside the bank; when Mrs. Lena Sakimoto got shot to sukiyaki, Maggie fled to Tijuana, fearing similar reprisals. Bob didn’t know exactly where she was. I pressed, threatened, and damn near shot Murikami to get the answer I wanted most: where Maggie Cordova got “Prison of Love.”

Bad Bob didn’t know; I had to know. I made him a deal I knew I’d double-cross the second Lorna slinked into view. You come with me, we’ll withdraw all the gelt, you take me to T.J. to find Maggie and the money’s all yours. Murikami agreed; we sealed the bargain by toking a big bottle of laudanum laced with sake. I passed out on my cot with my gun in my hand and segued straight into the arms of Lorna.

It was a great hop dream.

Lorna was performing nude at the Hollywood Palladium, backed by an all-jigaboo orchestra — gigantic darkies in rhinestone-braided Uncle Sam outfits. She humped the air; she sprayed sweat; she sucked the microphone head. Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, and Hirohito were carried in on litters; they swooned at her feet as Lor belted “Someone to Watch Over Me.” A war broke out on the bandstand: crazed jigs beating each other with trombone slides and clarinet shafts. It was obviously a diversion — Hitler jumped on stage and tried to carry Lorna over to a Nazi U-boat parked in the first row. I foiled Der Führer, picking him up by the mustache and hurling him out to Sunset Boulevard. Lorna was swooning into my arms when I felt a tugging and opened my eyes to see Bob Murikami standing over me, saying, “Rise and shine, shamus. We got banking to do.”

We carried it out straight-faced, with appropriate props — handcuffs on Bad Bob, phony paperwork, a cereal box badge pinned to my lapel. Murikami impersonated over a dozen fellow Japs; we liquidated fourteen bank accounts to the tune of $81,000. I explained that I was Alien Squad brass, overseeing the confiscation of treasonous lucre; patriotic bank managers bought the story whole. At four we were heading south to T.J. and what might be my long-overdue reunion with the woman who’d scorched my soul long, long ago. Murikami and I talked easily, a temporary accord in Japanese-American relations — thanks to a healthy injection of long green.

“Why are you so interested in Maggie, Hearns?”

I took my eyes off the road — high cliffs dropping down to snow-white beaches packed with sunbathers on my right, tourist courts and greasy spoons on the left. Baby Tojo was smiling. I hoped I didn’t have to kill him. “She’s a conduit, kid. A pipeline to the woman.”

“The woman?”

“Right. The one I wasn’t ready for a while back. The one I would have flushed it all down the toilet for.”

“You think it will be different now?”

Eighty-one grand seed money; a wiser, more contemplative Hearns. Maybe I’d even dye a little gray in my hair. “Right. Once I clear up a little legal trouble I’m in, I’m going to suggest a long vacation in Acapulco, maybe a trip to Rio. She’ll see the difference in me. She’ll know.”

I looked back at the highway, downshifted for a turn, and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to face Bad Bob and caught a big right hand studded with signet rings square in the face.

Blood blinded me; my foot hit the brake; the car jerked into a hillside and stalled out. I swung a haphazard left; another sucker shot caught me; through a sheet of crimson I saw Murikami grab the money and hotfoot it.

I wiped red out of my eyes and pursued. Murikami was heading for the bluffs and a path down to the beach; a car swerved in front of me and a large man jumped out, aimed, and fired at the running figure — once, twice, three times. A fourth shot sent Bob Murikami spiraling over the cliff, the money bag sailing, spilling greenbacks. I pulled my roscoe, shot the shooter in the back, and watched him go down in a clump of crabgrass.

Gun first, I walked over; I gave the shooter two good measure shots, point blank to the back of the head. I kicked him over to his front side and from what little remained of his face identified him. Sergeant Jenks, Bill Malloy’s buddy on the Alien Squad.

Deep shit without a depth gauge.

I hauled Jenks to his Plymouth, stuffed him in the front seat, stood back and shot the gas tank. The car exploded; the ex-cop sizzled like french-fried guacamole. I walked over the cliff and looked down. Bob Murikami was spread-eagled on the rocks and shitloads of sunbathers were scooping up cash, fighting each other for it, dancing jigs of greed and howling like hyenas.

I tailspinned down to Tijuana, found a flop and a bottle of drugstore hop, and went prowling for Maggie Cordova. A fat white lezbo songbird would stick out, even in a pus pocket like T.J. — and I knew the heart of T.J. lowlife was the place to start.

The hop edged down my nerves and gave me a savoir faire my three-day beard and raggedy-assed state needed. I hit the mule act strip and asked questions; I hit the whorehouse strip and the strip that featured live fuck shows twenty-four hours a day. Child beggars swarmed me; my feet got sore from kicking them away. I asked, asked, asked about Maggie Cordova, passing out bribe pesos up the wazoo. Then — right on the street — there she was, turning up a set of stairs adjoining a bottle liquor joint.

I watched her go up, a sudden jolt of nerves obliterating my dope edge. I watched a light go on above the bottle shop — and Lorna Kafesjian doing “Goody, Goody” wafted down at me.

Pursuing the dream, I walked up the stairs and knocked on the door.

Footsteps tapped toward me — and suddenly I felt naked, like a litany of everything I didn’t have was underlining the sound of heels over wood.

No eighty-one-grand reunion stash.

No Sy Devore suits to make a suitably grand Hollywood entrance.

No curfew papers for late-night Hollywood spins.

No P.I. buzzer for the dramatic image of the twentieth century.

No world-weary, tough-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside sensitive code of honor shtick to score backup pussy with in case Lorna shot me down.

The door opened; fat Maggie Cordova was standing there. She said, “Spade Hearns. Right?”

I stood there — dumbstruck beyond dumbstruck. “How did you know that?”

Maggie sighed — like I was old news barely warmed over. “Years ago I bought some tunes from Lorna Kafesjian. She needed a stake to buy her way out of a shack job with a corny guy who had a wicked bad case on her. She told me the guy was a sewer crawler, and since I was a sewer crawler performing her songs, I might run into him. Here’s your ray of hope, Hearns. Lorna said she always wanted to see you one more time. Lor and I have kept in touch, so I’ve got a line on her. She said I should make you pay for the info. You want it? Then give.”

Maggie ended her pitch by drawing a dollar sign in the air. I said, “You fingered the B of A heist. You’re dead meat.”

“Nix, gumshoe. You’re all over the L.A. papers for the raps you brought down looking for me, and the Mexes won’t extradite. Givesky.”

I forked over all the cash in my wallet, holding back a five-spot for mad money. Maggie said, “Eight-eighty-one Calle Verdugo. Play it pianissimo, doll. Nice and slow.”

I blew my last finnsky at a used clothing store, picking up a chalk-stripe suit like the one Bogart wore in The Maltese Falcon. The trousers were too short and the jacket was too tight, but overall the thing worked. I dry-shaved in a gas station men’s room, spritzed some soap at my armpits, and robbed a kiddie flower vendor of the rest of his daffodils. Thus armed, I went to meet my lost love.

Knock, knock, knock on the door of a tidy little adobe hut; boom, boom, boom, as my overwrought heart drummed a big band beat. The door opened — and I almost screamed.

The four years since I’d seen Lorna had put forty thousand hard miles on her face. It was sun-soured — seams, pits, and scales; her laugh lines had changed to frown lines as deep as the San Andreas Fault. The body that was once voluptuous in white satin was now bloated in a Mex charwoman’s serape. From the deep recesses of what we once had, I dredged a greeting.

“What’s shakin’, baby?”

Lorna smiled, exposing enough dental gold to front a revolution. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened, Spade?”

I stayed game. “What happened, baby?”

Lorna sighed. “Your interpretation first, Spade. I’m curious.”

I smoothed my lapels. “You couldn’t take a good thing. You couldn’t take the dangerous life I led. You couldn’t take the danger, romance, the heartache and vulnerability inherent in a mean-street-treading knight like me. Face it, baby: I was too much man for you.”

Lorna smiled — more cracks appeared in the relief map of her face. She said, “Your theatrics exhausted me more than my own. I joined a Mexican nunnery, got a tan that went bad, started writing music again, and found myself a man of the earth — Pedro, my husband. I make tortillas, wash my clothes in a stream, and dry them on a rock. Sometimes, if Pedro and I need extra jack, I mix Margaritas and work the bar at the Blue Fox. It’s a good, simple life.”

I played my ace. “But maggie said you wanted to see me — ‘one more time,’ like—”

“Yeah, like in the movies. Well, Hearns, it’s like this. I sold ‘Prison of Love’ to about three dozen bistro belters who passed it off as their own. It’s ASCAP’d under at least thirty-five titles, and I’ve made a cool five grand on it. And, well, I wrote the song for you back in our salad days, and in the interest of what we had together for about two seconds, I’m offering you ten percent — you inspired the damn thing, after all.”

I slumped into the doorway — exhausted by four years of torching, three days of mayhem and killing. “Hit me, baby.”

Lorna walked to a cabinet and returned with a roll of Yankee greenbacks. I winked, pocketed the wad, and walked down the street to a cantina. The interior was dark and cool; Mex cuties danced nude on the bar top. I bought a bottle of tequila and slugged it straight, fed the jukebox nickels and pushed every button listing a female vocalist. When the booze kicked in and the music started, I sat down, watched the nudie gash gyrate, and tried to get obsessed.