The Best American Noir of the Century

1988 JAMES ELLROY SINCE I DON’T HAVE YOU

During the postwar years I served two masters — running interference and hauling dirty laundry for the two men who defined L.A. at that time better than anyone else. To Howard Hughes I was security boss at his aircraft plant, pimp, and troubleshooter for RKO Pictures — the ex-cop who could kibosh blackmail squeezes, fix drunk drivings, and arrange abortions and dope cures. To Mickey Cohen — rackets overlord and would-be nightclub shtickster — I was a bagman to the LAPD, the former Narco detective who skimmed junk off nigger-town dope rousts, allowing his Southside boys to sell it back to the hordes of schwartzes eager to fly White Powder Airlines. Big Howard: always in the news for crashing an airplane someplace inappropriate, stubbing his face on the control panel in some hicktown beanfield, then showing up at Romanoff’s bandaged like the Mummy with Ava Gardner on his arm; Mickey C.: also a pussy hound par excellence, pub crawling with an entourage of psychopathic killers, press agents, gag writers, and his bulldog Mickey Cohen Jr. — a flatulent beast with a schlong so large that the Mick’s stooges strapped it to a roller skate so it wouldn’t drag on the ground.

Howard Hughes. Mickey Cohen. And me — Turner “Buzz” Meeks, Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, armadillo poacher; strikebreaker goon; cop; fixer; and keeper of the secret key to his masters’ psyches: they were both cowards mano a mano; airplanes and lunatic factotums their go-betweens — while I would go anywhere, anyplace — gun or billy club first, courting a front-page death to avenge my second-banana life. And the two of them courted me because I put their lack of balls in perspective: it was irrational, meshugah, bad business — a Forest Lawn crypt years before my time. But I got the last laugh there: I always knew that when faced with the grave I’d pull a smart segue to keep kicking — and I write this memoir as an old, old man — while Howard and Mickey stuff caskets, bullshit biographies their only legacy.

Howard. Mickey. Me.

Sooner or later, my work for the two of them had to produce what the yuppie lawyer kids today call “conflict of interest.” Of course, it was over a woman — and, of course, being a suicidal Okie shitkicker, forty-one years old and getting tired, I decided to play both ends against the middle. A thought just hit me: that I’m writing this story because I miss Howard and Mickey, and telling it gives me a chance to be with them again. Keep that in mind — that I loved them — even though they were both world-class shitheels.

January 15,1949.

It was cold and clear in Los Angeles, and the papers were playing up the two-year anniversary of the Black Dahlia murder case — still unsolved, still speculated on. Mickey was still mourning Hooky Rothman’s death — he French-kissed a sawed-off shotgun held by an unknown perpetrator — and Howard was still pissed at me over the Bob Mitchum reefer roust: he figured that my connections with Narco Division were still so solid that I should have seen it coming. I’d been shuttling back and forth between Howard and Mickey since New Year’s. The Mick’s signature fruit baskets stuffed with C-notes had to be distributed to cops, judges, and City Council members he wanted to grease, and the pilot/mogul had me out bird-dogging quiff: prowling bus depots and train stations for buxom young girls who’d fall prey to RKO contracts in exchange for frequent nighttime visits. I’d been having a good run: a half-dozen Midwestern farm maidens were now ensconced in Howard’s fuck pads — strategically located apartments tucked all over L.A. And I was deep in hock to a darktown bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison. I was sitting in my Quonset-hut office at Hughes Aircraft when the phone rang.

“That you, Howard?”

Howard Hughes sighed. “What happened to ‘Security, may I help you?

“You’re the only one calls this early, Boss.”

“And you’re alone?”

“Right. Per your instructions to call you Mr. Hughes in the presence of others. What’s up?”

“Breakfast is up. Meet me at the corner of Melrose and La Brea in half an hour.”

“Right, Boss.”

“Two or three, Buzz? I’m hungry and having four.”

Howard was on his all-chilidog diet; Pink’s Dogs at Melrose and La Brea was his current in-spot. I knew for a fact that their chili was made from horse meat air-freighted up daily from Tijuana. “One kraut, no chili.”

“Heathen. Pink’s chili is better than Chasen’s.”

“I had a pony when I was a boy.”

“So? I had a governess. You think I wouldn’t eat —”

I said, “Half an hour,” and hung up. I figured if I got there five minutes late I wouldn’t have to watch the fourth-richest man in America eat.

Howard was picking strands of sauerkraut off his chin when I climbed in the back seat of his limousine. He said, “You didn’t really want it, did you?”

I pressed the button that sent up the screen that shielded us from the driver. “No, coffee and doughnuts are more my style.”

Howard gave me a long, slow eyeballing — a bit ill at ease because sitting down we were the same height, while standing I came up to his shoulders. “Do you need money, Buzz?”

I thought of Leotis Dineen. “Can niggers dance?”

“They certainly can. But call them colored, you never know when one might be listening.”

Larry the chauffeur was Chinese; Howard’s comment made me wonder if his last plane crash had dented his cabeza. I tried my standard opening line. “Getting any, Boss?”

Hughes smiled and burped; horse grease wafted through the back seat. He dug into a pile of papers beside him — blueprints, graphs, and scraps covered with airplane doodles, pulling out a snapshot of a blond girl naked from the waist up. He handed it to me and said, “Gretchen Rae Shoftel, age nineteen. Born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, July 26, 1929. She was staying at the place on South Lucerne — the screening house. This is the woman, Buzz. I think I want to marry her. And she’s gone — she flew the coop on the contract, me, all of it.”

I examined the picture. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was prodigiously lunged — no surprise — with a blond pageboy and smarts in her eyes, like she knew Mr. Hughes’s two-second screen test was strictly an audition for the sack and an occasional one-liner in some RKO turkey. “Who found her for you, Boss? It wasn’t me — I’d have remembered.”

Howard belched again — my hijacked sauerkraut this time. “I got the picture in the mail at the studio, along with an offer —a thousand dollars cash to a PO box in exchange for the girl’s address. I did it, and met Gretchen Rae at her hotel downtown. She told me she posed for some dirty old man back in Milwaukee, that he must have pulled the routine for the thousand. Gretchen Rae and I got to be friends, and, well…”

“And you’ll give me a bonus to find her?”

“A thousand, Buzz. Cash, off the payroll.”

My debt to Leotis Dineen was eight hundred and change; I could get clean and get even on minor-league baseball — the San Diego Seals were starting their preseason games next week. “It’s a deal. What else have you got on the girl?”

“She was carhopping at Scrivner’s Drive-in. I know that.”

“Friends, known associates, relatives here in L.A.?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

I took a deep breath to let Howard know a tricky question was coming. “Boss, you think maybe this girl is working an angle on you? I mean, the picture out of nowhere, the thousand to a PO box?”

Howard Hughes harrumphed. “It had to be that piece in Confidential, the one that alleged my talent scouts take topless photographs and that I like my women endowed.”

“Alleged, Boss?”

“I’m practicing coming off as irate in case I sue Confidential somewhere down the line. You’ll get on this right away?”

“Rápidamente.”

“Outstanding. And don’t forget Sid Weinberg’s party tomorrow night. He’s got a new horror picture coming out from the studio, and I need you there to keep the autograph hounds from going crazy. Eight, Sid’s house.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Find Gretchen Rae, Buzz. She’s special.”

Howard’s one saving grace with females is that he keeps falling in love with them — albeit only after viewing Brownie snaps of their lungs. It more or less keeps him busy between crashing airplanes and designing airplanes that don’t fly.

“Right, Boss.”

The limousine’s phone rang. Howard picked it up, listened, and murmured, “Yes. Yes, I’ll tell him.” Hanging up, he said, “The switchboard at the plant. Mickey Cohen wants to see you. Make it brief, you’re on my time now.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was Howard who introduced me to Mickey, right before I got wounded in a dope shootout and took my LAPD pension. I still give him a hand with his drug dealings — unofficial liaison to Narcotics Division, point man for the Narco dicks who skim x number of grams off every ounce of junk confiscated. The LAPD has got an unofficial heroin policy: it is to be sold only to coloreds, only east of Alvarado and south of Jefferson. I don’t think it should be sold anywhere, but as long as it is, I want the 5 percent. I test the shit with a chem kit I stole from the crime lab — no poor hophead is going to croak from a Mickey Cohen bindle bootjacked by Turner “Buzz” Meeks. Dubious morality: I sleep well 90 percent of the time and lay my bet action off with shine bookies, the old exploiter washing the hand that feeds him. Money was right at the top of my brain as I drove to Mickey’s haberdashery on the Strip. I always need cash, and the Mick never calls unless it is in the offing.

I found the man in his back room, surrounded by sycophants and muscle: Johnny Stompanato, guinea spit curl dangling over his handsome face — he of the long-term crush on Lana Turner; Davey Goldman, Mickey’s chief yes-man and the author of his nightclub shticks; and a diffident-looking little guy I recognized as Morris Hornbeck — an accountant and former trigger for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob in Milwaukee. Shaking hands and pulling up a chair, I got ready to make my pitch: You pay me now; I do my job after I run a hot little errand for Howard. I opened my mouth to speak, but Mickey beat me to it. “I want you to find a woman for me.”

I was about to say “What a coincidence,” when Johnny Stomp handed me a snapshot. “Nice gash. Not Lana Turner quality, but USDA choice tail nonetheless.”

Of course, you see it coming. The photo was a nightspot job: compliments of Preston Sturges’s Players Club, Gretchen Rae Shoftel blinking against flashbulb glare, dairy-state pulchritude in a tight black dress. Mickey Cohen was draping an arm around her shoulders, aglow with love. I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “Where was the wife, Mick? Off on one of her Hadassah junkets?”

Mickey grunted. “‘Israel, the New Homeland.’ Ten-day tour with her mahjong club. While the cat is away, the mice will play. Va-va-va-voom. Find her, Buzzchik. A grand.”

I got obstreperous, my usual reaction to being scared. “Two grand, or go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”

Mickey scowled and went into a slow burn; I watched Johnny Stomp savor my bravado, Davey Goldman write down the line for his boss’s shticks, and Morris Hornbeck do queasy double takes like he wasn’t copacetic with the play. When the Mick’s burn stretched to close to a minute, I said, “Silence implies consent. Tell me all you know about the girl, and I’ll take it from there.”

Mickey Cohen smiled at me — his coming-from-hunger minion. “Goyische shitheel. For a twosky I want satisfaction guaranteed within forty-eight hours.”

I already had the money laid off on baseball, the fights, and three-horse parlays. “Forty-seven and change. Go.”

Mickey eyed his boys as he spoke — probably because he was pissed at me and needed a quick intimidation fix. Davey and Johnny Stomp looked away; Morris Hornbeck just twitched, like he was trying to quash a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. “Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I met her at Scrivner’s Drive-in two weeks ago. She told me she’s fresh out of the Minnesota sticks, someplace like that. She —”

I interrupted. “She said ‘Minnesota’ specifically, Mick?”

“Right. Moosebreath, Dogturd, some boonies town — but definitely Minnesota.”

Morris Hornbeck was sweating now; I had myself a hot lead. “Keep going, Mick.”

“Well, we hit it off; I convince Lavonne to see Israel before them dune coons take it back; Gretchen Rae and I get together; we va-va-va-voom; it’s terrific. She plays cagey with me, won’t tell me where she’s staying, and she keeps taking off — says she’s looking for a man — some friend of her father’s back in Antelope Ass or wherever the fuck she comes from. Once she’s gassed on vodka Collinses and gets misty about some hideaway she says she’s got. That —”

I said, “Wrap it up.”

Mickey slammed his knees so hard that Mickey Cohen Jr., asleep in the doorway twenty feet away, woke up and tried to stand on all fours — until the roller skate attached to his wang pulled him back down. “I’ll fucking wrap you up if you don’t find her for me! That’s it! I want her! Find her for me! Do it now!”

I got to my feet wondering how I was going to pull this one off— with the doorman gig at Sid Weinberg’s party thrown smack in the middle of it. I said, “Forty-seven fifty-five and rolling,” and winked at Morris Hornbeck — who just happened to hail from Milwaukee, where Howard told me Gretchen Rae Shoftel told him a dirty old man had snapped her lung shots. Hornbeck tried to wink back; it looked like his eyeball was having a grand mal seizure. Mickey said, “Find her for me. And you gonna be at Sid’s tomorrow night?”

“Keeping autograph hounds at bay. You?”

“Yeah, I’ve got points in Sid’s new picture. I want hot dope by then, Buzzchik. Hot.”

I said, “Scalding,” and took off, almost tripping over Mickey Cohen Jr.’s appendage as I went out the door.

A potential three grand in my kick; Morris Hornbeck’s hinkyness doing a slow simmer in my gourd; an instinct that Gretchen Rae Shoftel’s “hideaway” was Howard Hughes’s fuck pad on South Lucerne — the place where he kept the stash of specially cantilevered bras he designed to spotlight his favorite starlets tits, cleavage gowns for his one-night inamoratas, and the stag film collection he showed to visiting defense contractors — some of them rumored to costar Mickey Cohen Jr. and a bimbo made up to resemble Howard’s personal heroine: Amelia Earhart. But first there was Scrivner’s Drive-in and a routine questioning of Gretchen Rae’s recent coworkers. Fear adrenaline was scorching my soul as I drove there — maybe I’d played my shtick too tight to come out intact.

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 zaftig 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 DTs without benefit of booze. After an hour of talk and chump-change handouts, I knew the following:

That Gretchen Rae Shoftel carhopped there for a month, was often tardy, and during midafternoon 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 L.A. 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 moneyman. And — the lovely Gretchen Rae had continued carhopping 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, cosmeticized, 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 L.A.

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 taste buds, 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 mailorder place in New Hampshire. In all of them the less-expensive items were check-marked. 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 ensure 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. Pay dirt at Beacon: three days ago at 3:10 p.m., a cab was dispatched to 436 South Lucerne; its destination: 2281 South Mariposa.

Big pay dirt.

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 L.A. 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 spot-checking 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-to-hand 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 5 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.

“Yes?”

“Howard, you been in Milwaukee the past few years?”

“I was in Milwaukee in the spring of’47. Why?”

“Any chance you went to a whorehouse that specialized in girls made up like movie stars?”

Howard sighed. “Buzz, you know my alleged propensity in that department. Is this about Gretchen Rae?”

“Yeah. Did you?”

“Yes. I was entertaining some colleagues from the Pentagon. We had a party with several young women. My date looked just like Jean Arthur, only a bit more …endowed. Jean broke my heart, Buzz. You know that.”

“Yeah. Did the high brass get looped and start talking shop around the girls?”

“Yes, I suppose so. What does this —”

“Howard, what did you and Gretchen Rae talk about — besides your sex fantasies?”

“Well, Gretchy seemed to be interested in business — stock mergers, the little companies I’ve been buying up, that sort of thing. Also politics. My Pentagon chums have told me about Korea heating up, implying lots of aircraft business. Gretchy seemed interested in that, too. A smart girl always interests herself in her lovers’ endeavors, Buzz. You know that. Have you got leads on her?”

“I surely have. Boss, how have you managed to stay alive and rich so long?”

“I trust the right people, Buzz. Do you believe that?”

“I surely do.”

I gave my sitting-in-the-dark stakeout another three hours, then raided the icebox for energy and took the Other Guy Routine on the road, a mitzvah for Mickey in case I had to play an angle to shoot Gretchen Rae to Howard — his very own teenage murderess. First I wrapped up Fritz Steinkamp in three windows’ worth of chintz curtains and hauled him out to my car; next I mummified Voyteck Kirnipaski in a bedspread and wedged him into the trunk between Fritz and my spare tire. Then it was a routine wipe of my own possible prints, lights off, and a drive out to Topanga Canyon, to the chemical debris dump operated by the Hughes Tool Company —a reservoir bubbling with caustic agents adjacent to a day camp for underprivileged kids: a Howard tax dodge. I dumped Fritz and Voyteck into the cauldron and listened to them snap, crackle, and pop like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Then, just after midnight, I drove to the Strip to look for Mickey and his minions.

They weren’t at the Trocadero, the Mocambo, or the La Rue; they weren’t at Sherry’s or Dave’s Blue Room. I called the DMV night information line, played cop, and got a read on Mo Hornbeck’s wheels —1946 tan Dodge Coupe, CAL-4986-J, 896¼ Moonglow Vista, South Pasadena — then took the Arroyo Seco over the hill to the address, a block of bungalow courts.

At the left side tail end of a stucco streamline job was 896V4 — rounded handrails and oblong louvers fronting tiny windows strictly for show. No lights were burning; Hornbeck’s Dodge was not in the carport at the rear. Maybe Gretchen Rae was inside, armed with stuffed animals, negligee garrotes, stew pots, and frying pans — and that suddenly made me not give a fuck whether the world laid, prayed, stayed, or strayed. I kicked the door in, flipped on a wall light, and got knocked flat on my ass by a big furry mother with big, shiny, razor-white teeth.

It was a Doberman, sleek black muscle out for blood — mine. The dog snapped at my shoulder and got a snootful of Hart, Schaffner & Marx worsted; he snapped at my face and got an awkwardly thrown Meeks right jab that caused him to flinch momentarily. I dug in my pocket for my Arkansas toad stabber, popped the button, and flailed with it; I grazed the beast’s paws and snout — and he still kept snapping and snarling.

Giving the fucker a stationary target was the only way. I put my left arm over my eyes and tried to stay supine; Rex the Wonder Dog went for my big, fat, juicy elbow. I hooked my shiv up at his gut, jammed it in, and yanked forward. Entrails dropped all over me; Rex vomited blood in my face and died with a snap-gurgle.

I kicked the day’s third corpse off of me, stumbled to the bathroom, rummaged through the medicine cabinet, and found witch hazel. I doused my elbow bite and the blood-oozing teeth marks on my knuckles. Deep breathing, I splashed sink water on my face, looked in the mirror, and saw a middle-aged fat man, terrified and pissed to his drawers, in deep, deep shit without a depth gauge. I held the gaze, thinking it wasn’t me for long seconds. Then I smashed the image with the witch hazel bottle and eyeballed the rest of the bungalow.

The larger of the two bedrooms had to be Gretchen Rae’s. It was all girlish gewgaws: pandas and arcade Kewpie dolls, pinups of matinee idols and college pennants on the walls. Kitchen appliances still in their boxes were stacked on the dresser; publicity glossies of RKO pretty boys littered the bedspread.

The other bedroom reeked of VapoRub and liniment and sweat and flatulence — bare walls, the floor space almost completely taken up by a sagging Murphy bed. There was a medicine bottle on the nightstand — Dr. Revelle prescribing Demerol for Mr. Hornbeck — and checking under the pillow got me a .38 Police Special. I flipped the cylinder, extracted four of the shells, and stuck the gun in my waistband, then went back to the living room and picked up the dog, gingerly, so as not to drench myself in his gore. I noticed that it was a female; that a tag on its collar read janet. That hit me as the funniest thing since vaudeville, and I started laughing wildly, shock coming on. I spotted an Abercrombie & Fitch dog bed in the corner, dumped Janet in it, doused the lights in the room, found a couch, and collapsed. I was heading into some sort of weird heebie-jeebie haze when wood creaking, a choked “Oh my God!” and hot yellow glare jolted me to my feet.

“Oh Janet, no!”

Mo Hornbeck beelined for the dead dog, not even noticing me. I stuck out my leg and tripped him; he hit the floor almost snout to snout with Janet. And I was right there, gun at his head, snarling like the psycho Okie killer I could have been. “Boy, you’re gonna blab on you, Gretchen Rae, and them bodies on Mariposa. You’re gonna spill on her and Howard Hughes, and I mean now.”

Hornbeck found some balls quicksville, averting his eyes from the dog, latching them onto me. “Fuck you, Meeks.”

“Fuck you” was acceptable from a ranking sheriff’s dick in my debt, but not from a statch raper hoodlum. I opened the .38s cylinder and showed Hornbeck the two rounds, then spun it and put the muzzle to his head. “Talk. Now.”

Hornbeck said, “Fuck you, Meeks”; I pulled the trigger; he gasped and looked at the dog, turning purple at the temples, red at the cheeks. Seeing myself in a cell next to Fud, the Meeks boys playing pinochle sideways through the bars, I popped off another shot, the hammer clicking on an empty chamber. Hornbeck bit at the carpet to stanch his tremors, going deep purple, then subsiding into shades of crimson, pink, death’s-head white. Finally he spat dust and dog hair and gasped, “The pills by my bed and the bottle in the cupboard.”

I obeyed, and the two of us sat on the porch like good buddies and killed the remains of the jug — Old Overholt Bonded. Hornbeck blasted Demerol pills along with the juice, flew to cloud nine, and told me the saddest goddamn story I’d ever heard.

Gretchen Rae Shoftel was his daughter. Mom hit the road shortly after she was born, hightailing it to parts unknown with a Schlitz Brewery driver rumored to be double-digit hung, like the human equivalent of Mickey Cohen Jr.; he raised Gretch as best he could, nursing a bad case of the hots for her, ashamed of it until he picked up scads of unrelated skinny: that his wife was servicing the entire Schlitz night shift during the time his little girl was conceived. On general principles he stayed hands-off, taking his lust out on girls from the greenhorn hooker camps up in Green Bay and Saint Paul.

Gretchy grew up strange, ashamed of her old man — a gang stooge and occasional killer. She took her old lady’s maiden name and buried her head in books, loving arithmetic tricks, figures, calculations — stuff that proved she was smart. She also took up with a rough South Milwaukee crowd. One crazy Polack boyfriend beat her silly every night for a week straight when she was fifteen. Mo found out, put the kid in cement skates, and dumped him in Lake Michigan. Father and daughter were happily reunited by the revenge.

Mo moved up in Jerry Katzenbach’s organization; Gretch got a bundle together tricking the hotel bars in Chicago. Mo installed Gretchen Rae as sixteen-year-old pit boss of a swank whorehouse: movie-star surrogates, the rooms bugged to pick up gangland and political skinny that might prove valuable to Jerry K. Gretch got friendly with stock swindler Voyteck Kirnipaski; she just happened to be listening through a vent one night when Howard Hughes and a cadre of Army three-stars were cavorting with Jean Arthur, Lupe Velez, and Carole Lombard, greenhorn versions. Gretch picked up lots of juicy Wall Street gossip, and realized that this could be the start of something big. Mo contracted stomach cancer about that time and got the word: half a decade tops — enjoy life while you can. Cash skimmed off Jerry Katzenbach’s books provided class-A treatment. Mo held his own against the Big C. Jerry K. got bum press for his whorehouse, kiboshed it, and banished Mo to the Coast, where Mickey Cohen welcomed him with open arms, using his juice to get Mo’s two statch-rape indiscretions plea-bargained to bubbkis.

Back in Milwaukee, Gretchen Rae audited business classes at Marquette, and hauled Voyteck Kirnipaski’s ashes for free when she learned he was working for Jerry K. and was dissatisfied with the pay. Then Mo had a relapse and came back to Milwaukee on a visit; Voyteck Kirnipaski skipped town with a bundle of Katzenbach’s money so he could bankroll stock swindles in L.A.; Gretchen Rae, always reading the papers with an eye toward political repercussions, put her overheard dope from Howard and the high brass together with whispers on the Korea situation and decided to get more info from the man himself. Mo took some lung shots of his little girl and mailed them to Big How; he bit; Gretchy glommed leads that the on-the-lam and hotly pursued Voyteck was hanging out at Scrivner’s Drive-in, and, wanting to enlist his aid in possible squeeze plays, got a job there. Mickey Cohen’s crush on her put a monkey wrench into things — but she thought, somehow, that the little big man could be tapped for juice. She became his consort concurrent with Howard, father and daughter pretending to be strangers at Mickey’s nightclub get-togethers. Then, at a Santa Monica motel, she located Voyteck, terrified that Katzenbach triggers were right behind him. Mo gave her the key to Mickey’s Mariposa Street hideout; she ensconced Voyteck there, moving back and forth between Howard’s fuck pad, pumping information subtly and pumping Kirnipaski blatantly — attempting to lure him into her web of schemes. She was making progress when Fritz Steinkamp made the scene. And damned if Gretchy didn’t rise to the occasion and throttle, scald, and frying pan him to death. She attempted to soothe the terrified Voyteck afterward, but he went into cardiac arrest: the volatile combo of a murder attempt, a murder, and a murderess’s tongue. Gretchen Rae panicked and took off with Voyteck’s pilfered cash — and was currently trying to unload “secret insider” prospectuses on Hughes stock to a list of potential customers Kirnipaski had compiled. The girl was holed up someplace — Mo didn’t know where — and tomorrow she would be calling at the homes and offices of her last wave of potential “clients.”

Somewhere in the course of the story I started liking Mo almost as much as I liked Gretchen Rae. I still couldn’t see anyway out of the mess, but I was curious about one thing: the girly gewgaws, the appliances, all the squarejohn homey stuff Gretchy had glommed. When Mo finished his tale, I said, “What’s with all the clothes and gadgets and stuffed animals?”

Morris Hornbeck, worm bait inside six months, just sighed. “Lost time, Meeks. The father-and-daughter act someplace safe, the shtick we shoulda played years ago. But that’s tap city, now.”

I pointed to the dead dog, its paws starting to curl with rigor mortis like it was going to be begging biscuits for eternity. “Maybe not. You sure ain’t gonna have a trusty mascot, but you might get a little taste of the rest.”

Morris went to his bedroom and passed out. I laid down on the homey dreambed, holding a stuffed panda, the lights off to ensure some good brainwork. Straight manipulation of Mickey and Howard fell by the wayside quick, so I shifted to the Other Guy Routine and made a snag.

Sid Weinberg.

RKO line producer.

Filthy-rich purveyor of monster cheapies, drive-in circuit turkeys that raked in the cash.

A valuable RKO mainstay—his pictures never flopped. Howard kissed his ass, worshiped his dollars-and-cents approach to moviemaking, and gave him carte blanche at the studio.

“I’d rather lose my you-know-what than lose Sid Weinberg.”

Mickey Cohen was indebted to Sid Weinberg, the owner of the Blue Lagoon Saloon, where Mickey was allowed to perform his atrocious comedy routines without cops hanging around — Sid had LAPD connections.

The Mick: “I’d be without a pot to piss in without Sid. I’d have to buy my own nightclub, and that’s no fun — it’s like buying your own baseball team so you can play yourself.”

Sid Weinberg was a widower, a man with two grown daughters who patronized him as a buffoon. He often spoke of his desire to find himself a live-in housekeeper to do light dusting and toss him a little on the side. About fifteen years ago, he was known to be in love with a dazzling blond starlet named Glenda Jensen, who hotfooted it off into the sunset one day, never to be seen again. I’d seen pictures of Glenda; she looked suspiciously like my favorite teenage killer. At eight tomorrow night Sid Weinberg was throwing a party to ballyhoo Bride of the Surf Monster. I was to provide security. Mickey Cohen and Howard Hughes would be guests.

I fell asleep on the thought, and dreamed that benevolent dead dogs were riding me up to heaven, my pockets full of other guys’ money.

In the morning we took off after the prodigal daughter. I drove, Mo Hornbeck gave directions — where he figured Gretchen Rae would be, based on their last conversation — a panicky talk two days ago; the girl afraid of phone taps; Mo saying he would let the evidence chill, then dispose of it.

Which, of course, he didn’t. According to Mo, Gretch told him Voyteck Kirnipaski had given her a list of financial-district sharks who might be interested in her Hughes Enterprises graphs: when to buy and sell shares in Toolco, Hughes Aircraft, and its myriad subsidiaries — based on her new knowledge of upcoming defense contracts and her assessment of probable stock price fluctuations. Mo stressed that was why Gretchy raped the Bullocks catalog — she wanted to look like a businesswoman, not a seductress/killer.

So we slow-lane trawled downtown, circuiting the Spring Street financial district, hoping to catch a streetside glimpse of Gretchen Rae as she made her office calls. I’d won Mo partially over with kind words and a promise to plant Janet in a ritzy West L.A. pet cemetery, but I could still tell he didn’t trust me — I was too close to Mickey for too long. He gave me a steady sidelong fisheye and only acknowledged my attempts at conversation with grunts.

The morning came and went; the afternoon followed. Mo had no leads on Gretchen Rae’s home calls, so we kept circling Spring Street — Third to Sixth and back again — over and over, taking piss stops at the Pig & Whistle on Fourth and Broadway every two hours. Dusk came on, and I started getting scared: my Other Guy Routine would work to perfection only if I brought Gretchy to Sid Weinberg’s party right on time.

6:00.

6:30.

7:00.

7:09. I was turning the corner onto Sixth Street when Mo grabbed my arm and pointed out the window at a sharkskin-clad secretary type perusing papers by the newsstand. “There. That’s my baby.”

I pulled over; Mo stuck his head out the door and waved, then shouted, “No! Gretchen!”

I was setting the hand brake when I saw the girl — Gretch with her hair in a bun — notice a man on the street and start running. Mo piled out of the car and headed toward the guy; he pulled a monster hand-cannon, aimed, and fired twice. Mo fell dead on the sidewalk, half his face blown off; the man pursued Gretchen Rae; I pursued him.

The girl ran inside an office building, the gunman close behind. I caught up, peered in, and saw him at the top of the second-floor landing. I slammed the door and stepped back; the act coaxed two wasted shots out of the killer, glass and wood exploding all around me. Four rounds gone, two to go.

Screams on the street; two sets of footsteps scurrying upstairs; sirens in the distance. I ran to the landing and shouted, “Police!” The word drew two ricocheting bang-bangs. I hauled my fat ass up to floor 3 like a flabby dervish.

The gunman was fumbling with a pocketful of loose shells; he saw me just as he flicked his pieces cylinder open. I was within three stairs of him. Not having time to load and fire, he kicked. I grabbed his ankle and pulled him down the stairs; we fell together in a tangle of arms and legs, hitting the landing next to an open window.

We swung at each other, two octopuses, blows and gouges that never really connected. Finally he got a chokehold on my neck; I reached up through his arms and jammed my thumbs hard in his eyes. The bastard let go just long enough for me to knee his balls, squirm away, and grab him by the scalp. Blinded now, he flailed for me. I yanked him out the window head first, pushing his feet after him. He hit the pavement spread-eagled, and even from three stories up I could hear his skull crack like a giant eggshell.

I got some more breath, hauled up to the roof, and pushed the door open. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was sitting on a roll of tarpaper, smoking a cigarette, two long single tears rolling down her cheeks. She said, “Did you come to take me back to Milwaukee?”

All I could think of to say was “No.”

Gretchen reached behind the tarpaper and picked up a briefcase — brand-new, Bullocks Wilshire quality. The sirens downstairs were dying out; two bodies gave lots of cops lots to do. I said, “Mickey or Howard, Miss Shoftel? You got a choice.”

Gretch stubbed out her cigarette. “They both stink.” She hooked a thumb over the roof in the direction of the dead gunman. “I’ll take my chances with Jerry Katzenbach and his friends. Daddy went down tough. So will I.”

I said, “You’re not that stupid.”

Gretchen Rae said, “You play the market?”

I said, “Want to meet a nice rich man who needs a friend?”

Gretchen Rae pointed to a ladder that connected the roof to the fire escape of the adjoining building. “If it’s now, I’ll take it.”

In the cab to Beverly Hills I filled Gretchy in on the play, promising all kinds of bonuses I couldn’t deliver, like the Morris Hornbeck Scholarship for impoverished Marquette University Business School students. Pulling up to Sid Weinberg’s Tudor mansion, the girl had her hair down, makeup on, and was ready to do the save-my-ass tango.

At 8:03 the manse was lit up like a Christmas tree — extras in green rubber monster costumes handing out drinks on the front lawn and loudspeakers on the roof blasting the love theme from a previous Weinberg tuna, Attack of the Atomic Gargoyles. Mickey and Howard always arrived at parties late in order not to appear too eager, so I figured there was time to set things up.

I led Gretchen Rae inside, into an incredible scene: Hollywood’s great, near-great, and non-great boogie-woogieing with scads of chorus boys and chorus girls dressed like surf monsters, atomic gargoyles, and giant rodents from Mars; bartenders sucking punch out of punchbowls with ray-gun-like siphons; tables of cold cuts dyed surf-monster green — passed up by the guests en masse in favor of good old booze — the line for which stood twenty deep. Beautiful gash was abounding, but Gretchen Rae, hair down like Sid Weinberg’s old love Glenda Jensen, was getting the lion’s share of the wolf stares. I stood with her by the open front door, and when Howard Hughes’s limousine pulled up, I whispered, “Now.”

Gretchen slinked back to Sid Weinberg’s glass-fronted private office in slow, slow motion; Howard, tall and handsome in a tailored tux, walked in the door, nodding to me, his loyal underling. I said, “Good evening, Mr. Hughes” out loud; under my breath, “You owe me a grand.”

I pointed to Sid’s office; Howard followed. We got there just as Gretchen Rae Shoftel/Glenda Jensen and Sid Weinberg went into a big open-mouthed clinch. I said, “I’ll lean on Sid, boss. Kosher is kosher. He’ll listen to reason. Trust me.”

Inside of six seconds I saw the fourth-richest man in America go from heartsick puppy dog to hard-case robber baron and back at least a dozen times. Finally he jammed his hands in his pockets, fished out a wad of C-notes, and handed them to me. He said, “Find me another one just like her,” and walked back to his limo.

I worked the door for the next few hours, chasing crashers and autograph hounds away, watching Gretchen/Glenda and Sid Weinberg work the crowd, instant velvet for the girl, youth recaptured for the sad old man. Gretchy laughed, and I could tell she did it to hold back tears; when she squeezed Sid’s hand I knew she didn’t know who it belonged to. I kept wishing I could be there when her tears broke for real, when she became a real little girl for a while, before going back to being a stock maven and a whore. Mickey showed up just as the movie was starting. Davey Goldman told me he was pissed: Mo Hornbeck got himself bumped off by a Kraut trigger from Milwaukee who later nosedived out a window; the Mariposa Street hideout had been burglarized, and Lavonne Cohen was back from Israel three days early and henpecking the shit out of the Mick. I barely heard the words. Gretchy and Sid were cooing at each other by the cold cuts table — and Mickey was headed straight toward them.

I couldn’t hear their words, but I could read the three faces. Mickey was taken aback, but paid gracious respect to his beaming host; Gretch was twitching with the aftershocks of her old man’s death. L.A.’s number one hoodlum bowed away, walked up to me, and flicked my necktie in my face. “All you get is a grand, you hump. You shoulda found her quicker.”

So it worked out. Nobody made me for snuffing the Milwaukee shooter; Gretchy walked on the Steinkamp killing and her complicity in Voyteck Kirnipaski’s demise — the chemical-sizzled stiffs, of course, were never discovered. Mo Hornbeck got a plot at Mount Sinai Cemetery, and Davey Goldman and I stuffed Janet into the casket with him at the mortuary— I gave the rabbi a hot tip on the trotters, and he left the room to call his bookie. I paid off Leotis Dineen and promptly went back into hock with him; Mickey took up with a stripper named Audrey Anders; Howard made a bundle off airplane parts for the Korean War and cavorted with the dozen or so Gretchen Rae Shoftel look-alikes I found him. Gretchy and Sid Weinberg fell in love, which just about broke the poor pilot-mogul’s heart.

Gretchen Rae and Sid.

She did her light dusting —and must have thrown him a lot on the side. She also became Sid’s personal investment banker, and made him a giant bundle, of which she took a substantial percentage cut, invested it in slum property, and watched it grow, grow, grow. Slumlord Gretch also starred in the only Sid Weinberg vehicle ever to lose money, a tear-jerker called Glenda about a movie producer who falls in love with a starlet who disappears off the face of the earth. The critical consensus was that Gretchen Rae Shoftel was a lousy actress, but had great lungs. Howard Hughes was rumored to have seen the movie over a hundred times.

In 1950 I got involved in a grand jury investigation that went bad in an enormous way, and I ended up taking it on the road permanently, Mr. Anonymous in a thousand small towns. Mickey Cohen did a couple of fed jolts for income tax evasion, got paroled as an old man, and settled back into L.A. as a much-appreciated local character, a reminder of the colorful old days. Howard Hughes ultimately went squirrelshit with drugs and religion, and a biography that I read said that he carried a torch for a blond whore straight off into the deep end. He’d spend hours at the Bel Air Hotel looking at her picture, playing a torchy rendition of “Since I Don’t Have You” over and over. I know better: it was probably scads of different pictures, lung shots all, the music a lament for a time when love came cheap. Gretchy was special to him, though. I still believe that.

I miss Howard and Mickey, and writing this story about them has only made it worse. It’s tough being a dangerous old man by yourself — you’ve got nothing but memories and no one with the balls to understand them.