Inherent Vice (48 page)

next day was
as they say another day, and by the time Doc found
himself in the Hall of Justice again sitting on a chair from some long-ago
yard sale in front of a tape recorder mike back in a neglected cubicle among brooms, mops, cleaning supplies, and an antique floor-waxing machine which may have been assembled from WWII tank parts, he’d begun to wonder if the affectionate Penny of last night hadn’t just been
another wishful hallucination. She kept calling him Larry, for one thing,
and avoiding eye contact. The witness she brought along naturally turned
out to be her cubicle-mate Rhus, whose glare had intensified overnight from suspicion to loathing.

Doc ran through for them what he’d seen in Vegas, having stopped by his office earlier to pick up a logbook, a sign not so much of professionalism as of Doper’s Memory. There was uncommon interest in Mickey’s white suit, for some reason. Lapel-notch location and so forth.

Ready-made or bespoke. And how was his attitude? they wanted to know.
Who was present besides the FBI? Who appeared to be in charge?

“No way to tell. There was casino security, and all kinds of civilians in suits moving around, but in terms of Mob folks, if that’s what you’re getting at, were they wearing black fedoras, making with Eddie Robinson remarks? no, not that I know of?”

This county-DA exercise really looked to Doc like pissants versus elephants. You could catch the FBI in the act of sodomizing the president in the Lincoln Memorial at high noon and local law enforcement would still just have to stand around and watch, getting more or less nauseated depending which president.

On the other hand, nobody asked about Puck Beaverton, and Doc didn’t volunteer anything. Now and then he caught the two deputy DAs giving each other significant looks. What about, he had no idea. Finally the tape ran out and Penny said, “I think we’re done here. On behalf of the DA’s office, Mr. Sportello, thank you so much for your cooperation.”

“And thank you, Miss Kimball, for not thanking me while the tape was on. And Miss Frothingham, may I add, that skirt length on you today is especially attractive.”

Rhus screamed and picking up a galvanized trash can prepared to throw it at Doc’s head, but Penny intervened and coaxed her out the door. Just before she disappeared herself, she looked back at Doc and
pointed at the phone, making phone-call gestures. Who was supposed to
call whom was less clear.

The clock up on the wall, which reminded Doc of elementary school
back in the San Joaquin, read some hour that it could not possibly be. Doc
waited for the hands to move, but they didn’t, from which he deduced that the clock was broken and maybe had been for years. Which was
groovy however because long ago Sortilege had taught him the esoteric
skill of telling time from a broken clock. The first thing you had to do
was light a joint, which in the Hall of Justice might seem odd, but surely
not way back here—who knew, maybe e
ven outside the jurisdiction of
local drug enforcement—though just to be on the safe side he also lit a
De Nobili cigar and filled the room with a precautionary cloud of smoke
from the classic Mafia favorite. After inhaling potsmoke for a while, he
glanced up at the clock, and sure enough, it showed a different time now,
though this could also be from Doc having forgotten where the hands were to begin with.

The phone rang, he picked up and heard Penny say, “Come down to my cubicle, there’ll be a package waiting for you.” No hello or nothing.

“Will you be there?”

“No.”

“How about what’s-her-name?”

“Nobody’ll be there but you. Take all the time you need.”

“Thanks babe, oh hey and by the way I was wondering, if I could find
you a Manson-chick type wig to wear? would it be, like, a problem”— the change in sound ambience as she hung up echoed for a while—”I was thinking in terms of Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, you know, sort of long and curled at the same time, and—Oh. Uhm
...
Penny?”

downstairs in penny’s
cubicle, waiting for Doc on a beat-up old wood table and decorated with all kinds of top-secret stickers, sat the record of Adrian Prussia’s strange history with the California Public
Code, including his numerous escapes from punishment for murder one.
Doc lit a Kool, opened the folder, and started reading, and it was clear right away why the Department didn’t want any of this known. His first thought was how much danger Penny might’ve put herself in the way of for unsealing this—maybe not even aware of how much. For her it was just more ancient history.

Detective X’s name turned out to be Vincent Indelicato. Adrian’s law
yers had argued justifiable homicide. Their client Mr. Prussia, a widely
respected businessman, believing someone was breaking in to his beach
apartment on Gummo Marx Way, had mistaken the decedent for the irate husband of a female acquaintance and, swearing further that he’
d
seen a gun, thereupon fired his own. No one was more upset than Mr.
Prussia to find he’d plugged an LAPD detective, one he had even in fact met occasionally in the course of his normal days business.

The body was identified by the arresting officer, Detective Indelica-to’s partner of many years, Lieutenant Christian F. Bjornsen.

“What,” Doc wondered aloud, “the fuck, is going on here?”

Bigfoot’s partner. The one he didn’t ride with these days, or talk
about, or even mention by name. Bigfoot’s air of possessed melancholy now began to make sense. This was mourning all right, and it was deep.

And where else could the events have taken place but Gummo Marx Way—GMW, as it was known locally, the hard-luck boulevard everybody living along Doc’s piece of shoreline sooner or later ended up on, though nobody Doc knew had ever lived there, or knew anybody else who did. Yet somehow there it always lay, between the populations of the South Bay beach towns and other places they thought at some point
in their lives they needed to be. The home of a girlfriend whose psychopathic parents wanted her back before curfew. A dealer shifty as a rat up
a palm tree, whose less-wary clients found themselves putting oregano and Bisquick to uses they were never meant for. A pay phone in a bar that a friend of a friend, in peril and without resources, had called you
from, the hope in his voice already fading, too late at night.

“Okay, wait a minute,” Doc muttered, maybe out loud, “is what this
is now, is
...
” Bigfoot’s partner is murdered by Adrian Prussia, with the
apparent collaboration of elements in the department. How does Bigfoot react? Does he check out an appropriate-size cannon and some
extra clips and go looking for Adrian? Does he plant a bomb in the loan
shark’s car? Does he keep it all inside the LAPD and embark on a nonviolent and lonely crusade for justice? No, none of the above, instead what Bigfoot does is, is he finds some dumb-ass sucker of a civilian PI
who’ll keep nosing on into the case, maybe even clumsily enough to call
some attention.

And then what? What did Big
foot expect to happen? Somebody
would decide to come after Doc? Groovy. And where’d be the nameless,
unspoken-of partner to watch Doc’s back for him?

As if looking for something he knew he didn’t want to find, Doc leafed quickly through the other arrests in the folder. It became clear as
vodka you keep in the icebox that whatever the connection was between
the LAPD and Adrian Prussia, he might as well have been working for them as a contract killer. Time after time he was pulled in, questioned, arraigned, indicted, no matter—somehow the cases never quite got to trial, each being bargained down in the interests of justice, not to mention of Adrian, who invariably walked. The thought did flit on fragile mothlike wings in and out of Doc’s consciousness that the DA’s office had to be aware of all this, if not outright complicit. Sometimes there
wouldn’t be enough evidence for a case, or what there was would be inad
missible, or too circumstantial, or the body couldn’t be found, or some
times a third party would come forward and plead to some make-believe
offense like voluntary manslaughter. One of these thoughtful patsies in particular caught Doc’s attention, turning out to be who but his old parking-lot Q&A buddy Boris Spivey, currently on the run out in the
U.S. someplace with his
fiancée
Dawnette. From Pico Rivera. Curiously,
after pulling reduced time on the Semi-Honor Block at San Quentin, Boris had then been cut loose to go directly t
o work for Mickey Wolf
mann. Making him, along with Puck, the second AP Finance alumnus
Doc knew of who’d hired on with Mickey. Was Adrian Prussia also run
ning a talent agency?

Doc was about to shut the folder and go looking for a cigarette machine when something more recent caught his eye. It was a brightly lit photograph which didn’t look attached to anything else, as if it had been tossed in in some miscellaneous way. It showed a group of men standing on a pier next to an open box about the size of a coffin, full of U.S. currency. Among them was Adrian Prussia in some idea of a yachting costume, holding up one of the bills and making with the shit-eating grin which had endeared him to so many. The bill was a
twenty and looked strangely familiar. Doc rooted around in his fringe bag till he found a Coddington lens and squinted through it at the pic
ture. “Aha!” Just as he thought. It was that CIA Nixonhead funnymoney
again, like the bills Sauncho and his pals had fished out of the drink.
And in the background, riding calmly at anchor in some nameless har
bor, slightly out of focus as if through the veils of the next world, the
schooner
Golden Fang.
There was a date on the back of the photo. Less
than a year ago.

on the way
back to the beach, Doc looked in at the offices of Hardy,
Gridley & Chatfield. Sauncho was there, but mentally for the moment
not available, having the other night happened to watch
The Wizard of
Oz
(1939) for the first time on a color TV set.

“Did you know it starts off in black and white,” he informed Doc
with some anxiety, “but it changes to color! Do you realize what that
means?”

“Saunch...”

No use. “—the world we see Dorothy living in at the beginning of
the picture is black, actually brown, and white, only
she thinks
she’s see
ing it all in color—the same normal everyday color we see our lives in. Then the cyclone picks her up, dumps her in Munchkin Land, and she walks out the door, and suddenly
we
see the brown and white shift into
Technicolor. But if that’s what
we
see, what’s happening with Dorothy?
What’s her normal’ Kansas color changing into? Huh? What very weird
hyper
color?
as far beyond our everyday color as Technicolor is beyond
black and white—” and so on.

“I know I should
...
be worried about this, Saunch, but
...
”

“The network ought to’ve at least run a disclaimer,” Sauncho by now
quite indignant. “Munchkin Land is strange enough, isn’t it, without
adding to the viewer’s mental confusion, and in fact I think there’s a
pretty good class-action suit here against MGM itself, so I’m gonna
bring it up at the firm’s next weekly get-together.”

“Well, can I ask you something that’s sort of related?”

“You mean about Dorothy and the—”

“Y—sort of. You recall that stash of Nixon bills you guys hauled out
of the drink. I just ran across a photo of a loan shark named Adrian Prussia posed next to a box full of the stuff. Maybe from the same batch you found, maybe not. Did anybody keep a record of what happened to it after you hauled it in?”

“I’d certainly like to think most of its safe and sound in a federal evi
dence room someplace.”

“You’d like to, but.
..
”

“Well, for a while out on deck there, it all got into a happy-go-lucky type atmosphere
...
Federals are like everybody else, you can’t expect them to live on their salaries.”

“Thing about this picture is, is they all look like they just got off, or were maybe about to get on, the
Golden Fang?

“Swell. So how does this relate again to Dorothy Gale and her color-vision situation?”

“What?”

“You said this photo you saw was ‘sort of related.”

“Oh. Oh, well it was in this, this strange color process? Yeah. Colors looked like they do on acid?”

“Nice try, Doc.”