Los Angeles Stories (24 page)

Woody called three, and I got out. What's a juicy up­town blond doing in the Belfont at this time of night? I wondered.

I took Ray's bridge from the icebox and set it down on my bench. It looked very good. Ray was going to be a new man. Whatever happened next was not my problem. He could get another steel guitar. I had a feeling the Bigsby was going to change things for me. I might be moving up. I picked up the phone and dialed. Sammy answered.

“Ha' Spa'.”

“Sammy, it's Sonny. If Houseley comes in, tell him to get a cab over here. I'm ready for him.”

I left a similar message with Ray's landlady. I smoked a cigarette; I had a drink from the bottle and played the radio. It was Thursday night and that meant swing music live from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. I counted five saxophones, minimum. I bet a blond like that blond in the elevator knows all those sax players by their first names, I thought. Bet she could get real chummy at the Roosevelt. I heard knocking. I was expecting Ray Randy, but it was Woody Dick­pants.

“Help me, Mr. Kloer.” Woody was vibrating like a tuning fork.

“Come on in, have a seat,” I said. “Drink?”

“Oh, thanks, you're a pal. I need a drink bad. Something terrible happened.”

“Elevator stuck again?”

“It ain't funny Mr. Kloer, don't laugh. She laughed at me, that's what started it.”

“Just tell it, Woody,” I said.

“The blond, you remember, you saw her, in the fur coat? All I said was, ‘That's a mighty nice coat.' ”

“You let her out on the fourth.”

“Yeah, but this was later. She rang the buzzer, and I went up. I was going off duty, but I figured it won't hurt me to go back. It's dark on the stairs. I didn't mean nothing, Mr. Kloer, I'm a sick man.”

“You went back up. Take it from there.” I looked at the office clock. It was 10:30.

“I went back up to the fourth. She says, ‘Down, boy.' I says, ‘Going down.' Like I always say. Then, she came up close to me. She leaned on me. She says, ‘I said, down
, boy
.' I says, ‘Lady, I'm trying to operate this elevator.' She says, ‘Do you pull that trick with all the girls, or do you like me special?'” Woody started to cry.

“What happened?”

“She laughed at me with her big mouth. I pushed her off. Maybe I pushed a little too hard, I don't know. The Good Lord knows how sick I am. She fell. I think she hit her head. Please help me, Mr. Kloer.”

“Where is she?”

“Right here, on the third. In the elevator.”

I walked down the hall to the elevator cage. The hallway was dark. The light in the elevator was an outdoor bulb and it was too bright. She was lying on her back with her head jammed in the corner. She looked all wrong, like the strings had been cut — the way they look in police photographs — one arm pinned underneath and the other flung out to the side. One shoe was off. Her dress was hiked all the way up, and her panties were torn. Good old Dick­pants. There was blood. It made me feel sick. I checked her purse, like they do in the movies, but then I heard somebody walking toward me. I panicked. I put the purse down and tried to stand up and I stumbled. A hand steadied me. It was Houseley. “He's gone,” Houseley said, after I got my balance.

“Who?” I asked.

“Office door is open. Whiskey bottle's empty. Woody, I presume, has ankled the scene and left you holding the proverbial bag.”

I felt faint, sick. The army doctors had warned me about what they called “over­stimulation.”

“I think she's dead, but I'm afraid to touch her,” I said to Houseley. “You're the doctor, you want to make sure, don't you? I got to call the cops.”

Houseley shook his head. “She's dead as she'll ever be. I'm wanted in five states, please allow me to step gracefully off.
Au revoir, mon vieux
.” He disappeared down the back stairs, and then there was nothing on the third floor except the dead girl in the light and the ringing in my head and the radio in the lab. The announcer was signing off: “Be sure to tune in again next week for the uptown sounds of Harry Spivak and the boys, featuring the glamorous vocal stylings of Miss Josephine Hutchinson! This program was transcribed for broadcast on the Armed Services Radio Network. Roy Rowan speaking.”

“Kloer, get your stuff and clear out,” was all Puss Walgreen had to say. The thanks I get. He claimed Woody absconded with five thousand dollars' worth of his dental gold supply while I was out of the room. He implied I might be in on it. I figured Puss was going to stick it to the insurance company. He never kept that much gold around; you order it as you need it. The cops took my statement and told me not to leave town. I told them my car couldn't get past the city limits.

They put out an APB for Woody.
May be carrying a concealed weapon, approach with caution
. Detective Spangler didn't buy the Dick­pants story: “This was penetration ­with ­instrument. We'll find it.”

The cops wanted to know what the girl was doing in the Belfont. She didn't have much money in her purse, so it wasn't a pay­off. Unless I took it? She was going up to the fourth, but she didn't say why, not in my presence. I never even been up there. How would I know if this was a grudge­ screw? I make teeth, that's all I know about. Woody had never been in trouble in the building before. He's an old man, he doesn't have any known associates.

“He's a deviated sex-­killer,” Spangler said, “It's another Black Dahlia. This baby is mine.”

The police turned me loose from headquarters at seven in the morning. I hadn't been outdoors at that hour in years. I drove over to Philippe's on Alameda and got breakfast. Ordinarily, I didn't eat breakfast, but I ordered bacon and eggs. I hadn't had bacon since I was in the army. Army bacon was mostly fat.

I am what you call a methodical person, that's the steel player in me. Steel guitar is a very methodical instrument and very logical, and that's why I like it. You sit there and you put your steel bar down on the strings and you play your patterns. That's how we do it. It's fine for a genius like Joaquin Murphy to play free and easy and just wing it, but the average Joe has to plan ahead.

The citizens cleared out, and Philippe's got quiet. I tried to do a little thinking. I couldn't do any work that meant standing up for long periods, and I didn't have skills you need for office work. The one thing I knew how to do besides making teeth was playing the steel guitar, and I didn't even own one. But that could change.

Ray Randy: Why didn't he come back for his teeth? It must have been something drastic. I wrote down all the places he might be: The Sunshine Hotel on Bunker Hill; the Musicians Union in Hollywood; The Riverside Rancho, a Country-­Western joint in Glendale. Any bar between here and the Pacific Ocean. Turned out to be none of those.

Woody Atkins, AKA Dick­pants: He slept on a cot in the basement, and the building superintendent paid him in cash. The police found an old copy of
Mankind United
under his pillow.
Happy Birthday Woodrow from Gertrude
was inscribed on the flyleaf. I figured Woody was just a lonely, old man who ran the elevator and had a weird nervous disorder, and now he was gone. Not my problem. Turned out it was.

Houseley Stephenson: If I could locate him, maybe he could help me. I found him all right, but when I did, he was no help at all.

The Barlow Sanitarium had been a tuberculosis hospital back in the 1800s. It was very run­down and very quiet. The reception area was dim and smelled like floor wax.

The usual nurse was sitting at the usual desk, and I had a flashback to the army hospital in San Diego. I should have worn my medals, and I've got plenty.

The nurse stared at me. I leaned heavy on my cane. Up close, she was not so usual: about thirty, with very smooth, clear skin and black hair. Her eyes brought you up short, though, they stopped your show. Violet, for real.

“Howdy, ma'am,” I said, with a little salute thrown in. “My name is Loren Kloer. They call me Sonny. I'm looking for Dr. Stephenson.”

“There's nobody here by that name,” she said. I liked her voice, she wasn't army.

“I'm talking about Dr. Houseley Stephenson. He told me he was consulting. So maybe he's not on the regular staff, see?”

“Just a moment, please,” said the nurse. She went through a side door and came back with a man in a white coat. He was very tall and thin with a very tall, wavy hairdo, like a gospel singer. He had big red lips that he poked out in an aggravated way, and dark beady eyes. He sighted down his long nose at me and said, “I'm Dr. Cross. This is a private hospital, what do you want here?”

“Very little. I want to see Dr. Houseley Stephenson, if he's available. If not, I'll come back later,” I said.

“You've made a mistake. There's no such person as Houseley Stephenson.”

“I make mistakes, but I don't think this is one of them. I bet he's here somewhere. How 'bout I look around, how would that be?” Dr. Cross didn't like that at all. He pursed his lips and twitched his eyebrows, and pointed his clipboard at me.

“Nurse Bari, show this man out immediately. I object to these intrusions.” He turned and went back through the side door. The nurse came around from behind her desk and stood next to me. She was just my height, but plenty strong looking.

“If you please,” she said.

“Okay, but why the big display? Houseley's a good friend of mine. I picked him up down the road two nights ago. He told me he was working here; it had to do with schizophrenia. See, I'm not making this up, why would I?”

“Dr. Cross is a very busy man,” she said. She held the door open for me.

“I'm in the way of being a medical man myself,” I said. “You better take the doctor's pills away from him. He's all strung out, he might collapse at any time.” I was kidding around, but Nurse Bari paused. Her eyes changed, and then changed back. With the clear violet, you could see it happen. I hobbled out and down the steps. She waited until I got in the car and then went back inside and closed the door. Absolute quiet returned.

Houseley Stephenson was an unusual name, a mouth­ful, and Dr. Cross had shot it back at me a little too fast. I decided to do recon, like we did back in Leyte. The army taught us the best way was to get some altitude so you can look down on your objective and get the picture. The Barlow was situated low against the hill, called Palo Verde, or “green hill.” I followed the road up to the top and parked. I walked through the tall grass to where the hill sloped down, where I could see the whole layout of the hospital. The top of L.A. City Hall was visible just over the next ridge. The city had grown up around the Ravine, but the Ravine itself hadn't changed much since the old days when the Barlow was first built. I spread my jacket on the ground under a eucalyptus tree and sat down to rest my legs. I figured it wasn't a military operation, so I had a smoke. After a while, I fell asleep.

My commanding officer in Leyte used to say, “You do recon, you do not engage, I don't care what you find out there.” This was toward the end, when we were mopping up, or so we thought. We came across a company of Jap infantry in a little clearing by a pool of stagnant water.

We watched them, and it was terrible to see. They were starved and emaciated and their uniforms were in shreds. One soldier was eating gravel and whimpering like a frightened child. Another soldier went over and struck him. The first man held up his hands and begged and pleaded, and the other guy stopped hitting him. Then, the whole routine started over.

We fell back and had a pow­wow. One said he was for wasting the whole bunch, but another said, “Let's take 'em back to command, we might learn something.”

Another fella said, “I say shoot 'em and keep moving.”

We couldn't decide, so we voted. The vote was four to two in favor of taking them back, even though it went against direct orders. We advanced in a circle formation. When the soldiers saw us, they fell on their knees and went into a prayer routine, it seemed. They showed us they had discarded their weapons, so we got them to stand up and fall in line.

Then all hell broke loose. Suddenly, we were under fire. There must have been fifty more Japs up in the trees waiting for us, and they let us have it. The fact is, these guys were just decoys. They figured Americans are soft and they figured right. You know, democratic. It was a massacre for us as well as the poor starved soldiers. I grabbed one and started running back into the trees, using him as a shield. He was crying the whole time, really crying, and it made me sick, but he took the hits and it saved my life. It was just me and my buddy named Clark that survived and got back to the unit. I got hit in both legs and Clark had to carry me most of the way.

The CO didn't want trouble, so he reported to the high command that we were heroes. I was decorated. My CO said if I ever breathed a word about what really happened, he'd track me down and kill me. I heard he died recently, so I'm not worried about him anymore, but he was right, in principle. Do not engage, because you don't know the enemy's strength. Remember the Japs in the trees.

A motor was running, and it woke me up. A little Mexican girl with pink hair ribbons was sitting beside me in the grass. It was getting dark.

There was an old panel truck parked down below in front of the hospital. The girl pointed to the truck. “Cousin Beto,” she said. She was holding a homemade rag doll that looked like it could have once belonged to Pancho Villa. “I like your doll,” I said, “what's her name?”

“Lydia.”

“You know Cousin Beto?”

“Yes.”

“Does he live around here?”

“Yes. There is my house.” She pointed to a lopsided wooden shack down the road from my car. A goat was tethered to a tree in the front yard.

“Regreso a la casa para comer. Adios.” Something about going to the house to eat. I hadn't eaten since Philippe's. She waved good-bye and took off with her doll.