Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (36 page)

"Let him make a
call," the detective said.

The jailer nodded as he opened
the gate and slammed it shut behind me. Twenty minutes later, he took me out to
the pay phone. "Go ahead."

"I need a dime."

"You don't have a
dime?"

"Man, you guys took my
money when you booked me."

"I didn't book you. I
wasn't here."

"How am I gonna make a
phone call?"

"Without a dime, I don't
know."

My face was aflame when he put
me back in the cell. I swung on an emotional pendulum between indignant fury
and despair.

An hour later, an old Chicano,
a trusty in khaki with
county jail
stamped across both knees, the breast pocket and back of the shirt, came down
the runway outside the cells. He was pushing a broom. "Hey, man,
esel"

The trusty looked around to
make sure no jailer was watching. "Yeah."

"Hey, man, I need a
fuckin' dime to make a phone call."

He made a face of pain. He was
torn between fear of the jailers and desire to help another prisoner.

"Please, man."

When he reached my cell he put
a quarter on the bars and kept going.

"Jailer! Jailer!
My mama's got thirty
million dollars and I want a phone calll"
I punctuated the cry by
shaking the gate as hard as I could. It banged loudly.

"Shut the fuck up down
there Mr thirty million mother- flicker."

"Fuck you, and
your mama, too.
Officer! Jailer! I
wanna make a phone call!"

On Saturday night the
detectives began taking us out at roll call. That is when the shift of officers
changes. They meet in the muster room. After checking the roll and assigning
cars, they are told about recent crimes and other things they should know
about. The burglary detectives marched us downstairs and paraded us in front of
the graveyard shift. Our pedigrees were announced. "... two of the best
safecrackers in California . . . and this one looks young, but don't be fooled.
This—" he shook several pages of yellow paper — "is his rap sheet
..."

We were taken again when the
day shift came on. As I stood under the hot lights, I called out, "Do I
get to make a phone call or not?"

"Didn't they let you make
one already?"

"No."

When they took us back, a
different jailer took me back to the pay phone. "Go ahead," he said.

As I stepped up and dropped the
quarter into the slot, I watched the jailer's face — and his surprise was
almost neon across his mug. I dialed Louise's private number, to her phone in
her bedroom. "Hello," she said.

"Hello, Mama, it's me. I
need help ..." I explained what my situation was. I had no one else to
call. I told her what had to be done, and even gave her the name of a shyster
mouthpiece who would take care of it.

It took until late Sunday
evening to get the writ and post the bond. While I was out seeing the bondsman,
Billy the Bouncer was out seeing his lawyer. He wasn't going to bother with a
writ. Tomorrow they would be charged with a misdemeanor and have a misdemeanor
bail. It was about one fifth of the felony bail I had to post today. He didn't
have a parole officer to worry about. He laughed with bad teeth and told me the
detectives were angry. They'd hoped to match the tools in the car trunk with
tool marks on several open safes. Alas, all the tools had been freshly ground
down and sharpened. They were so clean that they didn't even have fingerprints.
"How the hell can they get in a car trunk without being touched by a human
hand?"

I walked out into the Beverly Hills
night, palm trees blowing in a Santa Ana breeze. Louise waited, her presence
unexpected. She drove me to my apartment on 9
^th
and Detroit. I told
her exactly what had happened, and in my view I was innocence personified. I
was, indeed, the drunk in the back seat. Whether she believed me or not, her
voice and manner registered disappointment, partly for the trouble and partly
because I had almost stopped coming to see her. "You went to see Marion
last week. Why didn't you visit me?" True enough, one afternoon I had
stopped by Marion Davies's house and had a gin and tonic with her. She drank a
left of gin.

The writ was returnable in the
Beverly Hills Municipal Court in ten days. I was to be there at 10 a.m. with
counsel. I marked it on the calendar and forgot about it. I had other things to
think about. This meatball case could be stalled for many months, quite
possibly until I was off parole. Then a misdemeanor conviction would be
inconsequential. I would gladly serve six months in jail if I could get rid of
the parole leash that was choking me.

As expected, all they could charge me with were
several misdemeanors. Instead of entering a plea, we motioned for a month
postponement to study the arrest and investigation reports. My lawyer, an old
man who taught criminal law, who knew the judge but was long of tooth for trial
wars, combat by words, was able to get us five weeks' postponement to study the
reports. The City Attorney objected; he was young and feisty. The judge ignored
him and set arraignment for a Monday, at 10 a.m., five weeks away. We would
probably enter a "not guilty" plea and have a trial date set for
ninety days away. Even if we went to trial and a jury found me guilty, during
the appeal of a misdemeanor conviction the defendant has an absolute right to
bail. An appeal would last a minimum of eighteen months. In other words, if all
things went bad, the earliest I had to confront fleeing the country or going to
jail for a few months was over two years away. That
was eternity relative to the
pace that I was living.

It would take too long to
recount all my adventures at nearly twenty-four. Having read Aldous Huxley's
The Doors of Perception
and
Heaven and Hell,
when a magazine article did a
piece on magic mushrooms in Mexico, I happened to have $9,000 and a willing
companion in Bill D., Jimmy D.'s brother. We drove old Route 66 through Arizona
and New Mexico and turned south through El Paso into Juarez. We drove through
Mexico, and twice when stopped by soldiers and asked for a visa, we paid $50 and
drove on. We got some mushrooms from an Indian. It was a strange high. Three
weeks later we went back to Los Angeles.

I also discovered Las Vegas.
Sandy took me there the first time, but after that I would go for two or three
days almost on whim. I loved to gamble. No, not gamble exacdy; rather I loved
to play poker. Although the casinos of the era seemed the ultimate in wealth
and glamour, they were virtually insignificant compared to the gigantic
gambling palaces of today. I liked to cross the casino pit and have a pit boss
tell me, "Table open, Mr Bunker ..." I was twenty-three years old; it
made me feel like a big shot.

One funny thing happened. As I
said, I had a Jaguar sports car. My insurance had been canceled so I had a
crushed-in bumper and a few other dings and dents, plus it was a world of
trouble mechanically. Half humorously I told a youngster that I'd give him a
couple of cans of grass if he would get me one that looked like mine. At the
used sports car lot where I had the front of a job, I learned that Jaguars have
their numbers on a plate screwed into the firewall. What was screwed in could
be unscrewed, and screwed in somewhere else — like a better car.

The following Sunday morning I
awakened at Flip's apartment next to Paramount (the building is now on the
Paramount lot), and for some reason called the neighbor who lived in the bottom
apartment of the main house. The neighbor said, "That kid made a lot of
noise when he brought your car here last night."

My car! At home. "Wait a
second," I said. I went to the window and looked down onto the street.
There sat my car. The one the youth had brought was not mine.

We went to look at it. It was
an exact duplicate, including skirts along the rear wheel well. It was in
perfect condition. It was a jewel.

My problem was to dispose of
the old one. With Flip in tow, I went looking for help. I wanted Jimmy D., who
knew the scrap metal business, and Jack K., who was a machinist and had access
to a cutting torch from his father's machine shop. They would help me cut up
the Jag. Its body was aluminium; Jimmy could have that for scrap. Jack was into
engines; he could have the Jaguar 6, already a legendary piece of work. The Jag
engine was always great; it was everything else, especially electricity, that
made them deteriorate so quickly for so many years. We don't know how good they
are today; it will take a few years. They do depreciate swiftly.

The day was hot, the asphalt
parking lots soft. I found Jimmy and Jack together, coming out of the dim
coolness of a bar. They were game for the plan. Jack went to get the acetylene
torch. We would chop it up in the garage of Jimmy's father-in-law, whom I had
known since I was caught sleeping in his garage when on an escape from juvenile
custody. His eldest daughter was then my girlfriend. Now she was married to a
man in prison, who had been my running partner in youth. The second daughter
was married to Jimmy, and he disliked being married except for his two sons,
whom he adored. He had a physical revulsion to routine. He was psychologically
incapable of getting to a job on time. He might stay up partying until 6.30, so
how could he get to a job at eight? Cutting up a car on a Sunday afternoon was
another matter.

The house with the garage was
in El Monte. It had a
deep
back yard, so what we were
doing in the garage should not have disturbed the family barbecue. We would
make one cut through the body and peel it off in two pieces. Whde Jack put on
the goggles and wielded the torch, Jimmy used his considerable muscle with a crowbar,
to dig and pry.

More and more family members
and friends walked by
the
garage to the back yard
barbecue. Everything might have
been
all right, except that the
torch had set rubber insulation on
fire
,
or at least smoldering so
seriously that smoke poured through
a
broken window at the rear of the garage and billowed
out
across
the yard. The acrid black smoke
filled the garage, too. We had
to
raise the garage door to let in
air. The air blew even more smoke through the broken window in the back yard full
of coughing and choking Italians.

Flip, wearing white hot pants,
white blouse and white headband (the look of Lana Turner in
The Postman Always Rings
Twice),
stood in the garage doorway and laughed until she was in tears.

Soon enough the dispute began: Jimmy
would get the aluminum body, Jack would take the engine, but who would get the
chassis had not been considered. I told them to finish cutting it and then we
would decide.

When the body was peeled off
and all that remained was a chassis, four wheels and two bucket seats, I took
the license plates, the plate we had unscrewed from the firewall and the car
keys, and departed the scene with Flip.

Forty minutes later I screwed the
plate with the vehicle identification number, engine number and the rest, onto
the pristine black XK140 convertible. I liked it better than the 120 because it
had windows that rolled up. The 120 had side panels that snapped into place.

I inserted the key to the old
Jag into the ignition of the stolen one. With a tiny jiggle the key turned and
I pushed the starter button, which was separate from the key. It kicked over
and roared, the sound hypnotic to sports car enthusiasts, of which I was one.

A few days later I discovered
that Jimmy and Jack had taken the chassis with four wheels and two seats — but
no body, no windshield, no headlights, no license plates — out onto the San
Bernardino Freeway, Interstate 10, and driven it to Riverside. They said it was
the fastest thing on the road. By some miracle the Highway Patrol didn't spot them
and test their speed claim. They sold the engine to someone who put it into a
boat.

I drove the new Jaguar for about a year, and once had
it impounded without anyone discovering that it really belonged to a Van Nuys
car dealer. Even when I became a fugitive, I put out-of-state license plates on
the Jag and drove it for a few months. One night I parked it on a steeply
sloped street off the Sunset Strip. While I was gone the brakes gave out and it
rolled downhill into the front door and entryway of an apartment building. It
had been towed away when I came out.
C'est la vie.