Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (37 page)

Sandy moved back to the Sunset
Strip, to a sleek apartment on Sweetzer between Sunset and Fountain. Late one
afternoon she called me and said to come over. "Somebody wants to see
you."

"Who is it?"

"No. No. It'll be a
surprise."

When she opened the door, she
said, "You'll never guess who's here."

On the living room sofa sat
Ronnie H. She was right; I never would have guessed. I had no idea he was out.
I hadn't seen him since San Quentin. He was from Sandy's neighborhood; she had
known him before he went to prison. Actually she was more friendly with his
sister, who would later be murdered in the desert by an escaped convict who was
sentenced to die, although I cannot recall if he was actually executed or got a
commutation when the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional as
it was then being applied. Ronnie H. was a good convict, although no killer. In
prison lexicon, he was a
regular.
He grinned gape-mouthed, showing a missing tooth.
"Hey, Eddie B. We heard you had it all going for you, a Jaguar and all
that."

My affability was a front.
Although Sandy was not my "old lady," and in fact we had not even
gone to bed together, I felt something unusual for me: jealousy, which increased
as she told me that Ronnie had lots of money from hanging bad paper, and they
were going away on a long trip together. "I always wanted to live a while
in New York."

"That's great. When are
you leaving?"

Ronnie answered. "In a
couple days. I gotta pick up some money that's owed me." When she went out
of the room, he lowered his voice: "Bill D. said you could get blank
payroll checks. I need some."

"How many do you
want?"

"I dunno ... as many as
you can get, I guess."

"No, I don't think you
want
that
many.
You can only cash about a dozen a day."

"I got some other people
cashin' 'em, too. What about a hundred . . . maybe a hundred and fifty? How
much is that?"

"How's six grand?"

"That sounds fair
enough."

"Okay . . . what's
tomorrow?"

"Friday."

"I'll get 'em tomorrow
night. You'll have my money."

"Oh yeah . . . sure ... as
soon as I see these guys that owe me."

"No, no ... I don't want
to wait."

"No, you won't have to
wait. If I don't see them, I'll give it to you out of some other money I've
got."

"Okay, good. When I get
the checks, where do you want me to reach you?"

"Reach me here at
Sandy's."

As I went back to my car, I
realized that I hadn't known how much I wanted Sandy until it appeared as if
she was leaving.

I had a dozen Southern Pacific
Railroad checks, and nine from Walt Disney, all made out. Not enough. I knew
where to get more, from a machine shop in South Pasadena. It was an easy prowl;
there was no burglar alarm. It had security bars on the rear window, but they
had been cut so an air conditioner would fit on the window ledge. Wearing
gloves, of course, I bent the bars, lifted out the air conditioner and climbed
in. In a couple of minutes I had a big checkbook. The checks could not get hot
until Monday. That would give them two days before they were on any kind of hot
list.

I called Sandy from the machine
shop. "Hey, baby, is he there?" I asked.

"He went out somewhere ...
I think to see those guys about the money they owe him. He'll be back in a
littlewhile."

"Hold him. I'm on my
way."

"Did you get them?"

"Yes ma'am."

It was still dusk when I turned
down the ramp onto the Pasadena Freeway, but when I exited the Hollywood
Freeway at Highland Avenue, the city's lights were biting into night. I
followed Highland to Fountain,
went west to Sweetzer and found a parking space at the curb.

The apartment building was from
Southern California's architectural heyday, around 1940. It was a two-storied
stucco with red tde roof. To enter from the street you had to pass through the
gate of a walled courtyard with lush ferns and a fountain.

When Sandy opened the door, she
let me know that Ronnie was in the apartment.

"Has he got my
money?"

"I dunno. Talk to
him."

He was in the living room
watching a football game on TV. As soon as he saw me and stood up, I knew without
a word that he didn't have the money. "They were supposed to meel
me," he said.

"Uh uh! No! That's
bullshit. That's got nothing to do with me. I need my money."

"I know you do," he
said. "I'll pay you out of these checks right off the top."

"Look here, Ronnie, you
and me are all right . . . but I don't commit felonies for free. I want my
money tomorrow, and I want $50 a check instead of $40."

Ronnie nodded before I
finished. "Sure, man. Thanks, man. Fuck, I'll even cash some tonight and
give you the dough." He looked toward the door to the bedroom, where Sandy
was packing up. "Can you get me a check protector?"

"I don't know.
Maybe."

"Let's go get some
money," he said. "We'll take my car, but you drive. Okay."

It was fine with me. I could
keep track of my money. We went to my apartment to type a name on the checks.
It was then I learned that Ronnie lacked phony identification. "We'll use
my ID," he said. "Why not? I mean . . . what the fuck . . . I'm gonna
be a fugitive anyway. What's the difference between a parole violation and a
new check beef?"

His logic had some validity. I
wouldn't have done it, but the truth was that he might serve about the same
time for hanging paper as for a parole violation. He'd gone down the first time
foi armed robbery. The parole board might think he was improving if he came
back on a forgery.

When he came out of the first
market and handed me the money, he said, "Don't tell Sandy about
this."

"About what?"

"About using my own
identification."

"Yeah . . . sure."

"I'll get the rest
tomorrow," I said.

"Yeah, sure. It's going
good, huh?"

I nodded. "You better get
all the money you can . . . because the more you have the longer you can
run."

"That's right. We'll have plenty when we pass the
rest of that paper."

The next morning it fell upon
me to evacuate Sandy from the apartment. What she wasn't taking with her was
going to the garage at her parents' home in the San Gabriel Valley. When I
arrived at the apartment she was in a heated argument with the landlady, who
refused to return the security deposit because Sandy was leaving before her
lease expired. "C'mon," I said, almost dragging her away. Sandy was a
big girl, and although she dressed like a socialite, she had been raised on
mean streets and was not averse to punching the landlady in the eye. I didn't
want that to happen. As I pulled her to the car, I said, "Take it easy.
We'll get her. I'll come back and clean it out." Which I did several
nights later, carting away everything that would sell, including a rug that, by
itself, brought twice the security deposit. The landlady was a shrewish bitch,
but she did have good taste.

After leaving everything except
two suitcases at the small but neat tract home, we went to a house in Alhambra.
It was a frame house built before the Depression situated far back on the lot.
The unpaved driveway had two grooves from the passage of coundess cars. Once
there had been a front lawn; now some patches of grass remained, and it was
obviously a common practice to park on the front yard. Two cars sat there. I
recognized neither. Ronnie's wasn't there, nor was his crime partner's. R.L.
was in on the forgery scheme. In fact he was supposed to pay me the rest of the
money. He drove an old maroon Cadillac convertible. It predated the rear fins,
which in 1957 had evolved to their maximum flamboyance.

I let Sandy out and went around
the block to park. It was unlikely that the police would arrive, but it was
possible. If they did pull up in front, I would have a chance to go over the
rear fence. If that happened, I didn't want to leave my car. I always parked
some distance away when I was doing something wrong.

Sandy was alone in the living
room when I entered. "Who's here?" I asked.

"R.L.'s old lady and some
teenage chick." She gestured toward the archway into the kitchen. There I
found Charlene, the wife, called "Charlie," and a neighborhood girl
named Bonnie. Charlie was feeding a baby in a high chair. Piled on the kitchen
table were sacks of groceries. Somebody had been cashing the checks. Hanging
paper in supermarkets, which was the place to cash them, created a byproduct of
many groceries. I would give them to Jimmy D.'s sister-in-law, whose husband
was in San Quentin. She could use it all, especially the baby food.

Charlie's greeting was cold,
and when I asked the whereabouts of her husband, she made a face and a sound of
disgust. "I don't know. I don't care. Here." From beneath a magazine
she produced a stack of greenbacks. "We still owe you six hundred,"
she said. "Get it from him."

To Bonnie, I made a face
intended to be a humorous reaction to Charlene's manifest anger. Bonnie didn't
respond, and on closer scrutiny I could see that she had been crying.

The sound of the front screen
door banging shut brought me back to the living room. R.L. had returned. He was
grinning at Sandy with drunken stupidity. "How ya doin', ya big fine . .
." Then he saw me. "Hey, big E.B. Damn, you dress sharp. Where's that
baaadass Jaguar of yours?"

Charlene came past me.
"Well . . . ?" she said.

"'Well' what . . . ?"
R.L. responded.

"Did you pass any?"

He shook his head. "They
won't take 'em from me."

"Lyin' bastard," she
said; then snorted and went back to the kitchen.

R.L. looked to me as the appeal
judge. "I don't know why, man. I swear, they won't take 'em from me."

Fifteen minutes late we pulled
R.L.'s Cadillac into a parking lot beside a supermarket on Huntington Drive.
While driving there I told R.L. exactly what to do. He got out and I waited.
Five minutes later he came around the other corner and hurried to the car,
shaking his head even before he got in. "I told you. They just
won't."

It was obvious that he had
simply walked around the market without going in. When we stopped at the next
market, I accompanied him. It was a huge Safeway. "Get a cart," I
said.

He pushed the cart and I piled
it high with groceries. I went with him to the checkout line. When he was one
customer from the cash register, I went around and stood by the door. He handed
over the payroll check. The checker called the manager, who looked at the driver's
license and initialed the check. The groceries were bagged and loaded back into
the cart while the checkout clerk counted out the change and handed it over.

"That was easy," R.L.
said when we were back in the car.

I held out my hand.

"Oh yeah, I owe you,"
he said, handing me the wad of bills.

I took him through the same
dance twice more, loading the cart, leading him to the checkout line and
patting him on the back before stepping to the sidelines. "Man, it's
easier than I thought," he said as he handed me the money. It was all he
owed me. "Let's get a couple more before we go back."

At the next market, as we
neared the front door, Ronnie H. came out pushing a cart of groceries.
"Don't go in there," he said. "The manager was a
little bit
suspicious. Let's go back to
the house."

When we got back, I had all the
money owed me. I had wads that bulged both pants pockets and the inside pocket
of my jacket. I got my car and loaded it with the groceries to give away.
Ronnie was taking a temporary rest before going out again. He knew that it
didn't matter if he cashed ten checks or two hundred; he would

serve the same amount of time
when caught. The more he cashed, the farther he could travel and the longer he
could stay out of danger. Give me enough money and it would be impossible for
the authorities to catch me.

Sandy was still waiting on the
sofa. Ronnie looked at her and said, "You're the smartest one of all.
You're getting everything without doing anything."

"No," she said.
"I'm not the smartest. He is." She nodded toward me.

I was at the screen door.
"Goodbye and good luck to one and all."

"I'll call you
tomorrow," Sandy said.

"You're leaving
town."

"I'll call you from
wherever I am. You'll want to know how I am, won't you?"

"Of course. Later."

I gave them all a salute and
walked out into the late afternoon light, humming a song and snapping my
fingers: "I'm the king of everything . . . gotta have a joint before I
swing."

I got in the car and fired up a fat joint called a
bomber.

When the phone rang late the
following afternoon, I knew it was Sandy. I picked up the receiver and I said,
"Hi, baby."

"How'd
you know it was me" "E.S.P."

"Wanna go to a
movie?"

"Sure."

"Pick me up at my
mother's."

"What time?"

"Whenever you get
here."

That evening we drove to Pasadena
where we saw Frank Sinatra play the Prohibition era comedian, Joe E. Lewis, in
The Joker is Wild.
It seemed a good movie,
although my memory of it is less clear than of some I've seen. I lost track of
the movie while thinking about her body beside me. I'd played a waiting game,
hiding my lust for many months, certain of her contempt for a man she could
lead around by his sexual desire. Now she was ready to be
my woman. The idea was
dizzying. She was the perfect female for me, streetwise yet educated. That she
had been a call girl was great with me. I had no use for a square john chick
who, if I was in jail, would come to the visiting room and cry on the glass. I
wanted a partner who could, and would, trick the bondsman to raise me on bail.
She was fine, too, 5'9", with an eye-turning shape and long, gleaming red
hair. She had the most sensuous walk I've ever seen on a woman, with long
tanned legs that were shapely, although her thighs were bigger than is
fashionable today - but just what I like. So do most men.

Visions of having her on white
sheets with those legs spread wide filled my mind and I knew it would come to
pass, but this wasn't the right time to bring it forward. A lot of things were
communicated wordlessly. "We can be a great team," she said and,
after a pause, added: "Incidentally, I hear well..." I said nothing;
I even liked that she said it, for it validated my dominance in the
relationship. Why tell her that the very idea of hitting a woman was anathema
to me?