I stared at the words on the paper: storms, muses, and moral stands. The very history of my thirty-third summer.
I showered, put on clean clothes, and went looking for a safe place to put my new fortune. I selected a somber, formidable old B. of A. on Market and Kearney, walked in and inquired about safe deposit boxes. The branch manager was most helpful, took my payment for a five-year rental fee on three boxes, handed me my keys and left me in privacy to stuff the square metal boxes full of money. I retained ten thousand dollars for operating expenses, which left me with an incredibly stuffed wallet and billfold.
Next I went looking for the U.S. Passport Office. I found it on Montgomery Street, within walking distance. The clerk took my application and told me that indently a birth certificate was required as I.D., but since I was a licensed private investigator he could overlook it. He kept glancing furtively at my left armpit, no doubt trying to determine whether or not I was carrying a heater. He referred me to a photographer down the street and told me to bring a photograph back later today. My passport should be ready in ten days.
I made a fast circuit: photographer’s shop, quick photo session, back to the Passport office with the photo, all within one hour. Which left me at a strange juncture: alone in San Francisco with ten thousand dollars in my pocket, an empty Mark Cross suitcase, no desire to get drunk or laid and suddenly bored with my beloved city.
Not knowing what to do, I walked northwest. When I passed the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Larkin and McAllister, I knew I had found my destination. I headed straight for the poetry section on the second floor. For the next six hours I pored through hundreds of volumes, looking for my dream poem. It was nowhere, either as a complete poem or as a fragment of one. I gave up when nervous hunger and eyestrain combined to give me a colossal headache.
A gourmet meal in Chinatown and a walk back to the hotel in the brisk night air put me in better spirits. But with sleep came more nightmares — without poetry this time, but just as vividly violent: monsters wielding golf clubs rising out of sand traps to attack me. On waking the next morning I hoped for a failure of memory, for if the dreams continued after the killing of Cathcart, I would surely go insane.
I had three things left to accomplish in San Francisco: scoring some dope, preferably heroin, acquiring a handgun, illegally, and formulating a plan for eliminating Cathcart. I started by buying some used counter-culture garb at a second-hand store in the Haight-Ashbury. Bell-bottom pants, sandals, a tank top bearing the likeness of a rock-and-roller named Neil Young, and an Army fatigue jacket. When I changed into my outfit back at the hotel, I knew it would never work. It was impossible. I had that outsized, moustached, arrogant-elitist look indigenous only to cops. Nobody on the street would sell me a firecracker, let alone a large quantity of heroin.
I approached the bellboy I had tipped so generously. The best he could come up with was cocaine or quaaludes. I decided to forego second-class drugs and to try instead to cop some smack in L.A., where I knew the territory and could probably shake down some connections.
Late in the afternoon I called Ralston at Hillcrest. The switchboard girl put me through to him at the first tee. When he said, “First tee, may I help you?” his voice sounded strained.
“This is Brown,” I said. “Are you busy?”
“Not really,” he replied.
“Good. How’s our buddy? Have you talked to him?”
“Yeah, today in fact. He thinks you’re in Mexico. He got word somehow that Cruz and Sandoval are dead. He thinks you did the job. He’s pissed and maybe even scared. He’s going down there himself this weekend to look for you.” It was almost too good to be true, but I believed him. My mind ran around in circles for long moments. Finally, Ralston broke in: “Brown? Are you still there?”
“Yeah. Look, when do you think he’ll split for Baja?”
“I don’t know. He usually leaves Friday nights, after he gets off duty. But maybe it’s different this time, because the trip is strictly business. Why?”
“Do you know his address in Del Mar?”
“No, I’ve never been down there. And I won’t ask him, in case you’re thinking of asking me to. I’m not fucking with you, I just don’t want to do anything suspicious. I’ve been staying away from him. When he called me today he said he wanted to see me, but I begged off. If he sees I’ve been beat up, he’ll know something’s wrong.”
“Listen, Daddy-O, don’t mess with the big fella. Are you afraid for your ass, Hot Rod?”
“Yeah. I am. Because I’m sane. Are you?”
“Yeah, but it’s almost over. I’ll call you when it is.”
Before he hung up, Ralston told me to be careful at least half a dozen times. In a cursory way I took each admonition to heart, but the wheels in my brain were already grinding out a plan.
I enlisted my bellboy buddy and we made a little recording on tape. My plan was starting to jell. I took a 7:15 flight from San Francisco International to San Diego Airport and rented a car from the Hertz office at the terminal.
The rest was simple. I called Del Mar Information and asked for the address and phone number of Haywood Cathcart. It took all of three seconds for them to give it to me: 8169 Camino De La Costa, 651–8291. Cathcart’s policeman-criminal mentality and sense of indentcy had dictated a phone listing (“I’m a police officer of high rank, and a solid American citizen. What have I got to hide?”).
I drove up the Coast Highway to Del Mar. Del Mar is a rich town, built upwards on rolling hills from the sea, but it does have a middle-class beachfront enclave and that’s where I found 8169 Camino De La Costa. It was so perfect that I almost collapsed in gratitude. Maybe there was a God.
A twisting road led me down to a giant parking lot. I parked and walked along the sand, checking out the house numbers. The houses, large bungalows really, were identicaclass="underline" white wood frame, obviously built as part of a development fifty or sixty years ago, and were spaced a solid fifty yards apart, separated by sand drifts. I found 8169. It was the most immaculately kept place on the beach front. I walked around the back. There was a chain-linked barbed-wire fence around a small back yard of some kind of synthetic grass. Old Haywood. Keep the property value up, and the niggers out. Through the fence I could see that the back door entered into some kind of service porch. It was a good setup and my mind clicked methodically with embellishments on my plan.
I drove back to San Diego and spent the night in a Hyatt motel. The next morning, Thursday, I returned the car to the airport and flew to L.A., where my other loaner was waiting in the parking lot.
It took me all day to accomplish what I had to, but I was satisfied with the results. A shakedown at gunpoint of Larry Willis and two black drag queens had provided me with three ounces of heroin, a small bag of coke, and some assorted uppers and downers. A seven-hundred-fifty-dollar payoff to an old informant from my Wilshire Patrol days had got me a cold Iver-Johnson .38 revolver with a silencer.
After I had everything I needed, I started to get scared: there was nothing left to do but the act itself.
I dropped off the overdue loan car at the agency. They were pissed and about to call the fuzz. I gladly paid the extra money they wanted, took a cab to L.A.X. and hopped a plane for San Diego.
Once ensconced in a motel in nearby Escondido, I started to get scared for real. I wanted to drink, but didn’t dare. If I did I would die. Throughout the night I tried to sleep and comforted myself with the poem I seemed to have composed myself: