“He’s, uh, not home, I guess,” said Cochran to cover his embarrassment as they scuffed back to the booth. Their dinners had been served—two plates sat on the tablecloth, the meat and vegetables piled on them steaming with smells of garlic and lamb and onion and cinnamon, along with another Manhattan and a fresh shot glass of bourbon and five fresh glasses of beer.
“Where would we be without you to figure these things out?” Plumtree said acidly as she slid into the booth.
Cochran sat down without replying, and as he began hungrily forking up the mess of onions and tomatoes and veal on his plate he looked around at the bar and the other patrons rather than at Plumtree. He hoped she’d be Janis again soon; and he resolved to catch her if she got up to go to the ladies’ room.
The bartender was a woman too, and as Cochran watched she drew a draft beer for one of the men who had been playing bar dice. The man pulled a little cloth bag from his coat pocket and shook from it a pile of yellow-brown powder onto the bar. The bartender scooped the powder up with a miniature dustpan and disposed of it behind the bar.
Gold dust? wondered Cochran with the incurious detachment of being half-drunk. Heroin or cocaine, cut with semolina flour? Either way, it seemed like an awful lot to pay for one beer.
A black dwarf on crutches was laboriously poling his way out of the bar now, and when he had braced the door open to swing his crutches outside, Cochran caught a strong scent of the sea on the gusty cold draft that made the lamps flicker in the moment before the door banged shut behind the little man. And under the resumed knock and rattle of the dice he now heard a deep, slow rolling, as if a millwheel were turning in some adjoining stone building.
He became aware that his food was gone, along with the bourbon and a lot of the beer, and that Plumtree had a cigarette in her mouth and was striking a match. Cochran’s cigarettes were still back at the madhouse.
When she threw the match into the ashtray it flared up in a momentary flame; an instant later there was just a wisp of smoke curling over the ashtray, and a whiff of something like bacon.
“Brandy in the ashtrays?” said Cochran, in a light tone to cover for having jumped in surprise. “What’s the writing on it say? ‘No smoking near this ashtray’?”
Plumtree was startled herself, and she reached out gingerly to tilt the ashtray toward her. “It says—I think it’s Latin—Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit amor. What does that mean?”
“Lemme see.” Cochran tipped the warm ashtray toward himself. “Uh…’How romantic, to be…submitting…in a motor bus, having…a bit!…of love.’”
“You liar!” She actually, seemed frightened by his nonsense. “It doesn’t say that, does it? In a motor bus? You’re such a liar.”
Cochran laughed and touched her arm reassuringly. “No, I don’t know what it says.” He took a sip from one of the beer glasses, and to change the subject he asked, “Why did you say Coors is like screwing in a canoe?”
“Because it’s fuckin’ near water. Ho ho. Let’s get out of here. Strubie the Clown ought to be home by now. I’ll go copy down the address listed for him and call us a cab.” She had got out of the booth and was striding away toward the telephone before he could protest.
“Strubie the goddamn Clown…?” he muttered to himself. “It won’t be the right guy, not this lawyer you want. Tonight?”
He at least managed to finish the beers before she got back and pulled him up onto his feet; but when she had marched him to the door and pulled it open—there was no sea scent on the breeze now—she hurried back inside so that she could speak to the blond woman who had been shouting, and who by this time was very drunk and crying quietly.
When Plumtree rejoined him and pushed him out across the Rosecrans sidewalk, she immediately began looking anxiously up and down the street. “I hope the cab gets here quick,” she muttered.
“Oh hell. Me too,” said Cochran, for he saw that she was now holding a purse.
STRUBIE THE Clown’s house was a little one-story 1920s bungalow off Del Amo and Avalon in the Carson area of south Los Angeles, and after the taxi dropped them off Cochran and Plumtree hurried out of the curbside streetlight’s glare, up the old two-strip concrete driveway to the dark porch.
No lights seemed to be on inside the house, but Plumtree knocked on the door. Several seconds went by without any sound from inside, and Cochran blinked around at the porch.
A wooden swing hung on chains from a beam in the porch roof, and Cochran wobbled across the Astroturf carpeting and slumped into it—and instantly one of the hooks tore free of the overhead beam, and the swing’s streetside corner hit the porch deck with an echoing bang.
“Christ!” hissed Plumtree; she reeled back and bumped a ceramic pot on the porch rail, and it tipped off and broke with a hollow thump and rattle on the grass below. Cochran had rolled off the pivoting and now-diagonal swing, but his arm was tangled in the slack chain, and it took him several seconds to thrash free of it. The fall had jolted him. His face was suddenly cold and damp, and his mouth was full of salty saliva; beside the front door sat a wide plastic tray heaped with sand and cat turds, and he crawled over and began vomiting into it, desperately trying to do so quietly.
“You shithead!” Plumtree gasped. “We’re wrecking his place!”
Cochran was aware of the sound of a car’s engine idling fast out at the curb as it was shifted out of gear, and then the noise stopped and he heard a car door creak open and a moment later clunk shut.
“He’s home,” whispered Plumtree urgently. “Stop it! And get up!”
Cochran was just spitting now, and he got his feet under himself and straightened up, bracing himself on the wall planks. “‘Scuse me,” he said resentfully with his face against the painted wood. “‘Scuse the fuck out o’ me.” He pulled his shirt free of his pants and wiped his mouth on it, then turned around to lean his back against the wall.
“Who’s there?” came a man’s frightened voice from the front yard.
“Oh,” muttered Plumtree, “I got no time for this flop.” A moment later she turned toward the front steps. “Mr. Strube?” she said cheerily. “My friend and I need your help.”
“Who are you?”
Cochran pushed the damp hair back from his face and peered out into the yard. The figure silhouetted against the streetlight glare wore baggy pants and a tiny., tight jacket, and great tufts of hair stood out from the sides of the head. The shoes at the ends of the short legs were as big as basketballs.
“We’re people in trouble, Mr. Strube,” Plumtree said. “We need to find a boy whose name sounds like…well, like Boogie-Woogie Bananas. He’ll be able to help us.”
“I…don’t know anybody whose name sounds…even remotely like that.” The clown walked hesitantly up to the porch steps, and his gaze went from Plumtree to Cochran to the broken swing. “Is he a clown? I know all the local clowns, I think—”
“No,” said Plumtree. “He’s…a king, or a contender for some kind of throne…it’s supernatural, a supernatural thing, actually….”
Strubie’s bulbous rubber nose wobbled as he sniffed. “Did you two get sick here? Are you drunk? What have you done here? I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m in the entertainment business, and my schedule…”
Cochran jumped then, for suddenly a man’s voice came grinding out of Plumtree’s mouth, gravelly and hoarsely baritone: “Frank, you got a show-biz friend in the bar here!” the voice drawled amiably. “Nicky Bradshaw, his name is. Shall I tell him where you live?”