Quadruple bingo — and then some.
The man who had to be Miller Treadwell was sitting in an overstuffed chair, his pants down, moaning, “Guddamn, guddamn.” I could see a woman’s left hand bracing the chair arm, but nothing more of the woman herself. Agent Stensland was trussed up, lying on his side on the floor, next to the entrance-way into the front room. He was working his wrist bonds against a wall grate, his breath expanding and contracting against the fabric tape crisscrossing his mouth.
Miller moaned with his eyes shut, then a pretty blonde head popped up and spoke to him: “Sugar, let me talk to you for a sec.”
“Guddamn, girl, don’t stop.”
“Miller, you have to make him tell you where he put the money.”
“We got ours, girl. He ain’t gonna tell us; he knows I’ll kill him if he does. We got ours, and we can trade you again.”
“Daddy’s too cheap to pay more. We could have twice as much, Sugar. We could go away and be together and just forget about Daddy.”
“Sugar, don’t talk nonsense. We got plenty, your papa’s got plenty more, and I ain’t able to talk so good in this state you got me in. You wanta...”
The head disappeared again; Miller went back to moaning. I wondered where Evans was and watched Stensland move his bound wrists against the grate. The kidnapper-killer’s ecstacy was reaching a crescendo when I saw my partner, inside the pad, tiptoeing over to the entranceway. He was just a few feet in back of Stensland when the G-man got his hands free and ripped the tape from his mouth. He went flush at the pain, and I followed his eyes to a .45 automatic on the armrest beside Miller’s right hand.
Pawing at his leg restraints, racing against the Okie’s release, Stensland banged his elbow on the grate. Miller jerked out of heaven and aimed the .45 at him just as I wedged my gun through the window crack. He fired at the fed; I fired at him; Davis emptied his piece at the chair. There must have been a dozen explosions, and then it was all over except for Jane Mackenzie Viertel’s record-length scream.
A shitload of Hollywood division black-and-whites showed up, and the meat wagon removed Miller Treadwell and Special Agent Norris Stensland, D.O.A. A detective lieutenant told Davis and me he wanted a full report before he contacted the feds. We kept the Viertel girl in handcuffs on general principles, and when the commotion wound down and the crowd of rubberneckers dispersed, we braced her on the front lawn of the courtyard.
Unlocking her cuffs, I said, “Come clean on the money. What happened? Where’s the dough Miller was talking about?”
Jane Viertel, backlighted by a street lamp, rubbed her wrists. “The money was in two packages. When it got crazy, they were dropped. Miller and Leroy got one, and it ripped open. The FBI man dropped his and Leroy ran with me, then Miller took off. The FBI man took Harwell to his car, then came back and grabbed the last package so Harwell wouldn’t know he had it. But Miller saw him. He had some loose bills he picked up, and he hid the rest of the money from Leroy. Miller and Leroy gave the loose money to these dreadful slobs to hide us out, and Leroy thought that was all there was. Then Miller and I got cozy, and he told me there was forty thousand for us.”
I looked at the girl, nineteen-year-old pulchritude with whorehouse smarts. “Where’s Miller’s money?”
Jane watched Davis lovingly eye the Auburn speedster. “Why should I tell you? You’d just give it back to that cheapskate father of mine.”
“He paid a hundred grand to save your life.”
The girl shrugged and lit a cigarette. “He probably used the interest from Mother’s trust fund. What’s wrong with fatso? Is he queer for cars or something?”
Davis walked over to us. “She needs a complete paint strip, new paint job, new upholstery and some whitewalls. Then she’s a peach.” Winking at Jane Viertel, he said, “What’s your goal in life, Sweetheart? Pussywhipping killers?”
Jane smiled, walked to the car, and unscrewed the gas cap. She dropped in her cigarette and started running. Davis and I hit the ground and ate grass. The gas tank exploded and the car went up in flames. The girl stood up and curtsied, then walked to us and said, “Miller’s money was in the trunk. Too bad, Daddy. Maybe you can tell Mother it’s a tax write-off.”
I recuffed Jane Viertel; the flames sent flickers of light over Davis Evans’s bereaved face. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled them out empty, and said to me, “You got a couple dimes, partner? AX6-400’s a toll call. I need me a peach like a mother dog.”
Since I Don’t Have You
During the post-war years I served two masters — running interference and hauling dirty laundry for the two men who defined LA at that time better than anyone else. To Howard Hughes I was security boss at his aircraft plant, pimp, and troubleshooter for RKO Pictures — the ex-cop who could kibosh blackmail squeezes, fix drunk drivings, and arrange abortions and dope cures. To Mickey Cohen — rackets overlord and would-be nightclub shtickster — I was a bagman to the LAPD, the former Narco detective who skimmed junk off niggertown dope rousts, allowing his Southside boys to sell it back to the hordes of schwartzes eager to fly White Powder Airlines. Big Howard: always in the news for crashing an airplane someplace inappropriate, stubbing his face on the control panel in some hicktown beanfield, then showing up at Romanoff’s bandaged like the Mummy with Ava Gardner on his arm; Mickey C.: also a pussy hound par excellence, pub crawling with an entourage of psychopathic killers, press agents, gag writers, and his bulldog Mickey Cohen, Jr., — a flatulent beast with a schlong so large that the Mick’s stooges strapped it to a roller skate so it wouldn’t drag on the ground.
Howard Hughes. Mickey Cohen. And me — Turner “Buzz” Meeks, Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, armadillo poacher; strikebreaker goon; cop; fixer, and keeper of the secret key to his masters’ psyches: they were both cowards mano a mano; airplanes and lunatic factotums their go-betweens — while I would go anywhere, anyplace — gun or billy club first, courting a front-page death to avenge my second-banana life. And the two of them courted me because I put their lack of balls in perspective: it was irrational, meshugah, bad business — a Forest Lawn crypt years before my time. But I got the last laugh there: I always knew that when faced with the grave I’d pull a smart segue to keep kicking — and I write this memoir as an old, old man — while Howard and Mickey stuff caskets, bullshit biographies their only legacy.
Howard. Mickey. Me.
Sooner or later, my work for the two of them had to produce what the yuppie lawyer kids today call “conflict of interest.” Of course, it was over a woman — and, of course, being a suicidal Okie shitkicker, forty-one years old and getting tired, I decided to play both ends against the middle. A thought just hit me: that I’m writing this story because I miss Howard and Mickey, and telling it gives me a chance to be with them again. Keep that in mind — that I loved them — even though they were both world-class shitheels.
January 15, 1949.
It was cold and clear in Los Angeles, and the papers were playing up the two-year anniversary of the Black Dahlia murder case — still unsolved, still speculated on. Mickey was still mourning Hooky Rothman’s death — he French kissed a sawed-off shotgun held by an unknown perpetrator — and Howard was still pissed at me over the Bob Mitchum reefer roust: he figured that my connections with Narco Division were still so solid that I should have seen it coming. I’d been shuttling back and forth between Howard and Mickey since New Years. The Mick’s signature fruit baskets stuffed with C-notes had to be distributed to cops, judges, and City Council members he wanted to grease, and the pilot/mogul had me out bird-dogging quiff: prowling bus depots and train stations for buxom young girls who’d fall prey to RKO contracts in exchange for frequent nighttime visits. I’d been having a good run: a half dozen midwestern farm maidens were now ensconced in Howard’s fuck pads — strategically located apartments tucked all over LA. And I was deep in hock to a darktown bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison. I was sitting in my quonset hut office at Hughes Aircraft when the phone rang.