“That you, Howard?”
Howard Hughes sighed. “What happened to ‘Security, may I help you’?”
“You’re the only one calls this early, Boss.”
“And you’re alone?”
“Right. Per your instructions to call you Mr. Hughes in the presence of others. What’s up?”
“Breakfast is up. Meet me at the corner of Melrose and La Brea in half an hour.”
“Right, Boss.”
“Two or three, Buzz? I’m hungry and having four.”
Howard was on his all chili dog diet; Pink’s Dogs at Melrose and La Brea was his current in-spot. I knew for a fact that their chili was made from horse-meat air freighted up daily from Tijuana. “One kraut, no chili.”
“Heathen. Pink’s chili is better than Chasen’s.”
“I had a pony when I was a boy.”
“So? I had a governess. You think I wouldn’t eat—”
I said, “Half an hour,” and hung up. I figured if I got there five minutes late I wouldn’t have to watch the fourth richest man in America eat.
Howard was picking strands of sauerkraut off his chin when I climbed in the backseat of his limousine. He said, “You didn’t really want it, did you?”
I pressed the button that sent up the screen that shielded us from the driver. “No, coffee and doughnuts are more my style.”
Howard gave me a long, slow eyeballing — a bit ill at ease because sitting down we were the same height, while standing I came up to his shoulders. “Do you need money, Buzz?”
I thought of Leotis Dineen. “Can niggers dance?”
“They certainly can. But call them colored, you never know when one might be listening.”
Larry the chauffeur was Chinese; Howard’s comment made me wonder if his last plane crash had dented his cabeza. I tried my standard opening line. “Getting any, Boss?”
Hughes smiled and burped; horse grease wafted through the backseat. He dug into a pile of papers beside him — blueprints, graphs, and scraps covered with airplane doodles, pulling out a snapshot of a blonde girl naked from the waist up. He handed it to me and said, “Gretchen Rae Shoftel, age nineteen. Born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, July 26, 1929. She was staying at the place on South Lucerne — the screening house. This is the woman, Buzz. I think I want to marry her. And she’s gone — she flew the coop on the contract, me, all of it.”
I examined the picture. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was prodigiously lunged — no surprise — with a blonde pageboy and smarts in her eyes, like she knew Mr. Hughes’s two-second screen test was strictly an audition for the sack and an occasional one-liner in some RKO turkey. “Who found her for you, Boss? It wasn’t me — I’d have remembered.”
Howard belched again — my hijacked sauerkraut this time. “I got the picture in the mail at the studio, along with an offer — a thousand dollars cash to a PO box in exchange for the girl’s address. I did it, and met Gretchen Rae at her hotel downtown. She told me she posed for some dirty old man back in Milwaukee, that he must have pulled the routine for the thousand. Gretchen Rae and I got to be friends, and, well...”
“And you’ll give me a bonus to find her?”
“A thousand, Buzz. Cash, off the payroll.”
My debt to Leotis Dineen was eight hundred and change; I could get clean and get even on minor league baseball — the San Diego Seals were starting their pre-season games next week. “It’s a deal. What else have you got on the girl?”
“She was car hopping at Scrivner’s Drive-In. I know that.”
“Friends, known associates, relatives here in LA?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
I took a deep breath to let Howard know a tricky question was coming. “Boss, you think maybe this girl is working an angle on you? I mean, the picture out of nowhere, the thousand to a PO box?”
Howard Hughes harumphed. “It had to be that piece in Confidential, the one that alleged my talent scouts take topless photographs and that I like my women endowed.”
“Alleged, Boss?”
“I’m practicing coming off as irate in case I sue Confidential somewhere down the line. You’ll get on this right away?”
“Rapidamente.”
“Outstanding. And don’t forget Sid Weinberg’s party tomorrow night. He’s got a new horror picture coming out from the studio, and I need you there to keep the autograph hounds from going crazy. Eight, Sid’s house.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Find Gretchen Rae, Buzz. She’s special.”
Howard’s one saving grace with females is that he keeps falling in love with them — albeit only after viewing Brownie snaps of their lungs. It more or less keeps him busy between crashing airplanes and designing airplanes that don’t fly.
“Right, Boss.”
The limousine’s phone rang. Howard picked it up, listened and murmured, “Yes. Yes, I’ll tell him.” Hanging up, he said, “The switchboard at the plant. Mickey Cohen wants to see you. Make it brief, you’re on my time now.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was Howard who introduced me to Mickey, right before I got wounded in a dope shoot-out and took my LAPD pension. I still give him a hand with his drug dealings — unofficial liaison to Narcotics Division, point man for the Narco dicks who skim x number of grams off every ounce of junk confiscated. The LAPD has got an unofficial heroin policy: it is to be sold only to coloreds, only east of Alvarado and south of Jefferson. I don’t think it should be sold anywhere, but as long as it is, I want the five percent. I test the shit with a chem kit I stole from the crime lab — no poor hophead is going to croak from a Mickey Cohen bindle bootjacked by Turner “Buzz” Meeks. Dubious morality: I sleep well ninety percent of the time and lay my bet action off with shine bookies, the old exploiter washing the hand that feeds him. Money was right at the top of my brain as I drove to Mickey’s haberdashery on the Strip. I always need cash, and the Mick never calls unless it is in the offing.
I found the man in his back room, surrounded by sycophants and muscle: Johnny Stompanato, guinea spit curl dangling over his handsome face — he of the long-term crush on Lana Turner; Davey Goldman, Mickey’s chief yes-man and the author of his nightclub shticks; and a diffident-looking little guy I recognized as Morris Hornbeck — an accountant and former trigger for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob in Milwaukee. Shaking hands and pulling up a chair, I got ready to make my pitch: You pay me now; I do my job after I run a hot little errand for Howard. I opened my mouth to speak, but Mickey beat me to it. “I want you to find a woman for me.”
I was about to say “What a coincidence,” when Johnny Stomp handed me a snapshot. “Nice gash. Not Lana Turner quality, but US DA choice tail nonetheless.”
Of course, you see it coming. The photo was a nightspot job: compliments of Preston Sturges’ Players Club, Gretchen Rae Shoftel blinking against flashbulb glare, dairy-state pulchritude in a tight black dress. Mickey Cohen was draping an arm around her shoulders, aglow with love. I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “Where was the wife, Mick? Off on one of her Hadassah junkets?”
Mickey grunted. “‘Israel, the New Homeland.’ Ten-day tour with her Mah-Jongg club. While the cat is away, the mice will play. Va-va-va-voom. Find her, Buzzchik. A grand.”