Waxman’s office was stone silent; I picked the back door lock, walked in and made straight for the safe behind his playmate calendar — the place where I knew he kept his dope and bribery stash. Left-right-left: an hour of diddling the tumblers and the door creaked open. Four hours of studying memo slips, ledgers and little black book notations and I trusted myself on a reconstruction.
Labyrinthine, but workable:
Private eye reports on Gail Curtiz and Linda Claire Woodruff — the two paternity suit kids Wax considered most likely to contest the Bendish estate. Lists of stooges supplied by Wax contacts in the LAPD: criminal types to be used to file phony claims against the estate, whatever money gleaned to be kicked back to Wax himself. Address book names circled: snuff artists I knew from jail, including the fearsome Angel “Fritz” Trejo. A note from Phil Turkel to Waxman: “Throw Stan a bone — he can babysit the dog until we get the money.” A diagram of the Betty Ford Clinic, followed by an ominous epiphany: Wax was going to have Phil and the real paternity kids clipped. Pages and pages of notes in legalese — levers to get at the extra fifteen million Sol Bendish had stuffed in Swiss bank accounts.
I turned off the lights and raged in the dark; I thought of escaping to a nice deserted island with Basko and some nice girl who wouldn’t judge me for loving a bull terrier more than her. The phone rang — and I nearly jumped out of my hide.
I picked up and faked Wax’s voice. “Waxman here.”
“Ees Angel Fritz. You know your man Phil?”
“Yeah.”
“Ees history. You pay balance now?”
“My office in two hours, homeboy.”
“Ees bonaroo, homes.”
I hung up and called Waxman’s pad; Miller answered on the second ring. “Yes?”
“Wax, it’s Klein.”
“Oh.”
His voice spelled it out plain: he’d heard about the southside holocaust. “Yeah, ‘Oh.’ Listen, shit-bird, here’s the drift. Turkel’s dead, and I took out Angel Trejo. I’m at your office and I’ve been doing some reading. Be here in one hour with a cash settlement.”
Waxman’s teeth chattered; I hung up and did some typing: Stan Klein’s account of the whole Bendish/Waxman/Turkel/Ottens/Trejo scam — a massive criminal conspiracy to bilk the dog I loved. I included everything but mention of myself and left a nice blank space for Wax to sign his name. Then I waited.
Fifty minutes later — a knock. I opened the door and let Wax in. His right hand was twitching and there was a bulge under his jacket. He said, “Hello, Klein,” and twitched harder; I heard a truck rumble by and shot him point blank in the face.
Wax keeled over dead, his right eyeball stuck to his law school diploma. I frisked him, relieved him of his piece and twenty large in cash. I found some papers in his desk, studied his signature and forged his name to his confession. I left him on the floor, walked outside and pulled over to the pay phone across the street.
A taco wagon pulled to the curb; I dropped my quarter, dialed 911 and called in a gunshot tip — anonymous citizen, a quick hangup. Angel Fritz Trejo rang Wax’s doorbell, waited, then let himself in. Seconds dragged; lights went on; two black & whites pulled up and four cops ran inside brandishing hardware. Multiple shots — and four cops walked out unharmed.
So in the end I made twenty grand and got the dog. The L.A. County Grand Jury bought the deposition, attributed my various dead to Ottens/Turkel/Trejo/Waxman et al — all dead themselves, thus unindictable. A superior court judge invalidated Basko’s twenty-five mill and divided the swag between Gail Curtiz and Linda Claire Woodruff. Gail got the Bendish mansion — rumor has it that she’s turning it into a crash-pad for radical lesbian feminists down on their luck. Linda Claire is going out with a famous rock star — androgynous, but more male than female. She admitted, elliptically, that she tried to “hustle” Gail Curtiz — validating her dyke submissiveness as good old American fortune hunting. Lizzie Trent got her teeth fixed, kicked me off probation and into her bed. I got a job selling cars in Glendale — and Basko comes to work with me every day. His steak and caviar diet have been replaced by Gravy Train — and he looks even groovier and healthier. Lizzie digs Basko and lets him sleep with us. We’re talking about combining my twenty grand with her life savings and buying a house, which bodes marriage: my first, her fourth. Lizzie’s a blast: she’s smart, tender, funny and gives great skull. I love her almost as much as I love Basko.
Torch Number
Before Pearl Harbor and the Jap scare, my living room window offered a great night view: Hollywood Boulevard lit with neon, dark hillsides, movie spots crisscrossing the sky announcing the latest opening at Grauman’s and the Pantages. Now, three months after the day of infamy — blackouts in effect and squadrons of Jap Zeros half expected any moment — all I could see were building shapes and the cherry lamps of occasional prowl cars. The ten P.M. curfew kept night divorce work off my plate, and blowing my last assignment with Bill Malloy of the D.A.’s Bureau made a special deputy’s curfew waiver out of the question. Work was down, bills were up, and my botched surveillance of Maggie Cordova had me thinking of Lorna all the time, wearing the grooves on her recording of “Prison of Love” down to sandpaper.
I mixed another rye and soda and started the record over. Through a part in the curtains, I eyeballed the street; I thought of Lorna and Maggie Cordova until their stories melded.
Lorna Kafesjian.
Second-rate bistro chanteuse — first-rate lungs, third-rate club gigs because she insisted on performing her own tunes. I met her when she hired me to rebuff the persistent passes of a rich bull dagger who’d been voyeur perving on her out at Malibu Beach — Lorna with her swimsuit stripped to the waist, chest exposed for a deep cleavage tan to offset the white gowns she always wore on stage. The dyke was sending Lor a hundred long-stemmed red roses a day, along with mash notes bearing her nom de plume d’amour: “Your Tongue of Fire.” I kiboshed the pursuit quicksville, glomming the tongue’s Vice jacket, shooting the dope to Louella Parsons — a socially connected, prominently married carpet muncher with a yen for nightclub canaries was prime meat for the four-star Herald. I told Louella: She desists, you don’t publish; she persists, you do. The Tongue and I had a little chat; I strong-armed her nigger bodyguard when he got persistent. Lorna was grateful, wrote me the torch number to torch all torch numbers — and I got persistent.
The flame burned both ways for about four months — from January to May of ’38 I was Mr. Ringside Swain as Lorna gigged the Katydid Klub, Bido Lito’s, Malloy’s Nest, and a host of dives on the edge of jigtown. Two A.M. closers, then back to her place; long mornings and afternoons in bed, my business neglected, clients left dangling while I lived the title of a Duke Ellington number: “I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good.” Lorna came out of the spell first; she saw that I was willing to trash my life to be with her. That scared her; she pushed me away; I played stage door Johnny until I got disgusted with myself and she blew town for fuck knows where, leaving me a legacy of soft contralto warbles on hot black wax.
Lorna.
Lorna to Maggie.
Maggie happened this way:
Two weeks ago Malloy co-opted me to the D.A.’s Bureau — the aftermath of the bank job was running helter-skelter, he needed a man good at rolling stakeouts, and a citizens committee had posted extra reward gelt. The B of A on North Broadway and Alpine got knocked off; two shitbirds — Caucasians, one with outré facial scars — snuffed three armed guards and got away clean. A score of eyeball witnesses gave descriptions of the robbers, then — blam! — the next day a witness, a seventy-three-year-old Jap granny set for internment pickup, got plugged — double blam! — as she was walking her pooch to the corner market. LAPD Ballistics compared the slugs to the pills extracted from the stiffs at the bank scene: match-up, straight across.