Hughes smiled and burped; horse grease wafted through the back seat. He dug into a pile of papers beside him — blueprints, graphs, and scraps covered with airplane doodles, pulling out a snapshot of a blond 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 blond 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 preseason games next week. “It’s a deal. What else have you got on the girl?”
“She was carhopping at Scrivner’s Drive-in. I know that.”
“Friends, known associates, relatives here in L.A.?”
“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 harrumphed. “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?”
“Rápidamente.”
“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 shootout 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 5 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 90 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 USDA choice tail nonetheless.”
Of course, you see it coming. The photo was a nightspot job: compliments of Preston Sturges’s 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 mahjong club. While the cat is away, the mice will play. Va-va-va-voom. Find her, Buzzchik. A grand.”
I got obstreperous, my usual reaction to being scared. “Two grand, or go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”
Mickey scowled and went into a slow burn; I watched Johnny Stomp savor my bravado, Davey Goldman write down the line for his boss’s shticks, and Morris Hornbeck do queasy double takes like he wasn’t copacetic with the play. When the Mick’s burn stretched to close to a minute, I said, “Silence implies consent. Tell me all you know about the girl, and I’ll take it from there.”
Mickey Cohen smiled at me — his coming-from-hunger minion. “Goyische shitheel. For a twosky I want satisfaction guaranteed within forty-eight hours.”
I already had the money laid off on baseball, the fights, and three-horse parlays. “Forty-seven and change. Go.”
Mickey eyed his boys as he spoke — probably because he was pissed at me and needed a quick intimidation fix. Davey and Johnny Stomp looked away; Morris Hornbeck just twitched, like he was trying to quash a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. “Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I met her at Scrivner’s Drive-in two weeks ago. She told me she’s fresh out of the Minnesota sticks, someplace like that. She —”
I interrupted. “She said ‘Minnesota’ specifically, Mick?”
“Right. Moosebreath, Dogturd, some boonies town — but definitely Minnesota.”
Morris Hornbeck was sweating now; I had myself a hot lead. “Keep going, Mick.”
“Well, we hit it off; I convince Lavonne to see Israel before them dune coons take it back; Gretchen Rae and I get together; we va-va-va-voom; it’s terrific. She plays cagey with me, won’t tell me where she’s staying, and she keeps taking off — says she’s looking for a man — some friend of her father’s back in Antelope Ass or wherever the fuck she comes from. Once she’s gassed on vodka Collinses and gets misty about some hideaway she says she’s got. That —”
I said, “Wrap it up.”
Mickey slammed his knees so hard that Mickey Cohen Jr., asleep in the doorway twenty feet away, woke up and tried to stand on all fours — until the roller skate attached to his wang pulled him back down. “I’ll fucking wrap you up if you don’t find her for me! That’s it! I want her! Find her for me! Do it now!”
I got to my feet wondering how I was going to pull this one off— with the doorman gig at Sid Weinberg’s party thrown smack in the middle of it. I said, “Forty-seven fifty-five and rolling,” and winked at Morris Hornbeck — who just happened to hail from Milwaukee, where Howard told me Gretchen Rae Shoftel told him a dirty old man had snapped her lung shots. Hornbeck tried to wink back; it looked like his eyeball was having a grand mal seizure. Mickey said, “Find her for me. And you gonna be at Sid’s tomorrow night?”