Inherent Vice (45 page)

next morning
—
ocean smell,
fresh coffee, a cool edge—Doc was in Wavos, going through the Sunday
Times
to see if there was anything new about the Wolfmann case, which there wasn’t—though of course with twenty or thirty different sections you never knew what might be hiding among the real-estate ads—and was about to dig in to a specialty
of the house known as Shoot the Pier, basi
cally avocados, sprouts,
jalapeño
s
, pickled artichoke hearts, Monterey jack cheese, and Green Goddess
dressing on a sourdough loaf that had first been sliced lengthwise, spread
with garlic butter, and toasted, seventy-nine cents and a bargain at half the price, when who should stroll in, who else, but Shasta Fay. She was wearing, near as Doc could tell, unless she owned a drawerful of them now, the same old Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt as in the olden days, same sandals and bikini bottom. Strangely, his appetite did not produce a hall pass and ask to be excused, but on the other hand, what was this?
was he having an acid flashback, was he about to run into James “Moon-
doggie” Darren in
The Time Tunnel
or something? Last Doc knew, his ex-old lady here had been at least a person
of interest to countless levels
of law enforcement, yet here she was now, same getup, same carefree atti
tude, as if she still hadn’t even met Mickey Wolfmann, as if some stereo
needle had been lifted and set back down on some other sentimental oldie on the compilation LP of history.

“Hi, Doc.”

Which of course was all it ever took, and sure enough, would you look at this. Suavely positioning the Book Review over his lap, he grinned as sincerely as possible. “Heard you were back. Got your postcard, thanks.”

One of those little puzzled frowns she may have perfected around kindergarten. “Postcard?”

Well, that’s probably significant too, he thought, and I better write it down or I’ll forget. Ouija-board pranksters at work again, no doubt.

“Thought it was your handwriting, must have been somebody else’s ... so! where
’ve
you been?”

“Had to go up north? Family stuff?” Shrug. “Anything been happening down here?”

Bring up Mickey? Don’t bring up Mickey? “Your
...
friend in the construction business ...”

“Oh, that’s all over.” She didn’t look specially sad about it. Or happy either.

“Maybe I missed something on the news—he isn’t.
..
back, by any chance?”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’ve been away.” Around her neck on
a piece of thong, she was wearing a seasheli, maybe even brought back
from a distant Pacific island, whose shape and markings reminded Doc
of one of the zomes in Mickey’s now-abandoned project in the desert.

Ensenada Slim came in. “Howdy, Shasta. Hey Doc, Bigfoot’s been looking for you.”

“Oboy. How long ago?”

“Just saw him over to the Brain. Seemed pretty intense about something.”

“Either of you like to finish this?” Doc crept out the back way, only to
find Bigfoot lounging in the alley with a peculiar smile.

“Don’t look so nervous. I’m not planning to inflict bodily harm,
much as I’d like to. Part of this godforsaken hippie era and
it’s
erosion of
masculine values I expect. Wyatt Earp would have been using your head
for sledgehammer practice by now.”

“Hey, that reminds me—my bag, just going to reach in my bag here,
okay? two fingers? slowly?” Doc brought out the antique coffee cup he’d
found in Vegas.

“Though one grows hardened in police work,” said Bigfoot, “occa
sionally one’s sensibilities are profoundly challenged. What is
...
this
...
supposed to be?”

“It’s Wyatt Earp’s personal mustache cup, man. See, it’s got his name
on it and everything?”

“May I, without wishing to cause offense, inquire as to the provenance of this ...” He paused as if groping for the right term.

“Antique dealer in Vegas named Delwyn Quight. Seemed respectable
enough.”

Bigfoot nodded bitterly and for some time. “You obviously don’t sub
scribe to
Tombstone Memorabilia Collectors’Alert.
Brother Quight poses
for
its
centerfold at least every other month. The man is a byword of
fraudulent Earpiana.”

“Wow.” And worse, what if that also meant the
Liberace necktie
was a
fake, too?

“It’s the thought, isn’t it,” said Bigfoot. “Listen,” and exactly in
cadence with Doc saying the same thing, “I’m sorry about last night.”
They paused for exactly the same number of pulses, and again in unison
said, “You? Why should you be sorry?” This could have gone on all day,
but then Doc said, “Weird,” and Bigfoot said, “Extraordinary,” and the
spell was broken. They went ambling down the alley in silence till Big
foot said, “I’m not sure how to tell you this.”

“Oh, shit. Who is it this time?”

“Leonard Jermaine Loosemeat, whom you might recall as a minor-
league heroin dealer in Venice. Floater. Found him in one of those canals.”

“El Drano. Coy Harlingen’s dealer.”

“Yes.”

“Funny coincidence.”

“Define ‘funny.’” Doc heard something in his voice and looked over, and thought for a second that Bigfoot had finally arrived at his own
long-overdue cop-related nervous breakdown. His lip was trembling, his
eyes moist. He caught and held Doc’s gaze. Finally, “You don’t want to be fucking with this, Doc.”

Puck Beaverton had issued the same free advice.

which didn’t keep Doc
from driving up to Venice that evening to see what he could see. Leonard had been living in a bungalow beside a canal with a rowboat tied up at a little pier in the backyard. Periodically a dredge came through, and all the dopers who’d hidden their stashes in the canal could be observed the night before running around frantically trying to remember who’d put what where exactly. Doc happened to
arrive in the middle of one of these exercises. In the soft and bath-warm
night, half a dozen stereos were going at once out the open windows and
sliding glass doors. Low-voltage garden lights glowed through the night
foliage, up and down driveways and in the yards. Neighborhood people
wandered around with beer bottles or joints in their hands or lounged on
the little bridges watching the fuss.

“What? You forgot to put it in something waterproof again?”

“
Ups.
”

Doc had El Drano’s address from Bigfoot’s field interrogation card. Almost before he had time to knock, the door was opened by a fat guy with thick eyeglasses and a little tiny mustache, holding and chalking a pool cue handsomely inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

“What, no camera crew?”

“Actually, I’m here representing HULK, that’
s Heroin Users
Liberation
Kollective. W
e work out of Sacramento, and we’re basically a
lobby in the state assembly for junkie civil rights
.
May I offer our condo
lences for your loss
?
”

“Hi, I’m Pepe, and junkies, in fact dopers in general, are diseased human
trash who wouldn’t know what to do with civil rights if it walked up and
bit them on the ass, not that civil rights actually does that, understand,
oh come on in, by the way, do you happen to play eight ball?”

The walls inside were fiberboard and painted Prison Pink, a shade at that time believed to produce calm among the institutionalized. Every room had a pool table in it, including little bar-size units for the bathrooms and kitchen. There were nearly as many TV sets. Pepe, who
appeared to’ve had nobody to talk to, or at, since El Drano’s passing, kept
up a monologue into which Doc now and then tried to slip a question.

“.
..
not that I begrudged him the money he borrowed or even owed me because I was always the consistently better one in terms of pool playing, but what really annoyed me was the loan sharks, and the thugs they used to send around, if money at high interest was the whole story, well that would have
its
own integrity I suppose, but they also deal in
pain and forgiveness—their forgiveness!—and they traffic with agencies
of command and control, who will sooner or later betray all agreements they make because among the invisible powers there is no trust and no respect.”

He had paused briefly in front of one of the TV sets to flip through the channels. Doc took the occasion to ask, “Do you think it could have been one of those loan sharks who killed Leonard?”

“Except that all that was over. For the first time since I knew him,
Lenny was free of debt. My impression is that up at some level somebody
had decided to forgive everything he owed. But then, in addition, every month a check also started coming for him in the mail. Once or twice I
would sneak a look at the amount. Serious money, my friend—what was
your name again?”

“Larry. Hi. This money—you think it was from a client?”

“I asked, naturally, and sometimes he’
d say operating expenses, and
sometimes he called it a retainer fee, but one night—he shouldn’t have been using, but it was the Christmas holidays—he was in this mood, being nice to everybody, putting a little extra weight in the bags— around three in the morning he started freaking out, and that’s when he mentioned ‘blood money,’ and I asked about that later and he pre
tended he didn’t remember, but I knew his face by then, every pore, and
he remembered, all right. Something was corroding him from inside.
You’d never know to look at him, but he had a conscience. One of those
checks showed up last week and normally Lenny would
’ve
been out to the bank first thing to deposit it, but this one he just let sit, he was very upset about something
..
. here, look, this is it, no use to me, not like I ever had any power of attorney.”

The check was drawn on the Arbolada Savings and Loan in Ojai— one of Mickey Wolfmann’s, Doc rec
alled, also used by the Chrysky
lodon Institute—and signed by a financial officer whose name neither of
them could read.

“Worse than a forged prescription,” Pepe said.

“A nice piece of change here, Pepe. There has to be some way you can
cash this.”

“Maybe I should just donate it to your organization, in Leonard’s name, of course.”

“I’m not going to pressure you one way or the other, though it might
help with our new Save a Rock n’ Roller program. You know how many
musicians have been overdosing in recent years, it’s an epidemic. I’ve noticed
it especially in my own area, surf music. I happen to be a huge fan of the
Boards—fact it’s how I got personally involved in overdose prevention, ever
since one of their sax players passed away.... Remember Coy Harlingen?”

It could’ve been some unexpected side effect from all the dope he’d been smoking, but Doc now felt an ice-cold electric shock blasting through the room—Pepe went rigid, his face, even with all the pink reflection in here, drained suddenly to an alarming white, and Doc saw the pain he must have been in all this time, how much Leonard must have meant to him, how he must have thought all the d
esperate talking
would get him through this ... but here was something he’d been for
bidden to talk about, maybe even suspicions of his own that he could not
allow himself to go into, with Coy Harlingen clearly at the heart of it.
Pepe’s silence went on, the multiple voices of the TV sets in all the rooms
combined in jagged disharmony, till far too late he finally said, “No, that name doesn’t register. But I understand. Too many needless losses. Your
people are in a position to do something wonderful, I’m sure.”

If El Drano, on somebody’s orders, had switched the 3-percent shit he’d been selling Coy for something that was sure to kill him, then it seemed clear that nobody had bothered to tell him later about it being a scam, and that Coy was still alive. All this time they’d let him think
he was a murderer. Was it finally too much for this conscience Pepe said
he had? Was he about to go confess to somebody? Who wouldn’t have wanted him to do that?

On one of the pool tables lay an impossible arrangement of balls ready
for some superhero of the sport to address. “One of Lenny’s safety shots,” Pepe said. “It’s been there ever since he stepped out and never came back.
I keep meaning to finish the game, I know I could run the table, but somehow.
..
”

Doc walked back to his car through a slightly more calmed neighborhood, the dopers were all back indoors heading for the bedding, the uproar had died down, the moon was out, what had been found again
was found, what was lost was gone for good except for what some lucky dredgefolks tomorrow would happen across. Lost, and not lost, and what
Sauncho called lagan, deliberately lost and found again
...
and there was something now scratching like a rogue chicken at the fringes of the unkempt barnyard that was Doc’s brain, but he couldn’t quite locate it, let alone account for the critter when evening rolled around.