Inherent Vice (46 page)

he thought he’d
better go discuss Adrian Prussia with Fritz, who’d had more of a history with the loan shark than Doc did. Sparky, who worked the vampire shift, hadn’t come in yet.

“I wouldn’t go near Adrian,” Fritz advised. “He’s no longer the wholesome Chamber of Commerce bigshot we used to know in the olden days,
Doc, he’s bad shit anymore.”

“How can he be worse than he was? He’s the reason I quit being a pacifist and started packing.”

“Something happened to him, he made a deal with somebody bigger than him, bigger than anything he was into up till then.”

“I heard something about him along the same lines out in Venice tonight. ‘Agencies of command and control,’ is how it went. Seemed strange at the time. Who’ve you been talking to?”

“State attorney general’s office, they’ve been after him for years. But
nobody can touch him, partly because of this interesting portfolio of IOUs he’s holding. The amounts themselves aren’t all that huge, but
taken one at a time, it’s always enough to guarantee obedience.”

“Obedience to
...
”

“Commanders. Controllers. Prussia gets the money, plus the vig, and
the others get what they want done done.”

“But there’s loan sharks everywhere. Are they all in on this, too?”

“Maybe not. Prussia’s allergic to competition. Anybody started threat
ening his share, they’d be apt to suddenly wind up in distress.”

“Dead?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“But the more of that he does—”

“The better his chances of being popped, yeah you’d think. But not if
he’s running the ones most apt to do the popping.”

“LAPD?”

“Oh, heaven forfend.”

“And Prussia’s immunity from them would also extend to the people he sends around to collect?”

“How it usually works.”

“Then something here is ungroovy.” Doc ran down Puck Beaver-ton’s history briefly. “The last time he got popped? I looked it up. One
seed they found in his vacuum-cleaner bag, my little nephew who’s five
could
’ve
got him off. But nobody fixed it, he still got arrested and with his record he
could’ve
been in for a zip six at least.”

“Maybe some cop he offended?”

“Not likely any of the cops who borrowed from Prussia—that was all
easy terms and friendly relations. But, just about the only one of Prussia’s
people that ever got run in was Puck.”

“So it was really personal.”

“Bummer. Means I have to talk to Bigfoot again.”

“You should know how to do that by now.”

“No, I mean human to human.”

“Jesus. Don’t tell me how
that comes
out.”

doc
figured
he’d
be likely to run into Bigfoot out at the Waste-a-Perp Target Range down off South La Brea. For some reason Bigfoot liked to
use civilian ranges. Had the LAPD 86’d him from cop facilities? Were
there too many colleagues looking to shoot him down and pretend it was
an accident? Doc wasn’t about to ask why.

He went out to the range after suppertime, as soon as it got dark. He knew that Bigfoot preferred the Urban, Gang-related and Hippie (UGH) section, where full-length plastic images of black, Chicano, and longhaired menaces to society came lurching at you on a 3-D
shooting-gallery-type arrangement while you blew the suckers to shreds.
Doc himself liked to spend most of his time on the low-light part of the
range. Lately he’d come to regard these visits as not so much about exer
cising night vision as John Garfield dead in the gutter, and dead from real-world Hollywood betrayal and persecution, and the controlling order under which outcomes like this were unavoidable, because they ran off of cold will and muzzle velocity and rounds discharged in the dark.

Sure enough, there was Bigfoot at the cash register, just settling up.

“Need to talk,” Doc said.

“I was headed for the Raincheck Room.”

This esteemed West Hollywood saloon was known in those days for a
thrifty approach to light bills. Doc and Bigfoot found a booth in back.

“Mrs. Bjornsen sends her regards, by the way.”

“ What’re you talking about, she hates me.”

“No actually you quite intrigue her now. If I weren’t so confident in my marriage, I’d almost be jealous.”

Doc tried to remove all sympathy from his face while thinking, ah you poor Swedish Fish, and I hope you’re keeping that service .38 out of everybody’s reach. Far as Doc could see, the woman was danger
ously unbalanced, and he estimated a week and a half before apocalypse
descended upon the Bjornsens. “Well sure, tell her howdy.”

“Anything else I can do for you this evening?”

“Correct me if I’m mistaken here, Bigfoot, but it’s been clear to me for
some time that you’re desperate to have a word with Puck Beaverton but
can’t let on, because otherwise you’re in deep shit with powers unnamed,
so instead you keep putting me out there on point for all
’em
AKs in the jungle to open up on—have I got that more or less right so far?”

“We’re in sensitive territory here, Sportello.”

“Yes, I know all that man, but somebody’s gonna have to be less sensitive for a minute and just wipe off their chin and stand up and
deal
with it, cause I’m tired of this bein jacked around all the time, if there’s something you need just come on out and say it, how hard can that be?”

With Doc this passed for an outburst, and Bigfoot gazed back in what, with him, passed for astonishment. He nodded at Doc’s shirt-pocket. “Mind if I have one of those?”

“You don’t want to start smoking, Bigfoot, smokin’s bad for your ass.”

“Yes well I wasn’t planning to smoke it in my ass, was I?”

“How I’m spoze to know that?”

Bigfoot lit up, puffed without inhaling in a way Doc found annoy
ing, and said, “Among certain of my colleagues, Puck Beaverton—for a felony offender with conspicuous impulse-control issues and a swastika
on his head—was always considered rather a charming fellow, really.”
He took half a beat. “For any number of reasons.”

“And now I’m supposed to say—”

“Throwing you a cue. I’m sorry. It’s a habit.”

“Like smoking.”

“All right.” Bigfoot squashed out the cigarette irritably and glared at
Doc, who by reflex was already looking covetously at the lengthy butt.
“Puck’s former employer, AP Finance, did regular business with many
officers in the Department, all of it friendly and as far as I know above-
board. Perhaps with one unhappy exception.”

A name which must not be spoken aloud. Doc shrugged. “Part of
that IA hangup you keep mentioning.” Breezily enough, he hoped.

“Please understand, without a preeminent need to know ...”

“Groovy with me, Bigfoot. And this unnamable cop—how did Puck
happen to feel about him?”

“Hated him, and the hatred was mutual. For—” Dropping then into
second thoughts.

“For good reason. But you have an Eleventh Commandment about criticizing a fellow flatfoot, I can dig that.” Doc then had a thought. “Is
it okay to ask if this party is still on the job?”

“He’s—” The silence was as clear as the word withheld. “His status is
Inactive.”

“File’s unavailable too, I bet.”

“The IA’s locked it all down till the year 2000.”

“Don’t sound like it was natural causes somehow. Uh who do you
thank, as Elvis always sez, when you have such luck?”

“Aside from the obvious, you mean.”

“Puck, sure, it could’ve been him. But tell me now, this cop—what
do we call him?—Officer X?”

“Detective.”

“Okay, let’s say this mystery cop was actually the one who arrested Puck on that chickenshit dope-seed charge, hoping with his record he’d
be put back in Folsom for a while. If it wasn’
t Puck who did him, then
let’s see, who else
...
oh! how about Adrian Prussia, who can’t afford to
look bad in front of the community, if even one of his former people gets
arrested, maybe convicted. That’s a shot somebody’s taking not just at
Puck but at him. Almost as bad as some deadbeat refusing to pay back a
loan. What happens in those cases again. I forget.”

“You begin to see?” Bigfoot glumly nodding. “You think it’s all one
big monolithic funfest at the LAPD, don’t you, nothing to do all day
but figure out new ways to persecute you hippie scum. Instead it might
as well be the yard at San Quentin. Gangs, addicts, butches and bitches
and snitches, and everybody’s packing.”

“Can I say something out loud? Is anybody listening?”

“Everybody. Nobody. Does it matter?”

“Say Adrian Prussia iced this Detective X, or had it done. And what
happens? nothing. Maybe everybody in LAPD knows he did the deed, but there’s no back-channel outcries in the paper, no vigilante revenge
by horrified fellow officers.... No, instead IA locks it all up tight for
the next thirty years, everybody pretending it’s another cop hero fallen
in the line of duty. Forget about decency, or respecting the memories
of all the real dead-cop heroes—how can you people be that fuckin
unprofessional?”

“It gets even worse,” Bigfoot said in a slowly stifled way, as if trying in
vain to call to Doc out of years of history forbidden to civilians. “Prussia has been prime suspect in
...
let’s say a number of homicides—and each time, upon intervention from the highest levels, he’s walked.”

“And you’re saying what? Ain’t it awful’?”

“I’m saying there’s a reason for everything, Doc, and before you get
too indignant you might want to look at why Internal Affairs should
even be duked into this in the first place, let alone be the office that’s sit
ting on the story.”

“I give up. Why?”

“Figure it out. Use what’s left of your brain. The trouble with you
people is you never know when somebody’s doing you a favor. You think
whatever it is, you’re entitled because you’re cute or something.” He got
up, dropped a handful of shrapnel on the table, tossed a disgruntled salute to the barkeep, and prepared to step out into the street. “Go look in a mirror sometime. ‘Dig yourself, man,’ till you understand that
nobody owes you anything. Then get back to me.” Doc had seen Bigfoot
out of sorts now and then, but this was getting downright emotional.

They stood on the corner of Santa Monica and Sweetzer. “Where were you parked?” said Bigfoot.

“Off of Fairfax.”

“My direction as well. Walk with me, Sportello, I’ll show you something.” They begin to stroll along Santa Monica. Hippies were thumbing rides up and down the street. Rock ‘n’ roll was blasting from car
radios. Musicians who’d just come awake were drifting out of the Tropi-
cana looking for evening breakfast. Reefer smoke hung in pockets up and down the street, waiting to ambush the unwary pedestrian. Men were murmuring to each other in doorways. After a few blocks, Bigfoot turned right and ambled down toward Melrose. “This looking familiar yet?”

Doc had an intuition. “Its Pucks old neighborhood.” He started looking for the overgrown courtyard complex Trillium had told him
about. His nose began to run and his clavicles to shiver, and he wondered
if somehow one or all of the happy threesome were about to appear, to what Sortilege liked to call manifest, and from the corner of his eye he noticed Bigfoot watching him closely. Yes and who says there can’t be
time travel, or that places with real-world addresses can’t be haunted, not
only by the dead but by the living as well? It helps to smoke a lot of weed
and to do acid off and on, but sometimes even a literal-minded natch-meister like Bigfoot could manage it.

They approached a courtyard apartment building nearly dissolved in the evening. “Go have a look around, Sportello. Sit out by that pool there under the New Zealand tree ferns. Experience the night.” He made
a show of looking at his watch. “Regretfully, I have to be moving along.
The missus will be expecting me.”

“One special lady for sure. Pass on my regards.”

No lights, either incandescent or cathode-ray, showed in any of the apartment windows. The whole place might have been deserted. The
traffic on Santa Monica was scarcely audible. The moon rose. Small
critters went running around in the undergrowth. What came creeping
out of the shrubbery after a while actually were not ghosts but logical
conclusions.

If Internal Affairs was hushing up the murder of an LAPD detective,
then somebody in the Department must have wanted him dead. If they were unwilling to do it themselves, then they were hiring contract spe
cialists, and the list plausibly
could’ve
included Adrian Prussia. It would
be interesting to look into the other murder raps Bigfoot claimed that
Prussia had beaten. But even on the remote chance Bigfoot had access
to it, there might be no direct way for him to get the information to
Doc. Which might explain why it looked so much like he’d been hus
tling Doc, from the jump, into discovering some other way into the loan
shark’s history.

Doc wondered what way that might be. Fritz’s ARPAnet would be
too much of a crap shoot—according to Fritz, you never knew from one
day to the next what you’d find on it, or wouldn’t find. Which left Penny. Who had already shopped him to
los
federales
and might have little if any
problem reshopping him to the LAPD. Penny who might not even want
to see him anymore. That Penny.