No Beast So Fierce (28 page)

“If she sticks her nose out, you put it back in. We'll get done and be gone as quick as we can.”

“Groovy. What're you gonna do?”

“Fix some gear to beat a silent alarm. There'll be no joy in Beverly Hills when we're through.”

“Man, you're gonna fuck around and get busted again.”

“Don't sweat it.”

“Just sayin' what I think. How long will you be here?”

“Half an hour.”

“If you're gonna give me that bread, why don't you loan me your car for a few minutes. I'll get back before you're finished.”

I hesitated, knowing that he wanted to go buy some heroin. Reluctantly, I handed him the car keys. “Don't hang me up, motherfucker! Get back here so we can blow.”

“Twenty minutes. I called the connection after I talked to you on the phone. He's waiting for me in a bar about twenty blocks from here.” Willy sniffled. His nose was runny. I saw that his pupils were enlarged and there was a film of perspiration on his upper lip. He was suffering beginning withdrawal and I could sympathize with him. Nothing compares with the combination of mental and physical craving and torment. A sick dope fiend would rather have a fix than salvation.

Willy helped us carry the box of tools, electronics equipment, wire, and meters to the garage. Then he got into my car and backed out. I saw that his car's front tires were both flat—and had been for several days according to the leaves piling against them.

While Aaron tested and modified the equipment, he explained (as I understand it) that he'd measure the force of the particular electrical impulses going through the alarm line, cut through and feed the same impulses to the alarm company office. The alarm, if sounded, would run into a dead end. The normal impulses, from a different source (he had a device that would use another line), would keep the warning board at the company office dark. He explained that when he cut in on the line there'd be a momentary flicker on the board, but nobody would pay attention because it would be gone in a second. Cats, mice, rats—many things caused such a flicker.

Aaron finished in twenty minutes. He then put on gray coveralls with Pacific Telephone blazoned in red on the back. With a tool belt around his waist he looked as if he were a telephone company lineman.

“I'll cover you on the trial run,” I said.

“We'll just open the manhole and you drop it closed after me. No use using the barricades for that. About five in the morning should be the best time for that.”

Willy was still gone when the box was again full and Aaron was in his street clothes. We waited in the shade of the garage doorway. After fifteen minutes of watching vehicles speed past the driveway without Willy pulling in, I was smoldering. Aaron asked where Willy had gone.

“To buy some dope, the jive ass is undependable … I knew he'd fuck around.”

“He might be busted. I've got to be in town by two.”

“Let's go call you a taxi. There's no telling when that asshole will get here.”

Uncaring about Selma's possible attitude, I led Aaron into the house through the kitchen door. The room smelled of boiled cabbage and the sink was stacked with unwashed dishes.

Our entrance brought the two boys to the doorway arch, one peering over the shoulder of the other. Moments later Selma loomed behind them, brushing them out of the way and glaring at me. In her anger, her gauntness was more apparent. She was as worn as a sharecropper's wife in the great depression. She refused to look at Aaron. He might as well have been invisible. He seemed amused. Before she could speak, I did.

“Willy's got my car and I need to use the phone to call a taxi for my friend.”

Her teeth clicked shut. She wished to refuse—but wished more urgently to rid her house of our unwelcome presence. She pointed out the phone.

Twenty minutes later, Aaron departed—and Willy hadn't returned. I was furious. I thought about punching him in the mouth, but knew that in a brawl he was capable of breaking me in pieces. When he whipped me, I'd be forced to kill him. It was my fault for having given him the keys. I'd talk bad to him and let it go.

Willy drove up almost three hours late, grinning as he turned off the motor and got out. “Man, I got hung up. Where's your partner?”

“He's gone. And where the fuck did you go? Tijuana?”

“I'm sorry, man, but my connection didn't have anything on him and wanted a ride to East LA. to see his connection … and he got hung up for an hour. You know how that shit goes.”

Willy wasn't high. He was more sick than when he left. This phenomenon blunted my anger by arousing curiosity, for a junky will fix with the police kicking in the door, especially if he's sick.

“I gotta wait. Nalline today. But I'm ready when I get done.” He brought forth a condom swollen with beige powder, its open end tied into a knot. “An ounce.”

“You didn't get a piece with forty pesos.”

“He gave me a little credit for the ride. He knows I'll pay him … and pull the rent money, too.” Willy was happy, feeling that he had something going. “Hey, why don't you give me a lift to the nalline center? My short is fucked up and I don't wanna borrow Mary's wheels.”

“I'll drop you off but I'm not driving you back. You're on your own there.”

“Well, can you wait until I get through and drop me at the bus depot downtown?”

“How long will you be?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, like the twenty minutes with the car.”

“Man …”

“Fuck all that ‘man' shit. Put that box in the trunk and get in.”

Willy wrestled the heavy box to the automobile and set it inside. “What's the portable telephone for?” he asked.

“I told you we're gonna jam an alarm and rip off a spot in Beverly Hills.”

“Good luck.” He slammed the trunk lid down. “Wait a minute while I stash this junk and tell Selma where I'm going.”

The “minute” became fifteen minutes. I pumped the automobile's horn. Willy rushed out, buttoning a shirt.

“That broad was making a bad scene. She doesn't dig you.”

“I don't dig her either.”

Twenty minutes after leaving the house we were on the dingy street with the featureless building where Rosenthal had taken me. Willy got out half a block away. I told him to wait on the same corner when he was through; I'd come back by in half an hour. I didn't want to wait too close to the repulsive building. I drove several blocks away and ate chili and salt crackers at a greasy-spoon cafe in a neighborhood of scrap yards and industry.

Before going back for Willy, I telephoned Allison. She'd gone to the beach alone, her usual activity on days when I was busy. She'd expected me home by this hour—but my lateness didn't disturb her. She was happy, as if it was a pleasant surprise, as if she hadn't seen me six hours earlier and wasn't expecting me for days. Her radiance increased my good feelings. She'd planned a surprise, a super fancy supper, and wanted me to hurry because she was already cooking. “But don't ask me what it is.”

“An hour more.”

“Oh! There's my schedule down the drain.”

“I'll make up for it with bonbons and flowers.”

I started to say goodbye.

“Wait … wait. Bring some avocados with you. Just a couple.”

“Okay, baby.”

Willy wasn't on the corner when I drove by. I circled several blocks and came back. The corner was still empty. Two Mexicans were coming down the sidewalk; one was vaguely familiar. I pulled to the curb, assuming that they'd just come from nalline, and called them. Neither knew Willy by name, but when I described him they told me that he'd been held in custody, locked in the cage at the end of the corridor. I confirmed what they said by telephoning the testing center and passing myself off as an attorney. The parole officer who answered was evasive; when dealing with the poor the parole department was unaccustomed to answering questions; it was also unaccustomed to lawyers asking the questions. He finally put his supervisor on the line. The supervisor reluctantly and with a note of challenge told me that Willy was in custody as a parole violator—but the supervisor refused to say why. It wasn't really necessary. I knew Willy's pupils had grown larger instead of smaller. He'd failed to run the gauntlet.

Before starting home, and with trepidation, I called Selma, gave her the news in a couple of sentences, and hung up before she could burst into recrimination and self-pity. Tomorrow I'd drive Allison to the jail to visit him with clean socks, underwear, and cigarette money. As a fugitive I was going no closer to the jail than the parking lot. After the visit I'd give Selma some money to help tide her over until welfare checks began. It was the right thing to do, by the thief's code.

If Willy was lucky, if the prison system had enough bodies on hand to justify its budget to the legislature, some anonymous bureaucrat or committee would order him a “dry out', thirty to sixty days in jail. If he was unlucky he'd be sent back to the rehabilitation center for another year or more of group therapy. I felt no great sympathy. He'd been a fool to go in for the test in the first place, for he'd certainly known the likelihood that he'd fail to pass it.”

“Like a fuckin' fly to flypaper,” I muttered.

Afternoon shadows were stretching themselves on the jail's parking lot when Allison and I arrived. We'd overslept because after going to a drive-in movie we'd driven through the hills, following the curves of Mulholland Drive from its origins in Hollywood past expensive homes to beyond Beverly Hills, where except for a few palatial homes the countryside became almost empty. We ran out of gas in an isolated spot, but thought it was the fuel pump because the gas gauge showed a quarter tank. It took two hours to find a house, telephone for a truck, and be towed twenty miles to an allnight garage in the San Fernando Valley. Only after a new fuel pump had been installed and failed to work was a stick probed into the gas tank. The float in the tank had stuck and told the gauge a lie. When the tank was full the gauge still registered a quarter tank.

As we trudged upstairs to the apartment, Allison hanging on my arm and trilling laughter at how our sentimental night had fizzled, it was so near dawn that baby sparrows in the dark shadows of trees were calling out for food.

So we slept until noon and then rushed, missing breakfast, buying socks and underwear on the way. I told Allison to inform Willy that on the next visit the border on the three one-dollar bills would be saturated with the clear solution of cooked heroin.

“How do you do that?” Allison asked.

“Just cook it like a fix, and then use the eyedropper. It soaks into the paper like it was cotton. You waste two-thirds of it, but Willy can slice off the rim, put it in a spoon with some water and, wham, he'll get fixed.”

“What about the … hypo kit? Where does he get that?”

“Believe me, there's one in there he can get hold of.”

I parked at the farthest corner of the lot from the building, beneath a stripling tree. Other cars had been parked close to the building to shorten walking distance. No car was closer than thirty yards. Nobody could sneak up on me. If something did happen, which was unlikely, I could drive through a flower bed and over the curb into the street. I also had the Browning pistol on the floor boards between my feet. Coming here where hundreds of deputies worked, and where every law enforcement agency brought prisoners, aroused tension that was cousin to what I felt going on a caper. I watched closely from the moment we arrived.

Allison came back in ten minutes. The bag of socks and underwear was still in her hand. Her quick return and the bag indicated that she hadn't gotten in, but she walked too leisurely for anything serious to have gone wrong. I pulled the car across the lot to meet her halfway. She'd been refused the visit because Willy was allowed one visitor per day and someone had already been there. Obviously it was Selma, and I should have anticipated that she'd rush to the jail as soon as possible to vilify him for his failures.

I felt compelled to drive out and give her some money, unpleasant a task as it would be. There was no reason to confront Allison with Selma's acrimony, so I dropped her at the nearby Union train depot where she could take a taxi. I promised to be home in two hours and to call if something came up.

When I reached Willy's home, Selma was gone. Willy's automobile was still leaning on its flat tire in the driveway.

I drove to Mary's, wondering if she had any news and to leave the money for Selma with her. Willy's two boys were there. Actually, they were somewhere in the neighborhood with Joey. Selma had left them and borrowed Mary's car. She was expected back at any time. I gave Mary a hundred dollars for Selma, glad to have missed her. I left quickly, not only to avoid Selma, but because Lisa was in the kitchen. The girl said nothing, and would hardly meet my eyes, except furtively. The vibes were bad.

*    *    *

Two days later I again drove Allison to the jail. Again she was turned away, this time because Willy was gone; he'd been released that very morning. It was a pleasant surprise. I hadn't anticipated his quick reinstatement on parole. I telephoned him to see what had brought about the miracle. Nobody answered. I planned to phone again later, but the momentum toward the jewel robbery was increasing and I was caught up in that, and so forgot Willy. That night, Jerry, Aaron, and I rehearsed and timed everything except the action with Gregory's. Aaron would drive, let us out, jump the alarm and pull around to wait and drive getaway. The alarm had to be fixed minutes before the robbery, because once it was done the phone in Gregory's would go dead. He'd wait across Wilshire with a radio tuned to police calls and the walkie-talkie—and he'd have the motor running when we came out. A huge market six blocks away had a block-long parking lot in its rear, an ideal place to switch cars. There were no traffic lights between the market and the jeweler's. After switching cars, it was two more minutes of slow driving until we reached the teeming traffic of Sunset Boulevard. We could follow it, hidden by the multitude, into Hollywood, or swing through the hills. Nobody in Gregory's would see a Negro among the robbers, so Aaron would be behind the wheel while Jerry and I lay on the floorboards. By the time the police got the description of the original getaway vehicle—panel truck or plain sedan—we'd be at least eight or nine miles away in an entirely different (and differently described) automobile.