True Confessions (10 page)

“I’ll buy that,” he said to Turd Turner.

“You know what the story of my life is, Tom?”

“It’s shit,” Tom Spellacy said. He hoped he sounded sympathetic. He felt in his pocket for some change. If the time ran out, the girl was done for. He placed a dime and three nickels on the metal counter in the booth.

“Even the booze I steal is shit,” Turd Turner said. “Four Roses.”

Tom Spellacy could hear him noisily take a drink at the other end of the telephone. He pumped a nickel into the coin slot and hoped Turd was too busy to hear it.

“I wish you’d think it over,” he said.

“You think I should, Tom?”

“They’re not giving you a rain check on this one. They’re coming in after you, like in the movies. The chiefs got a tommy gun, for Chrissake. They’ll get you and the dyke. And blame her on you. That is no shit.”

“Those assholes.”

“They’ll give that dyke a funeral like you never saw. A city holiday. The mayor. The chief. She’s worth a lot to them dead. The Cardinal. A big municipal funeral, all the pictures in the paper, and no one will ever know she’s a dyke except you and me, and you’re dead and I got a pension I got to worry about. You give them a big funeral and that’s going to take a lot of that grand jury heat off their ass.”

“You crapping me, Tom?”

“How long have I known you?”

“I’d hate to help those assholes out of the shit.”

“For a dyke.”

Tom Spellacy cleaned the lather off his face and stepped into the shower. The hot water made him feel better. It was funny how things turned out. The Turd was convicted, the mayor recalled, the chief indicted. And Crotty was right. Corinne was a great fuck.

“How did you talk him out of there?” she would say.

“We were old friends.”

He had never expected to run into Corinne again. It was eight months after he had talked Turd Turner into letting her go. He and Crotty had stopped at an all-night drugstore off the Strip that did most of its after-midnight business with the girls who worked in the line at the Mocambo and the Troc. Tampax and douche bags and rubbers. The walls were decorated with a dozen eight-by-ten glossies of dance teams, the man in each picture in tails, the girl hanging backward over his arm, her tits all flattened out, with inscriptions like, “Thanks, Bernie, from Lurene and Ned, The Fox Trotters.” He was drinking a cup of coffee when he recognized her. She was buying a package of tampons.

“Not Kotex,” Crotty said. “They wear tampons, then they must fuck. Crotty’s law.”

He got up and walked back to the feminine hygiene counter. “Hi,” he said.

“Beat it,” she said.

“Sorry.”

He went back to the table and ordered another cup of coffee.

“You’re a lost cause,” Crotty said. “I’m going home.”

He watched her buy some tooth powder and aspirin and lipstick. Dr. Lyons, Bayer and Helena Rubinstein. Noticing brand names was like remembering licence plates, something he did. All part of being a cop. Like watching a Mexican wearing sneakers in a bus line. Snatch and run, it was quicker in sneakers. Or going down to the basement and turning off the water before a drug arrest. The stuff couldn’t be flushed down the crapper if the water was off.

Then she was standing at the table.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you, I mean, I don’t think I ever thanked you . . .” She seemed to falter. “And I guess you saved my life. That night, I mean.”

“Some coffee?” he said.

She wanted a drink. Her apartment was only a couple of blocks away. One large room and a Murphy bed. She had half a pint of rye and no ice. The refrigerator was defrosting. The mattress on the Murphy bed was soft and the frame unsteady. The center of the mattress caved in and in effect she slept in a trench. His knees could not get purchase and his elbows slid and he kept slipping out of her. Finally she had him lie beneath her and she got on top of him. The veins in her arm stood out and there were beads of sweat on the down on her lip and she told him what to do and at last he did it.

“Sometimes I think my brains are in my cunt,” Corinne Morris said.

Cunt. C-U-N-T. It was a word Brenda used, or one of her girls. Not the girls in Boyle Heights. Not Mary Margaret. “Down there,” Mary Margaret said, and she meant down there on him as well as down there on her. He wondered if she talked about down there with Saint Barnabas of Luca.

“I’m sorry the way I was in the drugstore,” Corinne said. “You know the kind of guys they get in there, the way they come on. They got a rubber rolled up in their wallet, so you can’t miss it, and then they flash it at you and ask you for a date. Assholes.” She threw her leg over him. “I hate assholes like that.”

“There’s a lot of them like that,” he had said. He couldn’t think what else to say. It was easier talking to Brenda. The take, the payoff, who was in on the action, things that were useful. Maybe if he had talked to Mary Margaret about assholes with rolled-up rubbers in their wallets instead of wishing that her period lasted for a long time, maybe she wouldn’t be in Camarillo at that very moment.

“My husband was one.”

He remembered her husband was killed at Pearl Harbor. Making her a gold-star widow.

“The war hero.”

“That was my second husband. Homer Morris. Charlie Quinlan was my first husband. Both assholes. They always seem to find me, the assholes.”

“Thanks.”

She ran a finger down his face. “Not you. None of the creeps I know would have saved my life.” She raised herself on an elbow. “You know where I was on December 7th?”

He shook his head.

“The about-to-be war widow was grieving in Reno, getting a divorce.”

“Fucking a cowboy, too, I bet.” He was getting more comfortable with her. He seldom indulged in bed talk. Mary Margaret called it talking dirty. She would not permit it.

“How’d you guess?” She seemed pleased that he would reach that conclusion.

“I’m a cop.”

“Kiss my brains, copper,” Corinne said. “Eat my brains.”

He went down on her and even as he did he let his eyes roam the apartment. Her pussy’s in my face, he thought, and I’m still casing the layout. Her thighs held his face in a vise and he checked where the door was, one thing a cop should always know and that’s where the door is, and how many steps to his piece, he should have put his piece under the pillow and not on the couch, what if someone came through the door, his piece was too far away. Then she moaned and as she came he took in the old Victorian wicker chair and the monogrammed bill box and the pewter candlesticks and the faded Christmas cards still stuck in the bookcase and he made a note to ask her about them sometime.

That was the first time he had come to her apartment.

He never had asked her about the Christmas cards.

They never went to his place. “The Essence of Valley Living,” the late Chester Hanrahan called his place. Three bedrooms, two baths, one family room. That was a joke, family room. He had bought the house for Mary Margaret the last time she got out of Camarillo. “A home environment is what she needs,” the psychiatrist had said. “No stress.” No fucking around is what he meant. It was funny the way Mary Margaret could always sense it. There was never any evidence, he was careful about that. He slept with her once every menstrual period, he had made a point of it for ten, fifteen years, he couldn’t recall exactly how long. The definite-patterns approach. But she still sensed it. A Brenda, a Corinne. And she began to talk to Saint Barnabas of Luca. “Involutional melancholia,” the psychiatrist called it. Back to Camarillo. She seemed to like Camarillo. Except for Father Cruz, the chaplain who gave her communion once a week. Why isn’the down in the missions of Bolivia, she would say, working with the Mexicans? To Mary Margaret, everyone who lived between San Diego and Tierra del Fuego was a Mexican.

Maybe Des can arrange it, he would say.

Or Saint Barnabas, she would say.

And so he never brought Corinne to the Chester Hanrahan Development. Never volunteered, never asked. There were too many questions there. It was always her place and the Murphy bed with the trench in it.

The Murphy bed was made when he went back into the living room. Corinne was wearing a half-slip and nylons and shoes. Nothing else. Half-naked. A nun’s phrase, “half-naked.” (“No playing ball half-naked in the schoolyard, Thomas Spellacy.
Put your undershirt back on”)
He noticed that she had laid out some fresh clothes for him on the bed.

“I bought you a couple of shirts yesterday,” Corinne said. “It was as if the argument had never happened. “And some Jockey shorts.”

“I don’t like Jockey shorts usually,” Tom Spellacy said. “They bind is what I don’t like about them.”

“They bind so nice,” Corinne said.

“How’d you happen to get them?” he said. It had always been understood before. She didn’t come to the house in the Valley, he didn’t leave any clothes in her apartment. Something like that you shouldn’t have to spell out.

“I cleared out a drawer,” she said. She lit a cigarette and began to puff on it nervously. “I had these old winter things I got rid of and the drawer was empty.”

“Oh.”

“You put on the same shirt, the same socks every time you leave here, it’s got to be grubby.”

“You got some socks, too, then?”

“At Bullock’s. The mid-month sale. Men’s furnishings.” She crushed her cigarette into the ashtray at the side of the bed. “I’ll blow you, you want.”

What I want is what she’s doing now, he thought. What she’s so good at. What I don’t want are the shirts and the socks and the Jockey shorts. It’ll be the sport coat next and buying the brisket at the Safeway and a bigger apartment and the movie at Grauman’s Tuesday and Saturday and the occasional sneak preview in Glendale. Jesus, she’s good at this. A Catholic girl, that’s the funny part of it. Makes you wonder what the nuns are teaching over to Holy Resurrection there. Funny thinking of the sisters teaching her this. Cop the old joint, Corinne, when the conversation gets a little nervous. They must pass out As when you learn that at Holy Resurrection.

The telephone was ringing. On the eleventh ring, she rose and picked up the receiver.

“It’s Crotty,” she said. She was suddenly furious. “I thought you were never going to give this number to any of your scummy cop friends.”

“I thought you were never going to buy me any Jockey shorts.”

She glared at him as he took the phone.

“Tom,” Crotty said, “I know I shouldn’t call that number . . .”

“That’s okay, Frank.”

Corinne rose from the edge of the bed. She came to the telephone table and knelt in front of him.

“We’ve got this little problem, is why I called.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Can’t it wait?”

“Not really.”

“Sweet Mother of God . . .”

“You all right, Tom?”

“. . . the fuck is it, it can’t wait?”

“It’s something the monsignor might be interested in, is the reason I don’t want to talk about it on the phone, if you get my meaning.”

“Des.”

“That’s the one.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“The Alvarado Arms Hotel.”

“Oh, Jesus, on 11th Place.”

“Step on it.”

“Jesus.”

He drove slowly past the Alvarado Arms once, turned around
at the end of the block and parked down the street from the hotel in front of a dried-out frame house with a faded “Rooms to Let” sign stuck crookedly into the tiny, scorched lawn. The trash barrel by the door of his car was filled with broken liquor bottles. He lit a cigarette. The smoke filled the car. Through the rain-washed windshield, he occasionally saw curtains move in the unkempt houses lining the street. Checking me out, he thought. And checking out the prowl car in front of the hotel. It was a dumb place to park the black-and-white. Whoever was driving should have pulled it into the alley leading to the garage. There was no point in making the people behind the curtains curious. They weren’t bad people. Just too-little, too-late people. Has-beens, never-weres, never-will-bes.

He opened the car door and dropped his cigarette into a rain puddle. The broken palm trees along the street all looked as if they had curvature of the spine. Even with the rain now beginning to pelt down, he walked slowly, reluctantly across the street toward the hotel. The Alvarado Arms was a dilapidated five-story building with chipped masonry cornices and a fire escape grafted on the front to hide the cracks and scars of the 1933 earthquake. The gilt lettering in the ground-floor windows was starting to peel: BRENDA’S 24-HOUR COURIER SERVICE, BRENDA’S 24-HOUR CHAUFFEUR SERVICE. BRENDA’S PERSONAL SERVICES, LTD.

It’s been a long time, Tom Spellacy thought as he stared at the windows. You put me in the shit, Tom, Brenda Samuels had said. I don’t need that. Stay away. So he had stayed away. While Brenda took the heat. First from the grand jury, then from the military. It was a funny thing about the army. They passed out rubbers to the GIs going on pass, then they closed down the whorehouses. Join the army and jerk off in a Rameses. Not that it stopped Brenda for long. She was nothing if not resourceful, Brenda. He had followed her career in the Yellow Pages, BRENDA’S PERSONAL SERVICES, LTD. Nothing fancy. Nothing like the old days. Mobile screwing. Enough to get by. And Vice let her alone. Vice always liked Brenda. Especially after she kept her mouth shut when she testified to the grand jury. It wasn’t much, but it was a living.

That fucking Lenny Lewis, he thought.

The linoleum in the lobby of the Alvarado Arms was worn through to the floor. Crotty was standing by the desk. The desk clerk was a frightened old man with one opaque lens in his eyeglasses.

“Second time in six months a guy checked out in this fieabag, he was in the saddle,” Crotty said.

“I wasn’t on that time either, Lieutenant,” the desk clerk said. His shirt was frayed, he needed a shave and he was beginning to snivel. A comic book was open on the desk in front of him. “It was the night man that time, too. It’s a swell place in the daytime, I make sure of that. Very quiet.”

“That’s why the Shore Patrol was bitching last week about sailors catching the clap in here,” Crotty said.

“Not to me,” the old man said. “It must’ve been the night guy again.”

“You ever done time?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“What were you in for?”

“Exposure.”

“I figured you had to have references, get a nice job like this,” Crotty said. He turned and pointed Tom Spellacy toward the stairs. There was no elevator in the Alvarado Arms. They did not speak until they reached the first landing.

“What the hell is this all about?” Tom Spellacy said. “I don’t have enough troubles, I got to see Brenda?”

“That just happened, Tom, it’s one of those things,” Crotty said.

“She here?”

“Third floor.”

“She say hello?”

“She told me to go fuck myself.”

“She hasn’t changed then.”

“Forget Brenda, Tom, she’s not the problem. It’s the stiff in 514 that’s going to upset the monsignor.”

“What’s it got to do with Des?”

“You’ll see.” The exertion of the climb was making Crotty sweat. On the fourth landing he had to pause to catch his breath. “Vice was checking out the girls like you said, to see if anyone knew someone liked to cut. Or a girl with a rose tattooed on her pussy. They don’t like to roust Brenda, Vice, so they got the beat cops to do it. Bingo and the jig.”

“Oh, shit.”

“A good fucking thing, Tom. Bingo recognized the stiff and called me.”

Bingo McInerney and Lorenzo Jones were standing in the corridor outside Room 514. Crotty told them to go to the landing and not let anyone up to the fifth floor. Bingo winked at Tom Spellacy.

“Of all the guys to be dipping it . . .” Bingo said.

“Shut the fuck up,” Crotty said.

The body in Room 514 was naked under a sheet on the bed. His clothes were folded neatly over the back of a chair. His socks were balled inside his wing-tip shoes, which were lined up even with the bedpost. On the bureau were his keys, wallet and a handkerchief monogrammed with the letters
MG
. There was no money in the wallet. Tom Spellacy checked the identification.

“Shit,” he said.

“Mickey Gagnon,” Crotty said.

“Monsignor Mickey,” Tom Spellacy said.

“He used to be a curate at Saint Luke’s there, was the reason Bingo recognized him.”

Tom Spellacy looked at the ID again. “Saint Lawrence the Martyr in Redondo Beach, it says.”

“He’s the pastor there now,” Crotty said. He blew his nose in the handkerchief monogrammed
MG
, then put it in his pocket. “The girl must’ve crapped her pants, she laughed so hard when she saw the ID.”

“Not so hard she forgot to clean out his wallet,” Tom Spellacy said. “She got a name?”

“Claudine Smith. A shine.”

“Swell.”

“We can pick her up.”

“Forget her,” Tom Spellacy said. “That’s all we need on this caper is a blabbermouth fifteen-dollar hooker.”

“Ten,” Crotty said.

Tom Spellacy turned to the body again. The pleasant look on Monsignor Gagnon’s face embarrassed him.

“Heart attack?” he said, wrenching his eyes away.

“Looks that way,” Crotty said. “Come to think of it, it’s not a bad way to go, the heart-attack hump, you don’t mind going in a state of mortal sin. I’d take my chances, I think.”

“It’s going to look swell in the newspapers,” Tom Spellacy said, “MANHUNT TURNS UP MONSIGNOR IN CATHOUSE.”

“That’s why I called you,” Crotty said. “I thought you might like to give your brother a little warning.” He took a toothpick from his pocket and put it in his mouth. “What do we do with the monsignor here?”

“The first thing we do is get him dressed,” Tom Spellacy said.

It took them ten minutes to put the clothes on Mickey Gagnon. When they finally double-knotted his shoes, they propped him up against the headboard and folded his hands in his lap. He looked as if he were on the first day of a vacation.

“What the fuck were you doing here?” Tom Spellacy asked the corpse suddenly.

“Getting his ashes hauled is a good bet, I think,” Crotty said. “You figured out yet how we keep the coroner out of this?”

Tom Spellacy picked up the car keys from the bureau.

“He’s got a car around here someplace,” he said. “A black Buick, I bet. Parked on the street. We send Bingo and Lorenzo out to find it. They bring it back here, they park it out back in the alley.”

“Then what?”

Tom Spellacy stared at the body on the bed. “He’s wearing those duds, then he must’ve been taking the day off or something. What do you do, you take a day off.”

“Go to the track.”

“He’s a priest, for Chrissake, Frank.”

“Then what the fuck’s he doing here, he’s such a terrific priest?” Crotty said. “He’d’ve been better off at Santa Anita, I think.”

“Jesus, you’re a help.”

“Go to the beach then.”

“It’s raining.”

“Go shopping.”

Tom Spellacy snapped his fingers. “That May Company over on Pico.”

“The new one.”

“It’s got a parking lot a mile long.”

“We get Bingo and Lorenzo to leave him in the lot.”

“The way it’s raining, nobody’s going to pay any attention to them.”

“Somebody’s bound to find him sooner or later.”

“Coronary in the car.”

“Happens all the time,” Crotty said. “What do you tell the monsignor, is what I want to know.”

“I tell him not to get too curious how Mickey checked out, is one thing I tell him,” Tom Spellacy said. “No autopsy is another thing I tell him.”

“You’re not going to say anything, I’m not going to say anything, nobody in this joint’s going to say anything,” Crotty said. He dug at his teeth with the toothpick. “The coon’s a tomb. Which leaves Bingo.”

“I’ll take care of Bingo.”

Tom Spellacy opened the door of Room 514 and called Bingo Mclnerney inside. Bingo closed the door behind him and whistled when he saw the corpse propped up on the bed.

“Jesus, you did a hell of a job is all I got to say,” Bingo said. “I nearly shit, I saw who it was. A real pain in the ass in confession. You told him you picked your nose, he’d give you a rosary.” He began to smirk. “When my old lady was president of the Altar Society at Saint Luke’s there, it was always Father Gagnon this and Father Gagnon that. She’d crap her pants, she knew he was a tail chaser.”

“How about the boys at McGovern’s?” Tom Spellacy said.

“They’ll cream.”

“You like a transfer to 77th Street?” Tom Spellacy said.

“You got to be kidding,” Bingo said.

“Wall-to-wall nigger in 77th Street,” Crotty said.

“It’s a fucking jungle, 77th Street Division,” Bingo said. “What’d I do, deserve 77th Street?”

“You open your face about this, McGovern’s or any other place, you’ll be walking the bricks out of 77th Street,” Tom Spellacy said.

“Jesus, Tom, you can trust me,” Bingo said. He jerked his thumb toward the door. “It’s the coon you got to worry about.”

“No, we don’t,” Crotty said. “It’s you.” He smiled pleasantly. “Tom’s brother, the monsignor, he’s got a special mass he says for them cops been blown away in the 77th. They play the fucking tom-tom.”

“Jesus,” Bingo Mclnerney said.

Bingo Mclnerney and Lorenzo Jones found the black Buick parked across from MacArthur Park. There was an illegal parking ticket stuck under the windshield wiper. When Lorenzo Jones drove the car into the alley behind the Alvarado Arms, Crotty tore the ticket up. He and Tom Spellacy placed the body, which they had carried four flights down the back stairs of the hotel, in the middle of the front seat. The body immediately collapsed toward the passenger door. It looked like a drunk who had passed out. Crotty told Lorenzo to park the Buick in an empty section of the May Company lot and to leave the glove compartment open with the keys in the lock to make it look as if Mickey Gagnon had been searching for something when he was stricken. He was then to walk through the store and out the front door. Bingo would be parked in the black-and-white two blocks away. They were then to resume their watch and not mention the incident in their report.

“Any questions?” Crotty said.

“No,” Lorenzo Jones said.

“It’s too early in the morning and it’s raining too hard for anyone to be around,” Crotty said.

“I know,” Lorenzo Jones said. He eased the Buick out the alley.

“He thinks this is something white folks do,” Tom Spellacy said.

“I got a question,” Bingo Mclnerney said. “How come the coon drives Mickey?”

“He’s got a natural sense of rhythm, it comes to driving a Buick,” Crotty said.

“I could’ve done that,” Bingo said.

“You could end up in 77th Street, you don’t shut up,” Tom Spellacy said.

“Who was that you were sneaking out of here?” Brenda Samuels said.

“The mayor,” Tom Spellacy said.

Brenda poured two cups of tea and placed the kettle back on the hot plate. Her rooms smelled of cats. There was a pan of kitty litter in one corner of the sitting room and saucers of soured milk in the other three. Through the open door, he could see a rust-colored cat asleep in the unmade bed in the bedroom and a mangy Persian chewing on a curtain it had torn loose from the curtain rod. He remembered that she had always had cats. They just never smelled before.

“You always were a talkative bastard,” Brenda said. “Where’s your friend, does all the business with the Chinks?”

So she knows about Crotty’s motel, he thought. He wasn’t surprised. Brenda always liked to know what was going on. Even in a dump like this, she would be plugged into what was happening. It always helped. Especially in a dump like this. “He went back downtown.”

“He used to like dark meat, he ever tell you that?”

Tom Spellacy sipped his tea. That was something that must have slipped Crotty’s mind.

“Never took off that white suit when they were doing him. I used to watch him through the peek.”

On the cuff, no doubt. He wondered what else Crotty got from Brenda.

“Lenny Lewis hung himself,” he said.