True Confessions (22 page)

So he left. And tracked down false teeth. And tried not to think about her.

It was harder than he thought.

He parked two blocks from MacArthur Park. Not that anyone would be poking around. It was just force of habit again. There was still half an hour. He bought an Orange Julius and a newspaper and waited in the car. As always, he read the sports pages first. Ike Williams and Bob Montgomery signed for a rematch in Philly. Sonny Shaw, the jockey, lost a paternity suit. Bill Tilden was in trouble again. Dick Wakefield was 0 for 37. He turned the pages. A chicken in Auburn, New York, had laid an egg nine inches long and nine inches in circumference, with three yolks. The president was in Key West. Hedda Hopper said that Rita Hay-worth was involved with an Arab prince. He wondered what it would be like going to bed with an actress. He thought she would always be talking about the set and how Franchot Tone kissed. Fuck her. Britain was balking on the Red pact and the King of Denmark was better and the suicide of banker C. K. Dodge had nothing to do with the slaying of Lois Fazenda, according to Chief of Detectives Fred Fuqua. “Darling,” C. K. Dodge’s suicide note had read.

On the front page, three women mystery writers discussed the murder of the Virgin Tramp. Ngaio Marsh said the murderer was a foreigner, Craig Rice said it was a transient pickup and Mignon G. Eberhart said the killer knew his victim. An editor’s note announced that the murder would be discussed the next day by Ben Hecht and on succeeding days by Steve Fisher, Rex Stout, Adela Rogers St. Johns and by the handwriting expert who was a prosecution witness at both the Lindbergh and the Aimee Semple Mac-Pherson trials.

At five minutes to noon, Tom Spellacy walked into the park. He stood for a moment on the knoll above the boathouse. Below he could see Brenda feeding the pigeons. She was wearing a large floppy hat to shield her face from the sun. It had always been a house rule never to let her girls take much sun. The tricks didn’t like tan markings. Or stretch marks. Or appendicitis scars or Caesarian scars. There was a time when he knew all of Brenda’s house rules. How different his life would have been if he had never met her. It was just chance. That great fucker-up of lives. The memory was like a dream. He was a beat cop. Alone. His partner was sick. An ambulance barreled up Sunset. No siren. No lights. He followed. The ambulance pulled into a house in the hills. He was no dummy. He knew the address. Brenda was polite. There had been an altercation. First between a gentleman and a lady, then between the bouncer and the gentleman. It was always best to handle these things quietly. That was why the police had not been called. Although Officer Spellacy would always be welcome. The gentleman for whom the ambulance was summoned was a pillar of the community. A city councilman, in fact. Not one to complain about his internal bleeding. As the lady would never complain about the cigarette burns on her bosom. There was an envelope in the city councilman’s jacket. There appears to be money in it, Brenda said. Count it. I don’t wish to be responsible. It must contain five hundred dollars. He stopped counting at two thousand. He knew the drill. Leave the five hundred dollars, keep the rest. He asked to use the telephone. Brenda brought him into her office. The telephone was in a cabinet in the desk. There was also a miniature deputy chief’s badge in the cabinet and a paper on which were typed the home telephone numbers of a captain and a watch lieutenant in Central Vice. Brenda smiled at him. In case he did not get the picture that she was well wired. A nice smile. If you want to make it a three-horse parlay, Brenda said, we could fuck.

Brenda.

She knew her man.

She did not look up when he sat down on the bench beside her. A cat crouched on her lap, ready to pounce on any bird that dared to pick up the bread she was throwing.

“You feeding the pigeons or your cat?” Tom Spellacy said.

Brenda laughed. “Day-old bread. There’s a bakery down the street that gives it to me.” She crumbled a piece between her fingers and lobbed it into the water. The cat watched a duck gobble it up. Tom Spellacy knew enough not to rush her. She would say what she had to say when she wanted to say it. No sooner. He checked the other benches around the lake. No one there but old people feeding the birds. He knew the type. They would strike up a conversation with the mother of a young child and say the baby was the picture of Ginger Rogers or the image of Clark Gable. And then almost without pausing for breath they would begin talking about
Kitty Foyle
or
Mutiny on the Bounty
and after that Carole Lombard and
Nothing Sacred
and wasn’t it a shame the way poor Carole went, what it must have done to Clark, but at least he knew she died selling war bonds for her country, that must have been a comfort.

The scene vaguely depressed Tom Spellacy and then he understood why. The projection of an old and lonely Brenda sitting by the lake feeding the pigeons was not one he wished to contemplate. It was too much a coded portrait of his own life.

“Where’s your other cat?”

The question sounded strange and forced, and he realized suddenly it was because in all the years he had known Brenda, they had never really communicated except in sexual reference points. Hustling and the payoff were the perimeters of their knowledge of each other. She knew everything there was to know about coming, and as a matter of course she told him about the number of free fucks it took to buy a grand-jury transcript and the cost of a deputy chief and about the triple-decker sandwich the lieutenant governor liked to watch. But that was all. It was a slum of a relationship surrounded by acres of indifference.

“It died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It got run over by a car. A blue Packard. The bastard didn’t even stop.”

“If you know the license, I’ll try to do something.”

“It won’t bring the cat back.”

Tom Spellacy watched the ducks swimming in the lake. Except for Corinne, he had only one reference point with all the women in his life. It made them easy to ignore. Religion with Mary Margaret. Sex with Brenda. That was the trouble with Corinne. She was too complicated to ignore. There were too many reference points.

“You asked about a cutter,” Brenda said.

He tried to remember when. That morning when Mickey Gag-non died, that was it. Check around, he had said, see if any of the girls know anyone likes to cut. He did not like to remember that morning. He thought that life would be a lot simpler if it hadn’t been for Mickey Gagnon. If Mickey hadn’t decided to get his ashes hauled, he wouldn’t have run into Brenda again. And she wouldn’t have told him why he never got indicted. There were so many ifs. And so many things you were better off not knowing.

“Find anything?” The cutter. Mickey. Brenda. Des. Corinne. Jack. Lois Fazenda. He had a feeling that everything was connecting in some way he did not understand. Except that it was a maze and he was in the middle and he had a feeling he was not going to get out.

“It’s hard to find a whore hasn’t been cut. It’s a risk they take.”

“That’s swell, Brenda. That’s why I came all the way over here for, to hear a lot of deep shit about how tough it is being a hooker.”

Brenda picked up the cat and put it in her lap. She fed it a piece of bread and began stroking its back.

“There was a guy, a couple of the girls ran into him, three, four maybe, the word is out, everyone on the bricks seems to have heard about him. Bald, fifty, a Rotary button in his lapel. Elks, Kiwanis, I don’t know that shit. He picks them up in his car.”

“What kind of car?”

“Old. Before the war.”

“License?”

Brenda shook her head. “Some kind of sticker in the window. Palm Springs. San Diego Zoo, something like that. Maybe a high school, I don’t know. Everyone, the girls, they all got a different story.”

“What’s his number?”

“He likes to shave the girl’s bush. He’s a walking fucking barber’s college, the word is. Scissors, razors, lather, the works.”

“What if the girls don’t play?”

“He says he’ll cut their tits off.”

“Fair enough,” Tom Spellacy said.

“She still have her bush, your girl?”

“She still had her bush.”

“Then that’s the best I got,” Brenda said. “Nobody’s seen him for a while, this guy, the girls say.”

“Thanks, Brenda.” Tom Spellacy got up to leave. A pigeon swooped down on a piece of bread and escaped a split second before Brenda’s cat struck.

“I’m leaving town, Tom.”

He sat back down on the bench and took a piece of bread from her bag. “Why?”

“Change my luck. I don’t have any leverage anymore.”

He shredded the bread and threw the pieces into the water. “You in the shit?”

Brenda shook her head. “I did a scrape a couple of days ago. I made a mistake. I nicked something. She hemorrhaged.”

“Die?” For an instant he wondered what he would do if she said yes.

“No.” Brenda did not look at him. “It was one of my old girls. Lucille Cotter. She’ll keep her mouth shut. It was one of those things.”

“Lucille Cotter.” The name was familiar. “Silver Tongue?”

Brenda nodded. Lucille Cotter was called Silver Tongue for obvious reasons. A real pump primer. She had been one of the leading attractions at the house on Sunset. There was a peek into her room so that other customers could watch her work. She never turned out in the line. You had to book Silver Tongue in advance.

“She works lower Sunset now,” Brenda said. “She’s one of the ones ran into the barber.”

“Lower Sunset,” Tom Spellacy said. “On the bricks?”

Brenda said yes.

“That’s a long drop.”

“She got old, Tom,” Brenda said. “It happens.”

He considered the answer. “You never used to do scrapes.”

“That happens, too.”

Tom Spellacy watched the ducks swimming in the lake. In the old days with Brenda there had never been young couples in pad-dleboats floating in the water.

“Where you going?” he said.

“A place in Reno, maybe. And there’s a joint in Vegas I can run.”

He spoke before thinking. “You want a reference.”

Brenda looked directly at him for the first time. “I never had any trouble buying cops,” she said evenly. “If you remember.”

I deserved that, he thought. I sound like the resentful bagman.

“You know what Jack used to say about you?”

“I don’t really care.”

“No discipline, he used to say. He used to see you fight. You had trouble making the weight. No discipline.”

“He’s a real judge of character, Jack,” Tom Spellacy said. He wondered how Jack judged Des.

Brenda threw a crust into the lake. Two ducks fought over the piece, pecking at each other with their bills.

“That girl,” she said, “the one who was cut.”

“What about her?”

“She worked for the Protectors of the Poor, didn’t she?”

Tom Spellacy nodded. He and Masaryk had checked out the charity at County General. He hated hospitals. The smell of antiseptic and starch reminded him of his mother. She had lingered in a charity ward for seven months before she died. He brought her magazines and she demanded holy pictures and asked him to say a novena and to make the nine first Fridays and the Stations of the Cross. Fuck it, he finally told Des, this is your racket, you see her. The hospital superintendent said she did not remember Lois Fazenda. There were so many charities. And so many volunteers. They come and they go. A bad apple was bound to creep in. You can’t blame the hospital for that. The Protectors specialized in Mexicans. Accident victims, mainly. The volunteers passed out candy and cigarettes. The superintendent had smiled. And Roman Catholic doodads, she said.

“Passing out rosary beads,” Tom Spellacy said.

“Virgin of Guadalupe medals, too,” Brenda said. “Some of my girls used to work for the Protectors.”

He stared sharply at her, wondering what whores were doing working for a Catholic charity. “Doing mission work?”

“Rubbing up against guys. Flashing their tits, too, you want to know the honest truth. I bet she was very good rubbing up against guys, that girl.”

“Why would she want to do that?”

“To make the guy feel good, I guess. You’re all broken up, it must make you feel good, looking down a girl’s dress.”

“I bet it would at that.”

“That’s when she flashes the insurance form at him, Tom. ‘Sign this, I’ll get you a lawyer who’ll sue the bastard who hit you.’ “

It was slowly beginning to come clear. No wonder whores were volunteers. “I bet there’s lawyers who’d pay for a form like that.”

“Fifty bucks each, I hear,” Brenda said. “Maybe more.”

“And the wetback, I bet he never sees the insurance settlement.”

“There’s a lot of expenses involved, Tom.”

“Ambulance chasing is what you’d call it, you want to put a dirty name to it.”