I popped up to my pad off Pico. I saw a pack of pachucos parked outside. Mean Mexicans in mohair shirts and mohawk haircuts. Machismo-mangled minions. Don Jordan’s homicidal hermanos.
I hauled to the Hush-Hush office. I hit on a horrific scene out of Hieronymus Bosch.
Heaps of Hush-Hush dirt files tossed and torched to Cinder City. Scandal skinny scorched and dumped into dust piles. Art sheets shivved and shorn to shit. Type trays trashed and chairs chopped into chop suey.
My crew:
Bruised, contused, confused, and ripped from a raid on Dave Dockweiler’s dope stash.
Dawn.
I dashed back to Delores’s Drive-In and dipped by at a safe distance. I drove one-handed and drilled the dive with my Bausch binoculars.
Cops–a bevy of bulls from the Beverly Hills PD. Two guys swinging the sweaty swish onto a sheet-shrouded stretcher. A biiiig bull bracing Ben Luboff–nellyingly nervous and limpwristedly lily-white now. Shit shaking inside the shack–drones dripping print powder on the symbiotically symbolic closed closet door. Checking it out: Chief Clinton Anderson.
I fought a fit of foul flicking fear: I fondled that door and forgot to wipe my prints.
I buzzed by the BHPD Building. By the back door: two bulls and Buddy “Bug King” Berkow. Buddy looked beat on. I knew the bulls had bopped him with beaver-tail saps.
I bombed my Buick out of Beverly Hills. I ran my radio for random newscasts. KMPC coughed up crap on Croatian commies and switched to a swift bit on the sweaty swish.
A commentator called it a suicide. Clinton Anderson confirmed the call conclusively.
I was prespiringly perplexed and pulsatingly puzzled. I sent up guarded thanx to my guardian angel and dipped the dial to the BHPD band.
“All BHPD units only, APB on Daniel Douglas Getchell, G-E-T-C-H-E-L-L, white male, 28, 61, 18o, brown and brown, driving a 1953 Buick Skylark, license G-B-D, 88z. Be advised, BHPD units only, approach and bring to station.”
What?–a pristinely private bulletin to bag me. A BHPD exclusive–to swing with the sweaty swish “suicide.”
I felt bad boogie bopping my way. I bombed to Burbank and breezed by Brad’s Auto Dump. I boosted fresh plates off an old Oldsmobile and placed them over my plates. I plowed back to L.A. and mainlined myself to the L.A. Times morgue.
I felt intertwined intrigues interdicting me. I played a Hush-Hush hunch and read reports on recent Beverly Hills burglaries.
Six–slickly slotted from late ’57 to last week. Ulceratingly unsolved. Salivatingly similar stats: bedroom boosts while Mama and Papa went out to separate parties. Large losses and no standard talk of stakeouts to bag the B&E bad boys.
Bad BHPD boogie bopping my way? Twisted twirls and circles circumscribing me–
I popped to a pay phone and called Steve Crane. I told him to light out to the Luau lickety-split.
I beelined to Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. I Bausch & Lomb’d Lana Turner’s backyard. I saw Johnny Stompanato jump on Lana and lash out with limitlessly lewd language. Lana lashed back. She julienned Johnny with jive on his jilt-happy gigolo ways. She spritzed spite. She shot shit at him shamelessly. She pounced on his pint-sized penis and his wicked welterweight dupe Don Jordan. She called him a guinea gangster and said he poured the pork to her Mexican maid with his poquito pee-pee. She said he pandered and pimped her and got her gussied up in her own Givenchy gown.
Some show: A bracing breakfast bash on beautiful Bedford. Dig the all-star audience, perched on their porches with pancakes and poached eggs:
Dino, Duke Wayne, Walt Disney, wolfing Wheaties. That white-haired wimp on The Webster Webfoot Show.
Steve Crane said, “So I’m letting Don Jordan run girls out of here. So Yolanda Paez brings me back the latest on Lana and Johnny. So what? You want to write the story up, great. But it’s the last you’ll ever peep out of my peepholes.”
The Luau was listlessly still. Steve opened up early to meet me. My meth jolt was melting down. I mixed a mammoth martini to remagnetize it.
“I think Johnny crashed Jordan’s whore racket and lured Yolanda into it. And I think the girls are the advance team for a burglary angle thatJohnny and Jordan are working.”