“To the mother the child belongs. Even a failed lawyer like you should know that maxim.”
Side 33
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The Mal listened to Celeste’s sewing machine, Stefan’s toy soldiers hitting the door. He came up with his own epigraph: saving a woman’s life only induces gratitude if the woman has something to live for. All Celeste had was memories and a hated existence as a cop’s hausfrau. All she wanted was to take Stefan back to the time of his horror and make him part of the memories. His final epigraph: he wouldn’t let her.
Mal walked back in the house to read the Commie snitch’s files: his glory grand jury and all it would reap.
_Juice_.
CHAPTER SIX
The two picket lines moved slowly down Gower, past the entrances of the Poverty Row studios. The UAES hugged the inside, displaying banners stapled to plywood strips: FAIR PAY FOR LONG HOURS, CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS _NOW_! PROFIT
SHARES FOR ALL WORKERS. The Teamsters paced beside them, a strip of sidewalk open, their signs–REDS OUT! NO CONTRACTS FOR COMMUNISTS–atop friction-taped two-by-four’s. Talk between the factions was constant; every few seconds, Fuck or Shit or Traitor or Scum would be shouted, a wave of garbled obscenities following. Across the street, reporters stood around, smoking and playing rummy on the hoods of their cars.
Buzz Meeks watched from the walkway outside Variety International Pictures’ executive offices–three stories up, a balcony view. He remembered busting union heads back in the ’30s; he sized up the Teamsters versus the UAES
and saw a bout to rival Louis and Schmeling Number Two.
Easy: the Teamsters were sharks and the UAES were minnows. The Teamster line featured Mickey Cohen goons, union muscle and hard boys hired out of the day labor joints downtown; the UAES was old leftie types, stagehands past their prime, skinny Mexicans and a woman. If push came to shove, no cameras around, the Teamsters would use their two-by-four’s as battering rams and charge–brass knuckle work in close, blood, teeth and nose cartilage on the sidewalk, maybe a few ears ripped off of heads. Then vamoose before the lackluster LAPD Riot Squad made the scene. Easy.
Buzz checked his watch. 4:45; Howard Hughes was forty-five minutes late.
It was a cool January day, light blue sky mixed with rain clouds over the Hollywood Hills. Howard got sex crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab’s Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty’s yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes’s–one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes Enterprises’ fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself. Hopefully, bonus money was involved: he was still in hock to a bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison.
Buzz heard a door opening behind him; a woman’s voice called out, “Mr.
Hughes will see you now, Mr. Meeks.”
The woman had stuck her head out of Herman Gerstein’s doorway; if the Variety International boss was involved, then bonus dough was a possible. Buzz ambled over; Hughes was seated behind Gerstein’s desk, scanning the pictures on the walls: semicheesecake shots of Gower Gulch starlets going nowhere. He was dressed in his usual chalk stripe business suit, sporting his usual scars–facial wounds from his latest airplane crash. The big guy cultivated them with moisturizing lotion–he thought they gave him a certain panache.
And no Herman Gerstein; and no Gerstein’s secretary. Buzz dropped the formalities that Hughes required when other people were present. “Getting any, Howard?”
Hughes pointed to a chair. “You’re my bird dog, you should know. Sit, Buzz. This is important.”
Buzz sat down and made a gesture that took in the whole office: cheesecake, rococo wall tapestries and a knight’s suit of armor hatrack. “Why here, boss? Herman got a job for me?”
Hughes ignored the question. “Buzz, how long have we been colleagues?”
“Goin’ on five years, Howard.”
“And you’ve worked for me in various capacities?”
Buzz thought: fixer, bagman, pimp. “That’s right.”
“And during those five years have I given you profitable referrals to other people in need of your talents?”