’cause he was an absconder and he didn’t want the censors to get a handle on Side 59
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The him.
“So Marty calls me at my sister’s five days or so ago, maybe the thirtieth, maybe the thirty-first. He says he’s playing horn for peanuts and hates it, he took the cure, he’s gonna stay off horseback and pull jobs–burglaries. He says he just got together with an old partner and they needed a third man for a housebreak gang. I told him I’d be down in a week or so, and he gave me this address and told me to let myself in. That’s me and Marty.”
Darkness made the room pulsate. Danny said, “What was the partner’s name? Where did Goines know him from?”
“Marty didn’t say.”
“Did he describe him? Was he a partner of Marty’s when he was pulling jobs back in ’43 and ’44?”
Bordoni said, “Mister, it was a two-minute conversation, and I didn’t even know Marty pulled jobs back then.”
“Did he mention an old running partner with a burned or scarred face?
He’d be mid to late twenties by now.”
“No. Marty was always close-mouthed. I was his only pal at Q, and I was surprised when he said he had an old partner. Marty wasn’t really the partner type.”
Danny shifted gears. “When Goines sent you letters, where were they postmarked and what did they say?”
Bordoni sighed like he was bored; Danny thought of giving him a peek at his old pal’s eyeballs. “Spill, Leo.”
“They were from all over the country, and they were just jive–jazz stuff, wish you were here, the horses, baseball.”
“Did Marty mention other musicians he was playing with?”
Bordoni laughed. “No, and I think he was ashamed to. He was gigging all these Podunk clubs, and all he said was ‘I’m the best trombone they’ve ever seen,’ meaning Marty knew he wasn’t much but these cats he was gigging with were really from hunger.”
“Did he mention anybody at all, other than this old partner you were going to team up with?”
“Nix. Like I told you, it was a two-minute conversation.”
The Miller High Life sign atop the Taft Building blipped off, jarring Danny. “Leo, was Marty Goines a homosexual?”
“Marty! Are you crazy! He wouldn’t even pork nancy boys up at Q!”
“Anybody up there ever make advances to him?”
“Marty would have died before he let some brunser bust his cherry!”
Danny hit the light switch, hauled Bordoni up by his cuff chain and twisted his head so that it was level with a long slash of wall blood. “That’s your friend. That’s why you were never here and you never met me. That’s heat you don’t want, so you just stay frosty and think of this thing as a nightmare.”
Bordoni bobbed his head; Danny let him go and unlocked the cuffs.
Bordoni gathered his stuff up off the floor, taking extra care with his tool case. At the door, he said, “This is personal with you, right?”
Buddy Jastrow long gone, four shots a night not enough, his textbooks and classes not real. Danny said, “It’s all I’ve got.”
o
o
o
Alone again, Danny stared out the window, watching movie marquees blink off, turning the Boulevard into just another long, dark street. He added
“possible burglary partner” to “tall, grayhaired,” “middle-aged,” “homosexual ,”
and “heroin-wise”; he put off Bordoni’s protestations that Marty wasn’t fruit as sincere but wrong–and wondered how long he could stick inside the room without going crazy, without risking the landlord or someone from the front house dropping by.
Looking for house lights that might be _Him_ looking back was childish; eye prowling for sinister shapes was a kid’s game–the kind of game he played by himself as a schoolboy. Danny yawned, sat down in the chair and tried to sleep.
He got something near sleep, an exhaustion shortcut where he wasn’t quite out, couldn’t quite form thoughts and saw pictures that he wasn’t making himself. Street signs, trucks, a saxophone man running scales on his instrument, flower patterns, a dog at the end of a stick. The dog made him twitch; he tried to open his eyes, felt them gummed and eased back to wherever he was going.