Jane smiled, walked to the car, and unscrewed the gas cap. She dropped in her cigarette and started running. Davis and I hit the ground and ate grass. The gas tank exploded and the car went up in flames. The girl stood up and curtsied, then walked to us and said, “Miller’s money was in the trunk. Too bad, Daddy. Maybe you can tell Mother it’s a tax write-off.”
I recuffed Jane Viertel; the flames sent flickers of light over Davis Evans’s bereaved face. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled them out empty, and said to me, “You got a couple dimes, partner? AX6-400’s a toll call. I need me a peach like a mother dog.”
SINCE I DON’T HAVE YOU
During the post-war years I served two masters–running interference and hauling dirty laundry for the two men who defined LA at that time better than anyone else. To Howard Hughes I was security boss at his aircraft plant, pimp, and troubleshooter for RKO Pictures–the ex-cop who could kibosh blackmail squeezes, fix drunk drivings, and arrange abortions and dope cures. To Mickey Cohen–rackets overlord and would-be nightclub shtickster–I was a bagman to the LAPD, the former Narco detective who skimmed junk off niggertown dope rousts, allowing his Southside boys to sell it back to the hordes of schwartzes eager to fly White Powder Airlines. Big Howard: always in the news for crashing an airplane someplace inappropriate, stubbing his face on the control panel in some hicktown beanfield, then showing up at Romanoff’s bandaged like the Mummy with Ava Gardner on his arm; Mickey C.: also a pussy hound par excellence, pub crawling with an entourage of psychopathic killers, press agents, gag writers, and his bulldog Mickey Cohen, Jr.,–a flatulent beast with a schlong so large that the Mick’s stooges strapped it to a roller skate so it wouldn’t drag on the ground.
Howard Hughes. Mickey Cohen. And me–Turner “Buzz” Meeks, Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, armadillo poacher; strikebreaker goon; cop; fixer, and keeper of the secret key to his masters’ psyches: they were both cowards mano a mano; airplanes and lunatic factotums their go-betweens–while I would go anywhere, anyplace–gun or billy club first, courting a front-page death to avenge my second-banana life. And the two of them courted me because I put their lack of balls in perspective: it was irrational, meshugah, bad business–a Forest Lawn crypt years before my time. But I got the last laugh there: I always knew that when faced with the grave I’d pull a smart segue to keep kicking–and I write this memoir as an old, old man–while Howard and Mickey stuff caskets, bullshit biographies their only legacy.
Howard. Mickey. Me.
Sooner or later, my work for the two of them had to produce what the yuppie lawyer kids today call “conflict of interest.” Of course, it was over a woman–and, of course, being a suicidal Okie shitkicker, forty-one years old and getting tired, I decided to play both ends against the middle. A thought just hit me: that I’m writing this story because I miss Howard and Mickey, and telling it gives me a chance to be with them again. Keep that in mind–that I loved them–even though they were both worldclass shitheels.
* * *
January 15, 1949.
It was cold and clear in Los Angeles, and the papers were playing up the two-year anniversary of the Black Dahlia murder case–still unsolved, still speculated on. Mickey was still mourning Hooky Rothman’s death–he French kissed a sawed-off shotgun held by an unknown perpetrator–and Howard was still pissed at me over the Bob Mitchum reefer roust: he figured that my connections with Narco Division were still so solid that I should have seen it coming. I’d been shuttling back and forth between Howard and Mickey since New Years. The Mick’s signature fruit baskets stuffed with C-notes had to be distributed to cops, judges, and City Council members he wanted to grease, and the pilot/mogul had me out bird-dogging quiff: prowling bus depots and train stations for buxom young girls who’d fall prey to RKO contracts in exchange for frequent nighttime visits. I’d been having a good run: a half dozen midwestern farm maidens were now ensconced in Howard’s fuck pads–strategically located apartments tucked all over LA. And I was deep in hock to a darktown bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison. I was sitting in my quonset hut office at Hughes Aircraft when the phone rang.