* * *
I drove to a pay phone and made some calls, straight and collect. An old LAPD pal gave me the lowdown on Morris Hornbeck– he had two California convictions for felony statch rape, both complainants thirteen-year-old girls. A guy on the Milwaukee force that I’d worked liaison with supplied Midwestern skinny: Little Mo was a glorified bookkeeper for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob, run out of town by his boss in ’47, when he was given excess gambling skim to invest as he saw best and opened a call house specializing in underaged poon dressed up as movie stars– greenhorn girls coiffed, cosmeticed, and gowned to resemble Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Veronica Lake and the like. The operation was a success, but Jerry Katzenbach, Knights-of-Columbus family man, considered it bum PR. Adios, Morris–who obviously found an amenable home in LA.
On Gretchen Rae Shoftel, I got bubbkis; ditto on the geezer with the arithmetic tricks similar to the carhop/vamp. The girl had no criminal record in either California or Wisconsin–but I was willing to bet she’d learned her seduction techniques at Mo Hornbeck’s whorehouse.
I drove to Howard Hughes’s South Lucerne Street fuck pad and let myself in with a key from my fourteen-pound Hughes Enterprises key ring. The house was furnished with leftovers from the RKO prop department, complete with appropriate female accoutrements for each of the six bedrooms. The Moroccan Room featured hammocks and settees from _Casbah Nocturne_ and a rainbow array of low-cut silk lounging pajamas; the _Billy the Kid_ room–where Howard brought his Jane Russell look-alikes–was four walls of mock-saloon bars with halter-top cowgirl getups and a mattress covered by a Navajo blanket. My favorite was the Zoo Room: taxidermied cougar, bison, moose, and bobcats–shot by Ernest Hemingway–mounted with their eyes leering down on a narrow strip of sheet-covered floor. Big Ernie told me he decimated the critter population of two Montana counties in order to achieve the effect. There was a kitchen stocked with plenty of fresh milk, peanut butter, and jelly to sate teenage tastebuds, a room to screen stag movies, and the master bedroom–my bet for where Howard installed Gretchen Rae Shoftel.
I took the back staircase up, walked down the hall, and pushed the door open, expecting the room’s usual state: big white bed and plain white walls–the ironic accompaniment to snatched virginity. I was wrong; what I saw was some sort of testament to squarejohn American homelife.
Mixmasters, cookie sheets, toasters, and matched cutlery sets rested on the bed; the walls were festooned with Currier & Ives calendars and framed _Saturday Evening Post_ covers drawn by Norman Rockwell. A menagerie of stuffed animals was admiring the artwork–pandas and tigers and Disney characters placed against the bed, heads tilted upward. There was a bentwood rocker in a corner next to the room’s one window. The seat held a stack of catalogs. I leafed through them: Motorola radios, Hamilton Beach kitchen goodies, bed quilts from a mail-order place in New Hampshire. In all of them the less expensive items were checkmarked. Strange, since Howard let his master bedroom poon have anything they wanted–top of the line charge accounts, the magilla.
I checked the closet. It held the standard Hughes wardrobe– low-cut gowns and tight cashmere sweaters, plus a half-dozen Scrivner’s carhop outfits, replete with built-in uplift breastplates, which Gretchen Rae Shoftel didn’t need. Seeing a row of empty hangers, I checked for more catalogs and found a Bullocks Wilshire job under the bed. Flipping through it, I saw tweedy skirts and suits, flannel blazers, and prim and proper wool dresses circled; Howard’s charge account number was scribbled at the top of the back page. Gretchen Rae Shoftel, math whiz, searching for another math whiz, was contemplating making herself over as Miss Upper-Middle-Class Rectitude.
I checked out the rest of the fuck pad–quick eyeball prowls of the other bedrooms, a toss of the downstairs closets. Empty Bullocks boxes were everywhere–Gretchen Rae had accomplished her transformation. Howard liked to keep his girls cash strapped to insure their obedience, but I was willing to guess he stretched the rules for this one. Impersonating a police officer, I called the dispatcher’s office at the Yellow and Beacon cab companies. Paydirt at Beacon: three days ago at 3:10 P.M., a cab was dispatched to 436 South Lucerne; its destination: 2281 South Mariposa.