A taco wagon pulled to the curb; I dropped my quarter, dialed 911 and called in a gunshot tip–anonymous citizen, a quick hangup. Angel Fritz Trejo rang Wax’s doorbell, waited, then let himself in. Seconds dragged; lights went on; two black & whites pulled up and four cops ran inside brandishing hardware. Multiple shots–and four cops walked out unharmed.
* * *
So in the end I made twenty grand and got the dog. The L.A. County Grand Jury bought the deposition, attributed my various dead to Ottens/Turkel/Trejo/Waxman _et al_–all dead themselves, thus unindictable. A superior court judge invalidated Basko’s twenty-five mill and divided the swag between Gail Curtiz and Linda Claire Woodruff. Gail got the Bendish mansion–rumor has it that she’s turning it into a crash-pad for radical lesbian feminists down on their luck. Linda Claire is going out with a famous rock star–androgynous, but more male than female. She admitted, elliptically, that she tried to “hustle” Gail Curtiz–validating her dyke submissiveness as good old American fortune hunting. Lizzie Trent got her teeth fixed, kicked me off probation and into her bed. I got a job selling cars in Glendale–and Basko comes to work with me every day. His steak and caviar diet have been replaced by Gravy Train–and he looks even groovier and healthier. Lizzie digs Basko and lets him sleep with us. We’re talking about combining my twenty grand with her life savings and buying a house, which bodes marriage: my first, her fourth. Lizzie’s a blast: she’s smart, tender, funny and gives great skull. I love her almost as much as I love Basko.
TORCH NUMBER
Before Pearl Harbor and the Jap scare, my living room window offered a great night view: Hollywood Boulevard lit with neon, dark hillsides, movie spots crisscrossing the sky announcing the latest opening at Grauman’s and the Pantages. Now, three months after the day of infamy–blackouts in effect and squadrons of Jap Zeros half expected any moment–all I could see were building shapes and the cherry lamps of occasional prowl cars. The ten P.M. curfew kept night divorce work off my plate, and blowing my last assignment with Bill Malloy of the D.A.’s Bureau made a special deputy’s curfew waiver out of the question. Work was down, bills were up, and my botched surveillance of Maggie Cordova had me thinking of Lorna all the time, wearing the grooves on her recording of “Prison of Love” down to sandpaper.
Prison of Love.
Sky above.
I feel your body like a velvet glove. . . .
I mixed another rye and soda and started the record over. Through a part in the curtains, I eyeballed the Street; I thought of Lorna and Maggie Cordova until their stories melded.
Lorna Kafesjian.
Second-rate bistro chanteuse–first-rate lungs, third-rate club gigs because she insisted on performing her own tunes. I met her when she hired me to rebuff the persistent passes of a rich bull dagger who’d been voyeur perving on her out at Malibu Beach– Lorna with her swimsuit stripped to the waist, chest exposed for a deep cleavage tan to offset the white gowns she always wore on stage. The dyke was sending Lor a hundred long-stemmed red roses a day, along with mash notes bearing her _nom de plume d’amour_: “Your Tongue of Fire.” I kiboshed the pursuit quicksville, glomming the tongue’s Vice jacket, shooting the dope to Louella Parsons–a socially connected, prominently married carpet muncher with a yen for nightclub canaries was prime meat for the four-star _Herald_. I told Louella: She desists, you don’t publish; she persists, you do. The Tongue and I had a little chat; I strong-armed her nigger bodyguard when he got persistent. Lorna was grateful, wrote me the torch number to torch all torch numbers–and _I_ got persistent.
The flame burned both ways for about four months–from January to May of ’38 I was Mr. Ringside Swain as Lorna gigged the Katydid Klub, Bido Lito’s, Malloy’s Nest, and a host of dives on the edge of jigtown. Two A.M. closers, then back to her place; long mornings and afternoons in bed, my business neglected, clients left dangling while I lived the title of a Duke Ellington number: “I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good.” Lorna came out of the spell first; she saw that I was willing to trash my life to be with her. That scared her; she pushed me away; I played stage door Johnny until I got disgusted with myself and she blew town for fuck knows where, leaving me a legacy of soft contralto warbles on hot black wax.