Stupid, crazy, sentimental, lunatic dumb.
But kissing Audrey Anders was worse.
Buzz parked in the City Hall lot, transferred all the cash to his doughnut box and took it upstairs to Ellis Loew’s office. Going in the door, he saw Loew, Big Dudley Smith and Mal Considine sitting around a table, all of them talking at once, garbled stuff about cop decoys. No one glanced up; Buzz eyeballed Considine four years after he gave him the cuckold’s horns. The man still looked more like a lawyer than a cop; his blond hair was going gray; there was something nervous and raggedy-assed about him.
Buzz rapped on the door and tossed the box onto the chair holding it open. The three looked over; he fixed his eyes on Considine. Ellis Loew nodded, all business; Dudley Smith said, “Hello, Turner, old colleague,” all blarney; Considine eyed him back, all curiosity, like he was examining a reptile specimen he’d never seen before.
They held the look. Buzz said, “Hello, Mal.”
Mal Considine said, “Nice tie, Meeks. Who’d you roll for it?”
Buzz laughed. “How’s the ex, Lieutenant? She still wearin’ crotchless panties?”
Considine stared, his mouth twitching. Buzz stared back, his mouth dry.
Mexican standoff. 50-50, Considine or Dragna.
Maybe he’d hold off just a tad, cut the Red Menace just a bit more slack before he signed on.
CHAPTER TEN
It was two nights of bad dreams and a day’s worth of dead ends that had him making the run to Malibu Canyon.
Driving northbound on Pacific Coast Highway, Danny chalked it up as an elimination job: talk to the men on the list of fighting dog breeders he’d gotten from Sheriff’s Central Vice, make nice with them and get educated confirmations or denials on Doc Layman’s animal-aided killing/blood bait thesis. No such beast existed in the County Homicide files or with City R&I; if the breeders, men who would know if anyone did, laughed the theory off as nonsense, then maybe tonight he could sleep without the company of snapping hounds, entrails and screechy jazz.
It started this way:
After the Moonglow Lounge and Janice Modine’s pass, he’d gotten an idea–build his own file on the Goines snuff, write down every shred of information, glom carbons of the autopsy and print reports, stick Dietrich with lackluster summaries and concentrate on his paperwork, his case–the 187 he’d follow up even if he didn’t nail the bastard before the skipper pulled the plug. He drove to the Hollywood Ranch Market then, grabbed a stack of cardboard cartons, bought manila folders, colored side tabs, yellow legal pads, typing and carbon paper and drove home with them–allowing himself two extra shots of I.W. Harper as a reward for his dedication. The booze put him out on the couch– and it got hairy.
Goines’ mutilations in wraparound Technicolor. Guts and big bruised penises, so close up that at first he couldn’t tell what they were. Dogs rooting in the gore, him right there, Man Camera filming it until he joined the brood and started biting.
Two nights of it.
With a day of shit in between.
He put the first night’s dream off as scare stuff caused by a frustrating case and no food in his system. In the morning he got double bacon, eggs, hash browns, toast and sweet rolls at the Wilshire Derby, drove downtown to the Sheriff’s Central Bureau and scanned Homicide files. No animal-aided murders were on record; the only homosexual slashings even remotely similar to Marty Goines’ were open-and-shut jobs–lovers’ spats where the perpetrator was captured, still serving time or executed by the State of California.
Shitwork was next.
He called Karen Hiltscher at the Station and sweet-talked her into making phone queries of other musician’s locals that might have sent Marty Goines out on gigs, and LA area jazz clubs that might have hired his trombone independently. He told her to ring the other LASD station houses and solicit run-throughs of their burglary files: paper scans for jazz musician/burglars who might prove to be known associates of Goines. The girl reluctantly agreed; he blew kisses into the phone, promised to call for results later and drove back to Local 3126.
There, the counterwoman gave him another look at the Horn of Plenty’s employment record, and Danny copied down club and roadhouse addresses going back to Mad Marty’s first gig in ‘36. He spent the rest of the day driving by jazz spots that were now laundromats and hamburger joints; jazz spots that had changed hands a half dozen times; jazz spots that had retained the same owner for years. And he got the same response across the board: a shrug at Goines’ mugshot strip, the words “Marty who?”, a deadpan on the topics of jazzbo burglars and the longshot of a burglar kid with his face bandaged up.