I FINALLY GOT TO THE right part of town—I had no idea which town or city I was in, Los Angeles itself or one of the towns that hug a lower-middle-class neighborhood with kids playing catch and hanging out looking teenage-shifty. I asked directions again and began to climb through increasingly narrow streets of aging bungalows and cars parked at curbside rather than hidden in garages. The sidewalks were old and cracked but the palm trees swayed above and seemed to make everything else okay.
I felt the stinging in my eyes. My face felt as if I’d stuck it into a bag of hot coffee grounds. Los Angeles was a mystery to me. Geographically, climatologically, and zoologically. Katz and Lamas. I was still thinking of how cute movie people could be when they got serious about it, then suddenly realized I could breathe without coughing. I’d fumbled out of the worst of the smog and was looking down on it again past the tops of palm trees and some towering oaks.
Rosen’s house was hidden behind a wall and gate at the top of the hill in a cul-de-sac. Was it a hill or a mountain? How the hell should I know? I was a stranger there myself, as the man said.
I parked the Caddy and walked across the shady street to the gate, which was a showstopper. It was about ten feet tall and solid wood, no peek-a-boo grille. And it was carved. All over, like something conceived and executed by the English genius Grinling Gibbons. It’s not often that the old chap comes to mind, but when he does there’s no alternative to him. Staring at that gate, what else could a fellow think? Grinling Gibbons. Of course Gibbons didn’t specialize in countless anthropomorphic mice, ducks, squirrels, kitties, bunnies, hound dogs, teddy bears, chipmunks, beavers, knights in armor, maidens leaning from tower windows, dragons with great elongated tails and talons, serpents with flicking tongues twisting around tree trunks featuring owls on branches and more gnarls than you could count. It all resembled a Disney animator’s worst hangover. But there was a nutty magnificence to it as well; it might have been a metaphor for the whole place. That’s one of the problems about Los Angeles, Hollywood, whatever you want to call it. You’ve got to keep fighting the impulse to find metaphors everywhere. It’s all a result of the movies, which are themselves merely metaphors for reality … you see, there I go again. Anyway, it was late afternoon and the sun was casting long shadows. As the light lowered, the carved animals seemed almost alive. Maybe when night fell they left the gate and went to town.
If they could find it …
I pushed the gate and slowly it swung back on its massive hinges. The driveway curled around a small pond with a very large fountain in the middle, lily pads below. Mermaids sat on the edge of the fountain feeling the gentle spray of three cherubs peeing. There were no actual human beings in sight, peeing or otherwise, but I could hear a hellish din coming from inside the big house, which was, I supposed, vaguely hacienda-like. There were stucco or adobe and terra-cotta tiles and pots and big dark beams that appeared to be poking through the walls. A very classy-looking old Mercedes convertible sat up near the porch, the kind of car Reichsmarschall Göring would have liked. I stopped to look at the car and found someone in the backseat. The noise from the house was getting louder. It was—if you were willing to stretch a point or two—a rock band. “Hello, there,” I said, but the little boy on the black leather upholstery was engrossed in a picture book about dinosaurs. “That’s a stegosaurus,” I said.
He looked up. He was three, maybe three and a half. “No way, José,” he said confidently, patient with adult idiocy. “Dimetrodon. They’re very different.” He pointed to the spine fin. “Very different,” he said again for the slower students.
“What’s that?”
“What?” He looked up, round-eyed. Maybe he was four. I’ve never had kids of my own. How should I know how old he was? But definitely not five. He was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball shirt, blue jeans with plaid cuffs, and red sneakers the size of my thumb.
“That Baggie. What’s in it?” I prayed I was wrong.
“Daddy’s coke, I guess.”
“Ah.” The baggie was open and some of the white powder had sifted out onto the black leather. There was a smudge of it on one of his fingers. “Would you like me to take it to your daddy?”
“No way, José. I’m guarding it.” He folded the top of the Baggie tight and moved it closer to his thigh with a proprietary gesture.
“Right. I get it. Now that’s a brontosaurus, I’m sure about that.”
“Nope. Seismosaurus. It’s bigger. Biggest of all.”
“Man, you really know your stuff.”
“Yeah.” He nodded.
“Is your daddy in the house?”
“I guess. Sleeping, I bet.”
“I’ll go see. Say, how do you like the music?”
He made a face.
“You got that right,” I said.
It was dim and gloomy inside the house and the noise was overpoweringly awful. A blonde in a seersucker skirt and jacket with blue-and-white spectator pumps was standing in the hallway. A gold-and-platinum Rolex sliding on her wrist like a bracelet. Brownish-red nails approximating the color of dried blood. Her hair was cut in a page boy that swirled around her face when she noticed me standing in the open doorway. She looked at me with sharp, distrustful eyes, and wasn’t overwhelmed. She had a Vuitton bag hung over one shoulder. She was speaking into empty space and her voice cut like a saber through the concrete wall of sound. She was shouting about the plans for the evening, names and places and hours. The recitation sounded like the day’s marching orders at Fort Zinderneuf. Sort of the march-or-die approach to social engagements. She concluded on a grace note.
“And if you didn’t hear me over this shit and you fail to keep your appointed rounds, my dear little dickhead, you are dead meat.” She looked at me as if she had some suggestions for my social calendar that I probably wouldn’t much like, then stuck a ruthless smile on her pretty face. She reminded me of Doris Day in the old days. “And who the hell are you? No, on second thought, no. You’re not the vet and the only man on earth I want to see right now is the vet. I’ve got a Bouvier des Flandres who’s been upchucking into the swimming pool all morning. Not pretty, believe me. Do dogs get hair balls? No, I suppose not. You want Freddie, well, miraculously he is risen. In the music room.” She speared the air with one of the nails. A Masai warrior would have thought twice about going up against her. “I’ve always said Freddie needed a damn good thrashing.” She showed her teeth. “And now he’s got one.” She brushed past me on a cloud of Giorgio and I went into the room she’d pointed out.
The biggest, rattiest speakers I’d ever seen were standing in the corners of a room that half-shook with the noise. You could feel the sound coming from the floor, like snakes up your pant leg. A man with a bald head sat in what looked to me like the Barcalounger my grandfather had acquired in his sunset years. He wore a faded blue terry-cloth robe and watched me through a cloud of cigarette smoke. His mouth moved but I couldn’t hear a word. I shrugged. A cheap turntable played an unlabeled disc. A forty-five. His mouth moved some more and I shrugged some more. His mouth went on and on and I saw he was swearing. It was like watching the manager run out onto the field to engage the umpire in dialogue. He reached over, flipped a switch, and the sudden silence made my ears sting.
“I suppose,” he said, still shouting, “you’re the guy Bechtol called me about.”
“I’m not some guy, birdbrain. I’m Lee Tripper. You send me very large royalty checks. I could take JC and go to another label anytime I choose. Guy. Jesus.” I looked at the stereo equipment. “Nice rig you got here.”
“Basic rule. You gotta listen to shit if you’re gonna play shit. The worse the rig, the better it sounds. Mick the J taught me that. You must know that, your background.”
“I’ve heard the theory. And I didn’t mean to bust in on you here—you could have taken me for a narc and blown me away.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I just got up, got my cup of Yuban Instant, I’m not thinking clearly. You giving me shit or what?”
“You’re a sleaze farm and I’ve known you thirty seconds and already I feel like I’m up to my heinie in manure. I met your son in the back of that little Mercedes out front. He was guarding your cocaine for you. Very classy touch. If I were half a man I’d rip your head off and stuff it down the hole.”
“Jeez, man, you get outta bed on the wrong side, or what?” He stood up and slipped out of the robe. He was about a size forty-eight, portly, deeply tanned, and looked oily. There were gold chains and medallions around his thick neck. He was about fifteen years out of date, but this was the record business, this was LA. Maybe he looked exactly right but it was hard to believe. Maybe time had stood still for Freddie Rosen. “We’re off to a bad start, my man. Let’s just chill out a minute here. Damned good thrashing always puts me in a lousy mood.”
“Leave your sex life out of this.”
He picked up a hand-painted shirt and slipped it on. I just knew it would be too tight. Somewhere there was a Too Tight Shop and all the Freddie Rosens were steadies. He buttoned the shirt and he looked like he’d just won the Wet T-Shirt Contest the first night of his Club Med vacation. He stuck out a hand with four rings on it, all set with diamonds that looked like zircons on him. This guy was head of MagnaDisc. I shook his hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
“Come on, it’s time for Freddie Deuce’s computer class.” He led the way back outside. Late afternoon shadows were lengthening. “Then I’ll buy you breakfast. We gonna get along just fahn.” He leaned into the back of his Mercedes where his son was playing with little plastic dinosaurs. “Hey, Deuce, you want to play with the computers?”
“You gotta be kidding,” the little boy said. “Sure.”
“Gimme five, man,” Rosen said, slapping palms with his son. “And gimme that Baggie. Nasty stuff. Bad.” His son handed him the Baggie. We got into the elegant little car and set off down the driveway, through the gate where the animals still gamboled, and down the hill.
“My car’s back there,” I said. “Can you find your way back?”
“Do it every day.”
“It’s the breadcrumbs,” his son said from the backseat and broke into maniacal laughter.
“So what about a damned good thrashing?”
“No, thanks, never indulge.”
He laughed, stroked his bandido mustache. “That’s the name of the new band. We’re about to blanket the earth with ’em. A Damned Good Thrashing. ADGT. That’s their name. A return to pure Heavy Metal. Gonna be a monster. Hey, Deuce? Here, take the Baggie.” He handed the bag of cocaine back to his son. “It’s bad. You got that? Coke is bad. Okay, now open the bag and dump it over the side.”
I watched the grinning kid as the wind took the white powder and blew it away down the street.
“Showing off for me?” I asked.
He laughed again. “I could care less what you think. Gotta set the Deuce here an example.” He sighed. “The joys of fatherhood. I gotta kick it, man. Always said I could if I wanted to. The Deuce makes me want to. Freddie Rosen the Second. Now we’ll see if I was right.” He pulled over to the curb beside a grammar school. His son was already out of the car, impatient to get at the computers. Freddie Rosen said he’d be back in a minute. I watched them walk across the grass and through the front door. By then the little boy was already talking to another kid and Freddie Rosen was chatting with a woman who’d brought her daughter.
When he came back he said, “Breakfast time.” It was five o’clock, but apparently it was morning for Freddie Rosen. We drove forever and found a place called Nate and Al’s in Beverly Hills. It turned out to be a big New York deli. He led the way to a booth far from the door. I ordered a toasted bagel and coffee. He had a lox-and-onion omelet, potatoes, bagels, a knish on the side, an order of cole slaw. He looked at me. “I gotta go on a diet. I’m a mess, man. I need an image transplant. I need a really good rug. I need a really first-rate trainer, guy comes to the house, sculpts my body into a thing of beauty, into the temple it’s meant to be … What have I got now? Body by fuckin’ Sara Lee. What can I say?” He shoveled in about two hundred calories, one forkload, and looked miserable.
“You could tell me what you know about my brother. Bechtol thinks he might still be alive. He said you’re one of the people I should talk to about that.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “You think I like lookin’ like this? for Chrissakes, what am I, crazy? Fuckin’ gold chains make me look like a fuckin’ bondage freak from Keokuk. Shirts too tight make me look fat—hell, I am fat. And that miserable cunt of a wife, Samantha, Sammy she likes to be called, Sammy Shit I call her—what did I do to deserve her? What sins were so terrible? You think I want to raise the kid in a sandbox full of cocaine? My problem is an occupational hazard. I’m forty-eight, I’m a carryover from the Stone Age. The stoned age, right? I mean I got no fuckin’ guts, right? They bought me a long time ago …” Sweat was beading up on his swarthy bald head. “You know how much money I made last year? Way over a million bucks. Now I spend my life dealing with what? The second, third generation of these freaked-out little bastards with all their whining and butt-fucking and electric guitars and keyboards and plug-in MTV brains, the deejays on the take as much as ever. I’m selling this crap and calling it entertainment and music and fun … It’s disgusting. I’m underpaid, my soul is in limbo.” He kept on eating and talking like an old-time speed freak. “Now JC Tripper, he was different, one of the greats, the American Joe Cocker, a legitimate legend, y’know, Joseph Christian Tripper, a Harvard man … a Renaissance man, fuckin’ A, we’re not gonna see his like again … The dope, of course, did him in, more or less …”
“Did you ever meet my brother?”
“Coupla parties, shook hands, award ceremonies. He was a pretty private guy—well, hell, what am I telling you for? But I didn’t like know him.” He probed at the knish, cut it in half, and opened wide. You had to hand it to him, the man could put it away.
“So what’s with you and Bechtol?” I asked. “Why am I here? Not that I’m not fascinated by your list of complaints—”
“Admit it,” he said. “You didn’t like me at the start.”
“You noticed that?”
“I had to win you over.” He smiled as winsomely as possible. “I’m sensitive to that kind of thing. Vibes, y’know. Bad karma. You like me better now, would you say?”
“Sure,” I said. “I like you better.”
“Thanks, pal. It’s important to me. So what’s on Bechtol’s mind … what’s on Bechtol’s mind … well, who knows? The man’s a genius, a great writer, am I right?” One of the greats. A giant—”
“All right already.”
“We’re very simpatico, Bechtol and me. So, Lee—you don’t mind if I call you Lee, right?—so, Lee, we were talking about your brother, Bechtol’s running all these stories past me, and I’m getting into it, telling him things I’ve heard …” He shrugged. “You know.”
“No time to be coy and demure, Freddie. I don’t know, that’s the point.”
“The murder stuff.” He sniffled and busied himself with the last of the knish and the cole slaw. “It’s hard to talk about this stuff with, y’know, you.”
“And why is that, Freddie?”
“Well, I keep hearing about what happened in Tangier and it always comes back to murder. Somebody got murdered back there in Tangier … now, was it your brother? Or some other poor asshole who got it in the back so your brother could do a fade? And maybe you, the faithful brother, were the, ah, well, the hit man … your brother’s keeper … and they hustled you off to the nuthatch in Switzerland and papered over the whole thing … heh, heh …”
“All so JC could disappear.” I shook my head.
“Listen, people high in the Magna Group were scared shitless about all of it for a long time. Serious anxiety.” He had begun to squirm and look at his watch.
“What were they afraid of?”
“Afraid of? Afraid of?”
“That’s right, Freddie. That’s the question.”
“Don’t you think the idea of murder is just a little scary? Murder scares me. You? Maybe not. But put it together: JC Tripper is dead … the brother disappears … secret cremation … The whole thing is covered up but there are rumors right away … is JC really dead? Did somebody off him for reasons unknown? Or did he just die? And why in some utterly half-assed place like Tangier? It’s like an old Claude Rains movie. Turns out they’re not such hot record-keepers over there in Tangier, everything’s a little hazy in Tangier … Sounds like a great JC Tripper song, right?” He laughed softly, suddenly comfortable with himself.
“It was a JC Tripper song,” I said. “I watched him working on it. The last song he ever wrote. The famous lost valedictory of JC Tripper … it’s a legend because nobody ever knew what happened to it.” I felt a chill along my spine and it wasn’t the air-conditioning.
“That was the whole story all right.” He smiled and pushed his plate away. “ ‘Everything’s Hazy in Tangier.’ Imagine what it would be worth if it ever turned up …”
“Imagine,” I said.
“Everything’s hazy in Tangier,” he said, reciting the words slowly, “or is it really clear … in Tangier … maybe all the haze and smoke and fog … exists in here … in my mind, in the daze and the smoke and the fog … of a mind on fire … in Tangier …
“How do you know those words? Nobody knows those words—”
“You know them,” Rosen said.
“I was there. You weren’t. How, Freddie?”
“It came in the mail, my friend.”
“When did it come in the mail, Freddie?”
“About a month ago. Sucker just came in the mail.”
“What makes you think it’s real?”
“Oh, it was JC’s handwriting. No doubt of it. We had all that checked out.”
“Where was it posted?” My heart was down to about three beats a minute. I wasn’t ready for this. “Who’d had it all these years?”
“One of the secretaries opened it. Put it on my desk. I was out of town, up in Vegas, some damn place. I got back, fuckin’ girl never even put a flag on it. I got to it a couple days later. The envelope was long gone. There was no covering letter, nothing. Just some handwritten sheet music. Oh, it’s a mystery, pal.”
“You told Bechtol?”
“Listen, I’m a good soldier.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“A good soldier gets his marching orders, he marches.”
“Why Bechtol?”
“Marching orders, my man.”
“Who gives you your orders?”
“Who do I work for?” He signaled for the check.
“What is this cagey thing you’re doing?”
“I’m just someone in the middle. I keep thinking about murder … rumors of murder.” He shrugged. “It all scares me. It all comes out of the past and yells ‘boo’ at me and I’m scared. People dyin’ around here … dig?”
“ ‘Rumors of Murder.’ Another JC Tripper platinum hit.”
“He recorded that one, Lee. Man, I don’t like the look in your eyes.”
“ ‘The Look in Your Eyes.’ What are we doing, Freddie? Carrying on a whole damn conversation in JC’s titles? Y’know, Fred—you don’t mind if I call you just plain Fred, do you?—some of the murders are more than rumors … some are absolutely real—”
“I know that. The real murders, those are the scariest of all …”
“Sally Feinman was tortured before she was killed. Do you know why, Fred?”
“Come on, Lee.”
“It couldn’t have been much fun in that cistern out in Pacoima … what if he was still just barely alive when they stuffed him in the cistern? Poor old Shadow.”
“That’s the understatement of the eighties, Lee. And it’s exactly why I am staying as cagey as I can while still being a good little soldier—”
“I’m getting tired of the soldier shtick, okay?”
“Sorry. But it’s fitting as a metaphor. Or I could call myself a pawn. How’s that?”
“We’re talking about my late brother,” I said. “I don’t like any of this—”
“Look on the bright side. Maybe he’s not so late. Maybe JC himself sent the song … maybe he’s gonna come out of hiding after all these years—why not? Crazy dude, JC.”
“JC’s dead,” I said. “Anybody hanging around in those days could have grabbed that song … it was a mess back then.”
“Listen, if that works for you, go with it. I gotta haul ass, man. We gotta pick up the Deuce and get you back to your jalopy.” He eased his bulk along the booth, the buttons of his shirt screaming for mercy.
We picked up Freddie II and listened to his chatter about computers. Neither one of us knew what the hell he was talking about.
When he pulled up next to the old Caddy, Freddie turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re okay, Lee. Really okay. You listened to all my shit, you were very patient with me.”
“Talk about understatement,” I said.
“So I’m gonna give you a little present.”
“No coke, no thanks.”
“Bad stuff,” came from the backseat. “Throw away.”
“Just a name,” Rosen said. “Save you some digging. Cotter Whitney the Third. I’m only a soldier. Cotter Whitney is the commander in chief, you might say.”
Freddie the Deuce was waving to me as they disappeared through the carved gate toward home, toward Sammy the Shit.