“YOU’D THINK you’d have told me you were married.”
Front walkway of apartment C, Diablo Bonita, Lovely and Paez bake in the midday heat with a mute boot detective who just takes notes, his hat cocked back.
Cops going in and out like Union Station.
They’ve hashed through the basics already. Name: Isla Lovely, née Schollenberger. Age: twenty-nine. Only child. Hometown: Grand Junction, Colorado. Occupation—
—But there’s a lot that Lovely simply doesn’t know.
“How long?”
“Eleven years, in August.”
Paez whistles. “Holy mackerel. How long since you’d seen her?”
“I don’t know.” In fact, he does. “Seven.”
“Seven. Years?”
Lovely shrugs. “I got busy. Time flies.”
“You didn’t divorce her, she didn’t ask for one?”
Lovely doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. He doesn’t want to think about it. He wants to rewind a couple hours and give Johnny back the note she wrote and maybe—“It’s a long story, not . . . relevant.”
“Relevant to what? This? Somebody shooting her? Well, guess what, my friend? You do not get to decide what is or is not relevant to a homicide.”
Lovely looks at him, raw. “Just give me a little space, Henry, I got another appointment I need to attend—”
“No sir. I’munna need you to come downtown and—”
Lovely cuts him off: “What happened to you? You used to be a good guy, now you’re a prick.”
“I was always a prick,” Paez says. “I just hadn’t made sergeant yet.”
“Okay, well, how about I save us both some time, here, Detective. You’re gonna ask me if I have any idea who might want her dead, and I’m gonna tell you I don’t even know who she is anymore—you’ll imply I’m a suspect on account of maybe she threw me over and I got jealous, I can tell you how far up your ass to put that idea and then maybe we’ll circle a few times like a couple of bantam roosters, but it won’t get us anywhere, so eventually you’ll tell me, ‘Stay in town and out of my investigation, Lovely,’ and I can swear to you—swear to you—that I have no interest in solving this one.”
Paez studies him. “No interest in solving your own wife’s murder.”
“Nope.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah.” Paez starts to turn away—
“But if I was,” Lovely says to the sergeant’s back, “interested, I mean, in solving, or at least taking a stab at understanding what happened here”—waiting until Paez turns to face him again—“I’d start with the guy she was sleeping with.”
Paez squints, like some kind of burrowing rodent emerging in daylight. “Thought you said you hadn’t even seen her in—”
“Dents.” Lovely lets this hang for a moment, petulant, he knows, but wanting to take some of the piss out of Paez. “On either side of the bed,” he adds, finally, and advises, “Go check. I’ll wait. But make it snappy, there’s this thing I gotta do.”
“Like I said, Love, I’munna need you downtown to get your official statement typed up—”
“I will. After my thing. Go. Check.”
There follows a stubborn repose, in which Paez, not wanting to appear too eager to see if Lovely’s right, studies some scuffing on the side of his wingtips.
In the bedroom, where the body is already covered with a coroner’s sheet, Lovely knows Paez will find in the sheets and feather mattress padding, under the swirl of covers, two shallow human-sized depressions he noticed before he saw Isla’s body. Dents, side by side.
The day’s gray glare has Paez putting on sunglasses when he comes back out to Lovely and the note-taking junior detective left behind to make sure Lovely didn’t leave.
“Now you’re seeing dents.”
“Or snow angels,” Lovely says drily. “Take your pick.”
“It never snows in L.A.”
“Process of elimination, I guess.”
“So who was she sleeping with?”
Lovely gestures: no idea. Jams his hands in his pockets and starts walking back to the street. “It never snows in L.A.”
“Yeah, well . . . it sure gets cold enough.” Then Paez calls after him, “Hey, what time should I expect you? Hey. Hey! Lovely—?!”
The actress is standing barefoot in the open doorway of her flat, chaste and demure now in a cotton swim cover-up due to all the leering cops and consternation, although the front’s tied loose; she tilts her cat’s-eye shades down and idly follows Lovely’s retreat.
Back in his Morris—it smells like old baked leather and wool—he rolls the window down, puts the key in the ignition. But just sits, staring out at nothing, overcome.
It was during lunch, ninth grade, the first time he saw her, across a crowded cafeteria at Goddard Junior High. They’d been in school together since fourth, when her family moved west from Chicago, but this was the first time he saw her, really saw her, in that way a boy can see a girl; she took his breath away and, to be truthful, he never really got it back.
Three weeks, it took, to work up the courage to say something.
The first time he touched her face was electric.
The last time—he can still conjure the ache of her rejection. It doesn’t seem possible that she is never to be touched again.
He closes his eyes. And breathes.
Opens them again as he becomes conscious of something he’s seen but not registered: a two-tone Hudson Commodore, with a square-faced, good-looking man inside, confident chin, wheat-colored hair piled haystack high, hands hooked over the wheel and gazing out at all the activity spilling from apartment C of the Diablo Bonita.
After a while, Mr. Handsome swings his head to the Morris and locks eyes with Lovely. Realizes he’s been made. Starts his car, drops it into gear, guns the engine, and pulls quickly from the curb, cutting a sharp U-turn before heading away.
Lovely has his car already idling. He allows the Hudson half a block, then eases out after it, but a big black Buick sedan cuts him off from a side street. Screeches to a stop, blocking Lovely’s right-of-way, and a white guy in a dark suit and aviator glasses angles his square, pink head out the driver’s-side window like a turtle from its shell and shouts: “Why don’tcha watch where you’re going?”
By the time they back up and untangle, the Hudson is gone. Lovely watches the Buick cruise past, the turtle man expressionless, not even giving him a second look, and in his rearview mirror Lovely sees the U.S. GOVERNMENT license plates that scream federal cop.
Hudson has a babysitter.
—
LOVELY HAD HOPED LILY HIMES was wrong about her nephew. He’d tailed him from the colored projects at Jordan Downs north through midcity and Chinatown to the wilds of Elysian Park, and then parked and followed on foot, taking the winding overgrown paths into the lengthening shadows of Sulphur Canyon, and the Mexican-American squatter towns in Chavez Ravine, where he understands, now, not only what business the kid is about to transact, but that it is not going to end well without some proactive interdiction.
At least it gives Lovely something to think about besides Isla for a while.
The young man with the ebony face answers to Oscar, and the gabardine suit stands out starkly, as if surely a mistake against the pale dust of the Ravine. He waits near a ragged picket of abandoned mailboxes, mopping his face with a cotton handkerchief and sipping from a bottle of Coca-Cola. Two dirt roads intersect here, equidistant from the ramshackle ruins of vacant housing clusters built over the years by Calexican families from salvaged bricks and lumber, and emptied recently under eminent domain by the Los Angeles Housing Authority.
Only a few die-hard residents have resisted relocation, and two of them are leaning over the balcony of a clapboard house high on the southern hillside to look down at the colored man, pretty sure that he isn’t there for the scenery.
Sure enough, a green Chevy coupe crests the rise from the Silver Lake side and rattles down the steep gravel slope toward the intersection, grinding gears.
Lovely comes out of the shade of a half-collapsed carnecería and starts to walk briskly up the road. The morning’s brume didn’t burn off; a dying, dyspeptic sun bakes out its last behind the low clouds that cloak the canyon, heat trapped between the hills wafts weird thermals devoid of any real breeze.
The gabardine delinquent is in deep discussion with a trio of Mexicans in shirtsleeves and felt hats. It’s civil. There is a proffer of money and an exchange of what can only be a paper-wrapped brick of marijuana. Handshakes all around, some final small talk and an intent to conclude and depart, the free market at work, supply meets demand, everybody happy.
Lovely picks up his pace. Unfortunately, two big black Cadillac coupes blow past and dust him with their backwash, just what he’s been worried about, skidding up and hard men spilling out of every door, some with guns, before Oscar Himes or his suppliers can manage a getaway.
Chavez Ravine is still Mickey Cohen territory, still the go-to spot these days for bootleggers and illicit transactions despite (or maybe the genius of it is because of) the Police Academy training grounds right next door, and now here is Mickey’s muscle, no doubt all thinking that three brown faces and one black one will not, in the scheme of things, be missed if they simply disappear from God’s green earth and are made an example of.
Plenty of unmarked graves to keep them company.
The Mexicans are put on their knees, their money thrown to scatter into the mustard weed, while Lily’s nephew is stripped of the dope and struck with a crowbar swung by a Hollywood B-movie-gorgeous, curly-haired man who seems to be in charge of Mickey’s crew.
“Johnny Stomp!” Lovely has recognized him: a former Marine and putative Brentwood gift shop owner who’s become Mickey Cohen’s enforcer since Cohen went to jail, and who harbors a secret crush on Lana Turner, for whom MGM recently hired Lovely to mediate.
The curly-haired man shades his eyes, straddling the fetal curl of the black man bleeding on the ground beneath him. “Lovely? Geez Louise. What brings you up here?”
A squat muscle monkey in an ill-fitting brown suit has cocked his pistol and put it to the back of the nearest Mexican’s head. Lovely keeps coming, friendly. “Day care.” He gestures to Lily’s nephew. “Turn my back, he’s got his track shoes on, hightailing it up here for some reefer madness with these mariachis.”
Johnny Stompanato frowns as all this new information rattles through his reptile brain. He looks at the Mexicans doubtfully. Mariachis?
“They open every Tuesday and Thursday at the Fall-Out,” Lovely lies, adding, “free tacos,” and arriving, hands casual in his pockets, finding the trigger of the .38 on his right side, in case he needs it. “Kid is Lily Himes’s sister’s boy.” He uses his chin to indicate the gabardine victim at Stompanato’s feet.
“The singer?”
“That’s her.” Lovely looks down at the kid. “I hope that tire iron knocked some sense into you, Oscar.”
Johnny Stomp’s monkey snorts, impatient. He looks keen to put a bullet into something.
“They’re on Mickey’s turf,” Stompanato says.
“True enough,” says Lovely. “But that trumpet player”—meaning the man with the gun to his head, and Lovely goes all-in with the bluff—“he happens to live right up the hill there, one of the last families holding out against eviction—and that’s his dad and his uncle looking down at us right now, so if you whack him, you’re gonna have to go whack them, too, which won’t be easy, as they have the high ground, not to mention that I doubt Mickey’ll to be too thrilled to hear about you starting a war with the White Fence Gang.”
The decision is slow coming. Lovely starts calculating the odds he can survive a close-quarter firefight against four armed men with his six-shot revolver, but Johnny Stomp steps back and waves for his monkey to put the pistol away. “I appreciate that you didn’t queer things with Lana when I had that misunderstanding at Culver Studios,” Stompanato murmurs low to Lovely, so that his crew won’t hear it.
“Love is a lonely journey, Johnny.”
“A-fucking-men.” Stompanato, losing interest, glances down at Oscar Himes and points with the crowbar. “He’ll be okay. I cracked him in the one place I couldn’t hurt him.”
It’s meant to be a joke; Lovely has to work a bit to supply the laugh. Cohen’s crew climbs back into their Hudsons and, as the cars jockey around to head back the way they came, Johnny Stomp leans out his window toward Lovely and confides, “She’s got the hots for me, Lovely. Nobody believes it, but you and me, we know. Just a matter of time, baby. And I am a patient man.” His Cheshire leer lingers in the dust clouds long after the cars are gone.
Lana Turner, Lovely muses, shaking his head. In your dreams, Johnny Stomp. Only in your dreams.
Lily’s nephew is back on his feet. Glassy-eyed, thoughts all thickened, his bell rung, slick red blood lurid down the side of his face. But the paper brick of dope has made its way back into his pocket.
“You’re welcome,” Lovely says.
Oscar just licks the blood from his lips.
The Mexicans brush themselves off, rattling in Spanish as they bend and stoop to retrieve their money from the hillside weeds. Lovely doesn’t know the language well enough, or he’d say something, warn them to keep their business east of the river, but as they return to their car, the one who’d had the gun pressed against his head turns to Lovely and asks, still pale, with no accent, not joking, “How did you know I played the trumpet?”
Now Lovely laughs for real. But there’s no joy in it.
And only after they’ve driven off does he turn to discover that Lily’s nephew is already halfway to the ridge, running, too far and too fast to chase down, trailing a lean, lanky shadow, coattails and silk tie flapping back dismissively in a mocking contempt.
—
AT the Westwood Veterans Administration Hospital tucked tight to the runnels of the ragged Santa Monica Mountains half an hour’s drive from downtown, Lovely’s Morris exits Wilshire, climbs toward the Wadsworth Theatre, curls east on Eisenhower to Bonsall, and floats between the concrete-block buildings filled with forgotten casualties of war. The stolid marine layer has soughed back in over the West Side like a thin paste, ghosting the eucalyptus and live oak, giving the scatter of new Brentwood Arts and Crafts bungalows and Deco apartments that litter the near distance an aura of geometric dream.
Lovely’s Florsheims click-clack on the freshly waxed tile of Building T-88. Light from a window on the opposite splits the hallway half in shadow, and against the wall, shrouded, sits a gangly Korean War vet in a wheelchair, short sleeves, arms amputated, a futile pack of cigarettes in his lap.
“Got ya knock-knock joke, Kilroy.”
Lovely stops, comes back, picks up the veteran’s crumpled pack of Chesterfields and shakes a cigarette out. He puts it in the man’s mouth and flicks the chrome lighter he always has in his pocket, even though Lovely doesn’t smoke, the one he got in the service and keeps for good luck.
“Nucular rib-tickler.”
Lovely is game. “Go.”
“Knock-knock.”
“Who’s there?”
The armless veteran says nothing. Just levels his eyes at Lovely and smokes. After a moment, deadpan: “Get it?”
Lovely nods. “Yeah, I get it. That’s a good one.” He first heard it in Baghdad, in ’51. He puts the coffin nails on the vet’s lap and keeps walking.
“Nuthin’!” The vet laughs, yellow teeth bared, hacking smoke. “No answer! Gonesville, baby . . .”
Room 123 contains a precisely tucked bed, a wooden dresser, no decorations, and, at a metal desk, pecking laboriously on a typewriter, his rounded back to the open doorway that Lovely has entered through, a man Lovely’s age but those same years lived perhaps twice as hard.
“There’s whole species that evolve faster than you can type, Buddy,” Lovely says.
“A-a-and, tragically, you’re not a m-member of any of them,” the man at the desk rattles out, without turning. His typewriter is odd: six keys, a palm-sized space bar. The Perkins Brailler. A sheaf of blank pages with little dots pressed into them is neatly stacked beside it.
“Still favor your Heaven Hill rye?”
Buddy Dale turns to face Lovely, blind. A big crimson scar is slashed across his once-beautiful face, more or less horizontally. He wears the dark glasses, his hair is short, slicked back carefully, his shoulders broad, muscular once, his skin almost translucent. Just slightly off: “I stopped drinking in ’49. They said it would help with my m-m-memory. Maybe it did, I can’t remember.” It’s like Buddy’s brain has a couple parts missing. The stutter, the loops.
Lovely stares sadly at his old friend, remembering the times in high school when all he wanted to be was half as cool as Buddy Dale. And Buddy smiles, crooked. As if he can feel Lovely thinking about him. The awkward silence aches. Lovely has already pulled halfway out of his inside coat pocket the bottle of whiskey he bought in Westwood; now he starts to push it back in, but—
“Go ahead, put that pint on the bureau, though. I’ll try to b-bribe my nurse with it, maybe get an extra s-sponge bath.”
Brush, comb, sundries all lined up so Buddy knows where they are. And, incongruously, a Rolleiflex. Lovely puts the Heaven Hill next to them, on the dresser.
“What’s this? You got a camera?”
“I like taking pictures.”
The contradiction of the blind man with the twin-lens Rollei automat poses its own question, but Buddy just shrugs, as if sensing what Lovely is thinking: Don’t ask.
“We blew the Bikinis to kingdom come,” Lovely says, stalling the reason he’s come. He picks up the camera. There’s film in it.
“Yeah. Three months ago. I heard, I still got ears,” Buddy says. “H-bomb. Seven letters bigger than A.”
“Bigger and better,” Lovely riffs. “American ingenuity. Yankee know-how.” Whatever rapport they once had is stale.
“And I heard you were back,” Buddy says, cutting to the quick. “Three y-years ago. Guess you forgot how to g-g-get here.”
Lovely takes a guilty breath, replacing the camera, staring at himself in the mirror, not at his friend. “Look, Buddy, I know—”
“—I heard you were a private dick, too,” Buddy talks over him, his voice loud and forced, “which kind of makes sense, I s’pose, for a guy who never runs out of questions.”
Turning back, Lovely catches sight of Buddy awkwardly stuffing something into the top drawer of the desk.
“What do you come wanting, is my question. Three years and nothing, then, all of a sudden here you are with a b-b-bottle of hooch. Gets a man wondering.”
“Isla’s dead.”
The silence that follows this statement says everything. Buddy’s face collapses. Lovely feels a weight pressing down all over again, same one he took on at the Diablo Bonita Apartments, when he looked at the body on the bedroom floor and understood who it was.
“Shot through the heart.” And Lovely wonders: Was that his voice, saying it?
“Oh, God, when?”
“I don’t know. Last night? I found her in her apartment this morning. Cops were already there.”
“You?”
Lovely resents the implication. “Yeah.”
Tears leak from Buddy’s ruined eyes. He’s overwhelmed, his voice frogged. “Why would somebody want to kill Isla? Why would somebody want to hurt Isla? She’s a saint. God help me, she is a saint.”
“Was.”
“Goddamn it.”
Outside the window, on the lawn, two old soldiers are playing catch. A sharp leather smack as a ball hits a mitt. Lovely watches Buddy twist in his chair and stand up, with nowhere to go. His hands flutter out from his sides, and settle. He searches for Lovely with sightless eyes. Wipes the end of his nose with his shirt cuff.
“She wanted to see me, Buddy, but I don’t know what about. Do you?”
Buddy orients to Lovely’s voice and crosses. His movements are exact: six steps to the bed, half a turn without touching it, and sit. His head angles at Lovely, his hands grip and ungrip the metal frame. “We split up, me and her. Six months ago. I haven’t heard a hide nor hair since.”
Buddy was always a good liar; Lovely studies his friend now and senses he’s not telling the whole truth, but isn’t ready to press it. He pushes away from the bureau and crosses to the desk, Buddy tracing the sound of his movement with dead eyes.
“Your idea or hers?”
Buddy hesitates. “Let’s call it mutual consent.”
“Let’s not call it anything,” Lovely snaps. “Let’s tell it to me straight. Or does she just still keep her furniture all nice and lined up for old times’ sake?”
Buddy shakes his head, back and forth, back and forth, a metronome. “She moved on, Ry. I’m damaged goods. She m-m-moved on from me, just like she did with you.”
This silence cuts deep, honed on the tangled past.
Coldly, Lovely says, “No, I’m pretty sure what happened with me was a onetime deal.” It’s mean, and he knows it, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind as he reaches down and silently eases the desk drawer open to see what Buddy stowed inside it. Buddy stands up again, agitated, still with nowhere to go.
“We didn’t mean for it to happen,” he protests. “And you could’ve—”
“—Why was she calling me?” Lovely asks again, with no interest in following Buddy down Bad Memory Lane.
“She loved you,” Buddy says.
“She loved us both,” says Lovely, and knows it’s true. “Or whoever was in front of her. Cherchez la femme.”
“Knock off the frog talk, will ya?” Buddy lurches, walks, six quick steps, reaches, finds and slams the desk drawer shut, almost snapping Lovely’s fingers in it. This brings him right in Lovely’s face, sightlessly searching for Lovely’s eyes, as if it would matter.
“I didn’t come to argue about what did or did not happen seven years ago,” Lovely says to him, contrite. He wants to mean it.
“Why are you here, then?”
“To tell you she’s gone. I figured you’d want to know.”
Silence.
Lovely adds, “I didn’t want you to hear it from some cop coming to see if you have an alibi for last night.”
“Blind ain’t enough?”
“Or whatever. You know.”
Another silence.
“Just that?”
“Yes.”
Smackpop of the ball in the glove. The rattle of a lawn mower starting up. A nurse’s rubber soles squeak down the corridor. Lovely feels like he can’t get his breath. The air in Buddy’s room has become thick, like the Arroyo Seco Parkway at morning rush, bitter and acid and foul. What is it they call it? Smog?
Or, Lovely thinks, the unrelenting regret.
“What’s it like outside?”
“Oh, you know.”
Buddy wipes at his eyes with the back of his hands, voice breaking: “You’ve got to f-find out what happened to her, Rylan.”
Lovely shakes his head, testy. “Why’s everybody so sure I’m interested?”
“Because,” Buddy sparks right back at him, “th-that’s who you are, isn’t it?”
No, Lovely hears himself screaming, but he says nothing. No, not this time.
This silence hunkers down, stubborn. Softer, sadder. Angry or lost, Lovely can’t tell anymore, Buddy repeats himself: “That’s just who you are. White hat and everything.”
Lovely wants to explain to his friend how wrong he is. Instead he walks out, hoping he won’t have to come back.