Court Street was old town, wop town, cook town, any town. It lay across the top of Bunker Hill and you could find anything there from down-at-heels ex-Greenwich-villagers to crooks on the lam, from ladies of anybody’s evening to County Relief clients brawling with haggard landladies in grand old houses with scrolled porches, parquetry floors, and immense sweeping banisters of white oak, mahogany and Circassian walnut.
THAT WAS HOW Raymond Chandler, the great (and unabashedly politically incorrect) detective-story pioneer had described the place in his own time. His works had poured the foundation for film noir, Ignacio Bozal’s crash course on English as a second language, and incidentally Valentino’s guiltiest pleasure. Some of these dark forays into the abnormal psychology of crime had been based on Chandler’s novels and stories, others were filmed directly from his screenplays; most of the rest bore his influence.
Although Valentino knew the neighborhood well—and as recently as last night’s celebration in the Bradbury Building—he looked forward to returning as a guest of its most famous resident.
There’s nothing rarer than an East L.A. millionaire. That paradox was enough in itself to pique the film archivist’s interest, without the added incentive of an invitation to screen some mysterious property possibly lost for generations. Together, they’d compelled him to cancel his day’s appointments and brave the gangs and carjackers who preyed upon the honest residents to pay the old man a visit.
There, scorning the mansions of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, Ignacio Bozal had bought a city block of modest houses in the largely Mexican-American suburb of Los Angeles. A wall went up around it, sheltering his middle-aged children, grown grandchildren, and great-grandchildren under his benevolent eye. He’d kept the largest home for himself and converted it to make room for his various collections; an example of one of which boated into the curb in front of The Oracle and blew a horn that played the first four notes of the Dragnet theme.
“Boated” sprang to mind the moment Valentino pushed through the brass-framed front door to the sidewalk: The car was more than twenty feet long, most of its length belonging to the hood, which resembled the visor of a medieval knight’s helmet. The cup-shaped headlights were encased in gleaming chromium to match wheel covers the size of hula hoops, and the paint was two-tone, liquid black and royal purple, baked on in so many coats it made a man dizzy staring into the depths of his own reflection.
The next surprise was the driver. Such a rig suggested a chauffeur in livery. Instead, Bozal himself leaned across the front seat from behind the wheel to swing open the door on the passenger’s side. He was dressed casually in an old rust-colored suede jacket, threadbare at the elbows, faded jeans, penny loafers, and a billed cap bearing the logo of what his guest suspected belonged to a Mexican baseball team: a rattlesnake coiled around a bat, with a cigar in its mouth.
“Bugatti Type ’forty-one,” he said as they peeled away from the curb, the motor churning like a powerful dynamo beneath the country block of hood. “The Royale. Only seven ever made, back in ’thirty-one. The kings of Spain and Belgium each had one. That year I had a bike that blew a tire before I rode it the distance from the rear bumper to the front; not that I ever saw one of these babies then.”
Valentino felt swaddled in rich aromatic leather. The old man was a skilled driver, careful but confident. The white-enamel elephant attached to the radiator cap remained rock-steady in the center of the lane. The scenery slid by precisely at the speed limit, according to the gauge in the padded dash. This was what it must have been like to ride in a first-class cabin on the Twentieth Century Limited.
Nearing Bunker Hill, enough of the Victorian homes were still standing to help Chandler find his bearings, but he’d have been nonplussed by the high-rise buildings that had sprung up to cast their shadows on the spires and turrets. They crossed into East L.A., passing Mexican restaurants, corner markets, and long stretches of cinder block sporting gaily colored murals, then purred to a stop before an iron gate in a stucco wall sprayed all over with graffiti. Bozal tilted his head toward the peace signs, hallucinogenic images, and aerosol text in two languages.
“Kids, they gotta have whatchacallit artistic release. I don’t mind it, ’cause I’m behind it.” He punched the horn.
After a short interval the gate opened and a young Hispanic man in a tailored gray uniform stepped outside. Blue-white teeth shone in a brown face. “Hi, Grandpapa!”
“We have a guest, Ernesto.”
“!Sí! Welcome, señor.” He stood aside and they cruised through the opening.
The compound reminded Valentino of a barrio scene in Border Crossing: tawny children in baggy swimsuits frolicking in the spray from an open fire hydrant, substantially built women in light summer dresses sitting on porches, sleek-haired hombres in bright sport shirts smoking cigarettes and conversing in rapid Spanish on the sidewalks. There was plenty of family resemblance to go around. His host had established a colony of his own north of the border, a modern-day Cortez expanding his influence deep into gringo country.
At the end of the block they turned into a circular driveway paved with limestone around a gushing fountain. A motionless parade of exotic automobiles parked bumper-to-bumper formed a horseshoe around the edge. The guest knew little about makes and models, but he was aware that the low-slung convertibles, bus-shaped sedans, high-centered horseless carriages, and slab-sided hardtops covered the history of the motorcar from early days to the Kennedy years. They were enameled in canary yellow, emerald green, candy-apple red, cerulean blue, and gunmetal gray, and all glistening as if they’d been run through a gigantic dishwasher and dipped in molten wax.
“Overflow,” Bozal said, pulling up behind a seven-passenger touring car straight out of the original Scarface (it might well have been in the movie, at that) and setting the brake. “I knocked down five bungalows to make room for a garage and it still wasn’t big enough. I’m waiting for my granddaughter next door to get hitched, then I’ll doze her place and build on. Her fiancé’s got a job waiting in Omaha, for cat’s sake. Maybe I’ll get some good steaks out of the deal.”
The house was the biggest in the compound, although it was by no means palatial; its owner seemed to have had more interest in obtaining room to display his treasures than to loll in the lap of luxury.
“Hello, Grandfather.” A woman in her twenties, pretty but pouty-looking, opened the front door. She wore a red dress, modest in design, but her trim figure, lustrous black hair, and healthy flush under olive-colored skin made it provocative.
Bozal introduced Valentino. “Esperanza, my granddaughter. Not the one who’s deserting me for the Nebraska wilderness. I offered to put her through college, but she insists on working her way to a master’s; in communications, no less. She could be head curator of the Motion Picture Hall of Fame, but she wants to produce a news show on cable.”
“CNN,” she clarified. “C-SPAN would be my next choice. Movies are my grandfather’s thing, not mine; but he’s forgiven me so far as to pay me three times the going wage for answering the door and taking visitors’ coats.” Despite her solemn expression, a merry light glimmered in her eye. Valentino saw something more than idle mischief when their gazes met; but he was off the market: a mantra worth repeating. She swiveled aside for them to pass.
“What’s your poison?” Bozal took up a post behind a sleek white bar with a wall-size mirror at his back. The glittering display of liquor bottles and stemmed glasses slung upside-down from the ceiling might have belonged to a gangster boss’s lair on a 1940s soundstage.
“It’s early for me, thanks.”
“You ain’t had practice.” He poured amber liquid from a cut-glass decanter into a tumbler, squirted in seltzer, and carried his drink down into a sunken living room.
The room was done in neutral tones, a sharp contrast to the warm, vibrant colors that decorated the rest of the neighborhood. It was like stepping from bright glare into shade. The chairs and sofas were upholstered in cushy leather. Above the mantel hung a portrait of a woman with the proud features of a Spanish patrician. She wore jet buttons in her ears and a plain blouse cut low to show off her shoulders. It was as haunting as the painting now in Valentino’s possession, the original centerpiece for the film Laura.
Bozal saw the cast of his glance. “Estrella, my wife. I lost her fifty years ago. Damn careless, if you ask me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She wouldn’t know regret if it bit her on the nose. She’s responsible for everything you lay eyes on here. All I did was supply the juice. Wasn’t for her, I’d be one of them parasites you see in the country clubs, palling around with cheap broads in expensive perfume.” He lifted his glass to the image and sipped.
“But why East L.A.?”
“Might as well ask why Beverly Hills? There, I’d be just a spick with money, probably earned pushing drugs; a racist neighbor with unlimited credit is still a son of a bitch in a sheet. Here, I’m part of the community, something bigger than me.”
They sat facing each other in matching armchairs.
“I can’t thank you enough for Laura,” Valentino said. “It will occupy the place of honor in the lobby of The Oracle.”
“Just don’t fall in love with it. That gag only works in movies, and then only through the closing credits. The audience rips it apart on the way home.”
“Not Laura.”
Bozal aimed a porcelain smile over the edge of his glass. It was as vaguely sinister as his eccentric use of the English language. “Okay, sure. But lay off the thanks till you see my end of the deal. You may want to give it back.”