CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

The Tar Pits was a two-story apartment house built around a large patio and swimming pool. While hardly luxurious, it had been well constructed and was kept in good condition, attractive, comfortable. It was a co-op for people over sixty, kind of a geriatric version of a swinging singles building, though perhaps a little less sedate than that.

The place was cooperative in much more than the legal sense. The people there helped one another out, contributed their energies and particular abilities—legal, medical, organizational, culinary, whatever—to the common good. The goal was self-sufficiency, and as a group, having lots of different skills and backgrounds to draw on, they managed pretty well. At least they didn’t need a retirement village social director to plan a jolly afternoon of pottery-making or to remind them how much fun they were having. The group was there if someone wanted it, but avoidable if someone didn’t. It was called the Tar Pits because, as the residents said, it was full of fossils.

O’Brien and I each knew a couple of people who lived there, and over the years we’d met a lot more. If I hated to go to Sunset Grove because it gave me the creeps, the Tar Pits was always full of surprises. I’d go there and find that half a dozen people were planning a trek in the Himalayas. Or that after thirty-five years of marriage each, the Callahans and the Schultzes had decided to switch partners for a while. Or that Mrs. Pitman had moved in with Mr. Andrews, Mrs. Jenkins, and Miss Tucker to form some bizarre kind of ménage à quatre, and that Mr. Andrews strutted around like a rooster and was known as the Sultan. It all seemed to work out well for those involved, but I gathered that some of these arrangements were profoundly upsetting for the children, who found both their parents and their own children living what they considered to be, at best, highly unconventional lives.

Basically, though, these relationships merely reflected certain realities: that there was a need for companionship; that there were three times as many old women as old men; that pensions could be lost if an old widow became a new wife; that propriety somehow didn’t seem so important, once you realized there might not be a tomorrow; that a person tended to regret what he didn’t do, not what he did do. Yeah, when you got to your sixties, you usually had a good grip on reality, if nothing else.

Or some of us did. Others of us still played cops and robbers. Shit.

“Well, look who’s here!” a voice said as we walked onto the patio.

“Our own Sam Spade!” a second voice said.

“And the fuzz. Oh, oh!” said a third.

“Jesus! The fruit salad,” O’Brien said.

The voices belonged to three guys sitting under an umbrella advertising Cinzano. I had known them from way back, from one of the studios. They had been in make-up, costumes, and set design, and had been together since the days when their pleasure had been a crime. More than a couple of times I had gotten them—individually and collectively—out of some ugly little messes. Though forty years together had made them look like triplets—all neat, pink, plump, and seeming to be fifteen years younger than they were—one tended to be outgoing, always ready for action. Another complained a lot. And the third was quiet, often nervous in a protective kind of way. Obviously, everyone had always called them Itchy, Bitchy, and Twitchy. I wasn’t sure if they’d been given the names because they fit, or if they’d grown to fit their names.

“Would you boys like a Margaret?” Itchy said.

“I keep telling you it’s called a Marguerita, you fool,” Bitchy said.

“And I keep telling you I only make the damn things. I never claimed to be good at languages.”

“Now, now,” Twitchy said.

“Shut up and drink your Margaret, and stop clucking like an old lady,” Bitchy said.

O’Bee and I turned down another offer of drinks.

“You like my new eye shadow, Jake?” Itchy said.

“Oh, is that what it is? I thought maybe Bitchy’d hit you.”

“If only he would. He’s all talk and no action, that one. It’s called ‘Midnight in Paris.’ What do you think?”

“I remember it well.”

“I think,” Bitchy said, “that it makes you look like the model of Joan Crawford in the Hollywood Wax Museum.”

“Nobody asked you. You’re just jealous, because you have those little pink eyes and if you wore make-up, you’d look like a queer rabbit.”

“At least I don’t look like an over-the-hill drag queen.”

“That’s not fair. I’m not the one with the dress what’s-her-name wore in Gone with the Wind, hanging in my closet.”

“Well, I don’t wear it.”

“Well, I hate to think what you do do with it.”

“Uh, Jake—” O’Brien said, poking me hard in the ribs with his elbows

“Right.” I rubbed the spot. “Is Leo around?”

“I think he’s upstairs.”

“Okay. O’Bee, why don’t you tell these three what we want?”

“You want what they all want,” Bitchy said.

“Not this time, we don’t. O’Bee?”

“Thanks a whole fucking lot.”

“Don’t worry, Patrick,” Twitchy said. “We won’t bite.”

“Well, maybe only a little,” Itchy said.

The three of them started to giggle. As I walked away, I heard O’Brien call, “Hurry up, Jake.”

I laughed. The three had been playing this routine so long, I doubted if they or anyone else knew what was an act and what was for real. Never having tried to hide anything, they forced everyone to accept them on their own terms. That some people didn’t was one of the reasons I’d had to bail them out from time to time in the past. Outsiders their whole lives, they never seemed to notice the isolation of old age. If anything, it had been liberating—a new license to outrage, new preconceptions to shake. They were something, all right.

I knocked on the door to 212.

“Jacob! Come in.”

Leo Kessler was the only person who called me that, but he was also the only person still around who’d known me when I was a Spanovic. We went back so far, it was scary. Back to the neighborhood, to college, and then to Paris. After that our paths split, with Leo going on to Oxford, Cambridge, and a long and distinguished academic career, while I chose to associate with a slightly different class of people, like George the Roach and Slimy Solly Wiseman.

We lost track of one another for nearly thirty years, until he came out to teach in California, and we’d kept in touch since then. It was important for both of us to maintain contact with someone who knew who we had been so long ago, a link to a past that was rapidly ceasing to be even a memory. At the same time, though, it made us kind of uncomfortable, because we each somehow represented the other’s unrealized potential.

I went into the book-filled apartment. So many books that it seemed like there were no walls, only rows and rows of books in half a dozen languages, from the floor to the ceiling. I thought about my stacks of lurid paperbacks.

“Jacob, you’re looking as disreputable as ever, which I take to be a good sign.”

In the decades between Paris and California Leo acquired a vaguely British accent that was still with him, and that I found goddamn incredible for someone from my neighborhood.

“And as always,” I said, “you’re looking like you made a wrong turn thirty years and three thousand miles away from here.”

“You mean I’m wearing a tie.”

“Right.”

Actually, if anyone ever looked like the Central Casting idea of what he should be, it was Leo Kessler, Professor Emeritus of Literature. He was short and trim, in a brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a solid brown vest, a stiff, gleaming white shirt, and a carefully hand-tied dark-green and white polka-dot bow tie. Other than funeral directors, Leo must’ve been the only person in Southern California who wore a jacket and tie all the time.

I kidded him about it, but I couldn’t imagine him any other way. With his glossy white hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and highly polished little shoes, he was as neat and precise as the sentences he wrote in the authoritative scholarly essays that earned him his reputation. He had lots of little widows working themselves into lavender frenzies over him, but as far as I knew he was no more active in that regard than I was. At least, I thought somewhat meanly, I sure as hell hoped he wasn’t.

“You keep your nifty little tie on when you went to that beach?”

Leo smiled. “You heard about our excursion. Sorry to disappoint you, Jacob, but I did not participate. Living in the Tar Pits has certainly loosened me up, but, uh—”

“It hasn’t entirely untied you?” I helped out.

“That’s one way of putting it, yes. You know, Jacob, despite that, I sometimes wish that I knew back then”— he gestured vaguely over his shoulder with his hand— “what I’ve learned in the last few years.”

I shook my head. “Madness lies that way.”

“I know. But sometimes it’s hard not to want to correct the past. Especially when it seems, more and more, much closer than the present.” He made a sound of disgust. “But enough, right? You know all that.”

Did I ever.

I took a deep breath. “I’ve got a little bit of the present that might interest some of the people here.”

“Oh?”

Leo was one of the unofficial leaders in the Tar Pits, and I quickly told him what I wanted. That I needed help checking out some cars, finding out whether the color was light or dark, and who owned or drove it. I didn’t tell him why, just that I needed to know. Again, I wanted to keep quiet as-much of the situation as possible. If loose lips sank ships, Itchy, Bitchy, and Twitchy could put the whole Sixth Fleet on the bottom.

Leo looked a little disbelieving, then he shook his head and chuckled. “You’re still at it, aren’t you? You know, Jacob, you always amused—maybe even amazed—me. You were an intelligent, well-educated man, much more so than most of the tenured colleagues I’ve known, yet you chose to live like and with thugs. Incredible.”

“Gee, and I always thought you were the aberrant one.”

“And you’re still doing it.”

“Once a thug, always a thug.”

“Forgive me, but I say this as a friend. Are you really up to it?”

“Of course not. If I were, do you think I’d be trying to enlist the aid of the old croakers who live in this place? Come on, Leo, cut it out. I didn’t come for advice. Only to find out whether anyone here’d be interested.”

“Are you serious? The chance to play sleuth? You’ll have to beat them off with a stick.”

“You know, it’s not all that interesting. Basically, it’s just a matter of waiting around, as inconspicuously as they can, until they spot the car, and, if it’s dark colored, the person or people connected with it. Then they call in. That’s all.”

“Is there any danger?”

“Only if they doze off and miss their bus stop. At most they might have to use a bit of ingenuity to find out what I need. You know, go up to a house and pretend they have the wrong address, so they can get a look at whoever owns the car. That kind of thing.”

“That should be no problem. We’ve learned to become fairly ingenious around here. How many people do you want?”

“As many as you can get. There are about two hundred cars to check out and very little time.”

Leo nodded. “I’ll start on it right away. I should be able to get you lots of help. I may have to somewhat enhance the way it sounds, though. A group here recently completed a class in self-defense, and some of them have been walking around with chips on their shoulders, just dying to try out what they’ve learned.”

I groaned inwardly, seeing some wild-eyed old geezer threatening to judo-chop someone unless he came clean. “Please, Leo. The idea is to do this quietly.”

Just then I heard hoots of raucous laughter coming from the courtyard, followed by O’Bee’s rather desperate cry of “Jake!”

Leo and I looked at each other. “Well, as quietly as possible,” I said.

I gave him the lists of license numbers and addresses, and explained in detail what I wanted and how we’d work it.

Another cry of “Jake!” from down below.

“I’d better get going.” I pulled out two of Sal’s C-notes. “This’ll cover bus fares, gas, whatever.”

Leo stared at me, then took the bills. “Oh, Jacob,” he sighed.

I got downstairs in time to rescue a grateful O’Brien from a complicated story involving a vat of Crisco and the old Hollywood Stars baseball team. As I’d expected, Itchy, Bitchy, and Twitchy were delighted to help, and said they’d get some other friends involved as well. O’Bee muttered something about every hairdresser in Hollywood being on the case. Even though we left them happily discussing where they could get summer-weight trench coats, I was confident that they’d be serious when it counted.

O’Brien and I took a very roundabout route back to my place, and managed to locate three of the cars on the list. One was light brown, one was a bilious green, and the third, while the right shade of red, belonged to a forty-five-year-old home economics teacher.

That left only two hundred and eight.

Progress.