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Da
Brown burped and said, “Why should I tell you?”
Da
“I feed three times a day, officer. Snitching gives me an appetite.”
Da
Da
The bass man took a deep breath. “I gigged pickup with Marty, back when he called himself the Horn of Plenty. Hunger huts out in the Valley when Ventura Boulevard was a fuckin’ beanfield. Half the boys toked sweet lucy, half took the needle route. Marty was strung like a fuckin’ dog.”
So far, his seven-dollar story was ru
“Weeell, Marty pushed reefers—not too good, since I heard he did time for it, and he was a righteous boss mothafuckin’ burglar. All the pickup boys that was strung was doin’ it. They’d grab purses off of barstools and tables, get the people’s addresses and swipe their house keys while the bartender kept them drinkin’. One set you’d have no drummer, one set no trumpet, and so forth, ‘cause they was utilizizin’ their inside ski
Righteous new stuff—even to an ex-car thief cop who thought he knew most of the angles. “What years are you talking about, Chester? Think hard.”
Brown consulted his Listerine. “I’d say this was goin’ on from summer of ‘43 to maybe sometime in ‘44.”
Goines copped his second marijuana beef in April of ‘44. “Did he work alone?”
“You mean on the burglarizizin’?”
“Right. And did he have ru
Chester Brown said, “ ‘Cept for this one kid, the Horn of Plenty was a righteous loner. He had this sidekick, though—a white blondy kid, tall and shy, loved jazz but couldn’t learn to play no instrument. He’d been in a fire and his face was all covered up in bandages like he was the fuckin’ mummy. Just a fuckin’ kid— maybe nineteen, twenty years old. Him and Marty pulled a righteous fuckin’ fuckload of burglaries together.”
Da
“I du
“I was getting to that. You got any ideas?”
Brown shook his head. “Marty always stayed to himself. Never socializized with the boys out of the club.”
Da
“Say what?”
“Queer, fruit, homo! Did he fucking like boys!”
Brown killed the bottle of Listerine and wiped his lips. “You don’t gots to shout, and that’s a nasty thing to say about somebody never did you harm.”
Da
The bass man opened his instrument case. There was no fiddle inside, only bottles of Listerine Mouthwash. Chester Brown cracked the cap on one and took a long, slow drink. He said, “That’s for Marty, ‘cause I ain’t the fool you think I am, and I know he’s dead. And he wasn’t no queer. He may not have been much for trim, but he sure as fuck wasn’t no fuckin’ fruitfly.”
Da
A buzz to the West Hollywood Station switchboard got him a pouty conversation with Karen Hiltscher, who said that the four long shots from the sex offender files proved to be just that—a toss of their jail records revealed that none of the men had O+ blood. Administrators had called in from both San Quentin and Lexington State Hospital; they said that Marty Goines was an institutional loner, and his counselor at Lex stated that he was assigned a Fed case worker in LA—but hadn’t reported to him yet, and left no word about where he would be staying when he got to Los Angeles. Even though the lead was probably a big nothing, Da
At just after 1:00 P.M. there was nothing he could do but pound familiar pavement one more time. Da
In a famous essay, Maslick described a technique he had developed while undergoing analysis with Sigmund Freud. It was called Man Camera, and involved screening details from the perpetrator’s viewpoint. Actual camera angles and tricks were employed; the investigator’s eyes became a lens capable of zooming in and out, freezing close-ups, selecting background motifs to interpret crime-scene evidence in an aesthetic light. Da
It took long moments for him to calm down, to get it right. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday; he’d postponed his bourbon ration in order to tread the Strip clear-headed. Hitting late-night clubs and restaurants with questions on a tall, gray-haired man New Year’s would be straightforward police work to keep him chilled.