The Big Nowhere

“A house? An apartment?”

Clean Shirt piped in: “Little shack with all these statues in front.” He twirled a finger and pointed to his head. “The mother is crazy. Loca grande.”

Buzz sighed. “That’s all I get for fifteen scoots and my show?”

Javier said, “Every vato in the Heights hates those cabróns, ask them.”

Clean Shirt said, “We could make up some shit, you could pay us for that.”

Buzz said, “Try to stay alive,” and drove to 4th and Evergreen.

The lawn was a shrine.

Jesus statues were lined up facing the Street; there was a stable made out of kid’s Lincoln Logs behind them, a dog turd reposing in baby J.C.’s manger. Buzz walked up to the porch and rang the bell; he saw the Virgin Mary on an end table. The front of her flowing white gown bore an inscription: “Fuck me.” Buzz made a snap deduction—Mr. and Mrs. Benavides couldn’t see too well.

An old woman opened the door. “Quién?”

Buzz said, “Police, ma’am. And I don’t speak Spanish.”

The ginch fingered a string of beads around her neck. “I speak Inglés. Is about Sammy?”

“Yes, ma’am. How’d you know that?”

The old girl pointed to the wall above a chipped brick fireplace. A devil had been drawn there—red suit, horns and trident. Buzz walked over and scoped him out. A photo of a Mex kid was glued where his face should be, and a line of Jesus statues was looking up from the ledge, giving him the evil eye. The woman said, “My son Sammy. Communisto. Devil incarnate.”

Buzz smiled. “It looks like you’re well protected, ma’am. You’ve got Jesus on the job.”

Mama Benavides grabbed a sheaf of papers off the mantel and handed them over. The top sheet was a State Justice Department publicity job—California-based Commie fronts in alphabetical order. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was check-marked, with a line in brackets next to it: “Write P.O. Box 465, Sacramento, 14, California, for membership list.” The old woman snatched the pages, flipped through them and stabbed a finger at a column of names. Benavides, Samuel Tomás Ignacio, and De Haven, Claire Katherine, were starred in ink. “There. Is the truth, anti-Christ Communista y Communisto.”

The ginch had tears in her eyes. Buzz said, “Well, Sammy’s got his rough edges, but I wouldn’t exactly call him the devil.”

“Is true! Yo soy la madre del diablo! You arrest him! Cornmunisto!”

Buzz pointed to Claire De Haven’s notation. “Mrs. Benavides, what have you got on this woman here? Give me some good scoop and I’ll beat that boogie man up with my stick.”

“Communista! Drug addict! Sammy took her to clinica for cure, and she—”

Buzz saw a prime opening. “Where is that clinic, ma’am? Tell me slow.”

“By ocean. Devil doctor! Communista whore!”

Satan’s mother started bawling for real. Buzz blew East LA and headed for Malibu—a sea breeze, a doctor who owed him, no cockroach fights, no fuck me mado

Pacific Sanitarium was in Malibu Canyon, a booze and dope dry-out farm nestled in foothills a half mile from the beach. The main building, lab and maintenance shacks were surrounded by electrified barbed wire; the price for kicking hooch, horse and drugstore hop was twelve hundred dollars a week; detoxification heroin was processed on the premises—per a gentleman’s agreement between Dr. Terence Lux, the clinic’s bossman, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors—the agreement based on the proviso that LA politicos in need of the place could boil out for free. Buzz drove up to the gate thinking of all the referrals he’d given Lux: RKO juicers and hopheads spared jail jolts and bum publicity because Dr. Terry, plastic surgeon to the stars, had given them shelter and him a 10 percent kickback. One still rankled: a girl who’d OD’d when Howard booted her out of his A list fuck pad and back to selling it in hotel bars. He almost burned the three hundred Lux shot him for the business.

Buzz beeped his horn; the gate watchman’s voice came over the squawk box: “Yes, sir?”

Buzz spoke to the receiver by the fence. “Turner Meeks to see Dr. Lux.”

The guard said, “One moment, sir”; Buzz waited. Then: “Sir, follow the road all the way down the left fork to the end. Dr. Lux is in the hatchery.”

The gate opened; Buzz cruised past the clinic and maintenance buildings and turned onto a road veering off into a scrub-covered miniature canyon. There was a shack at the end: low wire walls and a tin roof. Chickens squawked inside it; some of the birds were shrieking bloody murder.

Buzz parked, got out and peered through the wire. Two men in hipboots and khaki smocks were slaughtering chickens, hacking them with razor-bladed two-by-four’s—the zoot sticks Riot Squad bulls used to pack back in the early ‘40s, emasculating Mex hoodlums by slashing their threads. The stick wielders were good: single neck shots, on to the next one. The few remaining birds were trying to run and fly away; their panic had them scudding into the walls, the roof and the zoot men. Buzz thought: no chicken marsala at the Derby tonight, and heard a voice behind him.

“Two birds with one stone. A bad pun, good business.”

Buzz turned. Terry Lux was standing there—all rangy gray handsomeness, like a dictionary definition of “physician”. “Hello, Doc.”

“You know I prefer Doctor or Terry, but I’ve always made allowances for your homespun style. Is this business?”

“Not exactly. What’s that? You doin’ your own catering?”

Lux pointed to the slaughterhouse, silent now, the stick men tossing dead chickens in sacks. “Two birds, one stone. Years ago I read a study that asserted a heavy chicken diet is beneficial to people with low blood sugar, which most alcoholics and drug addicts have. Stone one. Stone two is my special cure for narcotics users. My technicians drain out all their existing contaminated blood and rotate in fresh, healthy blood filled with vitamins, minerals and animal hormones. So, I have a hatchery and a slaughterhouse. It’s all very cost-effective and beneficial to my patients. What is it, Buzz? If it isn’t business, then it’s a favor. How can I help you?”

The smell of blood and feathers was making him gag. Buzz noticed a pulley system linking the maintenance huts to the clinic, a tram car stationed on a landing dock about ten yards in back of the chicken shack. “Let’s go up to your office. I’ve got some questions about a woman who I’m pretty damn sure was a patient of yours.”

Lux frowned and cleaned his nails with a scalpel. “I never divulge confidential patient information. You know that. It’s a prime reason why Mr. Hughes and yourself use my services exclusively.”

“Just a few questions, Terry.”

“I suppose money instead is out of the question?”

“I don’t need money, I need information.”

“And if I don’t proffer this information you’ll take your business elsewhere?”

Buzz nodded toward the tram car. “No tickee, no washee. Be nice to me, Terry. I’m in with the City of Los Angeles these days, and I just might get the urge to spill about that dope you manufacture here.”

Lux scratched his neck with the scalpel. “For medical purposes only, and politically approved.”

“Doc, you tellin’ me you don’t trade the skim to Mickey C. for his referrals? The City hates Mickey, you know.”

Lux bowed in the direction of the car; Buzz walked ahead and got in. The doctor hit a switch; sparks burst from the cables; they moved slowly up and docked on an overhang adjacent to a portico with a spectacular ocean view. Lux led Buzz down a series of antiseptic white hallways to a small room crammed with filing cabinets. Medical posters lined the walls: a picture primer for plastic surgeons, facial reconstruction in the style of Thomas Hart Benton. Buzz said, “Claire Katherine De Haven. She’s some kind of Commie.”