The Big Nowhere

The moment was slipping away from him—like it wasn’t worth the danger. Buzz grabbed Audrey’s hands. “So that means we’re lookin’ at a next time?”

“You didn’t have to ask. I’d have told you in a minute or so.”

“I like to know where I stand, too.”

Audrey laughed and pulled her hands away. “You stand guilty, Meeks. You got me thinking the other day. So whatever happens, it’s your fault.”

Buzz said, “Sweetie, don’t underestimate Mickey. He’s sugar and spice with women and kids, but he kills people.”

“He knows I’ll leave him sooner or later.”

“No, he doesn’t. He figures you’re an ex-stripper, a shiksa, you’re thirty-somethin’ and you’ve got no place to go. You give him a little bit of grief, maybe it gets his dick hard. But you stroll, that’s somethin’ else.”

She couldn’t meet his eyes. Buzz said, “Sweetie, where would you go?”

Audrey pulled a pillow down and hugged it, giving him both baby browns. “I’ve got some money saved. A bunch. I’m going to buy some grove property in the Valley and bankroll rentals on a shopping center. They’re the coming thing, Meeks. Another ten thousand and I can get in on the ground floor with thirty-five acres.”

Like his acreage: fourteen dollars per on the sure thing that should have made him rich. “Where’d you get the money?”

“I saved it.”

“From Mickey’s handouts?”

Audrey surprised him by chucking the pillow away and poking his chest. “Are you jealous, sweetie?”

Buzz grabbed her finger and gave it a little love bite. “Maybe just a tad.”

“Well, don’t be. Mickey’s all wrapped up in his union business and his drug thing with Jack Dragna, and I know how to play this game. Don’t you worry.”

“Sweetie, you better. Because it is surely for keeps.”

“Meeks, I wish you’d quit talking about Mickey. You’ll have me looking under the bed in a minute.”

Buzz thought of the .38 in the other room and the fruit lawyer with the bruised neck and tear-mottled cheeks. “I’m glad bein’ with you is dangerous. It feels good.”

Chapter Eighteen

Acting Supervisor Upshaw.

Task Force Boss.

Skipper.

Da

There was a lectern and blackboard at the front of the room; Da

Dudley Smith had called him at home yesterday afternoon, interrupting a long day of nursing watered-down highballs and working on his file. The Irishman told him to meet him and Considine at West Hollywood Station; the fix was in via Ellis Loew, with the temporary detachment order approved by both Chief Worton and Sheriff Biscailuz. He’d brushed his teeth, gargled and forced down a sandwich before he met them— anticipating one question and building a lie to field it. Since they’d already told him he would be planted around Variety International Pictures and they knew he’d incurred bossman Gerstein’s wrath there, he had to convince them that only the gate guard, the rewrite man and Gerstein saw him in his cop capacity. It was Considine’s first question—and a residue of bourbon calm helped him brazen it out. Smith bought it whole, Considine second-hand, when he ran his prerehearsed spiel on how he would completely alter his haircut and clothes to fit the role of Commie idealist. Smith gave him a stack of UAES paperwork to take home and study and made him scan a batch of psychiatric reports in their presence; then it was hard brass tacks.

His job was to approach UAES’s suspected weak link—a promiscuous woman named Claire De Haven—gain entrance to the union’s strategy meetings and find out what they were pla

Career maker.

“You’ll be a lieutenant before you’re thirty.”

“There’s a woman you’ll have to get next to, lad. You might have to fuck the pants off of her.”

A bludgeon to smash his nightmares.

He felt cocky when he left the briefing, taking the nonpsychiatric reports under his arm, promising to report for a second confab this afternoon at City Hall. He went back to his apartment, called a dozen dental labs that Karen Hiltscher hadn’t tapped and got zilch, read a dozen homosexual homicide histories without drinking or thinking of the Chateau Marmont. He then started feeling very cocky, took his 2307 Tamarind blood scrapings to the USC chemistry building and bribed a forensics classmate into typing them, hoping he could combine the wall spray pictures with the victims’ names, reconstruct and get another fix on his man. The classmate didn’t even blink at the bloodwork and did his tests; Da

Three victims, three different blood types—the risk of showing illegally obtained evidence was worth it. The Marty Goines AB+ blood matched the sloppiest of the wall sprays; he was the first victim, and the killer had not yet perfected his interior decorating technique. George Wiltsie and Duane Lindenaur, types O- and B+, had their blood spat out separately, Wiltsie in designs less intricate, less polished. Conclusions reinforced and conclusions gained: Marty Goines was a spur-of-the-moment victim, and the killer went at him in a total rage. Although filled with suicidal bravado—as witnessed by his bringing victims two and three to Goines’ apartment—he had to have had an ace reason for choosing Mad Marty, which could be one of three:

He knew the man and wanted to kill him out of hatred—a well-defined personal motive;

He knew the man and found him a satisfactory victim based on convenience and/or blood lust;

He did not know Marty Goines previously, but was intimately acquainted with the darktown jazz strip, and trusted himself to find a victim there.

Have his men recanvass the area.

On Wiltsie/Lindenaur:

The killer bit and gnawed and swallowed and sprayed Wiltsie’s blood first, because he was the one who most attracted him. The relative refinement of the Lindenaur blood designs denoted the killer’s satisfaction and satiation; Wiltsie, a known male prostitute, was his primary sex fix.

Tonight, double-agency sanctioned, he’d brace talent agent/procurer Felix Gordean, co