It started this way:
After the Moonglow Lounge and Janice Modine’s pass, he’d gotten an idea—build his own file on the Goines snuff, write down every shred of information, glom carbons of the autopsy and print reports, stick Dietrich with lackluster summaries and concentrate on his paperwork, his case—the 187 he’d follow up even if he didn’t nail the bastard before the skipper pulled the plug. He drove to the Hollywood Ranch Market then, grabbed a stack of cardboard cartons, bought manila folders, colored side tabs, yellow legal pads, typing and carbon paper and drove home with them—allowing himself two extra shots of I.W. Harper as a reward for his dedication. The booze put him out on the couch—and it got hairy.
Goines’ mutilations in wraparound Technicolor. Guts and big bruised penises, so close up that at first he couldn’t tell what they were. Dogs rooting in the gore, him right there, Man Camera filming it until he joined the brood and started biting.
Two nights of it.
With a day of shit in between.
He put the first night’s dream off as scare stuff caused by a frustrating case and no food in his system. In the morning he got double bacon, eggs, hash browns, toast and sweet rolls at the Wilshire Derby, drove downtown to the Sheriff’s Central Bureau and scanned Homicide files. No animal-aided murders were on record; the only homosexual slashings even remotely similar to Marty Goines’ were open-and-shut jobs—lovers’ spats where the perpetrator was captured, still serving time or executed by the State of California.
Shitwork was next.
He called Karen Hiltscher at the Station and sweet-talked her into making phone queries of other musician’s locals that might have sent Marty Goines out on gigs, and LA area jazz clubs that might have hired his trombone independently. He told her to ring the other LASD station houses and solicit run-throughs of their burglary files: paper scans for jazz musician/burglars who might prove to be known associates of Goines. The girl reluctantly agreed; he blew kisses into the phone, promised to call for results later and drove back to Local 3126.
There, the counterwoman gave him another look at the Horn of Plenty’s employment record, and Danny copied down club and roadhouse addresses going back to Mad Marty’s first gig in ’36. He spent the rest of the day driving by jazz spots that were now laundromats and hamburger joints; jazz spots that had changed hands a half dozen times; jazz spots that had retained the same owner for years. And he got the same response across the board: a shrug at Goines’ mugshot strip, the words “Marty who?”, a deadpan on the topics of jazzbo burglars and the longshot of a burglar kid with his face bandaged up.
At dusk, he called Karen for her results. Goose egg: more “Marty who?”, the burglar files yielding eleven names—seven Negroes, two Mexicans, two white men whose jail records revealed AB+ and O- blood. Pure undiluted shit.
He remembered his promise to Janice Modine then, called the San Dimas Substation and talked to the boss of the Auto Theft Detail. John Lembeck was still in custody there, being sweated over a series of GTAs. Danny told the man his snitch story, stressing the angle that Lembeck was dead meat if he made it to the County jail. The squad boss agreed to roll him up for release; Danny could tell Jungle John was in for a severe thumping first—but not half as bad as he was going to give him.
Then it was back to his apartment, four shots of I.W. and work on the file, side tabs labeled and stuck to folders—“Interviews,” “Eliminations,” “Chronology,” “Canvassing,” “Physical Evidence,” “Background.” One thought burned throughout the writing of a detailed summary: where was Marty Goines living between the time of his release from Lexington State and his death? The thought led to a phone call—the night switchboard at the hospital for a list of other men released to California around the same time as Goines. The answer, after holding the line long distance for twenty minutes—none.
Exhaustion, writer’s cramp and no sleep followed. Four bonus shots and a sheet-thrashing roll on the bed got him unconsciousness and the dogs again, the Man Camera with teeth—his—biting at a whole morgueful of O+ stiffs lined up on gurneys. Morning and another big breakfast convinced him to make the elimination; he called Central Vice, got the list of breeders and was warned to go easy: the dog farms in Malibu Canyon were run by cracker strongarms, cousins from the Tennessee sticks. They bred their pit bulls there, which was not against the law; they only fought them in South LA, and none of the men had been convicted of dog fighting since the war.
Danny turned off Pacific Coast Highway at the Canyon Road and climbed inland through scrub-covered hills laced with little streams and valleys. The road was a narrow two-laner, the left side featuring kiddie camps, stables and occasional nightclubs, the right a wood retaining wall and a long drop into green-brown bush forest. Signs pointing into the scrub indicated clearings and houses and people; Danny saw the roofs of villas, Tudor steeples, the chimneys of extravagant log cabins. Gradually, the quality of the real estate declined—no ocean view, no sea breeze, the scrub thicker and thicker, no dwellings at all. When he hit the top of Malibu Ridge and started rolling downhill, he knew the dog farms had to be nearby—his vista was now dotted with tar-papered shacks and the heat was zooming up as the shade-producing foliage thinned out.
The Vice officer he’d talked to had the three farms tagged as a mile in on a dirt access road marked by a sign: PIT PUPS—AUTO PARTS. Danny found the sign just as the two-lane leveled off into a long, flat stretch, the San Fernando Valley in the distance. He swung onto it and wracked his Chevy’s undercarriage for three-quarters of a mile, sharecropper-like shacks on both sides of him. Then he saw them—three cinderblock huts encircled by a barbed-wire fence; three dirt yards littered with axles, drive shafts and cylinder blocks; three individually penned broods of squat, muscular dogs.
Danny pulled up to the fence, pinned his badge to his jacket front and tapped the horn—a little courtesy to the hut dwellers. The dogs barked at the noise; Danny walked over to the nearest stretch of wire and looked at them.
They weren’t the dogs from his dreams—black and sleek with flashing white teeth—they were brindle and tan and speckled terriers, barrel-chested, jaw-heavy and all muscle. They didn’t have the outsized genitalia of his dogs; their barks weren’t death snaps; they weren’t ugly—they were just animals bred for a mean utility. Danny eyed the ones penned up closest to him, wondering what they’d do if he gave them a pat on the head, then told them he was glad they didn’t look like some other dogs he knew.
“Rape-o, Hacksaw and Night Train. Them dogs won sixteen altogether. Southern California record for one man’s stable.”
Danny turned to face the voice. A very fat man in overalls was standing in the doorway of the shack just off to his left; he was wearing thick glasses and probably couldn’t see too well. Danny unpinned his badge and slipped it in his pocket, thinking the man was garrulous and ripe for an insurance agent ploy. “Can I talk to you for a second about your dogs?”
The man ambled to the fence, squinting and blinking. He said, “Booth Conklin. You in the market for a good pit hound?”
Danny looked into Booth Conklin’s eyes, one a free-floating waller, the other cloudy and pocked with cataracts. “Dan Up-shaw. You could start me off with some information on them.”
Conklin said, “I kin do better than that,” waddled to a speckled dog’s pen and flipped the latch. The beast made a dash, hit the fence with his front paws and started licking the wire. Danny knelt and scratched his snout, a slick pink tongue sliding over his fingers. He said, “Good boy, good fellow,” putting off Doc Layman’s theories as long longshots then and there.
Booth Conklin waddled back, holding a long piece of wood. “First lesson with pits is don’t talk baby talk to ’em or they won’t respect you. Rape-o here’s a leg pumper, just wants to get your trousers wet. My cousin Wallace named him Rape-o ’cause he’ll mount anything with bad intentions. Down, Rape-o, down!”
The pit bull kept nuzzling Danny’s fingers; Booth Conklin whacked him in
the ass with his stick. Rape-o let out a shrill yowl, cowered away and started rubbing his backside in the dirt, all fours up and treading air. Danny felt his fists clenching; Conklin stuck the stick in Rape-o’s mouth. The dog clamped down his jaws; Conklin lifted him up and held him out at arm’s length. Danny gasped at the feat of strength.
Conklin spoke calmly, like holding seventy pounds of dog at the end of a stick was everyday stuff. “Pits dish it out, so they gotta be able to take it. I won’t sell you no dog if you gonna coddle it.”
Rape-o was hanging stock-still, groans vibrating from his throat. Every muscle was perfectly outlined; Danny thought that the animal was perfect mean beauty. He said, “I live in an apartment, so I can’t have a dog.”
“You just come out to look and jaw?”
Rape-o’s groans were getting deeper and more pleasured; his balls constricted and he popped an erection. Danny looked away. “Questions more than anything else.”
Conklin squinted, his eyes slits behind coke bottle glasses. “You ain’t a policeman, are you?”
“No, I’m an insurance investigator. I’m working a death claim and I thought you could help me with some questions.”
Conklin said, “I’m the helpful type, ain’t I, Rape-o,” moving the stick up and down, wrist flicks while the dog humped the air. Rape-o yowled, yipped and whimpered; Danny knew what was happening and fixed on the fat man’s coke bottles. Rape-o let out a final yowl/yip/groan, let go and fell to the dirt. Conklin laughed. “You ain’t got the sense of humor for pits, I can tell. Ask your questions, boy. I got a cousin who’s an insurance man, so I’m prone to the breed.”
Rape-o slinked over to the fence and tried to rub his snout up against Danny’s knee; Danny took a step backward. “It’s a murder claim. We know the victim was killed by a man, but the coroner thinks he may have let a dog or coyote or wolf at him after he was dead. What do you think of the idea?”
Conklin stuck a toothpick in his mouth and worked his words around it. “Mister, I know the canine family real good, and coyotes and wolves is out—’less the killer captured and starved them and left the dead guy out for them to pick clean someplace amenable. What kind of damage on your victim?”
Danny watched Rape-o curl up in the dirt and go to sleep, sated, his muscles slack. “Localized. Teeth marks on the stomach, the intestines bitten and sucked on. It had to have happened someplace inside, because the body was clean when the police found it.”
Conklin snickered. “Then you rule out coyotes and wolves—they’d go crazy and eat the fucker whole, and you can’t exactly keep them inside the house. You thinkin’ pits? Dogs?”
“If anything, yes.”
“You sure them teeth marks ain’t human?”
“No, we’re not sure.”
Booth Conklin pointed to his pit pens. “Mister, I run these three farms for my cousins, and I know how to get what I want from dogs, and if I was crazy enough to want one of my pups to eat a man’s guts, I imagine I could think up a way for him to do it. I’ll tell you though, I’ve got a real taste for blood sport, and I couldn’t imagine any human being doin’ what you just told me.”
Danny said, “If you wanted to, how would you do it?”
Conklin petted Rape-o’s hindquarters; the dog lazily wagged its tail. “I’d starve him and pen him and let bitch dogs in heat parade around in front of his cage and make him crazy. I’d muzzle him and bind his legs and put a restrainer around his dick so he couldn’t get himself off. I’d get me a rubber glove and tweak his dick till he just about got there, then I’d clamp his balls so he couldn’t shoot. I’d get me some doggie menstrual blood and spray it in his eyes and nose for a week or so, till he came to think of it as food and love. Then, when I had me that dead man, I’d spread a big puddle of pussy blood right where I wanted him to bite. And, mister? I’d have a gun handy in case that tormented old dog decided to eat me. That answer satisfy you?”
Danny thought: No animals, it just isn’t right. But—have Doc Layman do organ taps on Goines, his body parts near the mutilations, tests for a second, nonhuman, blood type. He threw Booth Conklin a long-shot question. “What kind of people buy dogs from you?”
“Boys who love blood sport, and I ain’t talkin’ ’bout your crazy shit either.”
“Isn’t dog fighting against the law?”
“You know who to grease, then there ain’t no law. You sure you ain’t a policeman?”
Danny shook his head. “Amalgamated Insurance. Look, do you remember selling a dog to a tall, gray-haired man, middle-aged, within the past six months or so?”
Conklin gave Rape-o a gentle kick; the dog stirred, got up and trotted back to his pen. “Mister, my customers are young studs in pickup trucks and niggers lookin’ to have the toughest dog on the block.”
“Do any of your customers stand out as different than that? Unusual?”
Booth Conklin laughed so hard he almost swallowed his toothpick. “Back durin’ the war, these movie types saw my sign, came by and said they wanted to make a little home movie, two dogs dressed up with masks and costumes fightin’ to the death. I sold them boys two twenty-dollar dogs for a C-note apiece.”
“Did they make their movie?”
“I ain’t seen it advertised at Grauman’s Chinese, so how should I know? There’s this sanitarium over on the beach side of the Canyon, dryout place for all the Hollywood types. I figured they were visitin’ there and headin’ to the Valley when they saw my sign.”
“Were any of the men tall and gray-haired?”
Conklin shrugged. “I don’t really remember. One guy had a funny European accent, that I do recall. Besides, my eyes ain’t the best in the world. You about done with your questions, son?”
Ninety-five percent against on the blood bait theory; maybe a quash on his nightmares; useless dope on Hollywood lunacy. Danny said, “Thanks, Mr. Conklin. You were a big help.”
“My pleasure, son. Come back sometime. Rape-o likes you.”
* * *
Danny drove to the Station, sent out for a hamburger, fries and milk even though he wasn’t hungry, ate half the meal and called Doc Layman at the City Morgue.
“Norton Layman speaking.”
“It’s Danny Upshaw, Doctor.”
“Just the man I was going to call. Your news first or mine?”
Danny flashed: Rape-o chewing on Marty Goines’ midsection. He threw the remains of his burger in the wastebasket and said, “Mine. I’m sure the teethmarks are human. I just talked to a man who breeds fighting dogs, and he said your blood bait theory is feasible, but it would take a lot of planning, and I think the killing wasn’t that premeditated. He said dog menstrual blood would be the best bait, and I was thinking you could tap the cadaver’s organs next to his wounds, see if you got any foreign blood.”
Layman sighed. “Danny, the City of Los Angeles cremated Martin Mitchell Goines this morning. Autopsy completed, no claim on the body within forty-eight hours, ashes to ashes. I have some good news, though.”
Danny thought, “Shit”; said, “Shoot.”
“The slash wounds on the victim’s back interested me, and I remembered Gordon Kienzle’s wound book. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“Well, Kienzle is a pathologist who started out as an emergency room MD. He was fascinated with nonfatal assaults, and he put together a book of photos and specifications on man-inflicted woundings. I consulted it, and the cuts on Martin Mitchell Goines’ back are identical to the sample wounds listed under ‘Zoot Stick,’ a two-by-four with a razor blade or blades attached at the end. Now, the zoot stick dates back to ’42 and ’43. It was popular with anti-Mexican gangs and Riot Squad cops, who used it to slash the zoot suits certain Latin elements were sporting.”
Check the City/County Homicide files for zoot stick killings. Danny said, “It’s a good lead, Doc. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I checked the files before I decided to call you. There are no zoot stick homicides on record. A fri
end of mine on the LAPD Riot Squad said 99 percent of your white-on-Mexican assaults weren’t reported and the Mexicans never took the damn sticks to each other, it was considered dirty pool or whatever. But it is a lead.”
Robe wad suffocating, hands or sash strangling, teeth biting, and now a zoot stick cutting. Why the different forms of brutality? Danny said, “See you in class, Doctor,” hung up and walked back to his car just to be moving. Jungle John Lembeck was leaning against the hood, his face bruised, one eye purple and closed. He said, “They got real rough with me, Mr. Upshaw. I wouldn’t have told Janice to ditz you, except they were hurting me so bad. I’m stand-up, Mr. Upshaw. So if you want payback, I’ll understand.”
Danny balled his right fist and got ready to swing it—but a flash of Booth Conklin and his pit hound stopped him.
Chapter Eleven
The cigars were Havanas, and their aroma made Mal wish he hadn’t quit smoking; Herman Gerstein’s pep talk and Dudley Smith’s accompaniment—smiles, nods, little chuckles—made him wish that he was back at the LAPD Academy interviewing recruits for the role of idealistic young leftist. His one day of it had yielded no one near appropriate, and starting their interrogations without a decoy at the ready felt like a mistake. But Ellis Loew and Dudley, fired up by Lesnick’s psychiatric dirt, were trigger-happy—and here they were getting ready to brace Mondo Lopez, Sammy Benavides and Juan Duarte, UAESers playing Indians on the set of Tomahawk Massacre. And now Gerstein’s schtick was making him itchy, too.
The Variety International boss was pacing behind his desk, waving his Havana; Mal kept thinking of Buzz Meeks sliming back into his life at the worst possible moment.