Lesnick heard Coleman out—in a series of arduously detailed two-hour sessions. He believed the Sleepy Lagoon story to be fabricated on two levels: Coleman needing to justify his search for his father and his own latent homosexuality; Coleman wanting to curry favor with SLDC Latins by saying the killer was white—not the unfound Mexican gang members the leftist community asserted the slayers to be. That aside, he believed Coleman’s narratives, comforted him and urged him to break off the affair with his father.
Lesnick was also seeing Loftis as a patient; he knew Reynolds was guilt-crazed over the affair, giving more and more money to more and more causes—especially the SLDC—an adjunct of the lever of manipulation he had applied to get Coleman to consent to the plastic job. Coleman felt reality closing in and began visiting Thomas Cormier’s wolverines again, feeding and loving them. One night he felt an incredible urge to pet and hold one. He opened a pen, tried to embrace the beast and was bitten all over his arms. He and the wolverine fought; Coleman won with a stranglehold. He took the carcass home, skinned it, ate its flesh raw and made dentures out of its teeth, wearing them in his private hours, pretending to be the wolverine—stalking, fucking, killing.
Time passed.
Reynolds, convinced by Claire and Lesnick, broke off the liaison with Coleman. Coleman resented his sex power being usurped and started hating Daddy outright. The boys convicted of the Sleepy Lagoon killing were exonerated and released from prison—the SLDC largely responsible for securing the piece of justice. Claire and Coleman continued to talk, but now sporadically. Coleman copped Southside heroin for her to dally with; Claire was more disturbed than pleased by the gesture, but she did give Coleman a two-thousand-dollar loan he asked for. He used the money to buy himself a second Terry Lux surgery, the doctor going at his face with weighted boxing gloves, then holing him up at the hatchery with morphine and syringes to keep himself painless. Coleman read anatomy and physiology texts there; he left the clinic, kicked the drug cold turkey and showed up at Claire’s door black and blue, but not looking like his father. When he asked Claire to sleep with him, she ran away in horror.
1945.
Coleman moved out of Los Angeles, Claire’s revulsion a hot wind at his back. He bummed around the country and played alto with pickup bands, taking Hudson Healy’s surname. In ’47, Reynolds Loftis went before HUAC, refused to inform and was blacklisted; Coleman read about it and was delighted. Coleman was living in a world of impacted rage: fantasies of hurting his father, possessing Claire, raping men who looked at him the wrong way and eating their flesh with the wolverine teeth he still carried everywhere. Composing music and playing it was the only thing holding him glued. Then, back in LA at the end of ’49, he read that Daddy and Claire were getting married. His threadbare, jerry-built world crashed in.
Coleman’s fantasies escalated to where he couldn’t even think of music. He knew he had to act on the fantasies and build a purpose around them, clear and precise like what his music meant to him. He found out about Reynolds’ UAES membership and learned when the union held its Executive Committee meetings. He decided to kill sex partners of his father’s—ones he remembered from the time of Daddy’s breakup with Chaz. Coleman recalled George Wiltsie and Latin lover Augie by face and name, but they would never be able to identify him: at the time he was protectively colored as a lowly kid brother. He remembered other Reynolds conquests strictly by face, but knew the bars they frequented. Finding victims would be easy, the rest of it more difficult.
The plan:
Kill the Reynolds lovers on UAES meeting nights, disguised as Reynolds, spreading Reynolds’ identical O+ seed, dropping clues to point to Reynolds as the killer, forcing him to—at worst—be implicated in the murders, or—milder punishment—cough up his treasonous UAES meetings as alibis. Daddy could be convicted of the crimes; he could be a suspect and have to admit his homosexuality to the police; he might get smeared in the press, and if he used his precious union soirees as alibis, he might ruin his newly resurrected movie career on grounds of Pinko associations.
Coleman knew he needed money to finance his killing spree, and he was only making chump change gigging on Central Avenue. On Christmas Eve he ran into his old pal Marty Goines at Bido Lito’s. Marty was surprised—and happy—it was the first time he’d seen Coleman post-bandages, years had gone by, the boy had become a man with a new face—and was not a bad alto. Coleman suggested they pull another B&E string; Mad Marty agreed. They made plans to talk after New Year’s; then, early New Year’s Eve, Goines saw Coleman outside Malloy’s Nest and told him he’d called a Quentin buddy in Frisco, Leo Bordoni, and invited him to join their gang. Coleman, enraged at not being consulted—but not showing it—determined that Goines hadn’t mentioned him or described him to Bordoni and decided that his old jazz mentor was prime wolverine bait. He told Marty to meet him at 67th and Central at 12:15, and to be quiet about it—there was a reason.
Coleman went to his room and got the Reynolds gray wig and makeup kit he’d brought. He fashioned a zoot stick from a plank he found in the garbage and a Gillette five-pack. He snapped that UAES was holding a party/meeting that night, copped four H bindles and a hypo from his old source Roland Navarette, pegged an unlocked Buick on 67th as his wheels, played his last gig at the Zombie, walked into the men’s can at the Texaco Station on 68th as Coleman, walked out as Daddy.
Marty was right on time, but drunk—he didn’t even blink at Coleman’s disguise. Coleman coldcocked him on the sidewalk, slung him against his shoulder like a boozed-out buddy, got him into the Buick and hot-wired it. He geezed Marty up with a heavy junk load, drove him to his crib in Hollywood, shot him with the other three bindles and stuffed the hood of a terrycloth robe in his mouth so he wouldn’t vomit blood on him when his cardiac arteries burst. Marty’s heart popped big; Coleman strangled the rest of his life out, zoot slashed his back, pulled out his eyes like he tried to with the coin collection man back at Sleepy Lagoon. He raped those bare sockets; he put on his wolverine teeth and feasted, spraying blood on the walls to wild alto riffs in his head. When he was finished he left the eyeballs in the Frigidaire, dressed Goines in the white terry robe, carried him downstairs and propped him up in the back seat of the Buick. He adjusted the rear-view mirror so he could watch Marty with his eyeless head lolling; he drove to Sunset Strip in the rain, thinking of Daddy and Claire reamed to their teeth in every orifice. He deposited Marty nude in a vacant lot on Allegro, prime fruit territory, a corpse on display like the Black Dahlia. If he was lucky, victim number one would get just as much ink.
Coleman went back to his music, his other life. The Goines kill did not reap the publicity he hoped it would—the Dahlia was a beautiful woman, Marty an anonymous transient. Coleman rented U-Drive cars and patrolled 2307 Tamarind at odd times; no cops showed up—he could use the place again. He got George Wiltsie’s address from the phone book and decided that Wiltsie would be victim number two. He spent nights cruising queer bars near the pad, saw Wiltsie at the dives, but always in the company of his squeeze, a guy he called “Duane.” He almost decided to let the bastard live—but thinking of the possibilities a duo kill presented made him tingly and reminded him of Delores and the man going 69. Then Duane mentioned to a barman that he worked at Variety International—old Daddy turf.
Providence.
Coleman approached George and Duane, carrying a little kill kit he’d concocted: secobarbital caps bought from Roland Navarette, and strychnine from the drugstore. Two to one, barbiturate to poison—pinprinks on the capsules for a quick effect. Coleman suggested a party at “his place” in Hollywood; George and Duane accepted. On the ride over in his U-Drive, he gave them a pint of rye to slug from. When they were half gassed, he asked them if they’d like to try some real Spanish Fly. Both men eagerly swallowed death pills; by the time they got to Marty’s dump they were so woozy Coleman had to help them upstairs. Lindenaur was DOA, Wiltsie in a deep slumber. Coleman undressed them and went to work zooting the dead guy
.
Wiltsie woke up and fought to live. Coleman slashed one of the fruiter’s fingers off defending himself and killed him with a knife thrust to the throat. With both men dead, he zooted, wolverined, raped the standard way and drew music pictures and a trademark W on the walls. He put Wiltsie’s digit in the icebox; he showered Duane and George free of blood, wrapped them in spare blankets, carried them down and drove to Griffith Park, his old sax-honking territory. He stripped them and carried them up to the hiking trail; he 69’d them for the world to see. If he was seen, he was seen as his father.
Two events coincided.
Dr. Saul Lesnick, near death and wanting to somehow recoup his moral losses, read a scandal tabloid account of the Wiltsie/Lindenaur murders. He recalled Wiltsie as a name bandied in a Reynolds Loftis psychiatric session years before; the zoot slashing reminded him of Coleman’s fantasies regarding the Scotch Voice Man and the weapons at Terry Lux’s hatchery. What finally convinced him that Coleman was the killer was the hunger behind the obliquely described bite marks. Coleman was hunger personified. Coleman wanted to be the most vicious, insatiable animal on earth, and now he was proving that he was.
Lesnick knew the police would kill Coleman if they caught him. Lesnick knew he had to try to get him to a locked-ward institution before he killed anyone else or took it in mind to go after Reynolds and Claire. He knew Coleman had to be close to the music, and found him playing at a club on Central Avenue. He regained Coleman’s confidence as the one person who had never hurt him, secured him a cheap apartment in Compton and talked, talked, talked to him, hiding with him when a friend in the leftist community told him Reynolds and Claire were also seeking Coleman out. Coleman was experiencing moments of clarity—a classic behavior pattern in sexual psychopaths who had succumbed to murder to satisfy their lusts. He poured out the story of his first three killings; Lesnick knew that chauffeuring a dead man in the back seat and the second two victims brought to Tamarind Street were a pure subconscious attempt to be caught. Psychological craters existed for a skilled psychologist to drive wedges into—Saul Lesnick’s redemption for ten years of informing on people he loved.
Coleman was fighting his urges inchoately, with music. He was working on a long solo piece filled with eerie silences to signify lies and duplicities. The riffs would spotlight the unique high sounds he got with his sax, loud at first, then getting softer, with longer intervals of silence. The piece would end on a scale of diminishing notes, then unbroken quiet—which Coleman saw as being louder than any noise he could produce. He wanted to call his composition The Big Nowhere. Lesnick told him that if he got to a hospital, he would survive to perform it. The doctor saw Coleman faltering, clarity gaining. Then Coleman told him about Danny Upshaw.
He’d met Upshaw the night after he killed Marty Goines. The detective was on a routine canvassing assignment, and Coleman brazened him out with his “I was in plain view all night” alibi, knowing Upshaw believed it. That belief meant Goines had kept mum about meeting him, and Coleman took the opportunity to lie about Marty being fruit and drop clues on tall, gray Daddy. He put Upshaw out of his mind and went on with his plan, killing Wiltsie and Lindenaur, wavering between Augie Duarte or another Daddy squeeze he knew as victim number four. But he’d started having dreams about the young detective, steamy stuff that said he really was what Daddy tried to make him. Coleman made a decision to murder Reynolds and Claire if he couldn’t smear Daddy to the rafters—he thought that potential added blood to his stew would spice him up and make him dream about the women he once loved.
The plan didn’t work. Coleman had more Upshaw dreams, more Upshaw fantasies. He was Daddy-garbed and in the process of staking out Felix Gordean’s office for leads on old Reynolds lovers when he spotted Upshaw holding down his own surveillance; he was nearby when Upshaw phoned the DMV Police Information Line. He caught the gist of his talk, and tailed Upshaw in the Pontiac he’d stolen—just to get close to him. Upshaw spotted the tail; a chase followed; Coleman got away, stole another car, called the DMV and pretended to be the deputy’s partner. One of the names the clerk read back to him was Augie Duarte; Coleman decided it was providence again and settled on him as victim four then and there. He drove to Gordean’s beach house, spotted Upshaw’s car, hid and listened to Gordean and one of his musclemen talking. The pimp/queer expert said, “That policeman is coming out of the closet. I know it.”
The next day, Coleman let himself into Upshaw’s apartment and savored it. He saw no mementoes of women, nothing but a too-tidy, impersonal pad. Coleman knew then, and began to feel a complete identification with Upshaw, a symbiosis. That night, Lesnick left the apartment to get medicine at County General, thinking Coleman’s Upshaw fixation would break him down on his homosexuality, stymie and stalemate him. He was wrong. Coleman picked up Augie Duarte at a downtown bar, sedated him and took him to an abandoned garage in Lincoln Heights. He strangled him and hacked him and ate him and emasculated him like Daddy and all the others had tried to do to him. He left the body in the LA River wash, drove back to Compton and told Lesnick he had finally put Upshaw in perspective. He was going to compete with the man, killer against detective. Saul Lesnick left the apartment and took a cab back to his rest home, knowing Coleman Healy would wreak slaughter until he was slaughtered himself. And the frail old headshrinker had been trying to get up the guts for a mercy killing ever since.
* * *
Lesnick ended his narrative with a deft storyteller’s flourish, pulling a revolver from the folds of his robe. He said, “I saw Coleman one more time. He had read that Upshaw died accidentally and was very disturbed by it. He had just purchased opiates from Navarette and was going to kill another man, a man who had been an extra on one of Reynolds’ films, an opium dabbler. The man had had a brief fling with Reynolds and Coleman was going to kill him. He told me, like he thought I would do nothing to stop it. I bought this gun at a pawn shop in Watts. I was going to kill Coleman that night, but you and Captain Considine got to him first.”
Buzz looked at the piece. It was old and rusted and would probably misfire, like the shrinker’s nutso take on Sleepy Lagoon as a fantasy. Coleman would have slapped it out of his bony hand before Pops could pull the trigger. “You pleased the way it turned out, Doc?”
“No. I am sorry for Reynolds.”
Buzz thought of Mal shooting straight at Daddy—wanting Coleman alive for his career and maybe something to do with his own kid. “I’ve got a cop question, Doc.”
Lesnick said, “Please. Ask me.”
“Well, I thought Terry Lux hipped Gordean to all the stuff Gordean blackmailed Loftis with. Your story makes me think Chaz Minear told Felix some details, details that he put together when he blackmailed Loftis a second time just lately. Stuff that made him think Coleman was killin’ people.”
Lesnick smiled. “Yes, Chaz told Felix Gordean many things about Coleman’s clinic stay that could be construed as clues when put together with newspaper facts. I read that Gordean was murdered. Was it Chaz?”
“Yeah. Does that please you?”
“It’s a small happy ending, yes.”
“Any thoughts on Claire?”
“Yes. She’ll survive your grand jury pogrom like a Tigress. She’ll find another weak man to protect and other causes to champion. She’ll do good for people who deserve good done for them, and I will not comment on her character.”
Buzz said, “Before things got out of control, it looked like the UAES had some kind of extortion scheme brewin’ against the studios. Were you playin’ both ends? Holdin’ back stuff you heard as a psychiatrist to help the union?”
Lesnick coughed and said, “Who wants to know?”
“Two dead men and me.”
“And who else will hear?”
“Just me.”
“I believe you. Why, I don’t know.”
“Dead men got no reason to lie. Come on, Doc. Spill.”
Lesnick fondled his pawnshop piece. “I have verified information on
Mr. Howard Hughes and his penchant for underaged girls, and much information on various RKO and Variety International actors and the narcotics cures they periodically undergo. I have information on the underworld associations of many studio executives, including one RKO gentleman who ran down a family of four in his car and killed them. The arrest was fixed, and it never went to trial, but that allegation by itself would be most embarrassing. So the UAES is not without weapons, you see.”
Buzz said, “Boss, I pimped them girls to Howard and fixed up most of them dope cures. I got that RKO guy off the hook and ran the payoff to the judge that woulda arraigned him. Doc, the papers would never print what you got and the radio would never put it on the air. Howard Hughes and Herman Gerstein would laugh your extortion right back in your face. I’m the best fixer this town ever saw, and believe me the UAES is crucified.”
Saul Lesnick got to his feet, wobbled, but stayed standing. He said, “And how will you fix that?”
Buzz walked on the question.
* * *
When he got back to his motel, there was a note from the manager on the door: “Call Johnny S.” Buzz went to the pay phone and dialed Stompanato’s number.
“Talk to me.”
“It’s Meeks. What’s up?”
“Your number, but hopefully not my money. I just got a lead, through a friend of Mickey’s. LAPD did a routine ballistics run-through on that jazz club shootout you were in. That hotshot coroner Layman examined the report on the pills they took out of that rat guy you told me about. It looked familiar, so he checked back. Bullets from your gun matched the pills they took out of Gene Niles. LAPD makes you for the Niles snuff, and they’re out to get you in force. Shoot to kill. And I hate to mention it, but you owe me a lot of money.”