The Glitter Dome (5 page)

The Ultimate Question—that which stopped lethargic waiters (off-duty SAG members) dead in their tracks, along with table-hopping mannequins (ditto), and even busboys literally scraping at table crumbs (the Screen Extras Guild for these shmucks), and caused the rest of the eavesdropping clientele to cease all shop-talk, ice-cube rattling, furtive coke whiffing, thigh stroking of either sex by either sex, sometimes simultaneously—that which produced the frozen take reminiscent of the E. F. Hutton television commercial: “My broker is E. F. Hutton and E. F. Hutton says …”

The Ultimate Question, delivered through clenched teeth to keep the jaw from trembling, was: “Now that I've explained the incredible potential of this film, do you think you might like to get in on the project, for a substantial part of our rather modest budget of …
eight
million? It was always a “film” or a “project,” never a “picture” or, God forbid, a “
movie
.” And if the Arab, Iranian, Texan, or other wog simply said “maybe,” this outlander would ascend from the ranks of the great unwashed and become eligible for a “B” table at any one of the Six Famous Restaurants. (The “A” table was his
when
the movie started shooting. Talk is cheap.)

All of this was only vaguely understood by Captain Woofer but had led indirectly to his constipation. For the late Nigel St. Claire had been found shot to death in the parking lot at a bowling alley near Sunset Boulevard in downtown Hollywood at eleven
P.M.
Everyone knew that a man like Nigel St. Claire, one of the Truly Successful in The Business, would not be caught dead in such a place at such an hour. But he
was
caught dead, and it got great news coverage, and helped to induce Captain Woofer's internal blockage.

Both Al Mackey and Martin Welborn thought it prudent to let Captain Woofer take his good old time getting around to it, and so he did. He settled comfortably on the rubber ring cushion he used for his inflamed hemorrhoids, lit his briar, sucking on it for thirty seconds to get it cooking. Then he fiddled with the stack of papers in his incoming basket and toyed with a plastic paperweight the size of a building brick which had entombed within it a set of gold captain's bars. (They said that even Mrs. Woofer called him Captain.) Finally, he looked at the two detectives and said, “I suppose you men wonder why I called you in here?”

Oh, God! Al Mackey was too hung over for this shit. First Fuzznuts Francis' lecture, then losing the bucks to the Weasel on the “impact” bet, and with it the fearful image of Marty hanging upside down like a dead marlin.
Three minutes, Al
. Sure. And barely able to keep last night's debacle repressed. If he started thinking about last night, there'd be a successful reprise tonight and Mrs. Donatello could stop worrying so much about fleas and roaches and deal with the problem of scraping Al Mackey's brains off her wallpaper with a putty knife.

But he'd been a cop for twenty-two years. And something within him required that he give someone of captain's rank a response, even someone like Whipdick Woofer. So he nodded tightly and said, “Yes, Captain, I
was
wondering why you called us in here.”

Captain Woofer sucked on the briar some more and put his feet up on the desk
very
carefully, since elevated legs were good for common cop hemorrhoids but bad for painful police tummies.

“It's because of Nigel St. Claire,” he said.

“That's not our case, sir,” Martin Welborn responded gently.

“It hasn't been,” Captain Woofer nodded. “But it's been four weeks. Schultz and Simon don't have a single lead. They've interviewed more than fifty people.”

“We don't know any more about the case than what's in the newspapers.” Al Mackey looked at Martin Welborn and shrugged. “Schultz and Simon aren't exactly the gabby type. They haven't asked us for any help.”

“
I'm
asking for your help,” Captain Woofer said, taking the pipe out of his little teeth. He'd begun to look rather old of late. He'd become more bald and he'd shrunk a bit.

“What do you need, Skipper?” Martin Welborn asked.

“I need you two to take over the case,” Captain Woofer said. “St. Claire was a famous man. This case stays in the news. The department's taking a beating these days. Questionable shootings. Outlaw cops. That third-rate television station skewering us all the time. I retire in September. You think I can take so much heat at this time of life? Every day a hack from
that
TV station asks for a progress report on the murder. I have to go out of my way to be obliging.” Captain Woofer's eyes got soft and moist. He looked exceptionally small and old.

“But we're not supersleuths,” Al Mackey said.

“What would Schultz and Simon think if we took their case?” Martin Welborn said.

“I know only
too
well you're not supersleuths,” Captain Woofer reminded them. “And I don't give a shit what Schultz and Simon think. They've had their chance. There's only one other homicide team available and you're it. Besides, you're the
ideal
team for this one.”

Before either puzzled detective could ask why, Captain Woofer's eyes narrowed and he said, “You solved Clyde Barrington's murder, didn't you?” Captain Woofer gave them his craftiest look and chewed on his pipestem, letting the two detectives chew on the remark.

The character actor Clyde Barrington was of show biz, true, but what other similarity? Al Mackey said, “Skipper, Clyde Barrington wasn't murdered. We didn't
solve
his murder because there wasn't one. We cleared the case by showing he murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide.”

“Nobody's asking anybody to
solve
anything. I just like the way you two seem to
clear
every homicide that might make me more …” He sighed and didn't finish. At that instant he exactly shared the same longing as poor old Cal Greenberg, minus the Glenn Miller concert.

So they didn't have to
solve
the crime, only clear it? Al Mackey and Martin Welborn looked at each other again.

“Captain,” Al Mackey began, “this is a bit different. It would be pretty hard to suggest he committed suicide, what with two .38-caliber bullets in his face and no gun found.”

“You resourceful boys handled that death two years ago where the coke dealer killed himself with the hatchet, didn't you?” Captain Woofer looked at them craftily. “You haven't lost your nimble inventive ways, have you?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Al Mackey said, “but the hatchet was right there.”

Through a videotaped demonstration, Al Mackey, using the “suicide” weapon, performed convincingly for the camera and persuaded the ever-persuadable Captain Woofer that a man of average strength like the cocaine dealer Dilly O'Rourke, given utter dedication to self-destruction, could actually strike a fatal blow to the front of the skull. It took some doing, including expert opinion from a pathologist regarding the fragility of the human skull at the point of violent contact with the hatchet.

The mushy hole in the
back
of his skull was another story. Martin Welborn, in his youth a Jesuit seminarian, had suggested wryly after three weeks of fruitless investigation that it was time to
pray
for the answer. And lo, within the hour their prayers were answered, not by the God of failed seminarians but by Lord Buddha.

While they were going over Dilly's former digs for the thirteenth time, a sandwich vendor with her hair full of dandelions came tripping in from Hollywood Boulevard carrying a thirty-pound brass Buddha in her track-marked, tattooed little arms. She apologized for having removed it the night Dilly O'Rourke was taken off to become part of the Eternal Force. Someone said she might get in trouble and should bring it back.

She was startled right out of her place in space when the two detectives, with grins a yard wide, grabbed her and sat her down and pumped her shallow well of memories until she recalled that Lord Buddha had always rested over by the Ouija board where Dilly's dead body was visited by every coked-out tenant of the building before someone stopped chanting mantras and called the cops.

Al Mackey's performance was spectacular. The videotape showed him miming the self-inflicted blow to the front of the skull, after which he dropped the hatchet, held the back of his wrist to his forehead like a damsel on a train track, and staggered exactly nine feet five inches across the room, keeling over and feigning a bone-popping collision with the unyielding brass bean of the chubby Chinese deity.

Martin Welborn whistled, applauded, and cheered when the performance was over.

Captain Woofer showed the videotape to the commander and accepted his praise with becoming humility. Another whodunit
cleared
. It became official. Dilly O'Rourke left this vale of tears on his own steam.

The tattooed junkie with the head full of dandelions to this day never failed to wave at the detectives when she spotted them on Hollywood Boulevard while she was selling avocados to buy heroin—a swap, they called it, of deciduous fruit for insidious fruit. She often gave the detectives whole-grain sandwiches filled with parsley and peanut butter in gratitude for not hassling all the tenant-customers of the bloodsucking, coke-stealing little fuck. Now admitting that the tenant-customers had been overjoyed to see him lying dead in his own blood.

The implied message was coming through loud and clear with every suck of Whipdick Woofer's ugly old pipe: Remember the Plato Jones case.
Nimble inventive ways
.

That was a particularly difficult homicide for Captain Woofer. Plato Jones had made and lost three fortunes in the record industry and was now riding high on a hot roll. During his losing spells he supplied a few girls (or boys as the case might be) and roughly two tons of Colombian over the years to his out-of-town customers, which brought him smack into the L.A.P.D. Intelligence files.

But when he managed to bounce back into big bucks with real zippo, as they say, he'd stocked the campaign larders of front-runners in state and local elections. He was embraced by the Truly Successful in The Business. He attended most “B” premieres and all “A” charitable functions. He sailed in yacht races with a United States senator. He greased Sacramento lobbyists. He loved baby seals and whales and American Indians. He hated big oil and nuclear power plants. So the guy
had
a few bad habits, who's to cast the first stone?

But there was considerable giggling, backslapping and hee-hawing around Hollywood Station the day they found Plato Jones shot through the temple in a trick-pad near Sunset and La Brea, the death weapon beside his body. Of course there wasn't a whore in sight when the corpse was found. There wasn't a fingerprint of a whore, nor anyone else's for that matter—this despite the discovery of a half-drunk glass of Pouilly-Fuissé bearing
no
fingerprints, resting beside the corpse. It caused considerable damage to the suicide theory, but not as much as the expended shell from the death-dealing .32 automatic. The shell was found on top of a seven-foot armoire, an eighteenth-century French piece the likes of which was seldom seen in a trick-pad. But then, Plato Jones had nothing if not style, a sentiment echoed at his funeral by two congressmen, three city council members, one consumer activist, two dozen recording stars, a Lebanese opium runner, and thirteen whores.

After a six-week investigation which was getting on everyone's nerves, particularly Captain Woofer's because of the incessant calls from City Hall by a support-your-local-police councilman who was sweating out a $10,000 campaign donation from Plato Jones and wanted this goddamn case put to
bed
, the deft and artful team of Al Mackey and Martin Welborn were handed the investigation and ordered to retrace the steps of the crestfallen failures Detectives Schultz and Simon, who couldn't solve it.

It took Al Mackey and Martin Welborn exactly three days. First, the half-drunk glass of wine was a cinch. Three of Plato's whores were located through a snitch and freely admitted to being in and out of the trick-pad on the night in question. Two of them couldn't remember, but “might” have had a glass of white wine. And, Lord be praised, Plato thought that black velvet gloves were a super turn-on. Ergo,
no
fingerprints! No lipstick on the glass? Baby, do you think you have
any
lipstick left on your mouth after three or four of those flossy fatcats from Brentwood with those limp little peters make you suck your eyes crossed? (The memory of
that
remark struck Al Mackey where he lived.)

The problem was, of course, the expended .32 cartridge shell resting in an upright position on top of the armoire. The solution came in a flash to Al Mackey. The
proof
of the solution came after three sweaty hours with Al Mackey standing where Plato Jones received one shot through his right temple. Martin Welborn videotaped Al Mackey, the death weapon at temple height, ejecting an empty cartridge, which due to the angle of the chamber was kicked high in the air and,
voila!
came down on the top of the armoire in an upright position, just as if someone had placed it there.

What the tape
didn't
show was the 231 times the shell was ejected and
didn't
land in an upright position. Had anyone checked closely they would have found gaps in those videotapes ten times bigger than any attributed to former President Nixon. Al Mackey and Martin Welborn decided privately that the odds, therefore, were 232 to 1 that the pimp blew his own brains out. That was close enough. Certainly better odds than Plato Jones ever gave. The deputy chief was happy. Captain Woofer was thrilled. The city councilman was ecstatic. The case was cleared.

“I'd like you to take over the Nigel St. Claire case. I already advised Schultz and Simon this morning before you two arrived.
Ten minutes late
.”