“Not since I got married I don’t.”
“How long you been married?”
“Little over a month.”
“Yeah, just wait! Your wife gets pregnant, and she’s got a belly out to here, wait and see if you don’t get tempted. Wait and see, then fucking judge.”
“Is it true you gave Beth an engagement ring?”
“Yeah… that was stupid. But jewelry, half the time we’re swimmin’ in it, and Patsy and me, we’d had a bad fight and I really was thinkin’ of leaving her, and… yeah, I gave her a ring, and it was stupid.”
“Didn’t Beth eventually find out you were married?”
“Yeah, of course. She took it surprisingly good, like she expected men to do bad, stupid shit in her life. Besides, I told her I was gonna break up with Patsy-though, you know, I told her I was gonna wait till after the baby came.”
“Sure. You wouldn’t walk out on your wife till after the baby came.”
The pretty face frowned. “Hey, fuck you, what’s your name? Heller? I’m trying to level with you. I was in love with Beth Short.”
I managed not to laugh. “You weren’t in love with your wife anymore?”
He shrugged. “I loved her, too. When I was with the one, I loved her; when I was with the other, I loved that one. Haven’t you ever been in that situation?”
“Was Beth pregnant, too, Bobby?”
“I think maybe she was.”
“You think?”
“It wasn’t mine, if so.”
“No?”
“No. I never fucked her.”
“You never fucked her.”
“No-she said she wanted to wait till after we were married.”
“So that’s why you got ‘engaged’ to her… thought she’d give it up that way…”
“Fuck you! Anyway, it didn’t work. She was still ‘saving herself’ for our friggin’ wedding night.”
I drew a breath, looked up at the sky where Grauman’s searchlights were streaking across like a prisoner had escaped. “Let me get this straight. Your wife can’t service you sexually because she’s too far along… so you start dating a girl who’s saving herself for marriage? And this girl, who talks like a virgin, also happens to be pregnant, just not very pregnant? Am I missing anything here?”
He sighed, shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, and I forgot-you loved her.”
“No… no, I’m talking about, you know… the blow jobs.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You can’t imagine the mouth that girl had,” he said, shaking his head, woozy with erotic nostalgia, “and what she could do with it.”
Maybe I could.
“Well,” I said, “she was pregnant- somebody fucked her.”
“She never said she was pregnant. But I figured she was, since she needed money for an operation.”
“Around five hundred dollars, the going abortion rate.”
“That’s right. Saving for it, hitting everybody up. And I told her, after this Mocambo score, I’d fix her up with whatever cash she needed. That’s when she got… weird on me.”
“Weird, how?”
Savarino shook his head, dark curls dancing. “She was an odd duck, man. She seemed so… worldly, is that the word? Like she’d been around, like she knew the streets, she was almost a goddamn hooker the way she’d work a guy for drinks… I got a feeling I’m not the only guy she went down on, to buy her dinner.”
“What’s your point?”
“Still, there was this, whaddayacallit, naive side to her. Yeah, she wore black, and she was in show biz and hung out on the fringes of society, with lowlifes like me. Man, you should have seen her, dolled up in those black outfits, seamed black stockings, with that sweet, innocent face, glowin’ in the night, like a fuckin’ angel.”
“Your point?”
“She had no idea what I did for a living-no clue that she was hanging out, there at the McCadden Cafe, in the middle of a nest of goddamn thieves. When I told her I’d give her the rest of the money she needed, outa my share of the heist, she wigged out-blew her friggin’ top, man, scratchin’ me, clawin’ at me, slappin’ me.”
“And you got a little rough with her.”
His dark eyes flared. “Well, I grabbed her by the arms and threw her ass offa me, yeah! Wouldn’t you?”
“Is that when she took off for San Diego?”
He blinked in surprise. “How did you know-oh yeah, it was in the papers, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. You and Helen and Henry went down there, after her, didn’t you? To the house where she was freeloading?”
“Sure we went lookin’ for her… She’d sent a telegram to Helen, askin’ for money… still trying to raise money. So we had the address.”
“Why did you go all the way down there, Bobby? Why didn’t you let sleeping dogs lie?”
“I guess… I guess maybe I was afraid, as bad as she needed money, she might sell what she knew to somebody… about the Mocambo score we was plannin’. You know, tip ’em off.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No. And after the score, she come back, and she started stayin’ with Helen. Hiding out.”
“Why hiding out? Hiding from whom?”
“The cops. Beth figured she was an accomplice to the Mocambo score, since she knew about it, and didn’t do nothing to stop it.”
She’d been right about that: she would have been considered an accomplice.
“Anyway,” Savarino was saying, “we fight, get back together, fight, get back, bust up… back and forth like that. I kept thinkin’ I was gonna get in her pants, but I never made it past her mouth.”
“And your wife never got wise?”
“Naw. Women believe what they want to believe. Anyway, I’m well rid of that crazy cunt. I’m happy with the one I got.”
I savored the ambiguity of that for a moment, then asked, “You don’t have any doubt, Bobby, that Dragna had Beth Short killed, as a warning to you?”
“None. Oh, that sex-crime angle, that’s a good one-keepin’ those dumb-ass cops busy. But when I heard about her face, how it was cut ear to ear, I knew what that meant. And I clammed, man-I clammed.”
I stood. So did he.
I gave him the fifty bucks, and said, “Give this to your wife. If you don’t, she’ll come looking for me.”
He laughed. “Yeah, she is a pistol.”
“I saw her on stage, Rialto, back in Chicago. She was something.”
Beaming proudly, he said, “She sure was. Amazing how she could make them tassels go in both directions.”
“Bobby, you have any idea how lucky you are? Beautiful wife who loves you? Kid on the way?”
“I know,” he said. He shook his head, curls flouncing, and his sigh started down around his shoes. “Now if only I wasn’t facing no twenty years in stir.”
And he went inside.
19
Of the jewels in the glittering bracelet of the Sunset Strip after dark-the Trocadero, the Crescendo, La Rue, and Ciro’s, to name a few-the Mocambo was the brightest, and the gaudiest. The epitome of a Hollywood nightspot, with record-breaking attendance unfettered even by the post-VJ Day slump, the Mocambo sported a deceptively simple exterior. The two-story building’s lower story was red with its name emblazoned in bold stylish white, the upper floor white with red-shuttered windows and a modest neon sign, with only the oversize canopy’s red-and-white-striped awning to suggest anything remarkable might await within.
The club had a wildly eccentric South American motif, the inside of Carmen Miranda’s mind as depicted by Salvador Dali. Oversize baroque tin wall sculptures of flowers and harlequins and dancing girls mingled with flamboyant terra cotta and soothing shades of blue, the latter perhaps intended to tone things down a bit in a room where striped patterns were everywhere, from draped walls to candy-cane columns wearing chrome crowns with oversize ball fringe dangling, invoking a demented gaucho’s sombrero. An exotic aviary-a cockatoo, several macaws, a quartet of love birds, a couple dozen parakeets-added constant punctuation to the Latin music of house-band leader Phil Ohman (lured from the Trocadero).
The tariff at the Mocambo was steep-ten bucks a head-but a tourist’s bargain, considering the parade of stars the joint attracted. With Eliot trailing after us like a high-priced bodyguard, Peggy and I were escorted through the packed club by maitre d’ Andre (stolen from New York’s “21”). Along the way we passed Judy Garland and her escort, Myrna Loy and hers, Lana Turner with Tony Martin, Marlene Dietrich with Jean Gabin, and Rosalind Russell and an old gent my wife informed me via whisper was Irving Berlin. If a bomb dropped on this place, the only thing left of American show business would be the Ritz Brothers.