He jumped up. He grabbed his bag and shoved people out of the way. His coat flapped. People saw his gun and got panicked. He shoved his way down the ramp. He elbowed some hippie fools and a nun. He made the runway. He saw Reggie and Mary Beth lock in an embrace.
The kid was sobbing. Mary Beth held his head down. She looked up and saw Crutch. She gave him her green-flecked eyes for a moment and walked her son off.
125
(Los Angeles, 4/13/72)
Joan built identities.
She worked at Dwight’s desk. Klein and Sifakis were verboten now. Too much had happened. She’d overused Williamson, Goldenson, Broward and Faust.
They needed birth certificates. Forest Lawn sent her a plot list. It included names, dates of birth and dates of death. She thumbed through it. The decedents were alphabetized. They needed two women. 1920s DOBs, one ethnic/one not. She was Jewish and looked it. Karen was Greek and did not.
She scanned columns. The correct-age name selection was scant. They needed solitary women. Scant family or none. That required backup research. From there: driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, official file plants.
The names bored her. She sipped tea and lit a cigarette. Her wrist scars itched. She glanced around the fallback.
An envelope by the door. Expensive paper. It barely fit under the crack.
She got up and reached for it. She saw the set of initials on the back. She slit the top and read the note attached.
Mi Amor,
Me quedo. For la Causa. Con respeto al regalo que иres tu.
She’d kissed the page below her signature. Her lips had left an imprint bright red.
(Los Angeles, 4/14/72)
Roll it.
Clyde and Buzz were out. Crutch worked the briefing-room projector. He spooled in the film and matched the sprocket holes. He killed the lights and pulled down the wall screen. He centered the beam and got Action.
Color footage, grainy stock. He jiggled dials. Better now-a clear image.
Fade in. There’s a panning shot. There’s a living room. The camera catches a window. It’s light outside. The room is small and cheaply furnished. It’s not Horror House.
A shot holds: the living room, close in. Five people walk into the frame. There’s three women, two men. They’re all naked and body-painted. Voodoo symbols, head to foot. The two men are black. Two women are white. They all wear wooden masks. The other woman is unmasked and wildly tattooed. She’s Maria Rodriguez Fontonette.
Crutch straddled a chair. The camera swerved through the living room. There’s the window again. The street is visible, it’s Beachwood Canyon, we’re near Horror House.
The camera re-centered. The actors swallowed brown capsules. Haitian herbs, yes. Cut to a close-up. There’s Maria. There’s the tattoo on her arm. The severing bisected the artwork soon after. She had lovely hands. They’d be severed. She moved gracefully. The killer cut inside of her. All that lithe movement, quashed.
Crutch watched. He felt compressed. Summer ‘68. Tattoo crashes in Horror House, Tattoo dies there. Arnie Moffett’s rental houses. Joan and Celia rent one. The rental-house screenings. It’s all compressed. He was close at the start of it and never since. Warning click: there’s something you missed.
Jump cut: we’re in a bedroom now. There’s an uncovered water bed, jiggling. The actors mill around. They talk to someone offscreen. Their lips move soundless.
Crutch stared at Tattoo. She’s beautiful, she’s alive. She betrayed 6/14 in ‘59 and reconciled later. “It was a wild time.” Celia said that. He couldn’t reconcile the Cause with a fuck flick. It offended him.
The men trembled and shook. They fell on the bed. Their backs arched. Their legs spasmed. The potions took hold. They were early-stage zombified. They dumped their masks and gasped for air. They sweated the voodoo paint off their bodies.
Tattoo whipped them. Soft shots, for show. The two white girls started trembling. Their movements were puppet-string jerky. They got on the bed and stroked the guys hard. They all seized and thrashed. They all did grand mal shit, out of body. The men thrashed prone. Their movements slowed. The white girls straddled them and pulled them inside. The camera got insertion-close.
Different herbs. The women contorted at a hyper-pace. They pinned down the men. Their hips and arms moved in counterpoint. Their heads moved on some spazzy axis. The camera caught the men close. Their eyes were open and dead. Tattoo soft-whipped the women. Their contortions accelerated.
Tattoo stepped out of sight and stepped back in the frame. She held a fireplace tool, shaped like a phallus. The cock tip glowed. It was near white-hot. She touched the carpet with it and got combustion. The women thrashed and opened their mouths. She fed them the cock head. They sucked it and displayed no pain. They removed their mouths and pressed the cock head to the bedstead. The fabric sizzled and burned down to the springs.
The men were zombified. The women voodoo-fucked them. Tattoo grabbed the burning cock and burn-carved the wall. Crutch got it. He knew the markings. Tattoo drew them at Horror House. Tattoo drew them in fire on a fuck film-set wall.
The sprocket holes jammed. The screen went all white. The film died at just that spot.
Convergence. Connection. Confluence. Clyde’s line: It’s who you know and who you blow and how you’re all linked.
Warning click: something’s missing. You don’t know who killed Tattoo. You don’t know who glued all this up.
Crutch drove up Beachwood Canyon. It was all tight. There’s Horror House. There’s the house Joan and Celia rented. There’s Arnie Moffett’s other pads. Your four-years-back memory holds.
He zigzagged side streets. He calibrated the view out the fuck-film window. There it is, intact. The same palm trees and driveway across the street. A Moffett Realty sign.
Still all tight. Stone’s throw here, stone’s dribble there. Who/what started it and made it all cohere?
Celia said Arnie Moffett ran an import-export biz. Click-we’re back there again.
Confluence. It’s who you know and who you-
Crutch drove downtown. Clyde had pull at the L.A. License Bureau. File access cost you fifty clams and a wink.
The duty clerk recognized him. Import-export from a while back? The boxes in Room 12.
The room was a musty paper swamp. The boxes were marked by years. No pull tabs, no alphabetizing. Real paper digs.
He started at ‘66 and worked backward. He hit at ‘63.
Arnie had a low-rent biz going. “Arnie’s Island Exotics, Limited.” Curios, knickknacks, connection. Imports from: Jamaica, Haiti, the D.R. closer now. Where’s that little link-it-all click?
The same office. The same next-door deli. “The Home of the Hebrew Hero.”
He brought a pint of Jim Beam. Arnie was a lush. The booze softened the beating then. It might work now.
Crutch walked in. A bell jingled. Arnie sat at the same desk. His bowling shirt was green today. He picked his nose and read Car Craft.
Crutch took the client’s chair. Arnie ignored him. Crutch placed the jug on his blotter.
Arnie glanced at it. Crutch said, “Summer ‘68. What’s the first thing you think of?”
Eyes on the jug. He considers, re-considers and re-cogitates. Aaah, he gets it.
“The first thing I think of is all that political tsuris. The second thing I think of is you.”
Crutch cracked the jug and passed it over. Arnie chugalugged.
“The third thing I’m thinking is that you look a lot older. The fourth is that I hope you ain’t still on that crusade. If it pertains to my houses, Gretchen Farr, Farlan Brown or Howard Hughes, you heard everything I got.”