I switched it off. My head was banging like cymbals gone mad, with guilt and fear racing for control of my mind. I fought them off, taking deep breaths and telling myself it was all to the good: Fat Dog’s insanity was peaking and I was the only one who could stop him. I started the car and headed south on side streets, cutting corners and running stop signs.
I caught the Santa Monica Freeway westbound near Washington. There was a midmorning lull in traffic and I made good time. I got off the freeway at Lincoln and headed for the arson shack. The back yard looked the same: forgotten playthings and high grass. The door of the shack was open, and the place had been completely cleaned out: no arson supplies, tools, or pornography. The pseudo-gang graffiti I had painted on the walls had been crossed out with large brush strokes of the same color. Freshly painted obscenities covered the back wall near the workbench: “fuck,” “cocksuck,” “kill fuck,” and “cocksuck bastard.” I got down on my knees and looked around. Nothing.
Leaving the door ajar, I walked up to the front house and knocked on the door. A fat black woman in a muu-muu answered. “Yes?” she said suspiciously.
I sized her up quickly as a T.V. watcher and took my act from there: “My name is Savage,” I said, “I’m with the F.B.I. We have reason to believe that the man renting your back house is an escaped convict. We...” I never got the chance to finish. The woman threw open the screen door and almost threw herself on me, slamming her huge arms against her sides in frustration.
“You arrests that no good bum, officer!” she screamed. “That no good bum took off owing me two months’ rent, and threw all kind of filthy pictures on the grounds for all the little childrens to see. You arrests him! He called me a nigger bitch!”
I placed an arm on her quaking shoulder. “Hold on, ma’am,” I said. “Just let me ask a few questions, all right?”
“All right, Mr. Savage.”
“First of all, is this man who rents from you about forty years old, short, fat, with dirty golf clothes?”
“That’s the no-good bum!”
“Good. How long has he rented from you?”
“Goin’ on four years. He don’t live there, he just keep his Tijuana sin things there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dirty books! Dirty pictures! He tells me he the king of Tijuana. He tells me he gonna race dogs down there. He...”
I interrupted. “When did you see him last?”
“I sees him last night. He knocks on my door and says: ‘Bye-bye, nigger bitch. I’m goin’ to T.J. to claim my kingdom, but I’ll be back to throw you in the gas chamber.’ Then he points to the yard and says ‘I left plenty of reading material for the kiddies.’ Then he makes the devil’s sign at me and runs down the street! You arrests him, officer!”
I didn’t wait to find out what “the devil sign” was. I ran back to my car, leaving the woman standing on her porch, slamming her arms and demanding justice.
I took surface streets to Beverly Hills, to give me time to think. I put on KUSC. They were playing a symphonic piece that sounded like Haydn. I was exhilarated, so high that a cup of coffee might blow the top of my head off. I wondered what my elation stemmed from. My case had blown sky high, the two people I had vowed to protect were in grave danger, and Fat Dog Baker was almost certainly in Mexico.
Then it hit me. I was home. For the first time in my life I was on to something important, something vast and complex, and I was the sole arbiter of it. Before this, September 2,1967, had been the pivotal date of my life. I was twenty-one. On that date I had heard, really heard, music for the first time. It was Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Walter had been trying to get me to listen to classical music for years, to no avail. The First Movement of the Eroica went through me like a transfusion of hope and fortitude. I was off with German romanticism, listening to Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and Bruckner six, eight, ten hours a day. I had found truth, or so I thought, and a strange metamorphosis took place: infused with the romance of giants, I gave up my vague academic dream and became a cop. An uneasy, malcontented one at first, until the booze came along and made the low-level administration of power exciting beyond my wildest fantasies.
It worked for a while, but gradually I began fucking up. My performance on the streets deteriorated as my dependence on alcohol grew. I finally committed an irrevocable act, and my career was over. Fortunately I had done Cal Myers a big one during my days with the Vice Squad, and now I was the repo-prince of the new car king of the Valley.
I remembered what Stan The Man had said last night: that he didn’t have to be a caddy. My feeling three days ago as I was waiting for Irwin had been prophetic: my life was changing, my vistas were endless in this charisma fixated society — if I didn’t blow this case.
I parked and walked several blocks to the ruins of Solly K’s fur empire. From a block away I could see a crowd of spectators looking interestedly into a roped-off area. Two patrolmen were watching the crowd. There was one patrol car and two red fire-marshals’ cars parked on the sidewalk.
When I got to the site of the leveled building I saw men in business suits poking in the rubble, carrying evidence kits and talking guardedly among themselves. I waited for them to finish. The site was one of total devastation: mountains of charred wood and insulation, piles of ashes, soot everywhere. It had settled on adjoining buildings and some storeowners had set workmen out to scrub down their walls.
I had no idea how large Kupferman’s warehouse had been. The facade was deceiving — the structure itself had extended back a quarter of a city block. From what I could see, no other buildings had been even singed by the fire. Fat Dog’s arson skills had improved since his Molotov Cocktail days. I was impressed.
One of the detectives was walking out of the rubble, brushing soot from his pants and looking worried. He was a burly cop, about fifty. I watched him move away from the crowd of onlookers toward an unmarked police car. I intercepted him as he unlocked the door. “Excuse me,” I said, “my name is Brown. I’m a private investigator.”
I handed him my photostat to prove it. He checked it out carefully and handed it back. “What is it, Mr. Brown? I’m very busy.”
I ran off my hastily prepared cover story: “I won’t keep you long. Sol Kupferman has hired me to look into the fire. He trusts the police and firemarshals to do a thorough investigation, but he wants this thing covered from all angles. Right now I only want to know one thing. Was it arson?”
The cop looked me over from head to toe. “You should know that police officers at crime scenes do not give out confidential information to civilians. We will be in touch with Mr. Kupferman. Good day.”
I watched him get into his car and drive off. He had the drawn, abstracted look of a veteran cop just handed a tough one. His worried expression was more than enough confirmation. I walked back to my car, then headed for the gas station at Franklin and Argyle to see Omar Gonzalez, conspiracy buff.
Franklin and Argyle was a blast from my past; one of the big ones. In June of 1972, on information supplied by Jack Skolnick, I led a raid on the notorious Castle Argyle, methedrine capitol of the West Coast. An eight-story Moorish apartment house built in the 20’s, the Castle Argyle was a hotbed of hippie intrigue in the early 70’s. Skolnick had told me he had been approached by one “Cosmo,” a UCLA chemistry major and resident of the castle, with an offer to sell him three gallons of liquid meth amphetamine for $5,000. The street value was close to half a million. I was hot for adventure and began staking the castle out, along with an obnoxious rookie patrolman named Snyder. We never told our superiors or the guys in Narcotics what we were doing. We were rogue cops, out for the big kill.