L.A. 46, page 17
“That’s right,” the sergeant said. “Look, Mister. If that accident prevention car is still in front, ask the officer in it to step in here, will you? It will save me putting it on the air. Tell him I just got a call from Corona del Mar that a young Marine from here slammed his car into a jackknifed semitrailer and the boys down there want us to try to contact his parents.”
“Yes, of course,” Gam said. “If the officer is still outside, I’ll tell him.”
18
John Brown’s body lies a mouldering
in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a mouldering
in the grave.
John Brown’s body lies a mouldering
in the grave
But the truth goes marching on.
Morning dawned hot and clear. Since it was Saturday, shortly after nine o’clock the usual number of female and twice the number of male tenants gathered in the lanai to exchange news of the week, knit, doze in the sun, or try to keep cool in the pool.
At ten o’clock, dripping perspiration and good humor, Mr. Hanson distributed the last of the mail. At ten-fifteen, Captain Johnson, who liked to sleep late, told the two models who had been quarreling since early morning to “Stop that goddamn yelling, for crisake and turn down that goddamn hi-fi.” At ten-thirty, right on time, Mr. Melkha finished the paper and his last cup of coffee and lit his first cigar and built his first highball of the day. Promptly at eleven o’clock, with well-earned shadows under her eyes and wearing a new bikini even scantier than those Colette affected, Lili Marlene minced her way down the front stairs, followed by Don Richardson whose bald head gleamed in the sun. She knocked on the manager’s door and became the fourth tenant in twenty-four hours to complain about the unprovoked, unwarranted and unwanted attentions of Marty the Wonder Boy.
“On account of it being so hot and the joint not doing much business and the few suckers we had either about to be 86ed or stiffing the bar,” the dancer explained to Mrs. Malloy, “we only did three shows last night. So that made it an hour earlier or around two forty-five when I got home. I put my car in its stall in the garage and walked up the ramp cold sober, like a lady. All I wanted to do was come in the front way and there the big, drunken son of a bitch of a greaser was waiting by the mailboxes. ‘How about it with me, beautiful?’ he propositions me. Using the dirty four letter word for it, mind you. All of this coming right out of a clear sky. ‘You think I’m a good guy, don’t you?’ he sez.” The Same-colored hair of the former motion picture child star crackled with anger. “Then he grabbed me. You know where. What I mean, he got a handful. But when he grabbed me I yelled and Mr. Richardson heard us and came down the stairs. God only knows what would have happened if he hadn’t.
“God only,” said Richardson, poker faced.
The dancer added, needlessly, “What I mean, right up against the mailboxes.”
“I’m sorry, believe me, Miss Marlene.” Mrs. Malloy attempted to soothe her tenant’s ruffled virtue. “Yours is the fourth complaint I’ve had in two days. Yesterday Mrs. Katz and one of the girls in Apartment 23. Then Mrs. Wylie this morning. Romero must have tried to get fresh with Ruby just before you came in. And now you.”
“I was that furious.”
“It won’t happen again, I promise. I gave him notice to vacate his apartment a half hour ago. Not that I wasn’t going to anyway. Mr. Romero knew when he signed the lease that we don’t allow children in the building.”
Lili was mildly interested. “I heard about that. I also heard the kid crying before I went to work last night.” She looked at the big-breasted, black-haired girl standing thigh deep in the water at the shallow end of the pool, then at the six-year-old, dangling his legs from the coping. “That’s him there, I suppose.”
Mrs. Malloy nodded. “That’s right. And Romero’s wife. At least she says she’s his wife.”
“He’s rather cute for a Mex kid.”
“Cute,” Richardson said dutifully.
“Yes,” Mrs. Malloy admitted. “He is. He’s also a very well-mannered child. I feel sorry for both him and his mother. But regulations are regulations. Besides, in a building like this, I can’t have one of my tenants acting like Mr. Romero has, doing the things he’s done. Why, he was so nasty drunk this morning when I knocked on the door of his apartment and gave him notice to vacate that—well—I won’t repeat what he said. But I do know this much. If he causes me any more trouble before they leave, I’m not going to fool with him. I’m going to call the police.”
“That might be a good idea,” Richardson said. “Where is he now?”
Mrs. Malloy shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. He could be sleeping it off. He could have gone for another jug. The girl and the boy came down a few minutes ago but I haven’t seen Romero since this morning when I talked to him.”
The dancer and Richardson moved on to two of the web chaise longues near the pool. After smiling at Mrs. Fine, Lili took off her robe and lowered herself to one of the chaises where she stretched out full length, her face turned sideways and resting on one of her hands, while Richardson, sitting on the other chaise, solicitously applied suntan lotion to her back and the backs of her long, shapely legs.
Lying on a lounge on the other side of the pool, his eyes half closed behind his dark sunglasses, John Johns watched them, cynically amused. He hoped, for Mrs. Fine’s and Mrs. Leslie’s and some of the other less broad-minded tenants’ sakes, that Richardson didn’t become too interested in what he was doing. Not that he blamed the writer. If a man liked them tall and big, and most small men did, Lili Marlene was a lot of woman and Richardson, for as long as it lasted, was eating high on the hog. There should be a telecast, a good one, in the overgrown, onetime child star. If he could come up with an angle.
Johns closed his eyes and relaxed, enjoying the heat of the sun on his lean body. Of course, Lili being smalltime and strictly local, a story about her wouldn’t have the impact of his telecast about Gloria Ames. That one had been a natural. Stories like that came to a man only once in a lifetime. He could always tell how well a show had gone by whether anyone in the building spoke to him the next morning. Tills morning no one, not even Mrs. Malloy, had spoken to him. More, when he’d phoned his office, his delighted secretary had told him that indignant telegrams and letters were still flooding in from incensed Gloria Ames fans. If they were anything like the phone calls he’d gotten before leaving the studio, they damned him from Los Angeles to Moscow. But the same indignant vox populi who had rushed to the dead star’s defense would be glued in front of their TV sets when he came back on the air.
“And so, ladies and gentlemen, I leave you with this, I hope, sobering, thought. Wasn’t the needless, yes, tragic, death of this poor misguided young woman by her own hand partly your fault and mine; the end product of a way of life in which license is mistaken for liberty and the pinnacle of perfection and feminine acting ability is presumed to be two oversized, overexposed mammary glands? Until Monday night. Good evening.”
Johns scrunched lower on the chaise. It was one of the best signoffs he’d ever done. If there was any well-heeled group more gullible than the great American public, of which thank God he was one, he hoped he would still be hawking soap chips or shaving lotion or whatever when the new soft touch was discovered.
It had been so simple. All he’d had to do to transform himself from just another announcer to a television personality and an acknowledged authority on the arts and sex and politics and all matters pertaining to the common weal, had been to follow the old gambling axiom—always bet against the dice; to become more liberal and more iconoclastic in his public announcements; to fail to see any good in anything or anyone if he, she, or it smacked of tradition.
Aye, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
Her banner in the sky.
Nail to the mast her holy flag.
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the God of storms,
The lightning and the gale.
He’d been dubious at first but it had worked. His Nielsen rating had jumped twenty points following his first telecast in the new format. Now he had two audiences, those who believed that Paul Revere had been a fink and the superpatriots who hated his guts but who always tuned him in so they could begin their morning conversation by asking:
“Did you hear what that Red son of a bitch said last night? Why doesn’t he go back where he came from?” To Osage, Oklahoma, population 425? No, thank you. Johns felt for his cigarettes and lit one without opening his eyes. It was a living, a good one. Now if he could only find a way to avoid some of his taxes. Withal, he was doing a public service. Good or bad, right or wrong, he was making his listeners think. That was more than he’d done when he’d merely parroted wire service reports and press releases over the air.
Now he was set and he had only two worries, one a regret, the other a premonition. He regretted that he hadn’t been smart enough to become a card-carrying member of the Communist Party when the great rush to the steppes had been on in the late thirties and early forties. If he had, it would give his broadcasts more poignant authenticity. Besides, he could have demanded a hundred thousand dollars by recanting in an eighty-thousand word, four-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post. Then there would be the substantial increase in his lecture fees when he spoke to the Working Mothers for Peace, Ban the Bomb, and Let’s Stamp Out Sex groups.
The premonition was more serious. There were nights when he woke up in a cold sweat, dreaming that his perfidy had been discovered, that some reporter had finally checked his record and found out that, instead of being a bona fide liberal and iconoclast as John Brown (his real name), he’d been foolish enough to enlist in the Army in 1942 and crazy enough to earn a silver star, four battle stars, and a purple heart fighting for the same decadent traditions he decried five nights a week at so many dollars a show.
Johns consoled himself with a comforting thought. There was a tongue-in-cheek telecast he’d always wanted to do but had never been able to figure how to get past the F.C.C. Now that both Mr. and Mrs. R. were dead, perhaps he could come up with something. Public idols died hard and if he ever was exposed, his listeners would probably forgive him and clasp him to their hate again if he could manage to intimate over the air that it not only had felt like a mole, it had been one.
He opened his eyes and blew smoke through his nose. So it was all a lot of gobbledegook, an updated version of “ ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” yet a great deal of what he said made sense. At least, to date, no Supreme Court decision or session of Congress had outlawed the man’s inhumanity to man bit.
Johns looked at the black-haired girl standing thigh deep in the water at the shallow end of the pool. Mrs. Mauricio Romero was an excellent example. The girl had large but well-formed breasts. What he could see of her body was attractive. Her wealth of hair was neatly combed. She was generally well groomed. All the girl was asking of anyone was to be recognized as a human being. By his watch, she’d been standing in one spot, unrecognized, unspoken to, for fifteen minutes. The hopeful smile she beamed at everyone who turned her way was beginning to turn pathetic. How much was she supposed to take? Applying the rule of guilt by association and because she’d been silly enough to perform a woman’s. basic function and bear a child, the good burghers and frauen, secure in their own self-righteousness, were putting her in Coventry.
Johns pursued his train of thought. Because they despised her husband, because she had a child, and because her complexion was a shade too dark. A complexion inherited from honorable and honored ancestors who had run cattle on the soil, right here where the Casa del Sol was now standing, for a hundred years before the miners who’d come in ’49 and the whores who’d followed in ’51 had put their best features together and begotten the so-called native sons.
Johns raised his eyes to the closed door of Apartment 25. Again, in the human interest department, there was the case of blond Mrs. Mazeric. There was definitely something going on there. He wished he knew what it was. He hoped Cara could tell him why, instead of sleeping in her own place, the girl had spent the night with Mrs. Katz while Katz had moved in with Dr. Gam and Mazeric had stormed out of the building shortly after Gam, Katz, and Morton had brought Mrs. Mazeric home around three-thirty that morning. According to Cara’s report over their morning coffee, Mrs. Mazeric had been missing almost all of the day before and Mazeric had spent the hours between nine in the morning and midnight knocking on doors or buttonholing every tenant in the building to ask if he or she had seen his wife Eva.
It made for interesting conjecture. It was local, true, but possibly an interesting telecast. If he ever found out just what was going on.
Johns started to close his eyes again and sat up, instead, as his wife stepped out of the elevator, glancing around, obviously looking for him. Then seeing him, she crossed the lanai and walked around the pool toward the chaise on which he was sitting.
Johns lit two cigarettes, one for himself and one for her. Cara was all his. She might not have the physical endowments of the late Gloria Ames, the very much alive Lili Marlene, or even Mrs. Mauricio Romero. But she had enough. It would serve. It comforted him to know that most men, not familiar with Cara as he was and judging all women by their most obvious assets, would never try to woo her away from him. What they didn’t know was that when the occasion warranted it, the rather plain, former Iowa farm girl could make any of the fabled houris of Islam look like a group of Bluebird Girls learning how to tat antimacassars.
His wife sat on the lounge beside him and twisted a wisp of hair on his chest around one of her fingers. “I think I’ve found out what you want to know. But you’ll never believe it.”
Johns gave her one of the cigarettes. ‘Try me.”
“Well, I don’t know if you can use it or not but I’ve just come from pumping Mrs. Eden and the reason the little mother-to-be didn’t come home last night was because she was being held in Division 6 on charges of drunk and disorderly conduct, assault and battery and malicious damage to private property.”
“Ah. You’re putting me on. You have to be.”
Mrs. Johns shook her head. “No. It seems when he made a pass at her she belted a joker over the head with a fifth of whiskey, then threw the bottle through Kolowski’s back bar mirror and he had her pinched. The local station held her in lieu of five hundred dollars bail until Mr. Morton and Mr. Katz and Dr. Gam raised the money between them.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Mrs. Johns lowered her voice. “And the best is still to come. Guess why she got looped.”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“She just learned that she and Mazeric are brother and sister.”
“You must be kidding.”
“No. Fact.”
“Mrs. Eden told you that?”
“And she got it straight from Mrs. Morton who got it from Mrs. Katz who got it from Eva. That’s why the Mazeric girl moved into the Katz apartment last night and Katz moved in with Gam.”
“How many people know this?”
“I don’t know but not many, I imagine.” Mrs. Johns hesitated, then continued. “It should make a hell of a story for you. Beautiful, homeless waif from a D.P. camp. Virile, handsome freedom fighter. A new country, a fresh start in life. Orange blossoms. Wedding bells. Then when she’s three months pregnant—blooey.” Johns felt as though a tight band was being drawn tighter around his head. “No,” he said finally. “Okay. I’m a bastard. I’m not that big a one. Let them work it out themselves.” He looked back at the black-haired girl still standing in the pool. “But I tell you what you can do for me.”
“You name it.”
“First, you can stop getting your kicks by twisting the hair on my chest. Then you can tell me if there’s any coffee on the stove.”
“No, there isn’t. But I can make some in a minute.”
“And are there some strawberries and cream left? And some bacon and eggs? And some of those almond cookies we had for dessert last night?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Johns said, puzzled. “Why, John?”
Johns picked up his robe from the back of the chaise. “I’ll tell you what you and I are going to do.”
“I’m all agog.”
Johns stood up and put on his robe and belted it. “I don’t know how long they’ll be here. Probably not very long. But right now you and I are going over and extend the hospitality of the Casa del Sol to Mrs. Mauricio Romero and her son. So the other tenants don’t like it. They know what I think of their opinions. And after we introduce ourselves and lie that we are very happy to meet her, you’re going to invite her and her son up to our place for brunch.”
Cara touched Johns’ cheek with her fingertips. “Well, like they say about Tito.”
“What do they say about Tito?”
“At least he’s our bastard.” The girl snuggled his arm. “My big, bad country boy husband. Are you certain you don’t believe some of that stuff you broadcast?”
19
If coming events cast their shadows, the tenants of Casa del Sol were cheated. None of them were forewarned. There were no bloody auguries in the noon sky. No mysterious male hand appeared against any of their walls to write, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,” on the plaster.
After spending a pleasant morning in the lanai, nearly all of them found more important things to do during the afternoon.
The Barry Edens climbed into their sports car to drive to San Bernardino and up the Rim of the World Highway to visit another British couple who had a cabin in the mountains. The Suddermans and Johnsons and Fines decided at the last minute to try their luck at Santa Anita. The Leslies drove out to the Valley to spend the afternoon and evening with their married son and family. Mr. and Mrs. Morton left on a similar mission, their destination West Covina. At Wylie’s insistence that they spend some of their waking hours together and to make up to her for having taken Ruby’s part the night before, he and Vera drove to Culver City to check on the progress being made by the crew working overtime on the new body shop he was scheduled to open on Monday. They were planning to dine in one of the smart restaurants along the La Cienega Restaurant Row.
