I’ve spent twenty-eight years in this fucking hellhole. Now, they tell me I can memoir-map my misadventures and write my way out.

All that religious shit I disdained and disobeyed has played out true. There’s Heaven for the good folks, Hell for the beastfully baaaaaad. There’s Purgatory for guys like me — caustic cads that capitalized on a sicko system and caused catastrophe. I’ve sizzled in my sins for two decades plus. I’ve relived my earthly life in dystopian detail. My cunning keepers are currently dangling a deal:

Record your jaundiced journey. Trumpet the truth, triumphant. Hop to Heaven, and hit that high note.

Baby, it’s time to CONFESS.

Purgatory is shitsville. You’re stuck with the body you had on Earth when you died. You eat nothing but coach-class airplane food. There’s no booze, no jazzy intrigue, no wilt-your-will women. Violated victims bop by my cell. They remind me of my many misdeeds and jab me with red-hot pokers. Gay gauchos hurtle down from Heaven and scold me for outing them back in the homo-hate ’50s. It was my job. I entrapped soiled celebrities and putzo politicos, and cornholed them in Confidential. I sold my soul to that maladroit magazine. Now, I’m sordidly SORRY.

So what?

Sorry’s for limp-dick losers. Confession salves the savage self and rips it to righteous redemption. Hear my plaintive plea, O watchful world:

Get me the fuck out of here!!!!!

My keepers have poised me with pen and paper. They’ve compiled a complete run of Confidential. My synapses soar with a million malignant memories. Freddy Otash, 1922–1992. I’m a rogue cop, a private eye, a shifty shakedown artist. I’m the demonic deus ex machina of my tattered time and place. I’m the hellhound who held Hollywood captive. I’m the man with the sex-scorched secrets you irksome earthlings want to hear.

Confidential presaged the infantile Internet. Our gobs of gossip were repugnantly real. Today’s blowhard bloggers and their tattle texts? Pussyfooting punks all. We stung the studios. We popped the pooh-bahs. We hurled the hurt, wholesale. We voyeur-vamped America and got her hooked on the shivering shit. WE CREATED TODAY’S TELL-ALL MEDIA CULTURE. We crazily crafted a lurid language and made it our own.

It’s the lexicon of the lowdown. It’s the dialogue of the dish. It’s the slithering slur and the thrill of the threat. I think and write in algorithmic alliteration. Language must lambaste and lay on the lash. Language liberates as it offends. Confidential taught me that. My confession will make this dizzy dialect divide you in two. There’s Sin and Atonement, fuckers — there’s nothing else.

Purgatory’s a punitive proposition. Montgomery Clift pitchforked me yesterday. Confidential labeled him “the Lavender Lilliputian” and “Princess Tiny Meat.” JFK followed Monty. I dumped the dish on his dope habit and call-girl cavalcade. Marilyn Monroe penance-poked me next. Marilyn was a snout trout. She dispensed head to rogue pharmacists, XXX-exclusive. They dispensed noxious Nembutal back. Maybe I shouldn’t have tattled the tale — but I was within my First Amendment rights!!!!!

I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.

I was working Hollywood Vice in ’51. We got word on a fuck pad, operating out of a crib at the Villa Elaine. I hotfooted it over there.”

We’re bopped back in my booth. There’s my audience: four showbiz machers in worse shape than me. Walkers, canes, and oxygen tanks clog the aisles to the kitchen. Fractious Freddy O.’s holding court.

It’s late summer, ’92. I’m seventy and in baaaaad fucking shape. I’ve consumed scads of scotch and sucked three packs a day since I shot out the chute. I’ve got emphysema and a bum pump. I’m aching to make eighty. It’s a lunar-looped long shot.

Sol Sidell said, “Get to it, Freddy. You roll to the pad, and then what?”

Sinful Sol. A jailbaiter from jump. He produced beach-blanket flicks in the sick ’60s. I pulled him out of the shit, circa ’66. He was reefer-ripped and poking two underage twists.

I said, “Okay, I roll to the crib and peep a side window. Shit — there’s Sam Spiegel, the cat that produced Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai. He’s muff-diving a three-hundred-pound chick. That was a boss beef, back in ’51. I told Sambo it’s dues time. It’s a morals bust, or a monthly donation to the Fred Otash Retirement Fund.”

My pals yukked. I wrapped into my Reuben sandwich and felt a twisted twinge in my chest. I downed digitalis. I saw Jules Slotnick suck on his oxygen mask and light a Camel Light. Julie produced turgid turkeys about farmworker strife. Call him Mr. Guilt for Gelt. He made all his live-in maids blow him. He held their green cards as a hedge against their refusal to bestow daily head.

Sid Resnick said, “Give us another one, Freddy.”

The Sidster was Mr. Holocaust Heartache. He produced schlockumentaries for Islamic TV. He was the King of the Chubby Chasers. He longed for it laaarrrge.

I cruised my cranium cracks for a story. Two elderly gay cats sashayed by the booth. That fed me my cue.

I pointed to them. “I got tipped to an all-male pajama party, back in ’56. I paid some LAPD hard boys a yard apiece to bust it, and brought my camera along. Those cats were piled up in a five-way with Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, and a dude with giant acne cysts. Confidential wrote it up. Universal paid me ten g’s to keep the Rockster’s name out of the story.”

The booth roared and re-roared. Julie Slotnick gasped for breath. Al Wexler yukked out a bagel chunk. It flew and flopped to the floor.

Alky Al owned six porno bookstores and nine nose-job clinics. He plowed a truck full of migrant Mexicans and left six dead. I got it mashed down to a Mickey Mouse misdemeanor. Al owed me, laaaaarge.

I killed my sandwich. Alky Al blew a faux fanfare. I laid out my lifelong credo: “I’ll do anything short of murder. I’ll work for anyone but the Reds.”

My boys clapped and guffawed. A bad twinge hit my heart. I downed digitalis and deep dips of scotch.

Corned beef and sauerkraut socked my system. I got floaty and deep dyspeptic. I brought up a bread crust. It popped on my plate.

The booth tumbled. My pals vaporized. My vision blurred black. Calendar sheets shot backward. Decades disappeared and devolved. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m just dreaming this shit—

There I am. I’m fetching fine in ’49. I’m beefcake, boss, and bangin’ them bonaroo bitches, three at a pop.

I’m handsome and heavy-hung. I’m a lustful Lebanese. Call me a camel cad from the get-go. I’m an ex-Marine. I trained troops at Parris Island and sent them off to Saipan, savvy. I joined the LAPD in late ’45. I went on the grift faaaaaast.

I formed a 459 ring. They worked my downtown foot beat. They popped pawnshops and dumped dope-pushing pharmacies. I fingered the jobs. My gang cadged cash and dope. They were 2:00 a.m. creepers. I was their Rogue Cop Rajah.

I’m corrosively corruptible and tempted by the take. I live for the scurrilous score. It’s my existential fate. I had a squaresville home life in bumfuck Massachusetts. My mom and dad loved me. Nobody butt-fucked me in my bassinet. I live by a cool-cat code. There’s shit I won’t do. My code got catastrophized on 2/4/49.

I hogged a hall mirror. I combed my hair and noosed my necktie. Sy Devore tailored my formfit uniform. The squadroom buzzed baaaad all around me. It’s a Code 3 squawk — shoot-out at 9th and Figueroa.

Two men down. One traffic cop/one heist geek. The cop’s nudging near death. The geek suffered superficial wounds. Both men — ensconced at Georgia Street Receiving, right now.

The squadroom bebop buzzed. The squadroom phones rang incessant. The buzz bombarded me. I heard murderous murmurs laced with a lynch-mob gestalt.

I heard heavy footfalls. Booze breath bristled me.

“If you’re through admiring yourself, I’ve got something.”

I turned around. It’s a Robbery bull named Harry Fremont. Harry has a rancid rep. He stomped two pachucos dead during the zoot suit riots. He pimped transvestite whores out of a he-she bar. He was shit-faced drunk at noon.

“Yeah, Harry?”

Harry said, “Be useful, kid. There’s a cop killer at Georgia Street. Chief Horrall thinks you should take care of it. This is an opportunity you don’t want to pass up.”

I said, “Take care of what? The cop he shot isn’t dead.”

Harry rolled his eyes. He passed me a key fob. He said, “4-A-32. It’s in the watch commander’s space. Look under the backseat.”

I got it. Harry locked on my look. He went Nooowww, he gets it. He winked and waltzed away from me.

I steadied myself and stood still. I loaded up on that lynch-mob gestalt. I lurched through the squadroom and zombie-walked downstairs. I hit the garage.

I found the watch commander’s space. There’s 4-A-32. The key fits the ignition. The garage was dark. Ceiling pipes leaked. Water drops turned wiggy colors and morphed into wild shapes.

I gunned the gas and pulled out onto Spring Street. I drove sloooooow. The heist geek was jacked in the jail ward. It was a lockup-transfer ruse. It was forty-three years ago. It’s still etched in Sin-emascope and surround sound. I can still see the passersby on the street.

There it is. There’s Georgia Street Receiving.

The jail ward sat on the north side. The squarejohn ward sat to the south. A narrow pathway bisected the buildings. It hit me then:

They know you’ll do it. They know you’re that kind of guy.

I reached under the backseat. I pulled out transfer papers for Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I grabbed a .32 snubnose revolver.

I put the gun in my front pocket and grabbed the papers. I slid out of the sled. I popped down the pathway and went through the jail-ward door.

The deskman was PD. He pointed to a punk cuffed to a drainpipe. The punk wore a loafer jacket and slit-bottomed khakis. He sported a left-arm splint. He was acne-addled and chancre-sored. He vibed hophead. He looked smack-back insolent.

The deskman did the knife-across-throat thing. I handed him the papers and uncuffed and recuffed the punk. The deskman said, “Bon voyage, sweetheart.”

I shoved the punk outside and pointed him up the pathway. He walked ahead of me. I couldn’t feel my feet. I couldn’t feel my legs. My heart hammered on overdrive. I lost my limbs somewhere.

There’s no telltale windows. There’s no pedestrians on Georgia Street. There’s no witnesses.

I pulled the gun from my pocket and fired over my own head. The gun kicked and lashed life back in my limbs. My pulse topped 200 rpms.

The punk wheeled around. He moved his lips. A word came out as a squeak. I pulled my service revolver and shot him in the mouth. His teeth exploded. He dropped. I placed the throwdown piece in his right hand.

He tried to say “Please.” This dream’s a routine reenactment. The details veer and vary. The “Please” always sticks. I’m alive. He’s not. That’s the baleful bottom line.

Central Division. The doofus day watch. Freewheeling Freddy’s at loose ends.

I disbanded my 459 gang. My main men got hooked on Big “H.” They were decidedly desperate and snitch-prone. I’d gambled away my gelt. I was living on a schmuck cop’s pay and was suffused with the blues. William H. Parker became Chief in ’50. He instituted righteous reforms and riddled the ranks with a phalanx of finks to sniff out miscreants and misconduct. I drove a Packard pimpmobile. I won it in a darktown dice game. Parker’s punks tattled to the hellhound Jefe. I got called in and grindingly grilled. Parker warned me not to be a Bolshevik. He said, “I’ve got my four eyes on you.”

It rained that day. It was some mad monsoon. Wild winds whipped me along on my foot beat. I stopped at a lockbox phone and called the station. The deskman told me to hotfoot it to 668 South Olive. They were shooting a Racket Squad episode in the lobby. They needed a hard boy to shoo off autograph hounds.

I headed over there. I caught a taut tailwind and slalomed in the slush. It was a medical building. The lobby was all lit up. I caught a frazzled fracas, right off.

Lights, cameras, boom mikes. Here’s the action, straight up.

A jug-eared cat was hassling a boss blonde. He wore pegged chinos and a gone jacket. She was built, va-va-voom.

The cast and crew orbed the scene. Jug Ears grabbed the blonde’s arm and applied abrasions. It gored my gonads and hit my heartstrings. I walked up behind him. He saw my shadow and swift swiveled. I notched his nose with a palm shot. I looped a left to his larynx. I kneed his nuts as he dropped.

The blonde genuflected. I tipped my hat. Jug Ears cradled his busted beak and moaned for his mama. The cast and crew clapped.

The blonde said, “He’s my ex-husband. He stiffed me for three months’ alimony.”

I kicked him in the head and lifted his wallet. Jug Ears mama-moaned anew. The cast and crew whistled and stomped.

The wallet weighed in heavy. I fanned the cash compartment and counted a sea of C-notes. I handed them to the blonde. She dropped them in her purse and dropped a dollar on her ex-hubby. She said, “For old times. He was good in the sack.”

I laffed. I reached in my pocket and handed her a card. Understated class shows. There’s my name, phone number, and “Mr. Nine Inches.”

She dropped the card in with her cash stash. A guy yelled, “You’re up, Joi. Scene 16-B.”

She winked and walked away from me. I cuffed Jug Ears behind his back and pay-phone-called the station. Hollyweird: they filmed the scene with the ex coma-conked and cuffed on the floor.

I walked outside and smoked a cigarette. A black-and-white cruised by and hauled the ex to Georgia Street. I thought of Ralph Mitchell Horvath. A kid returned my calling card. She wrote on the back: “Joi Lansing. 39-25-38. Googie’s, tonight at 8:30.”

A fey factotum met me. The yard was tropically tricked out and football-field size.

Flamingos flitted. Toucans tooled and bit bugs. A path cut through ten-foot-high fronds and floral explosions. Everything was green, purple, and pink.

We hit a clearing. It was paved with stones embossed with musical clefs. The pool was shaped like a piano. Liberace sat in a deck chair. A leopard with a mink collar snoozed at his feet.

The factotum sashayed off. I pulled up a deck chair. The leopard stirred and snarled at me. I scratched his neck and kissed his snout. He went back to sleep.

Liberace said, “You’re fearless. You’re the kind of man I need.”

“I’m here to help you out, sir. Joi said you’ve got a guy bugging you.”

The factotum sashayed back with cocktails. Two highball glasses glowed pink. The guy served us and skedaddled. My drink tasted like radioactive bubble gum.

Liberace said, “Bottoms up.”

I yukked. “A kid’s putting the boots to you, right? Pay up, or he’ll rat you to the Legion of Decency. All those dago mob guys that book your act in Vegas will hightail it. Your TV show will be canceled if word gets out you go Greek.”

Liberace sighed. “Inimitably candid, and so, so true. He’s a dishwasher at Perino’s. What was I thinking?”

I sipped my pink drink. “Pictures?”

“Of course, dear heart. He lured me to a motel with a wall peek.”

A hi-fi speaker sparked and kicked on. Judy Garland belted, “Someday he’ll come along / The man I love.” The leopard lolled and licked his balls. Liberace goo-goo-talked him.

“Five thou, sir. You get the pictures and the negatives, along with my assurance that it won’t happen again.”

Liberace pouted. His chest heaved. Sequins popped off his toga. The leopard loped to the pool and arced his ass over the edge. A giant shit ensued.

The factotum ran up. He wielded a turd-scoop contraption. Liberace reached under his chair and snagged a scrapbook.

“Ex-convicts are a weakness of mine, I’m chagrined to say. I’ve got mug shots of him, and quite a few other rough-trade conquests. It’s my new hobby. I paste pictures, when I’m not wowing my fans or practicing Chopin.”

I grabbed the book and leafed through it. It was the fucking lavender lodestone. I counted twenty-six K-Y cowboys wearing neck boards. Names/dates/penal-code numbers. A smutty smorgasbord of malignant maleness. Parole holds and prosty beefs galore.

Liberace jabbed a pic of one Manolo Sanchez. The guy vibed baleful bantamweight.

“He broke my heart, while his evil lezzie sister took snapshots. Feel free to get tough.”

I nodded and flipped ahead. Three glum glamour boys popped off the page. Ward Wardell, Race Rockwell, Donkey Don Eversall. All booked for possession of pornography.

I pointed to the pics. “Blue-movie actors, right? They peddle it on the side. You see the movies, you get a yen, you make a phone call.”

“That’s correct. I went to a screening at Michael Wilding and Liz Taylor’s house. Michael screened Locker Room Lust and Jailhouse Heat, and supplied the referral.”

“Referral” ripped me. “Could these guys get it up for women?”

Liberace whooped. “Could, can, and do, sweetheart. And Donkey Don is the eighth wonder of the world, if you follow my drift.”

I tingled. I thought Parlay. I saw dollar signs and movie-star movement on my Landing Strip.

“So, Michael Wilding’s a gay caballero?”

“In spades, love. His house is known as the ‘Fruit Stand,’ which perturbs lovely Liz no end.”

I yukked. “And Liz wants a divorce, so she can move on to her next husband and break the all-time world record?”

Liberace slapped his knees. “Yes, and she’s pulling ahead of your girlfriend in that department.”

I cracked my knuckles. Liberace swooned. The cat almost creamed in his jeans.

“Tell Liz to meet me at the Beverly Hills Hotel, tomorrow night. Fill her in on my résumé.”

Liberace re-swooned. The leopard snarled and shooed a toucan up a tree.

Joi woke me up. I was nudging off a nightmare. It was a dark double dip. Ralph Mitchell Horvath, shot in the mouth/Manolo Sanchez with skeleton claws.

I looked across the bed. Shit — Liz was gone.

Joi read my mind. “She had an early call. She said to remind you that Arthur Crowley wants that phone date.”

I lit a cigarette. I chased bennies with Old Crow. Aaaaaaah, breakfast of champions!!!!

“Remind me again. Who’s Arthur Crowley?”

“He’s that divorce lawyer who needs your help.”

I said, “I’ll call him when I go off-duty.”

Joi stepped into a skirt and pulled her shoes on. She dressed as fast as most men.

“No more girls for a while, okay, Freddy? Liz is great, but Barb is like Helga, She-Wolf of the SS. Really, that stunt with the armband and the garters? That, and she hogs the whole bed.”

I laffed loud and lewd. My wake-up whipped through me. It canceled out all dreary dreams and coarse cobwebs. Late summer in L.A. — ring-a-ding-ding!!!!

Joi kissed me and bopped out of the bungalow. I shit, showered, shaved, and put on my uniform.

The phone rang. I snagged it. A man said, “Mr. Otash, this is Arthur Crowley.”

I buffed my badge with my necktie. A mirror magnetized me. Man-O-Manischewitz, I look good!!!!

“Mr. Crowley, it’s a pleasure.”

Crowley said, “Sir, I’ll be blunt. I’m swamped with pissed-off husbands and wives, looking to take each other to the cleaners. Legal statutes are in flux, and divorce-court judges are demanding greater proof of adultery. Liz Taylor told me you might have some ideas.”

I lit a cigarette. Benzedrine arced through my arteries and piqued my pizzazz.

“I do have ideas. If you have flexible scruples, I think we can do biz.”

Crowley laffed. “I’m listening.”

I said, “I know some Marines stationed down at Camp Pendleton. I was their DI in ’43 and ’44, and now they’re back from Korea and looking for kicks. It’s a parlay. Hot rods, good-looking shills, walkie-talkies, phone drops, and Speed Graphic cameras.”

Crowley hooted. “Semper fi, sir. You’re a white man in my book.”

“Semper fi, boss. We’ll work out the details at your convenience, and I’ll round up my boys.”

“And, in the meantime? Is there anything you need?”

Benzedrine was a groin groper. One thing did come to mind.

“My Landing Strip’s got two empty runways tonight. Liz told me you’re conversant with the concept.”

Voices vibrated outside the bungalow. They were mucho male and brazenly brusque. I heard foot scrapes and coughs.

Crowley said, “Liz explained the concept, so I called you prepared. I’ll send two stenos over.”

“Mr. Crowley, you’re a pisser.”

“It takes one to know one, sir.”

We hung up. The voices vibrated. I caught key-in-lock sounds. I walked into the living room. The door whipped wide.

It’s William H. Parker.

With two plainclothes bulls. Both six-four. They live to hurl hurt. They’re mastiffs on a mission to maul for their master.

“Send not to know for whom the bell tolls—”

I unpinned my badge and tossed it at Parker. It hit his chest and dropped on the floor. The mastiffs moved. Parker went Get back. The mastiffs pawed the carpet and growled loooowwww.

I unhooked my gun belt and dropped it on a chair. I called up some cool. Freon Freddy, the Shaman of Shakedown.

“Hit me, Bill. Shack jobs, living above my means, bending the rules here and there. My head’s on the chopping block, baby. Guillotine me.”

The mastiffs smirked smug. Pious Parker parsed out a grin.

“You are currently engaged in an intimate relationship with a Pan American stewardess named Barbara Jane Bonvillain, now in Federal custody for possession of narcotics procured in Mexico. I must inform you that the outsized Miss Bonvillain is a Communist agent and a personal emissary of Marshal Tito, the Red boss of Yugoslavia. As if that weren’t enough, Miss Bonvillain is really a man. She underwent a sex-change operation in Malmö, Sweden, in late 1951, before her stellar efforts impersonating a woman at the ’52 Olympics. You fucked a man, Freddy. You’re a homo. Get the hell off my police force.”

I’m balefully back. It’s time for my next contaminated confession. I’m still stagnantly stuck in the Hell Adjacent Hilton and yammeringly yearn for a heavenly reprieve. I’m still stuck with the fucked-up and failing body I had when I crapped out, back in ’92. It’s still confession/repentence/atonement. It still comes down to that. Here’s the draconian drill:

I’ll repugnantly reprise some shit I pulled in phantasmagoric ’54. I’ll be freewheeling Fred Otash at thirty-two. ’54 was a ring-a-ding-ding year. I’m going to diiiiiiiig going back.

So, succumb to the seditious soul of a scandal-rag scoundrel — because wicked words on paper are pop-pop-popping your way.

Freaky Freddy O. rides again.

It’s a wind-whipped winter nite. It’s cloudless clear all the way to noxious Nevada. Uncle Sambo is detonating a payload-packed A-bomb in some deserted desert burg. We’re here to grok, groove, flip, flash, and gas on the show.

We’ve got a ripe rooftop perch. I’m here at Bondage Bob Harrison’s behest. Confidential’s running a farkakte feature on radioactive waste as a dick-enlargement bonanza. Bob’s got a mad chemist brother. He’s calling his priapic product “Megaton Man.”

We’re here. That means me and my Marine Corps mastiffs: Race Rockwell and Ward Wardell. Mattress Jack has slipped his gilded guests binoculars and Hyannis Port toggle coats. My cool contingent carries burglars’ tools and comes with B and E know-how. The plan: burglarize Senator Jack’s bungalow in the wiggy wake of the blast.

Dig the guest list. There’s Jack the K. and insolent Ingrid Bergman. There’s Bob Mitchum and Juicy Jane Russell. There’s Tarzan-toned Lex Barker and liquor-looped Lana Turner. Jimmy Dean’s on my guest card. He’s still peddling snapshots of Marlon Brando with a dick in his mouth. Jimmy’s got director Gadge Kazan in tow. He’s this close to snagging the top role in East of Eden. Gadge is a maladroit midget. His flicks send me somnambulistic. He ratted some Comintern cads to HUAC and earned Confidential’s fevered fealty. He snitches recidivistic Reds to Bondage Bob, subversively sub rosa.

Senator Jack served rum drinks topped with floating hashish cubes. I opted for the Benzedrine-spiked reefers. Jack Baby loves my larcenous Lebanese ass. I flew a bitching bevy of call girls down to Acapulco last year. They trashed Jack’s paparazzi-pounced honeymoon and made Jackie jump into my bed. Jack’s a c’est la vie, Daddy-O, noblesse oblige sort of guy. Jackie was grovelingly grateful.

A portable radio announced the countdown. Waiters stood by with postblast drinks and hors d’oeuvres. A doomsday disc jockey intoned: “ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one — zero.”

Bombs Away, Motherfuckers!!!!!

A magnificent mushroom cloud morphed into mauve and pink. Man, what a suck-your-soul sight!!! My balls contracted. My boys and I hopped off the roof, down to ground level. Ground zero popped pink particles high in the sky. The gilded gang applauded and roared.

Jimmy Dean and I lolled by the two-way mirror. We looked down at the dregs and the dreck and the dreamy drag queens dragging themselves through the aisles. Shifty shoplifters shot their gaze to our opaque eye in the sky.

Jimmy said, “Aisle six. That fat guy slid a Swanson’s TV dinner down the back of his pants.”

I lit a cigarette. “The checkstand guy will spot the bulge and nail him.”

“You’re abstracted today, Freddy.”

“I had a late night, and I don’t feel like messing with chumps.”

Jimmy pulled a chair up. I collapsed on my couch. Jimmy tossed a magazine on my lap.

“I talked to Billy Eckstine after you left Googie’s. He told me you’re entranced with a certain lezzie athlete. I heard she frequents Linda’s Little Log Cabin, and I thought you might appreciate page twenty-six.”

The Trojanette Sporting News. Glittery glossy and a boss booster rag. Page twenty-six: a fulsome foldout of Joan “Stretch” Perkins.

Woo-woo!!! She’s a Viking Valkyrie. She’s a blitzkrieg blonde with bleached-blue eyes. She’s bigger than Barb Bonvillain — richly revealed to be a man some quack diced and dehomoized.

There’s Strapping Stretch. She’s Stunning Stretch in USC crimson-and-gold silks. She wears no makeup. She looks heavenly wholesome. She’s smiling because she’s bigger than everyone — men insistently included. And I know and dig that that means ME — you towering temptress.

I tossed the magazine back to Jimmy. He said, “Something’s eating you.”

“Joi moved out last night, while I was at Googie’s. She left me a note: ‘Fuck you and go to hell. You’re a storm trooper, and the world is wise to your shit.’ ”

Jimmy yukked. “Joi’s vivid, but I found you a new roommate — at least for a while.”

“Stretch Perkins?”

“No such luck. Liberace called me. He wants you to look after his leopard while he goes on tour. You’re the only man for the job. The fucking leopard would kill anyone else.”

I yukked. “I’ll consider it. Tell me some other shit I don’t know, and make it entertaining.”

Jimmy lit a cigarette and blew concentric smoke rings. Gadge Kazan told me the trick got him East of Eden.

“I did two days on Ride Clear of Diablo, at Universal. Lew Wasserman knows we’re pals, and he chatted me up on the set. He said Rock Hudson’s going batshit with boys of all races, colors, and creeds, and Morty Bendish at the Mirror’s getting ready to blind-item it, and he’s passing the specific dirt and some motel-room infrareds on to some guys at Transom and Whisper. He wants you to put the squelch on it and find Rock a wife, so maybe the appearance of being married will put the skids to all those persistent and wholly accurate rumors.”

I roared righteous and laffed lewd. I folded my fitful funk and tossed Jilting Joi and Jittery Johnnie Ray aside. I popped two of Jack Kennedy’s Dexedrine and went rippled and revitalized.

“Call Lew, and put him on your side in all matters pertaining to your career. Tell him we’re in. I’ll lean on Bendish and the Transom and Whisper guys. We’ll negotiate the wife search when I glom the infrareds, and we’ll split Lew’s paycheck fifty-fifty. Hit the studio casting pools and hustle up some good-looking skirts who know an opportunity when they see one, and who know how to keep their mouths shut. No semipros, nothing garish. Withhold the ‘He’s a fruit’ punch line until we’ve narrowed down our list of candidates. Call Rock now and tell him to be discreet and order in his woof-woof, for the time being. Tell Lew that he’s the one to break the news to Rock — and to tell him the good news that as far as women are concerned, nothing lasts forever.”

Bernie said, “I’m wary of this job. This psycho cocksucker scares me.”

Studly Steve lived on Havenhurst between Fountain and the Strip. Three sparkle-Spanish buildings/one cool courtyard. Six pads per building. Call girls and minor movie minions ensconced within.

It’s 9:14 a.m. now. Steve’s home. His coon maroon Merc’s parked out back.

I lit a cigarette and gargled Old Crow. I had a case of the yammering yips and the mean megrims. I kept seeing things. Strongarm cops in surging surveillance. Women I wanted wicked baaaaaaaad and weren’t there. Waiting wilted me. I wanted WORK. I popped two Dexedrine to goose things along.

Bernie said, “He’s got four rooms, plus bathroom. I checked with the County Planning Office. The walls are soft stucco, and all rough-finished. They’ll be easy to drill and respackle. I broke in last night and carved some paint chips. It’s a new paint job, so it should be easy to match.”

We wore TV repairman jumpsuits. Master keys would get us in. Steve the Stud was filming some crime lox called Private Hell 36. Bernie spot-tailed him yesterday. He said Steve got his all-day calls at 9:30 a.m.

I said, “We’ll piggyback the listening post on Sweetzer. Burt Lancaster’s got his torture den in the same building. My Marines will monitor both locations. We’ll have a man hot-wired in at all times.”

Bernie went Oy. “Burt swings both ways. Ward Wardell told me. He buys his boys from a swish named Dwight Gilette.”

I said, “To each his own. You’re a big cheese at your synagogue, and you’ve got eight schvartze girlfriends.”

Bernie went Oy. I pointed across the street. Studly Steve’s rolling. His cherry Merc’s wheeling southbound.

We loaded up. Drills, spackle paste, paint and brushes — check. Wire rolls, condenser mikes, friction tape — check. Wire clamps, spatulas, industrial vacuum — check. Toolbox packed with close-work tools — check.

We packed two big metal cases. They were marked “Acme TV Repair.” We vacated the van and coursed through the courtyard. We hit Steve’s door at a sprint. Bernie jabbed keys at the door lock. Key #3 got us in.

I popped through the pad. It was cool, cozy, and tidy tight. Living room/ bedroom/kitchen/bathroom/washroom. One connecting hallway. One demented decorating motif:

World War II. Ripe real regalia. Booty from Berchtesgaden and Jap flags salvaged from Saipan. Swastika wall banners. German helmets as cereal serving bowls, sunk in the sink. SS-motif ashtrays. Rising-sun rugs. Showy shadow-boxed Lugers. Beaver pix of Eva Braun — der Führer’s freaky Frau. Choice tchotchkes on chairs/tables/wall racks. Dig this, deranged: Jap shrunken heads, beady-eyed beasts, all wearing fit-to-size Brooklyn Dodger hats.

Bernie slavered, slack-jawed. I got out my Minox spy camera and shot it all. I smelled Smear Job. Let’s foto-fuck this creep.

Steve Cochran, the Big Dick Bürgermeister of the L.A. Reich. Nazi nests at Warner’s, Metro, and Fox. We’ll loose-link it to last year’s Nazi/flying saucer piece. Bondage Bob Harrison partied with Paraguayan parasite Alfredo Stroessner and wicked Juan Perón. They hid hordes of Hitlerites, circa ’46. Commie columnists called Confidential “fascistic,” “nativistic,” “hucksteristic,” and “the voice of vile volition in the vox populi.” The coruscating Cochran exposé would lash those leftist lies!!!!!

Bernie jerked at my jumpsuit and jacked me half off my feet. “Freddy, let’s go. Quit gawking. We’ve got work to do.”

So, yeah — we worked. We whipped wires to wainscoting and wiggled them under rugs. We drilled white walls and wedged in bug mounts. We rigorously respackled and repainted. We vacuumed up Spackle dust. We planted microphones in cracks, crevices, crawl spaces. We ripped the receivers off the two telephones and planted condenser mikes. We studied standing lamps and stuck bug mounts under the shades. We bugged the bedroom and looped the living room. We supersocked in the sound.

Tick, tick, tick. Four-plus hours’ work. I was sweat-swacked and dexie-ditzed and stomp-the-stars elated. We repacked our gear. Bernie sighed and went Oy. Opportunity is love. That maladroit maxim moved through me.

I made the Mirror. Niteklub Inferno: P.I. Fred O. In Frantic Fracas. I made the Herald: Confidential Cop Otash In Ciro’s Brouhaha. The hot headlines heartwarmed me. They instilled instant pride. Joan Horvath dead-deadened it. Freddy, what thou hath wrought.

Bondage Bob called and congratulated me. The insidious ink spiked Confidential’s early-morning sales. Ciro’s was Sheriff’s turf. Bob called Gene Biscailuz and pledged ten thou to his reelection campaign. It covered the cost of my ten-minute tantrum and frosted out possible beefs.

Joan Horvath got a bleary blip in the Herald’s local spread. Widow Woman Slain in Hollywood Home. Burglary-Sex Motive Cited.

Bob and I biz-talked. I tossed him the tattle on the Rock Hudson wife hunt and laid out the lowdown on the would-be wives. Bob knew candidate Claire Klein. She played shakedown shill at Whisper, back in ’51. Her part-time gig at Universal was a plain ploy to meet extortable men. I weighed in: We’ve got to scoop the fan mags on this one. Dole out the dish on Rump Ranger Rock’s disingenuous dates with real women. Sock in the subtext. It’s a shadow shuck. Hollywood will fuck you when no one else will.

Bob agreed. He added, And we’ll double-cross Rock on his wedding nite and expose his boy bent. We yukked the irksome irony. I dumped the dirt on the Steve Cochran gig. Bob pooh-poohed the Nazi-Jap fetish trove and called Steve a history buff and no more. He himself paid five thou for a swastika-print bikini once worn by Leni Riefenstahl. His girlfriend turned heads at that big Polio Fund pool party.

“And, Freddy — I heard Cochran leans left, if anything.”

I closed with the cloying clue of “Celebrity Smut.” Bob told me to work the listening post my own self. “And — if it pans out, we’ll send in a female ringer to entrap Steve — Claire Klein might be good.”

Bob signed off with “Sayonara.” I offered “auf Wiedersehen,” boss. I shit, showered, shaved, and made myself march to the mirror. I saw myself and saw where all this was going. Freddy, what thou hath wrought. I called Harry Fremont and made a lunch date.

We drank lunch. My appetite was up, up. I kicked assiduous ass all morning. Morty Bendish at the Mirror. The Transom and Whisper guys. I told them Rock Hudson was my gig, X-clusive. They kvetched, moped, and moaned. Blood bloomed on my beavertail sap. I sacked their civil contracts and ratched their rights of free speech.

Harry badged our waiter. He slipped us a jug at the PD’s stock half price. Old Crow and Dexedrine — va-va-voom!!!!!

“Let’s get to it. You want in on the Joan Horvath snuff. You’ve been waxing sentimental on that nutty broad for years. The price is five yards to buy in, and a yard a pop for special favors.”

I flashed my flash roll and peeled off ten C-notes. Frazzled Freddy always comes flush. Harry cadged the cash and smiled smug.

“It looks like a hot-prowl 459, gone way bad. The guy came in a cracked window and left rubber-glove prints on the sill. He had Joanie’s purse in his hands when she woke up and fought him. She scratched him, and we took AB-negative blood spill and dark and coarse beard fragments out from under her nails. That’s good, so far. But there wasn’t enough blood to run individual comparisons on. In this case, that means that blood type can exonerate, but it can’t convict.”

I gargled Old Crow. “Go on, and tell me why you called Joan a ‘nutty broad.’ ”

Harry made the jack-off sign. “One, she married Ralphie Horvath, had two kids with him, and stuck with him. Two, she was overqualified for a low-life thief and punk like Ralphie. She had some big education, and was some kind of Russian-history scholar, but all she did was stay at home and tend to her snot-nosed kids.”

I lit a cigarette. “Here’s the big question. Did George Collier Akin do the job?”

Harry shook his head. “I’m not so sure. Bill Parker’s convinced himself, he’s convinced the Hats, and you know what that means. Parker saw the hospital pix of that girl that Akin, Brown, and Dulange abducted, and now he’s running hot, with a thermometer so far up his ass that it hurts. He wants Akin dead, the Hats want to kill him, and it’s true that Akin broke with Brown and Dulange when they wouldn’t agree to snuff the girl. Okay, we can assume that Akin — who’s a hot-prowl man from way back — is off working solo, and most likely in L.A. city. So far, so good — but I go back to ’43 with this evil cocksucker — and the Horvath caper doesn’t look like his kind of deal.”

I stubbed out my cigarette. “How so?”

Harry said, “Okay. He’s got dark and coarse facial hair, so that matches. I checked his Quentin file, and he’s got AB-negative blood, so that matches, and it’s pretty rare. But I popped Akin for eight hot prowls in ’43, and he always wore a rubber red devil mask, cut down low on his neck, to protect him from scratching and gouging, and to further terrorize his victims — because he is the most sadistic son of a whore I’ve ever met — so if the Hats want to put him down, who am I to raise a stink?”

I gargled Old Crow. It rerouted my dexie surge, molto bene.

“He wanted to kill the cheerleader girl, but he’s never killed any women, prior to that, that you know of.”

Harry twirled his glass. “Never. He spent ’43 to ’51 in Quentin. He paroled out in November, hung up his parole, and went rogue. We’ve had six more hot-prowl/assaults possibly attributable to the Red Devil Bandit since then — all with grievous bodily harm short of murder. Then this fuck hooks up with Brown and Dulange, and it’s the BHPD’s grief from that point on.”

I said, “He split from Brown and Dulange two weeks ago. You ‘assume’ that he’s working solo, but you’re ‘implying’ that he’s not strictly adhering to his Red Devil Bandit MO, and you’ve got no reported hot prowls that you’re sure he’s good for.”

Harry sighed. “You nailed it. Never let it be known that the infamous Freddy O. drew a dumb breath.”

I chained cigarettes. “What else? Describe the crime scene.”

“The pad was ransacked. I think he was looking for something besides purse cash and whatever else he could carry away. There was over six grand of your penance money stashed in Joanie’s clothes closet, and he didn’t bother to find it or steal it. This whole deal reeks of personal animus. It’s an I-hate-you-and-I’m-going-to-kill-you job, and that spells revenge.”

I flashed my flash roll and rolled off five more C-notes. Harry snatched them up.

“You’re a white man, Freddy. I’ll have complete background paper on Joanie by tomorrow.”

I got noxiously nostalgic. “Harry,” “Ralphie,” “Joanie.” ’49 to ’54. A kid cop THEN. A Pervdog of the Nite NOW.

“I remember that day in the squadroom. You were younger and not quite so fat. ‘Hey, kid, you look bored. Go shag this Ralphie guy and kill him.’ ”

Harry went nix. “Can it, Freddy. You can’t pull the shit you pull in your everyday life and think that this jive crusade of yours will render you squeaky-clean.”

Late nites become me. They obfuscate and overtake me. They send me where I’m supposed to be.

I pulled up and parked on Camerford. LAPD yanked their crime-scene guard. The shit shack now stood dark. The clock marched toward midnite. I ran my radio and notched Nachtmusik.

Stan Kenton’s “Machito.” Jimmie Lunceford’s “Uptown Blues.” Gonesville, Daddy-O. Mad music to B and E by.

I ditzed the dial and extended the interlude. I got bop, by way of Bird and Deranged Dizzy. Bop bops me and sends me where I’m supposed to be.

I brought my evidence kit. I brought my burglar’s tools. I was jazzed and jacked-up exhausted.

I’d worked Operation Rock Wife all day. Sexville, Daddy-O. Close contact with Claire Klein had me gooooooone.

Jimmy handled Rock and played director. Confidential supplied a foto man. I called Harry Fremont and brought him into the gig. Harry sprung three badass beaners from the Lincoln Heights drunk tank. They portrayed the pachucos who mob-menace Claire. We staged our stirring scene at Scrivner’s Hollywood. Claire sips a pineapple malt in her ’51 Ford. Rock lurks nearby. Swish carhops swarm him. He signs mucho autographs.

Jimmy feeds the cholos their motivation. He stamps them Stanislavskiites at the gate. Dig it: you want white pussy baaaaaaad.

They surround Claire’s car. They coochie-coo her and weenie-wag her. Claire shrieks. Rock rocks to the rescue. He pounds the three pachuco punks to the pavement. LAPD rolls up and rousts the beaners. Harry Fremont cued them in advance.

It all worked, perfecto. Our fotog shot film and stills and got it all in four takes. Rock meets Claire. It’s love at first sight. Jimmy counseled reluctant Rock. Brother, you have to. Lew Wasserman decrees that you take a wife.

I called Harry and pledged him five yards for his work. Harry shot me leads per the Horvath snuff.

Lead #1: he ran the plate number on that cop car I saw at the crime scene. Bip — it’s a Fed sled/FBI/on loan to serpentine Senator Joe McCarthy and his L.A. Commie hunt. Lead #2: the Hats pulled in a shitbird pal of George Collier Akin’s. He was a hump hot-prowl man himself. The Hats were hammering him haaaaaaaard.

Bird bopped me. Dizzy dinged me. I pulled on rubber gloves. I grabbed my evidence kit and rolled.

Shadows shrouded me. Streetlights were dim. I poured across the porch and braced the front door. I pulled a #4 pick and jammed the jamb upside the latch spring. The door popped open, faaaaast.

I pulled my penlight. I locked myself in. I laid my evidence kit on a chair. Harry got me the PD’s print manifest. Joan’s prints and her kids’ prints were inked in.

Smudge-and-smear locations were noted. No other known or verified prints were found and logged in. Here’s my job: roll overlooked touch-and-grab surfaces. Contrast and compare.

Chez Joan. It’s all there for you to touch and taste. She’s there for you as your own. Go forth, Pervdog — contrast and compare.

I roamed. I spread print powder on unlisted surfaces and pulled up dust and palm sweat. I worked back toward Joan’s bedroom and saved it for last. I hit the kids’ bedroom. It broke my hard heart. I pulled an unlogged little-kid print off a bed rail. I checked shelves and drawers for stashed booty and got zilch.

The kitchen reeked of overripe food and dumped trash. I rolled it, regardless. I dusted the breakfast-nook table and pulled up a full-digit print. I checked the print manifest and compared tents, arches, and whorls. Eureka — it’s an unknown.

I inked it on a fresh print card. My pad prowl was now two hours and ten minutes in. My heart hurtled on overdrive. I stepped into Joan’s bedroom and stood there.

Stale perfume stung me. It was Tweed or Jungle Gardenia. The Pervdog’s a scent dog and knows whereof he speaks. I caught Joan’s underscent. It jazzed me and fucked me up, in caustic concurrence. I penlight-flashed the walls and saw something.

A small borehole. Right there. The east-facing wall. Just above the floor. White Spackle paste caked at the edges. One frayed wire sticking out.

I knelt and flashed a close-up. I’m a bug-and-tap pro. I know bug-and-tap work when I see it. This was a bore-and-tap access point. The frayed wire was old. The bug-and-tap mounts had been removed. The Spackle paste was old and crumbled. The bug-and-tap removal man did a shit camouflage job.

Stale perfume. Tweed or Jungle Gardenia, mixed with her—

I went through the bedroom drawers. Joan’s underthings were stacked neatly. The stale perfume scent became her scent, all by itself.

The Hats had a hump in the hot seat. A claustrophobe closet/one table/six chairs. One fat phone book in vivid view.

He’s Delbert Davis Haines/white male American/DOB 6-12-18. He’s tight with George Collier Akin. They met and compared notes at Quentin. Haines did a doomsday dime for 459 plus rape-sodomy.

Harry Fremont dragged a dragnet and hauled him in. He was alibied up for the Joan Horvath homicide. He blew blues clarinet at a round-the-clock romp at the Riptide Room. Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper alibied him.

Harry said he’d made pay-phone contact with Akin. Haines said Akin was casing cooze for a Red Devil Bandit comeback. He’s bidding Beverly Hills bye-bye. He’s back on L.A. city turf.

The Hats hovered. They straddled chairs and loomed over Haines. I kicked my chair against a side wall and scoped it. Haines was a junkie. He skin-popped Big “H” and held off a habit. He was snaggletoothed and pustule-pocked. He wore a Sir Guy shirt and slit-bottom khakis. He was one mean motor scooter and bad actor.

Max Herman said, “You could waltz, Delbert. We’ve got nothing on the books we can hold you on.”

Red Stromwall said, “Or we could concoct something and hold you indefinitely.”

Harry Crowder said, “Or we could get ugly.”

Eddie Benson said, “You know what we want and who we want, and the sooner you give it to us, the less likely it is that we’ll lay on the grief.”

Haines said, “Who’s that guy kicking his chair back? I think I’ve seen him before.”

Max Herman said, “That’s Mr. Otash. He’s a former Los Angeles policeman, currently employed as a private investigator.”

Haines said, “He’s a greaseball. I’m very much attuned to racial distinctions. I’m on the editorial board for the National States’ Rights Party, and I write for Thunderbolt Magazine.”

Red Stromwall said, “Let’s stick to the topic at hand. George Collier Akin. You know what we want.”

Haines picked his nose and ate the goober. He said, “I want your wife to suck my big dick.”

Red phone-booked him. Wham! — a big roundhouse shot. His face hit the table. His nose cracked. Blood blew out.

He tried to wipe his face. Harry Crowder grabbed his hands and cuffed them to his chair slats. The ratchets racked deep and drew blood.

Haines giggled and licked blood off his lips. He wagged his well-hung tongue at the Hats.

“I’m the Lizard of Love. Check my rap sheet. I’m a go-down man from way back.”

Harry Crowder said, “We like Akin for a burglary-homicide two nights ago. Lower Hollywood. Camerford off Vine. The victim’s name was Joan Horvath. Does that ring a bell with you?”

Haines said, “Your wife rings my bell, eight nights a week. She’s a go-down girl from way back.”

Harry phone-booked him. He sidled a sidewinder shot. Haines’ head whiplashed. Nose blood and mouth blood blew wide. Two teeth hit the far wall.

Eddie Benson said, “Joan Horvath. Camerford off Vine. The B and E snuff there. She wakes up and fights him. Does this sound like Akin? Has he mentioned the job to you?”

Haines licked his lips and torqued his tongue. He said, “Your wife mentioned that you’re hung like an amoeba. That’s why she brings me all the woof-woof.”

Eddie phone-booked him. He ripped a reverse sidewinder. It tore one eyebrow loose. Blood spattered the opposite wall.

I said, “Joan Horvath was pushing forty. She had some gray hair, and she was on the stout side. I bet Akin likes it younger and firmer, and Harry Fremont told me the Red Devil Bandit doesn’t range that far north and west.”

Haines licked blood off his lips. “Hey, the greaseball speaks, and he don’t speak with forked tongue.”

Max Herman said, “Tell us what you mean by that.”

Haines said, “I mean the greaseball speaks la verdad. The Red Devil Bandit likes young gash he can terrorize. He likes the pads off Washington and Jefferson, down near USC. I can get more specific if you give me that waltz and lay a big dinner-and-drinks chit for Kwan’s Chinese Pagoda on me.”

Max Herman said, “You’re on.”

Red Stromwall said, “We’ll throw in a shower and a run by Georgia Street. We know all the doctors there. They’ll fix you up.”

Harry Crowder said, “Delbert’s a white man.”

Eddie Benson said, “Let’s not go overboard.”

Haines looked straight at me. “Severance Street, the first block south of Jefferson. The Bandit’s casing a pad there. He might hit tonight. The chick’s a predental student. She’s got short dark hair in a pixie cut.”

Max uncuffed Haines and handed him his handkerchief. Haines wrung his wrists and grabbed the chair back. He staggered and struggled to stand up.

I said, “You don’t make him for Joanie? There’s no way he’d go for that?”

Haines haw-hawed. “ ‘Joanie?’ Do I detect something there?”

The Hats haw-hawed. They shared wicked winks. Max said, “We make him for Joanie, and that’s all that counts.”

Yeah, I did it. Yeah, it was wrong. Yeah, I enjoyed it. He got what he paid for. I knew I’d pay for what I did — somewhere down the line.

The Hearst rags loved it. Hats Slay Red Devil Bandit!!! Celeb P.I. Assists!!! Dig the fetching fotos. I stand with Max, Red, Harry, and Eddie. They dwarf me. We point to something red and dead on the ground.

More headline hullabaloo. Tipster tattles Red Devil Bandit!!! Daring Blastout Ensues!!! More fetching fotos. Georgie Akin’s 1943 mug shots. A posed my-hero shot. Fractious Freddy with Max Herman and Red Stromwall. We strut. Louise Marie Vernell smarmy-smiles up at us.

BHPD blew a stakeout on Durward Brown and Richard Dulange. The Hats hunted them down and killed them four days later. The Hearst rags loved it. More headline hullabaloo. Motel Massacre!!! Hats Gun Down Kidnap-Rapists!!! All Gang Members Now Dead!!!

Many more fetching fotos. The Hats with Chief Parker. Mastiffs maul for their master. Big backslaps and yuk-yuks. Many mentions of me. Max Herman sez, “We needed Freddy O. on this one. Freddy’s our boy. He’s the Man to See.” Red Stromwall sez, “God bless Freddy O. What’s a daring blastout without him?”

Yeah, I did it. Yeah, I knew it was wrong. Yeah, I loved the hack hullabaloo. Don’t fuck with Freddy O. He’s the Man to See. Too bad the world sees back. Too bad the world’s inside him.

The Googie’s gang saw me and tipstered me and fed me scandal skank. I scored scads of sinuendo for the magazine. Homos, lezbos, dipsos, hopheads. Underhung Untermenschen and big-dick barracudas. Heavy hermaphrodite action sunders the Sunset Strip!!!

Freddy O.’s the Shaman of Shame. He’s got to see you. Meanwhile, you see him.

I saw Joan “Stretch” Perkins and Claire Klein. We talked about things and around things. I saw them, they saw me. They taunted, tickled, and teased me. Stretch wanted kid love, with all the va-va-voom verboten. We slept in my bed. Stretch wore basketball silks. I wore pajamas. We necked to a naughty nexus and stopped cold. Lance the Leopard got between us. It was nighty-night then.

Stretch taunts and teases me. She knows things about me. She knows I killed the Red Devil Bandit in cold blood. She knows it all pertains to the hellhound Horvaths — and that I’m not done with them yet. Claire Klein taunts and teases me. She won’t fall down with me. We meet at Googie’s most nights. We smile and drink. Our hands often brush. We discuss Operation Rock Wife. I’ll be taking over Jimmy Dean’s stewardship soon. He’ll be off to shoot East of Eden with Gadge Kazan and that big Texas flick with Liz and Rock. Claire wants to kill a man. I see that. It consumes her. She sees that I’m going at the Cochran gig and the Commie Connie connection circumspectly. She’s an I-want-to-see-it-and-know-it-all-now girl. And most assuredly a psychopath. She withholds from me. I withhold from her. Our boundaries wiggle, wilt, and hold firm. She scares me. I don’t scare her. I’m not the Man to See. I’m the man to help her fulfill her murderous destiny.

Stretch provides innocence. Claire turns my lifelong voyeurism back in on me. I want to know her secret shit — but fear the price she’ll make me pay. She knows that I killed the Red Devil Bandit to impress her. She intends to kill a man. I intend to kill the man who really killed Joan Horvath. The hellhound Horvaths. It all comes back to them. Claire sees that and knows that full well. I told her that I killed a man so she’ll love me. She failed to reply. She won’t love me until I find the man that she wants to kill. In the meantime, my will to work rages.

I work the Cochran gig. Bondage Bob wants a wild and sex-soiled serialization. I live at the listening post. The bugs and taps work gooooood. I listen to Studly Steve fuck my ex-woman Joi Lansing. They deliriously defame me. They underestimate me. Joi tattles, taunts, and teases me. She knows there’s bugs and taps in place. She hasn’t told Steve. She knows I’m listening. She wants me to hear. That means she wants me to see.

Sound equals sight. My imagination seals the sensory gaps. Information insistently issues. Steve’s recruited Lana Turner and hunk hubby Lex Barker. Lurid Lex loooooves underage stuff. The casting-call aspect of the celeb smut film proceeds. I’m on it. I’m on the Connie connection just as assiduously.

I haunt the UCLA library. I bug the admin folk: where’s the Joan Horvath transcripts? The admin folk go Soon, soon. I read and reread Connie’s columns. Connie’s a codified Commie. She’s Comintern. She’s a Red Reptile couched in cold cover. She’s seditiously subtle. Her words work on a mini-microdot level. She’s linked to Steve Cochran. Steve rolls Red. I’m building a scandal-rag exposé and a damning derogatory profile. I’ll leak it to Joe McCarthy or some more rigorously responsible cat. I’ll get Claire the name of the man she wants to kill in the process. She’ll love me then or she won’t. I’ll love her whatever the outcome.

Work. Operation Rock Wife. Rock and Claire like each other and look good together. Lew Wasserman’s pleased. Rock orders in bunboys from a dial-a-dick service owned by Bondage Bob’s wayward kid brother. He gets his regular woof-woof.

I fotograph Rock and Claire’s at-the-doorway kisses. It’s sterile stuff. Rock’s a movie star and a very sweet man. He’s engaged to wed a batshit bomb thrower and more. Only in America, only in L.A., only in Hollyweird.

Work. Allies and adversaries. Old friends passing through.

The Hats hold their hands in. They swing by Googie’s and torque me as I tally tipster dish. How’s the boy, Freddy? Do you miss us, Freddy? The Chief misses you, Freddy. You’re always in his thoughts.

I looked for them when they weren’t there. I listened for them at the listening post. They imparted the impudent theme of We See You. I saw them everywhere. I popped pills and saw them. I drank and saw them. I adamantly abstained and saw them most of all.

Work. I got my FBI kickback on that Horvath house print. Bad news: there’s no file print extant. I lived at the listening post. I wore headphones and willed the next static-stung stammer that would tell me something big and something wrong. I waited for UCLA to call. Commie Connie confounded me. She never left her Hancock Park home. I needed to prowl the premises. I needed to booby-trap bugs and hot-wire the whole hut.

Connie hid from me and hindered me and immolated my imagination. I parked across the street and ran my radio. Joe McCarthy proclaimed his presence in L.A. Bondage Bob told me a Fed listening post had been set up someplace/somewhere. I saw my wires crossed with their wires, strung as strangling cords.

Work to constant communion. The Horvath house as soiled sacristy. I vowed vengeance. I exonerated the Red Devil Bandit and ran my rationale for his death. Joan heard me. I know that. Vigilance is love. I hold vigil most nights. I know that Joan hears me and sees me.

Connie’s casa: a cool contemporary job at 1st and Beachwood. Two stories. All aluminum and glare-glinted glass, up and down. Some dippy Dane’s idea of swank.

Sit-and-brood surveillance. A raging rainstorm brings a brainstorm. Hey, lady — we’ve got fone lines down. Let me in to check your fones, willya?

I perched in my Packard pimpmobile. Bernie was due. He had the pseudo repair tools and the know-how. He’d wing it, wham-bam. One fone/one condenser mike/one half-ass tap. No time to tackle bug mounts.

Raging rainstorms rip me, recollective. They wash my broiled brain and cleanse it clean. Last month. The Willoughby listening post. Stretch Perkins works Call-Girl Line #2. She hears Claire Klein and Barbara Payton trick with V. J. Jerome. The appalling apparatchik’s in Connie’s address book. That’s Cold Connection #1. Here’s Cold Connection #2:

Last month, ditto. Claire and I nosh the news and flare-flirt at Googie’s. Claire lights me large with this line:

“I came to L.A. to kill a man. I don’t know his name, but I think Connie Woodard might.”

Hence, my bristling brainstorm. Hence, my ripe resolve. Work the Connie Connection now.

I yawned. My ass dragged. I was up late last nite. My landlord lashed my lease and tossed me out, temporary. Lance the Leopard laid waste to his rose gardens and crotch-sniffed his crotchety wife. I rented a boss bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Stretch helped me move. We hung up corkboards and tacked on Confidential sales graphs. Plus notes for my tricky troika: Operation Rock Wife/the Cochran Gig/my Horvath Crusade.

Lance looooooved his new lair. Room service served his cheeseburgers and fries in a dog dish. Lance slept with Stretch. I slept on the couch.

I yawned. I dexie-dosed my case of the blahs. Bernie showed. He’d scrounged a PC Bell repair truck, for vivid verismo. He parked in Connie Woodard’s driveway and drilled her doorbell.

She opened up. There she is. She’s still rangy, nervous, and knock-kneed. She’s the Specious Spinster and Miss Soviet Suck-Up of 1924.

Bernie schmoozed her. I rolled down my window and heard it. He went Oy, lady. She went Oh dear — are you sure? Ooohhh — she talked butch bass like Lauren Bacall.

She let Bernie in. He shut the door. I timed the house call.

Twenty-two and a half minutes. Bernie tips his cap and walks back out the door. Connie holds the door. Her russet hair’s wrapped in a bun now. She waves toodle-oo.

Transcripts. One fat file box. She was Joan Marcelline Hubbard then. She’s Joan Horvath of My Heart now.

The admin folks delivered. They called me this a.m. They stridently stressed that rules and regulations apply. View the contents here. Return the box by 9:00 p.m. Don’t snitch documents. Don’t mooch monographs. The honor system applies.

I took a table all by myself. I tallied tabbed file folders and crafted a chronology. Joan Marcelline Hubbard. DOB 11-6-18. She hails from the hellish-hot San Joaquin Valley. She’s farmworker stock. She graduated high school in ’35. She picks fruit with a wetback work crew. She digs her way out of the Depression. She applies to UCLA.

She’s accepted. She hits Westwood in the fall of ’39.

It’s all language labs and lit crit. She learns Russian/Polish/Italian. She flaunts her fluency in class and stages stirs. La Hubbard’s a hambone. She’s a distaff disc jockey on Bruin Radio. She shoves Shostakovich down the throats of the campus illiterati. She rewards them with reductive Rachmaninoff and cheesy Tchaikovsky. She riffs on Russki literature. She writes her own commercials for Russian restaurants. She’s a regular at Karlov’s Kasa Kiev. Karlov kicks back kash. She writes her own commercials for Polish Pete’s Pirogi Palace. Pete pays her in cold cash and kielbasa cutlets. She works her way through college in this mad manner. She’s a noted campus cutup. She’s a sinfully self-promoting cheerleader chick.

She gets the grades. Woooo!!! — Straight A’s across the board. She studies the Russian romantic poets. She cruelly critiques the movement. It’s all marginal and mystical malarkey. She links Polish piano pounder Paderewski to nattering Nazi composers of the oompah-band ilk. Her professors know that she’s a gallivanting gadfly — but stress the solid soundness of her rigor. ’39, ’40, ’41. Joan Marcelline Hubbard makes her mark and goes forth.

She graduates. She goes on to grad school. That crisp chronology cruised me through her academic life. Course names/dates/test scores/grades/the names of professors. The transcripts tripped by as La Joan’s light fantastic. File pages blew by in a blur.

I hit late ’41 and the cusp of ’42. I hit my first chronological misfile. Spring ’40: An Introduction to Polish Labor Movements/Professor Witold Kirpaski. I put the transcript aside and plowed through late ’41. Then this, then this, then THIS:

Fall ’39. The Political Content of the Post-Revolutionary Russian Novel/Guest Professor Constance Woodard.

Harry said, “This is pricey. I’ve got palms to grease. Bondage Bob’ll have to dig deep on this one.”

Some office. One confined cubicle. Thoroughly threadbare. Bare-bones and strictly cut-rate. It’s twenty feet by twenty feet. There’s three desks/three chairs. There’s one file cabinet, no fone, no Teletype.

“These guys are black bag, all the way. McCarthy’s kaput. He can’t call old man Hoover and say, ‘Hey, Johnny — I need some men to hunt Reds.’ ”

Harry shrugged. “They’ve got some Federal motor pool vehicles. At least three, by the looks of this place. Remember that plate number I ran for you? That car was checked out to these guys.”

I said, “See if you can put a name to it, okay? The car might have been specifically assigned.”

“Sure, kid. You and Bondage Bob say, ‘Jump,’ and I say, ‘How high?’ ”

I thought it through. The word Hollywood hit me. I prowl Casa Connie. Her current diary drivel drills me. She fears jumped-up Joe McCarthy’s last gasp and fears for her cell. Joe’s working a Hollywood angle. It’s in tight and spicy specific. He thinks he’ll bag big names somewhere down the line. It’s his loopy last hurrah. It’s a Hollywood headline hunt. Here’s a hunch. He doesn’t quite know where it all is or what he’s got.

Harry harumphed. “Freddy, get to it. We’ve got three hours, not three weeks.”

I popped the top file drawer. It was Bug City. Bug mounts, bug mikes, bug transceivers and cords. Plus loooooong-range broadcast shit. I popped the middle file drawer. It was Hurt City. Brass knucks, rubber truncheons, ball-bearing saps.

I popped the bottom file drawer. It was Rat City. A file sticker spelled it out: “Security 1-A: Coded Informant Index.”

Four thin files. Thin gruel. Thin carbon sheets couched within.

File #1. Code name: “Big Duke.” These notes: “No remuneration. Subject has said his motive is ‘love of country.’ Has numerous contacts within the entertainment industry.”

I’ll say. It has to be John Wayne. He’s ratted Reds since the ice age. It doesn’t say he’s a cross-dresser. He’s strictly straight — but still. My Marines foto-fucked him at the Big Girls Boutique in Balboa. He bought his way out of a biiiiiiiig exposé.

File #2. Code name: “Mama Zee.” These notes: “Noted writer (Negro) turned anti-Communist zealot. Has numerous contacts within the Negro community in Los Angeles.”

I’ll say. It has to be Zora Neale Hurston. She rats Reds to Bondage Bob. She’s fetchingly featured in Confidential’s “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” clips.

File #3. Code name: “Mr. Webfoot.” These notes: “Subject hosts local L.A. kiddie show. In hock to bookmakers. Always needs $ & knows people within the CP.”

I’ll say. It has to be Jimmy Weldon. He’s a venal ventriloquist. Webster Webfoot’s a downscale Donald Duck. Jimmy’s a Googie’s geek. He peddles piles of the Carole Landis nude morgue pix.

File #4. Code name: “Redbird.” No summary notes. One bank-deposit summary.

The deposits ran from March ’47 up to last month. $150 per week. ’47 to ’54. Almost seven full years. Account #8309. The bank branch: the B of A at Melrose and Cahuenga.

I’LL SAY. Melrose and Cahuenga. It’s four blocks from the Horvath House of Death. Red Stromwall found a B of A passbook in Joan’s undie drawer. The balance: fourteen g’s. The weekly snitch pay stopped last month. Joan Horvath esta muerto.

I’ll say. What would you say? How does this sound to you?

My Joan. Communist Party infiltrator/FBI snitch.

It started like that. We were joined in Joan and forged in forgiveness. Sex saturated us. I’ve decided to dim the details by dint of decorum. “Freddy & Connie.” Initials cutely carved on a tree. I’m thirty-two, she’s fifty-two. You know what I am. Connie Woodard defies cloying classification. Commie, lezbo, sweltering switch-hitter. Take your punk pick. She’s all of it, some of it, none of it.

I’m being dizzy disingenuous. Connie’s a righteous Red. She’s a treasonous true believer with her hooks hitched into me. I’m foiled and fucked five thousand ways. Perdition, catch my soul. And she won’t let me all-the-way SEE her.

I needed names to know her and to know who killed Joan. Known associates, rancid Reds, fractured front-group front men. Fellow travelers, pusillanimous pinks, lily-livered leftists. Give me names/no, I won’t/Connie takes the farshtinkener Fifth Amendment. Tell me the names of your Commie cell mates. I’ve already memorized their initials. Who’s SA? Who’s RJC? Who’s EPD? I’ve scurvily skimmed your diaries — and I’m tweaked. I told you I killed the Red Devil Bandit in cold blood. You must reciprocate in kind.

No, Freddy. I’m your recidivistic refusenik. Besides, there’s one name that you’ve withheld from me.

Yes, that’s true. I refused to name Claire Klein. I equivocated here. I told Connie that a dangerous woman was orbiting her orbit. She wants to kill a man — but she won’t tell me why. She won’t name the man. She’s my other ripe refusenik. I’m not naming her. She’s one of the other two women that I love.

“Freddy & Claire.” “Freddy & Stretch.” More names cutely carved on a tree. Unconsummated communions. That’s fine for now. I’m beat-to-shit busy. I’ve got to find a man and kill him, myself.

Connie won’t name names. I vow to kill Joan’s killer. Connie won’t name names. I vow to jerk Joe McCarthy’s chain so that he won’t expose her. Connie still won’t name names. Why’s Jack Kennedy’s name in your address book? Oh, pshaw — Jack’s just an old pal. Why’s Steve Cochran’s name in your address book? Here, Connie withers and wilts me: he was my last tortured and torturing male lover — before you.

I’m thirteen days in with Constance Linscott Woodard. It’s tender and tortured. I’m beat-to-shit busy. I’m rolling lucky and unlucky thirteens.

Lucky 13: Harry Fremont frosted out my assault on Big Steve. He greased the Sheriff’s bulls investigating the caper. They put it off to a B and E man out to clout Big Steve’s Nazi gear. Unlucky 13: Thirteen Women and Only One Man in Town debuted a week later.

In Harry Cohn’s rec room. Popcorn and cut-rate booze. I’m there. Big Steve’s there. He’s beat-to-shit bandaged and mummified like Pharaoh’s granddaddy. Jack the K.’s there. Bill Knowland’s there. They yuk-yuk and wolf-whistle. Joe McCarthy’s there, his own self.

The flick made me squirrelshit squeamish. I’ve got no beef with the A-bomb. We should have mushroomed Moscow after we juked the Japs. Joi Lansing was my ex, and I had a wolfish wingding with Babs Payton. It was the sexploitation aspect. That’s what gored my goat.

Bondage Bob bagged me outside the rec room. He said he was killing the Cochran exposé. Big Steve was tight with some powerful pols. He pimped for Jack K. He juiced Jack’s pill habit. Freddy, let this one go.

I did. It rudely rankled me. I compensated, commensurate. I bore down big on the who-killed-Joan and the spare-Connie-from-Joe McCarthy fronts.

I gave Harry Fremont a gooooood gig. The rogue Feds had to have a long-range listening post. Find it for me, Dads. Lucky 13: Harry hit it, hard. Unlucky 13: I found bugs and taps in Connie’s living room and bedroom. Lucky 13: they were mismounted and mismatched and malfunctioned. The broadcast beams barely made it next door.

Lucky 13: Stretch worked my Sweetzer listening post. Unlucky 13: she picked up Lez Line #2 chat. Claire Klein tricked with V. J. Jerome. She pressed him on “Robin Redbreast” — but venal V.J. purported to know zilch. Claire pressured him on Connie Woodard. V.J. said, “Don’t sound me — she’s just a dilettante.” Stretch told me his tone was deadly demeaning. V.J., you speak with forked tongue.

Thirteen days. I want names. Claire wants names. V.J. won’t name names. Connie won’t name names, most of all.

I vow to find Joan’s killer. Connie won’t name names. I vow to save her from Joe McCarthy. Connie won’t name names. We make love. We pillow-talk around the whirlwind woman who brought us together. Connie won’t name names. She won’t say whether she and Joan did or didn’t do the deed and were or were not rapture-rapt lovers.

I read Connie’s diaries. The sex sent me. It remained kiss and swerve, breath and scent. I read through years of Commie collusion. Delusion deluged me. Pathos pounded me. Connie and her cell siblings suck up Soviet yak-yak and proudly proclaim it as truth. They dialecticize purulent purges, cold conquest, mass murder. Connie says she’s Sovietizing me. I roll my eyes. It makes her laugh. She covers her mouth then. Some Central Committee of Kremlin kreeps might be listening.

Connie won’t name names. She won’t reveal Robin Redbreast’s real moniker. She won’t name names. I’m on her side as much as she’ll let me be — and more. She won’t name names in Joan’s memory. She memorializes Joan and tells me how much she loved her. She loves me with her body and won’t say the worshipful words. I explore the world’s secret shit. I excoriate it and explode it in Confidential. I live to do this. I’ve peeped windows since 1936. Connie joined the Party that same year. She joined the Party to run rogue in the squarejohn world and live baaaad bourgeois while she did it. We bit the same cancerous coin and spit it back at the world. Shared blood blooms in our veins. We both know this. She still won’t name names.

The noxious nite shift. Torrid two-line tilts. Pizza pie and beer and Pink’s hot dogs. Stretch worked Lez Line #1. I worked Lez Line #2. We held hands and swapped nifty nuggets.

Gamal Abdel Nasser’s in town. He’s scrounging funds to overthrow Egypt. He’s a fellow camel jockey. He’s banging butch girls, three at a throw. Go, Gamal, go!!!

Biff Stanwyck’s ensconced at a hot-sheet hut on Highland. She likes it fresh and heavenly wholesome. There’s a dyke slave den near Hollywood High. The den doyenne’s an old studio scrape nurse. She “reeducates” nymphets and feeds them dope and the lewd lore of Lesbos. Currently embroiled: ex — kiddie star Natalie Wood. Jimmy Dean told me she’s hot to trot, across the sex spectrum. Biff’s got first dibs.

Art Pepper’s at it again. He’s gone foto fiend. He’s now the King of the Sapphic Snapshot. He’s snapping pix at a fuck pad on Fountain. Go, Art, go!!!

I was big-time bored. My headphones itched. Lance went home to Liberace. Stretch and I boo-hoo’d his departure. The lez line pickings were thin — but tasty. Then Harry Fremont called, two hours back. Go, Harry, go!!! Once again, Harry delivers.

That Fed car. The rear plate I saw. Outside the Horvath crime scene. It’s on loan to a Fed fuck named Charles Fullerton. He’s in Joe McCarthy’s posse. He’s a rogue Red basher from Jump Street. And, Freddy, dig: I’ve located the longrange listening post. It’s a shit shack in Silver Lake. They’re running bug-taps up the yammering ying-yang. I hit my PC Bell contact. Dig: the phone bills run three grand a month.

Woooo!!! — that’s one nifty nugget!!!

I yawned. I scratched my balls. I ogled Stretch in basketball silks. I got insistently itchy. I wanted to sloooooooow-cruise the Fed pad and lay some late-nite love on Connie.

I yawned. I scratched my balls. I ogled Stretch in basketball silks. She went Wowie-zowie and scribbled up her scratch pad. She hurled off her headset and went You, too.

I hurled my headset. Stretch glooooowed and dished this:

“Claire and Babs just tricked with V. J. Jerome. I got forty minutes of grunts and groans, and then Claire starts pumping V.J. on Robin Redbreast again. V.J.’s vexed and bored, but he finally cops that Robin Redbreast was a crackpot scientist and a CP flunky named ‘Sammy.’ But that’s as far as it went, because they all started up with the woof-woof again.”

Research. Reading-room rigor. Know your foe. They might have YOU made, going in. You’re the Tattle Tyrant Who Holds Hollywood Hostage. You’re the Freewheeling Freddy O.

I felt gooooooood. Connie fed me a big breakfast. I chased it with three dexies and four jolts of Old Crow. I hit the library early. I collated a cavalcade of goooooood dish. I tapped solid sources.

The L.A. Herald and the L.A. Sentinel — L.A.’s colored rag. Who’s Who In America/1953. Who’s Who In American Academia/1953. Plus Downbeat magazine, the Daily Worker, and a call to LAPD R & I.

Dig:

Comrade Sammy Ahlendorf. Age sixty-three. That’s “Robin Redbreast” to you. He’s a physicist. He got doctorates in his native Russia and the U. of Chicago here. He’s also a kultural kommissar. He partied with bibulous bohemians in wicked Weimar Berlin and malignant Moscow. He knew Eisenstein/Nijinsky/Stanislavsky/Meyerhold/Okhlopkov. Sicko cinema, dipshit dance, stilted stage productions for the maimed millions enslaved by the Red Beast. Sambo emigrates to the U.S., circa ’36. He’s dumped off the Manhattan Project, circa ’44. He was pro-A-bomb then. He’s anti-A-bomb now. This guy gored my goat. I was hopped-up and out for Commo blood — baaaaaad. I might phone-book Sambo in the studly style of the Hat Squad.

Comrade Robert Jones Crawshaw/aka “KKKomrade X.” Age forty-one. Labor agitator and scurvy scribe for the Daily Worker. Would-be “Racial Reconciler.” Dig this: He tried to integrate the L.A. Klan, circa ’40. Close pal of my pal Billy Eckstine. The august author of Black Pimp, Black Bossman, Black Savior, Black Dictator, Black Kingpin, Black Bwana, and the KKKontroversial Black Führer. Comrade Bob renounces Communism, circa ’51. Comrade Bob heads hard right. He’s pals with nativist nudnik Gerald L. K. Smith. He’s got a righteous rap sheet. There’s three pops for receiving stolen goods. There’s the cancerous capper, circa ’48. Ralph Mitchell Horvath bails him out on a burglary beef.

Comrade Eleanor Price Donnell. Age thirty-eight. Tenured history professor at UCLA. She’s a shrill shrike and shrieky Soviet suck-up. She’s the author of Moscow Miasma — an apoplectic apologia for the show-trial sins of Uncle Joe Stalin. You think you’ve got this bilious babe pegged, don’t you? Well, fuckers, here’s the real reconstructionist riff:

She’s an ex — call girl. She pandered poon to the Party, circa ’44–’45. She sold sex to CPers with gelt. She was part of a poor-working-girls/Stalinist stable. She gets popped V-E Day. A cadre of Commie construction magnates celebrates Hitler’s surrender. It’s caviar and call girls for these cats. La Donnell and her sick sisters turn tricks for striking dock workers. LAPD Vice intervenes. They raid a fuck pad-cum-millionaire’s mansion. La Donnell and eighteen other confessed Commie girls get busted. La Donnell writes a memoir about her salacious sojourn. It’s called Party Girl. She wrote it under the pseudonym “Miss X.” Robert Jones Crawshaw’s publisher published it.

My Connie’s Commie cell. Add on the late Joan Hubbard Horvath: Commo, turncoat, licentious lover. Here’s the tattle-tabloid tilt of a lifetime:

I’m marching into the maximum maw of madness.

Googie’s. Early-bird peeps from my Packard pimpmobile. A peremptory peep for Claire Klein, specific.

I popped dexies and chain-smoked. The a.m. Herald was due. Fullerton wouldn’t rat me. He was in deep with a putrid pol soon to implode. I had him for all his Joanie-Ralphie 459 shit. The listening-post blast would blare headlines. The Feds would stagnantly stonewall it. The words McCarthy/black-bag job/rogue action would not pry their way into print.

I peeped the back window. Four shadows whipped by my windshield. Sergeant Max Herman. Sergeant Red Stromwall. Sergeant Harry Crowder. Officer Eddie Benson.

The Hats. Pearl gray suits and white Panamas. Trouble treads my way.

I waved faux wolfsbane. They deadpanned it. Max and Red yanked me out of the car. Harry and Eddie cuffed me. They tossed me in the backseat of their K-car and sandwiched me in tight.

Max drove. Red whistled “Funeral March of a Marionette.” We ran Code 3 downtown. We hit City Hall and took the freight lift up to the DB. They dumped me in sweatbox #3 and cuffed me to a chair. Note the fat fone book on the table.

Max said, “You’re fucked, Freddy. Metro’s been spot-tailing you since February.”

Red said, “We know everyone that you’ve seen and everything that you’ve done.”

Harry said, “The moment of truth approaches, Freddy.”

Eddie said, “Your camel-fucking ass is grass.”

I said, “Maybe we can pin my grief on some random lowlifes. The Herald’s always willing to go that route for you guys.”

Max phone-booked me. He threw a top-of-the-head/leave-no-marks shot. He cracked my cranium gooood.

“We know every sleazy thing that you and your goons have pulled for Confidential. We saw you and Bernie Spindel hot-wire Steve Cochran’s place, and we saw you pull that red devil stunt with him the night of the film shoot. We know all about your wingding with the den mother, who seems a little long in the tooth for a young stud like you. We tailed you to your interviews with Samuel Ahlendorf, that geek Crawshaw, and Ellie Donnell. We boom-miked your assault on Agent Fullerton, and we saw you blow up the Fed post.”

Red phone-booked me. He threw a cause-great-pain/leave-no-marks shot.

“You’re fucked, Freddy. We know all of your shit, inside out.”

Harry phone-booked me. “You’re not our pal anymore, Freddy. You’re just some jamoke that’s outlived his usefulness.”

Eddie phone-booked me. “We’ve got you for Treason, Sedition, and boocoo Smith Act violations. You’ll burn, just like the Rosenbergs.”

Max phone-booked me. He employed his love-tap/this-ain’t-so-bad swing. “We’d appreciate it if you’d recount your interviews with Ahlendorf, Crawshaw, and Donnell. That would go a long way toward earning our favor.”

Red phone-booked me. He tossed a love-tap uppercut.

“We’ll let you think about it. We’ll put you up in a tidy cell, away from the riffraff. I know the Chief is looking forward to speaking with you.”

Harry phone-booked me. “Freddy O.’s wild ride has just ended.”

Eddie phone-booked me. “R.I.P., Freddy.”

I said, “It’s for Joan.”

She said, “You know exactly what to say to get exactly what you want from me. Truth serum, really.”

Connie sat in the red chair. I sat on the red footstool. She held out her left arm. I swipe-swabbed it with alcohol and measured a mainline. I spike-speared her and jammed her the juice.

She sighed and went loosey-goosey. I said, “Count backward from one hundred and feel free to shut your eyes.”

She moved her lips. I barely heard it: 100, 99, 98, gonesville. I took a brief breather and consulted my control notes.

Joan rat-out #84. Code name: Lazy Maizie. She’s a San Marino socialite. She makes big donations to the Strikebusters’ International. It’s a known Commo front. Joan rat-out #204. Code name: John Henry. He’s a male Negro. He’s right tackle for the Detroit Lions. Charlie Fullerton’s comment: “All the mud-shark girls go nuts for him.”

I said, “How do you feel, Connie?”

Connie said, “Loose. But what if I don’t feel inclined to...”

“Name names? That’s okay. I’d be satisfied with simple, candid responses.”

Connie, très loose: “Love, I’m sure that’s all you’ll ever get from...”

I said, “Lazy Maizie.”

Connie, très, très loose. “She smoked hashish. She... put... her... hand on Joan’s leg... and Joan slapped her.”

That was gooooood. It was Joan-centric and Joan-phobic. I laid John Henry on her.

Connie, yet more loose: “He was... a steel-driving man in a Negro spiritual. We... sang that song at all the Scottsboro Boys rallies... we knew that something like half of them were guilty, though.”

It was half good. Connie voiced un-Commie-esque candor. I gave her a brief breather.

Rat-out #114 was un-code-named. I’d have to mention Sammy Ahlendorf to rouse recollection. The papers toed Bill Parker’s line, per dead Sammy. It’s suicide, case closed. Connie believed that horseshit.

I said, “Joan informed on this man. She must have felt very strongly about him. He said he wanted to murder all FBI snitches, but I don’t know his name. He never joined your cell, although he was very much in the thrall of Sammy Ahlendorf, and I think it’s safe to say that he shared Sammy’s anti-A-bomb mentality, which is to say he was pissed off when we A-bombed the Japs, even though they were fascists, and even though they dropped those eggs on Pearl Harbor.”

Connie sighed. Her hands twitched. Her eyelids fluttered. She’s digging deep here.

“I... remember him... He said, ‘We’ve got to expose the bomb before it wipes out the human race, and I’m going to build my career on it.’ ”

She snapped awake then. She didn’t name names or say his name. She didn’t need to. She’d already said this to me:

“He was my last tortured and torturing male lover — before you.”

Fullerton’s file facts fit. They surged circumstantial. Joan’s rat-out rang true. It did not mean that Steve Cochran killed her.

Connie snapped très awake. She blinked, blank-faced. She didn’t recall what she’d said.

“Did you learn anything provocative? I’d hate to think that I let Joan down.”

I said, “You did swell.”

Ashes to ashes, baby. Ask the rental rabbi. Sammy Ahlendorf eats the dust.

LAPD quick-processed the stiff and released it. The graveside service was bilingo and brief. The rabbi ululated in Hebrew and extolled Sambo in English. He was a bomb builder, a macher, a mensch.

I stood graveside. The den mother stood with me. Grave diggers grappled the casket into the ground. The rabbi lit a cigarette and split the gig. It was a rush job. Who’s this Ahlendorf schmendrick?

Connie and I came in two cars. She insisted on it. We walked toward the street and the Big Splitsville. Connie lifted her veil and dropped my hand.

“You brought a whirlwind into my life. We were united in common cause for a moment — and one that I’ll never forget. But the walls between us stand too high to breach, darling. It’s best that we end this thing now.”

I said, “Stay strong, Red. It was a gas knowing you. You’re History’s child. Someone has to carry the torch, and I’m glad that it’s you.”

Connie touched my cheek. “Oh, Freddy — I knew you’d understand.”

I winked. “Rain check, okay?”

Connie winked back. Her eyelash stuck. She pulled out a hankie and wiped it free.

“Always, love. For you, the world.”

I walked away. She walked away. I felt ghastly and relieved.

I’m beastfully back. This concluding confession covers spring ’55 to spring ’60. The freewheeling Freddy O. is now a sniveling snitch. I’m Chief Bill Parker’s back-room bitch and punk pawn in his crusade to take down Confidential. It’s a fucked-up fin de siècle. The madcap magazine is doomed, Daddy-O. And I’m the ardent architect of its dipshit demise.

I’ve lost that lush life. I’m bopping the byways of big boo-hoo. Joi Lansing’s gone. Connie Woodard’s gone. Claire Klein’s gone. Stretch Perkins went licentiously lez and snagged herself a barmaid at Linda’s Little Log Cabin. Jimmy Dean’s pulling away. He’s a movie star now. He toplines Giant and East of Eden. He’s been shooting a teen turkey called Rebel Without a Cause. It’s filming on some loopy L.A. locations. I’m his main mentor no more. Director Nicholas Ray has replaced me. Nick Ray’s a sweaty switch-hitter and a carcinogenic Commie. I’m Jimmy’s real faux dad.

Boo-hoo, boo-hoo. I’m surfing a sicko surge of self-pity. But — this thunderous thought keeps me poised to pounce.

I know people. I’m now the pills-and-cocaine conduit for Senator Jack Kennedy. I broker scrapes for the contract cooze at Columbia and Metro. I’ve got L.A. bugged, tapped, and hot-wired here to Hell. I’m all repugnant resource and the withering will to survive.

Opportunity is love. Confluence is opportunity. I move in a mélange of machers, grifters, and graft-grabbers, and the sex-soiled sycophants so indigenous to L.A. Something has to pop my way. Something’s coming. Something’s telling me that IT is a SHE.

The wheelman lot. It’s the baaaaaad bane of wicked wives and horndog hubbies, hot to trot. Divorce begins here. Lowlife lawyers call the pay phone by the lube rack. Punk PIs hustle off to hot-sheet huts and kick doors down. There’s flashbulb flare and eeeek and shreeek and fuckee-suckee singed on celluloid.

The wheelman lot. It’s my lurid launching pad today. Confidential’s cornholing Art Pepper. Artful Art’s an alto sax hopping high on the Downbeat poll. He’s a junkie with a jacked-up jones for high school honeys. He’s nailed Miss Belmont High and Miss Lincoln High already. He’s meeting Miss Franklin High at the Leechee Nut Lodge in Chinatown, one hour hence. I’ll be there to instigate fuckus interruptus.

I’m serving two masters here. Confidential’s calling the piece “Sax Potentate Pepper: Junk and Jailbait Call the Tune Now!!!!!” LAPD Vice laid on the lead to the meet and laid down the law: We’ll be there to slam this slime for Stat Rape/1st Degree.

Bill Parker hates hopheads and jailbait jumpers. Bill Parker’s out to keester Confidential. He wants to catalogue Confidential’s coercive methods and march the mag to Indictment City. He’s implementing a looooooooooong-range strategy.

I lounged in my Packard pimpmobile. Ward Wardell and Race Rockwell reclined in their surveillance van. Donkey Don Eversall worked the outside spot. Miss Franklin High had her own sled. She handed out hand jobs, at five bucks per, and glommed a beat-to-shit ’48 Merc. Donkey Don would call the pay phone. He’d say It’s on and tail the twist to the Leechee Nut Lodge. The desk clerk was an LAPD lapdog. He told Don that putzo Pepper was smack-back in Room #9. Two Vice Squad goons were mainlining mai tais in the Lily Pad Lounge. They were set to grind Pepper while my camera crew rolled film.

I’m a snitch. I’m a rat fink. I’m a doofus double agent. I’m LAPD Lapdog #1.

I eyeballed the lot. Six wheelmen reposed in their rides. They drove hellacious hot rods and blew their gelt on booze, kustom kar kits, and cooze. They lived at the lot. They slept in their sleds. They poked B-girls from the Kibitz Room at Canter’s Delicatessen and bounced their backseats, six at a pop.

Ward Wardell walked to the phone. Race Rockwell schmoozed a wigged-out wheelman with pizza-pus zits. The cat was a cop buff. He said the Hat Squad was chasing two 211/rape-o’s. They stormed steak houses at closing time. They tapped the tills and took wallets. They purloined purses and made the women strip and dispense snout jobs. The Hats were out to take scalps on this one.

I tuned it out. The Hats and I had shared some shimmering shit. Fuck them — more current shit shivered through me.

Bondage Bob called me this morning. He beefed a southside radio station and a late-nite show called Nasty Nat’s Soul Patrol. It was all pimp patois, cool-cat consciousness, and jive jazz. A woman called in three nights running. She came off winsome and waaaay white. She called herself “Miss Blind Item.” She jawed with Nasty Nat and aped Confidential’s alliterative prose style. Bob had no gripe there. But — she crossed some craaaaazy line and madly mauled the magazine. She baaaaad — beefed the August ’52 piece on “Red Light Bandit” Caryl Chessman.

The piece bawled boo-hoo per Chessman’s tripartite conviction. It’s baaaad: Kidnap/Armed Robbery/Forced Oral Cop. Dig: the tone was apoplectic apostasy. The tone disregarded the magazine’s perpetual fry-the-fucker stance. Chessman was convicted in spring ’48. The Little Lindbergh Law applied. Hanging judge Charles Fricke righteously mandated DEATH. Chessman professed his innocence. Chessman excoriated capital punishment. Lunar-looped liberals took up his hue and cry. ’48 to ’55. He’d held off his trek to the green room for seven full years. He filed appeals. He wrote screechy screeds and peddled them to pinko publishers. Now, this wiggy witch was mocking my magazine, and lambasting its one lamentable lapse in moral tone.

Bondage Bob told me to tune in Nasty Nat tonite. He said the witch called in at 1:00 a.m. and motormouthed till 3:00. I said I’d jump on it and take boocoo notes.

The pay phone rang. Ward grabbed it and grinned. He said, “Arriba, boss.”

The 8:00 p.m. rush. Prosaic-predictable. Folks tumbled tables, noshed and shot the shit. Niteclub action accelerated around 9:30. Ditto, late-show movies. The Strip/the Boulevard. Ciro’s, the Mocambo, the Crescendo. Grauman’s Chink and the Egyptian. Googie’s bopped close to all.

I took my table. Tipsters tagged the Tattle Tyrant as fair game. They salaamed and sucked up. They delivered the dubious dish.

Orson Welles sliced the Black Dahlia. That choice chestnut. Here’s five scoots — please go away.

Here’s a ripe wrinkle. Orson Welles sliced the Black Dahlia. Yeah — I know, it’s day-old bagels at half price. Yeah, but dig this: Rita Hayworth held the Dahlia’s legs while Orson sawed her in half.

Okay, here’s ten scoots — now go away.

Van Johnson’s at it again. The old semen demon’s always up for a taste. He siphoned Tab Hunter’s python in a back row at the Admiral Theatre.

No, I can’t prove it. Yeah, I need gelt. There’s a sneak peek at the Iris, and I’m short on the freight.

Here’s twenty scoots. Uncle Freddy’s a soft touch. The popcorn’s on me.

A guy peddled Carole Landis morgue shots. Yawn. A guy peddled pix of Marlon Brando with a dick in his mouth. Shit — I thought I cornered that market, back in ’53. A call girl tossed me a tip on the steakhouse rape-o/robbers. They were holed up in a hot-sheet flop on 54th and Vermont. They were geezing Nazi-made morphine and meth speedballs. I slid her forty scoots. She slipped me her phone number. I told her to tattle the tip to the Hat Squad. She told me she banged Red Stromwall at an Elks Club smoker, back in ’46.

Juan the fry cook passed me a message. Jimmy was 86’ing the Phyllis Gates meet. Nick Ray culled the cast and called for a script read. Nick Ray ran regular “Motivational Missions,” as in tonite. Sorry, babe — give Phyl my love.

Neuter Nick Ray. “Motivational Missions.” Robbie Molette’s mad monologue. My pal Jimmy. The “Human Ashtray.” I felt god-awful gut-punched.

It was 8:55. A late nite loomed. I had a batch of bilious back issues to study for Big Bill Parker. Nasty Nat’s Soul Patrol popped the airwaves at 1:00. Miss Blind Item might call in. She’d castigate and condemn Confidential. She’d evince righteous rage per Red Light Bandit Caryl Chessman. The deal instantly intrigued me. Chessman was sure as shit guilty. I wanted him to burn, baby, burn.

My dexie dose fizzled, drizzled, and withered to wisps and gnashed nerves. I popped two more and awaited the aaaaahhhh. Phyllis walked in. I stood up and bowed. She walked up and curtsied cute. She wore twill slacks and a cashmere cardigan. She radiated rectitude and a reserved ring-a-ding.

A waitress brought menus. Phyllis sat across from me. She went Where’s Jimmy?

I said, “He couldn’t make it. Something about a script rehearsal.”

The waitress whipped back. Phyllis ordered a dry martini. I held up two fingers. The waitress scrammed. Phyllis said, “Drat.”

I laffed. “Drat?”

“Well, yes.”

“Should I decode that?”

“Well... Jimmy and Rock were pals on Giant. I was hoping that he might provide...”

“A perspective on Rock’s bent, and your conundrum? Maybe buffer you and me getting down to brass tacks?”

The martinis materialized. Phyllis mainlined half of hers. She said, “Drat. What have I gotten myself into?”

I lit a cigarette. “You love him, right?”

“What’s not to love? He’s every Minnesota farm girl’s dream. But this girl has lived in Hollywood for a while, and I’ve heard the rumors, and I know how to read signs.”

“How discouraged are you?”

Phyllis laffed. “Not that much. Part of me knows that it’s more than a little bit of a lark.”

I mainlined my martini. It payload-packed the dexies. I rippled resurgent and revitalized.

“I’m on your side, and Rock’s side. ‘Love conquers all,’ and all that happy horseshit. The magazine’s on your side, and Rock’s side, but the magazine is Confidential, with all the skank that implies. We’ve got to dispel one set of rumors, and create a contradictory, second set to eclipse it. Bob Harrison’s committed to an eternal triangle scenario. That means we need to find a bait girl, and L.A.’s the bait girl capital of the world. And, for what it’s worth, I like your idea of a catfight at the Mocambo.”

Phyllis popped the olive out of her drink and snarfed it. I tossed my olive on her place mat. She snarfed it, quick-quick.

“Rock’s a sweetie pie. Who am I to demand perfection in a man?”

“You’ve got every right to demand more than you damn well might have to settle for.”

Phyllis said, “Ouch.”

I said, “I’m sorry. That was harsh.”

Phyllis went Pshaw. “It’s not like I’m a hundred percent discouraged.”

“Give me the good news, then.”

“Rock took an inkblot test once, in the Navy. He saw butterflies and snakes, which symbolize a feminine nature and the penis. He took a second test, after the war — and this time he scored much more butch.”

I sighed, sad-ass. “Shit, don’t break my heart.”

Phyllis snatched my martini and drained it dry. Her eyeballs boinged. Now, she’s all rectitude — ripped to the gills.

“It’s a lark, right?”

“Right.”

“And there’s no guarantee it’ll remain a lark, right?”

“Right.”

“So I should be prepared for any and all outcomes, right?”

“Right.”

“Didn’t you say something about us getting down to brass tacks?”

I leaned close. Phyllis leaned close. We deep-dialed our eyes and cleaved close. She wore Chanel No. 5. I wore Lucky Tiger. Our separate scents sizzled and merged, molto bene.

“You’ll want out sooner or later. You won’t want him hurt in the press, but you’ll want your fair share of the pie. I’ll handle the entrapment and all the other shitwork for ten percent of the initial property and revenue split, and ten percent of your alimony, in perpetuity.”

Phyllis kissed me. She found the fit and held my head and leg-clamped me under the table. The kiss lingered loooooong. We wrapped ourselves into it. Our scents merged that much more. Some geeks at adjoining tables whistled and clapped.

I ran the radio. KKXZ — le jazz hot levied with listless bop ballads that blew blue and nodded off to nothingness. A low-watt/storefront station. Above Sultan Sam’s Sandbox and Rae’s Rugburn Room.

I was laid low, bent bare, and stripped to striation on the Isle of Deep Despair. The Westwood caper cornholed me. I humped Hilgard to Sunset. I ripped rubber just as the fuzz and fire engines arrived. The Afrika Korps beat it southbound. Their goofy getaway masked their insidious intent. A moment to maul my memory: Jimmy Dean, with pink panties stretched eyeballs to neck.

Nasty Nat’s Soul Patrol popped the airwaves. Nat read local news spots before he samba’d back to his soporific sounds of the nite. He kicked off with his “Cutie.”

UCLA. Sorority row. Panty raid at Chi Beta Gamma. The fuzz arrive. There’s a garland of girls, wrapped in robes and issuing indignation. Four girls put it off on the SAE boys or USC football studs. One girl called it “more evil than that. These guys were older. One guy carried a camera. They ripped our robes, and tried to shoot a nudie film right there.”

Nasty Nat put down some pooh-pooh patter. “UCLA ain’t the ghetto, sisters. And I’m sure those young buck cops will be back to ask you to stage in-the-buff reenactments.”

Ouch.

Nasty Nat said, “It’s crime on the dime, tonite. The some might say infamous LAPD Hat Squad shot it out with those two steakhouse rapist-robbers. It went down at Tommy Tucker’s Playroom on Washington and La Brea. One man escaped in the mad melee. Muerto at the scene: Richie ‘The Dutchman’ Van Duesen/white male American/age thirty-eight. Still at large: George ‘Fat Boy’ Mazmanian/white male American/age forty-two. The Fat Boy is purportedly armed and dangerous, so watch out.”

Nasty Nat mimicked the Confidential style. It gored my goat. He cut from crime on the dime to bleak blues from the Synagogue Sid Trio. Dig: Sid on bass sax, Bobby Horvitz on flügelhorn, Aaron Adelman on drums. The piece: “Premature Funeral March for Gamal Abdel Nasser and King Farouk.” Nat laid down the intro. He closed with “These cats run long.” One, two, three — shalom, cats.

Synagogue Sid blatted his sax. Bobby Horvitz flaunted his flügelhorn. Aaron Adelman drilled his drums. I doused the volume. I got imperiously impatient. Where’s Miss Blind Item? Where’s her cruel critique of Confidential’s Caryl Chessman piece??? Where’s her fry-the-cocksucker rebuttal???

I was itchy/antsy/fraught/fragged and dexie-ditzed out of my gourd. I got out my notepad and skimmed ’52 to ’55 Confidentials. I’m a snitch, a rat fink, a stool pigeon, a squealer, a quisling, a rogue dog who bites the hand that feeds him. Let’s do legal prep work for Chief William H. Parker.

Bill Parker and me. We’re like that now. Let’s take down Confidential.

Back issues. Clipped-on legal files. Lawyers’ notes and field reports. Look for loopholes. Dippy depositions to dice and deep-six. The mag hired ace legal beagles. The mag had Freddy O. for strongarm vetting and verification. All our slurs and slander slams are true. We stand by our shit. Yeah, but if anybody’s prone to fuck it all up, it’s yammeringly yours truly.

I skimmed back issues. I read legal briefs and my own notes. I muddled through mellifluous memories.

December ’52: “Showgirl Sells Shares in Self!!!”

Bland, by and large. A stock-market spoof. Vetted by a kid clerk. No slander slams or libel loops here.

December ’52: “Exposed: Love in the UN!!!!”

Tattle text. The Multinational March of Miscegenation. Minor minions j’accused. I’m bored already. No vetting notes. Doofus diplomats never sue.

November ’53: “Marked for Death: Walter Winchell, Bishop Fulton Sheen!!!”

Anti-Commie pap. Lawyers cite unnamed sources. Snoresville, U.S.A.

March ’54: “Why Orson Welles Bit the Lip of Eartha Kitt.”

Miscegenation — Confidential’s merry mainstay. Orson was boning irksome Eartha. A Vegas stringer fed us the bit. Eartha said goons broke down her door. She was right. I hired the goons. Eartha demanded cold compensation. I slid her ten thou. Orson said, “You’re a shit, Freddy.” I bitch-slapped him.

This piece was bad juju and a potential Parker payoff. It exposed the mag’s strong-arm methods and exposed ME. I put it in my secret Parker dirt file.

November ’54: “Christine Jorgensen’s Romance with a Vanderbilt Stepson.”

He-she hijinx. Ex-man Christine set Vanderbilt up and had me shoot sneak pix. She wanted the publicity — to goose her dead-stalled film career. I shook down Vanderbilt for twenty thou. Christine and I split the gelt. Confidential published a pablum-packed piece that went pffft. Christine was pissed. She wanted to see some wild and wet woof-woof. This piece could mulch the magazine, baaaaaad. Ditto, Fred Otash. It was goooood Parker file fodder.

January ’55: “Eartha Kitt and her ‘Santa Baby’ Arthur Loew, Jr.”

Miscegenation marches on. The old colored canary/white sugar daddy bit. It’s Irksome Eartha again. Eartha threatens to sue. I’m the bagman. Confidential coughs up cold cash.

Synagogue Sid blatted on. I yawned. Where’s Miss Blind Item? It’s almost 2:00 a.m.

March ’55: “The Wife Clark Gable Forgot.” Yawn. “The Girl in Gregory Peck’s Bathtub.” Man, it’s sacked-out soporific.

Synagogue Sid bleated bleak and deep diminuendoed. I heard the mike-magnified cough of coins dropped in a pay phone. I kicked the volume. Nasty Nat said, “Miss Blind Item’s back — so I know we’re going to be talking Confidential magazine and the infamous Caryl Chessman case.”

Miss Blind Item said, “Hey, Nat. What’s shaking?”

I dug her voice. It was cool contralto and mucho Midwest.

“Nothing but the leaves on the tree, baby.”

“Locate me, Nat. Where did we leave off last time?”

“Well, we did the long-range overview of Confidential, and we both commented on how atypically liberal their coverage of the Chessman case was, given that Confidential’s been a Red-baiting and race-baiting rag from jump street.”

Nasty Nat told it true. August ’52. The cheesy Chessman piece. The mag was naïvely new then. I didn’t sign on till fall ’53.

Miss Blind Item laffed. “Confidential’s got style, baby. You’re starting to alliterate already.”

Nasty Nat wolf-whistled. “And you’ve got cojones, as our Mex cousins say, calling a Negro man ‘baby.’ ”

Miss Blind Item relaffed. Phone-booth sounds went mike-magnified. There’s a match strike and exhale. She’s smoking a cigarette.

“I’m an actress, Nat. You can always count on me to go for a provocative effect.”

“Disc jockeys go the same route. Our sponsors here encourage it. Come on, Sultan Sam’s Sandbox and Rae’s Rugburn Room? They ain’t paying me for bland.”

“Talk about alliteration, baby.”

Nasty Nat said, “You ain’t Miss Blind Item, you the sexy succubus. Now, moving along, before you get me in trouble with the Klan, the Catholic Legion of Decency, and Chief Parker his own self, why don’t you drop the basic lowdown on the Chessman case on all the folks out in Radioland.”

Miss Blind Item refed the pay phone. Dimes dipped, nickels notched down the slot.

“It’s early ’48. Chessman’s fresh out of Folsom. He’s stealing cars and committing armed robberies. He’s utilizing a hot ’46 Ford as his rape vehicle, and he’s affixed a phony red light to it, so he can pass himself off as a policeman. Now, he’s prowling lovers’ lanes in Pasadena and up above Hollywood. He’s robbing young couples making out. On two legally affirmed occasions, he forcibly removes young women from their cars, and places them in his car. That legally constitutes kidnapping. Once they’re in his car, he sexually assaults them, which constitutes a second, specific set of felony charges. His two certified victims conclusively identified him. He was convicted at trial and sentenced to death. Much has been made of the fact that Chessman did not kill anyone. C’est la guerre, sweetie. The Little Lindbergh Law applies. Now, that evil no-goodnik has become an ace jailhouse lawyer, and he’s beaten back a slew of attempts to send him to the green room, where he most devoutly belongs. He wrote a book, which was published last year, called Cell 2455, San Quentin. In it, he fatuously asserts his innocence of the Red Light Bandit crimes and demands a redress of the entire American legal system.”

Nasty Nat went whew! “I’m renaming you, and it ain’t ‘baby’ or ‘sweetie.’ And you ain’t really Miss Blind Item, you more the ‘Vindictive Vixen,’ which prompts me to ask you why you so het up on this case, when just about everybody I know thinks Chessman got railroaded, and these justice-minded folks I know are all doing their darnedest to make sure he don’t go to that green room.”

Go, Nasty Nat. You snagged it on the snout. Baby, sweetie, Miss Item — why you calling in to my radio show?

“It’s dawning on me, sugar. You got a personal stake in this whole Chessman hullabaloo. That means there’s something you haven’t told us.”

Miss Blind Item lit a cigarette. I heard the match flare and exhale.

“There was a third victim. She came forth and identified Chessman, but the DA chose not to have her testify at trial. The sexual assault that Chessman perpetrated against her was especially vile and vicious. Bluntly put, she went insane, and has spent the past seven years in Camarillo. The young woman was a friend of mine. We studied at a prestigious acting school in New York together, back in late ’47. That’s the long and short of it, Nat. I’m on leave from a gig in New York now, so I thought I’d make a little ruckus in my friend’s hometown, and maybe take a little drive up to Camarillo.”

Es la verdad. I was at Hollywood Station that night. I saw Miss Third Victim walk in and collapse on the squadroom floor.

Ouch!!!!!

Outdoor surveillance. The withering worst. Dirt on my duds and briar bristles brushing my ass. I’m up some hellhole hiking trail. There’s a noxious noonday sun singeing me. I’ve got binoculars trenchantly trained on the Observatory lot.

It’s lunchtime. The lot’s cordoned off for cast and crew, exclusive. It’s loaded with hot rod heaps and kool kat kids couched within. Robbie Molette’s hopping, heap to heap. He’s pushing pills and reefers. I’m peeping the transactions. It’s a rippling replay of last nite’s panty raid/chickie run.

There’s Nick Ray, Nick Adams, my putz pal Jimmy Dean. The gang’s got up in street threads. There’s no Afrika Korps kouture and Sieg Heil today. There’s the three B-boys. They’re still dressed in blasphemous black. I memorized the Chevy van plate stats last nite. They came back to one Chester Alan Voldrich/white male American/age twenty-six. Dig: he bossed the nabobically noted Hollywood High Rat Pack, circa ’49. They rolled elderly fruits and Mickey Finn’d Marymount girls and got in their pants.

That was goooooood derogatory dish. Bill Parker would crap-his-pants cream. And — per Nick Adams/real name Adamshock/DOB 7-10-31/Nanticote, Pennsylvania:

No arrests/eight rousts on suspicion: GTA, flimflam, malicious mischief, Stat Rape, Peeping Tom, pushing pornographic snapshots. Plus: gay-bar roust sheets on Jimmy Dean and Nick Ray. Confirmed per Jimmy: Robbie Molette’s “Human Ashtray” shtick. Confirmed per Nick Ray: rousted at the Saints and Sinners Drag Ball. Whoa, Nellie — Nick was a knockout in his Red Guard empire gown. Plus: Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, popped at the “Jailbait Jamboree” at Linda’s Little Log Cabin.

It’s all Kids Run Wild/Kids Led Astray. It summoned me to serve Bill Parker and my meshugenah magazine. It summoned me to save Jimmy D. from himself.

I binocularized the big parking lot. Robbie pushed pills. Jimmy and Nick Adams shot craps on a Nazi-flag blanket. Jimmy called my service and left a message: “See you at Googie’s tonite.” That meant this: he didn’t make me at the panty raid/chickie run.

I binocularized. Chester Voldrich and his B-boy buddies sniffed a glue-soaked rag. Natalie Wood basked in a bikini. She reclined on the roof of a ’52 Eldo. Nick Ray walked by and kissed her thighs on the sly.

A.M. shitwork. Phone work and field reports. Two per Rebel Without a Cause. Mendacious memos to Bondage Bob Harrison and Bill Parker.

I called Nasty Nat at KKXZ. Pathos pounded me. He lived at the station. His noxious news: last nite’s trace went blooey. Nat said he’d try again tonite. I bid the big bopster bon voyage.

Miss Blind Item. You’ve got me torched and scorched.

I wrote my report to Bondage Bob. I delivered the dish on Nick Ray’s Afrika Korps and described the pustulant panty raid in delirious detail. I omitted Jimmy Dean’s presence. I owed Jimmy that. I exorbitantly expanded my memo to Bill Parker. I reported Robbie Molette’s dish per Führer Nick’s “escalation” escapades. Dig, Chief: He’s planning hot-prowl 459’s and liquor-store 211’s. He’s the maladroit mastermind of the “motivation” crime. Addled actors bow to his bidding. Nazi Nick’s applied the Stanislavskiesque stamp.

I called Confidential’s messenger service. A car schlepped down from Sunset and Vine and picked up the pouches. Chop, chop, fucker — deliver them now.

My desk phone rang. I picked up. Bondage Bob bored straight in.

“Lew Wasserman just called me. Rock’s at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station. He was booked under his kosher name of Roy Fitzgerald, and it looks like he was drunk or maybe Mickey Finn’d, he might have been blowing some guy in a parked car, and what’s for sure is he swung on a deputy, so now he’s in custody. All this means I need you and your boys to get him out and clean him up before the press gets wind of it.”

I said, “Jawohl, boss. I’ll jump on it.”

Bob bored back in. “We’ve got to safeguard our exclusive on the ‘Rock marries a woman’ front. Lew’s a hundred percent behind us on this. He wants to call the piece ‘Rock’s Rocky Road to Marital Bliss,’ and he’s a hog for the eternal-triangle bit that you and Phyllis have cooked up. That means you’ve got to find us a bait girl to play the other woman. You dig, bubi? I want a fresh face, which means nobody we’ve used before. If Rock falls in the shit on this Sheriff’s deal, we can lay the bait girl off as the ‘sexy succubus who led the righteously religious Rockster to tasty temptation,’ or some such happy horseshit.”

I said, “I’ll have Rock out inside of an hour.”

Bob said, “Lay off the kraut jive. I’m one twenty-fourth Jewish, and I’m touchy about it.”

Stakeout. Eine kleine Nachtwerk. The mad march to 1:00 a.m. and Miss Blind Item. I’d run my radio looooooooooow. I’d hear coins slip-slide down that slot. Nasty Nat would try for a trace. I’d hear Her voice.

Nutty Nick Adams. There’s his chump-change chalet. I’m parked across the street and two doors down. It’s a murky moon-mist nite. I’m cunningly camouflaged. Shade-tree shadows shield the shape of my sled.

It’s peeper peekaboo. I see Nick’s pad. Nick can’t see shit. There’s window lights. Big beams bounce my way. I possess Peepervision. No one else does.

There’s a scurrilous script read. Nick Ray pontificates. Nick A. and Jimmy Dean declaim dialogue.

I hexed the house. I made mental mincemeat of the punks and mocked their motivation. Leave now, feckless fools. I’ve got work to do inside.

I brought my evidence kit. It contained print gear and Ray Pinker’s stop-frame camera. I dunned the DMV. They fed me photostats of three drivers-license applications. I had right thumbprints for Jimmy Dean, Nick Ray, Nick Adams. Pinker’s camera light lit latent prints and magnified tents, whorls, and arches. My game was confirmation and/or elimination. If they touched the B and E swag that Rock described, I’d know.

I turned on the radio. Synagogue Sid serenaded me. Sid’s bass sax sallied forth. The flügelhorn flew with it. The drums drilled a cool counterpoint. Then that cacophonous coin cough cut in.

Adios, Sid. Nasty Nat’s nudged you aside for Miss Blind Item. I ran the radio looooooooow. I listened for tone above text. Talk to me, love. Say something, say anything. Give me your voice.

Miss Blind Item riffed and rang rapport with Nasty Nat. I listened for tone above text. I nite-dreamed as she talked.

Caryl Chessman would be in L.A. As in soonsville. He had a court appeal downtown. Nick Ray wants Jimmy Dean to play the Red Light Bandit. It surged as subtext and nudged me nonplussed. It couldn’t compete with Her Voice. Her vowels suggest the urban Midwest. It’s a seen-it-all city voice.

A door slammed. I orbed the chalet. Mark it: 1:23 a.m. The punks pop from the pad. They bag Nick Adams’ rental ragtop and roll northbound.

I rolled. It’s late, time is tight, you need an hour inside. I ran to the door and laid into the lock.

Lock picks and penlight. It’s up-close, in-tight work. I jammed a #4 pick in the keyhole and massaged the main spring. Two tumblers tipped. I pulled out the #4 and jammed in a #2. The door jerked from the jamb. I shoulder-shoved it and inched inside.

I locked myself in. I penlight-flashed the main room and dug on the details. Bullfight posters, bongo drums, a TV tuned to a test pattern. Natalie Wood nudie pix tacked to one wall.

It’s cheesecake chiaroscuro. Natalie’s backlit by flickering flames and feral faces peering out. It’s the Afrika Korps, the B-boys, the Nick’s Knights Kar Klub. The Führer’s face peers out above them. Nick Ray’s wearing devil horns and torquing a ten-inch forked tongue.

I cut down the hall. I flashed a bare-mattressed bedroom and a bathroom in bad disarray. My light speared the spare bedroom. My beam swung over the swag.

The hip hi-fis. The cumbersome consoles. The fetchingly fenceable TV sets and camera cascade. They were hurled haphazard and carelessly covered the floor.

I left the room lights off. I got out my gear. I made for the mountain of merchandise and went to work.

My penlight put me in close. I went contraband item to item. I marked manufacturers’ ID numbers on my scratch pad. It was all B and E stash. I knew that. It might be traceable to specific burglary lots.

Prints next. That’s the tuff part. Dust touch-and-grab surfaces. Daub contrasting-color powder. Put the stop-frame camera up to liftable latents. Expand the images and look for thumbprint configurations. Count tents, whorls, and arches. Compare them to the DMV photostats.

I went at it. I had at it, wholesale. I kept the lights off. I penlight-parsed and brushed purple powder over every touch-and-grab surface in sure sight. Finger oil brought up smudges, smears, paltry partial and full fingerprints. I went item to item. I dusted hi-fis/consoles/cameras/TV sets. Smudges, smears, and partials popped up. No glaring glove prints stood out. That was gooooood.

I caught two full finger spreads. They popped off a pinewood console. That meant bupkes/zero/zilch. I needed right thumbprints X-clusive.

I worked myself weary. I wound my way down to two portable TV sets.

They had hard-to-hold planes and no handles. They were cumbersome and unwieldy. They were hoist every which way items.

I dusted Set #1. I hit hard surfaces, crevices, cracks. I brought up a right thumbprint. I raised my camera. I zoomed close. I let fly.

The camera magnified. The camera impaled images and brought them up, white-on-black. I counted comparison points. I’d memorized the photostat points. I’d broiled them into my brain. I knew every tent, whorl, and arch.

I counted One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten—

Nick Adams, it’s you. You’re fucked for 459 PC.

I dusted Set #2. It’s hard to hold and pry off the premises. There’s that hard-to-hold tube housing.

I dusted it. I pulled Right Thumbprint #2.

I put the camera up to the print. I magnified it. I counted common points. Six points saddened and sickened me. Nine points nullified me. Ten points pounded James Dean, courtroom conclusive.

Rolling stakeout.

It’s 8:55 p.m. I’m parked perpendicular, down from bungalow row. I borrowed Donkey Don’s ’53 Chevy. It’s innocuous compared to my Packard pimpmobile. I’m snout-out in a flat flower bed. I’m ready to roll.

I’m still stage door — stuck and looped on Lois standard time. We talked until 2:00 last nite. We tippled at topics and nodded off into non sequiturs. We laffed, we flirted, we surged toward and circumnavigated a path past Shirley Tutler and Caryl Chessman. Lois refused to divulge her L.A. hideaway. I called Nasty Nat and Ray Pinker two hours back. They’d trace-tracked three Lois calls. They got cloyingly close. Ray tracked transformer stations and logiced out a loose location. He made it mid-Wilshire east.

It’s a booth call. Here’s his best shot at a border-to-border bid. It’s Western to the west/Vermont to the east/Beverly to the north/Olympic to the south.

I got it. I saw it. My mind churned and channeled straight to Chapman Park.

The Ambassador Hotel’s there. Ditto, the Chapman Park Hotel and the Gaylord Apartments. The Brown Derby’s there. Dale’s Secret Harbor’s there. It’s a lively locale. Lois would light there — I knew it.

The fone fungooed my whole day. Rodent Robbie called and ran me raw. He said, Jack loved Janey. I said, No shit, Shadrack — what’s not to love? Robbie goosed me: You giving her the bait gig? I said, Yeah — tell her to meet me tomorrow nite/Frascati/ten p.m. It’s a pithy party of four. She’ll meet the players then. Robbie hung up. Harry Fremont called. Caramba!!! — Sheriff’s Burglary called him.

It’s a make. The Nick Adams swag matched the manifests for six 459’s. Six B and E’s — all within one mile of Nabob Nick’s rent-a-pad. That’s gooooooood. If Nick keeps the cache, he’s cooked. Here’s what’s baaaaad. The Sheriff’s lab dutifully dusted the B and E locations. They turned up no viable latents.

I called Bill Parker and tattled the tidings. He said, Sit on it for now. I called Bondage Bob and told him. He said, This Rebel Without a Cause caper is a cause célèbre.

I’m a snitch. I’m a rat fink. I’m an infernal informer. I beat both ends against some malignant middle. And the wide world knows.

I checked my mailbox, midafternoon. I found one piece of paper. Dig this vivid valentine:

Jimmy, you shitbird cocksucker. I knew you when.

I bug-eyed bungalow row. I watched my watch. 9:00 p.m. nudged by. Bungalow row remained snoresville. The action accelerated at 9:14.

There’s the filthy phalanx. Farshtinkener Führer Nick Ray stridently strides ahead. His Untermenschen unfurl behind him. Jimmy Dean, Nick Adams, Chester Alan Voldrich. The two black-jacket Kameraden from the sorority soiree.

Die Fahne hoch. Die Reihen fest geschlossen—

They’re all Afrika Korps tonite. The jumpsuits, the big-billed caps, the Rommelesque regalia. Nick R.’s got his movie camera. We’re back at El Alamein, ’42. Rommel’s resolute. He’s readying his raid on the brave British forces.

It’s a quivering quick-march. The Kiddie Korps follows their festering father — they goof some goose steps and hop in the Chevy van. Voldrich whips behind the wheel and peels out.

They looped left on Sunset. I looped left and lagged back. I caught cover behind a big bus booming eastbound. I rode the back bumper and kept their back bumper surveilled.

We headed into Hollywood. The bus barged due east. The van vizzed south on Wilton Place. A taco wagon wiggled between us. It was chopped and channeled. It surged, submarineesque. The sassy side panels read Los Intrusos.

The van vipped ahead. I surfed behind the submarine. We’re headed southbound and down. Wilton arced into Arlington. We passed Mount Vernon Junior High/aka Mount Vermin. The van angled east at the Jefferson juncture. The tacomobile tooled on south.

I lost my car cover. I dawdled three car lengths back and dug darktown by nite. Something Rodent Robbie Molette said sacked me.

Escalation. Liquor-store 211’s. We’re at Jefferson and Normandie. It’s liquorland lit large — right here, right now.

Telepathy ticked — me to them. Don’t read my mind, Menschen — don’t cross this line.

The van wriggled to the right lane and crept curbside. I saw the lit-up liquor store window, jarringly just ahead. I whipped wide and nudged up to the north-side curb. The van stopped in front of the store.

Achtung!!!! Raus!!!! Mach schnell!!!!

The six sickos pile out. Nazi Nick’s got the camera. Nabob Nick’s got a pump shotgun. Jimmy Dean’s got a bottle of T-Bird topped with a cotton-wick fuse. It’s a sure-as-shit Molotov cocktail.

I froze, I watched, I peeped. I’m a peeper first and forever. Bill Parker told me to intercede and fuck up all felony actions. I didn’t. I disobeyed. I sought succor in savagery. I was coldly complicit. I’m all vile volition, and—

They walked into the store. The counter clerk saw them and guuuuulped. Nick Ray rolled film. Chester Voldrich reached behind the counter and tapped the till. The clerk yelped. His mouth moved. I imagined a plaintive please. The two no-name Kameraden hopped the counter and taped his mouth shut.

Voldrich shagged a shelf bottle. He uncorked it and passed it to his putrid pals. Some reflex ripped me. I kept going for a gun I didn’t have.

Nick Ray rolled film. No-name Nazi #2 pulled out a Minox minicamera and snapped stills. Jimmy flicked his lighter and lit the Molotov. Nabob Nick pumped his shotgun and blasted the booze shelves.

Glass shattered and sheared. Wino wine and rotgut rye and skunk scotch blew wide. Jimmy tossed the Molotov. It caught the cold cuts case and exploded. Fumes flared and flattened out at the ceiling. Electrical cords caught fire and sparked blue and white.

Smoke smothered my Peepvision view. The clerk ran outside and ran straight out of my frame. Nick’s Knights walked out, en masse. They stood studly, six across. They rebel-yelled. They whipped out their whangs and pissed in the street.

I confessed. I crawled my crib, cruciform. I drank myself draconian and drip-dried my dearly soul. What soul? They could have clipped the clerk and popped some pedestrians. I had to peep it and imprint the images. I’m the Pervdog of the Nite — past all rancid rationale and jacked-up justification.

I confessed to God and Chief William H. Parker. I wrote him a self-defaming memo and had it messengered, posthaste. I read my Bible and ripped right to Revelation:

Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand... Anyone destined to live by the sword will die by the sword.

That’s Nick’s Knights, that’s me. That’s God’s conflagration called down on Confidential.

I sat by the phone. I willed Lois to call. She didn’t call. I laid the phone in my lap. It rang. I picked up. It wasn’t Lois. It was Reptile Robbie Molette.

He blathered. I listened, listless. I was shot to shit and half in the bag.

“...and, Freddy, I figured I should tell you. Nick Ray’s over at Googie’s right now. He’s got a group of his kids in tow, and they’re all ragging on you pretty bad.”

I hung up. I willed Lois to call. I voodooized the airwaves and tried to make the phone ring. It rang. It wasn’t Lois. It was Chief William H. Parker.

He said, “You’re absolved, Freddy. We’ve got those humps on Arson, Assault 1, 211, and six related firearms charges. They’re sunk if Ernie Roll and I decide to sink them, and you’ve proved to me you won’t sell me out to Confidential. Get it? You’re not a coward or a quisling. You’re a shitbird who played it smart for the first time in his life.”

I blathered. Parker said, “Shut up, and enjoy your absolution and the rather astonishing fact that I’m starting to like you. And, while I have you, here’s a suggestion. It might be nice if you let Nick Ray and his gang know that they should mind their p’s and q’s.”

Fone rings raked me and drilled through a dream. I was the Giant Ant, once again. I wrangled the receiver and scoped the nitestand clock. It read 8:12 a.m.

I said, “This is Otash.”

A man said, “It’s Jack, Freddy. Don’t ask questions, just get out here, immediately.”

It was Jack. He came off panic-pounced and scream-screechy. I said, “I’ll roll now.”

The Hats and me. Full-fledged partners. One rich run at the roses. We reckoned we could race three full days. Max had a cousin in Bremerhaven, Germany. He worked at a pharmaceutical facility. They manufactured Pervitrol. It was a loopy lozenge that maximized merriment and once drove the Wehrmacht Tank Korps to pound Poland to pulp in record time. Anschluss!!! Blitzkreig!!! We rendezvoused at Stan’s Drive-In. Comely carhops hopped us pineapple malts laced with 151 rum. We popped Pervitrol and particularized our werkload.

We ran through our records checks to date. Dig: Janey Blaine dropped out of Visalia J.C. Her Smith — Bryn Mawr credentials were shucksville. She looked it, she didn’t earn it. Dig: her phone records came through threadbare. She buzzed mom and dad in Visalia and Robbie Molette. That’s it — sadly solamente.

We ran Robbie’s records. He had his own line listed at mom and dad’s Highland Park hutch. Dig: Robbie called Janey and the fourteen other call girls listed in his merchandise book. Harry braced the security boss at Metro. The boss vouched the names. He roundly ratted out Rodent Robert J. Molette, Sr. He’d been instigating ingénues into the call girl arts since ’49. He told Harry he’d have a damning dossier for them soon. We returned to Robbie’s records. Re-dig: Robbie called Nick Ray, Nick Adams, Jimmy Dean, Chester Voldrich, and Nick Knight Arvo Jandine. Arvo was the so-called unit fotog at the liquor-store job.

We discussed the Robbie senior and junior jihad. We agreed: senior would seize a lizardesque lawyer, faaaast. We agreed: we’ll hardnose Robbie and get him to give daddy up. I reported on my records checks. I lamentedly left Lois for a 3:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. fone stint. I ran the Rebel rascals and supply supplanted my existing records checks. Now, hear this:

Nick Ray’s under subpoena from State and Fed HUAC. He ran Comintern-financed front groups, ’42–’43. Among them: the Hollywood Committee for Artistic Freedom, the People’s Party to Resist Censorship, and the Hands-Off Comrade Stalin Committee. Max interjected: he talked to a Sheriff’s Burglary bull this a.m. Bingo, baby: the noxious numbers on Nick Adams’ swag matched two recent 459 lots. We agreed: we’ll haul him in and bat him around till he bitch-squeals.

I returned to my Rebel checks. It was all junk juvie shit — Arvo Jandine’s excepted.

He was a whipout man. He tossed his tool during daring girls’ locker room gambols. He hit Pasteur Jr. High, Nightingale Jr. High, Le Conte Jr. High, Foshay Jr. High, and Audubon Jr. High. We all agreed: this cocksucker mandates consideration.

Eddie reported per the crime-lab crucible. Dig: the rape-o/presumed killer was a savage secretor. Ray Pinker typed his blood, off his putrid payload. It’s AB negative. Jammed upside Janey’s body: plasticene and foam fabrics. Car seat-cover shit. Bad news here: said shit was indigenous to Mercs, Buicks, and Pontiacs, produced between ’51 and ’54. We all groooaned. That meant mucho millions of cars. It came down to this: we had to check all indigenous makes and models per our suspect pool.

Cars. This banged our bells per a big issue. How did Janey get up to Mulholland and Beverly Glen? She had no car. She called no cab. Rock and Phyllis didn’t drop her. She didn’t wait outside Frascati. Ergo: somebody picked her up near the restaurant.

It’s in Beverly Hills. It’s a short hill hop up Beverly Glen to Mulholland. It all came down to Janey’s tricks, past and present. It all came down to Robbie Molette and whether or not Janey worked freelance.

Eddie riffed on the crime-scene canvass. It boded bupkes — nobody saw shit. Ray Pinker noted drag marks at the foot of Beverly Glen and the embankment. This indicated one suspect, pulling upward. A West L.A. squadroom dick disagreed. He studied a bunch of crushed leaves. They indicated two suspects, dragging Janey down that embankment. Per toxicology: Janey had a big booze load in her system. No shit: she sheared down martinis and most likely wine at Frascati. Yeah, and she gobbled or was force-fed four Seconol. Ray called her comatose at her TOD.

Max said, “I’m bored. Let’s go get Robbie. Freddy and Eddie, you come with me.”

Harry said, “We’ve got leads on Fat Boy I’d like to check out.”

Red said, “Nix. You and I will go pick up Adams. The Sheriff’s bull said we could have first dibs.”

I guuuullped. Jimmy was Nick A.’s 459 accomplice. I failed to mention that—

Dope raid. Preselected bungalows. Nick Ray’s hip hutch. The cast and crew crawl pad. The B-level bedrooms of the Nick’s Knights Kar Klub.

It was 7:50 p.m. Rodent Robbie ran the dope by at 7:20. Nazi Nick had assembled the Juvie Jugend at his place. He’ll pitch one more motivation message. The flick wraps three days hence.

We perched on the access road. Four Sheriff’s plainclothes cars, eight Narco cops, plus me. The Hats were off elsewhere. They had Fat Boy Mazmanian 94.6 percent pinned. That quashed our Janey Blaine job. Fat Boy punched the ticket for Rape/Murder One. He’d go down soonsville.

We were looping up loose ends. The shoot would wrap. Ernie Roll would run the evidence and finalize filings. The panty raid. The liquor store 211/Arson. The four burglary counts to keester Nick Adams and Jimmy Dean. The Hats thumped Nick and Jimmy and cut them loose. We were playing and plying a loooooooooong game here. Call it collusive convergence — cops and Fourth Estate.

The Confidential smear job and the issued indictments must hit concurrent. The big bonanza lay there. I ran rapaciously rogue through all this Rebel rigamarole. I would confess all at the Confidential v. State of California trial.

“Two years, Freddy. We’ll be in court then. What you and I hath wrought.”

Parker said it. I believed it. It vouched my visions of Lois and fifty grand. It stamped Caryl Chessman’s insisted innocence Null and Void. I believed it. I had to believe it. So why hasn’t she called?

The radio rumbled. The squawk box squawked. That meant go, goon squad—

We got out and barged up to bungalow row. We’re heat on the hoof — eight cops up against hip hopheads and dizzy dilettantes. We hit the Führer Bungalow at a sprint. We prepeeped the door kick. Here’s the big window view:

Nick Ray in white robe and sandals. He’s serving up the Sermon on the Mount. His addlepated acolytes are attired likewise. That’s Nick Adams, Jimmy, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo.

Reefer smoke smogged the air. The acolytes noshed home fries and Googie’s burger bits. It’s the Last Supper. Jimmy beat his bongo drums. Natalie and Sal made like Muslims and ululated to Allah. Nihilist Nick held up a cheesy chalice of cheap wine. He said, “Art is self-sacrifice in the fight against Squaresville America. Come, drink from my blood.”

He’s serving Commie Communion. T-Bird wine and burger bits for wafers. Natalie whipped off her white muumuu and stood starkers. No shit — she’s the altar!!!

We kicked the door in. I went straight for Nick Ray. I elbow-popped his face and gnashed his nose in. His cheesy chalice flew. I kicked him in the balls and jackknifed him to the floor. I double-cuffed his hands to his ankles. I bow-bent him back ninety degrees. The fucker scree-screeched.

The acolytes made like Mahatma Gandhi. They went supine and sang Sufi songs to unnerve the fuzz. The cops shackle-chained Jimmy, Nick A., and Sal. They fondle — felt up Natalie and let her linger nude. They grabbed pill vials and reefer wrappers off the floor.

I ran down the row. I hit the crawl crib and crashed in the door. Four grimy grips groused and ground themselves deep in their bedrolls. I noticed no dope evidence extant. I ran down the row to the B-level bedrooms. I beat down the door to room #29.

It’s a two-bed flop. There’s nobody home. My roust sheet listed the occupants: Chester Alan Voldrich and fotog Arvo Jandine.

I eyeballed the room. A glossy glint gleamed on the dresser. I checked it out.

It was a black-and-white snapshot. Dig the built babe in a bikini. I’d seen her before. I knew where. Robbie Molette’s girl book. This studette starred in his stable.

He’s back there. It’s a back garage setup. He’s paying furtive fugitive rates for three hots and a cot. The front house is a sweltering sweatshop. A kiddie korps sews Sir Guy shirts and sicknik silks for L.A. gang goofballs. Ten cents an hour, muchachos. You’re overpaid at that.

He’s George “Fat Boy” Mazmanian. He’s survived his pustulant pal, Richie “the Dutchman” Van Deusen. We’ve got him for the steakhouse/211-sex assaults. That mandates death by cop, all in itself. We’ve got him for the Janey Blaine homicide. He didn’t kill Janey Blaine. Nobody’s perfect — least of all him, or US.

We evacuated the sweatshop. The Hats bought los muchachos Eskimo Pies off a Good Humor truck. The kids gassed on the LAPD’s largesse. We weren’t LAPD or the Hat Squad plus Fred Otash today. We were the Men from Mars.

Dig it. We’re spiffily space age. We’re wearing spangle-sparkly bulletproof vests. The PD purchased a big batch of Chicom surplus supplies. They’re hiiiiigh-density and heat-resistant. They’ll deflect H-bombs and silver bullets. They glow candy apple green in the dark.

We reconnoitered behind the sweatshop. We adjusted our vests. We loaded our Ithaca pump shotguns with rat poison — laced buckshot. We slipped on our headgear. Dig: L.A. Rams football helmets rigged with antiradiation rays and Plexiglas face shields. Wobbly whip antennae for that space-monster look.

We were ready. We were armed and attired. Uno, dos, tres — vamanos, muchachos—

We blasted the door off its hinges. Double-aught buck punctured pinewood to pulp. Fat Boy fired. I caught two shots. Max and Red caught two shots. They singed synthetic fabric and fell off our vests. Fat Boy popped four more shots. Harry and Eddie took them. Ricochets riddled my football helmet and zinged off of me.

We advanced. We were the Men from Mars. We feared no man or beast. We stood in point-blank range and let fly. I pumped my five rounds straight at his head. He was my voodoo-doll substitute. I saw Caryl Chessman’s face as I killed him.

I tallied table tips. I autographed a.m. Heralds. Here’s the headline: Men From Mars Battle Call Girl Killer!!!!!

Not quite — but I’ll take it.

I logged lowdown. It was all bullshit. I didn’t care. Let’s celebrate and gloat.

The Rebel wrap party was here tonite. The dope-raid arrestees had bailed out. Parker wanted it that way. Let’s postpone the parade of criminal indictments. We’ll sync them to the film’s release.

I tallied tips. I rippled with resurgence. The money. Fat Boy dead and scapegoated for Janey Blaine. It buttressed Jack the K.’s peace of mind. That was gooooood. That meant it buttressed me.

Yeah — but why hasn’t Lois called? I called her New York service fourteen times and got zilch back. I’d null-and-voided Caryl Chessman. Nobody knew but me. I was resurgent. That meant WE should be.

A tipster bopped up. He tattled the Secret Snatch Hair Auction at the Charlie Chaplin estate. Certified Jean Harlow locks went for thirty grand each. Certified Carole Lombard locks went for twenty grand, plus. L.A. County Morgue doctors certified the snips and attested to their authenticity.

Here, kid. Here’s forty clams. Uncle Freddy can afford to laff. He’s got Lois Nettleton and fifty g’s.

The Rebelites wandered in. Nick Ray, Nick Adams, Natalie Wood, and Jimmy the D. Jimmy had that bruised-and contused, I’ve-been-phone-booked look. His hacked hairline gave it away.

He saw me. He kissed his middle finger and flipped me off. He wheeled and walked back out the door.

You get the picture. I never saw him again.

Confidential fell. The mistrial mandated a move to excessive expurgation and bum bowdlerization. Jimmy Dean went tits-up in a car wreck. Tuff shit. His mopey martyrdom moves millions and redefines Confidential’s concept of epic boo-hoo. I felt next to nothing. Nada, nix, nein, nullification. Jimmy betrayed me. Jimmy dumped me. Jimmy left me for Demon Daddy Nick Ray.

Bondage Bob killed the Rebel Without a Cause smear job. Bill Parker dumped his derogatory profile on the teen turkey turned big hit. Ernie Roll rolled over and declined to file criminal charges on Nick’s Knights et al. Parker and Roll succumbed to sentiment and success. Canonized kid actor, boffo box-office take. They capitulated to cultural consensus. Movie money made them meek. That big boo-hoo made them back off, bitch-like. That’s the bilious bi-fecta. They’re satedly satisfied. I’m not.

’55 to ’57. It was all one speciously spectacular sprint. I served my two mad masters. I vetted vile stories for Bondage Bob as I bamboozled him. I tanked the verification process and trafficked the truth to Bill Parker. We built a defamous dossier. It topped two thousand pages. It was mucho more than any prize-prick prosecutor could ask for. It comprised one wicked workload. It detailed my libelous life as a smear merchant and thug and made for a massive missive of my misconduct. Why mince words? I’m a rat, a fink, a snarky snitch, and an insidious informant. And I revere Bill Parker for giving me the chance to become one.

’55 faded out. Rock Hudson married Phyllis Gates in November. Best of luck, kids. I give it two years. I’ll work Mrs. Hudson’s divorce gig then. Phyllis is a fine filly. We collapse in the kip once in a while. Phyllis pretends that I’m Rock. I pretend that she’s Lois.

Barbara Bel Geddes never caught cold or laid up with laryngitis. Lois never netted the ripe role of Maggie the Cat. The show shut down in November ’56. I remain Stage Door Freddy. I tune in my TV and watch the only woman I’ve ever loved. There’s Lois on Decoy. She’s dizzy and dykey in two prison-drama shows. Lois stuns on Studio One and mangles the motions on Captain Video and His Video Rangers. She’s bravura on The Brighter Day. She called out to me on Camera Three, and told me we’re still on.

Lois played Emily Dickinson. She was all Art and Loneliness. Her poet’s passion pounded me. I know why. Lois lives longing the same way I do. She said, “What will you do about it?” I haven’t told her I’ve done one big thing already. I haven’t said, “I’ll tell you all in time.” I want to rig our reunion in Shirley Tutler’s name and the name of Vindictive Justice. We’ve got time here. Three jolting jurists have told me that.

J. Miller Leavy prosecuted Chessman. He told me the hump should burn some time in ’59. Ernie Roll’s best guess is early ’60. Judge Charles Fricke calls it ’60–’61.

We’ve got time. Hotshot men owe me favors. We’ll get our jailhouse visit. I promise you that. In the meantime, I’ve done this:

I stored the pix from Jimmy D.’s crawl crib in a bank vault. I B and E’d the crib the day Jimmy died. I stole his Chessman letters and stored them in Vault #2. I ripped his Chessman wallpaper to shreds and burned it. I contacted two high-ups at Quentin and begged for all the names of Chessman’s approved correspondents. They’ve refused me so far.

We’ll reunite. I know it. We won’t ride as rich as I’d hoped. Jack the K.’s fifty grand sallied south.

The cocksucker stiffed me. A minion called and made the meet. The parcel weighed in weighty. I took it home and counted the cash. The bills boded wrong. I showed some to a Treasury man. He said the cash was counterfeit. Freddy, you’re fucked.

I hexed Jack the K. It worked at first. He lost the veep bid in ’56. ’56 is not presumptive ’60. Jack was right. My shakedown was short-range thinking and a small-time move. That made me a small-time man.

Yeah — but I took down Confidential.

Es not la verdad. I just helped. The gig was Bill Parker’s bristling brainstorm from the get. We compiled the damaging data. Parker fed it to AG Pat Brown. He launched the official investigation and empaneled the grand jury then. The grand jury issued indictments on 5/15/57. Conspiracy to Publish Criminal Libel. Conspiracy to Publish Obscene Material. Conspiracy to Disseminate Information in Violation of the California Business Code.

Call it a clamorous cluster fuck. Bondage Bob hired Arthur Crowley to defend the magazine. Art was a divorce lawyer. He was not a libel-defense lawyer. Assistant AG Clarence Linn repped California State. I owed Bob a big beau geste. I was not indicted. Parker and Roll kept their word. I made a ham-handed play to pollute the jury pool. It cost Bondage Bob forty g’s. I flew the fuckers to Acapulco. They lived large for one week. So what? Nobody noticed or seemed to care.

A load of lawsuits surfaced, postindictments. Maureen O’Hara sued. Confidential cornholed her in the March ’57 issue. It alleged that she made out with a Mexican at Grauman’s Chinese. Oops. Somebody futzed the fact check. It had to be me.

Robert Mitchum sued. Errol Flynn sued. Dorothy Dandridge sued. We miscegenation-mauled her on no evidence. The trial opened on 8/7/57. Prosecutor Linn called Bondage Bob “Mr. Big.” He said Mr. Big had prosties lure celebs into compromising contexts. No shit. He said we paid known homosexuals to rat out those of their ilk. No shit. He said we employed strongarm methods routinely. No shit. Art Crowley preached the letter of the libel laws and freewheeling freedom of speech. It bopped back and forth. The courtroom socked in summer heat. Maureen O’Hara testified. She said she never made out with that Mex. The trial traipsed and trucked along until late September. The jury was deep-six deadlocked. They stood at seven to five for conviction on two counts. The judge closed the cluster fuck off and declared a mistrial.

Doofus Double Agent Freddy. He’s the dippy deus ex machina of the whole mess. His secret depositions shaped the prosecutor’s trial brief. He gave up his guilt. It cost him big gelt. It freed him to dream and scheme anew.

Confidential survived. It cooled down its content. It now publishes pap for a reduced readership. Our circulation circled downward. Bondage Bob pledged to publish “only wholesome stories.” He went on a cost-cutting binge. Listening posts were abandoned. I’m on my way out. My goon squad squared up tall and went back in the Marine Corps. I’m a full-time private eye now. I work divorce gigs out of the wheelman lot and snitch to Bill Parker. A snitch fund pays me five yards per month. I make out okay. Robbie Molette and Nasty Nat Denkins work the wheelman lot with me. I’m their faux daddy who used to be hot shit.

I’m alone most nights. I talk to women who aren’t in the room with me. I think about Janey Blaine and Shirley Tutler. Rumination to revelation. A click clicked in my broiled-to-burnout brain, much belatedly.

January ’48. Shirley Tutler is abducted and assaulted. Near Mulholland and Beverly Glen. May ’55. Janey Blaine is raped and murdered. Near Mulholland and Beverly Glen.

Rumination to revelation. I now see replication at work here. Movie madness. The Rebel shoot. Craaaazy crisscrosses at play. Robbie Molette and Janey. Robbie and the Rebel crew.

The Rebel remnants remain in L.A. Nick Ray’s prepping a preachy lox at Fox. Nick Adams shows up on TV. The Nick’s Knights Kar Klub is surely making mischief. It poses a What-Will-You-Do-About-It? dilemma.

I’m bored. I’m underemployed. I may be ramping up to do something bold, brave, and stupid.

The useless eulogy. The dippy de-brief. The rip-snorting ride is over, Sahib.

We took chairs. Bondage Bob poured mid-morning martinis. He wore a pink-puce toga. Note the lash marks on his legs.

“It’s the end of an era, Freddy. And you’re savvy enough to know why I’ve called you in.”

I lit a cigarette. “You’re ‘Mr. Wholesome’ now. I’m redundant. You’ve got no need for a strongarm corps, so you’re cutting me loose.”

Bob sipped bum Beefeaters. The suite was bargain basement. The booze was bottom shelf. His toga resembled a reclaimed Klan sheet.

“That’s the long and short of it, son. There’s a few clean-up jobs you can take care of — but that’s it, over and out.”

I went nix. “You’ve got qualms about the trial. The prosecutors came in, armed to the teeth. Somebody fed them a shitload of inside dirt. It was either me, or one of my guys. You’re getting up the juice to ask me. You’re sitting there in your toga, and you look like Julius Caesar at a drag ball. You’re getting ready to lay some sort of ‘et tu, Freddy’ number on me.”

Bob went te salud. I went so ask. Bob scratched the whip scars on his ankles.

“I see Bill Parker behind the whole magillah. He ran the show and fed the dope to the AG’s boys. He recruited informants, took depositions, the whole schmear.”

I said, “Ask me, Bob. Accuse me and ask me, and I’ll say yes or no.”

Bob shook his head. “This is not the Freddy Otash of yore I’m seeing here today. This is some new kamikaze version, that I find disconcerting.”

I drained my drink. “You’re asking me to feed you cues. Okay, here’s the first one. The shit I pulled for you and the magazine was wrong. You take it from there.”

Bob made the jackoff sign. “You’re jerking my chain, son. You don’t get to take my money for as long as you did, and make me the bad guy.”

I said, “I’m the bad guy. I knew it when I put the hurt on Johnnie Ray.”

Bob shrugged. “I’m not going to ask you, and you’re not going to volunteer. I’ll tell you what gets me, though.”

I went so?

“Here’s what gets me, son. Whoever it was was some sort of insider, and that fucker sided with that pious son-of-a-bitch Parker, against me.”

I stood up. “Here’s a cue, dad. I’d rather be him than be you.”

The wheelman lot. Legions of the lost light and live here. We scrounge for scraps. We dive for divorce dough. I’m El Daddy-O by default and decree. I’m a licensed PI. I’m a DA’s Bureau special deputy. My ex-Confidential status still stamps me a stud. Bondage Bob fired me. I’ve still got my Ranch Market gig. Bob’s got me doing clean-up jobs on a per diem basis. I’m closing out listening posts, tomorrow. Taps, bugs — they’ve got to go. Bob’s divesting and dumping his properties. His profits have dipped looooooow.

He’s Mr. Wholesome now. He told the judge and prosecutors that. Call him Messrs. Bland and Blasé.

I slid low in my sled. I yawned and yodeled Old Crow. I popped two biphetamine and lashed the late-morning blahs. I shared my shit with Robbie Molette. He’s my new sidekick, thus my new Jimmy D. Nasty Nat Denkins dozed in the backseat. He crossed the wheelman color line. He’s now Mr. Darktown Divorce. He’s still got his gig at KKXZ. Confidential still subsidizes the station.

Robbie said, “What’s the deal today?”

I lit a cigarette. “France’s Parisian Room, over on Washington and La Brea. The mark’s an ofay stiff. The girl’s colored. She hops cars at the Parisian and peddles it part-time. The mark’s terrified of exposure. He’s a preacher at a drive-in church in Van Nuys. The wife wants a divorce. Nat’s playing a kitchen cook and bringing lunch over. The pad’s right behind the Parisian. We’ll take down the door and take the pictures. The girl’s in on it. There’s three of us and one of him. We’ll kick his ass and take him to Wilshire Station. The wife and her lawyer want criminal charges filed.”

Robbie yaaawned. He cricked and uncricked his neck. He slept on the lot. He slept in his ’49 Ford. He left his mom and dad’s house. He’s now Mr. Apostasy. He quit boning his kid sister and peddling her beaver pix. The Janey Blaine job tested and torqued him. He cleaned house and wound up here.

I said, “I’ve been teething on Janey. Who she knew, who she tricked with, who she might have met in Beverly Hills that nite.”

Robbie picked his nose. “We’ve been through all that. I’ve been through it with you and the Hats, and Max and Red braced my dad at Metro and polygraphed him. He came up kosher, and you and the Hats made Fat Boy for the snuff. I don’t want to keep on plowing up this old dirt.”

Nasty Nat stirred. “Fat Boy was framed. He’s Emmet Till and the Scottsboro Boys, reborn. I’m referencing him on my ‘Cutie’ tonight.”

I said, “Tell me why.”

“Those Chicom space suits the PD bought spontaneously combusted, in this Police Academy storeroom. Whoosh, they go up in flames. They were defective from the jump. No bad deed goes unpunished.”

Robbie said, “I never thought Fat Boy did it. He always worked with a partner, and he robbed the women first.”

I laffed. The pay phone rang. Nat reached out his window and wrapped the receiver.

He said, “Yeah, we’re here.” He listened. He hung up.

“It’s on. The girl says she’s afraid of the mark. He’s gone kinky on her.”

Shitwork. Divestment duty. I’m a wage slave. Lift that barge, tote that bale.

There’s six posts. Pack the furniture/box the bug-and-tap mounts. Take last listens. List damning dish Bill Parker would drool for. Look through bug-and-tap logs. Bootjack hot bug-and-tap tapes for Big Bill.

I started here. The Argyle post ran a loooooong-range transceiver. We bugged and tapped mid-Hollywood and the hip Hollywood Hills. Our bug-and-tap targets totaled twenty-four houses and apartments.

Film folk. Sullen subversives. Furtive fuck pads and nifty nests of stewardess call girls. Fly me — I’m Pam, Lizzie, Sally, Nancy, Kathy et al.

I scanned the logs. The indices listed bug-and-tap targets and their addresses. Tap callers were listed. Their call dates and times were marked. Two names nabbed me, straight off.

Ingrid Ellmore. Pan Am stew and poon panderess supreme. Ingrid invented the all-nite pajama party. She owned a six-bedroom A-frame on Bronson Hill. You got six girls/180-proof absinthe/all the poppable pills in the PDR. Ingrid had a heated pool. Ingrid had sauna and steam rooms. Two yards bought you the Debauch of the Damned. Ingrid rocked round the clock.

Ingrid’s call-in list. Note some names. AG Pat Brown, Mayor Norris Poulson. Baseball boss Leo Durocher. Sheriff Gene Biscailuz. TV titan Sid Caesar. Bumptious Buddy Hackett and lounge lizard Louis Prima.

I boosted three bug-and-tap boxes. I’d listen in and cherry-pick some choice shit for the Chief. This was a listen-at-your-leisure deal. The second name shrieked Listen Now!!!

Dalton Trumbo. Commie Caporegime. Bugged and tapped at his worker’s wigwam off Whitley Drive. Hollywood Ten hard-on. Gallivanting gadfly. Dig this name on his call-in list:

The Caryl Chessman Defense Committee. Dig Bernie Spindel’s margin notes:

“CP-financed. Popular front-group remnant. Evolved from the Free the Rosenbergs Committee. Frequent celebrity call-ups to target’s home phone. Names noted on specific call sheets.”

I culled the call sheets. They coughed up baaaaaad Burt Lancaster and cheesy Chuck Heston. There’s Calypso King Preston Epps. He’s hard on the heels of his hit “Bongo in the Congo.” There’s Liz Taylor. There’s Hugh Hefner. There’s Mr. Mumbles himself — Marlon Brando.

Marlon mauled my main mujer, Joi Lansing, at a party. It was fall ’53. I’ve ground that grudge for four years now.

I went straight for the call-in tapes. I was hopped up on hate now. I’d rereprised my role of the cornholed cornuto. I got a hot hit off the call-tap list: Marlon Brando at the Caryl Chessman Defense Committee.

I found the tape and wrapped it into a tape rig. Dig the date: 10/9/57. That’s just last week.

I got cozy. I lit a cigarette and sucked my flask. I punched play. Red rake Trumbo schmoozed Mumbles Brando.

Static cut through the call. I amputated the amenities and sundered some chitchat. Voices vibrated two minutes in.

Brando: “...and they’ve got that burglar-killer guy, slated to burn on the eleventh. What’s his name, again?”

Trumbo: “Donald Keith Bashor. The Party was thinking of sending some pickets up, but this guy was just too vicious. He killed two women, and messed around with the good-looking one, postmortem. We want him to burn, because it explicates the callous nature of fascist injustice. In fact, we want everyone to burn, including Caryl. The more the merrier. They’re martyrs to the cause. We can really play that angle up in the press.”

Brando: “You’re right about that. And, you know, there’s these rumors floating around that Caryl will be coming down soon for a hearing. I’m laying some groundwork on that. Can the Party bounce for two hundred protestors, at ten clams a pop? That’s two grand, all in all. I’m leading a protest outside the Hall of Justice, downtown. Me, Preston Epps, maybe Liz Taylor. That’s on the seventeenth, and I’m not floating this gig out of my pocket.”

Trumbo: “I’ll get you the bread, don’t worry. That’s what front groups do — they front their comrades money.”

Brando: “Rumors... yeah, I dig that concept. Hey, have you heard the one about the third victim? That Caryl bit her nipples off, and she’s been in the funny farm ever since? That she couldn’t testify at Caryl’s trial, because she was far-gone catatonic?”

Trumbo: “The fascist lie machine dreamed that one up. Of course, they made her a real baby doll, with tits out to here. Too bad she didn’t really exist.”

The call staticked up and stuttered out. Mumbles mumbled. Dial tones ditzed and dimmed Trumbo out.

I went back to work. Caryl Chessman click-clicked in my head. It felt like a fever. It’s mutating and metastasizing. It’ll maim me unless I do something soon.

I boxed up the Ingrid and Trumbo tapes. I called Confidential’s messenger service and told them to roll up here now. I added notes to Bill Parker:

“The Ellmore woman’s a mother lode for Headquarters Vice. Duplicate and forward the Trumbo tapes to your Intel Division, plus State and Fed HUAC. More to come/F.O.”

That fever. Festering, mutating, metastasizing. I could feel it. I could feel him — this malignant microbe inside me.

I called my answering service. I had one message:

Mr. Nat Denkins called. He said Miss Blind Item called him and will call the show tonight.

Oooga-boooga. There’s the protest. That’s two hundred college kids. Note the Party putzes passing out ten-spots. They’re buying a Commie cacophony. The kids are chugging out chants: “Chess-Man is Inn-O-Cent!!! Stop the Death Machine!!!”

There’s Brando. He’s in with the kids. He’s signing autographs and popping a placard high in the sky. He’s the solo celebrity. He’s top-lining this gig. He’s wrapped in a fulsome phalanx of fans. He’s a hog for their loooooooove.

The Spring Street sidewalk shook with their shouts. I curb-crawled and slid my sled inch-by-inch slow. I looked for Lois. I saw her not. I circled Spring to Temple and drove around the block. I saw counterpickets congregate. Their signs said Burn Chessman Now!!! They were weary working stiffs. The college kids packed more panache.

I full-circled the shit show and shot back to Spring. I saw a solo college boy by the bus stop. He looked bored.

Heh, heh. I had the antidote for that.

I pulled up. He saw me. I waved him up to the car. He ambled on over. Man — this kid’s entrenched in ennui.

I said, “Hey, junior. How’d you like to make a C-note for a half hour’s work?”

He said, “Doing what?”

I held up a stack of my Marlon Brando fotos. They’re a cool cultural touchstone and define our time and place. It’s Mr. Mumbles, gobbling schvantz.

Junior perused the pix. Junior’s jaw jerked and dropped to his drawers. He filched the fotos. I laid out the loot.

He said, “Gee, thanks.”

I said, “Distribute these to your pals. What’s a protest without some smut? Maybe he’ll autograph them.”

“Escalation.”

“Final filmic thrust.”

“Can you spell the word rape?”

All synced to Janey Blaine’s date of death.

I popped into the post. Bernie’s boys misfiled some May ’55 transcripts. They were master-filed here. I felt moon-mad in broad daylight. Lois was back. I was raking in righteous results.

I’d messengered a missive to Bill Parker. It included photostats of four Caryl Chessman to Jimmy Dean letters. Ernie’s out, Chief. Bill McKesson’s in. Remember that favor I asked? Twenty minutes with the Fiend?

Parker called McKesson and messengered me back. We got ten minutes with the Fiend.

I blew out of my pad then. I hopped to Hollywood and blitzkrieged Hollywood Station. I blew into the records room and cruised crime-scene pix. I found Shirley Tutler and Janey Blaine. ’48 meets ’55. Mulholland meets Beverly Glen. The abduction spot for Shirley. The probable dump spot for Janey. Five fotos total. They were point-by-point duplicates.

Here’s what’s hair-raising. The ’55 foliage had been trimmed back to ’48 dimensions. I did not imagine this. I saw tree and leaf clippings on the ground.

Escalation meets replication.

I locked myself up in the listening post. I pulled the July ’55 book and skimmed for misfiles. I found the Nick Ray/Chateau Marmont work order. The room-bug transcripts preceded the fone taps. The room bugs revealed jack shit.

Neuter Nick blathers and bloviates. Jimmy D. and Nick A. blather back. Nick pokes Nifty Natalie and Sassy Sal on the couch. Bernie’s notes note “low and high-pitched grunts and sounds of sexual frenzy.” Fourteen pages of garbled-voice overlap follow that.

I hit the phone-tap transcripts. The section ran sixty-two pages. A separate column listed callers. It got boring, fast.

Nick Ray calls Googie’s forty-three times. Cal the counter man picks up. Nick calls Jimmy/Nick A./Natalie and Sal. They discuss movie motivation. Nick promotes underage woof-woof.

Nick calls his agent. Nick calls twenty-nine unknown men and women. Forty-one unknown men and women call Nick. Bad-boring to languorous and long-winded. No ripe revelation. No talk worth jack shit.

I hit twenty-six pages of fone static. Bernie marked it as such. I hit a noodle-nudging non sequitur: Nick calls NO-65832 nineteen times.

It’s a pay phone in Silver Lake. It’s by the Black Cat Bar at Sunset and Vendome. Bernie lists it as a “known bookie drop.”

Nick and Unknown Man #21 talk. It’s 99.9 percent voice voids and static crunch. Yeah — but there’s nuggets in with the dross.

Nick, 5/11/55. Bookie Call #8: “Setups,” “lights,” “the girl.” Interlaced static throughout. Eleven minutes of line static follow.

Unknown Man #21, 5/13/55. Bookie Call #9: “Props,” “the ’46 Ford,” “some sort of real-life location.” Interlaced static throughout. Sixteen minutes of line static follow.

Nick, 5/14/55. Bookie Call #16: “Of course, Jimmy wants to play the Bandit.” Interlaced static throughout. Four minutes of line static follow.

Three more pay-phone calls follow. There’s no transcribed talk. So what? Calls 8, 9, and 16 dumped the dirt.

The calls precede the Janey Blaine snuff. It’s movie talk. “Props,” “lights,” “setups.” Janey’s “the girl.” Caryl Chessman drove a “ ’46 Ford” on his rape jobs. Mulholland and Beverly Glen is the “real-life location.” Jimmy wants to play the (Red Light) Bandit? If the shitbird weren’t dead, he could do just that.

Picket punks. Slogan slammers. College kids and movie morons moved to outrage. Their main martyr’s up in the DB. He’s hard-wired to a hot seat. We’re heading that way.

“Chessman Is Inn-O-Cent!!!” “Stop The Death Machine!!!”

I ran interference. Lois lugged a prop steno machine. Picket punks posed and paraded. They were packed tight and pissed off. They bristled with bromides and placard-plumed the air.

I stiff-armed us through them. We maneuvered by Marlon Brando. Lois said, “Hi, Marlon!” Brando said, “Lois, what are you doing with that putz?” I flipped his necktie in his face.

There’s the steps. We tumbled over, up, and inside. Max Herman and Red Stromwall played escort. They doffed their Hat Squad fedoras. Max ogled Lois. Red went Woo-woo!!!

We made the freight lift and the DB. We walked to sweatbox row. The Fiend’s in #2. I looked at Lois. She looked at me. I winked. We held the Holy Shit moment close and linked hands. I pushed the door in.

There he is.

Beelzebub. 666. The Biblical Beast. The red-horned/trident-tailed/cloven-hoofed apparition. He emits dust and sparks. Serpents coil through his hair. He’s assumed human form today. He’s thirty-six and pale. He’s got that bumpy nose. He’s skinny, he’s prissy, he wears jail denims. He vibes World’s Smartest Convict.

He sat cross-legged. I pulled a chair up. Lois perched her steno machine on the table. I brought my briefcase.

Chessman said, “You were at Hollywood Station. I recall you at the squadroom there.”

The Beast speaks. He’s a brazen braggart. I know that about him. He’s brought his so-soft voice today. He’s surgically circumspect and silky self-effacing. He’s the watchful world’s Victim of This Time and Place. He’s Sacco and Vanzetti, and Timothy Evans, framed for Reg Christie’s grief.

I said, “Yes, I was there. I saw Colin Forbes and Al Goossen interview you, and I was there when Shirley Tutler came in.”

Chessman said, “Who’s Shirley Tutler?”

“She’s the woman you assaulted between your assaults on Regina Johnson and Mary Alice Meza. I state that knowing full well that you’ve denied those crimes, and will certainly deny assaulting Miss Tutler.”

I let the moment meander and metamorphose. He’ll deny it. He’ll say there’s no proof. Lois futzed with her machine. Dear Lord, her eyes. Such righteous hate.

“I don’t have to talk to you. The court will invalidate the stenographer’s transcription, and I surely will not confess to yet another crime I did not commit.”

I popped my briefcase. I pulled out the forty-three-page depiction of Shirley Tutler’s bite wounds. I put the pages before the Beast’s eyes.

He looked down. He saw, he recognized, he willed himself nonreactive. His hands palsied, his neck veins pulsed.

“It’s not my handwriting. And even if it was, I’ve attributed those crimes to someone else.”

I lit a cigarette. “You only looked at the top page. You don’t know it’s crimes plural you’ve described here. I didn’t mention the attribution, and the only way you could have known that was if you’d written this document yourself.”

Chessman pushed the pages back to me. He’s Camus’ l’étranger. He’s beset by bourgeois burghers who just don’t understand. He’s implacably withstood their stupidity and indifference. He’s read Gandhi and Sartre. He knows how to trenchantly transcend.

He said, “No.” That one word. Existentialism 101. To refuse is your right of redress.

I passed him a pen. “You will write the following on that top page. ‘These are my crimes, as told to the late actor James Dean, and attributed to an unnamed rapist. Thus, they are my crimes, and these documents in the aggregate stand as my confession.’ ”

Chessman said, “No.” The Beast’s beset by Bourgeois Burgher Freddy. It’s his lot in life. Who’s that red-haired wraith? She’s rape bait, for sure.

Chessman said, “No.” I backhanded him and banged him to the floor. He went sullen silent and nonreactive. Bourgeois Burgher Freddy kicked him in the balls.

“You have two choices here, Caryl. Sign the confession or get kicked to death. The latter option leaves you no option. The former option permits you to survive, cultivate yet more public acclaim, and further dissemble in court.”

Chessman shape-shifted. He went maladroit Mahatma, coming off the railroad tracks. He couldn’t call up a costume change. He couldn’t shave his head and don his granny specs.

He stood up. He winced from my nut shot. He wrote out my confession text and signed his name below.

Lois said, “Jimmy Dean wanted to play you. That must have appealed to your vanity.”

Chessman said, “Hi, Red. I knew you’d have a kicky voice.”

I locked his confession in my briefcase. Chessman kicked back in his chair.

“I’m beyond vanity, Red. I’ve seen too much and had too much done to me. You’re a woman, so I’m sure you’ll understand.”

I said, “Too bad Jimmy crapped out. I would’ve dug on the movie.”

Chessman said, “There’s always Nick Ray’s alternative movie, not that it will ever surface. I was the technical adviser on it, so I’m sure it’s got some verisimilitude.”

Lois said, “Things went awry there, didn’t they? It seems that always happens with you.”

Chessman shrugged and grinned. Ring-a-ding. The Mahatma meets the Rat Pack.

“The game’s rigged, Red. That’s why I always take what I want, and take it where I can find it. And I always find it, because I’m not choosy. Johnson, Meza, and Tutler surely attest to that.”

That’s it, then. It took eight minutes and sixteen seconds.

I hustled Lois out to the hallway. The wall speaker spritzed and sparked static. Bill Parker and the Hats hooted, howled, and clapped.

I sat and tamped up some tension. I conjured Lois and moved money to new mountains on the moon. Nick notched his final take an hour back. His office slaves slid out early. I booby-trapped the doorway. I kept the lights off. I brought Exhibits A and B in my briefcase.

My pix of Jandine’s pix. My pix of his diary pages per Red Light Bandit. He kept his diary cached under his couch-bed. He kept his Junior High Hall of Fame pix close by.

Jandine recounted his revelatory fix on Janey Blaine. He met her at Robbie Molette’s place. Chrissy introduced them and called her a friend of her dad’s. Janey got him unit fotog work on The Last Days of the Black Dahlia and the Fatty Arbuckle flick.

His obsession per-per-percolated. He 459’d Janey’s pad and stole her diaries. He read them and got to the hard-hearted heart of her yen for men and money. He tried to seduce her with his own blackmail scheme. He enlisted Nick Adams. They Mickey Finn’d Rock Hudson and took nudie pix. He 459’d Robbie’s room and stole his list of powerfully perved clients. Janey laffed his blackmail scheme off. He fotographed Janey and Jack K. at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He had the unit fotog gig on Rebel, already. He ran up a rapport with Nick Ray and Jimmy Dean. They concocted Red Light Bandit. The shoot went swell. Janey jumped Jimmy’s bones for real, right out in the open. It made him mad. He said he’d drive her home after the wrap. It got out of hand. He didn’t mean to rape her and kill her. Shit like that happens. Thank goodness nobody blabbed.

The door opened. Nabob Nick hummed “Lisbon Antigua” and walked this way. My trip wire tripped him and proned him out flat on his face. His head hit the floor. He snagged his snout. He’s Nosebleed Nick now.

He groaned. I got up and stepped on his neck. It pinned him and muzzled his mouth. I penlight-flashed the pix and the diary pages. I ran them by his flattened face sidelong and slooooow. I gave him time to digest his dilemma and ponder Jandine’s every word.

“You’re going to pay me twenty-five percent of your net earnings, for the rest of your life. That means twenty-five percent of every dime you make. You’re going to cut me in for twenty-five percent of all your current bank balances, and you’re going to liquidate any stocks and bonds you might possess and pay me twenty-five percent of their value, now. You’re going to pay me twenty-five percent of the assessed values of any properties you might own, now. You will pay me my salary cuts on the first of each month, beginning on November 1, 1957. I called your bank in Beverly Hills this afternoon. I impersonated a Federal bank examiner and learned that your current balance is forty-four grand. We’re going to the bank together, tomorrow. I’ll take the first eleven grand in cash.”

Nick Ray squirmed and squinted back tears. Freon Freddy Otash. The Giant Ant ascends.

Jolting jam session. Walloping world premiere. Live in-studio: the Synagogue Sid Trio.

The piece:

“Trippy Triptych: Dirge for Shirley Tutler and Janey Blaine & Caryl Chessman’s Gas Chamber Chaconne.”

It’s hastily composed. As in right now. Sid and his boys embody improvisation. There’s four kool kats here for the bash. As in Lois, Robbie Molette, Nasty Nat, and yours truly.

We’re celebrating. I bought KKXZ outright and dumped the deed on Nat. Nick Ray paid the freight. I pocketed two g’s in chump change and paid Lois’ air-fare back to the Apple. She’s got an Armstrong Circle Theatre gig pending.

I’m bleak, blue, and shorn to shit. We defanged the Beast. We radically revised the sexy secret history of our nation. Lissome Lois leaves me for ten minutes on TV.

Sid and his boys cranked it. Bass sax/flügelhorn/drums. It only goes so far.

I got itchy and Giant Ant antsy. I kept thinking of fatal fuckups and the loony lore of decomposition. I walked to the waiting room and ran some deep breaths.

It helped. I de-antsified. I scoped the Charlie Parker tribute wall. I noticed a new screed scrawled below the Live on 52nd Street album.

“Pack up all your cares and woes / Here you go, swingin’ low / Bye, bye, blackbird.”

It was signed, “Much love, Lois N.”

It came and went. Confidential, the whole Rebel rigamarole. I waltzed on the Arvo Jandine snuff. Decomposition devastated all possible inquiries. Stagnant stomach gasses gasped out of the stiff and ignited. The studio blew up. Nobody made it a murder.

I burned all of the listening-post tapes and tape logs. Confidential and I went kaput. The mag moseys along without me. Bondage Bob’s been raked by residual lawsuits. Savaged celebs now savage him. He’s putting out ten and fifteen g’s per pop. Nuisance suits are draining him dry. The mag’s corrosive content has wizened to wispy white bread. There’s no vindictive va-va-voom and scandal skank. There’s no strongarm goons to dash dissent and fight that fierce First Amendment fight.

I’m shit out of luck there. I’m Ex-Officio Freddy. I’m a former PI and a dervish of divorce at the wheelman lot. I shook the shakedown tree and bled Nosebleed Nick Ray for a spell. Sustained extortion withered my wig. I blew my take on booze, dope, and women. I sold myself into sin and saw a certain sickness eat me alive. I divested to climb clear of the serpent sucking at my soul. I told Nosebleed Nick this. He genuflected and wept.

Opportunity is love. I’ve always known it. I doped a racehorse named Wonder Boy and tried to rig a run of races. I got popped for it. The L.A. DA issued indictments. Bill Parker interceded and rerouted my Quentin trek. I lost my PI’s license. I’m still Big Bill’s back-door bitch and informant. I’m still a rat, a fink, a snarky snitch. I’ve gone from tattle tyrant to tattletale. It’s the work I’m best suited for.

I’m still the Pervdog of the Nite. I still trawl for trouble and peep potent windows in my path. I’ve cruised and crashed a load of lives on said path to date. I’m lonely in my loss of them. I peep them from afar and peruse the paths they’ve chosen.

Jack the K. was resoundingly reelected to the Senate. ’58 boded big for him. Pat Brown was elected governor of California. The Confidential trial trounced the notion that Pat was a putz. Rock and Phyllis are Splitsville. I negotiated the divorce. Nick Ray remains the awful auteur. He makes miasmic movies that slide folks to sleep. The Rebel rigamarole marked his slide into evil. Confluence is destiny. He had help there.

Jimmy D.’s dead. I killed Arvo Jandine. Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo are movie stars. Nick Adams has his own TV show. Chester Voldrich lost the hand I mangled to gangrene. I slide him five yards a month, anonymous.

I see them all as the specious spawn of Caryl Whittier Chessman. The cancerous conjunction of vicious thug/victim/hard-hearted hipster left them too weak to resist. Escalation. The Sorority Panty Raid, the Liquor Store Inferno, the film Red Light Bandit. Spring ’55 et al. Chessman hovers in ellipsis. I cannot and will not forfeit the thought of him. He’s insistently intertwined with Lois Nettleton. They collectively colluded and marked my one shot to become someone else.

Chessman continues. He files appeals and writes books and claims the ownership of a fatuous phalanx of folks given to dime-store notions of redemption. He’ll fry sooner or later. I trust that legal consensus. Here’s what my most heated hatred and powerful perceptions tell me.

He’s struck Lois with a strain of his virus. It lives within that part of her where the hard-hearted careerist and ardent artist coexist. Lois worships a tricky trinity. It’s Art/Chessman/Shirley Tutler’s Desecration. She found me because she needed me and sensed my susceptibility and rage for romance. She’s discarded me twice now. She sees me as a Chessman casualty, as I see her. She knows that I’m love-struck in a way that careerist-artists are not. I torch for her as she does not torch for me. She’s unfit to live a squarejohn life. So am I. I’d try it with her. She won’t try it with me. I must change my life. She will not abet this design. She considers the design pathetic and inimical to her Drama of the Artist Alone. I’ve got one last shot at Lois Nettleton’s love. I consider it a curtain call. We must stand together the day Chessman burns.

There it is. This stark steel contraption. It’s ghastly ghost green and riven with rivets and big bolts. It faces the spectator seats. It fits one condemned convict. The door’s plied with a Plexiglas window staring straight at us. The hot seat features cinchable restraints. A vat socked with sulfuric acid sits beneath it. The cyanide pellets scoot through a chute and dissolve there. Thus begins the big adios.

I sat with Lois. Bill Parker booked our seats. Colin Forbes sat two seats down. Chessman drew a full house. Sixty seats. Sixty newsmen, politicos, and those with clear-cut clout.

We parked in a lower lot and pried through protesters to get here. A thousand people jostled, jeered, shoved, and shrieked. Marlon Brando mugged into a megaphone. He told the folks he was set to play Chessman in a forthcoming flick.

It’s 10:01 a.m. There’s the Beast. He’s entered through a side hallway. Two guards hold his arms. A third guard pops the door. They strap Chessman hard in the hot seat. He’s strapped legs, lap, and chest.

A doctor appears. He hangs a stethoscope around Chessman’s neck. The death dudes pop back out. Chessman’s alone in the green room. It’s 10:02 a.m.

The Warden spoke. Wall speakers sent sound our way.

“Do you have any last words?”

Chessman said, “I am not the Red Light Bandit.”

A green-room mike cranked out his credo. I winked at Colin Forbes. Colin went Freddy, you dog. Lois caught it and swatted my leg.

The pellets dropped. It was soundless. I saw Chessman feign nonchalance. Cyanide fumes filled the chamber. They were invisible. Chessman buckled and gasped and dripped drool.

His head lolled and sat sideways. His mouth stretched wide-wide. His lips curled over his teeth. His tongue torqued. His arms trembled and palsied palms-up. He looked sure-as-shit deadsville to me.

Time slipped slow and stood still. The fumes dissipated and died. The doctor reentered the green room. He held a handkerchief to his face. He donned his stethoscope and put it to Chessman’s chest. He said, “I pronounce this man dead.”