THE DEADLY DOOWOP 296
The Deadly Doowop
A novel
Charles Deemer
Copyright 2011 by Charles Deemer
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Contact Charles Deemer at: cdeemer at yahoo dot com.
Copyright 1988 as unpublished manuscript.
First published by greatunpublished.com
Title No. 842
2003
ISBN 1-58898-842-2
For Harriet
And also for Jivin’ Johnny Etheredge
For “Saturday Gold, Rock-n-Roll”
In all its incarnations over many years
A true believer
1
Tues, 8 June 54: Lionel's great line in the Army, "Fashion is the first refuge of a scoundrel." Get this in a play!
I found the address on a shady, pine-lined lane in the foothills north of Pasadena. It was one of those new uppercrust neighborhoods I'd never heard of, called - surprise of surprises - Foothills. All the homes were lean and long, on huge, shady lots.
I was about half an hour late, having under-estimated the time it would take to negotiate all the new freeway construction going on between the office in Venice and the suburban glitz of east Los Angeles County. The trip had been one detour after another, criss-crossing back and forth over the deep gullies that were the transportation arteries of the future. It was hard to see the future in all the dust and racket of construction.
I pulled Bad-Ass the Buick into the driveway, turned the key and waited until the engine sputtered still. Adjusting the rearview mirror, I buttoned my shirt collar and pulled up my tie. Then I got out.
On a lesser scale, digging in the earth was going on here, too, right next door. A gray-haired man in a red baseball cap was chest-deep in a hole alongside his house. Bad-Ass had attracted his attention, so I acknowledged his stare with a wave and he nodded before going back to his shovel. I guessed he was digging himself a fallout shelter. Freeways and fallout shelters were all the rage, both granted the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
I walked up the brick walk to the front porch and rang the doorbell. A young Negro woman answered, and I probably did a double-take, forgetting for a moment where I was. But her presence made sense: in the lily-white glitz of Foothills, having a Negro housekeeper would be as prestigious as having a fallout shelter.
When I told her who I was, she invited me in and led me to the den, not the living room.
"Mrs. Davies will be here directly, Mr. Trevorak," she said.
She was tan and pretty but somehow looked out of place in her starched white uniform. I got the idea she didn't like her job.
The den didn't look lived in, which made me wonder what the living room was like. I'm a big man, almost three hundred pounds, and all the chairs in the room looked too expensive and frail to sit on. For a moment I stood in the middle of the room, admiring the view out the large bay windows. It looked like a golf course back there. Finally I sat down on the divan and picked up a magazine off the adjacent coffee table. There was a framed photograph there, too, and I wondered if the tired-looking guy at the barbecue was her husband.
I was lingering over an underwear ad when a woman entered the room. As I closed the magazine and made a move to rise, she said, "Keep your seat."
I relaxed and heard the cushion under me groan.
"You're late," she said.
"I forgot about all the construction going on."
She just looked at me, as if I'd said something in a foreign language. Then she stepped to the divan with her hand out, saying, "I'm Joan Davies. You're not the one I talked to on the phone."
I shook her hand and tried to rise a gentlemanly distance up off the cushion, which was no easy task at my weight.
"Red Trevorak. You talked to my dad. We're a family agency."
"I see. And he sent you."
Though it was late in the morning, she was dressed for cocktails and dinner, in a black dress that looked expensive. She was a pretty woman, slender, tall, with jet black hair to match the dress. I put her at not quite thirty. She didn't seem thrilled that Dad had sent me and, to tell the truth, I wasn't so thrilled to be there either.
"I suppose you'll do fine," she said. "I want you to hear something."
She went to a radio console in the room and turned it on. She stayed there, looking out of place without a martini in her hand, staring down at the radio.
Then the radio came to life and said, Yes, indeedy! It's Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man, approaching the hour of high noon. Oo-ee, and we been having fun this morning! I love you cats out there, you know I do! And we'll be right back with more of the best in rhythm-n-blues, on radio KRB, your station for top Negro entertainment - after this message.
A commercial jingle started, One little, two little, three little sparkplugs; four little, five little, six little spark-plugs; seven little, eight little, worn-out sparkplugs...
Joan Davies said, "I want you to listen carefully and answer some questions about the disc jockey."
Who was soon back on the air: Oo-ee, baby! We got a great one for you now, going all the way back to 1948. Last year they had Crying in the Chapel but this was their first big one, and it's one sweet side. Lovin' Dan playing for you: It's Too Soon To Know!
The song started and Mrs. Davies turned off the radio.
"Well?," she said. "What can you tell me about the disc jockey?"
I had no idea what she was getting at. I said, "It sounds like he loves his job."
"What race is he?"
Though the question came from left field, I threw back a quick answer. "Negro, I assume."
"Exactly," she said.
She moved back across the room and sat in one of the frail wooden chairs across from the divan. She was so thin the chair didn't even squeak under her.
"That was my husband on the radio," she said, "and he's white. Or at least, I assume he is."
She paused, letting this sink in, but I was still looking for her drift. Then she came from left field again.
"Did you read the paper a few weeks ago, about the little scandal we had here in Foothills?"
I tried to remember a story about Foothills and couldn't. Lately the papers were dominated by what reporters called the Rat Murders, a bizarre series of killings with a weird m.o.: the murderer left a dead rat with each of his victims, as well as a short chapter in an on-going treatise he called "The History of Rats."
"I don't recall," I said. "I was up in the Bay area for a few days, maybe I missed it."
"Flo Albertson, who lives in the neighborhood, not far from here, as a matter of fact - I used to play bridge with her regularly - anyway, she gave birth to a son recently. The baby is a Negro."
Again she paused for effect before going on.
"Flo is white, or so we thought. So her husband thought. As it turns out, she's a Negro who was passing for white. Hence, her dark baby. You can imagine how upsetting this is to everyone, not to mention her husband."
I thought I was beginning to see her drift but it was too bizarre to take a wild guess about. Better she told me herself.
"What are you trying to tell me, Mrs. Davies?"
"Dan, my husband, hasn't been himself lately. Ever since Flo was discovered. And I'll never understand why he took the job at that horrible station, he used to work in Pasadena, playing Montavani and wonderful music. He says he actually enjoys Negro music. I just need to be sure."
My hunch was right but I still wanted her to say it herself.
"Sure about what?"
"Well, you heard yourself that he sounds just like a Negro on the air. Under the circumstances... well, I was one of Flo's best friends, I thought I was, and never for a minute suspected she was a Negro."
I just looked at her.
"I want a family myself some day," she said. "Your father said you can do background checks."
"We do that," I said.
"Well, then?"
"I'm still not sure what you want," I lied.
"I want to know if my husband has Negro ancestry."
It pained her to say it, and suddenly I felt sorry for making her. She stood up and said, "Your father quoted me a fee over the phone. I'll get it."
She fetched an envelope from a shelf filled with knick- knacks. I managed to struggle to my feet by the time she got back with it.
"How long will this take?," she asked, handing me the envelope.
"Depends. It would help if I knew the name of his parents, grandparents, as far back as you can go."
"I thought you'd want that. I wrote down everything I know - it's all in the envelope."
"Shouldn't be a problem then."
"Call me as soon as you find out anything."
We turned to leave the den and found the house-keeper standing in the doorway. I wondered how much she had heard.
"I'm through now, Mrs. Davies," she said.
"Very good, Ruth."
Ruth didn't budge from the doorway.
"Is there something else?," Mrs. Davies asked.
"Today's payday, ma'am."
"I'm sorry, I forgot. I'll write you a check."
I told Mrs. Davies I could find my own way out. She offered her hand, and I shook it. Her hand seemed colder than before.
"I want to hear the minute you find out anything," she repeated. I nodded and got the hell out of there.
On the porch I pulled loose my tie and snapped my collar open. I started toward Bad-Ass and heard a voice calling to me.
"Excuse me! Can you give me a hand over here?"
It was the neighbor digging the hole for the fallout shelter. "I can't quite reach my ladder," he said. "Apparently I've dug myself into a hole!"
He laughed like hell at this while I walked over and got his ladder for him. I lowered it into the hole.
"Thank you," he said and climbed up to ground level. He took off his baseball cap, which I saw now was a Phillies cap, and wiped his brow with a forearm. He drew one hand over his thinning gray hair and put the cap back on.
"How about an iced tea for your trouble?," he asked.
His name was Jeff Berger. I waited in the den while he fetched drinks and, unlike the den next door, this one was lived in considerably. A sports shirt was draped over a rocking chair. Newspapers and magazines were cluttered about. A dirty dish was on the coffee table. One wall was dominated by a large record collection and phonograph console, another by framed color photographs of various nuclear bomb explosions. Returning with iced tea, he caught me staring at the photographs.
"Incredible, aren't they?," he said. "Beautiful and frightening at the same time. I'll put them on the wall down in the shelter when I'm done."
He handed me my glass and went to the phonograph, playing the record that was already on the turnstile. It was classical, some symphony or other. He kept the volume low.
"Sit down," he gestured. The chairs in the room looked sturdy enough. Jeff took the rocker, and I took a stuffed chair adjacent to it.
"Forgive me for being nosy," he said, "but I'm guessing you're the detective that Joanie has been threatening to hire."
When I admitted I was, he told me what he thought about the matter. He thought Dan Davies was as white as he was but was having an affair. That's the difference in him that Joanie was reacting to.
"Not that I understand it," he went on. "Joanie's the catch, not Dan. She has family money, and Dan married up. Personally, I think he's a fool to jeopardize that but I'll bet it's the story. I've learned to read human nature pretty well by now, if I say so myself."
He rocked in his chair, looking very pleased with himself.
"Then there's nothing to this Negro business?"
"You have to understand that Joanie was pretty close to Flo, they were bridge partners. My wife Edna was in the same bridge club. When you spend that much time with someone, only to find out that they aren't at all the person you thought they were, well, it's very disturbing."
He had as much hair on his eyebrows as on his head, and he raised them now, in case I missed the seriousness of the matter.
"If Negroes have anything at all to do with this...," he continued. The eyebrows jumped again.
"Yes?"
"Well, maybe Dan's girlfriend, mistress, whatever, is a Negro. He does seem to have an affinity for them. You should hear how he carries on the radio, you'd think he was a Negro himself. I don't mean that literally. I mean it - well, spiritually, does that make sense?"
The question hung in the air as he got up and moved to a desk in the room.
"Do you build things?," he asked.
The desktop was covered with blueprints, all of which he insisted on showing me, pointing out the various features he was incorporating into his own original design for a fallout shelter. He would be able to lay in enough canned food and water to last three months. There would be sleeping facilities for four - himself, his wife, his daughter and granddaughter. There'd be a small library, a phonograph and the best of his records. When he was done, I lied that I had another appointment to make and thanked him for the refreshment.
He walked me to Bad-Ass. I started the engine, and a cloud of blue smoke bellowed out from the exhaust pipes. Grinning, I waved as he shook his head in dismay and got the hell out of there.
On the drive to the office, I found KRB on the dial. The radio said, Shoo-dot-n-shoo-be-do...
2
Between the foothills of east county and the ocean, smog was rising over the city like bad breath. The newspapers liked to write about all the beatniks living in Venice but at least here we could breathe relatively fresh air.
I parked Bad-Ass in front of the vacant storefront and hiked up the stairs to the office. The glass window in the door needed a paint job: the final s is Trevorak Private Investigations was almost gone, looking like a foreign language's curly accent line; below it, the disintegrating paint read Henry Trevorak, Sr., Henry Trevorak, Jr. and yours truly at the bottom, Clyde Trevorak. No one called me Clyde, and I hated the name. I'd been Red for as long as I can remember, homage to a body full of freckles and orange hair.
I walked in. The office was barely large enough for three desks. Dad was alone, feet up on his desk, reading the paper.
"Read the front page," he said at once, tossing me the Times. "Tell me she's not a hooker."
The reference was to another Rat Murder, announced in a bold front-page headline, “Rat Murderer Strikes Again.” Real original, these headline writers. I poured a cup of coffee and took the paper to my desk. I preferred the evening paper to the morning, which made me feel like I was always behind on the news.
"You read the story and tell me I'm not right," Dad said. He went back to reading the Sports section.
Dad had spent almost twenty years on the LAPD before a stray bullet during a foiled robbery put him on disability. Now he let Hank run the agency while he concentrated on solving the major crimes of the city.
It was Dad's theory that the rat murderer was a prostitute. All the victims to date had been male, all murdered by a .22 caliber pistol at close range. Each victim had been found in his car, two in compromising positions suggesting sexual activity. But I thought there were holes in Dad's theory, the main one being that it didn't explain the dead rat motif, or the on-going history of rats, which was written with some intelligence, I thought.
This victim fit the pattern: Franklin Cowley was 32, an attorney in his father's firm. His Chrysler was found parked in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the city, Cowley slumped over the steering wheel (two other victims had been found partially nude in the back seat) with a .22 bullet hole in his neck. The rat and new installment were on the front seat beside him. As always, the installment had been neatly typed on blue-lined school paper by a Remington Standard typewriter. This one read:
Rats are very good swimmers. A rat can stay under water for three minutes. Rats are good climbers and can jump about two feet. The rat can breed all year. However, it likes to breed best in the spring or fall. A female rat will have five or more litters in a year. The average litter is eight baby rats. The baby rats are born 21 days after mating. A few hours after the litter is born the mother can mate again.
There was a photograph of the installment and also of the car, taken from an angle that showed the lights of the city below. The reporter was buying Dad's theory and speculated that the murderer was "a deadly lady of the night."
"They were parked in Lover's Lane," Dad said when he saw me put down the paper.
"But no unzipped fly," I retorted.
"So no blow job this time, big deal. You want to cut it out and put it on the wall?"
I fetched scissors from the desk drawer and cut out the new installment. Dad was saving them, like episodes in a serial. I took this one to the wall and pinned it up with the others. Together, they gave an on-going history of rats.
The first installment read:
A rat is very different from a mouse. This was probably said for the first time in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, who lived from 1167 to 1223. For one thing, a rat is much bigger than a mouse.
There are many famous stories about rats. One is about the rats carrying away a whole hen's egg. One rat grabbed the egg with all four paws, and three other rats pulled the egg away with their tails. This story was told in Persia in 1291.
Another story about rats is from 1284. The pied piper played on his pipe and led all the rats into the river named Weser. But the city would not pay him, so he played his pipe again and led all the children into a hollow mountain. The pied piper is also called Rattenganger von Hamelin.
The second installment read:
A rat belongs to the Genus Rattus and the Order Rodentia and the Family Muridae. Rats make up the most varied genus of mammals. For example, over 550 species and varieties of rats have been noticed and described. Some examples of the species and varieties of rats are brown rats, house rats, wander rats, gray rats, Norway rats, cotton rats, wood rats, kangaroo rats, barn rats, sewer rats, roof rats, black rats, pack rats and Alexandrine rats, to name just a few.
However, there are only two main kinds of rats. These are Rattus norvegicus and Rattus rattus. Rattus norvegicus is also called the Norway, house, brown, wander, gray, barn and sewer rat. Rattus rattus is also called the roof, black, climbing and Alexandrine rat.
The third installment read:
Rattus rattus is the smallest rat and the oldest. Old fossils were found in Europe. Then the rat disappeared but returned to Europe between 400 and 1000 A.D. It came to Europe from somewhere in the East, probably Chinese Mongolia. It probably came to Europe on a ship. Rattus norvegicus didn't arrive in Europe until the 18th century. It was in England by 1728. It came to the United States in 1775. Then it went west on the wagon trains.
And now a fourth installment. Dad joined me at the wall, limping from the old injury that had made him a temporary hero and a permanent retiree.
"A pretty intelligent whore," I said. "She writes different from, not different than. She knows how to use the encyclopedia."
"So she's intelligent. Unzipped flies, Lover's Lane, male victims, a weapon only a woman would use. The facts speak for themselves."
Dad started rereading the history top to bottom, and I returned to my desk with the Sports section. I was reading about the Angels blowing a five-run lead to the Stars when Hank walked in from lunch.
"You get the gig?," he asked me.
"I got it."
Hank took after Dad. Both were big boned but able to keep their weight down, which made their appearance more athletic than their habits. Both wore trim moustaches in the manner of leading men of Dad's generation. Dad's moustache was almost fully gray, Hank's dark brown.
"Dad, don't you have that memorized by now?," Hank asked.
"She got another early this morning," Dad said from the wall. He turned and began limping toward Hank.
"If the killer's a she," Hank said.
"Course she's a she, even the reporter's calling her a deadly lady of the night now. You wait and see if I'm not right."
I sympathized with Dad's interest in the major crimes of the city. When he was on the force, he'd been involved with the real thing, not the petty business of Trevorak Private Investigations. Most of the time we were the Peeping Tom Patrol, scurrying about with our cameras, hoping to add the documentation of an adulterous embrace to a client's suspicions. Dad had never been able to stoop to the level of the agency's bread and butter, letting Hank run everything, and when I came back from Korea with no worse damage than a missing toe and a bad attitude, Dad had put me on the payroll. As near as I could figure, the only reason Dad kept coming to the office was to have someone to talk to and to listen to his theories about whatever crime was in the headlines.
Hank asked about my morning meeting, and I told him about Joan Davies and Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man. The gig was a little bizarre, which perked Dad's interest considerably.
"She doesn't even know the race of her own husband?," he asked.
"Her neighbor was passing for white," I said. "She's a little paranoid about it."
"It's different anyway," said Hank.
"He's a deejay and sounds like a Negro on the radio, actually. He works for a station that plays only Negro music."
Dad said, "She pay you?"
"Sure did."
I told them about Jeff-the-neighbor's theory that her husband was having an affair.
"As long as she pays her bill," Dad said. He started limping toward the door. "You had lunch yet, Red? Hank can hold down the fort."
"I grabbed a sandwich on the way back," I said. It was a figure of speech: actually I'd grabbed three Bob's Big Boy Hamburgers, a double order of fries, and a vanilla malt.
"See you when I see you, then."
Dad limped out of the office.
I waited until Hank left before phoning Butch, a buddy from the Army. Hank was always nosing into my gigs, not in a helpful way but to declare his superiority and establish my ineptitude for investigative work. I'd been a linguist in the Army but somehow this didn't count, he couldn't trust me to do anything right. To be sure, the day I sold a play to Broadway I'd be long gone from the Peeping Tom Patrol - but not even I expected that to happen soon, if at all, any more. In the meantime, I kept my gigs to myself as much as possible and tried to stay out of big brother's way. Butch was the only Negro friend I had, and I wanted to pick his brain about a few things without Hank looking over my shoulder.
"You're buying me breakfast?," Butch said on the phone, pretending to be shocked. "What'd you do, man, finally hit the big time?"
"Been a while since we touched bases, is all."
"You usually call when you want to bitch about work or need information. But that's cool, man, a free meal is a free meal. So when and where?"
We set a time and place, and hung up.
I got up and went to the radio on Dad's desk, turning it on. When nothing happened, I pounded on it until it came to life. I found station KRB.
The radio said, We sizzle! We sparkle! We fire! Hot Wire Wally's got all the best in Negro music for you - from blues to ballads, from bebop to boogie! Yes, indeedy!
It wasn't Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man but this deejay sounded Negro, too, I thought. I looked up KRB in the phone book, waited for a station break, and dialed the request line.
"It's your nickel, baby!," someone answered, in the same frantic voice of the deejay.
I said, "Do you take requests?"
"That's what we're here for."
"Anything by Perry Como."
There was a silence. Then, in a totally different voice, a voice I took to be clearly white, the man on the other end of the line said, "Don't I wish, man, don't I wish." He hung up.
I listened to KRB for the rest of the afternoon, background music to beginning the paperwork and phone work of tracing the lineage of Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man.
3
Wed, 9 June 54. A play about illusion and reality, people pretending to be something they are not. This is what politicians do all the time! A political play, then? A political farce?
I continued listening to KRB at home at night and also the next morning while writing in my journal. All the dee-jays sounded Negro to me, all had the same frantic style, all had nicknames like Lovin' Dan, Hot Wire Wally, Rockin' Ronnie, Brian the Bopper. The music selection varied greatly: a sweet ballad by Nat King Cole could be heard after a lowdown blues by Lightnin' Hopkins, music with nothing in common except that it was performed by a Negro. The emphasis, however, seemed to be on singing groups with names like The Crows, The Robins, The Orioles and The Clovers. In fact, KRB was in the midst of a local teenage doowop singing contest, "doowop" apparently being the label given to the group style of singing, in which nonsense but rhythmic sounds wove in and out of the melody line. Though my own tastes tended toward The Weavers, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, the music on KRB was catching. I wondered if Butch listened to the station.
When I went to the office in the morning, there was a note in Hank's handwriting to call Dad. There was also a snotty p.s.: Where are the blowups you promised me? Our office was so small because half the space we rented had been converted into a dark room.
I phoned Dad.
"Where's this deejay guy from?," he asked.
"Chicago. Why?"
"It will take you forever to put together his family tree by mail. Let me check around and see who's in Chicago who can help us. I'll call you later in the morning."
Dad had former colleagues and connections all over the country. While they were no help in peeping into a bedroom window, they could be a real time-saver in looking for a missing person or doing a background check. Within the hour Dad called back and gave me the name of Stan McNaughton, who was a friend of a friend of his. Fifteen minutes later, I had McNaughton on the job in Chicago. I figured I might have Dan's family tree by next week.
I spent the next hour in the darkroom, enlarging and cropping photographs of a well-known TV personality doing nasty things to a girl who couldn't have been fourteen. At least I think that's what he was doing. It was hard to say, the quality of the photographs was poor and enlarging them didn't help. The action had taken place on the deck of his yacht, and I was shooting with a zoom lens from a rowboat a good distance away. What I remembered most about the gig was worrying about falling into the harbor. A three-hundred pound man standing up in a rowboat is not the definition of stability.
The radio said, Doot-doodle-loot doodle-loot doodle-lootle-loot, doot-doodle-loot doodle-loot doodle-lootle-loot...
I found radio station KRB in a small Negro business district southeast of downtown L.A., called South City. I'm not sure what it was south of, except the new Pomona Freeway, which was noisily, dustily under construction less than a mile north of the dilapidated building that bore the address of the station. It was a rundown neighborhood, far past its prime, with more boarded-up storefronts than operating businesses.
I parked Bad-Ass across the street from the station, turned off the radio, turned off the ignition, and unwrapped the first of three Bob's Big Boy Hamburgers while waiting for the engine to sputter into silence. I was going to wait for the tired-looking guy at the barbecue to leave the building.
I could have let McNaughton in Chicago trace the lineage without staking out Dan Davies, of course, but the adultery business made more sense to me than the other. Besides, this was a solo gig, and I wanted to make the most of the opportunity to work without taking orders from Hank. If McNaughton gave Dan a white slate, so to speak, I'd be that much farther ahead if I knew he was engaged in extra-curricular diddling.
It was getting warm past noon, and with the heat came the smog. In the distance I could hear all the digging, scraping, shoving of progress. Were all these new freeways under construction supposed to take people into L.A. or give them a quick way out? It was too warm to roll up the window, so I got all the noise and the thickening smog together, as I finished the first two hamburgers and started on the third.
I almost didn't recognize him. In the photograph in his den, he looked thinner, perhaps because of the weary expression he showed the camera. He didn't exactly bounce out of the building with a happy, carefree gait but he was halfway down the block before it registered that this fellow looked a lot like the guy at the barbecue. I started the engine, adding bellowing blue smoke to the smog, but turned it quickly off when I saw Dan enter the corner building. I got out and hurried down the street, stuffing the last of the burger into my mouth and throwing the wrapper in the gutter.
A hand-painted sign said Caviar's Market, though it looked like the last place in the world to purchase gourmet foodstuffs, even though a 1950 pink Cadillac was parked out front. Unlike the store, which was in a building as dilapidated as the others in the neighborhood, the car was immaculate, its pink body gleaming in the dismal afternoon.
I waited on the corner across the street. If I smoked, it would've been a great time to light up and think about what to do next. What the hell, I didn't need a cigarette to know that the journey begins with a single step. I pulled up my tie and crossed the street.
We almost ran into one another at the doorway. Dan - and from close now I knew it was the guy at the barbecue - mumbled something I couldn't make out, perhaps an apology, and turned the corner, leaving me outside the door.
A voice in the market yelled, "If you're coming in, close the door! If you ain't, close the door anyway!"
I closed the door and turned the corner in time to see Dan going up a back stairway. I heard the voice of an old man calling down to him from above, "You're ten minutes late!"
What now? I went into the market.
"Hey, close the door behind you!," the same voice yelled. I found its source at the counter, a large Negro who was sitting in front of an electric fan, going over something or other in a ledger book.
"I'll be with you in a minute," he said. "You after the special on Russian Caviar, we're all sold out, man, and I don't expect nothing more in a long time. We ain't getting along too hot with the Russians these days."
He couldn't be serious, I thought - he sold Russian Caviar in a joint like this? Moving down an aisle, with one eye on the filthy front window, watching for Dan, I began to change my mind. There was no rhyme nor reason to the items on the shelves but many were indeed foodstuffs common to a gourmet market. I found canned frog legs, pickled dwarf corn, escargot complete with a package of shells, dried Chinese mushrooms. Scattered among these delicacies were flashlight batteries, cans of motor oil, various Negro cosmetics, a huge box of rubber bands. I didn't know what to make of the place.
"What can I do for you, man?"
On his feet, he was even larger than I had realized, towering perhaps six-seven above me, with the build of a lineman for the Rams. Even at my size, I felt dwarfed. He was grinning broadly as he shoved a huge hand at me. When I took it, he was kind and no bones were broken.
"I'm Tank," he said.
I wondered if this were Tank Younger, who played with the Rams. Apparently it was a common question.
"Not the Tank Younger," he laughed. "I had the nickname longer than he do."
"I'm Red," I said.
"You need help?"
"Just browsing."
"That's fine. If you're here to ask about that apartment for rent upstairs, the deejay cat already beat you to it. Unless he don't take it, of course. He's up there talking to Mr. Romanowitz right now. Tell you the truth, I think he's taking it. He been walking up and down the street, looking up at it, all damn week, man. I wish he be making up his mind."
"You know him?," I asked.
"He come in a couple times a week. He works at the station up the street, playing that goddamn doowop for the kids."
Tank was still grinning, staring down at me. If this was his way of intimidating a customer, it worked. I decided to buy something and get the hell out of there.
"You have pop?"
"A whole big cooler full, man. Back there."
There was no Dr. Pepper, so I purchased a bottle of coke and didn't object when Tank rang up fifty cents for it. He even had an explanation.
"That's vintage 1949 Coca Cola, man, they ain't never had a year better than that."
I went back onto the street to discover that, once again, I'd almost lost Dan. He was heading back toward the radio station. Coming around the corner at the same time was the old man from upstairs, Mr. Romanowitz, the landlord.
"Excuse me," I said. "I understand you have an apartment for rent."
"Just rented it," he said. He was much older than Dad, perhaps seventy, with full white hair and bad teeth. He grunted and rasped as he went on. "Been trying to rent it for six months, now I get two interested parties the same day. Two white men, the same day. What you want to live around here for is beyond me. Neighborhood full of winos and dope fiends. You interested in Buena Park? I got property in Buena Park."
"Is the guy moving in right away?"
"He paid a month's rent, he might as well."
The old man started up the street, walking slowly, and I followed along.
"He says he works right in the neighborhood. How about Arcadia? I got property in Arcadia. You want to live in Arcadia?"
When we were halfway up the street, Dan drove by in a recent model Mercury. I left the landlord stewing in his offers and ran up the street to Bad-Ass. After raising the usual cloud of smoke, I was accelerating behind the Mercury when Dan got through a yellow light that was red for me. Bad-Ass was no friend of heat and, in my anxiety, I let the engine stall waiting for the light to change, then flooded it trying to restart. By the time I was going again, Dan was long gone, and I just drove on back to Venice.
No one was in the office but I could tell that Hank had been at my desk, snooping around. He also had left a note to call Joan Davies.
"Hello?," she answered.
"Mrs. Davies?"
"Yes."
"This is Red Trevorak."
"Thank you for returning my call so promptly."
"No problem."
"I was talking to Jeff Berger, my neighbor. He said he gave you his theory about Dan having a mistress."
"Something like that."
"That may or may not be true, but I insist that you make that background check. I'm paying your salary, after all."
"Already started it," I said. "I may have something to show you as early as next week."
"That's wonderful. I was afraid you might think my request was, well, too bizarre, is the term Jeff uses. He's positive it's the other, and maybe it is, Lord knows Dan's been interested in something besides me lately. But I do need peace of mind about the other. That's the first priority."
"Like I said, the investigation has begun."
"If you knew what a shock it was, to have your own bridge partner turn out to be a Negro!"
"I can imagine," I said. But I couldn't.
"Well, that's all I wanted to say."
"Mrs. Davies?"
"You can call me Joan, Mr. Trevorak."
"That neighbor who was passing for white, I forget her name..."
"Flo Albertson."
"Right. So what's the story with her? I mean, did she move out of the neighborhood or what?"
"The house is up for sale but it's poor Gregory who moved out. I think he's staying with his mother."
"That's her husband?"
"Yes."
I brought the conversation to an end and hung up. I didn't intend to tell her about the apartment until I knew more about it, and why Dan had rented it, myself. But one possibility was immediately obvious: an apartment close to work would be damn convenient for messing around. Maybe the neighbor Jeff could read human nature as well as he bragged. I scribbled a note to the effect that my desk was off limits and put it on Hank's calendar, then locked up the office. I spent the rest of the day walking along the beach, barefoot and carrying my shoes, making four-toed prints in the sand and glorying in the sea breezes and the lithe and not-so-lithe female bodies baking in the sun, white skin sweating under oil to turn brown, thinking about brown-skinned bodies trying to pass for white.
4
Fri, 11 June 54. Something along the lines of Gogol's Inspector General. A reasonably common political event carried to extremes, to farce. Set it in a foreign country?
I met Butch for a late breakfast in Westwood, near the campus of UCLA, where he was taking classes on the G.I. Bill. We got together every two or three months, usually for breakfast at Connie's in Westwood, sometimes for beers and a few games of pool after he was done with classes. Butch liked to bug me about taking classes myself but sitting around with a bunch of budding Eugene O'Neills and Tennessee Williamses was not my idea of a good time.
Butch was an artist, a painter who worked with gigantic canvases that captured the work life and street life of his neighborhood in Watts, the largest Negro community in the county. He was studying to be a teacher, more interested in bringing something back to his community than in building an independent reputation. I didn't know anything about visual art but the sheer accomplishment of his huge canvases, which cluttered the warehouse he called both studio and home, impressed the hell out of me.
This morning, like always, Butch wore paint-splattered cover-alls and a cap (today a new beret) that hid a premature bald spot. As if making up for early loss of hair, he sported a Van Dyke beard, which he habitually stroked during conversation. In deference to the warm weather, he wore no shirt under the broad shoulder straps.
Waiting to be seated, I teased him about his outfit and he teased me about my floundering career as a playwright. I hadn't written a new play in six months but I was taking notes in my journal about a new idea for one.
The waitress seated us far back in the rear corner of the restaurant, and we both were hungry enough to order from memory.
"Take off that goddamn beret," I said when the waitress was gone. Usually he wore an Angel’s baseball cap. We were both diehard Angel fans but, somehow, had never taken in a game together.
"Picasso eats with his beret on," Butch replied.
"Now how in hell do you know that?"
"I saw his picture in Life Magazine, eating breakfast in a Spanish cafe with his beret on."
"They don't eat breakfast in Spain."
"Not ham and eggs, man. He was eating a roll and drinking red wine."
I smiled, conceding the point. Every time Butch and I got together, I wondered why we didn't do it more often. We'd met and become fast friends in the Army hospital, both put there by Korean frostbite. Like myself, Butch was in the Army Security Agency; I was a linguist and Butch a traffic analyst, the Army's term for keeping track of what the North Korean and Chinese military units were up to. In the hospital we discussed books and played gin rummy and exchanged war stories. We talked about our very different lives growing up in Los Angeles County. By the time the doctors let us go, each with a missing toe, we'd compared fantasies we shared with no one else, about bringing an art center to Watts or taking a play to New York. Now, a couple years after discharge, we were still getting together, but more casually now. We'd weathered since Korea and kept our fantasies to ourselves.
Small talk continued through breakfast. When I kept ordering coffee after the waitress had cleared our table, Butch guessed that something was bothering me.
"What's on your mind, man? You look like you're sitting on a hot potato."
"I'm not sure where to begin."
"You got a problem at work?"
I told him about my gig with Joan Davies, about the neighbor woman who had been passing for white until she had her dark baby, about Joan's anxiety that her own husband might be a Negro, about Lovin' Dan's radio show and renting an apartment in South City. When I was done, Butch just looked at me.
Finally he said, "So where do I come in?"
"Everything strikes me as so bizarre. I thought maybe you could shed some light on it for me."
"What's so bizarre?"
"A Negro woman pretending she's white. A white man sounding like a Negro on the radio. His wife wanting to check his lineage."
"Come on, man, you're pulling my leg. What's so difficult to figure out about that? If you're a Negro light enough to pass for white, and you want to climb up the social ladder, you got no choice but to pass for white. You think they're gonna let Negroes move into Foothills, man? Get serious. And what is she, probably one part in sixteen or some damn thing?"
"I mean, I know we live in a prejudiced society
but--"
"Prejudiced society, shit. Racist, Red. Racist to a conspiratorial degree."
I'd heard this theory two or three times before, usually when Butch had had too much to drink, but I'd dismissed it as the anger and frustration of a victim of prejudice.
Butch said, "If she wants to live in the best neighborhoods, man, the lady got no choice but to pass for white. Nobody's gonna let Negroes move around at will. Why the hell do you think they're building all these new freeways? Think about it."
"I don't see what this has to do with freeways."
"Come on, Red, open your eyes!"
He pulled a ballpoint pen out from a pocket and began drawing on a napkin, all the while continuing with greater excitement.
"What do the white City Fathers fear most of all? The expansion of Negro neighborhoods, man. The darkies infiltrating good white neighborhoods. I'm not jiving. Looky here."
His diction was changing as he spoke, so that now he was sounding more like Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man, with his hip vernacular, than like the cultured Butch I knew. He turned the napkin around so I could see what he'd drawn so quickly, a pattern of lines with a circle in the middle.
"This is the Freeway Grand Plan, okay? They even published it in the newspaper. Now this here is Watts, man. So more Negroes have been moving into Watts, so it's expanding to the west, right? Oo-ee, we got to head off them niggers at the pass! And so we start building this here Harbor Freeway to block them off, and this here Santa Monica Freeway to catch and trap all the ones that slip over the boundary before we can finish up the Harbor. But now Watts is expanding east, man, cause it's got to go somewhere, and so we got to head off them damn niggers again, oo-ee, baby, let's build ourselves the Santa Ana Freeway, only this time a whole mess of niggers got so far east we got to come down with another one, too, the Pomona Freeway -- look at it, Red. All these freeways ain't nothing but fences to keep the niggers from getting too close to good white neighborhoods. You mentioned South City. Well, what's South City, man? A town because people want it to be a town? Hell, no. It's nothing but the part of Watts that got over the Santa Ana but got cut off with the Pomona. It ain't a freeway system, Red, it's the walls of a prison!"
I stared at the napkin.
"You're saying," I began slowly, "that the purpose of the freeway system is to contain Watts?"
Butch laughed. "Shit, man, I think I'd better pay the check, you so dumb."
He started to get up.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Sit down."
Butch gave me a sad little grin, shaking his head and stroking his Van Dyke.
"What about the traffic problem?," I asked. "Freeways are being built to solve the traffic problem."
"Course they need freeways for the traffic, man. I'm talking about where they decide to build them."
"To get back to what started this - you're saying it's not unusual for a light Negro to pass for white. It is, in fact, the only way a Negro can get beyond the freeway walls. Something like that?"
"I'm saying if somebody is so dumb to want to move into your better neighborhoods, which are white, then they got to be white themselves - and if they can pass white, then some-body's going to try it."
"Would you try and pass for white if you were lighter?"
"Get serious. I generally don't even like white folks, Red. I ever tell you that? I make an exception of you. You got so many freckles, man, you don't even look like a white man. Dig this: if I'm the monkey in the zoo, you're the leopard, boy!"
Butch laughed, and I had to smile. I liked Butch, I really did.
I said, "Do you realize the way you talk has changed over the past few minutes?"
Butch howled and slapped the table. Then he replied in what was meant to be a cultured New England accent.
"In a society such as ours," he said, "a wise man assesses the rules of the game before he deigns to engage the competition." And then he switched to vernacular, more outrageous than ever: "Shee, baby, I don' think them UCLA professors dig what be happenin' in the world, man, in the world!"
He roared with laughter.
"Come on," he said, wiping tears from his eyes. "Let's get out of here."
He had a class, and I walked toward campus with him. Along the way I asked him why Dan would want to sound like a Negro on the radio.
"What you really mean," said Butch, "is he's talking jive. He does that because it's cool, man, it's part of the job. He's playing hip music for the kids, so he wants to sound hip."
"I don't know anything about the music," I admitted. "I like what I've heard."
"You're still listening to folk music, right?"
I nodded.
"The craze for the kids is doowop. It's just all that moon and spoon shit put in a new package."
We walked the rest of the way in silence, and at the edge of campus I thanked him.
"For what?"
"I think I've got a little better handle on things."
"If you say so."
"Not that I can understand why a woman would want to check the lineage of her own husband."
"Never under-estimate paranoia when matters of race are concerned," said Butch.
We shook hands and went our separate ways.
I spent the rest of the morning listening to KRB on the car radio and cruising the streets of Watts. To my amazement, Butch had a point, you couldn't drive in any direction out of Watts without being cut off by a new freeway under construction. It was like being caught in a maze.
It was past noon by the time I found a way over construction on the Santa Ana, too late to get to South City in time to tail Dan after his show. I decided to drive to Foothills and look up Flo Albertson. The playwright, more than the investigator, was fascinated with what made a woman like her tick. In the odd event that Dan had Negroes in his own background, understanding her psychology would help me understand Dan's -- this, at any rate, was the rationalization I needed to stay away from the office and to avoid any boring footwork Hank might have for me. So I drove north toward the central city, heading Bad-Ass into the worst soup of the smog. I rolled up the windows, preferring sweat to stinging eyes. I cranked up the music. The radio said, wah-wah-oh wah-oh...
5
After pulling off the Pasadena freeway, I discovered that a gas war had developed almost overnight. I chose a Standard station offering four gallons for a dollar. While the gas jockey filled the tank, I walked to the phone booth and looked up the Albertson address in Foothills.
A thin gray mist washed over the San Gabriel mountains to the north but it was difficult to know if it was smog creeping out of the city or the smoky residue from the morning burning of hundreds of family backyard incinerators. A movement had started to ban home incinerators in east county and a counter-movement had risen to protect the Constitutional guarantees of burning one's own garbage at home.
The Albertson home was like others in the neighborhood, a long lean ranch style set under the tall pines. Going up the brick walk to the front door, I saw a woman come out of the house and when we passed I recognized Ruth, the housekeeper for Joan Davies.
"Afternoon," I greeted her.
She nodded and passed. She was in the same white outfit, her black hair hanging in bangs in front, short and straight in back. It made sense that she had as many gigs in the neighborhood as she could get, and I liked her for not dropping Flo Albertson after what had happened. I also liked Mrs. Albertson for keeping her on. I wondered, since they both were Negro, if they talked about what had happened. When Mrs. Albertson answered the door, it was clear that she had been crying. Her eyes were puffy and red but even this fact did not hide that she was stunningly attractive, movie star attractive. Face to face with her, I never would have imagined that she was a Negro. She had a face like Audrey Hepburn, full of wonderful sweeps and angles.
"May I help you?," she asked.
"My name's Red Trevorak. I'm a private investigator and wonder if you have time to answer a few questions."
"About what?"
"Your neighbor, Dan Davies."
"Do you have identification?"
When I showed her, she invited me in. In this home, strangers were led to the living room. She offered me a seat in a wooden chair that could have been an antique but to be on the safe side I sat down instead on one end of the divan. As she sat down on the other end, I noticed that she was wearing an apron. She was so lovely that an apron had just disappeared on her.
"What do you want to know?," she asked.
I got right to the point, explaining about the gig with Joan and asking if she had any opinion one way or the other about Dan's race.
"Do you drink in the afternoon, Mr. Trevorak?," she asked, ignoring my question. "I'm having a gin and tonic and you're welcome to join me."
Though a gin and tonic sounded good, I declined. It wasn't that I was against drinking on the job, booze often loosened up an interview and let information surface that wouldn't come out sober. But I was too attracted to her to drink. I didn't trust myself to avoid acting like a fool.
She got up and went to a liquor cabinet across the room.
"I hardly know Dan Davies at all," she said. "I do enjoy his radio program. And I play bridge - used to play bridge with his wife. Of course, I'm ostracized up here now." She turned from the business of making her drink and faced me. "You do know what happened, of course."
"Just what Joan told me."
"I'm sure she told you everything."
Turning back to mix her drink, Mrs. Albertson said, "What we have here, Mr. Trevorak, is a case of classic white paranoia. Since I am not who I appeared to be, everyone is suspect. Especially poor Dan, who plays Negro records on the radio. Did Joan send you here?"
"She doesn't know I'm here," I said.
"She'll find out. If she hasn't found out already."
She came back to the divan with her drink, moving across the room with the grace of a ballet dancer. It was all I could do not to tell her she was beautiful and that I thought she was getting a raw deal.
"But to answer your question," she said, "the notion that Dan Davies may have Negro ancestors is ridiculous."
"A neighbor thinks he may be having an affair."
"That would be Jeff Berger, I bet."
I felt like telling her that her insight was incredible and let's have dinner tonight.
"And what does Jeff Berger say about me?," she asked. She smiled. "That I'm a loose woman. Am I right?"
"The person involved did not mention you," I said.
"Once you're a nigger, Mr. Trevorak, and a woman, it's a short step to becoming a whore."
She raised her glass in a sad toast and drank.
I couldn't hold it in any longer and said, "I think it's very unfair the way you've been treated."
"Oh come on now," she laughed in an outburst that surprised me. "Let me tell you something, Mr. Trevorak."
"Please call me Red."
"Mr. Trevorak. My mother was white, and my grandmother was white. I never knew my grandfather and my father left us when I was two. I've always considered myself white. At least until I applied for college, when I found out that legally I am a Negro. It was on my birth records. It was on my school records. The college I wanted to attend didn't accept Negroes. That information threw me into a tailspin, and for more years than I care to recall I was not doing myself or anyone else any good. When I finally got back on my feet, I decided that since I looked white, and since I had thought of myself as white for most of my life, there was no reason that I shouldn't be white. With such a positive outlook, it only took me five years to move into Foothills."
She finished her drink and moved across the room to fix another. I struggled to my feet and followed her.
"Straight tonic would be nice," I said.
"Surely."
"You said you enjoy Dan's radio show."
"I do."
"Don't you think it's strange that a white man tries to sound like a Negro on the radio?"
"Heavens," she burst out again, "he's not sounding like a Negro! Maybe like what he thinks a Negro should sound like. He's trying to be hip for the kids. All the deejays do it. To be honest, it seems to be the direction the radio station is going in, appealing more and more to kids. I prefer the way it used to be."
"How was that?"
"Playing more Nat Cole and Louis Jordan, and less of these new doowop groups."
She handed me my drink. I raised the glass, offering a toast, and she touched her own glass against mine.
"Mrs. Albertson," I said, "we have no control over the color of our skin. Look at me: I'm an orange-spotted mistake."
"And what makes you so liberal?"
"I call it common sense."
"My husband is a liberal. A liberal Democrat. Not that he flaunts it around, especially in Foothills. Well, do you know his reaction to all this? He's divorcing me. He thinks I married him for his money."