from here.
He closed his eyes. He ran names, faces through his mind. Dangerous people whom he’d hoped never to have to see again. People who could be his arms and legs. And fists. People who would see to it that the fat white fuck didn’t live to go to court.
If he could keep from helping Admer.
Which might not be too easy.
Mel Crane knew when someone was good at his job. And this cop was good.
He waited for sleep, which was overdue according to the every-ten-or-fifteen-minutes schedule. And it wouldn’t come.
He thought of when he himself had been good at a job. For a short while, true, but that was because pimping was a lot harder than popular myth and rumor had it, especially in little old New York. And after his year in Ossining, up the Hudson—his “easy dozen” that had shown him exactly who he was, and wasn’t—his days of imitating Iceberg Slim were numbered.
After the slammer, the only part of pimping he’d liked was breaking in a new chick. Holding them in line and knocking them around wore him down, and he’d left Manhattan and his East Side clientele at age twenty-nine and fled the width of the country to get away. And gone from well-heeled but miserable user to broke but contented john. Not exactly in one easy lesson, since he’d been in L.A. some twenty years.
Twenty-one years, he calculated, his mind clear and unclouded. Twenty-one years since he’d run that string of hard-as-nails broads in Manhattan. But every so often there’d be a cutie, a softie, a girl bound to be a loser at that tough trade in the long run. He would be touched and try to help her, because he knew they had something in common. And they would make beautiful music together for a brief time.
In fact, it was one of these he had helped to escape, a little Italian knockout named Anna, innocent deep down where it counted despite falling for the scum who’d sold her to Pell-Mel. That was how he had been known in those long-ago days, the nickname coming from his crazy way of fighting when he was forced to, a mad confused attack (covering his fear, his distaste for his way of life). Anna, with bright eyes that believed too much, whose light would be extinguished, he was sure, trying to survive in a world without tenderness—Anna had touched him so deeply he had taken her with him when he’d run from the trade, the racket overlords, the goddam ugliness. Dropped her off at her brother’s in Cleveland and told her, “No more pills and no more bums, got it?” and hoped she could make it in the straight world.
As he himself hadn’t been able to, becoming a smalltime bum himself. But one who’d never hurt people.
And now someone had hurt him.
And now look at yourself, nigger . . .
He didn’t have time to hit bottom again, because sleep grabbed him.
At eleven, Cloris left English class, but didn’t go to study hall in the auditorium. Instead, she left the school and walked to the shopping center, about ten minutes in the Valley heat, and met Verna Tomlinson and her boyfriend Buddy at the coffee shop. Verna and Buddy were both drop-outs from Granada High. They were secretly married, but the secret wouldn’t hold too much longer. Verna was pregnant, and so she and Buddy had decided to leave Granada Hills for Los Angeles. And Cloris had decided to join them.
It wasn’t a long trip, maybe fifteen, twenty miles (she was lousy at geography and maps), but the San Fernando Valley suburb and the Big Town were worlds apart in the things that counted to Cloris. A movie career. Discos. Roller boogie rinks. Lots of dates. And no mother and no Uncle Bert!
They had burgers and fries and coffee, and relaxed over cigarettes. Verna was a chunky brunette, pretty face but much too heavy. Still, Buddy seemed happy enough, and with his slouchy, skinny build and bad skin he was no bargain himself.
Cloris wouldn’t have dated him in a million years, though she’d been curious after Verna had said, “His thing’s a foot long and thick as my arm!” So at the party in Christofer Bayshore’s house, when Buddy got drunk and grabbed her playfully in the kitchen, she’d unzipped him and made it hard with her hand. And discovered Verna had been bragging about nothing. Then she’d had a job calming him down.
“You sure, Cloris?” Verna asked, leaning across the table conspiratorially. “You know Buddy and me can’t put you up or anything. We’re staying with his cousin Elma and her husband, and they only got two rooms in Echo Park.”
Cloris said she had a hundred sixty dollars saved from her part-time job at the supermarket checkout, “and before that’s gone I’ll have a job and I’ll move from the motel to a good apartment. I’m going to dramatic school and modeling school. Maybe take voice lessons too. I want a career in film”
“You got the looks all right,” Verna said. “Don’t she, Buddy?”
He nodded. “Sure do.”
Cloris said, “Thank you, thank you,” bowing her head as if on a stage, and they all laughed together, but she didn’t need them telling her what she had. She’d looked in the mirror a few times. “A teenaged American Charo,” that football player had called her.
Well, maybe, though she felt she had more class than cootchie-coo. But she was blonde with long hair and she was built on top and all the rest of it. And she had the sexy moves.
She smiled to herself, thinking how worked up the football player had been when she’d left him in his car in the drive-in movie to go to the bathroom. Instead, she’d gone to the snack-bar and called Freddy and said, “I can’t handle him, honey! Please come and get me,” and made crying sounds.
Freddy had raced over and she’d hopped into his car and they’d had a beautiful time that night.
Her smile faded.
He’d gone East to college last fall and hadn’t called or written since, and one of the kids said he was home on vacation but she’d heard nothing. Mom said he’d “used” her, and Uncle Bert nodded with that Holy-Roller look on his face, the bastard! He was jumping Mom twice a night in the bedroom just across the hall from Cloris in the small condo that had been fine when it was just Mom and Cloris and had become awful when Bert moved in.
Mom said he was going to marry her “soon.” That was nine months ago, and he’d never marry her and maybe she was lucky he wouldn’t. Because with all his lectures about “late hours” and “saving yourself for some fine boy” and “wearing less-revealing clothing,” just two weeks ago he’d shown what he really was. He’d come home early and Mom wasn’t back from work yet and Clois had been watching TV. It was hot; she hadn’t expected anyone; she’d been in her panties and bra. And there he’d stood, hands on his hips, face sour, eyes stern behind those teacher-like glasses.
But then, when she’d gotten up to go to her room for clothes, he’d suddenly grabbed her! What a shock, and she’d screamed, but it hadn’t stopped him. He’d been a wild man and she’d had to hit him in the face three times before he’d gained control of himself. By then, her pants and bra had been torn off and she’d backed away, naked. He’d stared and spoken in a hoarse, shaky voice: “A hundred dollars for what you give every schoolboy . . .”
She’d locked herself in her room. Later, he’d come to the door and said he’d “gone beserk” and begged her not to tell her mother. “It would only hurt her,” he’d pleaded.
It would also get him out of here, Cloris had reasoned.
