Larry, the sales manager at Casa, fixed me up with an old Cutlass demo, loaded. I told him I’d hang onto it for a week or so and return it gassed up. Rather than check out the places where my repo’ee’s worked, I decided to take the day off, maybe see my friend Walter. I headed down Ventura toward Coldwater. It was ten-thirty, and hot and smoggy already. Driving over the hill I felt good; relaxed and even a little hungry. Coming down into Beverly Hills, I felt again that my life was going to change.
I’ve got my own tax shelter, the Brown Detective Agency. It’s a detective agency in name only. As far as the IRS knows, I’m a starving gumshoe, declaring nine grand in total income and paying $275 in income tax. I save about eighty bucks a year by claiming myself as a deduction. I used to advertise in the Yellow Pages, before the repo racket got lucrative, and actually handled a few cases, mostly runaway kids who had dropped into the drug culture; but that was two years ago, when I had more illusions about myself as an urban manipulator. I still retain my office, an $85 write-off, in a crummy office building on Pico in Rancho Park. I keep my library there and go there when I want to read. It’s a dump, but it’s air-conditioned.
I decided to head for the office now, since Walter was probably still passed out from last night’s bout with T-Bird and TV. I parked in the lot, crossed the alley to the Apple Pan, and returned with three cheeseburgers and two coffees to go. I had wolfed down two of the burgers by the time I opened my office door. It was musty inside. I hit the air-conditioning immediately and settled into my chair.
It’s not much of an office; just a small, square room with Venetian blinds over a rear window facing an alley, a big, imitation-walnut desk with a naugahyde swivel recliner behind it for myself, a cheesy Bentwood rattan chair for clients, and an official-looking file cabinet that contains no files. There are two photographs of me on the wall, both designed to inspire confidence: Fritz Brown, circa 1968, my Police Academy graduation picture; and one of me in uniform taken three years later. I was drunk when that one was taken and, if you look closely, you can tell.
I scarfed my last burger, flipped on KUSC and sat back. The music was early baroque, a harpsichord trio; nice, but without passion. I listened anyway. Baroque can send you off on a nice little cloud, conducive to quiet thoughts, and I was off on one of them when the doorbell rang. It couldn’t be the landlord, since I paid by the year. Probably a salesman. I got up and opened the door. The man standing there didn’t look like a salesman, he looked like a refugee from the Lincoln Heights drunk tank. “May I help you” I said.
“Probably,” the man replied, “if you’re a private detective and this is your office.”
“I am, and it is.” I pointed to the visitor’s chair. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me how I can help you.”
He sat, grudgingly, after checking out the furnishings. He was close to forty, and fat, maybe 5'6" or 7" and about 220. He was wearing ridiculous soiled madras slacks three inches too short in the leg, a tight alligator golf shirt that encased his blubbery torso like a sausage skin, and black and white saddle golfshoes with the cleats removed. He looked like a wino golfer out of hell.
“I thought private eyes was older guys, retired from the police force,” he said.
“I retired early,” I said. “They wouldn’t make me chief of police at twenty-five, so I told them to kiss my ass.” He got a bang out of that and started to laugh, kind of hysterically. “My name is Fritz Brown, by the way. What’s yours?”
“I’m Freddy Baker. You got the same initials as me. You can call me Fat Dog. It ain’t no insult, everybody calls me that. I like it.”
Fat Dog. Jesus. “Okay, Fat Dog. You can call me Fritz, or Mr. Brown, or Daddy-O. Now, why do you need a private investigator? Incidentally, the fee for my services is one hundred twenty-five dollars a day, plus expenses. Can you afford that?”
“I can afford that, and more. I may not look like no millionaire, but I’m holding heavy. I’ll whip some bread on you today, after I tell you what I want.” Fat Dog Baker bored into me with wild blue eyes, and said “It’s like this. I got this sister, my kid sister, Jane. She’s the only family I got. Our folks is dead. For a long time now she’s been staying with this rich guy. A Jewish guy. He’s old; he don’t try no sex stuff with her—it ain’t like that—he just supports her and I never see her no more. This guy, he don’t want her to have nothing to do with me. He pays for her music lessons, and Janey, my own sister, shines me on like I’m a piece of shit!” His voice had risen to a shout. He was sweating in the air-conditioned room and had clamped his hands around his thighs until his knuckles were white.
“What do you want me to do? Is your sister over eighteen?”
“Yeah, she’s twenty-eight. I wasn’t thinking about hanging no morals rap on him, I just know he’s not right somehow! Somewhere, somehow, he’s using my sister for something. She won’t believe me, she won’t even talk to me! You could follow her, couldn’t you? Follow him, tail him around town, check out what he’s into? He’s fucking her around somehow, and I want to know what’s happening.”
I decided not to pass it up. I could work it in on my offtime from the repo’s. I liked the idea of a surveillance job. It sounded like an interesting change of pace.
“Okay, Fat Dog, I’ll do it. I’ll tail your sister and this nameless bad guy. We’ll give it a week. I’ll dig up all I can. But first, I need some more information.” I got out a pen and a notebook. “Your sister’s name is Jane Baker and she’s twenty-eight years old, right?”
“Right.”
“Have you got a photograph of her?” Fat Dog got out an old hand-tooled wallet and handed me a snapshot. Jane Baker was a good-looking woman. There was humor in her mouth and intelligence in her eyes. She looked like the antithesis of her fat brother. When I put the photo in my desk drawer, Fat Dog looked at me suspiciously, like he had just handed me an ikon and was afraid I would break it. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll take good care of the picture and get it back to you.”
“You do that. It’s the only one I got.”
“Now tell me about this guy. Anything and everything you know.”
“His name’s Sol Kupferman. He owns Solly K’s Furriers. His address is 8914 Elevado. That’s in Beverly Hills up north of Sunset, near the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“Describe him.”
“He’s about sixty-five, skinny, curly gray hair. Big nose. A typical Hebe.”
I wrote down the information, such as it was. “What can you tell me about Kupferman? I take it your plan is to confront your sister with whatever dirt I can dig up on him.”
“You got the picture. That’s my plan. I heard lots of things about Solly K. All bad, but all rumors. Caddy yard stuff, you got to consider the source. It’s feelings I got about him. Like intuition, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah. How did your sister meet Kupferman?”
“I was loopin’ Hillcrest, maybe ten, twelve years ago. That’s right down the street where all the Hebes play golf. She used to visit me in the caddy shack; sometimes she worked the lunch-counter there. But I didn’t like her to. Loopers got dirty mouths. Anyway, that’s where she met Solly K. He’s a member there. He met her out on the golf course. She used to take walks out there. He got her interested in music, got her to start taking lessons. She’s been living with him ever since. She says he’s her best friend and her benefactor. She hates me now. That Jew bastard made her hate me!”
Fat Dog was close to losing control, close to tears or some sort of outburst. His anti-Semitism was repulsive, but I wanted to know more about him. Somehow his insane rage grabbed and held me.
I tried to calm him down. “I’ll give this my best shot, Fat Dog. I’m going to stick close to both of them and find out everything I can on Kupferman. You hang loose and don’t worry.”
“Okay. You want some bread now?”
The iconoclast in me trusted there was some kind of logic in his lunacy. “No, if you’re holding as heavy as you say you are,
I’ve got nothing to worry about. I’m going to give this thing a week or so. You can pay me then.”
Fat Dog whipped out the fat old Mexican wallet again, and this time pulled out his roll. He fanned it in front of me. There must have been sixty or seventy C-notes. I wasn’t surprised. A lifetime in Los Angeles had taught me never to take anything at face value, except money. Fat Dog wanted me to be impressed. I hated to disappoint him, so I tossed him a bone. After all, he was tossing me a big one. “Woo! Woo!” I said. “I’m ditching this racket and becoming a caddy! Get me a hot-looking mama with a nice swing who likes to fuck. I’ll give her the old nine-iron on the course and off. Woo! Woo!” Fat Dog was laughing like a hyena, threatening to fall off his chair. I had delivered. I hoped he didn’t want more. Acting like a buffoon tires me quickly.
After a minute or so, he regained his composure and got serious again. “I know you’ll do me good, man. The Fat Dog can judge people, and you’re okay.”
“Thanks. What’s your phone number and address? I’ll be needing to get in touch with you.”
“I move around a lot, and in the summertime I sleep outside. I’m hard to find. L.A.’s full of fucking psychos, and you never know if one of ’em has your number. You can leave messages for me at the Tap and Cap—that’s a beer bar at Santa Monica and Sawtelle. I’ll get them.”
“Okay, one last thing. You said your sister is a musician. What instrument does she play?”
“One of those big wooden things that stand up on a pole.” The cello. That was interesting. As Fat Dog waved and walked out my office door, I found myself wondering if she could be any good.
I called an old friend who worked L.A.P.D. Records and Information and gave him three names, descriptions, and approximate years of birth: Solomon “Solly K” Kupferman, Frederick “Fat Dog” Baker, and Jane Baker. I told him I would call later for whatever info he had dredged up.
I got my Cutlass demo out of the lot. It looked prosperous enough for surveillance in Beverly Hills. I drove east on Pico and turned left on Beverly Drive, traveling up through the heart of the Beverly Hills business district, passing by shops catering to every taste in fashion, trinketry, and affluent boredom. North of Santa Monica the ritzy business facades gave way to ritzy personal ones: large, beautifully-tended lawns fronting Tudor mansions, Spanish villas, and pseudo-modern chateaus. When I crossed Sunset, the homes became larger still. This was the “pheasant under glass” district.
Sol Kupferman’s house was two blocks north of Sunset, off of Coldwater. It was some pad: a Moorish estate, immaculate white with twin turrets flying the California Bear flag. The house was set back at least forty yards from the street. A family of stone bears foraged on the broad front lawn, and there were two Cadillacs parked in the circular driveway: a one-year-old Eldorado convertible and a four- or five-year-old Coupe de Ville.
I parked directly across the street and decided to wait only one hour, not wanting to risk a confrontation with the ubiquitous Beverly Hills fuzz. I got out my binoculars and checked the license numbers on the two Cadillacs. The Eldorado bore a personalized plate: SOL K. The Coupe de Ville had one, too: CELLO-1. So, far, my case was working out. I switched on the radio just in time to catch Luncheon At The Music Center on KFAC. Thomas Cassidy was interviewing some French bimbo on the state of current French opera. The guy had lousy manners. You could hear him dropping his fork.
I turned off the radio and reached again for my binoculars. I was training them on Kupferman’s front door when it opened and a man in a business suit came down the steps carrying a briefcase. I had seen him before, I knew that immediately, but it took a few seconds for my formidable memory to supply the time and place: the Club Utopia, late 1968, just before the place burned itself into immortality. The man—who fit Fat Dog’s description of Kupferman perfectly—got into the Eldorado and backed out of the driveway and onto the street, passing me in the opposite direction.
I pulled into his driveway, and backed out to follow him. I caught him at the corner just before he turned right on Coldwater. I let a car get between us as Coldwater turned into Beverly Drive, and we headed south into Beverly Hills. It was a short trip. He turned right on Little Santa Monica and parked on the street half-a-block down. I drove on. He had parked in front of Solly K’s Furriers. From my rearview mirror I could see him enter the building. He had to be Kupferman.
In December of 1968, the Club Utopia, a sleazy neighborhood cocktail lounge located on Normandie near Slauson, was fire-bombed. Six patrons of the bar fried to death. Surviving eyewitnesses described how three men who had been ejected from the bar earlier that evening had returned just before closing and tossed a Molotov cocktail into the crowded one-room lounge, turning it into an inferno. The three men were apprehended by L.A.P.D. detectives a few hours later. They admitted their culpability, but denied it was “their idea.” They claimed the existence of a “fourth man” who met them outside the bar after they were thrown out and who “instigated the whole thing.” No one believed them. The men, who worked as painters and possessed long criminal records, were tried and convicted of murder. They were among the last people to be executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
I remember the case well, although I had nothing to do with it. At the time I was a twenty-two-year-old rookie working Wilshire Patrol. To unwind after work, I would go with patrolmen friends to bars to booze and trade war stories. One night after Thanksgiving ’68 I was riding around with another rookie named Milner. Somehow, we ended up at the soon-to-be-famous Club Utopia. We were sitting at the bar, and the man sitting next to me got up suddenly and spilled whiskey all over my expensive, newly-purchased white cashmere sweater. He was a thin, Semitic-looking man in his fifties, and he apologized effusively, even offering to buy me a new sweater. I good-naturedly shrugged it off, although I was pissed. The man left after several more apologies.
I have something close to total recall. I never forget a face. It had been over a decade, but I was certain: the man at the bar that night was Sol Kupferman. He had barely aged. A strange coincidence that probably meant nothing. If I ever got to speak to Solly K, I would ask him “What were you doing in a crummy bar on the south side in the fall of ’68?” And he would very rightfully look at me like I was insane and say, “I don’t know” or “Was I?” or “I don’t remember.”
I considered my options. I could wait around and tail Kupferman after he left his office, or I could take off and resume my surveillance the next day. I decided to head toward the old neighborhood to see my friend Walter.
Western Avenue between Beverly and Wilshire and the blocks surrounding it constitute the old neighborhood. Situated two miles west of downtown L.A. and a mile south of Hollywood, there is nothing exceptional about it. The prosaic thrust of the ordinary lives lived there produced nothing during my formative years but an inordinate amount of male children, a good portion of whom assumed roles emblematic of the tortured 60’s: Vietnam veteran, drug addict, college activist, burned-out corpse. The neighborhood has changed slightly, topographically: Ralph’s Market is now a Korean church, old gas stations and parking lots have been replaced by ugly pocket shopping centers. The human core of the neighborhood, the people who were in early middle-age when I was a child, are elderly now, with resentments and fears borne out of twenty years of incomprehensible history.
And that makes the difference. The library on Council and St. Andrews still has the same librarian, and the bars on Western still supply Wilshire Station with an extraordinary amount of drunk drivers. But it’s different now; it’s a middle-American graveyard inhabited by the malaise of my past, and I feel chills of doom whenever I drive through it, which I do frequently.
I got out shortly after my parents died, as did most of the guys I grew up with. But my friend Walter is still there, ensconced at the old house on 5th and Serrano, with his lunatic Christian Scientist mother, his TV set, his science-fiction books, his records, and his Thunderbird wine. He is thirty-two years old, and we have been f
riends for twenty-five. He is the one person in my life I have loved unequivocally. I do not judge his inertia, his self-destructiveness, his complex relationship with his mother, or his incipient psychoses. I accept his oblique love, his self-hatred, and anger. Our relationship is twenty-five years of shared experience: together and in our separate solitudes; books, music, films, women, my work, and his fantasy. Here Walter has the upper hand: he is far more intelligent than I, and in the fifteen years since high school his sedentary lifestyle has afforded him time to read thousands of books, from the profound to the trivial, to assimilate great music into the bedrock of his consciousness, and to see every movie ever to pass the way of the TV screen.
This is an extraordinary frame of reference for an agile mind, and Walter has taken fantasy into the dimension of genius. His is pure verbal fantasy: Walter has never written, filmed, or composed anything. Nonetheless, in his perpetual T-Bird haze he can transform his wino fantasies into insights and parables that touch at the quick of life. On his good days, that is. On his bad ones, he can sound like a high school kid wired up on bad speed. I hoped he was on today, for I was exhilarated myself, and felt the need of his stimulus: the power of a Walter epigram can clarify the most puzzling day.
I stopped at the Mayfair Market to pick up three chilled short dogs. Walter works best when inspired by the right amount of T-Bird. Too little invites peevishness, too much, incoherent rambling. T-Bird is Walter’s drink of choice because it is cheap and easily obtained by threatening his mother, ripping off her purse, or mowing the lawn for a few bucks.
I went around to the back yard, where Walter’s room jutted out from the house proper onto the dead brown grass. Walter is a lousy gardener. I could hear the TV going inside. I rapped on his window. “Yo, wino Walt,” I said. “I’m here. I brought gifts. Come on out.” I walked back into the yard, pulled up a lawn-chair, popped a can of ginger ale for myself, and arranged the three short dogs symmetrically on the old metal table beside me.