NORTH NORTH HOLLYWOOD - Chapter 27 -by Peter Nolan Smith

TWENTY-SEVEN

Most motorists on the Ventura Freeway drove the same route several hundred times a year and swore they could manage the way home or to the office blind, which was exactly what they were doing this evening, as the rain bucketed down from the tangled storm clouds above the Valley
Even with the Cadillac's windshield wipers volleying back and forth at full speed, Louie Sinreich could barely make out the taillights ahead of him, partially since his attention was absorbed by how miserable his day had been. First, Jimmo had called in sick with the flu, next, his secretary's car had been washed down the Topanga Canyon followed by his double-mocha cappuccino from the Thai donut shop ending up being an expresso, and it didn't stop there. Due to a roof leak at a ranch house in Van Nuys, the BIG ONE III shoot had to be relocated to a studio. The prima donna actresses had complained about how cold the studio was and the intellectual director had told Louie that 'money shots' were phony. He had instructed the director just keep shooting, but then an electrical failure in the studio had forced him to cancel the shoot and send everyone home. To top it off HUSTLER had given his two latest releases JACK-OFF II and CREAM SCENE III 'limp dick' ratings.
"Shit." Louie swore and veered across two lanes to catch the Balboa St. exit, miraculously missing a van. Stopping at the light, he glanced over to the car next to him. It was packed with Chinese men and he recollected reading about how in China there were a hundred million extra males than women. Louie calculated the returns for breaking that market, until his mobile buzzed. Louie put the caller on the speakerphone and asked, "Who is it?"
"Nothing like driving in the rain to put you in good spirits, huh, Louie?” Carl James, the owner of Angel Talent Ltd. commented. "So what's up?"
Louie got right to it and said, "I need Lena de Gama."
"Unless it's a girl-girl or multi-girl flick, you are wasting your time and mine.” Carl James had fielded this request from almost every producer in the business and every one of them had been shot down by the young actress.
"I'm talking much more than the going rate"
"How much more?"
"Say $20,000 and it isn't for a film."
"You really do need her.” Carl James figured Louie would go higher and translated his fee into a suede suit from Gucci. "No promises, but give me a few days and I'll get back to you."
If anyone could get Lena de Gama for him, it would be Carl James, for the agent was greasier than cheap pizza and Louie stepped on the gas to run a yellow light on Ventura. The Cadillac barreled through the downhill waves sloshing over the pavement. Several teenage knee-boarders surfed the swift, moving stream, proving there was a silver lining behind every cloud no matter how much rain it dumped.
Louie parked the Cadillac under the carport, glad to be home, until remembering his guest in the basement. Deciding Driscoll's fix could wait, he slipped into a silk robe and sat at the computer to go over the sales figures from TENDER BEEF CAKE II, the most recent gay release.
Having cost $25,192 to get the film into a box, it had earned six times that from rentals and purchases along with the soft-core versions' sales abroad. The Feds would have loved to bust him from transporting obscene material overseas, except Louie had learned long ago that you only break one law at a time.
Louie crunched more numbers into the computer. Pluses, minuses, assets, debts, taxes paid and owed, loans given and taken. All of these figures were above the table, for while skimming what you owed the IRS was a great temptation in this business, the Feds considered no crime greater than evading your taxes and punished any offenders, especially if they were pornographers, accordingly.
Louie's fingers lifted off the keyboard and down-powered the computer, reflecting on Isaac Conti. While he had not been troubled the smallest pang of guilt about the murder, he was increasingly worried about the old man's complete disappearance. Driscoll's having produced the wallet didn't prove a thing at this point and neither did his saying that he had had seen the old man get whacked. Something was really off and he couldn't put his finger on what.
Louie almost did another line of crystal meth, but decided to take it easy and get some sleep tonight. He went to the kitchen and stuck a frozen lasagna dinner into the microwave. Five minutes later he put the heated tray on the table and pushed around the instant food, while watching the evening news. According to the meteorologist, there was no end in sight to the rain. Louie only had to look out the window to arrive at the same prediction.
A sudden soaking swarmed over the house with a howl threatening to rip off the roof. Having no appetite, Louie tossed his dinner in the trash. On his way to the master bedroom, the doorbell rang. Friends and neighbors in LA do not call at this hour, so Louie went to the door with his 9mm in hand.
Peeking through the spy hole, he recognized the large man's face under a dripping fedora. Frank deRocco had finally come for his partner and the money he owed them. Louie could only hope that was all he wanted.
"Just a minute,” Louie yelled through the door and went to his office to get the $25,000, for nothing cures the maddog killer faster than the sight of cash.
Louie opened the door and the NYPD detective entered, dripping on the carpet.
"I'm glad to see you, Frank.” Louie poked his head outside. No one was in sight and he shut the door.
"You are?" deRocco draped his soaked coat over a chair and went into the kitchen, as if he had already been inside the house. Louie told himself that it was just a paranoid thought, for if the detective had broken into the house, he would have freed his partner.
"Of course, like aren't I always.” Louie noted the rumpled suit and unshaven face. "You have a good ride cross country,
"Yeah, fabulous and you get time to think about things."
"Yeah, it's a big country." Louie didn't like the sound of that and said, "I have your money and your friend is ready to go home."
"He had his fill of LA, huh?" The detective searched the cabinets, until he found a bottle of whiskey and a glass. "He any trouble?"
"Not since the first day. Of course I've had to keep him under with drugs.” Louie watched the cop pour whiskey into the glass. His leaving fingerprints signaled that he had not come to bury Louie, only wrap up unfinished business.
"He must have loved that." deRocco drained the glass in one go. "So you said you had the money."
"Yeah, I got it.” Louie place the stack of $100 bills on the table only to find himself facing the muzzle of a .45.
"Take that piece out of your other pocket. By the barrel. Be careful, cause this ain't no game.” Having vainly spent the last day in Vegas searching for any trace of Tempo or the old man had done nothing to improve deRocco's disposition, for there hadn't been a single mention of a murder in the Vegas papers and that omission was not good news. Something had fucked up big time and someone would have to pay for that mistake. In this case at least two people and he was looking at one of them.
"Like no problem.” Louie placed the pistol on the table next to the money. "The gun's your partner's. You can count the money, if you like. It's all there."
"It better be." deRocco stashed the gun and the money in his jacket pockets, which a Chinese tailor had sized for such occasions.
Guns had been pointed at Louie before, but no one had pulled the trigger yet and he could tell Frank deRocco wouldn't either as long as he could he divert the cop from whatever he had initial intentions. "Listen, I have another job for you. To find a man."
deRocco had come here to make a clean sweep, except the long ride had sapped his urge for murder, if only for tonight, so instead of pulling the trigger, he asked, "Who?"
"C'mon, I'll show you,” Louie said, relieved his ploy had worked, if only momentarily.
"No funny stuff." deRocco trailed Louie into his office.
"Me, funny? Never.” The producer turned on the TV and rewound the videotape to the image of the blonde man. He might not hold the key to where Che had disappeared with his video masters, but he had not gotten this far up the feeding chain in this business by letting people biting him in the ass without his biting back. "I want you to find this man."
deRocco's eyes, hidden from Louie, widened upon recognizing the blonde man's battered face, but he asked without any emotion, "Who is he and when was this taken?"
"More than a week ago. I don't know who he is. All I want is for you to find him and bring him to me. There's five thou in it for you."
"Just for findin' him?" deRocco was positive the producer was clueless that the man on the videotape was the shooter in Las Vegas
"That and maybe ask him a few questions.” Louie punched a button and the man's face was floated from a laser printer.
"You got any leads?" deRocco couldn't believe his luck and decided to put off getting rid of the producer, until he had Tempo.
"Just one." Louie had a good hunch and handed the cop another photo with an address on it. "He might be with this actress, Lena de Gama. She lives on Sepulveda Boulevard. Here's the address."
deRocco had seen the actress in a magazine circulating around the precinct. Everyone had raved about her, but she seemed like just another spic whore to him, though his mind boggled just thinking about the odds of Tempo ending up with her. "You want me to get the girl?"
"No, just him."
"What, if he's a no-show?"
"Like then you get half of five thou.” Louie could sense the cop wavering between what he should do with him and that throwing the money into the equation shifted the balance between life and death. "That's fair, right?"
"Yeah, sure." deRocco took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, thinking the producer had bought himself a week.
"What about your friend?"
"Kev needs a break. I'll send him back to New York." deRocco inhaled, the smoke futilely searching someplace tender to attack in his lungs.
"Not a bad idea. I'd hate to have him show up here crazy again."
"Kev's gonna do what I tell him. Always has, so just answer your phone from now on or else I'll send back Kev."
"I'll answer the phone,” Louie promised, leading the detective to the basement door.
Five minutes after Louis Sinreich and deRocco had carried the semi-comatose Kev out of the ranch house, the detective was southbound on Interstate 405 over the Santa Monica Mountains in a pelting rain. He concentrated on the traffic, but every so often he would look over his shoulder at his passenger in the rental car's rear seat.
The two of them had been through a lot, both on and off the force; arrests, shootings, bribes, strong-arming criminals, trials, drinking binges, vacations, and near or about seventeen killings, maybe five of them being legit. They had been to Internal Affairs more than any other officers on the NYPD and stuck to the same story every time, saving each other's skins and pensions.
They had been a great team, but there was no sense in getting sentimental about Kev, for while deRocco could easily have forgiven his partner for blowing it with Tempo and screwing up the pay-off from Louie Sinreich, his detective's intuition told him that Kev had been angling to be caught, just like that squealing cop in PRINCE OF THE CITY and given the chance his partner would sing to Internal Affairs like a Catholic Schoolboy at his first confession, not omitting a single sin, taking deRocco down with him and he had never heard about any cops doing easy time in jail.
There was only one solution.
Kev had to go.
"Where we goin’?” Kev struggled unsuccessfully to lift his head from the seat.
"Going to a classy whore hotel for the night," deRocco said, as they exited from the 405 onto the Santa Monica Boulevard, the wet road shining orange underneath the anti-crime streetlights.
"How'd you get here?"
"I drove.” If there was any consolation for Kev, it was that he wouldn't be going alone, though wasting the porno producer would be a pleasure, instead his being torn apart by what he had planned for his friend.
"What you do to that scumbag, Sinreich?"
"I offed him," deRocco lied, though it wouldn't be soon.
"Yeah, the bastard knew too much," Kev mumbled, then asked, "You get the money?"
"You know I did."
"What about Tempo?"
"What's my name?"
"Frank deRocco. NYPD." Kev half-sang before crashing underneath the heroin haze for the ride to the cheap motel in the Hollywood gay ghetto. After parking around the corner from the motel's office, he punched Kev in the shoulder.
"What now?" Kev's eyes were too glazed to discern their whereabouts.
"We're at the Happy Camper Motel. You go to the office and get us a room far from the street. Tell 'em only one person, that way we don't hafta pay double." deRocco handed Kev $50 and his partner stumbled through the rain past two transvestites under the motel walkway. The drag queens ignored the ex-cop, pegging him for a junkie, and he was too high to care what they thought. When Kev returned to the car, he said, "Did just like you told me."
"Good boy." deRocco parked with the car's rear end flush against the wall, then shut off the Taurus' engine and hauled Kev through the rain to Room 122.
It was a hovel. Its guests were the homeless, junkies, whores, and other deviants from the norm. If the uneven walls of this room could speak, they would have an endless selection of ugly stories to tell and probably wouldn't give what was coming next more than fifty words.
He dumped Kev on the bed and his partner immediately stuck out his arm like an East Village junkie dying for a fix. "You get anythin' for me. I'm really hurtin' real bad."
Louie Sinreich had given him several packets of brown Mexican smack and a shooting kit, saying they might come in handy. He was right and deRocco put the syringe, cotton balls, and match on the table along with a glass of water and watched, as his old partner wiped his runny nose with the back of his hand.
"Thank God." Kev took the implements of self-destruction in his hands. He bent the spoon, mixed the entire package of heroin with water, and heated the concoction with a match.
"Go easy on that shit." His partner had been telling the truth. He was in a bad way.
"Easy, yeah, I can go easy." Kev was too deep in his heroin ritual to worry about how strong this dope might be, plus the hardnose viewed himself as indestructible. "One little taste, then a good night's sleep and tomorrow all we gotta do is get on a plane and sit on a beach drinkin' goddamned Pina Coladas."
"Sounds like the dream." deRocco backed away into the moldy bathroom, where he put on a plastic glove and screwed a silencer on his .45.
The detective tried to psyche himself up for sticking the gun in Kev's ear. One shot to fake a suicide. In Kev's condition, he wouldn't even feel the bullet's impact, but deRocco had to ask himself, "Am I really going through with this?"
The answer was no.
The Beatles might break up, but Kev and he had been through too much. There was another way around this. Calling in his resignation to NYPD, he would still get most of his pension. They might ask questions, but the brass and IAU would be more than happy to close the book on both of them. If they went south of the border and Kev kept his mouth shut, his partner could live, though they would still have to take care of Sinreich and Tempo
Relieved deRocco unscrewed the silencer and stuck the .45 back in his pocket. He wouldn't tell Kev how close he had come to being wasted, until one day when they had told the same war stories too many times. Then he could say, "You remember that time in LA?" They would have a good chuckle, though deRocco would laugh harder.
He re-entered the bedroom smiling, but stopped short, for Kev was sprawled on the floor, the needle still in his arm. All the packets were empty and deRocco checked his pulse. Nothing. Nothing at all. He stood up and kicked the body. "You stupid asshole. I was gonna to work out all the shit and you had to go and do this. Why, motherfucker, why?"
The answer was too obvious.
His partner was no stranger to the rules of the game they played. He had seen the handwriting on the wall and chosen his own way out. deRocco swept through the room and wiped off any surface he might have touched. After saying a quick prayer for the dead, he left the room, shutting the door with his foot. No one was in the parking lot, as he ran to the car. Hand on the door he paused before getting into the Taurus, the guilt of leaving his best friend back in that room crawling under his skin like cocaine spiders.
Strangers would discover him and call the police. He might even end up in the John Doe section of the morgue. Of course the priest at his funeral would eulogize him as an altar boy gone astray. Kev would not have had it any other way.
There was little else deRocco could do for a dead man than have someone join him and it was only a question of time before he caught up with Tempo. If not here, then somewhere else. If not tomorrow, then some time later and deRocco drove into the stormy night, his mindset one two things and only one of them was sleep.