Black Cat Weekly #47

Chapter 5

byA bell tolled for me above the creaking door as I entered Doctor Johnson’s office. The receptionist looked up, smiled, looked down. The only other patient was an old lady in a checked babushka delivering a speech to herself. The topic was hemorrhoids.

“I have an appointment for 9:00 a.m.,” I told the receptionist.

She stuck a pen in her mouth. Her thick, pink tongue swirled lightly around the nib of the pen, then flicked back and forth across the top. She was going to be swallowing ink if she wasn’t careful. “You don’t look sick,” she said with a baking-soda smile.

I leaned on the countertop. “I’m not so much sick as frustrated,” I began, lobbing one back into her court. “You see, I bottle everything up inside, my emotions, my passions, until I’m ready to explode.” I handed her a look of despair, which she readily accepted.

“Oh,” she murmured.

A white-bearded man in a lab coat strode out of the back and interrupted our play.

“Mr. Sydney,” he informed me.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Follow me.”

We adjourned to an examination room at the end of a narrow corridor. A skeleton hung from the ceiling in one corner and medical charts covered the walls. The charts were so old that some of them still showed man with a tail.

Doctor Johnson was a tall, thin, determined-looking drink of water, with a neatly trimmed white beard and a pair of gold, wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like a man whose opinion you could trust, provided that there had been no medical advances in the last twenty years. He gestured at the examination table with a bony arm and I climbed aboard.

He looked me square in the eye and asked: “What’s the trouble?”

“Back trouble, Doc. I was doing some gardening on the weekend and it went out—I felt a twinge and it was gone. I’ve had it before. Normally I just get some muscle relaxants and that helps.”

“Hmm.”

Johnson proceeded to put me through a grueling ten-minute physical examination and exercise routine, the whole time peppering me with questions about the history of my back. I faked as much pain as I could, but I was getting the uneasy feeling that the doctor might just prescribe the truth. As I was re-buttoning my shirt, however, he finally came through and wrote out a prescription on a thick pad. He tore it off and handed it to me. Had I been an Egyptologist, I might have been able to read the hieroglyphics inscribed on it.

“That’s a prescription for a mild muscle relaxant. It should help,” he said briskly. “In the meantime, stay off your feet and get some rest. Best thing there is for a bad back.”

“Thanks, Doc,” I said.

“You can get that prescription filled at Cy’s Drugstore on McClellan,” he said.

“What about that big Ross Pharmacy on the corner? No good?”

“Cy’s been in the neighborhood for over twenty years. He’ll take care of you.” Doctor Johnson slapped me on the shoulder and pushed me out the door.

“That goddamn, petrified, cheating, son-of-a-b***h!” Ezra Ross screamed. He banged his desk with a tiny fist. The desk took it, used to the performance.

I had told him about my mornings’ findings. He took the bad news badly.

“That bum is s’posed to refer his patients to my pharmacy! I’m paying him five hundred a month and putting his goddamn grandson through medical school!”

Ross was dressed in a blue, pin-stripe, silk suit, and a flaming-red, silk tie. A giant purple puff hung out of his breast pocket, as soft and limp as a joyboy in a cathouse.

“The State Medical Association prohibits doctor affiliations with pharmacies, doesn’t it?” I asked.

He glared at me. “Yeah, so?”

“Nothing,” I said, smiling.

He relaxed. He smiled back. His teeth were as white as a lie.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “You done good. I wanted to know if Doc Johnson was chiseling me and you found out. Now I gotta have a talk with Johnson. Good work!”

He tossed me an envelope and I caught it. Four hundred dollars for two hours work—not bad. To meet Ezra Ross was to hate him, but he paid well.

He carefully placed his manicured fingertips together and brought them up to his petulantly pursed lips. “I got another job for you, Sydney.” He grinned, and I could almost see the chunks of decent people between his teeth.

“I’m listening,” I replied.

Mrs. Ross wasn’t hard to find. She was holding drunken court at the Hollywood Hills Hotel bar, like Mr. Ross had said. She wasn’t hard to get, either. It was dirty work, but it was work. I had done worse during the Vietnam War, although back then I had always felt like I was on the right side. Now there were no sides, only angles.

Ezra Ross had been a trained pharmacist until a personal pill problem had turned him into a small-time d**********r. Fate intervened, however, in the pungent form of some olive-skinned types from back East. They had needed some money laundered and had found Ezra with a bar of soap. With their money and muscle, and his background, he had set up a string of legitimate pharmacies where dirty money came clean. He became an asset on society’s ledger. He soon grew political aspirations, and that made him even more popular with the spaghetti-suckers. So when Ezra bought his way onto the City Council, the push was on for the Mayor’s chair. Unfortunately, his wife was rumored to be carrying on her own personal sack race with anything in pants—not the proper soulmate for the next Mayor of Dreamdom. He couldn’t just dump her like a truckload of movie extras, however; that wouldn’t go over well with the soap opera-spellbound electorate. He had to be the sympathetic victim of deceit, and for that you needed proof. Thus, my starring role in the whole sordid picture.

I took Barbara Ross back to the Boulevard Motel on the outskirts of town. The illicit love tract was a wiseguy-financed operation. Room 104 had a motivational view of an oil derrick pumping away in the distance, and a large mirror on the wall above the bed. Shorty Johns was in the room next door—handling a fat cigar and an infra-red camera that blinked every so often.

Barbara stumbled over the threshold and fell onto the bed. “What ever shall we find to do in a room like this?” she asked gaily.

She spoke with an English accent that was as phony as her breasts. I wondered what it was like living in a house of cards.

She swam off the bed and fell into my arms. She kissed me hard, breathing fire into my cold, flaccid body. “Let’s screw,” she said. Somewhere, a camera was clicking; clicking down to the end of the Ross marriage. Ezra had gone as far as he could with a horse named Barbara. It was a new race now, and it called for a new horse.

She stepped back and unzipped her low-cut, high-priced, black evening gown. It cascaded to the floor and puddled around her feet like an ebony tear drop. She was stark raving n***d except for her stilettos. She started tearing at the buttons on my shirt.

I heard the door quietly click open. Three large men and one small, perfumed man formed a line against the wall. None of them looked happy. Barbara saw them, and gasped.

“Ezra!” she screamed. She stood there in her birthday suit and the three goons ate up the free eye candy.

“I guess I’ll be going,” I said.

Barbara’s eyes flashed fire. The alcoholic mist had burned away. She slapped me hard on the cheek. “Bastard!” she hissed.

“Don’t blame Mr. Sydney, darling,” Ezra cracked, stepping out of the shadows where he belonged. “Blame yourself. Everyone will.” He smiled up at her, then smacked her across the face. He smacked her again. “You goddamn adultress!” he screamed, smacking her across the room, pinning her in a corner.

She took it stoically, probably used to it. “Maybe if you could satisfy me, I wouldn’t have to dredge the gutter for men like your friend here.” She pointed at me. Her English accent had disappeared along with my dignity. “Maybe if you weren’t butt-slamming every tight-assed Chicano—”

Ezra whacked her again. Sweat ran into the crevices of his sun-wasted face.

She just looked down at him.

“You’ve got your proof, Mr. Ross,” I said. “Why don’t you give the rough stuff a rest?” I grabbed his arm.

He stepped backwards in shock. He stared at the hand on his arm. His eyes were vacant. I let go of his arm. He was shaking like a little boy in the eye of a temper tantrum.

“No one cheats me and walks away free.” He looked at me. “Ask Doc Johnson—if you know sign language; you see both his eardrums are punctured. He could never listen to instructions too well.” He turned back to Barbara. “Poor Barbara,” he said. “One of her dirty lovers busted her up.”

Two of the goons stepped forward and grabbed my arms. I tried to break free but their grips were iron. Their faces were draped in the blank expressions I had seen on morgue attendants. I pegged one goon as Rocco Romano, a sometime bouncer at the Shark Club on Redondo. The other goon had a boulder for a head. The third guy was even bigger than the first two. He had a bodybuilder’s physique. He squeezed his huge hands into a pair of black, leather gloves and walked over to Barbara and Ezra.

I heard a car door slam outside and a motor roar to life. Shorty. He was a voyeur, not a fighter.

The big man with the black gloves gazed at Barbara’s body thoughtfully. He slowly turned his head and looked down at Ezra. “Now, Mr. Ross?” he asked politely. His voice was clinical.

“Now!” Ezra screamed.

The goon shot a right hand into Barbara’s kidney. His fist was a blur. She grunted and buckled. He straightened her up with a vicious uppercut. Her nose gushed blood. He slammed a left hook into her rib cage. Something popped. She folded over to that side. He bent at the knees and nailed her with a right to the groin. She vomited booze. He threw a hard jab into her right breast. Her body slammed against the wall with a thud. A picture of a green, peaceful mountain meadow fell off the wall and broke on the floor. She stared at me through wet, bloodshot eyes. She didn’t even have time to scream. He crushed her right eye with a left hook. A huge cut opened up on her eyebrow and a flap of skin hung down.

“Stop it!” I yelled.

Ezra didn’t even look at me. “Get rid of him!” he ordered. He stepped forward and licked some of the blood off his wife’s broken face, began to pull down his pants.

I was hustled out into the night. I was tossed in the trunk of my car and driven twenty miles down the road. I broke one goon’s nose and blackened the other’s eye when they pulled me out of the trunk. After that, I don’t remember a thing.

Two weeks in the hospital, and I still felt sick; inside. But there was nothing more that modern medicine could do for me. As I walked out the front entrance of the hospital I was met by a beautiful fall day—bright and crisp, with a brisk, cool wind that shoveled the smog up over the mountains. I stood on the sidewalk and tried to reconcile this world with the hellish world of Room 104 of the Boulevard Motel. I bought a newspaper at the corner box. The headline yelled at me: “Barbara Ross Killed In Auto Accident!”

I met Veronica May as she walked stiffly down the crumbling steps of St. George’s Anglican Church. I had forgotten they still had churches in LA. Her sister’s funeral had been private, with a closed casket.

“I want to talk to you about Barbara,” I said. I slipped my card into her moist hand.

“I want to talk to you, as well,” she said quietly, without stopping.

One of Ezra’s goons suddenly pulled up in a long, black limousine and jumped out. He ran around the side, opened the door, and gently pushed her in. Ezra Ross followed. He didn’t waste a look at me. The goon shut the door and roughly shoved me aside. It was Rocco. He sneered and I hit him square in the face with a left hook packed full of rage. His nose split down the middle and he flopped over backwards onto the trunk of the car. His limp body slid off the polished metal and into the gutter. His head cracked on the curb.

It’s a start, I thought, as I walked away.

Veronica May finally came to see me a week after the funeral. She was still dressed in black. She had the same long, dark hair of her sister, but her attitude was less sure, less jaded. She was quiet and nice and decent, and she lived in Wyoming with a husband and four kids. She had trouble breathing the air in LA.

“Barbara always told me that Ezra was capable of this,” she said. Her voice was soft and warm. She was seated in a chair in front of my desk.

I lit a cigarette and stared at her. “Capable of what?”

“Murder.” She threw it at me like a grenade.

I watched smoke waft out of the end of the coffin nail and find a home in the heavens. My stomach contracted like a fist as I played back the nightmarish scene at the Boulevard Motel. “You think that he killed your sister?”

“I know it!” she said emphatically. She blushed and looked down at her purse.

“How?”

“Barbara told me that he had found out about her, um, affairs. He had her beaten up.”

It was my turn to blush.

She clasped her writhing hands together and stared at me earnestly. “She told me all about it a day before her car went off the road and into the canyon.”

“The investigators didn’t find any evidence that the car had been tampered with. They concluded it was an accident.” I crushed out the cigarette; it stunk a little just before it died.

“He killed her. I’m sure of it.” She opened her purse and took out some money. “Will you prove it for me?” She fumbled three hundred dollars onto the desktop.

I gathered it up and gave it back to her. It wasn’t much, but it was clean. What the hell was I going to do with it? “I’ll look into it,” I replied.

She took the next jet headed east and I never saw her again. I had only seen Barbara once, too.

I poked and prodded around the blackened edges of the death of Barbara Ross, but I didn’t come up with anything usable or framable. She had smashed through a railing on a hairpin turn on the Angeles Crest Highway and crash-landed a hundred yards below on the rocky floor of a small canyon. She had earlier passed another motorist at high speed about a mile from the crash site. The night had been foggy and the road slick with rain. Visibility had been close to zero, especially when you’re wearing sunglasses to hide a pair of blackened eyes. The cops said that the car was clean and Barbara had been drinking. It was an accident.

If I was going to get Ezra Ross for literally driving his wife to her death, it would have to be outside of a court of law. But I knew that my conscience and I would never get along until the bastard had paid for the sins he had committed in Room 104 of the Boulevard Motel. I cursed the greed that had led me down the path to the Ross clan. Everything and everyone they touched was left soiled and cheapened. The only exception seemed to be Veronica—she kept her distance, and that kept her safe.

Jesse Ulmer was a part-time actor, part-time waiter, and part-time ball player—he played with the balls of the rich boys who preferred their s*x the ancient Grecian way. He was a piece of meat that sold for two hundred bucks a chewing. I gave Jesse his fee and sent him on an errand.

Shorty Johns and I eyeballed the sweaty, rear-guard action from behind the one-way glass of a mirror in Jesse’s boudoir. Jesse had crashed a fund-raising feed for Ezra Ross’s campaign, and the two had hit it off. Now, Jesse and Ezra were getting busy consummating their friendship. I chucked my guts all over Shorty, but, like a true pro, he never stopped clicking.

I anonymously sent the roll of film to some devout Catholics with swarthy complexions back east who made money the old-fashioned way—illegally. I included a note hinting that Ezra pillow-talked about business when he was getting his brownie points. A month later, I bought a newspaper that had some cheerful news for a change: “Ezra Ross Kills Himself!” I read the story and coughed up a good laugh. He was distraught over his wife’s recent death, his drugstore business was failing, he faced certain defeat in the Mayoralty run-off. It read like the boys back east wanted it to read and it was A-okay with me.

What I didn’t want to read was the letter I received from Veronica May two weeks after some bongo players had convinced Ezra he could fly. It read:

Dear Mr. Sydney,

I heard about Ezra’s death and I am relieved and grateful. Your fee is enclosed. I have to confess, however, that I lied to you. Barbara committed suicide. She phoned me, drunk, the night she died. She told me that she was sick of the life she was living. The beating was the final straw. She told me about your role in that beating. I had hoped that your guilt would force you to punish Ezra, and I guess I was right.

I’m sorry for deceiving you, but I think the cause was just.

Veronica

I burned the letter. I would have burned the money too, but it was all I had.

Laird Long pounds out fiction in all genres. Big guy, sense of humor. Writing credits include: Blue Murder Magazine, Hardboiled, Bullet, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Pulp Literature, and stories in the anthologies The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunits, The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries, and The Big Book of Bizarro. “Suicide Sleep” first appeared in the anthology Your Darkest Dreamspell, August 2009.

Blue Murder Magazine, Hardboiled, Bullet, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Pulp Literature,The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunits, The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries, The Big Book of Bizarro.Your Darkest Dreamspell