Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade (33 page)

I was grinning when Denis pulled
to the curb and honked. I got in and we pulled away, east on Sunset toward
Hollywood.

"You bring me a
piece?" I asked.

He pointed toward the glove
compartment. "In there."

"Could they trace it?"

"Not to us. Did you know
Richard Eck?"

"I met him." Richard
Eck had been killed running from a burglary a couple of years earlier.

"I bought it from him. I
think he got it out of a prowl."

The glove compartment divulged a
small automatic with
Walther
along its barrel. About firearms I knew very little.
This looked light enough to carry without disheveling my clothes, but it was
small and an automatic, so I had questions.

"Are you sure it's got
enough punch?" I asked.

"Oh yeah. It's what German
officers carried in World War II. They're expensive."

"I saw somebody shot with a
little .25 Beretta and it didn't even slow him down. He beat the shit out of
the guy that shot him." Actually I hadn't seen the futile shooting; it was
a tale related to me in a Big Yard bullshit session.

"No, no, it'll stop
'em."

It fit in my jacket pocket.
Good. Nevertheless I would have preferred a .38 or .44 caliber revolver.
Automatics were better weapons if one was firing many shots. Simply drop out
the magazine and ram another in. It took a couple of seconds. A revolver, on
the other hand, had to be reloaded by putting individual bullets in the
cylinder. An automatic held eight to a dozen bullets, a revolver five or six. I
still preferred the revolver because it was far more dependable. Leave a loaded
automatic in a drawer for a couple of years and the springs might weaken and
fail to shove a new cartridge into the firing chamber. They tended to jam. I'd
been target-shooting with a 7.6 Beretta and it happened on the second shot. I'd
never heard of a revolver jamming.

I remained silent about the
pistol preference, grateful for anything at the moment. A few days later I
bought a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson and left the German automatic at
Flip's apartment. When I confronted her with having warned them, she admitted
it and said, "They'd have somebody cut my face up. You're nuts, man. That
shit you're talkin' is something out of the movies." It was obvious from
her speech patterns that she had spent some time with black men, although her
last pimp — and the several who controlled the call girls of the time and place
- happened to be white.

I suppose they thought I would
shit in my britches and hide because they had imported some supposedly
mob-connected muscle from Vegas. It was they who got their ideas from movies.
Instead of hiding, I went hunting. Although I could have used the thousand
phone numbers in the book to destroy their business, it would have been a
Pyrrhic victory. By hassling the tricks and their wives, I would pull it all
down — but then they would have no way to pay me for protection against
extortion and so forth.

I didn't know where they lived,
but I did know a trick pad, an apartment on Sweetzer below Sunset used by one
pimp's "second store," his number two girl. I knew the routine, too.
Call girls, unlike streetwalkers, do most of their business during daytime
business hours. Their johns, men able to afford high-priced call girls, were
not chained to a desk or a schedule. Nobody raised an eyebrow if they were gone
for a couple hours in the afternoon. It was more difficult to get away from a
wife at night or on the weekend. Most of the time the call girl finished work
by early evening. That was when the pimp came to get
his
money. All she made belonged to
him was the cardinal principle of the relationship between whore and pimp.
During the day while she sold herself, he played pool and flashed his Hickey
Freeman suits and pinky diamond ring. After another hard day, he picked up his
women and took them to dinner at some of the city's best restaurants where they
looked like anything but whores and pimps.

It was at this dinner hour that
I jimmied open the apartment's kitchen door and went inside to wait. I used a
tiny pen light to navigate into the living room where I sat down to wait for
then return, giggling as I envisioned his face when he turned on the lights and
saw me seated on his living room sofa.

Tick tock turned the clock. They
seemed gone for a long, long time. I finally found a closet and opened the
door. The tiny flashlight revealed empty space; no clothes. Hmmm.

I swept the pen light around the
room and couldn't be sure of what I saw. I flipped the switch beside the door.
Sure enough. It was an empty furnished apartment. They had baled out and I had
to assume it was because the pimp had anticipated me.

For the next few days I spent
much of my time on the east side, in Lincoln Heights, East LA, Bell Gardens and
other, poorer districts where ex-cons were more likely to be found. I had one
ally that I trusted, and heard names of men I knew who were plenty tough, but
they were also too wild to control. They would want to rip everything off,
including the women, most of whom were far more beautiful than any of the
tattooed junkies that were these men's girlfriends. Denis and I discussed
burning down the nightclub and bashing in some jukeboxes, but by themselves
such things wouldn't accomplish my purpose. Flip had fouled my plan by telling
them before I was ready to move.

Out of nowhere the number one
pimp died in an automobile accident between Palm Springs and the Salton Sea. He
and his main store (number one girl) went over the middle line and hit a
Greyhound head on. Even though it was impossible for it to have been murder,
around the Hollywood underworld it was whispered that I had taken them out. All
of a sudden it was impossible for movie moguls and others to get a date with a
call girl in West Hollywood. The pimps had loaded their women into their
Cadillacs and left town. Sandy and Denis thought it was hilarious.

Around this time I had one of my
more bizarre experiences. After midnight during the week, my phone rang. I was
living in the apartment on 9
^th
and Detroit. Flip was on the other
end. She was drunk. "I have to see you, Eddie?"

"It's late, baby. I'll see
you in the morning." I hung up.

The phone rang within seconds. I
answered.

"If you don't come, I'll
kill myself."

"I'll be right there,
baby." She still had the pistol I'd left with her.

I drove to her apartment
building in the shadow of Paramount and parked on the narrow street in front of
it. When I rang the buzzer there was no response. Had she killed herself? I
doubted it, but still .. .

Walking around the building, in
the alley I spotted a hallway window open a few inches for ventilation. Beside
it was a heavy galvanized drainpipe, strong enough for me to climb up to the
window. Once inside, I moved on crepe-soled shoes along the hallway and up the
stairs to the third floor.

Nobody responded to my knock. I
didn't want to pound and wake up the buildings. I went downstairs and out the
front door, propping it open with a throwaway newspaper. From my car I took a
jimmy bar, went back inside and up the stairs to the third floor. At the end of
the hallway the window opened onto the fire escape, which extended over a few
feet to her kitchen window. A little tap followed by tinkling glass. I reached
in and unlatched the window. Through the arch I could see part of the living
room. It was flooded in green light, which she liked to use when entertaining.

I found Flip on the sofa in a
rumpled black teddy, passed out and snoring. I shook her and got one eye open.
"Where's my pistol?" I asked.

"Don' hurt Michael."

"Michael! I'm not gonna
hurt Michael."

"Don' hurt Michael."

Shit. Then I saw him, also
passed out, on the bottom landing of the stairs that led up to the bedroom and
bathroom. He was in his skivvies, one of those Italians with a mat of black
hair that covers his chest and, to a lesser extent, his shoulders. He was a
friend of Johnny Stompanato who had been killed by Lana Turner's daughter. He
worked as a bartender in a cocktail lounge, the Playboy, a block away on
Melrose. He wore a ducktail with a Tony Curtis curl falling down over his
forehead. He fancied himself a ladies' man
extraordinaire.
Flip had "pussy whipped"
him, which she could do if any woman ever could. He was in love with her and,
being an Italian stallion and stud, he hated it - that she was a whore and that
he loved her was hard for him to handle, especially when she played a mean game
of tormenting him. When the phone rang and Michael was there, she would stare
at him while telling the trick what she was going to do to him in bed. Michael
got drunk and slapped her around. He cried. She loved it, and afterward they
had great sex.

No matter how I protested, she
refused to believe I wasn't going to hurt Michael. After I shook her awake a
couple of times, I gave up that tactic and decided to find the pistol on my
own. How many places could she hide it in such a small apartment?

The first place I looked was
behind the cushions of the sofa where she lay. Reaching down between them, I
felt something and pulled it up. A butcher knife. What the hell was it doing
there?

I carried the butcher knife into
the kitchen and put it on the table. Then I began to search and in about twenty
minutes I found the pistol in a broiler pan inside the oven. I pocketed it and
went home.

I slept until about 11 a.m., and
then spent an hour or so taking a bath and getting dressed. Through the window
I saw the newspaper boy delivering the afternoon paper, Hearst's
Herald Express,
to my neighbor. As usual, I
opened the door and went out to get the newspaper. I always put it back when I
went out for the day sometime in the afternoon.

At this time Los Angeles was
hunting for one of its fairly common serial killers. They have had all kinds of
names such as "Night Stalker" and "Freeway Killers." This
time the killer was labelled the Hollywood Prowler. He had been invading the
apartments of single women around Hollywood and tin- Hollywood Hills, often by
cutting a window screen or some similar mode of entry. He had killed at least
one, as I recall.

I carried the newspaper back to
my apartment, poured myself a cup of hot coffee and opened it. The big headline
across the top read:
prowler's fingerprints found.
To
the right below the headline was a four-column picture of a
butcher knife. The ensuing article began: "Latest victim of the Hollywood
Prowler, actress/model Yvonne Renee Dillon ..." It was hard to read
because my hands shook. It did say that she was alive. Thank God for that.

Instantly I was at the window,
and within a minute I was going down the outdoor back stairs with shirt
unbuttoned and shoes in hand. My car was at the curb. I paused, hidden by
bushes, trying to see if the place was staked out. It seemed all right. I got
in and took off. Where should I go? I headed up Highland Avenue toward the
Hollywood Freeway. At a traffic light I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a
black and white police car pull up behind me. Either they didn't have the
license number or they weren't paying any attention. When the light turned
green I accelerated slowly, fighting the urge to stomp the gas pedal. That
surely would have gotten undue attention.

On reaching the freeway, I
decided to go east toward El Monte. I had friends out there. The Hollywood
Freeway became the San Bernardino. I turned on the radio. The lead story of the
spot news was about the prowler's fingerprints being found at his latest crime.
It also mentioned that the police wanted to talk to an ex-con. Imagine the
sinking feeling in my gut. At least my name wasn't mentioned.

On Valley Boulevard near Five
Points, I checked into a $1.50 a night motel,
sans
telephone or air conditioning;
then walked the half-mile to where Jimmy D. lived with his wife, child and
in-laws, including the wife's sister and her two children. Her husband was in
San Quentin. Jimmy wasn't there. His wife wasn't sure where he was; she
suspected he had gone to the barrio with Japo, the nickname of a Chicano with
vaguely Asian features. I'd known Japo since juvenile hall. I didn't tell
Jimmy's wife of my situation; fear of her husband getting into trouble might
cause her to call the police. "I'll call him," I said; then began my
trudge through the afternoon summer heat back toward the motel. As my feet
kicked up puffs of powdered dirt with each step, I alternately felt sorry for
myself and laughed aloud at the absurdity of the whole thing. The
more I thought about it, the
more unlikely it seemed that I would be charged as a serial killer or rapist. I
even remember thinking that someday I would write about these particular
happenings. Proust they were not, but entertaining they had to be.