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  Platinum Blues

  William Deverell

  ECW Press

  BOOKS BY WILLIAM DEVERELL

  Fiction

  Needles

  High Crimes

  Mecca

  The Dance of Shiva

  Platinum Blues

  Mindfield

  Street Legal: The Betrayal

  Trial of Passion

  Slander

  Kill All the Lawyers

  The Laughing Falcon

  Non-Fiction

  A Life on Trial: The Case of Robert Frisbee

  “My code name is Sergeant Pepper. I’m with the organization.”

  “The organization?”

  “You know the one.”

  Uh, jes’ a minute, lemme think. Hey, man, I got it. The Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ringo sent you, right?”

  “I can’t release names. It’s top security. High places.”

  “Sounds like you is definitely at some high place right now. What you been mainlining, goofballs?

  “What’s your name?”

  “Code name’s Mr. Elliott Goodweather.”

  “Are you in the organization?”

  “Well, I’m not actual an organization man, just a purveyor of quality spice and herbs, mainly from the Orient. Unbeknownst to me, some rascal went an’ hid opium in the saffron and thus, I, innocent, face trial in an hour.”

  “Yes. So do I.”

  “What they do you for, sergeant?”

  “Murder one.”

  “Oh, hey, you mus’ be the dude that shot up that restaurant in Hollywood, I heard you was coming up for trial.”

  “I was acting under orders.”

  “I got it. The ol’ reliable insanity defense. Used it in front of the draft board myself once. All the brothers heading off to Nam to be kilt, I decided, I’m hearin’ God talkin’ to me, God Hisself, passing down instructions to earth through the agency of Elliott Goodweather.”

  “They’ll be coming for me.”

  “The organization?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ask them to pick me up on their way out, okay, Sarge? Else I get buried. This is my fifth and I’m looking at twenty.”

  Chapter 1

  Raquel asks, “Warm you up, Mr. Gulliver?”

  Oliver tries to think of something flip and teasing to say to her — words should fall trippingly from a lawyer’s tongue — but the best he can do is a crooked smile and a “Call me Oliver.”

  “How about sugar?”

  “No, just plain Oliver is fine.”

  She laughs. Her little tank-topped tits move to six inches from his nose. He sucks in the fragrances, a nosegay of tart armpit over coffee freshly dripped, as she leans across him to refill the chief of police.

  If he could find the strength to move his head a few inches, he’d see one of her nipples. Her hair is orange and butch. It doesn’t seem right for a waitress in the Paradise Café.

  The chief, Jesse Gonzles, says, “I gotta go, I got the travail of ten men to do.” But he lets her fill his cup.

  The head of Foolsgold’s one-man police force, Jesse had two guys with him in better times. He uses words like travail, which comes from being self-taught but widely read. Oliver likes him: behind the grumpy crust hides a two-hundred pound teddy bear, full of soft stuffing. He has a thin, wimpy moustache he’s been trying to bring to flower for two decades.

  “You look like you could stand a little sweetening,” Raquel tells the chief. She drops half a dozen paper sugar pads in front of him and gambols away, deserting the two men in their window booth. Raquel has just shown up here from San Francisco, likes the small-town life, she says. What’s this brassy young thing doing in pokey, hokey Foolsgold? She won’t last long. Kids never do here. Foolsgold is a decaying bush town on the California North Coast, and Oliver V. Gulliver happens to be its mayor. No honor.

  His daughter Elora is in San Francisco, where there’s AIDS and crime. She’s eighteen, almost Raquel’s age, yet he has been composing hot fantasies of making out with this new waitress. Whence comes this sudden impurity of mind?

  Another facet of his late mid-life crisis.

  Oliver is a worrier, it’s what he does best in life, he holds the Guinness record. Mainly it comes from being single parent to Elora and Lindy, who has reached fifteen, an age of formidable danger. When Madelaine died eight years ago, in awful cancerous agony, not yet forty, Oliver declined the aid of grandparents, of relatives, of friends, and with stoic unease shouldered alone the task of ushering the girls into womanhood.

  Oliver looks outside, into the brightness of the day, across the street and along the weathered redwood storefronts of Madrona Street. Faithless for six months, the sun has finally routed the clouds of spring, and this morning it kisses Foolsgold, population 1,420, down from over 2,500, now just a circle with a dot in it on the Exxon road map.

  But maybe this year will be a good year, 1988, a turnaround in lumber, they’re already talking about a rise in house starts.

  “Here comes a pain in the fundament,” Jesse says.

  Ernie Bolestero, The Competition, turning on his simulated smile as he enters the café. He joshes with Raquel at the counter.

  He’s Foolsgold’s other lawyer, five-six, a ferret, neatly double-breasted compared to Oliver in his baggy old suit. He came here from Orange County five years ago, just before the bottom dropped out of lumber, and now they had two lawyers in a town big enough to support one, this young schemer always undercutting Oliver, hustling his clients.

  “I love it,” he says, joining them, “that pious little pork chop walking in and there’s this guy getting gobbled on the screen.”

  Jesse Gonzales looks at him blankly. “Gobbled on the screen?” Oliver isn’t sure either.

  “You guys haven’t heard? It’s all over town.” Ernie leans forward, looking pleased with his news. “You know the preacher Sybil McGuid has gone dotty for?”

  “Reverend Blythe,” says Oliver. A fleecer of lambs from Ohio who has been operating from a hired hall down in Eureka.

  “He was up visiting Sybil last night, staying over, and he decided for some reason to take a stroll at one in the morning, saw all the cars parked around by the Opera House, and the lights on inside. He walked in as the heroine was taking it in the mouth in living color.”

  “Clarence,” says Oliver, with a slowly sinking heart.

  Clarence, Oliver’s late wife’s brother, the bad news bear of Foolsgold. Clarence Boggs, proprietor of Boggs Insurance Agency. Who also works evenings as projectionist at the Opera House.

  Ernie chuckles. “Way I get the story, for about the last ten nights Clarence has been running porno flicks after the bars close. I gather he laid in a stockpile of product from L.A. Last night’s main feature was called The Harder They Come.”

  Jesse Gonzales says with relish: “Let me get this straight. Pastor Wilfrid Blythe of the True Word Pentecostal Assembly walks into the Foolsgold Opera House last night as some guy is getting his joint consumed on the screen?” He pounds the table and guffaws, and Mrs. Chong pokes her head from the kitchen door.

  Oliver isn’t finding this funny, not at all.

  “Has Sybil found out?” he says. Sybil McGuid, who owns half of Foolsgold including the Opera House, provides most of the bread Oliver butters for his family.

  Conversation stops as Clarence Boggs himself enters the restaurant, avoiding everyone, sitting down at the counter. The Paradise Café is the only place in Foolsgold you can get a beer in the morning. Oliver should have expected him.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” says Oliver, getting up.

  “Better tell him to get rid of the evidence,” Jesse says.

  Oliver brings his coffee over and sits beside Clarence, a tall, disconnected oddity. It is hard to believe he came out of the same womb as Madelaine. He has large eyes and a small nose, irregular features scattered across a slack, lazy face, and is wearing his trademark blue suit and red bow tie.

  “Jesus, get me a beer,” he says to Raquel.

  “What kind?”

  “Any kind. After I finish it get me another. I’m trying to work up enough courage to hang myself.”

  “Beer and a rope, comin’ up,” she says.

  Clarence says in a dismal voice, “I just talked to her, tried to apologize. She’s gonna close down the Opera House, and she’s talking about taking her insurance business to some State Farm guy in Eureka.”

  Oliver steadies his coffee cup before bringing it to his lips. The rainy season had made him demented, co-signing that note for Clarence. A hundred and twenty thousand from the Savings and Loan to buy old Tomlinson’s insurance agency, a doomed ship with Clarence at the helm. Oliver hadn’t been able to say no to his deceased wife’s kid brother. He is quietly, icily furious.

  “I’m tits up if she pulls her accounts. The policies on the mill, the plywood plant — shit, half the town — out the window. No one else pays any insurance premiums here worth a wet fart. We’re dying. The cheap lumber from Canada is murdering us. You got to feel it in your practice, too.”

  The worst scenario is this: Clarence will fold his business and steal away like a desert Arab, saddling Oliver with a lifetime of debt.

  Raquel brings the beer and flits off to the cash to get Jesse and Ernie, who have seen the storm on Oliver’s fac
e and are leaving.

  Clarence rambles on, not daring to look at Oliver. “I been thinking, if I could get a new start somewhere without this millstone hanging around my neck, I could be back in Foolsgold in five or six years and pay off the bank in one fell sweep. Around L.A., that’s where you make the boola boola. Film industry.”

  Oliver has struggled for everything he’s got, three acres, three-bedroom house with a terrific view, 1985 Chrysler LeBaron, 1979 Toyota four-wheel pickup, Bel-Air Model 24 Camperhome, fishing cabin up the Foolsgold River. And three big mortgages.

  Clarence, at thirty-eight, has, on the other hand, already fulfilled early promise of being a glad-handing layabout. As a lawyer, Oliver wouldn’t have advised John Paul Getty to co-sign that note.

  “Let’s face it, God’s great but invisible plan doesn’t have me in there as an insurance agent.”

  Oliver finds his voice. It’s loud and ill-humored. “Look, you asshole, if you lose Sybil McGuid’s accounts and then stiff me with that loan, I’m going to find you in your sleep one night and I’m going to be armed with a baseball bat and I’m going to split open both your kneecaps.”

  By the end of this speech, Oliver is almost shouting. The silence is long and hard. Oliver listens to Mrs. Chong stifle a cough by the kitchen door. Another silence.

  “We’re gonna have to cut that guy’s coffee off,” says Raquel from somewhere.

  Clarence tries for a nervous smile to make it light, but Oliver’s cold eyes hold him like hooks, and the smile dies.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll work something out with her.”

  ***

  From his upstairs office in the Foolsgold Savings and Loan Building, Oliver allows his gaze to travel across Madrona Street, up the fronts of the Paradise Café and the post office, beyond to the spire of the Methodist church, then distantly to the redwood forests running to the seacliffs, fingers of fog speeding in from the ocean, a horizon lost in a gauze of mist.

  The truly beautiful thing to see is the Foolsgold River, which curls and falls down a valley to the sea. Back upstream twenty miles lurk fat rainbow trout. Yes, maybe this weekend. He sees one rising sideways from the water, furious and on the hook.

  “Oliver, if you wouldn’t mind coming back into this world for a few seconds, here are two foreclosures just came in from the Savings and Loan.” Mrs. Plymm, his secretary, has snuck in behind him. “Daydreaming. Gracious, one of these days you’ll go someplace and never come back.” She hands him the new files.

  “I wasn’t daydreaming. I often meditate.”

  “Oh, honestly.” Mrs. Plymm knows him, she’s been with him for twenty years. She’s sixty-four and plump and full of cheer.

  “Foreclosures,” says Oliver. “More people to kick out of their houses. It fills you with a sense of power.” He looks over the files with dread.

  Foreclosures, wills, separation agreements, speeding tickets. It’s what he’s done all his working life and it’s what he’ll do until he dies. What happened to those youthful dreams of being a courtroom counsel, getting his name in the TV news? He’s fifty, still dreaming, but the former dreams of glory have become the pointless reveries of a foolish romancer trudging down the lonely road past middle age toward senility.

  He’s feeling sour. The scene with Clarence has put him permanently on edge for the day. He wants to escape to his nest, to Lindy, his dog, his gentle three acres.

  He glances outside again and sees Sybil McGuid’s 1981 Cadillac Brougham crawling around Two Street to Madrona. It angle-parks in front of his building, below him. Oliver watches her unbuckle Jamey, who is twenty-five, 250 pounds, and retarded. Sybil McGuid’s only child and heir, he dwarfs his mother, sixty, tiny, starched, her hair in a severe bun.

  Oliver turns around. “She’s here.”

  “I’ll put tea on.”

  Sybil walks in without knocking, it doesn’t matter, he could be taking instructions from the president of Chase Manhattan Bank and she’d come in and tell the guy to wait outside. It’s like being owned. When Oliver took over his father’s practice fifteen years ago, he told himself, this is it, the independent GP, never going to be beholden to anyone. But times are tough, and Sybil McGuid keeps the fridge full, and Ernie Bolestero lurks in the wings . . .

  She has left his office door open. In the waiting room he can hear Jamey and his mouth organ, a nice tune, he knows it from the radio, the Hit Parade, or whatever they call it these days.

  “Jamey, don’t bother Mrs. Plymm,” Sybil says.

  “Oh, he can serenade me all day long, Sybil,” Mrs. Plymm calls.

  Jamey has a basement full of musical instruments and plays them all. Someone read God’s recipe wrong, didn’t put in enough eggs and added too much flour, and Jamey is a musical idiot savant. Born out of wedlock, he was sired in mystery, perhaps by an itinerant kazoo salesman.

  Sybil fetches him, points him to the big horsehair chair he likes, and he plops into it. “Hullo, Mr. Gulliver.”

  Jamey shakes the spit from his harmonica, batting it into the palm of his other hand, and Sybil shrieks, “Jamey!”

  “It’s what they all do,” Jamey says. “Mick Jagger, I seen him do that on the TV.”

  She hands him a clean hanky. “Wipe it.” To Oliver, she says, “I suppose you’ve heard. Poor Pastor Blythe, he was so shocked.”

  “You can’t close the Opera House down, that’s unfair,” Oliver says. The Opera House, Foolsgold’s single architectural treasure, has been run as a movie theater for the last twenty years. It was built in 1901 when it looked like Foolsgold was about to go somewhere. Instead, the lumber barons chose Eureka, south of here, which likes to crow about its preserved Old Town.

  “We used to have touring companies,” she says, a little wistful. “Brigadoon, Naughty Marietta.” She snaps to. “Now it’s a place where layabouts pay Clarence Boggs to see filthy, filthy movies. I intend to put the theater to a more godly use. Pastor Blythe hopes to start a permanent congregation here. This town is full of Satan’s work, Oliver. The pastor will have his hands full.”

  “I’m gong to get you deprogrammed, Sybil, before you start signing everything over to him.”

  She huffs. “You don’t know him. Oliver, he is so good. I’m almost in tears when I think of how I failed Jesus all those years.” She takes a determined, business-like breath. “The Opera House is a beautiful building and we’re going to keep it intact, but add a few decorations. Pastor Blythe will want it this Sunday. Only twenty-three came out last Sabbath, but, really, that awful hall in Eureka.”

  Her father, from whom she inherited everything, had been a beer-drinking galoot of a forest baron. It was predictable, Oliver supposes, that Sybil would ultimately find solace in old-time religion.

  “I’m adamant. I’ve announced it to the Inquirer.”

  Oliver sighs. “I’ll draw up a lease.” He’ll stall for time, drag it out.

  “I trust Pastor Blythe.”

  “I’ll draw up a lease. And I’ll ask Clarence to make sure you’ve got the right coverage, it’s a priceless building.”

  She doesn’t respond right away. Jamey provides background music, humming.

  “I will never forgive him, running those evil movies in my theater.”

  “It was a prank. My God, you’ve known him since he was a baby. He pulls that stuff all the time.”

  “I am absolutely mortified, Oliver. And he’s your brother-in-law. Madelaine was such a jewel, I can’t believe God created them as sister and brother.”

  Oliver looks at Jamey, who gives him a big, reassuring smile. Clarence likes to kid Jamey, make him laugh. Jamey likes Clarence.

  Oliver takes a deep breath. “Look, Sybil, I’m not talking as his brother-in-law or anything, he’s got to make it on his own, but don’t you think you should be supporting local business instead of going to Eureka? That agent there doesn’t have a feel for the local conditions. It means you’ll bankrupt Clarence, he owes bills all over town. He’s just going through a phase, he’s lonely, that’s the trouble, especially after his girlfriend left him. What do you think, Jamey? We have to look after our own, don’t we?”

  “I like Clarence,” he says.