Smoked Out (Digger) Read online

  "How long will you be away?" she asked.

  "Four, five days, probably. What are you going to do while I’m gone?"

  "You don’t want to know."

  "Thanks for not telling me," Digger said. "I’m going to pack. Kiss goodbye?"

  "Smudge my lipstick," the woman said, walking toward the door. She stopped, came back, kissed the palm of her right hand and pressed the palm against Digger’s cheek.

  "I…" She stopped.

  "What?"

  "I hope you have a good time. Be careful."

  "Why should I be careful?"

  "Because you’re crazy. You crazy people have an obligation to all us sane ones to be careful."

  After she left, Julian Burroughs finished his drink, turned the phonograph record over and went into the bedroom. He looked inside a red-leather garment bag hanging in his closet to make sure that it still held a suit, a jacket, three pair of slacks, a pair of jeans, five shirts, underwear, socks and sneakers. From a dresser drawer, he took a small tape recorder, only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, and a plastic bag filled with accessories.

  He yelled at the door, "Koko, I only hang out with you because your people make good tape recorders. When the Germans get cooking, I’m trading you in for a blonde with an IQ of twenty-seven and a ninety-six inch chest."

  From a box under the bed, he took out twenty small cassette tapes. He packed them into a small overnight bag, along with the recorder and his shaving kit. He called the concierge and asked for a wake-up call at 5:00 A.M.

  Still fully dressed, he lay on the bed and fell asleep immediately.

  Chapter Two

  The drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles was 284 miles. Digger drove it in four hours and forty-five minutes, counting one gas stop.

  The attendant had seemed annoyed to see anyone at 6:45 A.M.

  "Fill it," Digger said.

  The attendant had let the gas trickle in automatically while he picked his teeth and looked out across the sand. When the pump cut off, he ran in four more cents to bring the gas pump total to $17.50.

  "Fill it," Digger said.

  "It’s full. Seventeen-fifty."

  "It’s not full. You guys pump just enough gas to get to an even number. I don’t want an even number. I want a full tank. Fill it. You think I want to die in the desert?"

  Grumbling, the attendant filled the tank to $19.11.

  "Nineteen-eleven."

  Digger paid with a credit card. The attendant gave him his receipt and tried not to give him his credit card back. Digger took it from the top of the gas pump.

  "Always stay as nice as you are today," he said.

  When he reached Los Angeles, Digger carefully skirted the city and Beverly Hills and drove directly to the Sportsland Lodge in West Hollywood, where he had stayed once before with his ex-wife. They had been on their honeymoon, married just one day. When he had first seen the small trout stream that ran through the hotel grounds, he realized it would be a wonderful place to drown a vicious, nasty, bitching woman. But it wouldn’t have been fair to the trout. He wondered if the trout knew that he had taken on twelve years of misery for them.

  He unpacked his clothes, then showered. He put a fresh cassette tape into the small recorder and attached the machine to the right side of his back, just above his waist, with a thin plastic strap. He took a long wire from the accessory bag. He plugged the jack end of it into the recorder and taped the rest of the wire to his side with white surgical tape. The other end of the wire was a small golden tie clip in the shape of an open-mouthed frog.

  Digger dressed in a blue suit, with a white shirt and dark tie, then fastened the clip to the tie. He reached behind him and, through his shirt, pressed the "record" button.

  "Seven. Eight. Nine."

  He depressed another button, held it, then pressed another.

  "Seven. Eight. Nine," the recorder repeated, high-pitched and metallic but clear. He rewound the tape again and turned the machine off.

  Two blocks away from the Sportsland Lodge, he found a stationery store and went in to look at the sympathy cards. He brought the two he liked best to the salesgirl, who looked as if she were having a special that week on teeth.

  "Which one of these do you like best?" Digger read them. " ‘Never say she is dead. Never say she is gone. She is only sleeping.’ And then there’s ‘The One We Loved Lived Life to the Fullest To Enrich the Lives of Others. And God Remembers.’ That one’s got a lot of capital letters in it. I kind of lean toward that one. You don’t think it’s too gaudy, do you?"

  "Oh, no. It’s kind of…you know, elegant. Not many people buy this kind of card."

  "Not many people care enough to send the very best," Digger said. "How much is it?"

  She looked at the card. "Two dollars and fifty cents."

  "If we take off that tufted satin cross in the middle?"

  "Oh, we couldn’t do that," she said.

  Digger shrugged. "Well, what the hell, let’s go for the two and a half. Mothers only die once."

  He checked his pocket to make sure he had a ball-point pen. Then he drove to the Sylvan Glade Cemetery, tucked away in a corner of Hollywood Hills, equidistant from the Hollywood Bowl and The Beauty on Duty Massage Parlor, open twenty-four hours a day. If You Don’t See It, Ask.

  The Sylvan Glade Cemetery made Digger think of the summer estate of a Roman emperor, newly converted to the cause of lunacy and bad taste. The rolling hills were beautiful. The grass was so green it looked as if it had been freshly painted that morning, but statuary jutted up from the greenery without apparent reason, like cow skulls in the desert. He drove by a statue of David that was twenty feet high. Michelangelo’s original was only fourteen feet tall. There was a marble reproduction of Michelangelo’s "Pietà" and, in front of it, an arrow-shaped sign stuck in the ground pointing the way to the office.

  The man on duty was reading the Sunday summary of the week’s stock market activity. When Digger opened the door, electronic chimes played the first two bars of "Pomp and Circumstance." As if he had been trained by Pavlov, the man behind the desk dropped the outside corners of his eyes to look sad. Digger thought he looked pitiful.

  "Yes, sir?" the man said.

  "I’m interested in a mausoleum," Digger said. "Something in pink."

  "We have access to the finest stone workers in the world," the man said. "Anything you want we could manage. Is the deceased—"

  "And maybe with a hot tub and a wine cellar. You got something with a hot tub and a wine cellar?"

  "It’s rather unusual."

  "See, this is going to be for me. When I die. And I entertain a lot, and I want people to remember me the way I was. I don’t want them just forgetting about me. I want them to come out here and have a great time, getting whacked, splashing around in the Jacuzzi, just like in the old days. Would there be a problem with something like that? Zoning or something?"

  "No, sir. I’m sure we could work it out."

  "Well, I wish you’d look into it and then have one of your representatives call me to discuss price and so forth."

  "Certainly. Your name?"

  "Walter Brackler. I’m a vice president of Brokers Surety Life Insurance Company. That’s room 66006, 1270 Sixth Avenue, New York. I’m just in town for a couple of days for a funeral. Where is the Welles gravesite, please?"

  "Welles? Oh, Mrs. Welles. You’re very early."

  "I wanted to get a head start. Start mourning with everybody else and one or two of them suckers is liable to beat you. But get off fast and nobody catches you, not ever. It’s not easy being a mourner. You know what a mourner is in New York City? It’s a nooner, only sooner. Don’t forget now. I’ll be back in my office by Wednesday and I really want somebody to call."

  Digger followed instructions and turned left at the "Pietà" and right at the "David." Past the Cherubim and Seraphim. Stop just before Rodin’s "The Kiss."

  The hole had already been dug. The piles of dirt lining it were covered w
ith Astro-Turf. A metal frame had been erected over the open grave and covered with a white cloth.

  Digger sat in the car, enjoying the air conditioning. He reread the clipping about Mrs. Welles’s death. Every few minutes a car passed him, most of them with family groups, husband and wife in the front seat, children in the back. He absolutely loved California. Families would go out for a Sunday drive to tour a cemetery. They are not dead, he thought. They are only sleeping.

  He turned on his tape recorder to test it and broadcast a message. He played it back.

  "All of California is certifiable," Digger heard his voice say. "It’s like a stewardess who asks you with a smile if you want lemon for your tea and, all the while, she knows some crazed Lebanese is running around in the pilot’s cabin with a pipe bomb, a machine gun and a set of 912 non-negotiable demands. I mean, here you’ve got this state that’s ready to go belly up the first time the earth coughs, and what do Californians do? They work on their tan."

  Digger rewound the tape, put on his dark glasses and walked around the cemetery, looking at the mausoleums, wondering about people who spent so much money on stone things which were sure to outlive their memories. He decided that when he died he would have a papier-maché monument made. If anyone loved him, they would have to shellac his monument every seven days. Seven days after everybody who loved him died, everything would dwindle away to blotter lint and that would be that.

  A flower car came down the road and parked alongside Mrs. Welles’s grave. Behind it was a hearse, and a hundred yards farther back Digger saw a procession of four Rolls Royces. It looked like Winston Churchill’s funeral. As was customary, the cars with the mourners turned away from the grave-site to tour the cemetery, while the funeral home employees did their setup work, carrying the coffin and placing it on the rack over the grave and setting the floral pieces around.

  Out of view of family and friends, two men hopped out of the hearse and lugged the casket to the grave with no more ritual than if they had been carrying a case of rifles. Another man started emptying flowers from the flower car and arranging them around the grave. All three wore black suits.

  Digger went to the flower car, took two standing arrangements and carried them toward the grave.

  "Who are you with?" the flower driver asked him.

  "Irving Schlepp. Here at the cemetery," Digger said.

  The man nodded. Digger helped him arrange the flowers but was not totally pleased with the results. The man’s taste was a little too symmetrical for Digger. The two men who had carried the coffin over to the grave stood around watching. When the Rolls Royces came back down the road toward the grave, the three men walked back to their vehicles. Digger continued to adjust some of the floral pieces, finicking, as if he had finished an essay test early, wasn’t allowed to leave the classroom, so was going back over it to polish the punctuation.

  The minister got out of the first car. He was a round, soft-looking man with an enormous gold cross hanging on a chain from his clerical collar.

  The second Rolls held Doctor Welles, looking tan, fit and handsome, and an elderly woman with blue hair and a hearing aid who wept a lot. Glancing over from a cross of flowers, Digger decided she was Mrs. Rochelle Lindsley, the dead woman’s mother. Five more people got out of the three other Rolls Royces. They shuffled around near the gravesite. The minister looked at Digger questioningly and Digger smiled and nodded for him to begin. Digger took the sympathy card and ball-point pen from his pocket and walked up to a young, pretty brunette. He extended the card and pen to her. She looked at Digger and whispered, "Who are you?"

  "From the cemetery."

  "Swell. Thanks," she said, and signed her name, taking elaborate pains to write neatly.

  He gave the card to another woman, a tall, trim blonde.

  "What’s this?"

  "Condolences. From the cemetery."

  The third person, a man, signed without any discussion, and by the time Digger reached the next man, the minister had started to speak, so the man just scrawled his name and handed the card back.

  "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today, in our grief…"

  Digger got the last woman to sign while the minister was still talking. He decided to skip Dr. Welles and the dead woman’s mother.

  He stood among the mourners, head bowed, as the minister gave the benediction. When Digger looked up, he saw Dr. Welles staring at him. Digger smiled back solicitously, the sort of look he would have given someone whose new Cadillac had been scratched in a supermarket parking lot. He thought that if Dr. Welles had been in mourning the past few days, he must have been doing it at poolside. He should meet Digger’s mother at a funeral. Then he should try sitting shiva for ten days, sitting on a box, wearing slippers and not shaving.

  He glanced away. Behind Welles, he saw a battered green Porsche parked at the roadside. The left window was down, but he couldn’t see the driver’s face. On the back of the sympathy card, he jotted down what he could see of the license number: IBW-1-something.

  Then the funeral was over and Digger went back to his hotel to go swimming and have some drinks.

  Especially to have some drinks. Funerals made him thirsty.

  Everything made him thirsty.

  Chapter Three

  Digger’s Log:

  Tape recording number one, 9:30 P.M., Sunday, Julian Burroughs regarding the Jessalyn Welles insurance claim.

  I have this wonderful trick for remembering people’s names. I write them down. These are today’s mourners.

  Lorelei Church. Young, pretty brunette, but she thanked me when I gave her the card to sign. I’ve got a hunch she would thank a rapist for thinking of her. I suspect someone has removed the aces from her deck.

  Alyne Gurney. The difference between a Hollywood blonde and a Beverly blonde is about three inches in the chest and three zeroes in the checking account. Alyne is a Beverly blonde. She oozes Beverly. But her shoes were scuffed on the tip and she had used liquid polish to cover them over.

  Something that looks like Aros or Amos and then a last name with a lot of e’s in it. Etti…something. Brown-haired, mild-looking, fussy. Looks like he would play tennis with a Prince racket and get upset if he scuffed his leather Adidases. Soft hands.

  Ted Dole. Midthirties, good-looking, husky, moves well. Not the kind you expect to find at anybody’s graveside ever. He would remember the dead by buying a drink. But he wouldn’t buy Dr. Welles a drink. He kept glaring at him through the service, and if Welles had been the corpse, instead of his wife, I’d have a pretty good idea how it happened.

  Mary Beckwith, gray-haired, hard mileage, fiftyish. Probably an employee or servant. Kept looking around like she was trying to make sure that she wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  Every one of these people share the view that The One We Loved Lived Life to the Fullest To Enrich The Lives of Others and God Remembers.

  God should. He knows what that card cost.

  Then, of course, there was Rochelle Lindsley, Mrs. Welles’s mother. She looked like she had arrived from Connecticut on the shoulders of native bearers. Sailing, riding, clipping coupons, inviting friends over so she could start drinking in the afternoon. Blue hair. All women with blue hair are secret drunks. Who started that particular mutilation, anyway?

  And then there was Gideon Welles, M.D. Make him forty-five, but he looks better than that. No wrinkles, and no face lift, either. Tan without being leathery. Diet. Exercise. Golf. Tennis. All that sick shit. A suit with hand-stitching. I don’t like his eyes. They remind me of someone’s. They never really smiled. No matter what his mouth did.

  What’s that you say? Just because he’s handsome, I’ve already got him tagged as a murder suspect?

  Wrong. Don’t forget what I’m doing here. I am here as the representative of Brokers Surety Life Insurance to make sure they don’t get ripped off. Only three things concern me. Was there fraud on Mrs. Welles’s insurance application? Did Mrs. Welles commit suicide? Did Gideon Welles want
to collect a million dollars?

  Anything else doesn’t matter to me. If I found out that Mrs. Welles was murdered by the KGB because she had uncovered a Russian plot to overthrow America and make Idi Amin President, as long as Dr. Welles wasn’t involved in it I’d just send a memo to Kwash and let him decide what to do. My areas of interest are very limited: fraud, suicide and beneficiary-as-murderer. Anything else belongs to the cops.

  I have to check the license number of a green Porsche, IBW-1-something. The driver sat there with his window down, listening to the minister talk his nonsense. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to pay our respects to good old what’s-her-face." Why does someone watch a funeral from the side of the road? Except for the fact that this is California.

  Tomorrow I’ll find out.

  I should call Koko. But it’s ten o’clock Sunday night, and if she’s not home, I’ll start chewing my insides wondering where she is and with who. I keep telling myself that she’s really not a hooker. She’s more like a party girl, right? Sure. She’s got a good job, dealing at the Araby. If she wants to go out once in a while, that’s her business. It stops things from getting too serious between us. A girl like that couldn’t really expect me to marry her, could she?

  That’s what she said, wasn’t it? "Why do we keep having this conversation? Are you going to propose?"

  No, my dear Tamiko, I am not going to propose. I’ve been there before and marriage is a wonderful way to ruin a friendship. Now, my father would propose. Every time I bring Tamiko home, he can’t keep his hands off her. I know he wants to ask me if it’s true, if it really goes sideways on Oriental women. No, Sergeant Burroughs, it doesn’t. Only the eyes slant, and they don’t even slant. It’s the eyelids that make them look like they slant. I’ve always wished the Boston Red Sox had signed that Japanese slugger, Sataharu Oh, to a contract. Then when he stopped hitting and the team died in September, like they always do, the sportswriters could blame it on the epicanthic fold. Never mind, you had to be there.