THE DEADLY DOOWOP

A Red Trevorak Mystery

By Charles Deemer

Synopsis

 

 

1/

 

Tues, 8 June 54: Lionel's great line in the Army, "Fashion is the first refuge of a scoundrel."  Get this in a play!

 

            I found the address on a shady, pine-lined lane in the foothills north of Pasadena.  It was one of those new upper-crust neighborhoods I'd never heard of, called - surprise of surprises - Foothills.  All the homes were lean and long, on huge, shady lots.

            I was about half an hour late, having under-estimated the time it would take to negotiate all the new freeway construction going on between the office in Venice and the suburban glitz of east Los Angeles County.  The trip had been one detour after another, crisscrossing back and forth over the deep gullies that were the transportation arteries of the future.  It was hard to see the future in all the dust and racket of construction.

            I pulled Bad-Ass the Buick into the driveway, turned the key and waited until the engine sputtered still.  Adjusting the rearview mirror, I buttoned my shirt collar and pulled up my tie. Then I got out.

            On a lesser scale, digging in the earth was going on here, too, right next door.  A gray-haired man in a red baseball cap was chest-deep in a hole alongside his house.  Bad-Ass had attracted his attention, so I acknowledged his stare with a wave and he nodded before going back to his shovel.  I guessed he was digging himself a fallout shelter.  Freeways and fallout shelters were all the rage, both granted the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

            I walked up the brick walk to the front porch and rang the doorbell.  A young Negro woman answered, and I probably did a double-take, forgetting for a moment where I was.  But her presence made sense:  in the lily-white glitz of Foothills, having a Negro housekeeper would be as prestigious as having a fallout shelter.

            When I told her who I was, she invited me in and led me to the den, not the living room.

            "Mrs. Davies will be here directly, Mr. Trevorak," she said.

            She was tan and pretty but somehow looked out of place in her starched white uniform.  I got the idea she didn't like her job.

            The den didn't look lived in, which made me wonder what the living room was like.  I'm a big man, almost three hundred pounds, and all the chairs in the room looked too expensive and frail to sit on. For a moment I stood in the middle of the room, admiring the view out the large bay windows.  It looked like a golf course back there. Finally I sat down on the divan and picked up a magazine off the adjacent coffee table.  There was a framed photograph there, too, and I wondered if the tired-looking guy at the barbecue was her husband.

            I was lingering over an underwear ad when a woman entered the room. As I closed the magazine and made a move to rise, she said, "Keep your seat."

            I relaxed and heard the cushion under me groan.

            "You're late," she said.

            "I forgot about all the construction going on."

            She just looked at me, as if I'd said something in a foreign language.  Then she stepped to the divan with her hand out, saying, "I'm Joan Davies.  You're not the one I talked to on the phone."

            I shook her hand and tried to rise a gentlemanly distance up off the cushion, which was no easy task at my weight.

            "Red Trevorak.  You talked to my dad.  We're a family agency."

            "I see.  And he sent you."

            Though it was late in the morning, she was dressed for cocktails and dinner, in a black dress that looked expensive. She was a pretty woman, slender, tall, with jet black hair to match the dress. I put her at not quite thirty.  She didn't seem thrilled that Dad had sent me and, to tell the truth, I wasn't so thrilled to be there either.

            "I suppose you'll do fine," she said.  "I want you to hear something."

            She went to a radio console in the room and turned it on. She stayed there, looking out of place without a martini in her hand, staring down at the radio.

            Then the radio came to life and said, Yes, indeedy!  It's Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man, approaching the hour of high noon. Oo-ee, and we been having fun this morning!  I love you cats out there, you know I do!  And we'll be right back with more of the best in rhythm-n-blues, on radio KRB, your station for top Negro entertainment - after this message.

A commercial jingle started, One little, two little, three little sparkplugs; four little, five little, six little sparkplugs; seven little, eight little, worn-out sparkplugs . . .

Joan Davies said, "I want you to listen carefully and answer some questions about the disc jockey."

Who was soon back on the air:  Oo-ee, baby!  We got a great one for you now, going all the way back to 1948.  Last year they had Crying in the Chapel but this was their first big one, and it's one sweet side. Lovin' Dan playing for you: It's Too Soon To Know!

The song started and Mrs. Davies turned off the radio.

"Well?," she said.  "What can you tell me about the disc jockey?"

I had no idea what she was getting at.  I said, "It sounds like he loves his job."

"What race is he?"

Though the question came from left field, I threw back a quick answer.  "Negro, I assume."

"Exactly," she said.

She moved back across the room and sat in one of the frail wooden chairs across from the divan.  She was so thin the chair didn't even squeak under her.

"That was my husband on the radio," she said, "and he's white.  Or at least, I assume he is." xxx

        She paused, letting this sink in, but I was still looking for her

    drift.  Then she came from left field again.

        "Did you read the paper a few weeks ago, about the little scandal

    we had here in Foothills?"

        I tried to remember a story about Foothills and couldn't. Lately

    the papers were dominated by what reporters called the Rat Murders, a

    bizarre series of killings with a weird m.o.: the murderer left a dead

    rat with each of his victims, as well as a short chapter in an on-going

    treatise he called "The History of Rats."

        "I don't recall," I said.  "I was up in the Bay area for a few

    days, maybe I missed it."

        "Flo Albertson, who lives in the neighborhood, not far from here,

    as a matter of fact - I used to play bridge with her regularly -

    anyway, she gave birth to a son recently.  The baby is a Negro."

        Again she paused for effect before going on.

        "Flo is white, or so we thought.  So her husband thought. As it

    turns out, she's a Negro who was passing for white.  Hence, her dark

    baby.  You can imagine how upsetting this is to everyone, not to

    mention her husband."

        I thought I was beginning to see her drift but it was too bizarre

    to take a wild guess about.  Better she told me herself.

        "What are you trying to tell me, Mrs. Davies?"

        "Dan, my husband, hasn't been himself lately.  Ever since Flo was

    discovered.  And I'll never understand why he took the job at that

    horrible station, he used to work in Pasadena, playing Montavani and

    wonderful music.  He says he actually enjoys Negro music.  I just need

    to be sure."

        My hunch was right but I still wanted her to say it herself.

        "Sure about what?"

        "Well, you heard yourself that he sounds just like a Negro on the

    air.  Under the circumstances . . . well, I was one of Flo's best

    friends, I thought I was, and never for a minute suspected she was a

    Negro."

        I just looked at her.

        "I want a family myself some day," she said.  "Your father said you

    can do background checks."

        "We do that," I said.

        "Well, then?"

        "I'm still not sure what you want," I lied.

        "I want to know if my husband has Negro ancestry."

        It pained her to say it, and suddenly I felt sorry for making her.

    She stood up and said, "Your father quoted me a fee over the phone.

    I'll get it."

        She fetched an envelope from a shelf filled with knick-knacks.  I

    managed to struggle to my feet by the time she got back with it.

        "How long will this take?," she asked, handing me the envelope.

        "Depends.  It would help if I knew the name of his

    parents, grandparents, as far back as you can go."

        "I thought you'd want that.  I wrote down everything I know - it's

    all in the envelope."

        "Shouldn't be a problem then."

        "Call me as soon as you find out anything."

        We turned to leave the den and found the housekeeper standing in

    the doorway.  I wondered how much she had heard.

        "I'm through now, Mrs. Davies," she said.

        "Very good, Ruth."

        Ruth didn't budge from the doorway.

        "Is there something else?," Mrs. Davies asked.

        "Today's payday, ma'am."

        "I'm sorry, I forgot.  I'll write you a check."

        I told Mrs. Davies I could find my own way out.  She offered her

    hand, and I shook it.  Her hand seemed colder than before.

        "I want to hear the minute you find out anything," she repeated.  I

    nodded and got the hell out of there.

        On the porch I pulled loose my tie and snapped my collar open.  I

    started toward Bad-Ass and heard a voice calling to me.

        "Excuse me!  Can you give me a hand over here?"

        It was the neighbor digging the hole for the fallout shelter.  "I

    can't quite reach my ladder," he said.  "Apparently I've dug myself

    into a hole!"

        He laughed like hell at this while I walked over and got his ladder

    for him.  I lowered it into the hole.

        "Thank you," he said and climbed up to ground level.  He took off

    his baseball cap, which I saw now was a Phillies cap, and wiped his

    brow with a forearm.  He drew one hand over his thinning gray hair and

    put the cap back on.

        "How about an iced tea for your trouble?," he asked.

        His name was Jeff Berger.  I waited in the den while he fetched

    drinks and, unlike the den next door, this one was lived in

    considerably.  A sports shirt was draped over a rocking chair.

    Newspapers and magazines were cluttered about.  A dirty dish was on the

    coffee table.  One wall was dominated by a large record collection and

    phonograph console, another by framed color photographs of various

    nuclear bomb explosions.  Returning with iced tea, he caught me staring

    at the photographs.

        "Incredible, aren't they?," he said.  "Beautiful and frightening at

    the same time.  I'll put them on the wall down in the shelter when I'm

    done."

        He handed me my glass and went to the phonograph, playing the

    record that was already on the turnstile.  It was classical, some

    symphony or other.  He kept the volume low.

        "Sit down," he gestured.  The chairs in the room looked sturdy

    enough.  Jeff took the rocker, and I took a stuffed chair adjacent to

    it.

        "Forgive me for being nosy," he said, "but I'm guessing you're the

    detective that Joanie has been threatening to hire."

        When I admitted I was, he told me what he thought about the matter.

    He thought Dan Davies was as white as he was but was having an affair.

    That's the difference in him that Joanie was reacting to.

        "Not that I understand it," he went on.  "Joanie's the catch, not

    Dan.  She has family money, and Dan married up. Personally, I think

    he's a fool to jeopardize that but I'll bet it's the story.  I've

    learned to read human nature pretty well by now, if I say so myself."

        He rocked in his chair, looking very pleased with himself.

        "Then there's nothing to this Negro business?"

        "You have to understand that Joanie was pretty close to Flo, they

    were bridge partners.  My wife Edna was in the same bridge club.  When

    you spend that much time with someone, only to find out that they

    aren't at all the person you thought they were, well, it's very

    disturbing."

        He had as much hair on his eyebrows as on his head, and he raised

    them now, in case I missed the seriousness of the matter.

        "If Negroes have anything at all to do with this . . .," he

    continued.  The eyebrows jumped again.

        "Yes?"

        "Well, maybe Dan's girlfriend, mistress, whatever, is a Negro.  He

    does seem to have an affinity for them.  You should hear how he carries

    on the radio, you'd think he was a Negro himself.  I don't mean that

    literally.  I mean it - well, spiritually, does that make sense?"

        The question hung in the air as he got up and moved to a desk in

    the room.

        "Do you build things?," he asked.

        The desktop was covered with blueprints, all of which he insisted

    on showing me, pointing out the various features he was incorporating

    into his own original design for a fallout shelter. He would be able to

    lay in enough canned food and water to last three months.  There would

    be sleeping facilities for four - himself, his wife, his daughter and

    granddaughter.  There'd be a small library, a phonograph and the best

    of his records.  When he was done, I lied that I had another

    appointment to make and thanked him for the refreshment.

        He walked me to Bad-Ass.  I started the engine, and a cloud of blue

    smoke bellowed out from the exhaust pipes.  Grinning, I waved as he

    shook his head in dismay and got the hell out of there.

        On the drive to the office, I found KRB on the dial.  The radio

    said, Shoo-doot-n-shoo-be-do . . .

 

 

 

 

 

    2/

 

        Between the foothills of east county and the ocean, smog was rising

    over the city like bad breath.  The newspapers liked to write about all

    the beatniks living in Venice but at least here we could breathe

    relatively fresh air.

        I parked Bad-Ass in front of the vacant storefront and hiked up the

    stairs to the office.  The glass window in the door needed a paint job:

    the final s is Trevorak Private Investigations was almost gone, looking

    like a foreign language's curly accent line; below it, the

    disintegrating paint read Henry Trevorak, Sr., Henry Trevorak, Jr. and

    yours truly at the bottom, Clyde Trevorak. No one called me Clyde, and

    I hated the name.  I'd been Red for as long as I can remember, homage

    to a body full of freckles and orange hair.

        I walked in.  The office was barely large enough for three desks.

    Dad was alone, feet up on his desk, reading the paper.

        "Read the front page," he said at once, tossing me the Times.

    "Tell me she's not a hooker."

        The reference was to another Rat Murder, announced in a bold

    front-page headline, Rat Murderer Strikes Again.  Real original, these

    headline writers.  I poured a cup of coffee and took the paper to my

    desk.  I preferred the evening paper to the morning, which made me feel

    like I was always behind on the news.

        "You read the story and tell me I'm not right," Dad said. He went

    back to reading the Sports section.

        Dad had spent almost twenty years on the LAPD before a stray bullet

    during a foiled robbery put him on disability.  Now he let Hank run the

    agency while he concentrated on solving the major crimes of the city.

        It was Dad's theory that the rat murderer was a prostitute. All the

    victims to date had been male, all murdered by a .22 caliber pistol at

    close range.  Each victim had been found in his car, two in

    compromising positions suggesting sexual activity. But I thought there

    were holes in Dad's theory, the main one being that it didn't explain

    the dead rat motif, nor the on-going history of rats, which was written

    with some intelligence, I thought.

        This victim fit the pattern: Franklin Cowley was 32, an attorney in

    his father's firm.  His Chrysler was found parked in the Hollywood

    Hills overlooking the city, Cowley slumped over the steering wheel (two

    other victims had been found partially nude in the back seat) with a

    .22 bullet hole in his neck.  The rat and new installment were on the

    front seat beside him.  As always, the installment had been neatly

    typed on blue-lined school paper by a Remington Standard typewriter.

    This one read:

 

 

        Rats are very good swimmers.  A rat can stay under water for three

    minutes.  Rats are good climbers and can jump about two feet.  The rat

    can breed all year.  However, it likes to breed best in the spring or

    fall.  A female rat will have five or more litters in a year.  The

    average litter is eight baby rats.  The baby rats are born 21 days

    after mating.  A few hours after the litter is born the mother can mate

    again.

 

 

       There was a photograph of the installment and also of the car, taken

    from an angle that showed the lights of the city below.  The reporter

    was buying Dad's theory and speculated that the murderer was "a deadly

    lady of the night."

        "They were parked in Lover's Lane," Dad said when he saw me put

    down the paper.

        "But no unzipped fly," I retorted.

        "So no blow job this time, big deal.  You want to cut it out and

    put it on the wall?"

        I fetched scissors from the desk drawer and cut out the new

    installment.  Dad was saving them, like episodes in a serial.  I took

    this one to the wall and pinned it up with the others. Together, they

    gave an on-going history of rats.

        The first installment read:

       

        A rat is very different from a mouse. This was probably said for

    the first time in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, who lived from

    1167 to 1223.  For one thing, a rat is much bigger than a mouse.

        There are many famous stories about rats.  One is about the rats

    carrying away a whole hen's egg.  One rat grabbed the egg with all four

    paws, and three other rats pulled the egg away with their tails.  This

    story was told in Persia in 1291.

        Another story about rats is from 1284.  The pied piper played on

    his pipe and led all the rats into the river named Weser.  But the city

    would not pay him, so he played his pipe again and led all the children

    into a hollow mountain.  The pied piper is also called Rattenganger von

    Hamelin.

 

 

        The second installment read:

 

 

        A rat belongs to the Genus Rattus and the Order Rodentia and the

    Family Muridae.  Rats make up the most varied genus of mammals.  For

    example, over 550 species and varieties of rats have been noticed and

    described. Some examples of the species and varieties of rats are brown

    rats, house rats, wander rats, gray rats, Norway rats, cotton rats,

    wood rats, kangaroo rats, barn rats, sewer rats, roof rats, black rats,

    pack rats and Alexandrine rats, to name just a few.

        However, there are only two main kinds of rats.  These are Rattus

    norvegicus and Rattus rattus.  Rattus norvegicus is also called the

    Norway, house, brown, wander, gray, barn and sewer rat.  Rattus rattus

    is also called the roof, black, climbing and Alexandrine rat.

 

 

        The third installment read:

 

                       

        Rattus rattus is the smallest rat and the oldest.  Old fossils were

    found in Europe.  Then the rat disappeared but returned to Europe

    between 400 and 1000 A.D. It came to Europe from somewhere in the East,

    probably Chinese Mongolia.  It probably came to Europe on a ship.

    Rattus norvegicus didn't arrive in Europe until the 18th century.  It

    was in England by 1728.  It came to the United States in 1775. Then it

    went west on the wagon trains.

 

 

        And now a fourth installment.  Dad joined me at the wall, limping

    from the old injury that had made him a temporary hero and a permanent

    retiree.

        "A pretty intelligent whore," I said.  "She writes different from,

    not different than.  She knows how to use the encyclopedia."

        "So she's intelligent.  Unzipped flies, Lover's Lane, male victims,

    a weapon only a woman would use.  The facts speak for themselves."

        Dad started rereading the history top to bottom, and I returned to

    my desk with the Sports section.  I was reading about the Angels

    blowing a five-run lead to the Stars when Hank walked in from lunch.

        "You get the gig?," he asked me.

        "I got it."

        Hank took after Dad.  Both were big boned but able to keep their

    weight down, which made their appearance more athletic than their

    habits.  Both wore trim moustaches in the manner of leading men of

    Dad's generation.  Dad's moustache was almost fully gray, Hank's dark

    brown.

        "Dad, don't you have that memorized by now?," Hank asked.

        "She got another early this morning," Dad said from the wall.  He

    turned and began limping toward Hank.

        "If the killer's a she," Hank said.

        "Course she's a she, even the reporter's calling her a deadly lady

    of the night now.  You wait and see if I'm not right."

        I sympathized with Dad's interest in the major crimes of the city.

    When he was on the force, he'd been involved with the real thing, not

    the petty business of Trevorak Private Investigations. Most of the time

    we were the Peeping Tom Patrol, scurrying about with our cameras,

    hoping to add the documentation of an adulterous embrace to a client's

    suspicions.  Dad had never been able to stoop to the level of the

    agency's bread and butter, letting Hank run everything, and when I came

    back from Korea with no worse damage than a missing toe and a bad

    attitude, Dad had put me on the payroll. As near as I could figure, the

    only reason Dad kept coming to the office was to have someone to talk

    to and to listen to his theories about whatever crime was in the

    headlines.

        Hank asked about my morning meeting, and I told him about Joan

    Davies and Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man.  The gig was a little

    bizarre, which perked Dad's interest considerably.

        "She doesn't even know the race of her own husband?," he asked.

        "Her neighbor was passing for white," I said.  "She's a little

    paranoid about it."

        "It's different anyway," said Hank.

        "He's a deejay and sounds like a Negro on the radio, actually.  He

    works for a station that plays only Negro music."

        Dad said, "She pay you?"

        "Sure did."

        I told them about Jeff-the-neighbor's theory that her husband was

    having an affair.

        "As long as she pays her bill," Dad said.  He started limping

    toward the door.  "You had lunch yet, Red?  Hank can hold down the

    fort."

        "I grabbed a sandwich on the way back," I said.  It was a figure of

    speech: actually I'd grabbed three Bob's Big Boy Hamburgers, a double

    order of fries, and a vanilla malt.

        "See you when I see you, then."

        Dad limped out of the office.

        I waited until Hank left before phoning Butch, a buddy from the

    Army.  Hank was always nosing into my gigs, not in a helpful way but to

    declare his superiority and establish my ineptitude for investigative

    work.  I'd been a linguist in the Army but somehow this didn't count,

    he couldn't trust me to do anything right.  To be sure, the day I sold

    a play to Broadway I'd be long gone from the Peeping Tom Patrol - but

    not even I expected that to happen soon, if at all, any more.  In the

    meantime, I kept my gigs to myself as much as possible and tried to

    stay out of big brother's way.  Butch was the only Negro friend I had,

    and I wanted to pick his brain about a few things without Hank looking

    over my shoulder.

        "You're buying me breakfast?," Butch said on the phone, pretending

    to be shocked.  "What'd you do, man, finally hit the big time?"

        "Been a while since we touched bases, is all."

        "You usually call when you want to bitch about work or need

    information.  But that's cool, man, a free meal is a free meal. So when

    and where?"

        We set a time and place, and hung up.

        I got up and went to the radio on Dad's desk, turning it on.  When

    nothing happened, I pounded on it until it came to life.  I found

    station KRB.

        The radio said, We sizzle!  We sparkle!  We fire!  Hot Wire Wally's

    got all the best in Negro music for you - from blues to ballads, from

    bebop to boogie!  Yes, indeedy!

 

        It wasn't Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man but this deejay sounded

    Negro, too, I thought.  I looked up KRB in the phone book, waited for a

    station break, and dialed the request line.

        "It's your nickel, baby!," someone answered, in the same frantic

    voice of the deejay.

        I said, "Do you take requests?"

        "That's what we're here for."

        "Anything by Perry Como."

        There was a silence.  Then, in a totally different voice, a voice I

    took to be clearly white, the man on the other end of the line said,

    "Don't I wish, man, don't I wish."   He hung up.

        I listened to KRB for the rest of the afternoon, background music

    to beginning the paperwork and phonework of tracing the lineage of

    Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

    3/ 

 

    Wed, 9 June 54.  A play about illusion and reality, people

    pretending to be something they are not.  This is what politicians do

    all the time!  A political play, then?  A political farce?

 

 

        I continued listening to KRB at home at night and also the next

    morning while writing in my journal.  All the deejays sounded Negro to

    me, all had the same frantic style, all had nicknames like Lovin' Dan,

    Hot Wire Wally, Rockin' Ronnie, Brian the Bopper.  The music selection

    varied greatly: a sweet ballad by Nat King Cole could be heard after a

    lowdown blues by Lightnin' Hopkins, music with nothing in common except

    that it was performed by a Negro.  The emphasis, however, seemed to be

    on singing groups with names like The Crows, The Robins, The Orioles

    and The Clovers.  In fact, KRB was in the midst of a local teenage

    doo-wop singing contest, "doo-wop" apparently being the label given to

    the group style of singing, in which nonsense but rhythmic sounds wove

    in and out of the melody line.  Though my own tastes tended toward The

    Weavers, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, the music on KRB was catching.  I

    wondered if Butch listened to the station.

        When I went to the office in the morning, there was a note in

    Hank's handwriting to call Dad.  There was also a snotty p.s.: Where

    are the blowups you promised me?  Our office was so small because half

    the space we rented had been converted into a dark room.

        I phoned Dad.

        "Where's this deejay guy from?," he asked.

        "Chicago.  Why?"

        "It will take you forever to put together his family tree by mail.

    Let me check around and see who's in Chicago who can help us.  I'll

    call you later in the morning."

        Dad had former colleagues and connections all over the country.

    While they were no help in peeping into a bedroom window, they could be

    a real time-saver in looking for a missing person or doing a background

    check.  Within the hour Dad called back and gave me the name of Stan

    McNaughton, who was a friend of a friend of his.  Fifteen minutes

    later, I had McNaughton on the job in Chicago.  I figured I might have

    Dan's family tree by next week.

        I spent the next hour in the darkroom, enlarging and cropping

    photographs of a well-known TV personality doing nasty things to a girl

    who couldn't have been fourteen.  At least I think that's what he was

    doing.  It was hard to say, the quality of the photographs was poor and

    enlarging them didn't help.  The action had taken place on the deck of

    his yacht, and I was shooting with a zoom lens from a rowboat a good

    distance away. What I remembered most about the gig was worrying about

    falling into the harbor.  A three-hundred pound man standing up in a

    rowboat is not the definition of stability.

       The radio said, Doot-doodle-loot doodle-loot doodle-lootle- loot,

    doot-doodle-loot doodle-loot doodle-lootle-loot . . .

 

        I found radio station KRB in a small Negro business district

    southeast of downtown L.A., called South City.  I'm not sure what it

    was south of, except the new Pomona Freeway, which was noisily, dustily

    under construction less than a mile north of the dilapidated building

    that bore the address of the station.  It was a rundown neighborhood,

    far past its prime, with more boarded-up storefronts than operating

    businesses.

        I parked Bad-Ass across the street from the station, turned off the

    radio, turned off the ignition, and unwrapped the first of three Bob's

    Big Boy Hamburgers while waiting for the engine to sputter into

    silence.  I was going to wait for the tired-looking guy at the barbecue

    to leave the building.

        I could have let McNaughton in Chicago trace the lineage without

    staking out Dan Davies, of course, but the adultery business made more

    sense to me than the other.  Besides, this was a solo gig, and I wanted

    to make the most of the opportunity to work without taking orders from

    Hank.  If McNaughton gave Dan a white slate, so to speak, I'd be that

    much farther ahead if I knew he was engaged in extra-curricular

    diddling.

        It was getting warm past noon, and with the heat came the smog.  In

    the distance I could hear all the digging, scraping, shoving of

    progress.  Were all these new freeways under construction supposed to

    take people into L.A. or give them a quick way out?  It was too warm to

    roll up the window, so I got all the noise and the thickening smog

    together, as I finished the first two hamburgers and started on the

    third.

        I almost didn't recognize him.  In the photograph in his den, he

    looked thinner, perhaps because of the weary expression he showed the

    camera.  He didn't exactly bounce out of the building with a happy,

    carefree gait but he was halfway down the block before it registered

    that this fellow looked a lot like the guy at the barbecue.  I started

    the engine, adding bellowing blue smoke to the smog, but turned it

    quickly off when I saw Dan enter the corner building.  I got out and

    hurried down the street, stuffing the last of the burger into my mouth

    and throwing the wrapper in the gutter.

        A hand-painted sign said Caviar's Market, though it looked like the

    last place in the world to purchase gourmet foodstuffs, even though a