The Best American Noir of the Century

A potential three grand in my kick; Morris Hornbeck’s hinkyness doing a slow simmer in my gourd; an instinct that Gretchen Rae Shoftel’s “hideaway” was Howard Hughes’s fuck pad on South Lucerne — the place where he kept the stash of specially cantilevered bras he designed to spotlight his favorite starlets tits, cleavage gowns for his one-night inamoratas, and the stag film collection he showed to visiting defense contractors — some of them rumored to costar Mickey Cohen Jr. and a bimbo made up to resemble Howard’s personal heroine: Amelia Earhart. But first there was Scrivner’s Drive-in and a routine questioning of Gretchen Rae’s recent coworkers. Fear adrenaline was scorching my soul as I drove there — maybe I’d played my shtick too tight to come out intact.

Scrivner’s was on Sunset three blocks east of Hollywood High School, an eat-in-your-car joint featuring a rocket-ship motif—chromium scoops, dips, and portholes abounding — Jules Verne as seen by a fag set designer scraping the stars on marijuana. The carhops — all zaftig numbers — wore tight space-cadet outfits; the fry cooks wore plastic rocket helmets with clear face shields to protect them from spattering grease. Questioning a half-dozen of them was like enjoying the DTs without benefit of booze. After an hour of talk and chump-change handouts, I knew the following:

That Gretchen Rae Shoftel carhopped there for a month, was often tardy, and during midafternoon lulls tended to abandon her shift. This was tolerated because she was an atom-powered magnet that attracted men by the shitload. She could tote up tabs in her head, deftly computing sales tax — but had a marked tendency toward spilling milkshakes and French fries. When the banana-split-loving Mickey Cohen started snouting around after her, the manager gave her the go-by, no doubt leery of attracting the criminal elements who had made careers out of killing innocent bystanders while trying to kill the Mick. Aside from that I glommed one hard lead plus suppositions to hang it on: Gretchen Rae had persistently questioned the Scrivner’s crew about a recent regular customer —a man with a long German surname who’d been eating at the counter, doing arithmetic tricks with meal tabs, and astounding the locals with five-minute killings of the L.A. Times crossword. He was an old geez with a European accent — and he stopped chowing at Scrivner’s right before Gretchen Rae Shoftel hired on. Mickey told me the quail had spoken of looking for a friend of her father’s; Howard had said she was from Wisconsin; German accents pointed to the dairy state in a big way. And Morris Hornbeck, Mr. Shakes just a few hours before, had been a Milwaukee mob trigger and moneyman. And — the lovely Gretchen Rae had continued carhopping after becoming the consort of two of the richest, most powerful men in Los Angeles — an eye-opener if ever there was one.

* * *

I drove to a pay phone and made some calls, straight and collect. An old LAPD pal gave me the lowdown on Morris Hornbeck — he had two California convictions for felony statch rape, both complainants thirteen-year-old girls. A guy on the Milwaukee force that I’d worked liaison with supplied Midwestern skinny: Little Mo was a glorified bookkeeper for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob, run out of town by his boss in ‘47, when he was given excess gambling skim to invest as he saw best and opened a call house specializing in underaged poon dressed up as movie stars — greenhorn girls coiffed, cosmeticized, and gowned to resemble Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Veronica Lake, and the like. The operation was a success, but Jerry Katzenbach, Knights of Columbus family man, considered it bum PR. Adios, Morris — who obviously found an amenable home in L.A.

On Gretchen Rae Shoftel, I got bubbkis; ditto on the geezer with the arithmetic tricks similar to the carhop/vamp. The girl had no criminal record in either California or Wisconsin — but I was willing to bet she’d learned her seduction techniques at Mo Hornbeck’s whorehouse.