The Best American Noir of the Century

The Other Guy Routine dates back to my days as a youth in Oklahoma, when my old man would beat the shit out of my old lady, and I’d haul a mattress out into the scrub woods so I wouldn’t have to listen. I’d set my armadillo traps down, and every once in a while I’d hear a snap-squeak as some stupid ‘dillo ate my bait and got his spine crunched for his trouble. When I finally fell asleep, I’d usually wake up to screeches — men hurting women — always just wind playing havoc with the scrub pines. I’d start thinking then: ways to get the old man off the old lady’s back without consulting my brother Fud — in the Texas Pen for armed robbery and grievous aggravated assault. I knew I didn’t have the guts to confront Pop myself, so I started thinking about other people just to get him off my mind. And that always let me develop a play: some church woman conned into dropping off a pie and religious tracts to calm the old man down; steering some local slick who thought Mom was a beauty in her direction, knowing Pop was a coward with other men and would love up the old girl for weeks and weeks just to keep her. That last play stood all of us good at the end — it was right before the old lady caught typhus. She took to bed with a fever, and the old man got in with her to keep her warm. He caught it himself— and died — sixteen days after she did. Under the circumstances, you have to believe there was nothing but love between them — right up to curtains.

So the Other Guy Routine gets you out of the hole and makes some other poor fuck feel good in the process. I worked it in niggertown as a cop: let some pathetic grasshopper slide, send him a Mickey fruit basket at Christmas, get him to snitch a horse pusher and skim 5 percent full of yuletide cheer. The only trouble with it this time is that I was locked on the horns of a jumbo dilemma: Mickey, Howard — two patrons, only one woman. And claiming failure with either man was against my religion.

I gave up thinking and called Kirby Falwell at the Sheriff’s Bureau. His two-state Teletype yielded heat:

The floor stiff was Fritz Steinkamp, Chicago-Milwaukee gunsel, one conviction for attempted murder, currently on parole and believed to be a Jerry Katzenbach torpedo. Mr. Heart Attack was Voyteck Kirnipaski, three-time loser, also a known Katzenbach associate, his falls for extortion and grand larceny — specifically stock swindles. The picture getting a little less hazy, I called Howard Hughes at his flop at the Bel Air Hotel. Two rings, hang up, three rings — so he’d know it’s not some gossip columnist.

“Yes?”

“Howard, you been in Milwaukee the past few years?”

“I was in Milwaukee in the spring of’47. Why?”

“Any chance you went to a whorehouse that specialized in girls made up like movie stars?”

Howard sighed. “Buzz, you know my alleged propensity in that department. Is this about Gretchen Rae?”

“Yeah. Did you?”

“Yes. I was entertaining some colleagues from the Pentagon. We had a party with several young women. My date looked just like Jean Arthur, only a bit more …endowed. Jean broke my heart, Buzz. You know that.”

“Yeah. Did the high brass get looped and start talking shop around the girls?”

“Yes, I suppose so. What does this —”

“Howard, what did you and Gretchen Rae talk about — besides your sex fantasies?”

“Well, Gretchy seemed to be interested in business — stock mergers, the little companies I’ve been buying up, that sort of thing. Also politics. My Pentagon chums have told me about Korea heating up, implying lots of aircraft business. Gretchy seemed interested in that, too. A smart girl always interests herself in her lovers’ endeavors, Buzz. You know that. Have you got leads on her?”

“I surely have. Boss, how have you managed to stay alive and rich so long?”

“I trust the right people, Buzz. Do you believe that?”

“I surely do.”

* * *

I gave my sitting-in-the-dark stakeout another three hours, then raided the icebox for energy and took the Other Guy Routine on the road, a mitzvah for Mickey in case I had to play an angle to shoot Gretchen Rae to Howard — his very own teenage murderess. First I wrapped up Fritz Steinkamp in three windows’ worth of chintz curtains and hauled him out to my car; next I mummified Voyteck Kirnipaski in a bedspread and wedged him into the trunk between Fritz and my spare tire. Then it was a routine wipe of my own possible prints, lights off, and a drive out to Topanga Canyon, to the chemical debris dump operated by the Hughes Tool Company —a reservoir bubbling with caustic agents adjacent to a day camp for underprivileged kids: a Howard tax dodge. I dumped Fritz and Voyteck into the cauldron and listened to them snap, crackle, and pop like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Then, just after midnight, I drove to the Strip to look for Mickey and his minions.