Bogart Sleeps Here: A Trace Novella (Chapter Six)

“Did you know that Nasser Reid used to own The Blue Orchid?” Trace asked Lisa over his cell phone.

He was mired in slow-moving southbound traffic on the 405. The section connecting the 405 between Route 90 and the Santa Monica Freeway had been a nightmarish mess for months while Cal Trans embarked on a $167 million project to extend the High Occupancy Vehicle Lane.

Create more gridlock in order to get a handle on gridlock, Trace thought. Makes fucking sense to me. Lisa’s voice momentarily pulled him out of his ire.

“Name me one club in L.A. that doesn’t have gangster lore attached to it,” Lisa said with an edge to her words.

“What’s wrong?” Trace asked.

“Nothing.”

“What is wrong?” he repeated forcefully while bullying the Packard into the number two lane. Over the phone he could hear Lisa’s band tuning up in the background. She always rehearsed in the late afternoon before the club opened for business.

“You didn’t stop by the club last night,” she said in a low voice.

“Oh, for chrissakes. I told you I probably wouldn’t come. Look, I’m in over my head right now. I’ve got this David Dulce thing going on, I still have to write this piece of shit vampire treatment, and now Hovic has given me a book to read that’s the size of the New York City telephone directory.”

“Poor baby.” There was no sympathy in her voice.

“And the book is set in the porn industry.”

“Your favorite subject.”

Trace could see this conversation was moving along about as fast as the snarled traffic around him.

“I’ll stop by later tonight, okay? Bye.”

He pressed the END button and auto-dialed the private number of Alfred Saenz, executive editor of The National Tattler in Manhattan, as the Long Beach Harbor came into view.

*****
Marcel scribbled out a check for $100 and passed it across the desk to Trace.

“The poem was great. I knew you could do it.”

“It was shit.”

“No, it’s very good. I love the title: ‘Bogart Sleeps Here’.”

“The title’s good. The verse is shit.”

Trace’s cell phone rang. It was Alfred Saenz from The National Tattler. Seeing that it was after 6:00 PM in New York, Trace figured they wanted the story, otherwise he would have received a call back in the morning.

“Will Dulce take a lie detector test?” Saenz inquired after asking for David’s contact information.

“I think he’d make love to a woman if he thought he could get paid for it.”

Saenz cackled on the other end of the line.

“This could be a big story,” Saenz said. “A front pager. It’s like Rock Hudson or Liberace. I mean, everyone knows that Rhapsody Williams is as queer as they come but the guy keeps insisting he’s straight.”

“Talk to Dulce,” Trace said. “I’m sure he’ll give you all the sordid details and then some.”

“Standard deal, Trace. Five thousand to you upon publication if his story checks out.”

“No. Twenty-five hundred when he passes the polygraph, the other twenty-five after publication.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

*****

It was six o’clock by the time Trace rolled the Packard out of the parking lot of Marcel’s office in the Long Beach Harbor. If traffic cooperated, he could be back in L.A. by seven, just in time to catch Lisa’s first show at The Blue Orchid.

The needle on the fuel gauge hovered near empty. The Packard got lousy mileage, creating another burden on Trace’s perpetually strained finances, but he had an affection for that old car that he could not recollect having for any human being, with the exception of his daughter.

He pulled into a gas station on Wilmington Boulevard. The station stood in the shadow of one of the thirteen oil refineries that churn out millions of barrels of oil a day and leave the air in the South Bay thick with the sickly sweet smell of gasoline. In the early 1900s, the South Bay area of Los Angeles was a round clump of willows. The land consisted of wheat and barely fields on which cattle and sheep grazed. In May of 1911, five men representing Standard Oil Company arrived to survey the undeveloped land as a possible site for their next oil refinery. Aside from the low cost of the land, they were also enticed by the proximity to the seashore that would provide easy access for their oil tankers. One month after the 1911 survey, Standard Oil bought 840 acres of land in El Segundo and the beachfront soil has been a petroleum churn ever since.

While pumping gas into the Packard under the glare of the station’s sodium lights, Trace felt he was being watched. His glance fell upon a city bus stop a few yards away. A young boy was sitting on the bus bench, his head craned over his shoulder, soft eyes fixed on the Packard. He had skin the color of milk chocolate and etched on his ten-year old face was an innocence that was almost heartbreaking.

After a moment, the boy stood and ambled toward Trace. He wasn’t decked out in the latest fashion for kids his age. He wore scuffed white sneakers, black denim pants with frayed holes in the knees, and a red and white striped short-sleeve shirt.

“What’s up, man?” the boy asked Trace.

“I’m pumping gas.”

The boy looked upon the Packard like it was a flying saucer.

“What kinda car is that?”

“It’s a 1948 Packard Touring Sedan,” Trace said, always eager to talk about his most prized possession. “Model 2211, complete, factory stock, smooth straight eight, economical standard shift with overdrive, original factory monogrammed floor mats, and some cosmetic restoration here and there.”

“Needs paint.”

“Sure does.”

“Is a big car.”

“Yep.”

Trace placed the nozzle back on the fuel pump.

“How much it cost you?”

“Four thousand and change.”

Trace began cleaning the windshield.

“Where you buy it from?”

“An auto restorer in El Dorado.”

“Where that?”

“Near Sacramento,” Trace said. The boy was perplexed by the answer and chewed on the inside of his lip. “Do you know where Sacramento is?”

“Nope.”

“It’s where the Terminator lives,” Trace said with a soft smile. “El Dorado is also the name of a very famous poem by a man named Edgar Allan Poe. Ever hear of him?”

“No, sir.”

Trace recited the first stanza for the child’s amusement. “Gaily bedight/a gallant knight/In sunshine and in shadow/Had journeyed long/Singing a song/In search of El Dorado.”

“Is that it?”

“There’s more but I only remember the first part. I liked that poem when I was your age. Do you go to school?”

“Not no more.”

“Why not?”

“Cuz we move around a lot.”

“Who’s we? Your mom and pop?”

The boy shook his head and stared at the shiny hubcaps on the Packard. “My mom and me and my sister and my cousin Angela. Somethin’ bad happened to Angela once ’n that’s why we always has to move.”

“I see.”

Trace finished cleaning the windshield and looked skyward in time to witness a dense cluster of tiny, fluttering creatures descending from out of nowhere. They moved as a unit, hundreds of them, a mass of aerodynamic color.

“Those are Mexican Monarch butterflies,” Trace explained to the boy. “Every year this time they migrate to California from Mexico.”

“Those ain’t Mexican Monarch butterflies,” the boy protested. “They’s Painted Lady butterflies. They kind of orange-brown colored with black and white patches. See?”

The boy excitedly pointed a slender brown finger at a stray Painted Lady that fluttered over the Packard.

“Mexican Monarch is just orange and black. Them’s Painted Ladies.”

“I thought you didn’t go to school.”

“I dun’t. But I ain’t stupid.”

Trace climbed back into the driver’s seat.

“Do you need a ride home? It’s almost dark.”

The boy took two steps backward and shook his head. “Uh-uh. My mom tol’ me never to take rides from strangers.”

Trace smiled. “Your mom is a smart woman.” He closed the door and ignited the engine. “Thanks for setting me straight on those butterflies. I’ll never mistake a Mexican Monarch for a Painted Lady again.”

The boy quietly watched as Trace pulled the Packard away from the gas station and into the smooth flowing traffic on Wilmington Boulevard. A series of small, hesitant steps returned the child to the bus bench. He kept his eyes on the departing Packard until it disappeared onto the freeway.

He sat down on the bench, his small legs dangling over the edge. Hunks of steel and chromium zipped by, many of them ominously close to the curb, motorists oblivious to the fears of a ten-year old child, chief among them getting hit by a car.

When the woman sat down on the bench next to the boy the first thing he noticed was her perfume. It was rosewater, the same perfume his mother dabbed behind her ears every morning. The woman placed her elbows in her lap and leaned forward so her face was level with the boy’s. The boy thought that her eyes did not look right, sort of like how Angela’s eyes get sometimes when she remembers the bad thing that happened.

“Are you waiting for the bus all by yourself?” the woman asked.