Bogart Sleeps Here: A Trace Novella (Chapter Seven)

“Is Nasser Reid still alive?” Trace asked the white-bearded bartender. He had to shout to be heard over Lisa’s dulcet blues crooning on the stage twenty feet from the horseshoe-shaped bar. “He used to own this place, you know.”

“Still alive, far as I heard.” The bartender nodded his bald head in beat with the throbbing bass line underlying Lisa’s singing. “He got outta prison last year.”

“What?” Trace downed his shot of Bushmills and moved the glass close to the edge of the bar for a refill. “He only did two years for the Laurel Canyon murders?”

“They never got him for that. What they snagged him on was jury tampering in the second trial. But they never could prove he had anything to do with the actual killings. Nasser covered his tracks too good for that to happen.”

“What about David Dulce’s testimony against Nasser?”

The bartender’s face – not an easy face to look at to begin with, Trace felt – twisted into a visage of pure hatred.

“That punk faggot,” he spat.

“Did he lie in his testimony? Is Dulce a liar?” If Dulce didn’t pass the polygraph there would be no sale to the Tattler and no five thousand dollar payday in Trace’s near future.

The bartender’s aged eyes narrowed to slits of suspicion. “What’s your interest in David Dulce all of a sudden, Trace?”

The bartender at The Blue Orchid disliked Trace because he never paid his bar tab, always leaving the mounting debt for Lisa to settle. His animus toward the writer grew deeper after Trace pulled a gun on a guest crooner who repeatedly passed off jazz tunes as blues tunes one evening.

“Buy yourself a musical education!” Trace shouted drunkenly, waving the 9mm in the air like a background player in a saloon scene from a John Ford western.

Trace was arrested but his friend Detective Selwyn at the Hollywood Division managed to make the charges disappear. Selwyn owed Trace a lot of favors and Trace was never shy about cashing them in.

“I have no interest in David Dulce,” Trace explained to the bartender. “I’m just researching a character for a book. That’s all.”

Trace turned on the bar stool to face the main floor of the club when Lisa segued from one heart-melting blues lament to another. She had a fine voice, Trace thought, a distinct sort of “house band” style of crooning that most people were too ignorant to recognize as a viable genre of live music.

He had arrived at The Blue Orchid at 7:30, a full half hour into her first set of the night. The place wasn’t crowded but it usually wasn’t on Tuesday nights. Although she enjoyed having Trace in the club watching her perform, Lisa never sang to him or at him, keeping her voice and eyes trained on the crowd at large, drawing in every patron so they felt she was singing to them individually. This is not to say, however, that she wasn’t aware of his every move when Trace was in the club. She was. Painfully. Being around Trace was sometimes akin to babysitting a gifted child with a propensity for outlandish temper tantrums – you don’t want to inhibit the savant but at the same time reminders need to be made about how normal people function in society.

“That’s the problem,” Lisa confessed to a friend over one too many sloe gins. “Trace doesn’t see the big picture most of the time. His whole world is about … him. He’s insensitive to other people’s feelings until he gets called on it and then he’ll overcompensate with acts of kindness and affection just to lull you into a false sense of security and then – BAM! – he’s back trouncing all over you again. I do love the bastard, though.”

From the stage, Lisa’s almond-colored eyes darted to the main entrance as Juliette LaFavre made her weekly appearance. Lisa once described her as “trash in high heels” although she didn’t deny that LaFavre — a former Heidi Fleiss hireling when Fleiss was still peddling flesh – was a stunner. Before Trace and Lisa ever hooked up, Trace had enjoyed a brief and very carnal affair with LaFavre. The wildly shifting emotional highs and lows of the former call girl were like unpredictable winds that Trace grew weary of trying to control. He called off the relationship before it became too serious.

Not unlike other call girls, Juliette was a consummate actress and she used her skills to conceal her hurt and bitter disappointment over the shattered relationship with Trace. He thought everything was “okay” between them but Lisa intuited otherwise because a woman can read the subtext in another woman’s mannerisms, attitudes, and body language far quicker than a man ever will. Juliette, Lisa understood, tried to haunt Trace’s life with the fervent hope that he would one day express a desire to revisit what they once had together.

“Hey! I read that book,” Juliette announced as she slid onto a bar stool next to Trace. She tapped the cover of “Losing Light” with a perfectly-manicured and polished fingernail. Trace had been sipping his Bushmills and lazily flipping through the book when Juliette made her way to the bar.

“Hovic at Warner Brothers asked me to read it.”

“Wow.” Juliette’s eyes lit up. “Finally a big studio assignment, huh?”

Trace frowned. “No, it’s more like a consultant job. Apparently I’m not on the studio’s A-list of writers.”

“Because you haven’t had an A-list assignment, honey. All in good time.”

She ordered a vodka martini.

“Tell me about the book,” Trace said.

“What do you want to know?”

“As much as you can recall: the settings, the characters, how realistic or fabricated the plot is.”

“Oh, it’s a lively and realistic plot, all right,” she said. “But if you want a full book report, you’ll have to buy me a drink … or two or three or four.”

*****

Juliette’s right leg dangled from the open passenger side door of the Packard like a fleshy appendage to the running board that the assembly crew forgot to bolt down. She was plastered and belting out a cruel and spiteful imitation of Lisa’s singing style.

“Good thing you didn’t let me drive,” she slurred when Trace came around to her side of the car. “Goddamn court took my license away months ago.”

“What did you do this time?” He grabbed onto Juliette’s left arm and helped her stagger to her feet.

“Mowed some guy down on Melrose. They wanted to stick me with vehicular manslaughter but the fucker lived. District Attorney’s been trying to get me ever since I popped his kid’s cherry – and it wasn’t a very tasteful cherry at that.”

Juliette LaFavre lived in an old stucco bungalow at the top of a heady flight of steps traversing a steep hillside in Los Feliz. Rancho Los Feliz was the name of the plot of land when real estate baron Griffith J. Griffith bought it in 1882. In 1896 the Colonel donated over 3,015 acres of the land to the city of Los Angeles to be used for a municipal park, the largest park in the world. But Griffith’s act of philanthropy was overshadowed by the attempted murder of his wife while under the influence of alcoholic delusions brought on by drinking two quarts of whiskey a day. Colonel Griffith was convicted and sentenced to two years in San Quentin. He returned to Los Angeles after his prison term as a wealthy but hated man. In response, he set up a trust fund and donated $150,000 to build the Griffith Observatory and the Greek Theatre on the parklands that bore his name.

“Even monsters want to be remembered fondly,” Trace had remarked to Juliette when he first told her the strange tale of the history of Los Feliz. Trace recalled that conversation as he half-dragged and half-carried Juliette up the exhausting flight of steps to the soothing light of the bungalow at the top. Was that Dulce’s ploy? Was the potential sale to The Tattler about more than money? It seemed more probable increasingly the more he thought about it. And the more probable it seemed, the more dangerous the whole enterprise was suddenly becoming in Trace’s eyes.