The Straight Man - Roger L Simon (6 page)

"Now and again," l said.

"Yeah? All James Bond gotta do is look at it and
he get his pecker wet. Think I'm a movie star, I could get laid
anytime I wanted it. No wonder I'm into coke .... C'mere, you!"

Otis reached unsuccessfully for a surf bunny who was
wandering by in a Malibu Beach Club tank top. She stopped and gave
him a look. "Sorry, baby, you know us niggers. We be full-moon
crazy we get near the water." He turned back to me with a grin
on his face. "So, Magnum-motherfucker, you wanna know 'bout
Brother Ptak. I got a suspicion Sigmund here killed him jus' so he
could get his greedy little hands on my contract—and I ain't
talkin' 'bout that shrink contract he made wid me. I'm talkin' 'bout
the big-assed cinematic movie star multipic pact, know what I mean?
Right, Sigmund?"

He pointed a French fry straight at Bannister, who
was sitting beside me, his head profiled against a production still
of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River. The Malibu Pharmacy
stayed close to its roots.

"I didn't know you were planning on making me
your manager," he said.

"Well, you tol' me yo'self I can't let them
blowhead mo'fuckers in the Bronx do it no more. They gonna snort my
profits or send 'em to Colombia to one of them generals in the green
glasses, buy 'em another plantation, and I'll be a lost motherfucker
without a penny to my name, rollin' in the gutter all alone. I'm a
little lost boy and I need help. Take care of me, take care of me,
please please please. You gonna be my main man, right, please?"

"Of course, Otis. Of course I'll be your main
man." Bannister said it soothingly, as if they were the key
words in a mantra. "I'll always be your main man."

Otis calmed down for a second.

It felt like the energy level of the whole room went
down a few notches.

"Moses is going to ask you a few questions now,"
Bannister continued, his voice still sounding like a disc jockey on
an easy-listening station.

"Okay, okay," said Otis.

"Where were you when Mike died, Otis?"

"Where I always be," he answered simply.
"Right here with Dr. Bannister."

"In the house?"

"Yeah. In the house. We was watchin' a tape of
Road Warrior. You like that movie?"

"
Uh-huh."

"You my man! Crazy bald motherfuckers with
chains. I love it! . . . Anyway, you was askin' me about my alibi.
You doin' an interrogation, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, great. I tell you everything you want to
know. Is that okay, Doctor?"

"Sure it's okay, Otis," said Bannister.

"When did Mike start on speedballs?"

"Speedballs? He was into speedballs? I didn't
know that."

He turned to Bannister. "See what I mean? I was
his partner and I didn't know shit. Motherfucker wouldn't tell me
nothin'. Probably a racist motherfucker, if you ask me. All that shit
about discoverin' me in Washington Square Park when I was doin'
stand-up and makin' my career—that's bullshit. Every motherfucker
in the Village knew me. Every last hippie and homo. Even Swami X knew
me . . . knew my whole family, even my brother, knew 'em all . . .
thems that was alive, anyway."

"
Who's Swami X?"

"Greatest fuckin' genius of comedy ever was.
Learned everything I knew from Swami X. Tell the truth to the
motherfuckers. That'll make 'em laugh. Tell 'em their secrets. Like
every motherfucker in this room's thinkin' about pussy—right
now—whether they like it or not. Whether they know it or not. Isn't
that right, Doctor?"

"That's right, Otis."

"And if they not thinkin' about pussy, they
thinkin' about dick." Suddenly Otis stopped his tirade and
looked at me quite seriously. "Who told you Mike was doin'
speedballs?"

"Police."

"
Motherfuckin' Liars."

"How do you know that?"

He jumped up and started pointing at me. "I know
it! Don't tell me I don't know it! Who the fuck you think you're
tellin'? I was his partner. I fuckin' went on the road with that
white nobody. I made him. He couldn't make a motherfucker laugh if he
tied him down and tickled his dick with ostrich feathers!" Otis
sat down again and started muttering. By now everyone in the coffee
shop was staring at us openly. "And him always telling me what
to do like he was my mother. You my mother, right, Doctor?"

"Yes, Otis."

"Thank God, I got a mother." He looked at
me. "You got any more questions, Mr. Dick? I got time for one
more question before I take my nap and go to my aerobics class. Gots
to be all rested up so's I can get my nose in the bush o' the Nazi
bitch teaches that class."

"
Okay. Just one. Did you or Mike know anything
about a police investigation into drugs in Hollywood? Some big
connection back East who's been funneling major amounts of dope to
movie people?"

"Connections'? What you talkin' about
connections?" He stared at me with a sudden blast of cold
hatred. "Who brought him in here?" he said to Bannister.

"He's working for Emily."

"That mind-fuckin' cunt .... Look, man, you
don't know nothin' about nothin'. Understand? And people who don't
know nothin', when they hear somethin', they ain't gonna understand
it anyway. So if I was you, I'd take your white face and get as far
away from here as you possibly can or one black brother's gonna cut
your ass. And that ain't no joke from Otis King. That's the blues and
the abstract truth. Good-bye, Mr. Charlie." And with that he
stood up. "C'mon, Sigmund."

"Good afternoon, Mr. Wine," said Bannister,
and followed the black man out. It was hard to know if the tail was
wagging the dog or the other way around.

7

"Bannister is directive."

"Otis can't pee without his permission. Every
hour of the patient's day is accounted for."

"That must cost a considerable amount."

"Enough to keep a staff of three on
twenty-four-hour-a-day duty in a house in the Malibu Colony."

Nathanson shook his head gravely. I was in his office
for my usual session that afternoon between two and three. A harsh
light filtered in through his greenhouse window and I was feeling
uneasy, disoriented. I wasn't sure whether to talk about myself or
talk about the case, so the conversation vacillated uncomfortably
between the two until the subject of  Bannister came up and
Nathanson pounced on it like a hawk.

"And on top of everything," I continued,
"it's possible that Bannister's real objective is not to cure
Otis but to get his hooks into his lucrative career. Otis practically
said as much when we were having lunch."

"And do you believe him?"

"I don't know what to believe. Otis is pretty
crazy. Or at least he pretends to be .... Look, Doctor, I'm still
feeling pretty depressed myself. I've been having these dreams about
my father and I--"

"Bannister's manipulative. He's more interested
in being a guru than a psychiatrist. And he does have excessive
material ambitions."

I stared at Nathanson. In the months I had seen him,
he had broken his shrink's persona once or twice, but never this
severely. It disturbed me and I told him so.

"Well, I'm sorry to hear that," he replied.

"Yes, but this is my hour."

"And?"

"I'm not feeling great."

"And you expect me to solve that for you?"

"
You're my shrink!"

"Moses, I am not usually a fan of Carl Jung. But
he wrote something once that I thought quite succinct: 'Neurosis is
always a substitute for legitimate suffering.' Keep that in mind the
next time you expect someone else to solve your problems for you."

"What're you talking about?" I felt a hot
stab of anger I through the back of my neck. "Then what'm I
doing here?"

"Think about it." Nathanson checked his
clock. "I'm sorry. That's all we have time for today." He
pressed his servo-control and sat up straight.

I got up to leave. "Oh, I meant to ask you—King
called Emily Ptak a 'mind-fucking cunt.' Do you know why that was?"

The doctor hesitated. "If I knew, I couldn't
give you that information, Moses. She's my patient."

"According to the law, if a psychiatrist has
information pertaining to a capital crime, he must reveal it."

"Yes, to the police. You're a private detective.
Besides, if you have a question about Emily, I suggest you ask her
yourself. See you Thursday."

Thursday? I walked out of Nathanson's office not
knowing what to think. A good working definition of a schizophrenic
was a private detective trying to solve a case for his shrink.

I thought about talking to Emily, but I had something
else on my mind as I pulled into a liquor store about half a block
away to use the phone. I picked up a couple of lottery tickets while
I was making change and started to scratch off the numbers as I
walked into the booth. I dialed Parker Center and asked for Inspector
Koontz. He wasn't in, but I was redirected to a Sergeant Estrada in
homicide who was working on the Ptak case.

"Who's this?" he said. He sounded
belligerent.

"Moses Wine. I'm a PI on the Ptak case. I'm a
friend of Koontz's." I stretched it a little.

"Yeah."

"He was going to find out for me the hours on
that Romanian bellhop, Vasile Nastase—the one who brought Ptak up
to his room. I understand his shift was over about twenty minutes
after Ptak arrived."

"What'd you say your name was?"

The first card was another loser and I chucked it in
the basket.

"Wine."

"Well, Mr. Wine, I wouldn't be going around
asking questions about Mr. Nastase if I were you."

"Why's that?" I rubbed through the first
two numbers of the second card—one five hundred and a one thousand.

"Because Mr. Nastase turned up dead this morning
at about ten-twenty-five."

He hung up. I stuffed the second ticket in my pocket
and left.

I got back in my car and started heading east along
Sunset back into the city, wondering what I had contributed to
Nastase's death. I must have been one of the last to see him alive
and he obviously wasn't pleased to see me poking around the D'Avignon
Suite at ten o'clock last night. It was obvious too that this would
reawaken, and perhaps broaden, the police investigation of Mike
Ptak's suicide. Where would they look? On the face of it Nastase, the
Romanian Orthodox bellhop, was not a prime candidate for a major
participant in the drug world, but then neither was the Thai
grandmother I read they arrested, last year importing seventy pounds
of brown heroin from Bangkok in her husband's funeral urn.

It was almost five o'clock when I reached the Beverly
Hills Hotel, and on an impulse I took a quick left up Benedict Canyon
to the address Emily Ptak had left me. She lived in a gated
mock-Tudor estate at the end of West Wanda and I parked right in
front of it. I was about to press the intercom button when I noticed
Genevieve playing in the front yard. I called to her and the little
girl ran over, followed immediately by a nervous English nanny, whose
concern was only mollified somewhat when she realized the girl knew
me. I never got inside the gate, but I did find out that Emily had
gone overnight to Ojai. The Cosmic Aid Foundation, I thought, and
continued on to the Albergo Picasso.

Koontz was conferring with a couple of other
detectives by a squad car in front of the hotel when I got there. One
of them, a dark, skinny Chicano with a beaked Mayan nose, I took to
be Estrada. Some comics I recognized from the Fun Zone were standing
in a cluster a few feet away, watching and commenting like some weird
Greek chorus of the entertainment-industry unemployed. I could almost
hear their wisecracks about dead Romanians when I walked up to
Koontz.

"How're you doin', Art?"

He pretended to ignore me, going over a dot matrix
printout with the other detectives. I waited for them to leave before
I addressed the inspector.

"What happened to Nastase?"

"Wine, is there any reason I should cooperate
with you?"

He scowled at me, but I smiled back at him. This
wasn't a time to get hostile. "I might help solve the crime."

"You might and you might not. You might actually
create more problems than you solve. I understand you visited here 
last night, masquerading as the owner of some leather store.

Pretty sleazy work you do."

"Is lying a crime, Koontz?"

"I don't know. Ask your psychiatrist."

He looked at me with a sarcastic, knowing smirk. I
did my best to ignore it and get back to business.

"How'd Nastase go'?"

"You are persistent, aren't you?"

"It's a racial characteristic." V

He took a deep breath. "All right. Look, your
friend Nastase was found dead way in the back of the Tujunga Wash
with a thirty-eight slug through his temple. The way he was hidden
under the brush, I don't think whoever did it banked on his being
found for a while. Who could've known some jerkoff William Morris
agents get their rocks off up there three mornings a week playing war
games with blank guns'?"