Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [25]
“Let’s hit it, then,” I said. We drove south, along the periphery of the U.C.L.A. campus, to Wilshire, then east. It was shortly past midnight, and I was getting tired.
“Your best bet is the south course,” Stan was saying. “There’s a gate on Wilshire that’s open twenty-four hours. There’s a bunch of wetback maintenance guys who live there. They got their own barracks. We can park in their lot. There’s the gate coming up. Slow down.” I did. The gate led down to a woodsy nothingness. I could hardly see. Stan was giving explicit directions. “Real slow now, hang a right now and stop.”
I stopped and Mexican music hit me. Then I heard laughter. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could see a large, one-story bunkhouse off to my left. There were men sitting on the doorway steps drinking beer. They stopped talking as they heard us approach. I grabbed my flashlight and thermos of coffee and beckoned to Stan The Man to follow me. We walked up to the beer drinkers. “Hola,” I said, “we’re looking for El Perro, Perro grande y blanco?”
It broke the ice. The five or six voices that answered my query were friendly. As best I could understand them, they all said the same thing: they hadn’t seen any big, white dog. I should have told them I was looking for a fat dog, but I didn’t know the Spanish word for fat. “Gracias, amigos,” I said.
“De nada,” they returned. As Stan and I moved into the darkness, they turned their mariachi music back on. Silently I wished them a good life in America.
The L.A. south course was flatter than Bel-Air, and more ur-banbound. The lights of the Century City business monoliths about a half mile away cast an eerie glow on the trees and hills. Stan was directing me to the spot where he thought Fat Dog was most likely to be: the eleventh tee. Our flashlights played over the terrain, picking out scurrying rodents. In the distance I could hear the hiss of a sprinkler.
Fat Dog was not residing on the eleventh tee. Somehow I didn’t care. I was astounded that I had lived in Los Angeles for over thirty years, had prided myself on my knowledge of my city, and had missed out on all this. This was more than the play domain of the very rich, it was quite simply another world, and such diverse types as caddies, wetbacks, and burned-out ex-cops had access to it, on whatever level of reality they chose to seek. Golf courses: a whole solar system of alternate realities in the middle of a smogbound city.
I decided to explore all the city’s courses, with my cassette recorder, on future sleepless nights. After Fat Dog Baker was safely locked up in the pen or the loony bin, of course.
I trained my light on a pair of wooden benches next to the tee. “Let’s sit down,” I said. I opened the thermos of coffee and poured Stan a cup, drinking mine directly from the container.
“You like it here, don’t you?” Stan asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m surprised it took me this long to discover it.”
We sipped coffee and stared into the darkness. We were facing north. Wilshire was a narrow strip of light in the distance. Cars glided silently along it.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. I shanghaied you out here illegally. You can take off, or I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”
I could feel Stan The Man staring at me in the dark. After a few moments, he laughed. “I knew there was something funny about you, I knew it, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. How come you’re looking for Fat Dog?”
“I’m working for him. He hired me to do a little work for him.”
“What kind of work?”
“It’s confidential. Do you want to split? I’ll drive you home.”
“Naw, I like it here too. What kind of cases do you handle?”
“Mostly I repossess cars.”
Stan laughed, wildly. “Now that’s really funny,” he said. “I used to steal cars and you repo them. That’s a fucking scream!”
“Tell me about looping,” I said.