“Don’t panic,” said Milo. “We couldn’t care less about
that stuff.”
“I’m not some kind of pervert,” Carmichael insisted. “If
you traced me that far back you know how it happened.”
“Sure. You were a dancer at Lancelot’s. After the show
one of the ladies in the audience picked you up. Sex for money was discussed
and she busted you.”
“She entrapped me. The cunt!”
Lancelot’s was a male stripper joint in west L.A.
catering to women who thought liberation meant aping the crudest aspects of
male behavior. The club had long been the object of neighborhood complaints and
a couple of years back the police and the fire inspectors had paid it lots of
attention. A harassment suit by the owner had ended that.
Milo shrugged. “Anyway, daddy got you off, the file
was closed, and you promised to behave yourself.”
“Yeah,” said Carmichael, bitterly. “End of story,
right? Only it wasn’t that simple.” The blue eyes burned. “Dad commandeered my
trust fund—money left to me by my mom. It was illegal, I’m sure of it, but the
lawyer in charge of the trust is one of Dad’s California Club buddies and
before I knew it the old man had all of it under his control. And me by the
balls. It was like being a kid again, having to ask permission for everything.
He forced me to go to school, said I had to make something of myself. Christ, I’m
thirty-six and I’m in junior college! If I get good grades there’ll be a place
for me at Carmichael Oil. What a crock. Nothing’s gonna change me into someone
I’m not. What the hell does he want from me?”
He looked at us beseechingly, wanting support. My
instinct was to give it to him but this wasn’t therapy. Milo let him cool down
before he spoke.
“And if he finds out about your current job, kaput,
eh?”
“Shit.” Carmichael stroked his beard. “I can’t help
it. I like doing that kind of thing. God gave me a great body and a great face
and I get off on sharing it with other people. It’s like acting but private, so
it’s better, more intimate. When I used to dance I could feel the women’s eyes
on me. I played to them, treated them good. I wanted them to cream right there.
It felt so—loving.”
“I told this to your boss and I’ll tell it to you,”
said Milo, “we don’t give a damn who fucks who in this city. It only becomes a
problem when people get cut or shot or strangled in the process.”
Carmichael didn’t seem to have heard.
“I mean it’s not like I’m hooking or anything,” he
insisted. “I don’t need the money—in a good week I pull in six, maybe seven
hundred bucks.” He dismissed that kind of money with a wave of his hand,
operating from the distorted value system of one born into wealth.
“Doug,” said Milo, with authority in his voice, “stop
defending yourself and listen: we don’t care about what you do with your dick.
Your file will stay sealed. Just tell us about Nona.”
The message finally got through. The look on
Carmichael’s face was that of a child who’d received an unexpected gift. I
realized that I kept thinking of him as a big kid because, except for the manly
outer husk, everything about him was childlike, immature. A classic case of
arrested development.
“She was a barracuda,” he said. “You had to hold her
back or she got too aggressive. The last time we worked together was a stag
party for an older guy who was getting married for the second time. A bunch of
middle-aged men, salesman types, in this apartment in Canoga Park. They’d been
drinking hard and watching fuck films before we got there. We were doing jock
and cheerleader that night. I had on a football uniform and she was wearing a
jersey top, a little pleated skirt, and sneakers. Pompons, her hair in
pigtails, the works.
“Those guys were harmless old farts. Before we got
there they’d probably been talking big, hooting at the movies like guys do when
they’re nervous. Then we walked in, they saw her, and I thought a few hearts
were gonna give out. She wiggled at ’em, batted her lashes, showed a lot of
tongue. We had the skit all planned out but she decided to ad lib. The script
says we do a little minor league fondling while trading suggestive lines—you
know stuff like I ask her how she’d like to be my wide receiver and she says ‘Do
it again, we like it, we like it!’ She was a lousy actress, by the way, real
flat, no emotion. But the audiences seemed to dig her—her looks made up for it,
I guess. Anyway, these old guys were eating it up and she got off on it. That’s
probably what gave her the idea of getting really outrageous.
“All of a sudden she reached into my pants, grabbed my
cock, did a bump and grind, started jerking me off, all the time gyrating at
them. I wanted to stop her—we’re not supposed to go past the script unless we’re
asked to.” He stopped, looked uncomfortable. “And paid to. But I couldn’t do it
because it would have ruined the skit and been a downer for all those old guys.
“They were staring at her and she was groping me and I
was smiling through it all. Then she let go and waltzed over to the guy who was
getting hitched—pudgy little fellow with big eyeglasses—and slipped her hand
down
his
pants. Everything got real quiet then. He was red as a beet but
he couldn’t say anything cause it woulda made him look like a wimp in front of
his friends. He got a sick look on his face, forced himself to smile. She
started tonguing his ear, kept yanking his chain. The other guys started to
laugh. To relieve their tension. Soon they were yelling out lewd comments. Nona
was high, like she was really getting off on groping the poor sucker.
“Finally I was able to ease her away without it
looking like a hassle. We got out of there and I yelled at her in the car. She
looked at me like I was nuts, said what was the matter, we got a big tip, didn’t
we. I could see it was no use talking to her so I gave up. We got on the
freeway. I was driving fast because I couldn’t wait to get away from her. Then
all of a sudden I felt her pulling at my zipper. Before I know it, my cock is
out and she’s got it in her mouth. We’re going seventy and she’s sucking me off
and telling me to admit it, I love it. I was helpless, just praying the highway
patrol wouldn’t pull us over—that would be my balls, right? I asked her to stop
but she had me and she wouldn’t let go until she finished me off.”
“The next day I complained to Rambo, insisted I wouldn’t
work with her anymore. She just laughed, said Nona would be great in films. Later
I found out she’d left, just walked out.”
Telling the story had made him sweat. He excused
himself, went to the bathroom, and came back freshly combed and sprayed and
smelling of aftershave. Milo started questioning before he sat back down.
“And you have no idea where she went?”
Carmichael shook his head.
“She ever talk about anything personal?”
“Nope. There was nothing personal about her. She was
all on the surface.”
“No hint where she might be headed?”
“She never even said where she came from. Like I told
you, we did three or four gigs, then she split.”
“How’d she connect with Adam and Eve?”
“No idea. Everyone gets into it differently. Rambo
called me after she caught my act at Lancelot’s. Some find out by word of
mouth. She runs ads in the underground papers and skin mags. Gets more
applications than she wants.”
“All right, Doug,” said Milo, standing, “I hope you’ve
been straight with us.”
“I really have, Detective. Please don’t pull me into
this.”
“I’ll do the best I can.”
We left. Back in the car Milo checked in with the
dispatcher. There were no important messages.
“So what’s the diagnosis on Surfer Boy?” he asked.
“Off the cuff? Personality problems, probably
narcissistic.”
“Which means?”
“That he’s got low self-esteem and it expresses itself
in self-obsession—muscles, vitamins, constant attention paid to his body.”
“Sounds like half of L.A.,” he growled and turned on
the ignition. As we pulled away, Carmichael came out of his house in swim
trunks carrying a surfboard, a towel, and tanning lotion. He saw us, smiled,
waved, and headed toward the beach.
Milo parked in a no parking zone near the entrance to
Western Peds. “I hate hospitals,” he said, as we boarded the elevator and rode
up to the fifth floor. It took a while to locate Valcroix. He was examining a
patient and we waited for him in a small conference room off the ward.
He came in fifteen minutes later, gave me a disgusted
look, and told Milo to hurry, he was busy. When the detective began talking, he
made a show of pulling out a medical chart, perusing it, and writing notes.
Milo’s a skilled interrogator but he struck out with
the Canadian. Valcroix continued to chart, unflustered, as the detective
confronted him with knowing the Touch visitors and his affair with Nona Swope.
“Are you through, Officer?”
“For the time being, Doctor.”
“What am I supposed to do, defend myself?”
“You might start by explaining your role in the
disappearance.”
“That will be quite simple. There is none.”
“No collaboration between you and the couple from the
Touch?”
“Absolutely not. I visited them once. That’s the
extent of it.”
“What was the purpose of your visit?”
“Educational. I’m interested in communal societies.”
“Did you learn much, Doctor?”
Valcroix smiled.
“It was a peaceful place. They have no need for
policemen.”
“What were the names of the people who visited the
Swopes?”
“The man was called Baron, the woman, Delilah.”
“Surnames?”
“They don’t use them.”
“And you’ve only visited the Touch once or twice.”
“Once.”
“All right. We’ll be verifying that.”
“Feel free.”
Milo fixed him with a hard stare. The Fellow smiled
contemptuously.
“Did Nona Swope tell you anything that would lead us
to her family’s whereabouts?”
“We didn’t talk much. We just fucked.”
“Doctor, I suggest you rethink your attitude.”
“Oh really?” The squinty eyes became hyphens. “You
interrupt my work to ask me stupid questions about my personal life and expect
me to have a good attitude?”
“In your case personal and professional seem pretty
enmeshed.”
“How insightful of you to notice.”
“Is that all you have to say, Doctor?”
“What more would you like to hear? That I like to fuck
women? All right. I do. I crave it. I’m going to fuck as many women as I can in
this life and if there’s a life thereafter I hope it will provide an endless
chain of warm, willing women so I can keep fucking. Last I heard, fucking was
no crime, or have they passed a new law in America?”
“Go back to work, Doctor.”
Valcroix gathered his charts and left, dreamy-eyed.
“What an asshole,” said Milo walking back to the car. “I
wouldn’t let him near my hangnail.” There was an illegal parking warning from
Hospital Security taped on the windshield. He ripped it off and put it in his
pocket. “I hope he’s not typical of what they’re passing off as doctors
nowadays.”
“He’s one of a kind. He won’t last much longer here.”
We headed west on Sunset.
“You going to check out his story?” I asked.
“I could ask the Touch people how well they know him
but if there is some kind of conspiracy they’d lie. Best thing is to call the
sheriff down there and find out if the joker’s been spotted more than once.
Small town like that the law tends to notice things.”
“I know someone who might be familiar with the Touch.
Want me to call him?”
“Why not? Couldn’t hurt.”
He drove me home and stayed for a minute to look at
the koi. He was transfixed by the colorful fish and smiled as they gobbled down
the pellets he tossed them. When he tore himself away to leave, his big body
seemed heavy and slow.
“Any longer, I’d stay here till my beard turned white.”
We shook hands, he gave a little salute, turned and
ambled off for another afternoon of witnessing the human animal at its worst.
I PHONED Professor Seth Fiacre at UCLA. He’s an old
classmate from grad school, a social psychologist who’d been studying cults for
several years.
“Hi, Alex,” he said, cheerful as always, “just got
back from Sacramento. Senate hearings. Stultifying.”
We reminisced and played catch-up and then I told him
why I’d called.
“The Touch? I’m surprised you’ve even heard of them.
They’re not well-known and they don’t proselytize. They’ve got a place called
the Retreat, used to be a monastery, down near the Mexican border.”
“What about the leader—Matthias?”
“Noble Matthias. He was a lawyer originally. Used to
call himself Norman Matthews.”
“What kind of law did he practice?”