The Saga of Blanche, Part V: Coyreen's War So here I was again, sitting in the run-down offices of Grimbros Investigations, Inc., trying once more to make sense of the strangest case of my career. I had my Fedora pushed back from my forehead, and I rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, trying to ease the strain caused by too much cigarette smoke, too many newspaper clippings, and the stack of 8X10 glossies that were spread all over the top of my rickety wooden desk. I'd been taking inventory of the case so far, and although I had come up with some pretty solid conclusions, I knew I needed more if I was gonna satisfy my client, Miles O'Smiles. With a sigh, I quit rubbing, fired up another Lucky, and resumed flipping through the photos. There she was, right on top: the deceased, Coyreen O'Smiles, formerly Coyreen, the Porno Queen, looking much sexier than she had when they dredged her out of the La Brea Tar Pits; there was Miles himself, the fifty-ish porn czar and heartbroken widower, every inch the tweedy, pipe-smoking, phony "English gentleman," who had actually been born in Oxnard, California; there was Vitaly Arkhoff, Coyreen's former masseur, bodyguard, and Ivan-of-All-Trades, looking exactly like the champion Russian weightlifter he had once been; and there, grinning or scowling into the lens of my own Minox, were all seven of the Devil's Dwarves: Chang, the massive, 6 '6 "Chinese; Snap, the tall, skinny ex-farmboy who had somehow talked his way into the group, and its only Caucasian; Nacho and Benny, the two wise-cracking Latinos; Ernie and Burt, the two cool, black ex-cons; and, finally the leader of the group, the undisputed alpha male, the lean, tough Paiute Indian known (predictably) as Chief. None of the Dwarves stood at less than 6 '3 "; the group's name had been chosen in some moment of ghetto whimsy. Flipping back and forth through the pictures, my eyes lingered on the face of the Dwarf that had been killed during the Coyreen affair: I wonder what he might have accomplished in life? At least, I figured, he had accomplished something in death ... and there, atop the pile of morgue photos of the other victims, in sharp and refreshing contrast, was the beautiful, pale face of Blanche Snow. What could be said about her? Everything, but someone more eloquent than me would have to say it. I just stared at her picture and thought about the magic, or the luck, or the miracle, that this whole fucking case had turned out to be.... ******************************************************** Okay, maybe words like "magic" sound pretty hokey coming from somebody like me: a second-rate private dick in downtown LA, a has-been cop in a town where "law enforcement" has become a dirty, scandalous joke; a two-time loser in the hallowed halls of matrimony; a "tough guy," if tough means that your skin and your soul are covered with scars: yeah, I was a real prize, and like our friend Coyreen, I wasn't getting any younger: I wouldn't see the sunny side of forty again. I'm not singing the blues, just mentioning that I wasn't exactly fairy-tale material. But maybe some things in life are so weird that there's no way to explain them, except with fairy tales..... For example: here we are again at the little wooden house in Watts where the Devil's Dwarves live. Last time we looked, the unconscious, indescribable body of Blanche Snow lay curled up on a mattress on the floor, with the Dwarves eyeballing her. You know what comes next, right? No, it didn't. The Chief thought the situation over, had a little chat with the Dwarves, and instead of a gang-rape, all of a sudden the guys were moving out, some to bring in supplies, some to find clothes for the girl, while a few, like the Chief and Benny and Burt, stayed behind and went to work on the little shitbox house itself. They replaced the shattered glass in the windows, and mopped the blood and piss off the hardwood floors, and Benny, who drew the shortest of three matchsticks, actually scrubbed down the bathroom, muttering ancient Aztec curses under his breath the entire time. And although the Dwarves' mattresses and bedrolls remained on the floor, they were at least sprayed down with Lysol and arranged neatly, and Ernie proved once again that he was the master shoplifter of all LA by bringing home brand-new shades for the beaten-up old lamps that lit the place. Snap, meanwhile, had visited a hardware store and lifted enough mousetraps and roach powder to kill off the entire vermin population of his native Ozark, Alabama. And by the time Blanche finally awakened, the nasty little crash-pad had become, if not exactly a respectable house, something of a home. Rather than bother with curtains, however, the Dwarves had simply spray-painted the insides of the newly installed window panes. Nacho dusted and rearranged the little shrines to the Virgin Mary and Julio Caesar Chavez, and Ernie smoothed and straightened the poster of Malcolm X, after first tearing down all the centerfolds from all the stolen porn magazines. They were trying to make a place this girl would feel comfortable. The didn't know why she'd been standing naked and terrified in the alley where they found her, but they knew was in trouble, and trouble was something they understood very well. So was being an outsider, which this girl obviously was. Sure, their immediate reaction had been wild, almost savage lust; but after a while, as Chief was the first to notice, their feelings became far more tender. The Dwarves all had ever-ready, seldom-denied cocks, which had been hard ever since they first saw Blanche, but their hearts were maybe a little softer. So they awkwardly but gently dressed her in a floor-length bathrobe Snap had "borrowed" from his girlfriend's place, and they made up her mattress with brand-new sheets stolen, along with a baby-blue electric blanket, by Ernie; and as the afternoon turned to evening, they all stayed home, making plans, taking turns watching her until she awakened. As Vitaly Arkhoff could have told them, Blanche had a way with people. ************************************************** At the moment, however, Vitaly was on the lam. After presenting Coyreen with what she thought was Blanche's freshly removed heart, he had told his once-beloved Meestress precisely what he thought of her, and walked out of her house, and her employ, forever. He was now roaring through the Hollywood Hills in his HumVee, wondering what to do next, fully aware that he had placed himself permanently on the Porno Queen's shit list. Furious as she was toward Vasily, however, Coyreen remained a very happy woman. The graying, rubbery mass that had once been a live, throbbing heart still lay in the middle of her bedroom floor, still oozing watery black blood, and starting to develop a noticeable odor. But Coyreen couldn't have cared less. "Let's see how fine they think you look now, you pasty-faced little cunt!" she screamed at the heart. "You thought you could take Coyreen's place?" Naked once again after Vitaly's refusal to fuck her, she marched across the bedroom, and taking careful aim with one pink little foot, she kicked the heart through the air, shrieking with laughter when it landed with a splat on the far wall, then bloodily slithered back down to the deep white carpet. I know what you're thinking, and you're right: Coyreen was now completely insane. She turned to the table where her brand-new computer sat. Miles' technical staff had completely rewritten the mirror.exe program, even going so far as to bypass the Watts Mass Choir and pay an outrageous amount of Miles' money for the services of a very popular "band" to serenade Coyreen on the all-new mirror.WAV. "Now I oughtta get my proper fuckin' respect," she cackled, booting up the machine and standing before it, hands on hips, legs spread, like a tribal priestess awaiting word from an oracle. In a moment, Coyreen's favorite images from her own films, now in high-definition, sparkled and swirled across her screen. She smiled and clapped her hands, squealing and standing up on her tiptoes like a schoolgirl. As a brief instrumental lead-in to mirror.WAV began, she demanded impatiently, "Okay, okay, just tell me! Who's the finest queen you've seen?" No sooner had she spoken than she heard the harmonious, fruity tones of N Synch: "Hotter than Brittney, wiser than Jewel, Blanche is the one who was born to rule!" "WHAT?" Coyreen screamed, her hands flying to her face in shock. "You're lying! Damn you, I'll prove you're lying!" As mirror.WAV continued with an a cappella chorus of "doo-waaaah"s, she raced across the room, snatched up the heart, and dashed back to the computer. "Look, you motherfucker," she howled, rubbing the much-abused organ back and forth across the monitor screen, "she's fucking dead! Here's her fucking heart!" She dropped it to the floor and began to sob. "She's...dead, dammit!" she gasped. As the pictures from her movies continued to flicker on the monitor screen, which was now smeared with gore, the voices of N Synch rose once more: "Search the deserts and the shores, But you'll find Blanche among the Dwarves! Doooooh-waaaaaahhh....... Blanche has made a brand-new start, And Coyreen's got a hooker's heart!" The words stunned Coyreen out of her hysteria. Dwarves? New start? What the fuck? Her eyes, red from tears, narrowed; her full, pouting lips thinned as she set her jaw. Breathing deeply for a moment to bring her nerves under control, she crossed the room, opened the bedside-table drawer, and pulled out the small .32 Beretta that Miles had given her for protection from burglars, as well as a cardboard box full of ammunition. Slamming the drawer shut, she walked purposefully back to the desk. Firing all six shots directly into the machine's hard-drive, she hissed, "This is for you, Vasily, you lying, double-crossing cocksucker!" Then, her breathing heavy but controlled, she emptied the chamber and reloaded the little gun. She lay it and the cardboard box down on the desk and walked slowly toward the huge clothes closet. "Let's see," she muttered to herself, "what does one wear when one goes to visit Dwarves?" In light of what happened next, it's a good thing that Miles really was at the studio that night. Otherwise, he'd have heard the shots and come running, just as he had come running so many times when Coyreen needed his attention. As it happened, the first one to hear the gunfire was Eddie Willbanks, a USC sophomore who had recently come to work at the O'Smiles Estate as a parttime security guard. After an hour of studying for a calculus test in the little guardhouse at the end of the driveway, Eddie had momentarily stepped out into the night air to smoke a cigarette, and had heard the six distant, but unmistakable "pops" of the little Beretta. Knowing that Miles was gone, and seeing the second-floor bedroom light, he dropped his Marlboro and sprinted up the driveway. By the time he had run up the stairs and burst into the bedroom, Coyreen was already dressed: sitting on the end of the bed, pulling on a pair of sandals, she wore tight, torn designer jeans and a tube-top made of genuine ermine. She glanced up at Eddy as though having strange men burst into her bedroom were a nightly occurrance, which, in fact, was not the case. "Oh, hi, Eddie," she said sweetly, checking to see that the buckles on her sandals were secure. "I didn't know you'd come on duty yet. How's school?" The boy's mouth hung open in amazement at the scene: the shattered glass and twisted circuitry of the computer, the strange, greasy bloodstains on the floor and wall, the stench of cordite and something that smelled like rotten meat, and Coyreen, the "lady" of the house, sitting calmly in the middle of it all, now rummaging around in her Gucci handbag to see if she had everything she would need. Fortunately for his state of mind, Eddie did not see the discarded heart, which lay obscured by part of the computer monitor's fragmented casing. "Holy shit, Miz O'Smiles!" he exclaimed. "What in the Hell happened here? Are you okay? Is somebody in here with a gun?" His eyes darted wildly around the room as his hand reached for the stun-gun on his hip, the only weaponry he was allowed to carry. "Oh, no, Eddie," laughed Coyreen, "it's just me, playing around with that silly old computer! I couldn't get the data I needed from it, and, well, Eddie," she lowered her voice and forced herself to blush, as she had learned to do in films, "it's a bad time of month, if you know what I mean, and I was feeling kinda cranky, so I just shot the thing! Pretty dumb, huh? Now somebody'll just have to clean it up!" Eddie continued to stare, but took his hand off the stun-gun. "But, Miz O'Smiles, ma'am, we've gotta call the police! Well, I gotta radio my supervisor, first, but I left my fuckin' radio down at the shack...." Coyreen interrupted him, standing up from the bed and slinging the straps of her handbag over her shoulder. "Why, Eddie? Why call the police? Nobody's committed any crime, and there sure aren't any intruders in here!" "Yes'm, I see, but whenever a gun is discharged in a residential district, I've gotta report it, and the police have to investigate it. I think that's a lot of bullshit, but I'll lose my job if I don't do it." She was walking toward the boy now. "Okay, Eddie, let's call the police. And your supervisor." Her voice was slowly turning coy, seductive, manipulative. Seeing the Porn Queen of the whole world undulating toward him, her breasts jiggling beneath the sleek ermine, might not have thrown Joe Friday for a loop, but it certainly confused the thinking of a normal, 20-year-old college kid. "But before we call them, will you tell me something?" Now they were face to face. "Um, sure, Miz O'Smiles, yes ma'am," Eddie stammered. "Well, Eddie, if there HAD been somebody with a gun in here, could that stun-thingie of yours have really stopped him?" "Oh, no way in Hell, ma'am," the boy replied, "'cause he'd probably have shot me first. But if I could get right next to him, and put it right on his skin, it would knock his ass from here to Dodger Stadium!" "REALLY?" gasped Coyreen in her best approximation of girlish wonder. "Wow, I didn't know that. Okay, now before we call the cops, tell me one more little thing. A friend of mine told me a riddle, and I can't quite figure it out. Eddie, if you wanted to find dwarves in Los Angeles, where would you go?" The boy's face was perfectly blank with incomprehension. "Dwarves, ma'am? Well, unless you mean really small people, then there's two places: Disneyland, and Watts." Coreen burst out laughing. "Watts? Why would there be dwarves in Watts?" The boy flushed; was she laughing at him? "Well, they're not REAL dwarves, ma'am," he said as patiently as he could, his eyes straying from Coyreen's face to the nearby telephone and back. "It's a gang: call themselves the Devil's Dwarves. It's a joke: all of 'em are real big guys." Coyreen nodded her head slightly. "Now, isn't that interesting. Eddie, I can see you're gonna do well in college. Well, thanks for helping me with my riddle! Now why don't you go on and call the police?" The boy looked immensely relieved; dealing with the cops was easier than talking to this crazy bitch any day. But wouldn't I like to get a hold of - - - no. He steeled his resolve, walked away from Coyreen, and picked up the phone. He'd call LA's Finest, then hustle down to the shack to radio his supervisor. Picking up the receiver in his left hand, his right forefinger punched in nine...one... "One," giggled Coyreen as the bullet entered Eddie's brain. The receiver clattered to the table. Eddie started to slump, but before he could fall, Coyreen had wrapped her arms around his chest to hold him while she slipped the stun-gun from its holster. She pressed the button and watched the sparks crackle. "Pretty," she said in Eddie's dead ear. Then she let him slip to the floor, reached over, and replaced the receiver in its cradle. She slipped the stun-gun into her handbag, along with the Beretta, and fished out the keys to her Porsche. "I think I can find Watts," she said confidently to herself.