The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online Page A

he was not involved, nevertheless satisfying the gang’s blood code by his demise. Chip Muirfield had stood behind the body and grabbed the top of the body bag and lifted the head a bit and made the cadaver, who stared with sad and sleepy eyes, respond to all of Melody Waters’ questions.
    “How’s the accommodations down here?” Melody giggled.
    “Is okay,” Chip said in a gravel voice, shaking the body bag so that the stiff nodded.
    “You wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time here, would you?” Melody asked the corpse.
    “Is not that okay,” Chip said in the gravel voice, moving the bag so that the stiff shook his head.
    They only knocked it off when Mario Villalobos caught them and said, “If you two could tear yourselves away from the gross-out gags, could you please pay a little attention to business?”
    Mario Villalobos, while awaiting the arrival of the shoulder holster kids, had given his crime report another perfunctory look-see. It was better than standing around the autopsy room watching them scoop out Missy Moonbeam like the honeydew melon filled with Haagen-Dazs ice cream that Chip Muirfield and Melody Waters had had for dessert. It was better than watching them replace her insides not with little balls of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, but with the scrambled heaps of guts shoveled back in by the morgue tech, who wiped the inside of her now brainless skull with soggy paper towels, which he stuffed inside the empty skull along with his sandwich wrapper when he was through.
    As it turned out, Thelma Bernbaum A.K. A . Missy Moonbeam was one of those unhappy wretches whose “funerals” would consist of a few words muttered by a grumpy undertaker who thought the county was screwing him by expecting him to plant this stiff in something remotely resembling a casket for the paltry amount the county was willing to pay to dispose of the little hooker.
    Thelma Bernbaum’s next of kin in Omaha were struggling to make it, what with the recession and unemployment, and weren’t about to spend a bundle of hard-earned bucks to bring what was left of Thelma back to a place she always said was about as stimulating as the Gulag Archipelago. (Thelma had read a book or two. What else was there for her in Omaha?)
    But upon arriving in Hollywood she had stopped reading anything except Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. She stopped reading altogether when the money was gone, along with the hopes and dreams. And when they lose their hopes and dreams in Hollywood, it’s like sliding bare-assed down a splintered two-by-four, they say. It hurts all the way to the basement.
    She’d started out as a $500-a-night call girl. Even a police mug shot could not obscure the fact that she had been a pretty girl at first. Then the inevitable: hash, dust, uppers, downers, speed, coke. She never got to heroin, but she might as well have. On one of her arrests she admitted to a coke habit big enough to keep her on her back and knees eighteen hours a day without a shred of real rest or untroubled sleep.
    The last mug shot of Missy Moonbeam looked like something that needed an exorcist. Mario Villalobos sighed his peculiar sad sigh and lit yet another cigarette and looked at his watch. It had been a marathon brunch. He wished he hadn’t let the lieutenant talk him into taking on Chip Muirfield for his “seasoning” session, with help from Melody Waters. Mario Villalobos’ regular partner, Maxie Steiner, was recovering from a heart attack, thanks to Leery’s Saloon, lousy diet, lack of exercise, two packs of cigarettes a day, middle-of-the-night meetings with murdered people, a rotten marriage and a divorce. In short, everything Mario Villalobos had experienced, except that Maxie Steiner was ten years older and Mario Villalobos had had two rotten marriages and divorces.
    Such troubling thoughts caused Mario Villalobos to look into the room, at the slab of lung a technician had placed on a steel table. It looked like a chunk of coal.