The Glitter Dome by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online

until she recalled that Lord Buddha had always rested over by the Ouija board where Dilly’s dead body was visited by every coked-out tenant of the building before someone stopped chanting mantras and called the cops.
    Al Mackey’s performance was spectacular. The videotape showed him miming the self-inflicted blow to the front of the skull, after which he dropped the hatchet, held the back of his wrist to his forehead like a damsel on a train track, and staggered exactly nine feet five inches across the room, keeling over and feigning a bone-popping collision with the unyielding brass bean of the chubby Chinese deity.
    Martin Welborn whistled, applauded, and cheered when the performance was over.
    Captain Woofer showed the videotape to the commander and accepted his praise with becoming humility. Another whodunit cleared . It became official. Dilly O’Rourke left this vale of tears on his own steam.
    The tattooed junkie with the head full of dandelions to this day never failed to wave at the detectives when she spotted them on Hollywood Boulevard while she was selling avocados to buy heroin—a swap, they called it, of deciduous fruit for insidious fruit. She often gave the detectives whole-grain sandwiches filled with parsley and peanut butter in gratitude for not hassling all the tenant-customers of the bloodsucking, coke-stealing little fuck. Now admitting that the tenant-customers had been overjoyed to see him lying dead in his own blood.
    The implied message was coming through loud and clear with every suck of Whipdick Woofer’s ugly old pipe: Remember the Plato Jones case. Nimble inventive ways .
    That was a particularly difficult homicide for Captain Woofer. Plato Jones had made and lost three fortunes in the record industry and was now riding high on a hot roll. During his losing spells he supplied a few girls (or boys as the case might be) and roughly two tons of Colombian over the years to his out-of-town customers, which brought him smack into the L.A.P.D. Intelligence files.
    But when he managed to bounce back into big bucks with real zippo, as they say, he’d stocked the campaign larders of front-runners in state and local elections. He was embraced by the Truly Successful in The Business. He attended most “B” premieres and all “A” charitable functions. He sailed in yacht races with a United States senator. He greased Sacramento lobbyists. He loved baby seals and whales and American Indians. He hated big oil and nuclear power plants. So the guy had a few bad habits, who’s to cast the first stone?
    But there was considerable giggling, backslapping and hee-hawing around Hollywood Station the day they found Plato Jones shot through the temple in a trick-pad near Sunset and La Brea, the death weapon beside his body. Of course there wasn’t a whore in sight when the corpse was found. There wasn’t a fingerprint of a whore, nor anyone else’s for that matter—this despite the discovery of a half-drunk glass of Pouilly-Fuissé bearing no fingerprints, resting beside the corpse. It caused considerable damage to the suicide theory, but not as much as the expended shell from the death-dealing .32 automatic. The shell was found on top of a seven-foot armoire, an eighteenth-century French piece the likes of which was seldom seen in a trick-pad. But then, Plato Jones had nothing if not style, a sentiment echoed at his funeral by two congressmen, three city council members, one consumer activist, two dozen recording stars, a Lebanese opium runner, and thirteen whores.
    After a six-week investigation which was getting on everyone’s nerves, particularly Captain Woofer’s because of the incessant calls from City Hall by a support-your-local-police councilman who was sweating out a $10,000 campaign donation from Plato Jones and wanted this goddamn case put to bed , the deft and artful team of Al Mackey and Martin Welborn were handed the investigation and