Giovanni's Room and Other Stories

By Jamie Groccia

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984579935

Jamie Groccia

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Giovanni’s Room

and Other Stories

Jamie Groccia

Copyright © 2020 by Jamie Groccia.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/19/2020

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Contents

Giovanni’s Room

Could Right Testicle Willie Be involved in Murder?

A Rich Man’s Kind of a Malibu Murder

A New Year’s Day Kind of L. A. Murder

An L. A. Witches Brew of Murder

The Sister Rebecca L. A. Murders

The Sugar Ray Robinson Also Boxed L. A. Kind of Murder

Hollywood Boulevard is North of Sunset Boulevard, Not South of It

Willow Moon Holly Lay in an L. A. Grave Kind of Murder

The Sunday Kind of L.A. Murder

Go for the Cripple then the Kill

Mercy on Seventh Avenue

A Young Woman in the Park

Age of Consent

Amante’s Bones

My Sister, Marcy Avenue, and Mariah Carey’s Face

Only the Dispossessed

The Beginning of Empty

The Divorcing Kind

The Girl who Sometimes. Sings, Summertime

The Immoralist

Three Bridges

A Child of the Sixties

The Girl who only Cries on Tuesdays

Outrageous

Red Roses

Dinosaur Virgin

Uncharted Waters

Angels Falling and the Moon

Nineteen Nineteen

Radio Suicide

Shotgun Radio

Radio Surrender

Giovanni’s Room

Harry Bright, in the heaviness of Giovanni Gunn, saw first on his low and too long coffee table, shined in linseed oil, the shyster’s automatic, unsympathetically laid out and turned, in the direction of a careful southpaw, near the Chinese ottoman, then the leather couch, tilted and off center, the right leg propped by his unread copy of last month’s Book of the Month Club’s feature novel, open to its white and stained chapter, the one in which Mary Ginsberg lost her patterned antique soft wood carved, and measure of reserve, and Harry somewhat still drunk, from his tryst, that last and very early morning, with his dark, Spanish woman, Gloria, stumbled backward, and kicked the opened book to the tightly knotted and colored faded Persian carpet, and it closed and opened, again, to another chapter, also unread.

Beautiful piece of Smith and Western hardware, Deak, don’t you think?

Deak reached for the gun he had long desired and picking up the automatic and sniffing its circular black holed tip, grimaced and pursed his face, suddenly reddened, in technicolor.

Used Harry, and very recently, at that.

Deak, with his sweated shirt, wiped the grip and started to place it back, where he found it on the table, in virgin repose.

Don’t forget the barrel, Deak, just in case, you know.

Harry saw in his partner Deak, a narrow escape, so like his big mistake on Roseview Avenue, in the quaint Hebrew strip of old markets and new eateries, near where the girl he almost married caught a 38-caliber bullet meant for him, and died.

Yeah, Harry, it’s what you always say, you can’t be too careful in this town.

Harry saw his reflection in the linseed desk, somewhat skewed.

You can’t be too careful in this town, said Harry.

Deak smiled, then changed his smile to a frown and watching his friend’s swollen lip, puffed and reddened and slightly cut, covered by a bit of reddish iodine, closing the cut in a false and tender healing, slightly ridiculous, on a tough guy.

Gloria really let you have it, huh, what was it a right cross?"

Better than anything Marciano throws.

Yeah, but tell me that she was worth it, Harry, tell me.

She was worth it, as you know.

Deak frowned, his mouth in the shadow of his face, his eyes drooping and squinting, his far-sighted eyes saw the far side of the room, ending in the glass French doors, off the bedroom, a strange kind of disarrangement, in blur.

It’s open, Harry.

What?

Giovanni’s boudoir door, what else?

Open, are you sure?

And made to look open, what do you make of that?

A set up?

For someone, what do you figure, maybe us?

I’d bet, just you, Harry.

Harry looked again at the reflected coffee table and saw a Shaman his shadowed face, in profile, his gleaming, softly Brill creamed black hair shinning wet, he was a Shaman, his reddened face a vision of Dante’s Seventh Level of hell. He felt the subtle manner of his usual self-pity, causally catching him unexpectantly, a woman in disguise.

Deak, why is it always me?

You’re so, how can I say this, without hurting you?

Harry edged his way to the open record player, and looking at the black vinyl thirty-three, smiled at the green floral label.

Jesus Deak, Caruso.

In Italian, Harry?

What else, it’s Giovanni, you know, Giovanni?

Harry put the record player’s diamond tipped needle above Enrico’s fourth rendition of ‘O Solo Meo," and stopped, and then reconsidering his stoppage, started and carefully found the Italian arias first groove. It played.

Christ, ‘O Solo Meo’, huh Harry?

Giovanni’s nothing but predictable.

Not anymore, or do you think I’m wrong?

Deak, you didn’t fail to lay a C note on Tim Tam, didn’t you? You know, Deak, like I told you, too?

Didn’t like the odds.

Always bet the underdog, Deak, don’t you know?

You’re too sentimental, Harry, Deak gave his friend a sardonic smile, And every grifter knows it.

Every grifter, ain’t every grifter, Deak.

You speaking of Gloria?

Who else?

Sentimental you, you stupid shmuck.

Harry dodge Deak’s next question, pertaining to Gloria and in his question Harry saw the possibility of parole, an escape, and in that, a manner of complete and absolute absolution, from her insistence, persistence and looking at the French door, open a quarter of an inch he saw between the grey and darkish edges, a red, absorbed in oak and turning brown to black and, to Harry, it was just the evidence that he needed to realize his discovery of another murder and in that dark deed there was, he knew, a trap a betrayal and a woman.

Deak saw in Harry, seemingly somewhat out of focus, his tell, for slightly sudden involvement and his denunciation of clues, a special gift that served him in army intelligence during the Korean War. That early shade of unshaved beard, deeply woven in his face, like his skin, which paled and as he sweated and wiping away the sweat of the sudden feel of sudden murder, he twisted his off centered, puffed red mouth, his tongue tasting the remnants of stale, early morning blood, and opening to close into a toothless grin, grimaced.

Harry saw in his sister, as she walked away, a little girl, as she gave the brown forest dirt a little quiet skip, and then resuming her false and purposeful stride, and disappear into the falling colored shadowed leaves and Harry kneeling, fell against an oak, and then sunk down into the carpet of the same colored fall leaves, and leaned into a lost countenance of his own purposeful demeanor and blew out air into an audible whoosh and whooshed again and whooshed again and whooshed again.

Deak, knowing his partner well, and his own lost regard for Harry’s sister, Rebecca, well within the parameters of his mind, left to chance, felt the sadness, they now found in each other.

What, Harry, you looked lost again, in your wasted dreams.

Christ Deak, you sound a bit like that kid, Carol King, or don’t you figure?

Deak rolled his eyes at the death of Rock N Roll, and saw in every new songwriter, now on the block, the prop that carried Buddy Holly to his early death, that previous snowy Idaho Christmas Eve.

Harry approached the wooden and glass etched French door, as if it would spring toward him, and open. It bubbled sweated beads and in the slim edges above and below a felted lock, unlocked, its silver knob protruding as if seeking the moist, female slip, usually accepting the entry of its mated lock, of silver like shiny steel.

Then, the sweated edge of the door, facing Harry, suddenly close and looking at that edge, his eyes rising up and rising down, his eyes narrowing and above the grey and fickle blue of his pupils, his bushy eyebrows, so usual on a Jew, bushed and burrowed and questioned.

Look, Deak, blood simple.

In the grain, you mean, right Harry, you think?

Where the fuck else, Deak?

Just asking, the obvious, you know, for validation, you know, to be sure.

Look, Deak, here.

May I, please, thy no-it-all, where, exactly where, you mean.

Here, Deak. See the pattern.

Christ, Harry. It’s planted.

Yeah, and not very professionally, unless not very professionally, you know?

On purpose, Harry, right, is that what you are getting at?

Well, what do you think?

What am I thinking in general of this shitty situation we find us in, again, or what do I think whether the blood was planted?

Come on, Deak, why do you always play around, when it might be murder?

A murder in central L.A., I don’t think might is a matter of speculation.

Yeah, Deak, that was my thought, too.

So, planted or not planted?

Planted of course, Harry, hell this is Hollywood, of course.

Of course, yes, it’s Hollywood.

Want my knife? I know you never have yours when you might need it.

Harry, reaching for his partner’s short knife, resented that its blade and knowing that it was very sharp, raised his right hand palm flat above it and then circled his fingers in a claw to loosely hold it and when it was balanced into a neutral grip he dug out a small sliver of wood, no bigger than that splinter, that years ago, when shopping on Market Street in Frisco, went into the last small, and owner owned antique book store, and trying to find any lost and forgotten first editions of lost and obscure western novels, he finding one, a very early and almost virgin Zane Grey, potentially and possibly worth thousands, skimmed his cowboy boot against the sawdust floor, and picking up the floors dirt and dust, and dirty dusty splinter, he absorbed through the long tear hole in the sole, that splinter which stuck in the right flat heal and foot.

Think Mary can get it under her scope, this afternoon, Harry.

Maybe, maybe I can talk her into it.

Talk, Harry?

Well I admit that Mary has been a bit difficult since we hocked her ortho thing, or other, but hey, it was useless, in L.A.

You think so, that that’s it?

No, she’s been on the rag now for so long, blaming me for everything, and being so fucking condescending, bitch like.

Harry reluctantly saw Mary, behind her black horned rim glasses, a deeply disturbed woman of outrageous intelligence and once her feline like curiosity cost her a demotion when she challenged the forensic department head, a balding moron seeking patronage of Belle Aire millionaires and high rent residents of the last quiet streets once reserved for old Spanish style bungalows, with orange tiled roofs, baking in the hot southern California sun, of mid-October, and in the large, windows, installed in recent years, for sunlight and high fashion, one could see the shade and shadow and sudden sun, of the wild fires, devouring thousands of acres, in the grey and survival almost wilderness, of the Hollywood, real world.

And Mary, ignoring the horrid gaze of Harry, moved toward and away from any advance, which always seemed to challenge her woman’s intelligence, and she was a Berkeley girl!

Deak sighed, his usual outward tell, of frustration with Harry’s eternal woman problems, especially sullen actresses, a result of Harry’s disparate charm, often implied in the offbeat comedy of Kurt Vonnegut, a Slaughterhouse-Five kind of dilemma for Harry, that undermined his determination to seek that goal of L.A. men, and met the soft and harsh acceptance of L.A. women, and their metaphor of open hands spread outward in a V, with curled and seductive fingers, closing and unclosing just like a woman and this would always defeat Harry in a New York minute, of that other place, of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, now seeking Marilyn Monroe, in L.A, and Harry would fade into the L.A, smog and purple sunrise haze, and be gone, if only he wasn’t just so fucking handsome!

"Harry?

Deak was someone annoyed, that Harry got so many girls, even starlets, and when he saw him with this one or that one, he would remember that when they were rookies on the Force, they saw in L.A. a wide expanse of real estate, and since they were county, they could roam from Malibu to Pasadena, and even hit the valley in Sherman Oaks or Granada Hills and there it was a short toss to Burbank, and a great Chinese Restaurant, on Sepulveda Boulevard there, a dive in a strip mall, protected by the Health Department by high rollers and nickel and dime producers, hanging on the fringe of Warner Brothers, and sad screenwriters, with heavy Remington’s, weighing on their corrupted souls like dynamite, exploding and imploding at the same time.

You say, something, Deak?

Harry.

Harry turned to the sudden articulation of his name and he heard in his name a retreat and excerpt of air, which in hideous vibration, reverberated.

Yes, Deak, did you say something?

I was thinking, Harry, and you know, there is something that is missing here, you know, in Giovanni’s room.

Oh, Deak, you mean the body?

The habeus corpus, you know, as insignificant as it is, you know in an actual murder, in Central L.A.

You mean, Deak, where is it?

Giovanni, well he isn’t exactly invisible, like glass, you know.

You think, he’s here?

Well, this is his ranch, his best and only ranch, although for Giovanni’s money, it’s kind of....

...A flop house.

Yes, why the fuck is that?

You think Gunn is into the shylocks, in this town. I guess it fits, Giovanni, likes to hang out with slime.

Yeah, he’s a magnet.

Only one thing.

What, is that?

He seems to be not here, or am I wrong?

I guess that there is one way to find out, for sure, don’t you want to know?

There is a vision, somewhere in that mirror, I see behind that French door, between that narrow opening framed by blood simple oak, or maple, that passes for mahogany, in this hell false parody, you know there, in the mirror, or here where we’re at, off Santa Monica Boulevard, just east of Beverly Hills, yes that place of dreams and suicides, or murders in the night, like Sal Mineo, you remember, West Hollywood.

I take it you see, Giovanni, waxing poetic like you do, Harry, something that always annoyed me, your voice of reason that changes when you rant, so literary.

Yes, Giovanni is hanging by a thread, in his bedroom and if you allowed yourself to breath in Rosefield, the smell beyond Giovanni’s open window, the salami smells, the old feel of cotton garments worn by Hasidic women at open markets in the afternoon, and breathing out and breathing in you can smell it, now can you?

Christ, Harry, decaying human flesh. It is Giovanni, sure as shit.

That’s great detective work, you know, for an Irishman.

Somewhat embarrassed, but not really, they pushed the French door aside, careful to use their handkerchiefs, the door cracked and opened and there, pushed down and tied with a lavender sheet, stained in red, turning black, was Giovanni Gunn, petrified and stiff, a smile ironically in his now closed and curled mouth and purple lips.

Don’t touch anything, Deak.

You think?

And call it in.

Could Right Testicle Willie

Be involved in Murder?

Harry Bright and Jean Deak Deegan saw Right Testicle Willie as a conundrum.

Lately, however, they thought that the old reprobate might be involved in murder.

Harry saw in his beloved partner’s many splintered heart of three essential parts, that first Deak was a brave and loyal partner who saved Harry from his own devices and his own so obvious death wish, second that he was irrevocably and madly in love with Harry’s sister, Rebecca, and third that Deak has an ongoing conversation with Vincent Van Gogh.

Deak saw Harry’s great divide, his splintered chasm between love and hate, the element of surprise, that when one was love the other hate, it often depends on what one ate, oysters or snails, garbage or nails, and in the final stage, Deak would notice Harry’s rage, on the sameness they were, on his L. A.’s fucking theater stage.

Deak noticed only after years, that the dark and dingy john at the Wilshire Boulevard police station had no separate point of view and that copper boys and copper girls used it all together, like Rosie O’Grady, and no one looked away, or thought my God he’s gay, yet copper girls were left alone, ‘because they yearned to be copper boys, or at least respected and left alone, or not, depending on that mentioned point of view, and stranger than before, their preference of gun, was their distinctive use of eyes, not their sex or the way they zipped their fly, or yanked their blue copper trousers high, unless they were undercover, and then copper boys and copper girls had better know and wear today’s many different colors, red on weekends, blue on Tuesdays, and green when it was apparent that that day you’d better pray, because your terrain meant drug deals in Beverly or murder in Bunker, both hills of a different color, like the horse in The Wizard of Oz, back in Culver City, in the backlots of MGM.

Harry heard Deak grunt, and shifted his body up and down while he pissed and knew that Deak had had a bit too much of Guinness brew, last night and that little bruise above his left eye was not from any stumble in his home, but a clean straight right at Madigan’s the night before, that Deak did not see coming, or block, and could not tell Harry the truth, because the punch came from Ruth, a Jewish girl, only twenty-two, but fucking deadly.

They both saw Right Hand Testicle Little Willy coming from far down Sepulveda, hobbling to the left and to the right and Harry starting to laugh Deak just had to remind Harry of their little side bet.

Is it the left, or is it the right, testicle, Harry?

Is our bet whether he has it, the right testicle or is it he lost it, Deak, I forgot?

Yeah, Harry, me too, yes me too, too.

Fuck it Deak, let’s take Right testicle Willy in and bust his single ball, and make him tell us.

Okay, Harry, on your mark.

Go, Deak, you first.

Right testicle saw his two favorite guys of L.A. law coming, and laughed and wondered himself where his monica came from, certainly not the number of his balls, right or left, the dicks had their choice, because he had either or both?

L.A. detectives often judged other reps on false pretenses and propositions, formed at the time, by drunks or wise guys spitting time out like blood from a vicious paper cut, the cut covered in too much iodine.

Harry saw the truth and looked at Deak staring at nothing and decided to fill his gap with the whisper of L.A.

Deak, you could smile and say, like The Platters, that the smog in West L. A., is always in your eyes.

What, Harry, you on the rag this today, that’s something a skirt would say.

Only once a month, Deak, or do you figure, not?

Don’t go there, Harry, this is not like you, to be so ornery, like you don’t respect woman.

You know I do, Deak, who better than I.

That’s my point, Dirty.

Ah, you’re finally using my new nickname, kinda cool, you think?

No, Harry I don’t, it’s not you, you know?

It works wonders on the street, and as Buddy Holly sings, it’s kind of neat.

Not anymore, Harry, not since last Christmas eve, remember?

Yeah, fuck Christmas eve, fuck Idaho, fuck single prop planes and fuck what else this morning, Deak?

Winter and snow, that too, that shit, that we left Brooklyn from.

We didn’t leave. We followed the Bums....

Yeah, Ebbets Field was cool, a bandbox, made the Duke a Mickey Mantle, but lest face it, The Say Hey kid is legit, right or am I wrong?

We are riffin, like fools. We both left Brooklyn before the war, as kids, me in ’39, you in, when?

The year that Red Schoendienst, scored from first on a single, the Cardinal second baseman, Deak, when was that, I forget, it was the summer after Pearl Harbor, when Saint Louis won the series, nineteen forty-one, was it forty-two?

Forty-two and you’re thinking of Enos Slaughter, idiot?

No, I’m not, not Slaughter, he’s too slow, and a left fielder as well?

Right fielder, not left, my lovely, Deaker Deagan,

Well it was the year The Splendid Splinter hit four hundred and Jolting Joe hit in fifty-six straight, and Pearl Harbor, yes or no, Harry, that would make it when, come on do the math?

Nineteen forty-one, we were kids, I was ten, Rebecca only four.

Rebecca four, was she beautiful Harry, when Rebecca was four?

Forget it Deak, she’s too good for you, an Irishman, she’s Jewish.

Is there any one Jew or Gentile good enough for Rebecca, for you, if so, then who?

Kirk Douglas, yes, but he’s married, and it’s not who, but whom, you, mi amado, you illiterate.

Why do you admire Kirk so, he’s a fucking actor.

Kirk is God, Deak, Kirk is God in this phony town of paper machete and cherry ice cream Sundays.

If you say so, Harry, if you say so, whom knows better, after all, you read books, even novels.

Yeah, I do.

"And speak Spanish and a little French, Harry, you are a fucking renaissance man, in the disguise as a tough guy, a soft touch, with the monica Dirty Harry?

Yes, I am, just don’t tell anyone, Deak.

Yes, I know, you went to UCLA and at nineteen you played half back in the backfield for the Bruins, with those negros, you know Woody Strode and,....

Ken Washington, and, guess whom, you piss me off sometimes, Deak, and this is the sometimes.

Okay, okay so he is you friend, fine, Jackie Robinson, now do feel like a legend in this town, the only white boy on The Gang of Four, but you couldn’t beat USC when it came to it, could you? And you backed Jackie up, you did even start, you say you were fast, Harry, you couldn’t even dodge that 38, in ’56, now could you, I was there, and, like I said, you couldn’t even beat USC in the ’40 Rose Bowl, right slugger?

"Nothing to nothing, in that fuckin’ game and it was in Pasadena,