Frostie's Revenge
Carlson, Richard W.
T he first hooker I ever got to know well was called "Frostie." Her real name was Edna. She lived with her daughter Pogo, 5, and another prostitute named Darlene Hibbs. The three of them shared one...
...That's her, I called out...
...Pogo sat against the wall in Denny's...
...At 11:10 the walkie-talkie crackled...
...They slammed him against a wood fence and handcuffed him...
...Bottles and rocks were arriving with more frequency...
...We were as proud of them as only truly unhandy people can be...
...Stu was called "Uncle Stu" behind his back...
...He sounds like he knows what he's talking about, though usually these tips are bummers...
...Izzy supplied the inmates of these houses of ill repute, as newspapers awkwardly called them, with the second most important tool of their trade (they had been born with the first): sexy clothing...
...It was padlocked...
...She knew Piggy and Jerry from the street...
...No problem," he said...
...Uniformed cops were out in the street arguing with the crowd...
...I was paying $12 a week for a room at the El Dorado Hotel on Spring Street...
...His present whereabouts are unknown...
...He was wearing a narrow green tie with a very tight knot...
...Larkin looked to Sergeant Umbrella...
...They kept bugging me to explain what we talked about...
...Uncle Stu was the original Mr...
...The robbery was self-authenticating...
...Jerry had been hit in the head with double ought slugs...
...Frostie had had few if any defenders in a life filled with humiliations and aggressions of a wide variety, and it was Lance's assault in defense of a slightly slow fat girl, I now realize, that led her, to confide in us...
...As I said, he's a smart guy...
...Why, we're practically roommates up here...
...It was also only a few blocks to City Hall...
...He handled himself well...
...Izzy—who knew we were reporters and hence nobody he was going to talk to—smiled weakly but looked through us...
...If they weren't on Vice (known inelegantly as the Pussy Posse) they had nothing to do with her life...
...Over the years Izzy did a little fencing, mostly jewelry...
...As the wagon pulled away a thin black line rolled under the rear door and continued down and across the step where it dropped off onto the street...
...She had spotted a pair of her own bangle earrings swinging from the lobes of another hooker one night in front of the Downtown Bowl, and it had pissed her off mightily...
...If he don't want sex, and he don't want money, then what's his game...
...Jerry Cook was in the lead...
...A rock hit the fence...
...He was an observant officer and one very, responsive to the public...
...To make this work even better we replaced all the light bulbs, both in the office and over the door, with flood-lamp bulbs we'd brought with us...
...I scooteddown and followed him immediately...
...What were you going to do, film up against the window...
...But their talk never went anywhere...
...We talked some more...
...Eddie was in the back...
...She visits her mother regularly...
...Willie Pyle looked at Piggy and Larkin...
...They were both wearing dark pants and dark overcoats...
...We'll cover news conferences, something Grimsby agreed when we were hired we would never have to do...
...They'd dump the car and saunter over to Haight Street...
...She's staring at the truck," said Frank...
...The sergeant put Frank in the back of our Land Rover whose use we volunteered...
...He represented Carol Doda's place and all the other topless clubs...
...We would meet after dark on Friday night...
...Okay," Grimsby said...
...Izzy Mitrovitch was one of the few men ever invited to this Christmas Eve open house and asked to spend the night and to stay for Christmas morning breakfast, after which he joined Sally for a Ramos Fizz, and watched the girls open their stockings by the fire in the living room...
...She could quit the business, maybe fill orders for him on Seventh Avenue while he traveled...
...The station was flooded with calls and letters over the week with only a few calling for dismissal...
...The line of models would slowly move by, résumés and composite photos clutched under their arms...
...he said, throwing a thumb over his shoulder towards Frank and Eddie...
...He wore a porkpie hat and a dirty trenchcoat as big as a pup tent...
...His gun was pointed our way...
...Sergeant Umbrella was promoted to Lieutenant in 1968...
...The wife with serious tenure had white hair and looked much like Stu...
...It was cream colored...
...By 10:30 everyone was in place...
...Lance lived in Beverly Hills...
...I don't know how he can stand it...
...He freaked out and pulled the camera back to a wide shot, fully exposing Uncle Stu who was collapsed in his chair, his rubbery face down flat on the desk in a drunken pool of saliva...
...costs for Lance and me to work Friday could be buried for weeks...
...Did you know that...
...She could stop being French Mary...
...So relaxed he reminded me of a Campbell Kid whose bones had been removed...
...Eddie would pose as the desk clerk...
...Lance was driving his new Chevy Monza, a smallish car whose style and looks never caught on with buyers...
...Izzy never heard her name again for the rest of his life...
...The square room was brightly lighted with overhead fluorescence...
...He was holding his money but it was out of her reach and he was continuing a slightly drunken harangue...
...Stu Williams, always smiling, was sitting with his butt in an open desk drawer...
...A good question...
...That was where I got my first impression of him Lance was almost sixfoot-two and thin...
...Frostie laughed and blew out a cloud of mentholated smoke...
...It was Frostie...
...It rested on the desk facing the door...
...I guess it really does make sense...
...Jerry and Piggy would be stretched out in the back...
...Jerry and Piggy would hit the motel...
...Well, maybe not totally removed...
...Century City itself was still the back lot of 20th Century Fox Studios, and there were plenty of people living who remembered when Sunset Boulevard became a dirt road as it went from Hollywood into Beverly Hills...
...He slid forward on his face in the black pool of blood growing around him...
...He said if you'll just stay a block or so away we can give you a call as soon as it's over...
...Davey Rosenberg, who weighed almost 400 pounds—"The World's Greatest Press Agent," his card read—was at Enrico's too...
...Lance had already laid his tray on the chrome bars...
...The answer is, of course, always tell the truth...
...Sally retired, too, and opened a restaurant...
...Izzy filled this void...
...It was Willie Pyle...
...The building was shaped like a horseshoe surrounding a parking lot...
...His actual name was Lou Canopy...
...Her name was Mary Ryan...
...So you sure have my sympathy...
...His plate (probably) had clipped his lip and he was bleeding...
...For more than fifty years, Izzy crisscrossed the country, calling on every bordello, whorehouse, and collection of cribs of any reputation and permanence...
...Do it," he said...
...How about if we come in early on Friday...
...The three of us crept rapidly down the stairs and onto the parking lot...
...Lance was an only child, a fact that he sometimes used to explain his occasional eccentricities...
...In fact, we'll do it right and it will bring you right over the top...
...If it falls through, Frostie is going to call us so we can cancel out...
...How did they get here so fast...
...Denny's Roundhouse #2 catered to a very rough trade...
...Jerry was a pretty dumb guy...
...The three of them shared one bedroom in a seedy walk-up in the warehouse district south of Market Street in San Francisco...
...Whatever film we might get would be too late for the Friday 11 p.m...
...Grimsby occupied the only chair...
...Roger muttered darkly about his chair being sabotaged...
...And he was right...
...She did...
...So he took up with the San Francisco street girls...
...They wouldn't need a car...
...They cost a week's wage...
...He was top man on the list that year...
...The fact that the deceased, Jerome Cook, was an armed accomplice to the crime which resulted in his own death made no difference under the law...
...We couldn't get rid of them...
...Do you know her...
...The cops had loaded the drawers with ones with a twenty on top of each pile...
...And the idea that they could catch these crooks right on TV got their adrenaline pumping...
...Jones, who had begun calling himself "Fillmore Slim" as a pimp handle, and had suggested "Frostie" instead of the out-of-date "Edna," was actually rather even-tempered...
...I said, "Lance, why don't you give Frank and Eddie a rundown on what Grimsby had to say...
...We shook hands...
...We know that's time and a half...
...The Friday night foray at the Executive Motel was to be their first institutional robbery, Frostie said, though they had cased a few mom-and-pop stores over the past weeks...
...Pogo's real name was Tiffany...
...Sergeant Umbrella and I left Lance and the two patrolmen ordering coffee at the white tiled counter...
...All dulcet tones and no sense...
...Frostie laughed and so did the cashier and so did the cook, who stood watching through clouds of charcoal smoke and steak fumes...
...Frostie was at the end of the bar with her roommate Darlene...
...We would, of course, have been willing to work this for nothing, but there wasn't a chance we could do that...
...The fact that we had a trustworthy informant who would be there was worth something...
...Grimsby and Stu barely made it to the anchor desk in time...
...We'd had stationery printed, so it was too late to change it...
...Maybe have a couple of drinks at a hippie bar...
...The waitress brought coffee mugs...
...She would visit him there all day on Sunday when he was off the road...
...You stay away from that old cracker, you hear, they would tell their girls...
...It was shortly before he and sportscaster Stu Williams would amble over to the bar across the street and tie one on before the 11 p.m...
...It said, VECTOR NEWS SERVICE FILM, TELEVISION, MAGAZINES R. CARLSON & L. BRISSON We'd come up with Vector News as a name after a long brain-storming session in a bar...
...When Piggy backed into the wagon Larkin spun him around and shoved him up and through the doors head first, slamming the door behind him and locking it...
...We're all set for tonight, Roger," I told him...
...He sold exotic lingerie, feather boas in a dozen hues, mesh stockings, net stockings, genuine silk stockings, fancy garters, embroidered panties, monogrammed panties, breakaway panties, crotchless panties (Izzy called them "an engineering marvel"), bras with no cup, bras that fell off when you looked at them, and various complex and sometimes ingenious clothing constructions not available in the Sears catalogue...
...A paddy wagon drove up with two patrolmen in the front...
...They were ten feet away...
...We went over it with him...
...He specializes in strategic planning...
...Her office wasn't much larger than ours, either...
...Izzy stopped talking immediately...
...They had been called in by Sergeant Umbrella...
...I gather Piggy never got hold of one...
...Frostie and Pogo were sitting at a back table...
...Stu had decided to stay in the City and had booked a hotel room...
...She was at Ellis and Market, her favorite venue, where she was soliciting motorists and trying to avoid the vice cops at the same time...
...Frank and Eddie left their unmarked but very obvious police car—a dark blue banged-up three-year-old Ford with black-wall tires—in the Doggie Diner parking lot and rode over to Grove Street in our Land Rover...
...Wife number two was closer to forty, but she was no runway model either...
...And Izzy took orders for straight clothes, too...
...Grimsby looked ill...
...It was one which had been nagging a little at both Lance and me...
...The guy knew he was going to lose...
...This is bizarre, I thought...
...Pogo is now about 30 years old...
...Piggy was through first...
...Grimsby's story was that he may have been drunk but he wasn't that drunk...
...In 1968, Roger Grimsby left San Francisco for ABC New York...
...The office itself was narrow...
...But I ain't going to be driving no car...
...The hood was sprung, the grille had fallen out, and both headlights were hanging down like eyeballs from an optic nerve...
...It certainly wasn't Jerry...
...Everyone was connected by walkie-talkie...
...But what the Hell can we do...
...One of them—it turned out to be Jerry—pulled a large pistol from inside of his coat and held it at a right angle as the two walked furtively past the office window and opened the glass doors...
...Since 1904, Izzy Mitrovitch's life had been hopelessly but fruitfully intertwined with hookers, and their lives were intertwined with Izzy was seldom ever a customer (not in decades, and in the early years only sporadically), never a pimp (a "mack" is what Izzy called them), often a friend, and always their clothier, their haberdasher...
...Lots of shouting, a little pushing...
...The sergeant grabbed some chalk from Pyle's car...
...Both wives were angry with him for some reason...
...There was a small inner office whose door was behind the counter near the far end...
...It took him about thirty seconds to change his mind...
...He put another circle around the gun and dropped it into an evidence bag...
...You guys are so cool, so bitchin'," she said, laughing and snorting as we chatted through swirls of smoke from our unfiltered cigarettes, drinking coffee after our meal...
...But, then again, possibly the child of her first cousin, her mother's sister's son...
...Willie carried a Whammo brand slingshot in the small of his back...
...Exactly how are you going to do this, I mean without you or the two cops getting killed...
...Neighbors were arriving from up and down the street, and Jones and friends were working to get them excited...
...When Izzy retired in 1958 at age 74, he moved to SanFrancisco, mostly to be near Sally, though her business was dying...
...That guy's hands were shaking so bad I thought he was going to shoot me for sure," said Eddie...
...If they did that it could be reasonably assumed they had decided to kill him...
...A couple of black-and-whites had pulled up...
...All of which is to say that if we had anything to do with it, Frostie and her robbery would be just another welcome link in this chain of melodrama and one about which the risks weren't even worth worrying...
...You won't believe it...
...The robbery was to be late Friday...
...He toted two steamer trunks on buses and trains...
...No wonder I didn't get shot...
...About Frostie...
...A dozen bullets were fired point blank...
...Lance missed the driver's door but plowed right into the rear side of the Caddy, knocking it against the curb and blowing a tire...
...Here's to you, Frostie...
...He was smart enough to recognize it...
...You have to pay us overtime and it was all for zero...
...No need for that...
...Blood was pouring through his stocking mask...
...I got the lead...
...The man turned towards us with his tray in both hands and said, "I'll get rollin' when I'm f---ing well ready, a---hole...
...Though he dropped the rag business, he could offer Frostie and her friends a small but helpful service...
...Roger had to agree that it might...
...The sergeant and Flaherty stood up simultaneously and so did I. The sergeant, I think, then yelled "police" and began to fire...
...We fidgeted in the room...
...The vice president and general manager of the O&O, a man who should be selling neckties from a suitcase on Market Street, the egomaniacal nobrainer who insists on doing every station editorial on camera himself and who always shakes his head the entirely wrong way when he says something like...
...The steak, the succotash, the potato and its sour cream, and a glass of milk all hit the man full and simultaneously...
...Dust-covered papers were in stacks on his metal desk...
...I realized they were women's stockings...
...Eddie was to lead the way into the back...
...And we did...
...She would be able to see Piggy and Jerry after they exited the motel office with the money and dashed around the corner...
...Fanning was dark-haired, good-looking, a guy with an easy smile...
...Meanwhile, the remainder of the chair went racing on its metal wheels over the wood platform that held the anchor desk and clattered onto the studio floor, knocking over the weather easel...
...I was tooling along and a guy in a Volkswagen drove by looking at me...
...That's how they go from Sergeant Umbrella to Lieutenant Canopy, if you get my drift...
...He looked very much like a desk clerk...
...You stay down," said Sergeant Umbrella to me...
...Be there in five minutes...
...by bus a few days before...
...And he seldom struck her...
...He looked at the camera and said slowly and quite clearly, "You wouldn't f---ing believe me if I tried to explain it...
...It could have been the drunk...
...Bet these two fellows told you you'd have to hang back for a while tonight when this goes down, didn't they...
...Deano returned the gesture with a roar of outrage as the two cars slowly accelerated down Wilshire...
...Two were from Vice and two from the Robbery Detail...
...We'll knock on every door in the projects...
...Grimsby was a star in this joint...
...We laid out the story as we knew it, leaving out the where, when, and who—including Frostie's name—until they agreed to do it our way, which basically meant keeping us clued in and letting us set up the filming ahead of time...
...I once heard a patrolman say about Denny's, "I ain't going in there...
...Frank seemed to know what was coming because he looked as uncomfortable as Lance...
...Frostie rooted around in the bottom of her straw tote bag...
...His double-knit pants were mud brown with white saddle-stitch...
...She said, "Piggy tried to borrow one...
...She laid it on the green felt of the table...
...Roger and Stu ran into some women at Enrico Banducci's cafe on Broadway...
...Piggy and Jerry were heading right for the door and for us...
...Lance's light fell on their backs as they sprinted up Grove...
...We won't stand for this...
...And he and Lamb were having fun with Eddie, calling him "Walter...
...Eddie had a walkie-talkie, which he'd turned off, in a file cabinet behind him...
...show...
...We normally worked Sunday night through Friday morning...
...But what Izzy wanted was too simple for them to grasp...
...We were protected from view in part by Flaherty's car...
...Piggy laughed as Jerry snatched it up and slid it into his belt next to his navel and under his filthy Ohio State University sweat shirt...
...We were side by side, really close, when the guy flips his lighted cigarette at my open window...
...I reminded them...
...But they were correct...
...She was called "French Mary," though she was from County Cork...
...She no longer uses the name Frostie...
...He was a newsie first and an anchor next...
...Frostie was able to make enough money to send Pogo to an expensive private school in Pacific Heights—although what didn't get spent on the little girl seemed to go up Frostie's nose, or down her throat, or into her veins...
...Mukesh the clerk would lock himself in a vacant room and watch TV until he was told to come out...
...It ran almost the length of the room...
...Grimsby would not be an easy sell...
...The visiting doctor—he came every Monday—had diagnosed Mary with TB...
...She then headed back up Grove Street and into the dark...
...Flaherty and the sergeant landed on him...
...W hat happened that night was pretty simple...
...We couldn't see her yet...
...We'll tell them they're giving away free drinks at the motel...
...She stopped in front of the door and looked through the glass at Eddie...
...Cute," said Grimsby...
...Cheryl had not been long out of official custody and was trying to find happiness with her father and away from her crazy mother...
...It was loaded with blanks...
...She had a heart-shaped face, lightly freckled, and long auburn hair...
...She said, "I don't know anything about guns...
...Grimsby was both the news anchor and the news director...
...The impact of the ball bearing striking and spidering the window was exactly like the sound of a high-powered rifle bullet...
...Lance and I had one large room with windows on the street...
...As you can imagine," I said, "the sergeant asked me the same question...
...We worked out a simple scenario on a scarred back-table at O'Doul's...
...James "Fillmore Slim" Jones was convicted in 1971 of the beating of two prostitutes with a coat-hanger...
...Blanks...
...I was walking fast up Grove...
...He would figure he would get exactly nothing for any money spent on OT...
...She was 28 years old...
...The lights were timed...
...They were in a business where the confusion of lots of people tossing clothes off and on every couple of hours had a profitable side-benefit if you were quick...
...His partner was Willie Pyle...
...At the moment the real desk clerk—whose name was "Mukesh" according to a pin on his shirt—was standing at the counter with Frank and Eddie...
...He was as tough as a winter apple...
...Frostie was wearing her mangy rabbit-fur jacket...
...Izzy went back on the road...
...We huddled behind it...
...If Lance had serious regrets about the practical consequences of this kind of decision-making—like having no money to fix the damage, and having to hide the car from his parents—he kept them to himself and bore up under it like a man...
...Lance said to the man, "Give her the money and get rolling, buddy...
...She would make a terrible witness anyway, a sure impeachment for the defense...
...In 1962, the sidewalks still rolled up after dark...
...He was standing behind the counter reading the American Automobile Association magazine...
...They had been drawn by all the radio traffic...
...The floors, the walls, and even the tables were covered in common white tile...
...We'll see you there in a half hour...
...I'd appreciate it...
...Not to Worry, said Frostie the Getaway Driver, crunching the ice from her Black Russian...
...I could see his flattened features through the stocking...
...Grimsby was sitting in his glassed cubicle in the corner of the newsroom...
...Sergeant Umbrella was an intelligent fellow...
...Grimsby took his feet off the desk and dropped the wire-copy...
...Okay, okay...
...Frostie would drive right up Grove Street, not too fast, and then onto Oak Street, with a straight shot up into the Haight-Ashbury...
...Anyway, after leaving Cheryl, we were sitting at the light when a car pulled up on our right...
...Homicide handled all police-related shootings...
...We would get a good story...
...The office window collapsed...
...Lance and I drove to our office on Union Street in Cow Hollow, at the foot of Pacific Heights...
...We're going to have, to bring some other guys into this...
...Jerry dropped like a weight thrown from a roof...
...The entire passenger side was as wrinkled as a crone's neck...
...Lance and I became friends the week after Christmas, 1962...
...If Stu didn't bring a woman back to the studio for a romp on the couch in Gypsy Rose Lee's dressing room, he would carry in his wire-copy script two minutes before airtime, slap some powder on his shiny forehead with a big puff, pose for the opening long shot with Grimsby at their desk...
...What does that dude want...
...Eddie had a .25 automatic in an ankle holster if he got into some kind of unexpected jam...
...Grimsby was a hard case...
...Roger means last week's quite amazing—and now rather well-known—on-air debacle...
...In the two years Lance and I had been pursuing film stories full-time for TV, we had met a lot of folks who were even more tightly wound, and who had no sense of humor at all...
...He was about 95 years old...
...He had a tough-looking Valley girl practically on his lap...
...He would solicit the customers himself, charging them twenty dollars each, and run through as many as he could...
...For instance, he took her to San Francisco General Hospital and actually waited while she finished her labor (it had begun some hours before...
...Film outside and your chances of getting shot might be fifty-fifty instead of a certainty...
...People who take risks in life get ahead...
...Frank Fanning was standing in the middle of the dark street...
...Screw homicide...
...He was stupefied...
...They'd let Jerry and Piggy get the money and head for the door...
...She was called Pogo not after the Walt Kelly cartoon but because she was so thin she looked like a mop standing up on its pole...
...No way the police would be looking for a white woman...
...He showed it to me because it was sharpened down...
...He looked like Fred Mertz from the Lucy show...
...Flaherty followed me...
...They needed a political boost of some kind to stay there, to gain permanent admission to the Detective Bureau, with its prestige and its career tenure...
...Darlene (whose real name was Margaret) worked out-call massage and was a lesbian...
...Lance and I would have checked with the informant to make sure the heist was still on...
...There was a trap door in it large enough for a man to crawl through...
...He kept his room in Hell's Kitchen...
...Sergeant Umbrella took Larkin's car, which he had brought from home, and parked it in the lot backed up to the office door...
...They would get the bad guys and the glory: a truly symbiotic relationship...
...The cops showed us the gun...
...I could see stray bills sticking between his fingers...
...They might forget to do the robbery...
...They have to do with guns...
...She pulled out Jerry's large .38 revolver...
...Mukesh seemed to be Indian...
...In this case, she was about to drop a story right in our laps...
...If he was saddled with the usual variety of physical fears, he never let them interfere with any split-second action he decided to take, such as that night at the steak-house...
...He is 51 years old and lives in Encino, California, with his wife Lane and their children...
...Piggy had a screwdriver...
...t was after midnight but there were quite a few people / in Tad's...
...Hi," one of us would say...
...I want to know how you got the sergeant to change his mind after he told you to butt out...
...After a four month trip in 1932, including three weeks in Cuba where Izzy wrote a dizzying stack of orders, he dropped into Polly Adler's place to see Mary...
...They were now working at the Chicken Ranch or Tillie's in Cleveland or Lulu Porter's on Olvera Street in L.A...
...Not only would that be a poor investment from Grimsby's point of view, but he would believe that the odds of the robbery actually coming off were slim...
...We'll embarrass the hell out of you two...
...They noticed many strange and cryptic references to 'Grove Street' and to the 'Executive Motel.' They may not be the sharpest tools in the shed but they've got some sense...
...We promised Roger we would get Frank and Eddie to call in backups...
...They would meet Frostie with it...
...Through yet another girl she found out that Piggy Roberts, ever the aspiring pimp, had given the earrings to the hooker as a gift...
...One was clearly capable of taking it back, so Jones gave it to him...
...Wouldn't it demonstrate sober judgement on Grimsby's part...
...You need backup help...
...They shined in the lighter flame...
...How you doing, boys...
...I said, "We made him a simple offer...
...Or words to that effect...
...Many of them...
...Eddie looked ready to rock and roll, at least if the dancing was going to be in a bar in Manila...
...It was chrome-plated with a six-inch barrel and white plastic handgrips with steers' heads on them...
...She had taken the blame for killing gangster Johnny Stompanato, her mother's lover, though the local gossip always held that she was protecting Lana...
...I never seen him, before in my life...
...He made them nervous...
...How does the sergeant explain to his Lieutenant and his Captain that you are both in the act...
...Jerry looked dim for a brief moment as the concept registered...
...The other man was behind the counter rifling the till...
...Mary couldn't quit Polly's...
...There was a sign painted on our door...
...Let's go talk to him," I said...
...I never understood in model jargon precisely what that meant...
...And now, on the only existent news film of this unseemly but interesting event he is the Hero of the Day or the Hero of the Hour or something...
...You saw what happened to your friend," said Flaherty...
...Grimsby is not convinced...
...She just wanted Jerry and Piggy sent to the Big House...
...Another example comes to mind...
...These were our words and Frank was lip-synching them...
...Izzy had been tiny but dapper in his youth...
...It wasn't quite the same...
...He was still in the spot where he'd pulled the trigger and killed Jerry Cook...
...Four pimps, one of them in a mink coat and with a toy poodle on a leash, fell out of the car and scrambled into a doorway for safety...
...Who delivered this crime to you anyway...
...It was close to our one-way mirrors...
...He'd already been working in the newsroom part-time for a couple of years as a copy boy, filling paste pots and running copy to the Linotype operators...
...We had met Canopy a number of times during the investigation into the assassination of Dow Wilson and Lloyd Green, Painters Union officials...
...In our large room we had two wooden desks and chairs, a couch, an editing bench with rewinds, a 16mm viewer and editing equipment...
...Nothing happened...
...These garments were known in the trade as "trick suits...
...Even from where I was I could feel their paranoia...
...She was wearing her Miss Hamlin's outfit: blue jumper, knee socks, penny loafers...
...The guy went into a robbery with a dud gun...
...I was worried that Piggy and Jerry would come back...
...We told Frostie about Eddie Wilson and Frank Fanning...
...F first, I should explain a couple of things about Lance...
...I don't know how to drive...
...At night you could park anywhere you wanted to...
...Any tourist who wandered into the Pam Pam at that hour might have thought they were an interracial theatrical troupe, one man and all these women in mini-skirts or hot pants and halter tops, and all with big, spiraled, beehive hairdos, snapping gum and using the f-word in loud, don't-give-a-damn voices...
...Cheryl Crane was our age but had already lived one life and was struggling to make another...
...I'm really sorry about this...
...Libido, a heavy player at the carnal piano...
...Once they're out of sight in the motel just drive away, then leave the car somewhere...
...I grabbed the keys from Frank who was still looking dazed...
...t was about 11:30...
...The sergeant took charge...
...Frostie was chatting up Jerry and Piggy over their pool game...
...Tell them these two news dopes said they were listening to a police radio in their office...
...She came out of the shadows alongside the office, stopped and looked in the window...
...Margaret "Darlene" Hibbs continued to work in San Francisco as a prostitute...
...I could barely see people across the street...
...Hey, Dicky, how ya doin', baby...
...He'd left the station...
...I was in the passenger seat...
...You and these cops sound as stupid as Piggy and his friend...
...It didn't break but skidded across the pavement and struck the building next to the motel...
...Eddie looked at Jerry who was clearly dying, or perhaps already dead...
...This was our film truck...
...Like a trio of ducks we waddled hunched over across the parking lot towards the office...
...He listened when the man told him he knew a woman, knew her well, who had overheard two men—Jerry and Piggy by name—planning an armed robbery of the Executive Motel that very night, in just a couple of hours...
...It was called "The Streetwalkers" and was pretty gritty for the day...
...We were on our way over to Tad's Steakhouse a few blocks away where we could get a charbroiled steak, baked potato, and coffee for $1.49...
...His middle finger is working like a piston, he is yelling insults, some of them directed at Lance's new car, which he calls an effing"wuss-hog," or some such, which it pretty much was...
...You know what they do with Black Russians in the Soviet Union...
...A rock hit the side of the Land Rover...
...The union watched Grimsby and us with a gimlet eye...
...How would the VP know...
...After a while he became embarrassed, and he stopped asking...
...Its bumper was about four feet from the door through which Piggy and Jerry would both come and go...
...The sergeant would then be smart enough to realize that this guy—who wouldn't give his name, by the way—has some kind of credibility...
...Frostie had a lumpy body and a bad complexion...
...Lance said to Frostie, "After they leave you for the motel don't wait in the car...
...They got down to business...
...The director, sitting in the control room down the hall was looking at a cue sheet...
...He rooted around in a desk drawer until he found a name tag for Eddie...
...I ain't getting in there with no dead body...
...So what do you want to tell me...
...Noah was thoroughly looped and when James Dean started practicing his hard-look our way, Noah gave him the finger...
...The sergeant was afraid—with real justification, it seemed tome—that Eddie would get caught in a crossfire...
...These were the accoutrements of various film expeditions...
...We feel bad but we don't have any choice...
...Plus we needed film of Jerry's gun...
...Or he said he did...
...He never learned to drive...
...He looked horrified, then outraged...
...Bob Larkin was sitting at a desk in the back room of the motel office...
...That's what I told him...
...Jones turned Frostie out within a few days of first bringing her back to his Tenderloin apartment...
...I'm just a guy with a tire truck trying to make a living...
...Lance Brisson received a fellowship from the American Political Science Association in 1971 after working as a reporter for Look magazine...
...He, too, had a shotgun...
...It was Friday night...
...She died of a drug overdose in the Tenderloin in the summer of 1974...
...There were many advantages to this arrangement...
...He described her as she passed him: black boots, red pants, white fur jacket, short blonde hair...
...At the far end of the inside bench sat a drunken white man, his feet pulled up beneath him, a look of terror on his face as Jerry's body skidded to a halt, head-first against the wall...
...How May I Help You...
...It was Jerry's blood...
...The force knocked the bumper off on one side and crumpled the back door so resoundingly that the window above it shattered and collapsed...
...A few years later they moved to Southern California, where they opened a restaurant...
...I walked over to the truck door and took a great deal of heat from them...
...We agree that it's true you never know for certain about two guys as flaky as Jerry and Piggy...
...Once, they even talked about marriage, maybe even children, this on the night of her twenty-fifth birthday when Izzy took her to Jimmy's Club Durante speakeasy for drinks and dancing...
...Frostie had brought the role of look-out and get-awaydriver upon herself, actually suggesting it to the pair...
...Actually that had been part of our plan, but we kept silent at this point...
...Regardless, I saw Eddie drop under the counter inside...
...I walked over to my, desk to get a Lucky Strike...
...He traveled every year from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon...
...They could never prove it...
...She looked tired...
...He was genuinely mountainous...
...These were people whose idea of punctuating a sentence was to putthree dots between every thought...
...You could see plainly inside...
...I recognized a couple of others...
...He was wearing Hush Puppy shoes with thick crepe...
...Here's to brass and here's to luck...
...It was a great place then, undiscovered by the international tackballs who would go on to ruin it...
...She worked at Polly Adler's whorehouse in Manhattan...
...F rostie's two robbers were Alvin Roberts, 24, known to friend and foe as "Piggy," and Jerome Cook, 23, who had no nickname...
...I'm heading over to the Executive Motel to check out a complaint from a citizen...
...He made the point that he would have to pay us overtime anyway, so cancellation didn't make any difference now...
...He smiled at the man and slammed the fellow's tray from the bottom right up into his face...
...The "SFPD" in worn gold letters at the back reflected Lance's floodlight...
...We wanted to get a shot of Jerry being wheeled into the morgue...
...This was some triangle...
...She always looked kind of a mess...
...She hopped in the back...
...He went down on his butt...
...It was Lance...
...It is time to be off...
...Much of the crowd of very annoyed people was spread around the Land Rover...
...We knew the vice cops pretty well...
...Frank would have a .12 gauge shotgun...
...Let's lay this out...
...In 1967 it still had Victorian charm and it was still quiet...
...Our agreement with Grimsby was that we could work out of our digs if we put in an appearance at the newsroom once a day when we were in town...
...They were a couple of inches too short...
...Forget that," he said...
...Who could know for sure...
...Unfortunately for them, they didn't know that she knew...
...Soon, Frostie started hanging around with Jerry and Piggy and their motley crew of street losers...
...In Los Angeles one early morning, Lance and I and a copy-editor from the Los Angeles Times named Noah Liebling were waiting at a red-light in front of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel...
...The director had no idea what happened...
...Meet us in the newsroom...
...Then the door glass shattered too...
...The only significant variance in color came from dozens of wieners of differing sizes rotating slowly over aluminum rollers behind a white-tile counter...
...Grimsby's eyes were damp from laughing and choking on his cigarette smoke...
...His partner, Eddie Wilson, was more serious, smaller, blond...
...Otherwise, you could count on being slapped, kicked, or punched—regularly and on principle...
...Could I talk with you outside for a couple of minutes, sergeant...
...I was about to cross the street to get the Land Rover when I saw the rear doors of the wagon open and realized where they were taking Jerry...
...I mentioned the advantages of having our office away from the ABC newsroom...
...he offered the same price on the stones which he'd pry loose and examine with a loupe before he melted the metal down in his crucible...
...The pimps all knew Izzy, too...
...The side of the office had a window over the sidewalk on Grove Street...
...We asked Frostie if she knew what had happened...
...His first couple of lines to her were flirtatious and kind of risque...
...I told him we would agree to keep Frostie out of the story...
...Willie Pyle and Dick Lamb drove up...
...We told Roger about the robbery...
...The greatest of these was next door: Miss Anne Demeter of Demeter Modeling Agency fame...
...She had seen Piggy and Jerry just hours before...
...Nothing fit well...
...Spitting on the floor was nothing...
...She lived in Mill Valley, miles to the north over the Golden Gate Bridge...
...He gave me a ride to Turk and Taylor and I picked up Pogo at my girlfriend' s." "I have a couple of questions, Frostie," I said...
...We used this truck often...
...Piggy was stabbed to death about 1978 in Folsom Prison by another inmate during an argument about food...
...Lance," I said...
...At that moment, Sergeant...
...He had gold chains nestled in his chest hair and they now were coated with potato and goo...
...The sergeant nixed the idea of anyone charging out of the inner office as Frank originally planned to do...
...Lance mounted a sound camera on a tripod in the window of the second floor "command post...
...The counter was to the left...
...Haul your butt out of there...
...Jerry and Piggy raced around the corner onto the sidewalk with the four of us in pursuit...
...Larkin pulled Piggy back away from the fence and began dragging him backward by his handcuffs...
...Sergeant Umbrella took one of the Robbery detectives named Bob Larkin, a man in his fifties with a crew cut, and put him in the back room...
...Piggy and Jerry would pass them on foot on their way to the motel...
...No, they hadn't seen her and they didn't know anybody who had...
...They actually threatened to drive up as the robbery was underway if we didn't let them in...
...The light was moving...
...If you didn't live there and you were on the streets at night you could count on being stopped and politely questioned by Anderson's boys...
...Lance was filming it...
...Grimsby and Williams were chortling over a joke...
...He would pick them all up off the streets around 4 a.m...
...Remember, vote yes on Proposition 9 and vote no on Proposition 11," is very seriously on Grimsby's case...
...I said...
...It was a crowd and it was moving out into the street and our way...
...We did a brisk business with it either way...
...No uniformed cop would dare enter without reinforcements...
...I could hear muffled shouting inside...
...Stu not only had two wives who knew and loathed each other—but also numerous girlfriends, many of whom also knew each other and sometimes clashed in and around ABC property...
...She had arrived in San Francisco from Dyersburg, Tennessee, on a bus six years before, a pregnant 14-year-old running away from a sleazy family...
...They left the car engine running, its doors wide open, in the middle of the street...
...She was plain as a post and a little slow...
...W e wandered into the news room...
...What could I do, arrest them...
...Jerry and Piggy must have thought Rod Serling was about to pop up and do a "Twilight Zone" intro...
...The sergeant and Flaherty each had a pistol in his hand...
...Mukesh had locked himself in a room a couple of doors down from us on the second floor...
...California law in 1967 allowed any participant in a crime to be charged with murder one if another person was killed during the commission of that crime...
...Saturday morning, three hours after the robbery was to go down...
...Jerry had the pistol cocked and pointed straight at Eddie's temple...
...Jerry said he stole that one...
...Uh, no, not yet," the lovely 20-year-old would say, her ash-blonde hair cascading over her slim shoulders...
...Where are you two going to be hiding, in the broom closet...
...He wiped the chili off his fingers with a napkin ball and shook hands with both Latice and me...
...they would say...
...It was 3 a.m...
...Grimsby glared at me over the glasses on his nose...
...Then he interrupted...
...He was reading a roll of wire-copy which curled around the floor like artwork by Cristo...
...This was to keep a family of tourists, say, from pulling up and parking there just as the robbery began...
...He had discOnnected the sound camera from the tripod, mounted it on his shoulder with a mike and a floodlight, and at that moment was careening across the parking lot towards us like a giant stork caught in a metal contraption...
...They were actually patrolmen who were temporarily in plainclothes...
...The Caddy looked better than the real James Dean's Porsche did after it hit Donald Turnipseed's car a few years earlier and a hundred miles north—but not all that much better...
...I ran down what she had to say about Piggy and Jerry's plan...
...He picked up his dash mike and identified himself...
...Our office always smelled good, like tempura, or like vegetables and ginger...
...He throws it into second, picks up speed, and makes a loop back directly headed at James Dean and his car door...
...I said, "Just a joke, Roger...
...They did not like him...
...en minutes later they came into view as we gathered T around the curtains, our lights out, and watched them...
...They thought that was unbelievable...
...It had just opened...
...We'd fill in the details later...
...They wandered over—and fell right into the crime scene...
...They probably bought their underwear at Macy's...
...Film at 11...
...They weren't welcome there...
...Dick Lamb and Willie Pyle were in an unmarked car on a cross street intersecting Grove about a block away...
...zzy lived in two rooms over Big Al's...
...Piggy's good friend Jerry Cook, a running mate of one of her former pimps, had been in Frostie's pad a few times...
...It was clearly the time for us to strike...
...Izzy rented a room in Hell's Kitchen to be near her...
...Not that he was sentimental...
...There was pushing and shoving...
...But what about the two of you...
...I had taken their car key...
...Izzy Mitrovitch had been the premier couturier to generations of the crème de la crème of America's whores...
...Hey pig...
...I could see a group of maybe twenty men and a couple of women, all black, out in the street...
...At 83, he still sometimes thought about her...
...He was smart, well-read, had a good sense of humor, and was a little tightly wound...
...Yo, man you gonna blow off your Johnson you ain't careful...
...They drifted apart...
...A stack of camping gear was so high it practically held up another wall...
...There was only silence, or at least only the sound of yelling, screaming and the Lovin' Spoonful on the jukebox, but no comment from Grimsby...
...He drew a fast circle around Jerry's body, right through the blood...
...Of course, he would probably be right...
...We took Frostie over to a corner booth...
...Noah was hooting and shouting encouragement from the back and Lance accelerated alongside and swung into the Caddy three or four times before Deano ground to a halt and he and his girl friend piled out on the sidewalk, escaping through the passenger door...
...Piece of cake...
...Until the sartorial and class distinctions between hookers and straight women began to blur, dress shops and some department stores were off-limits to hookers in many towns...
...There's no way this is happening without us...
...Not least among them—and it was openlyenvied by others in the news operation—was that we were hard to keep track of...
...Well, I can appreciate that," said Larkin...
...Not with him," he said, gesturing at the wagon...
...Through the rear window we could see Eddie with his hands over his head...
...Pyle and Lamb each had legs...
...The sergeant made the corner room on the second floor the Command Post...
...We'd never have the guts to call her by her first name in person...
...He was over 80 years old...
...He had a heavily keloided knife scar that ran from the corner of his right eye down over his cheek and across to the lobe of his ear...
...Everyone seemed to freeze: the three of us in a line facing Jerry and Piggy over the vinyl roof of Flaherty's 1965 Plymouth, which was about to lose paint to ricochet bullets...
...In 1988, Dick Carlson spoke at a banquet in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in honor of Roger Grimsby's sixtieth birthday...
...Piggy would try to borrow one...
...The office was on one prong of the horseshoe...
...Dick Lamb was one of them...
...Larkin had a shotgun...
...As we waited with our trays to pay her, the man in front of us, in front of Lance actually, began to give her a hard time...
...Lance shined his light on them...
...Our points were that any little O.T...
...We parked it across the street from the side of the office, up Grove about twenty-five feet...
...When Grimsby hired us at ABC, they agreed to pick up our rent...
...by the nape of his coat, holding on with both hands...
...He was about five feet tall and had furry eyebrows like summer caterpillars...
...Frostie gave a good natured snuffle at this stupid joke...
...An explosion rang out in the dark...
...Frank could sit in the back with a clear view of the sidewalk and office window...
...for breakfast at the Pam Pam Room, hauling them there in his bright green Caddy and then putting them at a big table in the back, where he would order pancakes with considerable noise and fanfare...
...I said, that's what you tell them if they ask, sergeant, but they probably won't...
...On the other hand our informant will be there to remind them...
...At the sergeant's order, the paddy wagon backed up on the sidewalk, momentarily blocking the scene from the crowd across the street...
...Sergeant Umbrella had Jerry...
...It was untucked at the waist...
...He only wanted to continue doing what he had been doingsince almost the turn of the century: hanging around working girls...
...Stu maintained that he had been drinking hardly at all and was simply resting, presumably thinking about how best to present that day's Dodgers' game...
...I watched as the old car, its rear bumper gouging a furrow in the street, amidst a spray of sparks and a terrible racket, drove along the curb trying to escape...
...Something like that...
...We could see Eddie very clearly through the camera view-finder...
...And we knew two cops with whom we could work this all out...
...He ain't my friend," said Piggy...
...In 1990 they were still running it...
...Of course, if we really screwed this up it could sink you...
...I could hear shouts of "Hey pig...
...He was giving Eddie a lesson in how to run check-ins and the office for the next hour or so...
...In one of those coincidences that no one would believe if it were connected to the Kennedy assassination, Jones had actually invited more than a dozen Bay Area black radicals to some kind of Black Power meeting shortly before the shooting began...
...He was one sandwich short for the picnic, you know...
...The chrome hubcap in the center of each was a one-way mirror through which a person in the closed bed could see, or film...
...It was not uncommon to see someone spit on a pool table or at the mirror behind the bar...
...It was on the waterfront in Sausalito...
...But we won't...
...And Lance's Monza had lost its pristine look, no question...
...This was his idea of how a motel desk clerk ought to look...
...Roger," I said when he came on the line...
...He'd probably just paid the girls for some jewelry...
...He was a religious man...
...His voice then took on a nastier sound and he began to insult her...
...The sergeant is saying to us `absolutely not, absolutely not.' How long can we argue with him...
...Someday our block would turn into Nirvana for swarms of horny yuppies, when singles bars like Perry's and the Cooperage popped up everywhere...
...Frank had some bottled beer in a grocery bag...
...The steady stream of real and imagined models in the hall didn't let the modesty of the surroundings dampen their ambition or their desire to impress Miss Demeter...
...I might get captured...
...Frostie knew we would be there Friday night, whether or not Grimsby came through with the overtime...
...They would use Jerry's gun...
...This was not exactly a low-life place, but it was borderline...
...You're doing this with us or you're not doing it at all...
...We would film Frank and Eddie as they took the pair on coming out the door after they'd gotten the money...
...We banged our cups...
...Most assuredly," I said...
...The part about getting some extra police did strum on the right chord, I had to admit...
...We crouched behind its roof parapet and watched Willie take out the rear window of a shiny Cadillac pimp-mobile as it waited at the red light below...
...For three years we had rented space over a Japanese Restaurant named Ming Gei Ya...
...Frank and Eddie were definitely uncomfortable...
...The heavy rubber curtains hanging in the entrance to the bar—to keep little kids from peeking in—were amateurishly painted with a fat mobster holding a tommy gun under his arm, a cigar the size of a banana clamped in his teeth...
...Otherwise we'd see her at Coffee Ron's at 2 a.m...
...We were both copyboys at the Los Angeles Times...
...Stu Williams and Roger Grimsby came into the empty newsroom together...
...It was cool and dark inside...
...When the camera dollied in on Grimsby reading the news, Stu would lay his pink face flat down on the desk and fall into a deep sleep, right up until the commercial before his sports segment, when the director would wake him over the 'studio loudspeaker, or until Stu started snoring, whichever occurred first...
...That's the way residents wanted it, that's the way they got it...
...Under this, on either side, was a painted tire...
...He was a tall, thin guy in jeans and a two-tone jacket...
...Lance and I walked into Roger Grimsby's crowded cubicle...
...She lived in San Mateo, twenty miles to the south...
...He was about 50, short and round, with a pink complexion...
...That got Piggy's attention...
...Pogo was in her school uniform...
...Polly had no idea where Mary had gone...
...Did they come on a bus...
...Lance's mother was Rosalind Russell, the actress...
...Grimsby has been fired by memo ("This multi-million dollar TV station is not your private plaything, Mister . . .") and then rehired, maybe...
...said the sergeant...
...They would get the drop on them...
...You got a gripe with the police go tell a police about it...
...He shifted the metal bulk to his side...
...They had been of considerable help to us on the documentary about hookers...
...On the other hand, if the motel was really held up, if Frostie really came through, if we caught the entire undertaking from beginning to end on highspeed color film with sound, well, I mean wouldn't that knock the VP's socks off...
...Izzy was gone for months...
...We'll set up lights and a tripod outside the office...
...It would be his prescience and his good judgement which wouldbring this case to justice...
...One cold night in October 1967, we spotted her flapping away the night air with her arms as she waved at cars...
...He was part Hawaiian and part Samoan...
...No way," he shouted...
...I knew where to find him...
...Lance and I greeted the trio...
...I was carrying a hand-held Bell & Howell silent camera...
...Painted on both sides was VECTOR TIRE COMPANY 2031 UNION STREET, SAN FRANCISCO WHOLESALE, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC in black letters...
...Redemption was clearly the angle to push, and we pushed it hard...
...Bob Larkin had his large white hand in the center of Piggy's back, pressing the side of his face against the fence...
...Frostie took a pint of Seagram's blended whiskey from her bag and poured a couple of fingers into each cup...
...Everyone called him Sergeant Umbrella...
...She looks like a hooker, he said...
...They send them to Patrice Lumumba University...
...Man, I wouldn't want to be locked in no dark wagon with a dead guy I didn't know either...
...We found the sergeant at the Doggie Diner on Van Ness Avenue...
...He was 71...
...But he did have very good news sense...
...Others were a definite bust, like the week spent tracking Big Foot, or our efforts to film a gold expedition in head-hunter territory in Ecuador...
...Big black Cadillac, probably a '52, driven by a James Dean imitator with a cascade of curls falling down over his forehead, his T-shirt sleeve rolled up over the deck of butts on his biceps...
...Half the customers at any given moment were armed, had just sniffed-or shot up, or were planning to do so shortly...
...He was also our mentor, our chief...
...Lance and Flaherty played cards on the bed...
...He was tired, he said, and wanted to go to bed without arguing...
...How 're you doing, sergeant...
...A half dozen pens were lined up in a plastic holder with a real estate broker's ad on its pocket flap...
...If we did get a good story, it would have to be used Saturday night...
...he said, his words muffled by the remainder of a bun which he popped through his lips as we shook hands...
...At that Eddie would shout, "Thank you for not shooting...
...It sounds like it has to do with flying, or the weather, they would say...
...She is a school teacher near Los Angeles...
...Lance and I had a couple of preparations to make as well...
...At the insult to his car Lance pulls away and swings a wide arc to the left across the center line...
...Screw the coroner...
...Hey, what do I know, was my general refrain...
...I had gotten to know so many prostitutes that once, as I walked with my girlfriend and her very social parents into Trader Vic's in Cosmo Alley in San Francisco, a group of black hookers, at least six of them, walked past in high heels and vinyl mini-skirts and started razzing me...
...She knew this translated that we'd tipped some cops and were set to go...
...She had called the motel office and talked with someone, probably Mukesh—who said the robber with the gun died and the other man went to jail...
...I understand you are near the top...
...I could see the guy in our headlights...
...Fanning and Wilson would lose a little glory but it wouldn't affect the story and it might even guarantee its outcome...
...Of course, Eddie didn't look that much different to begin with...
...There were six clubs...
...So please tell it all...
...Then we came along...
...He would run into girls who'd known her...
...We'll screw it up...
...I made a quick U-turn and pulled up next to Willie Pyle and Dick Lamb...
...He was earnest and helpful, albeit a little excited...
...You had to have been there...
...Sorry, Izzy...
...I have to mention that if it was the very worst thing that could happen to Roger and Stu, it was clearly the very best thing that had happened to thousands of Bay Area TV news watchers...
...It's Dick, girls...
...Frostie had gotten the message we had left with Darlene, saying that we needed to talk ASAP...
...They stopped just short of the light from the office window...
...said Eddie...
...He purposely had not put Frostie on film at all...
...He lost his balance and his cowboy boots slipped on the milk on the floor...
...We knew him slightly...
...I said...
...called Grimsby from a pay phone...
...Lance and I discussed the tack to take as we followed Eddie and Frank's unmarked Ford to the restaurant...
...If anything goes wrong and Eddie and Frank don't take them they'll be back to the car and you'll be in deep trouble...
...Get ready," said Sergeant Umbrella...
...Jerry's gun lay on the sidewalk a few feet away...
...I could see that she had goose bumps...
...The cashier was a heavy young woman whose name I don't recall, though Lance and I saw her often and she was always cheery with us...
...It was supposed to suggest that we targeted in on the news...
...We saw Frostie every few nights, even if only to say hello...
...She volunteered for the robbery as soon as she found out they were trying to decide what kind of a place to hit...
...A beer bottle flew out of the dark and hit the sidewalk near my - feet...
...She didn't know them...
...Deano stood on the gas and tried to outdistance the assault...
...The motel was close to a freeway overpass and on the rim of a tough, mostly black neighborhood...
...I pointed out to the sergeant, perhaps gratuitously, how much credit will accrue to him with his superiors because he had sufficient street intuition to follow this tip up as he did, and to organize the stake-out successfully...
...The bartender at The Buena Vista Cafe sounded harried, but he went and got Grimsby for me anyway...
...I watched the wagon begin to lumber down the street...
...The sergeant said you guys would understand...
...I waved him over and we turned a trick for $20 in the narking lot of the school were...
...Throw that gear in this truck...
...They had rap sheets as long as a Dead Sea scroll...
...There were bean fields around what is now the Century Plaza Hotel...
...In 1970 she married a blackjack dealer...
...And it was...
...I left Lance filming and began to walk back to the motel office to call Grimsby...
...Frank and Eddie were embarrassed...
...and of "working broads" (as Izzy called them) by the thousands...
...And I understand you are on the promotion list...
...She was reading papers from her book bag and looked a wee bit, out of place...
...Jerry's head was hanging down, weighted by a ball of gore which had collected like a goiter in the stocking mask...
...Have you met Anne yet...
...Uncle Stu Williams died of a heart attack on the third hole of the El Dorado Country Club near Palm Springs in 1989...
...Frank Fanning and Eddie Wilson were both promoted to the Detective Bureau of the SFPD within two years of the robbery...
...He never married, but for years was in love with one of the girls...
...We went over the plan Jerry and Piggy had outlined...
...She strutted down the sidewalk as we watched...
...We did, I said, answering my own question—Carlson and Brisson, the UPS of melodrama and TV violence...
...We learned later that Jones' apartment was in the building directly across from the motel...
...Presumably it was Piggy...
...The three men propelled Jerry across the shiny metal threshold of the wagon until he was almost well inside, then threw him...
...He was working on a chili dog at a table bolted to the wall...
...The tableau broke...
...This view held considerable potential for trouble, of course, but it was also a reliable source of amusement for me and others who might be around as witnesses...
...Willie was definitely a card...
...I was 21 and had arrived in L.A...
...Some were successful—the search for the Hermit of the Sierra Nevada, for instance...
...0 ur first problem was convincing Roger Grimsby that he should let us work overtime to stake out the motel...
...One bounced off the wagon's roof...
...We'd hide somewhere...
...This was in the days before commercially available scanners became popular...
...Frank Fanning and Eddie Wilson were partners, plainclothes detectives only a few years older than we were...
...The sergeant, Flaherty, Pyle, and Lamb each grabbed one of Jerry's limbs...
...When he opened the door he was to instantly hit the deck and Larkin would fire right over him with no warning, wasting Jerry and Piggy...
...show...
...He could teach her the rag trade...
...Noah, who was quite drunk, was in the back...
...When we left Big Al's, Darlene and Izzy Mitrovich were eating Slim Jims and playing bar dice with Big Al himself...
...Man, I don't like those dark streets over there...
...They held our recording equipment, camera gear and police radios...
...He had no idea we knew about their business relationship...
...She called it "Valhalla...
...There are just a couple of details we need to talk about...
...Izzy was lonely...
...I walked back to the knot around Jerry and Piggy...
...She couldn't work here like that, Polly said...
...Mary left a month ago, she told Izzy...
...Otherwise we're going to have to find Piggy and Jerry and take them out to dinner...
...Cesar Romero later told me he used to ride a horse down Sunset thirty years before...
...From behind it looked like the coat hanger had been left in his sport jacket...
...We would meet the sergeant in fifteen minutes at the motel...
...I recognized LeRoi Jones, the crazy poet...
...So, you ask me—as did the sergeant—how would the cops know about the robbery...
...Eddie would have a gun in his pants...
...Unbelievable...
...Sergeant Umbrella stood by the window...
...We're going to need some backup...
...Yes, it's true we won't be able to shoot anything else that night since it'll take time to set up...
...We asked her to come along, we'd buy...
...They lived for forty years at 706 North Beverly Drive...
...We put Eddie into the compartment through the rear door...
...She also knew that one or both of them had robbed her apartment and stolen her stereo and some costume jewelry...
...It was a short sprint back to the car...
...Frank Fanning was sitting in our swivel chair in the dark bed of the Land Rover...
...It was close to midnight...
...A row of battered file cabinets—they came from the Salvation Army—was along a wall...
...Frostie was lighting a Kool...
...They didn't find a gun on him and the cop behind the counter didn't see one...
...Grimsby was sitting in his cubicle, feet cushioned on his desk by mounds of paper...
...He was also meaner and more aggressive than Piggy, who was out trying to borrow a gun for himself...
...Nine months pregnant, pulling a battered vinyl bag tied with twine and filled with child's possessions, not in anticipation of the 'baby but because she was just a little kid herself, she was hit on before she was out of the bus station lobby...
...Darlene grinned blankly...
...Eddie would flip on the neon "No Vacancy" sign after 10:30 to keep prospective guests out of harm's way...
...The Executive Motel had three floors, each with about thirty rooms...
...Frank came on the air as she passed the Land Rover...
...Eddie spoke...
...Jones, now "Fillmore Slim," had gone on to build up a stable of women, and now had as many as six or seven girls working for him, at least half of them white, and all of them much better-looking than Frostie...
...He asked about her while he traveled...
...I laid out our position and our ideas as Lance and I had discussed them on the way over...
...He raised his chipped coffee mug...
...Lance was out of his chair like the seat had sunk its teeth into him...
...Amazing...
...Man, those boys didn't have no luck with guns, did they...
...A thin blonde girl was moving her feet on the bar and pretending to dance...
...In the years since her arrival on Trailways, Frostie had gone through two other pimps and now worked only for herself...
...I had the Bell & Howell pressed against my forehead and was seeing this all through its view-finder...
...Frostie wanted Jerry and Piggy sent up the river sans paddle...
...We also said we would telephone Grimsby in the newsroom at 11:45, after the news ended and (hopefully) after the robbery ended...
...Once, Lance and I climbed with Pyle and Lamb up the rusted fire escape at the rear of the old Fillmore Theatre on Fillmore Street...
...He gave Grimsby and Stu a pass for freedrinks good for every one of them and during the three hours between shows they dragged the women to each club for two drinks apiece...
...Every couple of weeks Frostie would bring him a paper bag with a small assortment of jewelry she or Darlene had lifted...
...She snorted and grinned...
...C offee Ron's was quiet when we arrived at 2:30 a.m...
...The facts are that in the middle of a live-reader five minutes into the show, Grimsby shifted his weight in his swivel chair and the seat snapped in half, causing him to disappear with a crash below the desk...
...No luck at all," said Lance...
...A collar of two robbers in flagrante could be quite a boost to their careers...
...What are we supposed to say...
...The, women were so drunk they fell asleep on chairs in the station lobby...
...Eddie ran up with Larkin from the back room...
...She could be Izzy's Mary...
...But she was genuinely friendly and had the kind of wry wit that comes from lots of experience with pain...
...They pulled masks over their faces...
...I said as we trooped across the room towards him...
...Larkin was a big guy...
...He glanced up in time to see that Grimsby had totally vanished in mid-sentence from the monitor...
...You've got so much brass you clank when you walk...
...That meant Eddie was sitting in the darkened rear talking through a wooden partition we'd built behind the front seat...
...Do we know her...
...He was sharp-featured, but with a broad smile...
...At the moment we stood up and the shoot-out began, a flood light behind us bathed the entire scene in a white light...
...He was a thin and pleasant fellow with an olive complexion and very curly hair...
...I heard a lot of shouting...
...The sergeant listened...
...Jerry and Piggy would be making a very bad career move if they decided to push Eddie into the rear quarters...
...Or maybe he began to fire and then yelled "police...
...He also carried a pocket full of steel ball bearings...
...I heard you say you didn't know this guy...
...Frank and Eddie were stunned by Sergeant Umbrella'schange of mind...
...For almost two decades he was a popular anchorman there, known for his droll behavior...
...Actually, Miss Demeter was elderly by my (unrealistic) standards of the time...
...A balcony and railing ran around the rim of the shoe on the second and third floors...
...He had hired us as free-lancers...
...As he was saying this he was pulling Piggy backward toward the wagon's rear platform...
...He struggled to his knees and seemed to be saying something...
...Sergeant Canopy listened to the citizen who came up to him in the Doggie Diner parking lot...
...My partner Lance Brisson and I had come to know Frostie when we shot an hour-long documentary on hookers and their friends for ABC...
...Izzy Mitrovitch was to the trick suit in his time what Jimmy Galanos was to the A-line dress in his...
...He had created considerable mischief with this combination over the years...
...He had very wide shoulders, not thick, but almost as if they had been steamrolled...
...Frostie worked briefly as a prostitute for an out-call service but she was not successful...
...Let's get him on board where he belongs...
...The line of hopefuls was particularly remarkable on Wednesday evenings, when Miss Demeter held her "try-outs...
...I think it's all crazy," Grimsby would say...
...He was dressed in wraparound shades and a white short-sleeved polyester shirt of Filipino design, called a Barong...
...He told the other one to leave or he'd kill him...
...Frostie was a chatterbox and a very good gossip...
...They looked suspicious almost beyond belief...
...Postscript Alvin "Piggy" Roberts was charged with both armed robbery and first degree murder...
...Those words (cynically suggested by me) would cause Frank to fly through the door and Eddie to pull his own gun...
...We'regoing to have a riot here if we don't get this body off the sidewalk...
...He wore a battered fedora back on his head and an overcoat two sizes too big...
...He looked as if someone had tried to peel him...
...The news shows on the weekend were losers: fifteen minutes of local news following fifteen minutes of a weak network feed...
...I said that Jerry Cook was definitely the dumber of the two and he definitely would have the gun...
...For two years while we free-lanced film to KGO-TV (the ABC owned-and-operated station), the union suspected Grimsby had us on an under-the-table retainer, a violation of union rules...
...A t 7 o'clock Frank Fanning and Eddie Wilson walked in...
...She walked around the corner of the office and into the lot...
...She was rounder than Stu, and close to the ground...
...We had built shelves above the table...
...They were very irritated with us...
...He is now retired and lives with his wife Maria in a cavernous apartment in Manhattan...
...All because of last week's unfortunate mishap," Grimsby says...
...We went down to the Hall of Justice tonight after the shooting," I said...
...The pair, criminal careerists, lived in the Fillmore District in a project called the Pink Palace...
...And so we were...
...He poppedthem open on the edge of the editing table and passed them around...
...San Francisco, or at least its wee-hours nightlife, was small, and Lance and I had been collecting film stories from its dark pool regularly for a couple of years...
...Frostie was only 20 and as homely and as sad-facet( as a mud fence, but she had an effervescent, almost goofy, and very appealing personality...
...Now, out of the way...
...and so on...
...They talked about living together...
...He'd been warned they were outside...
...Frostie" and Pogo left San Francisco for Las Vegas a few months after the robbery...
...her oft-repeated motto, "A house is not a home," was apt...
...Frostie was to meet them the next night at 10:30 on Grove Street, two blocks from the motel...
...Gold, silver or platinum bracelets, brooches and pins were a specialty...
...Mukesh the clerk was standing nearby...
...Her holiday blow-out filled "Valhalla," her Pine Street mansion, with an incredible assortment of men in tuxedos and ladies in long dresses: Judges, the mayor and his senior staff, every police captain in the city, county supervisors, the editors of the daily papers, a dozen swells from the Social Register, and as many as a hundred of Sally's girls, present and former...
...Clinton Anderson was the Beverly Hills Chief of Police...
...For years, when he lived in New York, Izzy would take a train to San Francisco for Sally Stanford's annual Christmas party...
...Her plan was to keep track of where and when it was to go down and then pass on the info to some of the vice cops she talked with once in a while...
...The stairway to the second floor was on the outside and began on the corner directly across from the office...
...We called them and met for a beer at Lefty O'Doul's saloon downtown...
...They were sipping Black Russians on the rocks and chattering like magpies...
...This was a plan with considerable flexibility...
...But, she didn't say a word...
...The money fluttered from Piggy's hand...
...It said, "Hello I'm Walter...
...Grab a leg," he said to Flaherty...
...This was convenient for Frostie and Darlene because their sticky fingers were regularly attaching themselves to gold tie-bars, platinum cuff links with diamond chip initials, pinky rings with rubies (or maybe that's only a garnet), and the like...
...He removed the pistol from under Eddie's Barong on the reasonable grounds that if Piggy or Jerry spotted it they would probably shoot Eddie on the spot...
...They were working themselves into quite a snit...
...She was wearing only a tattoo...
...Piggy tripped and fell over him skidding along the sidewalk on his hands and knees...
...Piggy would steal one...
...Sergeant Umbrella, Lance and I, and the other Robbery detective—a quiet fellow named Joe Flaherty—were in our command post...
...Frank Fanning would hide in the back room...
...Izzy would pay twenty cents on the dollar for the metal and give fair weight...
...It misses...
...She was asleep with her head on her book bag...
...Not common in that business even then, when most of the on-air TV people had drifted over from radio, rip-and-read radio in large part...
...Eddie pinned this below his pen holder on his breast pocket...
...A glass door led into it from the parking lot...
...He literally had a fistful of money...
...She was sending money home to Ireland...
...They're right over there...
...Piggy's pants and much of his coat were painted with Jerry's blood where Piggy had slipped and fallen in it...
...She was wearing a rabbit car-coat, black plastic boots, a mini-skirt, and some kind of dark stockings with red hearts on them...
...Lance began filming...
...Izzy Mitrovitch was perched on the stool between them...
...We've got something to tell you guys first," said Frank...
...It would be jammed at 4:00...
...Izzy searched New York for her to no avail...
...There were no chairs or stools...
...This is a guy who every time I ever talked to him in his office stood head down, legs apart, slowly swinging a putter at an imaginary ball on the carpet during the entire conversation...
...He took her in, bought her some clothes, and was reasonably nice to her...
...There wasn't a pair of break-away panties in the bunch...
...My date's parents were struck mute, even after I tried to explain how we had come to be acquainted...
...The VP is monumentally annoyed...
...Put him in the wagon," said the sergeant...
...We had been attacked with feet, fists, teeth, clubs, boards, kitchen appliances (a woman once threw an iron juice squeezer at me), chair legs, rocks, and bottles...
...The hitter was one James Jones, a pimp, or at least an aspiring pimp—which is why a mooshy-faced woman-child with no breasts and a pendulous belly looked to him like a potential money-maker...
...Amid a lot of swearing he walked out, sour cream and chives forming a white and green line across his pompadour...
...I tried to look disappointed, which was difficult...
...As they walked in he threw his hands in the air...
...We had to tell the sergeant...
...She'd picked up Pogo at Miss Hamlin's School on Broadway and the two had taken a taxi into the Fillmore District, where Frostie found Piggy and Jerry drinking beer and shooting pool in Denny's Roundhouse #2 on Fillmore Street...
...Izzy Mitrovich died in his apartment over Big Al's in 1979...
...Tips on robberies-to-be came in often, and seldom ever panned out...
...These women were often in the newsroom or the studios looking for, or touring around with, Stu...
...For one thing, the girls who worked there wore polyester and waited on tables...
...I'm 10-8 back in service at Van Ness and Market...
...This was almost supernatural...
...Two of those years we had been stringing for Time magazine and also shooting newsreel film...
...Its picture window looked directly across to the office seventy-five feet away on the street level...
...It was after the six o'clock news on Thursday night...
...Still laughing, Piggy gestured to the bulge of the gun as it pointed south from Jerry's waistband...
...It was just too dangerous the other way...
...Her fingernails were painted purple with little gold squiggles on them...
...Umbrella slid open the door to our room and duck-walked out onto the balcony...
...F rostie was good to her child, probably the daughter, she said, of a boy in her seventh-grade math class back in Dyersburg...
...We'll work all day...
...A bout eight o'clock that Thursday night, we found Frostie at Big Al's in the Tenderloin...
...in fact, many offered kudos for the most bizarre news delivery of the year...
...The place looked like an operating room for frankfurters...
...Stu had fallen into a deep sleep across the assignment desk...
...She even stashed a gun in her place for them for a week, all the while plotting her re:- venge...
...It must have had blanks in it to begin with...
...Eddie Wilson would replace the desk clerk...
...If the habitués of Denny's Roundhouse #2 (there was no #1, nor #3 either) all lived together, it would be on Tough Street in Meantown in the last house at the worst end of the block...
...The crowd across the street was screaming and swearing, although they could see little of this...
...Small wonder...
...But late every Wednesday afternoon Lance and I would hit the office trying to look cool and arty at the editing bench or working at our desks with the door wide open and the police radio crackling...
...Certainly, I said...
...You've seen them around, Lieutenant...
...I hope they don't shoot my goddamned car," said Flaherty with seeming sincerity...
...It created a sort of tableau...
...She wasn't a fully addicted junkie yet, but she was close...
...That's because Frostie knows the Land Rover," I said...
...Frostie had a Kahlua mustache over her lip...
...You could drive a truck through the holes in that plan," he said...
...He is now a successful political consultant...
...Stu's love life was like a political rally in the Balkans...
...he asked...
...There was a chair inside bolted to the deck...
...This remarkable scene concluded with Grimsby struggling to his knees behind the desk, his head and shoulders emerging over the top...
...We then ran a cable along the second floor railing from our room, where it was plugged into the sound amplifier of our Auricon camera, to a metal mike which we hung nakedly off the balcony and down a few feet over the top of the office door...
...When we didn't we rented it to private dicks for surveillance...
...The screen went black and that was the end of the show...
...Lance pulled over and Frostie leaned down and gave me her goofy, busy-toothed smile...
...He was to stay there in case Piggy and Jerry decided to take Eddie into the back room...
...We're not taking that guy in this car, not like that," he said to Larkin...
...Jeez, Frank, what a surprise," I said...
...Willie was short, black, and round...
...Polly was cool and businesslike, as usual...
...Frostie would sit behind the wheel, engine running, watching the rearview mirror...
...The director actually felt faint...
...He must like abuse...
...Too many teeth gathered in the front of her mouth, making her unable to close her lips fully and mufflingher speech...
...He was a good friend to Frostie, Darlene, and a dozen other Tenderloin whores...
...It didn't take a brain surgeon to figure that Jerry had fingered her stereo and jewelry and that Piggy, and maybe Jerry too, had walked off with them...
...People were always asking what it meant...
...I decided I wouldn't be the one to tell them we'd need a back-up...
...They supplemented their drug-dealing income with occasional street robberies, purse snatchings, and muggings of one kind or another...
...We'd been shot at a half-dozen times...
...He had his shotgun pointing down...
...You need them outside the office...
...Lance and I thought the justice aspect was nice, but that it ran a distant second to the film opportunity...
...Piggy came through the door and Jerry stepped out...
...He had a look of utter amazement on his pimpled face as Lance—wearing a toothy grin and with his hands in a death-lock on the wheel—bore his wuss-wagon right down on him...
...At best they had a hundred bucks...
...We are now up to about 25 m.p.h...
...About how reliable she is...
...I told them about our meeting with Frostie...
...He would have had a stroke if he knew that Frostie blabbed to us regularly about Izzy's life, including his busy little crucible and the jewel thieves he dealt with...
...It was on her thigh and might have been a scorpion...
...She knew exactly where and when the robbery was going to take place because she was going to be one of the robbers herself...
...His father was Freddie Brisson, a Broadway and film producer...
...W e were joined by four other detectives...
...If it's her...
...None of them owned a car...
...They were in a half-crouch against the building as they fished for something in their pockets...
...I didn't want to stare...
...It was warm in the place...
...Now these were people who were pissed off on the best of days, so you can imagine the mood they had worked themselves into watching Jerry's life ooze away on a sidewalk covered with pigs...
...Piggy and Jerry should be here shortly...
...Frostie promised to call our office and leave a message on the recorder if anything changed...
...They were pretty loaded...
...Oh, I loved that," she said about the guy sitting on the floor, steak juice running off his face, and proceeded to tell us about the robbery planned for the office of the Executive Motel on Grove Street this Friday night at 11 p.m...
...Frank was sitting between Lance and me in the front of the Land Rover...
...A couple of them were turned off by the physical fact of Frostie's pregnancy and demanded their money back...
...She could case the motel on foot and meet back at the car with her report...
...We'll know in a minute...
...Lance dropped out of USC in his third year and talked himself into a job as a city-side reporter, at age 21 the youngest in the Times's recent memory...
...But he did want to hear the story first...
...He became the clothing life-line and the boon friend of madams, parlor musicians, bouncers, sheet-and-towel girls, whorehouse maids, and cooks, and kitchen workers by the hundreds...
...I'd seen mug shots of Piggy and Jerry but I couldn't tell one from the other...
...His short barreled 12-gauge pump was loaded with double-ought buckshot...
...We went out into the parking lot and climbed into his black and white...
...Stu was very relaxed...
...We had just come from a wet night at the bar of the Luau, a nearby bistro run by Steve Crane, Lana Turner's ex-husband and father of Cheryl, with whom we had been chatting...
...I think they went right over her head, as she looked at him in confusion...
...In Frostie's previous life, not getting hit was a privilege reserved only for that time spent away from home, like in school or in a store...
...Other than Polly's girls, no one even knew who she was, much less had seen her...
...Yes, we understand that the union will make Grimsby pay a sixth day...
...Plus, if they got rid of Grimsby and Williams it would be sooner rather than later, so what difference would it make anyway...
...The street was empty...
...The sergeant got on Pyle and Lamb's radio and called for a couple of uniformed black-and-whites, the coroner and a homicide unit...
...Maybe we could put a word in for you...
...He had become one of Sally's closest friends...
...As soon as they get to the motel and can't see me I'm gone...
...Piggy was still trying to act as if he didn't know Jerry—in fact just happened to be wandering by when this whole weird Scene went down—but he too was watching this intently over his shoulder...
...Two 1950s Danish Modern chairs and a matching couch were against the wall on the right under the window...
...Piggy scrambled to his feet but slipped and fell in Jerry's blood...
...He said his cousin was supposed to bring one over but he got drunk and never showed up...
...He seemed excited by all this, she said, We asked her how she got out of the neighborhood...
...He said a white woman just got out of a car up the street and was walking down Grove on the motel side...
...Well, basically they would know about it because of the good police work of one Sergeant Lou Canopy...
...She was as small as Izzy...
...Its long lens peered out between drawn curtains and with its powerful zoom one could see clearly and with precision inside the office across the way...
...We feel sure these two guys will do the robbery...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
