To celebrate National Novel Writing Month, last November one of my colleagues in the English Department at Cal State LA came up with a challenge: begin writing a novel that includes the following elements:
Themes: Rites of Passage, Human Experience
Characters: Police officer and prostitute, Jerry: suicidal; seems happy
Lines of Dialogue: “How did the goldfish get in the can of creamed corn?”, “Damn we had a rough day.”
Objects: Mirrors, Grimoire (“Grim-wah”)
Places: Los Angeles, Cal State LA
Let’s see how many elements I was able to include:
Speak Easy
By Dan Lambert
The dead prostitute meant nothing to Jerry Miles. At least, that’s what he told himself. Why should she? As a detective for the LAPD Vice Squad, Jerry routinely busted girls like her on a daily basis. Six to twelve was the norm on a quiet night, but that number rose precipitously on cold nights and under full moons. The irony was not lost on Jerry: two things Los Angelinos liked to do under full moons were screw and kill. “You’re either baggin’ ‘em or bustin’ ‘em,” as the old vice squad saying went.
The pretty girl with the blonde bob and the slit throat was a prostitute: that was business as usual. Her story most likely followed the same tragic script that Jerry had read hundreds of times before: girl meets Internet Lothario; girl heads West; girl tries to get into Show Business; girl gets into an entirely different kind of Show Business she was not expecting to get into; girl meets the wrong John; girl gets dead. This script played itself out every day, like a broken record. As a rookie, Jerry cared about each and every dead girl (and boy): he memorized their names, collected their photos, tried to bust their Johns and pimps. Hell, once he even travelled as far as Boise, Idaho, to return a dead girl’s diary to her grieving parents. He had stolen the book from the Evidence Locker in the basement of Parker Center, and it almost cost him his shield.
This dead prostitute was different. More specifically, what Jerry found when he searched her meager apartment for evidence was different. It was a book, but Jerry knew it wasn’t a diary when he first discovered it. He was going through the girl’s closet when the book dropped on his head from its precarious position on an upper shelf. The book was heavy, voluminous, and evidently bound in leather. Jerry had opened the front cover to find these words in pencil on the frontispiece: Stacey Eileen “Speak Easy” Morgensen. This was how he learned the victim’s given name and apparent street name.
Jerry told himself again that the dead prostitute meant nothing to him. “Speak Easy” was just another sad chapter in the epic tragedy that was Los Angeles. Jerry’s invasion of the dead girl’s tiny apartment was the latest in a series of unwise moves. An inner voice kept telling him, Let the Homicide boys handle it; this could cost you your job if the Captain finds out. Jerry had several ways to quiet this inner voice; one of his most popular methods was to drown it in a bottle of Jim Beam. Another method (the one he was currently using) was equally effective: he would counter it with an even louder voice that would say something like, Those Homicide boys don’t know shit! My talents are wasted on the Vice Squad!
The opposing voices in Jerry’s head were duking it out when he found the girl’s book (or, rather, when it found him by dropping onto his head like a bloated spider). The book was unlike anything Jerry had seen in his 20 years on the Force. For starters, the leather cover was a shiny golden brown. The binding was exquisite, but the pages were yellowed and crumbling to dust in places.
(To be continued….)
