Mi Amor,

Me quedo. For la Causa. Con respeto al regalo que иres tu.

She’d kissed the page below her signature. Her lips had left an imprint bright red.

(Los Angeles, 4/14/72)

Roll it.

Clyde and Buzz were out. Crutch worked the briefing-room projector. He spooled in the film and matched the sprocket holes. He killed the lights and pulled down the wall screen. He centered the beam and got Action.

Color footage, grainy stock. He jiggled dials. Better now-a clear image.

Fade in. There’s a panning shot. There’s a living room. The camera catches a window. It’s light outside. The room is small and cheaply furnished. It’s not Horror House.

A shot holds: the living room, close in. Five people walk into the frame. There’s three women, two men. They’re all naked and body-painted. Voodoo symbols, head to foot. The two men are black. Two women are white. They all wear wooden masks. The other woman is unmasked and wildly tattooed. She’s Maria Rodriguez Fontonette.

Crutch straddled a chair. The camera swerved through the living room. There’s the window again. The street is visible, it’s Beachwood Canyon, we’re near Horror House.

The camera re-centered. The actors swallowed brown capsules. Haitian herbs, yes. Cut to a close-up. There’s Maria. There’s the tattoo on her arm. The severing bisected the artwork soon after. She had lovely hands. They’d be severed. She moved gracefully. The killer cut inside of her. All that lithe movement, quashed.

Crutch watched. He felt compressed. Summer ‘68. Tattoo crashes in Horror House, Tattoo dies there. Arnie Moffett’s rental houses. Joan and Celia rent one. The rental-house screenings. It’s all compressed. He was close at the start of it and never since. Warning click: there’s something you missed.

Jump cut: we’re in a bedroom now. There’s an uncovered water bed, jiggling. The actors mill around. They talk to someone offscreen. Their lips move soundless.

Crutch stared at Tattoo. She’s beautiful, she’s alive. She betrayed 6/14 in ‘59 and reconciled later. “It was a wild time.” Celia said that. He couldn’t reconcile the Cause with a fuck flick. It offended him.

The men trembled and shook. They fell on the bed. Their backs arched. Their legs spasmed. The potions took hold. They were early-stage zombified. They dumped their masks and gasped for air. They sweated the voodoo paint off their bodies.

Tattoo whipped them. Soft shots, for show. The two white girls started trembling. Their movements were puppet-string jerky. They got on the bed and stroked the guys hard. They all seized and thrashed. They all did grand mal shit, out of body. The men thrashed prone. Their movements slowed. The white girls straddled them and pulled them inside. The camera got insertion-close.

Different herbs. The women contorted at a hyper-pace. They pinned down the men. Their hips and arms moved in counterpoint. Their heads moved on some spazzy axis. The camera caught the men close. Their eyes were open and dead. Tattoo soft-whipped the women. Their contortions accelerated.

Tattoo stepped out of sight and stepped back in the frame. She held a fireplace tool, shaped like a phallus. The cock tip glowed. It was near white-hot. She touched the carpet with it and got combustion. The women thrashed and opened their mouths. She fed them the cock head. They sucked it and displayed no pain. They removed their mouths and pressed the cock head to the bedstead. The fabric sizzled and burned down to the springs.

The men were zombified. The women voodoo-fucked them. Tattoo grabbed the burning cock and burn-carved the wall. Crutch got it. He knew the markings. Tattoo drew them at Horror House. Tattoo drew them in fire on a fuck film-set wall.

The sprocket holes jammed. The screen went all white. The film died at just that spot.

Convergence. Connection. Confluence. Clyde’s line: It’s who you know and who you blow and how you’re all linked.

Warning click: something’s missing. You don’t know who killed Tattoo. You don’t know who glued all this up.

Crutch drove up Beachwood Canyon. It was all tight. There’s Horror House. There’s the house Joan and Celia rented. There’s Arnie Moffett’s other pads. Your four-years-back memory holds.

He zigzagged side streets. He calibrated the view out the fuck-film window. There it is, intact. The same palm trees and driveway across the street. A Moffett Realty sign.

Still all tight. Stone’s throw here, stone’s dribble there. Who/what started it and made it all cohere?

Celia said Arnie Moffett ran an import-export biz. Click-we’re back there again.

Confluence. It’s who you know and who you-

Crutch drove downtown. Clyde had pull at the L.A. License Bureau. File access cost you fifty clams and a wink.

The duty clerk recognized him. Import-export from a while back? The boxes in Room 12.

The room was a musty paper swamp. The boxes were marked by years. No pull tabs, no alphabetizing. Real paper digs.

He started at ‘66 and worked backward. He hit at ‘63.

Arnie had a low-rent biz going. “Arnie’s Island Exotics, Limited.” Curios, knickknacks, connection. Imports from: Jamaica, Haiti, the D.R. closer now. Where’s that little link-it-all click?

The same office. The same next-door deli. “The Home of the Hebrew Hero.”

He brought a pint of Jim Beam. Arnie was a lush. The booze softened the beating then. It might work now.

Crutch walked in. A bell jingled. Arnie sat at the same desk. His bowling shirt was green today. He picked his nose and read Car Craft.

Crutch took the client’s chair. Arnie ignored him. Crutch placed the jug on his blotter.

Arnie glanced at it. Crutch said, “Summer ‘68. What’s the first thing you think of?”

Eyes on the jug. He considers, re-considers and re-cogitates. Aaah, he gets it.

“The first thing I think of is all that political tsuris. The second thing I think of is you.”

Crutch cracked the jug and passed it over. Arnie chugalugged.

“The third thing I’m thinking is that you look a lot older. The fourth is that I hope you ain’t still on that crusade. If it pertains to my houses, Gretchen Farr, Farlan Brown or Howard Hughes, you heard everything I got.”

Crutch said, “Leander James Jackson.”

Arnie re-chugged. “Say what?”

“The other guy who came around asking questions. That woman ‘Tattoo,’ your fuck-film set, the house you rented out for the screenings.”

Arnie picked his snout. “We got two different agendas here. Where they connect, I don’t know. You had your Gretchie crusade, he had his thing for Tattoo. He’s dead, by the way. He got offed in that ‘Black-Militant Blastout.’ And, by the way, I didn’t hold nothing back from you. I told you I rented my cribs as porno-film sets, but you didn’t ask me no questions about Tattoo.”

Re-convergence, de-convergence. So far, Arnie played kosher. Shit hovered close.

“Tell me about Tattoo.”

“What’s to tell? I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew her. I heard she was on the skids. She heard I used to run an import biz out of her shitty country. She wanted to make some farkakte voodoo-smut film, and she needed a place to screen it. We talked on the phone. I gave her some leads. They were all pervy-type guys off my old import-customer list. She cold-called them, which ended our brief and borderline profitable encounter.”

Crutch rubbed his eyes. “Were you there for the film shoot?”

“No.”

“Did you meet the camera crew or the other actors?”