Before the sun waned, I drove to Los Feliz to try to speak with errant detective Martin Gladstone. The Ravencrest was one of those old dilapidated two-story mods with the burnt palm courtyard and an egg-shaped pool in the middle. A tilting for Rent sign stuck out of the dirt out front. I went in through the unlocked gate and knocked on the door of Unit 2, but nobody answered. I peered in through the smoke-stained window curtains—a bare, cream-rugged living room and a tiny yellow kitchen. I walked back out onto the street and dialed the number on the sign but got a machine. I was about to leave when I spotted an old lady stepping out of Unit 1 in a bathrobe, swim cap, and blue plastic flip-flops. She dropped her bathrobe on the lawn chair and was carefully descending into the pool in a frilly one-piece as I came back in through the gate.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry, sorry to bother. I’m an old friend of Martin Gladstone’s.” I thumbed his apartment. “I was wondering—do you know where he is or—?”
“Ya missed him, hon—Marty’s moved.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
“Just last week, gone down to Laguna.”
“Laguna. Did he leave a forwarding address?”
“Super might have it, but she’s never here. She’s duckin’ me ’cause I want the damn washer-dryer fixed.”
“I see.”
She ran her wrinkled, pale hands over the shining water and said, “Marty musta come into a pretty big chunk of change to be leaving this dump—lucky old fool.” Then she gently lunged into the blue.
As I headed for Double Fry’s, the Jukebox Id kicked in. Not everybody had the Jukebox Id, but if you had it, you knew it—song fragments spun in your head, nonstop. This one was a kind of rock thing with wild man drums, but sung to the tune of “He’s So Shy” by the Pointer Sisters:
Private eye
Private eye
He’s the guy who blew the case sky high
Private eye
Private eye
He took off just like a butterfly
Not good. So bad. But even the bad songs had a way of connecting the dots. At the boat, I caught Double Fry polishing his camera lenses on a big black towel.
“Before you get mad,” I said, “I want you to know how much I truly cherish our friendship.”
“What have you done?”
I told him about my night’s adventures and where I’d been.
“But…you didn’t get caught.”
“No, thank God. We, uh, slipped through the cracks.”
He shook his head, laughed through his teeth. “Well, thanks for listening to your lawyer’s advice, schmuck.”
“I know, I know—but I think this might be a real lead.”
“So what you’re saying is this detective guy went to investigate a retirement village, then he dropped the case and moved there?”
“Yup, that’s what it looks like.”
“Okay—but it might not be the way you’re framing it. Maybe he just…wanted to retire and his work happened to lead him to the right place.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “This place looks pretty upscale for an old snoop—Fountain Grove Estates. I mean, is it assisted living or some kind of…group or what?”
“You mean like a cult?”
“Not a cult-cult, but the web copy is ridiculous. Utopian alternatives, let’s all light some incense and play shuffleboard in the raw.”
Fry grinned. “I get it—heavy sixties ethos. Mindfulness, all natural, love and peace, vegan, holistic, hemp bathrobes, a little THC bar. Of course, public nudity’s on the menu.”
“Yeah, but something’s off-kilter. They have all this ad copy about dying with grace on the website, with all these euphoric, blissed-out aging faces.”
“Self-actualization for grandpa and grandma—nothing off-kilter about it. Ten zillion boomers are about to check out. They want it to be as groovy as Woodstock.”
“Okay, that much I understand. But where do the DJs fit in?”
“Corporate sponsors—they lure the target market.”
“According to Wiki, these guys were the kings of Boss Radio. They held the coveted Saturday night slot on KHJ—you know, AM for the cruisers.”
“Well, yeah—a hundred fucking years ago. Now how are they gonna earn some bread?”
Fry closed a case of black lenses embedded in black foam. Together, we pulled the awning across the deck and Fry opened the laptop. Howard the cat hopped on my lap—whatever was on that screen, he wanted to see it too.
“Check this out,” I said. “Seventy-two thousand fans—clockin’ their every move.”
Kip and Rog had their own Insta with links to YouTube videos of their air checks, and the talkbacks were loco:
