“I got the part.”
“You did?”
“Don’t act so surprised.”
“Good for you.”
The door opened and they called for Hondo, who winked at me and walked in the room, closing the door.
He came out thirty seconds later. We left and he said, “That was one weird audition. They didn’t ask me to read a scene, just if you and I were friends.”
“So you got the part?”
“I did.”
“You hang with me, I’ll get you into the big time.”
He slipped on his Ray Bans, “One of these days you’ll have to tell me about it.”
“One of these days.”
~*~
Finding Jericho Moon turned out to be easier than we anticipated. We drove to Venice and lucked out, finding a space in the parking area beside the Venice pier, where we spotted Bob Masters, a local fisherman we knew. Hondo asked, “Bob, do you know a guy named Jericho Moon?”
“Sure, Hondo.”
“You seen him around lately?”
“The Sermon on the Mount.”
“What?”
Bob pointed, “Over there on the grass. He’s preaching the gospel of Moon to the homeless kids.”
On the grassy area shaded by a dozen palms was a man with hair to his shoulders, and an acoustic guitar across his lap, wearing old jeans and what looked like a long sleeved white shirt made in the eighteen hundreds. He talked to seven or eight young people sitting on the grass at his feet while three women sat beside him.
“Puffy shirt.” Hondo said.
Bob and I both grinned. Bob said, “Like on that Seinfeld episode where he wore the shirt on the Today Show? Yeah. The Puffy Pirate Shirt.”
I asked Bob, “What do you think of him?”
“It’s not my scene, man. He’s a smooth talker, got a line of psycho-spiritual mumbo jumbo a mile long, and some of the kids around here think he’s a god. Really.”
“You don’t.”
“Nope. But I’m older and not a runaway or someone searching for the meaning of life. I think he’s some sort of scam artist. Pretty good singer, though. Kind of a folk and rock style, like back in the sixties. Talk was, he had a musician friend with contacts at Sony Records who was working to get Moon a recording contract, but someone murdered the guy before he completed the deal.”
I said, “Was that Tom Hammons, lived in Topanga Canyon? I read about that.”
“That’s him, murdered in his own home. The killers knifed him a few times, sliced off his ear, and tortured him for three days before stabbing him to death.”
Hondo said, “It had some witchy things about it, too, from what
I remember.”
“That’s what I heard. The killers used Hammons’ blood to write on the wall. That’s some heinous ju-ju there.”