Sleaze Factors Glitz

By R.Z. Sheppard

Police Lieut. Vincent Mora has just slipped between the sheets with Casino Singer Linda Moon when he hears a click at the door of his Atlantic City hotel room. With the barrel of his gun, he scoops up his Jockey shorts, pulls them on and is ready to meet the intruder. Wild shots are fired. The would-be killer escapes into the street with a chilly Mora in vain pursuit. On his way back to Miss Moon, he meets a drunk who gives him some sporting advice: "You should a bet your underwear. You never know when your luck'll change."

Elmore Leonard gives this piece of business a nice wrinkle by delaying the punch line for eleven pages. Don't ask how; the ploy works like the rim shot of a drummer perking up a lounge comic's routine. Leonard may not be the tightest plotter on the popular thriller circuit, but he is the writer who pays closest attention to getting the tacky details right. Bribing a night clerk with a greasy cheese-steak sub is something that could happen only in the Philadelphia-South Jersey axis of ethnic indigestibles.

Glitz, Leonard's 25th novel, lives up to its title. The settings are San Juan and Atlantic City ("It's like you're in a hotel in Star Trek"), and its characters operate low to the ground and leave slimy trails. One of them is after Mora, 41, a Miami policeman convalescing in Puerto Rico from a mugger's bullet that chipped his hipbone. The wound initially looked worse than it was, because the second shot shattered a half-gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy that Mora was carrying, along with a jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce and a bottle of prune juice. The items suggest that the lieutenant is no oenophile, dislikes cooking and suffers from constipation. More important, a grocery list is Leonard's shorthand way of establishing his hero's endearing authenticity as a middle-aged widower who, despite badge and gun, falls victim to street crime.

The bad guys require additional work, partly because most readers cannot readily identify with gutter smarts but mostly because embellishing evil is fun. Teddy Magyk, the creep who stalks Mora from the Caribbean to the Jersey shore, lives with his mother in Margate, in a house done up in a parrot motif. One of his specialties is robbing and raping elderly women. He is between jail sentences and is bent on killing his arresting officer. Who is, of course, Lieut. Mora.

Glitz departs from the usual tense stalker plot in a number of ways. Teddy's incidental murders are described with a casualness that underscores his sickening emotional vacuum. For some doubtful reason, Mora treats Magyk's threat nonchalantly even though he acknowledges that psychopaths are unpredictable and extremely dangerous. But then, Leonard always seems more interested in sociology than suspense. His supporting cast springs from that circle where commerce, show business and crime are hard to separate. Casino Manager Jackie Garbo likes to impress visitors with his autographed celebrity photos. Bodyguard Moosleh Hajim Jabara strains parody as an Ethiopian-born retired pro-football player who changed his name to DeLeon Johnson. LaDonna Holly Padgett is a former Miss Oklahoma and Miss Congeniality well on her way to such titles as Miss Cordial and Miss Bloody Mary. The rub-out of a Mafioso in the mandatory spaghetti joint summons up the sensible suggestion, "You'd think those guys'd learn to eat some other kind of food."

Leonard excels at this sort of corner-of-the-mouth satire. His research sometimes sticks out, but he has a perfect ear for punk talk, a hungry eye for sleaze and an eerie ability to get inside empty heads: "This ocean was different, the tourist believed, than the ocean up in New Jersey. Though it must be the same water because the oceans were all connected and the water would get different places." Madame Bovary on the boardwalk could not have said it better.