Puck Beaverton

Puck Beaverton is a former inmate and one of Mickey Wolfmann’s jailbird praetorians, whose last-minute shift change helps explain why Glen Charlock, rather than Puck, was present when armed men came for Mickey. Initially encountered through conflicting leads—as a nervous associate of dealer Leonard Jermaine Loosemeat and a fugitive believed to have gone to Las Vegas—Puck reappears with Einar in a Las Vegas casino, marries Trillium, and warns Doc that the apparent criminal world is only a cover for deeper power. Later, he discloses that Adrian Prussia recruited him to kill Detective Vincent Indelicato; by the time Doc encounters him again, Puck is an active threat, not merely a missing witness.

Identity and Background

Bigfoot calls Puck one of Mickey Wolfmann’s jailbird praetorians, identifying him as a former inmate associated with the security arrangements around Mickey. Boris’s account gives Puck a specific role in the night Mickey was taken: Puck had been assigned to let the raiders into the house and then disappear, but changed shifts with Glen Charlock at the last minute. He did not tell Glen what was planned and left. Glen was consequently present when the raiders arrived and was killed; Boris describes the death as cold-blooded. Puck’s decision spared him from being at the scene, though the account does not establish that he intended Glen to take his place.

The available evidence connects Puck to the Los Angeles criminal and police worlds through several different routes. Before going to Folsom Prison, he had worked for downtown loan shark Adrian Prussia. Bigfoot also notes that Puck was found at the Venice home of Leonard Jermaine Loosemeat, the dealer who had sold Coy Harlingen the heroin associated with Coy’s presumed death. The sheriff’s report describes Puck as unemployed, claiming he had come over to play pool, and unusually nervous around Loosemeat. Bigfoot proposes that Puck might have been there to buy drugs, but the possibility that he was acting for his former employer remains open rather than confirmed at that point.

Leads, Flight, and Reappearance

Puck becomes a person of interest in Doc’s investigation through information supplied by Boris and later through Bigfoot’s files. When Doc asks where Puck went after learning about the shift change, Boris guesses that he is probably in Las Vegas, where Puck believes people will look after him. Bigfoot’s account adds a separate lead: Puck’s presence at Loosemeat’s home may connect the dealer, Coy’s heroin, and Prussia’s former employee. Doc remembers Prussia from his own earlier skip-tracing work and regards him as dangerous, but neither the report nor the recollection settles what Puck was doing at the dealer’s house.

Doc later seeks help finding Puck, giving the name and a last known address in West Hollywood, though he is uncertain of the street. The search leads instead to a casino in Las Vegas. Tito guides Doc through the gaming floor to a remote corridor, where Puck is pretending to play a nickel machine while his running mate Einar works another slot. When both machines produce jackpots at once, Einar steps away and disappears from the scene. Puck, caught between the two machines and the arriving casino staff, runs for the nearest exit rather than claim the winnings. The episode gives Doc a direct sighting but no immediate conversation or explanation of Puck’s earlier disappearance.

Marriage and Warning to Doc

The next morning, Puck appears in a very different setting: he and Trillium arrive in a Camaro decorated with toilet paper, beer cans, and a handmade Just Married sign. After a night of partying, they had obtained a marriage license at the county courthouse and gone to the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather. Einar had served as best man, then decided to elope with another prospective groom after the woman who had been expected to marry him changed her mind. Puck and Einar persuaded the organ player to accompany them in a duet of “You’re Not Sick, You’re Just in Love,” and Puck takes a moment to speak with Doc about the wedding.

The domestic interlude does not undo Puck’s association with violence or his guilt over Glen. He acknowledges that he and Glen were blood brothers and that Glen’s death should have mattered to him, while also recognizing that remaining on the original shift could have left him dead instead. He does not claim he would have sacrificed himself for Glen. His account holds loyalty and self-preservation together without reconciling them: the friendship was real, but it did not prevent Puck from leaving Glen uninformed.

Puck then cautions Doc against pursuing the matter. He distinguishes the forces involved from what he calls the Mob and from the organized crime that people imagine they understand. When Doc asks what he means, Puck argues that the ethnic-crime explanation promoted by FBI agents is a cover, and invokes Howard Hughes to point toward a more concealed set of interests. His warning widens the investigation’s frame but supplies no verifiable identification of the power he describes. The mystery deepens rather than resolves: Puck presents himself as someone who knows that visible criminal affiliations do not explain who is ultimately served.

Prussia, Indelicato, and the Killing

Puck’s history with Prussia becomes more consequential when the investigation reaches Detective Vincent Indelicato’s murder. Prussia knows that Puck hates Indelicato, who had recently arrested him for a minor marijuana-seed offense. Puck connects that hostility to Indelicato’s repeated harassment of Einar, whom he describes as a target of the detective’s hatred of gay people. Prussia tells Puck about his own history as a contract employee and his unusual ability to avoid the consequences of earlier violence. He also says he lacks any personal desire to kill Indelicato, then offers Puck the opportunity to do it.

Prussia frames the killing as useful to both men: Puck would act on a hatred Prussia does not share, while Prussia could arrest him and let the jailhouse grapevine credit Puck with killing the officer who had put him in custody. Puck takes the offer and kills Indelicato. He later tells Doc that the marijuana-seed charge was settled before trial, so he never had to go to prison. The sequence exposes the arrangement as more than private revenge: Prussia solicits the murder, Puck performs it, and the LAPD’s institutional failures allow the men involved to escape the consequences that a functioning system would impose. Puck’s account does not identify who originally hired Prussia in connection with Indelicato; when Doc asks, Puck dismisses the question.

Doc’s Captivity and Puck’s Final Threat

Puck re-enters Doc’s immediate story when Adrian calls him into a room where Doc is being held. Doc greets him, but Puck denies knowing him. The brief exchange makes Puck’s return to the investigation a confrontation rather than an interview: he is now aligned with Prussia and has control of Doc’s movements. The supplied scenes do not explain how Doc came to be captive or establish the exact terms of Puck’s role in bringing him there.

Puck then threatens to obtain heroin for Doc, presenting the drug as a way to remove someone who has become a persistent nuisance. He notices Doc’s glance toward his empty ankle holster, says that he has the weapon, and promises to return it when Doc will be in no condition to use it. Puck leaves and locks the door behind him. The threat turns the earlier links among Puck, Prussia, and the heroin trade into immediate danger for Doc: Puck is no longer merely a source of information or a fugitive from the original inquiry, but an operative willing to use both drugs and confinement against him.

Narrative Role

Puck’s appearances repeatedly shift the meaning of information Doc has gathered. The shift-change story turns Glen’s death from an unexplained consequence of Mickey’s abduction into a consequence of a planned inside arrangement gone awry. Bigfoot’s file links Puck to Coy’s dealer and to Prussia, but leaves his purpose uncertain. The casino encounter confirms that Puck is alive and in Las Vegas without making him available for questioning; his wedding then briefly casts him as a participant in ordinary celebration before his warning restores the threat of forces beyond the investigation’s visible criminal categories.

His later account of Indelicato’s murder makes one part of that hidden machinery concrete: Prussia recruits Puck by joining personal hatred to a police-connected scheme, and Puck accepts despite the danger. Yet Puck’s warning about a Mob behind the Mob remains unsubstantiated in the supplied evidence. That tension defines his narrative function. He can reveal how individual crimes are organized and protected while remaining a compromised witness whose claims about the larger order cannot be treated as a complete explanation.