Hollywood Nocturnes (12 page)

  The tone reminded me of a mildly outraged negro minister rebuking his flock, and I braced myself for the voice that I knew would reply.

  "I gots cowboy blood, Mister Downey, like you musta had when you was a young man runnin' shine. That cop musta got loose, got Cora and Whitey to snitch. Blew a sweet piece of work, but we can still get off clean. McCarver was the only one 'sides me knew you was bankrollin', and he be dead. Billy be the one you wants dead, and he be showin' up soon. Then I cuts him and dumps him somewhere, and nobody knows he was even here."

  "You want money, don't you?"

  "Five big get me lost somewheres nice, then maybe when he starts feelin' safe again, I comes back and cuts that cop. That sound about--"

  Applause from the big house next door cut Simpkins off. I pulled out my piece and got up some guts, knowing my only safe bet was to backshoot the son of a bitch right where he was. I heard more clapping and joyous shouts that Mayor Bowron's reign was over, and then John Downey's preacher baritone was back in force: "I want him dead. My daughter is a white-trash consort and a whore, and he's--"

  A scream went off behind me, and I hit the ground just as machine-gun fire blew the window to bits. Another burst took out the hedgerow and the next-door window I pinned myself back first to the wall and drew myself upright as the snout of a tommy gun was rested against the ledge a few inches away. When muzzle flame and another volley exploded from it, I stuck my .38 in blind and fired six times at stomach level. The tommy strafed a reflex burst upward, and when I hit the ground again, the only sound was chaotic shrieks from the other house.

  I reloaded from a crouch, then stood up and surveyed the carnage through both mansion windows. Wallace Simpkins lay dead on John Downey's Persian carpet, and across the way I saw a banner for the West Adams Democratic Club streaked with blood. When I saw a dead woman spread-eagled on top of an antique table, I screamed myself, elbowed my way into Downey's den, and picked up the machine gun. The grips burned my hands, but I didn't care; I saw the faces of every boxer who had ever defeated me and didn't care; I heard grenades going off in my brain and was glad they were there to kill all the innocent screaming. With the tommy's muzzle as my directional device, I walked through the house.

  All my senses went into my eyes and trigger finger. Wind ruffled a window curtain, and I blew the wall apart; I caught my own image in a gilt-edged mirror and blasted myself into glass shrapnel. Then I heard a woman moaning, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy," dropped the tommy, and ran to her.

  Cora was on her knees on the entry hall floor, plunging a shiv into a man who had to be her father. The man moaned baritone low and tried to reach up, almost as if to embrace her. Cora's "Daddy's" got lower and lower, until the two seemed to be working toward harmony. When she let the dying man hold her, I gave them a moment together, then pulled Cora off of him and dragged her outside. She went limp in my arms, and with lights going on everywhere and sirens converging from all directions, I carried her to my car.

DIAL AXMINSTER 6-400

          Ellis Loew rapped on the pebbled glass door that separated LAPD Warrants from the Office of the District Attorney. Davis Evans, dozing in his chair, muttered "Mother dog." I said, "That's his college-ring knock. It's a personal favor or a reprimand."

  Davis nodded and got to his feet slowly, befitting a man with twenty years and two days on the job--and an ironclad civil-service pension as soon as he said the words, "Fuck you, Ellis. I retire." He smoothed his plaid shirt, adjusted the knot in his Hawaiian tie, hitched up the waistband of his shiny black pants, and patted the lapels of the camel's hair jacket he stole from a Negro pimp at the Lincoln Heights drunk tank. "That boy wants a favor, he gonna pay like a mother dog."

  "Blanchard! Evans! I'm waiting!"

  We walked into the Deputy D.A.'s office and found him smiling, which meant that he was either practicing for the press or getting ready to kiss some ass. Davis nudged me as we took seats, then said, "Hey, Mr. Loew. What did the leper say to the prostitute?"

  Loew's smile stayed glued on; it was obviously a big favor he wanted. "I don't know, Sergeant. What?"

  "Keep the tip. Ain't that a mother dog?"

  Loew put out his hail-fellow-well-met chuckle. "Yes, it's so simple that it has a certain charm. Now, the reason I--"

  "What do you call an elephant that moonlights as a prostitute?"

  Loew's smile spread into nasty little facial ties. "I . . . don't. know. What?"

  "A two-ton pickup that lays for peanuts. Woooo! Mother dog!"

  The Ted Mack Amateur Hour had gone far enough. I said, "Did you want something, Boss?"

  Davis laughed uproariously, like my question was the real punch line; Loew wiped the smile remnants off his face with a handkerchief. "Yes, I do. Did you know that there was a kidnapping in L.A. four days ago? Monday afternoon on the USC campus?"

  Davis kiboshed his stage chuckles; snatch jobs were meat and potatoes to him--the kind of cases he loved to work. I said, "You've got Fred Allen's interest. Keep going."

  Loew twirled his Phi Beta Kappa key as he spoke. "The victim's name is Jane Mackenzie Viertel. She's nineteen, a USC frosh. Her father is Redmond Viertel, an oil man with a big string of wells down on Signal Hill. Three men in USC letter jackets grabbed her Monday, about two o'clock. It's rush week, so all the witnesses thought it was some sort of fraternity stunt. The men called the girl's father late that night and made their demand: a hundred thousand dollars in fifties. Viertel got the money together, then got frightened and called the FBI. The kidnappers called back and set up a trade for the following day in an irrigation field up near Ventura.

  "Two agents from the Ventura office set up a trap, one hiding, one posing as Viertel. The kidnappers showed up, then it all went haywire."

  Davis said, "Wooooo," and cracked his knuckles; Loew grimaced at the sound and continued. "One of the kidnappers found the agent who was hiding. They were both afraid of disturbing the transaction with gunfire, so they had a little hand-tohand combat. The kidnapper beat the agent up with a shovel, then hacked off six of his fingers with the blade. The other agent sensed something was wrong and started to act fidgety. He grabbed one of the men and put a gun to his head, and the other man did the same to the girl. A real Mexican standoff, until the fed grabbed the money bag and a windstorm played hell with all that cash. The man with the girl grabbed the bag and took off, and the fed took his captive in. You see what I mean by haywire?"

  I said, "So two snatchers and the girl are still at large?"

  "Yes. The third man is in custody in Ventura, and the other agent is very angry."

  Davis laced his fingers together and cracked a total of eight knuckles. "Wooooo. These boys got names, Mr. Loew? And what's this got to do with me and Lee?"

  Now Loew's smile was genuine--that of a fiend who loves his work. Consulting some rap sheets on his desk, he said, "The man in custody is Harwell Jackson Treadwell, white male, age thirtyone. He's from Gila Bend, Oklahoma; your neck of the woods, Evans. He's got three strong-arm convictions running back to 1934 and has two outstanding warrants here in L.A.--robbery charges filed in '44 and '45. Treadwell also has two charming brothers, Miller and Leroy. Both are registered sex offenders and do not seem to care much about the gender of their conquests. In fact, Leroy rather likes those of the four-footed persuasion. He was arrested for aggravated assault on an animal and served thirty days for it in '42."

  Davis picked at his teeth with his tie clip. "Any old port in a storm. Miller and Leroy got the girl and part of the money?"

  "That's right."

  "And you want me and Lee to--"

  I interrupted, seeing my Friday night go up in smoke. "This is Ventura County's business. Not ours."

  Loew held up an extradition warrant and carbons of two bench summonses. "The kidnapping took place in Los Angeles, in my judicial district. I would very much like to prosecute Mr. Treadwell along with his brothers when they are apprehended. So I want you two to drive up to Ventura and return Mr. Treadwell to City Jail before the notoriously ill-mannered Ventura sheriffs beat him to death."

  I groaned; Davis Evans made an elaborate show of standing up and smoothing out the various tucks and folds of his outfit. "I'll be a mother dog, but I was thinkin' about retiring this afternoon."

  Winking at me, Loew said, "You won't retire when you hear what the other two brothers escaped in."

  "Wooooo. Keep talkin', boy."

  "A 1936 Auburn speedster. Two-tone, maroon and forest green. When they get captured, and you know they will, the car will go to City Impound until claimed or bid on. Davis, I expect to send those Okie shitheads to the gas chamber. It's very hard to claim a vehicle from death row, and the duty officer at the impound is a close friend of mine. Still want to retire?"

  Davis exclaimed, "Wooooooo!", grabbed the warrants and hustled his two-thirty-five toward the door. I was right behind him--reluctantly--the junior partner all the way. With his hand on the knob, the senior man got in a parting shot: "What do you call a gal who's got the syph, the clap, and the crabs? An incurable romantic! Wooooo! Mother dog!"

  *   *   *

          We took the Ridge Road north, Davis at the wheel of his showroom-fresh '47 Buick ragtop, me staring out at the L.A. suburbs dwindling into scrub-covered hills, then farmland worked by Japs out of the relocation camps and transplanted Okies. The Okie sitting beside me never spoke when he drove; he stayed lost in a man-car reverie. I thought about our brief warrants partnership, how our differences made it work.

  I was the prototypical athlete-cop the high brass loved, the exboxer one L.A. scribe labeled "the Southland's good but not great white hope." No one knew the "but not" better than me, and plain "good" meant flash rolls, steak, and nightlife until you were thirty, then permanently scrambled brains. The department was the one safe place where my fight juice could see me through to security--with muted glory along the way--and I went for it like Davis's mother dog, cultivating all the right people, most notably boxing fanatic Ellis Loew.

  Davis Evans was another opportunist, out for plain loot, out to shut down Norman, Oklahoma, fourteen siblings, family inbreeding, the proximity to oil money you could breathe but never quite touch. He took what he could and reveled in it, and he made up for being on the take by exercising the best set of cop faces I had ever seen--Mr. Courtly to those who deserved it, Mr. Grief to the bad ones, Mr. Civil to whoever was left over. That a man could be so self-seeking and lacking in mean-spiritedness astonished me, and I deferred to him on the job--senior man aside--because I knew my own selfishness ran twice as deep as his did. And I realized that the hard-nosed buffoon probably would retire soon, leaving me to break in a replacement cut out of my own cloth: young, edgy, eager for the glory the assignment offered. And that made me sad.

  Warrants was plainclothes LAPD under the aegis of the Criminal Division, District Attorney's Office. Two detectives to every Superior Court judiciary. We went after the bad guys the felony D.A.s were drooling to prosecute. If things were slow, there was money to be made serving summonses for the downtown shysters, and--Davis Evans's raison d'étre--repossessions.

  Davis lived, ate, drank, yearned, and breathed for beautiful cars. His Warrants cubicle was wallpapered with pictures of Duesenbergs and Pierce Arrows and Cords, Caddys, and Packards, and sleek foreign jobs. Since he stole all his clothes from arrestees, shook down hookers for free poon, ate on the cuff, and lived in the spare room of a county boarding house for recently paroled convicts, he had plenty of money to spend on them. The storage garage he rented held a '39 Packard cabriolet, a Mercedes rumored to have once been driven by Hitler, a purple Lincoln convertible that Davis called his "Jig Rig," and a sapphire blue Model T dubbed the "Li'l Shitpeeler."

  He acquired all of them through repos. There was a twentyfour-hour-a-day phone number issuing recorded information on delinquent cars, and every greedy L.A. cop had it memorized. All you had to do was dial Axminster 6-400 to get the dope on wanteds--who they belonged to, what dealer or credit agency was paying what amount of money for their return. Davis only moved on cars that he craved, and only on delinquent owners with outstanding warrants. It was a parlay that frequently occurred, on-the-lam punks not being known for sending in their monthly auto payments. Once the warrantee was arrested, Davis would locate the car, let it molder in his garage, do some minor defacing of it, then report to the dealer that the mother dog was in bad, bad shape. The dealer would believe him; being a softhearted misanthrope, Davis would offer a decent amount to keep the vehicle. The dealer would agree, thinking he'd taken advantage of a dust-bowl refugee with a leaky seabag--and Sergeant Davis Evans would have himself another true love.

  We were cruising through truck-farm country now--flat acres of furrowed land that looked dry, used up, like this was brutal August, not mild October. All the farmers were the sunburned poor-white prototype that Davis narrowly escaped being one of. Off to our right, nestled at the edge of a scrub valley, was Wayside Honor Rancho--a new county facility to house misdemeanor offenders. It had housed Japs during the war, Okie farmers their keepers on the temporary War Relocation Board payroll. But now the war was over--and it was back to dry dirt.

  I nudged Davis and pointed to a group of farmers uprooting cabbages. "There but for the grace of God go you, partner."

  Davis saluted the assembly, then flipped them his middle finger. "You can lead a dog to gravy, but you can't make him a lapper."

  *   *   *

          It was shortly past noon when we pulled up in front of the Ventura courthouse-jail. For a hick-town county seat, the joint had aspirations to class, all of them low--Greek pillars, a Tudor roof, and Spanish-style canvas awnings came togther to produce a building that gave you the feeling of d.t.'s without the benefit of booze. Davis groaned as we pushed open a door etched with Egyptian hieroglyphics; I said, "Be grateful it goes with your clothes."

  The interior was divided into two wings, and bars at the far end of the left corridor showed us where to go. There was a deputy seated just outside the enclosure, a fat youth done up in khaki that enclosed his blubbery body like a sausage casing. Looking up from his comic book, he said, "Ah. . . yessirs?"

  Davis whipped out our three warrants and held them up for the kid to scrutinize. "LAPD, son. We've got an extradition warrant for Harwell Treadwell, plus two others on old beefs of his. You wanna go get him for us?"

  The kid thumbed through the papers, probably looking for the pictures. When he couldn't figure the words out, he unlocked the barred door and led us down a long hallway inset with cells on both sides. Nearing the end, I heard muffled obscenities and thudding sounds. The deputy announced our presence by clearing his throat and saying, "Ah . . . Sheriff? I got two men here need to talk to you."

  I stepped in front of the open cell door and looked in. A tall, beefy man in a ribbon-festooned version of the deputy's getup was standing next to an even taller guy dressed like the archetypal G-man: gray suit, gray tie, gray hair, gray expression on his face. Handcuffed to a chair was our warrantee--white-trash defiance with a duck's-ass haircut, purple and puke green bruises covering his face, brass-knuck marks dotting his bare torso.

  The kid took off before the two hardcases could reprimand him for disturbing their third degree; Davis flashed our papers. The sheriff looked at them silently, and the fed buttoned his jacket over the knuckle dusters sticking out of his waistband. "I'm Special Agent Stensland," he said. "Ventura Office, FBI. What--"

  Harwell Treadwell laughed and spat blood on the floor. I said, "We're taking him back to L.A. Did he cough up any dope on the other two?"

  The sheriff shoved the papers at Davis. "He might have, you didn't interrupt our interrogation."

  "You've had him for three days," I said. "He should have blabbed by now"

  Treadwell spat blood on the sheriff's spit-shined cowboy boots; when the man balled his fists to retaliate, Davis stationed himself between the two. "He's my prisoner now Signed, sealed, and deeeelivered."

  Stensland said, "This won't wash. Treadwell's a federal prisoner." I shook my head. "He's got city warrants predating the extradition one, and the extradition warrant is countersigned by a federal judge. He's ours."

  Stensland bored in on me with beady gray eyes. I stood there, deadpan, and he tried a smile and cop-to-cop empathy. "Listen, Officer--"

  "It's Sergeant."

  "All right, _Sergeant_, listen: the Viertel girl and the other two men are still at large, and this filth was responsible for one of my agents losing six fingers. Don't you want to go back to Los Angeles with a confession? Don't you want his filthy brothers captured? Don't you want to let us try it our way just a little bit longer?"