The Big Nowhere (23 page)

Considine pointed to a folder atop the cubicle’s Out basket. “It’s all in there. You’re Ted Krugman. DOB 6/16/23, a Pinko New York stagehand. In reality you were killed in a car wreck on Long Island two months ago. The local Feds hushed it up and sold the identity to Ed Satterlee. All your past history and KAs are in there. There’s surveillance pictures of the Commie KAs, and there’s twenty-odd pages of Marxist claptrap, a little history lesson for you to memorize.

“So, day after tomorrow, around two, you go to the Gower Street picket line, portraying a Pinko who’s lost his faith. You tell the Teamster picket boss that the day labor joint downtown sent you out, muscle for a buck an hour. The man knows who you are, and he’ll set you up to picket with two other guys. After an hour or so, you’ll get into political arguments with those guys—per the script I’ve written out for you. A third argument will result in a fistfight with a real bruiser—a PT instructor at the LAPD Academy. He’ll pull his punches, but you fight for real. You’re going to take a few lumps, but what the hell. Another Teamster man will shout obscenities about you to the UAES picket boss, who’ll hopefully approach you and lead you to Claire De Haven, UAES’s member screener. We’ve done a lot of homework, and we can’t directly place Krugman with any UAESers. You look vaguely like him and at worst you’ll be secondhand heard of. It’s all in that folder, kid. Pictures of the men you’ll be pulling this off with, everything.”

A clean day to work the homicides; a full night to become Ted Krugman. Danny said, “Tell me about Claire De Haven.”

Considine countered, “Have you got a girlfriend?”

Danny started to say no, then remembered the bogus paramour who helped him brazen out Tamarind. “Nothing serious. Why?”

“Well, I don’t know how susceptible you are to women in general, but De Haven’s a presence. Buzz Meeks just filed a report that makes her as a longtime hophead—H and drugstore—but she’s still formidable—and she’s damn good at getting what she wants out of men. So I want to make sure you seduce her, not the opposite. Does that answer your question?”

“No.”

“Do you want a physical description?”

“No.”

“The odds that you’ll have to lay her?”

“No.”

“Do you want her sexual background?”

Danny threw his question out before he could back down. “No. I want to know why a ranking policeman has a crush on a Commie socialite.”

Considine blushed pink—the way Felix Gordean told him
he
blushed; Danny tried reading his face and caught:
got me
. Call-me-Mal laughed, slid off his wedding band and tossed it in the wastebasket. He said, “Man to man?”

Danny said, “No, brass to brass.”

Considine made the sign of the cross on his vestfront. “Ashes to ashes, and not bad for a minister’s son. Let’s just say I’m susceptible to dangerous women, and my wife is divorcing me, so I can’t chase around and give her ammo to use in court. I want custody of my son, and I will not give her one shred of evidence to spoil my case. And I don’t usually offer my confessions to junior officers.”

Danny thought: this man is so far out on a limb that you can say anything to him and he’ll stick around—because at 1:00 A.M. he’s got no place fucking else to go. “And
that’s
why you’re getting such a kick out of operating De Haven?”

Considine smiled and tapped the top desk drawer. “Why am I betting there’s a bottle in here?”

Danny felt himself blush. “Because you’re smart?”

The hand kept tapping. “No, because your nerves are right up there with mine, and because you always stink of Lavoris. Brass to rookie, here’s a lesson: cops who smell of mouthwash are juicers. And juicer cops who can keep it on a tight leash are usually pretty good cops.”

“Pretty good cops” flashed a green light. Danny nudged Considine’s hand away, opened the drawer and pulled out a pint and two paper cups. He poured quadruple shots and offered; Considine accepted with a bow; they hoisted drinks. Danny said, “To both our cases”; Considine toasted, “To Stefan Heisteke Considine.” Danny drank, warmed head to toe, drank; Considine sipped and hooked a thumb over his back at Harlan “Buddy” Jastrow. “Upshaw, who is this guy? And why are you so bent out of shape on your goddamn homo killings?”

Danny locked eyes with Jastrow. “Buddy’s the guy I used to want to get, the guy who used to be the worst, the hardest nut to crack because he was just plain nowhere. Now there’s this other thing, and it’s just plain terror. It’s incredibly brutal, and I think it might be random, but I don’t quite go with that. I think I’m dealing with revenge. I think all the killer’s methods are reenactments, all the mutilations are symbolic of him trying to get his past straight in his mind. I keep thinking it all out, and I keep coming back to revenge on old wrongs. Not everyday childhood trauma shit, but big, big stuff.”

Danny paused, drank and sighted in on the mugboard around Jastrow’s neck: Kern County Jail, 3/4/38. “Sometimes I think that if I know who this guy is and why he does it, then I’ll know something so big that I’ll be able to figure out all the everyday stuff like cake. I can get on with making rank and handling meat and potatoes stuff, because everything I ever sensed about what people are capable of came together on one job, and I nailed
why. Why
. Fucking
why
.”

Considine’s, “And why you do what you do yourself,” was very soft. Danny looked away from Jastrow and killed his drink. “Yeah, and that. And why you’re so hopped on Claire De Haven and me. And don’t say out of patriotism.”

Considine laughed. “Kid, would you buy patriotism if I told you the grand jury guarantees me a captaincy, Chief DA’s Investigator and the prestige to keep my son?”

“Yeah, but there’s still De Haven and—”

“Yeah, and me. Let’s just put it this way. I have to know why, too, only I like going at it once removed. Satisfied?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would be.”

“Do you
know
why?”

Considine sipped bourbon. “It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

“I used to steal cars, Lieut—Mal. I was the ace car thief of San Berdoo County right before the war. Turnabout?”

Lieutenant Mal Considine stuck out a long leg and hooked the wastebasket over to his chair. He rummaged in it, found his wedding band and slipped it on. “I’ve got a confab with my lawyer for the custody case tomorrow, and I’m sure he’ll want me to keep wearing this fucking thing.”

Danny leaned forward. “Turnabout, Captain?”

Considine stood up and stretched. “My brother used to blackmail me, threaten to rat me to the old man every time I said something snotty about religion. Since ten strokes with a switch was the old man’s punishment for blasphemy, old Desmond pretty much got his way, which was usually me breaking into houses to steal stuff he wanted. So let’s put it this way: I saw a lot of things that were pretty swell, and some things that were pretty spooky, and I liked it. So it was either become a burglar or a spy, and policeman seemed like a good compromise. And sending in the spies appealed to me more than doing it myself, sort of like Desmond in the catbird seat.”

Danny stood up. “I’m going to nail De Haven for you. Trust me on that.”

“I don’t doubt it, Ted.”

“In vino veritas, right?”

“Sure, and one more thing. I’ll be Chief of Police or something else that large before too long, and I’m taking you with me.”

Mal woke up thinking of Danny Upshaw.

Rolling out of bed, he looked at the four walls of Room 11, the Shangri-Lodge Motel. One framed magazine cover per wall—Norman Rockwell testimonials to happy family life. A stack of his soiled suits by the door—and no Stefan to run them to the dry cleaners. The memo corkboard he’d erected, one query tag standing out: locate Doc Lesnick. The fink/shrink could not be reached either at home or at his office and the 1942–1944 gaps in Reynolds Loftis’ file had to be explained; he needed a general psych overview of the brain trusters now that their decoy was about to be in place, and all the files ended in the late summer of last year—why?

And the curtains were cheesecloth gauze; the rug was as threadbare as a tortilla; the bathroom door was scrawled over with names and phone numbers—“Sinful Cindy, DU-4927, 38-24-38, loves to fuck and suck”—worth a jingle—if he ever ran Vice raids again. And Dudley Smith was due in twenty minutes—good guy/bad guy as today’s ticket: two Pinko screenwriters who avoided HUAC subpoenas because they always wrote under pseudonyms and blew the country when the shit hit the fan in ’47. They had been located by Ed Satterlee operatives—private eyes on the Red Crosscurrents payroll—and both men knew the UAES bigshots intimately back in the late ’30s, early ’40s.

And getting so chummy with an underling was strange. A couple of shared drinks and they were spilling their guts to each other—bad chain of command policy—ambitious policemen should keep it zipped while they climbed the ladder.

Mal showered, shaved and dressed, running book—De Haven versus Upshaw, even money as his best bet. At 8:30 exactly a car horn honked; he walked outside and saw Dudley leaning against his Ford. “Good morning, Malcolm! Isn’t it a grand day!”

They drove west on Wilshire, Mal silent, Dudley talking politics. “…I’ve been juxtaposing the Communist way of life against ours, and I keep coming back to family as the backbone of American life. Do you believe that, Malcolm?”

Mal knew that Loew had filled him in on Celeste—and that as far as partners went, he could have worse—like Buzz Meeks. “It has its place.”

“I’d be a bit more emphatic on that, given the trouble you’re taking to get your son back. Is it going well with your lawyer?”

Mal thought of his afternoon appointment with Jake Kellerman. “He’s going to try to get me continuances until the grand jury is in session and making hay. I have the preliminary in a couple of days, and we’ll start putting the stall in then.”

Dudley lit a cigarette and steered with one pinky. “Yes, a crusading captain might convince the judge that water is thicker than blood. You know, lad, that I’ve a wife and five daughters. They serve well to keep the reins on certain unruly aspects of my nature. If he can keep them in perspective, a family is an essential thing for a man to have.”

Mal rolled down his window. “I have no perspective where my son is concerned. But if I can keep you in perspective until the grand jury convenes, then I’ll be in
grand
shape.”

Dudley Smith exhaled laughter and smoke. “I’m fond of you, Malcolm—even though you don’t reciprocate. And speaking of family, I’ve a little errand to run—my niece needs a talking-to. Would you mind a small detour to Westwood?”

“A brief detour, Lieutenant?”

“Very, Lieutenant.”

Mal nodded; Dudley turned north on Glendon and headed up toward the UCLA campus, parking in a meter space on Sorority Row. Setting the brake, he said, “Mary Margaret, my sister Brigid’s girl. Twenty-nine years old and on her third masters degree because she’s afraid to go out and meet the world. Sad, isn’t it?”

Mal sighed. “Tragic.”

“The very thing I was thinking, but without your emphasis on sarcasm. And speaking of youths, what’s your opinion of our young colleague Upshaw?”

“I think he’s smart and going places. Why?”

“Well, lad, friends of mine say that he has no sense of his own place, and he impresses me as weak and ambitious, which I view as a dangerous combination in a policeman.”

Mal’s first thought of rising: He shouldn’t have confided in the kid, because half his juice was front just waiting to crack. “Dudley, what do you want?”

“Communism vanquished. And why don’t you enjoy the sight of comely young coeds while I speak to my niece?”

Mal followed Dudley up the steps of a Spanish manse fronted by a lawn display: Greek symbols sunk into the grass on wood stakes. The door was open; the lounge area buzzed: girls smoking, talking and gesturing at textbooks. Dudley pointed upstairs and said, “Toot sweet”; Mal saw a stack of magazines on an end table and sat down to read, fielding curious looks from the coeds. He thumbed through a
Collier’s
, a
Newsweek
and two
Life
’s—stopping when he heard Dudley’s brogue, enraged, echoing down the second-floor hallway.

It got louder and scarier, punctuated by pleas in a whimpering soprano. The girls looked at Mal; he grabbed another magazine and tried to read. Dudley’s laughter took over—spookier than the bellows. The coeds were staring now; Mal dropped his
Weekly Sportsman
and walked upstairs to listen.

The hallway was long and lined with narrow wooden doors; Mal followed Ha! Ha! Ha! to a door with “Conroy” nameplated on the front. It was ajar a few inches; he looked in on a back wall lined with photos of Latino prizefighters. Dudley and the soprano were out of sight; Mal eavesdropped.

“…bull banks and piñatas and spic bantamweights. It’s a fixation, lassie. Your mother may lack the stomach to set you straight, but I don’t.”

The soprano, groveling, “But Ricardo is a lovely boy, Uncle Dud. And I—”

A huge hand flashed across Mal’s strip of vision, a slap turned to a caress, a head of curly red hair jerking into, then out of sight. “You’re not to say you love him, lassie. Not in my presence. Your parents are weak, and they expect me to have a say regarding the men in your life. I will always exercise that say, lassie. Just remember the trouble I spared you before and you’ll be grateful.”

A plump girl/woman backed into view, hands on her face, sobbing. Dudley Smith’s arms went around her; her hands turned to fists to keep him from completing the embrace. Dudley murmured sweet nothings; Mal walked back to the car and waited. His partner showed up five minutes later. “Knock, knock, who’s there? Dudley Smith, so Reds beware! Lad, shall we go impress Mr. Nathan Eisler with the righteousness of our cause?”

Eisler’s last known address was 11681 Presidio, a short run from the UCLA campus. Dudley hummed show tunes as he drove; Mal kept seeing his hand about to hit, the niece cowering from her genial uncle’s touch. 11681 was a small pink prefab at the end of a long prefab block; Dudley double-parked, Mal jammed facts from Satterlee’s report:

Nathan Eisler. Forty-nine years old. A German Jew who fled Hitler and company in ’34; CP member ’36 to ’40, then member of a half dozen Commie front organizations. Co-scenarist on a string of pro-Russki turkeys, his writing partner Chaz Minear; poker buddies with Morton Ziffkin and Reynolds Loftis. Wrote under pseudonyms to guard his professional privacy; slipped through the HUAC investigators’ hands; currently living under the alias Michael Kaukenen, the name of the hero of
Storm Over Leningrad
. Currently scripting RKO B westerns, under yet another monicker, the work fronted by a politically acceptable hack writer who glommed a 35 percent cut. Best pals with Lenny Rolff, fellow writer expatriate, today’s second interrogee.

Former lover of Claire De Haven.

They took a toy-littered walkway up to the porch; Mal looked through a screen door into the perfect prefab living room: plastic furniture, linoleum floor, spangly pink wallpaper. Children squealed inside; Dudley winked and rang the buzzer.

A tall, unshaven man walked up to the screen, flanked by a toddler boy and girl. Dudley smiled; Mal watched the little boy pop a thumb in his mouth, and spoke first. “Mr. Kaukenen, we’re with the District Attorney’s Office and we’d like to talk to you. Alone, please.”

The kids pressed themselves into the man’s legs; Mal saw scared slant eyes—two little half-breeds spooked by two big boogeymen. Eisler/Kaukenen called out, “Michiko!”; a Japanese woman materialized and whisked the children away. Dudley opened the door uninvited; Eisler said, “You are three years late.”

Mal walked in behind Dudley, amazed at how cheap the place looked—a white trash flop—the home of a man who made three grand a week during the Depression. He heard the kids bawling behind wafer-thin walls; he wondered if Eisler had to put up with the same foreign language shit he did—then popped that he probably dug it on general Commie principles. Dudley said, “This is a charming house, Mr. Kaukenen. The color motif especially.”

Eisler/Kaukenen ignored the comment and pointed them to a door off the living room. Mal walked in and saw a small square space that looked warm and habitable: floor-to-ceiling books, chairs around an ornate coffee table and a large desk dominated by a class A typewriter. He took the seat furthest from the squeal of little voices; Dudley sat across from him. Eisler shut the door and said, “I am Nathan Eisler, as if you did not already know.”

Mal thought: no nice guy, no “I loved your picture
Branding Iron
.” “Then you know why we’re here.”

Eisler locked the door and took the remaining chair. “The bitch is in heat again, despite reports that she had a miscarriage.”

Dudley said, “You are to tell no one that we questioned you. There will be dire repercussions should you disobey us on that.”

“Such as what, Herr—”

Mal cut in. “Mort Ziffkin, Chaz Minear, Reynolds Loftis and Claire De Haven. We’re interested in their activities, not yours. If you cooperate fully with us, we might be able to let you testify by deposition. No open court, probably very little publicity. You slid on HUAC, you’ll slide on this one.” He stopped and thought of Stefan, gone with his crazy mother and her new paramour. “But we want hard facts. Names, dates, places and admissions. You cooperate, you slide. You don’t, it’s a subpoena and open court questioning by a DA I can only describe as a nightmare. Your choice.”

Eisler inched his chair away from them. Eyes lowered, he said, “I have not seen those people in years.”

Mal said, “We know, and it’s their
past
activities that we’re interested in.”

“And they are the only people that you want to know about?” Mal lied, thinking of Lenny Rolff. “Yes. Just them.”

“And what are these repercussions you speak of?”

Mal drummed the table. “Open court badgering. Your picture in the—”

Dudley interrupted, “Mr. Eisler, if you do not cooperate, I will inform Howard Hughes that you are authoring RKO films currently being credited to another man. That man, your conduit to gainful employment as a writer, will be terminated. I will also inform the INS that you refused to cooperate with a sanctioned municipal body investigating treason, and urge that their Investigations Bureau delve into
your
seditious activities with an eye toward your deportation as an enemy alien and the deportation of your wife and children as potential enemy aliens. You are a German and your wife is Japanese, and since those two nations were responsible for our recent world conflict, I would think that the INS would enjoy seeing the two of you returned to your respective homelands.”

Nathan Eisler had hunched himself up, elbows to knees, clasped hands to chin, head down. Tears rolled off his face. Dudley cracked his knuckles and said, “A simple yes or no answer will suffice.”

Eisler nodded; Dudley said, “Grand.” Mal got out his pen and notepad. “I know the answer, but tell me anyway. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A.?”

Eisler bobbed his head; Mal said, “Yes or no answers, this is for the record.”

A weak “Yes.”

“Good. Where was your Party unit or cell located?”

“I—I went to meetings in Beverly Hills, West Los Angeles and Hollywood. We—we met at the homes of different members.”

Mal wrote the information down—verbatim shorthand. “During what years were you a Party member?”

“April ’36 until Stalin proved him—”

Dudley cut in. “Don’t justify yourself, just answer.”

Eisler pulled a Kleenex from his shirt pocket and wiped his nose. “Until early in ’40.”

Mal said, “Here are some names. You tell me which of these people were known to you as Communist Party members. Claire De Haven, Reynolds Loftis, Chaz Minear, Morton Ziffkin, Armando Lopez, Samuel Benavides and Juan Duarte.”

Eisler said, “All of them.” Mal heard the kids tromping through the living room and raised his voice. “You and Chaz Minear wrote the scripts for
Dawn of the Righteous, Eastern Front, Storm Over Leningrad
and
The Heroes of Yakustok
. All those films espoused nationalistic Russian sentiment. Were you told by Communist Party higher-ups to insert pro-Russian propaganda in them?”

Eisler said, “That is a naive question”; Dudley slapped the coffee table. “Don’t comment, just answer.”

Eisler moved his chair closer to Mal. “No. No, I was not told that.”

Mal flashed Dudley two fingers of his necktie—
he’s mine
. “Mr. Eisler, do you deny that those films contain pro-Russian propaganda?”

“No.”

“Did you and Chaz Minear arrive at the decision to disseminate that propaganda yourselves?”

Eisler squirmed in his chair. “Chaz was responsible for the philosophizing, while I held that the story line spoke most eloquently for the points he wanted to make.”

Mal said, “We have copies of those scripts, with the obvious propaganda passages annotated. We’ll be back to have you initial the dialogue you attribute to Minear’s disseminating of the Party line.”

No response. Mal said, “Mr. Eisler, would you say that you have a good memory?”

“Yes, I would say that.”

“And did you and Minear work together in the same room on your scripts?”

“Yes.”

“And were there times when he said things along the lines of ‘This is great propaganda’ or ‘This is for the Party’?”