Zoot-Suit Murders (9 page)

Younger put the letter down and dialed the telephone. “Operator, I’ve been trying to reach a number but it’s always busy. Could you check on the listing for me, please, to make certain it’s active?”

“What’s the name of the party, sir?”

“
DIALGOD
.”

“One moment. Yes. I show it active; the number hasn’t been changed. Would you like me to dial it for you, sir?”

“Would you, please?”

Outside the window Younger’s eyes traced the once bright ropes of Christmas decorations. He remembered the December day more than a year and a half ago, before Pearl Harbor, when he watched a crew of men work their way down the street all morning, laboriously looping silver ropes with dangling, almost life-size plastic Santa Clauses from the slick legs of the palm trunk tops. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor no one came back to take down the decorations. They faded in the hot summer
sun, the strong winds battered the plastic bodies of Santa Clauses, covering them with dust.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Still trying.”

“I’ll wait.”

Younger was depressed. He was tired of the lousy war; he wanted it over. He wanted his brother to come home. He could get him a job. He wanted the city to take down its lousy Christmas decorations. Outside the window it looked to Younger like the city of Los Angeles had decided to hang every Santa Claus in the world by the neck in mass execution on his street.

“Sir?”

“Yes, operator?”

“I’m sorry, but all the circuits to DIALGOD are busy.”

“T
hey’re such nice kids, all of them.”

“That’s the thing, Kathleen. I just can’t believe they’re killers. But somebody pulled the trigger that gunned down those two FBI agents.”

Kathleen dipped her finger into the muscle of crosscurrent created in the wake of Younger’s steady rowing. Briefly her finger left a crooked little trail in the water behind the gliding boat. “Nathan, all through the long, awful trial I kept thinking to myself, over and over, as I watched those Zoot-suiters sitting silently in their blue jail clothes, handcuffed together like they were no more important than common cattle, I kept thinking it was all such a nightmare. Those boys are just children. They’re certain to die in the gas chamber at Alcatraz.”

“In the electric chair. They will die in the electric chair; that’s how they do it in a federal prison. It’s the state of California that sends people to the gas chamber.”

“Some of them could barely speak English, it was pitiful really. They couldn’t even follow what the district attorney was saying about them. It was so awful. A disgrace. Even if one of those boys did shoot the two FBI men, how can they condemn them all to die? Only one could have pulled the trigger, not all twelve at the same time. I was right there, and I didn’t see
one
of them fire a gun. But I guess the Sinarquistas teach them how to do things like that.”

In the sunlight Kathleen’s red hair went purple against the blue water. Even in the shade of a wide straw hat her face was flour white, almost colorless. She seemed someone never intended for the outdoors, only magically to be transported from house to house. She breathed so deeply, so strenuously, even while relaxing in the boat. Younger noticed the small pointed puffs of her breasts, rising and falling against the thin cotton of her long dress buttoned high to her throat, keeping every possible ray of sun from touching her pale flesh. Her heart was always racing, beating wildly beneath her breasts, like a small bird fluttering its wings against bars of a cage. Younger couldn’t keep his eyes off her as he rowed smoothly to the middle of the lake. There was something compelling about the frailty of her health, a strong magnet pulling him implacably to her in the strangest way. He could not look at her without uncontrollably feeling the heat of hardening flesh move between his legs. The weaker she seemed to become, the more excited he became.

He had always had an acute attraction for broad-boned women. Women with their feet solidly planted on the ground beneath them. Women he could hang on to for a wild ride. Women he could kiss in the dampness of their armpits and they would laugh in his face, throwing their heavy arms around him, bucking even harder beneath him. He had never been attracted to a small-breasted woman, no matter how pretty she was. He felt if he leaned over in the hot sun and unbuttoned Kathleen’s
dress from around her throat, spreading the thin cotton down over the bone white of her shoulders and kissed her under the arms, she would cry or even simply faint. He felt there was something unhealthy about his attraction to her, something fatal in her absolute frailty of body. Her illness had become an aphrodisiac to him. It surrounded her like the sweet musty scent of a rotting tree in the forest. He could not bear to take his eyes off the involuntary trembling of her bright red lips. The sweat of his palms, in a tight-fisted grip around the hard wood of the oars, made him aware he was holding on to something significant, substantial, but very slippery. When she turned her eyes to him, in the shade of her hat, her azure gaze fell upon him easily, the red lips momentarily stopped trembling, her relaxed body peaceful as a beautiful sleeping angel.

“Tell me.” She spoke in her usual way, breathless, as if words were not powered by the strength of her lungs but were given energy from some deep well of alien source. “Tell me, dear Nathan, about yourself.” Her eyes glowed in the shade of her hat. “You are such a mystery to me.”

Younger twisted the oars into the water, making the boat spin in a slow arc toward the lake’s center. He rested the oars and wiped his slippery palms across the knees of his pants. “Me, a mystery?” He heard his laughter trickle self-consciously across the still surface of the lake. “No, I’m not the one who’s much of a mystery. My life is very simple. I’m a simple man.”

“No one is simple, Nathan, in the grand scheme of the universe.”

Younger leaned uncomfortably back on the hard rim of the boat. “I’m afraid that when the universe got around to me, things weren’t so grand anymore.”

“You should take more pride in yourself. You are always sitting back and watching others, asking questions. You should try to control events around you.”

“I can’t control myself, let alone others.” Younger felt his hands shaking. “You see?” He laughed, holding his hands up.
“I told you, I can’t even control myself!” He clasped his hands together like a small boy in prayer.

Kathleen dipped her hand beneath the surface of the water; it looked like a pale blue fish. “Somehow, you don’t seem to fit in the Barrio. You seem out of place there. You don’t even seem to fit in Los Angeles.”

“That’s because I’m like everyone else, I’m not from Los Angeles.”

“Oh.” Kathleen brought her hand up, letting the clear beads of water drip off her fingers back into the lake. “How did you arrive here?”

“My father.”

“You came with your family?”

“No, I followed my father.”

“Your father came here first, then your family followed?”

“No, my father abandoned my family.”

“Oh, Nathan, no wonder you always seem so nervous. They say children from broken homes are always nervous, that they have a hard time learning to trust people and feel they can’t control events.”

Younger pushed himself up from the hard rim of the boat. “My father was a farmer up in Oregon. He was a simple man. He had two sons, four daughters, and six hundred acres of land in the Beaver Dam country, some of the richest truck-farming land in the world. But a small farmer’s life is no better than a gambler’s. House odds are always against the gambler; nature’s odds are always against a farmer.”

“What happened?”

“In 1925 onions were eleven dollars a hundred. My father borrowed against his already mortgaged land and put all six hundred acres in red-eye onions, but smut and cutworm ruined the crop. Next year, because of a bumper crop down here in California, the price of red-eye onions went down to ninety cents a hundred. My father just walked off the farm, walked away to the promised land where house odds are a little better, California.”

“You mean he didn’t take the family?”

“No, he just walked away. Leaving my mother with the mortgages and us kids.”

“How awful.”

“Awful, but not unusual. Farmers see things live and die, then reborn every year. I guess they figure they can do it too.”

“Did you work the farm?”

“I did what I could. I was fifteen, my brother Marvin was only six, the girls were all in between.”

“How terrible for your mother.”

“Yes, and it was even more terrible a year later. I just got up and walked away, just like my dad had.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. Actually, I wasn’t walking away from responsibilities of the farm. I was determined to find my dad.”

“Did you ever find him?”

“We knew where he was. We had an address on one postcard he sent back. He wasn’t trying to hide or anything like that. I found him here in Los Angeles way out on Fairfax Avenue, you know, where the Jews live. I found him living in a cheap apartment with a woman. He was friendly enough to me, real glad to see me as a matter of fact, and he asked about everybody up in Oregon. It was funny how much he really seemed to care, but after dinner he took me aside and said, ‘Nathan, all a man really wants in life is enough to eat and enough sex. All the rest of it is bullshit. Someday you’ll understand.’”

Kathleen’s eyes questioned Younger from the shadow of her hat. “Do you think you’ll ever understand?”

“I understood right away. That night I was sleeping in the living room. There was only one other room in the apartment, and that was the bedroom. I woke up hearing fighting back there, lots of loud cursing and thumping. The woman started screaming at my dad, ‘Either that little son of a bitch goes before morning or I do!’”

Kathleen said nothing. She looked across the lake to a small
boy toddling down from the shade of park trees, leaving a trail of broken pieces of bread along the shoreline, ducks and geese creating a loud commotion, quacking and honking furiously as they paddled from all directions to glut on the sudden feast.

“Before morning I left. I never saw my father again; I understood his words.”

When Kathleen turned her face back to him, Younger saw the stain of tears in the shadow of her face.

“I didn’t go back to the farm. I got lots of crazy jobs. I took anything. First one I had was for Jack Warner.”

“What could a sixteen-year-old boy do for a big movie producer?”

Younger laughed. “Babysit his son, Jack Junior. Junior was exactly my age, always trying to sneak off with some starlet or another from his father’s studio. There was always the threat of a paternity suit. My job was to stay with Junior at all times. I was a hired shadow; wherever he went, I went. Every Saturday afternoon we drove the limousine down from the Beverly Hills mansion to see one of the old man’s movies. Since the old man made the movies, he knew exactly how long they lasted and always called the ticket girl to ask if we arrived at the theater, so there could be no hanky-panky. But Junior was one up on the game. He’d give me twenty bucks to keep my mouth shut, slip out the side door of the theater, and take the limo to meet some hot date. He always got back just as the movie ended.”

“I bet I know what happened next.”

“What?”

“One day the limousine got a flat and Junior was caught in the backseat with a starlet.”

“How did you know?”

Kathleen tipped her straw brim up slightly. An oblique shaft of sun subtly lit the lower half of her smiling face.

Younger slumped back against the boat’s hard rim, nervously plucking at the worn wool of his pants stretched thinly over his knees. “After that I got a job with the actor Pepe Maria y Maria.”

“You don’t mean the vulgar Cuban comedian who used to stuff basketballs into his mouth?”

“That’s him, and he really could do it. It wasn’t a trick, only it was a soccer ball painted like a basketball he used. His way of making a living was no more vulgar than most others. He was an average guy, a baseball fanatic. He hired me to play catch with him.”

“That’s all, play catch?”

“That was it. I was big enough, strong enough, played baseball in Oregon. Pepe took me everywhere, to the studio, his three ex-wives’ homes, everywhere. I would wait for him until after he got out of his agent’s office. He’d come out mad as a hornet every time and throw the ball to me hard as he could for hours, working his anger off. He wasn’t such a crazy Cuban after all. But one thing he gave me to use later in life was Spanish. I learned all the swear words first, as he hurled the hard balls at me. Slowly I learned the rest of it. Ever since, I’ve been able to get jobs where Spanish had to be spoken as well as English.”

“And that’s how you got the job working with young boys in the Barrio?”

“That’s how. Not very complicated, is it?”

“You are not such a simple man after all, Nathan Younger.” Kathleen let loose of her wide straw brim, her white face disappearing once again into complete shadow. “And these stories you just told don’t lessen the mystery about you.” She fell silent. The water lapping alongside the boat murmured around her. The lightness of her hand came up to Younger’s face. Gently her fingers traced the scars down his cheeks. “Are these the scars you got from Barbara Carr the night of the murders?”

Younger placed his hand carefully over hers, as if trapping a butterfly. “Yes. She scarred me for life. But it’s of no consequence if a man shows his scars. With a woman, it’s different; she should never show she’s been wounded.”

“Your ideas about women are very odd, Nathan. You think we should all be perfect. That is what mystifies me most, your
belief women are without sin. The way you came to the rescue of Barbara Carr, it was so gallant, so—noble.” Kathleen’s voice lowered, barely discernible above the murmuring water. “That is what I have come to cherish in you most, your sense of greater nobility.”