This Storm

by James Ellroy

  Thad Brown ran in. Breuning and Carlisle crowded up. It got real hushed inside and real noisy out.

  Sirens whooped and cut off. Car doors slammed. Doc Layman ran in. Hideo Ashida and Joan Conville followed. Everybody eyeballed the death crib. Everybody cased the stiffs.

  Three dead men. All clothed. Perched upright on one couch. They’ve got upraised heads and wide open mouths. They’re sucking in last gasps of breath.

  A low-life Mex.

  Officer George Kapek.

  Officer Wendell Rice.

  42

  (ENSENADA, 12:30 P.M., 1/29/42)

  Dudley said adios. Long-distance fuzz skunked the call. He got the gist but no context.

  Mike called from the Club Alabam. There’s three dead in some coontown shithole. Two Alien Squad humps and a Mex rumdum. It might be homicide. It might be terp ODs. Thad Brown’s got the command.

  Thad formed a crash squad. Mike and Dick from Homicide. Hideo and Joan from the lab. Lee Blanchard and Elmer Jackson from the Alien Squad.

  Blanchard was lackluster. Jackson was meddlesome. Elmer’s proximity troubled him. It recalled Chinatown, New Year’s Eve.

  The botched stakeout. Tommy Glennon escapes. He forms a posse. Mike and Dick suit up. Ditto Jackson. Ditto dead cops Kapek and Rice. Add on Catbox Cal Lunceford.

  Eddie Leng is snuffed that night. Proximity as destiny. Design within the chaotic.

  Dudley spun his desk chair. He orbited his office and applied the brakes. He brooded up the coontown job. Two options appeared.

  Possible ODs. That meant cover-up. Dope-fiend cops just would not do. Possible homicide. That meant showcase. It’s the PD’s first double cop killing. Pull out the stops. Whitewash the victims. Enact justice at all costs.

  Sound recent and familiar? It should.

  The Watanabe job consumed December. It’s late January now. Two-Gun Davis remains volatile and perhaps talkative. He should choose a propitious moment and inform Jack Horrall.

  Dudley spun a reorbit. It cleared his head. Juan Pimentel walked in. He clicked his heels and saluted. He placed a grand object on the desk.

  Hideo Ashida’s photo device. A contraption suffused with true dash.

  “You’ve succeeded in delighting me, Lieutenant. Dr. Ashida’s invention has served to revolutionize policework in Los Angeles.”

  Pimentel reclicked his heels. “Mr. Ray Pinker sold the plans to Captain Vasquez-Cruz, who promptly had the design duplicated. He has already installed three devices at the Tijuana border. We can now photograph license plates as vehicles enter and leave our country.”

  Dudley pondered the sale. One conclusion popped. Pinker sold the plans covertly. Hideo would have told him otherwise.

  “I’ve had a grand brainstorm, Lieutenant. I would like you to place one of these alongside Kyoho Hanamaka’s carport. Stretch the trip wire across the entire circumference and affix three wide-angle lenses. I’m going up there now. I’ll bring you back a dimensional drawing.”

  Pimentel clicked his heels. He clicked elegantly and often. Heel clicks punctuated his dutiful young life.

  “A question before you go, Lieutenant.”

  “Sir?”

  “I would call your dislike and distrust of Captain Vasquez-Cruz plainly apparent. Am I correct here?”

  Pimentel clicked. “Sir, you are vastly correct.”

  * * *

  —

  He brought the bayonet. He undressed in the hidey-hole and donned Nazi black. The gold shaft caught lamplight and threw his image back. He rewrote History a tad.

  The Blitz. Evil London burns. Irish Republicans light bonfires to guide Luftwaffe bombers. He’s there to watch.

  Salvy Abascal joins him. They’re dressed in Sinarquista green. Joan Conville’s their consort. She’s green-clad. She wears her Scottish clan’s tartan sash.

  They’ve had one night together. He’s learned a few things. The scientist-empiricist shares his mystical streak. She’s as death-derived as he is. He told her of the Wolf he met on the British moors. She did not doubt the Wolf’s occasional visitations. He touched her clothing while she slept. He became the Wolf chasing her scent.

  She’s as man-bound and father-bound as he’s bound to his mother and women. She rages to kill the man who burned her father dead. She’s told him some things. He’s made a few queries. He shares her suspicions of mad inventor Mitchell Kupp.

  Burned Londoners run toward them. They resemble Joan’s father felled by scorched trees. Joan wields the gold bayonet. It’s both merciful and brutally just.

  She’s his sister-lover now. Her conduit-to-Bill Parker status may or may not play out. He will help her take a man’s life. Salvy Abascal saved his own life. He’s Joan’s half brother and his own full one. He demands respect and commands scrutiny.

  Salvy killed Victor Trejo Caiz. It was an act performed with bold premeditation. They spoke briefly after Father Coughlin’s broadcast. Their touchstone is shared ideology. Salvy wants something from him. This seductive dimension will soon be revealed. There’s a Sinarquista rally in Ensenada tonight.

  Lover-sisters/brothers/daughters/sons—

  Beth is due for a visit. He’ll pair her off with Joan Klein and commend them to mischief. Young Joan pilfers from stores. She’s pilfered bland SIS memos and cabled them to her “Comrades” in New York. She asked him to teach her how to shoot a gun. They had a father-daughter jaunt on the beach.

  Young Joan blasted driftwood with his .45. A sidearm vanished from the armory the next day.

  Young Joan to Young Juan. The snappy heel clicker and pay phone–tap whiz. The tireless surveiller of this selfsame hideaway.

  He read Juan Pimentel’s personnel file. He noted Class A fitness reports and a pithy biographical aside.

  Pimentel resigned a war college posting. He defamed President Cárdenas’ anti-Church policies. Lieutenant Juan is devoutly Catholic and pro-Sinarquista.

  Salvy will address a large crowd tonight. El Flaco Explosivo will surely explode.

  Dudley swung the gold bayonet.

  Where’s Kyoho Hanamaka?

  A nice heart attack would rectify the Two-Gun Davis glitch.

  Joan must miss him. He’ll send the Wolf by to sleep at the foot of her bed.

  * * *

  —

  Young Joan showed off her pin map. The Russian campaign wowed her. Her people hailed from that neck of the woods.

  They sat on Dudley’s terrace. Claire was off at afternoon Mass. Young Joan had nicked an atlas and tore out the Russian spread. She nicked the pins from the SIS squadroom.

  Little swastikas for the Nazis. Hammer and sickles for the martyred USSR.

  A grand child. Perhaps psychopathic. Only time would tell.

  She said, “The green swastikas represent armored battalions. The blue ones represent troop movements, and the penciled-in Xs represent the Germans’ retreat from Moscow. The red pins show the Home Guard dug in.”

  “You get your war news from the radio, do you?”

  “XERB. I know some Spanish now, but I base my troop movements on the English-language broadcasts.”

  Dudley lit a cigarette. Young Joan nicked one just to nick one. She didn’t smoke.

  “No more stealing memorandums to impress your chums back home. Keep the gun you stole, but don’t steal any others. Since you know damn well how softhearted I am, I’m offering you a job as a consolation prize.”

  Young Joan said, “That sounds intriguing.”

  She mimicked Claire’s inflections. She invaded Claire’s closets and tried on her clothes. He’d caught her at it.

  “Your Aunt Claire finds Captain Vasquez-Cruz suspicious, and I must say I agree. I’ve requisitioned a great many police files, and I don’t have time to go through them. I’d like you to. Study them and look for pictures and notations
pertaining to the captain. I’ll pay you, of course.”

  Young Joan said, “You’re a pal, Uncle Dud.”

  They shook hands on the deal. She pinned a green swastika to his necktie. Dudley roared.

  * * *

  —

  Avenida Ruiz was blocked off and torch-lit. Blackshirt Staties and Greenshirt Sinarquistas mingled. The crowd numbered some six hundred. Dudley stood at the back.

  He wore his Class A uniform. He retained the swastika tiepin for giggles and grins. He stood near men with coiled-snake armbands and women in green twill frocks.

  He caught a nap at the hotel. A dream placed him in the Maestro Manse, among gargoyles. Beethoven and Wagner busts sprang to life.

  A long-distance call roused him. Mike Breuning reports:

  The darktown crib remains chaotic. It’s still undetermined—homicide or terp ODs. Mike braced Thad Brown on Elmer Jackson. Thad said, “He worked the Alien Squad with Kapek and Rice. I want him in on this.”

  The call disconnected. Something vague tweaked him. He’d heard of the death crib. He can’t recall where or when.

  Cheers went up. Salvy Abascal took the stage. It was built from tin cans and lashed-up orange crates.

  El Flaco held a microphone. It was hooked up to a ’32 Ford. A Statie sergeant ran the engine and sparked the battery. Flaco let loose.

  He spoke Spanish. The microphone cut in and out. Dudley quick-translated and still lost bursts of text. The shrieking crowd further blitzed comprehension. Nobody heard a thing the man said.

  Dudley gave up sound for sight. Salvy gave the crowd Weimar Berlin, reborn. His gestures urged them to listen to their one united voice and imagine what it was saying. He swayed on rickety orange crates and held a dead microphone. He spoke the truth in the crowd’s one voice.

  It extended. It remained vitalist. Salvy swayed and made the crowd speak in his voice. Dudley supplied his own words. He began with the Book of Revelation and worked backward. Salvy stopped and he stopped with this:

  God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water—the fire next time.

  43

  (LOS ANGELES, 9:00 P.M., 1/29/42)

  They stood nine hours in. Thad Brown ran the Crash Squad. Nobody sleeps till I give the word.

  Newsmen swarmed outside. Brown nixed them inside. It’s the PD’s first double cop snuff. That’s the urgent gist and newsprint hook here.

  Arc lights glared outside. Cops and lab folk swarmed inside. Doc Layman left to testify in court. He was Crash Squad–adjunct. Hideo Ashida ran the lab slot. Joan backed him up.

  Newton blues roped off 46th Street. They cordoned Central to the west and Hooper to the east. Newsmen hopped backyard fences and got though regardless. Radio scribes spieled right there in the yard. Said yard was trampled past all forensic hope.

  Joan stepped outside. She gobbled aspirin and dosed a solvent-fume headache. Breuning and Carlisle ducked past her. They ran in and out. Ashida and Brown stuck inside. Lee Blanchard was canvassing. Elmer Jackson booked off somewhere. He’d redubbed the “death crib” the “klubhaus.” The news fools lapped it up.

  Joan lit a cigarette. Arc light glare torqued her headache. She caught newshound jabber. Dumb comments overlapped.

  It’s a shine caper. Coons off the jazz strip. You’ve got a skirt and a Jap on the job. The Dudster and Whiskey Bill should have a piece of this. They scored good on them Watanabe snuffs.

  “The Skirt and the Jap.” The news ghouls loved it. She ran her own Skirt-and-Jap riff. The punch line reverb’d.

  Half the gold’s mine. Don’t trifle with me. I’ll ruin you with Dudley Smith if you do.

  Ashida trembled then. She acted then. She typed a note to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s. She forged Ray Pinker’s signature and demanded this:

  “Photostat the gold-heist file. Do it now. Priority expedite.”

  Then, this callout. Then, all this grief.

  They’d worked nine straight hours. She dusted touch-and-grab surfaces and got all smudges and smears. She elimination-printed all the blues and detectives. Ashida photographed the klubhaus interior. The bodies remained on the couch. The Mex remained un-ID’d.

  She combed a two-block radius. She jotted vehicle descriptions and plate numbers. She brushed up against jazz-club habitués. Negroes and Mexicans with big conks and hairnets. They made faces and coochie-coo’d her. She blew that Indian’s foot off for less.

  Joan tossed her cigarette. She was hungry. Thad Brown just called Kwan’s. He ordered eight pupu platters and four fifths of hooch.

  Jumped-up jazz echoed. The Club Zombie and Club Alabam stood forty yards off. A big sedan bucked the west cordon and bumped up on the curb. The driver leaned on the horn. Jack Horrall got out.

  The newshounds cheered. A radio man held his mike up to catch the kerfuffle. Call-Me-Jack hopped the gate. He tried to look somber and tanked. He was a huckster. He lived for this.

  He held up his hands. He went Thank you, thank you. He almost but not quite grinned.

  The newsmen simmered down. Call-Me-Jack shook fifty hands in ten seconds. Joan pushed in close. Jack saw her and went woo-woo!

  He pushed two flat palms down and got instant ssshhh. He looked up at God and down at his feet. He tried to look humble and tanked. He looked straight at the newsmen and launched his spiel.

  “It’s a sad occasion any way you slice it, but we don’t know if it’s homicide or not. We haven’t ID’d the Mex yet, but our two late policemen are Officer Wendell D. Rice, age thirty-four, and Officer George B. Kapek, age thirty-six. Officer Rice came on in ’28, and Officer Kapek came on in ’30. They are survived by their lovely wives, Mrs. Vera Rice and Mrs. Dorothea Kapek. They’ve got a whole brood of kids between them, but I’m not sure how many. Our prayers go out to the bereaved families of these two fine young policemen, and to the Mexican’s family, if he had one.”

  The newsmen clap-clapped. Call-Me-Jack relaunched his spiel.

  “Here’s a tidbit you boys will enjoy. We’re reviving the all-league team that solved the baffling Watanabe murders last month, with a few exceptions and one addition. Sergeant Dudley Smith’s battling the Fifth Column in Mexico now, but he’s sure as you know what here in spirit. We’ve got Captain Bill Parker to ride herd, Lieutenant Thad Brown to run the show, Sergeants Mike Breuning and Dick Carlisle from Homicide, and two close pals of the dead men—Officer Lee Blanchard and Sergeant Elmer Jackson—from the Alien Squad. Big Lee was once a ranked heavyweight contender, so you reporters better be nice to this white man’s PD.”

  Haw-haws rose and fell. Call-Me-Jack did the flat-palms bit.

  “Last but not least, we’ve got Sergeant Turner Meeks, detached from Robbery. All you Western-movie fans know Buzz. He’s played in a lot of those oaters they shoot out in the Valley. He never gets the girl, but he always gets the horse. Maybe one day he’ll get lucky.”

  The Meeks jive drew laughs. It cued Meeks his own self. He jumped out of the Chief’s sedan and jumped through the gate. That drew more laughs. He saw Joan and jumped straight her way.

  He said, “Will you go to Acapulco with me?”

  Joan looked down at him. She patted his head. She said, “No, you’re too short.”

  That drew the biiiiiig laughs. Meeks doubled over. Newsmen pulled their notebooks and wrote up the shtick.

  44

  (LOS ANGELES, 10:30 P.M., 1/29/42)

  Dr. Nort shooed the cops out. They hit the yard and mingled with the press. Sid Hudgens made a liquor-store run and juiced the whole gang.

  Breuning and Carlisle dished out stale rumaki. Thad Brown sloshed bourbon in coffee cups. Buzz Meeks snoozed on the grass. Lee Blanchard was off canvassing. Elmer Jackson plain vanished.

  Ashida walked back inside and cased the dead men. He’d photographed them at 1:00 p.m. and reshot them at 8:00. They were rigor-locked and lightly liv
id the first time. They were full stiff now. Blood expanded their ankle and foot tissues. That meant they died sitting down.

  Dr. Nort wheeled up an arc light. He strapped a surgeon’s lamp around his forehead.

  “We’re not here to strictly determine cause of death, unless something jumps up and bites us. I’ll do the formal autopsies at the morgue. This is a triple the likes of which I’ve never seen. I’d like to examine them within the context of this equally unique place we have here.”

  Joan said, “I haven’t even begun the inventory.”

  Ashida said, “You have three men, near-identically posed. That suggests that the killer or killers rearranged their bodies postmortem.”

  Dr. Nort shook his head. “Yes, to an indeterminate degree. But the first thing that comes to mind for me is that they all appear to have died while struggling for breath, which suggests three men, insensate from the ingestion of narcotics, who died of toxic exsanguination within short intervals of one another.”

  Joan said, “They would have flailed then, Doctor. There’s a certain symmetry in the way they’re posed on the couch.”

  Ashida tugged the Mexican’s left biceps. He got no flex and no give.

  “The approximate time of death, sir?”

  Dr. Nort said, “I took rectal temperatures the moment I got here. I’m calling it 2:00 to 4:00 a.m.”

  Ashida deployed Man Camera. He panned the couch and framed the three men. He studied their clothes first.

  The Mexican wore slit-bottom khakis and black leather oxfords with crepe soles. Plus a white undershirt and striped zoot coat. Crepe-sole oxfords were burglars’ shoes.

  Rice wore brown wingtips and gray flannel slacks. He wore a cross-draw belt gun on his left hip. Plus a blue sport coat and loud Hawaiian shirt.

  Ashida extrapolated. The Man Camera revealed this: