by James Ellroy
“I could say the same about you, lad.”
“Yes, but I am more high-strung to begin with. I have never possessed your most serene composure.”
They slouched in Dudley’s prowl sled. They’d parked up from Hollenbeck Station. They had a clear front-door view.
The sweep stood complete. They’d observed the haul-ins. Nine fish were now jailed. Salvy tagged three Sinarquistas. Miguel Santarolo, Frankie Carbajal, Mondo Díaz. Hard boys all. Salvy said they’d never roll and bleat.
Dudley chain-smoked. His throat felt raw. His nerves ran raw, besides. Hideo called him, pre-sweep. Hideo tattled an odd chat with Elmer Jackson.
Elmer tumbled to the three-case convergence. He wouldn’t say how. He knew about the gold and fixated on the fire. A three-case principal must have killed his brother. Elmer believed it. Elmer vowed revenge.
It was unsettling. Hideo’s punch line troubled him.
Elmer and Buzz Meeks killed Tommy Glennon. The act redeemed Elmer’s New Year’s Eve fuckup. The act proclaimed a vow of fealty to one D. L. Smith. Hideo foisted his gold bar on Elmer. Hideo urged him to confess to Father D. L. Smith. The gold gift seems justified. How Elmer tumbled remains perplexing.
Salvy lit a cigarette. “You needn’t concern yourself as to what my boys might reveal about our plans. They know very little, and I’ll secure them a lawyer and post bail in the morning. This klubhaus mess will subside and resolve at some point, and I’ll keep my boys sequestered until then.”
Elmer Jackson showed. He walked out of the station. He lit a cigar and stretched loose some kinks. He looked disheveled. He was coatless and sported a badly stained white shirt.
Dudley beeped the horn and flashed his high beams. Elmer looked over. Dudley got out and stood on the sidewalk. Elmer ambled on up.
He leaned against a streetlamp. It backlit him nicely. The stains were wet blood.
Elmer said, “Forgive my appearance, Dud. A suspect got between me and Buzz.”
“Turner Meeks is a vivid interlocutor. He’s been known to lose patience with rowdy Mexicans. Might you tell me the suspect’s name?”
“Frankie Carbajal.”
“I’m assuming that he rolled in the end.”
“Such as it was, boss. He said the Sinarquistas are planning some 211s, and they plan to use some guns that Rice and Kapek sold them. Archie Archuleta brought girls to the haus, which don’t surprise me at all. Frankie was hipped on some queer jazz-club geek and some Jap with a sword fetish.”
Bland revelations. Ho-hum. Nothing catastrophic there.
Elmer pointed to the car. “Who’s the cholo?”
Dudley smiled. “He hardly concerns you.”
Elmer smiled. “Tommy Glennon concerns both of us. Buzz and me clipped him, in case you didn’t get that from Hideo already. I don’t expect an attaboy on it, but I’d sure like you to acknowledge the favor we did.”
Dudley said, “Muted bravos, Elmer.”
“Don’t you want to know what he spilled?”
“I was getting to that, yes.”
Elmer blew smoke rings. “He laid out some old news. You and Carlos Madrano ran wets, and Joe Hayes was his bun boy. He tried to squeeze you when you saw him up at Quentin last year, but he didn’t say what with.”
Dudley lit a cigarette. It was a gaffe. His hand trembled. Elmer caught it.
“I had quite the chat with Hideo. He told me that you’ve put some things together since the last time we spoke. I’m wondering how you came upon what you learned.”
Elmer stretched and rubbed his back against the streetlamp. He was milking this. You overreaching bumpkin, I will kill—
“I was over at Joan Conville’s place about a week before she died. I was putting some moves on her, but it wasn’t going my way. Joanie was terped, and she was mumbling about the gold heist and the fire. She kept fading in and out, and she talked up a diary before she passed out for real. I tossed the place, found it, and read it. It was mostly woo-woo about you and Bill Parker, but she wrote up her forensic shit with Hideo pretty good. I put some threads together, and figured the three of you were out for the gold. I put the diary back where I found it, kissed Joanie good night, and scrammed.”
Vivid verismo. Elmer Jackson in quintessence. Woman-crazed and self-seeking. Less than half smart.
“Sally forth, lad. Keep the gold bar. Kill your brother’s killer with my most fond regards.”
96
KAY LAKE’S DIARY
(LOS ANGELES, 11:30 P.M., 3/10/42)
I watched the Maestro compose. We sat at his piano; Otto picked out low-register chords and jotted notes on a scratch pad. He was working on the nightmare tone poem we had discussed several times. Otto encouraged me to improvise at the moments his imagination faltered. I filled in with passages from the three Bartók concerti; I was undermining Otto’s more foreboding motifs. My mission was therapeutic more than anything else. I was seeking to derail the Maestro’s darkly foreboding moods and loosen the hold of his formal therapist: the darkly corrupt Saul Lesnick.
Otto hit chords as I smoked and sipped brandy. Once again, I studied the piece of paper secured by the sheet-music stand. Words by Meyer Gelb and W. H. Auden. Once again, I came up against Comrade Gelb’s old Communist cell.
This storm, this savaging disaster.
Otto tapped the music stand and smiled at me. He said, “When I compose, I must always immerse myself in the mood the music attempts to express. Here, we have the chaos of my brain tumor and the muted light of my recovery, with recapitulative passages depicting the ongoing slog of the war.”
I hit a series of random chords, up and down the keyboard. They were meant to represent the overlapping jabber of the too-rude and too-voluble guests at Otto’s all-too-frequent parties. The chords covertly announced my intention to pump the Maestro for information on Jean Staley.
Otto said, “Tell me what that earsplitting passage represents, and perhaps I shall tell you a compatible tale.”
“Your parties,” I said. “Nesting grounds for parasites, all given to one doctrinaire view. All belligerent and convinced of their own uniqueness.”
Otto laughed and clasped my left hand; he poised it over the keyboard and banged a run of similarly unpleasant chords. I pulled my hand free and laughed with him.
Otto said, “Call it a crude parody of the German tanks approaching Leningrad in Comrade Dimitri’s new symphony, and anoint it the expression of my own loneliness and need to smother it with the company of idiots.”
I laughed and got to the point. “Jean Staley comes to mind there. She seems to have colonized your guesthouse permanently. One might call her ‘the woman who came to dinner.’ ”
Otto found this uproarious. I failed to add “while she’s been dodging a major police inquiry and perpetrating a bewildering mail ruse.”
“Jean has colonized my guesthouse before, and will colonize it again. She is a Communist, you see. She purports to despise private property, even as she appropriates it. She sublets the homes of the rich to suit the whims of the decadent Right, which I find delightfully hilarious.”
I banged right-hand chords up and down the keyboard. “I sense a provocative story, Liebchen.”
“Aaah, Katherine Ann Lake in her vamp mode, and ever the rival of other provocative women.”
“I’m hardly Mata Hari, Liebchen.”
“No, but you are the consort of inquisitive policemen, and I know when I’m being pumped.”
I laughed and covered my mouth. I was once again a conniving schoolgirl in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Otto sipped brandy and lit a cigarette. “I wasn’t there for the party that Jean midwifed, but I had given her my consent to sublet the house, and to do with it as she saw fit. Saul Lesnick had diagnosed my tumor, and I was taking a rest cure prior to my operation. So, I’m afraid my story
lacks the level of detail that might give it a corresponding punch.”
Once again, Saul Lesnick. Once again, Meyer Gelb’s cell. Annie Staples called me early this evening; she told me that she had secured wax impressions of Dr. Saul’s office keys.
“I’ve never minded incomplete stories.”
“I know that about you, dear. You’re quite capable of ascribing your own endings.”
“Otto, you’re taunting me—”
“It was early in ’39. Jean sublet my home for a party she described as having a ‘pro-fascist theme.’ I left the sanitarium and returned here. I immediately felt that something evil had happened in my absence, but I was debilitated, and disinclined to confront Jean as to what might have occurred. I was stuporous from headaches and the medicine that was prescribed to alleviate the pain, so I don’t know where I was or who the other person was when the following occurred.”
The Maestro taunted and teased me. I almost blurted “Don’t string this out.”
Otto hit the tanks-approaching chords from the Leningrad Symphony. They were ever dark and foreboding. The Maestro knew how to build suspense.
“The conclusion, dear Katherine. A man approached me and berated me for living in a haunted house. I beat that man to death.”
I shut my eyes. Otto hit the ominous chords again. I barely heard my own voice.
“And then?”
“And then, I told Dr. Lesnick. And Saul told me he knew an FBI man who could make it all go away, for a goodly amount of money.”
“Was the FBI man Ed Satterlee?”
“Yes.”
“Was Jean Staley the conduit for the financial transaction?”
The Maestro said, “Yes, she was.”
* * *
—
This/storm/this/savaging/disaster/the rain/the gold/the fire/it’s all/one story/you see.
I drove home and sat down at my own piano; I picked out those notes and tried to will a single three-case solution. The gold robbery as genesis; the fire as corresponding catastrophe; the Communist cell as point of constellation. Meyer Gelb, Jean Staley, Saul Lesnick. Ed Satterlee as snitch-recruiter. Otto Klemperer kills a man; Lesnick and Satterlee quash public exposure. The Maestro Manse as a current constellation point. Gelb’s current plan to recruit four exiled musicians and turn them as informants.
Lee was off at Hollenbeck Station; he’d told me the East L.A. sweep should run through the night. The house echoed those twenty-odd notes. My thoughts went nowhere constructive. I thought of Joan through it all.
The doorbell rang; I knew who it was; who else perched and pounced this late?
I got up and opened the door. Bill walked straight past me and beelined to the liquor shelf. I allotted him time to guzzle a tumbler of scotch. I knew all his brusque movements and modes of peremptory address.
He’ll turn to face me. He’ll reveal unsettling moments from the East L.A. sweep. He’ll take me in because I’m the woman he loves, and I hit him in the face ten days ago. I’ll notice the coffee stain on his wilted white shirt.
Bill did just that; the stain was off to the side of his necktie. He stood ten feet away from me and made no move to close the gap. He said, “Thad and I braced a dink named Miguel Santarolo. He said Rice and Kapek sold the Greenshirts a large quantity of Jap guns. He laid out some planned 211s and snitched off Salvy Abascal’s Irish-cop hermano. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Dudley has been murdering priest-killers down in Baja, or that he’s now a slavering fascist convert.”
I sat down on the couch; Bill sat down beside me. I took off his hat and sailed it across the room. It hit the piano and landed on the adjoining carpet. Bill shut his eyes. I put my hand on his chest and felt his heart race.
“Annie made those wax impressions. We’ve got access to Lesnick’s office now.”
“Have Ashida toss it. He’s primed to betray Dudley. There’s a glimmer of decency in him that we can exploit.”
I unbuttoned his shirt and ran my hand over his chest. Bill said, “Oh Jesus, Kay.” He fumbled at my legs and snapped one garter strap. I went dizzy. He kept his hand there and kept his eyes shut.
It was who kisses who now. I pulled off Bill’s shoes and unclipped his holster. He clamped his hand on my hand and held it to his heart. I threw my free hand back and hit the light switch by the couch. It was who kisses who in the dark now.
Bill surprised me there. He pulled me close and touched me under my sweater. We bumped noses and scraped teeth as we kissed in the dark.
97
(LOS ANGELES, 8:00 A.M., 3/11/42)
Mondo “El Tigre” Díaz. He defines intractable. Sweatbox #4’s his new habitat. Ashida played good guy. Blanchard played bad guy. They were ten hours in. They eschewed rough stuff. They fed El Tigre doughnuts and coffee. They plied him with booze and contraband weed.
El Tigre revealed zero. They stressed the Sinarquistas and his Peeping Tom busts. El Tigre came off bemused. He wore a sharkskin zoot suit and a coiled-snake pendant. He sported snarling-tiger tattoos.
Blanchard yawned. Ashida yawned. El Tigre told stale jokes. A lion is fucking a zebra. If a nigger and a Mexican jump off the Taft Building, who hits the ground first? Come-San-Chin, the Chinese cocksucker. That old chestnut.
El Tigre was twenty-nine. He graduated Lincoln High and LAJC. That was enticing. Ashida dispatched the Hollenbeck watch boss. El Tigre came off educated. See what you can find out.
Díaz lit a cigarette. He’d smoked all of his and half of Blanchard’s. He was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
“You guys have been good to me. I’ll concede that. You’ve read me pretty well, too. You know a tough nut to crack when you see one. I got popped for 459, back in ’38. It was a humbug roust. Two jamokes named Dougie Waldner and Fritzie Vogel leaned on me. They were rough boys. I withstood their grief, so you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll withstand yours.”
Blanchard yawned. “That Fritzie’s a mean one. He’s never learned the art of waiting your suspect out.”
Díaz said, “I’m the intransigent type. The day you wait me out will be the twelfth of never.”
Blanchard rolled his eyes. He ruffled the phone book on the table. The ’41 White Pages. Heavy and fat. The classic tell-me-now tool.
Ashida said, “You’re well-spoken, Mondo.”
“For a beaner. That’s what you’re saying.”
“No, I’m saying you’re well-spoken, by any and all standards.”
“Don’t butter me up, Charlie Chan. I’ve been buttered up by experts.”
Blanchard yawned. “Charlie Chan’s a Chink. You’re confusing him with Mr. Moto. Peter Lorre plays him in the movies. I popped that little twerp for possession of morphine. Some studio bulls put the skids to it.”
Ashida yawned. Díaz mock-yawned. Peter Lorre—snoresville. The room buzzer buzzed. Ashida got up and cracked the door.
A bluesuit passed him a folder. “That educational stuff you asked for. LAJC requisitioned it from the U.S. Passport Office. Your pal here did some traveling and raised some eyebrows.”
Ashida nodded. The bluesuit took off. Ashida shut the door and skimmed file pages.
Díaz had a Passport Office green sheet. He’d matriculated in Germany, circa ’35. He attended Dresden Polytechnic. He had a graduate chem degree. He’d joined the Nazi and left-wing Sparticist parties. He built bombs for Franco’s Falange and blew up Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War.
Díaz said, “Mr. Moto’s in a trance. He’s conniving something. He’s the inscrutable yellow man of the East.”
Blanchard said, “What gives?”
Ashida dropped the file and grabbed the phone book. He applied a two-hand grip and a baseball swing and smashed Díaz in the head. He heard his nose snap and watched blood burst. He reversed himself and slammed downward. Díaz whiplashed and jackknifed and bounce
d off the chair.
Blanchard jumped up and stood back. Díaz burrowed into the chair legs and covered his head. Ashida pounded his back. He made like Mr. Moto. He talked pidgin singsong.
“Dresden Polytechnic.”
“Your chem degree.”
“Your conflicting memberships.”
“Fascist or Communist. I’ll hit you until you roll.”
Díaz scrunched down and covered up. Ashida phone-booked him. He hit Díaz in the back, Díaz in the legs, Díaz in the head. He caught side shots of drop-jawed Lee Blanchard. He heard Díaz singsong-yell:
“Fuck Salvy.”
“Fuck his puto Greenshirts.”
“I’m playing the left-right field.”
“I’m in with the real Kameraden.”
“We’ve got cutouts and mail drops and microdots.”
“We’ve got rebop straight from Buck Rogers.”
“We’re running shakedowns and we’ll have spaceships before this war is through.”
“We’re invisible.”
“We’re everywhere.”
“We’ll rule the postwar world.”
“Ask my cutout, Two-Gun Davis. Ask sub-Führer Meyer Gelb. We’re invisible and we’re everywhere.”
98
(LOS ANGELES, 11:00 A.M., 3/11/42)
Crash Squad confab. The big postmortem. Let’s kick loose leads to death.
The squad ran underweight now. Ashida split for Baja and pressing Army shit. The roster ran Elmer, Buzz, and Lee Blanchard. Plus Bill Parker and Thad Brown.
They hogged the Hollenbeck muster room. Thad brought a jug. They yawned and stretched and crapped out at one long table.
Elmer was bennie-bopped. Ashida’s absence jazzed him and gored him. Ashida grabbed Jean Staley’s postcards. They might contain microdots. That was all good. Ashida foxed him otherwise. He dumped that microdot letter in the mail slot. It would shoot to La Paz. He’d probably snitch the PO box number to Dudley. Ashida was playing Dud ad hoc. Betray him/rat to him/betray him. Ashida ran this treadmill to The Big Where?