When Billy Boyle was cut loose from Chino, he had a free week in L.A. before his army induction and went looking for Cora. He found her hooked on ether at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah, seeing voodoo visions, servicing customers as Coroloa, the African Slave Queen. He got her out of there, eased her off the dope with steambaths and vitamin B-12 shots, then ditched her to fight for Uncle Sam. Something snapped in her brain when Billy left, and, still vamped on Wallace Simpkins, she started writing him at Quentin. Knowing his affinity for voodoo, she smuggled in some slave-queen smut pictures taken of her at the Casbah, and they got a juicy correspondence going. Meanwhile, Cora went to work at Mickey Cohen’s southside numbers mill, and everything looked peachy. Then Simpkins came out of Big Q, the voodoo sex fantasy stuff became tepid reality, and the Voodoo Man himself went back to stickups, exploiting her connections to the white criminal world.
When Cora finished her story, we were skirting the edge of High Darktown. It was dusk; the temperature was easing off; the neon signs of the Western Avenue juke joints had just started flashing. Cora lit a cigarette and said, “All Billy’s people is from around here. If he’s lookin’ for a hideout or a travelin’ stake, he’d hit the clubs on West Jeff. Wallace wouldn’t show his evil face around here, ’less he’s lookin’ for Billy, which I figure he undoubtedly is. I—”
I interrupted, “I thought Billy came from a square-john family. Wouldn’t he go to them?”
Cora’s look said I was a lily-white fool. “Ain’t no square-john families around here, ’ceptin those who work domestic. West Adams was built on bootleggin’, sweetie. Black sellin’ white lightnin’ to black, gettin’ fat, then investin’ white. Billy’s folks was runnin’ shine when I was in pigtails. They’re respectable now, and they hates him for takin’ a jolt. He’ll be callin’ in favors at the clubs, don’t you worry.”
I hung a left on Western, heading for Jefferson Boulevard.
“How do you know all this?”
“I am from High, High Darktown, sweet.”
“Then why do you hold on to that Aunt Jemima accent?”
Cora laughed. “And I thought I sounded like Lena Horne. Here’s why, sweetcakes. Black woman with a law degree they call ‘nigger.’ Black girl with three-inch heels and a shiv in her purse they call ‘baby.’ You dig?”
“I dig.”
“No, you don’t. Stop the car, Tommy Tucker’s club is on the next block.”
I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and pulled to the curb. Cora got out ahead of me and swayed around the corner on her three-inch heels, calling, “I’ll go in,” over her shoulder. I waited underneath a purple neon sign heralding Tommy Tucker’s Playroom. Cora come out five minutes later, saying, “Billy was in here ’bout half an hour ago. Touched the barman for a double saw.”
“Simpkins?”
Cora shook her head. “Ain’t been seen.”
I hooked a finger in the direction of the car. “Let’s catch him.”
For the next two hours we followed Billy Boyle’s trail through High Darktown’s nightspots. Cora went in and got the information, while I stood outside like a white wallflower, my gun unholstered and pressed to my leg, waiting for a voodoo killer with a tommy gun to aim and fire. Her info was always the same: Boyle had been in, had made a quick impression with his army threads, had gotten a quick touch based on his rep, and had practically run out the door. And no one had seen Wallace Simpkins.
11 p.m. found me standing under the awning of Hanks’ Swank Spot, feeling pinpricks all over my exhausted body. Square-john negro kids cruised by waving little American flags out of backseat windows, still hopped up that the war was over. Male and female, they all had mug-shot faces that kept my trigger finger at half-pull even though I knew damn well they couldn’t be him. Cora’s sojourn inside was running three times as long as her previous ones, and when a car backfired and I aimed at the old lady behind the wheel, I figured High Darktown was safer with me off the street and went in to see what was keeping Cora.
The Swank Spot’s interior was Egyptian: silk wallpaper embossed with pharaohs and mummies, papier-mâché pyramids surrounding the dance floor, and a long bar shaped like a crypt lying sideways. The patrons were more contemporary: negro men in double-breasted suits and women in evening gowns who looked disapprovingly at my rumpled clothes and two-and-a-half-day beard.
Ignoring them, I eyeballed in vain for Cora. Her soiled pink dress would have stood out like a beacon amid the surrounding hauteur, but all the women were dressed in pale white and sequined black. Panic was rising inside me when I heard her voice, distorted by bebop, pleading behind the dance floor.
I pushed my way through minglers, dancers, and three pyramids to get to her. She was standing next to a phonograph setup, gesturing at a black man in slacks and a camel-hair jacket. The man was sitting in a folding chair, alternately admiring his manicure and looking at Cora like she was dirt.
The music was reaching a crescendo; the man smiled at me; Cora’s pleas were engulfed by saxes, horns, and drums going wild. I flashed back to my Legion days—rabbit punches and elbows and scrubbing my laces into cuts during clinches. The past two days went topsy-turvy, and I kicked over the phonograph. The Benny Goodman sextet exploded into silence, and I aimed my piece at the man and said, “Tell me now.”
Shouts rose from the dance floor, and Cora pressed herself into a toppled pyramid. The man smoothed the pleats in his trousers and said, “Cora’s old flame was in about half an hour ago, begging. I turned him down, because I respect my origins and hate snitches. But I told him about an old mutual friend—a soft touch. Another Cora flame was in about ten minutes ago, asking after flame number one. Seems he has a grudge against him. I sent him the same place.”
I croaked, “Where?” and my voice sounded disembodied to my own ears.
The man said, “No. You can apologize now, officer. Do it, and I won’t tell my good friends Mickey Cohen and Inspector Waters about your behavior.”
I stuck my gun in my waistband and pulled out an old Zippo I used to light suspects’ cigarettes. Sparking a flame, I held it inches from a stack of brocade curtains. “Remember the Coconut Grove?”
The man said, “You wouldn’t,” and I touched the flame to the fabric. It ignited immediately, and smoke rose to the ceiling. Patrons were screaming “Fire!” in the club proper. The brocade was fried to a crisp when the man shrieked, “John Downey,” ripped off his camel-hair, and flung it at the flames. I grabbed Cora and pulled her through the club, elbowing and rabbit-punching panicky revelers to clear a path. When we hit the sidewalk, I saw that Cora was sobbing. Smoothing her hair, I whispered hoarsely, “What, babe, what?”
It took a moment for Cora to find a voice, but when she spoke, she sounded like a college professor. “John Downey’s my father. He’s very big around here, and he hates Billy because he thinks Billy made me a whore.”
“Where does he li—”
“Arlington and Country Club.”
We were there within five minutes. This was High, High Darktown—Tudor estates, French chateaus, and Moorish villas with terraced front lawns. Cora pointed out a plantation-style mansion and said, “Go to the side door. Thursday’s the maid’s night off, and nobody’ll hear you if you knock at the front.”
I stopped the car across the street and looked for other out-of-place vehicles. Seeing nothing but Packards, Caddys, and Lincolns nestled in driveways, I said, “Stay put. Don’t move, no matter what you see or hear.”
Cora nodded mutely. I got out and ran over to the plantation, hurdling a low iron fence guarded by a white iron jockey, then treading down a long driveway. Laughter and applause issued from the adjoining mansion, separated from the Downey place by a high hedgerow. The happy sounds covered my approach, and I started looking in windows.
Standing on my toes and moving slowly toward the back of the house, I saw rooms festooned with crewelwork wall hangings and hunting prints. Holding my face up to within a few inches of the glass, I looked for shadow movement
and listened for voices, wondering why all the lights were on at close to midnight.
Then faceless voices assailed me from the next window down. Pressing my back to the wall, I saw that the window was cracked for air. Cocking an ear toward the open space, I listened.
“… and after all the setup money I put in, you still had to knock down those liquor stores?”
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.
PART III
KILLER VIEWS
THE PEOPLE ACROSS THE CANYON
BY MARGARET MILLAR
L.A. Canyon
(Originally published in 1962)
The first time the Bortons realized that someone had moved into the new house across the canyon was one night in May when they saw the rectangular light of a television set shining in the picture window. Marion Borton knew it had to happen eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept the idea of neighbors in a part of the country she and Paul had come to consider exclusively their own.
They had discovered the site, had bought six acres, and built the house over the objections of the bank, which didn’t like to lend money on unimproved property, and of their friends, who thought the Bortons were foolish to move so far out of town. Now other people were discovering the spot, and here and there through the eucalyptus trees and the live oaks, Marion could see half-finished houses.
But it was the house directly across the canyon that bothered her most; she had been dreading this moment ever since the site had been bulldozed the previous summer.
“There goes our privacy.” Marion went over and snapped off the television set, a sign to Paul that she had something on her mind which she wanted to transfer to his. The transference, intended to halve the problem, often merely doubled it.
“Well, let’s have it,” Paul said, trying to conceal his annoyance.
“Have what?”
“Stop kidding around. You don’t usually cut off Perry Mason in the middle of a sentence.”
“All I said was, there goes our privacy.”
“We have plenty left,” Paul said.
“You know how sounds carry across the canyon.”
“I don’t hear any sounds.”
“You will. They probably have ten or twelve children and a howling dog and a sports car.”
“A couple of children wouldn’t be so bad—at least Cathy would have someone to play with.”
Cathy was eight, in bed now, and ostensibly asleep, with the night light on and her bedroom door open just a crack.
“She has plenty of playmates at school,” Marion said, pulling the drapes across the window so that she wouldn’t have to look at the exasperating rectangle of light across the canyon. “Her teacher tells me Cathy gets along with everyone and never causes any trouble. You talk as if she’s deprived or something.”
“It would be nice if she had more interests, more children of her own age around.”
“A lot of things would be nice if. I’ve done my best.”
Paul knew it was true. He’d heard her issue dozens of weekend invitations to Cathy’s schoolmates. Few of them came to anything. The mothers offered various excuses: poison oak, snakes, mosquitoes in the creek at the bottom of the canyon, the distance of the house from town in case something happened and a doctor was needed in a hurry … these excuses, sincere and valid as they were, embittered Marion. “For heaven’s sake, you’d think we lived on the moon or in the middle of a jungle.”
“I guess a couple of children would be all right,” Marion said. “But please, no sports car.”
“I’m afraid that’s out of our hands.”
“Actually, they might even be quite nice people.”
“Why not? Most people are.”
Both Marion and Paul had the comfortable feeling that something had been settled, though neither was quite sure what. Paul went over and turned the television set back on. As he had suspected, it was the doorman who’d killed the nightclub owner with a baseball bat, not the blonde dancer or her young husband or the jealous singer.
It was the following Monday that Cathy started to run away.
Marion, ironing in the kitchen and watching a quiz program on the portable set Paul had given her for Christmas, heard the school bus groan to a stop at the top of the driveway. She waited for the front door to open and Cathy to announce in her high thin voice, “I’m home, Mommy.”
The door didn’t open.
From the kitchen window Marion saw the yellow bus round the sharp curve of the hill like a circus cage full of wild captive children screaming for release.
Marion waited until the end of the program, trying to convince herself that another bus had been added to the route and would come along shortly, or that Cathy had decided to stop off at a friend’s house and would telephone any minute. But no other bus appeared, and the telephone remained silent.
Marion changed into her hiking boots and started off down the canyon, avoiding the scratchy clumps of chapparal and the creepers of poison oak that looked like loganberry vi
nes.
She found Cathy sitting in the middle of the little bridge that Paul had made across the creek out of two fallen eucalyptus trees. Cathy’s short plump legs hung over the logs until they almost touched the water. She was absolutely motionless, her face hidden by a straw curtain of hair. Then a single frog croaked a warning of Marion’s presence and Cathy responded to the sound as if she was more intimate with nature than adults were, and more alert to its subtle communications of danger.
She stood up quickly, brushing off the back of her dress and drawing aside the curtain of hair to reveal eyes as blue as the periwinkles that hugged the banks of the creek.
“Cathy.”
“I was only counting waterbugs while I was waiting. Forty-one.”
“Waiting for what?”
“The ten or twelve children, and the dog.”
“What ten or twelve chil—” Marion stopped. “I see. You were listening the other night when we thought you were asleep.”
“I wasn’t listening,” Cathy said righteously. “My ears were hearing.”
Marion restrained a smile. “Then I wish you’d tell those ears of yours to hear properly. I didn’t say the new neighbors had ten or twelve children, I said they might have. Actually, it’s very unlikely. Not many families are that big these days.”
“Do you have to be old to have a big family?”
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