by James Ellroy
Goose bumps: Susie Lefferts' boyfriend the Cathcart impersonator. "The ruckus": the boyfriend kills Cathcart--probably in San Berdoo to talk to the Engleklings. Susie at the Nite Owl, scoping out some kind of meeting, the boyfriend playing Cathcart--which meant the killers never saw the real Cathcart face-to-face.
THE BOYFRIEND CRAWLING AROUND UNDER THE HOUSE.
Bud got the phone, the operator, an L.A. number: P.C. Bell police information. A clerk came on. "Yes, who's requesting?"
"Sergeant W. White, LAPD. I'm in San Bernardino at RAnchview 04617. I need a list of all calls to Los Angeles from that number, say from March 20 to April 12, 1953. Got that?"
The clerk said, "I copy." Seconds, two minutes plus, the clerk back on. "Three calls, Sergeant. April 2 and April 8, all to the same number, HO-21 118. That's a pay phone, the corner of Sunset and Las Palmas."
Bud hung up. Phone booth calls a half mile from the Nite Owl; the deal or the meet worked out--extra cautious.
Hilda fretted Kleenex. Bud saw a flashlight on an end table. He grabbed it, ran with it.
Outside to the add-on, a foundation crawispace--one tight fit. Down, under, in.
Dirt, wood pilings, a long burlap sack up ahead. Smells: mothballs, rot. An elbow crawl to the bag--mothballs and rot getting stronger. He poked the sack, saw a rat's nest explode.
All around him: rats blinded by light.
Bud ripped burlap. In with the flashlight, rats, a skull caked with gristle. Drop the flash, rip two-handed, rats and mothballs in his face. A huge rip, a bullet hole in the skull, a skeleton hand out a sleeve--"D.C." on flannel.
He crawled out gulping air. Hilda Lefferts was right there. Her eyes said, "Please God, not that."
Clean air; clean daylight almost blinding. White light gave him the idea--his shiv at Exley.
A scandal mag leak. A guy at _Whisper_ owed him--a pinko rag, they bled for Commies and jigs and hated cops.
Hilda, about to shit her drawers. "Was . . . there . . . anything under there?"
"Nothing but some rats. I want you to stay put, though. I'm gonna bring back some mugshots for you to look at."
"May I have that last check?"
The envelope--flecked with rat droppings. "Here. Compliments of Captain Ed Exley."
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
A nice interrogation room-- no bolted-down chairs, no piss smell. Jack looked at Ed Exley. "I knew I was in the shit, but I didn't think I rated the top dog."
Exley: "You're probably wondering why you haven't been suspended."
Jack stretched. His uniform chafed--he hadn't worn it since 1945. Exley looked creepy--skinny, gray-haired, rimless glasses that made his eyes come off brutal. "I was wondering. My guess is Ellis had seconds thoughts on the complaint he filed. Bad publicity and all that."
Exley shook his head. "Loew considers you a liability to his career and his marriage, and leaving that crime scene and assaulting that officer are enough in themselves to warrant a suspension and a dismissal."
"Yeah? Then why haven't I been suspended?"
"Because for the moment I've interceded with Loew and Chief Parker. Any other questions?"
"Yeah, where's the tape recorder and the steno?"
"I didn't want them here."
Jack pulled his chair up. "Captain, what _do_ you want?"
"I'll throw that back at you. Do you want to flush your career down the toilet or would you like to skate for a few months and cash Out your twenty?"
Easy: Karen's face when he told her. "Okay, I'll play. Now what do you want?"
Exley leaned close. "In the spring of '53 your friend and business associate Sid Hudgens was murdered and two detectives who worked the case under Russ Millard told me you referred to Hudgens as 'scum' and were visibly agitated on the morning his body was discovered. During this time frame Dudley Smith asked you to tail Bud White, and you agreed. During this time frame the Nite Owl case was active and you worked a pornography investigation with Ad Vice and repeatedly submitted no-lead reports, when your long-standing procedure was to jam every report you wrote full of filler. During this time two men, Peter and Barter Englekling, came forward to offer state's evidence on an alleged pornography link to the Nite Owl. Russ Millard queried you on it, you went along with your 'no leads' routine. Throughout the smut investigation you repeatedly urged that the job be dropped. Those same two detectives, Sergeants Fisk and Kieckner, overheard you urging Ellis Loew to soft-pedal the Hudgens investigation, and one of your fellow Ad Vice officers recalls you as being atypically nervous throughout the smut job and absent from the squadroom for unusually long periods of time. Put it all together for me, would you, Jack?"
Ten counts guilty--he knew he was gawking, blinking, twitching. "How . . . the . . . fuck did you . . ."
"It doesn't matter. Now let's hear your interpretation of what I want."
Jack caught some breath. "Okay, so I tailed Bud White. Dud was afraid he'd go apeshit over some hooker snuff, 'cause White had that tendency where young stuff was concerned. Okay, so I tailed him and didn't pick up anything worth a damn. You and White hate each other, everyone knows it. You figure someday he'll try to get you for your job on Dick Stensland and you'll cut me slack with Loew and Parker in exchange for some dirt on him. _Is that what you want?_"
"Call that twenty percent of it and give me something you learned about White."
"Such as?"
"How about him and women?"
"White likes women, but that's no news flash."
"IAD ran a personal on White after he passed the sergeant's exam. The report had him seeing a woman named Lynn Bracken. Did White know her back in '53?"
Jack shrugged. "I don't know. I never heard that name."
"Vincennes, your face says you're a liar, but put the Bracken woman aside, she doesn't interest me. Was White seeing Inez Soto during the time you were tailing him?"
He almost laughed. "No, not while I had my tail on him. Is that what you're so worked up on? You think White and your--"
Exley raised a hand. "I'm not going to ask you if you killed Hudgens, I'm not going to make you put that spring together for me, not yet and maybe never. Just give me your opinion on something. You were up to your ears on the smut job _and_ you worked the Nite Owl. Do you make the three Negroes for the killings?"
Jack inched back--get away from those eyes. "There's loose ends out there, I knew it then. If it wasn't the three you got, maybe it was some other spooks, maybe they knew where Coates hid his car and planted the shotguns. Maybe it's tied to the smut. Do you care? Those niggers raped your woman, so what you did was right. What's this about, Captain?"
Exley smiled. Jack pegged it: a man sticking one foot off a cliff, hopping on one leg. "Captain, what's this--"
"No, my motives are my business, and here's my first guess. Hudgens was connected to the smut somehow, and he had a file on you. That's why you were all over that mess."
Quicksand. "Yeah, I did something really bad once. You know . . . shit, sometimes I think . . . sometimes I think I don't care who finds out anymore."
Exley stood up. "I've already squared the complaints against you. There'll be no trial board, no charges. Part of the agreement I made with Chief Parker is a stipulation that you voluntarily retire in May. I told him you'd agree, and I convinced him that you deserve a full pension. He didn't question my motives, and I don't want you to question them either."
Jack stood up. "And the trade?"
"If the Nite Owl ever goes wide, you and everything you know belong to me."
Jack stuck out his hand. "Jesus, you turned into a cold son of a bitch."
CALENDAR
FEBRUARY--MARCH 1958
_Whisper_ Magazine, February 1958 issue:
WRONG MAN KILLED IN
NITE OWL SLAUGHTER?
WEB OF MYSTERY SPREADS...
You remember the Nite Owl brouhaha, don't you? On April 14, 1953, three shotgun-toting killers entered the convivial Nite Owl Coffee Shop, just off Hollywood Bo
ulevard in sunny Los Angeles, robbed and murdered three employees and three patrons and got away with an estimated three hundred scoots, which divided by six comes to about fifty bucks a life. The Los Angeles Police Department threw itself into the case with characteristic zeal, arrested three young Negro men on suspicion of committing the murders and also charged them with kidnapping and raping a young Mexican girl. The LAPD was not quite certain that the three Negroes--Raymond "Sugar Ray" Coates, Tyrone Jones and Leroy Fontaine--committed the Nite Owl killings, but they were sure that the young men were the rapists of Inez Soto, 21, a college student. The Nite Owl investigation continued, with much attendant publicity and great pressure on the LAPD to solve L.A.'s "Crime of the Century."
The LAPD pursued fruitless leads for two weeks, then discovered the murder weapons inside Ray Coates' car, stored in an abandoned South Los Angeles garage. Shortly after that, Coates, Jones and Fontaine escaped from the Hall of Justice Jail . .
Enter a young police detective: Sergeant Edmund J. Exley of the LAPD. World War II hero, UCLA grad, informant against his fellow cops in the 1951 "Bloody Christmas" police brutality scandal and the son of construction mogul Preston Exley, the builder of Raymond Dieterling's mammoth Dream-a-Dreamland and the massive Southern California freeway system. The plot thickens .
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley was in love with rape victim Inez Soto.
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley located, shot and killed Raymond Coates, Tyrone Jones and Leroy Fontaine, with--poetic justice--a shotgun.
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley was promoted (two whole ranks!!!) to captain a week later, a large reward for his justice-by-the-sword resolution of a case the LAPD needed to solve quicksville in order to ensure perpetuation of its (overblown?) reputation.
Item: _Captain_ Ed Exley (a rich kid with a substantial private trust fund left to him by his late mother) soon became very cozy with Inez Soto and bought her a house down the block from his apartment.
Item: we at _Whisper_ have it on very good authority that Raymond Coates, Leroy Fontaine, Tyrone Jones and the man who was sheltering them--Roland Navarette--were unarmed when hero Ed Exley gunned them down . . . and, now, nearly five years since the Nite Owl killings, the plot thickens again .
Now, _Whisper_ is the underdog of what the squaresyule press calls "Scandal Sheet Journalism." We're not the mighty _Hush-Hush_, we're based out of New York and our beat is primarily the East Coast. But we do have our L.A. sources, and among them is a crusading private eye who wishes to remain anonymous. This man has been obsessed with the Nite Owl case for years, has investigated it extensively and has come up with some startling revelations. This man, whom we shall call "Private Eye X," spoke to _Whisper_ correspondents and revealed the following:
Private Eye eye-tem: during the Nite Owl investigation, two brothers, _Peter and Baxter Englekling_, printshop operators from San Bernardino, California, came forth and told authorities an account of how _Nite Owl victim Delbert "Duke" Cathcart_ approached them with a plan to print pornographic material, then theorized that the Nite Owl killings were the result of intrigue within the pornography underworld. The LAPD poohpoohed the brothers' theory in their haste to pin the crime on the Negroes, and now the Engleklings seem to have disappeared off the face of the globe .
Private Eye eye-tem: Mrs. Hilda Lefferts, mother of San Bernardino born and bred _Nite Owl victim Susan Nancy Lefferts_, told Private Eye X that immediately before the killings her daughter had a mysterious, unnamed boyfriend who greatly resembled Duke Cathcart, and she even heard him tell Susan Nancy: "Call me 'Duke.' Get used to the idea."!!! Mrs. Lefferts could not identifyr the man from privately hoarded mugshots that Private Eye X showed her. X then developed what we consider an x-cellent and x-citing theory!
X theory eye-tem: we think that mystery boyfriend X killed Duke Cathcart in an attempt to take over his pornography business, impersonated Duke Cathcart and wound up at the Nite Owl Coffee Shop to do biz with the three men who perpetrated the slaughter. Susan Nancy sat nearby in order to watch her boyfriend wheel and deal. Private Eye X offers the following unimpeachable evidence as proof:
Mrs. Lefferts said boyfriend X looked just like Duke Cathcart.
The body identified as Cathcart's was too decimated to correctly ID. The coroner's final identification was based on a _partial_ dental plate reconstruction crosschecked against Cathcart's prison dental records--yet other prison records listed Cathcart's height at 5'8", while the body discovered at the Nite Owl was 5' 9¼". All in all, unmistakable proof that an impersonator, not Duke Cathcart, was killed at the Nite Owl Coffee Shop . .
X-citing x-trapolations that we believe will lead to some x-tremely interesting revelations, x-asperate the trigger-happy Los Angeles Police Department and perhaps x-onerate the three Negroes falsely accused of the Nite Owl killings. We at _Whisper_ urge the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to x-hume the bodies of the Nite Owl victims; we x-coriate Captain Ed Exley for his cold-blooded murder of four societal victims and x-pressly petition the LAPD: redeem your old wrongs in the name of justice! Reopen the Nite Owl case!!!
EXTRACT: San Francisco _Chronicle_, February 27:
GAITSVILLE SLAYINGS BAFFLE POLICE
Gaitsville, Calif., Feb. 27, 1958--A bizarre double murder has the citizens of Gaitsville, a small town sixty miles north of San Francisco, scared--and the Mann County Sheriff's baffled.
Two days ago, the bodies of Peter and Barter Englekling, 41 and 37, were discovered at their apartment next door to the printshop where they were employed as typesetters. The two brothers, in the words of Mann County Sheriff's Lieutenant Eugene Hatcher, were "shady characters with criminal connections." The lieutenant guardedly elaborated to Chronicle reporter George Woods.
"Both Engleklings had criminal records for narcotics offenses," Lieutenant Hatcher said. "Granted, they've been clean for a number of years, but they were still shady characters. For instance, they were working at the printing shop under assumed names. So far we have no clues, but we do think we're dealing with a torturefor-information scenario."
The Englekling brothers worked at Rapid Bob's Printing on East Verdugo Road in Gaitsville and lived in the apartment building next door. Their employer, Robert Dunkquist, 53, knew the pair as Pete and Bar Girard, and discovered their bodies on Tuesday morning. "Pete and Bar had worked for me for a year and they were as regular as clockwork. When they were late for work on Tuesday I knew something was up. Also, the shop had been ransacked and I wanted them to help me find the culprits."
The Englekling brothers, whose true identities were revealed by a fingerprint teletype check, were shot to death, and Lieutenant Hatcher is certain the killer used a .38 revolver equipped with a silencer. "Our baffistics man found iron shavings embedded in the rounds we took out of the victims. This indicates a silencer and also indicates why the neighbors never reported any shots."
Lieutenant Hatcher would not reveal the status of his investigation, but he did state that all the standard investigatory approaches are being utilized. He stated that both victims were tortured prior to being shot, but would not describe the crime scene. "We want to keep that knowledge private," he said. "Sometimes publicityseeking lunatics confess to crimes like this, even though they didn't commit them. Keeping your facts private helps eliminate the guilty from the innocent."
Peter and Barter Englekling have no known living relatives, and their bodies are being held at the Gaitsville city coroner's office. Lieutenant Hatcher urged all parties who might have information concerning the homicides to contact the Mann County Sheriff's Department.
EXTRACT: San Francisco _Examiner_, March 1:
MURDER VICTIMS LINKED TO CELEBRATED
LOS ANGELES CRIME
Peter and Barter Englekling, murder victims killed in Gaitsville, California, on February 25, were material wimesses in the famous Nite Owl murder case that occurred in Los Angeles in April 1953, Mann County Sheriff's Lieutenant Eugene Hatcher revealed today.
"We got an anonymous tip on it yeste
rday," Lieutenant Hatcher told the _Examiner_. "A man just called in the information, then hung up. We verified it with the D.A.'s Bureau down in L.A., and they said it was true. I don't think it has anything to do with our case, but I called the Los Angeles Police Department anyway and ran it by them. They gave me the brush-off, so I say the heck with them."
EXTRACT: L.A. _Daily News_, March 6:
NITE OWL REDIVIVUS--SHOCKING NEW
REVELATIONS POINT TO INNOCENT MEN
KILLED
This is an ugly story. The _Daily News_, frankly Los Angeles' only exposé-oriented newspaper and the only Southland paper proud to call itself "muckraking," does not shy away from such stories. This story punctures the hero image of a man considered by many to be a perfect exemplar of law-and-order righteousness, and when heroes possess feet of clay, we at the _Daily News_ believe that it is our duty to expose their shortcomings to public scrutiny. The issues here are great, as notable as the crime that spawned them, so we are frankly sending up a muckraking hue and cry. That hue and cry: the infamous Nite Owl murder case--six people brutally robbed and shotgunned to death at a Hollywood coffee shop in April 1953--was solved incorrectly, at a great cost to justice. We want to see the case reopened and true justice achieved.
Raymond Coates, Leroy Fontaine and Tyrone Jones--do you recall those names? They were the three Negro youths, criminals and sex offenders to be sure, who were railroaded by the Los Angeles Police Department. Arrested shortly after the Nite Owl murders, they offered a heffish alibi: they could not have committed the killings because they were engaged in the kidnap and gang rape of a young woman named Inez Soto. They abused Miss Soto at a deserted building in South Los Angeles, then confessed that they drove her around and "sold her out" to their friends for more sexual abuse. They left Miss Soto with a man named Sylvester Fitch, and an LAPD officer shot and killed him while effecting the brave young woman's escape.