“…and I can tell you this, gentlemen: through passive resistance and other Commie shit the UAES is gonna force the Teamsters into kicking some ass, which is gonna make the UAES look good and us look bad. Commies like to get hurt. They’ll eat any amount of shit, smile like it’s filet mignon and ask for seconds, turn the other cheek, then bite you on the ass. Like those pachucos down on Set 23. Zoot suit punks who got themselves a union card, a license to give shit and think their own shit don’t stink. Am I right or is Eleanor Roosevelt a dyke?”
Dudley Smith laughed uproariously. “And a grand quiff diver she is. Dark meat, too, I’ve heard. And we all know about the late Franklin’s bent for little black terriers. Mr. Gerstein, Lieutenant Considine and I would like to thank you for your contributions to our endeavor and your hospitality this morning.”
Mal took the cue and stood up; Herman Gerstein reached into a humidor and grabbed a handful of cigars. Dudley got to his feet; Gerstein came at them like a fullback, pumping hands, stuffing Havanas in all their available pockets, showing them the door with hard back slaps. When it closed behind him, Dudley said, “No flair for language. You can take the Jew out of the gutter, but you can’t take the gutter out of the Jew. Are you ready to interrogate, Captain?”
Mal looked down at the UAES picket line, caught a back view of a woman in slacks and wondered if she was Claire De Haven. “Okay, Lieutenant.”
“Ah, Malcolm, what a grand wit you have!”
They took Herman Gerstein’s private elevator down to ground level and two rows of sound stages separated by a center walkway. The buildings were tan stucco, silo tall and humpbacked at the top, with sandwich boards propped up by the front doors—the name, director and shooting schedule of the movie crayoned on white plastic. Actors riding bicycles—cowboys, Indians, baseball players, Revolutionary War soldiers—whizzed by; motorized carts hauled camera equipment; technicians hobnobbed by a snack cart where a Roman centurion dished out doughnuts and coffee. The enclosed sets extended for nearly a quarter mile, black numbers above the doors marking them. Mal walked ahead of Dudley Smith, running Benavides/Lopez/Duarte file dirt through his head, hoping an on-the-job bracing wasn’t too much, too quick.
Dudley caught up outside Set 23. Mal rang the buzzer; a woman in a saloon girl outfit opened the door and popped her gum at them. Mal displayed his badge and identification. “We’re with the District Attorney’s Office, and we want to speak to Mondo Lopez, Juan Duarte and Sammy Benavides.”
The saloon girl gave her gum a last pop and spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent. “They’re on a take. They’re the hotheaded young Indians who want to attack the fort, but the wise old chief don’t want them to. They’ll be finished in a few minutes, and you can—”
Dudley cut in. “We don’t require a plot synopsis. If you’ll tell them it’s the police, they’ll adjust their busy schedule to accommodate us. And please do it now.”
The girl swallowed her gum and walked in front of them. Dudley smiled; Mal thought: he’s a spellbinder—don’t let him run the show.
The sound stage was cavernous: wire-strewn walls, lights and cameras on dollies, anemic-looking horses tethered to equipment poles and people standing around doing nothing. Right in the middle was an olive drab teepee, obviously fashioned from army surplus material, Indian symbols painted on the sides—candy apple red lacquer—like it was some brave’s customized hot rod. Cameras and tripod lights were fixed on the teepee and the four actors squatting in front of it—an old pseudo-Indian white man and three pseudo-Indian Mexicans in their late twenties.
The saloon girl stopped them a few feet behind the cameras, whispering. “There. The Latin lover types.” The old chief intoned words of peace; the three young braves delivered lines about the white eyes speaking with forked tongue, their voices pure Mex. Someone yelled, “Cut!” and the scene became a blur of moving bodies.
Mal elbowed into it, catching the three pulling cigarettes and lighters out of their buckskins. He made them make him as a cop; Dudley Smith walked over; the braves gave each other spooked looks.
Dudley flashed his shield. “Police. Am I talking to Mondo Lopez, Juan Duarte and Samuel Benavides?”
The tallest brave slipped a rubber band off his pony tail and shaped his hair into a pachuco do—duck’s ass back, pompadour front. He said, “I’m Lopez.”
Mal opened up his end strong. “Care to introduce your friends, Mr. Lopez? We don’t have all day.”
The other two squared their shoulders and stepped forward, the move half bravado, half kowtow to authority. Mal tagged the short, muscular one as Duarte, former Sinarquista squad leader, zoot suits and swastika armbands until the CP brought him around; his lanky pal as Benavides—Mr. Tight Lips to Doc Lesnick, his file a complete bore except for one session devoted to an account of how twelve-year-old Sammy molested his nine-year-old sister, a razor blade to her throat. Both men did a sullen foot dance; Muscles said, “I’m Benavides.”
Mal pointed to a side door, then touched his tie clip—LAPD semaphore for Let Me Run It. “My name’s Considine, and this is Lieutenant Smith. We’re with the DA’s Office, and we’d like to ask you a few questions. It’s just routine, and we’ll have you back at work in a few minutes.”
Juan Duarte said, “We got a choice?”
Dudley chuckled; Mal put a hand on his arm. “Yes. Here or the Hall of Justice jail.”
Lopez cocked his head toward the exit; Benavides and Duarte fell in next to him, lit cigarettes and walked outside. Actors and technicians gawked at the Indian-paleface migration. Mal schemed a razzle-dazzle, himself abrasive at first, then making nice, Dudley asking the hard questions, him playing savior at the end—the big push to glom them as friendly witnesses.
The three halted their march just out the door, leaning against the wall, nonchalant. Dudley stationed himself to the left of Mal, about a half step back. Mal let the men smoke in silence, then said, “Boy, have you guys got it made.”
Three sets of eyes on the ground, three phony Indians in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Mal rattled the leader’s cage. “Can I ask you a question, Mr. Lopez?”
Mondo Lopez looked up. “Sure, Officer.”
“Mr. Lopez, you must be taking home close to a C-note a week. Is that true?”
Mondo Lopez said, “Eighty-one and change. Why?”
Mal smiled. “Well, you’re making almost half as much as I am, and I’m a college graduate and a ranking police officer with sixteen years’ experience. All of you quit high school, isn’t that true?”
A quick look passed among the three. Lopez smirked, Benavides shrugged and Duarte took a long drag on his cigarette. Mal saw them sighting in on his ploy way too soon and tried for sugar. “Look, I’ll tell you why I brought it up. You guys have beat the odds. You ran with the First Street Flats and the Sinarquistas, did some Juvie time and stayed clean. That’s impressive, and we’re not here to roust you for anything you yourselves did.”
Juan Duarte ground out his cigarette. “You mean this is about our friends?”
Mal dredged the files for ammo, grabbing the fact that all three tried to join the service after Pearl Harbor. “Look, I’ve checked your Selective Service records. You quit the Sinarquistas and the Flats, you tried to fight the Japs, you were on the right side with Sleepy Lagoon. When you were wrong you copped to it. That’s the sign of a good man in my book.”
Sammy Benavides said, “Is a stool pigeon a good man in your book, Mr. Po—”
Duarte silenced him with a sharp elbow. “Who you trying to tell us is wrong now? Who you want to be wrong?”
Finally a good opening. “How about the Party, gentlemen? How about Uncle Joe Stalin getting under the sheets with Hitler? How about slave labor camps in Siberia and all the stuff the Party has pulled in America while they condoned the stuff going on over in Russia? Gentlemen, I’ve been a cop for sixteen years and I’ve never asked a man to snitch his friends. But I’ll ask any man to snitch his enemies, especially if they also happen to
be mine.”
Mal caught his breath, thinking of Summations 115 at Stanford Law; Dudley Smith stood easy at his side. Mondo Lopez eyed the blacktop, then his Tomahawk Massacre co-stars. Then all three started clapping.
Dudley flushed; Mal could see his red face going toward purple. Lopez brought a flat palm slowly down, killing the applause. “How about you tell us what this is all about?”
Mal thrashed for file dirt and came up empty. “This is a preliminary investigation into Communist influence in Hollywood. And we’re not asking you to snitch your friends, just our enemies.”
Benavides pointed west, toward the front office and two picket lines. “And this has got nothing to do with Gerstein wanting our union out and the Teamsters in?”
“No, this is a preliminary investigation that has nothing to do with whatever current labor troubles your union is involved in. This is—”
Duarte interrupted. “Why us? Why me and Sammy and Mondo?”
“Because you’re reformed criminals and you’d make damn good witnesses.”
“Because you thought we’d be jail-wise and bleed easy?”
“No, because you’ve been zooters and Reds, and we figured that maybe you had the brains to know it was all shit.”
Benavides kicked in, a leery eye on Dudley. “You know the HUAC Committee pulled this snitch routine, and good people got hurt. Now it’s happening again, and you want us to fink?”
Mal thought of Benavides as a kiddie raper talking decency; he could feel Dudley thinking the same thing, going crazy with it. “Look, I know corruption. The HUAC chairman is in Danbury for bribery, HUAC itself was reckless. And I’ll admit the LAPD screwed up on the Sleepy Lagoon thing. But you can’t tell—”
Mondo Lopez shouted, “Screwed up! Pendejo, it was a fucking pogrom against my people by your people! You’re sweet-talking the wrong people on the wrong case to get the wrong fuck—”
Dudley stepped in front of the three, his suitcoat open, .45 automatic, sap and brass knuckles in plain view. His bulk cast the Mexicans in one big shadow and his brogue went up octaves, but didn’t crack. “Your seventeen filthy compatriots murdered José Diaz in cold blood and beat the gas chamber because traitors and perverts and deluded weaklings banded up to save them. And I will brook no disrespect for a brother officer in my presence. Do you understand?”
Complete silence, the UAES men still in Dudley’s shadow, stagehands eyeballing the action from the walkway. Mal stepped up to speak for himself, taller than Dudley but half his breadth. Scared. Pendejo. He got ready to give signals, then Mondo Lopez hit back. “Those seventeen got fucked by the puto LAPD and the puto City court system. And that ees la fucking verdad.”
Dudley moved forward so that all there was between him and Lopez was the arc of a short kidney punch. Benavides backed away, shaking; Duarte mumbled that the SLDC got anonymous letters making a white guy for José Diaz, but nobody believed it; Benavides pulled him out of harm’s way. Mal grabbed Dudley’s arm; the big man flung him back and lowered his brogue to baritone range. “Did you enjoy perverting justice with the SLDC, Mondo? Did you enjoy the favors of Claire De Haven—filthy rich capitalista, tight with the City Council, a real love for that undersized spic cock?”
Benavides and Duarte had their backs to the wall and were sliding away from the scene an inch at a time. Mal stood frozen; Lopez glared at Dudley; Dudley laughed. “Perhaps that was unfair of me, lad. We all know Claire spread her favors thin, but I doubt she would have stooped to your level. Your SLDC friend Chaz Minear, now that’s another story. Was he there for the prime Mex butthole?”
Benavides moved toward Dudley; Mal snapped out of his freeze, grabbed him and pushed him into the wall, seeing razor blades held to a little girl’s throat. Benavides shouted, “That puto bought boys at a puto escort service, he didn’t do us!” Mal pressed harder, sweat-saturated suit against soaked buckskins, hard muscles straining at the body of a thin man almost forty. Benavides suddenly went slack; Mal took his hands off him and got a file flash: Sammy railing against queers to Doc Lesnick, a weak point they could have played smart.
Sammy Benavides slid down the wall and watched the Smith-Lopez eyeball duel. Mal tried to make his hands give signals, but couldn’t. Juan Duarte was standing by the walkway, scoping the business long-distance. Dudley broke the standoff with a pivot and a lilting brogue aside. “I hope you learned a lesson today, Captain. You can’t play sob sister with scum. You should have joined me on the Hat Squad. You would have learned then in grand fashion.”
* * *
Round one blown to hell.
Mal drove home, thinking of captain’s bars snatched away from him, smothered in Dudley Smith’s huge fists. And he had been partly at fault, going too easy when the Mexicans came on too smart, thinking he could reason with them, wheedle and draw them into logical traps. He’d thought of submitting a memo to Ellis Loew—lay off Sleepy Lagoon, it’s too sympathetic—then he tossed it into the pot for empathy, hit a nerve with the Mexes and upset Dudley’s bee in the bonnet on the case. And Dudley had stood up for him before he himself did, which made it hard to fault him for losing his temper; which meant that maybe direct UAES approaches were dead and they should concentrate solely on decoy infiltration and sub-rosa interrogations. His specialty—which didn’t lessen the sting of Dudley’s Hat Squad crack, and which increased the need for Buzz Meeks to join the grand jury team.
All debits, but on the plus side Dudley’s ranting didn’t put out information restricted to Lesnick’s files, leaving that avenue of manipulation still open. What was troubling was a cop as smart as the Irishman taking a nondirect attack so personally, then hitting his “brother officer” below the belt.
Pendejo.
Scared.
And Dudley Smith knows it.
At home, Mal took advantage of the empty house, dumping his sweaty clothes, showering, changing to a sport shirt and khakis and settling into the den to write a long memo to Loew—heavily stressing that there should be no further direct questioning of UAES members until their decoy was planted—a decoy now being a necessity. He was a page in when he realized that it had to be partly a gloss job—there was no way to accurately describe what happened at Variety International without portraying himself as a weakling or a fool. So he did gloss it, and filled up another page with warnings on the Loew choice for trouble-shooter—Buzz Meeks—the man who held the possible distinction of being the single most crooked cop in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department—heroin skimmer, shakedown artist, bagman and now a glorified pimp for Howard Hughes. After that page, he knew it was futile; if Meeks wanted in he was in—Hughes was the heaviest contributor to the grand jury bankroll and Meeks’ bossman—what he said would go. After two pages he knew why the tack wasn’t worth pursuing: Meeks was absolutely the best man for the job. And the best man for the job was afraid of him, just like he was afraid of Dudley Smith. Even though there was no reason for the fear.
Mal threw the Meeks memo in the wastebasket and started thinking decoy. The LAPD Academy was already out—straight arrow youths with no spark for impersonation. The Sheriff’s Academy was unlikely—the Brenda Allen mess and the LASD sheltering Mickey Cohen made it unlikely that they would lend the City a smart young recruit. Their best bet was a rank-and-file City officer, smart, good-looking, adaptable and ambitious, mid to late twenties, a malleable young man without a hard-edged cop quality.
Where?
Hollywood Division was out—half the men had been implicated over Brenda Allen, had had their pictures in the paper, were running scared and angry and wild—there was even a rumor floating around that three men on the Hollywood Detective Squad had been behind last August’s shootout at Sherry’s—a botched snuff attempt on Mickey Cohen that wounded three and killed a Cohen utility trigger. Out.
And Central was packed with unqualified rookies who made the Department because of their war records; 77th Street, Newton and University featured outsized crackers hired on to keep the Ne
gro citizenry in line. Hollenbeck might be a good place to look—but East LA was Mex, Benavides, Lopez and Duarte still had ties there, and that might blow their decoy’s cover. The various detective divisions were a possible stalking ground—if they could find a man who didn’t come off as irredeemably jaded.
Mal grabbed his LAPD station directory and started scanning it, one eye on the wall clock as it inched toward 3:00 and Stefan’s home-from-school time. He was about to start calling CO’s for preliminary screening talks when he heard footsteps in the hall; he swiveled in his chair, dropped his arms and got ready to let his son dogpile him.
It was Celeste. She looked at Mal’s open arms until he dropped them; she said, “I told Stefan to stay late after school in order that I should talk to you.”
“Yes?”
“The look on your face does not to make this easy.”
“Spill it, goddamn you.”
Celeste clutched her beaded opera purse, a favored relic of Prague, 1935. “I am going to divorce you. I have met a nice man, a man who is cultured and will make Stefan and me a better home.”
Mal thought: perfect calm, she knows her effects. He said, “I won’t let you. Don’t hurt my boy or I’ll hurt you.”
“You cannot. To the mother the child belongs.”
Maim her, let her know he is the law. “Is he rich, Celeste? If you have to fuck to survive, you should fuck rich men. Right, Fräulein? Or powerful men, like Kempflerr.”
“You always return to that because it is so ugly and because it excites you so.”
Match point; Mal felt his sense of gamesmanship go blooey. “I saved your wretched rich-girl ass. I killed the man who made you a whore. I gave you a home.”
Celeste smiled, her standard parting of thin lips over perfect teeth. “You killed Kempflerr to prove yourself not a coward. You wanted to be like a real policeman, and you were willing to destroy yourself to do it. Only your dumb luck saved you. And you keep your secrets so badly.”
Mal stood up on punch-drunk legs. “I killed someone who deserved to die.”