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Kay shook her head. “You quit boxing five years ago. It’s not your life anymore.”
The woman’s aggressiveness was making me itchy. I blurted, “And your boyfriend’s a never-was just like me, and you were some sort of gang skirt before he picked you up. You—”
Kay Lake stopped me by laughing. “Have you been reading my press clippings?”
“No. You been reading mine?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t have a retort for that. “Why’d Lee quit fighting? Why’d he join the Department?”
“Catching criminals gives him a sense of order. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“I’m saving myself for Rita Hayworth. Do you flirt with a lot of cops, or am I a special case?”
Shouts rose from the crowd. I glanced over and saw Blanchard’s sparring partner hit the canvas. Joh
Kay shuddered. “No. It’s a big moment for Lee.”
“He told you to come?”
“No. He would never do that.”
“The sensitive type, huh?”
Kay dug in her pockets for cigarettes and matches, then lit up. “Yes. Like you, but without the chip on the shoulder.”
I felt myself go red. “You’re always there for each other? Thick and thin and all that?”
“We try.”
“Then why aren’t you married? Shacking’s against the regs, and if the brass decided to get snotty they could nail Lee for it.”
Kay blew rings at the floor, then looked up at me. “We can’t.”
“Why not? You’ve been shacked for years. He quit fighting smokers for you. He lets you flirt with other men. Sounds like an ace deal to me.”
More shouts echoed. Glancing sidelong, I saw Blanchard pounding a new punchy. I countered the shots, duking the stale gym air. After a few seconds I saw what I was doing and stopped. Kay flipped her cigarette in the direction of the ring and said, “I have to go now. Good luck, Dwight.”
Only the old man called me that. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Kay said, “Lee and I don’t sleep together,” then walked away before I could do anything but stare.
I hung around the gym for another hour or so. Toward dusk, reporters and cameramen started arriving, making straight for center ring, Blanchard and his boring knockdowns of glass-chi
So I drove downtown to read her press clippings.
The clerk at the Herald morgue, impressed with my badge, led me to a reading table. I told him I was interested in the Boulevard-Citizens bank robbery and the trial of the captured robber, and that I thought the date was sometime early in ‘39 for the heist, maybe fall of the same year for the legal proceedings. He left me sitting there and returned ten minutes later with two large, leather-bound scrapbooks. Newspaper pages were glued to heavy black cardboard sheets, arranged chronologically, and I flipped from February 1 to February 12 before I found what I wanted.
On February 11, 1939, a four-man gang hijacked an armored car on a quiet Hollywood side street. Using a downed motorcycle as a diversion, the robbers overpowered the guard who left the car to investigate the accident. Putting a knife to his throat, they forced the other two guards still inside the car to let them in. Once inside, they chloroformed and trussed all three men and substituted six bags filled with phone book scraps and slugs for six bags filled with cash.
One robber drove the armored car to downtown Hollywood; the other three changed into uniforms identical to the ones the guards wore. The three in uniform walked in the door of Boulevard-Citizens Savings & Loan on Yucca and Ivar, carrying the sacks of paper and slugs, and the manager opened the vault for them. One of the robbers sapped the manager; the other two grabbed sacks of real money and headed for the door. By this time, the driver had entered the bank, and had rounded up the tellers. He herded them into the vault and sapped them, then shut the door and locked it. All four robbers were back on the sidewalk when a Hollywood Division patrol car, alerted by a bank-to-station alarm, arrived. The officers ordered the heisters to halt; they opened fire; the cops fired back. Two robbers were killed and two escaped—with four bags filled with unmarked fifties and C-notes.
When I saw no mention of Blanchard or Kay Lake, I skimmed a week of page one and two accounts of the LAPD investigation.
The dead heisters were identified as Chick Geyer and Max Ottens, San Francisco muscle with no known LA associates. Eyeball witnesses at the bank could not identify the two escapers from mug shots or provide adequate descriptions of them—their guard hats were pulled low and both wore lacquered sunglasses. There were no witnesses at the hijack scene, and the chloroformed guards had been overpowered before they got good looks at their attackers.
The heist went from page two and three to the scandal columns. Bevo Means featured it for three days ru
Means’ columns got further and further afield, and I turned pages until I hit the February 28 headline: “Tip From Ex-Boxer Cop Cracks Bloody Bank Robbery.”
The account was loaded with praise for Mr. Fire, but was short on facts. Officer Leland C. Blanchard, 25, a Los Angeles policeman attached to Central Division and a former “popular fixture” at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, questioned his “fight game acquaintances” and “informants” and got tips that Robert “Bobby” De Witt was the brains behind the Boulevard-Citizens job. Blanchard relayed the tip to Hollywood Division detectives, and they raided De Witt’s Venice Beach house. They found stashes of marijuana, guard uniforms and money bags from Boulevard-Citizens Savings & Loan. De Witt protested his i
Tiring of cops and robbers, I kept flipping pages. De Witt, a San Berdoo native with three pimping priors, kept yelping that the Siegel mob or the police had framed him: the mob because he sometimes ran cooze in Siegel territory, the cops because they needed a patsy for the Boulevard-Citizen job. He had no alibi for the day of the heist, and said he didn’t know Chick Geyer, Max Ottens or the still-at-large fourth man. He went to trial, and the jury didn’t believe him. He was convicted on all counts, and drew a ten-to-life jolt at San Quentin.
Kay finally appeared in a June 21 human interest piece titled “Gang Girl Falls In Love—With Cop! Going Straight? To Altar?” Beside the story there were photographs of her and Lee Blanchard, along with a mug shot of Bobby De Witt, a hatchet-faced guy sporting a greasy pompadour. The piece started with a recounting of the Boulevard-Citizens job and Blanchard’s part in solving it, then segued to sugar:
…and at the time of the robbery, De Witt was providing shelter for an impressionable young girl. Katherine Lake, 19, came west from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1936, not seeking Hollywood stardom, but seeking a college education. What she got was a degree in the college of criminal hard knocks.