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He did it.
And got more nothing.
Two hours’ worth.
The same accounts at Cyrano’s, Dave’s Blue Room, Ciro’s, the Mocambo, La Rue, Coffee Bob’s, Sherry’s, Bruno’s Hideaway and the Movieland Diner: every single place was packed until dawn New Year’s. No one remembered a solitary, tall, gray-haired man.
At midnight, Da
Da
Janice hunched into her straps and sat across the table from him. “It’s about John, Mr. Upshaw. He was arrested again.”
John Lembeck was Janice’s lover/pimp, a car thief specializing in custom orders: stolen chassis for the basic vehicle, parts stolen to exact specifications. He was a San Berdoo native like Da
Janice pulled a Kleenex out of her neckline and fretted it. “Upholstery.”
“City or County?”
“I—I think County. San Dimas Substation?”
Da
“No bail, because of John’s last GTA. See, it’s a parole violation, Mr. Upshaw. John’s scared because he says the policemen there are really mean, and they made him sign a confession on all these cars he didn’t really steal. John said I should tell you a San Berdoo homeboy who loves cars should go to bat for another San Berdoo homey who loves cars. He didn’t say what it meant, but he said I should tell you.”
Pull strings to save his career from its first hint of dirt: call the San Dimas bulls, tell them John Lembeck was his trusted snitch and that a nigger hot car gang had a jail bid out on him, shiv time if the stupid shit ever made it to a County lockup. If Lembeck was docile at the holding tank, they’d let him off with a beating. “Tell John I’ll get on it in the morning.”
Janice had pinched her Kleenex into little wispy shreds. “Thanks, Mr. Upshaw. John also said I should be nice to you.”
Da
Janice vamped him with wide baby blues. “He said I should be really nice to you.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I mean, like really extra nice.”
Da
Chapter Eight
Mal was in his office, on his twelfth full reading of Dr. Saul Lesnick’s psychiatric files.
It was just after 1:00 A.M.; the DA’s Bureau was a string of dark cubicles, illuminated only by Mal’s wall light. The files were spread over his desk, interspersed with pages of notes splashed with coffee. Celeste would be asleep soon—he could go home and sleep in the den without her pestering him, sex offers because at this time of the morning he was her only friend, and giving him her mouth meant they could talk until one of them provoked a fight. Offers he’d accept tonight: the dirt in the files had him riled up like back in the Ad Vice days, when he put surveillance on the girls before they took down a whorehouse—the more you knew about who they were the better chance you had to get them to finger their pimps and money men. And after forty-eight hours of paper prowling, he felt like he had a pulse on the Reds in the UAES.
Deluded.
Traitorous.
Perverse.
Cliché shouters, sloganeers, fashion-conscious pseudoidealists. Locusts attacking social causes with the wrong information and bogus solutions, their one legit gripe—the Sleepy Lagoon case—almost blown through guilt by association: fellow travelers soliciting actual Party members for picketing and leaflet distribution, nearly discrediting everything the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee said and did. Hollywood writers and actors and hangers-on spouting cheap trauma, Pinko platitudes and guilt over raking in big money during the Depression, then penancing the bucks out to spurious leftist causes. People led to Lesnick’s couch by their promiscuity and dipshit politics.
Deluded.
Stupid.
Selfish.
Mal took a belt of coffee and ran a mental overview of the files, a last paraphrase before getting down to tagging the individual brain trusters he and Dudley Smith should be interrogating and the ones who should be singled out for their as yet unfound operative: Loew’s projected possibility, his favored tool already. What he got was a lot of people with too much money and too little brains pratfalling through the late ‘30s and ‘40s—betraying themselves, their lovers, their country and their own ideals, two events galvanizing their lunacy, spi
The Sleepy Lagoon case.
The 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee probe into Communist influence in the entertainment industry.
And the fu
In August of 1942 a Mexican youth named José Diaz was beaten to death and run over with a car out at the Sleepy Lagoon—a grass-knolled meeting place for gang members in the Williams Ranch area of Central LA. The incident was allegedly sparked by Diaz being ejected from a nearby party earlier that night; he had allegedly insulted several members of a rival youth gang, and seventeen of them hauled him out to the Lagoon and snuffed him. Evidence against them was scant; the LAPD investigation and trial were conducted in an atmosphere of hysteria: the ‘42—’43 Zoot suit riots had produced a huge wave of anti-Mexican sentiment throughout Los Angeles. All seventeen boys received life sentences, and the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee—UAES brain trusters, Communist Party members, leftists and straight Citizens-held rallies, circulated petitions and raised funds to employ a legal team—which ultimately got all seventeen pardoned. Hypocrisy within the idealism: Lesnick’s male patients, hearts bleeding over the poor railroaded Mexicans, complained to him of Communist Party white women screwing “proletariat” taco benders—then assailed themselves as rabid bigots moments later.
Mal made a mental note to talk to Ellis Loew about the Sleepy Lagoon angle: Ed Satterlee wanted to procure SLDC rally pictures from the Feds—but since the kids were exonerated, it might backfire. Ditto the info the shrinkees poured out over ‘47 HUAC. Better for him and Dudley to keep it sub rosa, not jeopardize Lesnick’s complicity and use the info only by implication: to squeeze the UAESers’ suspected weak points. Going with the HUAC stuff full-bore might jeopardize their grand jury: J. Parnell Thomas, the Committee’s chairman, was currently doing time on bribery charges; hotshot Hollywood stars had protested HUAC’s methods and Lesnick’s files were rife with nonpetty trauma deriving from the spring of ‘47—suicides, attempted suicides, frantic betrayals of friendship, booze and sex to kill the pain. If the ‘50 LA City grand jury team attempted to use the juice of ‘47 HUAC their first precedent—they might engender sympathy for UAES members and subsidiary hostile witnesses. Better not to dip into old HUAC testimony for conspiracy evidence; imperative that the lefties be denied a chance to boohoo the grand jury’s tactics to the press.