The Big Nowhere

Upshaw yawned—broadly. “I’m bored, Vi

Scoppettone shook his head, spraying sweat. “What?”

Upshaw pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his hip pocket. “This was in last Tuesday’s Herald. ‘Yesterday evening tragedy occurred at a convivial cocktail lounge in the Silverlake District. A gunman entered the friendly Moonmist Lounge, carrying a large-caliber pistol. He forced the bartender and three patrons to lie on the floor, ransacked the cash register and stole jewelry, wallets and purses belonging to his four victims. The bartender tried to apprehend the robber, and he pistol-whipped him senseless. The bartender died of head injuries this morning at Queen of Angels Hospital. The surviving robbery victims described the assailant as “an Italian-looking white man, late thirties, five-ten, one hundred and ninety pounds.”‘ Vi

Scoppettone shrieked, “That ain’t me!” Mal craned his neck and squinted at the print on Upshaw’s newspaper, glomming a full page on last week’s fight card at the Olympic. He thought: pull out the stops, bluff him down, hit him once, don’t get carried away and you’re my boy—

“That ain’t fucking me!”

Upshaw leaned over the table, hard in Scoppettone’s face. “I don’t fucking care. You’re standing in a lineup tonight, and the three squarejohns from the Moonmist Lounge are go

“I didn’t do it!”

“Prove it!”

“I can’t prove it!”

“Then you’ll take the fucking fall!”

Scoppettone was putting his whole body into his head, the only part of him not lashed down. He shook it; he twisted it; he thrust his chin back and forth like a ram trying to batter a fence. Mal got a flash: the kid had him nailed for a backup heist that night; the whole performance was orchestrated for the newspaper punch line. He elbowed Dudley and said, “Ours”; Dudley gave him the thumbs-up. Vi

Upshaw whispered in Scoppettone’s ear; Vi

Mal studied the reaction. “Good work, Deputy. You were damn good.”

Upshaw looked at him, then Dudley. “You’re City, right?”

Mal said, “Right, DA’s Bureau. My name’s Considine, this is Lieutenant Smith.”

“And it’s about?”

Dudley said, “Lad, we were going to reprimand you for rattling Mr. Herman Gerstein’s cage, but that’s water under the bridge now. Now we’re going to offer you a job.”

“What?”

Mal took Upshaw’s arm and steered him a few feet away. “It’s a decoy plant for a grand jury investigation into Communist activity in the movie studios. A very well-placed DA is ru

“No.”

“You can transfer to the Bureau clean after the investigation. You’ll be a lieutenant before you’re thirty.”

“No. I don’t want it.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to supervise the triple homicide case I’m working—for the County and the City.”

Mal thought of Ellis Loew balking, other City hotshots he could grease for the favor. “I think I can manage it.”

Dudley came over, clapped Upshaw on the back and winked. “There’s a woman you’ll have to get next to, lad. You might have to fuck the pants off of her.”

Deputy Da

Part Two.

Upshaw, Considine, Meeks

Chapter Seventeen

He was a cop again, bought and paid for, in with major leaguers playing for keeps. Howard’s bonus had him out of hock with Leotis Dineen, and if the grand jury succeeded in booting the UAES from the studios he’d be minor-league rich. He had a set of keys to Ellis Loew’s house and the use of the City clerks who’d be typing and filing there. He had a “target list” of Pinkos untouched by previous grand juries. And he had the big list: UAES top dogs to glom criminal dirt on, no direct approaches now that they were deep in subterfuge, with newspaper pieces planted that said their investigation was dead. An hour ago he’d had his secretary place query calls to his local Fed contact, City/County DMV/R&I and the criminal records bureaus of California, Nevada, Arizona and Oregon States, requesting arrest report information on Claire De Haven, Morton Ziffkin, Chaz Minear, Reynolds Loftis and three unholy-sounding pachucos: Mondo Lopez, Sammy Benavides and Juan Duarte, asterisks after their names denoting them “known youth gang members.” The gang squad boss at Hollenbeck Station had been his only call back; he said that the three were bad apples— members of a zooter mob in the early ‘40s before they cleaned up and “got political.” East LA would be his first stop—once his secretary logged in the rest of her responses to his call-outs.

Buzz looked around his office for something to kill time with, saw the morning Mirror on the doormat and picked it up. He flipped through to the editorial page and got bingo! under Victor Reisel’s by-line, less than twenty-four hours after cuckold Mal told Loew his plan.

The title was “Reds 1—City of Los Angeles 0. 3 Outs, No Witnesses on Base.” Buzz read:

It all came down to money—the great equalizer and common denominator. A grand jury was in the works, an important grand jury that would have been as farreaching as the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Once again, Communist encroachment in the motion picture industry was to be delved into—this time within the context of labor trouble in the City of the Angels.

The United Alliance of Extras and Stagehands is currently under contract with a number of Hollywood studios. The union is rife with Communists and fellow travelers. The UAES is making exorbitant contract renegotiation demands, and a Teamster local which would like the opportunity to reach an amicable accord with the studios and step in to work UAES’s job for reasonable wages and benefits is picketing against them. Money. The UAES implicitly advocates the end of the capitalist system and wants more of it. The nonideologically involved Teamsters want to prove their on-the-job mettle by working for wages that anticapitalists spurn. Hollywood, show biz: it’s a crazy world.

Crazy Item #1: The glut of pro-Russian movies made during the early 1940’s were largely scripted by members of the so-called UAES Brain trust.

Crazy Item #2: UAES Brain trust members belong to a total of 41 organizations that have been classified as Commie fronts by the State Attorney General’s Office.

Crazy Item #3: The UAES wants more of that filthy capitalist lucre; the Teamsters want jobs for their people; a number of patriotic men in the LA District Attorney’s Office had been slated to gather evidence for a prospective grand jury to delve into just how deep those green-loving UAESers’ influence in the movie biz went. Let’s face it: Hollywood is an unsurpassed tool for disseminating propaganda, and the Commies are the subtlest, most cruelly intelligent foe America has ever faced. Given access to the motion picture medium and its pervasiveness in our daily life, there is no end to the cancerous seeds of treason that well-placed movie Reds could plant—subtle satires and attacks on America, subliminally planted so that the public and right-thinking movie people would have no idea they were being brainwashed. The DA’s men had made approaches to several subversives, and were attempting to get them to admit to the error of their ways and appear as witnesses when money—the great equalizer and common denominator—reared its head to give aid and comfort to the enemy.