7:37 a.m.
She saw him and walked straight over. Her hair was mussed. Her lipstick had been kissed off.
She came right up to him. He saw yesterday’s clothes and caught her boudoir scent.
“Good morning, Miss Lake.”
“You goddamn voyeur. Tell me what you want from me or get the hell out of my life.”
“Your amorous ways don’t concern me.”
“Yes, they do. They concern you and entice you, because you knock on women’s doors at night and extort them, because you get your kicks that way, because you have a famously bereft marriage, and you’re coming out of your skin with boredom and that slimy, itchy something that drives brutal men like you.”
Parker leaned on his car. He felt dizzy.
“I won’t say it’s the pot calling the kettle black. I won’t deny that I tend to watch and stare. I won’t say that your amorous ways don’t intrigue me.”
She made fists. “Goddamn you, Captain. Goddamn you for toying with me.”
“Or for seeing you? Or for recognizing something that you want seen, because you’re coming out of your own skin with your idiot attitudes and jejune notions, and your utterly fatuous belief that you’re smarter, stronger and better than every other human being on God’s green fucking earth, and isn’t it a pity that no one else knows it?”
She stepped toward him. Their arms brushed. Her body was warm.
“Say ‘yet,’ Captain. Say ‘no one else knows it yet.” Because recognition’s a two-way street. Because you can go to war, and I can’t. Because you can lock up criminals to sate your petty need for order, and I can’t. Because you can rise to Chief, rule your little world and move people around at whim like the shrill martinet that you are—but whatever you do, don’t underestimate the fact that I see you.”
Parker stepped back. “Have I convinced you that Lee Blanchard is dirty beyond your previous imaginings?”
“In your grossly manipulative and circuitous way, yes. The recordings put some things together for me, as you knew they would. But since I’ve known that Lee is capable of anything for some time, I’m truly not that surprised.”
Stay strong, Katherine. Validate my belief in your silly-girl grit.
“I hope you won’t confront Blanchard with anything you may have extrapolated from the recordings.”
Kay Lake stepped back. “I hope you won’t ask me what I figured out or discipline Lee in any manner.”
Parker nodded. “I’m assuming that you spoke to your friends Sergeant Jackson and Miss Allen about me, and that you described the task I assigned you.”
“I have, but I should tell you that they were nonplussed. And I seriously doubt that whatever you have planned for me concerns Brenda and Elmer or police-sanctioned prostitution. I would say that they have nothing to worry about, and I think you should permit me to tell them not to fret.”
Parker nodded. Light rain hit. Wind tossed the girl’s hair.
“You know and see so much. I’m astonished at how your actions betray your powers of insight and reveal you to be a reckless child out of her depth.”
Kay Lake laughed. “That’s a perceptive insight—from a man trying to drown me.”
Parker checked his watch. The Bit O’ Sweden was straight down on Sunset. Dudley was due at 9:00.
The rain hit harder. Parker opened the driver’s door. Kay Lake got in behind the wheel. His cigarettes were on the dashboard. She helped herself.
Parker got in the passenger side. Rain hit the windshield and obscured the street.
“I won’t transcribe any more recordings, and I don’t think you want me to. We both know that we should keep Brenda, Elmer and Lee out of this, whatever ‘this’ is.”
Parker shook out a cigarette. Kay Lake passed him hers for the light.
“The wedge wasn’t necessary, was it? You’re just round-heeled enough to take whatever I offer you.”
Kay Lake cracked the wind wing. Her hair was wet. The light streaks in with the auburn glowed.
“Test my boundaries, Captain. It may surprise you, but they do exist.”
Parker smiled. “Now, Miss Lake?”
“Yes. Now would be just fine.”
Parker said, “You’re going to infiltrate a Hollywood Fifth Column cell. They’re wholly seditious and deserve to be crushed. They’ve been investigated by the California State Committee on Un-American Activities and are currently disseminating anti-American and more specifically anti–Los Angeles Police Department propaganda, yet more specifically pertaining to the possible mistreatment and imprisonment of allegedly innocent foreign-born and native-born Japanese, now all the more relevant since yesterday’s attack. Dare I say that there will be a fair-minded scrutiny of the Jap contingent in Los Angeles. It will be judiciously enacted, and some arrests are likely to occur. The members of this cell are unscrupulous and ideologically insane. They will smear our country and my police force with huge strokes of Red paint. They will toe the Communist Party line and attempt to further the designs of Soviet Russia, once the Allies have won this war, as we inevitably will, and global Communist encroachment emerges as the chief threat to our internal security and the safety of the free world.”
Kay Lake said, “It’s a mad and presumptuous undertaking. It’s as questionable as you consider it to be certain.”
“Don’t stop there.”
“You haven’t worked pandemic racial bias into your equation. Since I’ve seen it already, I would urge you to.”
Parker tossed out his cigarette. Kay Lake tossed hers. Their knees brushed. Fucking rain. The car was a steam room.
“Will your concern for our Japanese citizenry prevent you from accepting this assignment?”
“Am I crossing your boundaries in any way?”
“No.”
Parker pointed to the backseat. “Los Angeles Police, Federal and state Subversive Squad reports on Claire De Haven, Reynolds Loftis, Chaz Minear, and some subsidiary scum. We’re going to build a derogatory profile on them. We’re going to see them indicted for sedition and/or treason and see to the destruction of their cell through coercive means. Your job is entrapment. You are to be a stool pigeon, a snitch, a rat and a fink. If those appellations offend you, c’est la guerre. You are an informant. You will collect incriminating information and report it to me. You are a wayward young woman with a traumatically checkered criminal past. I am betting that the Red Queen will find you irresistible.”
Kay Lake said, “It’s a matriarchy. I like that aspect.”
“Paul Robeson is appearing at Philharmonic Hall tonight. You will attend, sans escort. You will meet Claire De Haven and whatever fey men she brings as her escorts. You will steer the conversation to psychotherapy. The Communist Party psychiatrist in Los Angeles is a man named Saul Lesnick. He is a Federal informant. He tends to the psychic needs of Miss De Haven and her slaves, as he concurrently reveals the shallow breadth of those needs to his Federal handler. Dr. Lesnick is also a coerced informant, who is quite vividly susceptible to young women. You will endeavor to meet Dr. Lesnick. Do not tell him that you are also an informant. I want him to unwittingly collude with you.”
Kay Lake hugged the steering wheel. Her brown eyes were incongruous. They clashed with her auburn hair.
Parker said, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
She said, “I’m too thrilled to speak.”
8:53 a.m.
He walked down to Sunset. He walked for a chance to view Kay Lake on the sly. She cut across to her porch. He heard a radio. She tuned in Roosevelt’s congressional address.
The Bit O’ Sweden was overheated. The waitresses wore dirndl skirts. They looked like Nazi cheerleaders five thousand miles displaced. Beer steins dangled off wall pegs. The décor connoted Hitler at play.
Parker grabbed a window table. The sky cleared a bit. The Strip was lined with fake Christmas trees. Mock snow covered the sidewalk.
A tall redhead walked by. She looked like Joan from Northwestern. She was a Navy lieutenant j.g.
The blues, the gold sleeve bands. That stride, maybe it’s—
Parker ran outside. The woman was gone. A ’36 Dodge pulled away from the curb.
He walked back inside. A zaftig waitress brought coffee. The rain kicked back on. A Herald truck drove by. The side-panel blowup read WAR!
Parker sipped coffee. The wall clock tapped 9:00. Dudley Smith walked to the table.
They shook hands. Dudley said, “Good morning, sir.” Parker said, “Good morning, Sergeant.”
Etiquette. They observed it at work. Catholic fellowship. They called each other “Bill” and “Dud” around Archbishop Cantwell.
Parker said, “You missed Mass yesterday. His Eminence was peeved.”
“It was an inconvenient homicide, sir. I said a novena for the dead Japs, in acknowledgment of the Sabbath. I was up late writing you a first summary, by the way. I routed it to your office at Traffic.”
Parker stirred his coffee. “I read it this morning, so I assume I’m up-to-date. You lost crucial time on the canvass. Were you waiting for Nort Layman’s disposition?”
“Yes. I sent Mike Breuning and Dick Carlisle out belatedly, last night. They got nothing. The dead Japs kept to themselves. They were polite and properly diffident to their white neighbors. They had extremely occasional Jap visitors. They did not string Jap lanterns across their property to celebrate their heathen holidays and did not comport in the mysterious ways we Occidentals have come to expect from our Jap brethren. No one noted anything suspicious near the house during the Saturday-afternoon time frame of the presumed homicides, and given yesterday’s events, I would surmise that the white stiffs of Highland Park will not tax their minds for those buried memories that sometimes reappear and solve murder cases.”
Parker said, “Background checks?”
Dudley said, “They’ll be undertaken, but I’d call them futile. Papa and mama were born in Japan, the children were native-born. They weren’t Christian, so you won’t find family, birth, death, baptismal and marriage records in any of the conveniently located Jap churches in Little Tokyo. Our bright colleague Dr. Ashida examined the religious geegaws in the house and anointed the dead Japs as of the Shinto persuasion. As Sergeant Turner ‘Buzz’ Meeks said last night, ‘I like broiled eel as much as the next man, but all of this is Greek to me.’ ”
Parker smiled. “Property-records check?”
Dudley lit a cigarette. “Not applicable, for the moment. They own the house and a truck farm in the Valley, but Secretary of War Stimson has issued a Federal seizure order for the property of the Japs on the A-1 subversive list, which Ray Pinker tells me includes our very own dead Japs. With our country in its current state of agitation, I would say that we won’t be able to cut through the Federal red tape necessary to get at those records for some time.”
Parker lit a cigarette. “The son and daughter. Your description of their bedrooms was quite vivid.”
Dudley twirled his ashtray. “I don’t see their implicitly perverted relationship as being germane to the case, but that avenue is being explored. The dead lad and lassie attended Nightingale Junior High and Franklin High School, and Sergeants Breuning and Meeks roused the registrars of those lackluster institutions last night and grilled them per the dead Japlets. The registrars described them as ‘decent kids,’ ‘quiet kids,’ ‘kids who didn’t fraternize with white kids’ and ‘kids who got average grades and stuck to themselves.’ ”
Parker kicked it around. Parker looked out the window. Rain, rain and rain.
“The pharmacy heist, the gunshots at the two locations, the silencer threads?”
Dudley said, “We’ll be checking gun-sales records and robbery reports, but we’ll be coming up against the established fact that only one gun purchaser in six complies with state firearms-registration laws and actually registers their guns. That, and the established fact that Japs are clannish, that Japs sell guns to other Japs exclusively, and that the heist man at the drugstore yesterday was quite obviously a white man. Granted, I consider our dead Japs quite dicey. That stated, homicide is nearly always a closed racial circle, and I do not see a white heist man as a logical suspect in a feigned ritual-suicide murder case.”
Parker shook his head. “Hot potato. You’ve got forty-three Federal agents, Sheriff’s deputies and our Alien Squad working Little Tokyo. Nobody gives a shit about anything but the war, and why should they?”
Dudley said, “Why indeed?”
“Let’s go back to ‘quite dicey.’ I’m thinking of the hate tract and the Axis currency you found at the house.”
Dudley shook his head. “Hate tracts are fiendishly difficult to trace. The post office boxes listed on them are often designations for mail drops that hate merchants and pornographers use to muddle the trail of their filth. It’s a form of collusion that requires the aid of local postal carriers, and even the most seasoned postal inspectors find this sort of investigation problematic.”
Carl Hull knew hate tracts. He should call him and inquire. He should thank him for Kay Lake.
Parker said, “The currency.”
Dudley said, “Yes, I find it interesting as well.”
“Politics.”
“Yes, ‘politics.’ ”
“The A-1 list.”
“Yes. I think we should start there. I’ll be going down to Terminal Island. The Fort MacArthur MPs have a veritable invasion force of Japs in custody there.”
Parker said, “It’s our logical first step.”
Dudley said, “ ‘Closed racial circle.’ We’re guided by that concept. We should keep an open mind and still cleave to it.”
“You’re the homicide man, Sergeant. How likely is a non-Jap suspect for this thing?”
“Very highly unlikely, sir.”
Parker looked out the window. Rain, rain, rain. War headlines, war on the radio. Kill-the-Japs table chat.
“Cold potato. The Japs sank the Arizona. They’re going for the Philippines now. You can’t run a homicide case in this kind of atmosphere.”
Dudley smiled. His eyes twinkled.
“It’s a dead-ender, sir. I’ll give it the old college try, but I’m not optimistic. In the end, we’ll find that the killings derived from a grave misdeed in feudal Japan. A Jap warlord fucked another Jap warlord’s goat without first seeking permission. That transgression has festered for centuries. It finally came to a head on Avenue 45 in Highland Park, the day before the Japs grievously erred and bombed our grand fleet at Pearl Harbor.”
Parker laughed. “Keep your boys leashed. Don’t frame or kill anyone. This case isn’t worth it.”
9:46 a.m.
Dudley walked out. Parker kicked blood back in his legs. He was nerve-cramped the whole time.
Rain, rain and rain. Drink, shut the world out, walk back up Wetherly. Sleep it off in the car. She might be out on the porch. She might strike poses.
Parker ordered a double bourbon. The first sip burned. He toasted the Pearl Harbor dead and replayed the test blackout.
He took his black-and-white. He traveled sans headlights. The blackout ran 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. He monitored the Department’s two coastline divisions. He drove the coast road from San Pedro to Venice and caught dawn on the sea. No streetlights or traffic lights. House lights and car lights were off. Aircraft spotters were out on the beach. No Jap planes hovered or streaked. They had no glow to sight by and no targets to seek.
He cruised inland and checked individual houses. They were per-guideline dark. He peered through window-shade gaps. He saw strips of light and heard radios. FDR defamed the Japs—over and over.
Twenty-odd houses, all guideline dark. Let’s reprise Deadwood in 1916.
Voyeur. The Lake girl called him that. He was fourteen in ’16. He peered in brothel windows while his father fought the Great War. William H. Parker II came home with The Thirst. He reprised William H. Parker I, after the Civil War truce. Two Army captains. Antietam and the Argonne. War begets The Thirst.
Parker stared out the window. The zaftig waitress brought refills. He thought about Joan and the Lake girl. He fed The Thirst and watched their faces merge.