At the same time that Lyle was exacting revenge upon Emerson Waldie for all the years of abuse, Tom was standing in the middle of Erne’s living room in Silver Lake, looking at the disarray around him. Anything that had been standing upright was now upside down or lying on its side. Pillows were slashed, drawers emptied, shelves cleared.
The past ten or so hours had been a nightmare with Erne’s death, the police questions and the process of accompanying Erne’s body to the morgue. And then this morning, after just a few hours sleep, going to the mortuary to arrange Erne’s funeral which was scheduled for later in the week. He’d also phoned all of Erne’s ex-wives, informing them of Erne’s death, before dropping over at Erne’s place to pick up his one good suit for the burial. To find it, he’d have to burrow through a pile of clothes ripped from the closet and thrown into a heap on the floor.
You didn’t have to be super-smart to figure out that Erne was killed because he found out something he wasn’t supposed to find out. And that he’d probably threatened to expose what he’d learned. His last message to Tom was that he had some important information to talk to him about and that he should make sure and wait at Jimmy’s. Whatever that “important information” was, his killer or killers had also wanted it. As evidenced by the state of Erne’s apartment.
It was only after Tom had left Erne’s apartment and had got into his car that he noticed the envelope on his front seat. It contained the personal items found on Erne’s body when he was killed. They had been released to Tom by the people at the morgue. Opening the envelope, Tom took out Erne’s wallet, watch, signet ring, pipe and tobacco. Gone was his little notebook into which Tom had often seen Erne jotting things down.
Tom wondered if those “things” were, as it turned out, a record of everything Erne had been complaining about, mainly the outrageous wastage of supplies such as film, and the matter of personnel that were needlessly kept overtime. Was there even more than that in the notebook? Perhaps a few names?
These and other questions started plaguing Tom, clouding his mind. Starting up the car, he drove toward Hollywood, trying to figure what Erne had been on to and why it had cost him his life. But when he reached Hollywood and Vine, he was jarred back into reality. He saw that the road ahead was almost unpassable.
Up by the traffic lights, a large crowd of people were craning their heads upward as if they had spotted a squadron of enemy aircraft in the skies above Los Angeles.
Tom pulled his car over to the side of the street and got out. Just then, a woman ran past him screaming hysterically. “It’s poison gas from Japan,” she yelled. Up above, a sizeable grayish mass of smoke crept slowly across the otherwise unblemished blue California sky. It had no apparent connection with a ground fire of any sort, such as a blaze in downtown L.A. or in the Hollywood Hills that had got out of control, and there was nothing to indicate that it had come from an industrial smokestack of which there were many in wartime Los Angeles.
Tom knew, or thought he knew, what had caused the smoky looking substance. A few days before he was murdered, Erne had read aloud a newly published article having to do with air pollution. The article had reported that gray masses of dirty air had been sighted over Los Angeles in recent months. Erne had then voiced, in his own inimitable doomsday fashion, how air pollution would eventually smother L.A., block out all traces of sunlight, snuff out all forms of life.
And now Tom was out of his car trying to calm down the crowd. “That smoke is from the exhaust pipes of your cars,” Tom shouted above all the noise. He wanted to give them the benefit of Erne’s words and tell them about the accumulation of automobile and factory fumes that were trapped in the L.A. basin by the San Gabriel Mountains surrounding it. But the people were in such a panic that they didn’t seem to hear a word of what he was saying.
“It’s going to kill us all,” a man shouted as he ran up the road, barely missing being hit by a fast-moving car.
The car, trying to avoid hitting the man, swerved to the opposite side of the street and sideswiped a drab, khaki painted bus. It was transporting a group of Japanese/Americans and Japanese aliens from an assembly center at the Santa Anita race track. They’d been kept there, in the most rudimentary conditions, for six months and were now being taken to a relocation camp in Inyo County.
This move was in keeping with the Civilian Exclusion Act of 1942, also known as Executive Order 1099 which had been signed, at the insistence of west coast military authorities under General DeWitt, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the previous March. Even though a study had shown there to be No ‘disloyalty’ to the American flag by this particular segment of society, they were still being forced into “concentration” camps.
The exclusion act called for the evacuation of all people of Japanese ancestry now living in the western states of America. This meant the loss of homes, businesses, possessions, but most important, the dignity and freedom of these people, most of whom had been born in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland or Seattle. Word of who was on the bus spread through the crowd like wildfire.
“Let the yellow rats breathe in a little of their own poison,” a formidable matron yelled, suddenly rushing the huddle of bewildered evacuees who’d been ordered to get off the crippled military bus.
“My nephew was at Pearl Harbor,” the woman announced, hitting out blindly with her handbag.
“They should be strung up on telephone poles up and down Hollywood Boulevard,” someone else shouted. The roaring crowd was in total agreement. Completely out of control now, and with no law enforcement in sight, the crowd advanced menacingly, someone actually wielding a length of rope.
Tom, seeing what was happening and how the situation was escalating, jumped into the crowd’s path and tried to hold them off as best he could. There was no doubt that this bunch was hell-bent for revenge and wouldn’t be appeased until someone was killed.
“Now hold on just a minute,” Tom shouted into the crowd. “These people are Americans, most of them, and what you’re doing, taking the law into your own hands, is wrong.”
“Get the Jap-lover,” someone shouted. The crowd surged toward Tom who now found himself being pelted by an avalanche of fists, handbags and knees.
One of his attackers, a maddened old lady who looked like she taught Sunday School, when she wasn’t trying to lynch people, attempted to kick him in the groin.
Another attacker, a fox-faced man of about fifty ran up from behind Tom and slammed him painfully in the kidneys with an auto wrench.
“Take that, you lousy draft-dodger,” another person bellowed in his ear. The remark was accompanied by a sharp blow to the head, but Tom stood his ground and was now the only barrier between this ugly, out-of-control mob and the frightened evacuees, some of whom were very old.
Six or eight black and white patrol cars from the sheriff’s department finally arrived and the cops, getting out of them, halfheartedly came to the rescue of those being attacked. It was obvious that some of the officers would have preferred the carnage to continue.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard was moving normally again and the evacuees were in the process of being transferred to another bus.
They boarded the bus with an air of resignation, their destination being a place called Manzanar near Lone Pine. This was an isolated spot in the Sierras, a few hundred miles south of Yosemite. But before the bus pulled away, many of its occupants had thanked Tom for what he had done for them by protecting them against the unruly and violent crowd.
Tom thought about Lone Pine. He didn’t know anything about the area other than the fact that geologists spent a lot of time in that region, and also that movie companies sometimes filmed there when they needed a stark, mountainous background that was abundant in sagebrush and good for cowboy movies.
Tom stood on the side of the road watching the bus as it merged with the flow of Los Angeles traffic, the very traffic that Erne had predicted would one day turn the city into one big black cloud of gas fumes.
Well, Tom thought, at least Erne didn’t have to see if his prediction was to come true or not. At least he’d been spared that much. When the bus was out of sight, Tom returned to his car and drove off. It was only after he’d driven a quarter of a mile or so that he realized that there was someone crouching on the floor right behind his seat.