(Originally published in 1986)
From my office windows I watched L.A. celebrate the end of World War II. Central Division Warrants took up the entire north side of City Hall’s eleventh floor, so my vantage point was high and wide. I saw clerks drinking straight from the bottle in the Hall of Records parking lot across the street and harness bulls forming a riot squad and heading for Little Tokyo a few blocks away, bent on holding back a conga line of youths with 2 by 4s who looked bent on going the atom bomb one better. Craning my neck, I glimpsed tall black plumes of smoke on Bunker Hill—a sure sign that patriotic Belmont High students were stripping cars and setting the tires on fire. Over on Sunset and Figueroa, knots of zooters were assembling in violation of the Zoot Suit Ordinance, no doubt figuring that today it was anything goes.
The tiny window above my desk had an eastern exposure, and it offered up nothing but smog and a giant traffic jam inching toward Boyle Heights. I stared into the brown haze, imagining shitloads of code 2s and 3s thwarted by noxious fumes and bumper-to-bumper revelry. My daydreams got more and more vivid, and when I had a whole skyful of A-bombs descending on the offices of the L.A.P.D. Detective Bureau, I slammed my desk and picked up the two pieces of paper I had been avoiding all morning.
The first sheet was a scrawled memo from the Daywatch Robbery boss down the hall: Lee—Wallace Simpkins paroled from Quentin last week—to our jurisdiction. Thought you should know. Be careful. G.C.
Cheery V-J Day tidings.
The second page was an interdepartmental teletype issued from University Division, and, when combined with Georgie Caulkins’s warning, it spelled out the beginning of a new one-front war.
Over the past five days there had been four heavy-muscle stickups in the West Adams district, perpetrated by a two-man heist team, one white, one negro. The MO was identical in all four cases: liquor stores catering to upper-crust negroes were hit at night, half an hour before closing, when the cash registers were full. A well-dressed male Caucasian would walk in and beat the clerk to the floor with the barrel of a .45 automatic, while the negro heister stuffed the till cash into a paper bag. Twice customers had been present when the robberies occurred; they had also been beaten senseless—one elderly woman was still in critical condition at Queen of Angels.
It was as simple and straightforward as a neon sign. I picked up the phone and called Al Van Patten’s personal number at the County Parole Bureau.
“Speak, it’s your nickel.”
“Lee Blanchard, Al.”
“Big Lee! You working today? The war’s over!”
“No, it’s not. Listen, I need the disposition on a parolee. Came out of Quentin last week. If he reported in, I need an address; if he hasn’t, just tell me.”
“Name? Charge?”
“Wallace Simpkins, 655 PC. I sent him up myself in ’39.”
Al whistled. “Light jolt. He got juice?”
“Probably kept his nose clean and worked a war industries job inside; his partner got released to the army after Pearl Harbor. Hurry it up, will you?”
“Off and running.”
Al dropped the receiver to his desk, and I suffered through long minutes of static-filtered party noise—male and female giggles, bottles clinking together, happy county flunkies turning radio dials trying to find dance music but getting only jubilant accounts of the big news. Through Edward R. Murrow’s uncharacteristically cheerful drone I pictured Wild Wally Simpkins, flush with cash and armed for bear, looking for me. I was shivering when Al came back on the line and said, “He’s hot, Lee.”
“Bench warrant issued?”
“Not yet.”
“Then don’t waste your time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Small potatoes. Call Lieutenant Holland at University dicks and tell him Simpkins is half of the heist team he’s looking for. Tell him to put out an APB and add, ‘armed and extremely dangerous’ and ‘apprehend with all force deemed necessary.’”
Al whistled again. “That bad?”
I said, “Yeah,” and hung up. “Apprehend with all force deemed necessary” was the L.A.P.D. euphemism for “shoot on sight.” I felt my fear decelerate just a notch. Finding fugitive felons was my job. Slipping an extra piece into my back waistband, I set out to find the man who had vowed to kill me.
After picking up standing mugs of Simpkins and a carbon of the robbery report from Georgie Caulkins, I drove toward the West Adams district. The day was hot and humid, and sidewalk mobs spilled into the street, passing victory bottles to horn-honking motorists. Traffic was bottlenecked at every stoplight, and paper debris floated down from office windows—a makeshift ticker-tape parade. The scene made me itchy, so I attached the roof light and hit my siren, weaving around stalled cars until downtown was a blur in my rearview mirror. When I slowed, I was all the way to Alvarado and the city I had sworn to protect looked normal again. Slowing to a crawl in the right-hand lane, I thought of Wallace Simpkins and knew the itch wouldn’t stop until the bastard was bought and paid for.
We went back six years, to the fall of ’39, when I was a vice officer in University Division and a regular light-heavyweight attraction at the Hollywood-Legion Stadium. A black-white stickup gang had been clouting markets and juke joints on West Adams, the white guy passing himself off as a member of Mickey Cohen’s mob, coercing the proprietor into opening up the safe for the monthly protection payment while the negro guy looked around innocently, then hit the cash registers. When the white guy got to the safe, he took all the money, then pistol-whipped the proprietor senseless. The heisters would then drive slowly north into the respectable Wilshire district, the white guy at the wheel, the negro guy huddled down in the backseat.
I got involved in the investigation on a fluke.
After the fifth job, the gang stopped cold. A stoolie of mine told me that Mickey Cohen found out that the white muscle was an ex-enforcer of his and had him snuffed. Rumor had it that the colored guy—a cowboy known only as Wild Wallace—was looking for a new partner and a new territory. I passed the information along to the dicks and thought nothing more of it. Then, a week later, it all hit the fan.
As a reward for my tip, I got a choice moonlight assignment: bodyguarding a high-stakes poker game frequented by L.A.P.D. brass and navy bigwigs up from San Diego. The game was held in the back room at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah, the swankiest police-sanctioned whorehouse on the south side. All I had to do was look big, mean, and servile and be willing to share boxing anecdotes. It was a major step toward sergeant’s stripes and a transfer to the Detective Division.
It went well—all smiles and backslaps and recountings of my split-decision loss to Jimmy Bivins—until a negro guy in a chauffeur’s outfit and an olive-skinned youth in a navy officer’s uniform walked in the door. I saw a gun bulge under the chauffeur’s left arm, and chandelier light fluttering over the navy man’s face revealed pale negro skin and processed hair.
And I knew.
I walked up to Wallace Simpkins, my right hand extended. When he grasped it, I sent a knee into his balls and a hard left hook at his neck. When he hit the floor, I pinned him there with a foot on his gun bulge, drew my own piece, and leveled it at his partner. “Bon voyage, admiral,” I said.
The admiral was named William Boyle, an apprentice armed robber from a black bourgeois family fallen on hard times. He turned state’s evidence on Wild Wallace, drew a reduced three-to-five jolt at Chino as part of the deal, and was paroled to the war effort early in ’42. Simpkins was convicted of five counts of robbery one with aggravated assault, got five-to-life at Big Q, and voodoo-hexed Billy Boyle and me at his trial, vowing on the soul of Baron Samedi to kill both of us, chop us into stew meat, and feed it to his dog. I more than half believed his vow, and for the first few years he was away, every time I got an unexplainable ache or pain I thought of him in his cell, sticking pins into a blue-suited Lee Blanchard voodoo doll.
I checked the robbery report lying on the seat beside me. The addresses of the four new black-white stickups covered 26th and Gramercy to La Brea and Adams. Hitting the racial demarcation line, I watched the topography change from negligent middleclass white to proud colored. East of St. Andrews, the houses were unkempt, with peeling paint and ratty front lawns. On the west the homes took on an air of elegance: small dwellings were encircled by stone fencing and well-tended greenery; the mansions that had earned West Adams the sobriquet High Darktown put Beverly Hills pads to shame—they were older, larger, and less architecturally pretentious, as if the owners knew that the only way to be rich and black was to downplay the performance with the quiet noblesse oblige of old white money.
I knew High Darktown only from the scores of conflicting legends about it. When I worked University Division, it was never on my beat. It was the lowest per capita crime area in L.A. The University brass followed an implicit edict of letting rich black police rich black, as if they figured blue suits couldn’t speak the language there at all. And the High Darktown citizens did a good job. Burglars foolish enough to trek across giant front lawns and punch in Tiffany windows were dispatched by volleys from thousand-dollar skeet guns held by negro financiers with an aristocratic panache to rival that of anyone white and big-moneyed. High Darktown did a damn good job of being inviolate.
But the legends were something else, and when I worked University, I wondered if they had been started and repeatedly embellished only because square-john white cops couldn’t take the fact that there were “niggers,” “shines,” “spooks,” and “jigs” who were capable of buying their low-rent lives outright. The stories ran from the relatively prosaic: negro boot-leggers with mob connections taking their loot and buying liquor stores in Watts and wetback-staffed garment mills in San Pedro, to exotic: the same thugs flooding low darktowns with cut-rate heroin and pimping out their most beautiful high-yellow sweethearts to L.A.’s powers-that-be in order to circumvent licensing and real estate statutes enforcing racial exclusivity. There was only one common denominator to all the legends: it was agreed that although High Darktown money started out dirty, it was now squeaky clean and snow white.
Pulling up in front of the liquor store on Gramercy, I quickly scanned the dick’s report on the robbery there, learning that the clerk was alone when it went down and saw both robbers up close before the white man pistol-whipped him unconscious. Wanting an eyeball witness to back up Lieutenant Holland’s APB, I entered the immaculate little shop and walked up to the counter.
A negro man with his head swathed in bandages walked in from the back. Eyeing me top to bottom, he said, “Yes, officer?”
I liked his brevity and reciprocated it. Holding up the mug shot of Wallace Simpkins, I said, “Is this one of the guys?”
Flinching backward, he said, “Yes. Get him.”
“Bought and paid for,” I said.
An hour later I had three more eyeball confirmations and turned my mind to strategy. With the all-points out on Simpkins, he’d probably get juked by the first blue suit who crossed his path, a thought only partly comforting. Artie Holland probably had stake-out teams stationed in the back rooms of other liquor stores in the area, and a prowl of Simpkins’s known haunts was a ridiculous play for a solo white man. Parking on an elm-lined street, I watched Japanese gardeners tend football field—sized lawns and started to sense that Wild Wallace’s affinity for High Darktown and white partners was the lever I needed. I set out to trawl for pale-skinned intruders like myself.
South on La Brea to Jefferson, then up to Western and back over to Adams. Runs down 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue, 3rd, 4th, and 5th. The only white men I saw were other cops, mailmen, store owners, and poontang prowlers. A circuit of the bars on Washington yielded no white faces and no known criminal types I could shake down for information.
Dusk found me hungry, angry, and still itchy, imagining Simpkins poking pins in a brand-new, plainclothes Blanchard doll. I stopped at a barbecue joint and wolfed down a beef sandwich, slaw, and fries. I was on my second cup of coffee when the mixed couple came in.
The girl was a pretty high yellow—soft angularity in a pink summer dress that tried to downplay her curves, and failed. The man was squat and muscular, wearing a rumpled Hawaiian shirt and pressed khaki trousers that looked like army issue. From my table I heard them place their order: jumbo chicken dinners for six with extra gravy and biscuits. “Lots of big appetites,” the guy said to the counterman. When the line got him a deadpan, he goosed the girl with his knee. She moved away, clenching her fists and twisting her head as if trying to avoid an unwanted kiss. Catching her face full view, I saw loathing etched into every feature.
They registered as trouble, and I walked out to my car in order to tail them when they left the restaurant. Five minutes later they appeared, the girl walking ahead, the man a few paces behind her, tracing hourglass figures in the air and flicking his tongue like a lizard. They got into a prewar Packard sedan parked in front of me, Lizard Man taking the wheel. When they accelerated, I counted to ten and pursued.
The Packard was an easy surveillance. It had a long radio antenna topped with a foxtail, so I was able to remain several car lengths in back and use the tail as a sighting device. We moved out of High Darktown on Western, and within minutes mansions and proudly tended homes were replaced by tenements and tar-paper shacks encircled by chicken wire. The farther south we drove the worse it got; when the Packard hung a left on 94th and headed east, past auto graveyards, storefront voodoo mosques, and hair-straightening parlors, it felt like entering White Man’s Hell.
At 94th and Normandie, the Packard pulled to the curb and parked; I continued on to the corner. From my rearview I watched Lizard Man and the girl cross the street and enter the only decent-looking house on the block, a whitewashed adobe job shaped like a miniature Alamo. Parking myself, I grabbed a flashlight from under the seat and walked over.
Right away I could tell the scene was way off. The block was nothing but welfare cribs, vacant lots, and gutted jalopies, but six beautiful ’40–’41 vintage cars were stationed at curbside. Hunkering down, I flashed my light at their license plates, memorized the numbers, and ran back to my unmarked cruiser. Whispering hoarsely into the two-way, I gave R&I the figures and settled back to await the readout.
I got the kickback ten minutes later, and the scene went from way off to way, way off.
Cupping the radio mike to my ear and clamping my spare hand over it to hold the noise down, I took in the clerk’s spiel. The Packard was registered to Leotis McCarver, male negro, age 41, of 1348 West 94th Street, L.A.—which had to be the cut-rate Alamo. His occupation was on file as union officer in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The other vehicles were registered to negro and white thugs with strong-arm convictions dating back to 1922. When the clerk read off the last name—Ralph “Big Tuna” De Santis, a known Mickey Cohen trigger—I decided to give the Alamo a thorough crawling.
Armed with my flashlight and two pieces, I cut diagonally across vacant lots toward my target’s backyard. In the far distance I could see fireworks lighting up the sky, but down here no one seemed to be celebrating—their war of just plain living was still dragging on. When I got to the Alamo’s yard wall, I took it at a run and kneed and elbowed my way over the top, coming down onto soft grass.
The back of the house was dark and quiet, so I risked flashing my light. Seeing a service porch fronted by a flimsy wooden door, I tiptoed over and tried it—and found it unlocked.
I walked in flashlight first, my beam picking up dusty walls and floors, discarded lounge chairs, and a broom-closet door standing half open. Opening it all the way, I saw army officers’ uniforms on hangers, replete with campaign ribbons and embroidered insignias.
Shouted voices jerked my attention toward the house proper. Straining my ears, I discerned both white-and negro-accented insults being hurled. There was a connecting door in front of me, with darkness beyond it. The shouting had to be issuing from a front room, so I nudged the door open a crack, then squatted down to listen as best I could.
“… and I’m just tellin’ you we gots to find a place and get us off the streets,” a negro voice was yelling, “’cause even if we splits up, colored with colored and the whites with the whites, there is still gonna be roadblocks!”
A babble rose in response, then a shrill whistle silenced it, and a white voice dominated: “We’ll be stopping the train way out in the country. Farmland. We’ll destroy the signaling gear, and if the passengers take off looking for help, the nearest farmhouse is ten fucking miles away—and those dogfaces are gonna be on foot.”
A black voice tittered, “They gonna be mad, them soldiers.”
Another black voice: “They gonna fought the whole fucking war for free.”
Laughter, then a powerful negro baritone took over: “Enough clowning around, this is money we’re talking about and nothing else!”
“’Cepting revenge, mister union big shot. Don’t you forget I got me other business on that train.”
I knew that voice by heart—it had voodoo-cursed my soul in court. I was on my way out the back for reinforcements when my legs went out from under me and I fell head first into darkness.
The darkness was soft and rippling, and I felt like I was swimming in a velvet ocean. Angry shouts reverberated far away, but I knew they were harmless; they were coming from another planet. Every so often I felt little stabs in my arms and saw pinpoints of light that made the voices louder, but then everything would go even softer, the velvet waves caressing me, smothering all my hurt.
Until the velvet turned to ice and the friendly little stabs became wrenching thuds up and down my back. I tried to draw myself into a ball, but an angry voice from this planet wouldn’t let me. “Wake up, shitbird! We ain’t wastin’ no more pharmacy morph on you! Wake up! Wake up, goddamnit!”
Dimly I remembered that I was a police officer and went for the .38 on my hip. My arms and hands wouldn’t move, and when I tried to lurch my whole body, I knew they were tied to my sides and that the thuds were kicks to my legs and rib cage. Trying to move away, I felt head-to-toe muscle cramps and opened my eyes. Walls and a ceiling came into hazy focus, and it all came back. I screamed something that was drowned out by laughter, and the Lizard Man’s face hovered only inches above mine. “Lee Blanchard,” he said, waving my badge and ID holder in front of my eyes. “You got sucker-punched again, shitbird. I saw Jimmy Bivins put you down at the Legion. Left hook outta nowhere, and you hit your knees, then worthless-shine muscle puts you down on your face. I got no respect for a man who gets sucker-punched by niggers.”
At “niggers” I heard a gasp and twisted around to see the negro girl in the pink dress sitting in a chair a few feet away. Listening for background noises and hearing nothing, I knew the three of us were alone in the house. My eyes cleared a little more, and I saw that the velvet ocean was a plushly furnished living room. Feeling started to return to my limbs, sharp pain that cleared my fuzzy head. When I felt a grinding in my lower back, I winced; the extra .38 snub I had tucked into my waistband at City Hall was still there, slipped down into my skivvies. Reassured by it, I looked up at Lizard Face and said, “Robbed any liquor stores lately?”
He laughed. “A few. Chump change compared to the big one this after—”
The girl shrieked, “Don’t tell him nothin’!”
Lizard Man flicked his tongue. “He’s dead meat, so who cares? It’s a train hijack, canvasback. Some army brass chartered the Super Chief, L.A. to Frisco. Poker games, hookers in the sleeping cars, smut movies in the lounge. Ain’t you heard? The war’s over, time to celebrate. We got hardware on board—shines playing porters, white guys in army suits. They all got scatter-guns, and sweetie pie’s boyfriend Voodoo, he’s got himself a tommy. They’re gonna take the train down tonight, around Salinas, when the brass is smashed to the gills, just achin’ to throw away all that good separation pay. Then Voodoo’s gonna come back here and perform some religious rites on you. He told me about it, said he’s got this mean old pit bull named Revenge. A friend kept him while he was in Quentin. The buddy was white, and he tormented the dog so he hates white men worse than poison. The dog only gets fed about twice a week, and you can just bet he’d love a nice big bowl of canvasback stew. Which is you, white boy. Voodoo’s gonna cut you up alive, turn you into dog food out of the can. Wanna take a bet on what he cuts off first?”
“That’s not true! That’s not what—”
“Shut up, Cora!”
Twisting on my side to see the girl better, I played a wild hunch. “Are you Cora Downey?”
Cora’s jaw dropped, but Lizard spoke first. “Smart boy. Billy Boyle’s ex, Voodoo’s current. These high-yellow coozes get around. You know canvasback here, don’t you, sweet? He sent both your boyfriends up, and if you’re real nice, maybe Voodoo’ll let you do some cutting on him.”
Cora walked over and spat in my face. She hissed “Mother” and kicked me with a spiked toe. I tried to roll away, and she sent another kick at my back.
Then my ace in the hole hit me right between the eyes, harder than any of the blows I had absorbed so far. Last night I had heard Wallace Simpkins’s voice through the door: “’Cepting revenge, mister union big shot. I got me other business on that train.” In my mind that “business” buzzed as snuffing Lieutenant Billy Boyle, and I was laying five-to-one that Cora wouldn’t like the idea.
Lizard took Cora by the arm and led her to the couch, then squatted next to me. “You’re a sucker for a spitball,” he said.
I smiled up at him. “Your mother bats cleanup at a two-dollar whorehouse.”
He slapped my face. I spat blood at him and said, “And you’re ugly.”
He slapped me again; when his arm followed through I saw the handle of an automatic sticking out of his right pants pocket. I made my voice drip with contempt: “You hit like a girl. Cora could take you easy.”
His next shot was full force. I sneered through bloody lips and said, “You queer? Only nancy boys slap like that.”
A one-two set hit me in the jaw and neck, and I knew it was now or never. Slurring my words like a punch-drunk pug, I said, “Let me up. Let me up and I’ll fight you man-to-man. Let me up.”
Lizard took a penknife from his pocket and cut the rope that bound my arms to my sides. I tried to move my hands, but they were jelly. My battered legs had some feeling in them, so I rolled over and up onto my knees. Lizard had backed off into a chump’s idea of a boxing stance and was firing roundhouse lefts and rights at the living room air. Cora was sitting on the couch, wiping angry tears from her cheeks. Deep breathing and lolling my torso like a hophead, I stalled for time, waiting for feeling to return to my hands.
“Get up, shitbird!”
My fingers still wouldn’t move.
“I said get up!”
Still no movement.
Lizard came forward on the balls of his feet, feinting and shadowboxing. My wrists started to buzz with blood, and I began to get unprofessionally angry, like I was a rookie heavy, not a thirty-one-year-old cop. Lizard hit me twice, left, right, open-handed.
In a split second he became Jimmy Bivins, and I zoomed back to the ninth round at the Legion in ’37. Dropping my left shoulder, I sent out a right lead, then pulled it and left-hooked him to the breadbasket. Bivins gasped and bent forward; I stepped backward for swinging room. Then Bivins was Lizard going for his piece, and I snapped to where I really was.
We drew at the same time. Lizard’s first shot went above my head, shattering a window behind me; mine, slowed by my awkward rear pull, slammed into the far wall. Recoil spun us both around, and before Lizard had time to aim I threw myself to the floor and rolled to the side like a carpet-eating dervish. Three shots cut the air where I had been standing a second before, and I extended my gun arm upward, braced my wrist, and emptied my snub-nose at Lizard’s chest. He was blasted backward, and through the shots’ echoes I heard Cora scream long and shrill.
I stumbled over to Lizard. He was on his way out, bleeding from three holes, unable to work the trigger of the .45. He got up the juice to give me a feeble middle-finger farewell, and when the bird was in midair I stepped on his heart and pushed down, squeezing the rest of his life out in a big arterial burst. When he finished twitching, I turned my attention to Cora, who was standing by the couch, putting out another shriek.
I stifled the noise by pinning her neck to the wall and hissing, “Questions and answers. Tell me what I want to know and you walk, fuck with me and I find dope in your purse and tell the DA you’ve been selling it to white nursery-school kids.” I let up on my grip. “First question. Where’s my car?”
Cora rubbed her neck. I could feel the obscenities stacking up on her tongue, itching to be hurled. All her rage went into her eyes as she said, “Out back. The garage.”
“Have Simpkins and the stiff been clouting the liquor stores in West Adams?”
Cora stared at the floor and nodded, “Yes.” Looking up, her eyes were filled with the self-disgust of the freshly turned stoolie. I said, “McCarver the union guy thought up the train heist?”
Another affirmative nod.
Deciding not to mention Billy Boyle’s probable presence on the train, I said, “Who’s bankrolling? Buying the guns and uniforms?”
“The liquor store money was for that, and there was this rich guy fronting money.”
Now the big question. “When does the train leave Union Station?”
Cora looked at her watch. “In half an hour.”
I found a phone in the hallway and called the Central Division squadroom, telling Georgie Caulkins to send all his available plainclothes and uniformed officers to Union Station, that an army-chartered Super Chief about to leave for ’Frisco was going to be hit by a white-negro gang in army and porter outfits. Lowering my voice so Cora wouldn’t hear, I told him to detain a negro quartermaster lieutenant named William Boyle as a material witness, then hung up before he could say anything but “Jesus Christ.”
Cora was smoking a cigarette when I reentered the living room. I picked my badge holder up off the floor and heard sirens approaching. “Come on,” I said. “You don’t want to get stuck here when the bulls show up.”
Cora flipped her cigarette at the stiff, then kicked him one for good measure. We took off.
I ran code three all the way downtown. Adrenaline smothered the dregs of the morph still in my system, and anger held down the lid on the aches all over my body. Cora sat as far away from me as she could without hanging out the window and never blinked at the siren noise. I started to like her and decided to doctor my arresting officer’s report to keep her out of the shithouse.
Nearing Union Station, I said, “Want to sulk or want to survive?”
Cora spat out the window and balled her fists.
“Want to get skin searched by some dyke matrons over at city jail or you want to go home?”
Cora’s fist balls tightened up; the knuckles were as white as my skin.
“Want Voodoo to snuff Billy Boyle?”
That got her attention. “What!”
I looked sidelong at Cora’s face gone pale. “He’s on the train. You think about that when we get to the station and a lot of cops start asking you to snitch off your pals.”
Pulling herself in from the window, Cora asked me the question that hoods have been asking cops since they patrolled on dinosaurs: “Why you do this shitty kind of work?”
I ignored it and said, “Snitch. It’s in your best interest.”
“That’s for me to decide. Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Why you do—”
I interrupted, “You’ve got it all figured out, you tell me.”
Cora started ticking off points on her fingers, leaning toward me so I could hear her over the siren. “One, you yourself figured your boxin’ days would be over when you was thirty, so you got yourself a nice civil service pension job; two, the bigwig cops loves to have ball players and fighters around to suck up to them—so’s you gets the first crack at the cushy ’signments. Three, you likes to hit people, and po -lice work be full of that; four, your ID card said Warrants Division, and I knows that warrants cops all serves process and does repos on the side, so I knows you pickin’ up lots of extra change. Five—”
I held up my hands in mock surrender, feeling like I had just taken four hard jabs from Billy Conn and didn’t want to go for sloppy fifths. “Smart girl, but you forgot to mention that I work goon squad for Firestone Tire and get a kickback for fingering wetbacks to the Border Patrol.”
Cora straightened the knot in my disreputable necktie. “Hey, baby, a gig’s a gig, you gots to take it where you finds it. I done things I ain’t particularly proud of, and I—”
I shouted, “That’s not it!”
Cora moved back to the window and smiled. “It certainly is, Mr. Po-liceman.”
Angry now, angry at losing, I did what I always did when I smelled defeat: attack. “Shitcan it. Shitcan it now, before I forget I was starting to like you.”
Cora gripped the dashboard with two white-knuckled hands and stared through the windshield. Union Station came into view, and pulling into the parking lot I saw a dozen black-and-whites and unmarked cruisers near the front entrance. Bullhorn-barked commands echoed unintelligibly as I killed my siren, and behind the police cars I glimpsed plainclothesmen aiming riot guns at the ground.
I pinned my badge to my jacket front and said, “Out.” Cora stumbled from the car and stood rubber-kneed on the pavement. I got out, grabbed her arm, and shoved-pulled her all the way over to the pandemonium. As we approached, a harness bull leveled his .38 at us, then hesitated and said, “Sergeant Blanchard?”
I said “Yeah” and handed Cora over to him, adding, “She’s a material witness, be nice to her.” The youth nodded, and I walked past two bumper-to-bumper black-and-whites into the most incredible shakedown scene I had ever witnessed:
Negro men in porter uniforms and white men in army khakis were lying facedown on the pavement, their jackets and shirts pulled up to their shoulders, their trousers and undershorts pulled down to their knees. Uniformed cops were spread searching them while plainclothesmen held the muzzles of .12 gauge pumps to their heads. A pile of confiscated pistols and sawed-off shotguns lay a safe distance away. The men on the ground were all babbling their innocence or shouting epithets, and every cop trigger finger looked itchy.
Voodoo Simpkins and Billy Boyle were not among the six suspects. I looked around for familiar cop faces and saw Georgie Caulkins by the station’s front entrance, standing over a sheetcovered stretcher. I ran up to him and said, “What have you got, Skipper?”
Caulkins toed the sheet aside, revealing the remains of a fortyish negro man. “The shine’s Leotis McCarver,” Georgie said. “Upstanding colored citizen, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters big shot, a credit to his race. Put a .38 to his head and blew his brains out when the black-and-whites showed up.”
Catching a twinkle in the old lieutenant’s eyes, I said, “Really?”
Georgie smiled. “I can’t shit a shitter. McCarver came out waving a white handkerchief, and some punk kid rookie cancelled his ticket. Deserves a commendation, don’t you think?”
I looked down at the stiff and saw that the entry wound was right between the eyes. “Give him a sharpshooter’s medal and a desk job before he plugs some innocent civilian. What about Simpkins and Boyle?”
“Gone,” Georgie said. “When we first got here, we didn’t know the real soldiers and porters from the heisters, so we threw a net over the whole place and shook everybody down. We held every legit shine lieutenant, which was two guys, then cut them loose when they weren’t your boy. Simpkins and Boyle probably got away in the shuffle. A car got stolen from the other end of the lot—citizen said she saw a nigger in a porter’s suit breaking the window. That was probably Simpkins. The license number’s on the air along with an all points. That shine is dead meat.”
I thought of Simpkins invoking protective voodoo gods and said, “I’m going after him myself.”
“You owe me a report on this thing!”
“Later.”
“Now!”
I said, “Later, sir,” and ran back to Cora, Georgie’s “now” echoing behind me. When I got to where I had left her, she was gone. Looking around, I saw her a few yards away on her knees, handcuffed to the bumper of a black-and-white. A cluster of blue suits were hooting at her, and I got very angry.
I walked over. A particularly callow-looking rookie was regaling the others with his account of Leotis McCarver’s demise. All four snapped to when they saw me coming. I grabbed the storyteller by his necktie and yanked him toward the back of the car. “Uncuff her,” I said.
The rookie tried to pull away. I yanked at his tie until we were face-to-face and I could smell Sen-Sen on his breath. “And apologize.”
The kid flushed, and I walked back to my unmarked cruiser. I heard muttering behind me, and then I felt a tap on my shoulder. Cora was there, smiling. “I owe you one,” she said.
I pointed to the passenger seat. “Get in. I’m collecting.”
The ride back to West Adams was fueled by equal parts of my nervous energy and Cora’s nonstop spiel on her loves and criminal escapades. I had seen it dozens of times before. A cop stands up for a prisoner against another cop, on general principles or because the other cop is a turd, and the prisoner takes it as a sign of affection and respect and proceeds to lay out a road map of his life, justifying every wrong turn because he wants to be the cop’s moral equal. Cora’s tale of her love for Billy Boyle back in his heister days, her slide into call-house service when he went to prison, and her lingering crush on Wallace Simpkins was predictable and mawkishly rendered. I got more and more embarrassed by her “you dig?” punctuations and taps on the arm, and if I didn’t need her as a High Darktown tour guide I would have kicked her out of the car and back to her old life. But then the monologue got interesting.
When Billy Boyle was cut loose from Chino, he had a free week in L.A. before his army induction and went looking for Cora. He found her hooked on ether at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah, seeing voodoo visions, servicing customers as Coroloa, the African Slave Queen. He got her out of there, eased her off the dope with steambaths and vitamin B-12 shots, then ditched her to fight for Uncle Sam. Something snapped in her brain when Billy left, and, still vamped on Wallace Simpkins, she started writing him at Quentin. Knowing his affinity for voodoo, she smuggled in some slave-queen smut pictures taken of her at the Casbah, and they got a juicy correspondence going. Meanwhile, Cora went to work at Mickey Cohen’s southside numbers mill, and everything looked peachy. Then Simpkins came out of Big Q, the voodoo sex fantasy stuff became tepid reality, and the Voodoo Man himself went back to stickups, exploiting her connections to the white criminal world.
When Cora finished her story, we were skirting the edge of High Darktown. It was dusk; the temperature was easing off; the neon signs of the Western Avenue juke joints had just started flashing. Cora lit a cigarette and said, “All Billy’s people is from around here. If he’s lookin’ for a hideout or a travelin’ stake, he’d hit the clubs on West Jeff. Wallace wouldn’t show his evil face around here, ’less he’s lookin’ for Billy, which I figure he undoubtedly is. I—”
I interrupted, “I thought Billy came from a square-john family. Wouldn’t he go to them?”
Cora’s look said I was a lily-white fool. “Ain’t no square-john families around here, ’ceptin those who work domestic. West Adams was built on bootleggin’, sweetie. Black sellin’ white lightnin’ to black, gettin’ fat, then investin’ white. Billy’s folks was runnin’ shine when I was in pigtails. They’re respectable now, and they hates him for takin’ a jolt. He’ll be callin’ in favors at the clubs, don’t you worry.”
I hung a left on Western, heading for Jefferson Boulevard.
“How do you know all this?”
“I am from High, High Darktown, sweet.”
“Then why do you hold on to that Aunt Jemima accent?”
Cora laughed. “And I thought I sounded like Lena Horne. Here’s why, sweetcakes. Black woman with a law degree they call ‘nigger.’ Black girl with three-inch heels and a shiv in her purse they call ‘baby.’ You dig?”
“I dig.”
“No, you don’t. Stop the car, Tommy Tucker’s club is on the next block.”
I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and pulled to the curb. Cora got out ahead of me and swayed around the corner on her three-inch heels, calling, “I’ll go in,” over her shoulder. I waited underneath a purple neon sign heralding Tommy Tucker’s Playroom. Cora come out five minutes later, saying, “Billy was in here ’bout half an hour ago. Touched the barman for a double saw.”
“Simpkins?”
Cora shook her head. “Ain’t been seen.”
I hooked a finger in the direction of the car. “Let’s catch him.”
For the next two hours we followed Billy Boyle’s trail through High Darktown’s nightspots. Cora went in and got the information, while I stood outside like a white wallflower, my gun unholstered and pressed to my leg, waiting for a voodoo killer with a tommy gun to aim and fire. Her info was always the same: Boyle had been in, had made a quick impression with his army threads, had gotten a quick touch based on his rep, and had practically run out the door. And no one had seen Wallace Simpkins.
11 p.m. found me standing under the awning of Hanks’ Swank Spot, feeling pinpricks all over my exhausted body. Square-john negro kids cruised by waving little American flags out of backseat windows, still hopped up that the war was over. Male and female, they all had mug-shot faces that kept my trigger finger at half-pull even though I knew damn well they couldn’t be him. Cora’s sojourn inside was running three times as long as her previous ones, and when a car backfired and I aimed at the old lady behind the wheel, I figured High Darktown was safer with me off the street and went in to see what was keeping Cora.
The Swank Spot’s interior was Egyptian: silk wallpaper embossed with pharaohs and mummies, papier-mâché pyramids surrounding the dance floor, and a long bar shaped like a crypt lying sideways. The patrons were more contemporary: negro men in double-breasted suits and women in evening gowns who looked disapprovingly at my rumpled clothes and two-and-a-half-day beard.
Ignoring them, I eyeballed in vain for Cora. Her soiled pink dress would have stood out like a beacon amid the surrounding hauteur, but all the women were dressed in pale white and sequined black. Panic was rising inside me when I heard her voice, distorted by bebop, pleading behind the dance floor.
I pushed my way through minglers, dancers, and three pyramids to get to her. She was standing next to a phonograph setup, gesturing at a black man in slacks and a camel-hair jacket. The man was sitting in a folding chair, alternately admiring his manicure and looking at Cora like she was dirt.
The music was reaching a crescendo; the man smiled at me; Cora’s pleas were engulfed by saxes, horns, and drums going wild. I flashed back to my Legion days—rabbit punches and elbows and scrubbing my laces into cuts during clinches. The past two days went topsy-turvy, and I kicked over the phonograph. The Benny Goodman sextet exploded into silence, and I aimed my piece at the man and said, “Tell me now.”
Shouts rose from the dance floor, and Cora pressed herself into a toppled pyramid. The man smoothed the pleats in his trousers and said, “Cora’s old flame was in about half an hour ago, begging. I turned him down, because I respect my origins and hate snitches. But I told him about an old mutual friend—a soft touch. Another Cora flame was in about ten minutes ago, asking after flame number one. Seems he has a grudge against him. I sent him the same place.”
I croaked, “Where?” and my voice sounded disembodied to my own ears.
The man said, “No. You can apologize now, officer. Do it, and I won’t tell my good friends Mickey Cohen and Inspector Waters about your behavior.”
I stuck my gun in my waistband and pulled out an old Zippo I used to light suspects’ cigarettes. Sparking a flame, I held it inches from a stack of brocade curtains. “Remember the Coconut Grove?”
The man said, “You wouldn’t,” and I touched the flame to the fabric. It ignited immediately, and smoke rose to the ceiling. Patrons were screaming “Fire!” in the club proper. The brocade was fried to a crisp when the man shrieked, “John Downey,” ripped off his camel-hair, and flung it at the flames. I grabbed Cora and pulled her through the club, elbowing and rabbit-punching panicky revelers to clear a path. When we hit the sidewalk, I saw that Cora was sobbing. Smoothing her hair, I whispered hoarsely, “What, babe, what?”
It took a moment for Cora to find a voice, but when she spoke, she sounded like a college professor. “John Downey’s my father. He’s very big around here, and he hates Billy because he thinks Billy made me a whore.”
“Where does he li—”
“Arlington and Country Club.”
We were there within five minutes. This was High, High Darktown—Tudor estates, French chateaus, and Moorish villas with terraced front lawns. Cora pointed out a plantation-style mansion and said, “Go to the side door. Thursday’s the maid’s night off, and nobody’ll hear you if you knock at the front.”
I stopped the car across the street and looked for other out-of-place vehicles. Seeing nothing but Packards, Caddys, and Lincolns nestled in driveways, I said, “Stay put. Don’t move, no matter what you see or hear.”
Cora nodded mutely. I got out and ran over to the plantation, hurdling a low iron fence guarded by a white iron jockey, then treading down a long driveway. Laughter and applause issued from the adjoining mansion, separated from the Downey place by a high hedgerow. The happy sounds covered my approach, and I started looking in windows.
Standing on my toes and moving slowly toward the back of the house, I saw rooms festooned with crewelwork wall hangings and hunting prints. Holding my face up to within a few inches of the glass, I looked for shadow movement and listened for voices, wondering why all the lights were on at close to midnight.
Then faceless voices assailed me from the next window down. Pressing my back to the wall, I saw that the window was cracked for air. Cocking an ear toward the open space, I listened.
“… and after all the setup money I put in, you still had to knock down those liquor stores?”
The tone reminded me of a mildly outraged negro minister rebuking his flock, and I braced myself for the voice that I knew would reply.
“I gots cowboy blood, Mister Downey, like you musta had when you was a young man runnin’ shine. That cop musta got loose, got Cora and Whitey to snitch. Blew a sweet piece of work, but we can still get off clean. McCarver was the only one ’sides me knew you was bankrollin’, and he be dead. Billy be the one you wants dead, and he be showin’ up soon. Then I cuts him and dumps him somewhere, and nobody knows he was even here.”
“You want money, don’t you?”
“Five big get me lost somewheres nice, then maybe when he starts feelin’ safe again, I comes back and cuts that cop. That sound about—”
Applause from the big house next door cut Simpkins off. I pulled out my piece and got up some guts, knowing my only safe bet was to backshoot the son of a bitch right where he was. I heard more clapping and joyous shouts that Mayor Bowron’s reign was over, and then John Downey’s preacher baritone was back in force: “I want him dead. My daughter is a white-trash consort and a whore, and he’s—”
A scream went off behind me, and I hit the ground just as machine-gun fire blew the window to bits. Another burst took out the hedgerow and the next-door window. I pinned myself back first to the wall and drew myself upright as the snout of a tommy gun was rested against the ledge a few inches away. When muzzle flame and another volley exploded from it, I stuck my .38 in blind and fired six times at stomach level. The tommy strafed a reflex burst upward, and when I hit the ground again, the only sound was chaotic shrieks from the other house.
I reloaded from a crouch, then stood up and surveyed the carnage through both mansion windows. Wallace Simpkins lay dead on John Downey’s Persian carpet, and across the way I saw a banner for the West Adams Democratic Club streaked with blood. When I saw a dead woman spread-eagled on top of an antique table, I screamed myself, elbowed my way into Downey’s den, and picked up the machine gun. The grips burned my hands, but I didn’t care; I saw the faces of every boxer who had ever defeated me and didn’t care; I heard grenades going off in my brain and was glad they were there to kill all the innocent screaming. With the tommy’s muzzle as my directional device, I walked through the house.
All my senses went into my eyes and trigger finger. Wind ruffled a window curtain, and I blew the wall apart; I caught my own image in a gilt-edged mirror and blasted myself into glass shrapnel. Then I heard a woman moaning, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” dropped the tommy, and ran to her.
Cora was on her knees on the entry hall floor, plunging a shiv into a man who had to be her father. The man moaned baritone low and tried to reach up, almost as if to embrace her. Cora’s “Daddy’s” got lower and lower, until the two seemed to be working toward harmony. When she let the dying man hold her, I gave them a moment together, then pulled Cora off of him and dragged her outside. She went limp in my arms, and with lights going on everywhere and sirens converging from all directions, I carried her to my car.