1:02 p.m.

Another fucking convoy. Stalled traffic at Pico and Crenshaw.

A major intersection. All six lanes blocked. Civilian motorists honking their horns—part fervor, part frustration.

Parker checked his watch. He was now two minutes late. He was meeting Carl Hull at Wilshire Station. Carl kept the Department’s Fifth Column files. Carl was half intelligence agent, half cop.

A motorcycle punk jumped a half-track hitch and zoomed off, westbound. The act broke four traffic-code laws. The heist-hot car call cost him an hour. The Ashida kid’s gizmo compensated.

Soldiers applauded the jump. The punk flipped them the finger.

Parker stepped out of his car. The convoy stretched to Olympic north and Washington south. Crisscross traffic, lumbering vehicles, Army fools running red lights.

His siren was useless. Street noise would smother it. The fortifications were pledged to defense plants. Two howitzers were pledged to Douglas Aircraft. His old boss ran the plant police. James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis would get two more guns.

He was stalled in traffic. He was stalled in Traffic Division. He was The Man Who Would Be Chief. He was dead-stalled on all flanks.

He hailed from Deadwood, South Dakota. He was a son of the Holy Church and mining-town justice. He will be Chief. He will derail the Protestant line of succession. He will enact rigorous reforms. His brusque-tempered reformer’s zeal was divinely bestowed. He will be Chief. He’s been laying the groundwork for years.

He’s William H. Parker III. Bill Parker I was a Union army colonel and U.S. attorney. Bill Parker I closed down Deadwood’s whorehouses and dope dens. Bill Parker I was elected to Congress in 1906. Cirrhosis killed him at age sixty-one.

Bill Parker I had The Thirst. Line of succession: Bill Parker II and III inherited it.

His police department moniker is “Whiskey Bill.” It’s colorful, but incomplete. It fails to denote his comportment within the affliction.

He stayed dry throughout Prohibition. Alcohol was illegal then. 1933 brought repeal. He’s been drinking at odd intervals since then.

Deadwood. He acquired The Thirst there.

Deadwood formed him the way L.A. made him. He graduated from high school in ’20. He was the brightest kid in his class. His mother divorced Bill Parker II in ’22. She uprooted to L.A. then. He helped with the move and stayed on.

L.A. was a hundred times bigger than Deadwood and a hundred times more corrupt. He worked as a movie usher and cabbie. L.A.’s sinfulness enraged him. The scale of the place drew him in.

There was a horrible kid marriage. His bride was a trollop. He did vile things to her. He cannot say the woman’s name. He confessed his vile acts to a priest and received absolution.

He got a Church annulment and married again. Helen Schultz was a prudently chosen wife. She was an ex-policewoman. His first wife was a tawdry drunk dream. Helen was probity defined.

He drove taxicabs and attended law school. He joined the Los Angeles Police Department in ’27. It was sickeningly corrupt. Protestant hoodlums ran the Department. He held his tongue and made rank. He became the hatchet man for Two-Gun Davis. The man was bone-dirty. He acceded to the man’s designs. He heard things he shouldn’t have heard and did things he shouldn’t have done. His brutal ambition was forged from this ghastly descent.

He began his ascent. It started with his law school degree and stunning bar-exam performance. Jim Davis taught him the law from a morally forfeited perspective. He changed the law to vouch his career path.

Jim Davis and Mayor Frank Shaw were ousted. Fletcher Bowron was elected mayor. Bowron was a dimwit and half-assed reformer. Bowron brought in and sacked Chief Art Hohmann. Chief Art squawked when Fletch tapped “Call-Me-Jack” Horrall. Call-Me-Jack was a hear-no-evil/​see-no-evil Chief. He maintained a clean façade. He was buffered by hatchet men and bagmen. Captain William H. Parker was frozen in place. The promotion list was an ice floe. He deployed his legal knowledge to thaw himself out.

He crafted legal documents. They fortified civil-service statutes, curtailed political influence and buttressed police autonomy. He had reform-minded jurists introduce the measures. They were straw men and kept his name out of it. The first measures altered the L.A. City Charter and were voted into law. A final measure granted civil service protection to police chiefs. That law now protected Call-Me-Jack Horrall. It would protect him one day.

The Los Angeles Police Department was a snake pit. Rampant factionalism, feudal-warlord cops. City Hall was hot-wired. The Detective Bureau was full of mop-closet listening posts and wire-recording gadgets spackled to ledges and lamps. Cops talked heedlessly, cops kept tabs. Smart cops made their dirty calls from pay phones.

Like Dudley Smith.

They monitored one another. They played at civility. Their shared Catholicism served them there. They had monthly dinners with Archbishop Cantwell. Call-Me-Jack let Dudley peddle dope to southside Negroes. Call-Me-Jack cosigned Dudley’s loathsome theories of racial sedation. Dudley was a Coughlinite and America Firster. He was Irish-born. He hated the English. He smugly relished the Nazi bombing of London.

Parker leaned on his black-and-white. The northbound traffic was stacked down to Adams now. Soldiers whooped at Dorsey High girls. A girl flipped her skirt and displayed her undies. It created an uproar.

Traffic jam. Logjam in Traffic Division.

He ran the Accident Investigation Detail. It was boring work, crucial work, not a career booster. The L.A. boom continued. The automobile boom boomed exponentially. More cars, more car crashes, more injuries and fatalities.

Call-Me-Jack sent him to Northwestern U. last year. He matriculated at a school for ranking traffic cops. His professors predicted an “auto-wreck apocalypse.” He kept seeing a young woman on campus. She was tall, red-haired, about twenty-five. He asked a few students about her. They said she was a registered nurse and biology major. Her name was Joan something. She was from the Wisconsin boonies. She liked to drink.

It was 1:14 p.m. The convoy was impregnable. Wait—a northbound half-track stalled out.

Thread the needle. Hit the wiggle spot.

Parker got in the car and tapped his cherry lights and siren. Little kids on the sidewalk squealed. He gunned it and squeaked through the opening. He hit Wilshire Station at 1:16.

He parked and ran upstairs. Young cops gawked at the captain in full sprint.

Carl Hull had an office across from the squadroom. He ran the Red Squad in the ’30s and reformed it. The Department hired out cops as strikebreaker thugs. Hull kiboshed the practice and took on his file-keeper job.

Parker stepped into the office. Hull sat at his desk, with his feet up. A war map covered two walls. Blue and red pins denoted troops in Europe. Yellow pins denoted the Japs’ Pacific march.

Hull said, “You’re seventeen minutes late.”

Parker straddled a chair. “An auto theft and a drugstore heist pushed me back.”

“I’ve got scuttlebutt on that.”

“Tell me.”

Hull packed his pipe. “It’s off the Bureau pipeline. That Jap lab kid called Buzz Meeks. He got a fiber match to that rape-o MP.”

“Conclusive?”

“No, and the kid told Meeks that.”

Parker drummed the chair slats. “Who’d Meeks tell?”

“Dudley Smith.”

“And Dudley went to Call-Me-Jack, who said, ‘You take care of it, Dud.’ ”

Hull lit the pipe. “Yes, and in an ideal world, I’d prefer due process.”

Parker lit a cigarette. “As much as I despise rapists and heist men, so would I.”

A breeze buckled the war map. Parker studied the Russian-front pins. The resisting reds swarmed the advancing blues. It was a near rout.

“We’ll be up against Russia after the war, Carl.”

“Unless we intercede after Hitler bleeds them dry.”

Parker shook his head. “They’re our allies now. We need them to win this war, which hasn’t even started for us yet.”

Hull smiled. “Stalin will angle for a property split in eastern Europe. We’ll have to forfeit territories and hold on to some strategic possessions.”

Parker pointed to the map. “The conflict will be largely ideological then. It’s been that way since their goddamn revolution. They hate us, we hate them. We can’t let a momentary alliance blunt us to the fact that the world isn’t big enough for both of us.”

Hull twirled an ashtray. “You’re leading me, William.”

Parker smiled. “Here’s my cross-examination, then. Do you predict a U.S. versus Russia war of territorial chess, the moment that peace is declared?”

Hull said, “Yes, I do.”

“Then I’ll classify you as a friendly witness and capitalize on that concession. Do you consider our homegrown Fifth Column to be clever and farsighted enough to begin their subversive activities before our inevitable engagement in the current world conflict?”

Hull pointed to the map. “Yes. They know that Hitler can’t fight a two-front war and win, just like we do. They’ll play up the fact that Russian blood paved our way to victory, portray us as panfascists and ingrates, and roll out every cliché in the books from that point on.”

Parker pulled out a pocket-size tract. “Here’s some quotes from this. ‘A draconian policy of U.S. aggression against Russia, our current brave ally, after the war is won.’ ‘Escalating war hysteria and the racially inspired mass imprisonment of innocent Japanese citizens, a collusive tangle of the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI.’ ”

Hull tamped his pipe. “Devil’s advocate, William. The Feds do have a Jap subversive list, and they will use us if any type of detentions are required. You can’t fault the bastards’ logic here.”

Parker said, “Their logic is specious, seditious, disingenuous and criminally defamatory. These shitheels allege to be antifascist, yet they give aid and comfort to our shared fascist enemy with the very writing and publication of this tract. And if you require further verification of the pervertedly circuitous logic of it all, the tract was printed by the same outfit that prints Gerald L. K. Smith’s hate tracts.”

Hull stared at the wall maps. Parker tossed the tract in his lap. Hull skimmed it.

“I know who wrote this. I’ve got her prose style and vocabulary memorized.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s a woman. She’s a socialite, for want of less kind descriptions, and she runs a Red cell. She lords it over some screenwriters and actors. They show up at rallies, make speeches and cause a ruckus. The Feds have an informant in the cell. He’s a Beverly Hills psychiatrist that all the Reds spill their woes to. A pal on the Feds passes me the good doctor’s dirt. I’ll show you my file, if you quit leading me and come clean.”

Parker shook his head. “Give me some names first. Come on, Carl. I outrank you.”

Hull laughed. “The doctor’s name is Saul Lesnick. His daughter was riding a vehicular-manslaughter term at Tehachapi. The Feds sprung her on the proviso that he turn snitch.”

“The others?”

“The woman’s name is Claire De Haven. Her chief acolytes are a fairy actor named Reynolds Loftis and his inamorata Chaz Minear.”

No bells rang. The Urge hit out of nowhere. Come on—revoke The Pledge. One drink won’t kill you.

“These Reds are defaming our police department, Carl. We can’t have that.”

“You’ll be Chief one day, William. I look forward to that day, and I’ll serve proudly under you. For now, though, I’d be happy with an explanation.”

Parker stood up. “We’ll plant someone in the cell. Our own informant. Someone we’ve got a wedge on.”

Hull opened a drawer and pulled out four photographs. Parker leaned over the desk.

Hull laid the photos out. “I was checking my surveillance files a few weeks ago. These jumped out at me. I thought they might be useful at some point, so you might call this serendipitous.”

Four sneak snapshots. Group pix. Two indoor meetings, two outdoor rallies. Dates: mid-’37 to fall ’38. A young woman’s face circled, four times.

She had dark hair. She stared intently at something. She looked provocative.

“Who is she?”

“Katherine Ann Lake, age twenty-one. Here’s a hint. Her boyfriend was the bluesuit at your heist call a few hours ago.”

Bells rang. Provocative—sure.

The Boulevard-Citizens job. That persistent rumor: Lee Blanchard bossed the heist and framed a fall guy. Blanchard was allegedly tight with Ben Siegel. “Bugsy” was now in the Hall of Justice jail. He allegedly snuffed a hood named Greenie Greenberg. It was a Jew gang rubout—November ’39.

Siegel would be out soon. The prosecution’s key witness took a window dive. Last month—Coney Island, New York. Gangland thug Abe Reles falls to his death. NYPD men are guarding him. He fashions a bedsheet rope and attempts to escape. He plummets eight stories.

Katherine Ann Lake. The girl Blanchard met at the robbery trial. The prosecution’s stunning star witness.

Parker stared at the photos. “Blanchard’s a shitheel. You’ve heard the rumors.”

Hull coughed. “Yes, and I credit them. If you’re thinking of the Boulevard-Citizens caper for a wedge on the girl, you wouldn’t be far off.”

Parker said, “He wants to link up with Dudley and his boys. You’ve heard the rumors.”

Hull said, “Here’s something you haven’t heard. The NYPD Intelligence Squad spotted Blanchard in Coney Island, right before that witness in the Siegel trial jumped. The cops recognized him from his fight days.”

Parker stared at the photographs. The resolution was sharp. The Lake girl had fierce dark eyes.