by Max Grant
Mine fronted on the street, east of the central walk. From the living room it commanded an equally good view of the street out front and the lights of the city below. An elderly couple occupied the bungalow across the walk, but they kept out of sight most of the time and I had not yet met them. The landlady kept the bungalow behind theirs. She’d once told me the old party was a retired Federal Marshal from Chicago and his wife a former gun moll that he’d straightened out.
This day I’d decided to leave my roost early and spend some time at the office. Nothing had come up by early afternoon and I was developing a thirst. I’d just picked up my hat to leave for the day when the outer door opened and she walked in. She paused inside the doorway and regarded the room with a mildly disapproving look.
From just within the inner door, I barked “Can I help you, m’am?” She jumped about a half of foot in the air and quickly regained her composure.
Grinning, she said, “Well I was hoping it would be the other way around. It looks like you could use a secretary around here.”
I snorted out a weak chuckle and said, “I suppose it does.”
She looked like a teenager. She also looked like a hundred other diminutive Japanese beauties I’d seen the last couple of years working shore patrol in western Kyushu.
When I’d re-upped with the Navy in Okinawa, they’d sent me to a small maritime port called Sasebo, not too far from the ruins of Nagasaki. As part of the occupation, our job was to assist with the repatriation of Japanese refugees from China passing through the Hario return center. Located in the Saikai Straights near the hamlet of Hario, the installation was in sight of the three massive concrete transmission towers that had launched the coded command for the attack on Pearl Harbor almost seven years prior.
It was at the return center that I met Miss Sachiko Hashima. She showed up daily to peruse the afternoon arrivals, always leaving disappointed at afternoon’s end. During my second week of duty we‘d struck up a conversation and she’d accepted an invitation to dinner. A headstrong girl, she’d insisted on taking me to a bento box named Tsubuki, located north of the straights in a little junction called Haiki. It soon turned into an evening ritual with us, and I lived for a few weeks on a limited menu of yaki-tori, yaki-soba, and assorted sea critters.
The girl told me she’d spent a couple years at Pasadena College before the war. Her English was nearly flawless, but very nicely accented. She said she’d stayed with some relatives living in East LA. From then on she’d show up mid-day to look over the returnees and wait for me to get off duty.
She told me she lived in Yamate-cho, a small section of town in the hills overlooking Sasebo Harbor. Her parents had disappeared somewhere in the Pacific. She was down to Hario looking for her aunt and uncle, and the rest of their family that had been living in Manchuria, lately Manchukuo, since 1936.
One day she’d brought me her “pillow book,” a less-than-subtly illustrated accessory of the single female that I had heard rumors about from some of the men. I took the hint and moved out of the barracks, renting a room in a small ryokan on the road to Hario. In the course of one of our nocturnal conversations she brought up the subject or her cousin, Miss Tomoe Suzuki, young daughter of the relatives she’d stayed with in East LA.
Several months later in the spring of 1946 Sachiko was rewarded one morning with the sight of her folk’s family debarking from an old ferry boat at the return center. Her eyes were shimmering with tears of relief as she glanced up at me while passing to the exits.
It was a whole other week before I saw her again. She came down to tell me that she’d moved up to their hometown of Arita to live with the family, and would not be back in Hario again.
* * *
I ushered the young lady into my office and gestured to the chair in front of the desk.
“I’ve been getting along well enough on my own,” I lied, “but do tell me about yourself.”
She said, “My name is Miss Suzuki. My cousin, Miss Hashima, wrote me a letter and suggested that if I ran into you around town you would likely need some help. I just finished secretarial school this month.”
I stared at her for a long minute with some amusement. Finally I said, “Tomoe Suzuki, the son your father never had.”
Her eyes bugged out and her face did all kinds of strange things. She flushed beet red and looked down in her lap, laughing softly.
“So… It was like that with you and Sachiko.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No, she still thinks I’m some kind of baby girl, the bobby soxer she knew when she was out here for school.”
Sachiko had told me all about her American cousin. It seems the venerable Mr. Suzuki, a new immigrant to the States, had failed in his attempts to produce a son to bless with the name of his revered grandfather, Tomoyuki. So when his only daughter came, he named her Tomoe and from the age of five he had taken to secretly calling her Yuki, a name which just they shared. Yuki had always been annoyed at the difficulty her classmates experienced pronouncing her proper name and she quickly found that the catchy nickname gained her popularity and fame in middle school.
“So, Miss Suzuki, how is Sachiko doing these days?”
“She is staying at the home of my aunt and uncle in Arita. She hasn’t told me but I have heard rumors that she is dating an Army man with the occupation. She has written me many times about James-san, saying she was grateful for the help you gave her in finding her family.”
I chuckled at that one and let it drift by.
“Miss Suzuki, I haven’t totally gone through my earnings from the last case. I’d be pleased to take you on for as long as the money lasts. What would you have in mind?”
“Well you won’t be needing all that empty space in the reception room.”
“It’s all yours.” I reached into the side drawer and pulled out my spare key. “Your key to the suite. Please make yourself at home.”
Yuki placed a few phone calls and had her office set up by mid-afternoon. I kept one cabinet of confidential files in my office, and moved the other two out beside her desk in the reception room. She had her desk placed off-center near the middle of the room on the side where the guest phone was attached to the wall.
From her desk she commanded a view of the hall door, while maintaining a defensive position in front of the connecting door to my office. The couch and chairs were moved to the opposite wall. By mid-afternoon my new secretary was all settled in. And I was wondering what could possibly happen next.
* * *
In fact it all started the following afternoon. Outside the window, the June gloom had settled in all the way up to the Hollywood Hills and the basin below was still socked in with fog.
Yuki was sitting at her desk working her fingernails with an emery board when Sally from Magnum Studios dropped by to see if I still had my shingle hung out. She told me that Mr. Silverstein would like to have me drop by about some problem one of his stars was having. It seems that Magnum’s recent film sensation, Vivian Lane, had been approached by some local Reds and she wanted them off her back.
I told her I’d look Moe up first thing in the morning.
* * *
I showed up at the Magnum lot bright and early the next morning, hoping there was enough of a job in this to justify taking on a secretary. Sally ushered me right in to see Moe and he laid it out pretty much as Sally had described. He handed me a short stack of some of the initial correspondence Miss Lane had received, along with a second stack of unopened mail.
Moe Silverstein had a reputation for being the last of the good guys in Hollywood. Certainly he was the last of the original moguls. He lived for the art of the film and the people involved in the production. He tended to look at them all as equal participants: the writers, the editors, the director and everyone else in front of or behind the cameras. He didn’t play favorites and he had high expectations for everyone involved.
Moe believed that Magnum’s fortunes were tied to the reputations o
f the participants and he brooked no foolishness. Magnum was famous for having continued with the tradition of the great epics and was currently the lead Hollywood producer of family fare. The studio had largely avoided scandal because Magnum’s contracts contained some of the tightest morals clauses in the business. Moe would back his people up 110 percent on anything related to the product, but at the first hint of scandal he’d invoke the clauses and toss the miscreant out on his ear. He had enough clout with the news hawks to make sure that anything that developed later wouldn’t be associated with an ex-Magnum property.
Moe was also a rock-ribbed patriot. Unlike many of his tribe, he was deeply appreciative of the freedom and protection that had been afforded him in living and working in America.
The morals clauses covered several variants of deviancy and any like activity that could give Magnum a black eye to the movie-going public. Moe generally had been enforcing his rules with the help of the Pinkertons. However, he’d pretty much pulled me in as the unofficial house dick after Max Gold had given me the favorable mention.
Mostly I was called me in when Moe got wind of a situation he couldn’t handle with a simple trip to the woodshed. He’d have me run it down and head it off before it developed into something ugly. In which case nobody was usually the wiser of it and I walked off with a few C-notes for my landlords to share.
Typically, he would have Sally stop by with his instructions, and I’d post her a bill on completion. If he’d sent her to my office to arrange a meeting with me in person, he must have had something pretty serious on his mind. This particular request came as somewhat of a surprise as the subversive angle was something new for me.
Moe had always been careful about who he hired. He must have had a pretty good idea who most of the Party members and fellow travelers were in the business. I remember him telling me once he disliked Reds for a couple of reasons, one being that they offended his political sensibilities but the primary reason being that he didn’t trust them as people.
He’d said that from a business standpoint they were too caught up in their little gripes and fantasies to be productive in the workplace. And they were enthralled by the idea of white-collar unions, which Moe detested. Their fanatical personalities made them unyielding, intolerant and shrill.
I remembered him telling me, “These are the kind of people that become concentration camp guards. I don’t want them around my studio. If I catch anyone here on the lot proselytizing my people about subversion, they’re out on their can. As far as I’m concerned they’re pimps for immoral purposes, only they’re peddling bad ideas instead of jaded sex.”
I remember asking him one time how the lavender set fit into the morals clauses. He said, “Like most anyone else, I got no beef with them if they got enough sense to hide it. If they hide it from me and most everyone else, they’re fine. Otherwise, they’re out before they can cause any public damage. Like adultery, playing with minors, and whatever other deviancy, it’s hard work to keep stuff like that under wraps.”
So Magnum was generally immune to unfavorable appearances in the scandal sheets. The racier properties made homes elsewhere and, in fact, some of the studios thrived on the titillating publicity.
* * *
We jawboned for a few minutes more before Moe heaved his bulk back from the desk and offered a parting handshake. I scrambled out of there and made the office before noon.
Yuki was still in so I escorted her to lunch downtown at one of her favored eateries. With no pressing business back at the shop, we lingered there for a couple of extra hours and got to know each other a little better.
Then I filled her in on the new assignment, such as it was.
Yuki said, “Ray, I know someone that can help us get a quick lead on this one.”
“And who do you know that maybe knows Reds?”
“Monica, maybe. For sure that friend of hers I used to know back in high school.”
Yuki had told me the previous day about her best friend Monica Reyes. The two had grown up next door to each other in the old neighborhood. Monica and her brother Jaime had helped the Suzuki family by caretaking their residence and Mr. Suzuki’s nursery business during the time the family was interned in the Manzanar camp. Yuki was eternally grateful for the favor. It had helped to alleviate for her family the painful readjustment that most of the returned detainees had faced upon their release in late 1944.
Jaime was the older brother. I’d been told he’d kept a watchful eye over the girls throughout their high school career. Yuki, Monica, and friends had attended the all-girls Catholic high school in Brooklyn Heights, and Yuki had just made her high school graduation before being bundled off to Manzanar.
She told me that Jaime had enjoyed the rough and tumble of the local public school, but he’d successfully avoided the neighborhood gangs and the Zoot suit craze of a few years back. He was a big help to his mother and many of the neighbors, and was generally well loved and respected by all.
Now Yuki was filling me in on some more of the story. She told me that Monica’s dad, Pablo, had been murdered back before the war in some kind of union fracas. He’d been killed along with the father of a younger local girl named Lupe Fontanez. Although well known to the Reyes family, Lupe had been but a vague acquaintance of Yuki’s in high school. Between the age difference and the war separation they hadn’t ever run around in the same circles since.
These days Monica was content to help out with the family’s grocery and take in every new film that she could fit into her busy social schedule. Lupe, on the other hand, had studied hard and gravitated into a librarian’s position. It seems she had taken her father’s death pretty hard, and it was generally known that she was single minded in her determination to track down and expose her father’s killers.
Lupe had worked her way up to the reference desk at the Central Branch downtown, and she apparently spent most of her free time on what approximated a domestic version of military counterintelligence.
“Monica told me that Lupe is a red-diaper baby: raised in a CPUSA household, her father a dockworker and her mom a public school teacher. She believes her father was killed for wanting to leave the Party. She suspects that Gus Shafter and his harbor gang did it. She thinks they were aware Carlos - that’s her dad - was going to talk. She said Gus is more than just a big wig in his union, he’s high up in the CPUSA and heads some loyalty committee on the regional level.
“How about I spend a little time with her over at the library and see what turns up?”
Yuki’s interest was welcome and I was grateful for her ideas. I could count the hours I’d spent in a library on one hand, and this looked to be a job where some background would be helpful.
* * *
Yuki didn’t show up the next day, having told me I could find her at the library downtown. I’d developed a few ideas of my own from some vague squawk I’d heard in the past about Hollywood’s flirtations in the ‘30s with Stalin’s bloody crew. Old Country Joe, as he was affectionately known to his admirers, had lost a bit of his luster over the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, and commie chic had taken a quick fade.
Nevertheless, the die-hards had worked tirelessly, if behind the scenes, on the dictator’s behalf to keep the US out of the European war. But all that had changed when the single-nutted Little Corporal made his most insane and ultimately fatal error, opening a second front against the Russian bear by launching Operation Barbarossa late in the summer of 1941.
Then the Hollywood twits had re-emerged from hiding to host their rallies and benefits in support of the besieged Reds and their bloody butcher.
I rang up Esther, Max Gold’s executive assistant over at Millenium. She was a tad cool over the telephone, no doubt in her realization we shared intimate knowledge of the same distasteful secrets Max had had to confide in order to brief me for that February job.
Well, all that had been over for me for a long time now, and I wasn’t too surprised to have heard little since
from that direction. I asked her how I could get in touch with Bert Gantry. He was a regular screenwriter for Millenium that was known around town as a decorated veteran and a straight joe. She read off a telephone number and I held her on the line as I jotted it down.
Esther remained silent, and I was expecting the disconnect when a barely audible sigh came over the wire. “Mr. James. I’ve been meaning to thank you for taking care of Max this winter. It was a big load off his mind and he has really been getting back into the projects around here in a positive way. Everyone on the lot is happier now, although I doubt anyone else here knows it’s to your credit. Call me again if we can return the favor. Take good care now, Mr. James.”
Replacing the hand set, I palmed my lower jaw back to where it belonged. Well, what a surprise: the old battleaxe had some heart after all. I opened the bottom drawer and poured myself a couple of fingers from the office bottle, leaned back, and enjoyed the heat in my gullet as I pondered that one some more.
Finally, upending the glass, I snapped back to attention and dialed the new number on my blotter. A perky feminine voice answered off the first ring and patched me right through to Mr. Gantry.
“Bert Gantry? This is Raymond James over at James Private Investigations.”
“That’s real nice. What can I do you for?” the cynical voice growled.
“I’ve been doing some research for the studios lately, and your name came up as someone who might be of possible assistance.”
“And just exactly how might that be?”
“Well I don’t know at this moment, but it’s not a subject I’d like to bandy about over an unsecure commo line. Can I get you lunch?”
“You say you’ve been working with the studios. Anyone around here?”
“Yeah, Esther has a line on some of it.”
“Then let met get back to you and we’ll see which way’s up.”
I gave him my number and he rang off. The pigeons roosting outside my window held my attention for a little while. Then I put my feet up, unfolded the morning edition and stared at it for a few minutes more.
