by James Ellroy
The hiking trail. A dirt pathway. It’s steep and shrub-bordered. There’s a fluttering light fifty yards up. Smoke denotes a cookout.
Ace passed him his pistol and ax. Ace armed himself. They stepped from the car. Dudley followed Ace.
They walked up the trail. A roasting-meat smell hit them. The light grew bright. The trail leveled off. Yes—the light signifies cooking flames.
Dudley saw three men. There should be four. Huey had four heist helpers. There’s only three men here.
Voices now. It’s that Jap bark-and-grunt. Two men look pure Jap. One man’s a verified Chink.
Dudley recognized him. He was a Four Families initiate. Call him a “Collaborationist.” He probably fingered Rose Kwan.
It’s suppertime. They’re roasting rats impaled on ice-cream-bar sticks.
Ace stepped into the clearing. He struck a pose—the aging Bringer of Death. The fucks saw him. One fuck tittered. One fuck muttered. One fuck dropped his skewered rat.
Ace aimed above the flames. Muffled thuds became holes in their faces and brains out the backs of their heads. They pitched away from the fire. Dudley stepped up and mouth-shot them. Teeth and bone exploded. Ace dropped his gun and raised his ax.
The old man desecrated. Dudley watched him. Ace chopped off heads and legs. Ace quartered the fucks. Ace monkey-moaned through it all.
Ancient sounds. Heathen desecration. Blood, fire, burned rats on sticks.
7:27 p.m.
T.I. again. The same cell block and sweat room.
Ashida sat with Elmer Jackson. A cuff chain cinched them up. They were working the same ploy.
I’m Japanese, like you. I serve the police. Still, they oppress me. Aren’t I sympathetic? Answer my questions, NOW.
Captain Parker sent him down. The ploy derived from their 459 at Jim Larkin’s bungalow. The ledger. The assumed link to the house/farm buyouts.
Ashida and Parker discussed the ledger. Parker showed him the Feds’ subversive lists. They cross-checked them with the T.I. arrest log. Ashida matched up four initial sets.
T.A. equaled Thomas Akahara. G.Y. equaled George Yamato. W.O. equaled William Okamura. R.M. equaled Rollo Moriyama.
Elmer said, “This cuff routine is bullshit. I’ll unhook you if you want.”
Ashida smiled. “There’s a point to it. I’ll tell you about it someday.”
“I did a hitch in the Marines, and it was from hunger. I don’t want to go back, war or no war.”
Ashida said, “You’ll be draft-exempt. You’re friends with the Chief and the mayor.”
“You mean Brenda is. I just run bag and do the scut work.”
“You’ll be declared ‘police-essential.’ I’m sure of it.”
Elmer relit his cigar. “This white man’s police force has been good to us. You, especially. Remember that when they start carting your people off to some hellhole, and you get rightfully inclined to hate me.”
Ashida checked his notepad. He had opening questions prepped. Who approached you about your property? Why was the sale or potential sale attempted and/or recorded in secret? Were the buyer or buyers in any way suspicious to you?
Elmer smoked up the room. An MP walked in Thomas Akahara. Mr. Akahara seethed. He was fat. He sported a Hitler mustache.
Ashida stood up and rattled his cuff chain. Ashida dredged up Japanese phrases and dispensed a formal hello.
The MP uncuffed Akahara. He pulled out a news clip and spit on it. He bared Tojo teeth and glared.
Elmer hooted. The MP shrugged and recuffed Akahara. They about-faced and scrammed.
Elmer said, “Dr. Hideo Ashida. Reluctantly notorious and despised by his own kind. The only yellow man on the Los Angeles PD.”
“Let’s go back, Elmer.”
“Okay, but let’s stop at Lyman’s first.”
The guard captain poked his head in. “Telephone call, Sergeant.”
Elmer uncuffed Ashida and followed him. Ashida teethed on that missing something at the Watanabe house. He missed something at Larkin’s place. Two somethings tweaked him now.
He brain-walked through both locations. He walked room-to-room. He got something/nothing a dozen times over. Elmer walked back in.
“We got to put a rain check on Lyman’s. There’s three dead Chinamen in Griffith Park, and Bill Parker wants you.”
7:54 p.m.
They double-timed down the catwalk. Inmates held newspapers up to the bars. Ashida caught peripheral views.
Mariko ran her mouth again. The papers spieled the gist. Viva J. Edgar Hoover! God Bless the L.A. Police and Special Agent Ward J. Littell!
They shagged to Elmer’s car and peeled northbound. They crossed the bridge. The shoreline blackout swaddled them. It pressed down the sky. It smothered the ground. You got white pavement lines and no more.
Elmer said, “I can add, and I can go ‘one plus one makes two.’ That Scotty kid pops a Four Families boy last night, and now we got three dead Chinks. That adds up to ‘tong war’ in my book.”
Ashida stared out his window. They hauled north. The blackout lifted six miles up. Elmer tapped his headlights and siren.
They caught a long dead stretch and made Western Avenue. The siren bored them straight to L.A. proper. They cut west to the park road.
Note the door-to-door canvass. Note the blues holding back civilians. Note those lights in the Observatory lot.
A sentry waved them up. Elmer killed the siren. See that? It’s night arc-light glow.
Outdoor homicide. Follow the glow.
They made the lot. City vehicles packed it. Prowl cars, K-cars, meat wagons. Morgue men trudged a hiking path.
Follow the glow.
They parked and hiked up the path. The glow built to a blaze. A shitload of cops talked dead-man talk. Their voices boomed.
A clearing. Four bluesuits, three morgue men. Thad Brown, Buzz Meeks. Captain Bill Parker, civvy-clad.
Arc lights pointed down. Flashlights pointed down. Dirt soaked blood maroon. Entrail stink. No bodies, per se.
Ashida counted limbs. Six arms and legs meant three dead men. Four bedrolls in plain sight. That meant a fourth man snuffed somewhere else or plain gone.
Three heads. Forehead entry wounds, rear-head exit wounds. Mouth wounds. Exploded jawbones and teeth. They’re shot in the forehead first. They gasp for air. Second shots go straight in their mouths.
Ashida studied their faces. Ashida studied the severed limbs and matched up skin tone. Eugenics. Race science. Asian racial distinctions.
Skin color. Physiognomy. Hair density. He could subdivide Asians by race. Most Asians thought they could—but could not.
One victim was Asian mixed-blood. Two were Japanese. He based his ID’s on racial instinct. Scattered shells. Obvious .45’s. Dumdum bullets. Mouth wounds that blew noses up.
A cop said, “Check Tojo. He’s got his snout all over this.”
Thad Brown said, “Shut up.”
Bill Parker said, “Meeks, what are you doing here?”
Meeks said, “I caught the Bureau squeal. Slant-eyed homicides interest me these days.”
Ashida scanned the ground. Spilled blood oozed past the clearing. The path dirt was hard-packed. It would not imprint footsteps.
Three heads. No personal gear with the bedrolls. A rising-sun tattoo on one arm. A shotgun-size rubber bullet.
A knife beside the bedrolls. Unbloodied and undeployed here. A short handle. A central puncture blade. Six smaller blades welded to a metal strip.
Crude manufacture. Anachronistic. A torture weapon—vaguely feudal-style.
Ashida knelt by the bedrolls. He recalled the Goleta Inlet. The blade marks on the dead man. Similar to these blades.
A cop said, “Charlie Chan’s on the job.”
Thad Brown said, “Shut your mouth.”
Ashida studied the knife. Cigarette smoke diffused the death stink. A cop puked in the bushes. A cop squeezed prayer beads.
Elmer said, “I see a Four Families s
carf. We got ourselves a tong war.”
Ashida stood up. Parker and Meeks scoped the rubber bullet. It was riot-gun knock-you-flat size.
Meeks said, “Makes you think of Huey C., don’t it, Cap? There were four other guys on the van heist, but we only got three here. Is this all a little close for you?”
Parker walked up to Ashida. He hopped a severed leg and gestured down the path. The arc-light poles swayed. Arc-light heat juked up the stink.
Ashida followed Parker. They found a quiet spot. Ashida felt arc-light burns on his neck.
Parker said, “Preliminary impressions. Tell me what you think.”
Ashida said, “They’re Japanese, not Chinese. One man may be mixed. It’s imprecise science, but I’m reasonably sure of it.”
Parker lit a cigarette. “Meet me at Nort Layman’s office later. He’s got something new on the Watanabes. He called over for Dudley, but I picked it up.”
Ashida said, “I missed something at Larkin’s bungalow. It’s driving me crazy.”
Parker tossed his cigarette. “Break in again.”
“Elmer Jackson’s driving me. I don’t have my car.”
Parker handed him a key ring. “Take mine. The plate number is QF-661.”
Morgue men wheeled gurneys past them. Parker turned tail back to the clearing. Ashida walked down to the lot.
QF-661 stood by the park road. A half-full jug was there on the seat.
Ashida got in and U-turned. The park road got him past the sentries. Vermont got him to Sunset and that twisty shot to the beach.
The K-car was unwieldy. The shift lever stuck. The clutch squeaked and slipped. He drove west and got synced with it.
Hollywood to the Strip. The Strip to Brentwood. Brentwood to the Palisades.
He hit SaMo Canyon. He got out and walked to the door. He was 459-proficient now. One pick tweak got him in.
He shut the door. His penlight carved a path. Living room, kitchen, bedroom. He studied the koi stream and pond. The koi spoke to him.
There’s no telephone.
There’s no address book with names and phone numbers listed.
Lyman’s back room. The Wednesday-to-Thursday-midnight briefing. Stray talk. The Watanabes called Santa Monica pay phones.
Nearby pay phones. Near the SaMo aircraft plants—Boeing, Douglas, Lockheed.
There was one other something. It was seemingly prosaic.
Ashida shut his eyes. He went someplace calm. He smelled powdered fish food. The koi spoke to him.
The Sheriff’s bulletin. An inventory. Items found on Jim Larkin.
“Right-front trouser pocket. Three pay-telephone slugs.”
Something or nothing? Connecting thread or non sequitur?
Ashida walked back to the K-car. He U-turned to the coast road and Sunset east. He drove downtown. He’s a Jap in a cop sled. Colored fish talk to him.
He parked outside the morgue and walked in. Gurneys lined the central hallway. Body parts were gauze-wrapped and paper-pinned. Arms, legs, heads. All tagged “Griffith Park/12-12-41.”
He smelled thawing flesh. He traced it to Nort Layman’s exam room. Nort and Captain Bill had a jug. Ryoshi Watanabe was stretched out on a slab.
Ryoshi was six days and seven hours dead. Nort had sliced his back into chunks. The cuts were ten by ten. Freezing facilitated the slicing. Nort pointed to a chunk. It was tagged “upper-right posterior.”
The thawing revealed an old wound. It was etched in subcutaneous tissue. It was barely detectable.
It was a knife wound. It was a multiple-blade wound. It reprised the knife in the clearing and the knife scar on the Goleta man.
Nort said, “It’s a very old wound, so it wasn’t visible on the surface of the skin. I looked up the blade pattern in Ray Pinker’s weapons text. It’s a knife out of eighteenth-century Japan. Warlords poison-dipped the blades. It was quite the perverted thing.”
Parker said it first. “We just found a knife like that in Griffith Park.”
10:37 p.m.
The gang’s all here.
I knew some of the men at the bar personally, and some by their pictures in the papers. They were drinking and casually speaking; they ignored the people seated in booths a few feet away. I was waiting for Scotty and had secured a room at the Rosslyn Hotel. He was ninety minutes late, but I didn’t care. I was observing a blithe collusion.
Mayor Fletch Bowron, Jack Horrall, Sheriff Gene Biscailuz. FBI men Dick Hood and Ed Satterlee. Scorn for the Jap Whipping Boy. Brenda Allen’s regulars as war profiteers.
They discussed the seizure of Japanese holdings; they cracked jokes about the Jap woman who committed suicide in the Lincoln Heights jail. Satterlee hatched a plan to issue armbands to all local Japanese. Chat turned to the Watanabe case. Jack said DA McPherson had been “keestered.” Biscailuz laughed and said, “Dudley Smith?” Jack poked his middle finger through the circle of a forefinger and thumb. Mayor Fletch said, “Ouch.”
I nursed a Manhattan and eavesdropped. Fiorello La Guardia entered the grill and joined the Kameraden. He praised the blackoutmonitor work of Captain Bill Parker. Jack and the FBI men held their noses. I thought of Claire De Haven’s tract and saw Parker done up in jackboots.
The group broke up. Dudley Smith entered the PD’s back room a few minutes later. He carried a tweed suit in a cellophane wrapper. He’d lost weight—he reminded me of Captain Parker that way. His appearance didn’t surprise me. L.A. had been running on insomnia, cigarettes and liquor since last Sunday. People appeared at whim and vanished; I hadn’t seen Lee since our fight here Tuesday night. People comported with a new sense of allegiance. Everything was new. Many people embodied surprise; a few embodied revelation.
Scotty left my bed and returned to duty. The a.m. Mirror brought him right back. Sid Hudgens wrote the piece. Officer Robert S. Bennett, the Los Angeles Police Department’s first emergency wartime hire, proved his mettle during a murder dragnet in Chinatown last night. The niece of noted restaurateur Grover Cleveland “Uncle Ace” Kwan had been brutally murdered; “anonymous tips” led to a search for Four Families tong fiend Chiang “the Chinaman” Ling. Sergeant Dudley L. Smith and Officer Bennett cornered Ling. The Chinaman broke free and made an attempt on Sergeant Smith’s life. The inexperienced—but bold—Officer Bennett shot and killed Ling before he could “snuff” Sergeant Smith with “heathen aplomb.” A photograph of Scotty in football garb ran with the piece.
The article reeked of collusion. I juxtaposed it to Claire’s account of her journey with Whiskey Bill and teethed on my own wartime allegiance. I ran for my car and drove to Beverly Hills then. Claire’s Packard was parked in her driveway. I parked across the street and waited.
She walked out a half hour later. A scarf covered her Joan of Arc hair. I followed her to a Catholic church in Brentwood. She attended Mass there.
Comrade Claire, Supplicant Claire. I studied her from a dozen pews back, the same way she once studied the worshipful Bill Parker. Such adroit symbiosis. How perfect to merge with her perfect adversary on his own mystical plane. How perfectly unconscious for Parker to pick Claire as his target. His inner life perfectly mirrored the chaos that Claire so proudly displayed to the world.
I ducked out of the church before she saw me. Claire left the service and returned to her car ten minutes later. She took Bundy to Wilshire and drove all the way downtown. I stuck behind her, and ran a series of yellow lights keeping up.
Claire turned north on Main Street. I sensed her destination as Little Tokyo, and pulled up directly behind her. She turned east on 2nd Street and slowed down to observe. I watched her point a camera out her window and snap photographs.
I tracked her eye and camera lens. She snapped a sad-eyed man outside a fish market. She snapped the children with American flags on sticks and Cal Denton beating a man’s teeth in. And now she’s stopped her car. And now she sees Whiskey Bill Parker, standing at the corner of 2nd and San Pedro.
He jotted notes on his clipboard; Clai
re pulled up on his blind side and photographed him. She rested her arms on the window ledge and anchored the camera quite securely. She framed portraits of the man. She caught his superhuman focus and lunatic rectitude. I wondered if she noticed his slack uniform and the pathos in his eyes. How perfect. Her photographs indicted the man who sent me out to entrap her.
Wartime allegiance. Collusion.
Claire reloaded her camera three times. Parker reeled from exhaustion. He fell into his black-and-white and reached for his bottle. Something astonishing happened then.
Claire lowered her camera. She allowed the moment to go unrecorded. She felt pity or decided not to risk documenting it. I drove away then. I felt them both in the core of my bones.
Scotty was an hour and fifteen minutes late. Thad Brown and Jim Davis walked in and stretched out at the bar. They ignored the diners a few feet away. I lit a cigarette and listened to them talk.
Collusion.
Jim Davis ran security at Douglas Aircraft. They discussed the prospects of Fifth Column sabotage there. Thad changed the subject. Three Chinks were slaughtered in Griffith Park earlier tonight. Two Japs and one Chink-Jap, really. The breed was Four Families. Chinatown was running a fever. “That Scotty Kid” blew up that Four Families punk and stirred up a shitload of shit. We’ve got to avoid a full-scale tong war. We’ve got to whitewash the snuffs in the name of a Chinatown peace.
Bill Parker entered the grill. He saw me but did not acknowledge it. I waved and blew him a kiss. I regretted it instantly.
Parker joined Brown and Davis. I eavesdropped. The PD was mobilizing in Chinatown at midnight. The Dudster’s display of force had the Chinks all hopped-up. Davis spoke in singsong Chinese and stretched his eyelids for added effect. Thad told the tale of Come-San-Chin, the Chinese cocksucker. The bartender poured a double bourbon and slid it over to Parker. Whiskey Bill downed it and white-knuckled the bar rail.
Thad tapped his watch; the three men dropped dollar bills on the bar and walked out. Scotty was late. Now I knew why. Scotty was needed in Chinatown.
I was all-of-a-sudden bored. There were no more provocative men to distract me. Tableside war chat resounded that much more predictably. The eastern front, the Japs. My son’s draft deferment. I heard Hitler’s gassing Jews. Well, someone has to! Eleanor Roosevelt’s a lez—the shoe-shine boy at the Jonathan Club told me.
