by James Ellroy
The steno hooted. Dudley drummed the table.
“Let’s return to Thursday and Friday, December 4th and 5th. You’re on your knife-sharpening rounds in Highland Park. What drew you to that particular area? Was there any specific reason?” Shudo shrugged. “Instinct, I guess. I was on the Figueroa bus, and it looked like a good place to work.”
“Instinct.” A sure grabber. Lunatics succumbed to wisps.
“You say ‘Instinct.’ Had you been drinking terp at this time? Would you say that it contributed to your ‘instinct’?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
Dudley drummed the table. He went light-headed. He lit a cigarette and saw spots. He saw Bette in the wall mirror. He shook his head and shooed her off.
“Would you be more specific, please? Were you drinking terpin hydrate, and do you think it contributed to your ‘instinct’ to peddle your wares in Highland Park?”
Shudo pouted. “I want a pizza pie and medical attention. You and your pals kicked the shit out of me.”
“In due time, sir. We have the matter of your knife-sharpening rounds in Highland Park to discuss first.”
Shudo said, “Highland Park and Glassell Park. Them neighborhoods confuse me. It was the first two days I was out of the joint, and maybe more. I was belting terp. Things get fuzzy when you belt terp. You get hazy and lose track of the time.”
Missing time. Terp blackouts. Lunatic gems.
“You were on your rounds in Highland Park and possibly Glassell Park, on that Thursday, that Friday and possibly that Saturday, right?”
“Right.”
“You made some sales and talked to some customers, right?”
“Right.”
“Do you recall any specific sales that you made?”
“No. But I made sales, because I woke up in my room and had money in my pocket.”
“Do you recall any specific incidents that occurred on your rounds? Any specific people you might have talked to?”
Shudo giggled. “I talked to a little girl. She said I looked like The Wolfman. Her dad took a picture of me.”
“And when was this, sir?”
“It must have been Saturday, maybe noon or so. Her dad said a college football game was coming on the radio.”
“And this was in Highland Park, sir?”
“Yeah, one of them avenues with numbers. Forty or fifty something.”
“And then, sir? Do you recall any incidents or interactions that might have occurred after you talked to the little girl and her father?” Shudo shook his head. “It all got fuzzy then. Terp, man. It gets into your noggin.”
The door light blinked. Dudley got up and walked over. The floor dipped. He reached for the wall.
The door popped wide. Call-Me-Jack beamed. A thin man stood beside him. He looked like a lox jock. He wore a Phi Beta Kappa key.
“Dud, this is Ellis Loew. He’ll be presenting the case to the grand jury. He went to Harvard, and he’s a comer. Bill McPherson calls him ‘the Hebrew Hammer.’ ”
Loew cringed. Dudley laughed—That’s rich, sir.
“A pleasure, Mr. Loew.”
“Mine entirely, Sergeant.”
Jack pointed to Shudo. “He’s The Werewolf Slayer. Can you smell the wolfsbane? Sid Hudgens is writing that angle up.”
Loew drifted off. He screamed wet blanket. He was no shtick-meister Yid.
Jack said, “He’s a stick-in-the-mud, but he’s damn good in court. He’s got the ethics you’d expect from one of his kind.”
Dudley popped a sweat. The walls compressed. He loosened his necktie.
“Close him, Dud. Close that fucker and get this off our plate. Sid H. sees this caper as a Sunday-supplement series. It’ll take us straight up to that Fed probe and have us looking so good that that fucking pansy Hoover will drop the whole thing. The Japs got Pearl Harbor, but we got The Werewolf. He slayed his own kind, but we’re blind to racial horseshit, so we fucking slayed him. Close him, Dud. I’m going over to the tile game at Kwan’s. Meet me there later. We’ll belt a few.”
Dudley walked back. Call-Me-Jack shut the door. Shudo yawned. Dudley tossed a change-up.
“I’m still curious about something, Mr. Shudo.”
“So am I. I’m curious about Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Highland Park, when you got me for grief up the ridge route on Wednesday.”
“Then our curiosities overlap, sir. Your ‘instinct’ took you up the ridge route on Wednesday, and to Highland Park for the following three days. I don’t think we can entirely attribute your ‘instinct’ for Highland Park to the consumption of terpin hydrate, do you, sir?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Instincts are strange. It’s this word we use to explain things we can’t explain.”
Yes—like brainstorms. He could enlist Hideo Ashida. The lad could craft a Jap-script note. Fuji Shudo writes to Ryoshi Watanabe. A friendship preexists.
The note bolsters hazy memories. He rolls The Werewolf’s prints on transparency tape. He plants a print at the house.
“Did you belong to any Japanese fraternal societies before you went up, Mr. Shudo?”
“I went to the clubs. Why? I don’t get this, and I want to go home. The clubs were all Japanese, and the guys I keestered were white. I’m losing track of all this, and my head hurts, and you promised me medical care and a pizza pie.”
Dudley went light-headed. Dudley leaned across the table.
“I realize that things are often quite hazy for you, sir, given your long-standing consumption of terpin hydrate. However, I do know that you were often seen in the social clubs on 2nd Street, as far back as the early ’30s, often arguing politics and racial issues with a man named Ryoshi Watanabe. Do you recall Ryoshi Watanabe, sir?”
Shudo yawned, Shudo shrugged, Shudo rattled his cuffs.
“I don’t know. I used to go to those clubs, sure. I knew a guy named Ginzo Watanabe and a guy named Charlie Watanabe, and—”
“—and it all gets hazy after that, doesn’t it? It all gets hazy and instinctive, and you wake up in your hotel room with knives missing from your cart, and you wonder where your instincts took you before you passed out, and why there’s shit and blood on bamboo shoots, and what vile thing did you do with this or that sharp implement, when instinct led you to this or that house, where these hazy memories of arguments you had years before exploded, and you just couldn’t help yourself, so—”
Shudo spit at him. The glob hit his eyes. He saw spots. His eyes burned. He heard “You inconvenienced me.”
The Werewolf showed his teeth. Dudley pulled his sap and went for his mouth.
He hit him. He tore his mouth at the corners and crushed his stubbed teeth. He heard the door swing. He heard foot scuffs. He grabbed The Wolf’s mane and pulled him in tight. Something blocked his arm. It was Bill Parker, all red-face flustered.
He flicked his arm and flicked him aside. The flick tossed Parker sideways. The flick put him down on the floor.
The Wolf spit at him. It burned the spots in his eyes. The door crashed in. Thad Brown ran in. Mike Breuning and Dick Carlisle got to him first. “Go slack, boss”/“Go slack, boss”/“Go slack, boss—we’ve been here before.”
He went slack. He let go. They grabbed his sap and wrestled him out to the hall. The temperature dropped twelve thousand degrees. Some brain shutter doused his lights.
He heard, “Go to Kwan’s.” Everything tumbled. An elevator dropped.
He saw green numbers: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The doors opened. He saw marble walls and Main Street up ahead.
He walked outside. Lawn sprinklers twirled and sent up a mist. He anchored his legs and walked through the wet.
The water felt good. He slid on the grass. His trousers slid down his hips. He felt like Bill Parker looked.
Parker was frail. He flicked Parker off. It brought back ’38. He beat a Mex dead at Newton Station. His lads said, “Go slack, boss.”
“You inconvenienced me.”
He dashed the word
s and erased Bette’s picture. El Pueblo Grande at midnight. That howler’s moon and Chinatown straight ahead.
Dudley Liam Smith—the world tumbles.
He walked straight to Kwan’s. He wolfed all the gumballs at the counter. He’s werewolf-famished. The counter girl says, Dudster, you claaaaazy.
He weaved down to the basement. The tile game was sputtering out. Ace dealt to Harry Cohn. Clark Gable and that leopard snoozed on a couch.
He made the office. He made the den. There’s the pipe, the bowl and the tar.
He shut himself in. He removed his suit coat and holster. He kicked off his shoes.
Opium.
Go slack, boss. We’ve been here before.
Wisps and The Werewolf. His Army commission. Captain D. L. Smith. Parity with Captain Bill Parker.
That pesky bug. He flicked him.
Dudley smoked opium. His pallet flew over America. He visited his loved ones.
Stopover, Boston. Say hello to Beth Short. She’s laughing. She’s satirizing her rogue-daughter status. She’s calling him “Dad.”
Stopover, L.A. He nuzzles Bette’s Airedale. Bette’s naked, Bette’s loving him, Bette’s a crone in a flash. He inconvenienced her. She throws red roses in his face.
Dudley smoked opium. Stopover, Central Station and The Werewolf’s padded cell.
The Wolf wears a straitjacket. Terp vials dot the floor. The cell is lined with blood-and-shit-streaked bamboo. The smell drives him out. It’s a quick hop to the morgue.
He goes by Nort Layman’s office. He steals a vial of Ryoshi Watanabe’s blood. He revisits Fuji Shudo. He prints him and creates a tape transparency. He visits the house and finds an overlooked surface. He rolls on the bloody print.
Opium.
Create a note for me, Hideo. Link the victim to the killer in 1933.
Stopover, Nowhere.
He went blank. He reached for thoughts and snagged nothing. He reached for pictures and got empty frames.
“You inconvenienced me.”
Stopover, Dublin. A gallery on Sackville Street. At that location—portraits in gilt frames.
His mother. His dead father and brother. His wrathful Bette.
He heard “Perfidia.” He smelled roses. He felt sharp thorns on his face.
Dudley smoked opium. The pallet under him dropped.
Dudley said, “Don’t hit me.”
1:57 a.m.
They kissed.
It was Claire’s idea. Film it at the Anti-Axis Committee. Show the mixed-race lovers in a postmidnight clinch.
It was a post–Pershing Square kiss. It refracted his beaten appearance and Kay’s barn-burning speech. The shoot was running in high gear now. Kay laid out her latest intrigue.
She wanted the film to come off broad and parodistic. She wanted it to scotch Bill Parker’s loony crusade.
The kiss required umpteen takes. Kay was eager. Ashida faked urgency. Claire played director. The open doorway served as their set.
An arc light beamed down and prickled them. Two cameramen and a light man hovered. Reynolds and Chaz stood with Claire. Saul Lesnick brought his black bag. The Japanese extras got a dollar each.
They kissed again. Kay went in with her tongue. The cameramen shot the kiss from umpteen angles. They got the shelves stacked with antifascist pamphlets. They got the walls draped with AVENGE PEARL HARBOR! signs.
They kissed again. Kay caressed his bruises. Claire said, “That’s good, kids.”
The setup drew attention. Ashida saw a Fed sedan parked across the street. They broke the clinch. Claire said, “Once more, please.”
A car rumbled by. A man yelled, “Goddamn Jap!”
Ashida flinched and bumped the arc light. Kay steadied him. He brushed free and walked to the back of the room. He stood by a jingoist toy shelf. Kabuki dolls were dolled up red, white and blue.
It was escalating.
Pershing Square. Goro Shigeta. The Japanese man shot in Santa Monica. Nao Hamano’s suicide. A suicide at the Fort MacArthur stockade.
Claire talked to a cameraman. Their voices carried. She bribed a cop at the Lincoln Heights jail. They could film the Hamano cell.
Little Tokyo was decimated. Twelve days, then to now. Incarceration, confiscation, liquidation. It was common knowledge—the internment flies in February.
Fait accompli. One possible way out.
Dudley Smith. Brutally revealed tonight. Stunning and endearing.
It started with Pershing Square and impotent Bill Parker. Whiskey Bill came solely to ogle Kay Lake. The attack on Hideo Ashida disturbed his sense of order. Scotty Bennett’s intercession was something else.
Dudley knew the hate was building. Dudley knew that he’d ducked his bodyguards. Dudley sent men out to loose-tail him. They extricated him. Bill Parker flailed for his glasses and punched at the air.
The scene replayed at the Bureau. Parker witnessed Dudley’s lapse and reacted again. The civil forfeit offended him more than the brutality. Parker hated disorder. That hatred created disorder in him. Parker’s intervention was prissy and indicative of the man. Dudley’s lapse showed the raw man beneath the glib skein.
Ashida studied the Kabuki dolls. Kay glanced back and saw him. She blew him a kiss.
He tried for a Dudley Smith wink—and failed. Nobody winked like Dudley Smith.
Kay laughed. Ashida thought of Bucky. He got that flutter and walked to the parking lot. A Fed was checking license plates. He carried a flashlight and strolled.
It’s 2:26 a.m. There’s no one out but us Feds and Reds.
Ashida got his car and drove home. That JAP! was still there on his door. He went straight inside and straight to his picture trove.
He got out the photos and his gizmo prototype. He went all flutters. He placed the Bucky pictures on his lap and nickelodeon-fanned them. He made Bucky dance in the nude.
He kept old photos loaded in the gizmo. The lens glass magnified details. He clicked levers and slid photos by. Shutter stops and Bucky, in the nude.
He scrolled pictures. They began to blur. It wasn’t attrition caused by exposure. The pictures rarely met light.
Ashida studied the gizmo. Diagnostic scrutiny, prognosis.
A too-tight lens mount. Upward pressure. Hence, tears in the film.
The housing gears had rusted. The blurs were not pronounced. A new lens mount would halt the blurs at this point.
He had one new lens mount. His new gizmo was still affixed by Whalen’s Drugstore. He could switch mounts. The new gizmo had run out of film. It was a twenty-minute drive, door-to-door.
He ran back out. He drove to Whalen’s and braced the new gizmo. He pulled wires and detached the generator. He grabbed the new gizmo and drove straight back home.
All right. Prognosis to procedure.
Ashida studied both gizmos. Ashida figured it out.
It’s a scroll-through. Go back to the first day the new gizmo clicked film. It’s thirteen days ago. It’s Saturday, December 6. It’s that drugstore 211.
Scroll film until it runs out. Pull the lens mount then.
Ashida tapped levers. Click—car wheels hit a rubber strip stashed curbside. Click—the shutter snaps. Click—an image appears under glass.
Click—that first car parks. Click—the man looks like Bucky. Click—there’s the robber’s car. Click, click, click—throughout the day.
Click—the gizmo works. The precise time and date are clock-marked below each image.
Click—cars pull up and park. Click—there’s a double exposure and blurred image. The gizmo jerked off the pavement. The lens jerked upward and snapped foot traffic. See the passersby on Spring Street?
Ashida scrolled photos. Click/snap/picture—all 12/6/41. 1:46 p.m., 2:04 p.m., 2:17 p.m. A rattled-lens run—note the blurred foot-traffic pix.
2:36 p.m., 2:42 p.m. Clear pix off an upward-right image. 3:08 p.m., 3:18 p.m., 3:19 p.m.—WAIT.
Hold it now. Wait, wait, wait.
Click/snap—a downtown st
reet scene.
That’s FUJI SHUDO in the foreground. He’s stagger-gaited and visibly bleary. He’s zorched on terpin hydrate. The people around him look agitated and downright scared.
They should be. He’s evil. He practices bamboo-shoot rape.
It’s 3:19 p.m. He’s three and a half miles south of the Watanabe house. He’s out among refuting eyewitnesses. It’s Nort Layman’s precise time of death.
The fearful people will recall Shudo. He’s that outré. Coerced eyewits have placed Shudo in Highland Park at this time. These eyewits countermand those eyewits. Sure, it’s a frame. Sure, The Werewolf will burn. Yes, it’s justifiable. But that brings up this:
The Hearst papers will blast the case. Evidential details will be spilled nationwide. The real eyewits will recall The Werewolf and fuck it all up.
Ashida studied the image. Earthlings walk with a werewolf. He terrifies them.
Call-Me-Jack ran late stags most Thursdays. He should hear this.
Ashida rolled. He ran down to his car and burned tread to City Hall. He double-parked in a City Council space and ran up to 6. He heard dirty-joke snippets, straight off.
He tracked it. “Dudster this,” “Dudster that.” “What do you call an elephant hooker? A two-ton pickup that lays for peanuts.”
Ashida walked to the briefing room. It was cops and Feds, intertwined. Note the Hearst Rifle Team boys. Note Brenda Allen by the all-Kwan’s buffet.
Highballs and a dice game. A Jap flag for a craps-rolling felt.
Ashida stood in the doorway. Call-Me-Jack waddled over. The lipstick smear on his neck matched Brenda’s shade.
“Dr. Ashida. What brings you here?”
A rifle man said, “Banzai.”
Thad Brown said, “Shut up, he’s ours.”
Jack gestured out to the hallway. Ashida complied.
“I’m sorry for the intrusion, sir. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t consider it urgent.”
“Urgent always gets my attention. Remember, though, I’m jaded. It was the Dudster versus The Wolfman a few hours ago.”
Ashida said, “This pertains to that, sir.”
“Okay, kid. Impress me. The Dudster versus The Wolfman. Take it from there.”
Ashida said, “Fujio Shudo was outside Whalen’s Drugstore at 6th and Spring at Nort Layman’s precisely estimated time of death. The trip-wire device that Ray Pinker and I installed that morning authenticates this quite plainly. Shudo was surrounded by five people who were obviously quite frightened of this fearsome individual. Those people will not forget Fujio Shudo, sir. They will come forth as newspaper and radio publicity accrues, they will contradict our eyewitnesses, and they will be credible.”
