The Little Tokyo Informant

by Andrew Rosenheim

  It had been a long day and he was glad to be home. Annie was right about that. Guttman realised that she knew him better than he knew her. He wondered what had happened to her Christmas plans. Why wasn’t she taking Jeff and going to California to visit Nessheim? Had he found himself another girl out there? The idiot. It was hard to believe he’d do better than Annie.

  He pulled off his tie and unbuttoned his collar, then went and poured himself half an inch of Johnnie Walker from the bar he kept in the living room. The whisky was a gift from the Director, which seemed ironic, to use Sedgwick’s word, given his situation right now.

  He raised his glass to take a first sip, then stopped and held the glass up even higher in a small private toast. To what? To his mission, he supposed, now that he knew he had one.

  * * *

  This time there was no memo from Hoover when he returned to the office, just a message to call Kevin Reilly of the Metropolitan Police. He ignored Marie’s question about his mother’s health and dialled the number. Reilly answered after the first ring.

  ‘Kevin, it’s Harry Guttman. You get anywhere with the Palmer case?’

  ‘No, and that’s not why I called you. Tell me, do you know a guy named Tamm?’

  ‘Yeah, if he’s from the Bureau. Edward Tamm. He’s almost as important as I am.’

  ‘Hard to believe,’ Reilly said. ‘Anyway, he came to see me, said he wanted to talk about Thornton Palmer.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ This seemed to show unprecedented initiative by Tamm. After his memo, Hoover wouldn’t be happy to find Tamm pursuing this. Unless Hoover had told him to.

  ‘Tamm wanted to know where things stood with the case. He asked if I thought it was a suicide and I said we were keeping an open mind. Not that there’s much else to go on. Without any new leads this case is going cold fast.’

  ‘Is that all he wanted to know?’

  ‘No, and that’s why I called you. He asked what your involvement was. I explained that we’d found your card near Palmer’s body.’

  ‘Right,’ said Guttman neutrally.

  ‘He asked how you’d explained that. I told him you said you had met with Palmer the week before to talk about Argentina.’

  ‘Was he all right with that?’

  ‘Yeah, he was.’

  ‘Did he want to know why we met in Rock Creek Park?’ Guttman asked tensely.

  ‘No he didn’t – but that’s because I didn’t tell him you met Palmer there.’ Reilly paused. ‘I figured there was no reason for him to know.’

  ‘Thanks, Kevin,’ Guttman said quietly.

  But Reilly wasn’t interested in his thanks. ‘The thing is, I didn’t get the sense he was all that interested in Palmer. I mean normally, he would have pressed me – Have you done this? Have you done that? The usual crap you experts give us amateur gumshoes. But he didn’t do that.’

  ‘Well, you said yourself there aren’t any leads.’

  ‘That’s not my point. Like I say, he didn’t really give a shit about Thornton Palmer. The person he wanted to know about was you.’

  Part Five

  Los Angeles Mid-October 1941

  13

  HE WAS COLLECTING Lolly at seven, so Nessheim left the studio early and went home. He drank a beer out in the backyard and tried hard to think of nothing other than the extraordinary fact that Ted Williams had managed to hit .400 over an entire season. Yet the Red Sox hadn’t made the World Series, which the Yankees had won in a ‘subway series’ against Brooklyn. Until April there would be no more baseball to distract him, and though he had played football at the highest level, he didn’t follow it except to check his old team Northwestern’s progress. Anything more made him think of what might have been.

  There was still no sign of Billy Osaka. Guttman had phoned Nessheim early that morning. He hadn’t bothered with preliminaries, but plunged in right away: Guttman had learned that Russian money had been sent west from New York to a Japanese-American bank in LA and he wanted Nessheim to investigate the transaction. Guttman had provided the name of the bank in Little Tokyo and the name of its recipient. There was nothing illegal about the Russians moving some money around, but it seemed a peculiar choice of bank to receive it, since Russia and Japan remained bitter enemies.

  Nessheim finished his beer by the persimmon tree, confirming that the spare key to the back door (which hung from a nail he’d hammered into the trunk of the tree) was still there. Reassured, he went inside and showered, then changed into a light-grey, birdseye suit – even in October the evenings were still warm. As he left the bedroom he collected his gun and holster. He wouldn’t normally take them for a social occasion, but since finding Mrs Oka dead in her bed, he didn’t go many places without his gun.

  Lolly lived on a little street in West Hollywood near Poinsettia Park, about two miles south and down the hill from his place. He liked her neighbourhood: quiet streets and trees he recognised, with little fenceless strips of grass in front. Lolly had told him she shared a house with two other girls; pulling up in front, Nessheim gave his horn a single gentle toot and got out of the car.

  When Lolly appeared the two roommates came out as well. One was wearing shorts and had her hair up in curlers; the other was barefoot and wore an old terry-cloth bathrobe. They were both plain girls and good-natured as they stood on the porch, giving him the once-over.

  ‘You look after our Lolly, you hear?’ the one in curlers joked.

  ‘Yeah,’ her companion joined in. ‘You better have her back by breakfast.’

  ‘Charlene!’ said Lolly reprovingly and Nessheim laughed.

  As Lolly came down the porch’s short flight of stairs the two roommates watched her with what looked like a mixture of pride and envy. Her sleeveless, pale-green taffeta gown swished as she walked; over one arm she carried a dark clutch coat. Red lipstick had replaced her usual peach lip gloss and she’d washed her hair and pinned it up in a sleek up-do. She didn’t look so young now, thought Nessheim; she just looked great. He said as much and Lolly gave a tight-lipped smile, since she knew she did, especially if she didn’t show her jumbled teeth. As they drove off the roommates called goodbye and waved from the porch. Lolly didn’t even turn her head – Nessheim could see she was thinking of the evening ahead.

  The benefit was in the Arabia Ball Room, a large shabby building of dark brick on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east of Vine. Nessheim had passed it often enough, but never paid it much attention, for it was overshadowed by its opulent near neighbour – the immense Hollywood Palladium, which had opened a year before with Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra and become the most popular dance hall in town.

  Cars lined both sides of Sunset and Nessheim had to park on a side street, but Lolly shooed away his suggestion that he drop her off. As they walked through the neighbourhood, the cicadas were singing and leaves from the sidewalk trees shimmered in the night’s mild breeze. On Sunset they joined other couples walking in the same direction. Couples in cars cruised down Sunset slowly, sticking to the 20 mph limit. Then a yellow jalopy sped by at twice that speed, with two teenage boys in front and another in the back with his head out the window, hooting at the people on the sidewalk. Nessheim said, ‘If he leans out much further he’ll fall out and kill himself.’

  ‘Hope so,’ said Lolly vehemently and Nessheim laughed in surprise.

  Inside the Arabia they checked their coats in the fading atrium, then went into the vast ballroom, which was rapidly filling up. At the far end of the room there was a raised stage flanked by a pair of matching wooden columns, each adorned with carved griffins and snakes and topped by the head of Cleopatra. On the wall behind the stage there was an enormous blank screen, which Nessheim figured must be a vestige of an earlier incarnation as a movie theatre. Above it there still remained faded painted scenes from The Arabian Nights. Along the walls, red-and-white bunting had been taped, and in the middle of the ballroom a crimson banner had been stretched across the width of the room, hovering twenty feet up in the air. Save Our
Soviet Comrades! it read in gold letters.

  Nessheim and Lolly joined the crowd on the hardwood dance floor. There was half-repressed anticipation in the air – like a wake, the evening promised a good time behind a sombre purpose. A jazz band of a dozen players were on one half of the stage, but their music was muted and Nessheim could just make out the tune of Artie Shaw’s ‘Frenesi’. A bar had been set up on three trestle tables along one side of the room, and Nessheim fetched two highballs after Lolly assured him she didn’t want a ginger ale.

  They stood sipping their drinks, watching as the room continued to fill. Most of the women were dressed up in cocktail dresses or fancy frocks with butterfly sleeves and padded shoulders. A few (like Lolly) wore evening gowns. A lot of the men were in suits, though a more artistic slice of the audience wore colourful pants, smoking jackets and loud shirts – Nessheim saw purple, pink and yellow ones. A tiny minority had adopted proletarian costumes of rough jeans and work boots, presumably out of solidarity with their working-class comrades elsewhere. If most people had come for a party, Nessheim thought, a few had come for the Party.

  Teitz appeared at Nessheim’s elbow, wearing a bright yellow bow tie and a blue suit with thick chalk pinstripes. He looked like a bookie. ‘You made it, G-Man,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Waverley thought you’d never show.’

  ‘How could I miss this?’ Nessheim parried.

  Teitz looked at Lolly appreciatively. ‘I’d say you made the right call.’ He surveyed the crowd. ‘What a funny mix,’ he declared. ‘It’s like New Year’s Eve at a Polish workingmen’s club. Tuxedos with kielbasa on paper plates.’

  ‘Who’s the band?’ asked Lolly.

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up. They’re a bunch of longshoremen from San Francisco, Harry Bridges’ boys. They read Marx better than they read music, though they’re not too bad.’ He looked at Nessheim. ‘Say, did you ever find the kid?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Nessheim abstractly, for he’d seen a familiar face, only to realise it was familiar because it was famous – Fredric March stood about fifteen feet away.

  ‘Billy, of course. You know, our Jap friend.’

  ‘Nope. No luck.’

  Teitz seemed unsurprised. ‘He’s probably holed up in a tourist court with some broad.’

  ‘Why a tourist court? Billy has his own place.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Teitz knowingly. ‘That’s the first place he’d look.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ Nessheim asked shortly.

  ‘An angry husband.’ Teitz laughed. ‘Billy’s got a girlfriend, some Jap girl in Boyle Heights, but I’ve seen him with a white chick. Well, she looked older, broiler rather than chick.’

  Others from the Ink Well joined them, including Grenebaum and Stuckey, which surprised Nessheim since he would not have figured Stuckey as a sympathiser. It was too early to dance, so they talked among themselves. Teitz said, ‘It makes me positively nostalgic being back in this old dump. I used to come here years ago.’

  ‘To see movies?’ asked Nessheim.

  ‘No, it didn’t make the transition to talkies. They used it for marathon dances in the early Thirties. People danced until they dropped – literally.’

  ‘Did you take part?’

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Teitz, and suddenly he slumped his head on his shoulder and closed his eyes. His tongue slid out between his lips, and Lolly gave a little squeal.

  Nessheim laughed. ‘Come on, you’re scaring the horses.’ Teitz opened his eyes and made a show of coming to. Then he looked around him intently. ‘Goddamnit, I forgot my glasses. I can’t tell who’s here. Stuckey, any of the big guys show up?’

  ‘Lots of them. You got to hand it to Waverley – he’s still got clout.’ He pointed at a bunch of smartly dressed men, huddled together with drinks in their hands. They were laughing confidently as one of them told a story. Stuckey started giving them names: ‘Young Schulberg’s over there, and Ring Lardner Junior, and Hecht.’

  ‘Are they famous?’ asked Lolly, sounding puzzled.

  ‘Not to you, young lady,’ Teitz said, ‘but in our neck of the woods they are. Put it like this: we eat a lousy lunch at Elsie’s Diner; they dine in the swanky confines of Musso & Frank. We live in sweltering East Hollywood rat traps or south of Central; they “reside” in the elevated air of Beverly Hills or Santa Monica. We think we’ve got it made if we’re paid two bills a week; they’re content to have an extra zero at the end of that.’ Speech over, he turned to Stuckey. ‘Waverley said Hammett might be coming.’

  Stuckey was unimpressed. ‘The rudest son of a bitch I ever met. I introduced myself at a party and he said he’d be happy to talk once he’d heard of me.’

  ‘I loved The Thin Man,’ said Lolly. ‘I heard they shot it in eighteen days. The same as The Red Herring,’ she added.

  Grenebaum said gently, ‘That, my dear, is the only point of comparison,’ and even Nessheim had to laugh.

  Waverley was working the crowd and stopped to say hello to his workmates. He nodded at Nessheim. ‘Special Agent, glad to see you’re here.’

  Trying to sound cordial, Nessheim said, ‘You’ve got a good turnout tonight.’

  ‘Would you like a list of attendees? You know, for your bosses at the Bureau.’

  It was said coldly and Teitz tried to lighten things. ‘You could ask Lolly to type it up.’

  Waverley didn’t laugh. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask, Nessheim – why are you called a “special” agent?’

  ‘Jim is special,’ Lolly said fiercely.

  Teitz rolled his eyes and said, ‘Of course he is, my dear. Nothing humdrum about our very own G-Man.’

  Waverley shook his head. ‘I’ll see you gentlemen later. I’ve got to round up our guest speaker.’

  Stuckey had brought his wife, a tall gal with shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair who looked a good ten years younger than her husband. She started talking to Lolly and Nessheim went to get refills for their highballs. As he stood in line for the bar, he looked around and figured there must have been two hundred people in the ballroom. He was still standing in line when the band finished their number and a man walked onto the stage. It was Waverley.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, tapping the oversized mike. ‘Welcome to the benefit for our Soviet brothers. We had originally hoped to hold this event in the Hollywood Palladium, but for some reason Norman Chandler didn’t want us there.’

  People laughed. Everyone knew that Chandler owned the Palladium and his father was the owner of the Los Angeles Times and almost as ferociously anti-Communist as he was anti-union – the unions providing the more immediate threat. Waverley went on, ‘But this place suits us just fine and we’ve got a big turnout tonight – I want to thank you all for coming. People from every corner of Hollywood – why, we’ve even got the FBI in attendance tonight.’ People laughed again and Nessheim looked vacantly at a distant wall.

  Waverley went on: ‘Some of you may remember that five years ago we had a similar benefit event. That was to raise money for the Republican forces in Spain – at a time when they had their backs to the wall.

  ‘But that was small beer compared to what’s happening today, when the very fount of progressivism is under threat. Spain was a guinea pig, a test tube if you like, an experiment in building a world all men would be welcome in and all men can enjoy. We have always known that certain forces would do everything in their power to fight off such a pioneering development, but what even the most realistic of us could not foresee five years ago was how quickly the forces of reaction would mobilise.’

  He paused to let this sink in, pursing his lips grimly. Then he said, lowering his voice, ‘And now truly the barbarians are at the gate, putting in peril the greatest experiment the world has ever seen in equality and comradeship.’

  Suddenly someone shouted: ‘Some experiment. What about the show trials?’

  Waverley turned and glared down at the crowd below the stage. Nessheim couldn’t see who the heckler was. Waverley continu
ed: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is essential that we do everything we can to help our brothers in the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Like they helped Trotsky?’ the voice in the audience shouted out.

  Waverley stopped. Nessheim could see the heckler now – he was a skinny young man in a dark cotton jacket, unremarkable looking. Waverley seemed to nod at the man, or perhaps it was at someone else, for suddenly there was a commotion on the floor. Two men had seized the heckler by the arms and were trying to force their way with him through the crowd. The heckler was shouting ‘Get your fucking hands off me!’ and then a third man approached him from the front and punched him hard in the stomach. The heckler doubled over and the two men got him through the crowd and rapidly out an exit. As they went through the steel fire door Waverley began to speak again.

  ‘I apologise for the interruption. You can see that counter-revolutionary elements are everywhere. But that should not distract us from our goal, and tonight that goal is to help our embattled brothers. I urge you to contribute what you can – and then some. Before we pass the hat, it is my great honour and privilege to welcome a representative of that brave nation here in this city. I know you’ll join me in welcoming the Vice-Consul for the Soviet Socialist Republics, Mikhail Mukasei. I’ve asked him to say a few words to us – about the dangers his country and every right-thinking citizen of the world face today. Comrades, I give you Mikhail Mukasei.’

  The applause that followed was muted; people seemed stunned by the violent ejection of the heckler. It was as if something bad had happened so quickly that it seemed unreal.

  Then someone pushed against Nessheim, harder than an accidental brushing by. He turned and found a big man with a face pitted by acne scars right behind him. The man glanced at Nessheim, as if to acknowledge his presence, but not the push.

  ‘Take it easy, bud,’ Nessheim said, his words only half-audible since the polite applause continued. Behind the man a woman stood, elegantly dressed in a black bolero jacket over a black cocktail dress. She tugged at the sleeve of the man’s jacket. ‘Ivan,’ she said loudly. ‘Give the man some room.’