Golden Throat (Cable Denning Mystery Series Book 1)
Page 1
The
CABLE DENNING
MYSTERY
SERIES
by
James P. Alsphert
JAMES P. ALSPHERT PRESENTS
Book 1
in
2 Parts
Copyright © 2011 by James P. Alsphert
Published by Movies of the Mind 2017
First paperback edition
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN-13: 978-1-64056-005-5
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner
whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief
quotations in a book review.
Movies of the Mind
www.moviesofthemind.net
WHY READ CABLE DENNING MYSTERY SERIES?
The retro sound of a phone ringing, a familiar voice answers…we’re off to another CABLE DENNING adventure in the seedy underworld of Los Angeles, California ranging from 1927-1954
Who is CABLE DENNING, one might ask? Well, first of all he is fashioned after a long-time friend of my Dad's, named Al Newley. He was a hard-living, hard-drinking, cop- turned-private detective. CABLE DENNING was born in 1900 and was raised in the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles. Like my Dad's friend, he is tall, handsome and women are drawn to him by his manner…he also starts out as a young, 27 year old Los Angeles cop and because of the corruption he sees on both sides of the law he quits and becomes a private detective.
GOLDEN THROAT is where it all begins and is Book 1 in a 22 book mystery series. I invite you to read these books that follow Denning in adventures that lead him into worlds of intrigue, mystery, HOT romance, murder, international spies, spine chilling horror and all of it spiked with a little Sci-Fi. You'll read references to historical people and events and real places in vintage Los Angeles, reminiscent of the great mystery writers of the past.
Given Cable's constant wrangling with the bizarre and man's inhumanity to man, it seems walking the streets late at night, he can find solace in one of the many smoke-filled dives where he goes to hear beautiful young babes, dressed to the nines, singing the great music of the times.
ADULT CONTENT
Watch for Book 2, LOVE ME OR KILL ME: Cable meets his would-be nemesis, Cronus-Gor and his otherworldly wife and daughter, Cassiopeia, not to mention the girl that lives in a seashell…while plenty of adrenalin-pumping action and murder dot the map of Cable's life. He battles the powerful Order of the 'Oculus' who are still trying to wrest from him the secrets of an ancient golden capsule.
I invite you to check out my blog: www.thecabledenningfanclub.wordpress.com/
For more information and updates about other forms in which the books are available, including dramatized audio books with actors and singers…please go to my website: www.moviesofthemind.net
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/moviesofthemind/
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 1
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART II
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 1: THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN THROAT
East of the Moon
All that Glitters
Chapter 2: JAZZ ME A FLAPPER
Ten Cents a Dance
Chapter 3: TWO IRONIES IN THE FIRE
Irony of the Missing Capsule
Irony of the Bella Notte
Chapter 4: FUNERAL FOR ONE
Blood and Elevators
Vaulting with Death
Snug as a Bear in a Rug
Chapter 5: THE LEGEND OF CRAZY JACK
Chapter 6: CLAIRVOYANTS, SOOTHSAYERS AND
WONDER WOMAN
Eusapia Palladino – Predicting the Future in Ragtime
Chapter 7: DANGERS ON A TRAIN
Chapter 8: CURSE OF THE RED DRAGON LADY
Hatchet Man
Chapter 9: THE REACH OF THE BLACK HAND
Land of the Extraterrestrials
Mom's Apple Pie
Chapter 10: A CASTLE IN THE CLOUDS
Dream a Little Dream of Me
Pulitzer Me a Prize, Billy Boy!
END PART 1
Part I
Chapter 1
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN THROAT
East of the Moon
Police sirens are unnerving. Case-in-point, even after years of hearing them cut through the night like screaming demons…harbingers of bad tidings, like coming home to your woman and finding all your belongings on the sidewalk—there’s a place in your psyche that gets frayed with that desolate, forlorn sound traveling through your body like a cold metal snake. Life comes across as a constant surprise package of good and evil…a mixed concoction in a magician’s bag of tricks, pulled from a dirty secret place and saved for a frenetic Friday like the one I found myself in this day. It was February 11, 1927. My partner Mario Angelo and I had been called out to one of those gangland murder sprees, the kind the mob used to clean out their ranks when something went wrong. And something was really wrong that Friday afternoon as Mario and I stood with our boss, Sergeant O’Flaherty, looking at the pools of blood that had formed around two stiffs face down on Alameda Street in Chinatown. In fact, my cop intuitions told me it stank. One of the dead guys was a hoodlum who had become top man in the local Mafioso…a guy named Ernesto Ardizzone. He had left his tracks all over town, dealing in Prohibition booze, money laundering, extortion, speakeasies and white slavery. Oh, yeah, and bumping off cops who didn’t go along with the Cosa Nostra or the corrupt politicians downtown.
O’Flaherty was talking at us. “You’d be wonderin’, boys, why they keep takin’ each other down like this. Be gatherin’ what you can and who’s been doin’ who in and why. And tomorrow, you be checkin’ with old doc Sandor down at the Morgue and gettin’ me some causes of death post haste—ha! as if I didn’t already know the half of it!”
“Yeah, Sergeant…east of Main Street,” I said that, glancing over toward the colored paper lanterns hung over the shop doors above the wooden sidewalks. It always looked to me like the Chinese were having an ongoing festive occasion with all the yellow, pink, green and red blowing in the afternoon breezes.
“What is it yer sayin’, Denning?” O’Flaherty probed. “East o’ what?”
“Oh, something I’ve observed lately, Sergeant. We’re getting a lot more murder cases east of Main Street.” I looked up at the sky. “It’s where the moon comes up, you know, right about there. Ever notice?”
“What a squirrely thing to be sayin’, now. You better not be drinkin’ any of that speakeasy hooch ‘afore ya come on the job, lad. Irish or no, I’ll have your badge for it!
“I guess I’m just tired of beating the pavement down on San Pedro and Central, chasing long braids in black hats for setting up their women as whores—at least today there’s some excitement.”
“Well, now, isn’t that an almighty shame, Officer Denning? For bein’ three years on the force, you’re still a might impertinent, wouldn’t you be sayin’? Excitin’ or not, you do what you’re gettin’ paid for. Check your tongue and be keepin�
�� to the job at hand, Mr. Rookie.” He surveyed the people standing around gawking at the bleeding bodies. “And clear these blood-thirsty Tongs out of here.” He stomped away toward his car.
My partner Mario and I began raising our clubs and scaring off the local populace. By the time I heard the ambulance shrieking its way toward us, I found a little old Chinese lady, shriveled and trembling with age, bent over the smaller of the two fallen men. She possessed sparkling dark-brown eyes that were very much alive and complained when I pulled her up off the body that she had been rifling through. “You can’t be doing that here, lady, they’re police property now—and that includes everything found on their bodies. Did you steal anything?”
“Little man have something belong to me. You go find! He steal…you go find!”
I looked curiously at the little slip of a woman. “Can’t do that, lady, I told you why—now scram and let us do our work here, okay?”
“I no go! Little man thief!” she persisted. “I not thief. He thief!”
Just then, Mario came to my aid and pulled the woman away swearing, kicking and swinging at him. For a twenty-seven year old cop, life was a merry-go-round here on the fringes of skid row, you always kept coming around to the same place you did last week and the week before that. Sometimes faces changed and pretty little feminine things right off the boat from Shanghai graced my beat for a while. Some were seamstresses, kitchen help, promised mail-order brides and the like—but most of the real beauties ended up with some pimp selling them in thirty-minute intervals for fifty cents a pop in back of a dirty dry goods store. And once in a while a drunken white man didn’t think he got his money’s worth and started beating up on her, until her fragile little body lay like bleeding pulp in a slaughterhouse. It was then that Mario and I would pick up the pieces. Beautiful black shiny hair, fine silken yellow robe with wide sleeves, her black skirt ripped and pulled up to her hips, her delicate painted face crushed in blood and bruises summed up the senselessness of it all and the depravity of human nature.
The ambulance attendants were just about to throw the bodies on stretchers and load them. I put my hand up to stop them. “Men…if you don’t mind, just a minute…I…uh, need to check something.” They stepped back. Mario was at my shoulder. I started rifling through the downed men’s clothing. “Now, if you ask me, I’d say Ardizzone here was chasing this little guy—maybe the old lady was right.” I found nothing on either man.
“What old lady?” Mario inquired, as if he didn’t have a clue.
“The old Chinese woman you escorted out of here.”
“Damn, there was something odd about that old crone, Cable. Like she had the energy of someone a fifth her age—ha! swore at me like a sailor and fought me tooth and nail! In fact, I had to handcuff her—over there, to the end post of that wooden walk near the Canton Bazaar.”
“You didn’t.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Son-of-a-bitch, Mario—you’re an ox and you can’t handle an ancient Chink?—c’mon, pal, your pulling my leg, here.”
“Shit, Cable, you take her on!”
I signaled for the guys from the county morgue to load the bodies. “I’ll get to that in a minute. Here we are, Mario—at the crime scene. Does anything look out of place here to you?”
Mario looked around. “I don’t know. You’re the detective type. Remember me, I’m the guy you talked into joining the force three years ago—and I’ve been sorry ever since,” he muttered. “So, Ardizzone was chasing the little guy for something he wanted, Jack Dragna’s guys saw it as an opportunity to bump off Ardizzone, so they did. What’s odd about that, Mr. Smart Cop?”
“Okay, you wanna know? First of all, why didn’t Ardizzone send one of his own goons to do the job—how much firepower does it take to dispatch the little guy? Hell, you could’ve strangled him in an alley. Second, what were they doing in Chinatown?—and third, there was no trace of a gun either around Ardizzone or the little guy. If either of them was carrying a piece, they were confiscated by someone else before we got here.” I looked at the Chinese gawkers still hanging around. “And you know as well as I do, the Chinks won’t talk—even if they saw the whole damn thing.”
Mario looked at the drying pools of blood as a Chinaman brought a bucket of water around from behind his establishment and began to wash the red away until it ran down the street in rivulets. “Well, you got me there, Cable.”
Mario left and went over to a little teashop to get something to drink. I wandered over to where he had left the angry little Chinese woman. I spied the silvery handcuffs shining in the afternoon sun okay, but the old woman had disappeared without a trace—and Mario’s handcuffs were still locked! Crap, this had turned out to be a hell of an afternoon, I thought.
I was walking around looking for clues when I spied one of the most beautiful young Chinese women I had ever laid my eyes on. Somehow she looked too classy to be haunting the wooden sidewalks of Chinatown. I went up to her. “Do you speekee English?” I asked, noticing her flawless skin and perfect little body. She was dressed in a lovely red silken robe, pearl slippers and a golden barrette in her hair.
“No need to speak down to me, police man,” she voiced in perfect English. “I see you looking at me. What is it you may desire?”
I wanted to say her, but I refrained. “I’m—I’m sorry—I, uh, I was just admiring your beauty. I haven’t seen you here before. Are you new?”
“I think you would say, just passing through. I am…I am looking for something I lost.”
“Well, now, ain’t that strange? Some old Chinese crone said the same thing hanging around two dead bodies earlier today—over there on Alameda Street.”
“So I heard. Terrible how you humans kill each other…as if you did not know another way…”
“And you’re not human?” I asked.
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean it like that,” she sputtered. “I do not go around killing other humans.”
Now the dame had captured my undivided attention. “So…ah…what exactly did you mean?”
“Highly evolved or cultured people do not sink to such primitive actions. In my land, I am a princess, you might say…”
“Ah, I see…” I said that, not knowing what this babe was getting at. “Well, anyway, as far as I can tell, we’re human enough for the duration of this trip called life—and I don’t see any way out of that. People kill other people for a lot of reasons, lady…mostly because someone else is in their way.”
“Still very primitive, police man.” Then she asked me a strange question. “Do you know where they take the bodies of the dead men?”
“Yeah, they usually end up at the County Morgue, south of town. Why would you ask that?” This was getting stranger by the minute!
“Thank you, police man.” She nodded to me, turned away and left.
I took out a Lucky Strike and lit it. The sound of a lonely sax went wailing through my head as I took in a big drag and exhaled. Hell, just another babe, even if she was particularly curious—not to mention a knockout. But there was something about her I liked. Like a lot of other things you can’t put your finger on. I bet to myself that little doll would be a fun roll in the hay. I kept telling myself a young cop had to take time out from this stinking world he lived in. After all it was 1927 and Prohibition had been in effect for seven years. But people still got thirsty and speakeasies thrived as much as open taverns ever did. Coming from an early life in the ghetto to Chinatown and Skid Row wasn’t much of a jump. But what was it I liked in this cock-eyed world? I guess I went for truth, justice and beautiful babes in red sequined gowns singing their little hearts out in smoky dives in the middle of the night—a sultry voice singing Blue Skies while the rest of the world hid its dirty secrets in the dark corners. As a cop you could see the greed, corruption and intrigue from a front row seat, as well as the rest of the underbelly of so-called humanity, whether it was the emotionally trapped citizen punching out his girlfriend or my partner and I pickin
g up the pieces of an accident victim—or even the boring everydayism of being a cop on a beat or on patrol car duty.
After the Great War in 1918 when Johnny came marching home to the tune of George M. Cohan’s Over There or I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, the lucky ones had something and someone to come home to. The war’s legacy was too often depression, suicide, and financial destitution—the wheel was turning too fast, spun by the wheeler-dealers on Wall Street and the bankers tucked away in their nifty million dollar homes off Mulholland Drive. It was tough for the returnees to get on board when someone else was pulling the strings, deciding who should prosper and who should be left to die in the dark shadows of poverty. Some kids were barely sixteen when they entered that bloody hell in the trenches, and they returned without professions or vocations, and little opportunity for a fair shake at education. And some came back from The Battle of Belleau Wood poisoned with mustard gas, shell-shocked, with no arms or legs, a burnt unrecognizable face or an emotional trauma big enough to sink another Titanic. Yeah, that was how the rich and famous used up the poor and not-so-famous.
All That Glitters
The next day Mario and I headed for the Los Angeles County Morgue. It was on West Temple now and the chief Coroner was Frank A. Nance, a guy who prided himself with burying more movie stars than any coroner in history. Nance ran a pretty tight ship. The principal floor doctor and chief autopsy surgeon was Dr. Boris Sandor, a sinister looking character. He seemed to take delight in circulating among the dozens of corpses brought in every week, dissecting them and making, so I heard, rather colorful reports to his boss. Mario and I parked our Model T patrol car just outside and meandered around the stiffs looking for our quarry. Funny, it seemed death was the one great unexpected thing, for the rigid, gaunt faces, in all sorts of grotesque poses, seemed to say a single message in that semi-dark slab room: “Help! I didn’t expect this!” Many had their mouths agape and stayed that way as rigor mortis set in. Mario and I found Dr. Sandor and he led us to the toe-tags of a couple of hoodlums who had just been sacrificed with a lot of bullet holes in their respective corpus delicti, courtesy of the local mob.