This Storm

by James Ellroy

Call-Me-Jack said, “Tommy G. That Irish cocksucker has been a thorn in my side since God was a pup.”

  Buzz said, “The Chief knows from Irish cocksuckers, given his long-standing friendship with Dudley Smith.”

  Call-Me-Jack went tut-tut. Breuning and Carlisle trembled. Elmer blew Buzz an Okie-redneck kiss.

  Joan laughed outright. Pinch me. What am I doing—

  Thad Brown said, “Jackson, Blanchard, Meeks. You take the address book. Jump on the names, jump on Glennon, and jump on all of it now.”

  Call-Me-Jack yawned. I’m half-gassed, I need a nap, you’re wearing me thin.

  “Get out of here. All of you. Find the guy who killed our pals Wendell and George, and try not to kill him until he’s confessed.”

  Parker dashed for the door. He detoured and slipped Joan a note. It read “Tonight?”

  Joan whistled and brought him up short. Parker turned and faced her. Heads shot their way. Joan spoke full vibrato. Damn circumspection. Let the world know.

  “Yes, Bill. I’d love to see you tonight.”

  * * *

  —

  The all-clear horn blew. The Army searchlights kept swirling. They lit up clouds you just never saw. False-alarm nights moved her. The war had its upsides.

  Joan said, “When peace comes, we’ll lose this.”

  Parker said, “They magnify the moon. That’s the part I like best.”

  They sat on Joan’s back steps. Joan sat one step down. His feet were right there. Joan held an ankle just so she could touch him.

  “You’ve been detached to work this job. I thought you’d be more displeased than you are.”

  Parker touched her shoulder. “We’re skirting that topic we weren’t going to discuss.”

  “You’re saying Jack Horrall’s pining for a certain case last month, so he’s assembled a near-identical Crash Squad.”

  “You understand this police department very damn well. You wouldn’t have learned the ins and outs of the Navy anywhere near as fast.”

  “I dreamt about the Mexicans last night. I was being tried for vehicular manslaughter, and the DA asked me if I knew the names of the victims. I said, ‘Well, my policeman colleagues call them wetbacks and cholos.’ ”

  Parker touched her hair. “Don’t do that. Don’t derail yourself when things start going your way.”

  Joan kissed his hand and placed it back on his knee. A searchlight beam crossed the moon. Joan saw little craters.

  She left City Hall and drove back to the klubhaus. She redusted and rephotographed all day. She hadn’t seen the Santa Barbara file. Ashida was there all day. He hadn’t seen it, either.

  Parker tapped her shoulder. “You’ve developed a particular habit. You keep worrying those gold cuff links, like you’re checking for signs of stigmata.”

  Joan smiled. “There’s a story behind it, but I’m not going to tell it to you.”

  “I’ll quote Jack Horrall, then. ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’ ”

  Joan looked up at him. His dumb sport coat complemented his dumb cologne. His trousers drooped. He wore a cross-draw belt gun.

  “I went to a wild party, just to observe Kay Lake. I took a steam bath with a famous actor and your old nemesis Claire De Haven. I kept thinking, Why am I naked with people I don’t even know? and They don’t do this in Tomah, Wisconsin.”

  Parker looked down at her. “What are you saying? You’re a scientist, and you never speak elliptically. I admire that about you. I never have to strain myself to grasp your intent.”

  Joan touched his leg. “I’m saying, ‘Darling Bill, you’ve given me a life that I never could have imagined, and I will remain forever grateful, however this thing of ours plays out.”

  Parker tripped down two steps instead of just one. Joan grabbed his arm and pulled him back up. She brought him in close. They kissed. His glasses snagged in her hair. They stumbled inside and into the bedroom. They knocked over a wobbly lamp as they fell.

  48

  (LOS ANGELES, 5:00 A.M., 2/1/42)

  Ashida dawdled. He felt gob-smacked. It felt indolent and all wrong.

  He made beaker-brew coffee. It salved his drinks-with-Dudley hangover. He ran checklists. He cleaned his lab gear. He replayed last night.

  They met at the Windsor and sat at the bar. They wore their uniforms and turned heads. It felt like a hot date.

  Dudley ordered stingers. Ashida felt like a girl plied with booze. Dudley brought a Statie print card. Hector Obregon-Hodaka/Kyoho Hanamaka’s KA.

  The klubhaus job dips south. It melds with Hanamaka and his gold bayonet. The bayonet’s mint marks match the marks on his gold bar. The mint-train heist and Griffith Park fire further intersect.

  Ashida cracked windows. Cold air fanned a lab-solvent stink. He sipped coffee. He tallied case points. What he knew and Joan Conville knew. What Dudley knew nothing of.

  He lost track of his falsehoods. He realized this:

  He was Dudley’s idolatrous accomplice. Joan was Dudley’s lover. He saw them together and sensed it. They had to disclose everything. They had to share the gold, three ways.

  Rain bounced off window screens. The coffee induced cold sweats.

  Dudley loved the bayonet. Its utility superseded 8.2 pounds of gold. The bayonet accessorized his fascist aesthetic. Captain D. L. Smith killed people and communed with a fantasy wolf. Lieutenant H. J. Ashida’s fantasy lover was quite insane.

  The bayonet was History. The bayonet was Dudley’s beloved Wagner and Norse myth. Dudley would accede to gold as money. The Myth of This Gold would gob-smack him and inspire him to possess it.

  Ashida checked his watch. He was due at the klubhaus. He had three lab tasks first.

  Test the semen-stained sheets. Run the Mexican’s prints. Study the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s heist file. Hope that Reckless Girl hasn’t studied it first.

  He’d blood-typed the ejaculate and ID’d four secretors. Two O-positive/one A-negative/one rare RH-positive. Dr. Nort would comparison-type the victims’ blood types. He was set to run foreign-substance tests himself.

  He prepped a burner and preheated an acid-phosphate solution. He added purified water and brought up a boil. He placed sheet swatch #1 in the liquid. The semen stain eroded in two seconds flat.

  Ashida noted swirling particles. One type was dark and granular. One type was viscous and near-transparent.

  He naked-eyed them. They were forensically compatible and easily ID’d.

  Human fecal matter. A glycerin-based lubricant. Most likely K-Y jelly.

  Ashida flinched. He turned off the burner and set the other swatches aside. He wide-cracked windows. A wet breeze raised goose bumps. He pulled the Unknown Mexican print card.

  Drudgework now. The print-card index. Card drawers subdivided by gender and race. Twelve drawers for “Mexican, Male.”

  Ashida microphotographed the Unknown Mex card. He got all ten digits and hit the photo lab. He locked himself in the darkroom. He worked with scissors, dip solvents, and a magnifying camera. He shot ten six-by-eight prints.

  A heater fan dried them inside twenty minutes. They developed white on black. He taped them to the wall above the print-card bank. He pencil-marked significant ridges and whorls. He pulled out the A drawer and worked standing up.

  He started at Abrevaya, George and Acosta, Ramon. He noted inconsistent whorl patterns and moved on. He went through Alvarez, Alvaro/Alvarez, José and Alvarez, Juan. Alvarez was a dirt-common name.

  He studied nine more Alvarez cards. He hit Archuleta, Arturo, aka “Archie.”

  There’s a tweaker. Check the left-forefinger print. Look—the top ridge patterns match.

  Ashida snatched his eyepiece scope. He went up/down, up/down, up/down. He studied Archuleta’s left-hand prints. He eyeball-skimmed the unknown Mex fotos.

  He cou
nted comparison points. He got ten points, fourteen points, a big twenty-one. That cinched it. Bam!—Archie Archuleta was klubhaus stiff #3.

  The lab went sauna hot. Ashida cracked all the windows. A breeze blew loose papers off desks.

  He hit the green-sheet index. He yanked the A to B file drawer and finger-walked. He pulled Archuleta’s green sheet. It revealed this:

  Born: Tijuana, Mexico—8/19/89. Narco jolts back to ’15. Two years at the dope hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Two Chino terms here. Popped for plain drunk/drunk 502/forging doctors’ scripts. 27 dope rousts, total. LKA: 841 Wabash, Boyle Heights. No KAs listed. Last bounce: drunk 502/3-6-39. Popped in ’35 Ford/59th and Central.

  Ashida wrote up his findings. He’d call Thad Brown and inform him. He’d paper-post his reports at Lyman’s.

  He got out the heist file. The page stack felt heavy. He checked the bottom of the pile and saw loose paperwork. It pertained to the ’33 liquor-store jobs. Robbery Division weighs in.

  Reckless Girl forged a file-request slip. She was Sloppy Girl here. His forgeries surpassed hers. Her “Ray Pinker” sigs looked like tomb hieroglyphs.

  Ashida skimmed the heist file. It detailed the mint train’s Santa Barbara stop. It featured Leander Frechette and Deputy Karl Tullock.

  Negro youth Frechette. He’s six-eight and weighs 340. He’s mentally dim and inhumanely strong. The Santa Barbara cops posit this:

  The gold-cage lock was removed. A look-alike lock was cosmetically affixed. Just enough gold was clouted. The low bar count ensured that the cache would not appear ransacked.

  The bars were wheeled off, walked off, or tossed off the train. Waiting confederates grabbed them. The cops canned the toss-off theory. It entailed confederates in moving surveillance. Said confederates could not know this:

  When the gold-cage walkway would stand unobserved. When the theft and toss-off would occur.

  The cops canned the wheel-off theory. Somebody would have seen it. The walk-off theory remained. The bulk weight of the bars meant this:

  The thief is exceptionally large and strong. He hides the bars on his person and obfuscates the load. He walks on and off the train. His confederates grab the gold.

  It’s a stop-for-coal stop. The eight convicts escape precedingly. The overall atmosphere remains chaotically charged. It obscures the thief’s actions.

  One train worker possesses just such strength and bulk. It’s Leander Frechette. Deputy Karl Tullock has at him.

  Tullock badgers and beats on Frechette. Leander holds firm. I didn’t do it/I don’t know who did it/I don’t know nothing.

  Frechette remains in stir. A Negro man named Martin Luther Mimms secures his release. Mimms is tight with L.A. Police high-ups. Frechette is released to his custody.

  Ashida kicked it around. This seemed certain now:

  The mass escape and train heist comprised one event. The two repair stops were caused by staged mechanical glitches. It all cohered behind Fritz Eckelkamp.

  He escapes and remains at large. He was a career heist man. The other escaped cons are shot on sight. It feels like preengendered chaos.

  Cut to the klubhaus job. Hector Obregon-Hodaka laid the haus gestalt out to Dudley. Hector knew Kyoho Hanamaka. Hanamaka’s gold bayonet: cast from the same ore as the bars on the train. This seems certain now:

  Eckelkamp, the German Marxist. Hanamaka, the left-right horror connoisseur. The klubhaus as haunt of debauched politicos. There’s a stench here. It’s Fifth Column mischief couched in criminal greed.

  Two mug shots were clipped to the file. Fritz Eckelkamp looked Teutonic fierce. Leander Frechette looked bewildered.

  Ashida jumped files. He went gold heist to liquor-store jobs in one heartbeat. He saw the witness-composite sketch. He saw a list of look-alike vagrants. They were detained, un-ID’d, released for lack of proof.

  The fourth name down: Jackson, Wayne Frank.

  49

  (LOS ANGELES, 10:00 A.M., 2/1/42)

  The boys are back in town.

  That bluegrass ditty nailed them. The KKKlan outkast and Okie shitkicker. Sergeants E. V. Jackson and T. R. Meeks their own selves.

  With their own prowl sled. On this big case. Fuck struck with bitching intent.

  Elmer drove. Buzz kibitzed. They got pigshit lucky. Hotdog Ashida notched a print make. The dead Mex now stood ID’d.

  Boyle Heights was Baja north. Shack rows on flat streets and hillsides. Tacofied taverns and pachucoized pool halls. Lots of Catholic churches. Sinarquista decals on souped-up cars.

  Elmer said, “Wabash. It’s around here somewhere.”

  Buzz said, “She’ll take it rough. Her Archie treated her raw, but he gave her the big chorizo like nobody else.”

  Elmer went nyet. “What did our first two widows give us? Nothing but relief that their hubbies were dead, and ‘Where’s my survivors’ pension check?’ ”

  “Twenty says you’re wrong.”

  “Twenty says I’m right.”

  They shook on it. It sealed their Pax Redneckiana. They’d breached Jack Horrall’s orders already. They braced the Personnel Division boss and the two widows. It revealed this:

  Call-Me-Jack pulled Rice’s and Kapek’s Personnel files. Them boys were just toooooooo dirty. Dirt leaks might besmirch the PD. Their bust lists were in those files. The Crash Squad needed a look-see. Maybe some crazed felon was fresh out of stir and hot for revenge.

  The widows pissed on Rice and Kapek, postmortem. You want baleful bile? Gas on this:

  Rice pimped his wife to cover his poker debts. Rice fathered Kapek’s three kids, and vice versa. The widows were lezbo lovers and turned dyke tricks out of Linda’s Little Log Cabin. Rice and Kapek filmed their antics and peddled the lez epics down in T.J.

  The widows evicted their hubbies at least once a week. They had a hideout somewhere. The widows knew zilch per the klubhaus and hubbies’ KAs. They knew their hubbies veered far right. Rice and Kapek made them wear dirndl skirts and Nazi armbands. Their kids wore lederhosen and Tyrolean beanies to school. They frolicked at German-American Bund summer camp.

  Elmer and Buzz eyeball-tossed their two domiciles. Rice possessed some farkakte fly-ur-self/build-from-scratch model-airplane kit. The fucking thing consumed half his garage. It had rivet-attached wings. It had Luftwaffe insignia and a cockpit-mounted machine gun. The Widow Rice said he bought it from some right-wing geek in Minnesota.

  Georgie Kapek possessed twenty-six incendiary bombs. The Widow Kapek called him a “Secret Firebug.” Georgie possessed two terp stills and thirty-four back issues of Goldlover Magazine.

  Georgie’s swag gored Elmer’s gourd. He knew he’d seen similar shit somewhere. It hit him belated:

  The late Don Matsura owned that selfsame shit. Terp stills and Goldlover Magazine.

  Elmer and Buzz logged man-hours. They quizzed the Alien Squad guys per Kapek and Rice. Nobody coughed up good drift. They said Georgie and Wendell were bent. So what? We all are. We’re bent in the ways of this bent PD in this bent and fucked-up town.

  That approach tanked. They braced the watch boss at Newton Station then. They pressed on complaints levied against the klubhaus. Nope—there were none. That approach tanked, likewise.

  Buzz said, “That’s the address.”

  Elmer pulled to the curb. Said address: a cinder-block and wood firetrap. Note the fat mamacita ensconced on the porch.

  The boys piled out and drifted over. Mama-san sniffed bad news. She had good feelers. Her snout twitch-twitched.

  “You’ve got him downtown, right? He topped out his parole, but you still got him for some dumb law he shouldn’t have broke.”

  Buzz doffed his hat. “Archie’s dead, ma’am. It took a few days to identify him, but it’s him. He was killed, along with two policemen. It occurred in a little clubhouse down in the colored side of town.”


  Mama shrugged. “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Adios, Arturo. With him you always knew the other shoe would drop.”

  Elmer said, “How so, ma’am?”

  Mama said, “Archie ran with lower companions. Water seeks its own level. He was a pendejo and a borracho. He snitched to the police and mainlined the white horse. You pay the piper, the piper calls the tune. You buy trouble, you get what you pay for.”

  Buzz spit tobacco juice. He doused the porch steps good.

  “Did he snitch to any particular policemen?”

  Mama shook her head. “I always told him ‘Don’t name me no names, ’cause what I don’t know can’t hurt me.’ I know he snitched to these two fools on the Alien Squad, but I made sure he didn’t name no names.”

  Elmer relit his cigar. “You’re saying you didn’t know Archie’s running partners, and you only had a general sense that he was out in the world, causing trouble.”

  “That’s right. Archie was a snake in the grass, but I told him ‘Don’t you bring no mice home to me.’ ”

  Elmer said, “Archie must have had himself a parole officer. He’d have known Archie’s associates.”

  “He always topped out his parole, so there’d be no strings attached. He said that way, he’d have the world on a string.”

  Buzz said, “How many niños you got, ma’am? You think they’d have more details on their daddy’s pals and activities?”

  Mama snorted. “Arturo was a back-door man. You don’t conceive no niños that way.”

  Elmer whooped. Ashida posted a lab report. Oooga-booga. Jizz stains, K-Y jelly, shit traces.

  “Here’s a question, ma’am. You’re the late Archie Archuleta. You’ve got time on your hands and a penchant for trouble. How do you spend your days?”

  Mama picked her nose. “Arturo knew his way around C-town and J-town. He sought most of his trouble there. ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ He sold his dope and bought his dope there, and he snitched to these two Alien Squad bulls who worked around there. He knew lots of tong men, crooked Japs, and these Jap Fifth Column types. He bought these Nazi-type trinkets from some Jap, and he sold them to the zoot-suit pendejos here in the Heights.”