David Bishop - Matt Kile 04 - Find My Little Sister

by David Bishop

  “He has to say it that way, Clara,” Matt explained. “He’s handed off jurisdiction of the case. He had to. The decisions aren’t his to make. You don’t have anything to worry about. Just do what the sergeant said. Tell it there like you told it here.”

  “You have a right to defend yourself and your home. Trust the system,” Fidge said. “We know what this is all about. The detective that comes out will get this bum identified. I checked the guy’s pockets. No ID. He likely has a rap sheet, probably more burglaries. Odds are the detective will have him identified in no time.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, the body was gone and Clara was in the back of a squad car on her way to the stationhouse to give her statement. Matt led Fidge back to his condo. They had missed breakfast so Axel offered to make his puffy pancakes for lunch.

  The moment they went back out onto his patio, Matt put his hand to his head and then collapsed to the deck. He went down like a dropped shirt. Out cold.

  “He had a bad headache this morning,” Axel said. “I think he had it last night, but he didn’t say anything then.”

  When a few more minutes passed without either Fidge or Axel being able to revive him, Fidge took out his cell phone. “I’m calling the station to get an ambulance out here … with a police escort.”

  From the time Matt fell to the deck of his patio until he was in a hospital bed, he had not regained consciousness.

  After they waited for what seemed too long, a doctor came into the waiting area.

  “Mr. Kile is in a coma,” the doctor said. “At the moment, we’re guessing he has a leaking brain aneurysm. If so, we’ll need to get in there right away and stop the leak. That will mean a trip to the O.R. First we’ll run some diagnostic tests and scans. For the moment, we’ll keep him in neuro ICU. That way we can monitor his condition and treat accordingly. Check with the nurses’ station about visitation.”

  Chapter Two

  You shoulda been there …

  January, 1938, Los Angeles, California

  I let go of the handrail and hopped off the streetcar as it slowed near the corner, a short distance from a downtown watering hole. As I got off, behind me I could hear the clacking as the trolley regained its speed against the rails. The drinking place had lost some of its luster, quite a bit actually, but kept much of its clientele, folks who weren’t primarily concerned with being seen by the swells and gossip columnists. I took a familiar seat and motioned the barkeep for my usual, Tullamore Dew on the rocks with a lemon twist.

  At a nearby table, a man sat alone, ignored like a mug of warm beer. His only movement, sucking the life out of a cigarette faster than it was sucking the life out of him—his contribution to the gray smoky mist that kept the air stale. The cig was a roll-your-own, the string from the tobacco bag trailing out of his shirt pocket. He reminded me of someone. Someone in a memory I couldn’t quite reach at the moment.

  The place had been a speakeasy in the basement roughly under the King Edward Hotel at Fifth and Los Angeles Street. The King Eddy was now a legit bar on the ground floor of the hotel. During prohibition, rumors said, an off-the-books piece of the action had been regularly passed to the LAPD and City Hall. Despite its underground location having been widely known while it had been a speakeasy, the King Eddie, to my knowledge, had never been raided.

  He relieved his lips of his cigarette from time to time to take a drink of what looked like whiskey neat. After which, each time, he quickly returned his focus to me. Don’t you hate it when a stranger just stares at you? You don’t know who. You don’t know why. They don’t just glance or periodically look away, just staring.

  He just sat there sipping, smoking, and watching. When the life of his cig got real short, his lips danced it to the right corner of his mouth. This moved the burning stub and its rising heat from directly under his considerable nose while he stubbornly pursued the last possible dose of nicotine. He narrowed his right eye to protect it from the curling smoke that climbed his cheek like a soldier desperate to find the nearest foxhole. The man was big. These last few minutes told me he was also patient. The cigarette going to the right suggested he was right handed, but I still couldn’t place who he looked like.

  When his cigarette finally died, he buried it in the brown dampness at the bottom of his glass, stood, snugged his hat onto his head, lit a fresh cig, and walked over to me.

  He started to speak, and then held up a moment as the clacking sound of a passing electric trolley rushed in through the front door opened by an arriving patron.

  “I hear you’ve been asking about me. I’m Carter Mitchum, a fellow gumshoe.”

  “I’m a columnist, Mitchum, so I don’t qualify for the nick, gumshoe.”

  “Where it counts it makes little difference. We both walk in quiet shoes and listen with big ears.”

  I knew his reputation: discredited copper. I also knew he was discredited because he wouldn’t go along with the corruption that had stunk up City Hall and the Los Angeles Police Department for as long as I could remember. Carter Mitchum had refused to go on the pad so after a steady diet of shit jobs from his captain, he put down his city shield and picked up a private one.

  I put my hand out. “I figured we should meet. I’m—”

  He interrupted. “I know who you are, Matthew Kile, you work the crime beat as an independent reporter. I figure you’re fishing for a new source. That why you figure we should meet?”

  “Hey, you came over to me. I didn’t approach you. Maybe you got something you’d like me to print in my column?”

  I was hoping he did. I get a fair number of nuggets this way.

  “I don’t need to tell you the LAPD stinks to high heaven,” Mitchum said. “You’re in a position to know it as well as anyone. But I ain’t about to rat ‘em out.”

  “Is it not true,” I asked, “that you sometimes use force to achieve your ends?”

  Carter Mitchum stood stone still, his eyes on mine. He didn’t blink or move any other parts. I matched him. Then he spoke. “It’s also true I sometimes use laxatives to achieve my ends.”

  He reached for his nearly new cigarette, dropped it on King Eddy’s wood floor and stubbed it out with his toe. He pulled out the chair across from me, dropped his gray Fedora hat with a gutter-dented crown onto my table, and sat down. I motioned the barkeep to bring two more.

  January 15, 1938 - Crime is Never Off Season.

  The NFL season may be over and major league baseball not yet ready to crack open its new battle for the next World Series, but Los Angeles crime never closes for business. As long as customers want hooch, games of chance, and the intimate attention of a slim ankle, the hoods exist to serve those needs. Some might argue they are a textbook example of the free market, but nothing they sell comes free, and those who break the rules of the game often pay with their lives.

  Unemployment in Los Angeles County has hovered in the 15 to 20% range for most of this decade. The have-nots, praying to hit it big, would risk what little they carried in their poke on a roll of the dice or the turn of a card. They lusted for a night or an hour of escapism from the suffocation of their money troubles. On the other side of the economic town, the haves toss their dough around in search of pleasure. Everybody’s a customer for the mob, and business is always good. So much so, that these purveyors of “feeling good” often kill to move up in line or to take away a territory serviced by a competitor. Once in the business, mobsters generally stay until death do they part, the death sometimes coming earlier and more suddenly than they expected.

  Early yesterday morning, Harry Raymond, special investigator for the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC) walked into the garage of his Boyle Heights home. He expected a day like a lot of other days. Only yesterday wasn’t like a lot of other days. For Raymond, it would be like no other day. He planned to drive his wife to the market, and then take her to lunch. That changed when he started his car. The engine blew apart along with a good portion of Raymond
’s garage.

  Harry Raymond, a former LAPD officer, had for a brief time in 1933 held the top job, Chief of Police, Los Angeles. According to rumors, Raymond, under the employ of CIVIC, had recently gathered massive amounts of evidence proving that a corrupt LAPD and City Hall provided protection for organized vice crimes throughout our city’s reputed chain of over 1,800 bookies, 600 brothels and 200 gambling dens. The story was that Raymond planned to take his extensive report and evidence to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury.

  Not wanting this to be done, the bad guys had wired his car to put an end to Raymond’s inquiries. But, Harry Raymond had the last laugh. This gristly veteran of law enforcement beat the bad guys. He survived the blast. Although, this time it hurt him to laugh about it. As I write this, Raymond is in Georgia Street Receiving Hospital where he has become the proud owner of over 100 stitches in addition to treatments for multiple fractures and two chest punctures. Yeah, it hurt him a lot to laugh.

  More on this story later …

  On a lighter note, the Philharmonic Auditorium will be presenting the fabulous George Gershwin musical “Porgy and Bess” starting February 4, 1938.

  Please tune in to my mid-week radio crime report on Wednesdays where I bring up new development on crimes covered in my column and new items of interest from the underworld and the celluloid world of movies.

  Good night, Mr. and Mrs. Los Angeles and all the gambling ships at sea … Good Luck, Suckers! Matt Kile

  Chapter Three

  April, 1938

  As the Friday sun slipped below the western horizon, I poured two fingers of Tullamore Dew, my favorite Irish, over crushed ice and sat back in my second floor office in the section of Spring Street known as the Wall Street of the West. I like a squeeze of lemon in my Dew, but I didn’t keep lemons in my office. I kept meaning to, just never seemed to think of it when I was at a store which sold lemons.

  Some nights I hung around to meet someone with a secret they wanted to see in the paper. Tonight, I stayed late to put some finishing touches to my column. Other nights I lingered simply because I had nowhere else in particular to be.

  The outside light silently slid in between the horizontal blinds which started one-third down from the curved top of the window. These shards of light grew into thicker and longer rows of dark and light against the far wall. The light from above the blinds charged in all bulky-like, only to be chopped up in endless battles with the blades in the ceiling fan. The room light was off, the gooseneck lamp at the corner of my desk on. It was a perfect setting for a vamp to walk in, plant the sole of one high-heel shoe on the edge of the chair between my legs, look into my baby blues, and smile. It had never happened, but who can say it won’t.

  A mild fog crowded the evening street, making things glisten and the trolley tracks spark now and again. Fog didn’t often make its way from the coastline into downtown LA, but it happened now and again, including tonight. The street lamps and scattered neon signs took on a frosty look, but visibility remained pretty good.

  My fantasy woman often walked by about this time and I didn’t want to miss her if she did so tonight. When things were quiet, like now, her image hung in my mind the way a dream lingers when you’re not quite sure you’re fully awake. With my window open, when she walked by, the rhythmic sounds of her heels on the sidewalk reverberated off the wood and concrete of the city, the way intimate whispers find their way around in a dark bed.

  I had first seen her in a restaurant two blocks down, a place where local office workers were known to have lunch—mostly women. I went there about once a week to window shop, I guess is a way of saying it. When she stepped inside, the yakety-yak stopped. She was the cool breeze on a hot night, or the warm breeze on a cold one, a society dame in a room full of everyday women. She just had that look. The one all women tried to reach for each time they stood in the doorways of their open closets or preening in front of a mirror. She seemed an office worker, yet she had the class of a gal you wanted to take home to meet mother.

  I didn’t approach her that first time. Figured she’d shoot me down in public. Not wanting that, I loitered with a cup of joe until she left. About a week later, I started noticing her comings and goings on Spring Street. Over the next couple of weeks, I got a feel for the times she came and went. On nights, like tonight, when I didn’t have a reason to be somewhere else, I watched for her.

  There she was. Not dreamlike, but real, striding along Spring Street halfway between Eighth and Seventh Avenues. She had beauty that would make Cleopatra look like a Cairo commoner. For some reason, tonight, watching from my office window would not be enough. I grabbed my hat and headed down to the street level. I wanted to see her from closer. Maybe tonight I’d approach her and introduce myself. For some unexplained reason, the elevator often ran slowly. I took the stairs down from my second floor office and eased into the shadowy corner of the doorway.

  When she crossed Seventh Avenue, her skirt briefly rose above her knee as she stepped up to the sidewalk. She eased her pace and glanced over as she passed Gus’s newsstand on the corner. Gus, who had started his closing down routine, forgot his magazines, newspapers, and candy to watch her go by. Each night I had watched her, she smiled at Gus. It gave her class, no snobbery, and let me know she was a regular Joe. A gorgeous woman being friendly to Gus, a retired cabbie whose eyes could still gather in an attractive shape, but could no longer work well enough to steer a hack through the challenges of city streets.

  The illumination from storefronts cut paths here and there across the walkway in front of her. She moved through their lights as if they had come outside just to feel her legs and rub up against her.

  Maybe tonight I’d follow her. See if she walked home from downtown or if she had a car parked in one of the nearby lots a block off Spring Street. Then again, maybe tonight I really would approach her. I meant her no harm. I just didn’t know how to breach the lack of an introduction.

  The night had completed its conquest of the city. Cars with their windshield wipers whisking against the fog still passed, but fewer than at her usual time. She was a little late. I had even started to worry. Nutty, huh? Me worrying about some doll I had never met. A dame whose name I didn’t even know.

  She moved as if she were part of the night, its lowest star. A breeze gently moved her hair. The way I would to expose the side of her neck, her ear. Her hand grasped a clutch purse. Her arm swinging it with each stride as if guided by a celestial maestro conducting the lights and sounds of the city that symphonized around her.

  As she drew closer, I stepped out. When I cleared the shadow of the doorway, she glanced over. I absorbed her smile. Felt its warmth. Then, perhaps recognizing I was a stranger, she withdrew her attention. Her initial reaction had been more from startle than gladness.

  She was my pleasure, private and respectful, distant yet close. Some days I also saw her going and coming from lunch. At least I assumed to and from lunch as it was usually around noon. She was lovely in the sun, but special at night. The darkness seemed to hurry to her. She absorbed its plainness and returned a soft glow.

  Right then I understood the way the Lon Chaney character felt in the movie, Phantom of the Opera.

  Meeting women had never been easy for me. Outside the brothel trade and the molls who accompanied the mob, approaching a woman was not easy in Los Angeles, even in the modern time of 1938. I needed an intermediary, someone to introduce us. Until then, I didn’t want to spook her by giving the impression I was shadowing her.

  When she passed, I whispered my frequent message: good night princess, and touched my index finger to the brim of an old porkpie hat I often wore in the office. I had no right to more. I even feared that knowing more might lessen the fascination. I needed her magic in my life. In some measure, it counterbalanced the gloom of the evil I wrote about daily, not to mention the steady stream of soulless gangsters and corrupt politicians I regularly observed and interviewed.

  When she turned the far corner, I
hurried down to grab an evening edition from Gus before he chunked his padlock into its overnight position. Then I hotfooted it another block to grab a bowl of chili-to-go from Max’s before heading back upstairs to my office.

  Tonight had been another elevating, yet disappointing encounter.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, not too early, I took a water taxi out to see Tony the Hat. His real name was Anthony Cornero, although the coppers often tacked on the last name of his widowed mother’s next husband, referring to Tony as Anthony Cornero Stralla. Tony, who, to my knowledge, had never been adopted by Mr. Stralla, considered his last name to be Cornero, not Stralla.

  On the way out, I fell under the spell of the relaxing sounds of the small waves lapping against the side of the boat, slapping hollow sounds which flowed right into your private thoughts.

  In April, there was still often a bit of low-hanging fog. Or what might better be called a haze, which sat on the lap of the ocean when the morning sun heated the air to a temperature higher than the cooler ocean water. At least that was how the weather guy at the paper explained it to me, assuming I understood his explanation. This morning was one of those mornings, but visibility remained good and clearing as we drew nearer the S.S. Tango.

  Tony was on the Tango planning the outfitting of his next gambling ship, the S. S. Rex, a Latin word meaning reigning king. And, from everything Tony had told me about those plans, the S.S. Rex would be the king of the nearly half-a-dozen gambling ships that were permanently parked off the coast of California.

  Technically, Tony no longer owned a part of the Tango. He had lost his considerable share in a high stakes crap game with his partners for winner take all. They weren’t getting along so they gambled to see who would get the Tango. Tony didn’t. Yet the deal allowed Tony, if he lost, to continue to use its facilities until the Rex was up and running.