Los Angeles Noir 2

by Denise Hamilton

  The fishermen found the soft spot in the fish’s head and pushed a spike in its brain. Helen was amazed how easy it was to kill a huge fish like that. It shuddered as if it was hoping for another chance at life, then went limp.

  There was a method to cutting a bluefin tuna. You first needed time to bleed the fish so that its sheen would still be maintained. And then go right to the internal organs in the gilling and gutting. Later you would cut the meat into chunks and sell them by the pound.

  Helen could skip many of the steps she had learned as a child. The most important tools here were the knife and the mallet. She was thankful some family friends had watched over her father’s tools while they had been in Manzanar.

  After Helen was done, she carefully packed different parts of Bob in three different suitcases and cleaned the cement floor of Kaji-san ’s kitchen. She had brought extra bottles of bleach for the task. She then drove to Pierpoint Landing and took Kaji-san ’s motorized fishing boat as far as she could, and dropped each suitcase into different parts of the ocean. The water was black as the ink of an octopus, and for a moment Helen imagined a huge sea monster emerging from the darkness and tearing her, too, into shreds. But her mind was only playing tricks on her. After closing her eyes hard and reopening them, she found that her fear had disappeared.

  Shortly thereafter, Helen, Diana, and Mama moved into the wood-framed house in southern Gardena. Next door was a flower farm and packing shed.

  “That Miura widow is a cold one,” the grower’s wife said to her husband as they were bunching up flowers at night to get ready for the early-morning drive to the Flower Market in Los Angeles.

  The flower grower, Tad, simply nodded, so that his wife would be under the impression that he was listening.

  “Never says hello. She was on one of those beauty queen courts back in 1941. But she wasn’t the queen. Too stuck-up for the judges, I think.”

  Tad grunted. He wasn’t one to spread stories. But he knew who she was. One day when he was driving back from the Flower Market in the morning after the children left for school, he saw her in the middle of his snapdragon blooms, next to one of the oil derricks. She was screaming and crying; at first he thought she had been injured. When he slowed his panel truck, she straightened her hair and rubbed the smeared makeup from below her eyes.

  “You okay?” he asked from his open car window.

  She stared back at him, her eyes shiny like wet black stones. She then spoke, her voice barely audible above the rhythmic squeak of the derricks. “Are any of us?”

  Tad’s panel truck remained idling as the widow slowly walked back into her house and closed the door.

  HIGH DARKTOWN

  BY JAMES ELLROY

  West Adams

  (Originally published in 1986)

  From my office windows I watched L.A. celebrate the end of World War II. Central Division Warrants took up the entire north side of City Hall’s eleventh floor, so my vantage point was high and wide. I saw clerks drinking straight from the bottle in the Hall of Records parking lot across the street and harness bulls forming a riot squad and heading for Little Tokyo a few blocks away, bent on holding back a conga line of youths with 2 by 4s who looked bent on going the atom bomb one better. Craning my neck, I glimpsed tall black plumes of smoke on Bunker Hill—a sure sign that patriotic Belmont High students were stripping cars and setting the tires on fire. Over on Sunset and Figueroa, knots of zooters were assembling in violation of the Zoot Suit Ordinance, no doubt figuring that today it was anything goes.

  The tiny window above my desk had an eastern exposure, and it offered up nothing but smog and a giant traffic jam inching toward Boyle Heights. I stared into the brown haze, imagining shitloads of code 2s and 3s thwarted by noxious fumes and bumper-to-bumper revelry. My daydreams got more and more vivid, and when I had a whole skyful of A-bombs descending on the offices of the L.A.P.D. Detective Bureau, I slammed my desk and picked up the two pieces of paper I had been avoiding all morning.

  The first sheet was a scrawled memo from the Daywatch Robbery boss down the hall: Lee—Wallace Simpkins paroled from Quentin last week—to our jurisdiction. Thought you should know. Be careful. G.C.

  Cheery V-J Day tidings.

  The second page was an interdepartmental teletype issued from University Division, and, when combined with Georgie Caulkins’s warning, it spelled out the beginning of a new one-front war.

  Over the past five days there had been four heavy-muscle stickups in the West Adams district, perpetrated by a two-man heist team, one white, one negro. The MO was identical in all four cases: liquor stores catering to upper-crust negroes were hit at night, half an hour before closing, when the cash registers were full. A well-dressed male Caucasian would walk in and beat the clerk to the floor with the barrel of a .45 automatic, while the negro heister stuffed the till cash into a paper bag. Twice customers had been present when the robberies occurred; they had also been beaten senseless—one elderly woman was still in critical condition at Queen of Angels.

  It was as simple and straightforward as a neon sign. I picked up the phone and called Al Van Patten’s personal number at the County Parole Bureau.

  “Speak, it’s your nickel.”

  “Lee Blanchard, Al.”

  “Big Lee! You working today? The war’s over!”

  “No, it’s not. Listen, I need the disposition on a parolee. Came out of Quentin last week. If he reported in, I need an address; if he hasn’t, just tell me.”

  “Name? Charge?”

  “Wallace Simpkins, 655 PC. I sent him up myself in ’39.”

  Al whistled. “Light jolt. He got juice?”

  “Probably kept his nose clean and worked a war industries job inside; his partner got released to the army after Pearl Harbor. Hurry it up, will you?”

  “Off and running.”

  Al dropped the receiver to his desk, and I suffered through long minutes of static-filtered party noise—male and female giggles, bottles clinking together, happy county flunkies turning radio dials trying to find dance music but getting only jubilant accounts of the big news. Through Edward R. Murrow’s uncharacteristically cheerful drone I pictured Wild Wally Simpkins, flush with cash and armed for bear, looking for me. I was shivering when Al came back on the line and said, “He’s hot, Lee.”

  “Bench warrant issued?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then don’t waste your time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Small potatoes. Call Lieutenant Holland at University dicks and tell him Simpkins is half of the heist team he’s looking for. Tell him to put out an APB and add, ‘armed and extremely dangerous’ and ‘apprehend with all force deemed necessary.’”

  Al whistled again. “That bad?”

  I said, “Yeah,” and hung up. “Apprehend with all force deemed necessary” was the L.A.P.D. euphemism for “shoot on sight.” I felt my fear decelerate just a notch. Finding fugitive felons was my job. Slipping an extra piece into my back waistband, I set out to find the man who had vowed to kill me.

  After picking up standing mugs of Simpkins and a carbon of the robbery report from Georgie Caulkins, I drove toward the West Adams district. The day was hot and humid, and sidewalk mobs spilled into the street, passing victory bottles to horn-honking motorists. Traffic was bottlenecked at every stoplight, and paper debris floated down from office windows—a makeshift ticker-tape parade. The scene made me itchy, so I attached the roof light and hit my siren, weaving around stalled cars until downtown was a blur in my rearview mirror. When I slowed, I was all the way to Alvarado and the city I had sworn to protect looked normal again. Slowing to a crawl in the right-hand lane, I thought of Wallace Simpkins and knew the itch wouldn’t stop until the bastard was bought and paid for.

  We went back six years, to the fall of ’39, when I was a vice officer in University Division and a regular light-heavyweight attraction at the Hollywood-Legion Stadium. A black-white stickup gang had been clouting markets a
nd juke joints on West Adams, the white guy passing himself off as a member of Mickey Cohen’s mob, coercing the proprietor into opening up the safe for the monthly protection payment while the negro guy looked around innocently, then hit the cash registers. When the white guy got to the safe, he took all the money, then pistol-whipped the proprietor senseless. The heisters would then drive slowly north into the respectable Wilshire district, the white guy at the wheel, the negro guy huddled down in the backseat.

  I got involved in the investigation on a fluke.

  After the fifth job, the gang stopped cold. A stoolie of mine told me that Mickey Cohen found out that the white muscle was an ex-enforcer of his and had him snuffed. Rumor had it that the colored guy—a cowboy known only as Wild Wallace—was looking for a new partner and a new territory. I passed the information along to the dicks and thought nothing more of it. Then, a week later, it all hit the fan.

  As a reward for my tip, I got a choice moonlight assignment: bodyguarding a high-stakes poker game frequented by L.A.P.D. brass and navy bigwigs up from San Diego. The game was held in the back room at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah, the swankiest police-sanctioned whorehouse on the south side. All I had to do was look big, mean, and servile and be willing to share boxing anecdotes. It was a major step toward sergeant’s stripes and a transfer to the Detective Division.

  It went well—all smiles and backslaps and recountings of my split-decision loss to Jimmy Bivins—until a negro guy in a chauffeur’s outfit and an olive-skinned youth in a navy officer’s uniform walked in the door. I saw a gun bulge under the chauffeur’s left arm, and chandelier light fluttering over the navy man’s face revealed pale negro skin and processed hair.

  And I knew.

  I walked up to Wallace Simpkins, my right hand extended. When he grasped it, I sent a knee into his balls and a hard left hook at his neck. When he hit the floor, I pinned him there with a foot on his gun bulge, drew my own piece, and leveled it at his partner. “Bon voyage, admiral,” I said.

  The admiral was named William Boyle, an apprentice armed robber from a black bourgeois family fallen on hard times. He turned state’s evidence on Wild Wallace, drew a reduced three-to-five jolt at Chino as part of the deal, and was paroled to the war effort early in ’42. Simpkins was convicted of five counts of robbery one with aggravated assault, got five-to-life at Big Q, and voodoo-hexed Billy Boyle and me at his trial, vowing on the soul of Baron Samedi to kill both of us, chop us into stew meat, and feed it to his dog. I more than half believed his vow, and for the first few years he was away, every time I got an unexplainable ache or pain I thought of him in his cell, sticking pins into a blue-suited Lee Blanchard voodoo doll.

  I checked the robbery report lying on the seat beside me. The addresses of the four new black-white stickups covered 26th and Gramercy to La Brea and Adams. Hitting the racial demarcation line, I watched the topography change from negligent middleclass white to proud colored. East of St. Andrews, the houses were unkempt, with peeling paint and ratty front lawns. On the west the homes took on an air of elegance: small dwellings were encircled by stone fencing and well-tended greenery; the mansions that had earned West Adams the sobriquet High Darktown put Beverly Hills pads to shame—they were older, larger, and less architecturally pretentious, as if the owners knew that the only way to be rich and black was to downplay the performance with the quiet noblesse oblige of old white money.

  I knew High Darktown only from the scores of conflicting legends about it. When I worked University Division, it was never on my beat. It was the lowest per capita crime area in L.A. The University brass followed an implicit edict of letting rich black police rich black, as if they figured blue suits couldn’t speak the language there at all. And the High Darktown citizens did a good job. Burglars foolish enough to trek across giant front lawns and punch in Tiffany windows were dispatched by volleys from thousand-dollar skeet guns held by negro financiers with an aristocratic panache to rival that of anyone white and big-moneyed. High Darktown did a damn good job of being inviolate.

  But the legends were something else, and when I worked University, I wondered if they had been started and repeatedly embellished only because square-john white cops couldn’t take the fact that there were “niggers,” “shines,” “spooks,” and “jigs” who were capable of buying their low-rent lives outright. The stories ran from the relatively prosaic: negro bootleggers with mob connections taking their loot and buying liquor stores in Watts and wetback-staffed garment mills in San Pedro, to exotic: the same thugs flooding low darktowns with cut-rate heroin and pimping out their most beautiful high-yellow sweethearts to L.A.’s powers-that-be in order to circumvent licensing and real estate statutes enforcing racial exclusivity. There was only one common denominator to all the legends: it was agreed that although High Darktown money started out dirty, it was now squeaky clean and snow white.

  Pulling up in front of the liquor store on Gramercy, I quickly scanned the dick’s report on the robbery there, learning that the clerk was alone when it went down and saw both robbers up close before the white man pistol-whipped him unconscious. Wanting an eyeball witness to back up Lieutenant Holland’s APB, I entered the immaculate little shop and walked up to the counter.

  A negro man with his head swathed in bandages walked in from the back. Eyeing me top to bottom, he said, “Yes, officer?”

  I liked his brevity and reciprocated it. Holding up the mug shot of Wallace Simpkins, I said, “Is this one of the guys?”

  Flinching backward, he said, “Yes. Get him.”

  “Bought and paid for,” I said.

  An hour later I had three more eyeball confirmations and turned my mind to strategy. With the allpoints out on Simpkins, he’d probably get juked by the first blue suit who crossed his path, a thought only partly comforting. Artie Holland probably had stake-out teams stationed in the back rooms of other liquor stores in the area, and a prowl of Simpkins’s known haunts was a ridiculous play for a solo white man. Parking on an elm-lined street, I watched Japanese gardeners tend football field—sized lawns and started to sense that Wild Wallace’s affinity for High Darktown and white partners was the lever I needed. I set out to trawl for pale-skinned intruders like myself.

  South on La Brea to Jefferson, then up to Western and back over to Adams. Runs down 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue, 3rd, 4th, and 5th. The only white men I saw were other cops, mailmen, store owners, and poontang prowlers. A circuit of the bars on Washington yielded no white faces and no known criminal types I could shake down for information.

  Dusk found me hungry, angry, and still itchy, imagining Simpkins poking pins in a brand-new, plainclothes Blanchard doll. I stopped at a barbecue joint and wolfed down a beef sandwich, slaw, and fries. I was on my second cup of coffee when the mixed couple came in.

  The girl was a pretty high yellow—soft angularity in a pink summer dress that tried to downplay her curves, and failed. The man was squat and muscular, wearing a rumpled Hawaiian shirt and pressed khaki trousers that looked like army issue. From my table I heard them place their order: jumbo chicken dinners for six with extra gravy and biscuits. “Lots of big appetites,” the guy said to the counterman. When the line got him a deadpan, he goosed the girl with his knee. She moved away, clenching her fists and twisting her head as if trying to avoid an unwanted kiss. Catching her face full view, I saw loathing etched into every feature.

  They registered as trouble, and I walked out to my car in order to tail them when they left the restaurant. Five minutes later they appeared, the girl walking ahead, the man a few paces behind her, tracing hourglass figures in the air and flicking his tongue like a lizard. They got into a prewar Packard sedan parked in front of me, Lizard Man taking the wheel. When they accelerated, I counted to ten and pursued.

  The Packard was an easy surveillance. It had a long radio antenna topped with a foxtail, so I was able to remain several car lengths in back and use the tail as a sighting device. We moved out of High Darktown on Western, and within minutes man
sions and proudly tended homes were replaced by tenements and tarpaper shacks encircled by chicken wire. The farther south we drove the worse it got; when the Packard hung a left on 94th and headed east, past auto graveyards, storefront voodoo mosques, and hair-straightening parlors, it felt like entering White Man’s Hell.

  At 94th and Normandie, the Packard pulled to the curb and parked; I continued on to the corner. From my rearview I watched Lizard Man and the girl cross the street and enter the only decent-looking house on the block, a whitewashed adobe job shaped like a miniature Alamo. Parking myself, I grabbed a flashlight from under the seat and walked over.

  Right away I could tell the scene was way off. The block was nothing but welfare cribs, vacant lots, and gutted jalopies, but six beautiful ’40–’41 vintage cars were stationed at curbside. Hunkering down, I flashed my light at their license plates, memorized the numbers, and ran back to my unmarked cruiser. Whispering hoarsely into the two-way, I gave R&I the figures and settled back to await the readout.

  I got the kickback ten minutes later, and the scene went from way off to way, way off.

  Cupping the radio mike to my ear and clamping my spare hand over it to hold the noise down, I took in the clerk’s spiel. The Packard was registered to Leotis McCarver, male negro, age 41, of 1348 West 94th Street, L.A.—which had to be the cut-rate Alamo. His occupation was on file as union officer in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The other vehicles were registered to negro and white thugs with strong-arm convictions dating back to 1922. When the clerk read off the last name—Ralph “Big Tuna” De Santis, a known Mickey Cohen trigger—I decided to give the Alamo a thorough crawling.

  Armed with my flashlight and two pieces, I cut diagonally across vacant lots toward my target’s backyard. In the far distance I could see fireworks lighting up the sky, but down here no one seemed to be celebrating—their war of just plain living was still dragging on. When I got to the Alamo’s yard wall, I took it at a run and kneed and elbowed my way over the top, coming down onto soft grass.