Los Angeles Noir 2

by Denise Hamilton

  The back of the house was dark and quiet, so I risked flashing my light. Seeing a service porch fronted by a flimsy wooden door, I tiptoed over and tried it—and found it unlocked.

  I walked in flashlight first, my beam picking up dusty walls and floors, discarded lounge chairs, and a broom-closet door standing half open. Opening it all the way, I saw army officers’ uniforms on hangers, replete with campaign ribbons and embroidered insignias.

  Shouted voices jerked my attention toward the house proper. Straining my ears, I discerned both white-and negro-accented insults being hurled. There was a connecting door in front of me, with darkness beyond it. The shouting had to be issuing from a front room, so I nudged the door open a crack, then squatted down to listen as best I could.

  “… and I’m just tellin’ you we gots to find a place and get us off the streets,” a negro voice was yelling, “’cause even if we splits up, colored with colored and the whites with the whites, there is still gonna be roadblocks!”

  A babble rose in response, then a shrill whistle silenced it, and a white voice dominated: “We’ll be stopping the train way out in the country. Farmland. We’ll destroy the signaling gear, and if the passengers take off looking for help, the nearest farmhouse is ten fucking miles away—and those dogfaces are gonna be on foot.”

  A black voice tittered, “They gonna be mad, them soldiers.”

  Another black voice: “They gonna fought the whole fucking war for free.”

  Laughter, then a powerful negro baritone took over: “Enough clowning around, this is money we’re talking about and nothing else!”

  “’Cepting revenge, mister union big shot. Don’t you forget I got me other business on that train.”

  I knew that voice by heart—it had voodoo-cursed my soul in court. I was on my way out the back for reinforcements when my legs went out from under me and I fell head first into darkness.

  The darkness was soft and rippling, and I felt like I was swimming in a velvet ocean. Angry shouts reverberated far away, but I knew they were harmless; they were coming from another planet. Every so often I felt little stabs in my arms and saw pinpoints of light that made the voices louder, but then everything would go even softer, the velvet waves caressing me, smothering all my hurt.

  Until the velvet turned to ice and the friendly little stabs became wrenching thuds up and down my back. I tried to draw myself into a ball, but an angry voice from this planet wouldn’t let me. “Wake up, shitbird! We ain’t wastin’ no more pharmacy morph on you! Wake up! Wake up, goddamnit!”

  Dimly I remembered that I was a police officer and went for the .38 on my hip. My arms and hands wouldn’t move, and when I tried to lurch my whole body, I knew they were tied to my sides and that the thuds were kicks to my legs and rib cage. Trying to move away, I felt head-to-toe muscle cramps and opened my eyes. Walls and a ceiling came into hazy focus, and it all came back. I screamed something that was drowned out by laughter, and the Lizard Man’s face hovered only inches above mine. “Lee Blanchard,” he said, waving my badge and ID holder in front of my eyes. “You got sucker-punched again, shitbird. I saw Jimmy Bivins put you down at the Legion. Left hook outta nowhere, and you hit your knees, then worthless-shine muscle puts you down on your face. I got no respect for a man who gets sucker-punched by niggers.”

  At “niggers” I heard a gasp and twisted around to see the negro girl in the pink dress sitting in a chair a few feet away. Listening for background noises and hearing nothing, I knew the three of us were alone in the house. My eyes cleared a little more, and I saw that the velvet ocean was a plushly furnished living room. Feeling started to return to my limbs, sharp pain that cleared my fuzzy head. When I felt a grinding in my lower back, I winced; the extra .38 snub I had tucked into my waistband at City Hall was still there, slipped down into my skivvies. Reassured by it, I looked up at Lizard Face and said, “Robbed any liquor stores lately?”

  He laughed. “A few. Chump change compared to the big one this after—”

  The girl shrieked, “Don’t tell him nothin’!”

  Lizard Man flicked his tongue. “He’s dead meat, so who cares? It’s a train hijack, canvasback. Some army brass chartered the Super Chief, L.A. to Frisco. Poker games, hookers in the sleeping cars, smut movies in the lounge. Ain’t you heard? The war’s over, time to celebrate. We got hardware on board—shines playing porters, white guys in army suits. They all got scatter-guns, and sweetie pie’s boyfriend Voodoo, he’s got himself a tommy. They’re gonna take the train down tonight, around Salinas, when the brass is smashed to the gills, just achin’ to throw away all that good separation pay. Then Voodoo’s gonna come back here and perform some religious rites on you. He told me about it, said he’s got this mean old pit bull named Revenge. A friend kept him while he was in Quentin. The buddy was white, and he tormented the dog so he hates white men worse than poison. The dog only gets fed about twice a week, and you can just bet he’d love a nice big bowl of canvasback stew. Which is you, white boy. Voodoo’s gonna cut you up alive, turn you into dog food out of the can. Wanna take a bet on what he cuts off first?”

  “That’s not true! That’s not what—”

  “Shut up, Cora!”

  Twisting on my side to see the girl better, I played a wild hunch. “Are you Cora Downey?”

  Cora’s jaw dropped, but Lizard spoke first. “Smart boy. Billy Boyle’s ex, Voodoo’s current. These high-yellow coozes get around. You know canvasback here, don’t you, sweet? He sent both your boyfriends up, and if you’re real nice, maybe Voodoo’ll let you do some cutting on him.”

  Cora walked over and spat in my face. She hissed “Mother” and kicked me with a spiked toe. I tried to roll away, and she sent another kick at my back.

  Then my ace in the hole hit me right between the eyes, harder than any of the blows I had absorbed so far. Last night I had heard Wallace Simpkins’s voice through the door: “’Cepting revenge, mister union big shot. I got me other business on that train.” In my mind that “business” buzzed as snuffing Lieutenant Billy Boyle, and I was laying five-to-one that Cora wouldn’t like the idea.

  Lizard took Cora by the arm and led her to the couch, then squatted next to me. “You’re a sucker for a spitball,” he said.

  I smiled up at him. “Your mother bats cleanup at a two-dollar whorehouse.”

  He slapped my face. I spat blood at him and said, “And you’re ugly.”

  He slapped me again; when his arm followed through I saw the handle of an automatic sticking out of his right pants pocket. I made my voice drip with contempt: “You hit like a girl. Cora could take you easy.”

  His next shot was full force. I sneered through bloody lips and said, “You queer? Only nancy boys slap like that.”

  A one-two set hit me in the jaw and neck, and I knew it was now or never. Slurring my words like a punch-drunk pug, I said, “Let me up. Let me up and I’ll fight you man-to-man. Let me up.”

  Lizard took a penknife from his pocket and cut the rope that bound my arms to my sides. I tried to move my hands, but they were jelly. My battered legs had some feeling in them, so I rolled over and up onto my knees. Lizard had backed off into a chump’s idea of a boxing stance and was firing roundhouse lefts and rights at the living room air. Cora was sitting on the couch, wiping angry tears from her cheeks. Deep breathing and lolling my torso like a hophead, I stalled for time, waiting for feeling to return to my hands.

  “Get up, shitbird!”

  My fingers still wouldn’t move.

  “I said get up!”

  Still no movement.

  Lizard came forward on the balls of his feet, feinting and shadowboxing. My wrists started to buzz with blood, and I began to get unprofessionally angry, like I was a rookie heavy, not a thirty-one-year-old cop. Lizard hit me twice, left, right, open-handed.

  In a split second he became Jimmy Bivins, and I zoomed back to the ninth round at the Legion in ’37. Dropping my left shoulder, I sent out a right lead, then pulled it and left-hook
ed him to the breadbasket. Bivins gasped and bent forward; I stepped backward for swinging room. Then Bivins was Lizard going for his piece, and I snapped to where I really was.

  We drew at the same time. Lizard’s first shot went above my head, shattering a window behind me; mine, slowed by my awkward rear pull, slammed into the far wall. Recoil spun us both around, and before Lizard had time to aim I threw myself to the floor and rolled to the side like a carpet-eating dervish. Three shots cut the air where I had been standing a second before, and I extended my gun arm upward, braced my wrist, and emptied my snub-nose at Lizard’s chest. He was blasted backward, and through the shots’ echoes I heard Cora scream long and shrill.

  I stumbled over to Lizard. He was on his way out, bleeding from three holes, unable to work the trigger of the .45. He got up the juice to give me a feeble middle-finger farewell, and when the bird was in midair I stepped on his heart and pushed down, squeezing the rest of his life out in a big arterial burst. When he finished twitching, I turned my attention to Cora, who was standing by the couch, putting out another shriek.

  I stifled the noise by pinning her neck to the wall and hissing, “Questions and answers. Tell me what I want to know and you walk, fuck with me and I find dope in your purse and tell the DA you’ve been selling it to white nursery-school kids.” I let up on my grip. “First question. Where’s my car?”

  Cora rubbed her neck. I could feel the obscenities stacking up on her tongue, itching to be hurled. All her rage went into her eyes as she said, “Out back. The garage.”

  “Have Simpkins and the stiff been clouting the liquor stores in West Adams?”

  Cora stared at the floor and nodded, “Yes.” Looking up, her eyes were filled with the self-disgust of the freshly turned stoolie. I said, “McCarver the union guy thought up the train heist?”

  Another affirmative nod.

  Deciding not to mention Billy Boyle’s probable presence on the train, I said, “Who’s bankrolling? Buying the guns and uniforms?”

  “The liquor store money was for that, and there was this rich guy fronting money.”

  Now the big question. “When does the train leave Union Station?”

  Cora looked at her watch. “In half an hour.”

  I found a phone in the hallway and called the Central Division squadroom, telling Georgie Caulkins to send all his available plainclothes and uniformed officers to Union Station, that an army-chartered Super Chief about to leave for ’Frisco was going to be hit by a white-negro gang in army and porter outfits. Lowering my voice so Cora wouldn’t hear, I told him to detain a negro quartermaster lieutenant named William Boyle as a material witness, then hung up before he could say anything but “Jesus Christ.”

  Cora was smoking a cigarette when I reentered the living room. I picked my badge holder up off the floor and heard sirens approaching. “Come on,” I said. “You don’t want to get stuck here when the bulls show up.”

  Cora flipped her cigarette at the stiff, then kicked him one for good measure. We took off.

  I ran code three all the way downtown. Adrenaline smothered the dregs of the morph still in my system, and anger held down the lid on the aches all over my body. Cora sat as far away from me as she could without hanging out the window and never blinked at the siren noise. I started to like her and decided to doctor my arresting officer’s report to keep her out of the shithouse.

  Nearing Union Station, I said, “Want to sulk or want to survive?”

  Cora spat out the window and balled her fists.

  “Want to get skin searched by some dyke matrons over at city jail or you want to go home?”

  Cora’s fist balls tightened up; the knuckles were as white as my skin.

  “Want Voodoo to snuff Billy Boyle?”

  That got her attention. “What!”

  I looked sidelong at Cora’s face gone pale. “He’s on the train. You think about that when we get to the station and a lot of cops start asking you to snitch off your pals.”

  Pulling herself in from the window, Cora asked me the question that hoods have been asking cops since they patrolled on dinosaurs: “Why you do this shitty kind of work?”

  I ignored it and said, “Snitch. It’s in your best interest.”

  “That’s for me to decide. Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Why you do—”

  I interrupted, “You’ve got it all figured out, you tell me.”

  Cora started ticking off points on her fingers, leaning toward me so I could hear her over the siren. “One, you yourself figured your boxin’ days would be over when you was thirty, so you got yourself a nice civil service pension job; two, the bigwig cops loves to have ball players and fighters around to suck up to them—so’s you gets the first crack at the cushy ’signments. Three, you likes to hit people, and po -lice work be full of that; four, your ID card said Warrants Division, and I knows that warrants cops all serves process and does repos on the side, so I knows you pickin’ up lots of extra change. Five—”

  I held up my hands in mock surrender, feeling like I had just taken four hard jabs from Billy Conn and didn’t want to go for sloppy fifths. “Smart girl, but you forgot to mention that I work goon squad for Firestone Tire and get a kickback for fingering wetbacks to the Border Patrol.”

  Cora straightened the knot in my disreputable necktie. “Hey, baby, a gig’s a gig, you gots to take it where you finds it. I done things I ain’t particularly proud of, and I—”

  I shouted, “That’s not it!”

  Cora moved back to the window and smiled. “It certainly is, Mr. Policeman.”

  Angry now, angry at losing, I did what I always did when I smelled defeat: attack. “Shitcan it. Shitcan it now, before I forget I was starting to like you.”

  Cora gripped the dashboard with two white-knuckled hands and stared through the windshield. Union Station came into view, and pulling into the parking lot I saw a dozen black-and-whites and unmarked cruisers near the front entrance. Bullhorn-barked commands echoed unintelligibly as I killed my siren, and behind the police cars I glimpsed plainclothesmen aiming riot guns at the ground.

  I pinned my badge to my jacket front and said, “Out.” Cora stumbled from the car and stood rubber-kneed on the pavement. I got out, grabbed her arm, and shoved-pulled her all the way over to the pandemonium. As we approached, a harness bull leveled his .38 at us, then hesitated and said, “Sergeant Blanchard?”

  I said “Yeah” and handed Cora over to him, adding, “She’s a material witness, be nice to her.” The youth nodded, and I walked past two bumper-to-bumper black-and-whites into the most incredible shakedown scene I had ever witnessed:

  Negro men in porter uniforms and white men in army khakis were lying facedown on the pavement, their jackets and shirts pulled up to their shoulders, their trousers and undershorts pulled down to their knees. Uniformed cops were spread searching them while plainclothesmen held the muzzles of .12 gauge pumps to their heads. A pile of confiscated pistols and sawed-off shotguns lay a safe distance away. The men on the ground were all babbling their innocence or shouting epithets, and every cop trigger finger looked itchy.

  Voodoo Simpkins and Billy Boyle were not among the six suspects. I looked around for familiar cop faces and saw Georgie Caulkins by the station’s front entrance, standing over a sheetcovered stretcher. I ran up to him and said, “What have you got, Skipper?”

  Caulkins toed the sheet aside, revealing the remains of a fortyish negro man. “The shine’s Leotis McCarver,” Georgie said. “Upstanding colored citizen, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters big shot, a credit to his race. Put a .38 to his head and blew his brains out when the black-and-whites showed up.”

  Catching a twinkle in the old lieutenant’s eyes, I said, “Really?”

  Georgie smiled. “I can’t shit a shitter. McCarver came out waving a white handkerchief, and some punk kid rookie cancelled his ticket. Deserves a commendation, don’t you think?”

  I looked down at the stiff and
saw that the entry wound was right between the eyes. “Give him a sharpshooter’s medal and a desk job before he plugs some innocent civilian. What about Simpkins and Boyle?”

  “Gone,” Georgie said. “When we first got here, we didn’t know the real soldiers and porters from the heisters, so we threw a net over the whole place and shook everybody down. We held every legit shine lieutenant, which was two guys, then cut them loose when they weren’t your boy. Simpkins and Boyle probably got away in the shuffle. A car got stolen from the other end of the lot—citizen said she saw a nigger in a porter’s suit breaking the window. That was probably Simpkins. The license number’s on the air along with an all points. That shine is dead meat.”

  I thought of Simpkins invoking protective voodoo gods and said, “I’m going after him myself.”

  “You owe me a report on this thing!”

  “Later.”

  “Now!”

  I said, “Later, sir,” and ran back to Cora, Georgie’s “now” echoing behind me. When I got to where I had left her, she was gone. Looking around, I saw her a few yards away on her knees, handcuffed to the bumper of a black-and-white. A cluster of blue suits were hooting at her, and I got very angry.

  I walked over. A particularly callow-looking rookie was regaling the others with his account of Leotis McCarver’s demise. All four snapped to when they saw me coming. I grabbed the storyteller by his necktie and yanked him toward the back of the car. “Uncuff her,” I said.

  The rookie tried to pull away. I yanked at his tie until we were face-to-face and I could smell Sen-Sen on his breath. “And apologize.”

  The kid flushed, and I walked back to my unmarked cruiser. I heard muttering behind me, and then I felt a tap on my shoulder. Cora was there, smiling. “I owe you one,” she said.

  I pointed to the passenger seat. “Get in. I’m collecting.”

  The ride back to West Adams was fueled by equal parts of my nervous energy and Cora’s nonstop spiel on her loves and criminal escapades. I had seen it dozens of times before. A cop stands up for a prisoner against another cop, on general principles or because the other cop is a turd, and the prisoner takes it as a sign of affection and respect and proceeds to lay out a road map of his life, justifying every wrong turn because he wants to be the cop’s moral equal. Cora’s tale of her love for Billy Boyle back in his heister days, her slide into call-house service when he went to prison, and her lingering crush on Wallace Simpkins was predictable and mawkishly rendered. I got more and more embarrassed by her “you dig?” punctuations and taps on the arm, and if I didn’t need her as a High Darktown tour guide I would have kicked her out of the car and back to her old life. But then the monologue got interesting.