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 Day-watch Robbery boss down the halclass="underline" “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 and 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 back seat.
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.