Davis Evans was another opportunist, out for plain loot, out to shut down Norman, Oklahoma, fourteen siblings, family inbreeding, the proximity to oil money you could breathe but never quite touch. He took what he could and reveled in it, and he made up for being on the take by exercising the best set of cop faces I had ever seen — Mr. Courtly to those who deserved it, Mr. Grief to the bad ones, Mr. Civil to whoever was left over. That a man could be so self-seeking and lacking in mean-spiritedness astonished me, and I deferred to him on the job — senior man aside — because I knew my own selfishness ran twice as deep as his did. And I realized that the hard-nosed buffoon probably would retire soon, leaving me to break in a replacement cut out of my own cloth: young, edgy, eager for the glory the assignment offered. And that made me sad.
Warrants was plainclothes LAPD under the aegis of the Criminal Division, District Attorney’s Office. Two detectives to every Superior Court judiciary. We went after the bad guys the felony D.A.s were drooling to prosecute. If things were slow, there was money to be made serving summonses for the downtown shysters, and — Davis Evans’s raison d’etre — repossessions.
Davis lived, ate, drank, yearned, and breathed for beautiful cars. His Warrants cubicle was wallpapered with pictures of Duesenbergs and Pierce Arrows and Cords, Caddys, and Packards, and sleek foreign jobs. Since he stole all his clothes from arrestees, shook down hookers for free poon, ate on the cuff, and lived in the spare room of a county boarding house for recently paroled convicts, he had plenty of money to spend on them. The storage garage he rented held a ’39 Packard cabriolet, a Mercedes rumored to have once been driven by Hitler, a purple Lincoln convertible that Davis called his “Jig Rig,” and a sapphire blue Model T dubbed the “Li’l Shitpeeler.”
He acquired all of them through repos. There was a twenty-four-hour-a-day phone number issuing recorded information on delinquent cars, and every greedy L.A. cop had it memorized. All you had to do was dial Ax-minster 6-400 to get the dope on wanteds — who they belonged to, what dealer or credit agency was paying what amount of money for their return. Davis only moved on cars that he craved, and only on delinquent owners with outstanding warrants. It was a parlay that frequently occurred, on-the-lam punks not being known for sending in their monthly auto payments. Once the warrantee was arrested, Davis would locate the car, let it molder in his garage, do some minor defacing of it, then report to the dealer that the mother dog was in bad, bad shape. The dealer would believe him; being a soft-hearted misanthrope, Davis would offer a decent amount to keep the vehicle. The dealer would agree, thinking he’d taken advantage of a dust-bowl refugee with a leaky seabag — and Sergeant Davis Evans would have himself another true love.
We were cruising through truck-farm country now — flat acres of furrowed land that looked dry, used up, like this was brutal August, not mild October. All the farmers were the sunburned poor-white prototype that Davis narrowly escaped being one of. Off to our right, nestled at the edge of a scrub valley, was Wayside Honor Rancho — a new county facility to house misdemeanor offenders. It had housed Japs during the war, Okie farmers their keepers on the temporary War Relocation Board payroll. But now the war was over — and it was back to dry dirt.
I nudged Davis and pointed to a group of farmers uprooting cabbages. “There but for the grace of God go you, partner.”
Davis saluted the assembly, then flipped them his middle finger. “You can lead a dog to gravy, but you can’t make him a tapper.”
It was shortly past noon when we pulled up in front of the Ventura courthouse-jail. For a hick-town county seat, the joint had aspirations to class, all of them low — Greek pillars, a Tudor roof, and Spanish-style canvas awnings came togther to produce a building that gave you the feeling of d.t.’s without the benefit of booze. Davis groaned as we pushed open a door etched with Egyptian hieroglyphics; I said, “Be grateful it goes with your clothes.”
The interior was divided into two wings, and bars at the far end of the left corridor showed us where to go. There was a deputy seated just outside the enclosure, a fat youth done up in khaki that enclosed his blubbery body like a sausage casing. Looking up from his comic book, he said, “Ah... yessirs?”
Davis whipped out our three warrants and held them up for the kid to scrutinize. “LAPD, son. We’ve got an extradition warrant for Harwell Treadwell, plus two others on old beefs of his. You wanna go get him for us?”
The kid thumbed through the papers, probably looking for the pictures. When he couldn’t figure the words out, he unlocked the barred door and led us down a long hallway inset with cells on both sides. Nearing the end, I heard muffled obscenities and thudding sounds. The deputy announced our presence by clearing his throat and saying, “Ah... Sheriff? I got two men here need to talk to you.”
I stepped in front of the open cell door and looked in. A tall, beefy man in a ribbon-festooned version of the deputy’s getup was standing next to an even taller guy dressed like the archetypal G-man: gray suit, gray tie, gray hair, gray expression on his face. Handcuffed to a chair was our warrantee — white-trash defiance with a duck’s-ass haircut, purple and puke green bruises covering his face, brass-knuck marks dotting his bare torso.
The kid took off before the two hardcases could reprimand him for disturbing their third degree; Davis flashed our papers. The sheriff looked at them silently, and the fed buttoned his jacket over the knuckle dusters sticking out of his waistband. “I’m Special Agent Stensland.” he said. “Ventura Office, FBI. What—”
Harwell Treadwell laughed and spat blood on the floor. I said, “We’re taking him back to L.A. Did he cough up any dope on the other two?”
The sheriff shoved the papers at Davis. “He might have, you didn’t interrupt our interrogation.”
“You’ve had him for three days,” I said. “He should have blabbed by now.”
Treadwell spat blood on the sheriffs spit-shined cowboy boots; when the man balled his fists to retaliate, Davis stationed himself between the two. “He’s my prisoner now. Signed, sealed, and deeeelivered.”
Stensland said, “This won’t wash. Treadwell’s a federal prisoner.”
I shook my head. “He’s got city warrants predating the extradition one, and the extradition warrant is countersigned by a federal judge. He’s ours.”
Stensland bored in on me with beady gray eyes. I stood there, deadpan, and he tried a smile and cop-to-cop empathy. “Listen, Officer—”
“It’s Sergeant.”
“All right, Sergeant, listen: the Viertel girl and the other two men are still at large, and this filth was responsible for one of my agents losing six fingers. Don’t you want to go back to Los Angeles with a confession? Don’t you want his filthy brothers captured? Don’t you want to let us try it our way just a little bit longer?”
Davis said, “Your way don’t work, so we try mine,” walked over, and unlocked Harwell Treadwell’s cuffs. Standing up, the Okie snatch artist almost collapsed, and bile crept from the corners of his mouth. Davis eased him out to the catwalk, and I said to Stensland, “That warrant has an evidence clause. I need everything you found at the crime scene, including the ransom money you recovered.”
The fed flinched, then shook his head. “Not until Monday. It’s locked up in a safe at the courthouse, and the courthouse is closed until then.”
“How much was there?”
“Twenty-one hundred something.”