103
(Los Angeles and Baja, 3/12–3/25/42)
Fractures.
Fissures.
Absences.
Checkmates.
Stalemates.
Abandonments.
Banishments.
Rifts.
Claire left him. Young Joan left him. Beth left him. His Mexican family has cut him adrift. Juan Pimentel is dead. Hideo Ashida has been imprisoned. Salvy Abascal is off, preoccupied. He’s running their biz ventures sans Salvy’s aid and Greenshirt collaboration. He’s neglecting his Army duties and his triple-murder case. The gold quest lies dormant. Army doctors have diagnosed Hideo’s “advanced fugue state.”
Hideo masterminded the gold quest and their three-case inquiries. Mike Breuning and Dick Carlisle have been removed from the klubhaus job. A hostile faction runs that investigation now. Elmer Jackson and Buzz Meeks are running rogue. Elmer read Joan’s diary. The rogue redneck knows the gold heist and fire jobs intimately.
He misses Claire. He misses Young Joan. He misses Beth. His wife and daughters have booked passage to Ireland. He misses Hideo most poignantly.
Hideo killed Juan Pimentel. A lust motive glimmers there. A hidden closet was revealed at chez Hanamaka. It was packed with garish costumes. Captain Juan’s severed tongue was found on the floor. Responding Staties noted Hideo’s blood-smeared lips.
Hideo has withheld from him. He senses that. His hideous omissions feel paradoxically defined. Juan Pimentel’s death plays non sequitur. He interfered in some vexatious manner and caused Hideo to react. Hideo was doing microdot work at the SIS lab. Singed cardboard and misplaced equipment suggest it. The microdot work revealed something. Hideo is near catatonic and in no shape to tell him what.
He had requisitioned a full range of three-case paperwork. A range of newly discovered files was cached within it. He gave the paperwork to Hideo to study and analyze. He searched Hideo’s quarters in Ensenada and L.A. The paperwork has gone missing. Hideo remains his sole hope for a three-case solution and shot at the gold.
Missing paperwork. Three-case principals, missing in action.
Link Rockwell — in Navy custody. Díaz, Carbajal, Santarolo — in Fed custody. James Edgar Davis — exiled to Terry Lux’s retreat.
Count Joe Hayes missing. He called the Archbishop and requested a formal chat with Monsignor Joe. His Eminence brusquely refused. Count Orson Welles missing. He’s off carousing and moviemaking. He’s an unproven snitch, so far.
Impasses.
Stalemates.
Checkmates.
Credit Bill Parker’s strategic aplomb.
Jack Horrall has not returned his phone calls. Parker’s Fed maneuvers have put Jack squarely in his debt. Thad Brown has fallen under Parker’s pious spell. The two great rivals for postwar Chief of Police. Now allied against Dudley L. Smith.
He’s made moves to restore a counterbalance. He’s requisitioned a second set of three-case paperwork. He’s saving it for Hideo’s hopeful return to health.
Hideo haunts him. He pulled strings with U.S. Army courts and secured binding writs. Hideo will not stand trial for the murder of Juan Pimentel. He will not rot in Leavenworth or a Mexican prison. Hideo will be interned at a U.S. relocation center later this month.
Three-case paperwork will await him. The U.S. Army is building him his own crime lab. Hideo will waltz the day that fascist Japan surrenders.
Countermeasures.
Logical applications.
Counterbalancing tasks.
Kyoho Hanamaka haunts him. He’s the crux of all explication. He’s the secret sharer. The gold heist and fire precede his tour of fascist-Communist hot spots. His friendship with Meyer Gelb precedes. His German-Russian schooling sets the course of hellish events to come. The gold is hoarded and left to snowball in value. World war looms as inevitable. Hanamaka envisions a postwar brotherhood. The gold will finance the survival of totalitarian rogues in extremis. A conspiracy is born. Murderous pratfalls occur. Personal agendas surface. 1942 marks a chaotic nexus. He must exploit it.
Countermeasures.
He’s issued a second APB on Kyoho Hanamaka. He’s tapped police agencies, jails, hospitals. Plus relocation centers and travel hubs. He’s blanketed Mexico and the U.S. Kyoho Hanamaka — arrest and detain.
Countermeasures.
Makework.
Tasks to tether him.
He’s adrift. He’s not demoralized. Constanza tethers him. They thrive as one imagination. Constanza loves the Wolf and trusts in his powers. They envision the gold and lust for it as one shared dream. Brother Juan lusts for the gold — but lacks their imagination. Brother Juan attended the ’40 conference. He knows things he might not have revealed. Constanza was Herr Hanamaka’s lover. She rutted with the one man who knows the whole story. Her body consecrates their dream quest.
Constanza withholds from him. He’s yet to brace her. He needs to know the mail-drop secrets of box 1823. He falters with women, on occasion. It’s his Achilles’ heel.
Constanza’s passion exceeds Claire’s. Terry Lux told him that Claire is kicking morphine at his retreat. Kay Lake urged the treatment and visits Claire daily. The Wolf views Kay Lake suspiciously and considers her a deadly proposition. His own opinion vacillates and finally rests at disbelief. The Lake girl is grandiose and heedless to her core. Claire has always overestimated her and vilified her to a fault. Kay Lake and Claire De Haven now live in rapprochement. They are casualties of early-wartime L.A. Only the war could have spawned such a fatuous misalliance.
He found Claire’s morphine stash in their hotel suite. He injects the drug periodically. He drifts off on a cloud where no woman ever beats or betrays him.
104
Kay Lake’s Diary
(Los Angeles and Baja, 3/12–3/25/42)
We were fated, Bill and I. He knocked on my door last December 6; he’d concocted an injudicious plan to entrap Communists and recruited me on the day before Pearl Harbor. He instilled my bitter loathing of Dudley Smith and introduced me to Claire De Haven. I was sucker bait for the heady series of events that have followed. I was at loose ends, in the Joan Conville manner. Bill hopped from crush to crush and ensnared us both. He pointed Joan on her way to self-immolation and allowed me to glimpse a blithe evil that I cannot turn my back on. The late diarist has provided the current diarist with the means to rectify her botched knife assault. I shouldn’t have done it; I could not have taken a human life and lived with the consequences. And why kill when one can facilitate a self-immolation of the sort that consumed my dear friend?
Joan’s words indicted Dudley. I will draft a freshly revised indictment. It will take various epistolary forms. I will create scripts for the Catholic Bill and Claire to perform for their confessor, Joe Hayes. The scripts will contain innuendo and misinformation calculated to push Dudley to blunder. Dudley is blunder-prone now. Elmer told me that Salvy Abascal has monumentally betrayed him, and has hinted at possible deadly ramifications. Dudley collects protégés. Witness Mike Breuning, Dick Carlisle, and — most auspiciously — Hideo Ashida. I encountered Breuning at Lyman’s a week back. He was in his cups and mourning the loss of some essential Dudley Smith. He told me that Dudley’s women are leaving him, one by one. Dudley’s corps of able and compliant men must be made to follow. This is the basic design of my malicious levy of words.
Hideo’s current gambit is no words. I have visited him at the Army stockade and am convinced that he is feigning a catatonic state. He is doing this in order to circumvent confrontation and capitulation in all matters pertaining to Dudley Smith. Dudley Smith and Hideo Ashida love each other deeply. Dudley’s love is fraternal. It’s the love of a brutalized Irish boy who saw British soldiers murder his brother, leaving him alone to suffer the whims of a sodden and vicious mother. Dudley holds Hideo Ashida to be James Conroy Smith, reborn. Dudley worships brilliance and mastery and possesses the generous gift of acknowledging it in all manner of people. He sees Hideo as his fascist-utilitarian kin. Hideo’s love for Dudley is wholly lustful and at odds with his fulsome knowledge of Dudley’s evil.