Welles was late. Like Salvy was late in T.J. Salvy refused to chaperone the Japs and the wets. The Wolf teethed on it.
Dudley ordered a private room. The del Norte staff salaamed and obliged. Welles drew flocks of autograph hounds. This room would hold them off. Orson called and requested the audience himself. It was a snitch and snitch-runner confab. It mandated privacy.
Dudley drummed the table. He felt fluttery. The flight back induced jitters. Cocaine exacted a price. He missed Constanza more than he should.
Dudley Liam Smith. Such a schoolboy crush. How unsound of you.
The door swung open. Such élan. Orson Welles entered rooms. He walked to the table. He was six-three and porcine. He exuded bonhomie and snitch fear.
Dudley stood up. They shook hands. Fat Boy’s clasp was damp and weak. Dudley wiped his hand on the tablecloth. He made a blunt show of it.
They sat down. Dudley poured champagne. It was one-dollar swill. L’auteur, le gourmand. He’ll gag on it.
“It’s good to see you, Dudley.”
“You’re looking sleek, lad. Would you consider me brusque if I asked what brings you to Ensenada?”
Welles sipped champagne. He almost but not quite pulled a face.
“It’s quite the ad-lib proposition. Howard Hughes flew us down. Dolores del Rio’s sister needed a blind date.”
Dudley went Tu salud. “Allow me to chart your train of thought, lad. You have information for me, and you thought you’d kill two birds with one stone.”
Welles guffawed. Note the coward’s cringe within.
“That’s Dudley Smith for you. He cuts to the third act, and forswears the amenities.”
“On that note, lad. You’re not here to waste my time, and who am I to deny Miss del Rio’s comely sister your presence?”
Welles coughed. “Well, I’ve been making appearances for the OIACC, as you well know. I’ve been traveling with a small jazz combo, and I’ve put together a few incidental things I thought might interest you.”
Dudley sipped rotgut champagne. He pulled a face and gagged it down.
“I’ll set the scene, lad. You’re traveling throughout Latin America. The combo plays inoffensive music during the cocktail receptions that precede your dinner talks.”
Welles said, “Right you are. And one of the musicians was a froufrou kid I first met at an admittedly bent party at Otto Klemperer’s place in ’39. Otto was holed up in a sanitarium then, and—”
Dudley clamped his champagne flute. The stem snapped. Fat Boy missed it. Dudley dropped the shards on the floor.
“—and the kid told me he was there at the party, which chagrined me quite a bit. He went on to tell me a rather outrageous story about the America Firsters he met—”
Dudley cut in. “Describe the party, lad. Set the scene for me.”
“Well, it was what you might call a masked ball, and the theme ran decidedly right of center. People wore Nazi costumes, and I screened an admittedly risqué film that I’d shot. I wore a mask, but the fruit kid recognized my voice from my radio broadcasts, although I’m reasonably sure that no one else did.”
I was there. You wore a Red Guard costume. I saw parts of your film. It repulsed me.
“Please continue, lad. You’ve piqued my interest, quite adroitly.”
Welles smiled. Mere hints of praise induced simpers.
“Well, the kid told me that he’d seen some real-life Nazis, whom he’d seen in newsreels, there at the party. They were talking out on the porte cochere, and they’d removed their masks. It was about dawn, and there had already been quite a ruckus. Some comatose woman was carried away, on the Q.T., which was—”
The She was a He. Dead is not comatose. Do you know who you’re talk—
“Here’s where it gets intriguing, if a bit outlandish. The kid told me the real-life Nazis were discussing the ‘Führer’s ultimately futile war’ and some sort of ‘future exoneration scheme.’ One man said they should assassinate Hitler, or deliberately fail at it, but publicize the failure. Another man said their ‘Red Kameraden’ should do the same thing with Stalin. There was some talk of potential postwar escape routes to Latin America, specifically pro-fascist or pro-Communist countries.”
Dudley said, “Please continue. It’s like your War of the Worlds broadcast. You’ve got me on the edge of my seat.”
Welles beamed. “Well, the kid sounded sincere about all this, and I’ll admit to having a soft spot for good stories. This was one story I couldn’t quite shake, and I tossed out hints to a few left-wing and right-wing types I met at various functions. I got a lot of murky responses, and heard rumors that this so-called plot derived from Mexico.”
Dudley lit a cigarette. “I’m tipping off the edge of my seat. Please continue.”
Welles laughed. “All right. Here’s the conclusion, and we jump from the winter of ’39 up to the present day. The kid told me a man named Wallace Jamie was at the party. He saw him unmasked, and he just recently put together who the man actually is. He recognized Jamie from newspaper photographs, a few weeks ago. That’s because Jamie’s in Dutch on that big Federal probe. The kid also said he recognized two other men who’d been at the party. Their pictures were in the papers, because they’d been murdered. I’m talking about Wendell Rice and George Kapek. They didn’t actually attend the party. They wore chauffeur’s garb and stood outside, on the porte cochere.”
Autopsy pix. The dead cops. Gasping mouths. Ice-pick punctures. Single hand-span bruises.
“It’s a small world, eh? Then the kid tells me that he knows another fruit kid, who’s also a jazz musician, up in L.A. He didn’t know the other kid’s name, but he said that when those murders were all the rage in the papers, the other kid told him he’d been to jam sessions at the clubhouse where the bodies were found. He bragged that he and a so-called ‘Red-fasco woman’ killed Rice, Kapek, and a Mexican friend of theirs. I’m telling you all this because Claire told me you were involved in the police investigation.”
112
Kay Lake’s Diary
(Los Angeles, 9:00 A.M., 3/30/42)
Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz. “Clean Gene” to his supporters. “Last Seen Gene” to his detractors. Frequently glimpsed at the Saints and Sinners Drag Ball.
We met the Sheriff at Kwan’s Chinese Pagoda; Uncle Ace set a table for four in the Chiang Kai-shek Conference Room. Hop Sing goons peddled trinkets out of the room, twenty-four hours daily. REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR!!! signs and I AM NOT A JAP!!! T-shirts were current hot sellers. Ace also sold Jap shrunken heads. They were purportedly harvested by Chinese death squads, in retaliation for the Rape of Nanking. Elmer gave me the true lowdown. Chinese kids at Nightingale Junior High were the culprits. They robbed recently planted graves in Japanese graveyards. Dr. Lin Chung performed the decapitations and supervised the shrinking process.
Thus, breakfast with Sheriff Gene. Bloody Marys, hangtown fry, and Emperor Tso’s flapjacks. Elmer, Bill, and I sat across from the Sheriff; he was three morning cocktails in and emitted a glow. His eyes clicked: Bill to Elmer to me. He already knew Bill and knew Elmer through Brenda — but what’s this young cooze doing here?
Bill kicked things off. He’d sent the note requesting the sit-down and had braced Biscailuz in advance. Brusque Bilclass="underline" the meeting pertains to Bev’s Switchboard.
“We know you’ve got points in Bev’s, Sheriff. We’d be going the search-warrant route if that weren’t the case.”
Biscailuz said, “I can read tea leaves. You’re talking about a raid.”