He spoke Spanish. The microphone cut in and out. Dudley quick-translated and still lost bursts of text. The shrieking crowd further blitzed comprehension. Nobody heard a thing the man said.
Dudley gave up sound for sight. Salvy gave the crowd Weimar Berlin, reborn. His gestures urged them to listen to their one united voice and imagine what it was saying. He swayed on rickety orange crates and held a dead microphone. He spoke the truth in the crowd’s one voice.
It extended. It remained vitalist. Salvy swayed and made the crowd speak in his voice. Dudley supplied his own words. He began with the Book of Revelation and worked backward. Salvy stopped and he stopped with this:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water — the fire next time.
43
(Los Angeles, 9:00 P.M., 1/29/42)
They stood nine hours in. Thad Brown ran the Crash Squad. Nobody sleeps till I give the word.
Newsmen swarmed outside. Brown nixed them inside. It’s the PD’s first double cop snuff. That’s the urgent gist and newsprint hook here.
Arc lights glared outside. Cops and lab folk swarmed inside. Doc Layman left to testify in court. He was Crash Squad — adjunct. Hideo Ashida ran the lab slot. Joan backed him up.
Newton blues roped off 46th Street. They cordoned Central to the west and Hooper to the east. Newsmen hopped backyard fences and got though regardless. Radio scribes spieled right there in the yard. Said yard was trampled past all forensic hope.
Joan stepped outside. She gobbled aspirin and dosed a solvent-fume headache. Breuning and Carlisle ducked past her. They ran in and out. Ashida and Brown stuck inside. Lee Blanchard was canvassing. Elmer Jackson booked off somewhere. He’d redubbed the “death crib” the “klubhaus.” The news fools lapped it up.
Joan lit a cigarette. Arc light glare torqued her headache. She caught newshound jabber. Dumb comments overlapped.
It’s a shine caper. Coons off the jazz strip. You’ve got a skirt and a Jap on the job. The Dudster and Whiskey Bill should have a piece of this. They scored good on them Watanabe snuffs.
“The Skirt and the Jap.” The news ghouls loved it. She ran her own Skirt-and-Jap riff. The punch line reverb’d.
Half the gold’s mine. Don’t trifle with me. I’ll ruin you with Dudley Smith if you do.
Ashida trembled then. She acted then. She typed a note to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s. She forged Ray Pinker’s signature and demanded this:
“Photostat the gold-heist file. Do it now. Priority expedite.”
Then, this callout. Then, all this grief.
They’d worked nine straight hours. She dusted touch-and-grab surfaces and got all smudges and smears. She elimination-printed all the blues and detectives. Ashida photographed the klubhaus interior. The bodies remained on the couch. The Mex remained un-ID’d.
She combed a two-block radius. She jotted vehicle descriptions and plate numbers. She brushed up against jazz-club habitués. Negroes and Mexicans with big conks and hairnets. They made faces and coochie-coo’d her. She blew that Indian’s foot off for less.
Joan tossed her cigarette. She was hungry. Thad Brown just called Kwan’s. He ordered eight pupu platters and four fifths of hooch.
Jumped-up jazz echoed. The Club Zombie and Club Alabam stood forty yards off. A big sedan bucked the west cordon and bumped up on the curb. The driver leaned on the horn. Jack Horrall got out.
The newshounds cheered. A radio man held his mike up to catch the kerfuffle. Call-Me-Jack hopped the gate. He tried to look somber and tanked. He was a huckster. He lived for this.
He held up his hands. He went Thank you, thank you. He almost but not quite grinned.
The newsmen simmered down. Call-Me-Jack shook fifty hands in ten seconds. Joan pushed in close. Jack saw her and went woo-woo!
He pushed two flat palms down and got instant ssshhh. He looked up at God and down at his feet. He tried to look humble and tanked. He looked straight at the newsmen and launched his spiel.
“It’s a sad occasion any way you slice it, but we don’t know if it’s homicide or not. We haven’t ID’d the Mex yet, but our two late policemen are Officer Wendell D. Rice, age thirty-four, and Officer George B. Kapek, age thirty-six. Officer Rice came on in ’28, and Officer Kapek came on in ’30. They are survived by their lovely wives, Mrs. Vera Rice and Mrs. Dorothea Kapek. They’ve got a whole brood of kids between them, but I’m not sure how many. Our prayers go out to the bereaved families of these two fine young policemen, and to the Mexican’s family, if he had one.”
The newsmen clap-clapped. Call-Me-Jack relaunched his spiel.
“Here’s a tidbit you boys will enjoy. We’re reviving the all-league team that solved the baffling Watanabe murders last month, with a few exceptions and one addition. Sergeant Dudley Smith’s battling the Fifth Column in Mexico now, but he’s sure as you know what here in spirit. We’ve got Captain Bill Parker to ride herd, Lieutenant Thad Brown to run the show, Sergeants Mike Breuning and Dick Carlisle from Homicide, and two close pals of the dead men — Officer Lee Blanchard and Sergeant Elmer Jackson — from the Alien Squad. Big Lee was once a ranked heavyweight contender, so you reporters better be nice to this white man’s PD.”
Haw-haws rose and fell. Call-Me-Jack did the flat-palms bit.
“Last but not least, we’ve got Sergeant Turner Meeks, detached from Robbery. All you Western-movie fans know Buzz. He’s played in a lot of those oaters they shoot out in the Valley. He never gets the girl, but he always gets the horse. Maybe one day he’ll get lucky.”
The Meeks jive drew laughs. It cued Meeks his own self. He jumped out of the Chief’s sedan and jumped through the gate. That drew more laughs. He saw Joan and jumped straight her way.
He said, “Will you go to Acapulco with me?”
Joan looked down at him. She patted his head. She said, “No, you’re too short.”
That drew the biiiiiig laughs. Meeks doubled over. Newsmen pulled their notebooks and wrote up the shtick.
44
(Los Angeles, 10:30 P.M., 1/29/42)
Dr. Nort shooed the cops out. They hit the yard and mingled with the press. Sid Hudgens made a liquor-store run and juiced the whole gang.
Breuning and Carlisle dished out stale rumaki. Thad Brown sloshed bourbon in coffee cups. Buzz Meeks snoozed on the grass. Lee Blanchard was off canvassing. Elmer Jackson plain vanished.
Ashida walked back inside and cased the dead men. He’d photographed them at 1:00 p.m. and reshot them at 8:00. They were rigor-locked and lightly livid the first time. They were full stiff now. Blood expanded their ankle and foot tissues. That meant they died sitting down.
Dr. Nort wheeled up an arc light. He strapped a surgeon’s lamp around his forehead.
“We’re not here to strictly determine cause of death, unless something jumps up and bites us. I’ll do the formal autopsies at the morgue. This is a triple the likes of which I’ve never seen. I’d like to examine them within the context of this equally unique place we have here.”
Joan said, “I haven’t even begun the inventory.”
Ashida said, “You have three men, near-identically posed. That suggests that the killer or killers rearranged their bodies postmortem.”
Dr. Nort shook his head. “Yes, to an indeterminate degree. But the first thing that comes to mind for me is that they all appear to have died while struggling for breath, which suggests three men, insensate from the ingestion of narcotics, who died of toxic exsanguination within short intervals of one another.”