Reckless Girl forged a file-request slip. She was Sloppy Girl here. His forgeries surpassed hers. Her “Ray Pinker” sigs looked like tomb hieroglyphs.
Ashida skimmed the heist file. It detailed the mint train’s Santa Barbara stop. It featured Leander Frechette and Deputy Karl Tullock.
Negro youth Frechette. He’s six-eight and weighs 340. He’s mentally dim and inhumanely strong. The Santa Barbara cops posit this:
The gold-cage lock was removed. A look-alike lock was cosmetically affixed. Just enough gold was clouted. The low bar count ensured that the cache would not appear ransacked.
The bars were wheeled off, walked off, or tossed off the train. Waiting confederates grabbed them. The cops canned the toss-off theory. It entailed confederates in moving surveillance. Said confederates could not know this:
When the gold-cage walkway would stand unobserved. When the theft and toss-off would occur.
The cops canned the wheel-off theory. Somebody would have seen it. The walk-off theory remained. The bulk weight of the bars meant this:
The thief is exceptionally large and strong. He hides the bars on his person and obfuscates the load. He walks on and off the train. His confederates grab the gold.
It’s a stop-for-coal stop. The eight convicts escape precedingly. The overall atmosphere remains chaotically charged. It obscures the thief’s actions.
One train worker possesses just such strength and bulk. It’s Leander Frechette. Deputy Karl Tullock has at him.
Tullock badgers and beats on Frechette. Leander holds firm. I didn’t do it/I don’t know who did it/I don’t know nothing.
Frechette remains in stir. A Negro man named Martin Luther Mimms secures his release. Mimms is tight with L.A. Police high-ups. Frechette is released to his custody.
Ashida kicked it around. This seemed certain now:
The mass escape and train heist comprised one event. The two repair stops were caused by staged mechanical glitches. It all cohered behind Fritz Eckelkamp.
He escapes and remains at large. He was a career heist man. The other escaped cons are shot on sight. It feels like preengendered chaos.
Cut to the klubhaus job. Hector Obregon-Hodaka laid the haus gestalt out to Dudley. Hector knew Kyoho Hanamaka. Hanamaka’s gold bayonet: cast from the same ore as the bars on the train. This seems certain now:
Eckelkamp, the German Marxist. Hanamaka, the left-right horror connoisseur. The klubhaus as haunt of debauched politicos. There’s a stench here. It’s Fifth Column mischief couched in criminal greed.
Two mug shots were clipped to the file. Fritz Eckelkamp looked Teutonic fierce. Leander Frechette looked bewildered.
Ashida jumped files. He went gold heist to liquor-store jobs in one heartbeat. He saw the witness-composite sketch. He saw a list of look-alike vagrants. They were detained, un-ID’d, released for lack of proof.
The fourth name down: Jackson, Wayne Frank.
49
(Los Angeles, 10:00 A.M., 2/1/42)
The boys are back in town.
That bluegrass ditty nailed them. The KKKlan outkast and Okie shitkicker. Sergeants E. V. Jackson and T. R. Meeks their own selves.
With their own prowl sled. On this big case. Fuck struck with bitching intent.
Elmer drove. Buzz kibitzed. They got pigshit lucky. Hotdog Ashida notched a print make. The dead Mex now stood ID’d.
Boyle Heights was Baja north. Shack rows on flat streets and hillsides. Tacofied taverns and pachucoized pool halls. Lots of Catholic churches. Sinarquista decals on souped-up cars.
Elmer said, “Wabash. It’s around here somewhere.”
Buzz said, “She’ll take it rough. Her Archie treated her raw, but he gave her the big chorizo like nobody else.”
Elmer went nyet. “What did our first two widows give us? Nothing but relief that their hubbies were dead, and ‘Where’s my survivors’ pension check?’ ”
“Twenty says you’re wrong.”
“Twenty says I’m right.”
They shook on it. It sealed their Pax Redneckiana. They’d breached Jack Horrall’s orders already. They braced the Personnel Division boss and the two widows. It revealed this:
Call-Me-Jack pulled Rice’s and Kapek’s Personnel files. Them boys were just toooooooo dirty. Dirt leaks might besmirch the PD. Their bust lists were in those files. The Crash Squad needed a look-see. Maybe some crazed felon was fresh out of stir and hot for revenge.
The widows pissed on Rice and Kapek, postmortem. You want baleful bile? Gas on this:
Rice pimped his wife to cover his poker debts. Rice fathered Kapek’s three kids, and vice versa. The widows were lezbo lovers and turned dyke tricks out of Linda’s Little Log Cabin. Rice and Kapek filmed their antics and peddled the lez epics down in T.J.
The widows evicted their hubbies at least once a week. They had a hideout somewhere. The widows knew zilch per the klubhaus and hubbies’ KAs. They knew their hubbies veered far right. Rice and Kapek made them wear dirndl skirts and Nazi armbands. Their kids wore lederhosen and Tyrolean beanies to school. They frolicked at German-American Bund summer camp.
Elmer and Buzz eyeball-tossed their two domiciles. Rice possessed some farkakte fly-ur-self/build-from-scratch model-airplane kit. The fucking thing consumed half his garage. It had rivet-attached wings. It had Luftwaffe insignia and a cockpit-mounted machine gun. The Widow Rice said he bought it from some right-wing geek in Minnesota.
Georgie Kapek possessed twenty-six incendiary bombs. The Widow Kapek called him a “Secret Firebug.” Georgie possessed two terp stills and thirty-four back issues of Goldlover Magazine.
Georgie’s swag gored Elmer’s gourd. He knew he’d seen similar shit somewhere. It hit him belated:
The late Don Matsura owned that selfsame shit. Terp stills and Goldlover Magazine.
Elmer and Buzz logged man-hours. They quizzed the Alien Squad guys per Kapek and Rice. Nobody coughed up good drift. They said Georgie and Wendell were bent. So what? We all are. We’re bent in the ways of this bent PD in this bent and fucked-up town.
That approach tanked. They braced the watch boss at Newton Station then. They pressed on complaints levied against the klubhaus. Nope — there were none. That approach tanked, likewise.
Buzz said, “That’s the address.”
Elmer pulled to the curb. Said address: a cinder-block and wood firetrap. Note the fat mamacita ensconced on the porch.
The boys piled out and drifted over. Mama-san sniffed bad news. She had good feelers. Her snout twitch-twitched.
“You’ve got him downtown, right? He topped out his parole, but you still got him for some dumb law he shouldn’t have broke.”
Buzz doffed his hat. “Archie’s dead, ma’am. It took a few days to identify him, but it’s him. He was killed, along with two policemen. It occurred in a little clubhouse down in the colored side of town.”
Mama shrugged. “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Adios, Arturo. With him you always knew the other shoe would drop.”
Elmer said, “How so, ma’am?”
Mama said, “Archie ran with lower companions. Water seeks its own level. He was a pendejo and a borracho. He snitched to the police and mainlined the white horse. You pay the piper, the piper calls the tune. You buy trouble, you get what you pay for.”