Dudley walked wall-to-wall. The shelves held small gold statuettes. Constanza’s wolf pack glared at him. Male wolves snarled. Mother wolves suckled their cubs. It refracted her brother’s menagerie. It refracted his own wolf worship. He hefted a wolf cub. It was solid gold. Gold plagued him and followed him, everywhere.
He studied the photographs. Constanza feeds jackals large slabs of meat. She’s wearing a bush jacket and safari hat. There’s Constanza kissing a jaguar. She’s wearing a summer dress tossed above her knees.
Constanza feeds wolves. She’s wearing lederhosen and a loden coat. Rhine maiden Constanza. Constanza, the Black Forest nymph.
The German motif extends. Constanza stands with pianist Wilhelm Kempff and conductor Karl Böhm. Wehrmacht officers huddle behind them. It’s a symphony bash. Constanza’s laughing and blowing smoke in the air.
More photographs. Constanza with Pierre Fournier and Alfred Cortot. Both men welcomed the Boche to France. Constanza wears a slit-legged gown. That’s Paris by night behind her.
We return to Deutschland now. Consider this photograph. Constanza warmly greets Adolf Hitler. Musik Maestra and furious Führer. Both evince delight.
Dudley stood by the desk. He noted the swastika paperweight. It was solid gold. He noted the blue leather diary.
It was locked. The clasp and keyhole were solid gold. The front cover was gold swastika — embossed.
Women as diarists. Intimate thoughts and deeds recorded. He recalled the late Joan Conville. She kept a diary.
He touched Constanza’s diary. He kissed the gold swastika and caught Constanza’s scent.
80
Kay Lake’s Diary
(Los Angeles, 9:00 A.M., 3/2/42)
“The rain, the gold, the fire. It’s all one story, you see.”
I knew Joan’s diary now. I had studied it to the point of memorization. She repeated that annunciatory phrase many times. She said the words to Dudley Smith on the first occasion. They had just made love, and Joan had settled in to tell her most complex and harrowing tale. She succumbed to evil in that moment. She recounted her rogue investigation with Hideo Ashida; she stitched the evidential links, from the discovery of Karl Tullock’s body up to a series of forensic crossovers to the Rice-Kapek murders. Her summary circumcribes a state of shock and awe, and depicts her immersion in the police world that has consumed me since 1939 and my collision with Lee Blanchard. Joan’s diary spotlights her analytic skills and her surpassing ability to plumb evidence and assess motive. Self-analysis eludes her. She cannot frame and assume a moral stance as to Dudley Smith. Her capitulation is wholly erotic and steeped in her overweening pride and ambition. Dudley Smith’s hold over women derives from the hold that women have over him. He projects a casual mastery over any and all perils. Joan found that irresistible. She was a woman determined to conquer a man’s world. She wanted Dudley Smith’s mastery more than she wanted the gold and a clean Rice-Kapek solve. Her efforts to countermand Dudley’s hold by the means of her concurrent affair with Bill Parker proved fruitless. She misjudged the two men as antagonists and failed to see them as complicitous and cravenly needy in all their strategic designs. I love Bill Parker unto the death and hate Dudley Smith just as passionately. I must take Joan’s account of her last six weeks and deploy it to a broad moral advantage. I must break the usurious bond between Bill Parker and Dudley Smith and see to Dudley’s most severe censure.
I’m writing these words on the upper-floor terrace of my house above the Sunset Strip. Yet more rain seems to be brewing. This house symbolizes my own capitulation to the police world that so consumed Joan. Lee Blanchard bought this house with bribe money. He tanked his boxing career because he knew he’d always be good and never great. Lee gave a wayward South Dakota girl a home; it’s a place where I muse, ponder, study, and cultivate opportunity with a ruthless will very much like Joan’s. I now possess the sum of Joan’s criminal knowledge. I have a grasp of Dudley’s racketeering plans. I know that Two-Gun Davis killed the Watanabe family and that he confessed to Bill Parker and Dudley Smith. Bill cut deals and saw to the dismissal of Werewolf Shudo’s death decree. I know all about Joan’s mission to avenge her father’s death and her suspicions of one Mitchell Kupp. I know that Dudley promised to look into him. I read yesterday’s Sunday Herald and spotted a page-eight piece. Mitch Kupp’s decomposed body was found at his house in San Bernardino. He had been shot dead at point-blank range. I sense a Dudley-and-Joan-at-their-most-crazed symbiosis here.
Hideo Ashida lives in Joan’s diary. He lives triangulated with Joan and Dudley, ever indebted to Dudley, ever corrupted, ever lustful and unfulfilled. Joan admired him, came to despise him, and developed a fond regard for him during the fevered merging of the gold quest and the klubhaus job. Hideo and Joan coveted the gold and coveted a clean murder-case solve just as furiously. Hideo’s desire to push through to a proper case solution jumped out at me. I had initially planned to meet Hideo and Elmer Jackson together. I put out feelers toward that end as soon as I’d read the diary. I reconsidered the approach almost immediately.
Joan’s diary was evidence. I trusted Elmer and did not trust Hideo. I wanted to present the evidence of Joan’s diary to them individually and gauge their individual reactions. I met them at Dave’s Blue Room yesterday. I reported the contents of Joan’s diary — but withheld a certain piece of information from both men.
Elmer evinced shocked outrage. He had brushed up against the events that Joan had described since New Year’s. His brother died in the Griffith Park fire and was surely involved with Karl Tullock and the summer ’33 robbery spree. Elmer had been cuckolded. His friends Hideo and Joan told him nothing. They ran their rogue investigation and brought in Dudley Smith. Elmer was enraged. Two purported friends had betrayed him. Elmer feared and hated Dudley Smith. Dudley had facilitated Joan Conville’s and Hideo Ashida’s lies and omissions. Elmer’s hatred now burned that much more fearfully and recklessly bright. Sweet Elmer, combustible Elmer. Now dangerously close with Buzz Meeks — who hated Dudley and did not fear him at all.
Elmer guzzled gin fizzes and chain-smoked cigars. I watched him flail at all of it as he fought back tears. I had omitted that key diary thread. It was a soundly reasoned omission.
Hideo, Joan, and Dudley had formed a pact to get the gold. I withheld that fact from Elmer. I withheld my perception that they were every bit as gold-crazed as Karl Tullock and Wayne Frank Jackson. I withheld this fact because I had to withhold it from Hideo Ashida. Elmer was volatile. He might go for Hideo’s throat — with Hideo’s gold greed as the spark that lit his fuse.
My dear friend Elmer. Pie-eyed from six gin fizzes. A silent moment passed between us. Telepathic sparks flew. We had engaged a deadly and foolhardy agenda. We will take down Dudley Smith.
Elmer weaved out of Dave’s Blue Room; Hideo Ashida timorously walked in. He wore his Army uniform, replete with sidearm, and caused jaded heads to turn. He sipped coffee in lieu of gin fizzes and heard me out impassively.
I presented Joan’s diary as evidence and cited my purely academic interest. I knew that Hideo underestimated women and saw me as an idiot child. Hideo held Joan in the same low regard, until she became his gold-quest accomplice. I excised Joan’s gold-quest narrative; I worked around it in the same manner as I had with Elmer. I further omitted Joan’s withering critique of Ashida’s homosexuality and fawning allegiance to Dudley Smith. I wanted to stun Hideo with what I knew and sustain his idiot-child assessment. This idiot child was now armed with damning facts but possessed no formal agenda. Hideo sat through my recitation, implacably. His eyes flickered when I told him that Jim Davis killed the four Watanabes. It was his only notable reaction.