L.A. Confidential (48 page)

  1948 primer-gray Merc coupe, purchased April 10, 1953. Register: Margaret Louise March, W.F., DOB 7/23/18, brown and brown, 5 '9", 215 lbs. Register's address: 1804 East Oxford, Los Angeles. Phone number: NOrmandie 32758.

  Warm to scalding--Fat Dot Rothstein's specs. Oxford ran north-south--not east-west. The call to Dot from the Noshery-- DU-32758--the dumb dyke tacked her own number onto a different exchange.

  And bought herself some purple paint.

  Bud whooped, punched the air, kicked boxes. Two cases made in one day--if anyone believed him. All dressed up and no one to kill. Circumstantial Dudley evidence--no hard proof. Dudley too well placed to fall, nobody who cared like he did.

  Except Exley.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  A stakeout on the house he grew up in. He couldn't go in and question his father; he couldn't ask for his help. He couldn't tell the man he confided secrets to a woman--and gave a brutal enemy the means to patricide. He brought the Atherton file with him--there was nothing in it he didn't already know, the man who made the smut and killed Sid Hudgens was intrinsic to the Atherton murders, maybe the killer himself--truths Preston Exley would dispute out of pride. He couldn't go in; he couldn't stop thinking. He counted memories instead.

  His father bought the house for his mother; it was really just a sop to his pride--the Exleys flee the middle class grandly. They never had Christmas lights on the lawn--Preston Exley said it was lowlife. Thomas fell off balconies--and had the style not to cry. His father threw him a "back from the war" party--only the mayor, the City Council and LAPD men who could further his career were invited.

  Art De Spain walked to his car, looking frail, one arm bandaged. Ed watched him drive off, his father's man, his Dutch uncle. Memory: Art said he wasn't cut out to be a detective.

  The house loomed big and cold. Ed drove back to the hospital.

o        o          o

  Trash was up, giving Fisk a statement. Ed watched from the doorway.

  ". . . and I was playing off Exley's script. I don't remember exactly what I said, but Patchett pulled out a gun and shot me. That shit piece Exley gave me jammed, and Patchett slammed me with a hypo. Then I heard shots and 'No, Abe, no, Lee, no.' And now you know as much as I do."

  From the hall, loud: "Abe Teitlebaum, Johnny Stompanato and Lee Vachss. They did the Nite Owl. Throw in Deuce Perkins as part of the gang and get ready to shit when I tell you who else I got."

  Ed smelled his sweat, his breath. White pushed him inside-- firm, not too rough. "Put our stuff aside for a minute. Did you hear what I said?"

  The names registered: gang muscle, a not-bad line to HEROIN. 'White looked insane--disheveled, a zealot. Fisk said, "Sir, do you want me to . .

  Ed moved his shoulders--White dropped his hands right on cue. "Two minutes, _Captain_."

  Scared--_be a captain_. "Duane, go get yourself some coffee. White, get my interest before I ream you for the Chinamen."

  Fisk walked out. Ed said, "Jack, you stay. White, you keep my interest."

  White closed the door. Disheveled: soiled clothes, inksmudged hands. "Good I heard the radio on you, Trashcan. I didn't know you were here, I mighta tried to do it all myself."

  Vincennes, on the bed looking queasy. "Do _what?_ Abe, Lee. You make Teitlebaum and Vachss for Patchett, spell it out."

  Ed: "You look Crim 101, White. Make like you're writing an occurrence chronology."

  White smiled--pure kamikaze. "I been tracking a string of hooker killings for years. It started with this girl Kathy Janeway. She got snuffed back in '53, right around the Nite Owl. She was Duke Cathcart's girlfriend."

  Ed nodded. "I know that story. I.A. ran a personal on you when you passed the sergeant's exam."

  "Oh, yeah? What you don't know is that a few years ago my case broke. I thought my killer was Spade Cooley--his band was in all the hooker snuff cities on the DODs. I was wrong. Cooley ratted off the real killer--Burt Arthur Perkins."

  Vincennes spoke up. "I buy Deuce as a woman killer. He's wrong to the core."

  White said, "You should know, 'cause Cooley said he was pals with Johnny Stompanato, and back around '52 you told me you rousted him hanging out with Johnny Stomp, Kikey T. and Lee Vachss. Cooley told me Johnny and Deuce were tight, so I went looking for Johnny."

  Ed said, "All right, so you went to Stompanato."

  White lit a cigarette. "Nix. Now I tell you that Dudley Smith has been using me for strongarm jobs on the Mobster Squad going back years. You know how he talks? 'Containment,' that's one of his favorite words. Contain crime, contain this, contain that. He's been beating around the bush about offering me outside work, and the other night he said I could be useful keeping the 'obstreperous Italian' that's afraid of me in line. Johnny Stomp's afraid of me--he used to snitch for me and I used to muscle him good. You know how Dud's this so-called gangland peacemaker? Well, the other night him, Carlisle and Breuning worked over this guy Lamar Hinton at the Victory, supposedly a Mobster Squad job. Bullshit--all Dudley asked him about was Nite Owl stuff--smut, Pierce Patchett."

  Ed, bug-eyed: this can't be coming. "So you went to Stompanato looking for Perkins."

  "Right. I go to Kike's deli, and Johnny's there with Kikey. I ask Johnny about Deuce, and Johnny's all hiked. Kikey's hinked worse and they both lie and say Deuce is just some bumfuck acquaintance. They deny that Deuce is tight with Lee Vachss, when I know goddamn otherwise. Johnny uses the word 'containment,' which is not a Johnny-type word. Hink all over these guys, and I drop that I'm on the Nite Owl reopening and they almost shit, Deuce for the Nite Owl, ho, ho. I leave, go to a pay phone and have P.C. Bell put a fifteen-minute trace on all calls out of the deli. Two calls--one to Dot Rothstein, Dudley's good pal and Kikey's cousin, one to Dudley's house."

  Vincennes said, "Holy fucking shit." Ed jerked a hand to his gun--wrong--White was a cop. "Give me corroboration."

  White flicked his smoke out the window. "Crim 101. The niggers didn't do it, so Dud and his gang planted a car by the Nite Owl. I went to the DMV and checked April '53 registrations, Caucasians this time. Dot Rothstein bought a '48 Merc, primer gray, on April 10. A phony name, a phony address, but the stupid bitch used the real digits on her own phone number."

  Vincennes looked shell-shocked. Ed reeled in a line so he wouldn't scream DUDLEY. "Right before the Nite Owl I was working late at Hollywood Station. Spade Cooley was playing a retirement party downstairs, and I saw Burt Perkins roaming the halls. Try this theory: Mal Lunceford, ex--LAPD patrolman. Call him the forgotten Nite Owl victim, and remember he worked Hollywood Division for most of his time on the Department. Now, did one of the shooters have a grudge against Lunceford? Was Perkins removing records of it that night at the station? Did the conspirators know that Lunceford was a Nite Owl regular and plan their Cathcart or Cathcart-impersonator hit so that they could clip him too?"

  White answered. "Dudley put me on the Lunceford background check, probably because he thought I'd fuck it up. I checked for old Lunceford F.I.'s and couldn't find a goddamn one. I buy that theory."

  DUDLEY past screaming--Ed held it down. Vincennes: "Fisk told me about Patchett, how he got the Cohen-Dragna summit heroin, how him and this unnamed bad guy who's obviously Dudley were getting ready to push it. Now, I know for a fact that Dud bodyguarded that deal, and there was this rumor floating around years ago--that Dud led this posse that killed this guy Buzz Meeks who heisted the summit. Fisk said that Patchett got most of the white horse that got clouted, some from the Englekling brothers and their father, some from this bad guy who's obviously Dudley. Okay, so what I'm thinking is-could Lunceford have been in on the posse? Was that when Dudley got the dope?"

  White shook his head--new stuff for him. "You fill me in on that, because I got a lead that ties in. Dud was talking up his containment shit, and he said something about keeping the niggers sedated, which sounds like heroin to me."

  Ed said, "Call that done for now. Jack, run with the Goldman-- Van Gelder angle. Put it together with our new leads."

  Trash stood up, steadied himself on the bed rail. "Okay, let's say Davey G. was in with Dudley, Stompanato, Kikey, Vachss and Dot. How any of them could trust a psycho like Deuce I don't know, but fuck it. Anyway, they're all conspiring against Mickey C. White, you don't know this, but Goldman had a bug in Mickey's cell at McNeil. I'm betting Dudley and his friends were in with Davey from the beginning, but fuck it, however it happened, Davey heard the Englekling brothers approach Mickey with Duke Cathcart's smut deal."

  Ed raised a hand. "Chester Yorkin said that the man who brought Patchett the bulk of the heroin--let's assume it's Dudley--had a hard-on for smut and quote 'contacts in South America and pervert mailing lists.' I always wondered about the profit on pornography, and now Dudley's connection makes it seem more feasible."

  Vincennes said, "Let me keep going. Dud worked with the OSS in Paraguay after the war and he ran Ad Vice back in '39 or so, so I know he's got those contacts, but sit on that. Right now we've got Goldman going to Smith and Stompanato with the word on the smut plan. Everybody, especially Dud, likes the idea, and they decide to crash the racket. On his own, a double cross, I don't know, Davey sends Dean Van Gelder, his prison visitor, to talk to Cathcart. Van Gelder decides to crash Duke's prostie racket and the smut gig on his own. He'd been seen by Davey face-to-face, but the outside prison men had never seen him. He figured he looked like Cathcart, so he could impersonate Cathcart and cut his own deal. By the time the impersonation was found out he'd be too far in good with the outside men for Davey to care what he'd done. So Van Gelder moved to San Berdoo to be close to the Englekling brothers. He fell in with Sue Lefferts and snuffed Duke. He knew the names of at least one of the outside men, called them at a pay phone from the Lefferts' house and asked for a meet. He went in tough and suggested a public place, he figured Sue could sit nearby and he'd be safe. One of the outside guys put Lunceford together with the Nite Owl and said let's meet there. Dud or one of his guys approached Patchett right _before_ the Nite Owl and told him to get his loose ends tidied. Patchett didn't know exactly what was gonna happen, but he had Chris Bergeron and her kid and Bobby Inge blow town just as I was starting in on the smut gig for Ad Vice."

  An air-cooled room--Ed felt every word boost the temperature. "Let me throw out a chronology, starting right after Van Gelder as Cathcart contacts the outside men. Now, we know Dudley loves pornography, we know he's been sitting on eighteen pounds of'H' since the Cohen-Dragna deal. Try this theory: he breaks into Cathcart's apartment and finds something that leads him to Patchett, something that includes mention of his chemistry background and his connection to old Dr. Englekling. He goes to Patchett, they strike a deal--develop the heroin, push the smut. He's astounded that Patchett's thinking along the same lines, that he's already got some of the horse from Doc Englekling. Now Dudley wants Cathcart killed, Mal Lunceford silenced for whatever reason--and he wants Patchett terrified. He's a policeman, and he's read about those Negroes discharging shotguns in Griffith Park. He sets up the meet at the Nite Owl, knowing Lunceford will be there, and Jack's right--he was ambiguous, but he told Patchett to get rid of his loose ends. Moving ahead, the investigation goes wider than Dudley thinks it will--because the Negroes don't get killed during their arrest, and they don't confess. He puts White on the Cathcart background check, and he probably _didn't_ know that Perkins killed the Janeway girl, but he wanted White steered away from getting involved on general principles--he wanted him to steer clear of possible Cathcart--Nite Owl connections."

  All eyes on Bud White. The zealot: "Okay, Dudley put me on the Cathcart check because he thought I'd screw up. But I checked out Duke's pad and saw that it was print-wiped, and I figured that somebody had tried on his clothes. The Dudley guys wiped the place, but they didn't touch the phone books, and I could tell that the San Berdoo printshop listings had been looked over. Now, I got a theory. When I was on the Carthcart check, I met Kathy Janeway at this motel out in the valley. Two days later she's raped and killed. When I left the motel I thought I was being tailed, but then I forgot about it. I think the tail was Deuce Perkins. I think Dud put a tail on Cathcart's K.A.'s, just to keep tabs on the investigation, which explains how he's always known so much about all this stuff that I've always kept secret. So Deuce, who's a rape-o shitbird psycho, sees Kathy and goes for her. Maybe Dudley knew he killed her, maybe he didn't. Either way he fucking pays."

  Vincennes lit a cigarette, coughed. "We've got no evidence, but I've got some more stuff to tie in. One, Doc Layman took five .30-30 slugs out of Patchett, and he said they match this gang unsolved in Riverside County. When Davey Goldman was babbling away up in Camarillo, he said something about three triggers. He babbled some other stuff that keeps running through my head, but it doesn't make any sense. Exley, did you listen to that tape I found at McNeil?"

  Ed nodded. "You're right. Nothing salient at all, just a passing mention of some gang hits."

  White: "There's been a bunch of mob unsolveds. I know, 'cause a suspect spilled some tangent stuff on them on a Mobster Squad roust. Always three triggers, Cohen franchise holders and upstart hoods clipped. Easy money: Stompanato, Vachss and Teitlebaum keeping things copacetic for Mickey C's parole. They wanted to keep things chilled for their containment gig and they figured when Mickey got out they'd test the wind and either clip him or use him. My bet's on clip. They had Cohen and Goldman bushwhacked in prison--a pure cross on Davey. Mickey's house got bombed and Mickey lived to tell. They'll clip him before too long and they'll contain real good, 'cause Dud's Mr. Mobster Squad and he's got Parker's fucking--what's the word? mandate?--to keep out-of-town muscle out. Do you fucking believe it?"