The Big Nowhere (17 page)

He went straight to the bottle then, quality sourmash burning like rotgut, Man-Cameraing women, women, women. Karen Hiltscher, Janice Modine, strippers he’d questioned about a stickup at the Club Largo, tits and cunt on display in the dressing room, inured to men looking at their stuff. Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, the hat check girl at Dave’s Blue Room, his mother stepping out of the bathtub before she got fat and became a Jehovah’s Witness. All ugly and wrong, just like the two wall-flowers at the Marmont.

Danny drank standing up until his legs went. Going down, he managed to throw the bottle at the wall. It hit a pinup of the blood patterns at 2307 Tamarind.

Mal got his lies straight on the doorstep and rang the bell. Heels over hardwood echoed inside the house; he pulled his vest down to cover his slack waistband—too many meals forgotten. The door opened and the Red Queen was standing there, perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed in silk and tweed—at 9:30 in the morning.

“Yes? Are you a salesman? There’s a Beverly Hills ordinance against soliciting, you know.”

Mal knew she knew otherwise. “I’m with the District Attorney’s Office.”

“Beverly Hills?”

“The City of Los Angeles.”

Claire De Haven smiled—movie star quality. “My accumulation of jaywalking tickets?”

Cop-quality dissembling—Mal knew she had him pegged as the nice guy in the Lopez/Duarte/Benavides questioning. “The City needs your help.”

The woman chuckled—elegantly—and held the door open. “Come in and tell me about it, Mr.…?”

“Considine.”

Claire repeated the name and stood aside; Mal walked into a large living room furnished in a floral motif: gardenia-patterned divans, tufted orchid chairs, little tables and bookstands inlaid with wooden daisies. The walls were solid movie posters—anti-Nazi pictures popular in the late ’30s and early ’40s. Mal strolled up to a garish job ballyhooing
Dawn of the Righteous
—a noble Russki facing off a drooling blackshirt brandishing a Luger. Sun-shine haloed the good guy; the German was shadowed in darkness. With Claire De Haven watching him, he counterpunched. “Subtle.”

Claire laughed. “Artful. Are you an attorney, Mr. Considine?”

Mal turned around. The Red Queen was holding a glass filled with clear liquid and ice. He couldn’t smell gin and bet vodka—more elegant, no booze breath. “No, I’m an investigator with the Grand Jury Division. May I sit down?”

Claire pointed to two chairs facing each other across a chess table. “I’m warming to this. Would you like coffee or a drink?”

Mal said, “No,” and sat down. The chair was upholstered in leather; the orchids were embroidered silk. Claire De Haven took the opposite seat and crossed her legs. “You’re crazy to think I’d ever inform. I won’t, my friends won’t, and we’ll have the best legal talent money can buy.”

Mal played off the three Mexicans. “Miss De Haven, this is a mop-up interview at best. My partner and I approached your friends at Variety International the wrong way, our boss is very angry and our funding has been cut. When we got our initial paperwork on the UAES—old HUAC stuff—we didn’t find your name mentioned, and all your friends seemed…well…rather doctrinaire. I decided to play a hunch and present my case to you, hoping you’d keep an open mind and find aspects of what I’m going to tell you reasonable.”

Claire De Haven smiled and sipped her drink. “You speak very well for a policeman.”

Mal thought: and you blast vodka in the morning and fuck pachuco hoodlums. “I went to Stanford, and I was a major with the MPs in Europe. I was involved in processing evidence to convict Nazi war criminals, so you see I’m not entirely unsympathetic to those posters on your walls.”

“You display empathy well, too. And now you’ve been employed by the studios, because it’s easier to see Red than pay decent wages. You’ll divide, conquer, get people to inform and bring in specialists. And you’ll cause nothing but grief.”

From banter to cool outrage in a half second flat. Mal tried to look hangdog, thinking he could take the woman if he gave her a tough fight, but let her win. “Miss De Haven, why doesn’t the UAES strike in order to achieve its contract demands?”

Claire took a slow drink. “The Teamsters would get in and stay in on a temporary payroll stipulation.”

A good opening; a last chance to play nice guy before they pulled back, planted newspaper dope and went decoy. “I’m glad you mentioned the Teamsters, because they worry me. Should this grand jury succeed—and I doubt that it will—a racketeering force against the Teamsters would be a logical next step. They are very heavily infiltrated with criminal elements, much the way the American left is infiltrated by Communists.”

Claire De Haven sat still, not taking the bait. She looked at Mal, eyes lingering on the automatic strapped to his belt. “You’re an intelligent man, so state your case. Thesis sentence style, like you learned in your freshman comp class at Stanford.”

Mal thought of Celeste—juice for some indignation. “Miss De Haven, I saw Buchenwald, and I know what Stalin is doing is just as bad. We want to get to the bottom of
totalitarian
Communist influence in the movie industry and inside the UAES,
end it
, prevent the Teamsters from kicking the shit out of you on the picket line and establish through testimony some sort of demarcation line between
hard
Communist propaganda aggression and legitimate leftist political activity.” A pause, a shrug, hands raised in mock frustration. “Miss De Haven, I’m a policeman. I collect evidence to put robbers and killers away. I don’t like this job, but I think it needs to be done and I’m damn well going to do it as best I can. Can’t you see my point?”

Claire took cigarettes and a lighter from the table and lit up. She smoked while Mal darted his eyes around the room, mock chagrin at blowing his calm. Finally she said, “You’re either a very good actor or in way over your head with some very bad men. Which is it? I honestly don’t know.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“All right, I’m not.”

Mal got up and paced the room, advance man for his decoy. He noticed a bookcase lined with picture frames, examined a shelf of them and saw a string of handsome young men. About half were Latin lover types—but Lopez, Duarte and Benavides were absent. He remembered Lopez’ comment to Lesnick: Claire was the only gringa he’d met who’d suck him, and he felt guilty about it because only whores did that, and she was his Communista madonna. On a shelf by itself was a picture of Reynolds Loftis, his Anglo-Saxon rectitude incongruous. Mal turned and looked at Claire. “Your conquests, Miss De Haven?”

“My past and future. Wild oats lumped together and my fiancé all by himself.”

Chaz Minear had gotten explicit on Loftis—what they did, the feel of his weight downstairs. Mal wondered how much the woman knew about them, if she even guessed Minear finked her future husband to HUAC. “He’s a lucky man.”

“Thank you.”

“Isn’t he an actor? I think I took my son to a movie he was in.”

Claire stubbed out her cigarette, lit another one and smoothed her skirt. “Yes, Reynolds is an actor. When did you and your son see the movie?”

Mal sat down, juggling blacklist dates. “Right after the war, I think. Why?”

“A point that I’d like to make, as long as we’re talking in a civil manner. I doubt that you’re as sensitive as you portray yourself, but if you are I’d like to illustrate an example of the hurt men like you cause.”

Mal hooked a thumb back at Loftis’ picture. “With your fiancé?”

“Yes. You see, you probably saw the movie at a revival house. Reynolds was a
very
successful character actor in the ’30s, but the California State Un-American Activities Committee hurt him when he refused to testify back in ’40. Many studios wouldn’t touch him because of his politics, and the only work he could get was on Poverty Row—toadying to an awful man named Herman Gerstein.”

Mal played dumb. “It could have been worse. People were blacklisted outright by HUAC in ’47. Your fiancé could have been.”

Claire shouted, “He
was
blacklisted, and I bet you know it!”

Mal jerked back in his chair; he thought he’d had her convinced he wasn’t wise to Loftis. Claire lowered her voice. “Maybe you knew it. Reynolds Loftis, Mr. Considine. Surely you know that he’s in the UAES.”

Mal shrugged, smokescreening a lie. “When you said Reynolds, I guessed that it was Loftis. I knew he was an actor, but I’ve never seen his photograph. Look, I’ll tell you why I was surprised. An old lefty told my partner and me that Loftis was a homosexual. Now you tell me he’s your fiancé.”

Claire’s eyes narrowed; for a half second she looked like a shrew in waiting. “Who told you that?”

Mal shrugged again. “Some guy who used to hang out and chase girls at the Sleepy Lagoon Committee picnics. I forget his name.”

Shrew in waiting to nervous wreck; Claire’s hands shaking, her legs twitching, grazing the table. Mal homed in on her eyes and thought he saw them pinning, like she was mixing pharmacy stuff with her vodka. Seconds dragged; Claire became calm again. “I’m sorry. Hearing Reynolds described as that upset me.”

Mal thought: no it didn’t—it was Sleepy Lagoon. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because he’s a lucky man.”

The Red Queen smiled. “And not just because of me. Will you let me finish that point I wanted to make?”

“Sure.”

Claire said, “In ’47 someone informed on Reynolds to the House Committee—hearsay and innuendo—and he
was
black-listed outright. He went to Europe and found work acting in experimental art films directed by a Belgian man he’d met in LA during the war. The actors all wore masks, the films created quite a stir, and Reynolds eked out a living acting in them. He even won the French version of the Oscar in ’48, and got mainstream work in Europe. Now the
real
Hollywood studios are offering him real work for real money, which will end if Reynolds is hauled before another committee or grand jury or kangaroo court or whatever you people call them.”

Mal stood up and looked at the door. Claire said, “Reynolds will never name names, I’ll never name names. Don’t ruin the good life he’s starting to have again. Don’t ruin me.”

She even begged with elegance. Mal made a gesture that took in leather upholstery, brocade curtains and a small fortune in embroidered silk. “How can you preach the Commie line and justify all this?”

The Red Queen smiled, beggar to muse. “The good work I do allows me a dispensation for nice things.”

A stellar exit line.

Mal walked back to his car and found a note stuck under the wiper blades: “Captain—greetings! Herman Gerstein called Ellis with a complaint: a Sheriff’s dick is making waves at Variety International (pansy homicide). Ellis spoke to his CO (Capt. Al Dietrich) about it—and we’re supposed to tell the lad to desist. West Hollywood Substation when you finish with C.D.H., please—D.S.”

Mal drove to the station, pissed at a stupid errand when he should be orchestrating the team’s next move: radio and newspaper spots to convince UAES the grand jury was kaput. He saw Dudley Smith’s Ford in the lot, left his car next to it and walked in the front door. Dudley was standing by the dispatching alcove, talking to a Sheriff’s captain in uniform. A girl behind the switchboard was flagrantly eavesdropping, toying with the headset on her neck.

Dudley saw him and hooked a finger; Mal went over and offered the brass his hand. “Mal Considine, Captain.”

The man gave him a bonecrusher shake. “Al Dietrich. Good to meet a couple of City boys who come off as human beings, and I was just telling Lieutenant Smith here not to judge Deputy Upshaw too harshly. He’s got a lot of newfangled ideas about procedure and the like, and he’s a bit of a hothead, but basically he’s a damn good cop. Twenty-seven years old and already a detective must tell you something, right?”

Dudley boomed tenor laughter. “Smarts and naivete are a potent combination in young men. Malcolm, our friend is working on a County homo snuff tied to two City jobs. He seems to be obsessed as only a young idealist cop can be. Shall we give the lad a gentle lesson in police etiquette and priorities?”

Mal said, “A brief one,” and turned to Dietrich. “Captain, where’s Upshaw now?”

“In an interrogation room down the hall. Two of my men captured a robbery suspect this morning, and Danny’s sweating him. Come on, I’ll show you—but let him finish up first.”

Dietrich led them through the muster room to a short corridor inset with cubicles fronted by one-way glass. Static was crackling out of a wall speaker above the last window on the left. The captain said, “Take a listen, the kid is good. And try to let him down easy, he’s got a bad temper and I like him.”

Mal strode ahead of Dudley to the one-way. Looking in, he saw a hood he’d rousted before the war. Vincent Scoppettone, a Jack Dragna trigger, was sitting at a table bolted to the floor, his hands cuffed to a welded-down chair. Deputy Upshaw had his back to the window and was drawing water from a wall cooler. Scoppettone squirmed in his chair, his County denims sweat-soaked at the legs and armpits.

Dudley caught up. “Ah, grand. Vinnie the guinea. I heard that lad found out a quail of his was distributing her favors elsewhere and stuck a .12 gauge up her love canal. It must have been messy, albeit quick. Do you know the difference between an Italian grandmother and an elephant? Twenty pounds and a black dress. Isn’t that grand?”

Mal ignored him. Scoppettone’s voice came over the speaker, synched a fraction of a second behind his lips. “Eyeball witnesses don’t mean shit. They got to be alive to testify. Understand?”

Deputy Upshaw turned around, holding a cup of water. Mal saw a medium-sized young man, even-featured with hard brown eyes, a dark brown crew cut and razor nicks on heavily shadowed pale skin. He looked lithe and muscular—and there was something about him reminiscent of Claire De Haven’s picture-pretty boys. His voice was an even baritone. “Down the hatch, Vincent. Communion. Confession. Requiescat en pace.”

Scoppettone gulped water, sputtered and licked his lips. “You a Catholic?”

Upshaw sat down in the opposite chair. “I’m nothing. My mother’s a Jehovah’s Witness and my father’s dead, which is what you’re gonna be when Jack D. finds out you’re clouting markets on your own. And as far as the eyeball witnesses go, they’ll testify. You’ll be no bail downtown and Jack’ll give you the go-by. You’re in dutch with Jack or you wouldn’t be pulling heists in the first place. Spill, Vincent. Feed me on your other jobs and the captain here will recommend honor farm.”

Scoppettone coughed; water dribbled off his chin. “Without them witnesses, you got no case.”