The Big Nowhere (21 page)

Jack Shortell was still scribbling; Mike Breuning was looking up at him strangely, eyes narrowed to slits. Danny turned back to Niles. “Got that, Sergeant?”

Niles had another cigarette going; he was scorching his desk with the tip. “You’re really in tight with the Jews, huh, Upshaw? What’s Mickey Kike paying you?”

“More than Brenda paid you.”

Shortell laughed; Breuning’s strange look broke into a smile. Niles threw his cigarette on the floor and stamped it out. “Why didn’t you report your lead on Marty Goines’ pad, hotshot? What the fuck was happening there?”

Danny’s hands snapped a piece of wood off the lectern. He said, “Dismissed,” with some other man’s voice.

Considine and Smith were waiting for him in Ellis Loew’s office; big Dudley was hanging up a phone with the words, “Thank you, lad.” Danny sat down at Loew’s conference table, sensing the “lad” was flunky Mike Breuning with a report on his briefing.

Considine was busy writing on a yellow legal pad; Smith came over and gave him the glad hand. “How was your first morning as Homicide brass, lad?”

Danny knew he knew—verbatim. “It went well, Lieutenant.”

“Call me Dudley. You’ll be outranking me in a few years, and you should get used to patronizing men much your senior.”

“Okay, Dudley.”

Smith laughed. “Lad, you’re a heartbreaker. Isn’t he a heart-breaker, Malcolm?”

Considine slid his chair next to Danny. “Let’s hope Claire De Haven thinks so. How are you, Deputy?”

Danny said, “I’m fine, Lieutenant,” picking up something wrong between his superiors—contempt or plain tension working two ways—Dudley Smith in the catbird seat.

“Good. The briefing went well, then?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read that paperwork we gave you?”

“I’ve got it practically memorized.”

Considine tapped his pad. “Excellent. We’ll start now, then.”

Dudley Smith sat at the far end of the table; Danny geared his brain to listen and
think
before speaking. Considine said, “Here’s some rules for you to follow.

“One, you drive your civilian car everywhere, on your decoy job
and
your homicide job. We’re building an identity for you, and we’ll have a script ready by late tonight. You’re going to be a lefty who’s been living in New York for years, so we’ve got New York plates for your car, and we’ve got a whole personal background for you to memorize. When you go by your various station houses to check reports or whatever, park on the street at least two blocks away, and when you leave here, go downstairs to the barbershop. Al, Mayor Bowron’s barber, is going to get rid of that crew cut of yours and cut your hair so that you look less like a cop. I need your trouser, shirt, jacket, sweater and shoe sizes, and I want you to meet me at midnight at West Hollywood Station. I’ll have your new Commie wardrobe and script ready, and we’ll finalize your approach. Got it?”

Danny nodded, pulled a sheet of paper off Considine’s pad and wrote down his clothing sizes. Dudley Smith said, “You wear those clothes everywhere, lad. On your queer job, too. We don’t want your new Pinko friends seeing you on the street looking like a dapper young copper. Malcolm, give our fair Daniel some De Haven lines to parry. Let’s see how he fields them.”

Considine spoke directly to Danny. “Deputy, I’ve met Claire De Haven, and I think that for a woman she’s a tough piece of work. She’s promiscuous, she may be an alcoholic and she may take drugs. We’ve got another man checking out her background and the background of some other Reds, so we’ll know more on her soon. I spoke to the woman once, and I got the impression that she thrives on banter and one-upmanship. I think that it sexually excites her, and I know she’s attracted to men of your general appearance. So we’re going to try a little exercise now. I’ll feed you lines that I think would be typical of Claire De Haven, you try to top them. Ready?”

Danny shut his eyes for better concentration. “Go.”

“ ‘But some people call us Communists. Doesn’t that bother you?’ ”

“That old scarlet letter routine doesn’t wash with me.”

“Good. Let’s follow up on that. “Oh, really? Fascist politicians have ruined many politically enlightened people by slandering us as subversives.’ ”

Danny grabbed a line from a musical he saw with Karen Hiltscher. “I’ve always had a thing for redheads, baby.”

Considine laughed. “Good, but don’t call De Haven ‘baby,’ she’d consider it patronizing. Here’s a good one. ‘I find it hard to believe that you’d leave the Teamsters for us.’ ”

Easy. “Mickey Cohen’s comedy routines would drive anybody out.”

“Good, Deputy, but in your decoy role you’d never get close to Cohen, so you wouldn’t know that about him.”

Danny got a brainstorm: the dirty joke sheets and pulp novels his fellow jailers passed around when he worked the main County lockup. “Give me some sex banter, Lieutenant.”

Considine flipped to the next note page. “ ‘But I’m thirteen years older than you.’ ”

Danny made his tone satirical. “A grain of sand in our sea of passion.”

Dudley Smith howled; Considine chuckled and said, “You just walk into my life when I’m engaged to be married. I don’t know that I trust you.”

“Claire, there’s only one reason
to
trust me. And that’s that around you I don’t trust myself.”

“Great delivery, Deputy. Here’s a curveball: ‘Are you here for me or the cause?’ ”

Extra easy: the hero of a paperback he’d read working night watch. “I want it all. That’s all I know, that’s all I want to know.”

Considine slid the notebook away. “Let’s improvise on that. ‘How can you look at things so simplistically?’ ”

His mental gears were click-click-clicking now; Danny quit digging for lines and flew solo. “Claire, there’s the fascists and us, and there’s you and me. Why do
you
always complicate things?”

Considine, coming on like a femme fatale. “ ‘You know I’m capable of eating you whole.’ ”

“I love your teeth.”

“ ‘I love your eyes.’ ”

“Claire, are we fighting the fascists or auditing Physiology 101?”

“ ‘When you’re forty, I’ll be fifty-three. Will you still want me then?’ ”

Danny, aping Considine’s vamp contralto. “We’ll be dancing jigs together in Moscow, sweetheart.”

“Not so satirical on the political stuff, I’m not sure I trust her sense of humor on that. Let’s get dirty. ‘It’s so
good
with you.’ ”

“The others were just girls, Claire. You’re my first woman.”

“ ‘How many times have you used that line?’ ”

Aw-shucks laughter—à la a pussy hound deputy he knew. “Every time I sleep with a woman over thirty-five.”

“ ‘Have there been many?’ ”

“Just a few thousand.”

“ ‘The cause needs men like you.’ ”

“If there were more women like you around, there’d be millions of us.”

“ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ ”

“That I really like you, Claire.”

“ ‘Why?’ ”

“You drink like one of the boys, you know Marx chapter and verse, and you’ve got great legs.”

Dudley Smith started clapping; Danny opened his eyes and felt them misting. Mal Considine smiled. “She does have great legs. Go get your haircut, Deputy. I’ll see you at midnight.”

Mayor Bowron’s barber shaped Danny’s outgrown crew cut into a modified pompadour that changed the whole set of his face. Before, he looked like what he was: a dark-haired, dark-eyed Anglo-Saxon, a policeman who wore suits or sports jacket/slacks combos everywhere. Now he looked slightly Bohemian, slightly Latin, more of a dude. The new hairstyle offset his clothes rakishly; any cop who didn’t know him and spotted the gun bulge under his left armpit would shake him down on the spot, figuring him for some kind of outlaw muscle. The look and his banter improvisations made him feel cocky, like the Chateau Marmont was a fluke that nailing Claire De Haven would disprove once and for all. Danny drove back to Hollywood Station to prepare for his second pass at the Marmont and his first shot at Felix Gordean.

He went straight to the squadroom. Mickey Cohen was vilified on the walls: cartoons of him stuffing cash in Sheriff Biscailuz’ pockets, cracking a whip at a team of sled dogs in LASD uniforms, poking innocent citizens in the ass with a switchblade sticking out of his prayer cap. Danny fielded an assortment of fisheyes, found the records alcove and hit the sex offender files—shaking hands with the beast—fuel for his Gordean interrogation.

There were six cabinets full of them: musty folders stuffed with occurrence reports, mugshots clipped to the first inner page. The filing was not alphabetical, and there was no logic to the penal code placements—homosexual occurrences were lumped with straight exhibitionism and child molestation; misdemeanants and felons brushed against each other. Danny scanned the first two files in the top cabinet and snapped why the system was so sloppy; the men on the squad wanted this wretched data out of sight and out of mind. Knowing he
had
to look, he dug in.

Most of the stuff was homo.

The Broadway Department Store on Hollywood and Vine had a fourth-floor men’s room known as “Cocksucker’s Paradise.” Enterprising deviants had bored holes through the walls of the toilet stalls, enabling the occupants of adjoining shitters to get together for oral copulation. If you parked on a Griffith Park roadway with a blue handkerchief tied to your radio aerial, you were a queer. The corner of Selma and Las Palmas was where ex-cons with a penchant for anal rape and young boys congregated. The Latin inscription on the Pall Mall cigarette pack—“In Hoc Signo Vinces”—translated as “With this sign we shall conquer”—was a tentative means of homo identification—a sure thing when coupled with wearing a green shirt on a Thursday. The muscular Mex transvestite who blew sailors behind Grauman’s Chinese was known as “Donkey Dan” or “Donkey Danielle” because he/she possessed a thirteen-inch dick. The E-Z Cab Company was run by homos, and they would deliver you a boy, queer smut films, extra KY Jelly, bennies, or your favorite liquor twenty-four hours a day.

Danny kept reading, weak in the knees and stomach, learning. When he saw a 1900–1910 birthdate or 6’ and up on a male Caucasian’s yellow sheet, he checked the mugstrip; every man he locked eyes with looked too ugly and pathetic to be
his
man—and prowling the ensuing arrest reports for blood types always proved him right. Thomas (NMI) Milnes, 6’2”, 11/4/07, exposed himself to little boys and begged the arresting officers to rubber-hose him for it; Cletus Wardell Hanson, 6’1”, 4/29/04, carried a power drill with him to pave the way for new blow job territory, restaurant men’s rooms his speciality. In stir, he put his ass on the line: day room gang bangs, a pack of cigarettes per man. Willis (NMI) Burdette, 6’5”, 12/1/1900, was a syphilitic street whore, beaten brainless by a half dozen johns he’d passed the disease to. Darryl “Lavender Blue” Wishnick, 6’, 3/10/03, orchestrated orgies in the hills surrounding the Hollywood Sign and liked to pork pretty boys dressed in the attire of the United States armed forces.

Four hours in, four cabinets down. Danny felt his stomach settling around hunger pangs and the desire for a drink he usually got in the mid-afternoon. That was comforting; so was the new hairstyle he kept running his fingers through, and the new embellishments on his new identity that he’d mention to Considine tonight: nothing at his apartment should seem settled—he was just in from New York; he should leave his piece, cuffs and ID buzzer at home when he played Commie. Everything in the first four drawers was wrong for his man, not applicable to his bad moments outside Felix Gordean’s window. Then he hit cabinet five.

This set of files was in some kind of order—“No Arraignments,” “Charges Dropped” or “Check Agst. Future Arrests” stamped on the front of each folder. Danny read through the first handful and got straight male-on-male sex that went to arrest but not to court: coitus interruptus in parked cars; male shack jobs snitched by shocked landladies; a toilet assignation where the theater proprietor blew the whistle, then punked out for fear of bad publicity. Straight sex recounted in straight copese: abbreviations, technical terms for the acts, a few humorous asides by waggish Vice officers.

Danny felt shakes coming on. The files carried twin yellow sheets—two mugshot strips, both sex participants in black and white. He eyed the pages for birthdates and physical stats, but kept returning to the mugs, superimposing them against each other, playing with the faces—making them prettier, less conwise. After a half dozen files, he fell into sync: a look at the photos, a scan of the arrest report, back to the mugs and the action visualized with prettified versions of the two plug-uglies clipped to the first page. Mouths on mouths; mouths to crotches; sodomy, fellatio, soixante-neuf, a Man Camera smut job, a little voice going, “It’s for the investigation” when some detail hit him so large that his stomach queased to the point where he thought his bowels would go.
No
middle-aged tall guy’s stats to make him stop and think; just the pictures, rapid fire, like nickelodeon flickers.

Bedspreads wet from fucking.

A naked blond man catching his breath, veins pumping in his legs.

Zoom-in shots of awful insertions.

“It’s for the investigation.”

Danny broke the string of images—making the pretty ones all gray, all forty-fivish, all his killer. Knowing the killer only had sex to hurt helped put the brakes on his fantasies; Danny got his legs back and saw that he’d twisted a lank of his new hairdo clean off his scalp. He slammed the cabinet shut; he recalled queer vernacular and interposed it into the questions he’d ask Felix Gordean—himself as a smart young detective who came prepared, who’d talk on the level of anyone—even if it was wrong sex to a queer pimp.

Cop to voyeur and back again.

Danny drove home, showered and checked his closet for the best suit to go with his new hair, settling on a black worsted Karen Hiltscher had bought him—too stylish, too tapered and skinny in the lapels. When he put it on, he saw that it made him look dangerous—and the narrow shoulders outlined his .45 revolver. After two shots and a mouthwash chaser, he drove to the Chateau Marmont.