“Dudley, how many did he get?” “Did he confess, Dudley?” “Smile, killer! This is for the L.A. Daily News!” “Tell us about it, Dud!” “Hey, it’s the cop who killed those two Mexican gunsels. Talk to us, Officer!”
We waded through them. Engels kept his head down, Dudley beamed for the cameras and I kept it stoical. We were met in the vestibule of the building by the head jailer, a sheriff’s lieutenant in uniform. He led us to an elevator, where a deputy shackled Engels’s legs. We rode up to the eleventh floor in silence. We watched as Engels was uncuffed and shackled, issued county jail denims, and led to a one-man security cell. Safely locked in, he stared at me one last time and spit on the floor.
The lieutenant spoke: “You men are wanted immediately at Central Division. The chief of detectives himself called me.”
Dudley nodded, stone-faced. I excused myself, took the steps down to street level, and walked out the front door, to be mobbed by reporters. Some recognized me from my previous notoriety and hurled questions as I made for the sidewalk.
“Underhill, whose arrest is it?” “What happened?” “Dudley says this guy’s a loony. Can you make him for any unsolved jobs on the books?”
I ignored them and pushed myself free as we hit the sidewalk. I ran all the way to Central Division headquarters on Los Angeles Street, four blocks away. Sweating, I tore through corridors, stopping for a moment to compose myself before I knocked on the door of Thad Green, the chief of detectives. His secretary admitted me to his waiting room. Dudley Smith was already there, sitting on the couch, smoking. We stared at each other until the buzzer on the secretary’s desk rang and he said, “You can go in now, Lieutenant Smith.”
Dudley walked into the pebble-glass-doored inner sanctum, and I waited nervously, furiously thinking of Lorna in an effort to quiet my mind. Dudley emerged half an hour later, walked right past me and out the door.
A voice from within the chief’s office called, “Underhill” and I went in to meet my fate. The chief sat behind his huge oak desk. He acknowledged my salute with a brisk nod of his iron gray head. “Report, Underhull,” he said.
When I finished, still standing, the chief said, “Welcome to the detective bureau, Underhill. -I’ll issue a statement to the press. The D.A.’s office will be in touch with you. I want a full written report in two hours. Don’t talk to any reporters. Now go home and rest.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “Where will I be assigned?”
“I don’t know yet. To a squad somewhere, probably.” He consulted his calendar. “You report back to me one week from today, at eight o’clock. That will be Friday, September 12. We’ll have found a suitable assignment for you then.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you, Officer.”
I wrote my report down the hall in a vacant storage room and left it with the chief’s secretary, then retrieved my car and drove home to Night Train, a shower, and a mercifully dreamless sleep.
12
A sparkling twilight found me waiting for the evening papers at a newsstand on Pico and Robertson. They came and the headlines screamed “Korea” rather than “Murder in L.A.” I was disappointed. I was curious to see how the department’s press release would jibe with Dudley Smith’s press handout.
After checking the second and third pages for a flash update, I started to feel relieved: I had Dudley by the balls, and the day’s reprieve the press was giving us would help smooth out what might be a tense evening with Lorna.
As I parked on Charleville I could see Lorna in her living room, smoking abstractedly and staring out her window. I rang the bell, and all my anger and enervation dropped like a rock. I started to feel a delicious anticipation.
The buzzer that unlocked the door sounded, and I sprinted up the stairs to find Lorna standing in the middle of the living room, leaning on her cane. She wore pink lipstick and a trace of mascara, and her burnished light brown hair had been set in a new style– swept up and back on the sides. It gave her a breathless look. She was wearing a tartan skirt and a man’s French-cuffed dress shirt that perfectly outlined her large breasts.