“You should have bit her neck,” Milner cracked.
“I do, every night.” Quinn guffawed, blowing out a huge lungful of smoke and pulling up a chair facing me. Milner laughed along and opened a tiny window at the back of the room, letting in rays of hazy sunshine and a flood of traffic noise.
“Officer Underhill,” he said, “my partner and I are here today because doubts have been raised about your fitness to serve the department.” Milner’s voice had metamorphosed into a precise professorial tone. He started a dramatic pause, drawing on his cigarette, and I answered, mimicking his inflections:
“Sergeant, I have grave doubts about the brass hats who sent you here to question me. Has Internal Affairs questioned Dudley Smith?”
Milner and Quinn looked at each other. Their look was informed with the humorous secret knowledge of longtime partners.
“Officer,” Quinn said, “do you think we are here because a queer slashed his wrists in County Jail yesterday?” I didn’t answer. Quinn continued: “Do you think we’re here because you initiated, illegally, the arrest of an innocent man?”
Mimer took over. “Officer, do you think we’re here because you have brought great disgrace on the department?”
He took a folded-up newspaper out of his back pocket and read from it: “‘Hero cop quick on the trigger? L.A.P.D. in hot water? Thanks to crack legal beagle Walter Canfield and a courageous anonymous witness, Eddie Engels almost walked out the door of County Jail a free man. Instead, humiliated and tortured by his ordeal of false arrest, he left under a sheet. Canfield and the man with whom Engels spent the night of August 12–the night he was alleged to have murdered Margaret Cadwallader–tragically got to the authorities too late with their information. Eddie Engels slashed his wrists with a contraband razor blade in his cell on the eleventh floor of the Hall of Justice yesterday afternoon, the victim of gunslinger justice.
“‘Our Seattle correspondent contacted the victim’s father, Wilhelm Engels, a pharmacist in suburban Seattle. “I can’t believe that God would do such a thing,” the white-haired old gentleman said. “There must be an investigation into the policemen who arrested my Edward. Edward was a gentle, lovely boy who never hurt anyone. We must have justice.” Mr. Engels told our correspondent that Walter Canfield has offered his services, free of charge, in filing suit for false arrest against the Los Angeles Police Department. “Mr. Engels will have his justice,” Canfield told reporters shortly before he learned of Engels’s death, “the justice his son was denied. This is clearly a case of a quick-on-the-trigger young cop out to make a name for himself.”‘”
Milner paused. My vision was starting to darken at the edges, but I shook my head and it cleared.
“Go on,” I said.
Milner coughed and continued. “‘Officer Frederick U. Underhill, canonized within the L.A.P.D. and by Los Angeles newspapers earlier this year for killing two holdup men, brought the ‘same rash justice to his investigation of Eddie Engels. Veteran L.A.P.D. Detective Lieutenant Dudley Smith told our reporter: “Fred Underhill is an ambitious young man out to make chief of police in record time. He caught myself and several others up in his crusade to get Eddie Engels. I admit I went along with it. I admit I was at fault. Last night I lit a candle for poor Eddie’s family. I also lit one for Fred Underhill and prayed that he learns a lesson from this tragedy he perpetrated.”‘”
I started to laugh. My laughter sounded hysterical to my own ears. Milner and Quinn didn’t think it was funny. Quinn snapped: “This article, which was in the L.A. _Daily News_, goes on to call for your resignation and an investigation into the entire department. What do you think about _that_, Underhill?”
I calmed myself and stared at my inquisitors. “I feel that that article was written in a very poor prose style. Convoluted, hysterical, hyperbolic. Hemingway would disapprove of it. F. Scott Fitzgerald would turn over in his grave. Shakespeare would be dismayed. That’s what I think.”
“Underhill,” Milner said, “you know the department takes care of its own, don’t you?”
“Sure. Witness that lunatic Dudley Smith. He’ll come out of this thing smelling like a rose and probably make Captain. Ahhh, yes. Grand!”