Rolff dug his feet in the grass, balled fists at his sides. “Tell Judith about Sarah and me. She won’t believe you.”
Dudley took a piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket. “May 11, 1948. ‘My Dearest Lenny. I miss you and want you in me despite what you carried with you. I keep thinking that of course you didn’t know you had it and you met that prostitute before we became involved. The treatments hurt, but they still make me think of you, and if not for the fear of Judith finding out about us, I would be talking about you my every waking moment.’ Armbuster 304’s are the cheapest wall safes in the world, comrade. A man in your position should not be Side 106
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The so frugal.”
Lenny Rolff hit the grass on his knees. Dudley knelt beside him and coaxed out a barely audible string of names. The last name, sobbed, was “Nate Eisler.” Mal double-timed it to the car, looking back once. Dudley was watching his friendly witness hurl typewriter and manuscript, table and chairs helter-skelter.
o
o
o
Dudley drove Mal back to his motel, no talk the whole time, Mal keeping the radio glued to a classical station: bombastic stuff played loud. Dudley’s goodbye was, “You’ve more stomach for this work than I expected”; Mal went inside and spent an hour in the shower, until the hot water for the entire dump was used up and the manager came knocking on the door to complain. Mal calmed him down with his badge and a ten-spot, put on his last clean suit and drove downtown to see his lawyer.
Jake Kellerman’s office was in the Oviatt Tower at Sixth and Olive. Mal arrived five minutes early, scanning the bare-bones reception room, wondering if Jake sacrificed a secretary for rental freight in one of LA’s ritziest buildings. Their first confab had been overview; this one had to be meat and potatoes.
Kellerman opened his inner office door at 3:00 on the dot; Mal walked in and sat down in a plain brown leather chair. Kellerman shook his hand, then stood behind a plain brown wooden desk. He said, “Preliminary day after tomorrow, Civil Court 32. Greenberg’s on vacation, and we’ve got some goyishe stiff named Hardesty. I’m sorry about that, Mal. I wanted to get you a Jew who’d be impressed by your MP work overseas.”
Mal shrugged, thinking of Eisler and Rolff; Kellerman smiled. “Care to enlighten me on a rumor?”
“Sure.”
“I heard you coldcocked some Nazi bastard in Poland.”
“That’s true.”
“You killed him?”
The bare little office was getting stuffy. “Yes.”
Kellerman said, “Mazel tov,” checked his court calendar and some papers on the desk. “At preliminary I’ll start stalling for continuances and try to work out an angle to get you switched to Greenberg’s docket. He’ll fucking love you. How’s the grand jury gig going?”
“It’s going well.”
“Then why are you looking so glum? Look, is there any chance you’ll get your promotion before the grand jury convenes?”
Mal said, “No. Jake, what’s your strategy past the continuances?
Kellerman hooked two thumbs in his vest pockets. “Mal, it’s a hatchet job on Celeste. She deserted the boy–”
“She didn’t desert him, the fucking Nazis picked up her and her husband and threw them in fucking Buchenwald.”
“Sssh. Easy, pal. You told me the boy was molested as a direct result of being deserted by his mother. She peddled it inside to stay alive. Your MP
battalion has got her liberation interview pictures–she looks like Betty Grable compared to the other women who came out alive. I’ll kill her in court with that–Greenberg or no Greenberg.”
Mal took off his jacket and loosened his tie. “Jake, I don’t want Stefan to hear that stuff. I want you to get a writ barring him from hearing testimony.
An exclusion order. You can do it.”
Kellerman laughed. “No wonder you dropped out of law school. Writs excluding minor children from overhearing testimony in custody cases cannot be legally sanctioned unless the counsel of both parents approve it–which Celeste’s lawyer will never go for. If I break her down in court–and I will–he’ll want Stefan there on the off-chance he runs to mommy, not daddy.