Mal walked over and looked at their evidence: information extraction thumbscrews. “He won’t testify before the grand jury, though?”
“No, never. He’s terrified of losing his credibility as a psychiatrist.
Confidentiality, you know. It’s a good hiding place for lawyers, and doctors covet it too. Of course, it’s not legally binding for them. Lesnick would be kaput as a psychiatrist if he testified.”
Dudley said, “You would think he would like to meet his maker as a good patriotic American, though. He did volunteer, and that should be a grand satisfaction for someone whose next life looms so imminently.”
Loew laughed. “Dud, have you _ever_ taken a step without spotting the angles?”
“The last time _you_ did, counselor. Captain Considine, yourself?”
Mal said, “Sometime back in the Roaring Twenties,” thinking that mano a mano, brain to brain, he’d favor the Dublin street thug over the Harvard Phi Bete. “Ellis, when do we start approaching witnesses?”
Loew tapped the file stacks. “Soon, after you’ve digested these. Based on what you learn here, you’ll be making your first approaches–on weak points–weak people–who’d seem most likely to cooperate. If we can build up an array of friendly witnesses fast, fine. But if we don’t get a fair amount of initial cooperation, we’ll have to put in a plant. Our friends on the Teamsters have heard picket line talk–that the UAES is planning strategy meetings aimed at coercing exorbitant contract demands out of the studios. If we get a string of balks right off the bat, I want to pull back and put a decoy into the UAES. I want both of you to think of smart, tough, idealistic-looking young cops we can use if it comes to that.”
Chills grabbed Mal. Sending in decoys, _operating_, had made his rep at Ad Vice–it was what he was best at as a policeman. He said, “I’ll think on it.
There’s just Dudley and me as investigators?”
Loew made a gesture that took in his whole house. “Clerks from the City pool here to handle the paperwork, Ed Satterlee for the use of his contacts, Lesnick for our psychiatric edification. You two to interrogate. I might get us a third man to prowl for criminal stuff, rattle cages, that kind of thing.”
Mal got itchy to read, think, operate. He said, “I’m going to clear up some loose ends at the Hall, go home and work.”
Loew said, “I’m going to prosecute a real estate man for drunk driving on his son’s motorcycle.”
Dudley Smith toasted his boss with an imaginary glass. “Have mercy. Most real estate men are good patriotic Republicans, and you might need his contribution one day.”
o
o
o
Back at City Hall, Mal made calls to satisfy his curiosity on his two new colleagues. Bob Cathcart, a savvy Criminal Division FBI man he’d worked with, gave him the scoop on Edmund J. Satterlee. Cathcart’s take: the man was a religious crackpot with a wild hair up his ass about Communism, so extreme in his views that Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s number-two man at the Bureau, repeatedly issued gag orders on him when he served as Agent in Charge at the Waco, Texas, field office. Satterlee was estimated to earn fifty thousand dollars a year in anti-Communist lecture fees; Red Crosscurrents was “a shakedown racket”–“They’d clear Karl Marx if the dough was right.” Satterlee was rumored to have been bounced off the Alien Squad for attempting a kickback operation: cash vouchers from interned Japanese prisoners in exchange for his safeguarding their confiscated property until they were released. Agent Cathcart’s summation: Ed Satterlee was a loony, albeit a rich and very efficient one–very adept at advancing conspiracy theories that stood up in court; very good at gathering evidence; very good at running outside interference for grand jury Side 30
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The investigators.
A call to an old pal working the LAPD Metropolitan Squad and one to an ex-DA’s man now with the State Attorney General’s office supplied Mal with the true story on Saul Lesnick, MD, PhD. The old man was, and remained, a CP card carrier; he had been a Fed snitch since ’39–when he was approached by two LA office agents, who made him a deal: provide confidential psychiatric dirt to various committees and police agencies, and his daughter would be sprung from her five-to-ten-year sentence for hit and run drunk driving–one year down, four more to go minimum– the girl then currently hardtiming in Tehachapi. Lesnick agreed; his daughter was released and placed on indeterminate Federal parole–which would be revoked if the good doctor ever broke his cover or otherwise refused to cooperate. Lesnick, given six months tops in his fight with lung cancer, had secured a promise from a high-ranking Justice Department official: upon his death, all the confidential files he had loaned out would be destroyed; his daughter’s vehicular manslaughter conviction and parole records would be expunged and all Fed/Municipal/State grand jury notations currently on official paper vis-à-vis Lesnick and his breaches of confidentiality with subversive patients would burn. No one would know that for ten years Saul Lesnick, Communist, psychiatrist, had played both ends against the middle–and had won his holding action.