Mal felt his overview sink in as solid: good evidence, good thoughts on what to use, what to hold back. He killed his coffee and went to the individuals–the half dozen of the twenty-two most ripe for interrogation and operation.
Side 43
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The His first was a maybe. Morton Ziffkin: UAES member, CP member, member of eleven other organizations classified as Commie fronts. Family man–a wife and two grown daughters. A highly paid screenwriter–100 thou a year until he told HUAC to fuck off–now working for peanuts as a film splicer. Underwent analysis with Doc Lesnick out of a stated desire to “explore Freudian thought” and allay his impulses to cheat on his wife with an onslaught of CP women “out for my gelt–not my body.” A rabid, bad-tempered Marxist ideologue–a good man to bait on the witness stand–but he’d probably never snitch on his fellow Pinks. He sounded intelligent enough to make Ellis Loew seem like a fool, and his HUAC
stint gave him an air of martyrdom. A maybe.
Mondo Lopez, Juan Duarte and Sammy Benavides, former Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee bigshots, recruited out of the Sinarquistas–a zoot suit gang given to sporting Nazi regalia–by CP bosses. Now token ethnics in the UAES
hierarchy, the three spent the ’40s throwing it to condescending white lefty women– enraged over their airs, but grateful for the action; more enraged at being told by their “puto” cell leader to “explore” that rage by seeing a psychiatrist. Benavides, Duarte and Lopez were currently working at Variety International Pictures, half the time as stagehands, half the time playing Indians in cheapy cowboy pictures. They were also serving as picket bosses on Gower Gulch–the closest thing the UAES had to muscle–pitiful when compared to the Mickey Cohen goons the Teamsters were employing. Mal pegged them as pussy hounds who fell into clover, the Sleepy Lagoon job their only real political concern. The three probably had criminal records and connections stemming from their zoot suit days, a good approach for the team’s troubleshooter–if Ellis Loew ever found one.
Now the brain trust got ugly.
Reynolds Loftis, movie character actor, snitched to HUAC by his former homo lover Chaz Minear, a Hollywood script hack. Loftis did not suspect that Minear ratted him, and in no way reciprocated the finking. Both men were still with the UAES, still friendly at their meetings and at other political functions they attended. Minear, guilt-crazed over his fink duty, had said to Doc Lesnick:
“If you knew who he left me for, you’d understand why I did it.” Mal had scanned both Loftis’ and Minear’s files for more mention of “he” and came up empty; there was a large gap in Lesnick’s Loftis transcripts–from the years ’42 to
’44–and Minear’s pages bore no other mention of the third edge of the triangle.
Mal recalled Loftis from westerns he’d taken Stefan to: a tall, lanky, silver-haired man, handsome like your idealized U.S. senator. And a Communist, and a subversive, and a hostile HUAC witness and self-described switch-hitter. A potential friendly witness par excellence–next to Chaz Minear, the Red with the most closeted skeletons.
And finally the Red Queen.
Claire De Haven did not possess a file, and several of the men had described her as too smart, strong and good to need a psychiatrist. She also screwed half her CP cell and all the SLDC bigwigs, including Benavides, Lopez and Duarte, who worshiped her. Chaz Minear was in her thrall, despite his homosexuality; Reynolds Loftis spoke of her as the “only woman I’ve ever really loved.” Mal picked up on her smarts secondhand: Claire moved behind the scenes, tended not to shout slogans and retained the Political and legal connections of her late father, a stolid rightwing counsel to the LA business establishment.
Minear speculated to Doc Lesnick that her old man’s political juice kept her from being subpoenaed by HUAC in ’47–and not one other witness mentioned her name. Claire De Haven screwed like a rabbit, but didn’t come off as a slut; she inspired the loyalty of homosexual screenwriters, switch-hitter actors, Mexican stagehands and Commies of all stripes.
Mal turned off his light, reminding himself to write Doc Lesnick a memo: all the files ended in the summer of ’49–five months ago. Why? Walking out to the elevator, he wondered what Claire De Haven looked like, where he could get a picture, if he could get his decoy to operate her out of her lust–politics and sex to nail the woman as a friendly witness, the Red Queen squeezed like a Chinatown whore, captain’s bars dancing his way at the end of a stag movie.