Benavides and Duarte had their backs to the wall and were sliding away from the scene an inch at a time. Mal stood frozen; Lopez glared at Dudley; Dudley laughed. “Perhaps that was unfair of me, lad. We all know Claire spread her favors thin, but I doubt she would have stooped to your level. Your SLDC
friend Chaz Minear, now that’s another story. Was he there for the prime Mex butthole?”
Benavides moved toward Dudley; Mal snapped out of his freeze, grabbed him and pushed him into the wall, seeing razor blades held to a little girl’s throat. Benavides shouted, “That puto bought boys at a puto escort service, he didn’t do us!” Mal pressed harder, sweat-saturated suit against soaked buckskins, hard muscles straining at the body of a thin man almost forty.
Benavides suddenly went slack; Mal took his hands off him and got a file flash: Sammy railing against queers to Doc Lesnick, a weak point they could have played smart.
Sammy Benavides slid down the wall and watched the Smith-Lopez eyeball duel. Mal tried to make his hands give signals, but couldn’t. Juan Duarte was standing by the walkway, scoping the business long-distance. Dudley broke the standoff with a pivot and a lilting brogue aside. “I hope you learned a lesson today, Captain. You can’t play sob sister with scum. You should have joined me on the Hat Squad. You would have learned then in grand fashion.”
o
o
o
Round one blown to hell.
Mal drove home, thinking of captain’s bars snatched away from him, smothered in Dudley Smith’s huge fists. And he had been partly at fault, going too easy when the Mexicans came on too smart, thinking he could reason with them, wheedle and draw them into logical traps. He’d thought of submitting a memo to Ellis Loew–lay off Sleepy Lagoon, it’s too sympathetic–then he tossed it into the pot for empathy, hit a nerve with the Mexes and upset Dudley’s bee in the bonnet on the case. And Dudley had stood up for him before he himself did, which made it hard to fault him for losing his temper; which meant that maybe direct UAES approaches were dead and they should concentrate solely on decoy infiltration and sub-rosa interrogations. His specialty–which didn’t lessen the sting of Dudley’s Hat Squad crack, and which increased the need for Buzz Meeks to join the grand jury team.
All debits, but on the plus side Dudley’s ranting didn’t put out information restricted to Lesnick’s files, leaving that avenue of manipulation still open. What was troubling was a cop as smart as the Irishman taking a nondirect attack so personally, then hitting his “brother officer” below the belt.
Pendejo.
Scared.
And Dudley Smith knows it.
At home, Mal took advantage of the empty house, dumping his sweaty clothes, showering, changing to a sport shirt and khakis and settling into the den to write a long memo to Loew–heavily stressing that there should be no Side 54
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The further direct questioning of UAES members until their decoy was planted–a decoy now being a necessity. He was a page in when he realized that it had to be partly a gloss job–there was no way to accurately describe what happened at Variety International without portraying himself as a weakling or a fool. So he did gloss it, and filled up another page with warnings on the Loew choice for troubleshooter–Buzz Meeks–the man who held the possible distinction of being the single most crooked cop in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department–heroin skimmer, shakedown artist, bagman and now a glorified pimp for Howard Hughes. After that page, he knew it was futile; if Meeks wanted in he _was_ in– Hughes was the heaviest contributor to the grand jury bankroll and Meeks’ bossman–what he said would go. After two pages he knew why the tack wasn’t worth pursuing: Meeks was absolutely the best man for the job. And the best man for the job was afraid of him, just like he was afraid of Dudley Smith.
Even though there was no reason for the fear.
Mal threw the Meeks memo in the wastebasket and started thinking decoy.