“I used to steal cars, Lieut–Mal. I was the ace car thief of San Berdoo County right before the war. Turnabout?”
Lieutenant Mal Considine stuck out a long leg and hooked the wastebasket over to his chair. He rummaged in it, found his wedding band and slipped it on.
“I’ve got a confab with my lawyer for the custody case tomorrow, and I’m sure he’ll want me to keep wearing this fucking thing.”
Danny leaned forward. “Turnabout, Captain?”
Considine stood up and stretched. “My brother used to blackmail me, threaten to rat me to the old man every time I said something snotty about religion. Since ten strokes with a switch was the old man’s punishment for blasphemy, old Desmond pretty much got his way, which was usually me breaking Side 97
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The into houses to steal stuff he wanted. So let’s put it this way: I saw a lot of things that were pretty swell, and some things that were pretty spooky, and I liked it. So it was either become a burglar or a spy, and policeman seemed like a good compromise. And sending in the spies appealed to me more than doing it myself, sort of like Desmond in the catbird seat.”
Danny stood up. “I’m going to nail De Haven for you. Trust me on that.”
“I don’t doubt it, Ted.”
“In vino veritas, right?”
“Sure, and one more thing. I’ll be Chief of Police or something else that large before too long, and I’m taking you with me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mal woke up thinking of Danny Upshaw.
Rolling out of bed, he looked at the four walls of Room 11, the Shangri-Lodge Motel. One framed magazine cover per wall– Norman Rockwell testimonials to happy family life. A stack of his soiled suits by the door–and no Stefan to run them to the dry cleaners. The memo corkboard he’d erected, one query tag standing out: locate Doc Lesnick. The fink/shrink could not be reached either at home or at his office and the 1942–1944 gaps in Reynolds Loftis’ file had to be explained; he needed a general psych overview of the brain trusters now that their decoy was about to be in place, and all the files ended in the late summer of last year–why?
And the curtains were cheesecloth gauze; the rug was as threadbare as a tortilla; the bathroom door was scrawled over with names and phone numbers–“Sinful Cindy, DU-4927, 38-2438, loves to fuck and suck”–worth a jingle–if he ever ran Vice raids again. And Dudley Smith was due in twenty minutes–good guy/bad guy as today’s ticket: two Pinko screenwriters who avoided HUAC subpoenas because they always wrote under pseudonyms and blew the country when the shit hit the fan in ’47. They had been located by Ed Satterlee operatives–private eyes on the Red Crosscurrents payroll–and both men knew the UAES bigshots intimately back in the late ’30s, early ’40s.
And getting so chummy with an underling was strange. A couple of shared drinks and they were spilling their guts to each other–bad chain of command policy–ambitious policemen should keep it zipped while they climbed the ladder.
Mal showered, shaved and dressed, running book–De Haven versus Upshaw, even money as his best bet. At 8:30 exactly a car horn honked; he walked outside and saw Dudley leaning against his Ford. “Good morning, Malcolm! Isn’t it a grand day!”
o
o
o
They drove west on Wilshire, Mal silent, Dudley talking politics. “. . .
I’ve been juxtaposing the Communist way of life against ours, and I keep coming back to family as the backbone of American life. Do you believe that, Malcolm?”
Mal knew that Loew had filled him in on Celeste–and that as far as partners went, he could have worse–like Buzz Meeks. “It has its place.”
“I’d be a bit more emphatic on that, given the trouble you’re taking to get your son back. Is it going well with your lawyer?”
Mal thought of his afternoon appointment with Jake Kellerman. “He’s going to try to get me continuances until the grand jury is in session and making hay. I have the preliminary in a couple of days, and we’ll start putting the stall in then.”