I got involved in the investigation on a fluke.
After the fifth job, the gang stopped cold. A stoolie of mine told me that Mickey Cohen found out that the white muscle was an ex-enforcer of his and had him snuffed. Rumor had it that the colored guy–a cowboy known only as Wild Wallace–was looking for a new partner and a new territory. I passed the information along to the dicks and thought nothing more of it. Then, a week later, it all hit the fan.
As a reward for my tip, I got a choice moonlight assignment: bodyguarding a high-stakes poker game frequented by L.A.P.D. brass and navy bigwigs up from San Diego. The game was held in the back room at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah, the swankiest policesanctioned whorehouse on the south side. All I had to do was look big, mean, and servile and be willing to share boxing anecdotes. It was a major step toward sergeant’s stripes and a transfer to the Detective Division.
It went well–all smiles and backslaps and recountings of my split-decision loss to Jimmy Bivins–until a negro guy in a chauffeur’s outfit and an olive-skinned youth in a navy officer’s uniform walked in the door. I saw a gun bulge under the chauffeur’s left arm, and chandelier light fluttering over the navy man’s face revealed pale negro skin and processed hair.
_And I knew_.
I walked up to Wallace Simpkins, my right hand extended. When he grasped it, I sent a knee into his balls and a hard left hook at his neck. When he hit the floor, I pinned him there with a foot on his gun bulge, drew my own piece, and leveled it at his partner. “Bon voyage, Admiral,” I said.
The admiral was named William Boyle, an apprentice armed robber from a black bourgeois family fallen on hard times. He turned state’s evidence on Wild Wallace, drew a reduced threeto-five jolt at Chino as part of the deal, and was paroled to the war effort early in ’42. Simpkins was convicted of five counts of robbery one with aggravated assault, got five-to-life at Big Q, and voodoo-hexed Billy Boyle and me at his trial, vowing on the soul of Baron Samedi to kill both of us, chop us into stew meat, and feed it to his dog. I more than half believed his vow, and for the first few years he was away, every time I got an unexplainable ache or pain I thought of him in his cell, sticking pins into a bluesuited Lee Blanchard voodoo doll.
I checked the robbery report lying on the seat beside me. The addresses of the four new black-white stickups covered 26th and Gramercy to La Brea and Adams. Hitting the racial demarcation line, I watched the topography change from negligent middleclass white to proud colored. East of St. Andrews, the houses were unkempt, with peeling paint and ratty front lawns. On the west the homes took on an air of elegance: small dwellings were encircled by stone fencing and well-tended greenery; the mansions that had earned West Adams the sobriquet High Darktown put Beverly Hills pads to shame–they were older, larger, and less architecturally pretentious, as if the owners knew that the only way to be rich and black was to downplay the performance with the quiet noblesse oblige of old white money.
I knew High Darktown only from the scores of conflicting legends about it. When I worked University Division, it was never on my beat. It was the lowest per capita crime area in L.A. The University brass followed an implicit edict of letting rich black police rich black, as if they figured blue suits couldn’t speak the language there at all. And the High Darktown citizens did a good job. Burglars foolish enough to trek across giant front lawns and punch in Tiffany windows were dispatched by volleys from thousand-dollar skeet guns held by negro financiers with an aristocratic panache to rival that of anyone white and big-moneyed. High Darktown did a damn good job of being inviolate.
But the legends were something else, and when I worked University, I wondered if they had been started and repeatedly embellished only because square-john white cops couldn’t take the fact that there were “niggers,” “shines,” “spooks,” and “jigs” who were capable of buying their low-rent lives outright. The stories ran from the relatively prosaic: negro boot-leggers with mob connections taking their loot and buying liquor stores in Watts and wetback-staffed garment mills in San Pedro, to exotic: the same thugs flooding low darktowns with cut-rate heroin and pimping out their most beautiful high-yellow sweethearts to L.A.’s powers-that-be in order to circumvent licensing and real estate statutes enforcing racial exclusivity. There was only one common denominator to all the legends: it was agreed that although High Darktown money started out dirty, it was now squeaky clean and snow white.