“That’s right.”
“And you want me and Lee to–”
I interrupted, seeing my Friday night go up in smoke. “This is Ventura County’s business. Not ours.”
Loew held up an extradition warrant and carbons of two bench summonses. “The kidnapping took place in Los Angeles, in my judicial district. I would very much like to prosecute Mr. Treadwell along with his brothers when they are apprehended. So I want you two to drive up to Ventura and return Mr. Treadwell to City Jail before the notoriously ill-mannered Ventura sheriffs beat him to death.”
I groaned; Davis Evans made an elaborate show of standing up and smoothing out the various tucks and folds of his outfit. “I’ll be a mother dog, but I was thinkin’ about retiring this afternoon.”
Winking at me, Loew said, “You won’t retire when you hear what the other two brothers escaped in.”
“Wooooo. Keep talkin’, boy.”
“A 1936 Auburn speedster. Two-tone, maroon and forest green. When they get captured, and you know they will, the car will go to City Impound until claimed or bid on. Davis, I expect to send those Okie shitheads to the gas chamber. It’s very hard to claim a vehicle from death row, and the duty officer at the impound is a close friend of mine. Still want to retire?”
Davis exclaimed, “Wooooooo!”, grabbed the warrants and hustled his two-thirty-five toward the door. I was right behind him–reluctantly–the junior partner all the way. With his hand on the knob, the senior man got in a parting shot: “What do you call a gal who’s got the syph, the clap, and the crabs? An incurable romantic! Wooooo! Mother dog!”
* * *
We took the Ridge Road north, Davis at the wheel of his showroom-fresh ’47 Buick ragtop, me staring out at the L.A. suburbs dwindling into scrub-covered hills, then farmland worked by Japs out of the relocation camps and transplanted Okies. The Okie sitting beside me never spoke when he drove; he stayed lost in a man-car reverie. I thought about our brief warrants partnership, how our differences made it work.
I was the prototypical athlete-cop the high brass loved, the exboxer one L.A. scribe labeled “the Southland’s good but not great white hope.” No one knew the “but not” better than me, and plain “good” meant flash rolls, steak, and nightlife until you were thirty, then permanently scrambled brains. The department was the one safe place where my fight juice could see me through to security–with muted glory along the way–and I went for it like Davis’s mother dog, cultivating all the right people, most notably boxing fanatic Ellis Loew.
Davis Evans was another opportunist, out for plain loot, out to shut down Norman, Oklahoma, fourteen siblings, family inbreeding, the proximity to oil money you could breathe but never quite touch. He took what he could and reveled in it, and he made up for being on the take by exercising the best set of cop faces I had ever seen–Mr. Courtly to those who deserved it, Mr. Grief to the bad ones, Mr. Civil to whoever was left over. That a man could be so self-seeking and lacking in mean-spiritedness astonished me, and I deferred to him on the job–senior man aside–because I knew my own selfishness ran twice as deep as his did. And I realized that the hard-nosed buffoon probably would retire soon, leaving me to break in a replacement cut out of my own cloth: young, edgy, eager for the glory the assignment offered. And that made me sad.
Warrants was plainclothes LAPD under the aegis of the Criminal Division, District Attorney’s Office. Two detectives to every Superior Court judiciary. We went after the bad guys the felony D.A.s were drooling to prosecute. If things were slow, there was money to be made serving summonses for the downtown shysters, and–Davis Evans’s raison d’étre–repossessions.
Davis lived, ate, drank, yearned, and breathed for beautiful cars. His Warrants cubicle was wallpapered with pictures of Duesenbergs and Pierce Arrows and Cords, Caddys, and Packards, and sleek foreign jobs. Since he stole all his clothes from arrestees, shook down hookers for free poon, ate on the cuff, and lived in the spare room of a county boarding house for recently paroled convicts, he had plenty of money to spend on them. The storage garage he rented held a ’39 Packard cabriolet, a Mercedes rumored to have once been driven by Hitler, a purple Lincoln convertible that Davis called his “Jig Rig,” and a sapphire blue Model T dubbed the “Li’l Shitpeeler.”