Minear came off as weak, the nance of the two, the clinging vine. Mal read through accounts of Chaz and Eisler scripting Eastern Front and Storm Over Leningrad together circa 1942– 1943, Eisler pissed at Minear’s sloppy work habits, pissed at his mooning over Loftis, pissed at himself for despising his friends’ homosexuality–tolerable in Reynolds because at least he wasn’t a swish. You could see Minear’s impotent rage building back in the Sleepy Lagoon days–his crying on Eisler’s shoulder over some fling Loftis was having–”My God, Nate, he’s just a boy, and he’s been disfigured”–then refusing to go any further on the topic. Hindsight: in ‘47, Chaz Minear hit back at his faithless lover–the snitch to HUAC that got Reynolds Loftis blacklisted. Mal made a mental note: if Danny Upshaw couldn’t infiltrate the UAES braintrust, then Chaz Minear, homosexual weak sister, might be ripe for overt bracing–exposure of his snitch duty the lever to get him to snitch again.
The rest of the diary was a bore: meetings, committees, gatherings and names for Buzz Meeks to check out along with the names Dudley coerced from Lenny Rolff. Mal killed it off while his steak got cold and his salad wilted in the bowl; he realized that he liked Nathan Eisler. And that with the journal checked out and dinner attempted, he had no place to go except back to the Shangri-Lodge Motel and nothing he wanted to do except talk to Stefan–a direct violation of Jake Kellerman’s orders. All the motel had to offer was women’s names scrawled on the bathroom door, and if he called Stefan he’d probably get Celeste, their first amenities since he reworked her face. Restless, he paid the check, drove up into the Pasadena foothills and parked in the middle of a totally dark box canyon: “Cordite Alley,” the spot where his generation of LAPD rookies got fried on kickback booze, shot the shit and target practiced, tall clumps of sagebrush to simulate bad guys.
The ground held a thick layer of spent shells; dousing his headbeams, Mal saw that the other cop generations had blasted the sagebrushes to smithereens and had gone to work on the scrub pines: the trees were stripped of bark and covered with entry holes. He got out of the car, drew his service revolver and squeezed off six rounds into the darkness; the echo hurt his ears and the cordite stink smelled good. He reloaded and emptied the .38 again; over the hill in South Pasadena skid other guns went off, like a chain of dogs barking at the moon. Mal reloaded, fired, reloaded and fired until his box of Remingtons was empty; he heard cheers, howls, shrieks and then nothing.
The canyon rustled with a warm wind. Mal leaned against the car and thought about Ad Vice, operations, turning down the Hat Squad, where you went in the door gun first and cops like Dudley Smith respected you. In Ad Vice he busted a string of Chinatown whorehouses deemed inoperable–sending in fresh-scrubbed recruits for blow jobs, followed five minutes later by door-kicking harness bulls and lab techs with cameras. The girls were all straight off the boat and living at home with mama-san and papa-san, who thought they were working double shifts at the Shun-Wong Shirt Factory; he had a cordon of muscle cops accompany him to the storefront office of Uncle Ace Kwan, LA’s number-one boss chink pimp. He informed Uncle Ace that unless he took his whores over the line to the County, he would show the pictures to the papa-sans–many of them Tong-connected–and inform them that Kwan-san was getting fat off daughter-san’s diet of Caucasian dick. Uncle Ace bowed, said, yes, complied and always sent him a candied duck and thoughtful card at Christmastime, and he always thought about passing the greeting on to his brother–while he was still on speaking terms with him.
Him.
Desmond.
Big Des.
Desmond Confrey Considine, who coerced him into dark houses and made him a cop, an operator.
Three years older. Three inches taller. An athlete, good at faking piety to impress the Reverend. The Reverend caught him boosting a pack of gum at the local Pig and Whistle and flayed his ass so bad that Big Des popped a bunch of tendons trying to get free of his bonds and was sidelined for the rest of the football season, a first-string linebacker with a third-string brain and a first-class case of kleptomania that he was now terrified to run with: no legs and no balls, courtesy of Liam Considine, first-string Calvinist.