Danny took PCH back to LA, all the windows down so he could keep his jacket on and buttoned full. Per Considine’s orders, he parked three blocks from Hollywood Station and walked the rest of the way, heading into the muster room dead on time for the noon meeting he’d called.
His men were already there, sitting in the first row of chairs, Mike Breuning and Jack Shortell gabbing and smoking. Gene Niles was four seats over, picking at a pile of papers on his lap. Danny grabbed a chair and sat down facing them.
Shortell said, “You still look like a cop.” Breuning nodded agreement. “Yeah, but the Commies won’t get it. If they were so smart they wouldn’t be Commies, right?”
Danny laughed; Niles said, “Let’s get this over with, huh, Upshaw? I’ve got lots of work to do.”
Danny got out pad and pen. “So do I. Sergeant Shortell, you first.”
Shortell said, “Cut and dried. I’ve called ninety-one dental labs, run the descriptions by the people in charge and got a total of sixteen hinkers: strange-o’s, guys with yellow sheets. I eliminated nine of them by blood type, four are currently in jail and the other three I talked to myself. No sparks, plus the guys had alibis for the times of death. I’ll keep going, and I’ll call you if anything bites me.”
Danny said, “Just make sure it’s a denture bite,” and turned to Breuning. “Mike, what have you and Sergeant Niles got?”
Breuning consulted a big spiral notebook. “What we’ve got is the old goose egg. On the biting MO, we checked LAPD, County and the muni files. We got a shine queer who bit his boyfriend’s dick off, a fat blond guy with a kiddie raper jacket who bites little girls and two guys who match our description–both in Atascadero for aggravated assault. On the queer bar scuttlebutt, zero. Biters do not hang out at homo cocktail lounges and say, ‘I bite. Want some?’ The fruit detail cops I talked to laughed me out on that one. On the Vice and sex offender file eliminations, nothing. Burglary, ditto. I cross-checked them, nothing duplicated. Nothing on a kid with burn scars. There were six middle-aged gray-haired possibles–all either in custody on the nights of the killings or alibied–squarejohn witnesses. On the recanvassing–nada–it’s too old now. Niggertown, Griffith Park, the area where Goines was dumped, nothing. Nobody saw anything, nobody gives a shit. On checking with snitches, forget it. This guy is a loner, I’d bet my pension he does not associate with criminal riffraff. I personally leaned on the only three possibles I got from State and County Parole–two queers and a real sweetheart–this tall, gray preacher type who cornholed three Marines back during the war, used to lube his prong with toothpaste. All three were in for curfew at the Midnight Mission–alibied by no less than Sister Mary Eckert herself.”
Breuning stopped, out of breath, and lit a cigarette. He said, “Gene and I muscled every southside H man we could find, which wasn’t many–it’s dry all over. Rumor has it that Jack D. and/or Mickey C. are getting ready to move a load of cut-rate. Nothing. We leaned on the jazz musician angle, nothing with our man’s description. Ditto on goofballs. Nothing. And we leaned hard.”
Niles chuckled; Danny looked at his own absent doodling: a page of concentric zeros. “Mike, what about the zoot stick angle?–the assault files and snitch calls?”
Breuning eyes narrowed. “Another goose. And that’s old Mex stuff, pretty far afield. I know Doc Layman tagged the back wounds as zoot stick, but don’t you think he could be wrong? As far as I’m concerned, it just doesn’t play.”
A Dudley Smith stooge patronizing Norton Layman, MD, PhD. Danny reached for some frost. “No. Layman’s the best, and he’s right.”
“Then I don’t think it’s a real lead. I think our guy just read about the damn sticks or eyeballed one of the zoot riots and got a kick out of them. He’s a fucking psycho, there’s no reason to those guys.”
Something about Breuning’s take on the sticks was off; Danny shrugged to cover the thought. “I think you’re wrong. I think the zoot sticks are essential to the way the killer thinks. My instincts tell me he’s revenging old wrongs, and the specific mutilations are a big part of it. So I want you and Niles to comb the station files in Mex neighborhoods and check old occurrence reports– ‘42, ‘43, around in there, the zoot riots, Sleepy Lagoon–back when the Mexes were taking heat.”