THE BIG NOWHERE by James Ellroy

Breuning stared at Danny; Niles groaned and muttered, “My instincts.” Danny said, “Sergeant, if you’ve got comments, address them to me.”

Niles cracked a grin. “Okay. One, I don’t like the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and their good buddy Mickey Kike, and I’ve got a County pal who says you’re not the goody two shoes you pretend to be. Two, I’ve been doing a little work on my own, and I talked to a couple of Quentin parolees who said no way was Marty Goines a queer–and I believe them. And three, I think you personally fucked me by not calling in Tamarind Street, and I don’t like that.”

No Bordoni. No Bordoni. No fucking Bordoni. Danny, calm. “I don’t care what you like or what you think. And who were the parolees?”

Two hard stares locked; Niles glancing down at his notebook. “Paul Arthur Koenig and Lester George Mazmanian. And four, I don’t like you.”

The bluff called. Danny looked at Niles, spoke to LASD Sergeant Shortell. “Jack, there’s a poster on the notice board that shits on our Department. Rip it up.”

Shortell’s voice, admiring. “My pleasure, skipper.”

o o o

Ted Krugman.

Ted Krugman.

Theodore Michael Krugman.

Teddy Krugman, Red Commie Pinko Subversive Stagehand.

Friends with Jukey Rosensweig of Young Actors Against Fascism and Bill Wilhite, a cell boss with the Brooklyn CP; ex-lover of Donna Patrice Cantrell, leftist firebrand at Columbia University circa ‘43, jumper suicide in ‘47–a dive off the George Washington Bridge when she got the news that her socialist father attempted suicide over his HUAC subpoena, turning himself into a permanent vegetable via ingestion of a scouring powder cocktail that scoured his brain down to sub-idiot quality. Ex-member of AFL-CIO, North Shore Long Island CP, Garment Workers’ Defense Committee, Concerned Americans Against Bigotry, Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Fair Play for Paul Robeson League. Socialist summer camps as a kid, New York City College dropout, not drafted because of his subversive politics, liked to work as a theater grip because of all the politically enlightened people you met and pussy. Worked a long string of Broadway shows, plus a handful of B movies shot on location in Manhattan. Slogan shouter, brawler, hardcase. Loved to attend meetings and demonstrations, sign petitions and talk Commie rebop. Active in the New York leftist scene until ‘48–then nowhere.

Pictures.

Donna Patrice Cantrell was pretty but hard, a softer version of her dad the Ajax guzzler. Jukey Rosensweig was a big fat guy with bulging thyroid eyes and thick glasses; Bill Wilhite was white-bread handsome. His supporting cast of characters, caught in Fed surveillance snaps, were just faces attached to bodies wielding placards: names, dates and causes on the back, to shore him up with some more history.

Parked on Gower just north of Sunset, Danny ran through his script and photo kit. He had his co-stars’ faces down pat: the Teamster picket boss he was supposed to introduce himself to, the goons he’d be picketing and arguing with, the LAPD Academy muscleman he’d fight–and finally–if Considine’s scenario played to perfection–Norman Kostenz, UAES picket boss, the man who’d take him to Claire De Haven. Deep-breathing, he locked his gun, badge, cuffs and Daniel Thomas Upshaw ID in the glove compartment, sliding Theodore Michael Krugman license photostats into the sleeves in his wallet. Upshaw into Krugman completed; Danny walked over, ready to do it.

The scene was pandemonium divided into two snakelike strips of bodies: UAES, Teamsters, banners on sticks, shouts and catcalls, three feet of sidewalk separating the factions, a debrisfilled gutter and studio walls bracketing the lines down a quartermile-long city block. Newsmen standing by their cars on the opposite side of Gower; lunch trucks dispensing coffee and doughnuts; a bunch of oldster cops stuffing their faces, watching newshounds shoot craps on a piece of cardboard laid across the hood of an LAPD black-and-white. Duelling bullhorns bombarding the street with squelch noise and static-layered repetitions of “REDS OUT!” and “FAIR PAY NOW!”

Danny found the Teamster picket boss, picture pure; the man winked on the sly and handed him a pine slab with UAES–UN-AMERICAN ESCAPED SUBVERSIVES printed on reinforced cardboard at the top. He went through a rigmarole of laying down the law and making him fill out a time card; Danny saw the guy working the Teamster lunch truck eyeball the transaction–obviously the UAES plant man mentioned in Considine’s info package. The shouts got louder; the picket boss hustled Danny over to his marching buddies, Al and Jerry, picture perfect in their grubby work clothes. Tough-guy. salutations per the script: three hard boys who brook no horseshit getting down to business. Then him–Ted Krugman–starring in his own Hollywood epic, surrounded by extras, one line of good guys, one of bad guys, all of them moving, separate lines going in opposite directions.

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