Duarte shook his cuff chain; Danny said, “Two to five minimum, and I don’t give a shit about the UAES.” A crowd was forming in the alley; Danny waved them back; they retreated with sidelong looks and slow head shakes. Duarte said, “Take these things off me and maybe I’ll talk to you.”
Danny unlocked the cuffs. Duarte rubbed his wrist, stood up, got rubber-legged and slid down to a sitting position, his back against the fence. He said, “Why’s a hired gun for the studios give a damn about my dead fag cousin?”
Danny said, “Get up, Duarte.”
“I talk better on my ass. Answer me. How come you care about a maricón who wanted to be a puto movie star like every other puto in this puto town?”
“I don’t know. But I want the guy who killed Augie nailed.”
“And what’s that got to do with you trying to get next to Claire De Haven?”
“I told you I don’t care about that.”
“Norm Kostenz said you sure care. When I told him you were the fucking law, he said you should get a fucking Oscar for your bonaroo portrayal of Ted Krug–”
Danny squatted by Duarte, holding the fence. “Are you going to spill or not?”
Duarte said, “I’ll spill, pendejo. You said you thought Augie’s snuff went back to Sleepy Lagoon, and that got my interest. Charlie Hartshorn thought that too, so–”
Danny’s hand shook the fence; he braced his whole body into it to stay steady. “What did you say?”
“I said Charlie Hartshorn thought the same thing maybe, so maybe talking to a puto cop ain’t all poison.”
Danny slid down the fence so he could eyeball Duarte close. “Tell me all of it, slow and easy. You know Hartshorn killed himself, don’t you?”
Duarte said, “Maybe he did. You tell me.”
“No. You tell me, because I don’t know and I’ve got to know.”
Duarte stared at Danny, squinty-eyed, like he couldn’t figure him out. “Charlie was a lawyer. He was a maricón, but he wasn’t a swish or nothing. He worked Sleepy Lagoon, filing briefs and shit for free.”
“I know that.”
“Okay, here’s what you don’t know, and here’s the kind of guy he was. When you saw me at the morgue it was my second time there. I got a call from a buddy who works there, maybe one in the morning, and he told me about Augie–the zoot cuts, all of it. I went to Charlie’s house. He had legal juice, and I wanted to see if he’d goose the cops so they’d give Augie’s snuff a good investigation. He told me he’d been goosed by some cop about the death of a guy named Duane Lindenaur, even though the cop pretended he didn’t care about that. Charlie read this scandal rag that said Lindenaur and some clown named Wiltsie got cut up by a zoot stick, and my morgue buddy said Augie got chopped like that, too. I told Charlie, and he got the idea all three snuffs went back to Sleepy Lagoon. He called the cops and spoke to some guy named Sergeant Bruner or something–”
Danny cut in. “Breuning? Sergeant Mike Breuning?”
“Yeah, that’s him. Charlie told Breuning what I just told you and Breuning said he’d come to see him at his crib right away to talk to him about it. I took off then. So if Charlie thought there was something to this Sleepy Lagoon theory, maybe you ain’t such a cabrón.”
Danny’s brain stoked on overdrive:
Breuning’s curiosity on the zoot stick queries, his making light of them. His strange reaction to the four surveillance names– Augie Duarte singled out–because he was Mex, a KA of a Sleepy Lagoon Committee member? Mal telling him that Dudley Smith asked to join the grand jury team, even though, as an LAPD Homicide lieutenant, there was no logical reason for him to work the job. Mal’s story: Dudley brutally interrogating Duarte/Sammy Benavides/Mondo Lopez, stressing the Sleepy Lagoon case and the guilt of the seventeen youths originally charged with the crime–even though the questioning tack was not germane to UAES.
Hartshorn mentioning “zoot stick” on the phone to Breuning.