A call to an old pal working the LAPD Metropolitan Squad and one to an ex-DA’s man now with the State Attorney General’s office supplied Mal with the true story on Saul Lesnick, MD, PhD. The old man was, and remained, a CP card carrier; he had been a Fed snitch since ‘39–when he was approached by two LA office agents, who made him a deal: provide confidential psychiatric dirt to various committees and police agencies, and his daughter would be sprung from her five-to-ten-year sentence for hit and run drunk driving–one year down, four more to go minimum– the girl then currently hardtiming in Tehachapi. Lesnick agreed; his daughter was released and placed on indeterminate Federal parole–which would be revoked if the good doctor ever broke his cover or otherwise refused to cooperate. Lesnick, given six months tops in his fight with lung cancer, had secured a promise from a high-ranking Justice Department official: upon his death, all the confidential files he had loaned out would be destroyed; his daughter’s vehicular manslaughter conviction and parole records would be expunged and all Fed/Municipal/State grand jury notations currently on official paper vis-à-vis Lesnick and his breaches of confidentiality with subversive patients would burn. No one would know that for ten years Saul Lesnick, Communist, psychiatrist, had played both ends against the middle–and had won his holding action.
Mal segued, new colleagues to old business, thinking that the lunger got what he paid for in spades, that his dance with the Feds was good value: a daughter spared broomstick rape and pernicious anemia from Tehachapi’s famous all-starch cuisine in exchange for the rest of his life–shortened by suicide via French tobacco. And he’d have done the same thing for Stefan–he wouldn’t have thought twice.
Paperwork was arrayed neatly across his desk; Mal, stealing glances at the huge grand jury pile, got to it. He wrote memos to Ellis Loew suggesting investigators to dig for backup evidence; he typed routing slips: case files to the green young Deputy DAs who would be prosecuting now that Loew was engaged full-time in battling Communism. A Chinatown hooker killing went to a kid six months out of the worst law school in California; the perpetrator, a pimp known for his love of inflicting pain with a metal-studded dildo, would probably walk on the charge. Two shine snuffs were routed to a youth still short of his twenty-fifth birthday–smart, but naive. This perp, a Purple Cobra warlord, had fired into a crowd of kids outside Manual Arts High School on the off-chance that there might be members of the Purple Scorpions in it. There weren’t; an honor student and her boyfriend went down dead. Mal gave the kid a fifty-fifty chance for a conviction–Negroes killing Negroes bored white juries and they often dropped their verdicts on whim.
The armed robbery/ADW at Minnie Roberts’ Casbah went to a Loew protégé; writing evidence summaries on the three cases took four hours and gave Mal finger cramps. Finishing, he checked his watch and saw that it was 3:10–Stefan would be home from school. If he was lucky, Celeste would be visiting her crony down the street, bullshitting in Czech, gabbing about the old country before the war. Mal grabbed his stack of psychiatric dirt and drove home, resisting a kid’s urge: to stop at an army-navy store and buy himself a pair of silver captain’s bars.
Home was in the Wilshire District: a big white two-story that devoured his savings and most of his salary. It was the house that was too good for Laura–a kid marriage based on rutting didn’t warrant the tariff. He’d bought it when he returned from Europe in ‘46, knowing that Laura was out and Celeste was in, sensing that he loved the boy more than he could ever love the woman–that the marriage was for Stefan’s safety. There was a park with basketball hoops and a baseball diamond nearby; the neighborhood’s crime rate was near zero and the local schools had the highest academic standing in the state. It was his happy ending to Stefan’s nightmare.
Mal parked in the driveway and walked across the lawn– Stefan’s lackluster mowing job, Stefan’s softball and bat weighing down the hedge that he’d neglected to trim. Going in the door, he heard voices: the two-language fight he’d refereed a thousand times before. Celeste was running down verb conjugations in Czech, sitting on the divan in her sewing room, gesturing to Stefan, her captive in a straight-backed chair. The boy was fiddling with objects on an end table–thimbles and thread spools–arranging them by progression of color, so smart that he had to keep occupied even while on the receiving end of a lecture. Mal stood aside from the doorway and watched, loving Stefan for his defiance; glad that he was dark and pudgy like his real father was supposed to be–not lean and sandy-haired like Celeste– even though Mal was blond, and it clued people in that they weren’t blood relations.