Mal thought of Benavides as a kiddie raper talking decency; he could feel Dudley thinking the same thing, going crazy with it. “Look, I know corruption. The HUAC chairman is in Danbury for bribery, HUAC itself was reckless. And I’ll admit the LAPD screwed up on the Sleepy Lagoon thing. But you can’t tell–”
Mondo Lopez shouted, “Screwed up! Pendejo, it was a fucking pogrom against my people by your people! You’re sweet-talking the wrong people on the wrong case to get the wrong fuck–”
Dudley stepped in front of the three, his suitcoat open, .45 automatic, sap and brass knuckles in plain view. His bulk cast the Mexicans in one big shadow and his brogue went up octaves, but didn’t crack. “Your seventeen filthy compatriots murdered José Diaz in cold blood and beat the gas chamber because traitors and perverts and deluded weaklings banded up to save them. And I will brook no disrespect for a brother officer in my presence. Do you understand?”
Complete silence, the UAES men still in Dudley’s shadow, stagehands eyeballing the action from the walkway. Mal stepped up to speak for himself, taller than Dudley but half his breadth. Scared. Pendejo. He got ready to give signals, then Mondo Lopez hit back. “Those seventeen got fucked by the puto LAPD and the puto City court system. And that ees la fucking verdad.”
Dudley moved forward so that all there was between him and Lopez was the arc of a short kidney punch. Benavides backed away, shaking; Duarte mumbled that the SLDC got anonymous letters making a white guy for José Diaz, but nobody believed it; Benavides pulled him out of harm’s way. Mal grabbed Dudley’s arm; the big man flung him back and lowered his brogue to baritone range. “Did you enjoy perverting justice with the SLDC, Mondo? Did you enjoy the favors of Claire De Haven–filthy rich capitalista, tight with the City Council, a real love for that undersized spic cock?”
Benavides and Duarte had their backs to the wall and were sliding away from the scene an inch at a time. Mal stood frozen; Lopez glared at Dudley; Dudley laughed. “Perhaps that was unfair of me, lad. We all know Claire spread her favors thin, but I doubt she would have stooped to your level. Your SLDC friend Chaz Minear, now that’s another story. Was he there for the prime Mex butthole?”
Benavides moved toward Dudley; Mal snapped out of his freeze, grabbed him and pushed him into the wall, seeing razor blades held to a little girl’s throat. Benavides shouted, “That puto bought boys at a puto escort service, he didn’t do us!” Mal pressed harder, sweat-saturated suit against soaked buckskins, hard muscles straining at the body of a thin man almost forty. Benavides suddenly went slack; Mal took his hands off him and got a file flash: Sammy railing against queers to Doc Lesnick, a weak point they could have played smart.
Sammy Benavides slid down the wall and watched the Smith-Lopez eyeball duel. Mal tried to make his hands give signals, but couldn’t. Juan Duarte was standing by the walkway, scoping the business long-distance. Dudley broke the standoff with a pivot and a lilting brogue aside. “I hope you learned a lesson today, Captain. You can’t play sob sister with scum. You should have joined me on the Hat Squad. You would have learned then in grand fashion.”
o o o
Round one blown to hell.
Mal drove home, thinking of captain’s bars snatched away from him, smothered in Dudley Smith’s huge fists. And he had been partly at fault, going too easy when the Mexicans came on too smart, thinking he could reason with them, wheedle and draw them into logical traps. He’d thought of submitting a memo to Ellis Loew–lay off Sleepy Lagoon, it’s too sympathetic–then he tossed it into the pot for empathy, hit a nerve with the Mexes and upset Dudley’s bee in the bonnet on the case. And Dudley had stood up for him before he himself did, which made it hard to fault him for losing his temper; which meant that maybe direct UAES approaches were dead and they should concentrate solely on decoy infiltration and sub-rosa interrogations. His specialty–which didn’t lessen the sting of Dudley’s Hat Squad crack, and which increased the need for Buzz Meeks to join the grand jury team.