Upshaw whispered in Scoppettone’s ear; Vinnie drooled an answer. Mal stood on his tiptoes for a better shot at the speaker and heard only static. Dudley lit a cigarette and smiled; Upshaw hit a button under the table. Two uniformed deputies and a woman holding a steno pad double-timed down the corridor. They opened the interrogation room door and swooped on their live one; Danny Upshaw walked out and said, “Oh shit.”
Mal studied the reaction. “Good work, Deputy. You were damn good.”
Upshaw looked at him, then Dudley. “You’re City, right?”
Mal said, “Right, DA’s Bureau. My name’s Considine, this is Lieutenant Smith.”
“And it’s about?”
Dudley said, “Lad, we were going to reprimand you for rattling Mr. Herman Gerstein’s cage, but that’s water under the bridge now. Now we’re going to offer you a job.”
“What?”
Mal took Upshaw’s arm and steered him a few feet away. “It’s a decoy plant for a grand jury investigation into Communist activity in the movie studios. A very well-placed DA is running the show, and he’ll be able to square a temporary transfer with Captain Dietrich. The job is a career maker, and I think you should say yes.”
“No.”
“You can transfer to the Bureau clean after the investigation. You’ll be a lieutenant before you’re thirty.”
“No. I don’t want it.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to supervise the triple homicide case I’m working–for the County and the City.”
Mal thought of Ellis Loew balking, other City hotshots he could grease for the favor. “I think I can manage it.”
Dudley came over, clapped Upshaw on the back and winked. “There’s a woman you’ll have to get next to, lad. You might have to fuck the pants off of her.”
Deputy Danny Upshaw said, “I welcome the opportunity.”
PART TWO
Upshaw, Considine, Meeks
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He was a cop again, bought and paid for, in with major leaguers playing for keeps. Howard’s bonus had him out of hock with Leotis Dineen, and if the grand jury succeeded in booting the UAES from the studios he’d be minor-league rich. He had a set of keys to Ellis Loew’s house and the use of the City clerks who’d be typing and filing there. He had a “target list” of Pinkos untouched by previous grand juries. And he had the big list: UAES top dogs to glom criminal dirt on, no direct approaches now that they were deep in subterfuge, with newspaper pieces planted that said their investigation was dead. An hour ago he’d had his secretary place query calls to his local Fed contact, City/County DMV/R&I and the criminal records bureaus of California, Nevada, Arizona and Oregon States, requesting arrest report information on Claire De Haven, Morton Ziffkin, Chaz Minear, Reynolds Loftis and three unholy-sounding pachucos: Mondo Lopez, Sammy Benavides and Juan Duarte, asterisks after their names denoting them “known youth gang members.” The gang squad boss at Hollenbeck Station had been his only call back; he said that the three were bad apples– members of a zooter mob in the early ‘40s before they cleaned up and “got political.” East LA would be his first stop–once his secretary logged in the rest of her responses to his call-outs.
Buzz looked around his office for something to kill time with, saw the morning Mirror on the doormat and picked it up. He flipped through to the editorial page and got bingo! under Victor Reisel’s by-line, less than twenty-four hours after cuckold Mal told Loew his plan.
The title was “Reds 1–City of Los Angeles 0. 3 Outs, No Witnesses on Base.” Buzz read:
It all came down to money–the great equalizer and common denominator. A grand jury was in the works, an important grand jury that would have been as farreaching as the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Once again, Communist encroachment in the motion picture industry was to be delved into–this time within the context of labor trouble in the City of the Angels.
The United Alliance of Extras and Stagehands is currently under contract with a number of Hollywood studios. The union is rife with Communists and fellow travelers. The UAES is making exorbitant contract renegotiation demands, and a Teamster local which would like the opportunity to reach an amicable accord with the studios and step in to work UAES’s job for reasonable wages and benefits is picketing against them. Money. The UAES implicitly advocates the end of the capitalist system and wants more of it. The nonideologically involved Teamsters want to prove their on-the-job mettle by working for wages that anticapitalists spurn. Hollywood, show biz: it’s a crazy world.