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Mayor Bowron’s barber shaped Danny’s outgrown crew cut into a modified pompadour that changed the whole set of his face. Before, he looked like what he was: a dark-haired, dark-eyed Anglo-Saxon, a policeman who wore suits or sports jacket/slacks combos everywhere. Now he looked slightly Bohemian, slightly Latin, more of a dude. The new hairstyle offset his clothes rakishly; any cop who didn’t know him and spotted the gun bulge under his left armpit would shake him down on the spot, figuring him for some kind of outlaw muscle. The look and his banter improvisations made him feel cocky, like the Chateau Marmont was a fluke that nailing Claire De Haven would disprove once and for all. Danny drove back to Hollywood Station to prepare for his second pass at the Marmont and his first shot at Felix Gordean.
He went straight to the squadroom. Mickey Cohen was vilified on the walls: cartoons of him stuffing cash in Sheriff Biscailuz’ pockets, cracking a whip at a team of sled dogs in LASD uniforms, poking innocent citizens in the ass with a switchblade sticking out of his prayer cap. Danny fielded an assortment of fisheyes, found the records alcove and hit the sex offender files–shaking hands with the beast–fuel for his Gordean interrogation.
There were six cabinets full of them: musty folders stuffed with occurrence reports, mugshots clipped to the first inner page. The filing was not aiphabetical, and there was no logic to the penal code placements–homosexual occurrences were lumped with straight exhibitionism and child molestation; misdemeanants and felons brushed against each other. Danny scanned the first two files in the top cabinet and snapped why the system was so sloppy: the men on the squad wanted this wretched data out of sight and out of mind. Knowing he had to look, he dug in.
Most of the stuff was homo.
The Broadway Department Store on Hollywood and Vine had a fourth-floor men’s room known as “Cocksucker’s Paradise.” Enterprising deviants had bored holes through the walls of the toilet stalls, enabling the occupants of adjoining shitters to get together for oral copulation. If you parked on a Griffith Park roadway with a blue handkerchief tied to your radio aerial, you were a queer. The corner of Selma and Las Palmas was where ex-cons with a penchant for anal rape and young boys congregated. The Latin inscription on the Pall Mall cigarette pack–”In Hoc Signo Vinces”–translated as “With this sign we shall conquer”–was a tentative means of homo identification–a sure thing when coupled with wearing a green shirt on a Thursday. The muscular Mex transvestite who blew sailors behind Grauman’s Chinese was known as “Donkey Dan” or “Donkey Danielle” because he/she possessed a thirteen-inch dick. The E-Z Cab Company was run by homos, and they would deliver you a boy, queer smut films, extra KY Jelly, bennies, or your favorite liquor twenty-four hours a day.
Danny kept reading, weak in the knees and stomach, learning. When he saw a 1900–1910 birthdate or 6’ and up on a male Caucasian’s yellow sheet, he checked the mugstrip; every man he locked eyes with looked too ugly and pathetic to be his man–and prowling the ensuing arrest reports for blood types always proved him right. Thomas (NMI) Milnes, 6’2”, 11/4/07, exposed himself to little boys and begged the arresting officers to rubberhose him for it; Cletus Wardell Hanson, 6’1”, 4/29/04, carried a power drill with him to pave the way for new blow job territory, restaurant men’s rooms his speciality. In stir, he put his ass on the line: day room gang bangs, a pack of cigarettes per man. Willis (NMI) Burdette, 6’5”, 12/1/1900, was a syphilitic street whore, beaten brainless by a half dozen johns he’d passed the disease to. Darryl “Lavender Blue” Wishnick, 6’, 3/10/03, orchestrated orgies in the hills surrounding the Hollywood Sign and liked to pork pretty boys dressed in the attire of the United States armed forces.
Four hours in, four cabinets down. Danny felt his stomach settling around hunger pangs and the desire for a drink he usually got in the mid-afternoon. That was comforting; so was the new hairstyle he kept running his fingers through, and the new embellishments on his new identity that he’d mention to Considine tonight: nothing at his apartment should seem settled–he was just in from New York; he should leave his piece, cuffs and ID buzzer at home when he played Commie. Everything in the first four drawers was wrong for his man, not applicable to his bad moments outside Felix Gordean’s window. Then he hit cabinet five.