Danny locked eyes with Jastrow. “Buddy’s the guy I used to want to get, the guy who used to be the worst, the hardest nut to crack because he was just plain nowhere. Now there’s this other thing, and it’s just plain terror. It’s incredibly brutal, and I think it might be random, but I don’t quite go with that. I think I’m dealing with revenge. I think all the killer’s methods are reenactments, all the mutilations are symbolic of him trying to get his past straight in his mind. I keep thinking it all out, and I keep coming back to revenge on old wrongs. Not everyday childhood trauma shit, but big, big stuff.”
Danny paused, drank and sighted in on the mugboard around Jastrow’s neck: Kern County Jail, 3/4/38. “Sometimes I think that if I know who this guy is and why he does it, then I’ll know something so big that I’ll be able to figure out all the everyday stuff like cake. I can get on with making rank and handling meat and potatoes stuff, because everything I ever sensed about what people are capable of came together on one job, and I nailed why. Why. Fucking why.”
Considine’s, “And why you do what you do yourself,” was very soft. Danny looked away from Jastrow and killed his drink. “Yeah, and that. And why you’re so hopped on Claire De Haven and me. And don’t say out of patriotism.”
Considine laughed. “Kid, would you buy patriotism if I told you the grand jury guarantees me a captaincy, Chief DA’s Investigator and the prestige to keep my son?”
“Yeah, but there’s still De Haven and–”
“Yeah, and me. Let’s just put it this way. I have to know why, too, only I like going at it once removed. Satisfied?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think you would be.”
“Do you know why?”
Considine sipped bourbon. “It wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“I used to steal cars, Lieut–Mal. I was the ace car thief of San Berdoo County right before the war. Turnabout?”
Lieutenant Mal Considine stuck out a long leg and hooked the wastebasket over to his chair. He rummaged in it, found his wedding band and slipped it on. “I’ve got a confab with my lawyer for the custody case tomorrow, and I’m sure he’ll want me to keep wearing this fucking thing.”
Danny leaned forward. “Turnabout, Captain?”
Considine stood up and stretched. “My brother used to blackmail me, threaten to rat me to the old man every time I said something snotty about religion. Since ten strokes with a switch was the old man’s punishment for blasphemy, old Desmond pretty much got his way, which was usually me breaking into houses to steal stuff he wanted. So let’s put it this way: I saw a lot of things that were pretty swell, and some things that were pretty spooky, and I liked it. So it was either become a burglar or a spy, and policeman seemed like a good compromise. And sending in the spies appealed to me more than doing it myself, sort of like Desmond in the catbird seat.”
Danny stood up. “I’m going to nail De Haven for you. Trust me on that.”
“I don’t doubt it, Ted.”
“In vino veritas, right?”
“Sure, and one more thing. I’ll be Chief of Police or something else that large before too long, and I’m taking you with me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mal woke up thinking of Danny Upshaw.
Rolling out of bed, he looked at the four walls of Room 11, the Shangri-Lodge Motel. One framed magazine cover per wall– Norman Rockwell testimonials to happy family life. A stack of his soiled suits by the door–and no Stefan to run them to the dry cleaners. The memo corkboard he’d erected, one query tag standing out: locate Doc Lesnick. The fink/shrink could not be reached either at home or at his office and the 1942–1944 gaps in Reynolds Loftis’ file had to be explained; he needed a general psych overview of the brain trusters now that their decoy was about to be in place, and all the files ended in the late summer of last year–why?
And the curtains were cheesecloth gauze; the rug was as threadbare as a tortilla; the bathroom door was scrawled over with names and phone numbers–”Sinful Cindy, DU-4927, 38-2438, loves to fuck and suck”–worth a jingle–if he ever ran Vice raids again. And Dudley Smith was due in twenty minutes–good guy/bad guy as today’s ticket: two Pinko screenwriters who avoided HUAC subpoenas because they always wrote under pseudonyms and blew the country when the shit hit the fan in ‘47. They had been located by Ed Satterlee operatives–private eyes on the Red Crosscurrents payroll–and both men knew the UAES bigshots intimately back in the late ‘30s, early ‘40s.