I looked around for Lee, and saw that he’d disappeared. “No. I’m the realistic type.”
“I’m not.”
“I can tell.”
“I’ve had enough reality to last me a lifetime.”
“I know.”
“Who told you?”
“The LA _Herald Express_.”
Kay laughed. “Then you did read my press clippings. Come to any conclusions?”
“Yeah. Fairy tales don’t work out.”
Kay winked like Lee; I got the feeling that she was the one who taught him. “That’s why you have to turn them into reality. Leland! Dinnertime!”
Lee reappeared, and we sat down to eat; Kay cracked a bottle of champagne and poured. When our glasses were full, she said, “To fairy tales.” We drank, Kay refilled, Lee said, “To Bond Issue B.” The second dose of bubbly tickled my nose and made me laugh; I proposed, “To the Bleichert-Blanchard rematch at the Polo Grounds, a bigger gate than Louis and Schmeling.”
Lee said, “To the second Blanchard victory”; Kay said, “To a draw and no gore.” We drank, and killed the bottle, and Kay retrieved another from the kitchen, popping the cork and hitting Lee in the chest. When our goblets were full, I caught my first blast of the juice and blurted, “To us.” Lee and Kay looked at me in something like slow motion, and I saw that our free hands were all resting a few inches apart on the tabletop. Kay noticed me notice and winked; Lee said, “That’s where I learned how.” Our hands moved together into a sort of triad, and we toasted “To us” in unison.
o o o
Opponents, then partners, then friends. And with the friendship came Kay, never getting between us, but always filling in our lives outside the job with style and grace.
That fall of ’46, we went everywhere together. When we went to the movies, Kay took the middle seat and grabbed both our hands during the scary parts; when we spent big band Friday evenings at the Malibu Rendezvous, she alternated dances with the two of us and always tossed a coin to see who got the last slow number. Lee never expressed an ounce of jealously, and Kay’s come-on subsided into a low simmer. It was there every time our shoulders brushed, every time a radio jingle or a funny billboard or a word from Lee hit us the same way and our eyes met instantaneously. The quieter it got, the more available I knew Kay was–and the more I wanted her. But I let it all ride, not because it would have destroyed my partnership with Lee, but because it would have upset the perfection of the three of us.
After tours of duty, Lee and I would go to the house and find Kay reading, underlining passages in books with a yellow crayon. She’d cook dinner for the three of us, and sometimes Lee would take off to run Mulholland on his motorcycle. Then we talked.
We always spoke around Lee, as if discussing the brute center of the three of us without him present was a cheat. Kay talked about the six years of college and two master’s degrees that Lee had bankrolled with his fight stash and how her work as a substitute teacher was perfect for the “overeducated dilettante” she’d become; I talked about growing up Kraut in Lincoln Heights. We never spoke of my snitching for the Alien Squad or her life with Bobby De Witt. We both sensed the other’s general story, but neither of us wanted details. I had the upper hand there: the Ashida brothers and Sam Murakami were long gone and dead, but Bobby De Witt was a month away from LA parole–and I could tell Kay was afraid of his return.
If Lee was frightened, he never showed it past that moment when Harry Sears gave him the word, and it never hindered him during our best hours together–the ones spent working Warrants. That fall I learned what police work really was, and Lee was my teacher.
From mid-November through the New Year we captured a total of eleven hard felons, eighteen traffic warrantees and three parole and probation absconders. Our rousts of suspicious loiterers got us an additional half dozen arrests, all of them for narcotics violations. We worked from Ellis Loew’s direct orders, the felony sheet and squadroom scuttlebutt, filtered through Lee’s instincts. His techniques were sometimes cautious and roundabout and sometimes brutal, but he was always gentle with children, and when he went strong-arm to get information, it was because it was the only way to grab results.