His certainty rankled me. “Ixnay. You’re too young, you haven’t made sergeant, you’re shacking with a woman, you lost your high brass buddies when you quit fighting smokers and you haven’t done a plainsclothes tour. You–”
I stopped when Blanchard grinned, then walked to the living room window and looked out. “Fires over on Michigan and Soto. Pretty.”
“Pretty?”
“Yeah, pretty. You know a lot about me, Bleichert.”
“People talk about you.”
“They talk about you, too.”
“What do they say?”
“That your old man’s some sort of Nazi drool case. That you ratted off your best friend to the feds to get on the Department. That you padded your record fighting built-up middleweights.”
The words hung in the air like a three-count indictment. “Is that it?”
Blanchard turned to face me. “No. They say you never chase cooze and they say you think you can take me.”
I took the challenge. “All those things are true.”
“Yeah? So was what you heard about me. Except I’m on the Sergeants List, I’m transferring to Highland Park Vice in August and there’s a Jewboy deputy DA who wets his pants for boxers. He’s promised me the next Warrants spot he can wangle.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Yeah? You want to hear something even more impressive?”
“Hit me.”
“My first twenty knockouts were stumblebums handpicked by my manager. My girlfriend saw you fight at the Olympic and said you’d be handsome if you got your teeth fixed, and maybe you _could_ take me.”
I couldn’t tell if the man was looking for a brawl then and there or a friend; if he was testing me or taunting me or pumping me for information. I pointed to Tomas Dos Santos, twitching in his booze sleep. “What about the Mex?”
“We’ll take him in tomorrow morning.”
“You’ll take him in.”
“The collar’s half yours.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Okay, partner.”
“I’m not your partner.”
“Maybe someday.”
“Maybe never, Blanchard. Maybe you work Warrants and pull in repos and serve papers for the shysters downtown, maybe I put in my twenty, take my pension and get a soft job somewhere.”
“You could go on the feds. I know you’ve got pals on the Alien Squad.”
“Don’t push me on that.”
Blanchard looked out the window again. “Pretty. Make a good picture postcard. ‘Dear Mom, wish you were here at the colorful East LA race riot.'”
Tomas Dos Santos stirred, mumbling, “Inez? Inez? Qué? Inez?” Blanchard walked to a hall closet and found an old wool overcoat and tossed it on top of him. The added warmth seemed to calm him down; the mumbles died off. Blanchard said, “Cherchez la femme. Huh, Bucky?”
“What?”
“Look for the woman. Even with a snootful of juice, old Tomas can’t let Inez go. I’ll lay you ten to one that when he hits the gas chamber she’ll be right there with him.”
“Maybe he’ll cop a plea. Fifteen to life, out in twenty.”
“No. He’s a dead man. Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”
I walked through the house looking for a place to sleep, finally settling on a downstairs bedroom with a lumpy bed way too short for my legs. Lying down, I listening to sirens and gunshots in the distance. Gradually I dozed off, and dreamed of my own few and far between women.
o o o
By the morning the riot had cooled off, leaving the sky hung with soot and the streets littered with broken liquor bottles and discarded two-by-fours and baseball bats. Blanchard called Hollenbeck Station for a black-and-white to transport his ninth hard felon of 1943 to the Hall of Justice jail, and Tomas Dos Santos wept when the patrolmen took him away from us. Blanchard and I shook hands on the sidewalk and walked separate routes downtown, him to the DA’s office to write up his report on the capture of the purse snatcher, me to Central Station and another tour of duty.
The LA City Council outlawed the wearing of the zoot suit, and Blanchard and I went back to polite conversation at roll call. And everything he stated with such rankling certainty that night in the empty house came true.
Blanchard was promoted to Sergeant and transferred to Highland Park Vice early in August, and Tomas Dos Santos went to the gas chamber a week later. Three years passed, and I continued to work a radio car beat in Central Division. Then one morning I looked at the transfer and promotion board and saw at the top of the list: Blanchard, Leland C., Sergeant; Highland Park Vice to Central Warrants, effective 9/15/46.