The New Black Mask (No 8)

Dial Axminster 6-400 James Ellroy

James Ellroy’s second story for NBM features Lee Blanchard, a main character in Mr. Ellroy’s forthcoming novel. The Black Dahlia, which will he published by the Mysterious Press in Fall 1987. A Los Angeles native, Mr. Ellroy has long been obsessed with his hometowns dark past, which he feels is epitomized by the 1947 murder on which the book is based. Commenting on “Dial Axminster 6-400,” Mr. Ellroy says it features two of his three loves — vintage cars and volatile women. Boxing, the third of his obsessions, will be the subject of a future story.

Ellis Loew rapped on the pebbled glass door that separated LAPD Warrants from the Office of the District Attorney. Davis Evans, dozing in his chair, muttered “Mother dog.” I said, “That’s his college-ring knock. It’s a personal favor or a reprimand.”

Davis nodded and got to his feet slowly, befitting a man with twenty years and two days on the job — and an ironclad civil-service pension as soon as he said the words, “Fuck you, Ellis. I retire.” He smoothed his plaid shirt, adjusted the knot in his Hawaiian tie, hitched up the waistband of his shiny black pants, and patted the lapels of the camel’s hair jacket he stole from a black pimp at the Lincoln Heights drunk tank. “That boy wants a favor, he gonna pay like a mother dog.”

“Blanchard! Evans! I’m waiting!”

We walked into the Deputy D.A.’s office and found him smiling, which meant that he was either practicing for the press or getting ready to kiss some ass. Davis nudged me as we took seats, then said, “Hey, Mr. Loew. What did the leper say to the prostitute?”

Loew’s smile stayed glued on; it was obviously a big favor he wanted. “I don’t know, Sergeant. What?”

“Keep the tip. Ain’t that a mother dog?”

Loew put out his hail-fellow-well-met chuckle. “Yes, it’s so simple that it has a certain charm. Now, the reason I—”

“What do you call an elephant that moonlights as a prostitute?”

Loew’s smile spread into nasty little facial tics. “I... don’t... know. What?”

“A two-ton pickup that lays for peanuts. Woooo! Mother dog!”

The Ted Mack Amateur Hour had gone far enough. I said, “Did you want something, Boss?”

Davis laughed uproariously, like my question was the real punch line; Loew wiped the smile remnants off his face with a handkerchief. “Yes, I do. Did you know that there was a kidnapping in L.A. four days ago? Monday afternoon on the USC campus?”

Davis kiboshed his stage chuckles; snatch jobs were meat and potatoes to him — the kind of cases he loved to work. I said, “You’ve got Fred Allen’s interest. Keep going.”

Loew twirled his Phi Beta Kappa key as he spoke. “The victim’s name is Jane Mackenzie Viertel. She’s nineteen, a USC frosh. Her father is Redmond Viertel, an oil man with a big string of wells down on Signal Hill. Three men in USC letter jackets grabbed her Monday, about two o’clock. It’s rush week, so all the witnesses thought it was some sort of fraternity stunt. The men called the girl’s father late that night and made their demand: a hundred thousand dollars in fifties. Viertel got the money together, then got frightened and called the FBI. The kidnappers called back and set up a trade for the following day in an irrigation field up near Ventura.

“Two agents from the Ventura office set up a trap, one hiding, one posing as Viertel. The kidnappers showed up, then it all went haywire.”

Davis said, “Wooooo,” and cracked his knuckles; Loew grimaced at the sound and continued. “One of the kidnappers found the agent who was hiding. They were both afraid of disturbing the transaction with gunfire, so they had a little hand-to-hand combat. The kidnapper beat the agent up with a shovel, then hacked off six of his fingers with the blade. The other agent sensed something was wrong and started to act fidgety. He grabbed one of the men and put a gun to his head, and the other man did the same to the girl. A real Mexican standoff, until the fed grabbed the money bag and a windstorm played hell with all that cash. The man with the girl grabbed the bag and took off, and the fed took his captive in. You see what I mean by haywire?”

I said, “So two snatchers and the girl are still at large?”

“Yes. The third man is in custody in Ventura, and the other agent is very angry.”

Davis laced his fingers together and cracked a total of eight knuckles. “Wooooo. These boys got names, Mr. Loew? And what’s this got to do with me and Lee?”

Now Loew’s smile was genuine — that of a fiend who loves his work. Consulting some rap sheets on his desk, he said, “The man in custody is Harwell Jackson Treadwell, white male, age thirty-one. He’s from Gila Bend, Oklahoma; your neck of the woods, Evans. He’s got three strong-arm convictions running back to 1934 and has two outstanding warrants here in L.A. — robbery charges filed in ’44 and ’45. Treadwell also has two charming brothers, Miller and Leroy. Both are registered sex offenders and do not seem to care much about the gender of their conquests. In fact, Leroy rather likes those of the four-footed persuasion. He was arrested for aggravated assault on an animal and served thirty days for it in ’42.”

Davis picked at his teeth with his tie clip. “Any old port in a storm. Miller and Leroy got the girl and part of the money?”

“That’s right.”

“And you want me and Lee to—”

I interrupted, seeing my Friday night go up in smoke. “This is Ventura County’s business. Not ours.”

Loew held up an extradition warrant and carbons of two bench summonses. “The kidnapping took place in Los Angeles, in my judicial district. I would very much like to prosecute Mr. Treadwell along with his brothers when they are apprehended. So I want you two to drive up to Ventura and return Mr. Treadwell to City Jail before the notoriously ill-mannered Ventura sheriffs beat him to death.”

I groaned; Davis Evans made an elaborate show of standing up and smoothing out the various tucks and folds of his outfit. “I’ll be a mother dog, but I was thinkin’ about retiring this afternoon.”

Winking at me, Loew said, “You won’t retire when you hear what the other two brothers escaped in.”

“Wooooo. Keep talkin’, boy.”

“A 1936 Auburn speedster. Two-tone, maroon and forest green. When they get captured, and you know they will, the car will go to City Impound until claimed or bid on. Davis, I expect to send those Okie shitheads to the gas chamber. It’s very hard to claim a vehicle from death row, and the duty officer at the impound is a close friend of mine. Still want to retire?”

Davis exclaimed, “Wooooooo!”, grabbed the warrants and hustled his two-thirty-five toward the door. I was right behind him — reluctantly — the junior partner all the way. With his hand on the knob, the senior man got in a parting shot: “What do you call a gal who’s got the syph, the clap, and the crabs? An incurable romantic! Wooooo! Mother dog!”

We took the Ridge Road north, Davis at the wheel of his showroom-fresh ’47 Buick ragtop, me staring out at the L. A. suburbs dwindling into scrub-covered hills, then farmland worked by Japs out of the relocation camps and transplanted Okies. The Okie sitting beside me never spoke when he drove; he stayed lost in a man-car reverie. I thought about our brief warrants partnership, how our differences made it work.

I was the prototypical athlete-cop the high brass loved, the ex-boxer one L.A. scribe labeled “the Southland’s good but not great white hope.” No one knew the “but not” better than me, and plain “good” meant flash rolls, steak, and nightlife until you were thirty, then permanently scrambled brains. The department was the one safe place where my fight juice could see me through to security — with muted glory along the way — and I went for it like Davis’s mother dog, cultivating all the right people, most notably boxing fanatic Ellis Loew.

Davis Evans was another opportunist, out for plain loot, out to shut down Norman, Oklahoma, fourteen siblings, family inbreeding, the proximity to oil money you could breathe but never quite touch. He took what he could and reveled in it, and he made up for being on the take by exercising the best set of cop faces I had ever seen — Mr. Courtly to those who deserved it, Mr. Grief to the bad ones, Mr. Civil to whoever was left over. That a man could be so self-seeking and lacking in mean-spiritedness astonished me, and I deferred to him on the job — senior man aside — because I knew my own selfishness ran twice as deep as his did. And I realized that the hard-nosed buffoon probably would retire soon, leaving me to break in a replacement cut out of my own cloth: young, edgy, eager for the glory the assignment offered. And that made me sad.

Warrants was plainclothes LAPD under the aegis of the Criminal Division, District Attorney’s Office. Two detectives to every Superior Court judiciary. We went after the bad guys the felony D.A.s were drooling to prosecute. If things were slow, there was money to be made serving summonses for the downtown shysters, and — Davis Evans’s raison d’etre — repossessions.

Davis lived, ate, drank, yearned, and breathed for beautiful cars. His Warrants cubicle was wallpapered with pictures of Duesenbergs and Pierce Arrows and Cords, Caddys, and Packards, and sleek foreign jobs. Since he stole all his clothes from arrestees, shook down hookers for free poon, ate on the cuff, and lived in the spare room of a county boarding house for recently paroled convicts, he had plenty of money to spend on them. The storage garage he rented held a ’39 Packard cabriolet, a Mercedes rumored to have once been driven by Hitler, a purple Lincoln convertible that Davis called his “Jig Rig,” and a sapphire blue Model T dubbed the “Li’l Shitpeeler.”

He acquired all of them through repos. There was a twenty-four-hour-a-day phone number issuing recorded information on delinquent cars, and every greedy L.A. cop had it memorized. All you had to do was dial Ax-minster 6-400 to get the dope on wanteds — who they belonged to, what dealer or credit agency was paying what amount of money for their return. Davis only moved on cars that he craved, and only on delinquent owners with outstanding warrants. It was a parlay that frequently occurred, on-the-lam punks not being known for sending in their monthly auto payments. Once the warrantee was arrested, Davis would locate the car, let it molder in his garage, do some minor defacing of it, then report to the dealer that the mother dog was in bad, bad shape. The dealer would believe him; being a soft-hearted misanthrope, Davis would offer a decent amount to keep the vehicle. The dealer would agree, thinking he’d taken advantage of a dust-bowl refugee with a leaky seabag — and Sergeant Davis Evans would have himself another true love.

We were cruising through truck-farm country now — flat acres of furrowed land that looked dry, used up, like this was brutal August, not mild October. All the farmers were the sunburned poor-white prototype that Davis narrowly escaped being one of. Off to our right, nestled at the edge of a scrub valley, was Wayside Honor Rancho — a new county facility to house misdemeanor offenders. It had housed Japs during the war, Okie farmers their keepers on the temporary War Relocation Board payroll. But now the war was over — and it was back to dry dirt.

I nudged Davis and pointed to a group of farmers uprooting cabbages. “There but for the grace of God go you, partner.”

Davis saluted the assembly, then flipped them his middle finger. “You can lead a dog to gravy, but you can’t make him a tapper.”

It was shortly past noon when we pulled up in front of the Ventura courthouse-jail. For a hick-town county seat, the joint had aspirations to class, all of them low — Greek pillars, a Tudor roof, and Spanish-style canvas awnings came togther to produce a building that gave you the feeling of d.t.’s without the benefit of booze. Davis groaned as we pushed open a door etched with Egyptian hieroglyphics; I said, “Be grateful it goes with your clothes.”

The interior was divided into two wings, and bars at the far end of the left corridor showed us where to go. There was a deputy seated just outside the enclosure, a fat youth done up in khaki that enclosed his blubbery body like a sausage casing. Looking up from his comic book, he said, “Ah... yessirs?”

Davis whipped out our three warrants and held them up for the kid to scrutinize. “LAPD, son. We’ve got an extradition warrant for Harwell Treadwell, plus two others on old beefs of his. You wanna go get him for us?”

The kid thumbed through the papers, probably looking for the pictures. When he couldn’t figure the words out, he unlocked the barred door and led us down a long hallway inset with cells on both sides. Nearing the end, I heard muffled obscenities and thudding sounds. The deputy announced our presence by clearing his throat and saying, “Ah... Sheriff? I got two men here need to talk to you.”

I stepped in front of the open cell door and looked in. A tall, beefy man in a ribbon-festooned version of the deputy’s getup was standing next to an even taller guy dressed like the archetypal G-man: gray suit, gray tie, gray hair, gray expression on his face. Handcuffed to a chair was our warrantee — white-trash defiance with a duck’s-ass haircut, purple and puke green bruises covering his face, brass-knuck marks dotting his bare torso.

The kid took off before the two hardcases could reprimand him for disturbing their third degree; Davis flashed our papers. The sheriff looked at them silently, and the fed buttoned his jacket over the knuckle dusters sticking out of his waistband. “I’m Special Agent Stensland.” he said. “Ventura Office, FBI. What—”

Harwell Treadwell laughed and spat blood on the floor. I said, “We’re taking him back to L.A. Did he cough up any dope on the other two?”

The sheriff shoved the papers at Davis. “He might have, you didn’t interrupt our interrogation.”

“You’ve had him for three days,” I said. “He should have blabbed by now.”

Treadwell spat blood on the sheriffs spit-shined cowboy boots; when the man balled his fists to retaliate, Davis stationed himself between the two. “He’s my prisoner now. Signed, sealed, and deeeelivered.”

Stensland said, “This won’t wash. Treadwell’s a federal prisoner.”

I shook my head. “He’s got city warrants predating the extradition one, and the extradition warrant is countersigned by a federal judge. He’s ours.”

Stensland bored in on me with beady gray eyes. I stood there, deadpan, and he tried a smile and cop-to-cop empathy. “Listen, Officer—”

“It’s Sergeant.”

“All right, Sergeant, listen: the Viertel girl and the other two men are still at large, and this filth was responsible for one of my agents losing six fingers. Don’t you want to go back to Los Angeles with a confession? Don’t you want his filthy brothers captured? Don’t you want to let us try it our way just a little bit longer?”

Davis said, “Your way don’t work, so we try mine,” walked over, and unlocked Harwell Treadwell’s cuffs. Standing up, the Okie snatch artist almost collapsed, and bile crept from the corners of his mouth. Davis eased him out to the catwalk, and I said to Stensland, “That warrant has an evidence clause. I need everything you found at the crime scene, including the ransom money you recovered.”

The fed flinched, then shook his head. “Not until Monday. It’s locked up in a safe at the courthouse, and the courthouse is closed until then.”

“How much was there?”

“Twenty-one hundred something.”

I said, “Send it down with an itemized receipt,” and walked out of the cell with the two minions of the law staring razor blades at me. I caught up with Davis and Treadwell at the barred enclosure, and the deputy snickered at the doubled-over prisoner. Treadwell shot a blood cocktail onto his shirtfront, and when fat boy stood up, shot him a pointy-toe boot to the balls. Davis whooped, “You a mother dog!” and the deputy nosedived onto his well-thumbed issue of Batman.

Davis’s “way” consisted of our taking Harwell Treadwell to a jig joint on Ventura’s south side and plying him with fried chicken, gravy-drenched biscuits, and yams while I held my gun on him and my car-crazed partner fired questions about the ’36 Auburn speedster. Treadwell obliged between wolfish mouthfuls, and Davis expressed worry that the Auburn would get shot up when the remaining Treadwell brothers got taken down by the law. “You worry about that girl,” Harwell told us over and over. “Them partners of mine got hound blood.” Then I interjected, “You mean your brothers?” and Treadwell always countered with, “I ain’t no snitch, son.”

It was midaftemoon when we finally headed south on Pacific Coast Highway, me at the wheel, Davis and the extraditee in the backseat, Treadwell’s wrists cuffed behind his back, ankles manacled to the front-seat housing. The ragtop was down and sunlight and seabreeze had me thinking that this wasn’t such a bad assignment after all. Behind me, the two Okies jawed, sparred, rattled each other’s cages.

“Who’s got the pink slip on the speedster, boy?”

“Who’s your haberdasher? I never seen so many divergent angles on a set of threads in my life.”

“I got Hollywood in me, boy.”

“Nigger blood more like it. Where you from in Oklahoma?”

“Outside Norman. You from Gila Bend?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s to do there?”

“Set dog’s tails on fire and watch flies fuck, drink, fight, and chase your sister.”

“I heard your brothers go for anything white and on the hoof.”

“Plain anything, boss. If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’.”

“You think they’ll hurt the Viertel girl?”

“That girl can take care of herself, and I ain’t sayin’ my brothers got her.”

“How’d you find out about her?”

“Miller read the society page and fell in love.”

“I thought you said your brothers weren’t in on this.”

“I ain’t sayin’ they are, I ain’t sayin’ they isn’t.”

“Kidnappin’s Oklahoma stuff from way back. The Barkers, Pretty Boy. How you account for that?”

“Well... I think maybe fellas comin’ from hunger are real curious about the ante on loved ones. How high can you go before they say, ‘No sir, you keep the son of a bitch’?”

“Let’s get back to the Auburn, boy.”

“Let’s not. I need somethin’ to keep you tantalized with.”

“Tantalize me now.”

“How’s this: tan leather upholstery that Miller spilled liquor on, radio that picks up the San Dago stations real good, a little grind on the gearbox when you go into third. Hey!”

I saw it then, too: an overturned motorcycle on fire smack in the middle of the highway. No cops were at the scene, but a sawhorse detour sign had been placed in the middle lane, directing southbound traffic to a road running inland. Reflexively, I hung a hard left turn onto it, the flames lapping at the car’s rear bumper.

Davis whooped, “Whooo! Mother dog.” Harwell Treadwell laughed like a white-trash hyena. The two-lane blacktop took us up and over a series of short slopes, then down into a box canyon closed in by scrub-covered hills that pressed right up against the roadside. I cursed the hour or so the detour was going to cost us, then a loud “Ka-raaack” sounded, and the windshield exploded in front of me.

Glass shrapnel filled the air; I shut my eyes and felt slashes on my cheeks and my hands gripping the steering wheel. Davis screeched “MOTHERFUCK!” and started firing at the hill to the left of us. Opening my eyes and looking over, I saw nothing but greenery, then three more shots hit the side of the car, richocheting ding-ding-ding.

I floored the gas; Davis fired at the muzzle bursts on the hillside; Harwell Treadwell made strange noises — like he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or weep. Head on the wheel, I kept one eye on the rearview, and through it I saw Davis haul Treadwell off the seat to use as a bulletproof vest, his .38 in Treadwell’s mouth as added insurance.

Ka-raack! Ka-raack! Ka-raack!

The last shot hit the radiator; steam covered my entire field of vision. I drove blind, picking up speed on a downslope, then there was another shot; the left front tire buckled, and the car fishtailed. I decelerated and aimed at the roadside shoulder away from the gunfire, sightless, trying to bank us in just right. Scrub bushes, green and huge, jumped out of nowhere, and then everything went topsy-turvy — and I was eating blacktop and steam.

More “ka-raacks” pulsated through me — and I didn’t know if they were gunshots or parts of my brains going blooey. Enveloped by dust and vapor fumes, I heard, “Legs’ Legs, boy! Run!” I obeyed, stumble-running full-out.

The vapor dissipated, and I saw that I was sprinting toward a patch of furrowed farm dirt. Davis was running in front of me, half hauling, half shoving Harwell Treadwell, gun at his head. I caught up with them, realizing the shots had ended — and at the far side of the dirt patch I saw trees and buildings — maybe a sharecropper shantytown.

We ran toward it — two cops and the kidnapper in handcuffs who was our bulletproof vest, life insurance and hole card, kicking dried-up cabbages and carrots and bean stalks out of the ground as we speedballed for sanctuary. Nearing the town, I saw that it was composed of one street with ramshackle wood structures on either side, a packed dirt road the only throughway. Slowing to a trot, I grabbed Davis’s arm and gasped, “We can’t risk taking a car out. We’ve gotta call the Ventura bulls.”

Davis jerked Treadwell’s bracelet chain, sending him face first to the ground. Catching his breath, he kicked him hard in the ass. “That’s for my car and in case I die.” Wiping dusty sweat off his brow, he pointed his .38 at the hick-town main street like he was imploring me to feast my eyes. I did, and a second later I saw what he was getting at: the phone lines were crumpled in a heap beside the base of the terminal pole that stood just inside the edge of the town proper.

I looked back at hardscrabble land and the roadway that held the remains of my partner’s car; I looked ahead at Tobacco Road, California style. “Let’s go.”

We entered the town, and I gave it a long eyeballing while Davis walked in a side-by-side drape with Harwell Treadwell, 38 snub dangling by a thumb and forefinger, business end aimed at his cojones. The left-hand side of the street featured a grain store, a market, the front window filled with stacks of Tokay and muscatel short dogs, and a clapboard farm-machinery repair shop with rusted parts strewn in front of it. On the right, the facades were all boarded up, with a string of prewar jalopies parked up against them, including a strange looking Model T hybrid that seemed made out of mismatched parts. The only strollers about were a couple of grizzled men dressed in sun-faded War Relocation Authority khakis — and they shot us a cursory fish-eye and kept on walking.

When we reached the end of the street, Davis spotted a flimsy-looking unboarded door, kicked it in, and shoved Treadwell inside. Turning to face me, he said, “We got what them boys want. You run into them you tell them Harwell is chewing on the end of my .38, and the first shot I hear he gets a hot lead cocktail. And you get us a car, boy.”

I nodded, then backtracked to the stand of heaps, looking for a likely one to commandeer. All six of them had at least one dead tire, and I started wondering about the lack of people, and why the two I’d seen so far didn’t seem alarmed at raggedy-assed armed strangers in their midst. Noticing a bolted-on fire ladder attached to the grain building across the street, I made for it, hoisting myself up the rungs.

At the top, I had a good view of the surrounding area. Shacks were nestled in little green pockets bordered by fenced-off crop acreage, with dirt access roads connecting them to each other and the town. No one seemed to be working in the fields, but there were a few people taking the breeze in front of their cribs, which struck me as eerie.

I descended the ladder, and when I was halfway down, saw an old man on one of the roads staring at me. I pretended not to notice, and he turned his back and ran — flat out — to the biggest shack in the community, a corrugated metal job with a white wood barn attached.

I hopped off the ladder and pursued, taking foot roads out of town and over an eighth of a mile or so to a stand of sycamore trees that formed a perimeter a few yards from the barn. The man was nowhere in sight, but the sliding barn door was open just a crack. I drew my .38 and sprinted over and in.

Sunlight through a side window illuminated a big empty space, and the smell of hay plus something medicinal hit my nostrils. In the center of the barn, the acid stench got stronger, and somehow familiar. I noticed a table covered with a tarpaulin wedged into a corner near the connecting door to the shack and saw dry ice hissing out of rips in the canvas. The shape underneath took form, and I pulled the tarp off.

A buck-naked dead man was lying on top of dry ice blocks, sachets oozing formaldehyde placed strategically on his body. He was a stone ringer for Harwell Treadwell, and you didn’t have to be a medical examiner to figure the cause of death — his crotch was blown to bits, torn, blooded flesh laced with buckshot all that remained.

I redraped the stiff, then eased the connecting door into a test jiggle. It gave, and I very slowly pulled it open, just a tiny fraction of an inch, in order to look in. Then it flew open all the way, and a big double-barreled shotgun was sighting down, and I shoved both my hands at midpoint on the stock and pushed up.

A huge “Ka-boom!” went off; the tin roof lurched under the force of the blast; pellets ricocheted. I threw myself at the shotgun wielder just as he tried to slam me with the butt of his weapon, wrestled it away from him, then chopped down at his head with the flat side of my .38 — one blow, two blows, three. Finally the man went limp. I kicked the shotgun out of harm’s way, then weaved on shaky, shaky legs.

It was the old man who’d rabbited when he saw me on the ladder. I looked around the room, saw a pail of water on the cracked wood floor by the front door, picked it up, and dumped it on my assailant. He stirred, then started sputtering, and I knelt down and placed my gun on his nose so he could get the picture up close. “You admit you killed that man back there or you convince me somebody else did, and you live. You tell me where the other Treadwell brother is and I don’t arrest you for assault on a police officer. You dick me around, you die.”

The geezer took it all in, his eyes getting clearer by the second, exhibiting the remarkable recuperative powers of the seasoned shat-upon. When he curled his lips to spit invective, I said, “No banter, no wisecracks, no shit,” and cocked the hammer.

Now pops got the whole picture, in Technicolor. “I ain’t no killer,” he said with a midwestern twang. “I’m a truck farmer likes to dabble in the medical arts, but I sure ain’t no killer.”

“I am. So you keep going and keep my interest, because I get bored easy, and when I get bored I get mad.”

Pops gulped, then spoke rapid-fire. “People here put up Miller and Leroy, ’long with the girl, when they had that trouble up in Ventura. They—”

I interrupted. “Did they pay you for it?”

Pops cackled. “Where you think everbody is? Miller and Leroy got cousins up the wazoo here, they spread the money around, everbody went up to Oxnard and Big V to spend it. Like to put Miller and Leroy broke they spent so—”

“What?”

“ ’Fore he died, Leroy told me they spent eight, nine thousand dollars, said this town of ours had hospitality like Hot Springs in the old days.”

I said, “Mister, the ransom money came to a hundred thousand.”

Pops snorted. “Big commotion back where it went bad. Police got most of it, Miller and Leroy got the dregs.”

My first thought was of the Ventura sheriffs holding back big. “Keep going.”

“Well, everbody got happy here, and Miller and Leroy and the cooze holed up, and Miller and Leroy started schemin’ another trade, and they started arguin’ and feudin’ over the girl, and she took to Miller ’cause Leroy was so nasty to her. Then Leroy tried to do her what you might call against her will, and she talked Miller into payin’ back her virtue.”

“Miller killed his own brother?”

“That’s right. And he felt so bad about it he paid me just about his last two hundred dollars to fix that boy up for burial, then put him in the ground when all the cousins got back after spendin’ their money.”

“Then Miller and the girl took off?”

“That’s right. Headed south, brand new black paint on that pretty car of Harwell’s.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. ’Bout noon.”

“Did they cut the phone lines before they went?”

Pops shrugged. “Don’t think so. Seems to me they was up this mornin’.”

I got the pins and needles tingling up the spine I always got when something was real wrong. Stensland the fed had said that there was “twenty-one hundred something” locked up as evidence, and Miller and Leroy dished out “eight or nine” grand for shelter. That left almost ninety thousand missing. Figure a few thousand blown away during the Mexican standoff — and the rest sucked up — probably by the feds and/or the Ventura sheriffs. And the scary part: if Miller Treadwell took off with Jane Viertel yesterday, it was the law that ambushed us — to make sure Harwell Treadwell didn’t squawk about his brother’s whereabouts — so they couldn’t tell us about their paltry take of the ransom pie.

I put my gun away, said “Bury the degenerate bastard,” and walked out the front door mad — like I’d been sucker punched.

When I got back to the dump where I’d left Davis and our prisoner, they were gone. A fresh wave of panic hit me; then I heard grunts and metal on metal noises coming from the other side of the building. I walked around, and there was Harwell Treadwell chained to a fence and my forty-six-year-old partner embarking on a new career as a hot-rod engineer.

He was working on the jerry-built heap I’d noticed earlier, which now resembled a cross between Buck Rogers’s spaceship and a collection of spare parts some trashcan dog dragged in. It was a Model T chassis with two motorcycle tires on the front, two tractor tires on the back, what looked like a half-dozen hooked-together lawnmower engines, and an undercarriage made up of chicken wire and friction tape. The man himself was on the ground toiling on the drive shaft, and when I reached into the driver’s seat and beeped the horn, he came up gun first, laughing when he saw who it was.

“Woooo, boy! You almost died!”

I walked over and whispered in Davis’s ear. “Miller killed Leroy and took off with the girl in the Auburn yesterday. The Ventura bulls are holding back on the ransom money, and I think it was them shooting at us. Let’s roll now. On foot if this thing won’t go.”

Davis smiled. “She’s got a name, boy. ‘Li’l Assdragger.’ And she’ll fly.”

I heard engines in the distance and stood on the contraption’s running board to grab a look. A three-vehicle caravan was thumping across the hardscrabble that bordered the town, sending up clouds of dust. Squinting hard, I saw black-and-white paint on one car, cherry lights on another.

Davis said, “Them?” I nodded. Suddenly he was a nut-tightening, screw-fastening, wire-connecting dervish, and Harwell Treadwell was shouting, “Come to big brother! Home cookin’ tonight! Come and get me!”

I ran over and fumbled at Treadwell’s bracelets with my handcuff key. I’d just gotten the left one off when he shot me a short right uppercut. Stunned, I started to duck into a crouch; then the free cuff lashed my face, the open ratchet ripping loose a chunk of my brows, blood in my eyes blinding me.

The black-and-white noise drew closer; I heard Davis frantically trying to start Li’l Assdragger. I wiped the blood from my eyes and got my balance just in time to see Harwell Treadwell hotfoot it around the edge of the building. I started to run after him, then the Okie jalopy lurched forward, cutting me off. Davis yelled, “I can’t brake too good. Jump in!”

I did. Davis popped the two foot pedals simultaneously, and the thing crept forward. I shouted “Treadwell!” above the engine noise. Davis shouted “He’ll pay!” twice as loud. On the street, I turned around and looked back, and there was our extraditee running headlong into the three-car dust storm, whooping and waving his arms. A second later I heard shotgun blasts and machine-gun fire, and parts of Treadwell flew in all directions before the storm clouds ate him up. Then I just held on.

We lurched, we bumped, we hit potholes and jumped three feet off the ground. We brodied through dirt and skidded over the connecting roads that led out of town. We fishtailed when we hit gravel, and we turned doughnuts when we hit wet spots. Davis leadfooted, double and triple clutched, honked stray dogs out of our way, and did everything else but hit the brakes. Dusk started coming on, and then we were on the big, broad Ridge Road southbound, blacktop under our mismatched wheels, a skinny yellow line separating us from collisions with real, live, normal cars. Davis hooted, “Ain’t got no lights!” and a moment later I saw the Wayside Honor Rancho turnoff sign. Davis saw it too, decelerated, pumped the floorboard and hooted “Ain’t got no brakes!” I shut my eyes and felt Li’l Assdragger shimmy. Then it was a triple fishtail-doughnut combo, and we were stone-cold still in the northbound lane, staring down the headlights of death.

We got out and ran. Tire screeches and thud-crunch-cracks behind us told me that Li’l Assdragger was fond recent history. Hugging the shoulder, we trudged over to the turnoff and up a road to the barbed-wire-enclosed guard hut that separated square-john citizens from county inmates. A light flashed on as we approached; I had my badge out and the word Peace on my lips. Then my legs turned to Jell-o, and I passed out thinking I should have more wind than a fat Okie fifteen years my senior.

I woke up to see that fat Okie standing over me in a clean white shirt and sedate print necktie. My first thought was that we had to be dead — Davis Evans would never dress that square unless God himself forced him to.

“Wake up, boy. I been doin’ police work while you been beauty sleepin’.”

In a split second it all came back. I groaned, felt the cot beneath me and looked around at the cramped interior of the guard hut. “Oh shit.”

Davis handed me a wet towel. “On a stick. I made me some phone calls. Pal of mine at the Ventura courthouse said he logged twenty-one hundred sixty-six beans of the ransom money into the evidence locker. What you think of that?”

I stood up and tried my legs. They wobbled, but held. “Miller and Leroy spread eight or nine grand around the town,” I said. “Leaving close to ninety out there. It’s got to be the Ventura cops.”

Davis shook his head. “Uh-uh. That was a legit dispatch that came into town and shot down Harwell. They saw that wreck of ours on the detour road and came lookin’ for survivors. See, I called R & I and Robbery for a list of Miller’s known associates from his old rousts. Got six names from his jacket, and the records clerk told me a Ventura fed called in a few hours before, got the same information. You think that ain’t sweet?”

I thought of Stensland, the all-gray federal man with the big tax-free pension — if he could kibosh the fact that the snatchers glommed only chump change. “Let’s go get him.”

“That mother dog gonna pay for hurtin’ my Buick.”

“Get a car from the duty officer. And this time I’ll drive.”

Back in familiar, if not safe-and-sane L.A., we formed an itinerary out of the six names and last-known addresses from Miller Treadwell’s K.A. file. Davis took the wheel again, and I picked and poked at my various cuts, lacerations, and bruises as we prowled the south-central part of the city — home to our first three possibles.

Number one’s wife told us her husband was back in Quentin; the apartment house of the number two man had been tom down and was now an amusement arcade frequented by Mexican youths wearing zoot suits; number three had gotten religion and praised Jesus as we searched his pad. He told us he hadn’t seen Miller Treadwell since their last job together in ’41, damned him as a fornicating whoremonger, and handed us leaflets that cogently explained that Jesus Christ was an Aryan, not a Jew, and that Mein Kampf was the lost book of the Bible. Davis’s response to the man was the longest “Wooooooo” I’d ever heard him emit, and we drove across town to Hollywood and K.A. number four, debating the pros and cons of parole violation on grounds of mental bankruptcy.

Number four — “Jungle” John Lembeck, white male, age thirty-four, two-time convicted strong-arm heister, lived in a bungalow court on Serrano just off the Boulevard. Giving the address a rolling once-over, Davis and I said “Bingo” simultaneously, and I added, “The Auburn with a bad black paint-job. Right by that streetlight.”

Davis blurted, “What?” slowed the car, and squinted out at the dark street. Noticing the dream-mobile, he said, “Double bingo. There’s a fed sled three cars down. If it’s got Ventura tags, this is grief.”

I got out and walked back to check; Davis continued on to the corner and parked. Squatting down, I squinted at the steel gray Plymouth’s rear license plate. Triple bingo: five-digit federal vehicle designation, 1945 Ventura County tags. Grief on a popsicle stick.

Davis trotted over, and we circled the bungalows in a flanking movement. They were individual stucco huts arranged around a cement courtyard, and John Lembeck’s file placed him in unit three. Alleys separated the court from the adjoining apartment buildings, and I took the one on the left.

The night was deep blue and cloudless, and I crept through the alleyway helped by light from apartment windows. The first two huts had drawn curtains, but the third one back was cracked for air, the Venetian blinds down to just above the narrow open space. I drew my gun, put my eyes to the slice of light, and looked in.

Quadruple bingo — and then some.

The man who had to be Miller Treadwell was sitting in an overstuffed chair, his pants down, moaning, “Guddamn, guddamn.” I could see a woman’s left hand bracing the chair arm, but nothing more of the woman herself. Agent Stensland was trussed up, lying on his side on the floor, next to the entranceway into the front room. He was working his wrist bonds against a wall grate, his breath expanding and contracting against the fabric tape crisscrossing his mouth.

Miller moaned with his eyes shut, then a pretty blonde head popped up and spoke to him: “Sugar, let me talk to you for a sec.”

“Guddamn, girl, don’t stop.”

“Miller, you have to make him tell you where he put the money.”

“We got ours, girl. He ain’t gonna tell us; he knows I’ll kill him if he does. We got ours, and we can trade you again.”

“Daddy’s too cheap to pay more. We could have twice as much, Sugar. We could go away and be together and just forget about Daddy.”

“Sugar, don’t talk nonsense. We got plenty, your papa’s got plenty more, and I ain’t able to talk so good in this state you got me in. You wanta...”

The head disappeared again; Miller went back to moaning. I wondered where Evans was and watched Stensland move his bound wrists against the grate. The kidnapper-killer’s ecstacy was reaching a crescendo when I saw my partner, inside the pad, tiptoeing over to the entranceway. He was just a few feet in back of Stensland when the G-man got his hands free and ripped the tape from his mouth. He went flush at the pain, and I followed his eyes to a .45 automatic on the armrest beside Miller’s right hand.

Pawing at his leg restraints, racing against the Okie’s release, Stensland banged his elbow on the grate. Miller jerked out of heaven and aimed the .45 at him just as I wedged my gun through the window crack. He fired at the fed; I fired at him; Davis emptied his piece at the chair. There must have been a dozen explosions, and then it was all over except for Jane Mackenzie Viatel’s record-length scream.

A shitload of Hollywood division black-and-whites showed up, and the meat wagon removed Miller Treadwell and Special Agent Norris Stensland, D.O.A. A detective lieutenant told Davis and me he wanted a full report before he contacted the feds. We kept the Viertel girl in handcuffs on genera! principles, and when the commotion wound down and the crowd of rubberneckers dispersed, we braced her on the front lawn of the courtyard.

Unlocking her cuffs, I said, “Come clean on the money. What happened? Where’s the dough Miller was talking about?”

Jane Viertel, backlighted by a street lamp, rubbed her wrists. “The money was in two packages. When it got crazy, they were dropped. Miller and Leroy got one, and it ripped open. The FBI man dropped his and Leroy ran with me, then Miller took off. The FBI man took Harwell to his car, then came back and grabbed the last package so Harwell wouldn’t know he had it. But Miller saw him. He had some loose bills he picked up, and he hid the rest of the money from Leroy. Miller and Leroy gave the loose money to these dreadful slobs to hide us out, and Leroy thought that was all there was. Then Miller and I got cozy, and he told me there was forty thousand for us.”

I looked at the girl, nineteen-year-old pulchritude with whorehouse smarts. “Where’s Miller’s money?”

Jane watched Davis lovingly eye the Auburn speedster. “Why should I tell you? You’d just give it back to that cheapskate father of mine.”

“He paid a hundred grand to save your life.”

The girl shrugged and lit a cigarette. “He probably used the interest from Mother’s trust fund. What’s wrong with fatso? Is he queer for cars or something?”

Davis walked over to us. “She needs a complete paint strip, new paint job, new upholstery and some whitewalls. Then she’s a peach.” Winking at Jane Viertel, he said, “What’s your goal in life, Sweetheart? Pussywhipping killers?”

Jane smiled, walked to the car, and unscrewed the gas cap. She dropped in her cigarette and started running. Davis and I hit the ground and ate grass. The gas tank exploded and the car went up in flames. The girl stood up and curtsied, then walked to us and said, “Miller’s money was in the trunk. Too had. Daddy. Maybe you can tell Mother it’s a tax write-off.”

I recuffed Jane Viertel; the flames sent flickers of light over Davis Evans’s bereaved face. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled them out empty, and said to me, “You got a couple dimes, partner? AX6-400’s a toll call. I need me a peach like a mother dog.”