Blood's a rover

103

(Los Angeles, 3/15/71-11/18/71)

Frustration. Fucking ceaseless, day by day.

The county grand jury nailed the Bostitch boys posthumous. Scotty breathed easy then. The brothers snuffed Mr. Clean and formed a suicide pact. Nice, but the heist gig was stalled flat.

Who’s the Woman?

She was Thornton’s emerald conduit and cutout. A Woman pervaded the Jomo offshoot. Marsh perks when he says Woman. Marsh comes on bifurcated. He’s solid and untrustworthy.

Who’s the Woman? His notion: she was in with OPERATION BAAAAD BROTHER. Dandy, but:

He can’t brace Dwight Holly. Dwight is dead smart and subtle and would brace him right back. He can’t brace Jack Leahy. Jack knows about BAAAAD BROTHER. Jack is dead smart and subtle and would brace him right back.

Frustration. Mind-bending, night after night.

They stole the emerald-disbursement clip file and the coded ledger. He tried to crack the code. He spent months on it. He thought about hiring a cryptographer. A pro might crack the code. He finally nixed the idea. The code guy would know then. One more loose end would unfurl.

Federal bank examiners tossed the Peoples’ Bank. Scotty went with them and Jack Leahy. They tore the walls, floors and roof to shreds. They found the vault from Mr. Clean’s drawing. Inside: a dope stash and $89,000.

Cat’s-paw. Long-term stopgap. A hedge against possible exposure.

The money and remaining emeralds were stashed elsewhere. Thornton was smart. He didn’t give up the vault. He played the “I don’t know” card. He knew he was dead, anyway. Theory: the money and gems were in the vault. The heist guys knew it. They pulled them before the bank team went in.

Where’s Reggie? Who’s the Woman? Who’ll disburse the emeralds with Mr. Clean dead?

Frustration. Night sweats. Woooooo, toss the sheets.

Marsh was frustrated. He’s read all their files. He reads them and nit-picks the details. They’re the world’s greatest rogue cop salt-and-pepper team. They’re years in and still short of the rainbow.

Frustration meant backlash. Scotty fucked his wife and girlfriends more and lived for stakeouts. He nailed two cholos outside a Boyle Heights bodega in May. Marsh loved it-at least they weren’t black. He 86’d two neo-Nazis a week later. They robbed a black-owned market on Vermont. He blew one cracker’s arm off. He pulled a black tot to safety. Marsh loooooved it. Marsh had clout with the NAACP. They might give him a medal.

Marsh let steam off his way. Do your own thing? Sure. Marsh vanished three times in eight months. He said he took car trips, to re-wire his head. It had to be fruit shit. Fruit junkets, fruit trysts, fruit excursions.

Frustration. You want gooooood booty? Let Pastor Bennett and Peeper Crutchfield pimp for you.

Sissy Sal crush-crawled all over Macho Marsh. Marsh won’t jump his bones back. It was driving him nuts. Ditto Peeper, Fred T. and Fred O.

Frustration. Who’s the Woman?

He’s sniffed all over darktown. He’s gotten nothing substantive. The description rings bells. Some geeks seem slightly spooked. One guy said she might be black militant-connected. He queried his Panther and US contacts and got shit. The BTA and MMLF geeks were all off in prison. He couldn’t brace them there. His visits would be noted. Stray talk would disperse.

The case was all Her. The woman with the gray-streaked hair was Everything.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 11/18/71. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

Los Angeles,

November 18, 1971

Media was eight months ago. My comrades and I have remained unapprehended; no one has broken ranks; the FBI’s illegal surveillance of political organizations, civic groups and protest-inclined individuals has been revealed in a flurry of news reportage, angry editorials and television and radio airtime. The revelation has come and gone. The concept of the COINTELPRO has been introduced to the American people, who have largely chosen to ignore it. The FBI’s more draconian undercover operations were not mentioned in any of the released files. Dwight and Joan seemed pleased by this. I am quite capable of discerning Dwight’s unspoken thoughts. He’s happy that the FBI’s specific war on the civil rights movement and black-militant groups has not been preemptively placed under the COINTELPRO umbrella.

I don’t want to know what Joan and Dwight are planning; I suspect that I will learn of it in the public arena and am beginning to nurture a sense of it as a grandiosely large event. Media was a diversionary tactic and/or a setup. The ramifications of my one proactive salvo for Dwight and Joan will become apparent over time. I don’t want to know. They know that and withhold their plans from me. I have prayed over this and have made a vow to continue to love them, regardless of any horror and chaos they may perpetrate.

We never meet as a group of three. Joan has resurfaced in my life; we meet for coffee or lunch two or three times a week, always here in Silver Lake or Echo Park. We discuss politics incessantly. Nixon, Vietnam, labor issues and the black-militant movement in decline can engross us for hours. Joan is gaunt and speaks in nervous, yet fully coherent bomb bursts of invective, with perceptive flows of political monologue mixed in. The lovely and defining gray patches in her hair are turning white and are streaking through the overall black. I’m afraid she’s becoming paranoid- she says she’s had an intermittent sense of being followed-and she often speaks of her lover/comrade Celia, out of touch in Haiti or the Dominican Republic. Celia once told Joan not to try to find her should she go missing. How many times has Joan told lovers or lover/comrades the same thing? Now, Joan is the one bereft, and it is her bond with Dwight Chalfont Holly that has taken her to this point where she cannot suppress grief.

Joan smokes constantly and drinks pots of self-brewed Haitian herb tea. She swallows Haitian herb capsules with all her meals, at precisely timed moments of the day. I asked her about it. She said she was trying to get pregnant. She wanted to have a child.

I didn’t question her motive. I knew not to ask “Why?” Joan would simply say, “I’m not telling you.” A woman her age cannot will a child. Joan doesn’t seem to know how improbable it is. It continues to remain unspoken, albeit ineluctably true. She wants to have this child with Dwight.

Joan and I have always withheld from each other. We are individually compromised and duplicitous; we live in a mendacious world we have been morally charged to undermine and subvert. I could tell Joan the one thing I have never told Dwight. It might or might not hurt her. I know what it would do to Dwight. I fear the further breakdown that it might engender and the deep resolve it would certainly create.

DOCUMENT INSERT. 11/18/71. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Baldwin Hills,