The Black Dahlia

Twenty-five

Time passed. Kay and I worked and played at being a young married couple.

After our quickie San Francisco honeymoon, I returned to what remained of my police career. Thad Green talked turkey to me: he admired what I did with the Vogels, but considered me useless as a patrol cop — I had earned the enmity of rank and file blues, and my presence in a uniformed division would only create grief. Since my year of junior college showed straight A’s in chemistry and math, he assigned me to the Scientific Investigation Detail as an evidence technician.

The job was quasi-plainclothes — smocks in the lab and gray suits in the field. I typed blood, dusted for latent prints and wrote ballistics reports; scraped ooze off the walls at crime scenes and examined it under a microscope, letting the Homicide dicks take it from there. It was test tubes and beakers and clinical gore — an intimacy with death that I never became inured to; a constant reminder that I wasn’t a detective, that I couldn’t be trusted to follow up on my own findings.

From various distances I followed the friends and enemies the Dahlia case had given me.

Russ and Harry kept the El Nido file room intact, continuing to work overtime hours on the Short investigation. I had a key to the door, but didn’t use it — per my promise to Kay to bury “that — dead girl.” Sometimes I met the padre for lunch and asked him how it was going; he always said, “Slowly,” and I knew that he would never find the killer and never quit trying.

In June of ’47, Ben Siegel was shot to death in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills living room. Bill Koenig, assigned to 77th Street dicks after Fritz Vogel’s suicide, caught a shotgun blast in the face on a Watts street corner early in ’48. Both killings went unsolved. Ellis Loew was soundly trounced in the June ’48 Republican primary, and I celebrated by cooking up beakers of moonshine on my Bunsen burner, getting everyone in the crime lab fried.

The ’48 general election brought me news of the Spragues. A slate of reform Democrats were running for seats on the LA City Council and Board of Supervisors, “City Planning” their basic campaign theme. They asserted that there were faultily designed, unsafe dwellings all over Los Angeles, and were calling for a grand jury probe on the contractors who built the structures back during the ’20s real estate boom. The scandal tabloids took up the hue and cry, running articles on the “boom barons” — Mack Sennett and Emmett Sprague among them — and their “gangster ties.” Confidential magazine ran a series on Sennett’s Hollywoodland tract and how the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce wanted to lop the L-A-N-D off the giant Hollywoodland sign on Mount Lee, and there were photographs of the Keystone Kops director standing beside a stocky man with a cute little girl in tow. I couldn’t quite tell if it was Emmett and Madeleine, but I clipped the pictures anyway.

My enemies;

My friends;

My wife.

I processed evidence and Kay taught school, and for a while we reveled in the novelty of living a squarejohn life. With the house paid off in full and two salaries, there was plenty of money to spend, and we used it to pamper ourselves away from Lee Blanchard and the winter of ’47. We took weekend trips to the desert and the mountains; we ate in restaurants three and four nights a week. We checked into hotels pretending to be illicit lovers, and it took me well over a year to realize that we did those things because it got us out of the pad the Boulevard-Citizens bank job paid for. And I was so heedless in my pursuit of pampering that it required a live-wire shock to spell it out.

A floorboard in the hallway came loose, and I pulled it all the way off so I could reglue it. Looking in the hole, I found a cash roll, two thousand dollars in C-notes secured by a rubber band. I didn’t feel joyous or shocked; my brain went tick, tick, tick, and came up with the questions my rush into normal life had quashed:

If Lee had this money, plus the dough he was spending in Mexico, why didn’t he pay off Baxter Fitch?

If he had the money, why did he go to Ben Siegel to try to borrow ten grand to meet Fitch’s blackmail demand?

How could Lee have bought and furnished this house, put Kay through college and still have had a substantial sum left when his cut from the aborted heist couldn’t have amounted to more than fifty grand or so?

Of course I told Kay; of course she couldn’t answer the questions; of course she loathed me for dredging up the past. I told her we could sell the house and get an apartment like other normal squarejohns — and of course she wouldn’t have it. It was comfort, style — a link to her old life that she would not give up.

I burned the money in Lee Blanchard’s Deco-streamline fireplace. Kay never asked me what I did with it. The simple act gave me back some smothered part of myself, cost me most of what I had with my wife — and returned me to my ghosts.

Kay and I made love less and less. When we did it was perfunctory reassurance for her and a dull explosion for me. I came to see Kay Lake Bleichert as wasted by the obscenity in her old life, just short of thirty and already going chaste. I brought the gutter to our bed then, the faces of hookers I saw downtown attached to Kay’s body in the darkness. It worked the first few times, until I saw where I really wanted to go. When I finally made the move and came gasping, Kay stroked me with mothering hands, and I sensed that she knew I’d broken my marriage vow — with her right there.

1948 became 1949. I turned the garage into a boxing gym, complete with speed bag and heavy bag, jump ropes and barbells. I got back into fighting trim, and decorated the garage walls with fight stills of young Bucky Bleichert, circa ’40–’41. My own image glimpsed through sweat-streaked eyes brought me closer to her, and I scoured used book stores for Sunday supplements and news magazines. I found sepia candids in Colliers; some family snapshots reproduced in old issues of the Boston Globe. I kept them out of sight in the garage, and the stack grew, then vanished one afternoon. I heard Kay sobbing inside the house that evening, and when I went to talk to her the bedroom door was locked.

Twenty-six

The phone rang. I reached for the bedside extension, then snapped that I’d been a couch sleeper for the past month and flailed at the coffee table. “Yeah?”

“You still sleeping?”

It was the voice of Ray Pinker, my supervisor at SID. “I was sleeping.”

“Past tense is right. Are you listening?”

“Keep going.”

“We’ve got a gunshot suicide from yesterday. 514 South June Street, Hancock Park. Body removed, looks open and shut. Do a complete work-up and drop the report off with Lieutenant Reddin at Wilshire dicks. Got it?”

I yawned. “Yeah. Premises sealed?”

“The stiff’s wife will show you around. Be courteous, this is filthy rich we’re dealing with.”

I hung up and groaned. Then it hit me that the Sprague mansion was a block from the June Street address. Suddenly the assignment was fascinating.

I rang the bell of the pillared colonial manse an hour later. A handsome gray-haired woman of about fifty opened the door, dressed in dusty work togs. I said, “I’m Officer Bleichert, LAPD. May I express my condolences, Mrs.—”

Ray Pinker hadn’t given me a name. The woman said, “Condolences accepted, and I’m Jane Chambers. Are you the lab man?”

The woman was trembling underneath her brusqueness; I liked her immediately. “Yes. If you’ll point me to the place I’ll take care of it and leave you alone.”

Jane Chambers ushered me into a sedate, all-wood foyer. “The study in back of the dining room. You’ll see the rope. Now, if you’ll excuse me I want to do some gardening.”

She took off dabbing at her eyes. I found the room, stepped over the crime scene rope and wondered why the bastard did himself in where his loved ones would see the gore.

It looked like a classic self-inflicted shotgun job: overturned leather chair, the outline of the stiff chalked on the floor beside it. The weapon, a double-barreled .12 gauge, was right where it should have been — three feet in front of the body, the muzzle coated with blood and shredded tissue. The light plaster walls and ceiling showed off blood and caked-on brains to full advantage, the teeth fragments and buckshot a dead giveaway that the victim had stuck both barrels in his mouth.

I spent an hour measuring trajectories and spatter marks, scraping matter into test tubes and dusting the suicide weapon for latents. When I finished, I took a bag from my evidence kit and wrapped up the shotgun, knowing full well it would end up the property of some LAPD sportsman. Then I walked out to the entrance hall, stopping when I saw a framed painting hung at eye level.

It was a portrait of a clown, a young boy done up in court jester’s garb from long, long ago. His body was gnarled and hunched; he wore a stuporous ear-to-ear smile that looked like one continuous deep scar.

I stared, transfixed, thinking of Elizabeth Short, DOA at 39th and Norton. The more I stared the more the two blended; finally I pulled my eyes away and settled them on a photo of two arm-linked young women who looked just like Jane Chambers.

“The other survivors. Pretty, aren’t they?”

I turned around. The widow was twice as dusty as before, smelling of insect spray and soil. “Like their mother. How old are they?”

“Linda’s twenty-three and Carol’s twenty. Are you finished in the study?”

I thought of the daughters as contemporaries of the Sprague girls. “Yes. Tell whoever cleans it up to use pure ammonia. Mrs. Chambers—”

“Jane.”

“Jane, do you know Madeleine and Martha Sprague?”

Jane Chambers snorted, “Those girls and that family. How do you know them?”

“I did some work for them once.”

“Count yourself lucky it was a brief encounter.”

“What do you mean?”

The hallway phone rang. Jane Chambers said, “Back to condolences. Thank you for being so nice, Mr.—”

“It’s Bucky. Good-bye, Jane.”

“Good-bye.”

I wrote out my report at Wilshire Station, then checked the routine suicide file on Chambers, Eldridge Thomas, DOD 4/2/49. It didn’t tell me much: Jane Chambers heard the shotgun explosion, found the body and called the police immediately. When detectives arrived, she told them her husband was depressed over his failing health and their eldest daughter’s failing marriage. Suicide: case closed pending forensic crime scene work-up.

My work-up confirmed the verdict, plain and simple. But it didn’t feel like enough. I liked the widow, the Spragues lived a block away, I was still curious. I got on a squadroom phone and put in calls to Russ Millard’s newspaper contacts, giving them two names: Eldridge Chambers and Emmett Sprague. They did their own digging and calling, and got back to me on the station extension I was hogging. Four hours later I knew the following:

That Eldridge Chambers died enormously wealthy;

That from 1930 to 1934 he was president of the Southern California Real Estate Board;

That he nominated Sprague for membership in Wilshire Country Club in 1929, but the Scotsman was rejected because of his “Jewish business associates” — i.e. East Coast hoodlums;

And the kicker: Chambers, through intermediaries, got Sprague kicked off the real estate board when several of his houses collapsed during the ’33 earthquake.

It was enough for a juicy newspaper obit, but not enough for a test-tube cop with a foundering marriage and time on his hands. I waited four days; then, when the papers told me Eldridge Chambers was in the ground, I went back to talk to his widow.

She answered the door in gardening clothes, holding a pair of shears. “Did you forget something or are you as curious as I thought you were?”

“The latter.”

Jane laughed and wiped dirt from her face. “After you left I put your name together. Weren’t you some sort of athlete?”

I laughed. “I was a boxer. Are your daughters around? Have you got someone staying with you?”

Jane shook her head. “No, and I prefer it that way. Will you join me for tea in the backyard?”

I nodded. Jane led me through the house and out to a shaded veranda overlooking a large bent grass yard more than half dug up into furrows. I sat down in a lounge chair; she poured iced tea. “I’ve done all that garden work since Sunday. I think it’s helped more than all the sympathy calls I’ve gotten.”

“You’re taking it well.”

Jane sat down beside me. “Eldridge had cancer, so I half expected it. I didn’t expect a shotgun in our own home, though.”

“Were you close?”

“No, not anymore. With the girls grown up, we would have divorced sooner or later. Are you married?”

“Yes. Almost two years.”

Jane sipped tea. “God, a newlywed. There’s nothing better, is there?”

My face must have betrayed me. Jane said, “Sorry,” then changed the subject. “How do you know the Spragues?”

“I was involved with Madeleine before I met my wife. How well do you know them?”

Jane considered my question, staring out at the uprooted yard. “Eldridge and Emmett went way back,” she said finally. “They both made a lot of money in real estate and served on the Southern California board together. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, since you’re a policeman, but Emmett was a bit of a crook. A lot of his houses went down during the big quake in ’33, and Eldridge said that he has lots of other property that has to go bad sooner or later — houses made out of the worst possible material. Eldridge got Emmett booted off the board when he found out that phony corporations controlled the rentals and sales — he was enraged that Emmett would never be held responsible if more lives were lost.”

I remembered talking with Madeleine about the same thing. “Your husband sounds like a good man.”

Jane’s lips curled into a smile — it looked like against her will. “He had his moments.”

“He never went to the police about Emmett?”

“No. He was afraid of his gangster friends. He just did what he could, a little nuisance to Emmett. Being removed from the board probably cost him some business.”

“‘He did what he could’ isn’t a bad epitaph.”

Now Jane’s lips curled into a sneer. “It was out of guilt. Eldridge owned slum blocks in San Pedro. When he learned he had cancer, he really started feeling guilty. He voted Democratic last year, and when they got in he had meetings with some of the new City Council members. I’m sure he gave them his dirt on Emmett.”

I thought of the Grand Jury probe the scandal sheets were predicting. “Maybe Emmett’s heading for a fall. Your husband could have been—”

Jane rapped her ring finger on the tabletop. “My husband was rich and handsome and did a mean Charleston. I loved him until I found out he was cheating on me, and now I’m starting to love him again. It is so strange.”

“It’s not so strange,” I said.

Jane smiled very softly. “How old are you, Bucky?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Well, I’m fifty-one, and I think it’s strange, so it is strange. You shouldn’t be so all-accepting of the human heart at your age. You should have illusions.”

“You’re teasing me, Jane. I’m a cop. Cops don’t have illusions.”

Jane laughed — heartily. “Touché. Now I’m curious. How did an ex-boxer cop get involved with Madeleine Sprague?”

Now I lied. “I stopped her for a red light and one thing led to another.” My gut clenching, I asked casually, “What do you know about her?”

Jane stomped her foot at a crow eyeing the rose bushes just off the veranda. “What I know about the distaff Spragues is at least ten years old and quite strange. Baroque, almost.”

“I’m all ears.”

Jane said, “Some might say all teeth.” When I didn’t laugh, she looked across the dug-up yard to Muirfield Road and the boom baron’s estate. “When my girls and Maddy and Martha were little, Ramona directed pageants and ceremonies on that huge front lawn of theirs. Little enactments with the girls dressed up in pinafores and animal costumes. I let Linda and Carol participate, even though I knew Ramona was a disturbed woman. When the girls all got a bit older — in their teens — the pageants got stranger. Ramona and Maddy were very good at makeup, and Ramona staged these... epics, reenacting the things that happened to Emmett and his friend Georgie Tilden during World War I.

“So, she had children wearing soldier kilts and pancake faces, carrying toy muskets. Sometimes she smeared fake blood on them, and sometimes Georgie actually filmed it. It got so bizarre, so out of proportion, that I made Linda and Carol quit playing with the Sprague girls. Then one day Carol came home with some pictures Georgie took of her. She was playing dead, all smeared with red dye. That was the last straw. I stormed over to the Sprague house and berated Georgie, knowing Ramona wasn’t really responsible for her actions. The poor man just took my abuse, and I felt terrible about it later — he was disfigured in a car wreck, and it turned him into a bum. He used to manage property for Emmett, now he just does yard work and weeds lots for the city.”

“And what happened to Madeleine and Martha then?”

Jane shrugged. “Martha turned into some sort of art prodigy and Madeleine turned into a roundheels, which I guess you already know.”

I said, “Don’t be catty, Jane.”

Tapping the table with her ring, Jane said, “I apologize. Maybe I’m wishing / could pull it off. I certainly can’t spend the rest of my life gardening, and I’m too proud for gigolos. What do you think?”

“You’ll find yourself another millionaire.”

“Unlikely, and one was enough to last me a lifetime. You know what I keep thinking? That it’s almost 1950 and I was born in 1898. That floors me.”

I said what I’d been thinking for the past half hour. “You make me wish things were different. That time was different.”

Jane smiled and sighed. “Bucky, is that the best I can expect from you?”

I sighed back. “I think it’s the best anyone can.”

“You’re a bit of a voyeur, you know.”

“And you’re a bit of a gossip.”

“Touché. Come on, I’ll walk you out.”

We held hands on the way to the door. In the entrance hall, the scar mouth clown painting grabbed me again. Pointing to it, I said, “God, that is spooky.”

“Valuable, too. Eldridge bought it for my forty-ninth birthday, but I hate it. Would you like to take it with you?”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Thank you, then. You were my best condoler.”

“And you were mine.”

We embraced for a moment, then I took off.

Twenty-seven

Bunsen burner jockey.

Couch sleeper.

Detective without a case.

I worked at all three throughout the spring of ’49. Kay left for school early each morning; I pretended to sleep until she was gone. Alone in the fairy tale house, I touched my wife’s things — the cashmere sweaters Lee bought her, her essays to be graded, the books she had stacked up waiting to be read. I kept looking for a diary, but never found one. At the lab I pictured Kay prowling my belongings. I toyed with the idea of writing a journal and leaving it out for her to find — detailed accounts of my coupling with Madeleine Sprague — rubbing her nose in it to either gain forgiveness for my fix on the Dahlia or blow our marriage out of its stasis. I got as far as five pages scrawled in my cubicle — stopping when I smelled Madeleine’s perfume melding with the Lysol stench of the Red Arrow Motel. And wadding the pages up and throwing them away only fanned the brush fire into a blaze.

I kept the Muirfield Road mansion under surveillance for four nights running. Parked across the street, I watched lights go on and off, saw shadows flicker across leaded glass windows. I played with notions of crashing the Spragues’ family life, cashing in on being a hard boy to Emmett, coupling with Madeleine all over hot sheet row. None of the family left the manse during those nights — all four of their cars remained on the circular driveway. I kept wondering what they were doing, what shared history they were rehashing, what the odds were on someone mentioning the cop who came to dinner two years before.

On the fifth night, Madeleine, dressed in slacks and a pink sweater, walked to the corner to mail a letter. When she returned, I saw her notice my car, passing headlights illuminating the surprise on her face. I waited until she hurried back inside the Tudor fortress, then drove home, Jane Chambers’ voice taunting, “Voyeur, voyeur.”

Walking in, I heard the shower running; the bedroom door was open. Kay’s favorite Brahms quintet was on the phonograph. Remembering the first time I saw my wife naked, I undressed and lay down on the bed.

The shower went off; Brahms came on that much stronger. Kay appeared in the doorway wrapped in a towel. I said, “Babe,” she said, “Oh, Dwight,” and let the towel drop. We both began talking at once, apologies from both sides. I couldn’t quite make out her words, and I knew that she couldn’t unscramble mine. I started to get up to turn off the phonograph, but Kay moved to the bed first.

We fumbled at kisses. I went open-mouthed too fast, forgetting how Kay liked to be coaxed. Feeling her tongue, I pulled away, knowing she hated it. Closing my eyes, I trailed my lips down her neck; she moaned, and I knew it was a fake. The love sounds got worse — like something you’d expect from a stag film actress. Kay’s breasts were flaccid in my hands, her legs closed, but braced up against me. A knee nudge parted them — the response was jerky, spasmodic. Hard now, I made Kay wet with my mouth and went inside her.

I kept my eyes open and on hers so she would know it was just us; Kay turned away, and I knew she saw through it. I wanted to ease off and go slowly, softly, but the sight of a vein throbbing in Kay’s neck made me go as hard as I could. I came grunting, “I’m sorry goddamn you I’m sorry,” and whatever Kay said back was muffled by the pillow she was burying her head in.

Twenty-eight

The following night I was parked across the street from the Sprague mansion, this time in the unmarked Ford I drove to SID field jobs. Time was lost on me, but I knew that every second was bringing me closer to knocking on the door or bolting outright.

My mind played with Madeleine nude; I wowed the other Spragues with killer repartee. Then light cut across the driveway, the door slammed and the Packard’s headbeams went on. It pulled out onto Muirfield, hung a quick left turn on Sixth Street and headed east. I waited a discreet three seconds and followed.

The Packard stayed in the middle lane; I dogged it from the right one, a good four car lengths behind. We traveled out of Hancock Park into the Wilshire District, south on Normandie and east on 8th Street. I saw glittery bar beacons stretching for a solid mile — and knew Madeleine was close to something.

The Packard stopped in front of the Zimba Room, a dive with crossed neon spears above the entrance. The only other parking space was right behind it, so I glided up, my headlights catching the driver locking the door, my brain wires unraveling when I saw who it wasn’t and was.

Elizabeth Short.

Betty Short.

Liz Short.

The Black Dahlia.

My knees jerked into the steering wheel; my trembling hands hit the horn. The apparition shielded her eyes and squinted into my beams, then shrugged. I saw familiar dimples twitch, and returned from wherever it was I was going.

It was Madeleine Sprague, completely made over as the Dahlia. She was dressed in an all-black clinging gown, with makeup and hairdo identical to Betty Short at her portrait photo best. I watched her sashay into the bar, saw a dot of yellow in her upswept black curls and knew that she’d taken her transformation all the way to the barrette Betty wore. The detail hit me like a Lee Blanchard one-two. On punch-drunk legs, I pursued the ghost.

The Zimba Room interior was wall-to-wall smoke, GI’s and juke box jazz; Madeleine was at the bar sipping a drink. Looking around, I saw that she was the only woman in the place and already creating a hubbub — soldiers and sailors were elbowing the good news to one another, pointing to the black-clad figure and exchanging whispers.

I found a zebra-striped booth at the back; it was filled with sailors sharing a bottle. One glance at their peach fuzz faces told me they were underage. I held out my badge and said, “Scram or I’ll have the SP’s here inside of a minute.” The three youths took off in a blue swirl, leaving their jug behind. I sat down to watch Madeleine portray Betty.

Guzzling half a tumbler of bourbon calmed my nerves. I had a diagonal view of Madeleine at the bar, surrounded by would-be lovers hanging on her every word. I was too far away to hear anything — but every gesture I saw her make was not hers, but that of some other woman. And every time she touched a member of her entourage my hand twitched toward my .38.

Time stretched, in a haze of navy blue and khaki with a jet black center.

Madeleine drank, chatted and brushed off passes, her attention narrowing down to a stocky sailor. Her coterie dwindled out as the man shot them mean looks; I killed off the bottle. Staring at the bar kept me from thinking, the loud jazz kept my ears perked for the sound of voices above it, the booze kept me from rousting the stocky man on a half dozen trumped-up charges. Then the woman in black and the sailor in blue were out the door, arms linked, Madeleine inches taller in her high heels.

I gave them a bourbon-calmed five seconds, then hauled. The Packard was turning right at the corner when I got behind the wheel; gunning it and hanging a hard right myself, I saw taillights at the end of the block. I zoomed up behind them, almost tapping the rear bumper; Madeleine’s signal arm shot out the window, and she veered into the parking lot of a brightly lit auto court.

I skidded to a stop, then backed up and killed my headlights. From the street I could see sailor boy standing by the Packard smoking a cigarette, while Madeleine hit the motel office for the room key. She came outside with it a moment later, just like our old routine; she made the sailor walk ahead of her, just like she did with me. The lights went on and off inside the room, and when I listened outside it the blinds were drawn and our old station was on the radio.

Rolling stakeouts.

Field interrogations.

The Bunsen burner jockey now a detective with a case.

I kept Madeleine’s Dahlia act under surveillance for four more nights; she pulled the same MO every time: 8th Street gin mill, hard boy with lots of confetti on his chest, the fuck pad at 9th and Irolo. When the two were ensconsed, I went back and questioned bartenders and GIs she gave the ixnay to.

What name did the black-clad woman give?

None.

What did she talk about?

The war and breaking into the movies.

Did you notice her resemblance to the Black Dahlia, that murdered girl from a couple of years ago, and if so, what do you think she was trying to prove?

Negative answers and theories: She’s a loony who thinks she’s the Black Dahlia; she’s a hooker cashing in on the Dahlia’s look; she’s a policewoman decoy out to get the Dahlia killer; she’s a crazy woman dying of cancer, trying to attract the Dahlia slasher and cheat the Big C.

I knew the next step was to roust Madeleine’s lovers — but I didn’t trust myself to do it rationally. If they said the wrong thing or the right thing, or pointed me in the wrong/right direction, I knew I couldn’t be held accountable for what I would do.

The four nights of booze, catnaps in the car and couch naps at home with Kay sequestered in the bedroom took their toll on me. At work I dropped slides and mislabeled blood samples, wrote evidence reports in my own exhaustion shorthand and twice fell asleep hunched over a ballistics miscroscope, awakening to jagged shots of Madeleine in black. Knowing I couldn’t hack night five by myself or give it a pass, I stole some Benzedrine tablets awaiting processing for Narcotics Division. They juiced me out of my fatigue and into a clammy feeling of disgust for what I’d been doing to myself — and they gave me a brainstorm to save me from Madeleine/Dahlia and make me a real cop again.

Thad Green nodded along as I plea-bargained him: I had seven years on the Department, my run-in with the Vogels was over two years before and mostly forgotten, I hated working SID and wanted to return to a uniformed division — preferably nightwatch. I was studying for the Sergeant’s Exam, SID had served me well as a training ground for my ultimate goal — the Detective Bureau. I started to launch a tirade on my shitty marriage and how nightwatch would keep me away from my wife, faltering when images of the lady in black hit me and I realized I was close to begging. The Chief of Detectives finally silenced me with a long stare, and I wondered if the dope was betraying me. Then he said, “Okay, Bucky,” and pointed to the door. I waited in the outer office for a Benzedrine eternity; when Green walked out smiling, I almost jumped loose of my skin. “Newton Street nightwatch as of tomorrow,” he said. “And try to be civil with our colored brethren down there. You’ve got a bad case of the yips, and I wouldn’t want you passing it on to them.”

Newton Street Division was southeast of downtown LA, 95 percent slums, 95 percent Negroes, all trouble. There were bottle gangs and crap games on every corner; liquor stores, hair-straightening parlors and poolrooms on every block, code three calls to the station twenty-four hours a day. Footbeat hacks carried metal-studded saps; squadroom dicks packed .45 automatics loaded with un-regulation dum-dums. The local winos drank “Green Lizard” — cologne cut with Old Monterey white port, and the standard pop for a whore was one dollar, a buck and a quarter if you used “her place” — the abandoned cars in the auto graveyard at 56th and Central. The kids on the street were scrawny and bloated, stray dogs sported mange and perpetual snarls, merchants kept shotguns under the counter. Newton Street Division was a war zone.

I reported for duty after twenty-two hours of sack time, booze-weaned off the Benzies. The station commander, an ancient lieutenant named Getchell, supplied a warm welcome, telling me that Thad Green said I was kosher, and he’d accept me as such until I fucked up and proved otherwise. Personally, he hated boxers and stoolies, but he was willing to let bygones be bygones. My fellow officers would probably take some persuading, however; they really hated glory cops, boxers and Bolsheviks, and Fritzie Vogel was warmly remembered from his Newton Street tour years before. The cordial CO assigned me to a single-o foot beat, and I left that initial briefing determined to out-kosher God himself.

My first roll call was worse.

Introduced to the watch by the muster sergeant, I got no applause and a wide assortment of fisheyes, evil eyes and averted eyes. After the reading of the crime sheet, seven men out of the fifty-five or so stopped to shake my hand and wish me good luck. The sergeant gave me a silent tour of the division and dropped me off with a street map at the east edge of my beat; his farewell was, “Don’t let the niggers give you no shit.” When I thanked him, he said, “Fritz Vogel was a good pal of mine,” and sped off.

I decided to kosherize myself fast.

My first week at Newton was muscle rousts and gathering information on who the real bad guys were. I broke up Green Lizard parties with my billy club, promising not to roust the winos if they fed me names. If they didn’t kick loose, I arrested them; if they did, I arrested them anyway. I smelled reefer smoke on the sidewalk outside the gassed hair joint on 68th and Beach, kicked the door in and drew down on three grasshoppers holding felony quantities of maryjane. They snitched off their supplier and fingered an upcoming rumble between The Slausons and Choppers in return for my promise of leniency; I called in the info to the squardroom and flagged down a black-and-white to haul the hopheads to the station. Prowling the hooker auto dump got me prostitution collars, and threatening the girls’ johns with calls to their wives got me more names. At week’s end I had twenty-two arrests to my credit — nine of them felonies. And I had names. Names to test my courage on. Names to make up for the main events I’d dodged. Names to make the cops who hated me afraid of me.

I caught Downtown Willy Brown coming out of the Lucky Time Wine Bar. I said, “Your mother sucks a mean dick, Sambo”; Willy charged me. I took three to give six; when it was over Brown was blowing teeth out his nose. And two cops shooting the breeze across the street saw the whole thing.

Roosevelt Williams, paroled rape-o, pimp and policy runner, was tougher. His response to “Hello, shitbird” was “You a whitey motherfuck” — and he hit first. We traded shots for close to a minute, in full view of a cadre of Choppers lounging on front stoops. He was getting the better of me, and I almost went for my baton — not the stuff of which legends are made. Finally I pulled a Lee Blanchard move, rolling upstairs-downstairs sets, wham-wham-wham-wham, the last blow sending Williams to dreamland and me to the station nurse for two finger splints.

Bare knuckles were now out of the question. My last two names, Crawford Johnson and his brother Willis, operated a rigged card game out of the rec room of the Mighty Reedeemer Baptist Church on 61st and Enterprise, catty corner from the greasy spoon where Newton cops ate for half price. When I came in the window, Willis was dealing. He looked up and said, “Huh?” my billy club took out his hands and the card table. Crawford went for his waistband; my second baton blow knocked a silencer-fitted .45 from his grip. The brothers crashed out the door howling in pain; I picked up my new off-duty piece and told the other gamblers to grab their money and go home. When I walked outside, I had an audience: bluesuits chomping sandwiches on the sidewalk, watching the Johnson brothers hotfoot it, holding their broken paws. “Some people don’t respond to civility!” I yelled. An old sergeant rumored to hate my guts yelled back, “Bleichert, you’re an honorary white man!” and I knew I was kosherized.

The Johnson Brothers roust made me a minor legend. My fellow cops gradually warmed to me — the way you do to guys too crazy-bold for their own good, guys that you’re grateful not to be yourself. It was like being a local celebrity again.

I got straight 100’s on my first month’s fitness report, and Lieutenant Getchell rewarded me with a radio car beat. It was a promotion of sorts, as was the territory that came with it.

Rumor had it that both the Slausons and the Choppers were out to do me in, and if they failed, Crawford and Willis Johnson were next in line to try. Getchell wanted me out of harm’s way until they cooled off, so he assigned me to a sector on the western border of the division.

The new beat was an invitation to boredom. Mixed white and Negro, small factories and tidy houses, the best action you could hope for was drunk drivers and hitchhiking hookers soliciting motorists, trying to pick up a few bucks on their way down to the niggertown dope pads. I busted DDs and thwarted assignations by flashing my cherry lights, wrote traffic tickets by the shitload and generally prowled for anything out of the ordinary. Drive-in restaurants were popping up on Hoover and Vermont, spangly modern jobs where you could eat in your car and listen to music on speakers attached to the window posts. I spent hours parked in them, KGFJ blasting be-bop, my two-way on low in case anything hot came over the air. I eyeballed the street while I sat and listened, trawling for white hookers, telling myself that if I saw any who looked like Betty Short, I’d warn them that 39th and Norton was only a few miles away and urge them to be careful.

But most of the whores were jigs and bleached blondes, not worth warning and only worth busting when my arrest quota was running low. They were women, though, safe places to let my mind dawdle, safe substitutes for my wife at home alone and Madeleine crawling 8th Street gutters. I toyed with the idea of picking up a Dahlia/Madeleine lookalike for sex, but always quashed it — it was too much like Johnny Vogel and Betty at the Biltmore.

Going off-duty at midnight, I was always itchy, restless, in no mood to go home and sleep. Sometimes I hit the all-night movies downtown, sometimes the jazz clubs on South Central. Bop was moving into its heyday, and all-night sessions with a pint of bonded were generally enough to ease me home and into a dreamless sleep shortly after Kay left for work in the morning.

But when it didn’t work, it was sweats and Jane Chambers’ smiling clown and Frenchman Joe Dulange smashing cockroaches and Johnny Vogel and his whip and Betty begging me to fuck her or kill her killer, she didn’t care which. And the worst of it was waking up alone in the fairy tale house.

Summer came on. Hot days sleeping it off on the couch; hot nights patrolling west niggertown, bonded sourmash, the Royal Flush and Bido Lito’s, Hampton Hawes, Dizzy Gillespie, Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon. Restless attempts to study for the Sergeant’s Exam and the urge to blow off Kay and the fairy tale house and get a cheap pad somewhere on my beat. If it weren’t for the spectral wino it might have gone on forever.

I was parked in Duke’s Drive-in, eyeing a gaggle of trampy-looking girls standing by the bus stop about ten yards in front of me. My two-way was off, wild Kenton riffs were coming out of the speaker hook-up. The breezeless humidity had my uniform plastered to my body; I hadn’t made an arrest in a week. The girls were waving at passing cars, one peroxide blonde gyrating her hips at them. I started synchronizing the bumps and grinds to the music, playing with the idea of pulling a shakedown, running them through R&I for outstanding warrants. Then a scraggy old wino entered the scene, one hand holding a short dog, the other out begging for chump change.

The bottle blonde quit dancing to talk to him; the music went haywire — all screeches — without her accompaniment. I flashed my headlights; the wino shielded his eyes, then shot me the finger. I was out of the black-and-white and on top of him, Stan Kenton’s band my backup.

Roundhouse lefts and rights, rabbit punches. The girl’s shrieks out-decibeling Big Stan. The wino cursing me, my mother, my father. Sirens in my head, the smell of rotting meat at the warehouse, even though I knew it couldn’t be. The old geez blubbering, “Pleeese.”

I staggered to the corner pay phone, gave it a nickel and dialed my own number. Ten rings, no Kay, WE-4391 without thinking. Her voice: “Hello, Sprague residence.” My stammers; then, “Bucky? Bucky, is that you?” The wino weaving toward me, sucking his bottle with bloody lips. Hands inside my pockets, pulling out bills to throw him, cash on the pavement. “Come over, sweet. The others are down at Laguna. It could be like old—”

I left the receiver dangling and the wino scooping up the better part of my last paycheck. Driving to Hancock Park, I ran, just this one time, just to be inside the house again. Knocking on the door, I had myself convinced. Then Madeleine was there, black silk, upswept coiffure, yellow barrette. I reached for her; she stepped back, pulled her hair loose and let it fall to her shoulders. “No. Not yet. It’s all I have to keep you with.”