In one horizontal column, the UAES brain trust; in another, the names of the Communist front organizations they belonged to; in a vertical column atop the graph the names of friendly witnesses and their “accusation power” rated by stars, with lines running down to intersect with the brainers and the fronts. Each star was Satterlee’s assessment of the number of days’ testimony a friendly was worth, based on the sheer power of time, place and. hearsay: which Pinko attended where, said what, and which recanted Red was there to listen—a brain-frying, mind-boggling, super-stupendous and absolutely amazing glut of information impossible to disprove.
And he kept seeing Danny Upshaw smack in the middle of it, treading shit, even though the kid was on the side of the angels.
Buzz walked out to the back porch. He’d been brainstorming escape routes under the guise of writing reports for hours; three phone calls had fixed Audrey’s skimming spree. One was to Mickey, handing him a convoluted epic on how a bettor skimmed an unnamed runner who was screwing the bettor’s sister and couldn’t turn him in, but finally made him cough up the six grand he’d welched—the exact amount Audrey had grifted off the Mick. The second was to Petey Skouras, a tight-lipped runner who agreed to play the lovesick fool who finally made good to his boss for a cool grand—knowing Johnny Stompanato would come snouting around for the name Buzz wouldn’t give on, find him acting hinky and pound a confession out of him—the returned cash his assurance that that was his only punishment. The third was to an indy shylock: seven thousand dollars at 20 percent, $8,400 due April 10—his woman out of trouble, his gift for her grief: Gene Niles with his face blown off on her bed. Seven come eleven, thank God for the Commie gravy train. If they didn’t succumb to the hots for each other, he and his lioness would probably survive.
The kid was still the wild card he didn’t know how to play. It was twelve hours since he’d prowled Niles’ pad. Should he go back and make it look like Niles hightailed it? Should he have planted some incriminating shit? When the fucker was missed, would LAPD fix on him as a Dragna bad apple and let it lie? Would they make him for the bomb job and press Mickey? Would they assume a snuff and go hog-wild to find the killer?
Buzz saw Dudley Smith and Mike Breuning at the back edge of the yard, standing by Ellis Loew’s couch, left out in the rain because the DA put business before comfort. A late sun was up; Dudley was laughing and pointing at it. Buzz watched dark clouds barrelling in from the ocean. He thought: fix it, fix it, fix it, be a fixer. Be what Captain Mal told the kid to be.
Be a policeman.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Danny unlocked his door and tapped the wall light. The blood W’s he’d been seeing since the morgue became his front room, spare and tidy, but with something skewed. He eyed the room in grids until he got it: the rug was puckered near the coffee table—he always toed it smooth on his way out.
He tried to remember if he did it this morning. He recalled dressing as Ted Krugman, nude to leather jacket in front of the bathroom mirror; he remembered walking outside thinking of Felix Gordean, Mal Considine’s “Lean on him, Danny” ringing in his ears. He did not remember his methodical rug number, probably because Teddy K. wasn’t the meticulous type. Nothing else in the room looked askew; there was no way in the world HE would break into a policeman’s apartment .
Danny thought of his file, ran for the hall closet and opened the door. It was there, pictures and paperwork intact, covered by wadded-up carpeting puckered just the right way. He checked the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom, saw the same old same old, sat down in a chair by the phone and skimmed the book he’d just bought.
The Weasel Family—Physiology and Habits, hot off a back shelf at Stanley Rose’s Bookshop.
Chapter 6, page 59: The Wolverine.
A 40- to 50-pound member of the weasel family indigenous to Canada, the Pacific Northwest and the upper Midwest; pound for pound, the most vicious animal on earth. Utterly fearless and known for attacking animals many times its size; known to drive bears and cougars from their kills. A beast that cannot stand to watch other creatures enjoying a good feed—often blitzing them just to get at what remained of their food. Equipped with a highly efficient digestive system: wolverines ate fast, digested fast, shit fast and were always hungry; they possessed a huge appetite to match their general nastiness. All the vicious little bastards wanted to do was kill, eat and occasionally fuck other members of their misanthropic breed.
Alter ego of a biting, gouging, raping, flesh-eating killer of immense hunger: sexual and emotional. A man who possessed total identification with an obscenely rapacious animal, an identity he has assumed to right old wrongs, animal mutilations the specific means, his specific inner reconstruction of what was done to him.
Danny turned to the pictures at the back of the book, ripped three wolverine shots out, dug through his file for the 2307 blood pics and made a collage above the bed. He tacked the awful weasel thing in the middle; he shone his floor lamp on the collection of images, stood back, looked and thought.
A fat, shuffle-footed creature with beady eyes and a thick brown coat to ward off the cold. A slinky tail, a short, pointed snout, sharp nails and long, sharp teeth bared at the camera. An ugly child who knew he was ugly and made up for it by hurting the people he blamed for making him that way. Snap flashes as the animal and 2307 merged: the killer was somehow disfigured or thought he was; since eyewitnesses tagged him as not facially marred, the disfigurement might be somewhere on his body. The killer thought he was ugly and tied it to sex, hence Augie Duarte slashed cheek to bone with his thing sticking out his mouth. A big snap, all instinct, but feeling gut solid: HE knew the burned-face burglar boy, who was too young to be the killer himself; HE drew inspiration or sex from his disfigurement—hence the facial slashing. Zoot stick assaults were being tapped at station houses citywide; car thief MO’s were being collated; he told Jack Shortell to start calling wild-animal breeders, zoo suppliers, animal trappers and fur wholesalers, cross-reference them with dental tech and go. Burglar, jazz fiend, H copper, teeth maker, car thief, animal worshiper, queer, homo, pederast, brunser and devotee of male whores. It was there waiting for them, some fact in a police file, some nonplussed dental worker saying, “Yeah, I remember that guy.”
Danny wrote down his new impressions, thinking of Mike Breuning bullshitting him on the Augie Duarte tail, the other tails probably horseshit. Breuning’s only possible motive was humoring him—keeping him happy on the homicide case so he’d be a good Commie operative and keep Dudley Smith happy on his anti-Red crusade. Shortell had called the other three men, warned them of possible danger and was trying to set up interviews: the only cop he could trust now, Jack would be tapping into Dudley’s “boys” to see if the three Gordean “friends” had ever been under surveillance at all. He himself had stuck outside Gordean’s agency trawling for more license plates, more potential victims, more information and maybe Gordean alone for a little strongarm—but the carport had stayed empty, the pimp hadn’t showed and there was no traffic at his front door—rain had probably kept the “clients” and “friends” away. And he’d had to break the stakeout for his date with Claire De Haven.