The Big Nowhere Page 8

  A call to an old pal working the LAPD Metropolitan Squad and one to an ex-DA’s man now with the State Attorney General’s office supplied Mal with the true story on Saul Lesnick, MD, PhD. The old man was, and remained, a CP card carrier; he had been a Fed snitch since ’39—when he was approached by two LA office agents, who made him a deal: provide confidential psychiatric dirt to various committees and police agencies, and his daughter would be sprung from her five-to-ten-year sentence for hit and run drunk driving—one year down, four more to go minimum—the girl then currently hardtiming in Tehachapi. Lesnick agreed; his daughter was released and placed on indeterminate Federal parole—which would be revoked if the good doctor ever broke his cover or otherwise refused to cooperate. Lesnick, given six months tops in his fight with lung cancer, had secured a promise from a high-ranking Justice Department official: upon his death, all the confidential files he had loaned out would be destroyed; his daughter’s vehicular manslaughter conviction and parole records would be expunged and all Fed/Municipal/State grand jury notations currently on official paper vis-à-vis Lesnick and his breaches of confidentiality with subversive patients would burn. No one would know that for ten years Saul Lesnick, Communist, psychiatrist, had played both ends against the middle—and had won his holding action.

  Mal segued, new colleagues to old business, thinking that the lunger got what he paid for in spades, that his dance with the Feds was good value: a daughter spared broomstick rape and pernicious anemia from Tehachapi’s famous all-starch cuisine in exchange for the rest of his life—shortened by suicide via French tobacco. And he’d have done the same thing for Stefan—he wouldn’t have thought twice.

  Paperwork was arrayed neatly across his desk; Mal, stealing glances at the huge grand jury pile, got to it. He wrote memos to Ellis Loew suggesting investigators to dig for backup evidence; he typed routing slips: case files to the green young Deputy DAs who would be prosecuting now that Loew was engaged full-time in battling Communism. A Chinatown hooker killing went to a kid six months out of the worst law school in California; the perpetrator, a pimp known for his love of inflicting pain with a metal-studded dildo, would probably walk on the charge. Two shine snuffs were routed to a youth still short of his twenty-fifth birthday—smart, but naive. This perp, a Purple Cobra warlord, had fired into a crowd of kids outside Manual Arts High School on the off-chance that there might be members of the Purple Scorpions in it. There weren’t; an honor student and her boyfriend went down dead. Mal gave the kid a fifty-fifty chance for a conviction—Negroes killing Negroes bored white juries and they often dropped their verdicts on whim.

  The armed robbery/ADW at Minnie Roberts’ Casbah went to a Loew protégé; writing evidence summaries on the three cases took four hours and gave Mal finger cramps. Finishing, he checked his watch and saw that it was 3:10—Stefan would be home from school. If he was lucky, Celeste would be visiting her crony down the street, bullshitting in Czech, gabbing about the old country before the war. Mal grabbed his stack of psychiatric dirt and drove home, resisting a kid’s urge: to stop at an army-navy store and buy himself a pair of silver captain’s bars.

  Home was in the Wilshire District: a big white two-story that devoured his savings and most of his salary. It was the house that was too good for Laura—a kid marriage based on rutting didn’t warrant the tariff. He’d bought it when he returned from Europe in ’46, knowing that Laura was out and Celeste was in, sensing that he loved the boy more than he could ever love the woman—that the marriage was for Stefan’s safety. There was a park with basketball hoops and a baseball diamond nearby; the neighborhood’s crime rate was near zero and the local schools had the highest academic standing in the state. It was his happy ending to Stefan’s nightmare.

  Mal parked in the driveway and walked across the lawn—Stefan’s lackluster mowing job, Stefan’s softball and bat weighing down the hedge that he’d neglected to trim. Going in the door, he heard voices: the two-language fight he’d refereed a thousand times before. Celeste was running down verb conjugations in Czech, sitting on the divan in her sewing room, gesturing to Stefan, her captive in a straight-backed chair. The boy was fiddling with objects on an end table—thimbles and thread spools—arranging them by progression of color, so smart that he had to keep occupied even while on the receiving end of a lecture. Mal stood aside from the doorway and watched, loving Stefan for his defiance; glad that he was dark and pudgy like his real father was supposed to be—not lean and sandy-haired like Celeste—even though Mal was blond, and it clued people in that they weren’t blood relations.

  Celeste was saying, “…and it is the language of your people.”

  Stefan was stacking the spools, making a little house out of them—dark colors the foundation, pastels on top. “But I am to be an American now. Malcolm told me he can get me cit-cit-citizenship.”

  “Malcolm is a minister’s son and a policeman who does not understand our old country traditions. Stefan, your heritage. Learn to make your mother happy.”

  Mal could tell his boy wasn’t buying it; he smiled when Stefan demolished the spool house, his dark eyes fired up. “Malcolm said Czechoslovakia is a…a…a…”

  “A what, darling?”

  “A Bohunk rubble heap! A shit pile! Scheiss! Scheiss! In German for mutti!”

  Celeste raised a hand, stopped and hit her own pinched-together knees. “In English for you—little ingrate, disgrace to your real father, a cultured man, a doctor, not a consort of whores and hoodlums—”

  Stefan knocked over the end table and ran out of the room, straight into Mal, blocking the doorway. The small fat boy careened off his six-foot-three stepfather, then grabbed him around the waist and buried his head in his vest. Mal held him there, one hand steadying his shoulders, the other ruffling his hair. When Celeste stood up and saw them, he said, “You’ll never give it up, will you?”

  Celeste mouthed words; Mal knew they were native tongue obscenities she didn’t want Stefan to hear. The boy held on tighter, then let go and ran upstairs to his room. Mal heard ting-ting-ting—Stefan’s toy soldiers being hurled at the door. He said, “You know what it makes him think of, and you still won’t give it up.”

  Celeste adjusted her arms inside her overslung cardigan—the single European affectation Mal hated the most. “Nein, herr Leutnant”—pure German, pure Celeste—Buchenwald, the gas man, Major Considine, cold-blooded killer.

  Mal braced himself into the doorway. “Captain soon, Fräulein. Chief DA’s Investigator, and climbing. Juice, Fräulein. Just in case I think you’re ruining my son and I have to take him away from you.”

  Celeste sat down, knees together, a finishing school move, Prague 1934. “To the mother the child belongs. Even a failed lawyer like you should know that maxim.”

  A line that couldn’t be topped. Mal kicked up the carpeting on his way outside; he sat on the steps and watched rain clouds hover. Celeste’s sewing machine started to whir; upstairs, Stefan’s soldiers were still dinging his already cracked and dented bedroom door. Mal thought that soon they’d be stripped of paint, dragoons without uniforms, and that simple fact would tear down everything he’d built up since the war.

  In ’45 he was an army major, stationed at a temporary MP barracks near the recently liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. His assignment was to interrogate surviving inmates, specifically the ones the medical evacuation teams deemed terminally ill—the husks of human beings who would most likely never live to identify their captors in court. The question and answer sessions were horrific; Mal knew that only the stony cold presence of his interpreter was keeping him frosty, contained, a pro. News from the home front was just as bad: friends wrote him that Laura was screwing Jerry Dunleavy, a buddy from the Homicide Bureau, and Buzz Meeks, a crooked Narcotics Squad dick and bagman for Mickey Cohen. And in San Francisco, his father, the Reverend Liam Considine, was dying of congestive heart disease and sending daily telegrams begging him to embrace Jesus before he died. Mal hated the man too much
to give him the satisfaction and was too busy praying for the speedy and painless deaths of every single Buchenwald survivor, for the complete cessation of their memories and his nightmares. The old man died in October; Mal’s brother Desmond, the used-car king of Sacramento, sent him a telegram rich in religious invective. It ended with words of disownment. Two days later Mal met Celeste Heisteke.

  She came out of Buchenwald physically healthy and defiant, and she spoke enough English to render the interpreter unnecessary. Mal conducted his interrogations of Celeste solo; they spoke on only one topic: her whoredom with an SS lieutenant colonel named Franz Kempflerr—his price for her survival.

  Celeste’s stories—graphically told—killed his nightmares better than the contraband phenobarbital he’d been blasting for weeks. They excited him, disgusted him, made him hate the Nazi colonel and hate himself for being a voyeur eight thousand miles away from his legendary whore sweep operations in Ad Vice. Celeste sensed his excitement and seduced him; together, they reenacted all of her adventures with Franz Kempflerr. Mal fell in love with her—because he knew she had his number better than dumb sexpot Laura ever did. Then, when she had him hooked, she told him of her dead husband and her six-year-old son, who might still be alive somewhere in Prague. Would he, a veteran detective, be willing to search for the boy?

  Mal agreed, for the challenge and the chance to become more to Celeste than a voyeur-lover, more than the sewer crawler cop his family considered him to be. He made three trips to Prague, blundering around asking questions in pidgin Czech and German. Networks of Heisteke cousins resisted him; twice he was threatened with guns and knives and retreated, fear at his back like he was walking a beat in LA niggertown, whispers and catcalls from the okie cops who dominated the nightwatch there: college boy chickenshit, nigger scared, coward. On his final trip he located Stefan Heisteke, a pale, dark-haired child with a distended belly, sleeping outside a cigarette vendor’s stall in a rolled-up carpet lent to him by a friendly black marketeer. The man told Mal that the boy became frightened if people spoke to him in Czech, the language he seemed to best understand; phrases in German and French elicited simple yes or no answers. Mal took Stefan to his hotel, fed him and attempted to bathe him—stopping when he started to scream.

  He let Stefan wash himself; he let him sleep for seventeen uninterrupted hours. Then, armed with German and French phrase books, he began his most grueling interrogation. It took a week of long silences, long pauses and halting questions and answers with half the room between them for Mal to get the story straight.

  Stefan Heisteke had been left with trusted first cousins just before Celeste and her husband, gentile anti-Nazis, were captured by the Germans; they, fleeing, had shunted him to distant in-laws, who left him with friends who gave him to acquaintances sequestered in a deserted factory basement. He was there for the better part of two years, accompanied by a man and woman gone cabin-fevered. The factory processed dog food, and cans of horsemeat were all Stefan ate during that time. The man and woman used him sexually, then goo-goo-talked to him in Czech, lover’s endearments to a five-and six-year-old child. Stefan could not tolerate the sound of that language.

  Mal brought Stefan back to Celeste, gave her a mercifully abbreviated account of his lost years and told her to speak French to him—or teach him English. He did not tell her that he considered her cousins accomplices to the boy’s horror, and when Stefan himself told his mother what had happened, Celeste capitulated to Mal. He knew she had been using him before; now she loved him. He had a family to replace his shattered one at home in America.

  Together, they began teaching Stefan English; Mal wrote to Laura, requested a divorce and got the paperwork ready to bring his new family stateside. Things were going very smoothly; then they went haywire.

  Celeste’s whoremaster officer had escaped before Buchenwald was liberated; just as Mal was about to take his discharge, he was captured in Kraków and held at the MP barracks there. Mal went to Kraków just to see him; the stockade duty officer showed him the Nazi’s confiscated property, which included unmistakable locks of Celeste’s hair. Mal walked back to Franz Kempflerr’s cell and emptied his sidearm into the man’s face.

  A tight net was thrown over the incident; the military governor, an Army one-star, liked Mal’s style. Mal took an honorable discharge, brought Celeste and Stefan to America, returned to his LAPD sergeantcy and divorced Laura. Of his two cuckolders, Buzz Meeks was wounded in a shootout and pensioned off to civilian life; Jerry Dunleavy stayed on the job—but out of his way. Rumor had it that Meeks thought Mal was behind the shooting—revenge for the affair with Laura. Mal let the talk simmer: it played a good counterpoint to the coward innuendo he’d inspired in Watts. Word leaked out here and there on the gas man; Ellis Loew, DA’s comer, Jew, draft dodger, took an interest in him and offered to swing some gravy his way once he aced the lieutenant’s exam. In ’47 he made lieutenant and transferred to the DA’s Bureau of Investigations, cop protégé to the most ambitious Deputy District Attorney the City of Los Angeles ever saw. He married Celeste and settled into family life, a ready-made child part of the deal. And the closer father and son became, the more mother resented it; and the more he pressed to formally adopt the boy the more she refused—and tried to mold Stefan in the manner of the old Czech aristocracy that was yanked out from under her by the Nazis—language lessons and European culture and customs, Celeste oblivious to the memories they’d uprooted.

  “To the mother the child belongs. Even a failed lawyer like you should know that maxim.”

  Mal listened to Celeste’s sewing machine, Stefan’s toy soldiers hitting the door. He came up with his own epigraph: saving a woman’s life only induces gratitude if the woman has something to live for. All Celeste had was memories and a hated existence as a cop’s hausfrau. All she wanted was to take Stefan back to the time of his horror and make him part of the memories. His final epigraph: he wouldn’t let her.

  Mal walked back in the house to read the Commie snitch’s files: his glory grand jury and all it would reap.

  Juice.

  Chapter Six

  The two picket lines moved slowly down Gower, past the entrances of the Poverty Row studios. The UAES hugged the inside, displaying banners stapled to plywood strips: FAIR PAY FOR LONG HOURS, CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS NOW! PROFIT SHARES FOR ALL WORKERS. The Teamsters paced beside them, a strip of sidewalk open, their signs—REDS OUT! NO CONTRACTS FOR COMMUNISTS—atop friction-taped two-by-four’s. Talk between the factions was constant; every few seconds, “Fuck” or “Shit” or “Traitor” or “Scum” would be shouted, a wave of garbled obscenities following. Across the street, reporters stood around, smoking and playing rummy on the hoods of their cars.

  Buzz Meeks watched from the walkway outside Variety International Pictures’ executive offices—three stories up, a balcony view. He remembered busting union heads back in the ’30s; he sized up the Teamsters versus the UAES and saw a bout to rival Louis and Schmeling Number Two.

  Easy: the Teamsters were sharks and the UAES were minnows. The Teamster line featured Mickey Cohen goons, union muscle and hard boys hired out of the day labor joints downtown; the UAES was old leftie types, stagehands past their prime, skinny Mexicans and a woman. If push came to shove, no cameras around, the Teamsters would use their two-by-four’s as battering rams and charge—brass knuckle work in close, blood, teeth and nose cartilage on the sidewalk, maybe a few ears ripped off of heads. Then vamoose before the lackluster LAPD Riot Squad made the scene. Easy.

  Buzz checked his watch. 4:45; Howard Hughes was forty-five minutes late. It was a cool January day, light blue sky mixed with rain clouds over the Hollywood Hills. Howard got sex crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab’s Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty’s yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes’s—one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes
Enterprises’ fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself. Hopefully, bonus money was involved: he was still in hock to a bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison.

  Buzz heard a door opening behind him; a woman’s voice called out, “Mr. Hughes will see you now, Mr. Meeks.”

  The woman had stuck her head out of Herman Gerstein’s doorway; if the Variety International boss was involved, then bonus dough was a possible. Buzz ambled over; Hughes was seated behind Gerstein’s desk, scanning the pictures on the walls: semicheesecake shots of Gower Gulch starlets going nowhere. He was dressed in his usual chalk stripe business suit, sporting his usual scars—facial wounds from his latest airplane crash. The big guy cultivated them with moisturizing lotion—he thought they gave him a certain panache.

  And no Herman Gerstein; and no Gerstein’s secretary. Buzz dropped the formalities that Hughes required when other people were present. “Getting any, Howard?”

  Hughes pointed to a chair. “You’re my bird dog, you should know. Sit, Buzz. This is important.”

  Buzz sat down and made a gesture that took in the whole office: cheesecake, rococo wall tapestries and a knight’s suit of armor hatrack. “Why here, boss? Herman got a job for me?”

  Hughes ignored the question. “Buzz, how long have we been colleagues?”

  “Goin’ on five years, Howard.”

  “And you’ve worked for me in various capacities?”

  Buzz thought: fixer, bagman, pimp. “That’s right.”

  “And during those five years have I given you profitable referrals to other people in need of your talents?”

  “You surely have.”