“This is Associate Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Mr Clyde Tolson,” Yorty had introduced the older of the strangers. “And this is Senior State Department Attorney Mr Franklin Lovell.”
Clyde Tolson had given McKesson a long, slow look as if he was trying to decide if the Los Angeles County District Attorney was carrying a concealed weapon before shaking his hand. He had not spoken, simply nodded brief acknowledgement.
“Call me Frank,” smiled the State Department man, his gaze boasting none of the guarded suspicion of Tolson. But then he had not been J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand man for the last three decades.
The Mayor had quickly asserted a firm grip over proceedings.
Nebraskan born fifty-four year old Samuel William Yorty, the thirty-seventh Mayor of Los Angeles was, in modern times, perhaps the most colorful of the men to have held that position. Less than three years into his mayoralty ‘Mayor Sam’ had already earned a series of sobriquets from friends and foes; to some he was Travelin’ Sam, or Shoot from the hip Sam, to others he was Suitcase Sam, or just plain Mad Sam Yorty. The man himself positively revelled in the turbulence he left in his wake. It was typical of his contrariness that he — as a Democrat — had endorsed Richard Nixon (a Republican) in the 1960 Presidential Race. Before running for Mayor he had lost his seat in Congress, failed to get elected for the Senate and had a no holds barred run in with the House Un-American Activities Committee; having aggressively advocated the public ownership of key public utilities and supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Yorty had gone into the Army Air Corps during the Pacific War, serving in Intelligence. Having opposed Jack Kennedy in 1960 he had got himself elected to City Hall in 1961 despite the opposition of his own local Democratic Party machine and his Republican opponent, Norris Poulsen in one of the bitterest mayoral campaigns in recent history. At one stage Poulsen had claimed that Yorty was backed by the mob!
McKesson had always thought that this particular claim was no more than one of those reckless things that politicians pull out of a hat when they realize that they are on the wrong end of an election.
“I asked you to come in today, sir,” Sam Yorty explained as the four men settled in their chairs, “because Mr Tolson and Mr Lovell have been so good as to make Chief Parker and me aware of a situation.”
The District Attorney tried hard not to physically recoil from the word ‘situation’. No attorney liked to be on the receiving end of a surprise, let alone outright bad news and he was intuitively defensive.
“A situation, Mr Mayor?” He coughed, cleared his throat. “I was given to understand that I was to testify before the Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission?”
It was then that McKesson realized that he was not the man under the searchlight; that singular honour belonged to the brooding, glowering presence of fifty-eight year old South Dakota born William Henry Parker III, since August 1950 the Chief of Police of the Los Angeles Police Department. McKesson had known Parker for many years and had never — not ever — seen him hunkered down so deeply in his shell. The man was sitting across the room from him fulminating like a time bomb.
Aptly, for man who had enjoyed such a distinguished career as a lawman, Parker had been born in the town of Deadwood. Yes, the town famous for hosting the murder of Wild Bill Hickok and the site of the Mount Moriah Cemetery where both Hickok and Calamity Jane were laid to rest.
The Parker family had migrated to Los Angeles in the early 1920s. Parker had initially looked towards a legal career but joined the LAPD; later he had passed the California Bar Exam but opted to remain a policeman. Apart from his war service in the 1940s — he was wounded in Normandy, and in addition to a Purple Heart was awarded the French Croix de Guerre and the Italian Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity — he had spent his whole working adult life in the LAPD, rising steadily, surely through the ranks until, with a sense of inevitability, at the age of forty-five he had been appointed Police Chief. Back in 1950 he had inherited a corrupt, inefficient force which had lost control of the streets of large areas of the city, and become notoriously hands off in its dealings with organised crime. Parker had changed a lot of that but even after thirteen long gruelling years in the job reforming the LAPD was still, at best, a monumental work in progress. Significant pockets of resistance to the new order still survived and undermined the work of the generally much better trained, disciplined and organised city-wide force. Worse, Parker’s tactics to regain control of the streets had inflamed the citizens of many neighbourhoods largely inhabited by minority ethnic groups. His men were routinely accused of brutality and racism as well of corruption. It was heartbreaking for the majority of honest, decent officers to find themselves trapped between liberal reformers yearning for consensus policing and conservative hardliners who wanted pickpockets and unruly youths shot on sight, while all the while knowing that there was a incorrigible and apparently untouchable hard core of bad cops embedded within their ranks.
In all the hullaballoo most people forgot that Parker was actually in the process of, and had been wholly committed to — for several years — racially de-segregating the LAPD. The trouble was that although Parker had cleaned up the LAPD somewhat, used his public relations nous to improve the overall image of his force; within the LAPD the old practices around managing crime, particularly vice and minor offending, by employing essentially corrupt means and lazy, outdated policing methodologies persisted. Everybody in Los Angeles knew that you had a fifty-fifty chance of buying yourself out of a vice bust or of ameliorating the consequences of any minor felony arrest by greasing the right palm at the appropriate moment.
The Mayor glanced towards Franklin Lovell.
“I represent the interests of a Mister Samuel Brenckmann,” the svelte grey haired man from the State Department prefaced. “Mr Brenckmann is a twenty-six year old musician who was arrested by officers from Van Nuys Police Station on the night of the 9th December in the back lot of a club called The Troubadour at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard. At the time of his arrest he had just escaped from a burning building, the aforementioned Troubadour club, and was being attacked by the two men who, in all likelihood, were responsible for setting fire to that building. In defending himself he was struck by buckshot fired by a gun in the hands of the club’s, understandably aggrieved owner, a Mister Douglas Weston. At the time of his arrest Mister Brenckmann was endeavouring to staunch the blood from the most seriously assailant’s shotgun injuries…”
“What is going on here?” The Los Angeles County District Attorney demanded, finding his old Superior Court judge’s voice.
It was not lost on McKesson that at the mention of ‘Van Nuys’ Chief Parker’s eyes had rolled heavenward.
“Mister Brenckmann,” Franklin Lovell continued as if he had not heard the intervention, “was actively prevented from continuing to render possibly lifesaving assistant to the wounded man by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department arresting officers. In fact, notwithstanding the fact that he was covered in blood and limping heavily from his own injuries those ‘arresting’ officers repeatedly assaulted him at that time. As a matter of record it was at least eight hours before appropriate medical assistance was offered to Mister Brenckmann, and then only by a National Guard doctor rather than an LAPD registered medical practitioner. Mister Weston was also arrested and similarly manhandled at this time.”