She meets ex-Chief “Two-Gun” Davis. She meets the L.A. mayor and the current chief, “Call-Me-Jack” Horrall. Count Basie says, “Hi there, Red.”
Now she’s here. Mike Lyman’s Grill, 8th and Hill streets. A long oak bar and red leather booths.
Parker chose the spot. The PD had its own private room. Parker laid out the gist.
You had couches, chairs, and a Murphy bed. A police Teletype and phone line were laid in. Mike Lyman supplied free cold cuts and liquor. Married cops “poked” their girlfriends there. “Famous madam” Brenda Allen supplied high-class prostitutes.
Pinch me.
Joan lit a cigarette. Her booth faced the bar and the front door. Lyman’s was packed. War chat bubbled.
Jap atrocities. FDR’s draft quota. I heard Hitler’s really Jewish. The Jews started this boondoggle, if you ask me.
Joan sipped scotch and bitters. The Navy bash faded out, the cop bash faded in.
She almost met Hideo Ashida. He went out on a dead-body call as she arrived. She talked to a cop named Lee Blanchard. His girlfriend Kay something hovered. Blanchard ran down the Captain Parker gestalt.
He was “Whiskey Bill” and “The Man Who Would Be Chief.” He was a hotshot lawyer, juicehound, and devout Catholic. He was impervious, tough, and commanding. He was somewhat slovenly.
He’s married. He hides out from his wife and sleeps in his prowl car. The capper: “You’re too tall for him, Red.”
Men always called her “Red.” They thought it was hep. Said men were dinks and buffoons.
I ain’t jiving you, cousin. Hitler’s a lox jockey from way back. My wife’s cousin’s a full-blood Kraut. He knows whereof he speaks.
Parker walked in. He wore a fresh uniform. He’d trimmed his hair. He primped and slid into the booth.
He wore piss-poor lime cologne. He sucked a hide-the-hooch lozenge.
He tossed his cigarettes on the table. A waiter materialized. Parker pointed to Joan’s glass and held up two fingers.
Joan slid the ashtray over. “Am I officially employed by the Los Angeles Police Department?”
Parker lit a cigarette. “Forty-two hundred dollars a year. You’ll work Central Station, under Ray Pinker and beside Hideo Ashida. Learn what you can, while you can. Pinker’s looking at an indictment in this Fed-probe megillah, and Ashida will probably be interned next month. You’ll be logging property, as well as processing evidence.”
Joan snapped her fingers. “Just like that?”
Parker snapped his fingers. “I called in a favor. We don’t have to discuss it. You’re in means you’re in.”
“Yes, but you’ve got me at a disadvantage. You’ve placed me in your debt, and you know a great deal about me, while I know virtually nothing about you.”
Their drinks arrived. Joan let hers sit. Parker bolted his.
“You’re being disingenuous, Lieutenant. You read men like you read chemical tables. You met Lee Blanchard and Jim Davis at the party and solicited information. You gauged their bias and arrived at conclusions. You’re as up to speed on me as I am on you. I’ll concede my crush on the lithe Northwestern coed, if you won’t labor the point.”
“I’ll concede the scope of my debt, then, and refrain from judging your motives.”
Parker said, “Let’s go see Nort Layman and Dr. Ashida. They’re working late at the morgue.”
Dr. Nort lived at the morgue. Dr. Nort lived for his work.
Corpse gurneys flanked clothes racks. Formaldehyde bottles lined bookshelves. A cot and booze cabinet covered one wall. A charred box lolled on an autopsy table. A skeleton was jammed within.
Parker played emcee. The drift was meet your new colleague. She’s credentialed. She’s qualified. She swapped her Navy commission for a crime-lab gig.
Dr. Nort blushed. Dr. Ashida bowed Oriental. They stood by the table. The box deterred small talk.
Dr. Nort said, “These damn mud slides dislodged this box on the Griffith Park golf course. Our late friend here was stabbed, shot, and put to rest. We’re trying to determine the source of the fire and when it occurred.”
Joan studied a dirt clod jammed under the rib cage. She saw desiccated roots and granular ash.
“The box has been suspended in dirt for a very long time. I would posit that the killer or killers dumped the man in the box with that dirt mound stuck to his upper posterior, while he was still clothed. Those rags rotted off the cadaver, and the passage of time was accelerated by the application of the quicklime that remains visible on those cloth fragments. I think the box has been covered by heavily rooted soil for close to ten years.”
Ashida said, “A fatal brush fire in ’33 most likely caused that charring.”
Joan examined the box. “Look at the flame pattern. The box was surely buried on a hillside, and the flames leapt irregularly and scorched through to dry, freshly excavated dirt, at some point in time before the seeding that produced grass on that hillside. I would conclude that the box was buried immediately before the 1933 fire that Dr. Ashida mentioned, or at the time of the fire itself.”
Dr. Nort gawked. Ashida half-grinned. Joan tickled the dead man’s chin.
“Run molecular-compound tests on the charred wood, and check the grain markings against the photographic records kept at local lumberyards. You might be able to match the grain to a presold lot.”
Parker weaved a tad. Joan caught his booze breath. She reached in his pants pocket and tossed him a lozenge. Ashida slack-jawed the move.
12
(Los Angeles, 6:00 A.M., 1/2/42)
Man Camera. Attach your reverse lens. Become the object you observe. Deploy this Hans Maslick technique.
Maslick the Mystic. At one with nature and the material world. Organic specimens and objects live. You must assume their perspective.
Ashida rigged a microscope and dialed it in tight. He examined old dirt particles. He saw Miss Conville’s stripped roots.
He one-upped Miss Conville then. He added ionized water and bonded the particles. He dialed down and caught petrified ash. It theoretically confirmed the nine-year-old-fire assessment.
Maslick propounded time-travel theories. Place yourself in immediate context. You were there and you saw it. You observed and/or committed the crime.
He was alone. He beat the day-shift chemists in. He savored early-morning work. Juxtaposition. Bright lab lights and a black sky outside.
He time-traveled. He buckled into his time machine. It’s 10/3/33 now. It’s that very hot day.
He was at Belmont High. He was watching Bucky Bleichert toss a football. He indulged daydreams. Bucky needs a postpractice shower. You can kibitz and throw him a towel.
He watched Bucky dry off. A radio blared: BIG GRIFFITH PARK BLAZE!!! They got in Bucky’s car and drove over. Fire trucks stopped them short at Riverside Drive.
Ashida shut his eyes. It shuttered his Man Camera. He placed himself in Griffith Park. It’s still that very hot day.
Mineral Canyon. Dry dirt and scrub. It’s undeveloped. There’s no par-3 golf course yet.
The dead man. The killer or killers. The pine box, stashed. A hillside hole, at least partially dug.
Spontaneous blaze or covert arson. One gunshot. One stab wound. A hasty burial as the flames spread.
Thirty-four dead. The killer or killers might have survived. The killer or killers might have perished.
Ashida opened his eyes. His time machine lurched. His recollection lurched in sync.
He read Maslick in high school. He invented his own Man Camera. It was a trip-wire photo device. He shamefully deployed it. He snapped pictures of Bucky in the Belmont High locker room.