Mrs. Tullock tugged at her skirt. She wore tennis shoes with threadbare tweeds.
“I’m saying he read treasure magazines written for bums with big dreams, and he believed everything he ever read. The amazing thing is that he only got in trouble the one time — but it up and cost him his job.”
“Would you explain, please?”
“That gold robbery. Karl worked on the Santa Barbara end, and he got this fool notion that this dimwit colored boy was the thief. He did some beating on that boy, but some colored preacher with police friends in L.A. went to bat for the boy and got him released, and Karl got the ax for the whomping he did.”
Joan sifted it. “Did Karl ever mention any friends he might have had with the CCC in Los Angeles?”
Mrs. Tullock sneered. “Karl didn’t have friends. He had treasure magazines.”
Hot potato. The old girl tossed it. Catch it — don’t drop it.
Joan left the Tullock house and reparked down the street. Some sidewalk boys showed off for her. They chugged sneaky pete. They strutted and posed.
A cloudburst drove them indoors. Joan sat it out. She chain-smoked and fumed up the car.
She reprised the conversation. It ran circuitous. She sat in Lyman’s, two nights back. Lee Blanchard and Wendell Rice shot the shit.
Kay’s in with these Jew exiles. Longhair-music types. Otto Klemperer. She dotes on him.
Elmer the J. His dipshit brother died in the Griffith Park fire. This alky drifter. Always the big dreams. This big hard-on for that gold-train heist.
We have proximity. We have Karl Tullock and Wayne Frank Jackson. We have two men and one fire. One dead man has been ID’d. One dead man has been unearthed. We have a probable identification.
One ex-cop, one drifter, one idiot dream. Two violent deaths in concurrence. The ex-cop worked the gold heist. That event preceded and might have precipitated catastrophic arson.
And she kissed Bill Parker. And Bill Parker kissed her back.
I blew my shot at the war. Who cares? My new life’s aswirl.
24
(Los Angeles, 9:30 A.M., 1/7/42)
A college kid approached. He glared and flashed his fangs. His intent beamed.
He closed in. He leaned down. He said, “Filthy Jap.”
The library was dead still. The kid employed stealth. He made like a Jap Zero. No one else heard.
The kid strolled off. Ashida scanned his page book. He’d ordered up the L.A. Times. A clerk brought him bound photostats.
From May 19–23, 1931. From October 4–12, 1933.
Joan Conville called him last night. She described her talk with Ellen Tullock. They discussed death-by-fire and death-by-knife-and-gun proximity. Was it design or coincidence?
He told her not to talk to Elmer Jackson. Elmer might go off half-cocked. He described his lab findings. He omitted just this:
I found a gold nugget in that box you left me.
He found it. He’s hoarding the lead. He’s studied under Dudley Smith. He’s learned to lie. He’s a Jap. He’s shifty and stealthy.
He called Thad Brown last night. Thad was brusque. The dislodged-body job’s a dog. Chief Horrall wants it reburied. It puts a stink on the PD.
He withheld from Thad. He omitted the gold nugget and two-dead speculation. Karl Tullock and Wayne Frank Jackson died at the same time and place. Both were gold heist — fixated. He knew the full Wayne Frank story. Joan had picked up bar scuttlebutt.
The library was dead still. College kids studied and evil-eyed the Jap. Winos dozed in rock-hard chairs.
Ashida skimmed news stories. He read the heist accounts first. The stat sheets printed out white on black. The coverage ran threadbare.
The Frisco-to-L.A. mint train. Eight Quentin cons on board. There’s a track-switch snafu. Four masked men swarm the train. They overpower the crew. The cons escape en masse. The escape precedes the robbery. Seven men are hunted down and shot and killed that day. The unwritten law holds sway. Escape mandates death.
One man eludes the dragnet. He’s still at large. Fritz Wilhelm Eckelkamp. DOB 10/12/98.
He’s German-born. He’s a Great War stalwart. He wins the Iron Cross. He goes bad in ’20s Berlin. He toes the Sparticist line and skirmishes with Brownshirt thugs. He robs banks and jewelry stores. He stows away on a steamship and comes here. It’s ’27 now. He migrates to California and settles in Oakland. He reverts to armed robbery.
Liquor-store jobs. There’s always cash on hand. It’s high risk for low yield. Fritz falls behind multiple counts. He gets twenty-five to life at Big Q.
Fritz becomes a virtuoso jailhouse lawyer. He learns to write Federal writs. He secures a retrial. The Federal court’s in L.A.
Fritz Wilhelm Eckelkamp. Missing since 5/18/31. Karl Frederick Tullock. Reported missing 1/12/34.
Ashida chalked brain notes. He reviewed his stat sheets and compiled a checklist.
Secure Eckelkamp’s Oakland police file. Secure his Quentin file. Secure Tullock’s Santa Barbara Sheriff’s personnel file.
The mint train resumes its southbound journey. There’s a second track snafu. The heist occurs then. The theft is discovered at the Santa Barbara stop. Leander Frechette is grabbed for it. Karl Tullock “beats on him.” A Negro preacher intercedes and greases Frechette’s release. The preacher has “cop friends in L.A.”
Frechette drops from sight. Where is he now? Who’s the preacher? What cop friends in L.A.?
Ashida switched page books. He jumped from gold to fire. He logged more sketchy coverage.
It’s late September ’33. We’re into Indian summer. It’s hot in L.A. The heat provokes unrest. There’s leftist agitation and a garment workers’ strike.
It’s now October 3. The blaze occurs. The death toll mounts. It may or may not be arson. A pro forma query goes down. The Young Socialist Alliance proves suspect. The leader’s one Meyer Gelb.
YSA sloganeers “prophesied apocalypse.” Their rants ran from mid-September to the blaze. Meyer Gelb urged “a workers’ revolt.” “One line burned memorably at a Pershing Square stump speech.”
Gelb railed. He called out, “This storm, this savaging disaster.”
The line drew oohs and aahs. The Times got pissy here. “The flowery sentence might have been lifted from a noted British poet of the homosexual ilk.”
Ashida flipped pages. The fire was initially tagged “a spontaneous conflagration.” The death toll fluctuated daily. CCC workers tagged dead showed up alive. They’d been on booze binges and deserted their wives for a spell.
A well-dressed man was glimpsed in Mineral Canyon. Eyewits described him as “Chinese or Japanese.” He vanished as the blaze whooshed. A studio carpenter got popped the same night. He set a blaze in Fern Dell Park. Eyewits nailed his car’s license plate.
His name was Ralph D. Barr. He was a known firebug and public jack-off man. He was alibied up for the big blaze. He worked at Paramount all day.
That was it. The PD tapped out. The fire department tapped out. Nobody proved arson or disproved it. Local leftists were grilled and released. News coverage fizzled.
Ashida restacked his books. He stood up and stretched. He chalked more brain notes.
Get more on the YSA. Get more on Meyer Gelb. Track the gold chunk. What does “648” mean? Does the attached key correspond to a storage locker someplace?
He walked to the drop-off desk. A college boy waltzed by. He said, “Stinking Jap.”