Just like Hideo Ashida. He’s her scholar’s-lark confrere.
She hit the library late one night. She looked up and saw Ashida. He was studying her. The moment unnerved her. She realized this:
He’s omitting and dissembling. He’s withholding. He knows things that he will not reveal.
The gold consumes him. He craves it as substance and money. He may see it as the means to abrogate wartime injustice. He may crave it out of pure greed.
Gold is money. It would buy her a cabin in lake-bound Wisconsin. It would buy British shotguns and hunting dogs. She could shoot quail and sleep with her dogs. Provocative men might appear.
Scholar’s lark.
Treasure hunt.
Potent riddle.
The drudge work that pays her rent and counterweights her lust for the gold.
She works confiscations. The Alien Squad raids Japanese homes and impounds property. Appliances, guns, shortwave radios. Flags and political hate tracts. Ashida translates the tracts. She transcribes the dreary content.
They run ballistics tests on impounded guns and compare the results to custody pieces. They dismantle appliances and look for hidden explosives. They’ve found none to date.
The squad rousts are overzealous and waged against passive foes. The U.S. government has instituted full-scale internment. She’s observed brutal rousts and has a sense of the boys.
There’s Lieutenant Collier. He’s the permissive boss. Elmer Jackson and Lee Blanchard are the sweethearts. There’s Wendell Rice, George Kapek, and Catbox Cal Lunceford. They’re the Rodent Squad. They manhandle their prisoners and steal what they can.
Her work entails Lincoln Heights Jail runs. Ashida goes with her. They inspect the property of already-jailed Japs. Rank-and-file Japs hate Ashida. They hiss and spit at him. They curse him in Japanese. It started with Pearl Harbor and the Watanabe case.
He’s the white man’s slave. He’s the PD’s toady. He’s a tong shitheel. He sucked the big white dick and sidestepped internment. He’s a traitor and the real fascist. The big white woman is his whore.
She feels kinship with Ashida then. It dissolves fast. She’s always been good with men. Ashida’s the one man she can’t touch.
She’s assumed a role. She’s the handmaid to a cloistered patriarchy. She’s met Jack Horrall and Mayor Fletch Bowron. They radiate good cheer and casual corruption. The PD is rankly corrupt and headed toward rank incompetence. Good men go off to the war. Unfit “war hires” replace them. Cops fear the draft and the phone-tap probe.
She understands men. They’re seducible. Hideo Ashida is not.
She faked an excuse and dropped by his hotel suite. It was her sole visit. She angled her way in. Ashida’s living quarters impressed her.
The Biltmore. A large parlor and three bedrooms. Dudley Smith’s patronage and largesse.
She met Ashida’s affable brother and boozed-up mama-san. She went through Ashida’s bedroom en route to the john. She rifled drawers and found a boxed photo stash.
Candid pix. A boys’ locker room backdrop. A lanky boy in the foreground. He’s naked and toweling his hair.
She recognized him. He was Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert. She saw him fight in Milwaukee. He headlined a big card and knocked out a stumblebum.
The photos saddened and repulsed her. They force-fed her Hideo Ashida’s sickness and corruption. They backlit his complicitous bond with Dudley Smith.
Lyman’s. The all-night rumor mill. Here’s the tattle on Sergeant/now Army Captain Smith.
His blithe expediency. His axman-to-Jack-Horrall status. His rivalry with Captain Bill Parker. Their Watanabe-case clash.
She’s seen him at Lyman’s and Kwan’s. He’s a ravishing man. Hideo Ashida must be in love with him.
Which gives her pause. Which tells her to dissemble. Which tells her to withhold fire and gold leads. She knows that he’s omitted. He’s most likely up on her there.
Ashida underestimates women. He cannot see them. Let him underestimate you as he seems to underestimate Kay Lake.
They costar in the Male PD Drama. Joan Conville’s the handmaid. She’s PD-employed and has professional cachet. Kay Lake’s a specious seductress and brainy bawd. And William H. Parker stands between them.
Rumor: Kay Lake tears through men. Ask the long-aggrieved Lee Blanchard. Rumor: Kay and Whiskey Bill are yet to consummate. Rumor: Kay Lake shivved a bull dyke cop named Dot Rothstein. Dot’s pal Dudley Smith nixed reprisals. Rumor: Bill Parker and “Big Red” are madly enjoined.
No, it’s not true.
He’s an alcoholic voyeur. He abbreviates his marital vows. He does not trash them. They’ve kissed three times. Twice at the Biltmore. Once outside City Hall. Brenda Allen witnessed that last kiss.
He isn’t tall and handsome. His Catholicism gores her Protestant core. His wild grit mirrors her own and almost makes her love him.
Bill Parker knows from sin. It’s a shared papist-protty trait. Bill Parker revealed his great sin of omission.
They were half-gassed at Lyman’s. He told her that Two-Gun Davis killed the four Watanabes. Davis sat at the bar, a few feet away.
Parker solved the crime himself. Davis confessed to him. Parker withheld the solution from the at-large PD. The crime derived from Fifth Column intrigue.
Davis acted alone. His lunatic cohort did not participate. Rich America Firsters roamed the periphery. Japanese and Chinese saboteurs joined them. The band redefined Treasonous Alliance.
There was a Chinese physician. He was a plastic surgeon/eugenicist and very right-wing. There was a Beverly Hills psychiatrist. He was very left-wing. He pandered to film stars and socialites and snitched them off to the Feds.
Parker devastated her. She told him to reveal Two-Gun’s guilt and exonerate Werewolf Shudo. Parker refused. He cited Shudo’s sex-assault priors. He stressed this fact: Jim Davis indicted would destroy the PD.
She relented. Her protty guilt pushed her back. She got drunk and plowed the Mexicans. That meant two four-count indictments. Four dead wetbacks and four dead Watanabes.
It was her sin omitted. Bill Parker covered it up. Their shared complicity ran breathless deep.
She went to the library. She read Sid Hudgens’ series on the Watanabe case. Hudgens fawningly praised Dudley Smith. Equal praise went to Hideo Ashida.
Parker and Smith chat at Lyman’s and Kwan’s. She’s observed their brusque civility and the hatred underneath. They attend the same church. They drink with Archbishop Cantwell and confess to Monsignor Joe Hayes. They worship God, to the detriment of God’s law.
She drinks and jousts with Bill Parker. They drink, to their equal detriment. She worked a property-confiscation string with Hideo Ashida. They bagged a terpin hydrate still. The owner killed himself at the Lincoln Heights Jail.
She filched a dozen terp vials from Don Matsura’s apartment. She wanted to experience the effect. She consumed two vials in the back room at Lyman’s. She entered a vivid dream state.
She saw forest fires near Tomah, Wisconsin. She shotgunned a drunken Indian. She woke up on the couch. Dudley Smith looked down at her.
He said, “Hello, lass. You were extolling the wonders of gold in your sleep.”
28
(Los Angeles, 1/9–1/23/42)
Gold.
He stole the bar and stashed it in his hotel suite. He kept the key and called Lock-Ur-Self Storage. He learned the provenance of locker 648.
It was a permanent rental. A “John Jones” paid the full fee in June ’31. A file card listed John Jones’ address. It was a fake.