The cameraman moved the camera onto Brewster. Frederics held the mike in front of him. I kept the gun steady. Brewster was leaning against his desk, a little wobbly, but upright. He had my typescript in his hand. He read:
“A reporter from KNBS, Candy Sloan, through persistently good investigative reporting, finally uncovered the fact that I have been engaged in Mob-related criminal activity. She was about to report her story. To prevent that, I had her killed by a man named Rollie Simms. If it had not been for Candy Sloan, I would never have been caught.”
There was silence. I brought the gun down, reversed it, and held it out, butt first, toward Samuelson. He reached around behind the soundwoman and took it and dropped it in his side pocket. Brewster simply stood where he was. Frederics brought the mike back to his own face, the camera shifted slightly. “Right now in this room there is silence. A colleague is dead. This is John Frederics for KNBS News.” He stood still for another moment, then made a safe sign with his hands. He looked at me for a moment. “It’ll be on the air as soon as I get it back to the studio,” he said.
I nodded. He nodded his head toward the door, and the three TV people left. The soundwoman was last and she looked back at me as she went. Her eyes were wet.
“Okay,” Samuelson said. “Let’s go downtown.”
Chapter 29
IT WAS 11:03 P.M. in downtown Los Angeles. Since I’d come in about twelve hours ago with Samuelson, I had talked with three detectives, two assistant D.A.‘s, a sheriff’s investigator, a homicide captain, the chief of detectives (who called me “a bush-league fucking hot dog”), the department public relations officer, a guy from the mayor’s office (who said something about “civic responsibility” that I didn’t fully follow but seemed to be in substantial agreement with the chief of detectives), and a lawyer who KNBS had sent over to protect my constitutional rights, the same one they’d sent before. Now I was in Samuelson’s office with the door closed, drinking maybe my eighty-third cup of really despicable black coffee and watching the latenight news with Samuelson on a nine-inch TV on top of a file cabinet in the left corner of the room.
On the screen Frederic, the news director, looking bigger and more natural, was sitting on the edge of a desk in what was obviously the KNBS newsroom, speaking directly into the camera.
“Every reporter covers stories of sudden death,” he was saying. “But for all of us at KNBS News this has been a different story. This time the victim was one of us.”
Samuelson was coatless, his tie was hanging unknotted, his shirt was unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up above the elbows. He had his feet up on the corner of his desk as he watched, and he drummed with the fingers of his left hand softly on the desktop. I sipped some coffee. I didn’t want it, but there wasn’t anything else to do while I watched.
“KNBS feature reporter Candy Sloan was killed last night in the course of an investigation that linked motion picture industry figures to organized crime,” Frederics said. I looked at myself in the dark window behind Samuelson’s desk. My clothes had dried on me in complex wrinkles, my hair was stiff and angular. I had a two days’ growth of beard, and I hadn’t slept for a couple of days. I looked like a doorman at the drunk tank.
“Tinsel Town,” I said. “Glamor.”
Samuelson looked at me. “Land of dreams,” he said. On the tube Frederics was summarizing the events that culminated in Candy’s death.
“You ever notice that they never get it quite right,” Samuelson said.
“Not even this one,” I said.
“You want any more coffee?” Samuelson said.
“No.” I felt a little sick from all that I’d drunk that day. I hadn’t eaten in nearly as long as I hadn’t slept. Samuelson got up and turned the sound down on the television so that Frederics was reduced to pantomime. “You want to know what we got?” Samuelson said.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. We got lucky. Brewster couldn’t wait to blame Simms for everything. We read him his rights and warned him about using what he said and told him he needn’t talk without his lawyer, but he was in such a goddamn sweat to get it on record that Simms was the one who did everything, that he just kept right on bleating, and Simms got mad and started replying, and we got about everything they had. They might have been a little punchy from having been forcibly apprehended.”
I nodded.
“Anyway,” Samuelson said, “we got the files out on Simms, and he’s got a yellow sheet, looks like it belongs to Attila the Hun. He’s a Mob enforcer. Brewster’s tied into the Mob and that means they’re tied into him. They put Simms into Oceania to keep an eye on things.”
“Can you use what you got in court?” I said.
Samuelson shrugged. “Ain’t my department. D.A.‘s guys say maybe. But you know how it goes. There’s going to be expensive lawyers defending Brewster. They’ll say he was coerced by you. They’ll say he was not competent when he spoke without a lawyer. They’ll mention the fundamental concepts of American justice. Our side will be argued by some kid two years out of U.S.C.” Samuelson shrugged again.
“Start earlier,” I said. “Why did Franco kill FeIton?”
“Franco was a collector. Most recently for Ray Zifkind. About five, six years ago, Summit Studios was going down the chute, and Ray Zifkind bailed them out. That put the head of Summit, guy named Hammond, in the Mob’s pocket.”
“I know Hammond,” I said. “Zifkind the stud duck out here?”
“Yeah. Anyway, one thing led to another, Brewster got in on it. The way you might if you were playing cards and caught a guy cheating. Instead of blowing the whistle, you play along with him. Let him make you money too. You ever play cards?”
“Yeah. I get the idea.”
