Jack pulled his chair up. 'Captain, what _do_ you want?'
'I'll throw that back at you. Do you want to flush your career down the toilet or would you like to skate for a few months and cash Out your twenty?'
Easy: Karen's face when he told her. 'Okay, I'll play. Now what do you want?'
Exley leaned close. 'In the spring of '53 your friend and business associate Sid Hudgens was murdered and two detectives who worked the case under Russ Millard told me you referred to Hudgens as 'scum' and were visibly agitated on the morning his body was discovered. During this time frame Dudley Smith asked you to tail Bud White, and you agreed. During this time frame the Nite Owl case was active and you worked a pornography investigation with Ad Vice and repeatedly submitted no-lead reports, when your long-standing procedure was to jam every report you wrote full of filler. During this time two men, Peter and Barter Englekling, came forward to offer state's evidence on an alleged pornography link to the Nite Owl. Russ Millard queried you on it, you went along with your 'no leads' routine. Throughout the smut investigation you repeatedly urged that the job be dropped. Those same two detectives, Sergeants Fisk and Kieckner, overheard you urging Ellis Loew to soft-pedal the Hudgens investigation, and one of your fellow Ad Vice officers recalls you as being atypically nervous throughout the smut job and absent from the squadroom for unusually long periods of time. Put it all together for me, would you, Jack?'
Ten counts guilty--he knew he was gawking, blinking, twitching. 'How . . . the . . . fuck did you . . .'
'It doesn't matter. Now let's hear your interpretation of what I want.'
Jack caught some breath. 'Okay, so I tailed Bud White. Dud was afraid he'd go apeshit over some hooker snuff, 'cause White had that tendency where young stuff was concerned. Okay, so I tailed him and didn't pick up anything worth a damn. You and White hate each other, everyone knows it. You figure someday he'll try to get you for your job on Dick Stensland and you'll cut me slack with Loew and Parker in exchange for some dirt on him. _Is that what you want?_'
'Call that twenty percent of it and give me something you learned about White.'
'Such as?'
'How about him and women?'
'White likes women, but that's no news flash.'
'IAD ran a personal on White after he passed the sergeant's exam. The report had him seeing a woman named Lynn Bracken. Did White know her back in '53?'
Jack shrugged. 'I don't know. I never heard that name.'
'Vincennes, your face says you're a liar, but put the Bracken woman aside, she doesn't interest me. Was White seeing Inez Soto during the time you were tailing him?'
He almost laughed. 'No, not while I had my tail on him. Is that what you're so worked up on? You think White and your--'
Exley raised a hand. 'I'm not going to ask you if you killed Hudgens, I'm not going to make you put that spring together for me, not yet and maybe never. Just give me your opinion on something. You were up to your ears on the smut job _and_ you worked the Nite Owl. Do you make the three Negroes for the killings?'
Jack inched back--get away from those eyes. 'There's loose ends out there, I knew it then. If it wasn't the three you got, maybe it was some other spooks, maybe they knew where Coates hid his car and planted the shotguns. Maybe it's tied to the smut. Do you care? Those niggers raped your woman, so what you did was right. What's this about, Captain?'
Exley smiled. Jack pegged it: a man sticking one foot off a cliff, hopping on one leg. 'Captain, what's this--'
'No, my motives are my business, and here's my first guess. Hudgens was connected to the smut somehow, and he had a file on you. That's why you were all over that mess.'
Quicksand. 'Yeah, I did something really bad once. You know . . . shit, sometimes I think . . . sometimes I think I don't care who finds out anymore.'
Exley stood up. 'I've already squared the complaints against you. There'll be no trial board, no charges. Part of the agreement I made with Chief Parker is a stipulation that you voluntarily retire in May. I told him you'd agree, and I convinced him that you deserve a full pension. He didn't question my motives, and I don't want you to question them either.'
Jack stood up. 'And the trade?'
'If the Nite Owl ever goes wide, you and everything you know belong to me.'
Jack stuck out his hand. 'Jesus, you turned into a cold son of a bitch.'
CALENDAR
FEBRUARY--MARCH 1958
_Whisper_ Magazine, February 1958 issue:
WRONG MAN KILLED IN
NITE OWL SLAUGHTER?
WEB OF MYSTERY SPREADS...
You remember the Nite Owl brouhaha, don't you? On April 14, 1953, three shotgun-toting killers entered the convivial Nite Owl Coffee Shop, just off Hollywood Boulevard in sunny Los Angeles, robbed and murdered three employees and three patrons and got away with an estimated three hundred scoots, which divided by six comes to about fifty bucks a life. The Los Angeles Police Department threw itself into the case with characteristic zeal, arrested three young Negro men on suspicion of committing the murders and also charged them with kidnapping and raping a young Mexican girl. The LAPD was not quite certain that the three Negroes--Raymond 'Sugar Ray' Coates, Tyrone Jones and Leroy Fontaine--committed the Nite Owl killings, but they were sure that the young men were the rapists of Inez Soto, 21, a college student. The Nite Owl investigation continued, with much attendant publicity and great pressure on the LAPD to solve L.A.'s 'Crime of the Century.'
The LAPD pursued fruitless leads for two weeks, then discovered the murder weapons inside Ray Coates' car, stored in an abandoned South Los Angeles garage. Shortly after that, Coates, Jones and Fontaine escaped from the Hall of Justice Jail . .
Enter a young police detective: Sergeant Edmund J. Exley of the LAPD. World War II hero, UCLA grad, informant against his fellow cops in the 1951 'Bloody Christmas' police brutality scandal and the son of construction mogul Preston Exley, the builder of Raymond Dieterling's mammoth Dream-a-Dreamland and the massive Southern California freeway system. The plot thickens .
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley was in love with rape victim Inez Soto.
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley located, shot and killed Raymond Coates, Tyrone Jones and Leroy Fontaine, with-- poetic justice--a shotgun.
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley was promoted (two whole ranks!!!) to captain a week later, a large reward for his justice-by-the-sword resolution of a case the LAPD needed to solve quicksville in order to ensure perpetuation of its (overblown?) reputation.
Item: _Captain_ Ed Exley (a rich kid with a substantial private trust fund left to him by his late mother) soon became very cozy with Inez Soto and bought her a house down the block from his apartment.
Item: we at _Whisper_ have it on very good authority that Raymond Coates, Leroy Fontaine, Tyrone Jones and the man who was sheltering them--Roland Navarette--were unarmed when hero Ed Exley gunned them down . . . and, now, nearly five years since the Nite Owl killings, the plot thickens again .
Now, _Whisper_ is the underdog of what the squaresyule press calls 'Scandal Sheet Journalism.' We're not the mighty _Hush-Hush_, we're based out of New York and our beat is primarily the East Coast. But we do have our L.A. sources, and among them is a crusading private eye who wishes to remain anonymous. This man has been obsessed with the Nite Owl case for years, has investigated it extensively and has come up with some startling revelations. This man, whom we shall call 'Private Eye X,' spoke to _Whisper_ correspondents and revealed the following:
Private Eye eye-tem: during the Nite Owl investigation, two brothers, _Peter and Baxter Englekling_, printshop operators from San Bernardino, California, came forth and told authorities an account of how _Nite Owl victim Delbert 'Duke' Cathcart_ approached them with a plan to print pornographic material, then theorized that the Nite Owl killings were the result of intrigue within the pornography underworld. The LAPD poohpoohed the brothers' theory in their haste to pin the crime on the Negroes, and now the Engleklings seem to have disappeared off the face of the globe .
