Thursday nite.
But let's talk facts. Marion McPherson, Darktown Bill's long-suffering hausfrau, thinks Billy Boy spends Thursday nites watching Mexican bantamweights pound each other silly at the Olympic Auditorium. She's wrongsky-Bad Billy craves amour, not mayhem, on his Thursdays.
Fact numero uno-Bill McPherson is a regular at Minnie Roberts' Casbah-the swankiest colored cathouse on L.A. 's southside. Call it sinuendo, hepcat- but we've heard he likes the thirty-five-dollar milkbath, plied by two very large Congo cuties. Fact numero twosky-McPherson was seen listening to Charlie 'Bird' Parker (a notorious hophead) at Tommy Tucker's Playroom, on cloud ten from the Playroom's potent Plantation Punch. His date that night was one Lynette Brown, age eighteen, a dusky deelite with two juvenile arrests for possession of marijuana. Lynette told a secret «Hush-Hush» correspondent, 'Bill like his black. He say, 'Once you had black you can't go back.' He dig jazz and he like to party slow. He really married? He really distric' 'turney?'
He sure is, sweet thing. But for how much longer? There's a bunch of Thursdays between now and Election Day, and will Bad Bebop Billy be able to control his dark desires until then?
Remember, dear reader, you heard it first here-off the record, on the Q.T. and «very» Hush-Hush.
EXTRACT: L.A. «Herald-Express», March 1:
BLOODY CHRISTMAS POLICEMAN TO
LEAVE JAIL SOON
On April 2, Richard Alex Stensland leaves Wayside Honor Rancho a free man. Convicted last year on four assault charges related to the 1951 Bloody Christmas police brutality scandal, he walks out an ex-cop with an uncertain future.
Stensland's former partner, Officer Wendell White, spoke to the «Herald». He said, 'It was the luck of the draw, that Christmas thing. I was there, and I could have been the guy that swung. It was Dick, though. He made a good cop out of me. I owe him for that and I'm mad at what happened to him. I'm still Dick's friend and I bet he's still got lots of friends in the Department.'
And among the civilian population, it appears. Stensland told a «Herald» reporter that upon his release he'll go to work for Abraham Teitlebaum, the owner of Abe's Noshery, a delicatessen in West Los Angeles. Asked whether he bears grudges against any of the people who put him in jail, Stensland said, 'Only one. But I'm too law-abiding to do anything about it.'
L.A. «Daily News», March 6:
SCANDAL TURNS CLOSE D.A.'S RACE TO
LANDSLIDE
It was expected to go down to the wire: incumbent city D.A. William McPherson vs. Deputy D.A. Ellis Loew, the winner to hold the job as top elected crimefighter in the Southland for the next four years. Both men campaigned on the issues: how to deploy the city's legal budget the best way, how to most efficaciously fight crime. Both men, predictably, claimed they would fight crime the hardest. The L.A. law enforcement establishment considered McPherson soft on crime and too liberal in general and threw their support to Loew. Union organizations supported the incumbent. McPherson stood pat on his status quo record and played off his nice-guy personality, and Loew tried a young firebrand routine that didn't work: he came off as theatrical and vote-hungry. It was a gentleman's campaign until the February issue of «Hush-Hush» magazine hit the stands.
Most people take «Hush-Hush» and other scandal sheets with a grain of salt, but this was election time. An article alleged that D.A. McPherson, happily married for twenty-six years, cavorted with young Negro women. The D.A. ignored the article, which was accompanied by photographs of him and a Negro girl, taken at a nightclub in south central Los Angeles. Mrs. McPherson did not ignore the article-she filed for divorce. Ellis Loew did not mention the article in his campaign, and McPherson began to slip in the polls. Then, three days before the election, Sheriffs deputies raided the Lilac View Motel on the Sunset Strip, acting on the tip of an 'unknown informant' who called in with word of an illegal assignation in room 9. The assignators proved to be D.A. McPherson and a young Negro prostitute, age 14. The deputies arrested McPherson on statutory rape charges and heard out the story of Marvell Wilkins, a minor with two soliciting arrests.
She told them that McPherson picked her up on South Western Avenue, offered her twenty dollars for an hour of her time and drove her to the Lilac View. McPherson pleaded amnesia: he recalled having 'several martinis' at a dinner meeting with supporters at the Pacific Dining Car restaurant, then getting into his car. He remembers nothing after that. The rest is history: reporters and photographers arrived at the Lilac View Motel shortly after the deputies, McPherson became front-page news and on Tuesday Ellis Loew was elected city district attorney by a landslide.
Something seems fishy here. Scandal-rag journalism should not dictate the thrust of political campaigns, although we at the «Daily News» (admitted McPherson supporters) would never abridge their right to print whatever filth they desire. We have tried to locate Marvell Wilkins, but the girl, released from custody, seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Without pointing fmgers, we at the «Daily News» ask District Attorney-elect Loew to initiate a grand jury investigation into this matter, if for no other reason than his desire to assume his new office with no dark clouds overhead.
PART TWO. Nite Owl Massacre
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The whole squadroom to himself.
A retirement party downstairs-he wasn't invited. The weekly crime report to be read, summarized, tacked to the bulletin board-nobody else ever did it, they knew he did it best. The papers ballyhooing the Dream-a-Dreamland opening-the other cops Moochie Mouse-squeaked him ad nauseam. Space Cooley playing the party; pervert Deuce Perkins roaming the halls. Midnight and nowhere near sleepy-Ed read, typed.
4/9/53: a transvestite shoplifter hit four stores on Hollywood Boulevard, disabled two salesclerks with judo chops. 4/10/53: an usher at Grauman's Chinese stabbed to death by two male Caucasians-he told them to put out their cigarettes. Suspects still at large; Lieutenant Reddin said he was too inexperienced to handle a homicide-he didn't get the job. 4/11/53: a stack of crime sheets-several times over the past two weeks a carload of Negro youths were seen discharging shotguns into the air in the Griffith Park hills. No IDs, the kids driving a '48-'50 purple Mercury coupe. 4/11-4/13/53: five daytime burglaries, private homes north of the Boulevard, jewelry stolen. Nobody assigned yet; Ed made a note: bootjack the job, dust before the access points got pawed. Today was the fourteenth-he might have a chance.
Ed finished up. The empty squadroom made him happy: nobody who hated him, a big space filled with desks and filing cabinets. Official forms on the walls-empty spaces you filled in when you notched an arrest and made somebody confess. Confessions could be ciphers, nothing past an admission of the crime. But if you twisted your man the right way-loved him and hated him to precisely the right degree-then he would tell you things-small details-that would create a reality to buttress your case and give you that much more inteffigence to bend the next suspect with. Art De Spain and his father taught how to find the spark point. They had boxloads of old steno transcripts: kiddie rapers, heisters, assorted riffraff who'd confessed to them. Art would rabbit-punch-but he used the threat more than the act. Preston Exley rarely hit-he considered it the criminal defeating the policeman and creating disorder. They read elliptical answers and made him guess the questions; they gave him a rundown of common criminal experiences-wedges to get the flow started. They showed him that men have levels of weakness that are acceptable because other men condone them and levels of weakness that produce a great shame, something to hide from all but a brilliant confessor. They honed his instinct for the jugular of weakness. It got so sharp that sometimes he couldn't look at himself in the mirror.
The sessions ran late-two widowers, a young man without a woman. Art had a bug on multiple murders-he had his father rehash the Loren Atherton case repeatedly: horror snatches, witness testimony. Preston obliged with psychological theories, grudgingly-he wanted his glory case to stay sealed off, complete, in his mind. Art's old cases were scrutinized-and he reaped the efforts of three fine minds: confessions straight across, 95 percent convictions. But so far his drive to crack criminal knowledge hadn't been challenged-much less sated.
Ed walked down to the parking lot, sleep coming on. 'Quack, quack,' behind him-hands turned him around.
A man in a kid's mask-Danny Duck. A left-right knocked off his glasses; a kidney shot put him down. Kicks to the ribs drove him into a ball.
Ed curled hard, caught kicks in the face. A flashbulb popped; two men walked away: one quacking, one laughing. Easy IDs: Dick Stensland's bray, Bud White's football limp. Ed spat blood, swore payback.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Russ Millard addressed Ad Vice squad 4-the topic pornography.
'Picture-book smut, gentlemen. There's been a bunch of it found at collateral crime scenes lately: narcotics, bookmaking and prostitution collars. Normally this kind of stuff is made in Mexico, so it's not our jurisdiction. Normally it's an organized crime sideline, because the big mobs have the money to manufacture it and the connections to get it distributed. But Jack Dragna's been deported, Mickey Cohen's in prison and probably too puritanical anyway, and Mo Jahelka's foundering on his own. Stag pix aren't Jack Whalen's style-he's a bookie looking to get his hands on a Vegas casino. And the stuff that's surfaced is too high quality for the L.A. area print mills: Newton Street Vice rousted them, they're clean, they just don't have the facilities to make magazines of this quality. But the backdrops in the pictures indicate L.A. venue: you can see what looks like the Hollywood Hills out some windows, and the furnishings in a lot of the places look like your typical cheap Los Angeles apartments. So our job is to track this filth to its source and arrest whoever made it, posed for it and distributed it.'
Jack groaned: the Great Jerk-off Book Caper of 1953. The other guys looked hot to glom the smut, maybe fuel up their wives. Millard popped a Digitalis. ' Newton Street dicks questioned everyone at the collateral rousts, and they all denied possessing the stuff. Nobody at the print mills knows where it was made. The mags have been shown around the Bureau and our station vice squads, and we've got zero IDs on the posers. So, gentlemen, look yourself.'
Henderson and Kifka had their hands out; Stathis looked ready to drool. Millard passed the smut over. ' Vincennes, is there someplace you'd rather be?'
'Yeah, Captain. Narcotics Division.'
'Oh? Anyplace else?'
'Maybe working whores with squad two.'
'Make a major case, Sergeant. I'd love to sign you out of here.'
Oohs, ahhs, cackles, oo-la-las; three men shook their heads no. Jack grabbed the books.
