Brodie ran toward the door of the mansion. He didn’t bother to check McGurk, he knew he was dead. When he reached the door, he flattened himself against the wall, then whirled around the corner and dove into the house.
A moment later, a shot rang out. Then another. And another. Quick shots. Bang, bang… bang.
A second or two later, a woman’s scream split the dense night air like an axe splitting a log. And she kept screaming.
Although he didn’t know it then, Thomas Brodie Culhane would hear those screams for the rest of his life.
Book Two
1941
CHAPTER 1
It was just another day in Los Angeles. A black Rolls-Royce hearse, glass sides draped with silk and lace, carrying a fifty-two-year-old movie star, has a flat and holds up traffic on Sunset Boulevard for forty-five minutes. As a crowd gathers, his wife rolls down the window of her limo and yells, “He got a heart attack screwing some seventeen-year-old slut,” over and over again.
Out in Los Feliz, a four-year-old girl has gone missing for most of the day before she is discovered next door, floating facedown in the backyard pool.
A twenty-two-year-old unemployed Mexican named Suarez Bailuz kills and robs the forty-two-year-old clerk of a greengrocery on Racine and then, for no apparent reason at all, shoots her dog, a toothless little pup, fourteen years old and blind in one eye. Then he steals her ’36 Ford, runs out of gas in Coldwater Canyon, and shoots himself. His nineteen-year-old wife, who does not have a radio, reports him missing when he doesn’t come home for dinner.
On the west side, a forty-one-year-old ex-Marine, who had lost a leg in the trenches in 1918, spends most of the day drinking in a bar, staggers out the door, loses his balance, and falls in front of the right front wheel of the Ventura bus. A woman standing nearby faints and somebody steals her purse.
Out in Westwood, the manager of a movie theater smacks his wife for spilling his dinner and she returns the favor by stabbing him in the back of the neck with an eight-inch boning knife. He runs out of the house and drops dead on the front lawn, in front of some kids playing stickball in the street. While they stand around laughing and pointing at the knife that is still sticking in his neck, the investigating officers go in the house and find the new widow sitting at the kitchen table, smoking an Old Gold and reading Look magazine. She offers them a beer.
On La Cienega, a forty-six-year-old bartender shaking a martini drops dead of a heart attack.
And in the press room at homicide central, the police reporter of an L.A. gossip sheet is griping because he has nothing to write about.
“Just another day at homicide central,” the desk sergeant, named Conlin, says as he closes out the log at the end of his shift and scribbles the time and date-7:00 p.m., May 26, 1941-at the bottom of the page.
My partner, Ski Agassi, and I were running late getting back to the station house when the call came in. A woman had drowned in the bathtub in a pleasant subdivision called Pacific Meadows.
“Ah hell, let’s take it,” I said, “we’re only two minutes away.” I U-turned and headed west on Santa Monica.
“Let the new shift catch it, Zeke,” he growled. “We don’t get overtime for these jaunts, y’know.”
“It’ll take a half hour,” I said, snatching up the radio mike and calling the desk, while Agassi shook his head. Regulations ruled that any unobserved or accidental death should be considered a homicide until the coroner said otherwise. It was a courtesy for two homicide detectives to take the call.
“I’m starving, Zeke,” groaned Agassi, who at forty-two weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred sixty pounds. The boys at Division called us Laurel and Hardy-but not when we were in earshot.
“You’re always starving,” I said. I was three inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter.
Pacific Meadows was a deceiving name. A low slope shielded the tiny community from the ocean so there was no view of the Pacific. And the neighborhood was built on the shoulder of the slope as it rose to form one of the many canyons that separate L.A. from the Valley, so it could hardly be called a meadow. But it lived up to the serene promise of its name. It was a pleasant oasis neighbored by a sprawling rundown section of L.A. that had not yet recovered from the Depression.
The houses of Pacific Meadows, mostly one-story stucco or brick bungalows, were built close together and, although inexpensive, always seemed freshly painted. The lawns were well kept, the streets clean of debris. The neighborhood was a mix of once-affluent families-who had lost everything in the Crash, survived hard times, and had begun to rebuild their lives on the low end of the scale-with civil servants, who had weathered the catastrophe with low-paying but regular jobs. Bus drivers, court clerks, secretaries, office workers, schoolteachers. Salt-of-the- earth types. Pride and perseverance was reflected in the pleasant, well-kept environs, the sounds of kids at play, an occasional dog barking, the clatter of lawn mowers. It was the kind of community where people kept their door keys under the welcome mat.
We passed a house I recognized. I had been here once, about five years earlier, just after I was promoted to the homicide division. A man, whose name I couldn’t put my finger on, had taken a leisurely bath, donned his best Sunday blue serge suit, stuffed towels under the cracks of his garage door, and then cranked up his used Studebaker and waited for carbon monoxide to end his misery.
He had been the vice president of a textile company in New Jersey, with two kids in private school and a small estate on the affluent side of the tracks, when the Crash wiped him out in ’29. For six years, he and his family moved from place to place, riding the rails, flopping in Hoovervilles, living off soup kitchens and handouts, struggling to keep the family together. His two children had grown into teenagers with little hope of overcoming the social stigma sudden poverty often carries with it. When they reached the coast and California became the Pacific Ocean, he lucked out and found a job as a stock clerk in a hardware store just off Melrose. Over the next two years, he worked his way up to assistant manager, making enough money to rent a house in the Meadows and buy a used car. Then he was passed over for the manager’s position.
It was his final humiliation; hope had betrayed him once too often.
I remembered his wife and kids staring mute and dry-eyed as a couple of cops carried the sheeted stretcher out of the garage, their dreams of a new life wiped out by the turn of an ignition key.
Agassi also was familiar with the place. He had once considered a house in Pacific Meadows before finding one more to his liking on Ogden Avenue in Hollywood. Agassi had the kind of pleasant face that big men often affect to offset their intimidating size, but now he wore a frown, a reaction to what he called my “eager-beaver attitude.”
“He doesn’t have a wife waiting dinner on him,” Agassi grumbled at the windshield, mostly under his breath.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“Grab a left here,” Agassi replied.
The house was three blocks from the corner, a pleasant redbrick, one-story with a front porch and a white picket fence surrounding the front yard, split by the walkway to the front door. The left half of the yard was neatly mown and smelled of fresh grass. The other side hadn’t been touched. A spotless green ’39 DeSoto sat in the driveway.
People were standing in front yards, staring with morbid curiosity at the house and chatting in whispered tones. A cop was interrogating a man and woman in the yard of the house next door and taking notes. His partner was standing by the front gate with his hands clasped behind him, like a sentinel on the bank of the River Styx. He
