William Haggard - The New Black Mask (No 5)

“Want to get skin searched by some dyke matrons over at city jail or you want to go home?”

Cora’s fist balls tightened up; the knuckles were as white as my skin.

“Want Voodoo to snuff Billy Boyle?”

That got her attention. “What!”

I looked sidelong at Cora’s face gone pale. “He’s on the train. You think about that when we get to the station and a lot of cops start asking you to snitch off your pals.”

Pulling herself in from the window, Cora asked me the question that hoods have been asking cops since they patrolled on dinosaurs: “Why you do this shitty kind of work?”

I ignored it and said, “Snitch. It’s in your best interest.”

“That’s for me to decide. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Why you do—”

I interrupted, “You’ve got it all figured out, you tell me.

Cora started ticking off points on her fingers, leaning toward me so I could hear her over the siren. “One, you yourself figured your boxin’ days would be over when you was thirty, so you got yourself a nice civil service pension job; two, the bigwig cops loves to have ball players and fighters around to suck up to them — so’s you gets the first crack at the cushy ’signments. Three, you likes to hit people, and po -lice work be full of that; four, your ID card said Warrants Division, and I knows that warrants cops all serves process and does repos on the side, so I knows you pickin’ up lots of extra change. Five—”

I held up my hands in mock surrender, feeling like I had just taken four hard jabs from Billy Conn and didn’t want to go for sloppy fifths. “Smart girl, but you forgot to mention that I work goon squad for Firestone Tire and get a kickback for fingering wetbacks to the Border Patrol.”

Cora straightened the knot in my disreputable necktie. “Hey, baby, a gig’s a gig, you gots to take it where you finds it. I done things I ain’t particularly proud of, and I—”

I shouted, “That’s not it!”

Cora moved back to the window and smiled. “It certainly is, Mr. Po -liceman.”

Angry now, angry at losing, I did what I always did when I smelled defeat: attack. “Shitcan it. Shitcan it now, before I forget I was starting to like you.”

Cora gripped the dashboard with two white-knuckled hands and stared through the windshield. Union Station came into view, and pulling into the parking lot I saw a dozen black-and-whites and unmarked cruisers near the front entrance. Bullhorn-barked commands echoed unintelligibly as I killed my siren, and behind the police cars I glimpsed plain-clothesmen aiming riot guns at the ground.

I pinned my badge to my jacket front and said, “Out.” Cora stumbled from the car and stood rubber-kneed on the pavement. I got out, grabbed her arm, and shoved-pulled her all the way over to the pandemonium. As we approached, a harness bull leveled his .38 at us, then hesitated and said, “Sergeant Blanchard?”

I said “Yeah” and handed Cora over to him, adding, “She’s a material witness, be nice to her.” The youth nodded, and I walked past two bumper-to-bumper black-and-whites into the most incredible shakedown scene I had ever witnessed:

Negro men in porter uniforms and white men in army khakis were lying facedown on the pavement, their jackets and shirts pulled up to their shoulders, their trousers and undershorts pulled down to their knees. Uniformed cops were spread searching them while plainclothesmen held the muzzles of .12 gauge pumps to their heads. A pile of confiscated pistols and sawed-off shotguns lay a safe distance away. The men on the ground were all babbling their innocence or shouting epithets, and every cop trigger finger looked itchy.

Voodoo Simpkins and Billy Boyle were not among the six suspects. I looked around for familiar cop faces and saw Georgie Caulkins by the station’s front entrance, standing over a sheet-covered stretcher. I ran up to him and said, “What have you got, Skipper?”

Caulkins toed the sheet aside, revealing the remains of a fortyish negro man. “The shine’s Leotis McCarver,” Georgie said. “Upstanding colored citizen, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters big shot, a credit to his race. Put a .38 to his head and blew his brains out when the black-and-whites showed up.”

Catching a twinkle in the old lieutenant’s eyes, I said, “Really?”

Georgie smiled. “I can’t shit a shitter. McCarver came out waving a white handkerchief, and some punk kid rookie cancelled his ticket. Deserves a commendation, don’t you think?”

I looked down at the stiff and saw that the entry wound was right between the eyes. “Give him a sharpshooter’s medal and a desk job before he plugs some innocent civilian. What about Simpkins and Boyle?”

“Gone,” Georgie said. “When we first got here, we didn’t know the real soldiers and porters from the heisters, so we threw a net over the whole place and shook everybody down. We held every legit shine lieutenant, which was two guys, then cut them loose when they weren’t your boy. Simpkins and Boyle probably got away in the shuffle. A car got stolen from the other end of the lot — citizen said she saw a nigger in a porter’s suit breaking the window. That was probably Simpkins. The license number’s on the air along with an all points. That shine is dead meat”

I thought of Simpkins invoking protective voodoo gods and said, “I’m going after him myself.”

“You owe me a report on this thing!”

“Later.”

“Now!”

I said, “Later, sir ,” and ran back to Cora, Georgie’s “now” echoing behind me. When I got to where I had left her, she was gone. Looking around, I saw her a few yards away on her knees, handcuffed to the bumper of a black-and-white. A cluster of blue suits were hooting at her, and I got very angry.

I walked over. A particularly callow-looking rookie was regaling the others with his account of Leotis McCarver’s demise. All four snapped to when they saw me coming. I grabbed the storyteller by his necktie and yanked him toward the back of the car. “Uncuff her,” I said.

The rookie tried to pull away. I yanked at his tie until we were face-to-face and I could smell Sen-Sen on his breath. “And apologize.”

The kid flushed, and I walked back to my unmarked cruiser. I heard muttering behind me, and then I felt a tap on my shoulder. Cora was there, smiling. “I owe you one,” she said.

I pointed to the passenger seat. “Get in. I’m collecting.”

The ride back to West Adams was fueled by equal parts of my nervous energy and Cora’s nonstop spiel on her loves and criminal escapades. I had seen it dozens of times before. A cop stands up for a prisoner against another cop, on general principles or because the other cop is a turd, and the prisoner takes it as a sign of affection and respect and proceeds to lay out a road map of their life, justifying every wrong turn because he wants to be the cop’s moral equal. Cora’s tale of her love for Billy Boyle back in his heister days, her slide into call-house service when he went to prison, and her lingering crush on Wallace Simpkins was predictable and mawkishly rendered. I got more and more embarrassed by her “you dig?” punctuations and taps on the arm, and if I didn’t need her as a High Darktown tour guide I would have kicked her out of the car and back to her old life. But then the monologue got interesting.

When Billy Boyle was cut loose from Chino, he had a free week in L.A. before his army induction and went looking for Cora. He found her hooked on ether at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah, seeing voodoo visions, servicing customers as Coroloa, the African Slave Queen. He got her out of there, eased her off the dope with steambaths and vitamin B-12 shots, then ditched her to fight for Uncle Sam. Something snapped in her brain when Billy left, and, still vamped on Wallace Simpkins, she started writing him at Quentin. Knowing his affinity for voodoo, she smuggled in some slave-queen smut pictures taken of her at the Casbah, and they got a juicy correspondence going. Meanwhile, Cora went to work at Mickey Cohen’s southside numbers mill, and everything looked peachy. Then Simpkins came out of Big Q, the voodoo sex fantasy stuff became tepid reality, and the Voodoo Man himself went back to stickups, exploiting her connections to the white criminal world.