i already knew him by reputation, had our respective records down pat: lee blanchard, 43-4-2 as a heavyweight, formerly a regular attraction at the hollywood legion stadium.
and he knew me, bucky bleichert, light- heavy, 36-0-0, ranked tenth by ring magazine in 1937 fighting no-name opponents in no-man's-land division.
warrants was local celebrity as a cop. warrants was plainclothes without a coat and tie, romance and a mileage per diem on your civilian car. warrants was going after the real bad guys and not rousting winos and wienie waggers in front of the midnight mission.
i told myself i didn't care.
the 77th street lieutenant tapped as official lapd bookmaker had lee as an early 3 to 1 favorite.
he was better than i thought. it made what came next easier.
i'd almost finished the police academy when the background check turned up my father's german-american bund membership. pressured by the fbi goons to confirm my patriotism, i gave the alien squad sam murakawa, a guy i'd grown up with, in order to secure my lapd appointment.
the old fuck never knew any better. never knew what he cost me. or sammy, who'd died at manzanar. i was a good fit in the snitch's jacket and with a little alteration i slipped easily into the whole suit.
with no lead on the two escaped men, the heist quickly went from page one to page five. two weeks later.
one of lee's snitches fingered bobby dewitt, a greasy little pimp with a yard long rap, as the brains behind the bank job.
hey. canvasback!
mister fire. mister ice. the hero and the snitch.
let go of him! let go of him!
from november through the new year, lee and i captured a total of eleven hard felons, eighteen traffic warrantees and three parole and probation absconders.
after tours of duty, lee and i would go to the house and find kay. sometimes she made dinner for us, other times the three of us would go dancing, or see a flick.
i used a warrant cops special prerogative and issued an apb on lorna martikova aka linda martin. i wrote up my day's report, omitting marjorie graham's lead on the old dyke. i didn't need ellis loew quashing it along with the skinny on betty as the part-time prostie.
three days 'til bobby de witt hit la. three days since we killed four men.
barflies. daytime juicers. the longer i listened the more they talked about themselves, interweaving their sad tales with the black dahlia, who they actually believed to be a glamorous siren headed for hollywood stardom.
i logged forty-six phone tips, about half of which were reasonably coherent. lee left early, dodging any talk about de witt. ellis loew stuck me with writing up the summary report, most of which concerned the numerous dead end leads, bogus confessions and three hundred new dahlia sightings per day. it left me gut certain of one thing:
losing the first bleichert-blanchard fight got me local celebrity, warrants, and close to nine grand in cash; winning the rematch got me a sprained wrist, two dislocated knuckles and the rest of the day off. whoever said winning isn't everything got that part right.
back in la, linda short let slip that her "mex" was actually a local named walter wellington, who copped to making the film but quickly provided the cops his alibi for the dahlia's missing days.
not that this stopped loew and his boys from rousting spics all over town for a possible dahlia frame-up. the circus was becoming a farce.
i wanted to believe it was all about lee. tracking lee through her. through the files he had collected.
strangers' recollections of a girl's last days leading me to a partner.
but the deeper into her i got, the more i understood the detective's old saw: any dick worth his suit always takes a side: the perp or the vic.
most cops'll tell ya. one day you wake up and you're in the head of the killer. angry. powerful. in control. you're the perp.
few cops'll admit to walking the harder path. fear. pain. loss. few will admit to waking up in the head of the vic.
on my way over i played out their rap sheets in my head, trying to work up a head of hate. loren bidwell, three time atascadero loser, falls for aggravated sexual assault on minors. between prison jolts he confessed to all the big sex crimes.
charlie issler was a pimp and a career confessor specializing in copping to hooker homicides. his three procuring beefs had netted him a year county jail time, his phony confessions two ninety day observation stints at the camarillo nut farm.
east 5th street from main to stanford. blood banks, liquor stores selling half pints and short dogs exclusively, fifty- cent-a-night flophouses and derelict missions.
banished by ellis loew, who dared me to try my word against a twenty-two year man and the city's future district attorney. i confined the truth to russ and kay, and determined to spend my shifts trying to be the worst foot hack in history.
a month passed. the dahlia leads dwindled to zero and every officer except russ and harry were returned to their regular assignments. as for me, i'd been able to contain my dahlia interests within the walls of the el nido.
but sometimes betty came to me.
what kept me up that night wasn't the idea of fritz vogel extorting criminals, or fritz vogel bracing charlie the pimp to see if betty had told him something about one of her johns. maybe even vogel, himself. no.
what kept me up was this thought: if issler blabbed about liz and her tricks i would have overheard. fritz was confident he could keep me quiet.
i closed out my glory days the only way i knew how--i chased the gone man.
i got headshakes, bullshit broadsides and a strange series of tales that rang true. one had "el blanco explosivo" beating the shit out of three jack rollers, then buying off the cops with double-saws peeled from a large roll. another had lee donating 200 scoots to a leper ministry priest and then driving to ensenada.
i decided it would be wise to check in with the law before going out to question the ensenada citizenry.
lee and kay had lived in sin; not because their shack job was against department regs, but because the ghosts of their past had forced them to choose between love and passion, the veneer of a "fairy tale" only a band-aid for a fractured life.
our true vows were made in private; bury the past, bury our ghosts, and as kay said, "bury that fucking girl".
fire and ice. the hero and the snitch. bank robber and his best friend the bumfuck detective. triggerman. stooge. weak point in a fairy tale triangle.
newton street division. footbeat hacks carried metal-studded saps; squadroom dicks packed .45 automatics loaded with unregulation dum-dums.
kay. lee. madeleine. betty short. for one month i escaped them all.
a fucking supercop.
i escaped them all. almost.
it was a reunion of avowed tramps, old rutters who knew they'd never have it as good with anyone else.  afterwards we'd talk through the night. the spragues. crazy papa bleichert.
mostly, though we'd talk about betty. her utter malleability, a chameleon eager to please anybody. and the disrupter of every life close to me. it would last a month.
in the scheme of things it wasn't much. rich old lady gossip, as jane put it.
it came on then, big and ugly: bye-bye bleichert at the bus stop, adios shitbird, has-been, never-was, stool pigeon harness bull.
i tried to keep calm. i told myself that just because emmett sprague helped mack sennett build sets in the twenties didn't mean he had anything to do with a smut film twenty-five years later.
i told him everything. me and madeleine, the spragues. withholding evidence for her. everything. even lee. after all of it he only had one thing to say:
between my time with madeleine and the local boom baron expose in the papers, i was practically an expert on emmett sprague's land deals.
and if my hunch was right, we wouldn't have to look any further than one of emmett sprague's condemned bungalows. one that was isolated. abandoned.
and most importantly, close to a water source. where one could drain a body of its blood.
when i'd pulled george's print card that morning, i'd already laid fifty down with russ that he was our guy. amateur taxidermist, transient. if he was a cop 39th and norton woulda been right in the middle of his beat.
but i'd be lying if i said i hadn't wanted to nail the sicko myself, giving him ten rounds of bleichert rage.
maybe he'd have gone for a gun or probably a knife, and the bleichert fists would've given way to a full load of .45 in the chest.
we took the fall together.
ever the consummate actor, madeleine sprague confessed to killing lee by concocting a love triangle from the three of us. the bleichert. blanchard rematch fought over her hand, with lee beating emmett and demanding he "hand over" his daughter when she preferred me.
so the brass girl took the fall for the whole family. and i took the fall for me. iad cleared me on the motel shooting--a cop's code make-good for blanchard's snuff. we pull out and see bucky's cuffs, badge and gun sitting on the table in front of him.
but i had people to protect. people who already knew that, for the briefest of times, and in the darkest of places, i had been so, so, good at some things.
thank you elizabeth.