Beat the Devils

The California sun seemed to be free of its cage as he made the drive out to Echo Park from his studio apartment in the heart of Chinatown. Nobody ever seemed to bother anybody in Chinatown. Well, that wasn't entirely true. Good, "patriotic" Americans hated the chinks just as much as they hated the kikes, and there were drunken raids on Chinese shopfronts from time to time. These domestic pogroms often resulted in someone losing more than just their livelihood.

Still, living among the Coolies could made a Yid somewhat invisible. And besides, living alongside the Chinamen just felt right; there was an unspoken form of kinship with the Jews, was there not? They were, after all, two peoples who, at points throughout their histories, had amounted to nothing more than expendable labor forces and were, at present, now despised for their shared association with Communism.

Truthfully, Morris Baker didn't fit the stereotypical Jewish look, no matter how many jokes Connolly made to the contrary. His nose was thin, but it wasn't a crooked beak like so many of his kinsmen were said to possess. His eyes were a murky dark brown and (not surprisingly) noticeably sunken since the end of the war. In fact, the only feature that hinted at his heritage was a head of curly brown hair so dark, it looked black in all but the most selective of lights.

The sky was nothing like the Rockwell illustration on Baker's refrigerator. It was a deep, unpleasant shade of orange as the sun mated with the Los Angeles smog. The intense morning rays caused amorphous shadows among the forest of palm trees in Echo Park. At this hour, they looked more like deformed monsters than the botanical landmarks of warm weather. Despite the fact that it wasn't even eight o'clock yet, Baker's white shirt was already soaked with a healthy layer of sweat. He cursed himself for stupidly forgetting to put on an undershirt and neglecting to shave the shallow stubble creeping up his neck. At least his hangover was abating…sort of.

Looking out the open window of his pale-green Continental Mark II—whose noisy Y-block V-8 engine never shut the hell up—Baker saw a cluster of lotus plants shooting out of the Echo Park lake. The mottled growths resembled the periscopes of a bright-green submarine armada. The gibberish of Huey "Piano" Smith's "Don't You Just Know It" was coming out of the radio. Just like the country he now lived in, the lyrics made no sense to Baker.

"Aw yeaaah, baby!" said the disc jockey once the song had ended, letting out a wolfish howl. His voice sounded as though he had the unusual habit of gargling gravel most mornings. "Don't ya just love that one, folks? Even the Reds can't resist a tune that good! This is KPXM Los Angeles, where we're playin' all the jiviest jams of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, baby! Aww yeaahhh…!"

A new song began to play, but barely made it to the chorus before it was replaced by a garbled Shakespeare reading somewhere out of range. "The fault…Brutus…not in our stars…in ourselves…resist…"

"Piece of junk," said Baker, turning off the radio with a flick of the wrist.

Soon, the erstwhile Echo Park branch of the LA Public Library system came into view. The building resembled a multilayered cake, assembled from an appealing combination of white and orange bricks. Big black letters sat atop the entrance like blight on a potato farm: HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE OFFICES: LOS ANGELES DIVISION. Cleared of its books and shelves, the library was now a place where suspected Communists and deviants were taken to be processed, interrogated, and, in some cases, unofficially disposed of. People could still make it out alive, of course, but their psyches and fingernails were never the same.

The deafening roar of a supersonic jet overhead brought Baker back to his senses. For a moment, the thunderclap blurred out the Continental's overworked engine as the jet hit Mach 1. Baker snapped his head up just in time to see a white cloud bloom from the tail end of the aircraft as it sped off into the morning sky. Its scream became more and more muted by the second. For ten years, man had been able to break the sound barrier, and for ten years, he wouldn't let anyone on the ground forget it.

"Oy, we get it already," Baker shouted at the jet, his brain threatening to roll over like a dying dog.

It was only a five-minute drive from his apartment on North Hill Street to the former library and then another nine to the address Connolly had provided via Glendale Boulevard, which took him through Effie Street and then to Echo Park Avenue.

Altivo Way was a small street right off the avenue, boxed off by palm trees and bushes, and lined with bungalows. It gave the impression of an exclusive, colonized jungle that was both comfortable and expensive. The city proper was slightly visible between all the scrub, and Baker wryly warned himself to look out for hungry tigers waiting to pounce from the trees.

The house at 984 was curious in that it resembled a ranch. Upon further inspection, however, Baker could make out several lower levels that reminded him of the wooden puzzle boxes sold in the various shops and stalls across Chinatown.

He pulled up next to the house, noting that several sleek black-and-white Chevy Delrays were already parked outside. The circular crest on their bodies read CITY OF LOS ANGELES, FOUNDED 1891 and featured the state and American flags. A uniformed officer (a newbie named Thomas or Travis, Baker couldn't recall) was leaning against one of the squad cars, keeping an eye out for any nosy neighbors trying to catch a morbid glimpse of the crime scene. For added measure, a spiderweb of yellow police tape crisscrossed the entire lawn, and for the second time that morning Baker thought of barbed wire, a whole fence of the stuff running off into the horizon in either direction. Once again, he repressed the image.

Some Altivo Way residents, still in fluffy bathrobes and satin pajamas, were standing curiously on their lawns and driveways, craning their necks to see what all the fuss was about. Thomas/Travis acknowledged Baker in the way that nearly everyone on the force acknowledged him: by spitting on the ground. He was used to it by now. Any qualms he may have had about forgetting the little shit's name were forgotten.

"Top of the morning to you as well," said Baker sardonically.

Strolling up the stone walkway to the door of handsomely carved driftwood, Baker noted the gold calligraphed H on the house's mailbox. The brass doorknob was gleaming with indelicate smudges, no doubt a present from the uniformed officers who first arrived on the scene. Their hastiness and stupidity had probably destroyed any evidence of fingerprints. Baker turned the warm knob and walked inside.

The slight Irish lilt of Brogan Connolly boomed out of the darkness: "About time, you Hebe son of a bitch! Now we can finally get started!"

Nice to see you too, Brogan," said Baker with a smile.

Brogan Abraham Connolly was a large, loud, and foulmouthed—but (mostly) good-natured—Irishman with flaming red hair and muttonchops that had gone out of style sometime after the First World War. His bright-green eyes took prominence over his hair, but it was usually his mouth that was most recognizable.

Baker would have pegged Connolly as an anti-Semitic bigot long ago if he hadn't seen firsthand proof that Connolly hated everyone the same—regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. Hell, Connolly sometimes hated a person if they looked at him funny. Between them, Baker and Connolly had closed more cases than anyone else in the department and, therefore, bonded over this common ground more than anything else.

Their very first case together involved tracking down Raymond Neff, a particularly sick individual who had been abducting the youth of Los Angeles, molesting them, killing them, and burying their corpses in Death Valley National Park. Baker, who had seen children murdered countless ways during the war, was fed up with Connolly discounting his theories about the killer as "Hebrew hogwash" and even requested to be paired with another detective.

It was a stroke of luck that the two of them, leaving a nine-hour stakeout of a play park in Los Feliz, stumbled upon Neff trying to squash a particularly fat child into the trunk of his car. Baker left Neff with a broken arm and an eye so swollen, it had to be surgically removed before the man's state execution in the gas chamber. The violence against Neff earned Baker a month's suspension and docked pay, but it also earned him Connolly's respect and friendship, even if the latter did sometimes take umbrage at Baker's excessive drinking. Since that time, they'd worked as a seamless unit, constantly teasing each other like immature schoolboys. No other plainclothes detective would dare touch a case when the dynamic duo of Connolly and Baker was already on it, not unless they wanted to duke it out with the former.

"I was just telling Mickey here that if you hadn't shown up within the next five minutes, we'd send out an APB on a big-nosed Sheenie drunk fitting your description," said Connolly, chuckling.

Also present in the dimly lit hall were uniformed officers Mickey Sheehan and Kelvin Bletchley, both of whom were giving Baker nasty looks.

"I was asleep when you rang. You have," Baker said, his accent turning the word into half, "to give me time to get dressed, or I'd show up with my shirt on backward and my, how you Americans like to say? Yes, my pecker out," replied Baker, his eyes finally adjusting to the house's weak lighting. He now realized he was standing in a wide hallway painted canary yellow and adorned with film posters housed in thick frames: The Maltese Falcon, In This Our Life, Across the Pacific.

The beautiful, toughened, and pudgy faces of Bogart, Astor, de Havilland, and Greenstreet all stared back at him with sharp glances, while dramatic tag lines declared: EXPLOSIVE! BLAZING! and BOY, WHEN BOGART BOFFS THOSE JAPS…YOU CAN FEEL IT!

Although he wasn't a frequent attendee of the movie houses, Baker knew who Bogart was. Everyone in this town (and the world, for that matter) knew who he was: McCarthy's key propaganda tool in fighting Communism. He was still the iconic and manly symbol of American grit, especially after surviving a nasty battle with throat cancer a few years back.

Most recently, he'd played a key army general in the exemplar of sci-fi horror schlock: It Came from Planet Communist! In head-turning 3-D! While not a big fan of the drivel they played on screens these days, Baker killed an afternoon watching the picture and found the blue-and-red paper glasses far from head-turning. Headache-inducing was more like it.

Baker didn't recognize any of the films on display in these posters. Granted, he had arrived in America after the war and perhaps some of these had been made before his emigration, but he surely would have heard of them if they involved Bogart.

Most of the films these days (under the supervision of the government's Department of Motion Pictures) were basically the same: An unsmiling Communist, be it spy or alien, tries to ruin the American way of life and the brave Republican, capitalist, and democracy-loving hero stops them cold in their tracks.

Baker's slight confusion must have played on his face. Connolly piped up again in his gruff voice.

"I was confused for a second there too, Baker. Haven't seen these films in over ten years. In fact, no one has! Hueys banned them in '53, shortly after McCarthy took office. Didn't want people watching stuff that didn't keep them on their toes. You know how the story goes."

Baker straightened. "I assume the maker of these pictures is around here somewhere without a pulse?"

"Right down here, as a matter of fact," said Connolly, pointing to a brighter room off the darkened hallway. Baker headed in that direction, briefly noticing a kitchen at the far end and a set of stairs that led to the house's lower levels.

"By the way," he began. "What schmuck touched the doorknob with his bare hand?"

"That was Tommy outside. Kid doesn't know his gun from his dick yet," Connolly responded. "I've done some light dusting myself, but it's been goose egg so far. Whoever did this, they knew what they were doing. Right through here."

Baker walked through the slightly arched opening of the room toward which Connolly had directed him. A sudden flash exploded before his eyes, partially blinding him. Tiny lights popped and subsided, giving way to the blurry form of a man holding a large camera.

"Christ!" growled Baker, prompting an indignant squawk from Connolly. "You could warn a man!" He rubbed his eyeballs with knuckles that felt like sandpaper.

"Sorry, Morris," said crime scene photographer Philip Lathrop, already unscrewing the flashbulb from his cumbersome Graflex Speed Graphic camera and replacing it with a new one. "Didn't see you there. You check the lighting in here? It's absolutely perfect!"

Baker let out a small sigh. Of all the photographers the station had to send, it was the one who fancied himself an "art-eest." To call Philip H. Lathrop a perfectionist was an understatement. He sometimes forgot he was taking pictures of corpses—not actors and models. He'd have made one hell of a cameraman for the motion pictures if the background checks weren't so stringent and the president's cronies (along with their snot-nosed kids) didn't get first priority.

"I hadn't noticed," replied Baker, his vision returning. Lathrop was right, the lighting in here was pleasant and easy on the eyes. It lazily funneled into the space through high glass windows situated on both sides of the wood-paneled room.