The Precinct With The Golden Arm

By dennis broe

Calamitous Corruption: The Harry Palmer LA Trilogy
Book 3: The Precinct With The Golden Arm
“A superbly plotted, Chandleresque historical Noir”–Lilja Sigurðardóttir, “the Queen of Scandinavian Crime Fiction,” author of the trilogy Snare, Trap, Cage and of four financial thrillers, the latest of which is Dark As Night

“Private detective Harry Palmer, a distant relative of Philip Marlow and Lew Archer, takes us back to the LA of the 1940s in an exciting story with an impressive accumulation of details from the backstreets of that city” – Gunnar Staalesen, who Jo Nesbo called “the Norwegian Chandler,” writer of the Varg Veum series

“Dennis Broe compels us to assert that novelists, like himself—and not just poets—are the unacknowledged legislators: for in this masterpiece, he poetically provides a scintillating dissection of capitalism, L.A. style”—Gerald Horne, historian and author of Class Struggle in Hollywood

“...the seamy world of the LAPD,...the Mexican-American community in Boyle Heights...the Ku Klux Klan and the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry...combine and collide in a cleverly integrated story that will keep a reader fully engaged to the last page and beyond”–Eric Gordon, LA Progressive

“An ingeniously plotted book that weaves its plots together well, and gives us another fascinating look at mid-century Los Angeles”—Ellen Clair Lamb, assistant editor Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels

“The Precinct With The Golden Arm outlines an LA teeming with corruption end to end, and one–same as it ever was–not that different from the city today with many of the same problems still unresolved and thus recurring”–Crime Time
In his third encounter with the seamy world of the LA power structure of the 1940s, disgraced ex-homicide detective Harry Palmer tangles with the LAPD as it attempts to shed its aura of corruption while clamping down on the Mexican-American community of Boyle Heights in the wake of the Zoot Suit Rebellion. Lurking in the background is the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry as these various threads interconnect and lead Harry into a maze of sex and drugs as he confronts his own tarnished past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: dennis broe
• Release date: Dec 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005465612

Book preview

Prologue

The Roundup

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Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, Fall 1949

"C’mon, Teresa. ¡Vamos!"

The tall, gangly girl with the jet-black, almost movie-star hair nodded as her friend grabbed her hand and whisked her down the street to a night of partying that Teresa herself was not so keen on attending.

Her friends from East 4th Street were gathering in Hollenbeck Park and while the gathering was usually harmless enough, with Manuelito playing his lira and the gang drinking and belting out canciones, it was rumored there would also be yesca tonight, the Mexican marijuana, which made everyone a little less cautious. Lately, though, Teresa had also heard about at least one loco, a crazy person who might have been a tecato, an addict who would leave the party, go off by himself, and return in a state where no one could reach or talk to him.

Besides, Teresa was supposed to go to the movies tonight, an activity that she much preferred. She particularly loved going to the Mexican movies playing downtown, and tonight she was passing up the latest film from Dolores Del Rio, La Malquerida, with Del Rio a remarried widow, the unloved of the title, whose husband falls for her daughter. Teresa was anticipating a night of gleeful weeping and wailing at Del Rio’s tragedy, but instead her best friend Maria had talked her into a Friday night party.

The girls enjoyed the pungent smell, the sweet taste and the lazy aftereffects of the weed and it was rumored that some of them had even tried harder stuff. Teresa had smoked a little. With an active imagination, she found herself susceptible to the drug and was also tempted to go further for a more intense experience.

The girls in her group still flirted with the Pachuca look—revealing V-neck sweaters, short skirts, bobby sox and platform heels with long flowing hair sometimes running wild, often piled up in rings on the tops of their heads that they called a pompadour. The costume could be dangerous because along with its male counterpart of greatcoats and gold watches with long keychains, their dress recalled the zoot suits that had brought on the riots a few years before.

Teresa herself favored a more elegant look, with a longer skirt but tighter sweater while letting her jet-black hair flow onto her shoulders. She often affected the look of her heroine Dolores, whose name even meant sadness, with a slightly downcast gaze that the boys seemed to find attractive.

When she and Maria arrived at the park, they found the 4th Street Gang, as the group were called, in a celebratory mood. Manuelito was strumming wildly on his guitar, swinging from rancheros, which they all knew from the Mexican films, to corridos, another form of folk music with a faster tempo. He had everyone singing along. There was beer for the taking and a small fire with roast corn on the cob. A little way off in the distance beneath some trees, adjacent to the clearing the group inhabited, Teresa saw lights flickering on and off. She smelled the pungent marijuana, which had apparently just arrived from Mexico.

Manuelito took a break from singing, but kept playing. The boys and girls started dancing, swaying to a swing rhythm that featured each couple trying to outdo the other in rapid twists, turns and twirls. Teresa spent a little time out on the clearing-turned-dance floor with Manuel, a boy she knew from school, but he exhausted her. She retreated to the side, searching for Maria. Not finding her, she fell to the ground and sprawled out, watching the stars now visible in the heavens. Carried away by the pungent odor of the marijuana, she focused on one star, shining brighter than the others, and marked it as the one that would guide her to her successful career—as first a Mexican and then an American movie star, just like Dolores.

Engulfed in fantasies of red-carpet openings and elegant Mexican men lined up to court her, she dropped off into a peaceful sleep. She woke up to someone brushing over her, blinked and saw out of the corner of her eye the loco dancing wildly and scampering over everyone with no partner and she watched out of one hazy, cobwebby eye the other boys and girls doing their best to avoid him. She had seen him in the neighborhood. He had been friendly and had even offered her a taste of whatever was animating him. What happened next was hazy, and she did not like to recall it.

Tonight, she wanted no part of this. She was on the edge of drifting back to sleep again when a whistle pierced the air. Teresa and everyone knew that sound and what it meant. The park was off limits at night, and the 4th Street Gang usually posted scouts at the outer edges of their parties to warn of a police raid. Somehow this had not happened that night. At the sound of the whistle everyone took off, fleeing into all corners of the park with most scampering faster than LA’s finest could catch them.

Not so Teresa, who was still groggily trying to rise when a big burly chota with a badge who looked like he was some sort of officer grabbed her and lifted her roughly to her feet.

Well, looky what we got here, he said to his men, a unit of about ten officers who had returned to the clearing, not having managed to find any of the other members of the gang. Her friends knew the park better than the cops, and were adept at scurrying in and out and finding hiding places behind rocks and bushes.

Teresa, her thoughts returning, wondered if a soplón, a snitch, had alerted the police. But as the big burly man with arms wider than the stems of most cactus held her in a firm grip that continued to tighten, she had a second thought. He was somehow familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

When he released her, she thought perhaps they would let her go. She had done no drugs nor even drunk and far from partying, she was sleeping when they found her.

I want to go home, she said.

The burly man passed her to one of the other cops and bent down on the ground to search the grass where she had lain just a few minutes ago luxuriating and dreaming about her movie career.

You aren’t going anywhere miss, except down to the station house, he said, rising from the grass and holding a syringe that still looked partially full. He sprayed the liquid contents of the syringe on his finger and tasted it.

Wow, he said, this is pure stuff. This must have really knocked you out. You’re going away for a long time.

As two officers pulled Teresa out of the clearing, she shot a backward glance at her tormentor. He wore a smile of satisfaction at a successful evening and a job well-done.

Teresa’s strangest thought, as the officers tossed her rudely into the back of the patrol car, was that now she knew the pain that her heroine Dolores experienced in so many of her films. Not that that would help her, as she saw before her a life of misery with her dreams of the silver screen crushed.

Act I

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Police and Thieves

~

1

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It was a foggy, fall Monday morning in LA and the wind was blowing hot and cold. The Santa Anas did strange things in this city, but none stranger than a warm wind blowing in from the ocean on one block and a cold wind blowing down from the mountains on another. I could feel both on my way to work. I like to walk up into the mountains first and then down to my office in what, after the fog lifted, would be a steamy fall day.

The mood in the city was also blowing hot and cold, prosperity mixed with misery. LA was far from the Anglo paradise that its white founders had envisioned. The city was prospering after the war, with the arms industry revived and the movie industry slowly recovering from a post-war slump and beginning to figure out how to share the wealth with the budding TV industry. But racial tensions, fueled by the war, remained high. They were a big part of the LA I lived in—not the beginning-to-be-pristine bungalows of the sprawling suburbs but Bunker Hill, the site of my dilapidated hotel, near my downtown office, and my frequent prowling grounds on the east side and in south-central. All were cramped spaces mixing the city’s non-white populations as they struggled to make a place for themselves.

You could feel this hot and cold wind in the papers every day. A Negro, sore at losing a dice game—and at being one of the few Negroes left in the aircraft industry, paid less than his white counterpart who’d been welcomed back from the war as a hero—cut a white worker’s throat. A white woman, one of the few women still working in one of the city’s thriving shipyards, accused a Negro man of raping her—though when you read a little further the story revealed that she’d tried to lure him back to her apartment from a club and, according to him, his sin was that he had refused to go. LA was still a station for sailors moving across the Pacific to occupied Japan and a group of them, as recounted in that same issue of the paper, had stripped a Mexican boy of his long, elegant suit with the billowing pants, which had reminded them of the whupping some of their brothers had taken from the Mexican youth during the war.

Concluding the day’s edition of the Los Angeles Times—a rag if ever there was one—was a report of a Chinese woman slapped on Main Street, right near my office, by a white mother whose son had been killed fighting the Japanese in the Pacific and who apparently could not tell the difference between the Chinese, the worst victims of Japanese aggression, and the aggressors themselves.

I got in a little early that Monday morning. I had a sense something was popping, so rather than stay in bed for the extra hour I gave myself to start the work week, I got up, washed, walked, and was in the office by nine. My once secretary—now co-partner, at least according to her—Crystal Eckart was already at her desk. We weren’t working on a case at the moment. Truth was, with a handsome settlement in the last case involving a high-ranking officer, we had been coasting for a while.

Nevertheless, when I entered, Crystal had a slew of papers spread out in front of her and looked to be on the trail of something.

No luck yet? I asked as I ambled past her, my coffee and hard roll in hand, hoping she didn’t want to talk to me.

She looked up from the papers. She was wearing a tight orange number with the bodice cut low enough to make anyone wonder what lay below that mountainous cleavage. I had stopped wondering a long time ago, for the sake of office peace.

None, she said. Can’t find that girl anywhere.

Jade was her ex-roommate. The two had been budding performers and then club girls together, slinking into a downward spiral that I had rescued Crystal from, giving her an office job. Crystal had done the rest and proved herself an able assistant, while continuing to get small film parts on the side.

But Jade has disappeared into the LA fog and mist. Crystal felt a duty to try to save her, but Jade had left what had been their shared run-down Figueroa apartment, not being able to afford it when Crystal, slightly flush with our last payment, moved to a place in West LA. And that was the last anyone had seen of her.

I left Crystal to her hunt and planted myself in my back office. She still had the photo of the publicity man Paul Brunt on her desk. I guessed they were still a hot number, and would be until one of them moved on or up or caught each other on the down low with someone else. Hollywood PR people had a reputation for taking whatever scraps fell off the movie star table.

Come to think of it, LA detectives, myself included, had the same reputation. I’d had a short and sweet encounter with the rhythm and blues singer Dixie—or Dinitia, as she’d let me call her—that ended when she met a record producer who promised her the moon as well as a full album, which I understood she was recording. I hoped it would be a success. Since then, I had been enjoying a kind of lazy life, getting used to the idea that, having bitten me once, the relationship bug had passed me by.

That is, until she walked in. It’s the oldest line in the book, a Hollywood cliché hardly worth repeating, but it happened.

I heard a rustling at the door and I imagined Crystal looking up from her own work, annoyed that we had a customer.

Please, I must see Mister Harry, the voice in the outer office said in a kind of desperate pleading. She pronounced it Meester, in a bewitching way.

Come with me, Crystal replied, barely able to keep the bored tone out of her voice.

She threw open the door and a woman in her mid-thirties glided into the room.

My visitor was wearing a beige dress that was trying its best to conceal the perfectly formed curves of her figure and losing the fight. Her hair was a shiny, silvery black and fell loosely on her shoulders. The only way you could tell she was in her mid-thirties was the slightly stooped over, dejected way she entered the room. Her face, even with what looked like tears just recently brushed off it, still had the fresh and angelic look of a teenager.

Sit down, miss, I said, motioning to the chair in front of me. What can I do you for?

I watched her trying to process the expression. As it hit her that there might be something underneath it on my part, her face lit up for a moment. She smiled a playful smile that turned into a wide grin, followed by her crossing perfectly silky-smooth legs and pointing one of them at me in a way I found both alluring and dangerous. The wind that had been blowing hot and cold that morning was suddenly only blowing hot.

That mood passed quickly when she slumped backward in the chair and stared me straight in the eyes, trying to access what or who I was and whether she could trust me.

I’m Esperanza Picoté. My daughter has been keednapped, she said, and I want you to bring her home.

I straightened up in my easy chair, thoroughly engaged.

I’m very sorry, Mrs. Picoté. Have any idea where I can find her?

She straightened up at the word Mrs., and a smile slowly, almost imperceptibly and only for a moment crossed her face.

I not a messus for a long time, she said. That man is gone. As far as I’m concerned, dead and buried in Mexico. She threw her shoulders back and pointed two firm breasts straight at me in a show of defiance. I’m a free woman.

But then the heaviness returned. As to where you can find her, she’s at the Hollenbeck station where her keednappers are holding her.

Oh, that kind of kidnapping. This was suddenly a lot more complicated—and dangerous. Tensions were high between my old outfit, the LAPD, and the Mexican community. I was cautious about stepping into the middle of that conflict.

Why don’t you tell me what happened.

My daughter does not do drugs, she began. She reached in her pocket and produced a photo that she put on the desk in front of me.

This is Teresa, she said proudly. The face on the photo was eerily like that of her mother, minus a wrinkle or two, but the dress was different—short skirt, sweater and hair piled on top of her head in the Pachuca style.

She’s in a gang? I said.

Esperanza almost leaped out of her chair, livid at my accusation. She held her temper and sat down, but I liked seeing this fiery side of her.

Hardly. She’s just a neighborhood kid. Some of the girls like to dress that way, just to look wild, but not usually Tere. Her friend Maria made her take this photo. She doesn’t want to be in a gang, she wants to be a movie star. She’s only seventeen, but she has a look that people in the neighborhood notice. I was going to let her go to have some publicity pictures taken next week. They were going to shoot her.

She had a delightful way of mixing up the language, but I had to get back to work.

So why is she not going to get shot?

She knew I was teasing her and responded with a smile. Eenglishe, gringo, is not my mother’s tongue, but I do all right.

Yes, you do, I affirmed. Now go on.

"A bunch of kids went to the park on Friday night. They jump the fence and like to blow off steam. The chotas raided the party and the other kids got away, but they grabbed Teresa."

This shouldn’t be too hard to clear up, I said. Has she been in trouble before?

"No, never. When we lived just south of downtown on Figueroa, it was a rough neighborhood. She was out with the other kids after school, but nothing ever happened.

"Anyway, I went to see her, but they wouldn’t let me near her. Told me she was going to be ‘arraigned’ at the end of the week.

What’s the charge?

That was difficult to find out, but I smiled at one of the Mexican cops and he pulled me aside. He said she would be charged with possession and possibly sale of a dangerous narcotic.

Did he say what the narcotic was?

He said they found a syringe next to her and she looked to be in a daze, so much so that all the other kids got away and she was the only one left.

Do you know who the arresting officer was?

He was a sergeant. I think they said his name was Heegguns.

Higgins?

That could be it.

I backed up and slouched a little in my chair. That’s bad news. He has a ferocious reputation, and when he makes an arrest, he often makes it stick.

What I didn’t say was that we had a history. Heegguns was as responsible as anybody for my being stuck in a tiny office in downtown LA, running two-bit detective errands, rather than living the life of Riley in the suburbs and being honored by the force.

I’m not sure I can help you, I said, sorry to see both the case and what might have been a budding relationship end.

She came at me with the force of someone who had been wronged a lot in her life, but always got back up on her feet and battled for what was right.

"I saw your ad in La Opinión and in it you said you were an experienced chota, that you had been on the force. I don’t know anyone better who could help me than someone who understands the police and how they work from the inside."

Since my last client had been a Negro and that had worked out well, I had started advertising in both La Opinión, the Spanish press, and The California Eagle, which had a mainly Negro readership.

Not only is my daughter not guilty, she, despite her beautiful face and appearance, has been frail and often sickly since she was a child. Always under the care of a doctor. She has also always been a good girl who, like me, only wants a chance in an Anglo world. You can’t let them lock her away and kill her dreams. Please help me.

I was halfway there when she reached across the desk, grabbed my hand, and held it tight.

I threw caution, my budding second career, and maybe my life to the wind. Okay, I said. I’ll see what I can do.

What the hell, you’re only young once, though I was far from that. Plus, she did have eyes that were probably just brown but on her, accompanying that magically dark flowing hair, looked as black and as alluring and menacing as the pit I was about to be sucked into.

2

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On top of this being a dangerous encounter with the LAPD, Esperanza did not have much money to pay me. But that was all right. It didn’t happen often, but if I could prove wrongful arrest, I could take it to my personal shyster, the right honorable Ernie Schwartz, and we could start a civil suit that might pay off.

It was a good time to sue the LAPD. A few months earlier, the chief had lost his job for covering up his sergeant’s involvement with one of the city’s most notorious madams. The current head of the department was an ex-Marine who was supposed to instill honesty and discipline into his new civilian corps and supposedly would look askance at any trace of corruption.

Before I went to the Hollenbeck station, I first walked to Little Tokyo and the office of my former commanding officer in homicide. His name was Nader. He was so brusque and bothered that most people didn’t even know he had a first name. I did. It was Luis. I guess that made us best buddies.

When I walked into his office, he greeted me with the cheery hello I had come to expect from him.

What do you want? he said, looking up from a monstrous pile of papers that started on his desk, continued on the shelf behind him, and spread out further to the top of a filing cabinet beyond the shelf. He was chomping on a cigar. His burly tentacles seemed to be everywhere at once, like an octopus, grabbing one paper and then another.

I’m very glad to see you also, I countered. We just don’t get to spend much real time together.

Out, he replied. Before I have you thrown out.

Need to ask you a question about corruption on the force, and then I’m gone.

He looked up from the pile that trapped him. I had gotten his attention.

What do you know about what goes on at the Hollenbeck station? Are they honest cops?

Okay, Palmer, you did good work for me and have even given me some tips, so I’ll answer—but strictly off the record.

I was all ears.

I don’t want to guess what goes on in East LA, it’s a rough territory. But I will tell you that in general the department is cleaning up its act and weeding out the bad seeds. Horrall, the Marine, is only temporary. At the moment it’s a long shot, but the smart money right now is on the head of IA, Chief Parker, to replace him.

Parker had made a name for himself investigating other officers in Internal Affairs.

He was in Europe, you know, helping to roust out the fascists in the police departments in Germany and Italy. They say he’s incorruptible, even if some of those around him are not. Word’s getting around and everyone is on their best behavior. That’s all I know.

I started to thank him, but the audience was over. He returned to his papers, and I realized that the next time he looked up I had better be gone.

As I drove across the 6th Street Viaduct, over the Los Angeles River into Boyle Heights and across the flats toward the station, my mind was racing, mainly backwards.

scene break

I was new on the force in the late 1930s. It was my first job, walking a beat, when the LAPD still walked a beat. I had been assigned to what the force considered one of the city’s major crime areas, Figueroa around Olympic and 3rd, parallel to Flower Street. It was a mostly Mexican neighborhood that to me, as I got to know people up and down the street, seemed to be made up mostly of hard-working, low-wage earners trying to stay out of trouble.

My sergeant didn’t feel the same way. He seldom walked the street, mostly just appearing out of nowhere in his patrol car, keeping an eye on the neighborhood and maybe on me.

His name was Higgins. They called him Bulldog for reasons that were obvious. He was relentless when pursuing what he called criminals, and he had made a number of key arrests involving neighborhood thefts as well as breaking up domestic disputes. He was tall, just over six feet, towering above the Mexicans he was policing and throwing the fear of God into them. He wore a mustache he thought was dapper and had huge arms that helped him corral anyone he thought was breaking the law. The mustache was black despite his brown hair, which he wore in the clipped style of the army. He was said to be of old English stock and had a first name he apparently would never tell anyone, which made me determined to find out what it was.

His partner and co-sergeant was named Case, shorter, stockier and a ball of energy so loyal to Higgins that he never seemed to question anything Higgins did. They called him Snide, and that about fit his cynical personality.

They didn’t often travel together, so I was surprised when their patrol car pulled up alongside me. Case was driving. He parked and they both jumped out and steered me down an alley.

We hear good things about you, Palmer, Higgins began, thrusting his arm above my shoulder in a fairly menacing way while pretending to be nonchalant. Case stood behind him, his arms folded in a pose that managed to be both relaxed and threatening at the same time.

Yeah, Hairy Palms, you’re a star, Case said.

They knew I lived alone. The joke on the force, probably started by Case, was that since I had no girl, my relationship was mostly with myself and that was why my palms were hairy. Very funny.

Now, now, lay off Palms, Higgins said. He was going to be good cop today. We want to ask you something. We know there’s a lot of corruption on the force, and we want to know: if you saw something less than legal going on with your fellow officers, what you would do about it?

I wouldn’t turn them in, I said. "But I wouldn’t join in,