The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles by Ken Kuhlken (speld decodable readers TXT) 📖

new City Hall across the street.

The cell, about the size of his cottage living room, provided a cold floor and one bench. Most of the dozen occupants had resided there since various hours of Saturday night. Compared to this place, Tom thought, a team locker room smelled like chrysanthemums. He judged from the pools and splatters on the floor and cinderblock walls that several, at least, had either drunk far too much or drunk the wrong stuff and failed at keeping it down.

They were a glum but inquisitive crowd. When he asked the fellow beside him if he knew Frank Gaines, the eight colored men on the floor or propped against the walls responded with questions, looks of keen interest, or suspicion,

The fellow he asked said, “No sir.” They all claimed, one way or the other, the dead man meant nothing to them. But they knew about the lynching, having read the Forum or otherwise heard.

One man assured Tom the police lynched Frank. “Why else they be covering up?” he demanded. Two of them blamed bootleggers, about whom they admitted insider knowledge, though neither obliged when he asked for a name. The rest agreed it was nobody except the Klan.

“S’pose it been the Klan,” the accuser of the lawmen argued. “A goodly number of those police go home and skin off the blue suit, put on the white one.”

Tom asked every question and tried every angle he could dream up to squeeze his cellmates for clues or insights. Then he heard Leo’s growl from the hallway.

As the jailer who accompanied Leo unlocked the door and held it open, one of the fellows Tom was leaving behind begged the jailer to call his mother. Another gripped his belly and groaned from an ailment he hadn’t suffered a moment before.

Leo and Tom walked out and reached the elevator without a single formality. On the way down, Leo said, “Tia Consuelo’s?”

Outside, the sun appeared to sink into Temple Street. “Wasn’t coming for me risky?” Tom asked.

Leo shrugged, but Tom knew bravado when he saw it. Beyond placing Leo’s career in jeopardy, he might’ve landed the good man in mortal danger. “Florence get home okay?”

“Vi’s keeping company with Florence. You’ve got a live one there, Tom.”

“What’d you do to get Vi back?”

“Made promises.”

When Leo didn’t look his way, Tom knew better than to ask what promises. He said, “I’ll take my sister off your hands.”

“Vi has her at the picture show. The Volga Boatman. Seen it?”

“Movies are for dreamers,” Tom said, as he watched a redhead who waved at a passing taxi. She reminded him of the Hall of Records clerk. He sighed.

As Leo nosed his Packard to the curb in front of Tia Consuelo’s, he said, “I could go for a beer.”

“Don’t tell me,” Tom said. “Tell our congressman.”

“I don’t see any reason to bother with Senator Shortridge. I’ll go straight to the top. Tell Mister Hearst.”

Leo led the way inside and past a life size statue of Pancho Villa to the last vacant booth. “Why Hearst?” Tom asked, then sat and waited for an answer. But if Leo had mentioned Hearst for a reason, he didn’t mean to give any more than a clue.

So Tom devoted some minutes to pondering and found a pinch of solace. Even though he felt no closer to solving the murder, at least he knew three of the collaborators in the cover up, without whose agreement the hush couldn’t succeed. Tomorrow, he vowed, he’d get to Hearst, or Harry Chandler, or Two Gun Davis.

The waitress stood up from deep in a cushioned booth and waddled over, pad and pencil at ready. She nodded and raised her right eyebrow.

“How hot are the tamales?” Leo asked.

She shrugged and raised the left eyebrow.

“Give him tamales,” Tom said. “I just need a taco.”

“On me,” Leo said.

“Make it three tacos.” Tom waited for privacy, then leaned across the table. “Who’s the mug?”

“The fella you knocked around?”

Tom didn’t feel obliged to answer what was clearly no more than a stall.

“Aw, what’s the use, you’ll find out. Name’s Boles. Theodore Boles. Goes by Teddy.”

“Where’s he fit?”

“In the alleged murder?”

“Yeah. That.”

“He doesn’t.”

Tom rapped on the table. “Hey, bailing me out put you in the thick of this mess. Now don’t you go soft.”

Leo scowled. “Easy, boy.”

Tom raised a hand in peace. “Talk behind bars is, a goodly number of the force are KKK.”

“You might ask your smart self should I believe talk behind bars.” Leo turned to look out the window. The sky had gone gray. A pack of wolves stood at the corner preening, twirling their key chains, scouting for prey of the Florence variety.

“Back to this Teddy Boles,” Tom said. “You say he doesn’t figure in the murder. So why’d he bring his pals to the Casa Del Mar?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I damn sure do.”

Leo reached into his breast pocket for a Lucky Strike. He lit up, blew a couple smoke rings. “I don’t know a thing about Teddy Boles. I checked him out. No record. No warrants. Works for the city as an electrician. You want I should say where to go if you won’t take my word?”

“Yeah.”

“To your mother.”

The waitress arrived while Tom sat gaping. After she threw down the plates and retired, Leo said, “He’s Milly’s man.”

Tom’s stomach swelled and churned so he couldn’t even finish one taco. Leo helped him with the other two.

Off Wilshire, while gasoline poured into the Packard, pumped by an attendant dressed like a cross between an admiral and a soda jerk, Tom stared over a vacant lot toward Westlake Park, a place one could most always spot dramatic scenes unfolding. But this evening, so strongly had the Milly connection shaken him, all he noticed was a mob of folks clustered beneath an Iowa banner refusing to let dark close their reunion.

As they pulled out of the station, Leo said, “I could pay Milly a visit.”

“Let me sleep on it.”

Tom meant to talk this business over with Florence before he chose a path. If Milly would send a gang of roughnecks after him, she might send another crew to snatch her daughter. She might do anything.

In Cactus Court, Tom failed to mind his steps and brushed too close to a cholla. A barb nailed him, pinned his trousers to his ankle. With that, he hoped he’d experienced the day’s finale. But a note on flowered paper hung by a tack on his cottage door. In round script much like a sample from evidence leaked by the Grand Jury and copied and printed in the Times, the note read, “Dear Tom Hickey, please come for a brief visit with me at nine a.m., in the parsonage, which you’ll find next door to Angelus Temple. Come to the front. Emma will show you upstairs. With anticipation and respect, Aimee Semple McPherson.”

 

Twenty

EARLY morning sun was a pleasure Tom relished. Given time between rising and work, he brewed coffee and often carried it outside and around the side of his house to a patch of dirt with a eucalyptus stump sawed off at stool level.

He was on his way when he barely missed stepping on a copy of the Forum. He picked it up, continued on to the stump, and read it while drinking his coffee. The issue date was yesterday. Following the headline, BEWARE, the text read:

We darker folk are by nature a gentle people, content to live and let live, as a rule willing to suffer a lifetime of insult and hardship rather than respond to the voice of our baser natures when that voice advocates violence. The grievous history of our people in this land, as well as our patience enduring trials no human should be called to endure, is common knowledge.

Even the dreamers among us, who upon arriving in this young and vital city, allowed ourselves to believe we had crossed the Jordan and reached the promised land, now find ourselves mired in gloom, fear, and confusion. The despair that took root on Monday, October 11, with the murder of an innocent who harbored ill-will toward none, has since been magnified by the continued silence of the Times, the Examiner, the Express and the Herald. Either none of these institutions possess the courage to report the truth, or all have conspired, for reasons beyond our comprehension, to deceive the same public that pays their salaries, enriches their owners, and relies upon their integrity.

How then can this reporter, though he remains dedicated to the ideal of peace and brotherhood, condemn the desire of a certain element of the darker community in their efforts to organize and prepare for battle, as the enemy has organized into a fraternity of demonic principles and blatant symbolism that flaunts those principles?

A free press must accept the duty to warn, and on occasion to prophesy, as well as to report. What follows is this reporter's studied assessment of our moment in history:

Perhaps if Mister Hearst or Chandler will break the silence, publish the truth, and thereby cause justice to be duly administered, by doing so they will prevent the bloodbath that otherwise may occur once a certain element of the darker community concludes that, for the sake of us all and our loved ones, they must drive a certain white element out of the city and back to whatever the place, be it Georgia or hell, whence they came.

A half hour later, Tom slapped the broadside on the desk of Mister Woods. The boss didn’t reach for it, but sat as though immovable except for the hand that opened a side drawer of his desk.

Tom said, “I suppose it’s none of my business, but I’m asking you to tell me anyway. Do you belong to the Ku Klux Klan?”

The boss’ hand remained on the rim of the open drawer where, according to shop rumor, he kept an ancient Colt Peacemaker, a relic of his years as a Texas cowboy. His face and his tone could serve as a poster for a film about gunfighters.

“As you say,” he replied in gunfighter tone, “my associations are none of your damned business.”

Tom leaned both hands on the desk. “Frank Gaines is my business,” he said, his voice easily hard and resolute as Woods’. “Because I appear to be the only real friend he’s got.” He slapped the Forum. “And, as you’ll see when you read, some folks want to use his murder to justify something he would never have condoned.”

“Why are you here?”

“I want you to tell me if the Klan killed Frank. That’s all. If you can give me your word they didn’t, I’ll believe you. But if you won’t give your word, I’ll believe in my heart they killed him. And I’ll act accordingly."

Woods closed the drawer and lay both hands atop the desk. “Tom, I’ll pardon your behavior and consider your request. But hear this. If I learn anything about a lynching, I’ll be the one to decide if and when you should know.”

“Sure,” Tom said. “Just keep in mind, history’s full of tragic characters who waited too long.”

Woods lifted a fountain pen and tapped it on the back of his other hand.

“Meantime,” Tom said, “I’m not working for anybody who won’t deny being an accomplice to murder. You can get one of the butchers to drive my route, and send Bud or somebody for me when you’ve got an answer ready.”

The boss said nothing. His eyes never wandered from staring at Tom’s.

Tom nodded, turned, and walked out to the lobby. Then he noticed Mister Woods behind him, plucking bills out of his wallet. He handed Tom a twenty.

“In case you think you can buy me,” Tom said, “no deal.”

The boss’ face darkened to such deep purple, Tom worried the insult might’ve killed the old fellow.

But his voice came strong and sure. “Call it severance pay.”

Twenty-one

WEDGED between Angelus Temple and the Bible college, the parsonage was a concrete gray two-story of Italian design, with a rounded front and a dozen arches only a few feet apart, each with a glass door and small balcony.

A woman Tom knew from the newspapers stepped out to the balcony directly above the front door. Emma Shaffer, who on May 18 accompanied Sister to Ocean Park, watched her run into the surf, and after an hour reported her disappearance. With mouse-brown hair pinned tight, wearing a formless housedress, she gazed around like a vigilant sentry. As plain and impervious as Sister was comely and magnetic, she looked straight at Tom without giving any sign she saw him. Then she made a