“Not to be selfish, but how does this help me?” Monk asked, a lightness in his voice.

  “Even nonfiction books need a solid ending, comrade Monk. You agree to give me that, supply information for my book, and I’ll see what I can do about getting you plugged back into the Rancho. I’m still in touch with a few of the old-timers there. It’ll be in my interest to see you finish the job.” The older man quaffed a good portion of his glass, winking at Monk over the rim.

  Monk eased the manuscript out of the oversized envelope. “City of Promise: A Slightly Red Memoir of L.A.” was typed on the title page. There were some five hundred pages to the work. “Before I agree, I’d like to take this home and skim through it.” He hefted the pages.

  “I want you to. There may be something there in the past you’ll find of use in this current situation.”

  “Which leads me back to this DeKovan you mentioned. Who was he?”

  “Is—he’s still around. Though I understand he’s taken to more of the hermit lifestyle these days. Harwick Henri DeKovan got his start in garter belts and seamed nylons. Actually, it was a business his father began. There were rumors back then the old man had some doing with black market pharmaceuticals in Italy and France after the Second World War, but such is not the topic at hand.”

  “For another time over small takes of whiskey,” Monk said, warming to the older man’s style.

  Wilkenson touched his forehead with two fingers and extended them in a mock salute. “The younger DeKovan had a feel for things to come. He invested some of the hosiery profits in would-bes that seemed too odd to be understood by the money makers of yesterday.”

  “Like?” Monk asked with interest.

  “Fast-food joints, plastic trash bags, aluminum cans. Stuff that from today’s perspective make sense, but in the early sixties were iffy propositions.”

  “A visionary.”

  “A capitalist visionary,” Wilksenson said, bitterness tainting his voice for the first time. “DeKovan was a wheel in the Merchants and Manufacturers Consortium. It doesn’t exist now, but in those days they had offices in the Richmond Oil Building. Which also ain’t around these days. DeKovan, the mayor, and some others had a significant meeting some months after the riots. It finalized the course of this city.”

  “When was this, Fletcher?” The orange juice in his hand felt heavy.

  “Nineteen sixty-six, the spring after Watts went up on that godawful hot August eleventh in sixty-five. I have a chapter in the book about the meeting. I’ve written it partly through speculation based on what I know about the participants, and partly from an eyewitness account. Kind of a Capote approach à la In Cold Blood.” He smiled like a papa with new twins.

  “And you’ve kept up with DeKovan’s activities.”

  “Research,” he clipped.

  Monk wasn’t going to pursue the matter. He needed Wilkenson to get him back into the Rancho. “I’ll call you in a couple of days after I’ve looked your writings over, and we’ll talk.”

  Wilkenson was sitting rigid in his chair, his hands lying fallow in his lap. The big buildings out there seemed to be leering at him. “That’ll be fine.” Abruptly, he got up and walked Monk to his car. “Seems the Rancho never lets me go. Not a year’s gone by since I was driven out of the Housing Authority that the Taj hasn’t called me back for one reason or another.”

  “An albatross?”

  “A duty.” Wilkenson clapped him on the shoulder and waved him off. Driving away, Monk watched the former bureaucrat trudge up his hillside arboretum with a watering can. A trover in baggy pants.

  That night, Monk decided not to start “City of Promise” from the beginning. Instead he read the chapter Wilkenson had written about the historic meeting that took place after the Watts Riots since, frankly, it sounded so juicy.

  The traffic down below on Sixth Street was audible through an open window at the end of the polished hallway, brilliantly viridian in the failing light. Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty felt his stomach gurgling thick and gooey like air pumped through melted Velveeta. He stepped from the elevator, his two bodyguards before him. Goddamn Cardinal McIntyre always insisting on rare steaks at the Pacific Dining car for their charity prayer lunches. Just like a goddamn Irishman to be contrary, even after he’d suggested to him to vary the menu.

  “You guys stay put,” the short, going-to-stout mayor ordered his men. “And for God’s sake, Markham, don’t you go chasing any big-hipped red-lipped secretaries who come sauntering along.”

  Markham, the tall ex-investigator for the D.A., looked recalcitrant but said nothing.

  “Letting that goddamn Examiner reporter in like you did last time,” Yorty mumbled as he unlatched the rosewood doors to the boardroom on the twelfth floor of the black, art deco Richfield Oil Building with its gold chevron, spiral and frond fretwork. “That’s why I brought a good German boy like Miller along to watch you,” the mayor finished as the door swung shut on his bouncy frame.

  Yorty groaned again as his stomach bubbled with force, and again at the sight of that high-horse-riding and always ahead-of-time Police Chief William Parker. You could tell the cocksucker was tight; he’d noticed the number of double bourbons he’d knocked back at the luncheon. He was also sagging in his skin from the heart surgery he’d had last October.

  “Chief,” Yorty said, almost screwing up the word with a laugh he had to suppress.

  Parker gave the mayor a half-salute. A quick, mocking gesture Yorty assumed was lost on no one else in the room. He eased into a chair on the opposite end, toward the rear of the room, away from Parker. Yorty poured some water from one of the offered decanters and drained the cup greedily.

  Thompson McCain and Elias Toombs entered. Both men were members of the Golden State Realty Association. Each of them was dressed in a crisp double-breasted grey suit. Toombs’s suit was a bluer slate than his chunky associate’s. On Toombs, the cut of the cloth fell away gracefully from his Greek statue shoulders. As they sat down next to each other, Yorty once more had to hide a laugh. In the file that Parker had shown him, there were several mat prints of a swim-suited McCain with his head between the spread legs of the naked and muscular Toombs. The shots were blurry, but the intent was clear.

  “Mr. Mayor,” McCain greeted him, fingering the chain mail loop on one of his gold cuff links.

  “How’s the game?” Yorty asked him, knowing the show-off would only have something good to say about himself.

  “Shot a twelve over par on Monday at Wilshire,” McCain reported in an impersonal teletype voice that masked his vanity.

  “Now that things are starting to calm down,” Yorty replied in his nasal twang, “I’ll see if we can get a foursome going again.”

  “I look forward to it.” He gave his boyfriend a look the mayor of Los Angeles couldn’t interpret. Yorty took in the rest of the room. He nodded to several members of the M & M Consortium seated about the large oval table. All save one of them had been contributors to his last campaign. The holdout, the one who hadn’t shown yet, was that dimestore libertarian, Harwich DeKovan.

  Naturally, the smooth cocksucker had managed to get himself elected president of the M & M in the beginning of the year. Yorty knew from past experience he’d make his appearance after everyone else was in the room. Sure as shit, Yorty was working on his second glass of water when the rear door to the boardroom swung inward and DeKovan glided in like a preening swan.

  He was dressed in one of those Botany 500 sleek-silhouette numbers favored by pretty-boy actors like Tony Curtis, Yorty reflected bitingly. DeKovan augmented his suit with a blue shirt, a gold collar stay, and a black silk tie and matching pocket square. Yorty realized he was staring at DeKovan too much. He knew Parker was watching him, had seen him stop drinking his water to assess the fine dresser. Well, he reasoned, maybe Parker didn’t mind not taking care of himself, but Yorty could remember a time when he used to animate a set of clothes as DeKovan did. Okay, he didn’t have his height, but he𔄀d always fantasized himself in his early days as a compact, George Raft kind of guy.

  “Gentlemen, given the onset of evening, may I offer something stouter than water?” DeKovan held his six-foot-plus frame in the doorway, one hand on each knob. His pale eyes flitted over the gathered, a baron taking stock of the nobles under his sway.

  “You okay, Bill?” Yorty said, digging at Parker. This was May, and the chief was scheduled to return to work in June. But the operation, and the heavy shots he’d grown accustomed to after years in the top spot, had ravaged the once-dynamic man.

  “Fine,” the chief laconically managed. His hand was gripping the crown of his cap, pushing it back and forth on the table in short strokes like someone getting his arm ready for a shuffleboard match.

  “Have a seat, H.H.,” McCain intoned flatly. “Let’s save the drinks for after the meeting, and see if we indeed have something to celebrate.”

  “As you say, Tommy.” DeKovan made sitting down look like a command performance.

  Yorty, smiling, patted the side of his greying, but still wavy hair. McCain couldn’t abide his blue-blood name being butchered.

  “Yeah, I’ve got to be out in Gardena by six,” Parker growled. “I got a speech to do before the Satozo Block Club Association.”

  “Maybe you should take Lindsey with you,” one of the Merchants and Manufacturers reps cracked. Over a cigar he was lighting he added, “Bad as he likes Oriental pussy, you might have to take that little bastard in handcuffs, Bill.” That brought a round of laughter, except from Toombs, who looked uncomfortable.

  DeKovan allowed a proper pause for the guffaws then raised his hand imperiously for attention. “Alright, this is one more in a series of these meetings the committee has had since the unpleasantness in Watts several months ago.” A few more laughs punctuated his statement.

  Before DeKovan could continue, the hallway door opened, and a medium-built, bespectacled man with a jiggling stomach entered, handling a thick file folder. He was wearing a plain suit with a checkered bow tie. “Apologies, apologies,” he rushed out, taking a seat near Yorty. “Mr. Mayor,” the hurried man acknowledged.

  The mayor nodded briefly at the newcomer. He had a suspicion who he was, seems he’d met him somewhere recently.

  “We had just begun,” DeKovan said for the benefit of the late arrival. “In case everyone here doesn’t know him, I’d like to introduce Davis Shaw, producer of the ‘Mannion Forum’ radio program.”

  There were the requisite hellos, and Yorty watched Parker for his reaction. The chief grunted something but otherwise made no other sound, nor did he turn his head in Shaw’s direction. Parker was a frequent guest on the show, a program sponsored by the Birchers. Especially in the weeks after the riot last summer, Parker had stepped up his rhetoric about outside agitators and Mao-spouting intellectuals as the instigators of the burnings.

  “So the Committee of Interests has been meeting and mapping out various strategies in the wake of this”—DeKovan waved vaguely in a southerly direction—“and other matters. Last December, with some discreet input from us, and of course the, how shall I say, camisado participation of the chief—a recovering chief, I emphahsize—the December 1965 McCone Commission report offered a palatable version of the causes of the Watts riot.”

  “Yeah, it blamed the coons for causing the ghetto,” the man puffing out cigar smoke cackled.

  Unfazed, DeKovan went on over soft laughter. “This summer our city will be hosting the fifty-eighth annual governors’ conference. A little more than a year ago, it looked as if Pat Brown was a given for reelection as governor. Now, following the riots—and the handy defeat of Roosevelt’s son by our mayor to retain his post—the continued regime of the liberal Brown seems precarious.”

  “I start with the long view to zero in on the particular. The hot winds of last August have been sniffed by the patricians of the Valley, and they don’t like the way the wind is blowing.”

  “Now we’re getting to it,” Parker groused.

  “Yes we are, Chief,” DeKovan placated. “With our aid, and the aforementioned anxiety from the homeowners and parents who were in World War II or Korea, we can foresee a conservative rise. Indeed, specific to our interests, we can predict an ushering in of a business-friendly climate.”

  “But we have to give them preachers and professional Negro agitators something,” Yorty said irritably. Goddamn DeKovan always had to belabor the obvious. “With them kow-towing, or at least satisfied that changes are happening, they become the political buffer against the rock throwers and mau maus.

  “And don’t you all forget,” he added, pointing east, “down here across the Fourth Street Bridge, them Mexicans are taking note. This instability isn’t confined to just Watts.”

  “The Black Panthers have already opened an office on Central Avenue,” Davis Shaw blurted with impatience like a hyperactive child. “We have unimpeachable documentation that proves they’re receiving $4,000 a month from the Soviet Politburo.” Shaw started to assemble some papers from his file.

  “We’ll get to that in its proper time, Davis,” DeKovan said, eyeing the Bircher hard.

  He heard, but continued to collate his “facts.”

  “Anyway,” DeKovan continued, “as the mayor has reminded us, we’re here today to map out the next steps for the following four months. For as we know, not only is there a continuing yammering from the likes of those living south of the Coliseum, there’s the incessant demand from the members of the Johnson Administration to have some of these New Deal/Great Society policies implemented in Los Angeles.”

  “I don’t give a rusty fuck what bone we throw the wooly-heads or the beaners.” Parker reared back in his chair, his face an unhealthy hue from anger and alcohol and sickness. “I got my ass over here today to tell all of you there’s some heads to be put on the spike in front of City Hall if we ‘re going to make sure things don’t get out of hand again.”

  “But we have to be subtle,” Toombs warned.

  Parker snorted. “Like you, huh?”

  Toombs’s face became wood, his hatred for the man evident. “Everyone here doesn’t think like you, Parker. Some of us actually believe there’s some valid issues raised by responsible negro leaders like Bayard Rustin.”

  “You would use him for an example,” the man with the cigar piped in, snickering.

  DeKovan made a cutting gesture with the flat of his hand in the manner of John Kennedy as he talked. “Nonetheless, Mr. Toombs is on point. We want what’s good for business and the law wants order. Conversely, pragmatic negro leadership knows change will come, but it has to come at a pace to accommodate the will of the majority. They, like us, also realize as business blossoms, so do opportunities for black workers in blue-collar, factory situations and public sector employment. And many of this deliberate leadership agree that progress will only happen by excising this radical element. An element that ultimately holds the negros’ aspirations back while advancing a foreign philosophy antithetical to their culture.”

  “Wilkenson,” Parker barked.

  “Easy, Bill,” Yorty soothed mockingly.

  “Fletcher Wilkenson,” DeKovan echoed. “Somehow, Mr. Wilkenson escaped the spotlight during the realignment of forces that took place here in the late fifties when our friends in the real estate concerns helped get the good mayor elected.” DeKovan made sure the gathered saw his pale orbs float in the direction of Parker, then back to center.

  The LAPD chief, beads of whiskey sweat collecting on his temple, hadn’t missed the slight. “Wilkenson was small potatoes in those days. A greenhorn college boy who was little more than a file clerk.”

  “So was Hiss, before he became head of the Carnegie Foundation,” McCain reminded everyone.

  “Exactly,” DeKovan interjected, forestalling further verbal tangents. “The reality of 1966 finds Fletcher Wilkenson as a regional manager in the Housing Authority. He’s got an office down in the Rancho Tajuata Housing Projects not five miles from this boardroom.”

  “Sumabitch’s been all over the place since the riots,” Cigar Man said derisively. “Cover of Look, interviews with goddamn Walter Cronkite, debating Joe Pine—hell, making Pine seem like a loon on his own radio show. All the time talking about changes he wants to institute in the public housing program in bettering the status of poor people. Onsite job training centers, vouchers to encourage hillbillies down in Maywood and Bell to come live there in interracial harmony. Goddamn,” the man finished, as if the very notion of such a thing was blasphemy.

  “He’s also taken members of gangs and put them to work in various projects.” Shaw leaned forward earnestly. “He’s got coloreds and Mexicans painting and plastering in a couple of those projects like they were meant to be working together. And afterwards, he has them attending classes at these projects supposedly for reading and writing and discussion of community issues.” Shaw spat out the words like a bad taste. “But it’s really indoctrination sessions like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference did down South.”

  Toombs said, “Not all of his ideas come out of Moscow or Peking. Hell, I’ve heard some of you talk about instituting similar efforts after the riots. Harwick here”—he pointed at the sharp-dressed man—“has talked about the need to train workers for the future to stay ahead in the world marketplace.”

  “And I stand by that,” the other man emphasized. “The question is, can we tolerate a crimson pirate like Wilkenson being in the position to raid our ideas, twist them, and get credit for them?”

  The sepulchral smiles on the men’s faces provided the answer.

  “Then what’s the plan?” the Merchants and Manufacturers representative asked, stubbing out his smoked cigar.

  “Graham Greene wrote, ‘Any victim demands allegiance.’ Wilkenson is popular, inside and outside of Los Angeles. His removal must be seen as a desire on his part to go. Our hand in this must, by necessity, be nigh invisible.”

  Shaw erupted excitedly. “Through our media contacts, we can leak his membership in Communist front organizations, the Civil Rights Congress, his board position with the ACLU, and his strident support of school integration.”