Around ten-thirty in the morning, Claire called him.

  “Mom says come on out and see her,” she told him. “Today around two would be fine. She lives out in Riverside these days.”

  “Lay the address on me.”

  She did, along with her mother’s phone number. She added, “She does like to reminisce, so best not to be in a hurry.”

  “No sweat.”

  “I’ll tell her you’ll see her today.”

  Driving to Riverside, Ingram reflected on what Claire had said about her mother. She’d used the name Cynthia Hayes but that was a nom de guerre, Claire had emphasized. Her real name was Dorothy Nielson. Several years ago in the late 1950s, the anti-communist purges had come down hard on civil rights fighters like her, a public school teacher. She was hounded out of the L.A. Unified school system. But after changing her hair color and taking a false name, she’d been able to get a few jobs outside of teaching, like working for a freight outfit as a scheduler and as part-time as a bookkeeper at a go-kart track.

  Curiously, when he’d asked Claire about her father, Solomon, she’d been less forthcoming. She did vaguely allow that Solly, as he was called, was around. She didn’t elaborate and he didn’t push it.

  He did ask, though, “What do I call her?”

  “You call her ‘my queen.’”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Dorothy will do. I think she might have gone back to her real name but I’m not certain.”

  “How come?”

  She grinned. “Lefty parents aren’t always that up front with their kids. I do know she has a driver’s license and other identification in the false name.” She’d obtained them through this shady guy she knew who’d been part of Mickey Cohen’s crew.

  Ingram arrived on a residential street lined with fourplexes and tidy California bungalows, like the address he sought. He parked in front. The house’s postage stamp of a lawn was split by a walkway. The grass was yellowing but neatly trimmed. A dark-colored Buick of a few years’ vintage sat in the driveway. Up the walkway he went. His foot was sore and stiff, and he felt self-conscious using the cane, but it was necessary. The door opened before he reached the steps. The woman backlit in the doorway was a dead ringer for her daughter, build-wise. She stepped out onto the porch.

  “Miss Nielson, good to meet you.” They shook hands.

  “I’m sure Anita told you to call me Dorothy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She was darker hued than he had imagined until he realized she had a tan. There were light freckles on her face, and her eyes were a different color than her daughter’s.

  Inside, the home was neat and sparsely furnished. At least in this part of the house there were few framed pictures and the books on the small freestanding bookshelf lacked political titles. He smiled at one of the pictures, Anita and her sister as kids and their mom wearing a big floppy straw hat. Through an archway with pocket doors was the compact dining room that included a built-in sideboard of drawers and glassed-in shelves containing china and wineglasses. On the oval dining room table were laid out a pitcher and two drinking glasses on a place mat. There were two coasters as well.

  Nielson pointed. “That’s fresh lemonade made from the lemons growing in my backyard. Which, like the front, is not too large, just the trees and a few gopher holes. I suppose I should poison the little critters, but they’re just doing what their nature dictates.”

  Ingram smiled.

  She laughed heartily. “Yes, I guess Anita didn’t tell you I’m losing my mind.”

  “No, Dorothy, she skipped over that part.”

  “Have a seat. You want cookies? They’re store bought, though.”

  “Lemonade is fine.” He poured for them both and placed each glass on a coaster emblazoned with the Blatz beer logo. They both sat.

  “Here’s to progress,” she said, raising her glass.

  “To progress.” They clinked and he had a swallow. The stuff was exactly as he liked it, not so much sugar as to negate its natural sourness.

  “Before we dive in, you should know that when Anita and Bea were kids, it was Anita who would talk her sister into questionable activities. Like skipping school to adventure across the city or thumbing a ride when they were teenagers.”

  “She seems pretty levelheaded now.”

  As if she didn’t hear him, she said, “I tell you that so you understand that streak she didn’t inherit so much as develop. Admittedly, though, they were raised somewhat unconventionally.”

  “You trying to scare me off your daughter?”

  “Both my girls are pretty sharp. From what I hear you are too. But being able can trip you up. Figuring you’re smarter than the ones coming at you.”

  “I understand you speak from experience, Dorothy. I’m getting to be quite fond of Anita. I wouldn’t knowingly do anything to cause her harm.”

  “But you do want to find these two gangsters, who also, from what Anita told me, have a connection to Winston Hoyt, a Provider.”

  “A what?”

  “You know him to be a member of the Association of Merchants and Industrialists. Well, within their ranks, there’s an inner circle called the Providers. The AMI extols middle-class ideals. A chicken in every pot, a two-car garage and a barbecue pit in the back by the pool for weekend get-togethers. For white wage earners at least. Essentially mainstream Republicanism.”

  “And what is it the Providers want?”

  She considered her answer. “They take the position—not unlike, say, the White Citizens Council—that progress is fine, as long as it proceeds at the pace they set.”

  “Don’t get too uppity. Don’t be in such a hurry,” Ingram said.

  She nodded. “I imagine Anita has told you some of what our family went through not so many years ago. The worst being betrayals by our comrades.”

  “You mean rats?”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, but a rat is someone who finks, as Lenny Bruce would say, for money or because they’ve been caught. But a sleeper is an agent provocateur, like a G-man who’s been assigned to infiltrate, be your friend, and also nudge you into doing something illegal and dangerous.”

  “Hold on. You trying to tell me my friend was one of these infiltrators for the Providers?”

  She held up her hand. “I’m not saying that. I never met him and what little I know suggests he wasn’t. I am saying these two thugs might have been sent by whomever on an errand that is not what it seems to be. They could be more than what they seem to be.”

  Ingram flashed on Wicks and his Browning automatic, suggesting a background like his and Kinslow’s. “Are the Providers hooked into the government?”

  “I don’t think they have a direct line to Hoover. But I know they played a role in undermining our efforts in L.A. In particular there was a strike at Ferris Aircraft in Santa Monica in ’57. This was a big outfit.”

  “Still is,” he noted.

  “Solly was part of the strike team, the lead thinkers, we liked to call them, who developed strategy and tactics.”

  “Your ex?”

  She nodded.

  “There was a particular member, a man off the shop floor who wormed his way into my ex-husband’s good graces. In the end it turned out he’d been sent into the plant, with the bosses’ knowledge and aid, several months before, when the rumblings had begun about unionization. This man was responsible for not only telling the other side the strike team’s discussions but convincing several to engage in sabotage to get them arrested. The head of Ferris Aircraft is a member of the association, and this was a page out of their handbook.” She stared at nothing for a moment, then returned her attention to her visitor. “Anyway, I know Anita told you I can go on, but this was pertinent to what you’re looking into, I believe. More than anything, the Providers see themselves as Old World patricians who know how best to engineer society. They seek to manipulate and forge the course of history, particularly here in Southern California. They help fund groups like the John Birch Society headquartered in Orange County. Have you heard of them?”

  “I have.”

  “‘If Mommy is a commie, you have to turn her in,’” she said, smiling. “Their perspective is Black people wouldn’t be demanding things like equality and dignity if not for being whipped up by the reds. Three years ago, when the Democrats had their nominating convention here, the Providers made sure the politicians who they’ve contributed to pushed back on the idea of a comprehensive civil rights platform. They play both sides of the aisle.”

  “I covered the NAACP rally at the Shrine then,” Ingram said. “Adam Clayton Powell was the star that day, not King. And when Kennedy showed up to speak, he was booed.”

  She said, “It was felt he wouldn’t be a champion for civil rights like Humphrey.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But enough about recent history, what about the present, right?”

  “Exactly.” Ingram enjoyed more lemonade.

  “The man I was thinking you might talk to is named Hamish Segal.”

  “Related to Bugsy?”

  “No, not at all. Hamish is mostly retired now but I understand he keeps abreast of various goings-on. He and his brother came out of the schmatta trade in New York.”

  “The what?”

  “Garments,” she said. “His brother Hiram got involved in trade unionism while Hamish was more attracted to wearing flashy suits and diamond rings on his pinky.”

  “And this Hamish was helpful to you all at times?”

  “Fighting fire with fire, yes,” she said evenly. “Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’m all for turning the other cheek if you’re knocking me in the head with a two-by-four.”

  “I heard that.”

  She sat back, putting one leg over another, folding her arms. “You’re all right, Harry Ingram.”

  “Not sure how to answer that. Where can I find Hamish?”

  “I think he still has an office of sorts in the back of Chin Low’s in Chinatown.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” she said, straight-faced. “Let me make a couple of calls and see what I can do. Wicks and Morty are their names?”

  “Yep, Wicks is a good-sized fella and his buddy Morty more the weasel type. But he does like his knives.”

  She pointed at his foot. “That limp of yours?”

  Ingram, pouring more lemonade, nodded. He asked her about Howard Stockworth, the other name that had come up in connection to the Association of Merchants and Industrialists. In response she went away and returned with a pamphlet. On the cover was a stark black ink illustration of a paranoid, sweating man and a worried-looking woman. The title of the reading material was How Unions Are Fronts for Soviet Russian Infiltration.

  “He wrote that personally. It was distributed to all the employees of his supermarkets,” she said. “It was the second time an organizing drive had been attempted by the grocery workers of his chain. It failed.”

  He thumbed through the pamphlet and started to hand it back.

  “Hold on to it, read what he has to say. It’ll give you some insight on the Providers.”

  “Thanks.”

  When he returned to his car, the day had heated up and he seriously considered stopping at a watering hole to have a beer. But he kept going and got back to town, sweaty, hungry and thirsty. He parked and stepped into Whitehead’s, his shirt clinging to a large wet spot on his back.

  “Who’s that?” Arthur Yarbrough said as he detected an unfamiliar gait enter through the back way. He was sitting in the office working an abacus. The beads were textured so the visually impaired could work them. In his friend’s case, it was his way of keeping sharp, doing the additions and subtractions in his head.

  “It’s me, Arthur,” Ingram said.

  “What happened? I heard the tap of a cane. You break your toe or something?”

  Ingram told him, taking a seat in the only other chair in the small space. To his left was a small bathroom with a stainless-steel sink.

  “Damn, man, you might should stick to taking photos.”

  “You might be right, brother.”

  “Sounds like you could use a cold one.”

  “You read my mind.” He started to get up.

  “Relax, can’t have you slipping in the store and suing.”

  “That would be going into my own pockets, wouldn’t it?”

  Yarbrough was already up and walking confidently to the cooler case. A shopper asked about the cost of nectarines as the squeak of cart wheels floated to the back. Yarbrough returned shortly with two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He set these on the desk and removed an opener from a drawer. He punched triangular openings in the lids and slid a can across.

  “Here’s how,” Ingram said, making his second toast of the day, clinking his can against Yarbrough’s. “You don’t know how I needed that.” He slumped in the seat. They drank some in silence.

  “Man, I had this crazy dream the other night,” his friend began. “Seoul City Sue was out on the street calling to me through an open window. I go outside to look for her. Soon I’m down to my skivvies but I don’t pay it no mind. I have to find her like she’s a whatddaya call it for sailors?”

  “A siren.”

  Yarbrough snapped his fingers. “Yeah, one of them. I can’t resist her, Harry. I wind up on the train tracks. My foot gets caught in the rails and I hear that big freight bearing down on me. She’s driving the train, leaning out and sayin’, ‘Are you lonely tonight, GI?’”

  It was evident from the expression on Yarbrough’s face that he was seeing all this in his mind.

  “I stopped trying to get free and waited for her to roll right over me. But I wasn’t panicked in the least. Like I was welcoming it.”

  Ingram took this in, then admitted, “Man, I was in the Lucky Clover a few days ago and swore I heard her in there.” Ingram held up a hand defensively, even though his friend couldn’t see the gesture. “I swear I wasn’t tight. But I was so spooked, I was damn near searching under the stools for her.”

  “You think these are signs, like my grandmother would say?”

  “Of what? An invasion by the Red Chinese? They gonna roll down Broadway singing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’?”

  “And we’d be the chorus.”

  Ingram shook his head. “Who knows, maybe it’s all this talk about the big one, the A-bomb wiping us all out. Got them kids ducking and cowering under their desks, like that would protect them from the radiation.”

  “I know war does funny things to people,” Yarbrough said quietly.

  They both got quiet again. There was an intermittent drip from the faucet in the bathroom.

  “We ain’t cracking up, are we? Like that soldier in that Playhouse 90?” Yarbrough had a television set. Ingram and a couple of the other friends would go over to his place and watch boxing matches. They’d take turns describing the action to him, filling the in-betweens of the announcer’s observations.

  Ingram hesitated. Finally, with as much conviction as he could, he said, “I don’t think so, Arthur. Like we were, you know . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to utter the term “shell-shocked.”

  “Look, man, you show up every morning, open up the store and keep the apples red and the grapes green, don’t you?”

  Yarbrough chuckled. “That’s what they tell me. But what about you, Harry? Running after hoods and so on.”

  “It’s about Ben.”

  “Would he do the same if it was reversed? Nosing around like one of them detectives on TV?”

  Ingram drained his beer, wanting another. “It’s me on this side of the grave, man. What else can I do?”

  “Take those pictures of the good reverend when he’s here and parlay them into a gig where they fly you around the country taking snaps of Lena Horne and Satchmo.”

  “My luck they’d strap me to the back of the Greyhound with a box of greasy fried chicken.”

  “Beats getting a knife in your foot.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ingram said, rising with the aid of his cane and tapping it twice on the floor. “I might trade this one in for one with a big ol’ brass ball for a top so I can knock in a fool’s head when need be.”

  “See you, Harry.”

  “We gonna be all right, Arthur. We gotta be.”

  “What choice do we have?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Upstairs Ingram was pleased to find a bottle of beer behind the milk in his refrigerator. He opened it and for a change tuned the dial on his radio to KRLA. On-air was disk jockey Humble Harve. He said as he intro’d a song, “The hits just keep on comin’, folks. Up next is ‘Devil or Angel’ by the Clovers.”

  The song began and try as he might to be in a good mood, he couldn’t shake Yarbrough’s words. “Goddamn Korea,” he muttered, wiping at a tear.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ingram arrived at Chin Low’s on Alpine Street not far from Dodger Stadium, which opened the year before. There had been a fight about its construction as the sports venue displaced housing of mostly working-class Mexican and Mexican Americans in what was called Chavez Ravine. The man Ingram had run into at the party on Sugar Hill, Frank Wilkerson, had been involved on the side of the ones losing their homes. People did not go willingly, and the cops removed the recalcitrant by force after they were formally evicted from their rental properties. The worn wood frame buildings were bulldozed away, the dirt graded and tiered as if no one had ever lived there, tending their little gardens and sending their kids to school, hoping they’d get a better shake.

  Ingram stepped into a cool dark area fronted by a walnut and marble counter. A large brass disk of intricate design hung behind the young woman there.