Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [7]
Sol Kupferman’s house was two blocks north of Sunset, off of Coldwater. It was some pad: a Moorish estate, immaculate white with twin turrets flying the California Bear flag. The house was set back at least forty yards from the street. A family of stone bears foraged on the broad front lawn, and there were two Cadillacs parked in the circular driveway: a one-year-old Eldorado convertible and a four- or five-year-old Coupe de Ville.
I parked directly across the street and decided to wait only one hour, not wanting to risk a confrontation with the ubiquitous Beverly Hills fuzz. I got out my binoculars and checked the license numbers on the two Cadillacs. The Eldorado bore a personalized plate: SOL K. The Coupe de Ville had one, too: CELLO-1. So, far, my case was working out. I switched on the radio just in time to catch Luncheon At The Music Center on KFAC. Thomas Cassidy was interviewing some French bimbo on the state of current French opera. The guy had lousy manners. You could hear him dropping his fork.
I turned off the radio and reached again for my binoculars. I was training them on Kupferman’s front door when it opened and a man in a business suit came down the steps carrying a briefcase. I had seen him before, I knew that immediately, but it took a few seconds for my formidable memory to supply the time and place: the Club Utopia, late 1968, just before the place burned itself into immortality. The man—who fit Fat Dog’s description of Kupferman perfectly—got into the Eldorado and backed out of the driveway and onto the street, passing me in the opposite direction.
I pulled into his driveway, and backed out to follow him. I caught him at the corner just before he turned right on Coldwater. I let a car get between us as Coldwater turned into Beverly Drive, and we headed south into Beverly Hills. It was a short trip. He turned right on Little Santa Monica and parked on the street half-a-block down. I drove on. He had parked in front of Solly K’s Furriers. From my rearview mirror I could see him enter the building. He had to be Kupferman.
In December of 1968, the Club Utopia, a sleazy neighborhood cocktail lounge located on Normandie near Slauson, was fire-bombed. Six patrons of the bar fried to death. Surviving eyewitnesses described how three men who had been ejected from the bar earlier that evening had returned just before closing and tossed a Molotov cocktail into the crowded one-room lounge, turning it into an inferno. The three men were apprehended by L.A.P.D. detectives a few hours later. They admitted their culpability, but denied it was “their idea.” They claimed the existence of a “fourth man” who met them outside the bar after they were thrown out and who “instigated the whole thing.” No one believed them. The men, who worked as painters and possessed long criminal records, were tried and convicted of murder. They were among the last people to be executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
I remember the case well, although I had nothing to do with it. At the time I was a twenty-two-year-old rookie working Wilshire Patrol. To unwind after work, I would go with patrolmen friends to bars to booze and trade war stories. One night after Thanksgiving ’68 I was riding around with another rookie named Milner. Somehow, we ended up at the soon-to-be-famous Club Utopia. We were sitting at the bar, and the man sitting next to me got up suddenly and spilled whiskey all over my expensive, newly-purchased white cashmere sweater. He was a thin, Semitic-looking man in his fifties, and he apologized effusively, even offering to buy me