Violent Ward

Len Deighton

Violent Ward

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2011

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers in 1993

Copyright © Len Deighton 1993

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2011

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2011

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

VIOLENT WARD. Copyright © Len Deighton 1993. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780006479017

EBook Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780007450879

Version: 2017-08-10

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Cover designer’s note

Introduction

1

‘There’s a woman sitting on my window ledge,’ I said…

2

That was some bash, that party for Petrovitch. The little…

3

I drove back from the Petrovitch bash with a lot…

4

Fancy Goldie remembering our breakfasts in Tommy’s. It’s one of…

5

I’d had it too long to trade it in. Maybe…

6

It wasn’t like staying with friends. There was a sort…

7

Flying back from Colorado was not a pleasure for me,…

8

I went home to Woodland Hills and shuffled through some…

9

Next day was Sunday. From the very back of my…

10

Budd’s party was not the sort of Hollywood celebration that…

11

When my next-door neighbors, the Klopstocks, had people over, they…

12

My secretary, the indomitable Magda Huth, came running out of…

13

A week later a call from Felix Chiaputti brought a…

14

Petrovitch had a place up on Hillcrest, where the folks…

15

The trial of the policemen accused of beating Rodney King…

16

Like most of the city’s inhabitants, I spent many of…

About the Author

Other Books by Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Cover designer’s note

Prompted by seeing the renderings of my two murals for Cunard’s new ship, Queen Elizabeth, Len Deighton suggested that I illustrate some of the covers of this next quartet of re-issues. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to draw once again, as it has been well over thirty years since my days as a regular illustrator for the Sunday Times.

It is amazing to think that it is also nearly twenty years since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, an event which looms large in this book. When first reading Violent Ward, it struck a chord with my wife and me as we had just moved into our new apartment in Hollywood when the riots took place.

On the first night we were awoken by loud shouting: ‘Get out, get out, your building is on fire!’ The warning came from a police officer who was banging his night-stick against our building’s wall. In the alley behind us were a couple of LAPD black-and-white patrol cars, and I could hear an officer speaking on his radio urging the fire department to come as quickly as possible. Meanwhile my wife, wielding a garden hose, attempted to douse the flames that were engulfing our neighbouring garages.

The next night, along with several neighbours armed to the teeth, we formed a vigilante watch on the roof of our remaining garage. Apart from the sounds of a stray cat I am pleased to report that it was an uneventful night.

In the morning I visited Samy’s, the professional camera store across from our home, to purchase a few rolls of film in order to record the damage of the previous day. A couple of hours later, while sitting at my desk, I heard three loud explosions. Looking out of the window, I saw an enormous mushroom-cloud rising up from the camera store, which had been torched. It appears that their large stock of photographic chemicals were responsible for the enormity of the explosions.

The following morning I ventured to the scene of the crime to discover the burnt-out shop front strewn with the remnants of expensive cameras, including a gold Leica that had become molten by the inferno, and a large shattered fish-eye lens. These later became part of an exhibit in the store’s new premises.

The composition on the front cover draws upon all these events, with the addition of a National Guardsman who stands ready, and perhaps too eager, to respond to the civil unrest and general chaos that is unfolding. For the book’s title I chose a bold font within which could burn the flames of civil unrest; the falling ‘D’ an apt symbol of the city’s descent into ‘war’.

The back cover collage includes a book match cover from the Beverly Hills Hotel, a valet parking stub with Murphy’s Cadillac circled, a couple of Hollywood postcards, and a movie clapper board. Sitting behind all these is an edition of the ‘Los Angeles Messenger’, beneath whose fictional masthead shouts a contemporary headline that was all too true. When applying some authentic fire damage, we did not realize how flammable the newsprint would be, and nearly ended up burning our apartment down – it’s a good job Isolde was standing by with a bucket of water! Each item in the montage has been selected to convey a facet of the City of Angels, its glamour and charm that is always just a hair’s breadth away from a seedy underbelly full of corruption and violence.

The book’s spine features an LAPD badge. Observant readers will notice that each of the spines in this latest quartet of reissues features a metallic object; a subtle visual link that draws together four books written and set in very different times and places.

I have taken the photograph for this book’s back cover with my Canon 5D camera, and my illustration was drawn with a HB Staedtler pencil.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

Hollywood 2011

Introduction

Not all of the world’s greatest cities are old. Paris (where I set An Expensive Place to Die) is a great city. Cairo (the setting for City of Gold) is indisputably great but so is Los Angeles. People frown and argue when I say that but I stand by my assessment. And Los Angeles is dynamic; no sooner than you start to think you understand something of it you find it has substantially changed yet again. It is big, a vast sprawling city of low buildings that follow the freeways so that you can drive all the way to Mexico while believing you are still in the city. It is only when you fly over it that you see the uninhabited expanses that lie behind the freeways. The off-ramp signs offer a wonderland of realtor’s poesy: Tarzana, Hidden Hills, Thousand Oaks, Malibu Canyon, Lake Sherwood, Woodland Hills. But you are never far from the wild outback; listen to the raccoons pattering across the roof to invade your attic; hear the noise of a rattlesnake lurking in your woodpile, go into the yard and see a coyote rummaging through your garbage; go for an early morning round of golf and be confronted with an impudent mountain lion in no hurry to depart. This is Los Angeles County.

I had first visited Los Angeles as a very young man but it was meeting Bill Jordan, a detective with the LAPD intelligence division, that enabled me to see the inner life of the city. Bill arranged for me to go out with the police cars on such expeditions as raiding the home of a drug dealer. Bill showed me the downtown streets and alleys he had walked as a young police officer, a Pacific war veteran just out of the US Marine Corps. Eventually Bill became a private detective and he is as near to being Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe as anyone could be. But although also armed with a Law Degree, Bill Jordan is a very far cry from Mickey Murphy. Bill is a sober and reflective man whose honesty, skills and charm combined to make him into a very successful investigator. As I witnessed one night when riding in a police car, he could even make a drunken driver believe that being taken into custody was an act of goodwill. ‘How would you face your family if tonight you killed someone on the road?’

Bill showed me the many faces of Los Angeles, including the comfortable suburbia where a lot of this story is set. I returned many times and I was in Los Angeles during the days of the riots. It was a devastating time when mild-mannered citizens were suddenly brandishing guns. But writers are always apt to be opportunistic and I decided that the acrid smoke, drifting across the city’s stately skyscrapers like a net curtain, should become the climax of this book. The description of the riots is as accurate as I could make it. It was my publisher who provided me with a close view of Los Angeles at the height of the violence. Due at a book fair in Anaheim, I was collected by an out-of-town driver who carelessly took the direct route through the smouldering streets of South Central.

Many of my stories are written in the first person. Eight of nine of the Bernard Samson books are in the first person and this one is too. Deciding to set a story in the first person is a major decision in the planning of a book. Some authors prefer to have their first-person narrative written in what is sometimes called the authorial voice. Somerset Maugham did this and did little to change the idea that his tales are that of an author gathering material and reporting on the follies and misfortunes of his friends and acquaintances. Other writers use the voice and actions of the main character to create a person quite different to themselves. Bernard Samson exaggerates and distorts the world he tells us about. Without deliberate, self-serving lies he is apt to parody his superiors and ridicule his father in law. Well, this is not unknown in our real lives and it provides a chance to see into Bernard’s mind and judge his skills and his courage. Just as we love our friends and relatives as much for their failings as for their virtues, so we love and admire Bernard. The anarchic Mickey Murphy is also depicted by means of the first-person narrative and few men could be quite as different as Mickey is to Bernard. I hope that these characterisations provide something you enjoy for I devote a great deal of thought to creating these first-person people.

I am the luckiest of lucky men and I take pleasure in my work but I am a very slow worker. I envy those writers who find their characters speak to them and are able to dash off books at lightning speeds. I plod; writing books demands more than a year; no vacations, seven days a week and that includes wide-awake nights as I worry about whether to slim down characters, dump chapters or move them all to another town and start again. It is my family who deserve sympathy and have to be thanked for their understanding. Violent Ward was a specially happy book for me. Reading it again to write this introduction reminded me of all the fun I had creating the maverick Irish lawyer who has to be the hero because there is no one else around to play that role. More than one of my friends said that Mickey Murphy was exactly like me; quick to anger; quick to repent and tormented by self-doubt. Perhaps they were right. I admit to finding it relatively easy to create this rebellious Irish sinner; I admired him. Mickey’s abrasive, cynical manner cloaks the fearless morality that arms those with little or nothing to lose.

Most of my stories are love stories. And most of these love stories are set in a commanding environment such as Cairo, Los Angeles or Berlin; or an environment of hazard, such as war or espionage. Or both. And the love is tempered by the asserted masculinity of men who declare their failure to understand women. Mickey Murphy does not resemble Bernard Samson in any way other than a failure to understand the women he loves, but this failure can be a fatal one. The theme of what might have been is a sub-text of fiction and of life. This story was different to all the other books I had written. Mickey was different so when I finished the first draft of Violent Ward I asked Mickey to write to my publisher to explain the change:

Hear me out, buddy. They say if America is a lunatic asylum then California is the Violent Ward. My name is Murphy and I’m a Mick lawyer with an ex-wife who sends her astrologer around demanding money so she can pay off her orthodontist. My kid has hocked his 9mm Browning using false ID. I’m in love with the wife of my wealthiest client and the cops are trying to pin a nasty homicide on me.

But there’s no recession in the crime industry and my business is fine, or it might be if my German secretary could write and speak English, and my clients didn’t get wasted before they paid my bills. The kind of crooks I defend never plead the Fifth because they can’t count that far.

Okay, Okay. So nobody loves a lawyer.

See ya in court.

Len Deighton, 2011

If America is a lunatic asylum

then California is the Violent Ward.

1

‘There’s a woman sitting on my window ledge,’ I said quietly and calmly into the phone.

‘I can’t see you, Mr Murphy!’ said Miss Magda Huth, my secretary. Her German accent was more pronounced when she was agitated, like now, and her voice was strangled whenever she stood on tiptoe to see into my office over the frosted glass partition.

‘There’s a woman sitting on my window ledge. You can’t see me because I’m behind my desk.’

‘You must be on the floor.’

‘Yes, well, I’m trying not to frighten her,’ I said. ‘Will you please just do something about it?’

Miss Huth has no sense of urgency except when she is leaving work. ‘Your coffee is losing its froth out here,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if I brought it in to you—’

Jesus! ‘Are you listening to me?’ I said. ‘She didn’t come by for a cup of coffee and a Danish. She’s going to throw herself into the street. Any minute.’

‘There is no need to become belligerent.’ Magda Huth wasn’t young. She’d been some kind of schoolteacher in Dresden until reunification gave her a chance to leave, and at times she treats me like a backward pupil in a totalitarian kindergarten. That’s the way she was treating me now. ‘I will see if I can reach the Fire Department,’ she said primly.

‘Yes, you do that,’ I said.

Miss Huth had not been with my law partnership very long. Previously, for five years I’d had Denise, a really sensible woman and an efficient secretary. Then she went off on a package-deal skiing weekend in Big Bear – I must have been soft in the head to give her so much time off – and within eight weeks she was married to a Mexican orthodontist she met in a singles bar there. For a long time I kept hoping she’d tire of living in Ensenada and ask for her job back. But then last Christmas I had this long chatty boilerplate letter, plus a blurred snapshot of her and her husband and twin bambinos, and now I was trying to get used to Miss Huth all over again. It wasn’t easy.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Get the Fire Department, and tell them to make it snappy or they’ll be hosing her off the sidewalk.’

‘You should not talk that way,’ Miss Huth said, with a sniff, and cut me off before I could reply. I hung up so gently it didn’t make a sound.

I looked through the kneehole of the desk so that I could see the window. The woman was still there, fidgeting around, trying to look down into the street below her. This would happen today of all days. My new boss, the mighty Zachary Petrovitch – el supremo, ichi-ban, tycoon extraordinaire – was spending a few days at his Los Angeles mansion so he could be guest of honor at the ‘surprise party’ his minions had been planning for weeks. Petrovitch wanted his own little law firm here in the city, and he was bringing to this partnership something it had never had before – money. By putting one of his tame in-house lawyers behind Korea Charlie’s empty desk he’d found a legal way of getting control of a law practice. It had been decreed that I should be at his party tonight, tugging my forelock and bowing low and telling everyone how grateful I was to become a toiler ant in the Petrovitch zoo.

The phone buzzed and I snatched it up. It was Miss Huth again. ‘The people from Graham’s builders’ discount store have come out into the street; they are all staring up here, Mr Murphy.’

‘So?’

‘I thought you would wish to know.’

‘What did the Fire Department say?’

‘They’ve put me on hold,’ she said.

‘On hold?’

‘I’ve got them on the other line. They asked was it a fire, and I said no, it was not a fire.’

‘Well, that’s dandy. I’ll throw a lighted cigar butt into the shredder basket, and then maybe they’ll discuss the possibility of dropping by sometime.’

‘They are on the line now!’ she said urgently and cut me off again. I had to crouch real low to see properly. The woman outside my window was still shifting her ass about. Maybe the rubbernecks in the street thought she was getting ready to throw herself off the ledge, but I had my reasons for guessing that she was getting a cramp in the gluteus maximus and moving around to be more comfortable.

There was a tapping noise – imperious and persistent – on the frosted glass panel. It was Miss Huth, making a menacing shadow against the whitened glass with just her fringed hair and beady eyes peeping over it. She signaled to tell me that I’d put the phone down without putting it properly on the hook. I picked it up and she said, ‘They are coming. The firemen. They are coming – right away.’

‘I should hope so.’ There was the sound of a siren, but it grew fainter and went north up Western Avenue toward Hollywood. ‘Maybe I could use that cup of coffee,’ I told her. ‘If you put it on the mat inside the door, I’ll crawl over and pull it toward me.’

‘I don’t see what good you think you’re doing sitting there on the floor, Mr Murphy.’ She was peering over the frosted glass again; I could hear it in her voice.

‘I’m trying not to alarm her.’

‘The firemen will arrive and the woman will see them, won’t she? Why don’t you get up and go over and talk with her?’

‘And if she jumps, I take the blame? You come in and talk to her. Maybe you’ve got an insight into the motivation of women who jump off ledges.’

She let that one go and busied herself with placing two tall polystyrene cups on the mat, together with a Bear Claw on a paper napkin. I’d ordered one coffee and an almond croissant; the Bear Claws were too big and had brightly colored strawberry jelly inside, and I didn’t like them. The little old Vietnamese guy who had taken over Tony’s Deli employed his relatives, and some of them couldn’t understand a word of English. When Big Tony and his brother ran that place, Tonichinos – large cappuccinos to go – had froth you could cut with a knife. Now it withered and died within five minutes; I guess the Vietnamese didn’t understand the froth machine. Even so, Tony’s Deli still made the best cappuccinos in this part of town. Thank God those guys had passed on the recipe to their successor, because I was hooked on them.

Gently I pulled the mat over and grabbed the coffees. They were still warm; I savored them. Sitting there on the Persian carpet, the final sixteen payments for which had now been underwritten by our new owner, gave me a chance to reflect on the arrangements for the party that night. It had to go well. I needed the money, really needed it.

Before I’d finished the second cup of coffee I heard a siren coming along Olympic. I looked under the desk to see the window. The woman outside must have heard it too, for she was slowly and painfully getting up. First she brought one foot up onto the ledge, then she was kneeling there. Finally, moving like someone terrified of heights, she stood up and leaned back against the window, with both arms pressed flat against the glass. She was wearing an expensive light-weight tweed pants suit and a gold and blue Hermès scarf around her head, the kind of outfit a choosy woman would need to throw herself out of a Los Angeles window in springtime. I watched her cautious movements with great interest. Considering the way she’d been acting out there on the ledge, enjoying all the motions of a would-be suicide, she was certainly taking great pains now to make sure she didn’t lose her balance.

I went across the room. She had her back to me now. I slid the window up and said, ‘For God’s sake come on in.’

She swung her head around and stared at me with hate in her eyes. ‘Did you send for the Fire Department?’ She coughed to clear her throat. Her cheeks had reddened; I could see she was cold. Maybe that was why she’d decided to come in.

‘Why me?’ I said. ‘Any one of those people down there might have sent for them. The whole neighborhood’s been watching you.’ This was one of the few tall buildings in a street of one-story shacks; everyone could see her. ‘Come in!’

‘You’re a shit,’ she said, and moved suddenly, swinging her feet into the room with commendable dexterity. Spotting the polystyrene cups on the mat, she went across to get a hot drink. Finding that both cups were empty, she tossed them across the room with a violence that made me shudder. She didn’t seem to fancy the Bear Claw; I suppose it was the strawberry jelly. She made for the door.

‘The Fire Chief is going to be asking you some questions,’ I called after her.

‘You answer them, you goddamned lawyer,’ she yelled. ‘You’ve always got an answer for everything!’ She slammed out through the door that leads to the back stairs, just as the sirens were dying outside in the street. She knew the way to the back entrance; it was the way she got in.

The next moment the whole room was filled with burly men in shiny oilskin coats, rubber boots, and yellow helmets. They were mad at me. ‘How is it my fault?’ I yelled back at them. ‘You let her get away.’

‘Where’d she come from?’ said a burly fire fighter, picking up the Bear Claw and chewing a piece out of it.

‘How should I know where she came from? Maybe she escaped from the zoo.’

‘You called in and said this was an emergency,’ said a rat-faced little guy who seemed to be the chief. He smelled of metal polish and mint digestive tablets.

‘Is that so? Did I interrupt a poker game or something? What am I supposed to do when someone comes into my office and wants to leap out of the window, get an entertainment license?’

The burly one tossed the remains of the Bear Claw into the wastebasket, where it landed with a loud clang. No wonder they give me indigestion: toss away an almond croissant and it makes only a soft swoosh.

Maybe if I’d been a little more diplomatic, Ratface wouldn’t have turned nasty and sent two of his men to search out violations of the Fire Department Code. ‘You should have been doing that before your own block burned down,’ I said. But these guys were young kids; they hadn’t been with the department long enough to remember that scandal. Finally Ratface came up with a clipboard reading aloud what he said were twenty-two infringements. ‘The fire escape is rusty,’ he said, jabbing at the clipboard with his finger.