L.A. Noir (19 page)

At this point, her tone switched from sarcasm to anger. She castigated Parker for cutting off access to the family bank account—without notice—while he was continuing to whisper sweet nothings in his letters. She informed him that the week’s vacation she’d taken off from work had been for purposes of locating a new residence after a dispute with her unreasonable landlord, not, as Parker presumably implied in some missing letter, for some tryst. She also made passing references to her loneliness—a tacit justification for her “friendship” with the mysterious “H.J.”

“So now I come to the end of a story about ‘a good soldier,’” she concluded, “and the end of sixteen years … sixteen long years when I had hoped you had built some faith in me as your wife plus being a pal thru those horrible ‘political battles’ and those many happy occasions when we hunted and fished together, not alone at Topaz but up north and also in the Black Hills.” Her final line was pointed: “True, everything has an ending.”

That Helen’s initial response had been to march down to her local bank
to open her own bank account she did not reveal. (The manager, a friend of Bill’s, refused, prompting Helen to fume, “Were Bill’s friends everywhere?”)

Parker’s retreat was swift, his capitulation total—or nearly so. He was desperate to shore up relations with Helen; he simply couldn’t stand the prospect of another marriage disintegrating. In his subsequent letters to her, Parker was both apologetic and a bit defensive about the “the direct and harsh tactics” he had used in an effort “to learn the truth.” (At one point, he would later even go so far as to suggest that “when you pause in retrospection you will realize the justice involved.”) Now Helen had the upper hand, and she used it. It was she who would decide whether the marriage would endure or end.

On February 24, 1945, she wrote the decisive letter. She had spoken with “a man of religion” who had persuaded her to persevere in the marriage. Bill responded by reiterating his unwavering love for her—and warning that “the element of
INDECISION
must never be allowed to reenter our relationship”:

Helen accepted these conditions. Never again would she risk breaking with Bill. Henceforth, his life—and his career—would be her central concern.

      ALTHOUGH PARKER HAD NOT SUCCEEDED in winning early discharge, his complaints did result in a promising new assignment—as executive officer for the G-5 section, HQ Seine Division. There he participated in the liberation of Paris (accompanying one of the first food convoys into the city). He also achieved the long-sought goal of being promoted to the rank of captain. In the spring of 1945, Parker was assigned to the U.S. Group Control Council for Germany where he renewed his acquaintance with one of the most influential figures in American policing, Col. O. W. Wilson. A star student of the pioneering police chief and criminologist August Vollmer at Berkeley in the 1920s,
Wilson had gone on to be a trailblazing police chief in Wichita, Kansas. Among his innovations was the use of marked patrol cars for routine patrol duties. (Previously, departments including the LAPD had relied on officers walking the beat.) In time, the two men would radically reshape American policing, Parker by his work in Los Angeles and Wilson through his writings and, later, by his work as superintendent of the Chicago Police Department in the 1960s.

Parker’s first assignment in liberated Germany was to reorganize the Munich police force—in two months. At first, it seemed a daunting task. Organizationally, the German bureaucracy was unfamiliar. Moreover, the city was swarming with suspicious characters with opaque agendas who were trying to ingratiate themselves with the city’s new occupying power. A conspiratorial milieu, tangled alliances, pervasive corruption, and extensive vice—it was all very Los Angeles.

“All my life I have been accused of being too suspicious of my fellow man,” he confessed to Helen in one letter from Frankfurt. But in his efforts to reorganize the Munich and Frankfurt police departments, Parker found his skeptical approach to human nature fully borne out. “If I were permitted to relate the details of the situation that faces me,” Parker boasted in another letter, “it would rival the wildest fiction.”

Parker was clearly relieved to move away from the topic of his marriage to safer subjects, such as his grievances against his superiors at the LAPD. He was particularly concerned that Chief Horrall and his allies would attempt to thwart his return to the department.

“The present system of oral grading permits the superior officers to grade the candidates, as you know,” he wrote in another letter to his spouse. “My position would not be too good if I had to be graded by the men who were appointed to their positions from behind me on the list. Furthermore I don’t believe the Chief feels kindly toward me…. My present attitude is ‘to hell with them.’ I do not desire to be submitted to the ignominy of being passed up again.”

In fact, the LAPD seems to have been eager to get Parker back. That summer, Chief Horrall contacted the Army to request that Parker be discharged from the service so that he could return to duty with the LAPD. Horrall also wrote Parker directly, claiming “the Department never did recover from the losses sustained when you left” and stating “the sooner you get back, the better and more secure everyone will feel.” This was enough to prompt Parker to renew his efforts to win his release from the Army. Though reluctant to lose such an efficient officer (and worried that Parker’s superiors in the Los Angeles Police Department were less enthusiastic than
they let on), Colonel Wilson reluctantly agreed, and in September 1945, Parker was discharged from the Public Safety Division. The following month he came home to California.

He returned to a city transformed. The bucolic Los Angeles of blue skies, sunshine, and orange groves had disappeared (or at least withdrawn to wealthy Westside enclaves like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood). In its place was a new Manchester, a dark, industrial city.

Los Angeles’s transformation had occurred suddenly—so suddenly that it could almost be traced to a single day: July 26, 1943. The next morning, the
Los Angeles Times
published a bewildered article on the transformation:

The culprit was smog. By late 1943, it had settled permanently over downtown Los Angeles. The noir atmosphere that the director Billy Wilder captured so brilliantly with
Double Indemnity
in 1944 was not just a symbolically fraught artifact of black-and-white film technology, it was real. Not until 1946 would denizens of downtown Los Angeles see sunshine and blue skies again. Los Angeles had become a noir city.

The Los Angeles power structure had changed as well. In the 1920s, Harry Chandler and his fellow growth barons had dreamed of transforming Los Angeles into an industrial powerhouse along the lines of Chicago. It was clear now that they had achieved their goal. By 1945, Southern California was responsible for 15 percent of the country’s total industrial output. But in transforming Los Angeles into an industrial center, the business barons also brought about a change they had long feared. Aircraft companies Douglas, Northrop, and Grumman and outside companies RCA Victor, Firestone Tire, Dow Chemical, and Ford Motor Company simply
didn’t share the native Los Angeles business establishment’s antiunion fervor. Widespread unionization, long resisted, was now a fact. The LAPD’s “red squad” became a thing of the past, and with it, the business establishment’s need to dominate the LAPD.

The Los Angeles business community had experienced another dramatic change as well. In 1944, Harry Chandler died. Leadership of the
Los Angeles Times
passed to his son Norman (who had become publisher in 1941). Norman was a far more genial figure than his father. However, his father’s trusted associates continued to run the newspaper. Political editor Kyle Palmer was a major force in Sacramento and nationally. In Los Angeles proper, the gnomic Carlton Williams regularly attended city council meetings, routinely flashing a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to conservative members to tell them how they should vote. Under their guidance, the
Los Angeles Times
would continue to wield great power, as Fletcher Bowron would soon learn to his great sorrow.

The war had changed William Parker, too. Parker had left Los Angeles as a disgruntled midranking police officer with a stalled career. Despite his obvious talents, his prickly personality (and his association with former chief Davis) impeded his efforts to advance. He returned to Los Angeles as a decorated war hero, the highest-ranked LAPD officer to have served in the military. In a city to which veterans were relocating by the thousands every month, that put Parker in a politically powerful position. The city council took note, going so far as to pass a resolution thanking Parker for his wartime service and welcoming him back to the city. Even Chief Horrall penned a note of gratitude. Parker was determined to use that power. His first goal was to become a deputy chief.

Almost immediately, Parker ran into an obstacle—a departmental policy that required two years of service before returning officers were eligible to take promotional exams. As written, it would have prevented him from taking civil service examinations until 1947. Appeals to Chief Horrall to change the policy fell on deaf ears. So Parker went public.

One of Parker’s power bases in the department was American Legion Post 381, which served LAPD veterans. At a post meeting in February 1946, Parker laid into the department for having a policy “that is out of line with the whole nation.” The following day the
Los Angeles Times
played his comments on page two, in a sympathetic article titled “Policy on Police Veterans Flayed.” The city attorney weighed in by issuing an opinion that the department’s policy on promotions violated the state constitution, clearing the way for veterans to participate in the next round of civil service examinations. For the first time, Parker prevailed over the brass on a major policy dispute.

Parker also tended to other power bases, one of the most important of which was the Fire and Police Protective League. When Parker returned to the force, his former subordinate, the gregarious Harold Sullivan, was serving as the captain’s representative to the Fire and Police Protective League. Parker wanted that position and made it clear that he expected Sullivan to step aside. Sullivan did. In early 1949, Parker became the head of the league’s executive committee.

Popularity and a measure of power seemed to have boosted Parker’s confidence—if not his cockiness. Soon after taking over, Parker took Sullivan and John Dick, a fire department captain, along on a lobbying trip to Sacramento. When the state legislature adjourned for the weekend without taking action on the item they had come to lobby legislators about, Parker proposed that they stay on. The men readily agreed, and the group set off for the Fairmont Hotel. There Parker demanded—and received—a suite. The men then went down to the bar, where Parker boldly struck up a conversation with “two very attractive young ladies” and a fellow who seemed to be their chaperone. The bar closed down at midnight, but Parker wasn’t ready to end the evening.

“So what are you doing next?” Parker asked.

The ladies’ group mentioned that they were going to an after-hours joint in another part of town. Parker asked if his group could join them. The women and their male companion readily agreed to this, so off everyone went. At the end of the evening, Parker went home with one of the women, perhaps, said Sullivan dryly, “to give her a lecture on prostitution.”

This was the new Bill Parker, assertive, entitled, and worldly. And still only partially reconciled with his wife, Helen.

      IN THE SPRING of 1947, Parker’s newfound confidence was on display for all to see when he served as the toastmaster for the Protective League’s annual civic dinner. It was the largest dinner in the league’s history. Mayor Bowron was the guest of honor. By all accounts, Parker delivered a sparkling performance. That summer, Parker again garnered headlines when the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star for his service during the war. At the end of the month, when the LAPD released its promotions-eligibility list, Parker topped the list of those eligible for promotion to inspector. He moved up in the legion, becoming, first, vice commander of Post 381 and then commander. Under Parker’s direction, membership exploded, growing to 1,400 in 1947 (the largest annual increase of any post in the state). The next year, it topped the 2,000-person
mark. In recognition, he was made membership chairman of the statewide legion.