Zoot-Suit Murders Read Online Free

behind the gasoline pumps. She’s always in the Barrio hanging around the Zoots, trying to get them to come to her Mankind Incorporated meetings.”
    “Did the Zoots attempt to run away from the scene of the crime?”
    “Most of them were as confused as the rest of us, running in circles. I remember seeing the leaders of the Mateo Bombers, Marco Delgado and his cousin Gus Melendez Delgado, trying to get away up Flores Street.”
    “And did these two Delgados escape?”
    “No one got out of there. Within an instant, police cars had both ends of Flores blocked. There was a carload of Shotgun Squad cops. They got everything under control in minutes, holding shotguns on everybody until the homicide detectives arrived. Then I found out, when one of the detectives flipped open the coats of the two dead men. I saw the gold badges.”
    “What did you find out?”
    “The two dead men were FBI agents.”
    Senator Kinney tipped his chair forward and nervously clicked his ballpoint pen closed. “Thank you, Mr. Younger, you’ve been a most cooperative witness.”
    “One more moment of the witness’s time, Senator, if you don’t mind?” Burns stopped writing in his notebook and brought his eyes up to Kinney, the irritation in his voice unmistakable. “The purpose of this hearing is to ascertain facts. I have a final important matter.”
    Kinney leaned back in his chair and looked nervously at Younger. “Your witness, Assemblyman.”
    “Mr. Younger.” Burns continued writing in his notebook. “Do you know who the Sinarquistas are?”
    Younger tried to avoid the nervous gaze of Kinney as he answered. “They are a political organization active in the Barrio.”
    “And what does this word mean, Sinarquistas?”
    “Roughly translated, Assemblyman, it means
those without opposition
.”
    “And what are the Sinarquistas opposed to?”
    Younger turned away from Kinney’s nervous gaze and felt trapped as his eyes met those of La Rue. The blue brilliance of La Rue’s open stare seemed to burn a circle around Younger as he blurted his answer, “I guess the Sinarquistas are opposed to our American way of life.”
    Burns stopped writing, looked directly at Younger, and straightened his bowtie. “Excellent.”

4
    T he sun rising was no bigger than a baby’s fist in the distance across the concrete Los Angeles horizon. From his window Younger saw smokestacks of a sprawling tire plant far to the east, where washed-out gray stuccoed tenements on the flatlands blurred into more factories, one after the other, black columns of smoke pricking the blue-bellied morning from a forest of chimneys. He peeled a stick of Juicy Fruit and chewed it slowly, savoring the taste sweetly like it was the last meal of a condemned man. The palm trees swelling up from small squares cut into the cracked concrete sidewalk below always made him laugh. Tall and skinny, bent and bouncing in the wind, higher than the sun-blasted paint of the three-story walkup apartments lining his street. The brief green skirts of palm fronds at the very tops ofhigh smooth trunks made the skinny trees look like swaying one-legged hula girls. The palms stood out almost self-consciously, as if aware they were destined to line some broad boulevard, not a run-down street crowded by ragged children and people unable to conceal desperation in their faces over where the next meal was coming from. Every day Younger watched the desperation in the faces grow, until he couldn’t look in a mirror without seeing the same expression curl down his lips, couldn’t hide the glint of fear in his eyes—and he was in the Barrio by choice, not a proud man trapped by fate, like an elegant palm tree growing from a cracked sidewalk. The sound of wind playing through Younger’s dusty Venetian blinds was startling, like a monkey rattling his cage for freedom. Younger carefully unfolded the thin envelope of a red-white-and-blue V-mail letter. For the fourth time, he read the lines that hadn’t