A woman walked into the bar. Dwight saw gray streaks and glasses and clenched up. It kept happening. Wisps, blips-and it’s never Her.

Marsh walked toward Scotty’s girlfriend. He touched his chin-the signal/it’s now. Scotty was eye-locked: back and forth, his babe/the buck slave.

Dwight got up and stood closer. Marsh swooped on the girlfriend. There, he’s nuzzling her neck. There, he’s licking her ear. There, he’s tugging her earring with his too-bright teeth.

Scotty ran up behind him and grabbed his hair. Scotty kidney-punched him, two-handed. Marsh doubled over and spun around with an arm bar raised. He caught Scotty moving in. The jolt knocked him into the bar. Scotty grabbed his neck and sucked air in. He kicked out. He missed Marsh. He flailed at the bar top and grabbed a steak knife. Marsh stepped directly in front of him. Marsh smashed his nose with one flat palm and sent blood pluming. Dwight heard bones break. Scotty dropped the knife, wiped his eyes and came at Marsh biting. A dozen white cops got to him first.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 10/16/68. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Los Angeles,

October 16, 1968

I’ve tasted Scotty Bennett’s blood now. It was a much-belated revenge for the whipping Scotty put on me in April of 1966, a year before I joined the LAPD. I provoked that beating by passing several ink-stained bills from the robbery, and I provoked this beating of Scotty and my subsequent beating by his LAPD comrades under the flag of Special Agent Dwight C. Holly. On both occasions I assumed the dual roles of victim and provocateur. Two events, with two and a half years between them. The defining event of the robbery-murders, now four years and eight months in the past. Two confrontations fueled by one motive: I want to solve the robbery-murder case anonymously and keep the remaining cache of money and emeralds for myself.

I have never told a soul about my intention and have deliberately delayed the commitment of writing a journal. I was awaiting the fortuitous moment where my quest might appear truly feasible. That moment is now. I could have described my immersions in left-wing organizations for Clyde Duber, where I learned the acting skills, dissembling skills and poise that brought me to this point, but I’m pleased that I did not indulge that level of self-congratulation. I’ve always enjoyed being an underestimated black man, and now I’m a locally famous and somewhat over-praised and over-scrutinized black man. This is the adventure that I want to describe and dissect as I live it; this current confluence of events is surely the one story I have to tell.

I was severely beaten by somewhere between twelve and sixteen of my brother LAPD officers and spent four days at Central Receiving Hospital. My broken nose, facial lacerations and asymmetrically bent ears have enhanced my rather bland good looks and have added to my incipient black-militant cachet. I have Mr. Holly to thank for that. Mr. Holly sensed my gameness and willingness to play, and I will reward him with hard work and a very commanding performance as I pursue my own goals within the context of this operation.

The local newspapers, radio and television picked up the story of the horrible fracas between a black and a white policeman at a “convivial watering hole frequented by LAPD personnel.” Mr. Holly served as the unseen publicity director for this event. The LAPD launched an internal investigation, and-of course-all the eyewitnesses lied, stating that I sexually accosted the barmaid and attacked Sergeant Robert S. Bennett proactively. Scotty got a broken nose and one week’s “compassionate leave”; I was bound over for an interdepartmental trial board-i.e., a kangaroo court. Mr. Holly hired me a jabbery and flamboyant black lawyer reminiscent of Algonquin J. Calhoun of Amos ‘n Andy fame. The lawyer spouted more racially charged malapropisms than the worst mail-order black preacher ever to bang a pulpit for power and profit. I was hosannaed as the “Black Jesus”; Scotty Bennett was excoriated as the “White Judas Iscariot.” I was, of course, summarily fired from the Los Angeles Police Department. Mr. Holly later told me that the lawyer was a defrocked minister with a sinecure as a public defender in Visalia County. Gorgeous black-and-white collusion: white judges and prosecutors hire this man to assure the convictions of black clients they need to get off the streets.

I then became an oracle of racial bias, memorizing the blindingly articulate scripts that Mr. Holly wrote for me, withering critiques of institutional racism and the authoritarian mind-set- full of indignation, social rigor and righteous fury, all penned by a white lawyer cop with roots in the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Holly read me through the scripts, well in advance of my speaking them. I was astonished and almost swoony. Mr. Holly is a big, handsome man and a powerful public speaker. I got the uncanny feeling that he actually believed the words he wrote as he was speaking them.

Mr. Holly is a very difficult man to decipher. He understands racial bias and says “jungle bunny” routinely.

I was invited to a fund-raising party for Senator Hubert H. Humphrey at a big home in Beverly Hills. Mr. Holly told me to go, so I did. I was quite the center of attention, until some movie stars arrived and eclipsed me. Natalie Wood made a fuss over my facial wounds and slipped me her phone number; Harry Belafonte shook my hand; numerous liberals boo-hooed the recent passing of Senator Kennedy and Dr. King. People looked to me for expressions of political outrage. I had none to give them, because I now require Mr. Holly’s script-writing services in order to sound properly enraged. I will soon be a wonderfully apostatized black-militant convert, because a Klansman’s son will fuel my anger with his radical perceptions, leaving me to wonder at their origins and marvel at the man himself all over again.

Mr. Holly gave me $8,000 in cold FBI funds and told me to move farther south into the “Congo.” I should start frequenting the “jig joints” where my “soul brothers” congregate, to see what kind of “shine action” I draw.

Mr. Holly calls me a “shit magnet,” and I think he’s rather suspicious of me. I’d like to indulge “the Bent” right now, but I can’t. Mr. Holly might be having me spot-tailed. I have to keep my personal pleasures on hold until I feel more secure in my role.

I have an entirely new life now. My mother is dead; my father is elderly and living in Chicago. I have no real friends and my relationship with Mr. Holly is mutually usurious. I now have a dauntless and implacable enemy in Scotty Bennett. I’m sure that I know more about Scotty than Scotty knows about me. I have read the sanitized official reports on the eighteen armed robbers Scotty has killed in the line of duty. They were all black men. They were all summarily executed, per the unspoken LAPD mandate that armed robbers must die. The policeman in me condones this sanction; there is a large body of empirical data that states that most armed robbers take innocent lives and must be preemptively interdicted. It is the ghoulishly cherry-picked “male Negro” armed robbers that makes Scotty so unique. Other hard-charging Robbery cops have a middling “equal-opportunity” mйlange of white and Mexican kills. Not our Scotty. Oh no.

Last August 5, two University Division officers shot it out with four Black Panthers. The officers survived, but the Panthers did not. Two days later, Chief Reddin sent Scotty down to the Panther headquarters with pizza, beer and a pound of confiscated marijuana. Scotty was, by all accounts, courtly. The Panthers welcomed him with apprehension and seemed befuddled by his gifts. Scotty advised them not to shoot at Los Angeles policemen again. Should they do so, reprisals would be instantaneous and brutal. For every L.A. cop shot at, wounded or killed, LAPD would kill six Black Panthers.