Dwight sleeps even more fitfully now. I can feel him twitching his way through nightmares. When he awakens, he peers at me almost suspiciously. It’s as if he’s wondering what I know about him and what I’ve told other people. We’ve burgled each other’s homes. He’s read my much less candid journal. I’ve seen his check-writing kit, and have mentioned it to him elliptically. My black-bag jobs are a subtext of our relationship, one that Dwight accepts. I’ve often wondered about the specific nature of Dwight’s debt to Mr. Hoover. Last week, I did some checking and came up with an answer of sorts.

I recalled the starting date of Dwight’s check ledger: spring 1957. I knew the check recipient’s names: Mr. and Mrs. George Diskant of Nyaek, New York. I did some newspaper microfilm research then, and learned the story.

It was January ‘57. A man traveling north on the Merritt Parkway hit a center divider. He was drunk. The collision killed Mr. and Mrs. Diskant’s two teenaged daughters. The man was not named, nor was he ever criminally charged.

I can only assume that Mr. Hoover pulled strings. I would also be foolish to assume that Dwight’s horrible bond with that man was shaped by a single incident and no more.

Joan has told me that she knows things about Dwight. She leaves it at that. I wonder if she knows more about him than I do, despite their shorter-term dealings. I may be granting Joan a prescient quality that she does not really possess. Still, I swear that I can smell her on Dwight.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 5/1/69. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Los Angeles,

5/1/69

It’s May Day. I’m standing on the roof of my building, observing traffic jams on the San Diego and Harbor freeways and an anti-war march downtown. The BTA and MMLP are passing out leaflets along the march route. I declined to participate. I expect that there will be skirmishes and that I will be viewed as the cause.

I’m very frightened. It’s an escalating feeling that has me coming out of my skin. It started last month, when Wayne told me to confront Jomo-”I’ll tell the world that you’re a faggot if you don’t.” Oh, yes, the threat worked. I confronted Jomo and Jomo is dead, and I’m a direct link in the cause and effect.

If Wayne knows, who else knows and how did they find out? Does Mr. Holly know? Do Scotty Bennett or the LAPD at large know? Does the FBI know? Do men within the BTA and MMLF know?

How did I reveal myself? Was it the absence of women in my life that led Wayne to an informed supposition? I am not in the least effeminate and have always gone to great lengths to rid myself of the affect that men with the Bent generally possess. Do I swish? Do I assume hands-on-hips poses unconsciously? Do I lisp? Are my shit-kicking/black male mannerisms butch queer in some codified manner? Has some two-second anonymous trick out of my very circumspect past come forth to recognize me as a local celebrity and rat me off for police favors? Do people simply sense auras in the sexually charged/dream-state world I inhabit?

All of this frightens me. The upshot of the Jomo situation is much more perilous.

Scotty Bennett popped Jomo for that liquor-store spree that I suspected him of. Mr. Holly, who appeared oddly shocked by the incident, told me that Scotty beat Jomo half-dead at 77th Street Station and sent him to Morningside Hospital with severe kidney damage. Jomo hung himself in his cell several days later. That latter part of the story made the papers and got brief coverage on TV. Mr. Holly told me the story that never received public exposure: that Jomo confessed to a series of high-stakes residential robberies and the Dr. Fred Hiltz murder of last year.

The crimes netted an estimated $750,000 and were committed with a partner in no way aligned with the BTA or MMLF. The man blew all of the money on cocaine, gambling and prostitutes in Las Vegas. Jomo learned of this, killed the man and body-dumped him in the desert. Mr. Holly interviewed Jomo in the L.A. County Jail the day before he killed himself. Jomo told Mr. Holly that his half of the robbery take was earmarked for a “buy heroin” fund for the MMLF. Vicious and hapless criminal fools: Jomo pulls daring high-line jobs and clouts liquor stores. Jomo trusts his whore-chasing, dope-fiend partner. The MMLF’s dope seed money is squandered. I beat up Jomo, Jomo gets popped tangentially and offs himself. I should be grateful that Scotty busted Jomo-because Jomo would have come after me sooner or later. Jomo’s dead? All the better. Unfortunately, it’s playing out much differently.

The word is out: I gave Jomo up to Scotty.

It isn’t true.

Everyone who counts believes it anyway.

My new BTA brothers are glad. Right on, Brother Marsh: that nigger Jomo was stone-baaaad and stone-anti-BTA. I’m covered with them and uncovered everywhere else.

I told Wayne I didn’t snitch Jomo. He said he believed me, but I’m not sure he does. I told Mr. Holly I didn’t do it. Mr. Holly said he didn’t believe me, but his disbelief was not fully convincing. Scotty knows I’m not the informant, but he came by Tiger Kab yesterday and hugged me in full view of the crew.

Scotty wants people to think it. I’ve lost all sane track of what Wayne and Mr. Holly want people to think.

I’ve been hung out to dry. I don’t know who did it. I don’t think Scotty simply attributed the snitch-out to me as a means to avenge Mr. Holly’s staged beating. Somebody did this to me. I don’t know who, but it has to be politically motivated. Nobody knows I’m a plant, except Wayne, Mr. Holly and a very few people in the FBI and on LAPD.

It could be any black-militant street fool or fool ideologue. It could be some marginalized or factionalized BTA or MMLF fool with a fool’s gut instinct.

I’ve started wearing a bulletproof vest. The MMLF allegedly has a “bounty” out on me. Some MMLF fools saw me on Central Avenue and tossed brim-full malt-liquor cans at me.

I’m frightened. I wear that vest and spend hours standing in front of my bedroom mirror, perfecting mannerisms. Have I betrayed the Bent unconsciously? I am not in the least effeminate. Did someone prescient within my overall dream state simply discern the Bent in me?

I’ve stopped making queries on the armored-car heist. My lust for the money and emeralds has been subsumed by a survivor’s instinct. I’m sitting still for now, but Wayne and Mr. Holly are demanding results. Mr. Holly has been talking up the BTA as a heroin conduit. He wants me to proffer the notion to my BTA brothers, who are too motherfucking dumb to score heroin at a yard sale at a poppy farm in Thailand, which Mr. Holly can’t quite grasp.

I’m scared. I’m sitting still. I’m waiting. I’m wearing that vest. I’m studying dead-straight men and practicing their moves and masculine craft in my mirror.

Per dead-straight, there’s one bright spot in my life right now: my crazy Haitian friend, Leander James Jackson. Leander loves me, but he’s stone straight, so tough luck there. He had that knife fight with Jomo-which Wayne and I provoked-so he loves me for my alleged snitch-out, which resulted in Jomo’s death. I told Leander that I didn’t do it. Leander laughed and said, “Baby boy, I don’t believe you.”

Leander loves 151 rum and reefer and enjoys recounting his days in la belle Haiti. He tortured dissidents for the Tonton Macoute, practiced voodoo and took a sharp left turn. He assisted a group of rebel invaders and fled the island one step ahead of the noose. I wish I could tell him, “Baby boy, I’m frightened, so I’m sitting still these days.”

I have one friend, many nameless enemies and two enemy friends hovering close. Wayne knows that I have the Bent. I don’t want Mr. Holly to know it, or to know that pictures of him and that strange woman Joan haunt my dream state. It would kill me if Mr. Holly knew.