Death Wears a Blue Ribbon

January, 1948. Pete Delaney tends bar on Figueroa the same way he always has - honest pours, no questions asked. Then a regular named Harold Voss dies at his desk at City Hall, and Pete opens the envelope Harold left behind the bar two months earlier with instructions not to open it unless he didn't come back.

Inside: eight photographs, a safe deposit key, and a letter implicating some of the most powerful men in Los Angeles in eleven years of stolen public money. Pete didn't ask for any of it. Now people in clean suits are breaking his windows.

He calls Jack Malone.

Death Wears a Blue Ribbon is the third episode of The Midnight Frequency, an original old-time radio drama in the tradition of classic noir. Each case stands alone - no need to start at Episode 1.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Death Wears a Blue Ribbon. An old time radio drama in the style of Philip Marlowe. January in Los Angeles. The holidays were over, and the city had gone back to being what it was underneath the decorations, which was a place where people came to become something and mostly became something else instead. I'd had a quiet two weeks. No cases, no clients, no one coming through my door with a secret and a check. I had reorganized my filing cabinet, which didn't need reorganizing, fixed the stuck drawer, which promptly stuck again, and spent a considerable amount of time perfecting the art of doing nothing in particular. I was getting pretty good at it. Then I got a phone call from a bartender. His name was Pete Delaney. He ran a bar called the Rusty Anchor on Figaroa, which was the kind of place that didn't advertise because its regulars didn't need it to. Clean floor, honest pores, a jukebox that leaned toward Nat King Cole and away from trouble. I'd been in once, a year back, on a case that hadn't come to anything. Pete was the kind of bartender who remembered what you drank and didn't remember anything else, which is the ideal disposition for the profession. He'd asked me to come by, said he couldn't come to me, said he didn't want to leave the bar right now. I understood when I got there.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

Thanks for coming, Mr. Malone. I wasn't sure who else to call. I asked around, and your name came up from a from a woman in Hancock Park who said you'd done right by her family.

SPEAKER_04 1:18

Mrs. Marchetti is generous. What's going on, Pete? You know Harold Voss? Councilman Voss, 2nd District. Been on the city council since 4142, Civic type, Blue Ribbon Club.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

He was a regular here. Every Thursday, six o'clock, two fingers of bourbon, one glass of water, never more. Sat at the end of the bar, talked to nobody, tipped well. Fourteen years. He died three weeks ago. Heart attack, they said. At his desk in City Hall, he was sixty-two. Harold used to sometimes he'd leave things behind the bar, not often. His coat once. A briefcase once, when he'd had a little more than two fingers. He'd always come back for them. About two months before he died, he left an envelope sealed. My name on the front. He said he looked me in the eye and said, Pete, I need this to stay here. If I come back for it myself, good. If I don't come back for it, open it. I asked him if he was all right. He said he didn't know yet.

SPEAKER_04 2:20

Did he come back for it?

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Three weeks ago, I read his obituary in the morning paper. Heart attack at his desk. I opened the envelope.

SPEAKER_04 2:27

What was inside?

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Photographs, eight of them. And a letter. To me personally.

SPEAKER_04 2:33

The photographs were black and white, taken from some distance with a long lens, the kind of photography that required patience and a reason. They showed six men at a table in what looked like a private room. Wood paneling, heavy curtains, silver on the table. I recognized Harold Voss. I recognized City Comptroller Warren Fitch. I recognized a face from the building commission whose name I'd seen on a corruption inquiry that had gone nowhere two years ago. And at the head of the table, with the relaxed authority of a man hosting his own house, I recognized Alderman Gerald Cross. The Blue Ribbon Club, the sixth man I didn't recognize. He was turned slightly away from the camera, but there was a document on the table in front of him. And on the document, just legible in the photograph's grain, was a seal, a federal seal. What does the letter say?

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Pete, if you're reading this, things went the way I was afraid they might. The Blue Ribbon Club has been fixing city contracts for eleven years. What you're holding is the proof. The photographs show a meeting where federal infrastructure money was divided among the members. Warren Fitch processed the payments. Cross runs the operation. I've been part of it for eight years, and I'm ashamed of that, and I don't have the years left to make up for it the right way. The man with his back to the camera is federal. His name is Harlan Briggs. He audits the contracts we steal from. He takes a share for looking the other way. I have a safe deposit box at First Federal on Spring Street. The key is taped inside the back cover of this envelope, and everything else is in the box. I'm leaving it to you, Pete, because you're the only man I've sat with for fourteen years who never once asked me for anything. Take this to someone honest. I'm sorry I couldn't do it myself. Harold.

SPEAKER_04 4:17

And since you opened it?

SPEAKER_02 4:18

The day after I opened it, two men came in at closing. Clean suits, friendly, asked if Harold had left anything behind the bar. I said no. They were polite about it. Left. Yesterday a woman came in. Harold's wife, Dorothy Voss, said Harold had left some personal documents for safekeeping, and she'd like them back for the family. Said it very nicely. She was wearing a black dress that cost more than my car. I said Harold hadn't left anything with me.

SPEAKER_04 4:45

You're a good liar for a bartender.

SPEAKER_02 4:47

I'm not a liar at all, usually. That's what scared me. This morning I found my back window broken. Nothing taken. Just broken. Like a reminder that windows can be broken.

SPEAKER_04 4:59

Where are the photographs now?

SPEAKER_02 5:01

In my safe, in the back room.

SPEAKER_04 5:03

Leave them there tonight. Don't move them. Don't tell anyone I was here. I need to get into that safe deposit box before Cross's people figure out it exists. What are you doing tomorrow morning?

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Opening the bar at ten.

SPEAKER_04 5:17

Open it at ten. Be here. Don't go anywhere between now and then.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Mr. Malone. Harold was a complicated man and I knew it. Whatever he was involved in, I don't want anyone going to jail on his behalf who doesn't deserve it. I just want it to land on the right people.

SPEAKER_04 5:33

That's all anybody ever wants. I sat in my car on Figaroa and thought about Harold Voss sitting at the end of Pete's bar every Thursday for fourteen years. A man doing something he was ashamed of and sitting with someone honest once a week because he needed to remember what that felt like. That was a particular kind of loneliness, and at the end, he'd tried to do the one right thing available to him, and his heart had given out before he could do it himself. I thought about the federal seal in the photograph. If Harlan Briggs was dirty and he knew a safe deposit box existed, he had resources that went considerably beyond Gerald Cross and two men in clean suits. I went to find Santos. Santos listened to the whole thing over bad coffee in his office at seven in the morning, which was when Santos was at his most receptive because he hadn't yet accumulated enough of the day to be tired of it. He sat back and looked at the ceiling for a long moment after I finished.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Cross, Fitch, a federal auditor named Briggs, and a city councilman who kept a dead man's switch behind a bar on Figaroa for two months before his heart gave out. His doctor report a natural death. Same medical examiner who amended the Chinatown finding? Malone. If Briggs is federal and he's dirty, this goes somewhere I don't have jurisdiction. FBI or Treasury, depending on how the money moved.

SPEAKER_04 6:54

I know, but we need what's in that safe deposit box before anybody else gets to it. Whatever Harold Voss left there is what makes the photographs actionable.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

I can get a warrant on the basis of the letter. Give me an hour.

SPEAKER_04 7:05

First Federal on Spring Street had the particular hushed quality of a place where large sums of money conducted themselves quietly. The manager, a man named Hendrix, had brought Santos and me to the deposit vault with the cooperative nervousness of a man who understood that a detective's warrant was not a negotiating position. The box was in Harold Voss's name. Santos had the warrant. Hendrix had the master key. I had the key from the envelope.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Ledger. Eleven years of payments. Names, amounts, dates, account numbers, copies of the federal audit reports. Someone has annotated them. Here and here. Showing the variance between what was reported and what was actually contracted.

SPEAKER_04 7:48

This is the original bid documentation for the Spring Street Overpass. The city paid $400,000 for work that was contracted to a blue ribbon shell company for $240.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

The Harbor Commission expansion. The school district roofing contracts in $44. Malone. This isn't 11 years of city contracts. This is a list of every major public works project in Los Angeles County since 1936. How much? I'd want an accountant to be precise. But looking at the numbers here, more than two million dollars.

SPEAKER_04 8:18

Package it, all of it. Chain of custody from this moment.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Already doing it. The federal component, Briggs. I need to make a specific call. There's a man at the FBI field office I've worked with before, by the name of Hargrove. He's clean. If Briggs has been operating in federal infrastructure oversight, Hargrove will want to know about it this morning.

SPEAKER_04 8:39

Make the call, but Santos.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Pete Delaney needs protection until this is filed.

SPEAKER_04 8:44

His bar too. They know about the envelope. They just don't know what's in it or whether it still exists.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

I'll send a patrol car to Figaroa. Who else knows you came here?

SPEAKER_04 8:54

Nobody. I went to you straight from the bar.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Let's keep it that way for the next few hours.

SPEAKER_04 8:58

We were on the sidewalk outside First Federal when the car pulled up, a black packard, which is the automobile that trouble rides in when it wants to make an impression. Frank Delaney got out first. I didn't know his name yet, but I knew what he was from the way he moved, which was the particular economy of a man who had done this many times and considered it professional work. He was wearing a good coat and an expression of polite purpose.

SPEAKER_03 9:24

Mr. Malone, my name is Frank Delaney. I represent certain interested parties in the matter you've been looking into. I wonder if you might have a few minutes.

SPEAKER_04 9:34

Delaney, you have a brother 10's bar on Figaroa?

SPEAKER_01 9:38

We're not close. Detective Santos, LAPD. Mr. Delaney, I'd like to know who sent you and how you knew we'd be at this bank this morning. I was asked to pass along a message.

SPEAKER_03 9:48

Nothing more. By whom? Mr. Cross has a legitimate interest in documents that may have been removed from a private safe deposit box. He believes those documents were obtained improperly. He would be willing to compensate Mr. Malone generously for the return of any materials that were recovered this morning.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

I have a warrant for those materials, which makes them evident. You want to tell me who sent you, or do you want to tell me that at the station?

SPEAKER_03 10:14

Mr. Malone, think carefully about what you're holding and who it implicates. Some of those people have very long institutional memories.

SPEAKER_04 10:22

So do I. He got back in the packard and pulled away, and Santos watched him go with the flat expression of a man adding a name to a list. He knew we were here. Somebody in the bank made a call.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

I'll get a name on Frank Delaney from the plate. Malone. Get to Pete Delaney.

SPEAKER_04 10:38

Now. I ran the two blocks to where I'd parked my car and drove to Figaroa at a speed the city of Los Angeles would have had opinions about if anyone had been watching. The patrol car Santos had promised wasn't there yet. It was 7.45 in the morning, and Pete opened the rusty anchor at ten, and I had no way of knowing whether he'd stayed at the bar last night or gone home. The light was on in the bar. The bar was empty and quiet in the specific way that bars were quiet in the morning before they became what they were at night, all the furniture and none of the noise, a room waiting to be itself. The lights were up, the jukebox was off. Pete was behind the bar, and he was not alone. Dorothy Voss, Mr. Malone, I expected you sooner. Dorothy Voss was sixty in the way certain women were sixty, expensively maintained, the beauty of her youth surviving as architecture. She was sitting at the bar in a charcoal suit and a set of pearls that had not been bought for sympathy visits, and she was looking at me with the particular expression of a woman who had managed difficult men for forty years and considered this one no different. Pete was behind the bar with the careful movements of a man being very deliberate about everything. You all right?

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Mrs. Voss came by early. We've been talking.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Sit down, Mr. Malone. I've been waiting for this conversation for three weeks, and I'd rather have it now.

SPEAKER_04 11:58

You came to Pete's bar asking about the envelope.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

I came to Pete's bar to warn him. Whatever you believe about me, Mr. Malone, Harold was still my husband. And he was still, underneath everything, a man trying to do a right thing at the end. I was not going to let Gerald Cross decide how that ended.

SPEAKER_04 12:18

You knew about the Blue Ribbon account.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

I knew Harold was involved in something he shouldn't have been since 1939. I did not know the scale of it until the last year of his life when he told me he was trying to find a way out. He had been keeping records for two years. He was going to go to the FBI. Gerald Cross found out. Harold told me two weeks before he died that Cross knew that Frank Delaney had come to the house. Harold went back to City Hall the next morning, and his heart gave out at his desk at two in the afternoon. I think my husband had a moderate heart condition and no history of cardiac events, and I think Frank Delaney sat across from him the night before he died and made the nature of the situation very clear to him. Whether it was a pill in a glass or simply a conversation that finished what a bad heart started, I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is that I did not come to Pete's bar to retrieve Harold's evidence. I came to tell Pete to find someone who could use it and quickly before Cross moved to cover what Harold had documented.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

She told me to call you, Mr. Malone. She's the reason I called.

SPEAKER_04 13:33

Why not go to the police yourself?

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Gerald Cross has been buying goodwill in this city for eleven years with two million dollars of public money. I am a sixty-year-old woman whose husband was a confessed participant in his operation. I needed someone without a stake in the existing arrangement. I chose correctly, I think.

SPEAKER_03 13:54

Mrs. Voss, Mr. Malone, I think we've reached the point where informal arrangements need to be reconsidered.

SPEAKER_04 14:01

Two men behind him, not large men. The wrong kind of situation for large men. These were the careful kind, the kind that moved like they'd done this in rooms like this before. Delaney. You're a little early in the morning to be making decisions you can't take back. The documents from the first federal box, where are they? With Detective Santos. Filed his evidence approximately 45 minutes ago.

SPEAKER_03 14:24

Then you understand that the documents themselves are no longer the primary concern.

SPEAKER_04 14:29

The primary concern is sitting on a bar stool and has been a witness to this conversation. Two witnesses. The thing about a bar at eight in the morning is that it has things behind it that a room usually doesn't. Pete Delaney had spent twenty years running a bar in neighborhoods where it was sometimes necessary to be more than a good poor, and he had the particular calmness of a man who had thought about what he would do if a morning went like this and had the answer already in his hand.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

The gentleman behind Mr. Delaney should know that the shotgun I'm holding is a Remington 87. Oh, and I've been using one since I was seventeen years old in Cicero, Illinois. I'd like them to stay exactly where they are.

SPEAKER_04 15:08

That would be the patrol car Detective Santos promised, which means there are going to be officers walking through Pete's door in about 90 seconds. You want to think about what position you'd like to be in when that happens.

SPEAKER_03 15:18

Malone, Cross doesn't go down quietly.

SPEAKER_04 15:21

Nobody does. Frank Delaney made the calculation that a professional makes when the room has shifted past recovery. He did not run. He stood very still and was cooperative with the officers and said nothing at all, which was what a man said when he was already calculating the distance between his current situation and an arrangement that suited him better. He would talk eventually. Men like Frank Delaney always talked when the people who hired them stopped being able to protect them. Gerald Cross was arrested at City Hall at 9.15 that morning. Warren Fitch was arrested at his home in Bel Air at 9.40. Harlan Briggs, the federal auditor, was arrested by FBI Special Agent Hargrove at the Federal Building at 1010, which was precise and appropriate, and exactly the kind of thing Hargrove's office would do if you gave them clean evidence in three hours. I came back to the rusty anchor that evening, which was the first time I'd been there at the hour it was meant to be visited. The place was half full and easy, the jukebox doing its work, Pete moving behind the bar, with the practiced efficiency of a man back in his natural element. He put a glass in front of me without asking, and poured two fingers of rye without being told, because he was the kind of bartender who remembered what you drank.

SPEAKER_02 16:34

Santos called. The same way as the Chinatown case.

SPEAKER_04 16:42

Same examiner. He's getting good at spotting it.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

Harold sat at this bar every Thursday for 14 years. I knew he was, I knew he wasn't a simple man. I just I liked him anyway. Is that a failing?

SPEAKER_04 16:56

No, it's just accurate. People aren't simple. Liking a complicated person doesn't make you wrong about them.

SPEAKER_02 17:03

He tipped well. I know that's a small thing.

SPEAKER_04 17:06

It's not a small thing. A man who tips well has decided that other people's time is worth something. There's a philosophy in it.

SPEAKER_02 17:13

I'll put that on his headstone. What happens to Mrs. Voss?

SPEAKER_04 17:17

She cooperated. Santos says she'll have to testify. After that, I don't know. She knew what Harold was involved in. She made choices about it, but the choices she made at the end were the right ones, which doesn't cancel the earlier ones and doesn't not count either.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Harold.

SPEAKER_04 17:32

Harold. I drove back to Spring Street in the easy dark of a January evening, the city going about its business the way cities did, which was relentlessly and without reference to whatever had happened in it that day. Somewhere in a house in Bel Air, Dorothy Voss was sitting with the particular quiet of a woman who has done the last right thing available to her and does not yet know what comes after that. Somewhere in a county facility, Gerald Cross was discovering that eleven years of institutional goodwill had a surprisingly short half-life once the documents came out. And on a bar stool at the end of the bar, in the rusty anchor on Figaroa, a glass sat empty where Harold Voss had sat every Thursday for fourteen years, and Pete Delaney left it there until closing, because sometimes that was the only memorial available and it was enough. I parked my car, I went upstairs, I thought about men who carry things a long time and run out of time to set them down. I poured myself a drink. Outside Los Angeles kept going, it always did.