Zoot-Suit Murders Read Online Free PDF

in the V of her high-topped dress undone at the neck, her pulse raced wildly, blood pounding like a small fist in the slender cavity beneath her throat.
    “
¿Y Jesu?
”
    Kathleen looked blankly at the old Mexican woman in the front pew, but she did not answer her, the blue of her eyes rolling over pew after pew to the back of the room like sheer blue waves calming after a storm.
    “
¿Y Jesu?
” the old woman demanded.
    Kathleen still did not answer. A man in the pew behind the old woman stood up, rubbing his sweaty palms across the felt crown of the fedora he had absentmindedly crushed between his shaking hands as Kathleen told her awesome story.
    “
Señorita
.” The man spoke quietly, glancing away from Kathleen, intimidated by the intense blue in her eyes. “
Señorita
, what this woman wants to know, she who understands your English but cannot speak it, is what about Jesus Christ?” Theman sat down, then nervously asked the question he had been afraid to direct to Kathleen while still standing. “Is He in your beautiful city?”
    “What about Jesus Christ Our Savior?” Kathleen repeated the question with delight, her chest heaving with anticipation. “On December twenty-fifth, in the year 1885, a tiny group of generous and deeply sincere men and women, only sixty strong, met for the purpose of dedicating their lives and personal fortunes to the establishment of a worldwide commercial organization that would, by its works as well as its words, fittingly commemorate the birth of mankind’s greatly beloved exemplar and Way-Shower,
Jesus Christ Himself
. These sixty men and women were the Sponsors of mankind’s last hope for salvation.”
    The old Mexican woman in the front pew twisted noisily around to ask the man behind her what a Way-Shower was.
    Kathleen waited until the old woman turned with a smile on her lips back to the front of the room, delighted that Jesus was living in the Eternal City of Brotherhood with the rest of history’s sainted Way-Showers.
    “Are you the Voice of the Right Idea?” a man challenged from the center of the room.
    “No.” Kathleen blew her answer out from pursed lips, the word floating fragile as a bubble, hovering over the man’s head before bursting. “Absolutely not. I am not the Voice of the Right Idea. I am simply captain of the Pacific Coast Latin Service Bureau. There is only one true Voice of the Right Idea, although he has many doubles and can travel to a multitude of places at the same time, speaking in a multitude of tongues. He is the guiding spirit. He is many and all things: division superintendent of our worldwide bureaus, prophet-scientist of our International Institute of Universal Salvation and Administration. He is Mr. Department A, originator of the International Vigilantes, interpreter of the original Sponsor’s plan for mankind’s last hope. Above all else, he is founder, father, fountainhead of Mankind Incorporated.”

6
    Y ounger picked his way cautiously through noisy people crowding the one short block of Olivera Street, wedged into the cement high rises of downtown Los Angeles like a phony movie set. Between outdoor Mexican restaurants studded with plastic palm trees loud vendors waved tourists into narrow market stalls jammed with cheap Mexican curios. Hundreds of garish peasant puppets dangled from strings beneath shelves overloaded with giant sombreros and big-horned fuzzy pink bullfight toros. Sailors and soldiers on overnight leaves, weekend furloughs, and one-day passes nuzzled their teenage girlfriends. They strolled awkwardly, sides of their thighs pressed together, arms around each other, the men laughing, flushed faces of the self-conscious girls half hidden behind enormous puffed balls of cotton candy,their tongues darting tentatively at sticky pink clouds of spun sugar. Younger crossed the edge of palm-fringed Olivera Park at the end of the short street, the sharp sound of mariachi guitars pursuing him as he ran across four lanes