Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (10 page)

Cohen, who I’d met, had taken over for Ben Siegel in Los Angeles when Ben shifted his base of operations to Vegas. The bagman role Fowley was referring to probably meant Sergeant Brown was the local mob’s payoff conduit to scores of bent cops.

Shifting in my hard chair, I said offhandedly, “So him you could put on the payroll.”

“Yeah, for what good it’ll do us,” Richardson said.

“What do you mean?”

“Hansen’s no fool—if we know Brown is bent, don’t you think the Hat does, too? He’ll likely use Fat Ass as an errand boy and keep him in the dark as to what’s really going on.”

“If we could identify her before they do,” Fowley said, drumming his fingers on the scarred table, “that would put Donahoe in our pocket, and give us leverage on the Hat.”

And, of course, a man who could have identified her sat among them—and I was starting to think that by keeping it to myself, I was just digging myself a deeper hole.

“What are you planning to do, Bill?” one of the reporters asked Fowley, flipping a finger toward the still moisture-shiny blowup of the bisected corpse. “Show this around and see if somebody can identify
that
?”

Fowley had no answer, but his boss did.

Richardson said, “I’m already on top of that. I have a staff artist working with Heller’s photographs to see if he can come up with a sketch.”

“Good,” Fowley said.

Another of the reporters asked, “Which staff artist, boss?”

“Howard Burke.”

The reporter nodded. “Yeah, well, Howie’s a good artist, all right—but do you really expect him to be able to come up with a representation of what she looked like before her face got carved up and beat to shit?”

“Yes, I do—the bone structure, the eyes, even the general shape of the mouth, despite that gash . . . plenty for an artist to go on.” Richardson leaned on the table with his palms and his smile was almost as ghastly as the corpse’s. “And then we could give that sketch to the cops, to show Captain Donahoe and Detective Hansen just how helpful we’re trying to be.”

“Boss, I’m with you on this,” Fowley said, “but they got their own artists, remember. If Howie lucks out and comes up with a good likeness, I say screw giving it to the cops—we run with the pic in this extra edition and encourage phone calls from our loyal readers and see if we can identify her before the cops can. We hand them a
name
, they’ll start cooperating all the way down the line.”

A name. They wanted a name
Elizabeth Short
and the only guy in this town who could give it to them
Elizabeth Short
besides the killer was sitting right beside them. I knew who she was
Elizabeth Short
and the cops didn’t, which gave me a head start if I wanted to try to crack this thing
Elizabeth Short
before they made me as a suspect, which couldn’t happen till they figured out who the hell she was
Elizabeth Short
but first I had to shake loose of these newshounds. . . .

One of whom was saying, “Bill, you can forget that. The Hat’s probably identified the dame by her fingerprints, already—that’s where he made his reputation, in the Records Bureau. They say he could trace fingerprints faster than a team of ten.”

“You’re almost right, Ed,” Richardson said, and he finally sat down. He folded his hands, prayerfully. “I just had a call from Sid Hughes, who tailed the Black Maria over to the morgue.”

So they had the same slang for the black morgue wagon in L.A. as in Chicago. And when they arrested you, they probably threw you in a paddy wagon, here, too. . . .

“Sid’s sticking to the coroner like toilet paper to a shoe,” Richardson said, panning his gaze around on his boys, the slow eye taking its sweet time catching up. “And word is Hansen’s already eliminated this girl from local fingerprint files.”

“That’s impossible!” Fowley said. “They haven’t even had time to autopsy the body!”

“That’s a fact—the coroner took one look at her and said, ‘This can wait till after lunch!’” Richardson was lighting up a new cigarette off the old one. “But they did take time to print the half of her body that had fingers on it . . . and a card’s winging its way to the FBI for identification right now.”

The FBI had 104 million Americans on record in their neatly cataloged, cross-referenced files. Would Elizabeth Short be in there? I wondered.

“You’re assuming the girl was in trouble,” I said quietly.

Richardson’s wall-eyes settled on me, one at a time. “Well, we know she was in trouble at least once, Heller—when some bastard decided to take her on a date that was so lousy, she just went
to pieces. . . . Anyway, she may have worked at a war plant, or some other defense-related—”

“Boss!” Fowley was sitting up, like a kid in bed who woke from a bad dream. “Are you saying they sent the prints
airmail
special delivery, to the FBI—in Washington, D.C.?”

Richardson exhaled smoke, impatiently. “They didn’t send ’em Pony Express.”

Now a slow grin began to form on Fowley’s pleasant bulldog puss. “That’s what you think, boss. You got any idea what’s going on out on the East Coast right now?”

“Is the East Coast my business? I’m city desk.”

“Snowstorms are grounding planes all along the Atlantic seaboard. Washington, D.C.? They’re buried to their ass in two feet of snow.”

Richardson’s eyes were narrowing, even the wall-eyed one.

Fowley was saying gleefully, “They’ll be lucky to get to Chicago. It’ll take days, maybe even a week to get those prints to Washington for identification.”

Dragon smoke poured out of Richardson’s nostrils. “Then why are you grinning like the cat that ate the canary?”

Fowley was damn near bouncing on his chair. “You want to get the cops on our side? Let’s offer them the SoundPhoto machine! We can send the prints over the goddamn wire!”

I felt sick; I thought I might puke . . . maybe I could do it right on that blowup and cover that grotesque picture up. . . .

“Prints over the wire?” Richardson was on his feet again. “Can that be done? Has it
ever
been done?”

Fowley shrugged, grandly. “I don’t think it
has
been done, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be—if it works for a pic of Betty Grable’s gams, or DiMaggio’s ugly mug, why wouldn’t it work for fingerprints?”

Nodding slowly, sucking smoke, Richardson smiled and said, “Why wouldn’t it. . . .”

It wasn’t exactly a question.

“And,” Fowley pointed out, “the SoundPhoto is something we got that the cops don’t.”

“Yeah . . . yeah.” Richardson pointed with his cigarette
between thumb and forefinger. “And I could call Ray Richards at our Washington bureau and have him deliver them to the FBI.”

Fowley was nodding, grinning. “And we share it with the cops on the condition that the other papers don’t get the info until we’ve run our morning edition.”

The wall-eyes bugged again. “Fowley, there’s only one thing wrong with that idea.”

“Yeah? What?”

“
I
didn’t think of it. . . . Back to your desks, check if our boys in Leimert Park have phoned in with anything. We should have Burke’s sketch in a few minutes, and you can start showing it around.”

“Where?” one of the reporters asked.

“She was a good-looking piece, before she got turned into two pieces. Show the sketch at the studios, the casting agencies, up and down Hollywood Boulevard—do I have to do all the goddamn fucking thinking around here? Go, go, go!”

They went, went, went . . . but when I started to rise, Richardson held up a hand in a “stop” motion.

“Nate,” Richardson said, and he came over and looked right at me, hand settling on my shoulder just about the same time his left eye caught up with his right. “Stick around—we’ll talk.”

“We can hash out this p.r. business later,” I said, “when it’s not so frantic around here—”

“Yeah, yeah . . . but just sit back down, give me a few minutes. I gotta call the Hearst Washington bureau, gotta phone the FBI. . . . Want me to get you some coffee?”

“No—no, that’s okay.”

“Sit, sit, sit.”

I sat, sat, sat. Alone in the editorial chamber, I wondered what the hell I was still doing here, right smack in the middle of an investigation into a crime for which I might momentarily become a suspect. My head start had evaporated, or likely soon would, thanks to Fowley’s wirephoto brainstorm and the FBI’s 104 million sets of fingerprints.

All the while, the grisly photo of that poor butchered girl glistened on the table, taunting me . . . and then, as if Elizabeth
Short herself had whispered in my ear, it finally dawned on me that right smack in the middle was still the best place for me. With the jump Richardson had on this case, I could be in a position to know whether Beth’s murder was in any way leading back to me.

And if Fowley’s slant on sending those prints via wirephoto really did i.d. the corpse as Elizabeth Short, the cops would owe them bigtime—meaning most everything the cops had would be shared with Richardson and his boys.

Much as I wanted to flee the
Examiner
, like Stepin Fetchit exiting a haunted house, I knew the best way not to be a suspect in this murder would be to solve the fucking thing—to find the maniac responsible. If I could lend my skills to the investigation, help bring it to a quick resolution, I could clear myself before I needed clearing, before anybody had even tumbled to my connection to the girl.

After all, I had known her in Chicago, hadn’t even seen her in L.A., the only contact being that single phone call.

So what I needed to do now was find some way to stay a part of this . . . to stay on the
Examiner
’s team. . . .

I was pondering that when Richardson came back in, as usual lighting up a new cigarette off an old one. He shut the door, unintentionally slamming it a little, glass rattling—and rattling me.

But then the city editor settled in next to me and again placed a friendly hand on my shoulder.

“We have a singular opportunity, Nate,” Richardson said, and smiled, and looked at me sideways—of course, he always looked at you sideways, even when he was looking at you frontways.

“What would that be . . . Jim?”

“This whole notion of ballyhooin’ your agency in the
Examiner
? It’s blossomed from a nice little mutually beneficial arrangement into a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity.”

“Really.”

“Oh, yeah. I believe this ‘Werewolf’ case is gonna be the biggest thing since the Lindbergh baby. Fifty years from today, they’ll still be talking about the L.A. ‘Werewolf’ slayer.”

“It really ought to be ‘Vampire.’ ”

The wall-eyes flinched. “Huh?”

“She was drained of blood. That’s not a werewolf—it’s a vampire. Also, ‘Werewolf’ slayer sounds to me like somebody’s going around slaying werewolves. . . .”

Richardson patted his chest. “Leave the wordsmithing to us, Heller—your job is investigating.”

Perfect—this was going to be
his
idea. . . .

Playing reluctant, I said, “But this isn’t my case. And you know how the cops frown on private detectives working an active murder.”

“I’m putting every man I can spare on this thing.” He swiveled to look right at me—one eye at a time. His smile was just slightly crazed. “Nate, I’ve just talked to the Chief on the phone . . . and he’s as excited about this story as I am. Sees the full potential.”

By “the Chief,” Richardson meant Old Man Hearst himself.

“We’ll run circles around every other paper in town,” Richardson was saying, “and the cops, too—we’ve got expense accounts that make their allocations look silly.”

“Are you saying you want to hire me, Jim?”

“You’re goddamn right I want to hire you.”

“I’m not a reporter, you know—and you’re damn lucky those pictures turned out halfway decent. . . .”

So to speak.

“Listen, Nate, the difference between a reporter and a private detective is no wider than a gnat’s eyelash. Hell, when I was in between reporting jobs, I worked as a private eye myself.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Some of my best friends are private eyes—Harry Raymond, remember him?”

“Got blown up in a car, helping you try to bring down Mayor Shaw?”

“That’s the one. Hell of a guy.”

This was all so reassuring.

Richardson sucked on his cigarette, then said, “Considering the possible scope of this thing, me sending out crews of reporters and photogs, I’m gonna be shorthanded as hell—stay and help investigate this thing, Nate. You and Fowley’ll be the guys who
were in on it from the start. You stick with Fowley, and keep playing photographer.”

“I told you, I’m no photographer, Jim.”

“Well, pretend you’re peeping through a window—we can always hang drapes on a Speed Graphic, to make you feel at home.” He laughed, raspily, and it turned into a cigarette cough, after which he continued: “We’re gonna solve this damn case, Nate, and hand the murdering son of a bitch to the cops on a platter . . . and when we’re done, we’ll be the only paper that anybody in this town bothers reading, and you’ll be the most famous private eye in America.”

One way or the other.

“Okay, Jim,” I said, never more sorry to get what I wanted. “Get out Mr. Hearst’s checkbook.”

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