Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (16 page)

“Since when are you against a guy getting a dishonest piece of tail?”

“Hell, Nate, even I got more conscience than this guy. I mean, Savarino’s wife—she’s a doll, and seven, eight months pregnant, to boot—and he’s out chasing quim!”

I shrugged. “He’s a thief by profession.”

Fowley sighed. “The guy does have his balls. Day before yesterday, he tries to trade the cops some info to get his ass out of jail. You shoulda heard the yarn he spun.”

“Do tell.”

“This crazy fucker claims that several weeks ago he was offered twenty-five hundred bucks to bump off Mickey Cohen.”

That snapped me to attention. “What?”

“Yeah, Savarino claims him and his partners turned these guys down . . . I mean, our boy Bobby may be a liar and a thief, but him and his pals ain’t no Murder, Inc.”

“Are you saying this . . . Savarino wants to trade the cops the names of the guys who wanted Cohen rubbed out for—”

“For consideration or leniency or whatever. Although I understand yesterday he changed his tune, clammed up, getting smart after the fact. I mean, in the first place, if somebody wanted Cohen whacked, it’s probably Jack Dragna—and why would a guy like Dragna use smalltime, nonmob guys like Savarino and his boys?”

Because Dragna was supposed to be working on the same team as Cohen, and having outsiders do the hit might protect him from the wrath of the East Coast Combination—Meyer and Bugsy and Lucky and
their
boys.

“And in the second place,” Fowley was saying, sending his smoked-to-the-butt cigarette sparking out the window, “what sort of idiot would try to trade info on Dragna to the L.A. cops? Don’t these clowns know half the badges in this burg are in Dragna’s pocket?”

“Maybe they don’t. Are they local?”

Fowley gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “They’re from back East originally, I guess. But they been out here long enough to get wise, surely.”

“Maybe you’re right—maybe he’s just an idiot.”

“Hey, Savarino’s a cocky, good-lookin’ guy—take a look at him—he’s in the-day-before-yesterday’s paper . . . check the morgue, if you’re interested.”

The morgue Fowley was referring to was not in the basement of the Hall of Justice, rather his own backseat, where he kept a stack of recent
Examiner
s as a sort of traveling reference file for ongoing stories.

Soon I was thumbing through the January 14 edition, where (on page three, lined against a Central Station wall) tall, dark, cleft-chin handsome Bobby Savarino grinned smugly at me, a study in underworld black: black shirt under a black sportjacket, black trousers, black curly hair, black glittering eyes. Next to Savarino was his accomplice, a little guy in a rumpled light-color sportcoat and a dark wrinkled tie loose around an askew collar: Henry Hassau, who looked like an Arab camel trader yanked out of his tent in the middle of the night, his dark eyes startled in a narrow, sharp-cheekboned hook-nosed face set off with just the right trashy touch of wispy mustache and scraggly goatee.

“From the looks of him,” I said, tapping Bobby’s matinee-idol countenance, “Savarino shouldn’t need to play war hero to get laid.”

“Yeah, he’s got the tools, all right, but he’s greedy, a regular ass bandit. Reminds me of a guy I knew in the Coast Guard—son of a bitch was hung like a . . .”

And as chatterbox Fowley changed the subject (if not the subject matter), and Dinah Shore sang “Shoofly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” on the radio, I tuned them both out.

I was busy reading between the lines of an
Examiner
story (
BOOKIE DEATH OFFER BARED
) that indicated self-styled lover-boy war hero Bobby Savarino had been threatening mob boss Jack Dragna on Tuesday . . .

. . . knowing, as I did, that on Wednesday, the very next day, a beautiful woman would be found murdered in a vacant lot, a few blocks from Dragna’s house—wearing the mark of the informer.

9

Pacific Beach—a tiny farming and resort suburb just north of San Diego—was home to the Bayview Terrace Navy housing project, a sea of anonymous tract prefabs assembled during the war for shipyard workers and their families. The best you could say for the premeditated neighborhood was that its lawns were as green as they were flat, and that the little white crackerboxes—like the one at 2750 Camino Pradero, where Mrs. Elvera French resided—appeared sturdier than cardboard.

Fowley rang the bell; as we stood on the small cement stoop, we could hear the barely muffled roar of a vacuum sweeper. A second ring of the bell was only drowned out by the continuing Hoovering, so I stepped forward and rapped on the door several times, hard enough to be heard, I hoped, but not so hard as to knock the place over.

The vacuuming ceased, and the door opened; through the screen we saw a slender honey-blonde woman of perhaps forty-five in a white cotton blouse and blue denim pedal pushers, her medium-length hair ponytailed back. Though she wore no makeup, she was attractive, even though she was frowning at us—blue-eyed, apple-cheeked, brow flecked with sweat.

“Didn’t you gentlemen see the sign?” she asked, pointing to a
handlettered
NO SOLICITORS
card stuck in the wood frame of the screen.

“We’re not selling anything, ma’am,” Fowley said. “We’re from the Los Angeles
Examiner
.”

“Oh!” Now her frown turned thoughtful. “And I don’t suppose this is about a subscription, either . . . It’s about the Short girl?”

“Yes, it is. My name’s Fowley and this is Mr. Heller.”

She sighed sadly, shook her head. “Come in, gentlemen, come in, please.”

She opened the door for us, and we were immediately in a small, tidy living room. Moving the vacuum cleaner out of the way, she gestured to the rose-color, nubby-upholstered sectional sofa and seated herself in a nearby matching chair. The furnishings were as blonde as she was, and as starkly modern as the cream plaster walls.

“Dorothy and I thought the description in the paper fit Beth,” she said, still shaking her head, hands on her knees. “Dorothy’s my daughter. . . .We thought somebody would show up sooner or later, but frankly, I expected it to be the police.”

Fowley nodded. “You will be hearing from the police, soon, Mrs. French—the
Examiner
and the L.A. homicide squad are hand in hand, working together to find the maniac responsible, as soon as possible.”

“Anything I can do to help in that effort, anything. Either of you fellas have a cigarette?”

Fowley rose, shook a Camel out of its deck, and she plucked it out, Fowley firing it up for her, and depositing the waved-out match in a geometric glass ashtray on the blonde endtable.

Sighing smoke, she said, “You’re lucky to have caught me—this is my day off. I’m a widow. My husband died in the war, and we get a small government check, but it’s not enough. I work at the Naval hospital, clerical. . . . Our days off float, you see.”

“Yes,” Fowley said. “I understand Beth Short worked at the Naval hospital, too.”

Mrs. French laughed, then caught herself. “I’m sorry. . . . I’ll tell you right now, I have no intention of speaking ill of the
dead—I liked Beth, for all her faults. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that girl never worked a day in her life.”

“She wrote her mother that she was working at the hospital.”

Mrs. French laughed again, smoke trailing out her nostrils. “That wouldn’t surprise me, either. You see, my daughter is an even softer touch than I am—and I’m plenty soft—but we invited that girl in off the streets, just to spend the night. That ‘night’ was a month long.”

Fowley had his notepad out and was scribbling furiously.

In early December, Beth Short had turned up at the Aztec Theater, where Mrs. French’s daughter, Dorothy, worked as an usherette and cashier.

“Dorothy felt sorry for the girl,” Mrs. French said. “The Aztec, until recently, was an all-night theater . . . you know, the kind of place you can duck into and find a spot to sleep for the night, for the price of a movie ticket? Dorothy could tell the poor kid needed a place to stay . . . and Beth looked so pretty, and she had the air of somebody who’d been successful, but was down on her luck.”

Fowley nodded. “How did you react when your daughter brought home a stranger?”

“I didn’t think much of it. What with the housing shortage, so many girls losing their jobs to returning servicemen, prices going sky high . . . and us lucky enough to live in a rent-controlled house . . . why shouldn’t we help a nice girl get back on her feet?”

“And that’s how one night turned into a month.”

“More or less. The story was Beth had missed her ride and was kind of stranded, and would just ‘camp out’ on our couch for the night. That first night I sat and drank coffee with the girl and made her a sandwich and gathered quickly that she was hungry and homeless and broke. She looked so pale, and she coughed, like she had some kind of congestion. Like I said, I guess I’m a soft touch myself, and when it turned out she’d lost her husband—Major Matt something, died in a plane crash, in India—I guess I kind of identified with her.”

“You invited her to stay for a few days.”

“Yes . . . my son, Cory—he’s thirteen. I think had a kind of a crush on Beth—she sweet-talked him, after school, to take the
bus down to the Greyhound station and pick up her suitcases. Cory said her bags were so heavy they mighta been filled with rocks . . . but it was clothing, expensive clothing too, silk, satin, all those exotic black outfits she wore.”

I said, “I guess once you saw her moving in her suitcases, you figured your overnight guest was planning to stay awhile.”

Mrs. French nodded, smirking just a little, drawing on the Camel; she exhaled as she said, “Beth assured me she wouldn’t stay longer than a day or so, just until some money she had wired somebody for had arrived. And she said she’d pay us for our inconvenience. . . . Of course I said, ‘Don’t be silly—you’re our guest, our welcome guest.’ Welcome was right.”

When Mrs. French came home for lunch on the second day of Beth’s stay, she found the girl still asleep on the couch, with the living room turned into a virtual showroom of fancy clothing and underthings—including black lacy lingerie and black silk stockings.

“There was a strong, sickly sweet scent everywhere, from her perfume—as if she covered not just herself but her clothing in the stuff. She woke, when I came in, and she apologized for sleeping so late—she’d been out till two in the morning, the night before, she explained, a date with her prospective employer . . . supposedly she had applied for a job at Western Airlines.”

The late nights, followed by sleeping till noon, became a pattern for their houseguest. Every night, it seemed, Beth was out with a different man—“For a poor lost soul, this girl had gathered quite the circle of admirers!”—and the following morning, she would sleep till noon, then lounge through the afternoon in her black satiny pajamas and/or a black Chinese flower-and-dragon-bedecked robe, sipping coffee, raiding the icebox, writing letters, reading magazines, fiddling with her clothes, laying them out and looking at them, occasionally ironing them, putting on her makeup, painting her toenails red.

“I asked her to dress a little less casually when my son was in the house,” Mrs. French said. “Cory’s at that impressionable age—a beautiful half-naked girl wandering about the house, flaunting herself in front of a teenage boy, well . . . it’s hardly ideal.”

Unless you were a teenage boy. Hardly.

“She turned my living room into her bedroom,” Mrs. French said, shaking her head. “Then Beth tried to sweet-talk Cory into giving her
his
bedroom, suggesting he sleep on the couch, which he was more than willing to do . . . but I forbade that—things would’ve never got back to normal! That girl was treating my son like a damn coolie—pardon my French—sending him out after scented stationery and movie magazines and, excuse me, sanitary napkins. My son!”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “why didn’t you just throw her out on her pretty behind?”

She sighed more smoke. “Beth and Dorothy had become good friends, and Cory just loved her; she did these imitations of stars on the radio that made him laugh . . .”

Plus she walked around half-naked.

“. . . and me, well, the two of us would sit at the kitchen table and talk about our husbands who’d died in the war. She still loved her pilot, she said, so much so that it had kept her from falling in love again, no matter how many men she dated. She said if ‘fate had been kinder’ she might be living with her major in a little house somewhere, right now . . . a nice little house like ours.”

“She never did get a job?” Fowley asked.

“No, not at the Naval hospital or that airline office or anywhere else—she took a certain number of interviews, or at least pretended to. But that’s all. I started to get fed up, toward Christmas—I mean, here I am, tiptoeing around my own house, getting ready for work, not wanting to wake this lazy girl, who should have been up and dressed and out looking for her own job. I mean, particularly when you consider how badly she said she needed money.”

“Considering the low overhead,” Fowley said, “what did she need money for?”