Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (2 page)

When that memory had passed, as I kept playing photographer for Fowley (“Here, I’ll stand blocking her dirty parts, Heller, and you shoot from behind me, and we’ll get something Richardson can goddamn publish”), another memory, jogged by the windblown grass, kicked in. . . .

After the Japs had come at us in the morning, up a slope of golden
kunai
grass, screaming
“Banzai,”
machine guns chattering, we cut them down with our M-1s and they dropped into the grass, scattered about like ragdolls, bodies in the weeds, flung there by our bullets, bodies barely visible, and that afternoon as we waited for the next wave of them, their dead lay puffing and ripening in the sun, sending a sweet foul wind riffling through the grass. . . .

I lowered the camera, turned away.

“Heller! Nate . . . are you okay?”

I nodded.

“Shit, man, you look whiter than she does.”

When I turned back around, Fowley—porkpie hat shoved back on his head now—was hovering over the fly-attended corpse, way too close.

Anger blotted out the nausea, and I charged over and yanked him back. “What the hell are you doing? You’re tainting a crime scene! Stay away from her!”

Close up like this, I noticed for the first time the purple bruises and rope burns around her wrists and ankles. She’d been tied up, probably tortured.

“I was just gonna close her eyes,” Fowley said. He looked shaken.

That was when I got my first real look at the girl’s face; I’d been avoiding it, I guess, because the sadistic artist had reserved perhaps his most grotesque touch for her high-cheekboned, movie-star-pretty countenance: she had been slashed ear to ear, widening her mouth into a garish clown leer of death.

And her eyes—which were of a lovely clear mountain-lake blue—were indeed half-lidded open.

“Go ahead,” I said numbly.

Fowley knelt, closed the woman’s eyes gingerly, gently, and moved away. I already had.

In fact, I was standing in the street, legs unsteady, weaving. Because the worst memory of all the memories invoked by this gruesome crime scene had come to me, on that closer look at her.

I knew this girl.

Jesus Christ, I knew this girl!

Detectives do not believe in coincidence. Some of us believe in fate, a few even believe in God; but none of us believe in coincidence—when we see it, we know it’s not true, we know something smells, we know somebody’s trying to fuck us.

Nevertheless, my knowing this girl, whose dead body we’d stumbled onto, was a coincidence, pure and simple—and I would just have to live with it (and you will just have to take my word for it). Trouble was, this pure and simple coincidence would look impure and complex to the cops.

And as for reporters and coincidence—newspapermen like Fowley, here, and his boss Richardson—they would hang me out to dry, by the short and curlies.

So how did I come to be standing in this vacant lot in the University section of Los Angeles, over the bisected corpse of a girl I had known? Let’s start with what a Chicago boy was doing in California in the first place—the usual reasons: business and pleasure. The business aspect had to do with the branch of the A-1 Detective Agency I was opening, going partners with Fred Rubinski.

Fred was an ex-cop from Chicago who’d been running his own one-man agency out of the Bradbury Building in downtown L.A.
since before the war; he also had a piece of a Sunset Strip restaurant and good connections with the movie industry, both studios and stars. He was at the point where he needed to expand, much as I had done a few years earlier. Throwing in together would benefit both of us. So Fred was now Vice President of the A-1, with offices in Chicago and Los Angeles; and we were looking toward New York.

I’d arranged to stay for at least a month, getting the new partnership up and running, during which time—here’s the pleasure part—I would be on an extended honeymoon. Today—January 15, 1947—was in fact our one month anniversary, the former Peggy Hogan and me.

My wife and I were staying in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel—expensive digs, but the A-1 had landed a security-consultant contract with the hotel management, and this was a perk, a hell of a nice one. Less than half an hour before I found myself shooting photos of a bisected nude corpse in a Leimert Park vacant lot, Fowley had picked me up at my hotel, after breakfast, in a blue ’47 Ford.

I had the use of one of the agency’s cars, but my wife would be taking it to go shopping (I prayed it wasn’t Rodeo Drive again), so Fowley was escorting me to his paper, where he and I and Jim Richardson were supposed to work out the exclusive arrangement whereby the A-1 fed information to the
Examiner
in exchange for ongoing, positive publicity, starting with a big spread that would announce the merger of the Rubinski and Heller agencies.

“You understand, Bill,” I’d told him, as he made his leisurely way east along Venice Boulevard, “the A-1’s clients’ interests come first.”

“Do I look like a T-bone steak?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then spare me the friggin’ A-1 sauce.” Fowley said this with a friendly sneer, cigarette dangling. “Sure, a couple Chicago boys like you would never think of sellin’ out a client.”

“Well, we wouldn’t. It’s not good for business.”

He shrugged. “My biggest worry about this arrangement is your pal Bugsy Siegel.”

I shifted in my seat, spoke up over the police radio calls Fowley was monitoring. “He’s not my pal, and I wouldn’t call him ‘Bugsy’ to his face, if I were you.”

“Didn’t you work with him in Vegas?”

“I worked for Ben Siegel in Vegas, yes. Did a security job at the Flamingo. Taught his little private police force how to nab pickpockets, and stopped the pilfering that was nickel-and-diming him.”

“Yeah? So who was doing the pilfering?”

“His little private police force.”

Fowley sailed his spent cigarette out the window, spraying sparks of color into the gray morning. “I’m just warning you that the boss has a hard-on against Siegel—they’re blood enemies.”

“I thought Richardson relished the idea of my clients including the likes of Capone and Frank Nitti.”

“Oh, he loves that. Chicago gangsters are colorful. It’s the West Coast variety Jim hates—they’re criminals, y’know . . . except for Jim’s pal Mickey Cohen, of course.”

Fowley’s Ford was approaching Crenshaw Boulevard when a crackling voice on the shortwave said, “A 390 W down, 415, empty lot one block east of Crenshaw between 39th and Coliseum. Please investigate—Code Two.”

Code Two meant proceed quickly but without red light or siren; a 390 W was a drunk woman, and 415 was a public disturbance. This all added up to a drunk woman passed out in a vacant lot.

Fowley reacted like an old firehorse hearing a familiar bell. “Huh! We got a naked drunk dame, just a block or so over! Let’s have a look. . . .”

“Stop the presses. What the hell makes you think she’s naked?”

“She’s disturbing the peace and she’s unconscious; ’bout the only way a broad can pull that off is to pass out in the buff. Where’s your sense of adventure, Heller? Maybe she’s a looker!”

“Christ, Fowley, I don’t wanna follow you on some wild goose—”

But he was already turning south on Crenshaw; next it was east on 39th, where he started to crawl through the barren
war-zone landscape of vacant lots, some of which were staked off every thirty feet or so. Traffic was nil.

“Pretty wide-open spaces,” Fowley said. “See that lot over there? That’s where Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey used to put the circus on, before the war.”

“There she is,” I said, pointing to a bare white foot in the weeds.

Fowley slowed, craned his neck. “Hell, that’s not a woman—that’s a store mannequin or something. . . .”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

There’d been no sign of whoever called it in to the cops; not surprising a citizen would take a pass on getting involved in the likes of this.

Now—some minutes later—Fowley was scribbling frantically as I took a few more flash pictures, the Speed Graphic spitting blackened flashbulbs onto the crime scene; any moment a patrol car, having heard the same police call, would roll up and take over. Me, I wished they’d hurry.

But, as I may have mentioned, I was a detective, and, for better or worse, that’s how I looked at things. And I heard myself saying to Fowley, “You notice anything weird about this?”

Flies were blowing me the raspberry.

Fowley looked up from his notepad, raising his eyebrows, smirking as he said, “Oh hell no. This is about as routine as they come, Heller.”

“Where’s the blood?”

“The blood . . .” His eyes slitted, then widened. “Where the hell
is
the blood?” Suddenly Fowley was looking around like somebody who misplaced his car keys.

From the sidewalk, I pointed to the two-part corpse. “Look at the wounds—no signs of coagulation.”

Nodding slowly, Fowley said, “The grass isn’t bloody around the body, either—not even . . . you know, between the halves.”

“No sign of any other internal fluids, either. See that grayish white knob? That’s her spine. It looks like some organs have been removed.”

“What is this guy? A friggin’ vampire?”

“Maybe a werewolf.”

“Hey, that’s good!” Eyes popping, he scribbled that down. “That’ll make a swell headline . . . ‘Werewolf Murderer Butchers Beauty’!”

“Mention me at the Pulitzer dinner.” Tentatively, I stepped closer; thinking like a detective gave me distance, and kept the nausea in check. “Can you see that vertebrae? Lower part of her.”

“What about it?”

“No bone granules. It’s a clean cut—not sawed . . . severed.”

“Heller, look at this. . . .”

“Get back, Fowley! You’re too close.”

He was waving away the flies. “Aren’t those . . . bristles? God, they’re embedded right in her skin. Like off a wire brush!”

“You may be right, and that would make sense. There’s no way she was killed here. This isn’t a murder scene—it’s a dump site. She was bisected, drained of blood, scrubbed clean, and carted and dumped here, off the main drag, probably before dawn.”

I looked at the gray sky, wondering if it would keep its threat of rain and wash this lot clean of evidence. There was no rumble of thunder and this was, after all, California; it had been three weeks since it last rained. Still, maybe I needed to keep playing photographer. . . .

Slowly I scanned the vacant lot and its scant scattering of refuse; then my eyes fixed on a discarded cement sack, its limp gray cloth draped in the grass a few feet from the girl’s head. Going over to it, but trying to keep my distance and not further pollute the scene, I saw on the cheap gray material a few droplets of what might have been dried, watery blood.

“This may have been used to haul one half of her,” I said, and pointed out the possible blood drops to Fowley. “Not inside the sack, more like using it as a sling.”

“Brother,” Fowley said, snugging his porkpie back down, “she musta been drained damn near dry.”

I took a flash picture, retrieved the spent bulb.

Returning to the sidewalk, I said, “There’s a few drops here, too. . . .” I recorded that with the Speed Graphic, then kept looking. “Hey! This might be a piece of luck. . . .”

On the driveway to a house that had never been built was the dried-blood imprint of a shoe’s heel, half of one, anyway, partly obscured by an automobile tire track. Probably a man’s shoe, possibly a woman’s oxford.

“So our killer pulled in here,” I said, kneeling over the partial heel print in the driveway, taking a flash picture, “made two trips hauling ‘garbage’ out of his trunk, making this heel print . . .” I glanced toward the street. “. . . then he took the hell off, backing over and partially smearing it. . . .”

I got up and went to the street. Skid marks were burned into the gutter. Whether these were marks made by the car screeching to a stop, or peeling out, it was impossible to say. I took another picture.

“He was headed south,” Fowley said.

I nodded, rising.

As if the skid marks had come to life, squealing tires behind us announced a patrol car pulling in. Two uniformed cops climbed quickly out.

One of the cops was lanky, about thirty, the other was much younger, a rookie with a linebacker build; hard-eyed and pasty-faced under their uniform caps, both were undoing the safety straps of their holstered revolvers.

“Take it easy, fellas!” Fowley called out, holding up his hands; mine were already up. “I’m a reporter on the
Examiner
.”

Then Fowley reached inside his suitcoat pocket and the revolvers jack-in-the-boxed into the cops’ hands.

“Jesus Christ, boys,” Fowley sputtered, “I said I’m a reporter! Fowley’s the name! Let me show you my i.d.”

“Get ’em up,” the older one said, then to his partner added, “Check his i.d.”

The young one made his way over to reach inside Fowley’s coat and have a look.

“He’s okay,” the young cop said.

Nobody bothered to check my i.d.—the camera in my hand was apparently sufficient: I was an
Examiner
photographer.

Then the younger cop angled over toward the weeds, to get a gander at the drunk woman disturbing the peace. “Oh my God—Mike . . . Mike!”

“What?”

“This girl—poor girl, Jesus Mary, somebody’s cut her in half!”

The older cop, holstering his revolver, had a look at the body in the weeds, joining his partner, who was weaving like he was the drunk.

“Get on the radio, Jerry,” Mike told the boy, steadying him with a hand to a shoulder. “Get put straight through to the watch commander. Have ’em get a team over here pronto.”

Jerry nodded, but paused, thinking about whether or not to puke, didn’t, and—on unsteady legs—somehow got over to the patrol car, reaching in for the dash mike, calling in a dead body “at the 390 location—probable homicide.”

That seemed a fair assessment.

“Monitoring police calls, Mr. Fowley?” the older cop asked.

Fowley shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, hell, it’s legal, Officer.”

“Compromising a crime scene isn’t.”