Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (21 page)

So now I was again sitting in the
Examiner
conference room, sipping coffee, just Fowley and me and the wall-eyed, eagle-pussed Richardson.

Word from Hollenbeck Station was not promising, where
Robert “Red” Manley was concerned; as a human being, Red stunk—as a suspect, he also stunk. Ray Pinker had administered a polygraph, which he deemed “inconclusive.” A second test, with which Harry the Hat himself helped Pinker (presumably probing about those three undisclosed items), tended to substantiate Manley’s story. And Manley’s alibis were looking solid.

But that was fine with Richardson; he didn’t want this case solved that quickly, anyway—it was selling too many papers.

“Those bags you boys led us to were a gold mine,” Richardson said, referring to the two suitcases (and hatbox) at the Greyhound Bus Station that Manley had told us about.

I said, “You got to them before the cops?”

“Fowley called me with that tidbit from Hollenbeck Station. I sent Sid Hughes over.” Richardson grinned as he matched a cigarette. “It’s amazing what you can buy in this town for ten dollars.”

Shifting in my hard chair, I said, “I don’t mean to be a stick-in-the-mud, but just how much of this tampering and withholding of evidence can you get away with?”

The city editor waved that off. “I called Donahoe over at Homicide, first thing this morning, and he was tickled pink to get the stuff—Fat Ass Brown picked it all up half an hour ago.”

I sipped my coffee. “After you went through it all.”

He leaned both hands on the table, beaming at me, slow eye swimming into place. “Little elves at the
Examiner
workshop sat up all night, gleaning info out of that junk.”

“What kind of junk?”

His cigarette bobbled as he spoke, spilling gray ash on the scarred tabletop. “Lots of that satiny sexy black clothing she liked to wear, and sheer lingerie and silk stockings—but that ain’t all, fellas and girls. Yesterday all we had for art on this story were those ghoulish vacant-lot pics and that mug shot from the Santa Barbara bust. Now? Now we got glamour photos, cheesecake yet, her in playsuits and bathing suits and sittin’ in nightclubs with sailors on her arm and white flowers in her black hair.”

I grunted. “Don’t drool, Jim—it’s not becoming.”

“Plus, we got a list of names a mile long of ex-boy friends and former roommates. . . .We’re swimming in goddamn leads.”

Fowley said, “So how about giving us one?”

Richardson ripped a page out of a notepad. “I saved the best one for my best boys—the Florentine Gardens.”

“Hog dog,” Fowley said. “Not bad!”

Fowley’s reaction was understandable: the Florentine Gardens was a nightclub whose current floor show,
The Beautiful Girl Revue for 1947
, was the nudest in town—unusually so, considering the Mills Brothers were headlining, a mainstream (if colored) act for that kind of venue.

For many years, the Gardens had played second fiddle to Earl Carroll’s luxurious deco nightclub at Sunset and Vine, where nearly naked showgirls and most of the celebrities in Hollywood converged. But ever since Ziegfeld’s personal pulchritude picker—the legendary starmaker Nils Thor Granlund—had taken over as impresario, the nitery was flourishing.

“Seems till late last year,” Richardson was saying, “the Short dame was one of Mark Lansom’s harem living in that castle on San Carlos Street, behind the Gardens.”

“Who’s Mark Lansom?” I asked.

“Lansom owns the Gardens,” Fowley said. “Also, a buncha moviehouses and some dime-a-dance halls.”

I said, “I thought the Florentine was N.T.G.’s spot.”

N. T.G. was one of Nils Thor Granlund’s two well-known nicknames; the other was “Granny.”

“Granlund’s the manager of the Gardens,” Richardson said. “But Lansom owns the joint, and it’s his baby as much as Granny’s.”

“What’s this about a ‘harem,’ and a ‘castle’ behind the nightclub?”

“Lansom’s a regular ass hound,” Fowley said. “A lot of the chorus girls and waitresses live in this big house of his—fancy place, with a pool and everything.”

“A dormitory of babes,” Richardson said, leering, “and Lansom’s the housemother.”

Fowley gave me the rundown on Lansom: the former bootlegger was now a respected member of the Hollywood community, even a sponsor of the Junior Philharmonic. He was separated from a wife tied to him by mutual ownership of real
estate; she lived in Beverly Hills, alone, and he lived on San Carlos Street, with all those girls.

“Jim,” I said, “I know Granny a little bit, from when he brought his revue to Chicago.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, nobody knows his way around publicity—good or bad—like Granny. If I go there alone, and let him stay off the record, we might get further.”

Fowley bolted upright. “Don’t be a pig, Heller! Aren’t you getting enough pussy on your honeymoon to hold you?”

I gave Fowley a long unfriendly look. “Is it true you’re Noel Coward’s ghostwriter?”

Richardson was pacing, nodding, smoking. “You got something there, Heller. Tell Granlund we’ll keep his name away from the cops if he talks to us on the q.t.”

“Can we do that?”

“What’s stopping us?”

“Well, this lead came from the stuff you turned over to the cops this morning, right?”

“It might have.”

“Jesus, Jim! What are you withholding?”

“Your paycheck, if you keep asking
me
the nosy questions.” He turned to Fowley. “I got a good little lead left for you, too—a roomful of girls at the Atwater Hotel in Long Beach. . . . Here’s the address.”

Scowling, Fowley scribbled it down, then took the names of the girls.

“Right before Short moved in at Lansom’s,” Richardson said, “she bunked in with these babes—they’re B-girls and would-be singers and actresses. Short was one of five dolls jammed into one little hotel room.”

“Sounds like the stateroom scene in
Night at the Opera
,” Fowley said, his attitude toward the assignment improving visibly, “only with titties.”

“Well,” his boss said, ignoring this astute observation, “grab a camera, and don’t take all morning. I’m sending you up to Camp Cooke this afternoon.”

“I thought Sid Hughes was covering that.”

“Yeah, but Sid got busted, flashing a badge and pretending to be Harry the Hat. Irritated Harry, when he found out, and didn’t make the U.S. Army love the
Examiner
, either.”

Fowley pointed at himself with a thumb. “What makes you think I’ll do any better?”

“Say you’re with the
Herald-Express
. All in the family.”

Fowley and I went our separate ways, he in the
Examiner
’s Ford and me in the A-1’s Buick.

The Florentine Gardens was at 5955 Hollywood Boulevard, just a few blocks from its main competition, Earl Carroll’s. In the morning sunlight, the building was blinding white, a massive structure with modern lines and classical trim, including neon-lined columns. Spanish-style wrought-iron front doors were positioned between a pair of palm trees, and a banner advertising the Mills Brothers flapped above the club’s boldly neon-lettered name.

The place was closed, but the doors were open. The lobby walls were rounded and powder-blue, trimmed in gold, the carpet a luxurious floral number; to my left the hat- and coat-check window was unattended, and to my right an entryway revealed the black-and-white jungle of the Zanzibar Cocktail Lounge, also unattended. Straight ahead double doors closed off the ballroom; but I could hear a piano, seeping through, echoing across the big room beyond, playing “Don’t Fence Me In,” Cole Porter’s improbable cowboy tune.

When Nils Thor Granlund took this place over, a few years back, he had jettisoned the exotic motif designed to invoke ancient Florence (Italy), and went for an art moderne look, invoking Florenz (Ziegfeld). Still, the main room retained an open, airy feel, powder-blue rounded walls mirroring a central round dance floor with two tiers of spacious, high-backed golden-upholstered booths on either side, and private nooks recessed in the walls.

As I strolled in, down a wide gold-carpeted aisle that emptied onto the dance floor, I was facing the stage, way across the yawning room—a bandstand designed to look like a big top hat, with a window cut in it, its brim surrounding the stage. The tiered
seating for the orchestra was empty, but a bored bald heavyset cigar-chomping guy in his shirtsleeves was playing piano, while strung across the stage, a dozen pretty girls were rehearsing a dance number.

The chorus girls were in various casual leg-baring outfits—sunsuits, halter tops, short-sleeve blouses, shorts and short skirts—and their hair was either ponytailed back or in pincurls under a kerchief; they also weren’t wearing any makeup. And yet they seemed much sexier looking to me than if they’d been all dolled up.

“No, no, no! You impossible cows!” The choreographer, down on the dance floor in front, was a guy about forty in a short-sleeve white sweater, frayed dungarees, and moccasins.

The girls froze in midkick, the pianist stopped, taking time to relight his cigar. The girls relaxed as the choreographer began performing all of their steps (“Land, lots of land!”), admittedly with more grace than the girls, and comparable femininity, for that matter.

The chorus line nodded, acknowledging his superiority, and soon they were back at it, better than before. The guy knew his stuff.

I was just watching them, forgetting my troubles, enjoying their athletic beauty, thinking about how goddamn many beautiful women there were in the state of California, wondering why California couldn’t get along without the beautiful woman I was married to, when a gravel-edged voice called out to me.

“Are you still alive?”

I turned and noticed, nestled in one of the booths, the Florentine Gardens’ resident impresario, N.T.G. himself.

“Hiya, Granny,” I said, on my way over to join him.

Granlund was a big lumpy-nosed Swede who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a plow in the middle of a field, if he hadn’t been dressed in tailored gray sharkskin with a silk black-and-white-patterned tie. Smiling in his avuncular manner, gray hair slicked back, eyes a dark twinkling blue, Granny—who was in his late fifties—leaned his chin on a hand bedecked with gold rings, exposing gold cufflinks and a gold wristwatch no more expensive than a new Plymouth.

“I heard you were in town,” he said, gesturing for me to sit next to him in the booth. “You and Fred should do well.”

Granlund knew both Fred Rubinski and me primarily from his stay managing the showroom at Chicago’s Congress Hotel in the mid-’30s, where I’d handled security.

“Thanks, Granny. Nice little joint you got here.”

“Not mine, exactly, but thank you, Nathan. How do you like my girls?”

“You still know how to pick ’em.”

“Yes, I do.” Gazing almost dreamily at the chorus line as the choreographer whipped them into shape, he said, “The Short girl wasn’t in the chorus, by the way. She was strictly a waitress—Mark hired her.”

That caught me like the sucker punch it was. I said, “You don’t fool around, do you, Granny?”

He beamed at me like a big Swedish elf. “You’re mentioned in the
Examiner
coverage, fairly prominently. I assumed someone from the press or the police would show up—rather relieved it’s you.”

“To my knowledge, the cops haven’t connected Beth Short to the Gardens.”

With a smile and a contented sigh, pleased by the array of pulchritude he’d assembled, Granny leaned back in the booth, withdrew a gold cigarette case from his inside suitcoat pocket, offered me a smoke, which I declined, and then lit up.

“The police will connect her with us,” he said offhandedly, “if the
Examiner
runs a story.”

“The
Examiner
is prepared not to mention the Gardens—not until, or unless, the cops make that connection.”

Raising an eyebrow, he said, “Really. Why? Has Jim Richardson come down with a sudden bout of compassion?”

“It’s on the assumption that you could provide a few exclusive leads on the girl.”

“Off-the-record tidbits?”

I nodded.

He sat and smoked and watched his girls dance, for maybe a minute—a long one. The bored piano player kept grinding out “Don’t Fence Me In.”

Then Granny said, softly, “I only spoke to the girl a few times. As I say, Mark hired her. She was strictly a waitress, albeit a very decorative one, but then all of the waitresses here are beautiful. . . . You don’t come to the Florentine Gardens to see plain janes.”

“Having beautiful waitresses encourages drinking among male patrons.”

Half a smile dimpled one cheek. “Nathan . . . I know you too well. You’re trying to suggest that our waitresses are B-girls. That’s not the case. There’s no prostitution here. We did have a bad incident last year—”

“Those underage twins.”

Both eyebrows arched this time, smoke trailing out his nostrils. “You know about that?”

“I know you’ve always hired underage girls when you could get away with it, Granny.”

He shrugged. “What’s prettier than a pretty fifteen- or sixteen-year-old? And what’s wrong with displaying their charms, in a tasteful fashion? It’s just that one of the girls got involved with a customer, and . . . well, we were prosecuted for placing a minor in an ‘unsavory situation,’ and we’ve been most circumspect ever since.”

“How circumspect is it, this Lansom having your girls rooming over at his own house? Right behind the Gardens?”

Granny twitched a smile. “How off the record is this, Nathan?”

“All the way off—level with me about Lansom. This is for me, not Richardson.”

The dark blue eyes narrowed. “You have a . . . personal stake in this?”

“Yes.”

“Which is the extent of what you’ll reveal to me?”

“Yes.”

He gazed at his girls as they bounced to the piano. “I’m considering leaving the Gardens.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’m not entirely . . . in tune with my employer.”

“And why is that?”

Granny’s thin lips formed a faint sneer. “Let’s return to the subject of Elizabeth Short, shall we? She’s rather a case in point. You see, Mark hires these girls as waitresses, implying that this is the next step to their being discovered by yours truly.”