Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (42 page)

I parked in the driveway, purposely blocking it, and trotted up the winding walk to the two-story red-tile-roof pink stucco two-flat. I pressed the button and, on the third try, its little electric-chair buzz summoned an answer.

Framed there in the doorway, Patsy Savarino—her red hair tumbling to her shoulders, her mouth lushly lipsticked, the huge green almond eyes emphasized with matching eyeshadow—was proof positive that a woman eight months gone could still look alluring. The former stripper—though small in stature, she’d been voluptuous even before her pregnancy—wore a
yellow-and-green abstract-pattern print maternity top and pedal-pusher denims. She was in her bare feet.

“If you’re looking for my husband,” she said, guardedly, “he’s not here.”

“Any of his pals over here? Your upstairs neighbors, maybe?”

“The Hassaus moved out.”

“That was quick.”

“This morning.” She began to shut the door. “I’m alone here and you’re not coming in.”

“Sure I am,” I said, pushing my way in, stepping past her, into the vestibule, at the foot of the stairs to the second-floor flat. It took more than an expectant mother to stop this detective.

Her eyes were wide with indignation—and perhaps a little fear. “Mr. Heller, you’ll have to leave!”

I shut the door and took out the nine-millimeter, to encourage her cooperation, and her fright. But the lush red lips only sneered at me. “Do you often threaten pregnant women?”

“I think this may be a first.” I nodded toward the living room with its array of new, mismatched furniture. “How about your friend Arnold Wilson?”

Her arms were folded over her bosom and her chin was high—for some reason, she reminded me of a barroom bouncer. “Who says he’s my friend?”

“Is he here?”

“Of course not.”

I gestured with the nine-millimeter. “We’re going to have a look around.”

“Are we?”

I took her by the arm and dragged her along—“Hey! Lemme go, you bastard!”—checking every room of the eclectically furnished flat, finding no Bobby Savarino or Arnold Wilson or anyone else. The master bedroom closet was bare, nothing but hangers and a couple empty shoeboxes; the dresser was half-emptied. No male clothing at all.

She stood sullenly in the doorway, leaning back against the jamb, folded arms resting on breasts that had been formidable even before they began revving up for the coming child.

I turned to her. “You have an upstairs key?”

“What if I don’t?”

“I’ll kick the fucking door in.”

She sighed. “Yes, I have a key.”

“Can you handle those stairs all right?”

“Do I have a choice?”

I shrugged. “I can leave you down here tied.”

She grunted a humorless laugh. “Would that be another first, Mr. Heller?”

“No, I just did it the other day—Oh, with a pregnant woman? I believe so.”

Soon, she was dragging her ass up the stairs—albeit a nicely shaped one in the denim slacks, and her legs didn’t look heavy, either; the former No-Pasties-for-Patsy still had pride in her appearance, and hadn’t allowed herself to gain any excess weight, beyond the kid she was carrying.

She unlocked the door and showed me in, and around, the Hassaus’ apartment. The lights weren’t on but they weren’t needed—what was left of the afternoon sun was finding its way through windows whose drapes had been removed. The entire place was fairly emptied out, only a few larger pieces of furniture remaining, chiefly a Colonial-style maple china cabinet in the dining room and a big walnut-trimmed wine-velour overstuffed sofa in the living room.

Otherwise, tumbleweed was blowing through the goddamn place.

“Christ,” I said, and—convinced I was now alone with the knocked-up former stripper—I slipped the nine-millimeter back into the shoulder holster.

Again, she positioned herself in the doorway, arms folded on her chest, like a harem eunuch on guard, if an improbably pregnant one. “They loaded up a trailer this morning.”

I went right up to her, leaned a hand against the wall. She smelled like Chypre De Coty perfume. “Your husband go with them?”

Her expression was blank. “My husband’s out on bail. You know he can’t be leaving town.”

“Henry Hassau’s out on bail, too. They both skipped, didn’t they?”

She shrugged—then nodded.

“Afraid of Dragna?”

“Afraid of doing time.”

I could see that: they were facing twenty years, as her husband had pointed out to me.

I said, “The Ringgolds are going to be out some major scratch.”

A tiny smile tweaked the full red lips. “Yes, but Bobby and Henry won’t be testifying against them, will they?”

“That’s why you needed my money, right? Raising a little traveling cash for Bobby?”

The green eyes were half-lidded now. “Gee. Ain’t you the genius?”

I leaned in, doing my best to intimidate her, though with a tough little cookie like this, that wasn’t easy. “And, now what? Bobby’s going to get settled somewhere? Mexico maybe, and after you have the baby, you’ll join him?”

She frowned—then she moved forward, so close her nose was almost touching mine. Her tone was near vicious when she demanded, “You want to talk? Let’s go downstairs where I can take a load off. You think it’s easy being pregnant?”

“Let’s save a trip—why don’t you go sit on that couch?”

Holding the small of her back with both hands, wincing in discomfort, she trundled across the empty room and sat. I plopped down next to her, giving her a little space.

“Did Arnold Wilson happen to go along with the boys on this bail-jump trip?”

She nodded. “Helen went, too.” Her arms were at her side, now, and she was staring straight ahead at a wall whose wallpaper showed the shadows of absent framed pictures.

I sat sort of sideways on the couch, nestling in the corner, so I could look right at her, as she avoided my gaze. “Wouldn’t happen to have been Arnold’s idea, would it? Leaving town?”

She shrugged.

“Arnold’s an interesting guy. To look at him, he seems like some small-potatoes lowlife—a nobody, a six-foot-four,
pock-mark-pussed nebbish. Not a leader, certainly, like your husband. But sometimes you have to watch out for these guys out on the sidelines, hugging the fringes. . . . You’re in show business, Patsy—ever hear of a play called
Othello
?”

“No.”

“It’s by Shakespeare.”

She shrugged. “
Romeo and Juliet
.”

I folded my arms, crossed my legs—comfy here in the big mostly empty room. “Right. Friend of mine is thinking of making a movie out of it—
Othello,
that is. I’m not much of a reader, and most of the time, when I go to the theater, it’s to a house like your old stamping grounds, the Rialto.”

Now she looked at me, smiling faintly, crinkles of amusement at the corners of the almond-shaped eyes. “Ever see me?”

“I saw all of you. Any man who had would certainly understand how you could get in your current condition.”

“Is that your idea of a compliment?”

“Maybe you’d prefer me to commend your tassel work. Anyway, in that play, there’s this character off to one side, whispering in the hero’s ear, giving him bad advice. I forget the character’s name, but Arnold Wilson, he reminds me of that guy.”

“Does he?” Her gaze had returned to the wall of absent pictures. “That’s so very interesting.”

“For example, right before he brought me around here—to hear you and your husband expound on the subject of how Jack Dragna had the Short girl killed—Wilson stopped by the Beverly Hills Hotel. My wife and me, we’re staying in a bungalow there. Kind of a honeymoon.”

“What a lucky girl.”

“Arnold’s the kind of guy who knows how to seize an opportunity. That’s what separates the merely selfish, greedy, immoral sons of bitches, like most of us, from the really evil ones. You believe in evil, Patsy?”

“I guess.”

“You believe in God? In hell?”

Now she looked at me—apprehension creeping through her blank mask. “I suppose.”

I shrugged. “Me, I don’t know what I believe, other than I know that most of us are sinners, but that now and then you run into somebody who’s . . . wrong to the bone. Evil the way the Bible would define it. The psychologists call these people ‘sociopaths.’ ”

“Do they.” Her eyes tightened. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Let me finish, Patsy—if you don’t mind. I mean, you don’t have supper to fix, now that your man flew the coop.”

She granted me a sarcastic smirk. “Since I can’t seem to stop you—and you have a gun—please continue.”

“Thanks. So, anyway, Arnold waltzes into my bungalow at the hotel when I’m not around, convinces my wife he’s an old buddy of mine, that we were in the war together. Now, my wife has been around and she knows a criminal type when she sees one—and she knows I number criminal types among my acquaintances and even friends. In the course of conversation—he must have been waiting there for me, a good hour—she asks him a question. ‘Suppose I had a friend who was in trouble, and needed help?’ ‘What kind of trouble?’ Arnold asks. Well, to make a long story short, Wilson helped out my wife’s ‘friend’ . . . which is to say, my wife . . . and arranged for her to get an abortion.”

That got her attention. “I thought you were on your honeymoon. . . .”

“I know, it disappoints me, a little, too, that my wife wanted to start out our married life by killing our kid. But we’ve worked that out—we’ve decided to have him, or her. The thing is, your husband’s friend Wilson—manipulative weasel that he is—sent my wife to a specific abortionist because a special friend of his worked there—a very sick individual named Lloyd.”

And, finally, I hit home. She couldn’t hide the reaction: wincing, gritting her teeth as if a red-hot poker had been placed against her flesh, she turned away from me.

I remained casual, chatty in tone. “None of that is important—it is, after all, a kind of . . . coda to the real story, here. The real story begins with a pair of sick psychopaths, who have known each other for many years, and have visited all kinds of
hellish torture and perversion and murder upon women and men, usually striking the nameless, forgotten souls who litter the skid row of any major city. Arnold and this friend of his named Lloyd share a secret bond, as well as any number of unspeakable interests. Were you even aware that Arnold Wilson is a homosexual?”

The green eyes widened. “What?”

“That’s not really accurate—Wilson’s a bisexual. Gate swings, as they say, both ways . . . and that doesn’t offend me. I mean, whatever wets your wick, I always say. It’s just that both of the ways that Arnold’s gate swings are, well, a bit crooked. Arnold would quite naturally hide the homosexual aspect of his appetites from the all-male likes of your husband and the McCadden Group. He had to be one of the boys, right down to his war wound.”

Her red hair flounced as she shook her head. “You’ve gone wacky—Arnold is no queer. . . .”

“Let me ask you this, where does Wilson live?”

That froze her. “I . . . I don’t know.”

“I’ll wager you have the phone number and address of every other friend your husband did business with, certainly the entire McCadden crew.”

She said nothing, but that was a confirmation of sorts.

“Late last summer and for part of the fall, Elizabeth Short was hanging around the McCadden Cafe. She and your husband became involved . . . Don’t bother denying it, don’t try to look surprised. Beth Short even became friendly with Hassau’s wife Helen—the girl became sort of a mascot to the McCadden Group, a little more than that to your husband.”

Staring at the wall again, her face hardened back into that blank mask.

I continued, saying, “Wilson was working for Al Green at the cafe as a cook, as well as being a member of the heist crew. So of course Wilson got to know Elizabeth Short, was friendly with her. But he also considered her a kind of . . . loose cannon. Wilson knew the Short girl was trying to raise money, for some kind of operation she was planning to get—he figured it was possibly
an abortion, since she was consulting with a doctor who Wilson knew ran one of L.A.’s highest-class, most protected abortion mills.”

She gave me a glance, and a flinch of a frown. “Why are you telling me this? What the hell does this have to do with me?”

Outside the windows, magic hour was over—the darkness of night carried with it muffled traffic noise from nearby Hollywood Boulevard. I got up, switched on the overhead light, which bounced off the varnished wood floor. She winced, preferring the darkness. I sat beside her again.

“Wilson knew the Mocambo heist was going to be a big score. He also heard about the Short girl’s surprise when Beth discovered her new friends at the McCadden Cafe were a bunch of armed robbers. Wilson feared she might go to the cops, or otherwise sell them out, raising money for that supposed abortion. So he convinced his buddy Lloyd—who had been using his medical training to work for various abortionists on the West Coast—to apply for a job at that same abortion clinic where Elizabeth was enrolled as a patient. Fortuitously for Wilson, this was the perfect time for Lloyd to get work at the Dailey clinic: the chief doctor was failing mentally, slipping into senile dementia, and his female partner, a woman named Winter, could really use a good physician’s assistant about now, particularly one trained in the abortionist’s art.”

Patsy had turned away again. “You must like the sound of your own voice. I’m not even listening.”

“With Lloyd in place at the abortion clinic, the Short girl could be taken out, in a manner that—as a sick bonus—would allow these old pals in perversion to have a good old-fashioned debauched time. But Beth Short got spooked, with the Mocambo heist coming up, not wanting any part of a crime of that magnitude, and she fled to San Diego, where—typically—she freeloaded off a new friend she made. Several weeks later, before the heist, your husband and Helen and Hassau went down there to try to encourage Beth Short to come back to L.A.”

Her sharp glance indicated the latter was news to her.

“And, a month or so later, after the heist had been successfully
pulled, Bobby and the McCadden Group apparently getting away clean, Beth decides to come home to the City of Angels, where she gets back in touch with Bobby and Helen. She decides to keep a low profile, since she now knows her ‘fiancé’ already has a wife, a very pregnant one at that.”