Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 10

  “Then you’ll see things that they won’t,” Lou said, something hopeful in his voice. “You’ll look at evidence, at clues, that they’re dismissing, when you’re seeing the significance.”

  “Exactly. I have an in with both the Examiner and the lead police detective . . . and if my take on this murder is on target and theirs isn’t . . . I might come out of this with my ass and business intact.”

  “And maybe even your marriage.”

  I gazed at Peggy, still on her side, snoring softly. “Maybe even that.”

  Lou grunted. “. . . I guess this is my fault, really.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “When you were mooning over bustin’ up with Peggy? I encouraged you to get back in the saddle again.”

  “So to speak.”

  “Next time I give you advice, take it from me: don’t.”

  We signed off, and I placed another call, to a friend who was even closer to me than Lou, and just as close as I had once been to Barney—my other best friend in the world, actually. . . . Only I couldn’t risk coming clean with this guy. This guy was too straight an arrow for that. This guy was Eliot Ness.

  I had known Eliot since we were both students at the University of Chicago in the late ’20s. When I was a cop and, later, a private detective, I had found Eliot to be my most reliable source within federal law-enforcement circles, back in the days when he and his Capone squad—the so-called Untouchables—had helped put Big Al away.

  After Prohibition, Eliot had gone on to a well-publicized, highly regarded six-year stint as Cleveland’s (and the nation’s youngest) Public Safety Director, cleaning up one of America’s most corrupt police departments, busting the notorious Mayfield Road Gang’s numbers racket, and exposing numerous crooked unions. In several instances I had worked for Eliot in Cleveland, particularly during the period when the cops there couldn’t be trusted.

  One of the cases I’d helped crack was that of the infamous Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run; from 1935 through 1938, the torso killer had killed at least thirteen men and women, mostly indigents, and possibly as many as seven or eight more. Officially, this case remained unsolved. But Eliot and I knew otherwise.

  “This killing does sound as if it has some of the earmarks of the Butcher,” the celebrated gangbuster said from his home in Cleveland. We had a long-distance connection as strong and clear as Eliot’s voice. “A number of the torso slayer’s victims were bisected at the waist.”

  “And washed and drained of blood.”

  “Yes, Nate . . . but our friend Lloyd also liked to collect heads, remember. That was his signature.”

  The Butcher was Lloyd Watterson, a former medical student, the son of a well-to-do Cleveland physician. The prominence of the family had made it a political necessity to sweep the Butcher’s capture under the rug, and for Watterson himself to be committed to a Sandusky, Ohio, mental hospital.

  “I realize Watterson almost always decapitated his victims,” I said, “but this girl’s face was mutilated in such a distinctive fashion—”

  I could sense Eliot nodding. “Like an informer, a ‘squealer.’ ”

  “My thinking, exactly. The killer obviously left the girl’s head attached because the slashing of her face was a part of a message he was sending.”

  “A message to whom?”

  “That’s the key question, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think Lloyd Watterson would vary from his signature, particularly when sending a message . . . if he were at large.”

  “You’re probably right, Eliot. Still, with these striking parallels, I thought you should know about the murder. Since the Butcher case is officially open, and so few people actually know the score about Watterson, you could be getting a phone call from the LAPD, any time now. Harry the Hat specifically asked me to call you on this.”

  “Nate, I haven’t been Public Safety Director of Cleveland for a long time.”

  Eliot left the Public Safety post in March 1942, under a cloud, after he was in an icy-roads auto accident that involved drinking and even an accusation of hit-and-run on his part. It was mostly trumped up, by some of the crooked cops he’d been in the process of rooting out, but the scandal had damaged his otherwise Boy-Scout-flawless reputation.

  During the war, Eliot had regained much of his good name by heading up the federal government’s Division of Social Protection, which was a fancy way of saying he’d been the nation’s top wartime vice cop, battling the spread of V.D. on military bases and near defense plants.

  Currently, Eliot was chairman of the board of directors of the Diebold safe company, where he was apparently doing a good job, getting a glowing write-up in the current issue of Fortune.

  “I know you’re a private citizen, now, Eliot, but you were the famous face on the Butcher investigation . . . and you may want to keep an eye on this ‘Werewolf Slaying,’ since there are parallels . . . and, considering the way the Butcher case was ultimately handled, well . . .”

  “It was a cover-up, Nate—don’t sugarcoat it.”

  “Just as long as Watterson is still having his jacket buttoned up for him, in the back, by valets in white, I’m satisfied.”

  “I can assure you our man is still in a padded cell. I even get the occasional postcard from him.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes, that’s one of Lloyd’s hobbies—taunting me with his threatening gibberish.”

  “I would think they’d keep the lad away from sharp objects, including pencils.”

  “It’s a mental hospital, Nate, not a prison.”

  “All the more reason to check up on him, Eliot.”

  “I will. . . . What’s wrong, Nate?”

  “Wrong?”

  “I sense something in your voice. I’m reading a . . . personal involvement in this thing.”

  “I just happened to be with the reporter who stumbled onto the corpse, is all. . . . She was a pretty girl, Eliot, and some twisted bastard butchered her . . . It’s sickening.”

  “I know. I know all too well. I was called to enough vacant lots and the like to view the Butcher’s handiwork. . . . I’ll make sure Lloyd is still inside, Nate. You’ll hear from me tomorrow.”

  “Good.”

  “Don’t let this get to you. I had my share of sleepless nights myself, thanks to that fiend. We should have put his ass in jail.”

  “We should have killed him.”

  Eliot said nothing.

  “Anyway—thanks, Eliot.”

  When his voice returned, the tone had lightened. “You’re still willing to be my best man?”

  “What? Oh, sure! When is the wedding, again?”

  “January thirty-first, right here in Cleveland. Big church ceremony, the whole shooting match, family, friends. Can you and Peggy still make it?”

  “We’ll be there with bells on. I can’t imagine anything keeping me from standing up for you.” Except maybe a jail cell.

  “Betty and I are counting on the both of you. . . . Speaking of which, how’s married life treating you, so far?”

  “So far, so good,” I said, leaving out a few details.

  “Peggy’s a great gal.”

  “So’s Betty. I know you two will be happy, Eliot.”

  His laugh had a little embarrassment in it. “Well, you know what they say—third time’s a charm.”

  This would indeed be marriage number three for Eliot. He was a hardworking, hard-drinking guy and was no doubt not terribly easy to be married to. Wife number one had been his secretary, during the Capone Chicago years, and that marriage had burned out during his tumultuous Public Safety run. I had thought his second marriage, to a terrific girl named Evie—a fashion designer up for the high-flying social life Eliot relished so—would have stuck. But nobody knows what’s really going on inside somebody else’s marriage.

  Hanging up, I looked toward Peggy, who seemed, finally, to be stirring. I went in and kissed her neck and her ear and her face, gently rousing her.

&n
bsp; “Where have you been?” she asked me, sleepily, violet eyes half-hooded.

  “All your life? Or just today?”

  “Today’s a start.”

  I was seated on the edge of the bed, next to her. “Actually . . . it was long and kind of unpleasant. I’ll fill you in, but I think we oughta grab supper, first.”

  “Ooooo. . . . That unpleasant?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Neither one of us was terribly hungry, so we just had sandwiches and iced tea at the Fountain Coffee Shop, which was tucked away under the Polo Lounge stairway. Dressed casually, in a snappy white blouse with brown-white-checked boyish slacks, Peggy chattered about the wonderful buys she’d found, at the after-Christmas sales. I politely listened and did not point out that bargain-hunting in Beverly Hills was a contradiction in terms.

  Her hair was down, tonight, brushing her shoulders. All I could think of was how beautiful she was—and how much she and Beth Short looked alike.

  Over a piece of strawberry cheesecake we shared off a single plate, Peg began to babble about how excited she was, tomorrow being her first day on the Bob Hope picture.

  “I’ll be working with Dorothy Lamour, too,” she said. “And Peter Lorre. I’ll tell you a funny coincidence.”

  Not finding coincidences all that funny today, I managed, “What?”

  “It’s a private-eye spoof. Isn’t that a riot?”

  “Four alarm,” I said.

  As we walked hand-in-hand back to our bungalow, enjoying a cool breeze riffling the trees, she frowned up at me. “Here I’ve been babbling on and on about my fun day, and how I’m looking forward to tomorrow . . . and poor you, you’ve had such a long, hard day . . . How did you describe it?”

  “Unpleasant,” I said.

  “Unpleasant,” she nodded. “Tell me about it, darling.”

  I waited until we’d made a fire—and had dragged pillows off the couch, to make a cozy nest for us, where we fell into each other’s arms—before I told her.

  Told her what I could, that is: that I’d been with that reporter Fowley when the bisected body of a beautiful unidentified woman had been found, and that I would be working with the Examiner on the case.

  She knew immediately what I was talking about. Even on Rodeo Drive, newsboys had been hawking the Examiner’s extra edition, and the case had been all over the radio, as well.

  “I heard the grisly details in the car,” she said, sitting up. She was in panties and bra and looked like a bright-eyed girl at a slumber party; I was in T-shirt and boxers and socks, like a pervo pop peeking through a keyhole at his daughter’s girl friends at that same slumber party.

  “You don’t seem, uh . . . bothered at all,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? This is a big story! This is going to be the biggest thing since the H-bomb. And my husband’s in the middle of it!”

  “I’m glad you’re pleased.”

  “This is going to make our business, out here.”

  “Our business?”

  “Our business, your business! You’ll be the most famous detective in town, you big lug, if you take full advantage. Do you and Fred have a press agent?”

  “Not really—that’s why we teamed up with the Examiner.”

  “Well, you two may want to think about getting a press agent. God, this is exciting! What a wonderful break!”

  “Yeah, I’m, uh, pretty thrilled myself.”

  Her brow tensed and she raised a palm, like somebody was swearing her in at court. “Don’t get me wrong . . . I’m sorry for this poor girl. She was probably no different than me, just another beauty queen looking to make it in the movies or something. But she wasn’t lucky, like I was.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She didn’t have you in her life.”

  Then she kissed me. Long and hard, her tongue tangling with mine.

  The fire cast a glowing, flickering pattern on her creamy-white flesh, as if someone were projecting a film onto her body. The dark bushiness of her pubic triangle teased through the white panties. She sat up and reached behind her and undid her bra; it slipped to her lap, where she brushed it away like a pesky insect.

  Her breasts weren’t large—they were merely perfect, delicately veined, pertly symmetrical, hard-nippled. I kissed them, I touched them, I helped her scoot out of the panties and she climbed on top of me, sat on me, riding me slowly, eyes half-lidded, smiling in that distracted way that precedes orgasm, until the smile finally blossomed, her eyes closing, hips accelerating. . . .

  The sweetness of it lingered well after she was again in my arms, turning bitter only when she asked me once more if we couldn’t “wait” to have our first child. Things were going to be so perfect here, she assured me dreamily, with her landing her first film role, and me landing such an incredible, important case.

  I held her face in my hands and I looked into those lovely violet eyes and I said, “We’re going back to Chicago, as soon as you’ve shot your little movie and I’ve solved my big case. We’re going home and we’re having our kid, and then we’ll decide where we’re going to live and work. . . . I promise you I will abide by your wishes on that score, Peg. If you want to come back here and be in the movies, well, I’ll work here, too, and we’ll hire a nanny or whatever the hell and we will have it all—yes, we will. But if you ever suggest aborting our child again, I will fucking kill you.”

  With a yelp of fright, she bolted from my arms and ran naked to the bedroom, where she shut the door, though that didn’t keep me from hearing her crying in there, as I tried to sleep on the reassembled couch.

  Dumb little bitch.

  Stupid bastard.

  8

  The prints the Examiner sent by wire to the FBI were too blurred to be identifiable; but one of Richardson’s staff photographers suggested sending 8” by 10” negative blowups. Within minutes the prints were identified as those of Elizabeth Short, who had—four years before—applied for, and landed, a civilian job at an Army base near Santa Barbara, working at the post exchange at Camp Cooke.

  A description derived from the job application was as follows: weight, 115 pounds; height, five feet five; race, Caucasian; sex, female; hair, brunette; eyes, blue-green; complexion, fair; date of birth, July 29, 1924; place of birth, Hyde Park, Massachusetts.

  In addition, the FBI had cross-referenced an arrest in 1943, Santa Barbara, California; a minor, Elizabeth Short had been picked up for drinking in a bar where she’d been with a girl friend and two soldiers. To her description were added these telling details: an I-shaped scar on her back from a childhood operation, a quarter-size brown birthmark on her right shoulder, and a small tattoo of a rose on her outer left thigh. The girl had been sent by bus back home to Medford, Massachusetts, to be given over into the custody of her mother, Mrs. Phoebe May Short.

  “Look at this little beauty,” Richardson said, gesturing to a police mug photo, side and front, of Elizabeth Short. With her dark hair tousled, translucent eyes sullenly blank, wearing none of the China doll makeup at all, under the unyielding gaze of a police photographer, she was as lovely as a movie queen’s soft-focus, airbrushed glamour portrait.

  Richardson was standing at the head of the scarred wooden conference table; he and I and Fowley were in the glassed-off editorial chamber where we’d confabbed yesterday with a whole gaggle of reporters. This morning it was just the three of us.

  “She does look better than in the shots Heller took yesterday,” Fowley said. Wearing a light brown checkered sportcoat and a darker brown tie with yellow horses prancing across it, he was seated to Richardson’s right and I was across from the reporter, on the editor’s left.

  “A living doll,” Richardson said, managing to fix both his eyes on the photo, “or at least she used to be—and that gives us a genuine star for our ‘A’ picture.”

  The editor—in shirtsleeves and suspenders—was giddy as a schoolgirl. Yesterday, when the competition’s afternoon editions appeared with the “Werewolf Slayer” stor
y, it was two hours after the Examiner’s extra hit the street, in a sold-out press run second only to VJ Day.

  “You want us to hit Camp Cooke, boss?” Fowley asked.

  “Sid Hughes is already on his way up there,” Richardson said, lighting up a cigarette, waving out a match.

  “We could check out that Santa Barbara arrest,” I suggested.

  “I got two men on that.” Glee was coming off Richardson like heat off asphalt. “Right now we’re so far out in front of the pack—they’re never gonna catch up. I’ve had crews out digging since five o’clock this morning, and the other papers didn’t even know Elizabeth Short’s name till they read it in our morning edition.”

  Fowley shifted in his hard chair; his tone vaguely irritated, he said, “So what’s left for the first string, if you’ve emptied the bench covering every lead the FBI gave us?”

  “The best lead of all. . . . Get your notepad out, Mr. Fowley.” Richardson turned his eerie stare on me, his slow eye playing catch-up. “Nate, you’re the best interrogator in house at the moment.”

  I frowned. “Gee whiz, thanks—but what are you getting at?”

  His left eye was still swimming into place as he fixed his gaze on me. “Plus, you were a cop for a lot of years.”

  “What’s on your mind, Jim?”

  “You’ve had to break bad news before, I mean.”

  I’d grabbed a bacon and eggs breakfast at a diner on my way over here; the greasy remains were turning in my stomach. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “Also, you know how to work a phone.”

  That was self-evident: private detectives spent most of their working day on the phone. “What the hell do you—”

  “Just a second . . .” Richardson went to the door, opened it, and yelled for a copy boy to bring him in two phones. Then he looked at me again, one eye at a time, and unleashed a smile almost as ghastly as his gaze. “. . . I want you to locate Mrs. Phoebe May Short, in Medford, Massachusetts.”