Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  I gathered that Dragna—whom I’d never met—had resented the intrusion of Ben Siegel, a few years before, into the Los Angeles scene. East Coast mob bosses Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano had simply foisted Siegel upon Dragna, unapologetically muscling in on the California Godfather’s territory; and in recent months—after Ben began focusing his attention on the Flamingo hotel/casino in Las Vegas—Siegel’s L.A. rackets interests had been turned over to his former bodyguard, the diminutive, dapper, if somewhat goonish Mickey Cohen.

  “Are Cohen and Dragna business partners,” I asked Fred, “or business rivals?”

  “Yes,” Rubinski said. “Rumor has it Dragna is working against Mickey, but it’s all sub rosa stuff. You know Mickey a little, don’t you?”

  “A little is right—I remember him from Chicago. And Ben Siegel reintroduced us a few months ago, on Tony Cornero’s gambling ship.”

  “Ah, the late lamented Lux,” Fred said. “Well, you know Mick is a regular at Sherry’s. He’s an affable little guy, for a roughneck. He’d be good for you to get to know better.”

  “I don’t mind Mickey Cohen frequenting your restaurant, Fred, but I’m not sure we want him for an A-1 client. We’re already trying to collect bad debts for Ben Siegel, and I’ve got enough p.r. problems over my so-called Capone/Nitti associations.”

  “Cohen’s not that kind of gangster. He’s just a bookie.”

  “Yeah, and hasn’t he been bumping off his rival bookies?”

  “That’s none of my business, Nate. As long as they don’t go shooting up Sherry’s, what do I care?”

  “What does it mean to you, Fred, a woman murdered, wearing the slashed mouth of an informer, being dumped on Dragna’s doorstep?”

  “Could be Cohen warning Dragna—or maybe Dragna warning Cohen. Plays either way.”

  “Maybe I do need to talk to Mickey Cohen.”

  “Nate, I can make that happen.”

  “Fred, I’ll let you know.”

  Fowley and I had just passed Doheny Park, with its bougainvillea-terraced sea cliffs, when the reporter suddenly began sharing his insights on Elizabeth Short.

  “We got the perfect Hollywood story here,” Fowley was saying, as Perry Como sang “Prisoner of Love” on the radio. “Small-town girl, beauty contest winner, comes looking for fame . . . gets it the hard way.”

  “I’m not so sure being a movie star was her goal,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? You heard her mom—this was a typical movie-struck kid, the time-honored see-her-name-in-lights, stars-in-her-eyes routine.”

  “Stars and stripes in her eyes, you mean.”

  “Huh?”

  “Elizabeth Short had a thing for men in uniform,” I said. “You heard her mom say that, too.”

  Fowley shrugged. “Yeah, well lots of would-be actresses were Victory Girls, during the war. You were in the service, right, Heller? Marines?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was in the Coast Guard. Hey, it wasn’t the Marines, but we sank two German submarines on two convoys. And even that sorry Coast Guard uniform of mine—why, it was like a license to steal. I got more nookie than a Mormon on his honeymoon.”

  “Is there a slide show that goes with this?”

  “You know what I’m talking about; and these little Victory Girls—like Elizabeth Short—all they had to do was see a uniform, maybe a medal or two, or hear a sad tale about shippin’ out tomorrow, and they’d be on their backs, making the ‘V’ for victory—”

  “That’s my point, Bill. I think this girl spent more time laying soldiers and sailors than trying to break into the movies. Everybody told her she was pretty enough to be a movie star—but maybe what she really wanted was a husband.”

  “House, picket fence, passel of kiddies . . . maybe. We can run with that, if the Hollywood angle gets old.” He shook his head, grinned goofily. “Reminds me of this Mocambo deal.”

  “Mocambo deal?”

  “Yeah, the robbery at the swanky nightclub. It’s what we were playing up, before the Werewolf Slayer came dancing into our boring lives.”

  “I didn’t follow that story. Fill me in.” What else did we have to do? We were gliding by the white stucco and red roofs of the Spanish Village–style city of San Clemente.

  The heist had gone down a week ago, Monday, January 6. The notion of the glittering Mocambo—a prime haunt of almost every Hollywood star—being victim to an armed robbery summoned images of men with guns rushing in from (and back out into) the night, terrorizing beautiful women in furs and handsome men in tuxedos, lush surroundings echoing with harsh commands.

  In reality, the job had taken place in the morning, at 10:30, a “daring daylight robbery” by three armed thieves wearing slouch felt hats and raincoats. The trio had come in the back way, rounded up four employees (three of them women) into a small office, and calmly emptied the safe of $15,000 in cash and another ten grand worth of jewelry. The cash represented the nightclub’s weekend receipts, the jewels were part of a display for a Beverly Hills jewelry store. One of the thieves stood six foot four and his face was badly acne scarred, although that description fit none of the four men the cops had recently arrested.

  “The ringleader is a guy named Bobby Savarino,” Fowley said. “Three other guys got nailed, too—apparently they’re part of a pretty active heist string—the cops are looking at them for some bank robberies, too, including one where a teller got shot.”

  “How did these L.A. cops you’re so dismissive of manage to make the arrest?”

  “Well, Savarino and his partner, I forget his name, were brought in on some unrelated petty theft charge, and got put into a show-up, where the Mocambo witnesses made ’em.”

  “This is fascinating, Bill, don’t get me wrong—but why do Victory Girls screwing soldier boys remind you of this Mocambo heist?”

  Fowley grinned, sitting up, leaning over the wheel. “It’s this guy, Savarino—he’s half genius, complete idiot. When he was arrested, looking for sympathy, he tells the judge he’s a war hero—not just any kind of war hero, but a Congressional Medal of Honor winner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah! He has documents with him, too—his ‘Separation-Qualification Record,’ which states he’s the most decorated enlisted man in the ETO.”

  “Has Audie Murphy been informed?”

  Fowley snorted a laugh. “Get this—the documents say our armed robber was not only presented with the Congressional Medal by Harry-Ass Truman himself, he also got the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, oh hell, I forget what all.”

  “And he was a phony?”

  “Fourteen karat. Yours truly made a simple phone call to the War Department in D.C. They never heard of the bum.”

  I laughed. “Well, I hope he got some mileage out of it before you came along and spoiled his fun.”

  “I should say he did. He’s got a curvy little redheaded wife, who bought the story, and when I interviewed him, he started laughing and admitted he had his share of girl friends, too, who liked gettin’ close to a bona fide war hero . . . which kinda rubbed me the wrong way.”

  “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.”

&
nbsp; “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 Examiners 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 s
aid, 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.