Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 15

  I didn’t have a spear and I didn’t have my nine-millimeter, either.

  But I didn’t feel like chasing the fucker, so I just took off my shoe and took aim and hurled it.

  The heel of the Florsheim caught the heel of the Manley household in the back of the head; the sound, in the quiet night, was like the popping of a champagne cork. It knocked him off balance, and he yiped like a dog getting its tail stepped on, as he tripped over his own feet, tumbling to a stop against a curb.

  I walked over and collected my shoe, put it on, and then I walked over and collected Robert Manley.

  “First you trip over your dick, Bob,” I said, “and now you trip over your own feet.”

  As I hauled him by the arm to those feet, he blurted, “I know what this is about!”

  “Swell,” I said, and patted him down for a weapon. Clean.

  He put his hands up without being asked. His hair was a tousle of red curls, his face pale except where it was shadowed from not having shaved since morning. “Listen, I knew Beth Short.” His voice was youthful, breathy. “I turned sick inside when I read the paper in San Francisco, this morning.”

  “You just hadn’t got around to calling the cops about what you knew.”

  “Are you kidding? Think of the publicity! I got a beautiful wife and four-month-old son! What would you have done?”

  “Kept my pecker in my pants,” I said, and yanked him back toward the house.

  Manley’s boss professed to know nothing about Red’s connection to the already notorious “Werewolf” slaying, and generously—if nervously—turned over his kitchen for the questioning of his employee. I got a glimpse into the living room of the Spanish-appointed home, through a dining room archway, where Manley’s balding boss was hurriedly explaining the situation to his wife, a pleasant if distressed-looking fortyish brunette in a house robe, then herding her off, away from the “police” who had taken Robert Manley into their custody.

  Like the one in Manley’s home, the Palmer kitchen was streamlined and white and modern—but about three times the size, and touched with two tones of green, not blue. We sat at a green-and-white chrome-and-steel dinette, one of us on either side of Manley, who we allowed to smoke. He had taken off his brown sportjacket, slinging it over the back of his chair, and sat in his shirtsleeves, suspenders, and a green-and-brown tie that, oddly, seemed perfectly coordinated with the kitchen around us.

  “I’m just sick to my stomach,” he said, and he did look pale enough to puke. “My poor wife. What have I done to her? Jesus, my wife.”

  Again, Fowley took notes and I took the lead, where the questioning was concerned.

  “Where and when did you meet Elizabeth Short?”

  “It was a late afternoon in December—couple weeks before Christmas. She was just this pretty black-haired dish, standing on the corner near the Western Airlines office. Just standing there, not crossing with the light or anything, kind of . . . distracted. I went around the block, and she was still there, so I pulled over and offered her a lift. She played hard to get awhile, and I told her I was in town on business, could use a little help getting to know my way around San Diego, and . . . finally she let me give her a ride home.”

  “Home.”

  He nodded, breathing smoke out his nostrils. “To Pacific Beach, those people she was staying with, the Frenches. We went out a couple times—nothing happened. Kissed her a few times.”

  “Did she know you were married?”

  “Yeah. But I told her my wife and me were at a sort of crossroads, that it didn’t look like it was gonna work out. And, anyway, I thought at first Beth was married, too, ’cause she wore what looked like a wedding band. But then later she said her husband, this Matt she talked about all the time, was killed in the war. Officer in the Army Air Corps. I think she liked that I had been in the Air Corps, too.”

  “You didn’t tell her you were discharged on a Section Eight.”

  He winced, flicked ash into a green Bakelite tray. “You know that? How do you know that?. . . . Anyway, it was an honorable discharge. Lot of guys got out on a Section Eight.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  That perked him up; I’d made myself a little more likable. “You, too? You’re a vet?”

  “Yeah. Marines. I understand you were in the Army Air Corps band.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I was. Loved it—I mean, I couldn’t fit in with the Army ways, you know? All that discipline, regimentation.”

  “You’re a free spirit.”

  “Well, I’m a musician. Sax man.”

  “Still?”

  “Weekends and such. It’s pretty hard to do as a profession, music—you’ve got to have something special. I’m good, but . . . not special, not really.”

  “What were you doin’, Red, running around on that pretty little wife of yours?”

  “How do you know she’s pretty? She’s pretty, all right, but . . . how do you know?”

  “We spoke with her.”

  He hung his head, shook it. “Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus.” Now he looked up. “Is she all right?”

  “She didn’t break down on us or anything.”

  “No . . . no, she wouldn’t.”

  “But, Red—do you figure she’s ‘all right’ with her husband chippying on her?”

  He sighed smoke, gestured with the cigarette. “Look . . . I don’t expect you to understand, but . . . I was just trying to give myself a little test.”

  “A test?”

  “Yeah—see if I could resist a good-looking dame like Beth Short. See if I still loved my wife.”

  “How did you do?”

  He twitched a grimace. “I said you wouldn’t understand. We just had a baby. You married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any kids?”

  “One on the way.”

  “You’ll see, you’ll see. Nobody talks about it—nobody ever talks about it . . . your wife won’t want to have relations, you know, after she has the baby. Not for a while.”

  “It’s called recuperation, Red. Giving birth to a kid is no picnic.”

  “I know, I know . . . and then . . . when your wife does want to have . . . relations again . . . you may find you don’t feel the same.”

  “The same?”

  “She just didn’t seem . . . like the same person. Harriet was a real sexy baby, when we dated. But now she’s a . . . she’s a mom. . . . A kid came out of her, down there. And the baby, crying all the time, up all night, baby made me . . . nervous. I got nervous trouble anyway, you know—that’s why I got Sectioned Eight. Don’t think I don’t feel guilty about it. You think I don’t feel like a rat?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, I do. I talked to doctors over at the veterans hospital, a couple times, and they gave me some pills, for my nerves. I told them that putting my . . . you know, putting it into my wife, after a baby came out of her, made me feel queasy, and they—Aw, shit. I sound like a fucking creep, don’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, fuck you, Charley. You’ll see. There’s a readjustment period, for a guy, after his wife gives birth. And Beth Short . . .” He shrugged, drew on the cigarette. “. . . she was just part of my readjustment.”

  “She was the test you gave yourself.”

  “Yeah. And I didn’t have relations with her, understand? Never! I took her out for dancing and drinks and a few meals, and that was it. Usually this place called the Hacienda Club. This was during about a week when I was in San Diego, seeing my accounts. I’m a hardware salesman—did I tell you that?”

  “Palmer’s your boss. You deal in pipe.”

  He studied me, trying to find the sarcasm in that; he didn’t look hard enough.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I was going back and forth about my marriage—mentally, I mean. Loving my little son, not attracted to my wife anymore. I told the doc at the veterans hospital I thought I was having a nervous breakdown, and he said I was doing fine and gave me some more pills. And also I cou
ldn’t stop thinking about that girl.”

  “Beth Short.”

  “She was so damn pretty. So different from Harriet . . . Oh, Harriet’s pretty, real pretty, but Beth was sort of . . . I don’t know, exotic, with those spooky clear blue eyes and all that black hair and those black clothes and stockings and white flowers in her hair and all. Did you know she was called ‘the Black Dahlia’?”

  “I heard that.”

  “And Beth seemed so . . . worldly. So much older than her years. You know, she was in the movies, had all these big friends, like that famous director that was gonna give her a screen test.”

  “Did she mention his name? This director?”

  “No. She just smiled and laughed and said I’d be amazed, like as if it was gonna turn out to be Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or something . . . which is all the movie directors I ever heard of, by the way. So I decided to see her again, when it was time to go back to San Diego, and service my accounts.”

  The jokes were just too easy to bother making, with this guy.

  “The Frenches don’t have a phone,” he was saying, “so I wired Beth I’d be down. Then when I got there, she said she was wearing her welcome out with the Frenches, and could I drive her back to L.A.?”

  “This was on January eighth?”

  “I guess. It was last Wednesday, I mean a week ago Wednesday. Was that the eighth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then it was the eighth. I couldn’t take her back that night, ’cause I still had some accounts to see, in San Diego, the next morning. So we went out, again. Funny thing, for all her worldliness and fancy clothes, she was a cheap date. Preferred drive-in joints to posh restaurants.”

  “Is that where you took her, that night, a drive-in?”

  “To a little burger joint called Sheldon’s, not far from the Frenches. I did take her to the U.S. Grant Hotel—that’s about as fancy as we ever got—’cause they had a hot band playing that night, and I wanted to hear it.”

  “But you wound up staying at the Pacific Beach Motor Camp, right?”

  “Right. And we did some club-hopping . . . She drank a little more than usual; she wasn’t really a drinker, got a little sick, a little moody. When we finally landed at the motel, and she got undressed, I noticed something that, you know in retrospect, might be important.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She had red scratch marks on her arms. Forearms. I asked her about them, and she said she had a jealous boy friend. Which is a disturbing thing to hear a girl undressing in a motel room say.”

  “She mention a name?”

  “No—just that he was Italian, and ‘cute,’ but ‘not a very nice guy at all.’ ”

  “Were these recent scratches?”

  “I thought they were, ’cause they were bleeding a little; but she claimed the guy did it, her boy friend, before she came down to San Diego. That she just had a nervous habit of picking at the wounds.”

  “And you spent the night?”

  “Yeah—but we didn’t sleep together! She was feeling punk, actually. I made a fire—it was a cozy little cabin; it would have been perfect for romance, but it didn’t go that way.”

  “What way did it go?”

  “She was shivering, like she had the flu or something, coughing. She was sitting in a chair by the fire, bundled up in blankets. I offered her the bed, said I’d sleep in the chair, but she said no.”

  “So you took the bed.”

  “Yeah, and in the morning when I woke up, she was next to me in bed, or on top of it, pillow propped behind her, wide awake. I asked her if she’d slept at all and she shook her head no. I looked at my watch and saw I was late for my first appointment, and took a powder out of there—advising her to catch a few winks before I got back at noon, which was checkout time.”

  “And that’s when you got on the road?”

  “My morning calls ran late—we didn’t hit the road till twelve-thirty, quarter to one. I made a few calls on the way back to L.A. She had no objection. In fact, she was real friendly on that drive—wanted to know if she could write me letters, offered to make it sound like business so my wife wouldn’t get wise. Still wanted to get to know me—said I was sweet.”

  “How many stops did you make?”

  “Three business calls. Once for gas, again for food. She said she was planning to hook up with her married sister, who lived in Berkeley and was coming down to L.A., and that she intended to head home to Boston after that.”

  “What about her screen test?”

  “She said nothing about that. Or how these travel plans would fit in with seeing me, again. You got to understand, with Beth Short, you never knew what was a plan, and what was a daydream . . . and I’m not sure she knew the difference herself.”

  “How was she dressed, that day?”

  “Like a page out of a fashion magazine—black tailored cardigan jacket with a skirt that matched, an expensive-looking white blouse with a lacy collar, black suede pumps . . . light-color coat over her arm. And those black stockings with the seams up the calf?”

  “You were kinda taken with her, weren’t you, Red?”

  “Hard not to be—that hubba-hubba figure, those clear blue eyes . . . her perfume, man, she got inside you. . . .”

  Even if he hadn’t gotten inside her.

  “When you got to L.A.,” I asked, “where did you drop her off?”

  “Well, first I took her to the Greyhound Bus Depot, on Seventh Street. Kind of a rough neighborhood, so I went in with her, helped her put her suitcases and hatbox in a locker, there.”

  Fowley glanced up from his notepad. Those suitcases should still be there, tucked away in a bus-station locker—what a prize they would make to an industrious reporter.

  “Then I took her to the Biltmore Hotel, over on Olive Street. . . .”

  Where she had called me, from the lobby, with her unsettling news of a not-so-blessed event.

  “. . . and I parked around the corner, on Fifth, walked her into the lobby. She said she was supposed to meet her sister there, and had me check at the desk for her, but the sister hadn’t checked in and didn’t seem to have a reservation, either. Anyway, it was getting late . . . almost six-thirty . . . so I just said goodbye and she smiled—sort of thanking me—and touched my arm, squeezed it a little. It was real . . . affectionate. Her eyes were so beautiful, bright and shining and so clear and blue, looking right at me, looking right through me . . . and I gave her a little kiss on the cheek and took off.”

  “And that’s the last time you saw her?”

  “Well, going out the door, I glanced back at her, just to wave one more time, and she was getting change at the cigar stand. I saw her heading to the telephone.”

  Was I the only call she’d made?

  I asked, “Can you think of anything else pertinent, Red?”

  “No. I have to tell ya, fellas, I’m beat. Beat to hell. I feel like I could sleep forever.”

  If he was lying, that would be arranged by the state of California.

  I glanced at Fowley, who had closed his notepad. “Why don’t you go find Mr. Palmer and ask to use the phone?”

  Fowley’s eyebrows rose. “Time to call Harry the Hat and Fat Ass? Share the wealth?”

  “I think so.”

  Fowley grinned like a greedy child, and damn near scampered out of the kitchen.

  “Got another cigarette?” Manley asked.

  “No. My associate’s got the pack—he’ll be back and fix you up, in a minute.”

  “You think I’m a jerk, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. But most men are.”

  “You, too?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He laughed. “Funny what a guy’ll do for a little head.”

  “What did you say?”

  “. . . Nothing.”

  I sat up. “You said you didn’t have sexual relations with Beth Short.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But she sucked you off, didn’t she, Red?”

>   He wouldn’t look at me, now. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, you did. Oh yes, you did.”

  From the dining room, Fowley called to me. “Heller!”

  I went to the archway between rooms. “What is it?”

  “The Hat and Fat Ass are on their way. . . . Go out to the car and grab your camera . . . Somebody’s here to see our boy.”

  Fowley had barely said that when Harriet Manley—blonde hair tucked up under a flowered kerchief, shapely frame tied into a dark topcoat, pretty features delicately made up—rushed in, brushing by him, dashing desperately toward the kitchen.

  When I returned with the Speed Graphic, Red and Harriet were in each other’s arms. She was looking up at him, her red-lipstick-glistening lips quivering, her blue eyes moist, touching his face with red-painted fingertips, her expression a mixture of tenderness and hurt. They held hands, they embraced, they kissed, and I caught it all on film.

  “He’s gonna get away with it,” Fowley said, shaking his head.

  He meant Manley, getting back into the good graces of his lovely wife; but I wondered if the same might apply to whoever had killed the Black Dahlia.

  11

  The next morning was a big one for the Examiner, with its exclusive coverage of the arrest of Robert “Red” Manley. This made up, some, for getting beat to the punch by the Herald-Express on the Black Dahlia nickname, which their reporter Bevo Means had unearthed in time for yesterday’s afternoon edition, thanks to a Long Beach druggist.

  Outside the Palmer home, we had staged some photos for Harry the Hat, showing the cops making the capture; those—and my shots of Red trying to make up with his lovely, hurting bride—made the competing papers’ coverage look sick. At the scene, Fowley had suggested to the Hat that he and Sergeant Brown take Manley over to the Hollenbeck Station, instead of downtown, since a swarm of reporters who’d been monitoring police calls would no doubt be waiting. And that’s what the Hat arranged—lie detector, relay teams from Homicide, and even the police psychiatrist were soon waiting at the neighborhood station. But we weren’t invited to the party.