Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  He smiled faintly, shook his head. “The cops won’t bother us.”

  “Yeah? Low friends in high places, Mark?”

  A smirk lurked in the puffy face. “Does that offend your sensibilities, Nate? I thought you were from Chicago.”

  “Not offended in the least. I figure, if you’re running a call-girl operation out of the Gardens, then you’d need some police pro—”

  He interrupted sharply: “The Florentine Gardens is not a brothel.” The indignation in the mellow voice surprised me.

  “Well, some people seem to think Elizabeth Short was a hooker.”

  He snorted a laugh. “They didn’t know her, then. She was a manipulative little bitch, yes—hooker, no. She’d have to give it up to be a hooker, wouldn’t she?”

  “You’re saying she never paid her rent on her back?”

  The smirk curled into a sneer. “She was a conniving little prick tease. Oh, she’d put her face in your lap, but that’s as far as it went. She stole money from me, and she stole my address book, too—has that turned up?”

  This seemed to worry him.

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “If that fucking thing gets in the wrong hands,” Lansom said, eyes darting in thought, “like your boss, Richardson, well . . .”

  “You’d be royally screwed, Mark?”

  Lansom’s gaze settled on me like a rash. It took so long for him to speak again, I thought one of us was going to fall asleep first. “I don’t think I have anything else to share with you, Nate . . . about the Short girl or otherwise.”

  “What about her and Orson Welles?”

  He shrugged, looked out at the sun glimmering on the surface of the blue water in his white pool.

  “What was her Italian boy friend’s name?” I pressed. “The hood she got fired over?”

  He shook his head. The interview was over.

  “Well, thanks for the refreshment, Mark,” I said, and had one last sip of rum and Coke. Rising, I nodded toward the girls. “Quite a collection you’ve got there. I’m in the wrong business—next life, I’m gonna be a landlord.”

  I was walking around the table, heading for the archway between wings of the house, leading out to the street, when I noticed a familiar figure ambling through that same archway—not a shapely one, either.

  In a baggy brown suit and a crumpled fedora that would have looked fine on a horse, Sergeant Finis Brown was heading toward the pool area. No sign of his partner, Harry the Hat—just Fat Ass, shambling on over.

  “Maybe the police have caught up with you after all,” I said to Lansom, who was frowning as Brown approached.

  “What are you doing here, Heller?” Brown growled at me, his round face splotchy.

  “Following a lead,” I said.

  The chunky detective thumped my chest with three thick fingers. “You stay away from Mr. Lansom.”

  Lansom was sighing, shaking his head. “Sergeant Brown, Mr. Heller was just leaving. Let’s not make a scene in front of the girls.”

  Ignoring that, Brown thumped my chest again. “You get me, Heller?”

  “Oh, I get you, Brownie—this explains why you coppers haven’t traced Beth Short to the Florentine Gardens . . . Thad Brown’s brother is Mark Lansom’s boy.”

  The splotches disappeared in a flush of red, in the midst of which bloodshot brown eyes glowed like coals.

  “This ain’t your town, Heller,” he said, his nose almost touching mine. “And it ain’t your case.”

  I smiled in his face. “So what’s the story, Brownie? Mark here is running girls, and maybe Mickey Cohen gets a taste, and you’re the bag man?”

  Brown grabbed me by the lapels and was lifting me up when I kneed him in the balls.

  The girls around the pool were gathering their tops, their towels, their lotion, their things, scurrying inside.

  While Fat Ass was rolling around down there on the patio brick, clutching himself, howling in pain, I turned to Lansom and said, “In the weeks before she died, Beth Short was trying to raise money. She stole some from you, Mark—money and an address book.”

  “Get outa here, Heller,” Lansom said, not looking at me.

  I had to raise my voice to be heard over Brown’s cries of agony. “Beth Short was trying to shake you down, wasn’t she, Mark? She knew you were running hookers out of the Gardens, and she stole an address book filled with your best customers.”

  “You’re wrong. Go away.”

  I leaned a hand on the table, looking right at Lansom; he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “But was that worth killing her over? You couldn’t have done that yourself, could you, Mark, not that grisly piece of surgery. How about Fat Ass here?”

  And as I gestured at Brown, I saw him getting to his feet, recovering faster than I thought he would, or could, and I heard a cry of pain and anger, a deep wounded roar like a gored rhino, and then the chunky cop was charging right at me, tackling me, taking me down onto the brick patio.

  I hit hard, on my back, the wind whooshing out of me, and I was helpless for a while, long enough for Brown to try to take his revenge. Instead of just staying on top of me and beating the shit out of me, like any sensible son of a bitch, he clambered to his feet so he could rear back and kick me, kick me in the balls like Ihadhim. . .

  . . . was the point, but it didn’t take. I had my wind back and rolled to one side and caught Brown’s brown shoe as the kick swished by me, and grasped his ankle and yanked, setting him down, hard, on his ass.

  He cried out, “Fuck me!”

  Then I jumped on top of him, as if I were accepting his offer, and instead slammed my right fist into his face three times, turning his nose into a sodden red mass, blood streaming out his crushed nostrils. He was barely conscious when I took him by the collar and belt and dragged him to the pool and threw him in.

  Well, shoved him in—he was too fat and heavy for anything else, and I was strong, but not strong enough to make that grand a gesture.

  Fat Ass flapped around in there—it wasn’t deep—swearing at me, but not coming after me, streaky ribbons of blood from his shattered nose destroying the pool’s perfect blue.

  “Do you think that was smart?” Lansom asked, as I collected my hat.

  “Tell him the next time he lays a hand on me,” I said, trembling, “I’ll kill him.”

  Lansom studied me. His blue eyes were hard in his puffy face. “I believe you would.”

  “Mark, you’re a good judge of character.”

  I was dusting myself off, breathing hard, moving through the arched passageway toward San Carlos Street when Ann Thomson—still in the polka-dot bikini—bounced out a front door and up to me.

  “I saw everything from the kitchen,” she said, eyes wide and flashing, smiling like a happy kid. “You’re really something.”

  “You’re not exactly chopped liver yourself, kiddo.”

  She touched my arm. “You want to know the name of that Italian boy friend of hers?”

  “Is it Savarino?”

  She blinked in surprise. “Why, yes! He was involved in that Mocambo robbery. She met him in a cafe just a few blocks from here. . . . If you knew his name, why did you ask?”

  “Because until you told me,” I said, nodding goodbye, “it was just a hunch.”

  13

  Aggie Underwood and I both ordered the corned beef hash, one of the Brown Derby’s specialties. We shared a booth in the bustling restaurant, complete with framed movie-star caricatures and signature derby lampshade throwing soft yellow light. It took connections to land a booth here at the height of lunch hour; but my diminutive red-haired companion—schoolteacherly as ever in a white-dotted blue dress—was feared and respected in Hollywood.

  We were in the Brown Derby #2, the non-hat-shaped one on Vine Street, and Aggie had already pointed out the irony that two of the four caricatures sharing our booth were Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, stars of The Blue Dahlia.

  “I would have sworn Bevo Means cooked that ‘Black Dahlia’ mo
niker up,” she said, between bites of hash, “really too good to be true—but it keeps turning up.”

  “Yeah, we heard it from the French girl down in San Diego,” I said, just poking at my food.

  “Tell me why I should have accepted this invitation,” she said, eyes hard and glittering behind jeweled, dark-framed glasses, tiny mouth with tiny teeth smiling like a small predator, “when you’re working for the competition.”

  I shrugged, sipped my Coke—no rum this time. “The Examiner, the Herald-Express . . . it’s all in Mr. Hearst’s family.”

  She laughed humorlessly, spoke through a mouthful of hash. “Have you guys interviewed the father yet?”

  “Elizabeth Short’s father? No. Have you?”

  She nodded. “This afternoon’s edition—guy’s a fourteen-carat crackpot. Was an entrepreneur of sorts, back in the late twenties, building miniature golf courses; then when the depression hit, he went bust, like everybody else. So guess what Cleo Short does when times get hard?”

  “That’s his name? A man named Cleo?”

  “Yeah, Cleo.” Jaw jutting, she pointed her fork at me. “Guess what he does? Fakes his own suicide, and disappears!”

  “Jesus—how’d he manage faking his death?”

  “Left his car running on a bridge, with a suicide note, next to those icy waters. Years later, he writes his family and says, ‘Surprise, I’m not dead,’ and invites his daughters to come visit him.”

  “Did they?”

  “Over time. The mother was less than charmed, never spoke to the son of a bitch again.”

  “How about Beth?”

  “His daughter Elizabeth came to see him, in ’43, when he was working in the shipyard at Mare Island, and she stayed with him for a while . . . Deal was, she would keep house for him, and he’d help her look for work. In a few weeks, he threw her out.”

  “Why?”

  The little reporter waved her fork like a wand. “If I can remember his quote from my article, something like, ‘She was a lazy, greedy, boy-crazy little tramp.’ ”

  “Seems pretty broken up about losing his daughter.”

  “Says he hadn’t seen her since he tossed her out on her behind in ’43, and had no desire to ever see her again. ‘She went her way, I went mine!’ Even refused to identify the body. Officially Beth Short’s still a Jane Doe.”

  I shook my head, pushed my half-eaten plate of hash aside. “The mother can do the unenviable deed—she’s arriving this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, I heard—Jim Richardson’s flying her out.” She smiled like a pixie, eyes narrow and twinkling behind the jeweled frames. “You know where the father turned up, Nate?”

  “No, Aggie—where did the father turn up?”

  “In an apartment house on South Kingsley Drive, near Leimert Park.”

  If I’d opened my eyes any wider, they’d have fallen out. “What?”

  She was smiling smugly. “Fifteen minutes from that vacant lot.”

  “Christ, he’s sounding like a suspect.”

  Aggie shrugged. “Harry the Hat’s treating him that way. I don’t buy it, though. Cleo’s a pipsqueak, a mousy little bastard.”

  “Yeah, well, still waters run wacky . . . and as screwed-up as Elizabeth Short was, Aggie, how surprised would you be to have incest show up in her family history?”

  “Not very.” She pushed her plate—cleaned—to one side, lighted up a cigarette. “But it’s one thing for a loving papa to sex up his baby girl, and quite another for him to carve her up. . . . You having dessert?”

  We ate cheesecake and Aggie asked the obvious.

  “So why take me out on a date, Nate, when I look like a munchkin in a Harpo Marx wig, and you’re in a townful of beautiful dames, one of whom you’re newly married to?”

  “Well, in the first place, I think you’re a beautiful dame.”

  “Right answer.”

  “And in the second—Hell, Aggie, you know why. I need the kind of information only the best crime reporter in town might have.”

  She grinned, flicking ash onto her cleaned cheesecake plate. “That’s a lovely compliment, you lying son of a bitch, but you could talk to Sid Hughes or half a dozen others at the Examiner, and get what you need, and not come to a rival reporter.”

  “Hell, I’m not a reporter—I’m doing some investigative work for the Examiner, yes, but I’m going down some private roads.”

  Aggie’s eyes narrowed and she began to look at me differently. “Care to be more specific?”

  “Not to a real reporter, I don’t. Look, everybody in town is pursuing the sex-crime angle . . . understandably . . . but I’m chasing down a few stray rumors that put Beth Short next to some hoodlums. Nobody but me seems to be looking at that girl’s slashed mouth and coming up with ‘informer.’ ”

  This time her smile was like a tiny, enigmatic gash in her face, which opened as she asked, “You do understand why, don’t you, Nate?”

  “I think so. The papers like the sex-crime angle—it’s a better story that way. And the cops are so thick with the hoods that they’d rather not look under certain rocks.”

  “You’re not wrong.” Aggie was nodding. Her firm jaw lifted and, short though she was, she nevertheless seemed to gaze down at me. “You ever hear of the Georgette Bauerdorf murder?”

  “No.”

  “Socialite killed a couple years ago—pretty, apple-cheeked girl, kind of wild . . . she was strangled and raped and her body was found facedown in her bathtub.”

  I frowned, leaned toward her. “Are you saying there are similarities to the Dahlia murder?”

  “A few. It’s widely assumed Beth Short’s body was dismembered in a bathtub . . . Perhaps the Bauerdorf girl’s killer was planning to do the same thing, but got interrupted.”

  Leaning back again, I mused, “Beautiful dead nude girl, strangled . . . I can see it. But it doesn’t jump out at me.”

  Cigarette in her fingers, she gestured emphatically. “How does this grab you? The Bauerdorf girl and Beth Short were pals—they hung out at the Hollywood Canteen together.”

  For a few moments I just sat there, trying to absorb the words; this entire conversation—about grisly murders and their aftermath—seemed oddly abstract in the soft-yellow glow of the subdued Derby lighting.

  “Aggie,” I said finally, “that’s major—is that in the afternoon edition, too?”

  “No. That story got killed deader than the Dahlia.” She flicked ash onto the plate, adding casually, “As a matter of fact, I’m off the Dahlia story.”

  I sat forward. “What in hell . . . ?”

  “Got my ass yanked right off. The order came from upstairs—way upstairs.”

  “No! Old Man Hearst?”

  “William Randolph himself. Seems the girl’s father, George Bauerdorf, is a close friend of the Old Man’s, and Bauerdorf doesn’t want his daughter’s death, and her loose ways presumably, splashed all over the papers again, further soiling the good family name. Then there’s the Dagwood situation.”

  “Arthur Lake, you mean—Dagwood in the movies. He knew Beth Short. That I’ve heard.”

  “That’s right. But have you heard this, cutiepie? Lake knew the Bauerdorf girl, too. Met both murdered girls at the Hollywood Canteen.”

  My eyes were about to roll out of my head, again. “Shit, is Dagwood Bumstead the Black Dahlia slayer?”

  She laughed, once, pointing at me with the cigarette in hand. “Exactly the headline everybody wants to avoid. Lake has an alibi, and I’ve spoken to him—he’s a harmless, good-natured semilush. But he’s also married to the niece of Marion Davies. . . .”

  “Hearst’s mistress.”

  “That’s right. Hearst doesn’t want Dagwood’s name dragged through the mud, and he doesn’t want the Bauerdorf family to suffer through any more nasty publicity—their daughter’s tragic death was enough, after all.”

  “And so you’re off the Dahlia story?”

  She sighed, pretended to smile. “Starting tomorr
ow, I’m sitting at my desk with my embroidery hoop and needle. Nothing else on my docket . . . so, Nate, if there’s anything I can help you with, why not? Just don’t bother taking Dagwood and the Bauerdorf murder to Jim Richardson . . . the one man Jim doesn’t cross is Hearst.”

  Aggie had a cocktail—a stinger—and I had another Coke, still with no rum. My head was spinning enough from Aggie’s revelations.

  Finally, I got around to what I’d brought her here to ask her: “What do you know about the accused Mocambo robbers?”

  “Well,” she said, with a shrug, “four of them have been arrested—first, this Bobby Savarino and that Hassau character. Then a couple days later, Al Green and Marty Abrams. But it’s a bigger group than that—probably another half dozen stellar citizens in that gang.”

  “It’s a heist crew?”

  “Yeah, they pull down medium-size scores all over town. Operate out of Green’s bar and grill on North McCadden—the McCadden Cafe, it’s called. Green is short for Greenberg, by the way—you oughta ask Mickey Cohen or your pal Ben Siegel about him . . . He’s an old Murder, Inc., guy from back East.”

  “What do you make of Savarino’s yarn about being approached to hit Cohen?”

  Wincing, she shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of it . . . and he clammed up, almost immediately. Are you trying to make some connection to the Dahlia?”

  The waiter delivered the check and I took it.

  “You’re not on the story anymore, Aggie—remember?”

  She reached across the table and patted my hand. “Whatever this is really about, Nate . . . good luck.”

  I didn’t say anything—Aggie Underwood had a nose for news. I was just glad she was my pal—and off the Dahlia case.

  Before I left the Derby, I ducked into a phone booth and called Fred Rubinski. I wanted him to get out his black book of celebrity addresses and set up a meet for me.