Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  Flies were blowing me the raspberry.

  Fowley looked up from his notepad, raising his eyebrows, smirking as he said, “Oh hell no. This is about as routine as they come, Heller.”

  “Where’s the blood?”

  “The blood . . .” His eyes slitted, then widened. “Where the hell is the blood?” Suddenly Fowley was looking around like somebody who misplaced his car keys.

  From the sidewalk, I pointed to the two-part corpse. “Look at the wounds—no signs of coagulation.”

  Nodding slowly, Fowley said, “The grass isn’t bloody around the body, either—not even . . . you know, between the halves.”

  “No sign of any other internal fluids, either. See that grayish white knob? That’s her spine. It looks like some organs have been removed.”

  “What is this guy? A friggin’ vampire?”

  “Maybe a werewolf.”

  “Hey, that’s good!” Eyes popping, he scribbled that down. “That’ll make a swell headline . . . ‘Werewolf Murderer Butchers Beauty’!”

  “Mention me at the Pulitzer dinner.” Tentatively, I stepped closer; thinking like a detective gave me distance, and kept the nausea in check. “Can you see that vertebrae? Lower part of her.”

  “What about it?”

  “No bone granules. It’s a clean cut—not sawed . . . severed.”

  “Heller, look at this. . . .”

  “Get back, Fowley! You’re too close.”

  He was waving away the flies. “Aren’t those . . . bristles? God, they’re embedded right in her skin. Like off a wire brush!”

  “You may be right, and that would make sense. There’s no way she was killed here. This isn’t a murder scene—it’s a dump site. She was bisected, drained of blood, scrubbed clean, and carted and dumped here, off the main drag, probably before dawn.”

  I looked at the gray sky, wondering if it would keep its threat of rain and wash this lot clean of evidence. There was no rumble of thunder and this was, after all, California; it had been three weeks since it last rained. Still, maybe I needed to keep playing photographer. . . .

  Slowly I scanned the vacant lot and its scant scattering of refuse; then my eyes fixed on a discarded cement sack, its limp gray cloth draped in the grass a few feet from the girl’s head. Going over to it, but trying to keep my distance and not further pollute the scene, I saw on the cheap gray material a few droplets of what might have been dried, watery blood.

  “This may have been used to haul one half of her,” I said, and pointed out the possible blood drops to Fowley. “Not inside the sack, more like using it as a sling.”

  “Brother,” Fowley said, snugging his porkpie back down, “she musta been drained damn near dry.”

  I took a flash picture, retrieved the spent bulb.

  Returning to the sidewalk, I said, “There’s a few drops here, too. . . .” I recorded that with the Speed Graphic, then kept looking. “Hey! This might be a piece of luck. . . .”

  On the driveway to a house that had never been built was the dried-blood imprint of a shoe’s heel, half of one, anyway, partly obscured by an automobile tire track. Probably a man’s shoe, possibly a woman’s oxford.

  “So our killer pulled in here,” I said, kneeling over the partial heel print in the driveway, taking a flash picture, “made two trips hauling ‘garbage’ out of his trunk, making this heel print . . .” I glanced toward the street. “. . . then he took the hell off, backing over and partially smearing it. . . .”

  I got up and went to the street. Skid marks were burned into the gutter. Whether these were marks made by the car screeching to a stop, or peeling out, it was impossible to say. I took another picture.

  “He was headed south,” Fowley said.

  I nodded, rising.

  As if the skid marks had come to life, squealing tires behind us announced a patrol car pulling in. Two uniformed cops climbed quickly out.

  One of the cops was lanky, about thirty, the other was much younger, a rookie with a linebacker build; hard-eyed and pasty-faced under their uniform caps, both were undoing the safety straps of their holstered revolvers.

  “Take it easy, fellas!” Fowley called out, holding up his hands; mine were already up. “I’m a reporter on the Examiner.”

  Then Fowley reached inside his suitcoat pocket and the revolvers jack-in-the-boxed into the cops’ hands.

  “Jesus Christ, boys,” Fowley sputtered, “I said I’m a reporter! Fowley’s the name! Let me show you my i.d.”

  “Get ’em up,” the older one said, then to his partner added, “Check his i.d.”

  The young one made his way over to reach inside Fowley’s coat and have a look.

  “He’s okay,” the young cop said.

  Nobody bothered to check my i.d.—the camera in my hand was apparently sufficient: I was an Examiner photographer.

  Then the younger cop angled over toward the weeds, to get a gander at the drunk woman disturbing the peace. “Oh my God—Mike . . . Mike!”

  “What?”

  “This girl—poor girl, Jesus Mary, somebody’s cut her in half!”

  The older cop, holstering his revolver, had a look at the body in the weeds, joining his partner, who was weaving like he was the drunk.

  “Get on the radio, Jerry,” Mike told the boy, steadying him with a hand to a shoulder. “Get put straight through to the watch commander. Have ’em get a team over here pronto.”

  Jerry nodded, but paused, thinking about whether or not to puke, didn’t, and—on unsteady legs—somehow got over to the patrol car, reaching in for the dash mike, calling in a dead body “at the 390 location—probable homicide.”

  That seemed a fair assessment.

  “Monitoring police calls, Mr. Fowley?” the older cop asked.

  Fowley shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, hell, it’s legal, Officer.”

  “Compromising a crime scene isn’t.”

  Fowley was reaching in his pants pocket; but this time no revolver jumped into the hand of the man in blue. “Listen, Officer . . . I’d like to phone this in to my city editor.”

  “You just stay put.” But somehow the cop didn’t sound like he meant it; a ritual was in progress.

  Fowley handed the guy a folded-up tenspot. “Maybe you got change for this buck.”

  The patrolman took the tenspot, put it in his pocket, and came back with a nickel, which he flipped to Fowley.

  “Go make your call,” the cop said.

  This would have never happened in Chicago—a buck would have covered it. Maybe two.

  “Your photographer stays,” the cop said.

  “Fine,” Fowley said, “swell, not a problem.” Then he turned to me, took the Speed Graphic out of my hands, and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  “Thanks,” I said, just thrilled to be left here on deposit.

  Then I was alone with the two cops, and the dead girl, under a gray sky, waiting for all the other cops in L.A. to show up.

  “Poor kid,” the older cop said to the younger one, shaking his head. “That was a nice body ’fore it got butchered. What a waste.”

  Jerry swallowed; he was as pale as she was. “Geez . . . I wonder who she is?”

  “You mean you wonder who she was,” the older cop said.

  I wonder.

  2

  I suppose I would have been happier hearing my bride say she was pregnant if my girl friend hadn’t phoned that same day with similar news.

  Former girl friend, that is—what kind of heel do you take me for?

  “This is Elizabeth,” the voice on the phone had said. The voice was soft, low, husky, vaguely refined.

  It was early on a Thursday evening, six days prior to that vacant lot in Leimert Park.

  I was in the living room of our bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and my wife was sitting on the sofa next to me. The bungalow, a modest affair with a marble fireplace and French doors looking out on a private patio, was outfitted in plush furnishings that matched the peachy-pink walls and pink-and
-green floral carpeting. My wife’s dainty yet curvaceous frame was outfitted in a dark green bolero slacks suit with a white top; her open-toe-sandaled feet were on the Queen Anne coffee table, ankles crossed.

  “Who?” I asked the phone. The voice had been familiar but I didn’t immediately place it.

  “You know—Beth. Beth Short.”

  “Oh!” I glanced at my wife, who glanced back at me, pausing as she leafed through the latest Silver Screen magazine, in that chilling “Who is that, dear?” manner known by all men who’ve received a phone call from a woman while their wife is in the room.

  “I take it you remember me,” said the sultry voice on the phone.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  And here is why looking at my wife reminded me of who the girl on the phone was: they looked alike.

  The girl on the phone had lustrous brown hair so dark it almost appeared black; so did Peggy. The girl on the phone was not quite as petite as Peggy, but they had similarly creamy pale skin, slender shapely figures, and big beautiful eyes (Beth’s were blue-green, Peggy’s were Elizabeth Taylor violet). Both of them had fabulous smiles, slightly chubby chipmunk cheeks, with movie-star features reminiscent of screen songbird Deanna Durbin. And both liked to wear white flowers in their dark hair.

  I had known the former Peggy Hogan—my bride of almost a month—since 1938; but we had gotten serious in the summer of ’45, and soon were more or less engaged; then by the end of the next summer, we had broken it off. Rather, Peggy had broken it off, and gone gallivanting to Las Vegas to work for a friend of mine. Soon she and that “friend” were romantically inclined, which is to say reclined, so for about three and a half months—roughly the fall of ’46—I had been a spurned, rather bitter lover.

  And like so many a man enraged with the woman who cast him aside, I had promptly gotten myself involved with another woman whose striking physical resemblance to my lost love would allow me to bask in equal parts joy and misery.

  But my affair with Beth—and you will get the details of that, in time . . . patience—had been brief, and I had not given the little waitress with the movie-star looks a single thought since our final night together, back in Chicago, last November.

  Because in December, when Peggy’s affair came to an abrupt and rather unpleasant end, she ran back into my arms and I gratefully accepted the gesture. We were married a day later, in one of those shabby little Las Vegas wedding chapels, and spent several days thereafter frantically fucking, desperately reassuring each other that we were desperately in love with each other (as opposed to just plain desperate), never discussing, never mentioning the fact that she was mine on the colossal rebound.

  “You’re surprised to hear from me,” the girl on the phone said.

  “Yes,” I said, master of understatement that I am. “I didn’t think it was widely known I was in L.A., and the last time I saw you—”

  “Was in Chicago. But, Nathan—you knew I was a California girl. Remember, we talked about you opening an office here? You were going out in December. Remember?”

  I remembered. I only wished she hadn’t.

  “Listen,” the girl on the phone said, “I’m . . . I’m in trouble.”

  “What kind?” I asked, sitting up. “Kind you need a private detective for?”

  “No . . . you know. I’m in trouble.”

  “Trouble?” I asked numbly, knowing.

  “Nathan, I’m two months late.”

  Not private detective trouble, then; private dick trouble.

  “I see . . . and it’s, uh, it’s . . .” I glanced at my wife, who was still paging through the movie magazine, pausing intermittently to frown curiously at me.

  “It’s yours, Nathan,” the girl on the phone said. Beth said. Her low-pitched voice managed to seem worldly and youthful at the same time.

  I swallowed, smiling and shrugging at my wife, saying into the phone, “Forgive me, but . . . there’s no doubt of that?”

  “I haven’t been with anybody but you.” Dreadful certainty in the voice. “Not for over a month before we were together, and not at all since.”

  Fighting dizziness, I said, “Frankly, I don’t, uh, remember even . . . being with you.”

  Other than those incredible blow jobs. Yes, I am a classy guy.

  “Oh, Nathan, please, please don’t tell me . . .” The husky voice caught, a sob trapped in her throat. “. . . don’t tell me you were too drunk . . . too drunk to remember. . . .”

  What I did remember was that I had indeed been drunk that last night with her. Yes, sir, class act all the way.

  “This is a bad time,” I said.

  Now Peggy was looking at me, really frowning.

  “We have to talk,” Beth’s voice said.

  “Can’t this wait till business hours? I can be in my office at the Bradbury Building tomorrow morning.”

  “I know about your office,” Beth said. “How do you think I found you? Your friend Mr. Rubinski gave me your number.”

  My friend Mr. Rubinski and I would have to have a little talk.

  “I just need your help,” she said, “you know, to . . . get rid of it.”

  So she wanted money. What a shock.

  “It must be something, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Beth’s voice was saying, the sob gone now, replaced with a sort of purr. “I always dreamed of staying there.”

  “Yeah, it’s a swell place,” I said. Swell place to be staying when somebody was sizing you up for a shakedown.

  Peggy said, “Who is that?”

  I covered the mouthpiece, whispered, “A client.”

  Peggy smirked irritably and returned to her movie magazine.

  Into the phone, I said, “Where can I reach you?”

  The response had an edge in it: “I want to talk now.”

  “How about in an hour?

  “. . . All right. I’m at the Biltmore—Fifth and—”

  “I know where the Biltmore is.”

  “Why don’t you come down here, Nathan, and meet me in the lobby?”

  “That’s impossible. I’ll call you back.”

  “I’m in a pay phone.”

  “Well give me the number.”

  She did; I scribbled it down on a pad by the phone on the end table.

  “I’ll be waiting, Nathan,” Beth said. “Let it ring a long time—I’ll be sitting in the lobby, listening for your call. Don’t disappoint me.”

  The click in my ear was a relief—a momentary one. I felt sick to my stomach, head whirling. Pretty much the symptoms of morning sickness, but then this was evening, and I was a man. Sort of.

  “Do these people have to bother you at home?” Peggy asked.

  She looked lovely tonight—as she had on every day of our marriage, thus far—her dark hair up, a fetching pile of raven curls, her cute nose trailed with freckles, her wide full lips lushly lipsticked. No flower in her hair tonight; we’d have to settle for the cut flowers in crystal vases spotted about our cozy honeymoon shack.

  “I mean,” Peggy continued, movie magazine in her lap now, “you’re not even really working any cases in this town, are you? Isn’t that Fred’s job?”

  “I thought you liked it out here.”

  “I do. You know how I feel about that.”

  I knew well. We’d been here over three weeks, and Peggy had made it clear she liked Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. I had made it clear I did not: to me Hollywood was one big movie set, a world of cheap fancy facades, especially the people.

  I should have known I was in trouble the moment Peggy got a load of the Beverly Hills Hotel, with its pink-and-green stucco Mission-style-meets-Art-Moderne buildings strewn about grounds swarming with flowering shrubbery and colorful gardens. Staying at that hotel—a pastel, palm-flung make-believe land whose airy lobby was garnished with stunning floral arrangements and luxurious plants and overstuffed furniture for patrons with overstuffed wallets—was like living inside a movie, a sensation reinforced by having the likes of Ca
ry Grant, Hedy Lamarr, Jimmy Stewart and Rosalind Russell sitting at the table next to you, in the hotel’s main dining room or its Polo Lounge.

  Back in the late ’30s, when I met Peggy Hogan, she’d been studying at Sawyer Secretarial College, earning money on the side as an artist’s model, posing for Brown and Bigelow’s Chicago-based calendar artists. The business schooling was at her family’s insistence, as her ambition had been to become an actress. She had lived in Tower Town—at that time, the Chicago equivalent of Greenwich Village—and had some minor success in the Little Theater scene.

  By the time she and I got together, though, Peggy had abandoned her show business aspirations and used her considerable business skills—she was particularly adept at accounting—to help support her family, after her father’s second and fatal stroke. She was one of seven kids, and her only brother, Johnny, had been killed in the war.

  That burden was off her back now, however, because her uncle James Ragen—a client of mine—had died last August and left Peggy’s mother a tidy sum. Jim Ragen had been the head of Continental Press, a racing wire service used by bookies nationwide, and he had died—despite my best efforts to prevent it—at the hands of “rival business interests.”

  Close to her uncle and looking up to him, Peggy had been around that kind of people all her life—underworld figures, I mean (she even at one time dated a Capone bodyguard)—and had an unfortunate propensity toward fancying the “glamorous” world of bigtime gangsters.

  I guess my reputation for having mob ties myself—really exaggerated—maybe lent me a little of that same shady allure, from Peggy’s point of view. So maybe I shouldn’t have complained about her yen for the likes of her late uncle, and Capone bodyguards, and did I mention the friend of mine she’d run off to Las Vegas with was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel?

  All of which is to say, Peggy had been around, yet at the same time was naive about certain things. She could be impressed by the phony glitz of Ben Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel, the aura of excitement, danger and affluence that emanated from bigtime gamblers and gangsters, surrounded as they were by fawning sycophants and beautiful women in jewels and fur.