Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 22

  The door opened and a man in a white jacket and green tie and brown tweed trousers stepped in, drawing his head back and blinking as he saw me sitting there. He was in his sixties, somewhat pudgy, with a salt-and-pepper mustache—neatly trimmed, as was his full head of gray hair—and regular features, including rheumy green eyes behind wireframed glasses.

  He said, “Oh! Please excuse me.”

  And he went back out.

  I sat there, looking at the closed door, and perhaps two minutes later, he came in and blinked at me again.

  This time I stood, however, and stopped him before he could rush out. “Dr. Dailey?”

  He looked at me carefully. “Yes? Am I interrupting?”

  “No. I was waiting for you. My name is Nathan Heller. I just spoke to your receptionist, your nurse? I wanted a moment of your time.”

  “Certainly.” He smiled, nodded. “Certainly.”

  He took his place behind the desk and folded his hands. “What can I do for you, Mr. Heller?”

  I explained that I was the president of the A-1, that my Chicago agency had merged with Rubinski’s.

  “And I understand we’ve been sending you some referrals,” I said.

  The doctor frowned in seeming thought. “Have you?”

  “Yes. But I wanted to ask you about a specific young woman—Elizabeth Short.”

  That name—the hottest topic on the lips of just about every newspaper reader in Los Angeles—got no visible reaction out of him. He just shook his head. “I don’t recall that particular patient. I’m afraid I’m growing a bit forgetful, Mr. . . . uh . . .!”

  “Heller. Elizabeth Short was her name—she may have been an old family friend.”

  Nodding, eyes narrowed behind the wireframes, he admitted, “Now that does sound familiar. . . . Not the name, but . . .”

  “Did you practice medicine in New England, Dr. Dailey, before coming to California?”

  He sat up straight. “Did I? I could have. . . .”

  “Surely, Dr. Dailey, you can remember where you practiced medicine.”

  “Certainly. Medford Memorial Hospital.”

  This response had been crisp, immediate.

  I said, “Then Elizabeth Short did come here to make an appointment.”

  “Did she?”

  “Pretty girl, with black hair, fair complexion—she wore a lot of makeup.”

  “Like a geisha!” he said, snapping his fingers. He stood. The eyes seemed alert, suddenly. “Let me show you my jade collection.”

  “Uh . . . all right.”

  The little doctor moved quickly to the cabinet, where I followed him, and for several minutes he described the pieces in detail, in particular a tiny Fei Tsui jade dragon that was particularly valuable.

  “Should be in a safe deposit box, I suppose,” he said, shaking his head, “but I just couldn’t bear to hide away such beauty.”

  Throughout this mini-lecture, Dailey was entirely coherent and focused; it was no great stretch to see that he’d been a professor. And his hands, gesturing confidently, suggested the respected surgeon he’d once been.

  “What was your name?” he asked me, as he settled himself behind his desk again, and I took my chair.

  “Yes, what is your name?” another voice asked—female, strong, sultry.

  She stood framed in the doorway—unmistakably the amazon Fred had referred to—tall, perhaps as much as six feet, in white smock and pants that neither emphasized nor hid her generously well-shaped form. Not beautiful, exactly, Dr. Maria Winter was indeed “handsome,” her oval face home to large, languid yet piercing dark brown eyes, her nose aquiline, her mouth thin lipped and touched lightly red, her jaw firm, like her expression. Brown hair sat in a bun atop the rather oversize head; her smooth, clear complexion had an olive cast.

  “I’m Nathan Heller,” I said, standing. “I gave your receptionist my card—I’m president of the A-1 Detective Agency . . . your neighbor.”

  I offered her a hand and she shook it, firmly, introducing herself.

  “I’m afraid Sharon neglected to tell me you were here,” she said. “We’re closing for the day. Is this a business matter, or—”

  “Since my agency is sending referrals to you, I thought I should pay a courtesy call.”

  “How kind.”

  “But I also have a few questions about one of your patients.”

  And I went back and sat down. “Dr. Dailey was just telling me about working in Massachusetts.”

  She was still framed in the doorway, staring at me as if from two glass eyes.

  Dailey turned to her and said, “Would you mind if I showed the gentleman my jade collection?”

  Her mouth formed a smile, as she gazed at him, but it didn’t soften the hard, brittle mask of her face. She strode to him, put a hand on his shoulder—gently—and said, “You’ve had a hard day, a long day.”

  He touched the hand on his shoulder, beamed up at her lovingly. “Shall we go home, dear?”

  “Soon.” Her hand still on the doctor’s shoulder, she stared at me coldly. “Mr. Heller, Dr. Dailey is a fine man, and a fine physician . . . but he has his good days and bad, and his sapient moments and his . . .”

  “Not so sapient moments?” I offered.

  “The doctor is suffering from encephalomalacia, cerebral and coronary arteriosclerosis, and threat of myocardial infarction.”

  “He’s senile and at risk of heart attack.”

  “Yes.”

  Dailey was smiling at me, hands folded, seemingly oblivious to the conversation we were having about him.

  “The doctor and I work side by side,” she said. “He is often quite lucid, and—together—we are able to help many patients.”

  “I trust the doctor isn’t performing surgery, any longer.”

  “He is not . . . and as for the, uh, procedure in question . . .”

  “Abortions, you mean.”

  The eyes tightened in the terrible handsome mask. “Mr. Heller, I’m surprised a man in your line of work would be so indiscreet. Surely I don’t have to tell you that a private office can easily be bugged with dictaphones?”

  I smiled, shrugged. “My understanding is that you’re protected.”

  She folded her arms over the shelf of her breasts; she looked like an annoyed genie. “Be that as it may, the procedure is performed either by myself or by a physician’s assistant.”

  “Not a physician?”

  “An assistant with sufficient medical training to safely perform this simple procedure.”

  “Skip the hard sell, Dr. Winter. I know you’re good; otherwise you and Doc Dailey wouldn’t be the film colony’s favorite mistake correctors.”

  A frown disrupted the perfect smoothness of her face. “Is the referral fee we’ve been paying Mr. Rubinski in your view insufficient? I would hope you stand by the terms your partner and I negotiated, when—”

  “No, that’s fine. I’m here about Elizabeth Short. You know—the Black Dahlia.”

  Only the slightest twitch around her mouth indicated that what I had said had thrown her in any way. She said, simply, “I read the papers.”

  I leaned back in the chair. “Don’t play games, Dr. Winter. I know the Short woman was a patient, or anyway a prospective one—she knew Dr. Dailey back in her hometown. She must’ve heard his name bandied about among her Hollywood girl friends, as the reliable quack to go to for ‘the procedure’ . . . and recognized the name as that of an old family friend.”

  Dr. Winter came around the desk, sat on the edge of it, looming over me. Dailey was smiling, giving no indication of whether he was following any of this or not.

  She said, “Confidentiality between patient and doctor is a sacred pact, Mr. Heller.”

  “Get off your high horse, lady—this is an abortion mill . . . kindly old doc, respectable offices, and fancy jade collection don’t change that.”

  “I’m not going to confirm or deny Elizabeth Short as one of our patients.”

  “This
a murder case, get it? That alone should be enough to catch your attention; but it’s also not just any murder case. If the Short girl gets connected back to you, and this office . . . and then the A-1 office . . . we’re—”

  The door opened. A tall, broad-shouldered man in doctor’s whites leaned in and said, “Excuse me—am I needed any longer?”

  “Dr. Dailey and I are done for the day, Floyd,” Dr. Winter said, “but I’d like you to finish putting away those supplies, if you haven’t already.”

  “Glad to,” Floyd said. Though clearly in his early forties, he had a boyish look, his hair blond, his eyes ice-blue. “That’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “Thank you, Floyd,” she said. “Then lock up, would you?”

  “Sure,” he said, and slipped out, closing the door behind him.

  “Your physician’s assistant?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said; impatience tinged her tone. “Now, Mr. Heller, if I can assure you that Elizabeth Short was not referred to us by the A-1, will that allay your trepidation?”

  “Then you’re saying she was a patient?”

  Her gaze was withering, her sigh disdainful. “No, I am not. Is that all, Mr. Heller?”

  I said for the moment it was, and shook the smiling Dr. Dailey’s hand, complimenting him on his jade collection—he offered to take me over and give me a closer look, but I declined—and nodded to Dr. Winter, who nodded back, icily, and opened the door for me. After that, I found my own way out.

  In the corridor, I leaned against the balcony railing, feeling dizzy: it wasn’t vertigo; I wasn’t even looking over the edge. I was still gazing at the frosted glass doorway of the Dailey practice.

  Their physician’s assistant, Floyd, had not seemed to notice me, when he interrupted my conference with the two doctors; but I had noticed him.

  Only his name wasn’t Floyd, not really: it was Lloyd.

  Lloyd Watterson.

  Also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.

  16

  Union Station’s courtyard, with its peaceful patio of trees, bushes, benches, and flagstones, provided a less frantic setting for farewells and welcomes than most big-city train stations. With sunset approaching, cool blue shadows touched the low-slung sprawl of red-tile-roofed white stucco buildings, overseen by a formidable clock tower.

  I was surprisingly relaxed, and not at all tired, as I moved through the immense ticket room, with its tall, colored-mosaic ceiling, whistling a tuneless tune as I fell in with the flow of the hurrying crowd, passing through the soundproofed elegance of the waiting room with its leather chairs where bums slept and passengers waited. The cavelike, well-lighted passenger tunnel, with its eight ramps feeding sixteen tracks, echoed with footsteps, conversation, and the jolts and screeches of trains lurching in and out of the station. I stopped at the ramp where the Union Pacific had just come in, and saw Eliot Ness in the process of tipping a colored porter who was handing him a single buckled bag.

  Eliot looked both older and smaller than I remembered. His freckled, Scandinavian boyishness was largely obscured in a pouchy, puffy face; he was in his mid-forties, but—I was a little shocked to see—looked more like his mid-fifties. Eliot’s gray suit was typically well tailored, with a gray-and-shades-of-blue-striped tie, and a snapbrim fedora of a darker gray, a trenchcoat folded over the arm.

  Moving up the ramp, the aging Untouchable spotted me and smiled; but his gray eyes seemed troubled. He’d had a long train trip, which could take it out of anybody; still, I could tell this was more than that—something was wrong.

  Me, I was jingling the change in my pocket and whistling my tuneless tune.

  “You’re in a pleasant mood,” Eliot said, as we shook hands and I grinned at him.

  “Yeah, I’ve had a productive day.”

  The troubled gray eyes tightened. “Well, I’m afraid I’m going to spoil it for you. Can we take a moment, before you take me to the hotel? We need to talk privately.”

  The best place to talk privately, of course, is in public. The station fronted Alameda Street and I guided Eliot a few steps west, to the Plaza, that beaten-down circular patch of grass, pigeons, and spreading magnolias where Los Angeles was born, with the neighboring shabby relics to prove it. To the east the curio stores and restaurants of old Chinatown lurked; to the north sprawled Olivera Street, where Peggy and I had explored the bazaarlike tourist-trap marketplace; to the west stood the adobe walls of the Old Mission Church, adorned with a marker of historic significance, as well as graffiti (“KILROY WAS HERE!”); and at the south loomed the twenty-story white tower of City Hall, the present presenting its middle finger to the past.

  We sat on a bench with pigeons scavenging at our feet—I had bought some popcorn and a cold bottle of Coke from a street vendor, and Eliot was sipping a paper cup of black coffee into which he’d poured something from a silver flask. Around us, on nearby benches, elderly Mexicans in food-stained shirts and well-worn dungarees sat staring blankly, as if wondering how their city had managed to fall into Anglo-Saxon hands; a few others had abandoned such empty speculation and were curled up and enjoying a siesta. A stone bench, circling the park, seemed the province of bums and winos. Dusk settled a cool, soothing hand on the indigents and on two old friends, about to share secrets.

  “My dad would have been comfortable here,” I said.

  Eliot blinked at that. “What?”

  “Lot of the big labor demonstrations are held in this plaza. Pop would have been in his element.”

  “Do you still carry his gun?”

  “Yeah—the nine-millimeter. Well, not at the moment . . . It’s in my suitcase. I probably should be carrying it—this is turning into that kind of job.”

  I told him about punching out Fat Ass Brown.

  “Christ, they’re corrupt out here,” he said, shaking his head. “Worse than when I took over in Cleveland.”

  “At least when the Chicago cops do want to solve a crime—as opposed to commit one—they can pull it off.”

  “What about Harry Hansen?”

  “The Hat’s a real detective.” I sipped my Coke; the bag of popcorn was propped between my thighs and I alternated eating a kernel or two, and pitching one for the birds to fight over. “Hansen’s one of the smart, honest ones, even if he is a glory hound.”

  Eliot sighed. “I’m almost sorry to hear that he’s competent.”

  “Why?”

  He watched the pigeons pecking the popcorn I was pitching them. He sipped his coffee. Then he looked at the darkening sky for several long seconds, and finally at me, and said, “Nate . . . I have terrible news.”

  “Personal or professional?”

  “Both.” He shook his head. “This is something we have to keep to ourselves . . . something we have to do ourselves, work on in a . . . sub rosa manner.”

  “Of course.”

  “Nate, you’re the only one I can trust—”

  “Eliot. Go on. Spill.”

  He shrugged, gestured with both hands—no way to soften this blow: “Lloyd Watterson is in California.”

  “Really.”

  His brow clenched and the gray eyes were confused at my lack of reaction; nonetheless, he pressed on. “After we spoke on the phone, I figured I should check out Watterson’s status—personally. I went to the Sandusky Soldiers and Sailors Home, where Lloyd was in the psychopathic ward.”

  “I wasn’t aware Lloyd was a veteran.”

  “He wasn’t, but his father, Dr. Clifford Watterson, was. Anyway, I learned that because Lloyd was signed in as a patient voluntarily, he could be signed out the same way.”

  I frowned. “That wasn’t part of the deal you cut.”

  “Certainly wasn’t.” Finished with his coffee, he wadded up the paper cup and pitched it perfectly into a nearby trash receptacle. He turned to me and the gray eyes had hardened into steel. “Lloyd was to be committed, kept off the streets, completely out of circulation—and now I’ve learned that from August 1938, when he entered
the mental hospital, until September 1944, he was signed out by his father eight times, for periods up to three weeks.”

  “Jesus. . . . What about after September ’44?”

  He breathed in heavily, breathed out the same way. “His father died in August of that year. And then in September 1944, Lloyd signed himself out . . . and hasn’t been back since.”

  Something wasn’t adding up. “What about those taunting postcards you received, postmarked Sandusky?”

  Eliot helped himself to some of my popcorn, pitched it to the pigeons. “I did some good old-fashioned poking around—asked orderlies and patients about Lloyd. Turns out the Ohio Penitentiary Honor Farm shares certain facilities with the Soldiers and Sailors Home. Seems Lloyd struck up a friendship with a guy named Alex Koch, a convicted burglar.”

  “Is this Koch still serving his sentence?”

  “No. He’s been out for some time. I tracked him down to a rooming house in Cleveland. He was afraid, at first, when he saw me—and he wouldn’t cooperate unless I assured him he wouldn’t be considered an accomplice after the fact.”

  “Accomplice to what?”

  A wry little half-smile formed in the puffy face. “Sometime, in the course of their intimate friendship, Lloyd confessed to his friend Alex . . . bragged, it would seem . . . that he was indeed the Kingsbury Run butcher. Uh, as you may recall, Lloyd’s sexual preferences are . . . unusual.”

  I shrugged. “His gate swings both ways. Plus, there’s that little fetish he has—most guys like to get a little head; they just don’t keep a spare one in the icebox.”

  Eliot merely nodded. “I would call bisexuality combined with necrophilia a rather distinctive ‘fetish.’ And, although Alex did not specifically admit to this, I gathered that he and Lloyd were more than just friends. In any case, they did each other favors.”