Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  “Oh shit . . .” Lloyd said.

  “You and your daddy really fooled me, Lloyd,” Eliot said pleasantly. He planted himself in front of Watterson, arms folded, his expression bland, even benign. “Really put one over.”

  A sickly smile formed on the perpetually immature face, the disturbingly sensual lips quivering. “I got help from the doctors, Mr. Ness! I’m better now.”

  “Is that right? From what I gather, you’re back to your old bad habits.”

  Looking up at Eliot the way a child seated in the corner looks up at an approaching razor-strop-wielding parent, Watterson shook his head, and kept shaking it as he said, “No . . . no. I’m well. I’m cured of that sickness. I had therapy, Mr. Ness. I worked with the doctors. I don’t have those urges anymore. I’m helping people now.”

  Eliot’s eyes frowned and his lips smiled. “Performing abortions is helping people?”

  Watterson nodded emphatically. “The women who want them, who need them, think so.” Then he frowned at the unfairness of it all. “What other kind of work can I find? I’m not licensed.”

  It was damn near what Eliot himself had said.

  Standing off to one side, I put in, “How did you wind up working for Dr. Dailey, Lloyd?”

  Watterson turned his head to look at me, the rest of his body motionless, strapped to the chair. “He and Papa both went to Harvard. They were in the same class. After Papa died, I came out here and asked Dr. Dailey if he would take me in . . . let me be his physician’s assistant. I went to medical school, you know.”

  Eliot said, “You flunked out, Lloyd.”

  Watterson looked up at Eliot again; his expression seemed almost embarrassed. “I had good grades till I started drinking too much. It made my hands shake. I don’t drink at work.”

  “But you still drink?”

  “I drink—I drink at night with friends, in bars, like everybody. But Mr. Ness, I don’t have those unnatural urges, anymore. I don’t get out of control.”

  Eliot leaned in nearly nose to nose with Watterson. “Cutting a woman in half, Lloyd, that isn’t losing control?”

  Watterson turned his head away, as if Eliot had bad breath. “I didn’t do that.”

  “Do what, Lloyd?”

  Now he looked at Eliot. “Kill that woman in the papers—that ‘Blue Dahlia’ woman.”

  Eliot sighed, stood straight again, rocking on his heels. “Black Dahlia, Lloyd. That kill has your fingerprints all over it—severed torso, body drained of blood, washed clean. . . .”

  Watterson’s expression was one of wounded indignation. “But she had her head on! The papers said she had her head on. That’s not my style.”

  Eliot reached out and grabbed Watterson by the shirt, catching some of the twine. “Isn’t it, Lloyd? Or did you leave that poor girl’s head on her shoulders and carve that grin in her face so you could laugh at me, through her?”

  “No!”

  “Wasn’t that death grin you cut in her face just the latest smart-ass postcard you sent me, Lloyd?”

  “No! I didn’t do that crime—you know it didn’t fit my . . . what do you call it . . . modus operandi!”

  Eliot let go of him, and began to pace slowly, in a very small area right in front of Watterson in his chair. “You never had a consistent M.O., Lloyd. Sometimes you left the bodies whole, after decapitation.”

  Watterson managed to shrug, despite his bonds. “That was the men.”

  “Yes, the men—who you also emasculated. It was the women you cut in two.”

  “And dismembered them, remember! Mr. Ness, that Dahlia woman was only cut in half—she still had all her arms and legs! And you know that’s just not my style.”

  The surrealism of this discussion—Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run arguing over the finer points of mass murder—triggered images of Welles’ bizarre Crazy House set with its dismembered mannequin limbs.

  I moved in front of Watterson and Eliot stepped aside. “Lloyd, I can tell you something that is your style. One of your victims, in early ’37, was a woman, never identified, her torso bisected. . . . She was probably around twenty-five with a nice figure, and a fair complexion and brown hair.”

  Eliot, wondering what I was getting at, asked, “The partial torso that washed up on the beach at 136th Street, you mean?”

  “Yes,” I said to him. Then to Watterson I said: “That victim on the beach had another one of your special, whimsical touches—you stuffed an object up the woman’s ass . . . a pants pocket.”

  “I was sick, then,” Lloyd said, with quiet dignity. “I’m well now.”

  “Happy to hear that,” I said. “By the way, here’s something that hasn’t appeared in the newspapers, Lloyd: Elizabeth Short had something stuffed inside her, too—a scrap of flesh cut from her thigh, bearing a rose tattoo.”

  I stepped aside as Eliot moved in and pointed a finger at Watterson like a gun. “You did this crime, didn’t you, you miserable son of a bitch!”

  “No! I swear I didn’t. I’m well. I’m better!”

  I said to Eliot, “Get the door for me, would you?”

  “The door?”

  “Yeah, the door, Eliot. Open it.”

  Again, though he didn’t follow what I was up to, Eliot went along for the ride. “All right,” he said, went over and opened it and stepped aside.

  I grabbed Lloyd by the blond hair on the top of his head and I dragged him by it out into the hallway—only it wasn’t a hallway, really, but a relatively narrow corridor that bordered a five-story drop to the lobby floor. Casters screeching, the chair bearing the twine-tied Butcher did my bidding as I dragged it over to the central staircase and dragged his ass down the iron stairs, eight of them, jarring him, jolting him, shaking him, rattling him, thump, whump, thump. His wails of terror and pain echoed through the cavernous building, like memories of the cries of mercy he had ignored from his victims.

  In the shadow-crosshatched moonlight, we were on the landing, Lloyd and me—still almost five stories up—and it was as if a little stage had been provided for our modest melodrama. Our intensely interested audience—Eliot Ness—walked slowly down the iron steps, making no move or even uttering a sound to try to stop me, as I pushed the tied-in-the-chair Watterson face first toward and then right up to the edge of the railing. The railing itself was heavy, and about waist high. I lifted the chair and the man in it by the back of the chair and held him up and over the railing so he could see the hard, shiny floor waiting far below.

  I was barely breathing hard as I said, “Elizabeth Short was a patient at the Dailey clinic, Lloyd.”

  “Please don’t kill me!”

  “Don’t say that again or I will. She was your patient, Lloyd, wasn’t she?”

  “No!”

  “What happened? Did you botch the operation, accidentally, then find yourself with a beautiful young corpse on your hands? And did it just get the old juices flowing, Lloyd?”

  “Noooo!” His cry reverberated through the vastness of the Bradbury. “I didn’t kill her! I didn’t even operate on her! She was Dr. Winter’s patient, not mine!”

  I leaned him over some more, wondering if that twine would hold, not really caring. “You’re saying Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, just happened to be a patient at a clinic where you work?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Yes, you did it?”

  “Yes, it’s just a coincidence!”

  Detectives do not believe in coincidence. Some of us believe in fate, a few even believe in God; but none of us believe in coincidence.

  I pulled him back, sat him down, in his chair, teeth-rattlingly hard, on the iron floor of the landing. Backing away from him, I found myself sitting on the stairs as Eliot moved in to take over.

  “I don’t care whether you admit to this crime or not, Lloyd,” Eliot said, “you’re going back to Ohio, with me.”

  Out of breath, shaking his head, eyes rolling wildly, Lloyd yelled, “I’m not! I’m well! I’m cured! I was
legally released. I’m as sane as either of you crazy assholes! You have no right, no recourse to—”

  Eliot stood calmly, arms crossed. “Your uncle requested I bring you home.”

  Watterson’s face tightened, as if he was not sure he’d heard right. “My uncle . . . ?”

  “It’s either go home to your uncle, and sign in for some more therapy, Lloyd—or go to the police, and be identified in public as the Kingsbury Run torso killer . . . and the maniac who killed the Black Dahlia.”

  Lloyd thought about that for a while. And then, irritatingly, chillingly, he smiled. “You won’t do that.”

  Eliot’s eyes narrowed. “I won’t?”

  Watterson shook his head, confidently. “No. Mr. Ness, you would be disgraced, and I know you wouldn’t want that. Besides, the police would never arrest me.”

  “Is that right?”

  Now Watterson seemed openly amused—even smug. “It would expose Dr. Dailey and his clinic and all the crooked homicide cops involved.”

  Eliot laughed humorlessly. “You want me to believe the LAPD would cover up a crime of this magnitude?”

  “Why not? You did.”

  Eliot staggered back a step.

  Then he grabbed Lloyd by the shirtfront and said, “Do you want me to turn you over to my friend, here? He wants to cut off your head and bury you in the desert. And I’m ready to bring the shovel.”

  “I didn’t do this, Mr. Ness!” Watterson’s smugness had evaporated, and the terror was back. “It’s all just a coincidence, I tell you—a crazy goddamn coincidence!”

  I stood. For a while I was just poised there, on the stairs, as if not sure whether to go up or down.

  I thought of Orson Welles on that Columbia soundstage, wandering through a nightmare of his own creation, severed limbs and crazy shadows and clown grins. Was Welles the killer, or perhaps the mastermind manipulating some dupe, like Lloyd here? To me, that still seemed absurd on the face of it. And yet . . .

  . . . some hand was directing this action. Not the director of Citizen Kane, perhaps—but some sure, sick hand . . . .

  I said, “Eliot—a word.”

  Looking slightly shellshocked, Eliot followed me up the steps; we spoke at the mouth of the iron stairway, with Lloyd—tied in his chair—staring up at us with those empty blue eyes of his.

  “He’s right about the cops,” I said softly. “Dailey is part of an abortion ring that’s protected by the homicide bureau.”

  “Christ! I thought you said Hansen was straight.”

  “He is, but most of them are beyond bent—including the Hat’s partner, Fat Ass Brown.”

  “So we avoid the homicide dicks—maybe get a statement and turn it over to the press—”

  “Eliot,” I whispered, “he may not have done this.”

  Eliot’s eyes flared. “You have got to be kidding. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run just happens to be working in an abortion clinic where the Black Dahlia was a patient?”

  I was shaking my head. “Too many coincidences. One or two I can buy—that I was with Fowley when he caught that police call, okay. Just about everything else . . . no.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Somebody is stage-directing this. All of these things that we’re trying desperately to write off as coincidences . . . we’re being played for suckers. Hell, man, we’re not even pawns on a chess board—we’re just goddamn checkers.”

  He frowned. “Then who’s behind it all?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think Lloyd does, either—although it’s a good bet the person manipulating these events is someone in Lloyd’s life.”

  Eliot twitched a nonsmile; he was taking me seriously, anyway. “What do you suggest?”

  I took him by the arm and walked him down the corridor a ways—we could still see Watterson sitting on the landing.

  “We continue investigating,” I said. “I still look at that corpse in my mind’s eye and see ‘informer’ carved on that pretty face—and I haven’t even explored the Dragna avenue yet, or for that matter Mickey Cohen. You need to deal with Harry the Hat, and you could dig into the background of these abortion clinic players . . . see if anything turns up. Maybe Dailey isn’t the senile dip-shit he appears to be—maybe the Winter dame is the fucking Dragon Lady. We don’t know yet. . . . Then there’s this guy Arnold Wilson and the rest of the McCadden crew.”

  “Arnold Wilson?”

  “Tall guy with a war-wound limp—he was in on the Mocambo heist, but unlike Savarino and Hassau didn’t get nailed.”

  “Funny . . . Arnold Wilson—that name sounds familiar. . . .”

  “Eliot, that’s like saying ‘John Smith’ or ‘Joe Doakes’ sounds familiar.”

  His eyes were tight with thought. “No—I’ve seen it recently.”

  “Good, then that’s something else you can check.”

  “What exactly are you suggesting, Nate?”

  “I’m suggesting we tell Lloyd he’s convinced us of his innocence.”

  “What the hell?”

  “We apologize for roughing him up. Gee whiz we hope he understands, but we just had to make sure he wasn’t involved. And we make him believe he sold us his bill of goods . . . which, incidentally, may not be a bill of goods at all. Elizabeth Short may have been cut in half so that smart sleuths like us would play pin the crime on the Butcher.”

  Now it was Eliot who looked wild-eyed. “Just let him go? Are you nuts? He’ll run!”

  “Of course I’m nuts. I got out on a Section Eight, didn’t I? But I don’t think our twisted friend here will run—if we convince him he’s convinced us.”

  “Then what?”

  I nodded toward the A-1 office. “We’ll keep this guy tailed day and night—not too hard a job, since he works the fuck next door to my own detective agency. Fred and I have four ops working full-time, who we’ll tap into.”

  Finally Eliot was liking this. “And we’ll see who Lloyd intersects with.”

  “That’s right.”

  Nodding, Eliot said, “Okay. No reason why I can’t haul Lloyd back in a few days . . . but if any more butchered bodies turn up, I’m not going to sleep so good at night.”

  “How are you sleeping now?”

  “Not so good.”

  Then we walked down the iron steps and apologized profusely to Lloyd Watterson, who wanted to believe us so badly—when (as we untied him) we said we believed him—that he did.

  18

  It was almost nine by the time Eliot and I made it to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We had followed Lloyd in his prewar Chevy to his rented room in a shoddy two-story wood-frame building on East 31st, and—having called Fred Rubinski to put the surveillance in motion—waited until a fresh-faced A-1 operative named Teddy Hertel showed up to take over for us. We warned Ted that Watterson was a dangerous subject, but I wasn’t too worried—Hertel may have looked like a kid, but he had survived Bloodynose Ridge.

  In the airy hotel lobby, with its lush plants and lavish floral arrangements, we seemed to have stepped into a decidedly different world from the one in which the Black Dahlia had been murdered. In the aftermath of our confrontation with the Mad Butcher, these soothing pastel surroundings seemed as surrealistic as Welles’ Crazy House. We stood at the front desk as Eliot checked himself in; the desk clerk assured Eliot that a rental car would be delivered at the hotel, as prearranged, tomorrow morning.

  Eliot accompanied me to the bungalow—taking in the well-manicured hedges, flowering shrubs, and colorful gardens of the grounds we wound through, on this cool evening—and I unlocked the door, cracking it open, calling, “Peggy! Are you decent? We have company.”

  “Come on in, darling,” she called back, pleasantly. “And we already have company.”

  I stepped inside and found, sitting on the sofa, next to a less-than-roaring fire, Peggy—radiant at the end of her long day of filming, in a light blue T-shirt and trimly tailored darker trousers, legs crossed, red-painted toenails peeking through open-toed sand
als—seated next to a guest.

  “Your old friend Mr. Wilson dropped by,” she said, gesturing to the man seated next to her, “and said it was important. I insisted he wait.”

  My “old friend” (who dated way back to this afternoon) was one Arnold Wilson—that cadaverous cook from the McCadden Cafe. In this elegant suite, the shabby short-order jockey was like the non sequitur object in a kid’s “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” puzzle.

  “Mr. Wilson was telling me how you were in the war together,” she said.

  It was hard for me to believe Peggy had let the acne-scarred, Apache-looking Wilson in, considering he was still wearing the threadbare blue-and-white-striped shirt and faded blue jeans; he’d traded his apron for a ratty brown sportcoat, and was gaping at me with a grin displaying more shades of yellow than a paint-store color chart.

  He must have sold her one hell of a bill of goods.

  While I stood there giving Wilson a look that would have melted ice in a glass and maybe the glass, too, my wife bounded up, and went over to greet Eliot, hugging him.

  They were making small talk—since Peggy and I had eloped, this was the first chance Eliot had had to offer congratulations and kiss the bride—and the tall, twig-thin Wilson was rising from the plush couch, trembling, his grin dissolving into an apologetic pout, his big bony hands open in supplication.

  I had a hand on his wiry arm, squeezing, staring up into his narrow eyes, pointed nose poking at me, when he whispered, “Sorry I laid it on so thick, Nate . . . Mr. Heller. I just knew it was important to talk to you, right away.”

  “Why?”

  “Bobby Savarino got bailed out—the Ringgolds were good for it, like I thought they might be. He’s home right now, and he’s willin’ to talk—you said you’d give me another twenty if I set up a meet, remember?”

  I let go of his arm. “I appreciate this.”

  Wilson sighed, relieved; his breath was like old gym socks. “Good. Good.”

  Placing a hand up on his scrawny shoulder, I smiled and said, “But, Arnold—I don’t appreciate you invading where I live.”