Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 28

  A singular occasion, seeing the Hat impressed with another detective.

  “A real honor, Mr. Ness,” the Hat said, “meeting the man who put Capone away—not to mention cleaning up Cleveland.”

  “I had help in both instances,” Eliot said.

  “Let’s go where we can talk privately,” the Hat said, and led us through the bullpen out into the hallway, guiding us through the litter of desks and dicks. Our footsteps echoed off the marble floor. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you coming out here to lend us a hand.”

  “How much help I’ll be remains to be seen,” Eliot said.

  Soon we were in an interrogation room, little larger than a booth really, sitting at a small cigarette-burn-scarred wooden table, the walls lined with crumbling pale yellow soundproofed tile.

  “Where’s your partner?” I asked, wondering if the Hat was at all wise to the confrontation yesterday between Fat Ass and me.

  “Well on his way to Chicago by now, I should think,” Hansen said.

  A spasm knifed through my belly. “Chicago?”

  “Yes, he took a plane first thing this morning out of Burbank—we know the Short girl was in Chicago for a few weeks in the fall. Brownie will do his best to trace her movements, there.”

  “Good idea,” Eliot said, sitting back in a hardwood chair, arms folded, his expression blandly benign, not betraying his shared knowledge with me of just what lousy news this was.

  “Poor bastard took a nasty spill, yesterday,” the Hat said, shaking his head, working up half a smile. “Broke his stupid nose.”

  “How did he manage that?” I asked, studying the Hat’s sleepy countenance for any sign he was playing with me.

  “At home, slipping on his wife’s freshly waxed floor.” Hansen chortled. “Imagine that, the hazardous life of a homicide cop, and Brownie busts his beezer on the kitchen floor.”

  “Imagine that,” I said, manufacturing a chuckle.

  “Most accidents happen at home,” Eliot pointed out quietly.

  Of course, that one had happened at Mark Lansom’s home, poolside.

  “Well, I hope Brownie fares better in Chicago than we have here in the City of Angels,” the Hat said, crossing a leg, ankle on knee, leaning back in his chair. He was seated directly across from Eliot and their postures mirrored each other’s—except that Eliot had placed his hat on the scarred table, and Harry, of course, kept his on.

  Eliot asked, “Any leads at all?”

  “Nothing but leads—they just don’t go anywhere. We have over seven hundred investigators working this case, Mr. Ness—”

  “Eliot.”

  “Eliot. The sheriff has given us support by way of four hundred deputies, the highway patrol has two hundred and fifty men on the Dahlia. They’ve been searching storm drains, bridge basins, attics, cellars, looking for the killer’s ‘torture chamber,’ as the papers call it. Sound familiar?”

  Eliot nodded. “We went down the same road with the Kingsbury Run investigation. If that’s what the sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen are up to, what are you LAPD fellas doing?”

  “Our lab man Ray Pinker and his boys have fine-tooth-combed that vacant lot a dozen times and they’re still at it. Patrolmen going door-to-door in the Norton area are widening out into Highland Park and Eagle Rock. We have sixty men scouring saloons in Hollywood and downtown L.A.—no easy task, as there’s an endless supply of these seedy little bars.”

  Nodding, Eliot said, “Come up with anything?”

  “The Short girl is known in any number of these joints—the Loyal Cafe, the Rhapsody, the Dugout. She was working as a B-girl at some of them.”

  I asked, “As a prostitute, or just coming on to patrons to buy drinks?”

  “The latter. That’s the fascinating thing about this girl—she seems to have been a professional tease. Nate, I can tell your friend here more, if you agree not to share it with the Examiner.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Not that even Jim Richardson could use it, without inventing a whole new lexicon of euphemisms.”

  “Why is that?”

  “This girl was fairly promiscuous . . . and yet she seems never to have had, shall we say, conventional sex with a man.” Hansen’s mouth puckered in private amusement. “Take her stay at Camp Cooke, for example—where she was ‘Cutie of the Week,’ known as ‘Miss Look-But-Don’t-Touch’ at the PX. She even lived with a certain sergeant for a while—and yet, if you’ll pardon my French, boys, he never screwed her once.”

  Eliot sat forward, frowning with interest. “You’ve heard the same from other men who dated her?”

  Hansen nodded. “The movie star, Franchot Tone—real ladies’ man. Solid alibi, by the way. He described her as a ‘siren luring sailors to their death.’ ”

  “That’s a little melodramatic,” I said.

  The Hat shrugged. “Guy’s an actor. But I gathered Tone also dated but never slept with her. He indicated ‘certain intimacies,’ but as a ‘gentleman’ would say no more. All indications are Miss Short was an expert in the fine art of fellatio.”

  “She would go down on a guy,” I translated, “but not fuck him.”

  The Hat winced at my crudity, but he affirmed my suspicion with a nod. “Of course another reason the gentlemanly Mr. Tone would not admit as much is that oral sex, which is to say sodomy, is a felony in this state . . . albeit one rarely enforced. I have taken to speaking to Miss Short’s boy friends, off the record—assuring them no sexual charges will be brought, if they will be frank in their responses.”

  “Has this worked?” Eliot asked.

  Again the Hat nodded. “A certain Hollywood Boulevard shoe-store manager, for example. He had an affair with Miss Short, last summer—another of these married men, with good-looking wives at home, and children, who nonetheless stray. For six weeks, he provided Miss Short with several purses, numerous pairs of expensive shoes, and, on one occasion, car fare. He did not consider her to be a prostitute, rather his girl friend—and they frequently parked, whereupon she would invariably service him orally.”

  “They never had normal sex,” Eliot said.

  “No—she always had an excuse. . . . It was her ‘time of the month,’ or she had an upset stomach.”

  “You’re still following leads from her letters,” I said, “the boy friends she wrote to. . . .”

  “Yes, with no success as yet. Many of her servicemen paramours are out of state, with impeccable alibis. We have ruled out Red Manley, and her oddball father, Cleo, as well. Of course, we’re still swimmin’ in Confessin’ Sams—none of ’em coming close to answering any of my three key questions.”

  “At least you can weed them out quickly,” Eliot said.

  The Hat sighed heavily. “It’s still a royal pain. I’m going to start arresting these characters on obstructing justice, and see if that doesn’t thin the crackpot crowd, some.”

  Casually, I asked, “Have you talked to Arthur Lake, yet?”

  He frowned. “No. The actor? Dagwood actor?”

  “Yes. He knew Beth Short at the Hollywood Canteen. He also knew the Bauerdorf girl who was slain several years before.”

  “Georgette Bauerdorf, bathtub slaying,” the Hat said, nodding, digging out his notepad. “We’re looking into that for possible connections. The Hollywood Canteen is a problem for us, now that it’s been closed down, with the war over.”

  “Well, I didn’t give you that lead,” I said. Just trying to keep the Hat happy. “Lake is an in-law of Marion Davies, so the Examiner won’t be going down that road; the only place you’ll see Dagwood is on the comics page.”

  “I appreciate this, Nate,” the Hat said, jotting down Lake’s name. “Please do continue keeping your ear to the ground.”

  “Oh, I will—and if I hear hoofbeats, you’ll be the first.” I stood. “Now, I know you and Eliot have a lot to talk about, where the Kingsbury Run case is concerned. So I’ll leave you boys to it.”

  Eliot said to me, “I’ll ca
tch up with you this afternoon.”

  “See you,” I said.

  The Hat nodded goodbye, and I exited.

  My car was parked down the block, on North Spring Street. I was in something of a daze, wondering if I could crack this thing before my pal Fat Ass put the Short girl and me together, back in Chicago, when I realized someone had fallen in step alongside me.

  He was a handsome Italian in a powder-blue suit and a pastel-yellow tie and brown moccasin-style loafers—fairly big guy, muscular, dark curly hair, with a tan so dark it verged on black. Almost too good-looking to be a hood.

  Almost.

  “Mr. Heller,” he said, in a mellow baritone.

  My car was within sight.

  “Yeah?”

  “My name’s Stompanato. Johnny. We got a mutual friend.”

  We were just walking along, amid businessmen and clerks and lawyers and legal secretaries and tourists and other pedestrians, gliding by the Hall of Justice, Hall of Records, and State Building.

  “What mutual friend would that be?”

  “Mr. Cohen.”

  Now we were at the Buick.

  “I know Mickey a little,” I allowed.

  Johnny Stompanato was smiling, a handsome guy, beautiful features, pleasant. I wondered whether that was a revolver or an automatic bulging under his left arm; the bulge in his trousers would have been of more interest to the females in the crowd.

  “Well,” Stompanato said, “Mr. Cohen thinks highly of you, and wondered if you’d had breakfast yet.”

  “Actually, I grabbed a doughnut, earlier.”

  “Mr. Cohen said to tell you he has fresh-squeezed orange juice and his cook makes a killer omelet.”

  That was an interesting choice of adjectives.

  “Is this an invitation, or a demand?” I asked. I had my own bulges, after all.

  “Simply an invitation.” This guy was smooth. “Your partner Mr. Rubinski suggested to Mr. Cohen that you two might share a conversation, while you was in town.”

  “Where are you parked, Johnny? May I call you Johnny?”

  “Sure, Nate. Right behind you—the Caddy?”

  “Should have known. Can I follow you, or do I have to ride along?”

  “Follow me, by all means. I’ll keep the speed down, keep you in my rearview mirror.”

  I trailed the dark blue Caddy down Sunset to the exclusive suburb of Brentwood, adjacent to Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean, home to many movie stars and other celebrities, including one Mayer Harris Cohen, AKA Mickey, the pint-size Capone who controlled bookie operations in Los Angeles.

  Cohen did not live in a mansion, just a slightly oversize white Cape Cod cottage hugged by flowers exploding with color, surrounded by a wide, manicured lawn basking in the sunshine. This was the home every returning G.I. longed for, for his bride and himself, the postwar dream exemplified. Of course, Cohen’s World War Two service had been limited to home-front black marketeering, since as a felon he couldn’t serve.

  No walls and no guard gate for celebrity gangster Cohen—though Stompanato stopped at a squawk box on a pole at the mouth of the wide driveway, checking in. I slid the Buick up next to the Caddy, parked right in front of triple garage doors. The only indication that this home belonged to a celebrity—particularly of the underworld stripe—was the floodlights on telephone-style poles surrounding the estate; after dark this place would be lit up like night football, and the lawn was big enough to field a game, at that.

  I followed Stompanato to the front door, which opened as we got there, a middle-aged colored maid in full livery waiting for us. The maid peeled away and Stompanato did the honors, leading me across plush pile carpeting through a series of lavishly appointed rooms with gleaming woodwork and indirect lighting, each decorated in bold tones of a single color: a green room, a blue room, a mauve room, a pink room. From upholstery to the telephones, from the wallpaper to the fresh-cut flowers perched on the French Provincial furniture, one color at a time prevailed.

  “Morning, Mrs. Cohen,” Stompanato said to a petite redhead in the pink room, nodding to her, not introducing me.

  Mickey Cohen’s wife wore a pink top and blue slacks as she sat curled up on a sofa reading Better Homes and Gardens—the perfect little woman to go along with the dream cottage. And in that outfit, she could move from the pink room to the blue one with impunity.

  “Morning, Johnny,” she said in a distracted monotone. Her heart-shaped face had pretty, Shirley Temple-ish features, highlighted by huge dark green eyes; her expression was blank, in a stunned, recently poleaxed manner.

  Before long, Stompanato led me into a bedroom that broke the pattern by risking two tones—tan and cream. This was apparently the master bedroom, though there was no indication a woman shared these conspicuously male quarters. From a large bathroom off to the left came the machine-gun tattoo of a shower-in-progress.

  Stompanato stuck his head into the steamy room. “Boss! Mr. Heller’s here!”

  A raspy second tenor echoed back: “Great! Fine! Thanks!”

  A few awkward seconds slipped by. Then, just making conversation, Stompanato said to me, “I, uh, understand you was a Marine?”

  “Yeah. You too?”

  He nodded, the curly locks staying perfectly in lacquered place. “Tarawa.”

  I said, “Guadalcanal.”

  “Semper fi, mac,” he said, extending his hand, which I shook. “Pleasure.”

  I nodded, wondering if we’d be shooting on the same side in the next war.

  The big double bed had a cream-color spread with a grandiose MC monogram; one wall was a mirrored closet, another had recessed shelving arrayed with more brands of men’s colognes and creams than the May Company’s men’s toiletries department. Along one windowed wall, its exotic-plant-patterned drapes drawn, a comfy-looking love seat squatted next to a corner phone stand, over which staggered a few photographs of Mickey’s fishing escapades . . . including the hood posing next to a marlin bigger than he was. Which didn’t necessarily make it a very big marlin.

  In one corner was a much smaller version of the double bed, duplicate mattress, duplicate monogrammed spread, except labelled TC. Stretched out on it, looking up at me suspiciously, was an ugly little bull terrier.

  “That’s Tuffy,” Stompanato said. “Don’t try to pet him.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  Stompanato said, “Mrs. Cohen has her own bedroom. Mirrors and walk-in vault for furs and jewels. Real feminine boudoir—you oughta see it.”

  Apparently he had.

  Before long, the hairy, squarely built little Cohen, possessor of perpetual five-o’clock shadow, stepped from the shower stall, emerging from behind the moisture-streaked door with a towel wrapped around him, sarong-style. His black thinning hair flat to his egg-shaped skull, Cohen had the same broad forehead as his terrier, same pugnacious chin, similar flat blunt nose. The major difference lay in the eyes—the dog’s big brown eyes radiated intelligence.

  “Hey, Heller,” Cohen said good-naturedly, giving me a glance, stepping up to the big mirror at a counter where a small army of toiletries stood at attention, waiting for commands. “Looks like we’re both still alive.”

  “Luck on our part,” I said, “bad marksmanship on theirs.”

  Cohen hacked a laugh, and began washing his hands in the sink—apparently they’d gotten filthy in the shower. “Johnny, leave Heller and me be. We’re old friends. He saved my buddy Jake Guzik’s ass, couple years ago. Didn’t you, Heller?”

  “I’ll do just about anything for money,” I said.

  Soaping his hands, he said, “Johnny, ya can even let him hang on to that roscoe he’s packin’, under his arm.”

  Those eyes may have looked stupid, but they didn’t miss much. On the other hand, calling a gun a “roscoe” was fairly ridiculous these days.

  Stompanato nodded to me, said, “Nice meetin’ you,” and slipped out.

  I stood in the doorway of the bathroom as Cohen—finally convin
ced his hands were clean, all damned spots out, for now—used a handheld electric chrome hair drier on his wispy locks. The drier made a small roar that we had to work to speak above.

  “I hear you’re working for my pal Jim Richardson,” Cohen said, “over at the Examiner.”

  “Yeah—background on the Dahlia murder.”

  “Great guy, Jim. I known him since I was a kid, hustling papers at Seventh and Broadway. Jim used to let me sleep in the Examiner’s men’s john, waitin’ for the presses to roll off on some red-hot extra.”

  “Why’d Jim give you such special treatment, Mick?”

  Cohen grinned at me, his hair dancing under the drier’s wind. “That was back in his drinkin’ days. Richardson was a fuckin’ lush, y’know, back then. I’d sober him up, walk him to his desk. . . . Brother, he’s riding high on this Dahlia deal, ain’t he?”

  “It’s a big story.”

  “I knew her, y’know.”

  “Really? News to me.”

  “At the Gardens. She was workin’ there. Sweet kid. Prick tease, but really sweet. . . . I don’t want that in the papers, understand.”

  “Understood.”

  His hair was dry. He shut off the drier, set it down, and selected a green vial of hair tonic and began drizzling it on. “So you busted Fat Ass’ beak, I hear.”

  “You should know—he works for you, doesn’t he?”

  Cohen gave me a quick glare. “Says who?”

  “That’s the word on the street.”

  “What is?”

  “That Sergeant Finis Brown is your bag man—I figure Lansom’s running hookers outa the Gardens, and you’re getting a taste. Why not?”

  This glare wasn’t quick—he held it on me and I would swear I could feel the heat. “Why not?” he growled. “Because Mickey Cohen don’t traffic in no female flesh. I don’t do that—that’s fuckin’ low, low as fuckin’ dope. You tryin’ to piss me off, Heller?”

  “No. I just—”

  Still frowning, Cohen returned his attention to his reflection. He put the hair tonic down and began massaging his scalp. “You just get them sleazy fuckin’ thoughts outa your sleazy Chicago conk. I’m a businessman, not no fuckin’ pimp.”