Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  “Sorry for the crudity,” Lou said, “but she probably couldn’t let them in her back door, either, without showing herself—without them seeing that she was . . . like a child, down there.”

  So Harry the Hat’s third piece of information, gathered in the autopsy, was not that the Dahlia was pregnant—but that she was physically incapable of having normal intercourse with a man!

  Something clicked. “Lou—the money she was raising . . . It wasn’t for an abortion. It was for an operation—she wanted to be a normal woman!”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Lou said. “I guess that’s why you’re the president of this outfit.”

  Her physical abnormality was why she had gone to Dr. Dailey—her old family friend—whose partner, Dr. Winter, was a gynecologist. The money she was saving up—that five hundred dollars she was scrambling after, blackmailing me and others for—was so she could become a complete woman.

  Bobby Savarino had been talking marriage, and Elizabeth Short—like so many women, like so many men, in these sad, hopeful postwar days—wanted the cottage and the picket fence and the whole married American megillah. I’d been right, when I told Fowley that I figured Beth Short wanted to be a wife more than a movie star.

  And so, after years of thinking about it, and dreaming about it, and after discovering that a doctor from back home was practicing in Los Angeles—a doctor specializing in “woman troubles”—she finally had taken the step, to arrange for an operation. An expensive one.

  “What are you going to do with this information, Nate?”

  “The cops already have it,” I said, “or anyway the key cop does.” And I explained how the Hat was keeping this and two other only-the-killer-knows items under wraps. “But it means I have to rethink every piece of information I’ve gathered, every individual I’ve spoken to.”

  Lou laughed humorlessly. “Whole new ball game.”

  “Different game entirely—though this one also starts with a butchered girl in a vacant lot.”

  We discussed Brown’s presence in Chicago, and I told Lou to play it straight down the middle, should Fat Ass show up at the office with questions about me. Soon, perhaps today, I would tell the Hat about having known Short briefly in Chicago, and explain my reticence to come forward, due to the coincidence of having been along with Fowley for the discovery of the body.

  “Now that we know Beth Short wasn’t pregnant,” I said, “I’m much less a viable suspect.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that she told you she was pregnant,” Lou reminded me, “and tried to blackmail you.”

  “If she’d been pregnant by me,” I said, “there was a good chance she could’ve told some girl friend or other, or a doctor, or even another boy friend. But since she was lying to me, scamming me, chances are strong nobody knew about her calling me from the Biltmore . . . but me.”

  “And me,” Lou said. “But I ain’t tellin’ a soul. We’ll talk about my raise, later.”

  “Fuck you very much. Don’t you see, Lou? If she’d really been pregnant, a whole battery of men might have been suspects. They now have been turned into a meaningless bunch of former boy friends, whose tales of never having sex with the girl suddenly make sense.”

  “So the suspect field is narrowed,” Lou said.

  “Considerably.”

  I did not tell Lou about Watterson, because Eliot had requested I keep the lid on that; but, like a new Rosemary Clooney tune, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run had just jumped back to the top of my personal Hit Parade.

  “On the other hand,” Lou said, “maybe one of those boy friends killed her—you know, flew into a murderous rage when he discovered she could not be fucked.”

  “Jesus, yeah—that does make a terrible kind of sense.”

  Another humorless laugh. “Poor kid was the only prick tease on earth who didn’t want to be.”

  After hanging up, I just sat there on the couch in that bungalow, afternoon sun filtering in lazily through sheer curtains, my interview notepad in hand, and I paged through it as I mentally sorted through every fact, every facet, every suspect, every supposition, every rumor, every seeming coincidence, viewed through the new prism of Beth Short’s disability.

  Perhaps half an hour later, a frantic knocking at the bungalow door jarred me, as if I’d been sleeping and got jolted awake, and I went quickly to the door and opened it. Perhaps I had been in a trancelike state, but seeing Eliot Ness’s uncharacteristically excited expression made me instantly alert.

  “I have some incredible information,” he blurted.

  “You may want to hear mine, first,” I said.

  I sat on the couch and he pulled up an armchair, tossing his fedora on the coffee table, and listened to my retelling of Lou Sapperstein’s bizarre news. Midway he got up and helped himself to some Scotch from the wet bar.

  Visibly shaken, Eliot said, “It’s all beginning to make sick, tragic sense.”

  “Parts of it are coming clear, but I have to admit, most of it is still pretty goddamn murky from where I sit.”

  “Wait—just wait.” He gulped at the Scotch, then unbuttoned his suitcoat, set the drink on the glass top of the coffee table, and for several long moments sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands; that unruly comma of brown, graying hair hung almost to his eyebrows.

  “Are you all right, Eliot?”

  “Where shall I start?” He sat suddenly straight. “All right, the beginning . . . I spent two hours with Detective Hansen, wasting time retreading the Butcher inquiry, making the case for this probably not being the same perpetrator. He seemed to buy it well enough. Then I asked Hansen if anyone was exploring abortionists in the city—and he told me, yes, but that he personally thought that was a blind alley.”

  “Considering his knowledge of Beth Short’s deformity, that’s not surprising.”

  Eliot nodded, and pressed on. “But I pushed him, saying that in Cleveland we believed the Kingsbury Run Butcher was a doctor or perhaps ex-doctor, due to the medical precision of the dismemberments. The Black Dahlia’s corpse showed similar medical knowledge and the same sort of surgical skill.”

  “And,” I said, “you naturally told Hansen that if he’s really trying to see whether the Kingsbury Run Butcher committed this crime, then this is a logical path to go down.”

  “Yes. He put me with a young vice squad sergeant, Charles Stoker, and left us alone. I asked Sergeant Stoker for a list of known and suspected abortionists. Stoker gave me one, but Dailey’s name wasn’t on it. . . .”

  “Of course. Dailey’s protected.”

  Eliot nodded. “So I told the young detective that I’d heard about a doctor named Dailey, who was originally from Massachusetts, same as Elizabeth Short.”

  I winced. “Dangerous sharing that . . .”

  He raised a palm, as if getting sworn in on the stand. “But necessary to get the information—and, anyway, I can play it down, if it gets back to Hansen. Stoker started looking around the bullpen furtively, then finally, uneasily, admitted that certain local doctors suspected of abortion were not ‘bothered’ by the LAPD. He said it rubbed him the wrong way, but the policy in the department was that abortion was a fact of life and a few of the more responsible practitioners were given a blind eye.”

  “And he admitted Dr. Dailey was one of these.”

  “Yes, a very respectable retired Chief of Staff of Los Angeles County Hospital, after all, retired USC professor. But Stoker had some other interesting information about Dr. Dailey—he was very much aware of Dailey’s failing mental condition.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Eliot smiled tightly, nastily. “Seems Dailey’s estranged wife has been trying to arrange a commitment for her errant hubby—it’s been something of a minor scandal. Apparently Mrs. Dailey thinks this woman, Dr. Winter, is ‘exerting undue influence’ over her husband, using her ‘feminine wiles.’

  “As in, stealing the doc away from her.”

  Nodding again
, Eliot said, “Yes, and changing his will to favor Dr. Winter.”

  “It’s not a new story.”

  “But in the context of the death of Elizabeth Short, it makes a very interesting story.”

  I shook my head, confused. “How in hell could the Short girl’s murder have anything—”

  Eliot held up a traffic-cop palm. “Wait. Just wait. After Sergeant Stoker and I were finished, I came back here to the hotel and made a few phone calls . . . first to the main branch of the L.A. public library, to see if they had Harvard yearbooks on hand.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to see if Lloyd Watterson’s father and Dr. Dailey really were classmates. A librarian on the research desk said she would be happy to look into it for me, and she called me back, not half an hour ago. Both men did attend Harvard, just not at the same time—Lloyd’s father graduated the year before Dailey enrolled.”

  “What does that mean to you, Eliot?”

  The Untouchable leaned forward, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “It means Lloyd was lying to us about at least one thing. Getting the job with Dailey had nothing to do with him being a friend and classmate of dear dead dad.”

  “And why would he lie about that?”

  A tiny shrug. “Possibly to make himself look better to us—make it look as if he really was trying to make a clean start, with his family’s help . . . rather than going to work for an abortionist, through the efforts of some lowlife criminal acquaintance.”

  “This is all very interesting, but—”

  “Nate.” Eliot twitched a smile, sat back, hands on his knees. “Do you have a phone book?”

  Huh?

  “Well, sure,” I said. “It’s right there, in that drawer.” I pointed to the nearby endtable where the phone sat. “Why?”

  “Because I did one of my most effective if accidental pieces of detective work today just by looking up a number, and checking the address that went with it. Get the phone book, Nate—get it.”

  I got it.

  “From what Stoker told me,” Eliot said, “I thought it might be interesting to have a talk with Mrs. Dailey. Possibly not worth a trip to her house, but a phone call surely wouldn’t hurt. Look up her number, Nate. It’s under her husband’s name—until two and a half months ago, when he moved out, that was where the doctor lived.”

  Humoring Eliot, wondering what the hell had got into him, I looked up Dr. Wallace A. Daily in the phone book. The phone number was meaningless, but the street address was not.

  Dr. Dailey—or at any rate, his estranged wife—lived at 3959 South Norton.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “That’s . . .”

  “One block from a certain vacant lot.”

  I tossed the phone book on the carpet with a thud.

  “What the hell does it mean?” I asked, trembling.

  “I’m not sure,” Eliot said. “Presumably Doc Dailey and the Winter woman do their abortions at the clinic, not his private residence. But it is one hell of a . . . coincidence.”

  Detectives do not believe in coincidence.

  “Now I have one more item to share with you,” Eliot said, with a self-satisfied sigh, “and it makes all of the rest of these revelations . . . perhaps even that of Elizabeth Short’s unfortunate physical condition . . . pale to insignificance.”

  I leaned back on the couch, wondering how much more I could take; I felt as if I’d been pummeled.

  “Remember I said the name ‘Arnold Wilson’ rang a bell? And you said it was an ordinary name—unlikely that it would make any more connection in my mind than ‘John Smith.’ But we were in the presence of Lloyd Watterson at the time, weren’t we? The new improved mentally balanced Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run? And you may remember, prior to leaving for Los Angeles, I had just spent several hours with the thousands of pages of the Torso file.”

  “I remember.”

  “It occurred to me that perhaps the name ‘Arnold Wilson’ had turned up in that file. So I called Merlo at home, long distance, just a few minutes ago.”

  Detective Martin Merlo—who had lived and breathed the Butcher case since he was first assigned in the mid-’30s . . . .

  “I knew,” Eliot was saying, “that Merlo would know that file inside out, virtually have the damn thing memorized. I asked him if the name Arnold Wilson meant anything to him.”

  “And it did?”

  “Remember I mentioned that in the original Butcher investigation we had explored the theory that Watterson had had an accomplice of sorts? That some of the murders, the dismemberments, would seem to have required a second pair of hands?”

  “You had a suspect . . . some fag butcher. . . .”

  “A young homosexual, yes, who worked on St. Clair Avenue. Like Watterson, he liked to prowl the skid row sections of town, preying on society’s dregs. And his name, as you’ve guessed, was Arnold Wilson.”

  But could he be the same Arnold Wilson—the McCadden Cafe short order cook who had been so helpful to me? That skeletal, gimpy war veteran Wilson? And was he one of those cooks who butchered his own meat? I wondered.

  “It’s still a common name,” I said, not knowing whether I wanted this to be true or not.

  “Yes, but the description of the St. Clair Avenue butcher-shop boy was not common: he was a very pockmarked kid, very thin, very tall, Merlo said . . . perhaps as much as six four.”

  Just last night, Arnold Wilson had been sitting on this same couch next to Peggy—had been alone with her.

  “This description perfectly fits, incidentally,” Eliot said, “that of the eyewitness accounts of the one Mocambo robber who went unapprehended.”

  “Which,” I said, “is no coincidence.”

  “I think it’s time we had another talk with Lloyd Watterson,” Eliot said, sitting very straight. “Nate, I think we had the Dahlia’s killer in our hands—perhaps not the person who had her killed, and who provided this particular victim to Lloyd, for his perverse pleasures—but definitely the fiend who did the butchering itself.”

  The phone rang and we both jumped.

  “Hello,” I said numbly.

  “Nate, thank God.”

  It was Fred.

  “What is it, Fred?”

  “I’m at the Bradbury.”

  “What? Working?”

  “Yes—for you. I’m taking a turn at watching Watterson. He and Dailey and the Winter dame arrived here about half an hour ago—they’re in Dailey’s office. Listen, I don’t know what this means, but you may want to get over here right away.”

  “Why, what . . . ?”

  “I just saw your wife go in there.”

  22

  On Saturdays, the Bradbury Building was locked up by one p.m.—about half the offices staying open until noon, the others dispensing with weekend hours—so Eliot and I again parked in the alley and I used my tenant’s key in the rear door, near the service entrance.

  I had an idea I knew what was going on, and I had explained my theory to Eliot, chattering like a demented tour guide running stoplights and stop signs and wildly passing other cars in the fifteen or so frantic minutes from Beverly Hills to downtown L.A. He said little, just taking it in—but if a detective as astute as Eliot Ness did not contradict me, I knew I had to be on to something.

  We flew up the five flights of stairs, golden sun streaming down through the skylight, filtering through the ornate ironwork, casting delicate filigree shadows; our footsteps echoed off the iron steps like small-arms fire in the vast hollow cavern of the Victorian building. No sign of janitorial staff or other tenants. On the fifth floor, Eliot—as I’d instructed—ducked into the A-1 office, to fetch handcuffs and a gun from Fred Rubinski’s small arsenal . . .

  . . . while I barreled down the hall to the doctor’s office, nine-millimeter Browning automatic in hand.

  Fred Rubinski was already inside—and I could hear his voice, jovial through the frosted glass. I had directed Fred to bluff his way in and keep anything from happening till I got
there. Since Fred was a referral service for this high-class abortion mill, he would be humored by Dr. Winter and her senile mentor.

  I burst into the waiting room, where only one chair was taken—by Barney’s wife, Cathy, sitting reading a Ladies’ Home Journal.

  “Nate!” Cathy said. Casually beautiful in white blouse and black slacks, her dark hair up, the former showgirl looked at me with the wide, horrified eyes of someone who’d seen a ghost.

  “Hello, Cathy,” I said. “You just sit there, all right?”

  Everything in the coldly modern reception area looked aboveboard, nothing suspicious, nothing remotely sinister. Fred Rubinski, typically natty in a brown suit and green-and-yellow-striped tie, stood chatting with Dr. Dailey, in front of the receptionist’s empty window.

  Gray-haired, salt-and-pepper-mustached Dr. Dailey—not in his white jacket today, rather a rumpled blue-gray tweed suit—at first smiled, and began to say, “I’m sorry, sir,” possibly to inform me the clinic was closed; then the plumpish, grandfatherly gentleman’s expression froze. Senile or not, he’d noticed the weapon in my fist.

  Seeing me, Fred’s cheerful demeanor disappeared and the Edward G. Robinson face turned cop-hard.

  Dr. Dailey said, “What’s going on here? I don’t understand . . . ?”

  “You rarely do, you old jackass,” Fred snapped, and he took the doctor by the arm and sat him roughly down in one of the waiting room chairs. “Sit there and shut up.”

  And now Fred had a gun in his fist, too, a .38. Cathy was covering her mouth with a red-nailed hand, and looked as though she might cry. Behind his wireframes, the doctor’s rheumy green eyes were open wide, as was his mouth, as if he’d been struck in the belly.

  Pointing down the hallway, to the right of the receptionist window, Fred said, “Third door on the left.”

  Cathy rushed over, catching me just as I was starting down. She clutched my arm. “Nate, you don’t understand. . . . She just wasn’t ready. . . . Please don’t hurt her.”

  I lifted her hand off my arm. “She’s in there with a murderer, Cathy—go sit the hell down.”