Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 4

  “Thanks.”

  Shrugging, I hung up; what the hell—what had been her damn rush, anyway? Beth Short knew where to find me.

  So I leaned against the wall outside the ladies’ powder room, nodding to Bogart and Bacall as they strolled by, heading to the bar; Bogart nodded back and Bacall bestowed a smile. Nice couple. Glad somebody was happily married.

  Well, at least I could be sure of something: I might be one fertile son of a bitch, but none of the women in my life wanted to have my kid.

  3

  Flies were not alone in swarming around the milky-white cleaved cadaver in the weedy vacant lot on South Norton Avenue—within minutes of Bill Fowley abandoning me by driving off to make his phone call, cops and reporters and assorted rubberneckers were getting grisly glimpses.

  It began slowly, with another radio patrol car pulling up, a uniformed sergeant who’d been cruising Slauson having heard the 390 call. Though he was older, and obviously experienced, the sarge whitened and shook his head and backed away from the body, mumbling, “Man oh man oh man.” Shortly thereafter a blue ’41 Ford with a press sticker on the windshield drew up, parked in the street, and a fortyish fireplug of a woman in a raincoat, her short red hair uncovered, hopped out and headed over, trailed by a photographer—a real one—loading a bulb into his Speed Graphic.

  Round faced with pleasant features given an edge by her hard bright eyes and firm set jaw, Aggie Underwood might have been a schoolteacher; instead she was the first rival reporter to arrive at the scene. Sort of a rival, anyway: like Fowley, she worked for Hearst, just a different paper, the afternoon Herald Express.

  Trouble was, Aggie knew me—we were friendly acquaintances, having met when I came to L.A. in late ’44 on the notorious Peete case; Louise Peete—currently sitting on death row—was scheduled to be the second woman in California history to be executed. Aggie was regarded by many as the best police beat reporter in L.A., with a tough-as-nails, aggressive reputation that I knew from personal experience was well deserved.

  She didn’t notice me at first—I was standing off to one side—and when the younger uniformed officer, Jerry, stepped forward, holding out a traffic-cop palm, saying, “Just a minute, lady!” she brushed past him, speaking to the older cop, Mike, notepad and pencil at the ready.

  “Remember me, Officer?” she said chirpily. “Underwood of the Express?” Still charging forward, she jerked a thumb back at her photographer, who was ambling up behind her. “Jack here took that swell picture of you that made page three last month—that school fire?”

  “Miss Underwood, please stay back—”

  “What have we got here?”

  “It’s a bad one, ma’am, please prepare yourself . . .”

  Aggie laughed at that—the thought of any crime scene bothering a tough cookie like her being simply absurd—and then the laugh caught, and Aggie froze, one foot on the sidewalk, the other on the grass, almost stepping on the corpse’s left leg. The blood drained out of Aggie’s face, leaving her complexion fish-belly white under the shock of red hair.

  “Christ almighty,” she breathed. Swallowing, she said, “This poor kid’s been cut in two!”

  Nice to have a reporter on hand, to spell that out for the rest of us.

  And now Aggie was doing something she probably had never done before: she was moving away from a big story, walking backward till she dropped off the curb and stumbled against the nose of that first squad car. She covered her mouth, clearly queasy.

  Finally she said, “What kind of sick son of a bitch would do something like this?”

  Nobody bothered answering—not that anybody had an answer.

  I didn’t have one, either, but I figured I better break the ice, just the same. Better I make myself known than wait to be noticed.

  Joining her where she was propping herself against the patrol car, I said, “Been a while, Aggie.”

  She turned to me blankly; then recognition narrowed her eyes and she smiled, faintly, shaking her head, saying, “Nate Heller. Heard you were in town. . . .What brings a handsome devil like you to these picnic grounds?”

  Without mentioning I’d played photographer, I told her I’d been tagging along with Fowley for a meeting at the Examiner, to get some ink for my new partnership with Fred Rubinski.

  “And you didn’t come to me first?” she said, fumbling in her purse for cigarettes. She was shaking, a little. “After all we’ve meant to each other? . . . Jack! Get off your dead keister and take some goddamn pictures!”

  Jack—thin, thirty, a burning cigarette bobbing—looked at her with wide eyes that supposedly had seen everything, and said, “What the hell picture can I take of that?”

  “You take every picture, every angle you come up with, and leave the worries to the airbrush boys.”

  He sighed smoke. “Gotcha.”

  Aggie offered me a cigarette, a Camel, and I took her up on it. Like a lot of servicemen, I’d started smoking overseas; I’d managed to shake the habit, during my postcombat trauma stay in the mental ward at St. Elizabeth’s. But now and then I got the craving—stressful situations, mostly.

  “So the Examiner beat me here,” she said, plucking a tobacco flake off her tongue. “Well, too bad for them they only got a morning edition. . . . Did he have a photographer with him?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Jack’s right. This is gonna be a hard one to print pictures of.”

  I was lighting up off a book of matches she’d tossed me. “You okay, Aggie?”

  “Yeah. But, Nate, I swear to God that’s the worst one I ever saw. I mean, I caught some bad traffic accidents, and plenty of nasty homicides, from ice picks to axes . . . but, hell, this . . . the sick bastard put that poor little dame on display. It’s like a French postcard sent by the Marquis de Sade.”

  The younger cop was saying to the sergeant, “I make her for about thirty-five. What do you think, Sarge?”

  But it was Aggie who answered the question, trundling over, saying, “I got girdles older than that kid—she’s barely out of her teens.” Fully recovered, Aggie knelt over the corpse and pointed. “She’s got smooth skin. Get a load of those firm thighs, boys—she’s young and I think she might’ve been pretty. Who do you suppose she was? A starlet, maybe?”

  Maybe Aggie had her act together, but I was still trembling, leaning against the squad car, sucking on the cigarette. They could speculate all they wanted, but I knew who the dead girl was—and, yes, she had been pretty—only, to do my civic duty and inform police and press that this was Elizabeth Short, of Medford, Massachusetts, would be to reveal myself as a prime suspect. This woman had, after all, tried to hit me up for abortion money, less than a week ago. A child belonging to me was probably still inside her, right now, a tiny Heller every bit as dead as she was.

  On the other hand, if I kept quiet now, and the cops found out about the connection between us later, I could wind up breathing in more than a Camel cigarette, namely cyanide fumes at San Quentin.

  Still . . . despite the jam I was potentially in—and the murdered girl’s attempt to shake me down—I felt my eyes welling up and throat getting lumpy, and I wasn’t catching cold, either, despite the nippy wind under the gray sky. I had liked this girl—she’d been nice to me, and not just sexually; sure, she’d been troubled, with more ambition than common sense, one of the legion of pretty girls who came west daily, looking to trade beauty for fame, hoping to be discovered—just not in a vacant lot.

  More cops (from neighboring divisions), more reporters (from all five Los Angeles daily papers), arrived, as did numerous plain citizens; this desolate stretch of wired-off lots—previously populated chiefly by weeds and telephone poles—was suddenly teeming. The circus had come to this neighborhood once again, just not Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey this time. Onlookers, kept back by cops, stood on top of their parked cars to get a gander.

  Oddly, for such a mob, a quiet settled over the scene. People were talking, sure,
but with voices low, respectful, as if this were visitation at a funeral home.

  Before long, a plainclothes dick from nearby University Station—Lieutenant Haskins—took charge, casually informing Aggie that this would be his case. That proved to be wishful thinking.

  Aggie had moved away from the crime scene and was interviewing a little boy on a bike from the neighborhood when an unmarked midnight-blue Chevy sedan arrived and parked, barricade-style, to help block traffic.

  Even before they climbed out, I pegged them as homicide dicks from Central Division; no great deduction on my part: it happened I knew one of them a little—again from the Peete case—and this was not a lucky break for me. Aggie, distracted by the extreme nature of the slaying, had glossed over the presence of a private detective at this crime scene; Detective Harry Hansen would not.

  On the force for over twenty years, better than half of them working out of Homicide Division, Hansen stepped out from the rider’s side and just seemed to keep coming: tall, tanned, lanky, in his late forties, he had an oblong, deeply grooved face with deceptively sleepy eyes, a long blunt nose and a pursed kiss of a mouth. The big redheaded Dane—who supervised most significant L.A. homicide investigations—had a reputation as the most dapper cop in the department, which his wardrobe this morning lived up to: tailored dark blue suit, white-and-shades-of-blue-striped silk tie, and dark-banded powder-blue snapbrim fedora.

  The fedora—probably a fifty-dollar number—was his trademark, and he was seldom seen out of one, even indoors—in part, it was said, because he was balding. The newspapers liked to call Hansen “Mr. Homicide,” a sobriquet rumored to have been suggested by Hansen himself; but what he was called on the street, by both cops and crooks, was Harry the Hat.

  I didn’t recognize his partner, who’d been driving. Whoever he was, this plainclothes dick was not the second most dapper cop on the force: a prematurely gray, thirtyish, round-faced, chunky character in an off-the-rack slept-in-looking brown suit with red-and-white-dotted tie, with a rumpled brown fedora shoved back on his head, revealing a hairline that had receded to the next county.

  The Hat scowled, glancing down and around at the cigarette butts and spent black flashbulbs littering the street and sidewalk. Maybe because his eyes were lowered, he didn’t notice me, as he and his partner were ushered to the bisected body by that University Station lieutenant who, seeing Hansen, almost certainly realized he had just been usurped of his case.

  Along the way, Lieutenant Haskins—slender, nondescript, his gray suit flapping in the breeze—introduced himself to the city’s most famous homicide detective.

  “I’m the one who called Captain Donahoe and requested backup,” Haskins said.

  Hansen’s sleepy eyes snapped awake at the suggestion that he was “backup.”

  “I don’t much care who called Captain Donahoe,” Hansen said, his tone as gentle as his words were sharp, nodding toward the white shape in the weeds. “What I do care about is, who called this in?”

  “An unidentified female.”

  “That makes two unidentified females we have on our hands.”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “The anonymous woman caller just said somebody was lying in the weeds, and needed attending to.”

  “I would call that an understatement,” Hansen said, and ambled to the edge of the sidewalk. His chunky partner followed him, and when Hansen squatted to regard the corpse, the partner squatted beside him, as if their entire relationship were a game of Simon Says.

  Like Aggie Underwood, Harry the Hat had seen damn near everything; but even from my vantage point in the street, I could see his stony mask slip. The chunky cop at Harry’s side was scowling in disgust.

  “Christ, Harry,” he was saying, waving away the flies.

  “Somebody spent his sweet time on her, Brownie,” Hansen said to his partner. “Ever see a face cut up like that?”

  “Hell no.”

  “That grin carved in her face? Cut clean through the cheeks. . . . Somebody made a real hobby out of her.”

  The Hat rose; so did “Brownie.”

  Lieutenant Haskins said, “I already called in the lab boys. They should be on the way.”

  The Hat shot him a look. “Who did you talk to?”

  “Lieutenant Jones—Lee Jones.”

  “Call again. Get Ray Pinker over here.”

  Pinker was chief of the LAPD crime lab.

  “Yes, sir,” Haskins said, and went off to use the police radio.

  The Hat called out to him. “Don’t use the radio! We got enough bystanders and meddling cops and damn reporters, already. Where’s the nearest pay phone?”

  “There’s one on Crenshaw.”

  “Good. . . . Hurry back.”

  The lieutenant paused, as if trying to find the sarcasm in Hansen’s words; but the Hat was a deadpan comic and you couldn’t always tell.

  Gazing with what might have been mild disgust at the lieutenant, who was climbing into his squad car to go make his phone call, Hansen finally noticed me.

  Initially, surprise tightened the Robert Mitchum eyes; then his tiny mouth puckered into a smile. “And I thought this already was interesting. . . . Come say hello, Nate.”

  I nodded at the Hat as I made my way to the sidewalk.

  “We have a celebrity at the scene, Brownie,” Hansen was saying. “This is Nate Heller, that Chicago private detective you’ve heard so much about.”

  “I have?” Brownie asked.

  “Fred Rubinski’s new partner. The one who helped me break the Peete case.”

  Actually, I had broken it by myself, but never mind.

  “Good to see you again, Harry,” I said, and offered my hand.

  The Hat grasped my hand with one of his, using the thumb of his other hand to indicate his partner. “This is Sergeant Brown—Fine-us Brown . . .”

  That was spelled Finis, I later learned.

  Shaking Brown’s hand, I said to the Hat, “I thought you worked exclusively with Jack McCreadie.”

  “They split us up. Share the wealth—spread the expertise. I’m known for my skills as a detective, you know—like right away, my nose is twitching, finding a Chicago private dick at an L.A. crime scene . . . and what a crime scene.”

  I gave a quick explanation of how I came to be here.

  “I don’t know what became of Fowley,” I said, looking around, not hiding my irritation. “Son of a bitch stranded me here.”

  “I can tell you,” the Hat said. “Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce he drove over to the Examiner to fill Richardson in, in person. This is going to be a big case. Ever see the like, Heller?”

  “Well, actually . . .”

  The Hat snapped his fingers; the sleepy eyes popped awake. “You have! You worked that Butcher case in Cleveland! When was it, ’38?”

  That floored me. “How the hell do you know that, Harry?”

  The Hat shrugged. “You turned up in the middle of the Peete case, Nate. I researched you. I know things about you that you’ve forgotten. . . . Brownie, Mr. Heller here is thick with Eliot Ness.”

  “Who?” Brown asked.

  “Ness—he ran the Capone squad in Chicago, then made all those headlines in Cleveland, running the Mayfield Mob out of town. Youngest safety director in these United States, Ness was.”

  “Oh,” Brown said. But it was obviously all news to him.

  Under their lids, the Hat’s eyes fixed on me like gunsights. “You think I should talk to Mr. Ness about this, Nate? That case was never solved, was it?”

  “What case?” Brown asked.

  “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Thirteen torso killings . . . like this one, here.”

  “Not quite like this one,” I said. “The Butcher usually dismembered his victims, and usually decapitated them, just for good measure. . . .This is a similar M.O., but—”

  “Why don’t you call Mr. Ness for me?” the Hat asked genially. “He’s not safety director, anymore, I realize . . .”

  “Tha
t’s right. He’s in private business.”

  “But it would be nice to get his read on this. Would you mind?”

  “No! No, not at all.”

  That was Harry the Hat for you. His whole style was low-key—no intimidation, no rubber hoses from the Hat; he had a gentle touch, using psychology and subtle manipulation, to get confessions out of suspects.

  “Mr. Heller here is a true detective, in the best sense, Brownie. We’re lucky to have him with us . . . a lucky coincidence.”

  “I, uh, don’t see anything so coincidental about it,” I said.

  Brown was frowning, eyes disappearing into slits on his basketball-shaped head. “You don’t think it’s a coincidence? A private dick at a murder scene?”

  “Who worked another torso slaying,” Hansen added pleasantly. “That is, slay-ings.”

  “Listen, boys, I’m just waiting for my ride. You’ve got a lot to do. Let me just get out of your way. . . .”

  The Hat put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you pitch in? A man of your expertise. What have you noticed?”

  So I shared my observations with them, as I had with Bill Fowley, pointing here, pointing there: the lack of blood, the clean nature of the bisection itself, the discarded cement sack, the bloody obscured footprint on the driveway, the tire marks.

  “You see, Brownie? A master detective, our friend from Chicago.”

  We were still on the sidewalk, near the corpse.

  “You’ve hardly left anything for us to do, Nate.” The Hat leaned over the corpse, touched the white flesh of her thigh, near where a chunk had been carved away. “She’s cold. . . .” He eased his hand underneath her, just a little. He looked up at me in surprise. “Ground’s wet.”

  I frowned. “Dew?”

  Brown frowned. “Do what?”

  Hansen nodded at me. “She was left here before dawn, when the ground was still wet with dew. . . . I’d say this body was washed, perhaps soaked in water, possibly scrubbed. . . .”