Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 8

  Fowley was saying gleefully, “They’ll be lucky to get to Chicago. It’ll take days, maybe even a week to get those prints to Washington for identification.”

  Dragon smoke poured out of Richardson’s nostrils. “Then why are you grinning like the cat that ate the canary?”

  Fowley was damn near bouncing on his chair. “You want to get the cops on our side? Let’s offer them the SoundPhoto machine! We can send the prints over the goddamn wire!”

  I felt sick; I thought I might puke . . . maybe I could do it right on that blowup and cover that grotesque picture up. . . .

  “Prints over the wire?” Richardson was on his feet again. “Can that be done? Has it ever been done?”

  Fowley shrugged, grandly. “I don’t think it has been done, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be—if it works for a pic of Betty Grable’s gams, or DiMaggio’s ugly mug, why wouldn’t it work for fingerprints?”

  Nodding slowly, sucking smoke, Richardson smiled and said, “Why wouldn’t it. . . .”

  It wasn’t exactly a question.

  “And,” Fowley pointed out, “the SoundPhoto is something we got that the cops don’t.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah.” Richardson pointed with his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. “And I could call Ray Richards at our Washington bureau and have him deliver them to the FBI.”

  Fowley was nodding, grinning. “And we share it with the cops on the condition that the other papers don’t get the info until we’ve run our morning edition.”

  The wall-eyes bugged again. “Fowley, there’s only one thing wrong with that idea.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “I didn’t think of it. . . . Back to your desks, check if our boys in Leimert Park have phoned in with anything. We should have Burke’s sketch in a few minutes, and you can start showing it around.”

  “Where?” one of the reporters asked.

  “She was a good-looking piece, before she got turned into two pieces. Show the sketch at the studios, the casting agencies, up and down Hollywood Boulevard—do I have to do all the goddamn fucking thinking around here? Go, go, go!”

  They went, went, went . . . but when I started to rise, Richardson held up a hand in a “stop” motion.

  “Nate,” Richardson said, and he came over and looked right at me, hand settling on my shoulder just about the same time his left eye caught up with his right. “Stick around—we’ll talk.”

  “We can hash out this p.r. business later,” I said, “when it’s not so frantic around here—”

  “Yeah, yeah . . . but just sit back down, give me a few minutes. I gotta call the Hearst Washington bureau, gotta phone the FBI. . . . Want me to get you some coffee?”

  “No—no, that’s okay.”

  “Sit, sit, sit.”

  I sat, sat, sat. Alone in the editorial chamber, I wondered what the hell I was still doing here, right smack in the middle of an investigation into a crime for which I might momentarily become a suspect. My head start had evaporated, or likely soon would, thanks to Fowley’s wirephoto brainstorm and the FBI’s 104 million sets of fingerprints.

  All the while, the grisly photo of that poor butchered girl glistened on the table, taunting me . . . and then, as if Elizabeth Short herself had whispered in my ear, it finally dawned on me that right smack in the middle was still the best place for me. With the jump Richardson had on this case, I could be in a position to know whether Beth’s murder was in any way leading back to me.

  And if Fowley’s slant on sending those prints via wirephoto really did i.d. the corpse as Elizabeth Short, the cops would owe them bigtime—meaning most everything the cops had would be shared with Richardson and his boys.

  Much as I wanted to flee the Examiner, like Stepin Fetchit exiting a haunted house, I knew the best way not to be a suspect in this murder would be to solve the fucking thing—to find the maniac responsible. If I could lend my skills to the investigation, help bring it to a quick resolution, I could clear myself before I needed clearing, before anybody had even tumbled to my connection to the girl.

  After all, I had known her in Chicago, hadn’t even seen her in L.A., the only contact being that single phone call.

  So what I needed to do now was find some way to stay a part of this . . . to stay on the Examiner’s team. . . .

  I was pondering that when Richardson came back in, as usual lighting up a new cigarette off an old one. He shut the door, unintentionally slamming it a little, glass rattling—and rattling me.

  But then the city editor settled in next to me and again placed a friendly hand on my shoulder.

  “We have a singular opportunity, Nate,” Richardson said, and smiled, and looked at me sideways—of course, he always looked at you sideways, even when he was looking at you frontways.

  “What would that be . . . Jim?”

  “This whole notion of ballyhooin’ your agency in the Examiner? It’s blossomed from a nice little mutually beneficial arrangement into a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, yeah. I believe this ‘Werewolf’ case is gonna be the biggest thing since the Lindbergh baby. Fifty years from today, they’ll still be talking about the L.A. ‘Werewolf’ slayer.”

  “It really ought to be ‘Vampire.’ ”

  The wall-eyes flinched. “Huh?”

  “She was drained of blood. That’s not a werewolf—it’s a vampire. Also, ‘Werewolf’ slayer sounds to me like somebody’s going around slaying werewolves. . . .”

  Richardson patted his chest. “Leave the wordsmithing to us, Heller—your job is investigating.”

  Perfect—this was going to be his idea. . . .

  Playing reluctant, I said, “But this isn’t my case. And you know how the cops frown on private detectives working an active murder.”

  “I’m putting every man I can spare on this thing.” He swiveled to look right at me—one eye at a time. His smile was just slightly crazed. “Nate, I’ve just talked to the Chief on the phone . . . and he’s as excited about this story as I am. Sees the full potential.”

  By “the Chief,” Richardson meant Old Man Hearst himself.

  “We’ll run circles around every other paper in town,” Richardson was saying, “and the cops, too—we’ve got expense accounts that make their allocations look silly.”

  “Are you saying you want to hire me, Jim?”

  “You’re goddamn right I want to hire you.”

  “I’m not a reporter, you know—and you’re damn lucky those pictures turned out halfway decent. . . .”

  So to speak.

  “Listen, Nate, the difference between a reporter and a private detective is no wider than a gnat’s eyelash. Hell, when I was in between reporting jobs, I worked as a private eye myself.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Some of my best friends are private eyes—Harry Raymond, remember him?”

  “Got blown up in a car, helping you try to bring down Mayor Shaw?”

  “That’s the one. Hell of a guy.”

  This was all so reassuring.

  Richardson sucked on his cigarette, then said, “Considering the possible scope of this thing, me sending out crews of reporters and photogs, I’m gonna be shorthanded as hell—stay and help investigate this thing, Nate. You and Fowley’ll be the guys who were in on it from the start. You stick with Fowley, and keep playing photographer.”

  “I told you, I’m no photographer, Jim.”

  “Well, pretend you’re peeping through a window—we can always hang drapes on a Speed Graphic, to make you feel at home.” He laughed, raspily, and it turned into a cigarette cough, after which he continued: “We’re gonna solve this damn case, Nate, and hand the murdering son of a bitch to the cops on a platter . . . and when we’re done, we’ll be the only paper that anybody in this town bothers reading, and you’ll be the most famous private eye in America.”

  One way or the other.

  “Okay, Jim,” I said, never more sorry to ge
t what I wanted. “Get out Mr. Hearst’s checkbook.”

  6

  On Temple Street, between Broadway and Spring, the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice engulfed a block’s worth of prime real estate, its fourteen limestone-and-granite stories making it one of the taller edifices in this earthquake-mindful downtown. The rusticated stonework, massive cornices, and two-story crowning colonnade seemed a little grand for a building whose top five stories housed the county jail—granted the municipal courts, sheriff’s department, and D.A.’s offices were here as well.

  So was the county morgue—in the basement. Murderers could await trial in the upper reaches of this fine Italian Renaissance-styled building; their victims had to settle for the sweating pale yellow brick halls of a cramped, squalid warren of fogged-over glass, leaky water pipes, and electric-fan-circulated formaldehyde fumes.

  Late afternoon, we had come in the back way, through the wide entry that Black Marias backed up to, to deposit the various questionable deaths, unidentified corpses, and murder victims who made up the morgue’s client base. Fowley—having parked next to a sign that said NO PARKING AT ANY TIME—went up three cement steps, past a sign that said POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE.

  I followed.

  Just inside the hot, humid hallway, Fowley lighted up a cigarette (next to a NO SMOKING sign) and offered me one.

  I declined and tagged after him down the hallway, our footsteps echoing like small-arms fire.

  “They keep threatening to shut this shithole down,” Fowley said, striding past several gurneys bearing covered, unattended bodies. “But there’s only so much money, and lots of pockets that need filling—and the corpses never bitch about the accommodations, so what the fuck?”

  We moved by several rooms whose doors had moisture-frosted glass panels, creating a haze through which could be made out stiffs stacked on steel tables, like so much firewood.

  “Local funeral parlors have been raising a stink, though,” Fowley said, just making conversation. “Half the time the bodies sent over from here ain’t been sewn back up . . . you know, some poor bastard’s face, folded back up over his skull, with the wife and kids waiting on the other end.”

  Fowley paused at an open doorway, which revealed a lounge of sorts, where deputy coroners in blood-splotched white sat at tables drinking Cokes or coffee and eating doughnuts or candy bars, laughing, talking, their patients in no hurry.

  One of the deputy coroners looked up—a pudgy, balding, rat-faced little guy with dark, squinty, yet glittering eyes behind wirerim glasses—and frowned at Fowley, who crooked his finger, like a parent summoning a child. The little man sighed heavily, pushed to his feet and left his half-eaten doughnut and paper cup of coffee behind.

  “Hiya, Doc,” Fowley said, moving down the hall, away from the open door.

  The round little guy trailed after the reporter, but his eyes—blinking like a mole seeing sunshine—were fixed on me.

  “Who’s this? Who’s this?” he asked, pointing at me. His voice was a high-pitched whine.

  “My photographer,” Fowley said, blowing smoke. “He’s new.”

  “We have to talk in front of him?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tight lips twitched a grimace; then he shrugged. “Well . . . doesn’t matter, anyway. I don’t have anything for you.”

  Fowley frowned. “Haven’t they done the autopsy yet?”

  The deputy coroner nodded. “Just. I assisted. Jane Doe Number One. Down in room four. Newbarr and CeFalu.”

  Fowley whistled, impressed. “First string. Important homicide to you boys?”

  The little man looked furtively about. “Unusual. Unusual.”

  Nodding, sucking on his cigarette, Fowley said, “Getting cut in half, you mean.”

  “That, and—I can’t say any more.”

  “You haven’t said anything yet.”

  The squinty eyes somehow managed to narrow behind the wirerims. “I can tell you she was disemboweled. Certain organs were missing. There were . . . other irregularities.”

  Shaking his head, grinning, cigarette bobbling, Fowley reached a hand in his pants pocket; but the little rat-faced man held up his hands, as if in surrender.

  “Skip it. Skip it. . . . I can’t say anything. This time I can’t say.”

  “Why not, Doc?”

  “Certain facts are being withheld. Facts only the murderer and his victim could know. If I leak what I have, I could lose my job. Obstructing justice, it’s called.”

  “Doc . . . you can trust me. . . .”

  “Forget it. Forget it! We’ll do business some other time.”

  And the little round ratman clip-clopped back down the hall and slipped inside the lounge to finish his doughnut.

  “What the hell could they have found out?” Fowley asked.

  That she was pregnant when she was killed.

  But I just shook my head, like I was wondering the same thing. “It’s not like she was keeping any secrets, lying there naked, cut in half.”

  Fowley squinted in thought. “Something inside her, maybe. Something she swallowed. Or something in her pussy . . .” He snapped his fingers, eyes wild. “Maybe he fucked her in the ass!”

  Only Fowley could make a foul-smelling morgue like this even more distasteful.

  I said, “Come on, Bill—we’re not going to find anything out, down here.”

  “Don’t give up so easy, Nate,” he said, and dropped his cigarette to the cement floor, grinding it out with his heel. “What kind of detective are you? Let’s check out room four.”

  I followed Fowley down several more dank hallways, past more unattended corpses on gurneys.

  “Sometimes they do the autopsies right on the gurneys,” Fowley told me, lightly, “when things get bottled up. Rims around the gurney edges are too shallow to catch fluids, and blood and guts just spill on the floor, and they just wade in the shit. It’s the fuckin’ Middle Ages around this joint.”

  “Spare me the tour-bus chatter, will you, Fowley? And remind me not to die in Los Angeles.”

  The door to room four—which lacked any glass panel to peer through—was closed. Fowley stood there, studying the doorknob, apparently trying to decide whether to just barge in, when the door opened and two men ambled out: Harry the Hat Hansen trailed by his pudgy Watson, Finis Brown.

  I got just a glimpse of her on the shining steel table, the two halves of her, pelvis tipped obscenely up; her head was to one side, staring at me, teeth showing through the gaping wound across her mouth. The flesh of her scalp had been cut and pulled away, the top of her head had been sawed off, for the removal of her brain.

  Then, thankfully, the door was closed.

  Harry—his powder-blue fedora snugged in place, still natty in his dark blue tailored suit despite a brutally long day—looked at us blankly. He was the kind of premeditated man who had to decide whether or not he was pleased or pissed off.

  Brown—his rumpled fedora in hand, his suit looking more slept-in than ever—didn’t need time to know how he felt.

  “What the hell are you shitheads doing here?” the chunky cop exploded, moving forward, putting a flat hand against Fowley’s chest. “Get the fuck out. This is restricted!”

  Hansen, however, was smiling. He rested a hand on Brown’s shoulder. “Brownie—relax. These are the men who found the body, remember? Perhaps they’re just here to volunteer their formal statement.”

  “We can go down to Central Homicide, if you like,” Fowley said, obviously a little cowed from having the beefy Brown in his face.

  Gazing sleepily at us, the Hat spoke as if in benediction. “That’s not necessary. Brownie here can take your statement, Bill—and we’ll send over a typewritten version to the Examiner, for your approval, and signature.”

  Fowley didn’t quite know what to make of that.

  “Brownie,” the Hat said, “go see to it that police guards are posted at the ambulance entrance of this fine facility, would you?” To us, the Hat added, “That is how
you got in?”

  We nodded.

  “Do that, Brownie, please, and then get right back here, to take Mr. Fowley’s statement.”

  “Sure, Harry,” Brown said, flashing us a couple of dirty looks that would have seemed silly if the fat S.O.B. hadn’t been such a nasty piece of work.

  Once Brown had bounded off, the Hat looked from Fowley to me and back again, clapping his hands together. “First, do you boys have any questions? We’re going to cooperate, after all—the Examiner and the LAPD, that is. Two fine institutions with the public’s welfare at heart.” This son of a bitch was so dry, you could never tell when he was pulling your chain.

  “Any surprises in there, Harry?” Fowley said, nodding toward the closed door to room number four. He got out his notepad and a pencil and waited for an answer.

  It finally came.

  The Hat’s tiny mouth puckered a smile. “Of course there are . . . ‘surprises.’ I’m sure your source in the coroner’s office has already told you that . . . and I presume he’s also refused to share those surprises with you, or you wouldn’t still be standing here.”

  Fowley grinned, tapping his notepad with the pencil. “Fair enough, Harry. What can you give me?”

  “Let’s back up a little. Your extra edition has been on the street, what, two hours?”

  “Something like that.”

  The Hat lifted an eyebrow and the blue fedora rose a tad. “We’ve already had six confessions.”

  Fowley smirked. “I guess that’s no surprise—something this splashy . . . and this friggin’ weird . . . it’s gonna bring ’em out of the woodwork.”

  Nodding, the Hat said, “I anticipate more Confessin’ Sams than you could shake a stick at, making all kinds of work for us, pointless work that can get in the way of actually solving this thing.”

  I asked, “What can be done about that?”

  Harry held up three fingers. “Let the public know that Detective Hansen is withholding three pieces of information—three things that only that poor dead girl and her killer could know. That may help minimize the false confession problem.”