The Big Nowhere (13 page)

All debits, but on the plus side Dudley’s ranting didn’t put out information restricted to Lesnick’s files, leaving that avenue of manipulation still open. What was troubling was a cop as smart as the Irishman taking a nondirect attack so personally, then hitting his “brother officer” below the belt.

Pendejo.

Scared.

And Dudley Smith knows it.

At home, Mal took advantage of the empty house, dumping his sweaty clothes, showering, changing to a sport shirt and khakis and settling into the den to write a long memo to Loew—heavily stressing that there should be no further direct questioning of UAES members until their decoy was planted—a decoy now being a necessity. He was a page in when he realized that it had to be partly a gloss job—there was no way to accurately describe what happened at Variety International without portraying himself as a weakling or a fool. So he did gloss it, and filled up another page with warnings on the Loew choice for trouble-shooter—Buzz Meeks—the man who held the possible distinction of being the single most crooked cop in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department—heroin skimmer, shakedown artist, bagman and now a glorified pimp for Howard Hughes. After that page, he knew it was futile; if Meeks wanted in he
was
in—Hughes was the heaviest contributor to the grand jury bankroll and Meeks’ bossman—what he said would go. After two pages he knew
why
the tack wasn’t worth pursuing: Meeks was absolutely the best man for the job. And the best man for the job was afraid of him, just like he was afraid of Dudley Smith. Even though there was no reason for the fear.

Mal threw the Meeks memo in the wastebasket and started thinking decoy. The LAPD Academy was already out—straight arrow youths with no spark for impersonation. The Sheriff’s Academy was unlikely—the Brenda Allen mess and the LASD sheltering Mickey Cohen made it unlikely that they would lend the City a smart young recruit. Their best bet was a rank-and-file City officer, smart, good-looking, adaptable and ambitious, mid to late twenties, a malleable young man without a hard-edged cop quality.

Where?

Hollywood Division was out—half the men had been implicated over Brenda Allen, had had their pictures in the paper, were running scared and angry and wild—there was even a rumor floating around that three men on the Hollywood Detective Squad had been behind last August’s shootout at Sherry’s—a botched snuff attempt on Mickey Cohen that wounded three and killed a Cohen utility trigger.
Out
.

And Central was packed with unqualified rookies who made the Department because of their war records; 77th Street, Newton and University featured outsized crackers hired on to keep the Negro citizenry in line. Hollenbeck might be a good place to look—but East LA was Mex, Benavides, Lopez and Duarte still had ties there, and that might blow their decoy’s cover. The various detective divisions were a possible stalking ground—if they could find a man who didn’t come off as irredeemably jaded.

Mal grabbed his LAPD station directory and started scanning it, one eye on the wall clock as it inched toward 3:00 and Stefan’s home-from-school time. He was about to start calling CO’s for preliminary screening talks when he heard footsteps in the hall; he swiveled in his chair, dropped his arms and got ready to let his son dogpile him.

It was Celeste. She looked at Mal’s open arms until he dropped them; she said, “I told Stefan to stay late after school in order that I should talk to you.”

“Yes?”

“The look on your face does not to make this easy.”

“Spill it, goddamn you.”

Celeste clutched her beaded opera purse, a favored relic of Prague, 1935. “I am going to divorce you. I have met a nice man, a man who is cultured and will make Stefan and me a better home.”

Mal thought: perfect calm, she knows her effects. He said, “I won’t let you. Don’t hurt my boy or I’ll hurt you.”

“You cannot. To the mother the child belongs.”

Maim her, let her know he
is
the law. “Is he rich, Celeste? If you have to fuck to survive, you should fuck rich men. Right, Fräulein? Or powerful men, like Kempflerr.”

“You always return to that because it is so ugly and because it excites you so.”

Match point; Mal felt his sense of gamesmanship go blooey. “I saved your wretched rich-girl ass. I killed the man who made you a whore. I gave you a home.”

Celeste smiled, her standard parting of thin lips over perfect teeth. “You killed Kempflerr to prove yourself not a coward. You wanted to be like a real policeman, and you were willing to destroy yourself to do it. Only your dumb luck saved you. And you keep your secrets so badly.”

Mal stood up on punch-drunk legs. “I killed someone who deserved to die.”

Celeste fondled her purse, fingers over beadwork embroidery. Mal saw it as stage business, the buildup to a punch line. “No comeback for that one?”

Celeste put on her deepest iceberg smile. “Herr Kempflerr was very kind to me, and I only made up his nasty sexuality to excite you. He was a gentle lover, and when the war was almost over, he sabotaged the ovens and saved thousands of lives. You are lucky that military governor liked you, Malcolm. Kempflerr was going to help the Americans look for other Nazis. And I only married you because I felt very bad about the lies I seduced you with.”

Mal tried to say “No,” but couldn’t form the word; Celeste broadened her smile. Mal saw it as a target and ran to her. He grabbed her neck, held her to the doorway and aimed hard right hands at her mouth, teeth splintering up through her lips, cutting his knuckles. He hit her and hit her and hit her; he would have gone on hitting her, but “Mutti!” and tiny fists pummeling his legs made him stop and run out of the house, afraid of a little boy—his own.

The phone wouldn’t quit ringing.

First it was Leotis Dineen, calling to tell him that Art Aragon knocked out Lupe Pimentel in the second round, raising his debt to twenty-one hundred even, with a vig payment due tomorrow. Next was the real estate man up in Ventura County. His glad tidings: the top offer for Buzz’s dry-rotted, shadeless, rock-laden, non-irrigable, poorly located and generally misanthropic farmland was fourteen dollars an acre, the offerer, the pastor of First Pentecostal Divine Eminence Church, who wanted to turn it into a cemetery for the sanctified pets of members of his congregation. Buzz said twenty per, minimum; ten minutes later the phone rang again. No salutation, just, “I didn’t tell Mickey, because you’re not worth going to the gas chamber for.” He suggested a romantic drink somewhere; Audrey Anders replied, “Fuck you.”

Skating on the stupidest stupid move of his life made him feel cocky, despite Dineen’s implied warning: my money or your kneecaps. Buzz thought of cash shakedowns—him against fences and hotel crawlers he’d leaned on as a cop, then nixed the notion—he’d gotten older and flabbier, while they’d probably gotten meaner and better armed. There was just himself against 50-50 Mal Considine, who held a mean stare but otherwise looked pretty withered. He picked up the phone and dialed his boss’s private number at the Bel-Air Hotel.

“Yes? Who is this?”

“Me. Howard, I want in on that grand jury turkey shoot. That job still open?”

Danny was trying hard to stay under the speed limit, hauling into Hollywood—City jurisdiction—with the speedometer needle straddling forty. A few minutes ago a Lexington State administrator had called the station; a letter from Marty Goines, postmarked four days before, had just arrived at the hospital. It was addressed to a patient there and contained nothing but innocuous stuff about jazz—and the word that Goines had moved into an above-garage flop at 2307 North Tamarind. It was a scalding hot lead; if the address had been County ground, he’d have grabbed a black-and-white and rolled red lights and siren.

2307 was a half mile north of the Boulevard, in the middle of a long block of wood-framed Tudors. Danny parked curbside and saw that the cold afternoon had kept the locals indoors—no one was out taking the air. He grabbed his evidence kit, trotted up to the door of the front house and rang the bell.

Ten seconds, no answer. Danny walked back to the garage, saw a shacklike built-on atop it and took rickety steps up to the door. He tapped the pane three times—silence—got out his pocket knife and stuck it into the lock/door jamb juncture. A few seconds of prying, and snap! Danny scanned for witnesses, saw none, pushed the door open and closed it behind him.

The smell hit him first: metallic, acidic. Danny slow-motioned his evidence kit to the floor, drew his gun and fingered the wall for a light switch. His thumb flicked one on abruptly, before he’d clamped down his nerves to look. He saw a one-room dive turned slaughterhouse.

Blood on the walls. Huge, unmistakable streaks, exemplary textbook spit marks: the killer expelling big mouthfuls, spritzing the red out through his teeth, drawing little patterns on cheap floral wallpaper. Four whole walls of it—dips and curlicues and one design that looked like an elaborate letter W. Blood matting a threadbare throw rug, blood in large caked pools on the linoleum floor, blood saturating a light-colored sofa oozing stuffing, blood splashed across a stack of newspapers next to a table holding a hot plate, saucepan and single can of soup. Much too much blood to come from one ravaged human being.

Danny hyperventilated; he saw two doorless doorways off the left wall. He holstered his .45, jammed his hands in his pockets so as not to leave prints and checked the closest one out.

The bathroom.

White walls covered with vertical and horizontal blood lines, perfectly straight, intersecting at right angles, the killer getting the knack. A bathtub, the sides and bottom caked with a pinkish-brown matter that looked like blood mixed with soapsuds. A stack of men’s clothing—shirts, trousers, a herringbone sports coat—folded atop the toilet seat.

Danny turned on the sink faucet with a knuckle, lowered his head, splashed and drank. Looking up, he caught his face in the mirror; for a second he didn’t think it was him. He walked back to the main room, took rubber gloves from his evidence kit, slipped them on, returned to the bathroom and sifted through the clothing, dropping it on the floor.

Three pairs of pants. Three skivvy shirts. Three rolled-up pairs of socks. One sweater, one windbreaker, one sports jacket.

Three victims.

One other doorway.

Danny backed out of the bathroom and pivoted into a small kitchenette, expecting a gigantic rush of crimson. What he got was perfect tidiness: scrub brush, Ajax and a soap bar lined up on a rack above a clean sink; clean dishes in a plastic drainer; a 1949 calendar tacked to the wall, the first eleven months ripped off, no notations on the page for December. A telephone on a nightstand placed against the side wall and a battered Frigidaire next to the sink.

No blood, no horror artwork. Danny felt his stomach settle and his pulse take over, jolts like wires frazzling. Two other stiffs dumped someplace; a B&E on LAPD turf—Hollywood Division, where the Brenda Allen mess was the worst, where they hated the Sheriff’s Department the most. His violation of Captain Dietrich’s direct order: no strongarm, no prima donna in the City. No way to report what he found. An outside chance of the killer bringing number four here.

Danny gulped from the sink, swathed his face, let his gloved hands and jacket sleeves get sopping. He thought of tossing the pad for a bottle; his stomach heaved; he picked up the phone and dialed the station.

Karen Hiltscher answered. “West Hollywood Sheriff’s. May I help you?”

Danny’s voice wasn’t his. “It’s me, Karen.”

“Danny? You sound strange.”

“
Just listen
. I’m someplace where I shouldn’t be and I need something, and I need you to call me back here when you’ve got it. And nobody can know.
Nobody
. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Danny, please don’t be so rough.”

“
Just listen
. I want your verbal on every dead body report filed city and countywide over the past forty-eight hours, and I want you to call me back here with it,
quick
. Ring twice, hang up and call again. Got it?”

“Yes. Sweetie, are you all—”

“Damnit,
just listen
. I’m at Hollywood-4619, it’s
wrong
and I could get in big trouble for being here, so don’t tell anybody.
Do you fucking understand?
”

Karen whispered, “Yes, sweetie,” and let her end of the line go dead. Danny hung up, wiped sweat off his neck and thought of ice water. He saw the Frigidaire, reached over and opened the door, bolted for the sink when he caught what was inside.

Two eyeballs coated with clear jelly in an ashtray. A severed human finger on top of a package of green beans.

Danny vomited until his chest ached and his stomach retched itself empty; he turned on the faucet and doused himself until water seeped inside his rubber gloves and he snapped that a sopping wet cop couldn’t forensic a crime scene that Vollmer or Maslick would have killed for. He turned the water off and shook himself half dry, hands braced against the sink ledge. The phone rang; he heard it as a gunshot, pulled his piece and aimed it at nothing.

Another ring, silence, a third ring. Danny picked up the receiver. “Yes? Karen?”

The girl had on her singsong pout. “Three DOAs. Two female Caucasians, one male Negro. The females were a pill suicide and a car wreck and the Negro was a wino who died of exposure, and you owe me the Coconut Grove for being so nasty.”

Eight walls of blood spritz and a would-be lady cop who wanted to go dancing. Danny laughed and opened the icebox door for more comic relief. The finger was long, white and thin, and the eyeballs were brown and starting to shrivel. “Anywhere, sweetie, anywhere.”

“Danny, are you sure you’re—”

“Karen, listen real close. I’m staying here to see who shows up. Are you working a double shift tonight?”

“Until eight tomorrow.”

“Then do this. I want the City and County air monitored for male Caucasian DBs. Stay at your switchboard, keep the City and County boxes on low and listen for homicide squeals with male Caucasian victims. Call me here the same way you just did if you get any. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Danny.”

“And sweetie, nobody can know. Not Dietrich, not anyone on the squad,
not anyone
.”

A long sigh, Karen’s version of Katharine Hepburn exhausted. “Yes, Deputy Upshaw,” then a soft click.

Danny hung up and forensiced the pad.

He scraped dirt and dust samples off the floor in all three rooms, placing them in individually marked glassine envelopes; he got out his Rolleiflex evidence camera and shot wide angles and close-ups of the blood patterns. He scraped, tagged and tubed bathtub blood, couch and chair blood, wall blood, rug blood and floor blood; he took fiber samples from the three sets of clothes and wrote down the brand names on the labels.

Dusk came on. Danny kept the lights off, working with a pen flash held in his teeth. He dusted for latent prints, exhausting rolls of touch, grab and press surfaces, getting a rubber glove set—most likely the killer—and a full right- and partial left-hand unknown—which did not match the Marty Goines print abstract. Knowing Goines latents
should
appear, he kept going and was rewarded—a left spread off the kitchen sink ledge. Reconstructing the killer showering himself free of blood, he rolled every touch surface in the bathroom—bringing up one-, two-, three-finger and full hand spans, surgical rubber tips, the hands of a large man, widely spaced where he braced himself into the shower/tub wall.

Midnight.

Danny took the severed finger out of the icebox, rolled it in ink, then on paper. A matchup to the middle right digit on the unknown set. The cut point was jagged, just above the knuckle, cauterized by scorching—charred black flesh scabbing it up. Danny checked the hot plate in the living room. Paydirt: fried skin stuck to the coils; the killer wanted to preserve the finger, a shock to whoever discovered the carnage.

Or was he planning to return with another victim?

And was he keeping the pad under surveillance to know when that option was blown?

12:45.

Danny gave the place a last toss. The one closet was empty; there was nothing secreted under the rugs; a penlight wall scan gave him another notch on his reconstruction: approximately two thirds of the blood caking was texturally uniform—victims two and three were almost certainly killed at the same time. Checking out the floor on his knees got him a last piece of evidence: a glob of hardened white paste residue, neutral in smell. He tagged and bagged it, tagged and bagged Marty Goines’ eyeballs, sat down on the nonblooded edge of the sofa, gun out and resting on his knee—and waited.

Exhaustion crept in. Danny closed his eyes and saw blood patterns superimposed on the lids, white on red, the colors reversed like photographic negatives. His hands were numb from hours of working in rubber gloves; he imagined the metallic smell of the room as the smell of good whiskey, started tasting it, shut down the thought and ran theories in his head so the taste would stay away.

2307 Tamarind was a thirty-minute drive to the Strip tops—the killer had his maximum time of two hours to play with Marty Goines’ corpse and decorate the pad. The killer was monstrously,
suicidally
bold to kill two other men—probably at the same time—in the same place. The killer probably had the subconscious desire to be captured that many psychopaths evinced; he was an exhibitionist and was probably distressed that the Goines snuff had received virtually no publicity. The other two bodies had probably been dumped someplace where they would be found, which meant that last night or yesterday was when murders two and three occurred. Questions: were the patterns on the wall significant in design or just blood spat in rage? What did the letter W mean?
Were the
three victims randomly chosen on the basis of homosexuality or dope addiction, or were they previously known to the killer?

More exhaustion, his brain wires frazzling from too much information, too few connecting threads. Danny took to looking at his luminous wristwatch dial to stay awake; 3:11 had just passed when he heard the outside lock being picked.

He got up and padded to the curtains beside the light switch, the door a foot away, his gun arm extended and braced with his left hand. The locking mechanism gave with a sharp ka-thack; the door opened; Danny hit the switch.

A fortyish fat man was frozen by the light. Danny took a step forward; the man pivoted into the muzzle of a .45 revolver. His hands jerked toward his pockets; Danny toed the door shut and barrel-lashed him across the face, knocking him into wallpaper zigzagged with blood. The fat man let out a yelp, saw the wall gore for real and hit his knees, hands clasped, ready to beg.

Danny squatted beside him, gun aimed at the trickle of blood on his cheek. The fat man mumbled Hail Marys; Danny fished out his cuffs, slid his .45 out of trouble, worked the ratchets and slapped them around prayer-pressed wrists. The bracelet teeth snapped; the man looked at Danny like
he
was Jesus. “Cop? You’re a cop?”

Danny gave him the once-over. Convict pallor, prison shoes, secondhand clothes and grateful that a policeman caught him breaking and entering, a parole violation and a dime minimum. The man looked at the walls, brought his eyes down, saw that he was kneeling two inches from a pool of blood with a dead cockroach basted in the middle. “Goddamnit, tell me you’re—”

Danny grabbed his throat and squeezed it. “Sheriff’s. Keep your voice down and play straight with me and I’ll let you walk out of here.” With his free hand, he gave Fats a pocket and waistband frisk, pulling out wallet, keys, a switchblade and a flat leather case, compact but heavy, with a zippered closure.

He eased off his throat hold and examined the wallet, dropping cards and papers to the floor. There was an expired California driver’s license for Leo Theodore Bordoni, DOB 6/19/09; a County Parole identification card made out to the same name; a plasma bank donor slip stating that Leo Bordoni, type AB+, could sell his plasma again on January 18, 1950. The cards were racetrack stuff—voided betting stubs, receipts, matchbook covers with the names of hot horses and race numbers jotted on the back.

Danny let go of Leo Theodore Bordoni’s neck, the fat man’s reward for a parlay—reaction to the gore, blood type and physical description—that eliminated him as a killing suspect. Bordoni gurgled and wiped blood off his face; Danny unzipped the leather case and saw a set of bonaroos: pick gouger, baby glass cutter, chisel pry and window snap, all laid out on green velvet. He said, “B&E, possession of burglar’s tools, parole violation. How many falls have you taken, Leo?”

Bordoni massaged his neck. “Three. Where’s Marty?”

Danny pointed to the walls. “Where do you think?”

“Oh fucking God.”

“That’s right. Old Marty that nobody knows much about, except maybe you. You know about Governor Warren’s habitual offender law?”

“Uh…no.”

Danny picked up his .45 and holstered it, helped Bordoni to his feet and shoved him into the one chair not soaked red/brown. “The law says any fourth fall costs you twenty to life. No plea bargains, no appeals, nada. You boost a fucking pack of cigarettes, it’s a double dime. So you tell me everything there is to know about you and Marty Goines, or you hang twenty up at Quentin.”