The Black Marble (24 page)

But, but, Sergeant Lightfoot. Sergeant Valnikov. I would have sworn. Her face! I would have sworn she was raped and strangled. Her cheeks are puffed up like … like
…

The old woman with the unclogged drain took with her to eternity the face of a blowfish
.

“Uh, where are we going, Valnikov?” Natalie asked nervously.

“Charlie Lightfoot used to hate one of the guys from latent prints,” Valnikov said, turning on East Sixth Street, past the throngs of derelicts and winos. It was an aimless tour through Skid Row. Past the slave market where eight wretches sat on a bus bench, not waiting for a bus but talking to motorists who would stop. Wanna buy a slave, mister? No homo stuff. Just a day's work. Well, maybe half a day. Mow your lawn, paint your office. Haul your trash. No homo stuff for me, though. And no whips. None a that. Honest day's work. Fifteen dollars? Well, I don't know. Throw in two fifths a bourbon? You got yourself a deal, buddy!

“What guy from latent prints?” Natalie urged.

“This policeman. We called him Goremore. He used to like to fingerprint the corpses for us. Especially if he could find any excuse at all to use the bolt cutters.”

“The bolt cutters.”

“Goremore loved to cut their fingers off and put them in plastic bags and roll the fingerprints at his leisure back at the office, when he wasn't sitting around the crime lab trying to bring out the dates on buffalo nickles with etching acid. He used to love to go to the morgue and cut off those fingers. He used to say that he gave his wife a three-strand necklace of fingers for her birthday. Some people, some guys at the morgue, liked to joke around with Goremore. Once, on the Fourth of July, they stuck a tiny American flag on a toothpick into the penis of a cadaver. Goremore took a Polaroid of it. Carries it in his wallet to this day, I bet.”

“Valnikov …”

“Charlie was a good detective. Charlie once caught a strangler who wore rubber gloves when he tortured children. The only clue we ever had was one rubber glove from his fourth murder. When we caught him he had a schoolbook belonging to the little girl. It was a Braille reader, grade two. I'll never forget the title of that book. It was called
Happy Times
. Charlie couldn't get over it: a Braille reader called
Happy Times
.”

“Valnikov, I think I've heard …”

“Charlie thought of turning the gloves inside out and sure enough they picked up a partial palm print on the
inside
of the rubber gloves. We got a conviction.”

He was sweaty now and heading back westbound on the Skid Row street. Lines of bars, liquor stores, fleabag hotels, blood banks, the missions. The flotsam and jetsam which had not yet made it into the Big Sewer with Archie the Alligator.

“Where are you going, Valnikov? Do you know where you're driving?”

He stopped at a red light and wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “Of course. To lunch.”

She knew he had no idea they'd been driving aimlessly for nearly half an hour. “Do you still see Charlie Lightfoot?”

“What? I told you when we started this conversation.”

“
Told
me?”

“Charlie's dead. He died six months after he retired. I told you. Didn't I? By the Colorado River, they say. It was a hunting accident, they say. But Charlie was a fisherman. He was sitting on a log, they think. Cleaning his shotgun, they think. Somehow he had an accident. A load of twelve gauge square in the face. A hunting accident, they say.”

Charlie Lightfoot took with him to eternity the face of a coral sponge
.

“I don't think I care for any lunch today, Valnikov. Let's go back to Hollywood.”

“No? Well, all right.” And then he sat there at the intersection desperately looking around. She knew he was temporarily lost. Then he wiped his face again and said amiably, “Natalie, let's go to lunch. I have a surprise for you.” He smiled with that big sincere dumb smile of his that she had come to know so well in just two days.

“Valnikov, I think I want to go back to the station.”

“The station? We haven't even called on our burglary victims yet.”

“Take me to the station, Valnikov. Please.”

“All right,” he said.

And that was it. She had made the decision. There was no tangible proof that her partner was insane but she was certain that given an hour of conversation
anyone
could see. That was it. The die was cast. Except it wasn't. As always, fate can intervene. In this case, fate had been trucked into Skid Row in air-conditioned motor homes. Within those motor homes were two very pampered movie stars, reputed to be macho studs, who were portraying detectives on the trail of a whore who had gone underground in the Los Angeles Skid Row.

Every time the director tried to set up a scene the mob of derelicts sitting on the curb, sipping from shortdog wine bottles, started hooting and whistling and jeering: “Fake! Fake! Real cops don't do it that way! Fake! Fake!”

Finally, an assistant director got wise, bought ten fifths of Gallo burgundy from the nearest liquor store, passed it around the thirsty crowd, and they happily gave their blessing to the fake being perpetrated in their neighborhood.

While Valnikov and Natalie were trapped in the intersection trying to get through the maze of studio trucks and cars, vans and buses, they saw something which attracted their attention. There was a boy, fourteen years of age, wearing fifty-dollar, metal-studded jeans, and a T-shirt with the famous logo of a famous motion picture studio emblazoned across front and back, roaming around a group of semiconscious winos in a vacant lot.

“Probably doing a little on-location casting,” Natalie said. “Why isn't the little germ in school?”

Actually, the little germ wasn't in school because his producer father hadn't been able to find one this semester which would take him. So poor Dad-o decided to employ Elliott Jr. for a few weeks helping out on his latest epic. To get rid of the little germ, the director promised him fifty bucks to make the location look more authentic.

The little germ took to his job with relish. In no time, he had the vacant lot strewn with bodies, and garbage, and whores. Of course, he promised each of the wretches a double sawbuck which would burn the hell out of the assistant director when he found out later, but no matter. Little Elliott, like big Elliott, wanted realism.

“The way these bums hang around these streets,” Natalie muttered with disgust.

“Where can they go?” Valnikov said. “Beverly Hills? They've got nowhere to go.”

She looked quickly at him, because it was the first time she ever heard an edge to his voice. Then she followed his eyes to Elliott Jr., who was doing a little set decoration by spray-painting the side of a three-dollar-a-day hotel. On the side of the wall Elliott Jr. had spray-painted: “Santa Claus butt fucks Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.”

“Sweet,” said Natalie. “I'd like to spray-paint his goddamn head.”

“So would I,” said Valnikov, who made a sudden southbound turn which threw Natalie against the dashboard. Then he wheeled to the curb, stood on the brakes and was out of the detective car before Natalie could pick up her oversized glasses.

By the time Natalie ran to the vacant lot, Valnikov had Elliott Jr. by the back of the neck with one hand and the spray can in his other. To the amazement of Natalie Zimmerman, and the dismay of Elliott Jr., and the delight of three winos who were not quite unconscious, Valnikov turned the spray can on Elliott's fifteen-dollar haircut and didn't release him until the can of silver paint sputtered and spit.

With Natalie behind the wheel, they raced three blocks before Elliott Jr., dripping paint, reached the wardrobe truck bawling for his father. For two weeks, Elliott Jr. would be the only fourteen-year-old in Beverly Hills with gray hair.

“Wow!” cried a flushed Natalie Zimmerman when they were racing up Spring Street.

“Don't turn here, Natalie,” said Valnikov. “Keep going.”

“Wow, Valnikov!” she cried. “I hope nobody got our license number. Do you think the little germ knew you were a cop?”

“I don't think so,” Valnikov shrugged.

Her glasses were askew and her buckskin Friz was hanging to her nose. She pushed them both up where they belonged and said, “Do you know what you just did?”

“I painted his head,” Valnikov said.

“You … I … I just lived my fantasy! Do you realize how seldom in a person's lifetime that happens? I had a fantasy. I mentioned it to you. And then
you
let me live it!”

“Why not?” he said.

“Wow!”

“Natalie, do you still want to go to the station? Or should we handle our calls first, or what?”

She looked at him for a moment and said, “Let's handle some of our reports first. Let's make some calls. I don't think I have to go back to the station just yet.”

Then they were headed back outbound on the Hollywood Freeway. Valnikov stole occasional bleary-eyed glances at the legs of Natalie Zimmerman. She was awfully attractive, he thought. Even with her goofy glasses and dopey hairdo, she was an attractive woman. Valnikov wondered if she might go to the movies with him now that he had sprayed the kid's hair silver.

While Valnikov was trying to get up the nerve to ask Natalie Zimmerman again to go to a movie, Madeline Dills Whitfield was sitting in her living room beside the telephone, drinking Scotch and water at noon.

The pet mortuary had already arrived and taken Tutu away.

“We were saddened to hear about your dear Victoria,” the balding mortician said.

“Yes, yes, please, just give her a nice burial. Send the bill to me.”

“But, Mrs. Whitfield, your dog handler, Mr. Biggs, said you'd probably want to select the casket and …”

“Something moderately priced,” Madeline said, not trying to conceal the double Scotch. “Something moderate.”

“We have some very nice, reasonably priced caskets that …”

“Yes, that'll do. Yes.”

“As to a burial service, would you like …”

“No. No. No burial service. Bury her at once.”

“But the grave site, Mrs. Whitfield. You should select her site, and we have to present the body of Victoria Reg …”

“Bury her at once, do you hear me! Today. Any grave plot will do. A moderately priced coffin. Take her away now and do it!”

“Yes, Mrs. Whitfield, yes. I understand perfectly. Yes, it'll be done at once. And for the billing, should we …”

“Send your bill to this address. Please, I'm not feeling well.”

“You have our sympathy, Mrs. Whitfield, and be assured that Victoria Regina …”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

And now she sat by the telephone, waiting. Finally she called the kennel of Chester Biggs.

“Chester?”

“Mrs. Whitfield?”

“Did that … that man phone? The man I mentioned yesterday? Richard?”

“Just a minute, Mrs. Whitfield.”

An interminable wait and then, “Mrs. Whitfield, my wife said a man did call, and she gave him your number just as you instructed.”

“How long ago?”

“She says an hour, Mrs. Whitfield.”

“Thank you, Chester. Thank you. Good-bye.”

An hour! Why hadn't he called? Why? Is he trying to make her suffer? Is that it? Are people who do such things sadists as well as common criminals? Do they delight in torturing their victims? Would he torture Vickie for his own perverted enjoyment? Is Vickie being whipped? Or burned? Oh God!

Madeline Whitfield spilled the glass of Scotch on the carpet and leaned across the arm of an old wingback chair, weeping.

At that moment, Victoria Regina of Pasadena was reluctantly taking a bite of boiled horsemeat from the tobacco-stained fingers of Philo Skinner, who had been trying to feed her for the last two hours.

“That's it, sweetie,” Philo said soothingly. “Philo won't hurt you. Philo loves you. Philo loves all little terriers and you're
so
pretty.”