The Laughing Gorilla (17 page)

The smell of death and disinfectant was strong in the twelve-foot-square autopsy room. Bright light gleamed off a metal gurney with the herringbone gullied pattern where Dullea had laid out Josie Hughes’s clothes in 1932. He listened to the continuous sound of water trickling in a trough around the edge of the concrete floor and down a central drain. Low shelves held rows of brown bottles. Dr. Sherman Leland laid out gleaming instruments. A huge porcelain bucket was by his foot. As a steno took down dictated notes, Leland lifted the white muslin sheet and conducted a careful examination of the victim’s scalp and external surface of her body. He carefully photographed the wounds in close-up alongside a six-inch celluloid scale. Next, he cleansed the wounds of blood, then rephotographed them.

With her blood type established, Leland studied her dilated pupils. The tight pressure on her neck had paralyzed the sympathetic nerves and left pinpoint hemorrhages in the whites of her eyes. “That’s an infallible sign of strangulation,” Leland said. Still he was not sure.

But conclusive proof of manual strangulation would come from the cracked hyoid, a thin-armed, U-shaped bone buried in the heavy muscle of the neck. This free-floating anchor for the tongue’s muscles rests just where thumbs would press during strangulation. Yes, thought Leland, it is fractured on both sides. A powerful man with wide thumbs had been the strangler.

“Is there anything to indicate whether she was alive when the crushing force to her throat was applied?” asked Dullea from just outside the circle of light. His voice was tight, hoping she had been dead first, hoping she had felt no pain from the killer’s “autopsy.”

“She was not dead,” ventured Leland. “The muscle supporting her hyoid bone had been deeply bruised. Charlie, dead bodies don’t bruise.”

LaTulipe would challenge that assumption. This week in London, where forensic science currently led the world under the tutelage of Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury, Sir Robert Christison had demonstrated that a bruise from manual compression of the throat can be made up to two hours after death.

“You say she must have been lying on her back when she received the wounds,” asked Dullea. “Could she have lived long enough to turn herself over.”

“No. Death probably came while she was still on her back.” Leland rolled the corpse to the side. “Her back is crisscrossed with lines. A nude corpse’s dead weight registers the textures of any surface that exerts pressure against it. In this case—sheets.”

The absence of considerable blood in the room suggested the woman had been dead before she was disassembled. “Dead bodies don’t bleed.”

Leland examined her throat and neck, removed her lungs and heart, and noted Tardieu spots in her heart (tiny capillary hemorrhages due to raised blood pressure). This was another sign of strangulation as the cause of death. The surgeon put down his scalpel and shook his head. It had dawned on him that this was the
second
time the victim had been autopsied that day.

As Dullea made the lonely trek back to his office, he observed the bright, cold rooms and shadowy figures at work in the morgue. There is a weird kind of fascination about morgues and autopsies, about mortality and the fragility of life. He guessed it was a job not far removed from police work. Deep in thought, he climbed the stairs. Presently Dr. Leland came into his dimly lit office with his report. “Do you think our killer might work in a morgue somewhere,” asked Dullea, “and decided to try such an operation?”

“That’s a possibility,” replied Leland, “because that’s just what Mr. Meyers has done. He’s attempted an autopsy with some skill.”

“Perhaps we should stake out hospital morgues in case his intense fascination might draw him there.” Leland did not answer. It didn’t matter, Dullea’s most important questions—time and cause, had been answered by the doctor. Death had occurred around 4:00 A.M. from strangulation and hemorrhage. According to John Smeins, Mr. Meyers left thirty minutes after that.

A little after midnight (it was now Sunday, April 7), he assigned Desmond, Kelleher, and Husted to identify the murdered woman. “Get out there,” he ordered. “Trace her jewelry. Wake up pawnshop dealers around the Embarcadero and find out what you can.”

After they left, Dullea got an unexpected break. Routine fingerprinting by Inspector Dan O’Neill of the Bureau of Identification had paid off. Mrs. Meyers was in their arrest files as a “notorious police character” under the aliases of “Bette Davis,” “Bette Coffman,” “Lena Coffin,” and “Bette Coffin.” The police narrowed their list of the victims’ names to one when a man called to report his wife, Bette Coffin, missing. He was told to come to Merchant Street. Dullea notified Desmond and Kelleher to abandon their rounds of the pawnshops and instead spend the rest of the night combing sailors’ hangouts and shoreside dives tracking a Mrs. Bette Coffin’s last movements.

McGinn and Husted, who were now conducting the investigation, decided instead to go to Mrs. Coffin’s residence of record at 966 Broderick Street and get a list of her hangouts. It was vacant. Husted got the new address, 1207 Gough Street, from a neighbor. At the new location they learned Mrs. Coffin’s husband was already at the city morgue and started there to interview him.

By 3:20 A.M. a sad, seedy little man known as Al “The Mouse” Coffin (aka Ernest Coffin and Ernest Coffman) was rapping timidly at the entrance to the morgue, which was in an alley behind he HOJ. “I’ve come to claim my wife’s body,” said The Mouse as Dullea came downstairs from his office across the alley to join him. He saw The Mouse standing quietly under the blue light with shoulders bowed, which made him even smaller than he was. They both entered. “She left the rooming house Friday night to go downtown,” he told Dullea, “and that was the last I seen of her.” Tears welled in his eyes. The Mouse was so threadbare, he really owned nothing of value except an absolutely airtight, ironclad alibi, which his poker buddies later verified. Besides, they were looking for an apelike man with huge hands and a deep tan—not a pale shrimp like The Mouse. Dullea believed the poor little guy was genuinely bereaved.

Mrs. Coffin’s past was sad, too.

The Mouse admitted his wife had a police record as a vagrant and occasionally used dope. Dullea returned to his office to read over her file. Bette had been arrested scores of times as a streetwalker and drug addict.

“What kind of drugs did she take?” Dullea asked McGinn.

“That’s it,” said McGinn, who had been at a loss to establish a motive. “It’s the drug connection. Mrs. Coffin is a stool pigeon for the narcotics division. She was murdered in such a horrible way as an example to others. How else could you explain such the violence of the attack. That has to be the motive. The underworld has taken its terrible vengeance.”

—CHIEF QUINN

 

 

 

 

 

ON
Monday morning, April 8, over at the
San Francisco Chronicle,
Allan R. Bosworth lifted his green eyeshade. He was alone at his desk on the third floor. The great copy wheel was deserted. Thoughtfully, the editor tapped the end of his blue grease pencil and stared across the lines of vacant tank desks and rows of fat pillars. Shafts of light cut through the arched bow windows. A hint of salt air wafted through an open pivot window, carrying the clear northwest wind sweeping the Farallone Islands at fifteen miles an hour. The sea was moderate, and the barometer, at 30:14. At the Heads it was hazy with fog, but on the corner of Fifth and Mission streets, the sun was dazzling. The
Chronicle
’s clock tower was just striking 8:00 A.M. Bosworth studied the indestructible mint, with its classic Greek columns and sweep of marble steps, across the street.
⁷
It made
Chronicle
publisher Mike de Young proud to throw down double eagles bearing his neighbor’s mark when he bought his Picso punches. A block away was broad Market Street and at its source workers were pouring across the curved iron bridge to begin the dreary week all over again.

Out in the Bay, the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge had reached 540 feet (200 feet short of its final elevation) and was already 23 feet higher than the Bay Bridge’s highest tower. By God, it was a race between the two bridges! thought Bosworth. Twenty-four gangs of Bay Bridge riveters, driving more than two hundred thousand rivets, had just come level with the Golden Gate’s deck. For the eleventh time, the traveling derrick they used to erect the steel tower was raised into position, 480 feet above water level. It bent from the strain. No matter who won the race, it would almost certainly spell the demise of the Ferry Building as San Francisco’s front door.

Early morning in the block-long city room most of the swivel-back chairs and single pedestal desks were vacant. Royal typewriters were shrouded on their stands. In the alley below, a handful of unshaven reporters were sleeping off a bad night in their cars—arms flung out windows, fingers dangling. Copy boys began going from car to car taking orders for aspirin, coffee, and bacon and egg sandwiches.

Behind Bosworth, a man in shirtsleeves sat behind a little wooden gate running his hands through his hair. “The
Chronicle
city editor,” Bosworth explained, “was occupied in toning down a particularly gory bit of business for its breakfast-table audience. A girl variously described as Bette Coffin, Bette Coffman, and Lena Coffin was found dead in her bed at the Bay Hotel on April 6th, with one of her breasts sliced off. There was no special class to the story [but] it had its day on the lips of newsboys.”

The
Chronicle
routinely suppressed the more gory details of murders that captured the public’s imagination so they would not be too dreadful to contemplate over the breakfast table.

On Saturday, the
San Francisco News
’s scarehead had banner-lined in blue and green: “GIRL KILLED BY FIEND!; FOUND SLASHED TO DEATH IN SF HOTEL.” The bank under it read, “Slayer Chokes Victim, Then Hacks Body. No Signs of Struggle.” A halftone two-column cut on page one showed Smeins in his bathrobe, looking as birdlike as ever, giving his first-person account. On Sunday, the
Chronicle
ran this:

Lieutenant Otto Frederickson, head of the SFPD’s Homicide Division, told the press she had been the victim of a sadist. “This man might perpetrate a similar crime at any point,” he warned. “You haven’t seen the last of him. I recall that Mrs. Ruby Allen was found murdered in a similar way under similar circumstances in a cheap Post Street hotel one rainy April.”

Bosworth wondered if there was a connection between Mrs. Coffin and the slaying of Louise Jeppesen in Golden Gate Park the previous year. “What was the world coming to?” he thought. He had seen it all. After arriving in the Golden State via west Texas and the U.S. Navy, he had performed every newspaper job on the West Coast—police reporter, copy editor, picture editor, news editor, and editor of three dailies. A decade in the future he would be a columnist for the
Chronicle
and the author of three hundred magazine articles, a mystery novel, and three Western novels (
Hang and Rattle,
his most successful shoot-’em-up). Bosworth had done everything and known everyone—yet never met anyone like Slipton Fell.

But then Bosworth had never met a murderer before.

The
Chronicle
city room began filling up. A few men began monotonously pecking out stories with one finger—bell, shift, bell, shift. Copy boys assembled “books,” layers of cheap newsprint that they interspersed with sheets of blue carbon paper. They emptied ashtrays and thinned rubber cement with acetone. One copy boy, a scion of a wealthy Menlo Park family, conducted his duties in white tie and tails (he had a dinner party to attend that night). He ran corrected proofs, carried retouched photos to the composing room, installed rolls of paper in the Teletypes, and kept his tux spotless.

The tempo in the City Room picked up. Rows of Teletypes began chattering. Bells jangled insistently with news from Europe. Adolph Hitler was on almost every page every day. Copy boys tore, wrapped, and bound punched tapes with rubber bands.

At 11:00 A.M. the editors arrived to hold their preliminary meeting in the conference room to decide what would go in the paper. Though newspaper circulation remained high at the
Examiner
and
Chronicle,
ad revenue was plunging. Five years earlier there had been a 15 percent loss, then a 24 percent decrease the following year, and 40 percent the next, and 45 percent after that. Six years earlier, before Cornelius Vanderbilt and Will Hearst lost a bundle and the afternoon papers merged, there had been five big dailies.

The barnlike room was filled with men and smoke, and black rotary phones on desks began ringing. So did the pay phones in a row of green booths lining the north wall. Ticker tapes spooled on the floor of the financial department. From the back, a fossilized Sunday editor sneezed violently nine times in a row, something he did every hour. Bosworth believed if he ever sneezed a
tenth
time it would kill him. He glared at the big black clock.

Still no sign of his most personable, part-time reporter.