True Confessions (21 page)

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. The reason I came here was to tell you . . .”

“What?”

“How? Who? What?” the woman taunted.

“What?” Desmond Spellacy repeated.

“To go fuck yourself,” the woman blurted.

“And you think now I should ask why?” The woman was silent. “It’s every child’s wish. A show of bravado. ‘I hate God.’ I’ve thought it myself.”

“You?”

“Of course. More recently than you think, probably.”

“Why?”

“There are times when even a priest feels irrelevant. Useless.”

“That’s a sin of pride.”

“Hubris, actually. And even priests sin.”

The woman was silent. For a moment Desmond Spellacy thought she was going to leave the confessional. He realized he did not want to discontinue the discussion.

“I’m pregnant,” the woman said quietly.

“What are you going to do?”

“Abort.”

Desmond Spellacy said nothing. This was not a woman to argue with. The wrong word and she would flee.

“You’re not surprised?” she said.

“No.”

“You don’t talk about murder like other priests.”

Desmond Spellacy collected his thoughts. “I think you are aware of what you are considering and also of its consequences.”

“Goddamn you, you talk less about sin than any priest I’ve ever met.”

“I’m here to let you consider the possibilities.”

“And that’s all.”

“You came to tell me to go fuck myself. I can’t believe now you want my advice.”

“No.”

He could hear her rustling around the booth, making ready to leave. He knew he had to make an overture, some holding out of hope.

“Would you like absolution?”

“I didn’t confess. I’m not sorry.”

“You’re here.”

“Is that enough?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

Desmond Spellacy laughed. “I have to act on that assumption.”

“Thank you, Monsignor.”

“
Ego te absolvo
. . “

When he finished, she said, “My penance?”

Without hesitation, Desmond Spellacy said, “Do the right thing.”

“If that’s your idea of an easy penance, I’d rather have a rosary.”

“I never give them.” A thought formed in his mind. “Did you wish to see a priest—or me specifically?”

The woman was silent.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Desmond Spellacy said.

“I won’t.”

Then she was gone. Desmond Spellacy sat back on the kapok cushion and considered one word.

Tommy.

That was Thursday
.

Friday marked the beginning of the third week after the two halves of Lois Fazenda’s body were discovered at the corner of 39th and Norton. In the third week the following things happened:

Gloria Deane, the woman who worked in the rouge room at Max Factor, was telephoned at three in the morning and told, “You’re next, you whore.”

An unemployed actress named Betty Faith wept as she told reporters and photographers that her real name was Elisabeth Fazenda, although she was not in fact related to the victim.

The manager of the PX at Fort MacArthur told Howard Terkel of the
Express
, “I first met Lois in 1943 when she arrived in San Pedro from her home in New England. I was won over at once by her childlike charm and beauty. She was one of the loveliest girls I have ever known, and the most shy. She never visited over the counter with any of the boys and always refused to date them.”

The assistant manager of the PX at Fort MacArthur told Howard Terkel that Lois Fazenda blew the manager’s crippled husband every day in the storeroom at the rear of the Post Exchange.

A practical joker sent the morgue wagon to Gloria Deane’s new address with instructions to pick up her body.

The police department received a message glued together from newspaper lettering that said, “Don’t try to find the Fazenda girl’s murderer, because you won’t.”

Two hotel keepers in San Pedro reported that on the night of the murder, a young man with “dirty blond hair” tried to rent a room with a bath.

A waitress at the Dew Drop Inn at Broadway and Ninth reported a man who dropped a fourteen-inch butcher knife and said, “I don’t feel like eating, would you feel like eating if you just cut a woman in half?” The man was arrested, questioned and returned to the mental hospital he had been released from two days before.

The police department received another message glued together from newspaper lettering. This one said, “Had my fun. Turning in Monday. Virgin Tramp’s Killer.” No one turned himself in. A police-lab analysis showed that the hairs on the Scotch tape sticking the letters to the paper were different in both messages. The first message came from a man with red hair on the back of his hands, the second from a man with black.

Fourteen more people confessed to the murder of Lois Fazenda.

Tom Spellacy asked the landlady of the rooming house on Sierra Vista if she had a Bromo Seltzer. His head pounded. Leg-work, Fuqua had told the Major Crime Section. Legwork is how we’re going to crack this thing. Masaryk was the perfect partner for legwork. He didn’t have a brain in his head, but he wrote everything down. And never interrupted his train of thought. And typed a beautiful, neat report. With every fact in place. The fact was, Tom Spellacy liked legwork. Check and recheck. A teletype to all divisions ordering them to report any unusual disturbances the night of the murder. Check the baggage-claim areas at the railroad and bus stations and at the airport. Lois Fazenda must have left a suitcase somewhere. Check the cab companies. Show her picture. Check the funeral parlors. See if the morticians had anything funny to report. Go over old ground. Such as the rooming houses where Lois Fazenda had once lived. Which is what brought Masaryk and Tom Spellacy to the living room on Sierra Vista.

The landlady said she did not have any Bromo. “I’m Christian Science,” she said. “That’s what first attracted me to Lois.”

“She didn’t like Bromo either?” Masaryk said.

“She was Christian Science, too,” the landlady said. Her name was Mrs. Parnell and she was wearing a faded violet housecoat which she nervously pinched between her thumb and forefinger to wipe an imaginary smudge from her rimless glasses.

“What’s that got to do with Bromo?” Masaryk said. His notebook was out and his pencil poised. He thinks Bromo’s the breakthrough, Tom Spellacy thought.

“Forget it,” he said.

“It could be important,” Masaryk said.

“It’s not.” His shirt clung to his back. It was the second day on the shirt and he knew he was beginning to smell. Corinne’s fault. She wanted to think about things, she said. Meaning she wanted to be alone. Meaning he was back in the Chester Hanrahan Development in the Valley. Where the sheets were gray and there was no clean laundry.

“She didn’t have good Christian Science habits,” Mrs. Parnell said. She avoided looking at both policemen, smoothing an antimacassar on the back of an overstuffed chair, crumbling a paper doily on an armrest. Tom Spellacy knew the type. A widow come upon hard times, forced to take in boarders she resented. There were neatly lettered signs in the hallway by the pay telephone. No Food. Do Not Put Your Juice in the Refrigerator. She was too refined ever to complain openly about Kotex flushed down the toilet or the lipstick staining the toothbrush glass or the menstrual leakage on the sheets. Just signs. My Castle Is Your Home.

“In what way?” Tom Spellacy said. The only thing he knew about Christian Scientists was that there was some crazy woman who wouldn’t let them see doctors. Or use Bromo. He remembered a drugstore at the corner. He could get relief there. He cursed Corinne. Thinking about the abortion gave him the headache. Abortions. Brenda knew where to get one. And Jack. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea getting them all together. Corinne, this is Brenda. Jack, this is Corinne. It was the way everyone knew everyone else, the way that everything was coming together that made his head feel that it was going to blow out, like a tire.

“She cheated the telephone company,” Mrs. Parnell said. “You cheat the telephone company, you’re cheating yourself.”

A perplexed look passed over Masaryk’s face. “I think I missed something.”

Tom Spellacy smiled at the landlady. “How is that?” He wondered who had made Corinne pregnant the first time. Her other abortion. Or if it was only the first time.

Mrs. Parnell opened a drawer in a side table. She took out two rolls of coins and held them in her hands. “I didn’t want to say anything when the policeman came the first time. She’d just passed to the other side . . .”

Masaryk lifted his pencil. “Where?”

“. . . and I didn’t want to say anything that would reflect on her.” Mrs. Parnell’s face hardened. “Even though she never did pay me her last week’s rent. And the week before that.”

Tom Spellacy took the coin rolls and opened one. Nickel slugs fell into his hand.

“But now from all the things I read about her in the newspapers . . .” Mrs. Parnell shook her head. “All those people she didn’t pay the rent to. People like me. With no other income but our rents. It’s not right.”

Tom Spellacy held up a slug. “Your phone?”

“No, never my telephone.”

Of course not. Too easy to trace.

“Mr. Melnicker at the drugstore used to complain. I never made the connection until . . .” Mrs. Parnell pointed to the coin rolls and suddenly she began to chatter, as if Tom Spellacy were going to ask why a Christian Scientist would talk to a druggist. “I only buy my toothpaste at the drugstore. And dental floss. A home perm now and then. Toni. No Bromo.”

Out on the sidewalk, the palm trees offered no protection from the sun that blasted down on Tom Spellacy’s head. With his thumbs, he massaged the veins in his temples. For a moment the sun made him light-headed. The headache had been constant since he left Corinne’s. Or had she thrown him out? He wasn’t clear on that. A mutual leave-taking. Room to breathe. Except he hated his breathing room. You get used to a woman. You get used to their doing the little things. The socks, the Jockey shorts he had not wanted her to buy. It was the same thing with Mary Margaret’s meat loaf. It was there, he expected it. Fucking was extra. He wondered if the nuns at the chancery took care of Des. It was funny, it had never occurred to him before that someone must buy Des’s underwear, someone must order a dozen boxer shorts, size-32 waist, to cover the priestly basket.

Masaryk coughed discreetly, awaiting instructions.

He stood on the sidewalk with pencil and notebook ready. Tom Spellacy knew that Masaryk still did not understand about the slugs. He was still trying to figure out the Bromo Seltzer. Nor had Masaryk been able to understand checking out the funeral parlors either. He took down the dimensions of the morticians’ tables and the manufacturers’ names, but only when Tom Spellacy explained did Masaryk realize that a slab with gutters on the side to catch the blood was a perfect place to dissect a body and not leave a mess. Another possible Mystery Clue. Now he waited patiently for Tom Spellacy to draw in the lines between Christian Science and antacids and Pacific Telephone. It would all be in his notebook. He took perfect notes. He never missed an address or was wrong about the make or caliber of a weapon or the label in a hat or the color of a pair of shoes. It was the connections he was bad at.

“She was pumping slugs into the pay phone at the drugstore,” Tom Spellacy said. He spoke slowly so that Masaryk could take it all down. “You go to the telephone company and get a record of all the calls made from that phone during the time she was living here. She was probably using other pay phones around here, too. Just so nobody would get too suspicious. A gas station, maybe, a grocery store. So find out from the phone company if any other telephones in the neighborhood were turning up a large number of slugs in that same period. Get the records from those phones, too. Then start comparing numbers, see if the same ones show up.”

“On all the phones,” Masaryk said.

Tom Spellacy nodded. The movement hurt his head.

“Then we might find someone she knew.”

“Right,” Tom Spellacy said. He patted Masaryk on the shoulder. “We do the same thing, every place she’s lived the past three years.”

“I knew she had to use those slugs for something,” Masaryk said. “I thought it was for Hershey bars.”

Tom Spellacy reflected for a moment on Masaryk’s remark. “Why not Milky Ways?”

“No, I lost a filling once to a Milky Way. A frozen Milky Way. I had to have a root canal. Hurt like a bastard.” Masaryk opened his mouth, pointed to a tooth and then imitated a dentist’s drill. “Bzzzzzzz. And cigs. She could’ve used the slugs for cigarettes. Tough to trace, though. And I don’t know how much good it would do, tracing cigs.”

Tom Spellacy had had enough of Masaryk for the morning. At the drugstore he called in. There was a message to call Brenda’s 24-Hour Courier Service. That was something Brenda never used to do, call him at headquarters. The voice on the line at the 24-Hour Courier Service said he was to meet her in MacArthur Park at noon. The third bench west of the boathouse. Leave it to Brenda to remember the bench. It was where she used to pay him off. Sometimes at night she brought a blanket and they fucked on a knoll above the lake. It would be her idea of a joke to meet him there.

He dropped Masaryk off at Pacific Telephone. How do I get back, Masaryk said. Walk, Tom Spellacy said. Or call a cab. Or go over two blocks and take the Number 7 bus. Masaryk nodded and wrote it down in his notebook. It was still early. Tom Spellacy drove around MacArthur Park checking out the cars. Force of habit. Whether you were being paid off or going through a barricaded door, the M.O. was always the same. Know the turf, never be surprised. He was not certain of many things anymore, but he was sure of one thing: he was a very good cop. Maybe not always honest, but always thorough. He liked the trivial detail work of an investigation. Especially now. It gave an order and purpose to his days and kept his mind off Corinne. He liked cataloging the women’s clothes that were reported found and interrogating hotel keepers in San Pedro and talking to the waitresses and widows who reported seeing the victim before she died and he liked going through unclaimed luggage at the railroad station and listening to the crazies who confessed. He even liked tracing the false teeth. A newspaper delivery boy had reported picking them up a block from the murder site and Tom Spellacy had followed that old and badly constructed plate through the dental-supply houses and the union medical plans and the records of the VA hospitals. It was the VA who told him that the owner of the plate had died of malnutrition two days before Lois Fazenda’s murder.

And it kept his mind off Corinne.

“I went to confession.”

“Swell.”

“To your brother.”

“You’ve got a real gift for doing the smart thing.”

“He didn’t know I had anything to do with you.”

“He’s a lot of things, Des, but dumb isn’t one of them.”

“I just wanted to talk to him.”

“He must’ve got an earful.”

“I had a longer conversation with him than any I’ve ever had with you.”

“He’s a terrific talker, Des. He doesn’t have a fucking clue what life is all about, but he’s got all the answers. He works them out somewhere between the fairway and the green.”

“He told me to do the right thing.”

“His idea of the right thing is not to get a bogie on a par-five hole.”

“He’s just like you.”

“Well, you got all the breaks then, don’t you?”

“All I know is that you’re afraid of fucking and dying and feeling guilty and doing the wrong thing and even doing the right thing.”

“What the fuck you want me to do? Go see Des? ‘Corinne says we’re so much alike, I thought I’d stop by, find out what the fuck the right thing to do is.’ “

“I want to think about things, Tom. Alone.”