Staring into the Darkness (Urban & Brazil Book 1)

by Tim Ellis

  As far as she could tell, Erik and Jan had not worked out any of the clues the killer had left them. There’d been a lot of speculation, but they really had no idea who they were looking for, or why he was killing these women.

  She hadn’t known Detective Jan Janik, and she only barely knew Detective Eric Urban. She’d briefly met Detective Sergeant Mike O’Meara, whom she’d taken an instant dislike to. In total then, she knew very little about the detectives in the Los Angeles Homicide Division, or anywhere else for that matter. However, what little she had learned from her brief encounters with them, had not filled her with any measure of confidence that these police officers knew what they were doing, or that they had the intelligence or wherewithal to catch Annie’s killer. In fact, she felt that the opposite was true. So, there was no question of her leaving them to it, or trusting that they’d get there in the end. She was sure that without her help, they never would.

  ***

  There was a knock at the door.

  She opened it to find Martha standing there.

  ‘Oh! Hello, Martha.’

  ‘Hello, dear. How are things going with you?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. Would you like to come in for tea?’

  ‘I’ll make it.’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  Martha made her way down the hallway, held her hand up to her eyes as she walked through the living room, and went into the kitchen.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know how you can bear to look at those dead women. When people come in here, they shouldn’t have to see terrible things like that. It ain’t right to have those pictures on your living room wall.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ll go and cover the board up.’ She found two sheets and used drawing pins to tack the edges to the top of the board. Later, she’d go out and buy a length of material, some brass curtain rings and half-a-dozen hooks. That way, she’d be able to easily cover and uncover the pinboard. Martha was right, and it wasn’t just about her and Ruby seeing what was on the board. People might come to the apartment, people who she wouldn’t want to see what she and Erik were doing.

  There were no table and chairs in the kitchen like Ruby had, so they carried the tea into the living room and sat on the sofa. Maybe, while she was out, she could buy some kitchen furniture and ask for them to be delivered. She and Erik would need somewhere to sit while they were eating.

  ‘Yes, that’s much better,’ Martha said, referring to the sheets covering the pinboard. ‘After I’ve finished my tea, I’ll get on with the cleaning.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I don’t mean to pry, but are you going to be all right on your own here with Detective Urban?’

  ‘There’s two bedrooms. He’ll be sleeping in one, and I’ll be sleeping in the other. One thing you’ll notice about my bedroom is that there’s a lock on the door. I’m only here for one thing, Martha – to catch my sister’s killer. You can tell anybody who hasn’t got enough of their own business to worry about that’s what I’ll be doing.’

  ‘Of course. I just thought I’d mention it, because you know how people are, always sticking their snouts into other people’s truffles.’

  ‘Well, now you have mentioned it, and you’ve got your answer. Not only that, Erik is twice as old as me and he wasn’t exactly at the front of the queue when they were handing out good looks, was he?’

  They both laughed.

  Martha said, ‘Never a truer word.’ She threw back the dregs of her tea. ‘Well, the cleaning won’t do itself. You’ve done a nice job of this apartment.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘While Martha cleaned, she stuck her head under the sheet and continued putting the last of the information on the pinboard. She recalled reading magazines by torchlight under the bedclothes as a girl. That was when her mum had still been alive, and Annie was crying in her crib to be fed.

  She looked at the elapsed time between each murder. There were six months between the first two – Hildegard Zinn and Paula Simpson. After that it was usually two, three or four months. She had the feeling that in February 1946 murder was all new to the killer, he was waiting for the police to catch him, but when they didn’t he killed again. What had happened to make him start and continue killing young women?

  As a historian she was already a detective. She searched for clues about the past, putting them together to find out what had happened. A historian, not unlike a police detective, was concerned with constructing a continuous, methodical and coherent narrative that explained past events. Philosophers of history have long thought of history as archaeology – digging up the past. She realised then, that in order to create that coherent narrative, she needed a second pinboard to carry out her historical research and construct a timeline. Beginning at Lola Coburn, she needed to go back in time to Hildegard Zinn, look for the clues and then follow the trail of evidence.

  The telephone in the apartment was now working, because she’d paid the outstanding charges and had it re-connected. She phoned the carpenter and arranged for him to fix another pinboard on either side of the window later in the day.

  Soon, once she’d identified the gaps in the narrative, she and Erik would be in a position to conduct field research. Before that though, she needed to visit the library and Erik had to go to the police department, so that they could bring the information they had on the pinboard up-to-date.

  ‘That’s me finished, dear,’ Martha said. ‘It’s a lot easier cleaning this apartment than it is my own. Clutter soon mounts up. You think you’ll get rid of your clutter, but you never do, it just keeps on mounting up. The trouble is, everything has a memory attached to it. I could walk around my apartment, pick up the clutter and tell you my life story from the memories attached to each item.’

  The corner of Katie’s mouth curled upwards. ‘When I decided to come here, I left all my clutter behind. I have a small box with a few keepsakes inside, but most of my memories are in here.’ She tapped the side of her head with her index finger.

  ‘You’re still young, dear. When you get to my age, memories start leaking out as if your head was a colander. The clutter stops you from forgetting.’

  She gave Martha a ten dollar bill. ‘Thank you, Martha.’

  ‘See you soon, dear.’

  Chapter Three

  Tuesday, January 20, 1948

  Erik paid the cab driver, walked through the brick archway of Police Headquarters on the South Side of First Street and slowly climbed the stairs to the Homicide Division. He had to stop half-way to catch his breath.

  He didn’t know what to make of Katie Brazil. She was a strong-willed woman, that was for sure. Intelligent and beautiful as well, with her shoulder-length wavy black hair, hour-glass figure and green eyes that resembled chips of emerald ice. Her sister – Annie – had come here to make a name for herself as an actress, but it could just as easily have been Katie. A few years older than her sister, but those years hadn’t detracted from her beauty.

  Why hadn’t she got herself a man yet? He guessed that a man would want control, power and ownership over her, and from what little he knew of Katie, he doubted that she’d be prepared to hand any of that over to a man.

  She’d certainly taken control of his life, and he didn’t really know her. Maybe that was what he’d needed. In fact, there was no maybe about it. If she hadn’t come along when she did, he’d probably be lying on a freezer shelf in the county morgue just like those eight women by now.

  Since coming back from the war, he hadn’t made such a good job of his life. Truth be told, it wasn’t all peaches and roses before the war either. He hadn’t given it much thought, but his life had been pretty much squandered. Yeah, he’d made a bit of a difference, but he guessed he could have done so much more – maybe a wife, a couple of kids, someone to leave behind and remember him. It was too late now, too late by far.

  Maybe Katie Brazil had been sent for a reason. Maybe she was his chance to make things right with t
he world.

  The guys were sitting around the squad room smoking and swilling coffee like there was a world shortage or something.

  ‘Well, look who it ain’t,’ Detective Greg Lombardi said. He had his feet on the desk. A couple more inches would have put him in the horizontal position. ‘The shadow of the man we once knew as Erik Urban.’

  Erik smiled, took one hand off his walking stick and waved. ‘Hey!’

  They were all there – Mike O’Meara, Bill Ackerman, John Harrity, Carl Seger, Dennis Whipple, Jack Rogers and George Hirst. Made him wonder who was out doing the work.

  He sat down in the chair at his desk. Was it still his chair and desk? It didn’t look as though it had been occupied during his absence.

  ‘You back to work?’ Bill Ackerman enquired.

  He half-laughed. ‘Do I look like I’m back to work? I had to stop half-way up the stairs to re-start my heart.’

  ‘Yeah, you don’t look so good, Erik,’ Detective Sergeant Mike O’Meara said. ‘It’s good to see you’re on the mend anyway . . . You are on the mend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m over the worst of it. I’ll be back to work before you know it. Where’s the Lieutenant?’

  ‘Got a meeting with Mayor Bowron and his cronies first thing, but he shouldn’t be long.’

  He looked at the wall. ‘How’s the case going?’

  ‘That’s what the Lieutenant is seeing the Mayor about,’ Dennis Whipple said. ‘Lack of progress. Been going nowhere for months now.’

  Mike O’Meara eyed him and said, ‘It was going nowhere for months before that, Dennis.’

  Erik nodded. ‘Very true.’

  ‘You hear about Jan?’ John Harrity asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Damnedest thing. Shouldn’t have even been on the raid. Woman shot him in the face. The doctors at the hospital tried to save him, but it was no good. Between you and me, it was probably a good job they didn’t, because his face looked like a bowl of pasta. Carl came round to your apartment to let you know, but you must have been out or something.’

  Carl pursed his lips. ‘I saw a light on under the door, knocked a couple of times, but you was probably washing your hair, or in the sauna?’

  ‘Been through a tough time the last couple of months, but I’ve come out the other side now.’

  ‘On the mend?’ O’Meara repeated.

  ‘Exactly, Mike. I’ll soon be back at work. That’s why I’ve made the effort to come in and see the Lieutenant.’

  ‘Looking forward to it, Erik,’ Mike said, but there was no conviction in his voice.

  Carl said, ‘Jan was cremated a week last Thursday. John and me went to the funeral to represent the division. His ashes are interred in the mausoleum at Memorial Park Cemetery if you want to pay your respects.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll do that when I can get up a head of steam.’

  ‘His wife asked after you as well.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll need to go and see Barbara.’

  Just then, Lieutenant Bob O’Callaghan stomped in with a face like a stormy day. He was six-feet four in his bare feet and nearly as wide. Other than his size, the first thing anybody noticed about Bob was his nose – it was bent and twisted like the trunk of an ancient gum tree. In his youth he’d been a boxer, but for all his size and power he’d gone down like a sack of spuds. As soon as the word got out that he had a glass jaw, his boxing career was over. He’d had an offer of employment from the mob boss Mickey Cohen who needed an enforcer, and although Bob was tempted, he decided to join the police force and enforce the law instead.

  ‘My office, Urban,’ O’Callaghan said as he swept by.

  Erik pushed himself up and shuffled into the Lieutenant’s office.

  ‘Shut the door. Sit.’

  He did as he was told.

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘I’m not much good for anything at the moment, Lieutenant. I’d say in about a month.’

  ‘You’ve got two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks?’

  ‘I’ve kept you on the books for six months. On quarter pay I’ll admit, but at least you’re still a copper. The least you can do to pay me back for my generosity is return to work and catch the crazy bastard who’s killing these women. Hansen and Brown are going round in circles on the Black Dahlia case as well; and Mike . . . Well, you know what Mike’s like – couldn’t find his way out of a wet paper bag. And to put the icing on the cake, the Mayor wants results or my head on a platter. I need you back, Erik.’

  ‘What are you going to do with Mike if I come back?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere to put him, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try my best, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Your best had better have you back here in two weeks, Erik. If you’re not telling those lazy bastards out there what to do on Monday, February 2, don’t bother coming back at all.’

  ‘Two weeks?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘I’ll ask the guys to bring me up to speed on the case before I go then.’

  ‘You do that. Close the door on your way out.’

  ***

  There didn’t seem to be any point in wasting money on a cab, so she jumped on a streetcar to Echo Park, bought a bunch of flowers from a street vendor and laid them beneath the jacaranda tree where Annie had been found.

  ‘Goodbye, my sweet sister,’ she said, although she’d said goodbye to her a long time ago. And if she was being honest, this place meant nothing to her. It was where the naked body of Annie had been dumped – nothing more, nothing less.

  She walked to Echo Park branch public library at 1410 West Temple Street, filled out the form to join, and the librarian handed her a temporary library card until the permanent one was posted to her apartment. Shafts of dull grey light stabbed through the high arched windows as she made her way to the local newspaper section.

  The main newspaper she focused on was the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Most of the articles on the murders, that Erik had stuck to his wall, and she’d now transferred to the pinboard, were from that paper. She’d been taught to look beyond the article to the person who’d written it – their experience, motives and objectives.

  What surprised her was that a female reporter – Eliza Linton – was covering gruesome murders when most female reporters were confined to writing advice columns or reporting on high society, fashion and such like. She read all of Linton’s articles, her interview of Amelia Earhart after she’d successfully completed her solo flight from Honolulu in Hawaii to Oakland in California; the untimely deaths of Hollywood stars Thelma Todd and Jean Harlow; her series on women incarcerated in Tehachapi prison; and the murder of twenty-two year-old Elizabeth Short – the Black Dahlia. She was also covering the more recent “Starlet Murders”, as Linton had called them.

  Although Katie was angry about what Linton had written about Annie when the woman didn’t even know her sister, she also recognised a kindred spirit. Someone else who had rebelled against the expectations of a man being the breadwinner and a woman being the full-time homemaker. Writing about crime, especially murder, was what men did, not women. The male view was that women were stupid, submissive and purely domestic creatures. If they were working, then they were neglecting their husband and children. It was as simple as that. The days of “Rosie the Riveter” had come and gone. When the men had returned from the war, the women were expected to resume their homemaking duties. Well, it seemed that Eliza Linton wasn’t anybody’s homemaker, and neither was Katie Brazil.

  Reading between the lines of the articles, it was clear that Linton was in the newspaper-selling business, which meant she was sensationalising the murders rather than helping the police to solve them. She and her photographer – Russ Lapp – always seemed to arrive at the place where the bodies were found before the police and before the reporters from the other newspapers, which suggested that they were being tipped off by either the killer or someone in the police department. And because of their early
arrival at a crime scene, they appeared to be interfering with the police investigation by revealing information that the police probably didn’t want making public.

  She decided to go and see Eliza Linton at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner with a proposal for collaboration and friendship, but if neither were forthcoming, then she’d confront the reporter with her suspicions about an inside man in the police department tipping her off. If Katie was going to find Annie’s killer, then the last thing she needed was a reporter interfering in her investigation.

  ***

  Erik went back out to the squad room, sat at his desk and leaned on his walking stick like a centenarian.

  ‘What did the Lieutenant say?’ Mike O’Meara asked him. Of course, Mike was concerned about his position, which was only natural, but he must have known the writing was on wall.

  ‘You’ll have to ask him, Mike. All I know is that I offered to come back in a month, and he said I had two weeks. It’ll probably take me two weeks to get back to my apartment, and then I’ll have to turn right around and come back here.’

  ‘He putting you back in charge?’

  ‘That’s between you and him, Mike. He didn’t say anything about you to me, that’s not his way.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d be happy enough working for you, Mike. You’re a Sergeant after all. The Lieutenant’s hardly likely to put me in charge when you’re here, is he?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’