by Daniel Fox
“Hey, it’s Fortier.”
“Something happen?”
“Nah, tailed her to the Clarion offices, watched her go inside.”
George switched the phone to the other ear. “She got canned from there.”
“Apparently it didn’t take. Anyway, near as I can tell she’s fine. I was actually going to try to badge my way in just so I could get my eyes on her for a second but I got pulled.”
“Pulled from surveillance? But we just started.”
“The call came through. I got shifted to looking for the kidnapped girl.”
“Pulled by who?”
“Dispatch didn’t know. Anyway, I just stopped off to call you and let you know Bly doesn’t have anyone watching over her now.”
“Yeah, alright. Thanks.”
“You bet. You know what her car looks like? Got the plate number?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s parked in the south end of their parking lot.”
“Got it.”
George hung up. Looked around. The detectives’ floor was pretty much empty – night time plus everybody scattering to search for the new missing girl. Just a couple of civilian admin types, a janitor emptying garbage cans.
Bly, she’d be safe in the Clarion building, wouldn’t she?
Probably.
But maybe not.
Would he get in trouble for leaving?
Probably.
Would that trouble feel worse than how’d he feel if Bly got picked off because of his surveillance idea?
No.
He called down to the public outreach offices. Asked if Hartman was on duty.
She was. Polishing off paperwork. She had offered to help in the search for the missing girl but had been denied. She was up on the detectives’ floor inside of two minutes.
George pointed to the squawk-box on the wall. “You know what that is?”
“Sure.”
“I’m heading out. I need you to pick that up if a homicide call comes in. You take the location and any other info down to dispatch and you get them to relay it to me in my car pronto.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“And if anybody gives me grief I tell them to take it up with you.”
George shot her a finger pistol and bolted. He felt heavier than usual – he had absolutely zero idea if he was doing the right thing or not.
CHAPTER 29
Bob had to park outside the Row, the streets were so cluttered with cop cars. He could see police pulling apart every lean-to in sight, no organization, just vigour.
“Hey brother, hey!”
Bob looked over. A scrawny guy, Bob couldn’t tell how old, was bent over, putting a lean-to back together after the cops had been through. “You know what’s going on?”
“Another girl is missing.”
“What girl?”
“I couldn’t say.” Bob went over to him, helped him tie his canvas’ strings to the chain-link fence. “The police say anything to you?”
“Just to get out of the way if I didn’t want a thumping.”
“They didn’t ask you about the girl? They didn’t describe her?”
“Nossir.”
“Did they say how they know she’s missing?”
“Yeah, that they mentioned. Anonymous tip called in.”
Bob looked down the street at the wave of police moving along, spreading around the Row’s grid of streets. One black man must have said the wrong thing – Bob watched as two uniformed officers tore his lean-to’s tarp into pieces.
“Getting to be a regular sight.” The scrawny man stood next to Bob, watching the cops. “Looks just like the blockade raid. Except less organized. It’ll do about as much good too. Maybe that’s why all the hubbub – cops promised no more crime out of the neighbourhood, but here we are, two girls down one right after the other, bam and bam.”
“You might be onto something there.”
“You a reporter?”
“I am. From the Clarion.”
“All this ruckus over a maybe-girl gone maybe-missing. But did any of this happen when we called in the gunshots? Hell no.”
“What gunshots?”
***
Ida stood at the elevator banks. Her notepad and pencil were in her pocket. She knew where that guy who first told her about the gunfire fight lived, more or less. If he hadn’t moved his lean-to.
The second elevator from the left dinged. The doors slid open. Ida stayed still. Going out meant making herself vulnerable. Whoever heaved that brick at her was out there. Maybe waiting. Maybe watching the building right now.
But if she didn’t go, what did she have left?
She caught the door before it closed completely. Punched the button for the lobby.
***
George found Ida Bly’s car easy enough in the Clarion building’s parking lot. He parked himself down the street from it with an easy view. And then did absolutely nothing.
He shifted.
He fidgeted.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
It felt one hundred percent wrong to be sitting still when there was so much going on.
He should have taken the offer to be on the Gangster Squad when it had rolled his way. Specially-picked men, given the nod by Chief Horrall himself, set up to bully, beat, and break organized crime members trying to set up shop in L.A. George had said thanks but no thanks, it had seemed like pure goon work. He’d wanted to show he was detective material. A case-worker. Now he was thinking that keeping his left-right combos up to snuff by working them out on the rib-cages of oily Italians would have been something at least, counting bruises as a way to mark achievements.
That made him think of the bum he had battered. The shoe-sex goofball. A mouthy motherfucker who thought himself smart because he used big words but had never reconciled himself to the fact that he was living nowhere, was nobody, had made nothing of himself.
George thought about the state he had left the bum in after the beating. Leaking blood, eyes already swelling shut, at least one tooth wiggling loose. Did he make it to a hospital or just lie there hoping to recover over time?
The tooth... that tooth wiggling free in the guy’s gums...
He grabbed the car radio. Called in – get me the number for Doctor Vincent Bader.
He jotted it down on the palm of his hand, got out of his car, jogged over to an all-night diner. Inside the phone booth, he called up Bader.
“Doctor Bader? This is Sergeant Schuttman from- Yes sir, that’s me. I apologize for calling so late. I’ve got a question about our girl. We found her shoes and they were expensive. Could you tell if she was upscale though? How were her teeth? Was she seeing a dentist on the regular? Was she eating well? You ever maybe find any previously broken bones that got taken care of the right way?”
George listened, the Doctor’s German accent rolling down the line to his ear. No previously broken bones found but yes to well-maintained teeth and yes to proper nourishment.
A confirmation – she had grown up in at least a healthy amount of money. So she had fallen to the Row recently, or she had been slumming it, or she had been dumped there from a completely different area. In any case, she wasn’t from Skid Row originally.
When George got back to his car he found that the Bly woman had driven off without him.
***
Ida got to J-town just north of the Row. Everybody was out of their apartment buildings on the sidewalks and looking south. Ida looked too - the Row looked like there had been an explosion at the police uniform factory – it looked like every beat cop from every zone in L.A. was at the party.
She tugged on the sleeve of an elderly black woman. “What’s going on?”
“Another girl went missing.” She crossed herself.
Ida nearly did the same. The image from the brown paper bag crowded into her mind – that long thin man with the dark apron and scarf with a new girl at his mercy.
It hit her that nobody
at the Clarion had thought to tell her about the new missing girl. Someone there had to have known. It stung pretty good, getting the feeling that she was already so far gone on the outside that nobody thought it was worth telling her about the alert.
Forget the mystery gunfire fight – this was a whopper in the making. A new dead girl. Not that Ida was hoping the girl would pop up dead and mangled. Of course not. It was just that if there was a new body there was a good chance she’d be the first one with the story if the other papers weren’t hep to the scene yet.
She walked south, putting some hustle in it – cops were setting up sawhorses at the edge of the Row, getting ready to close the area off. A month ago she might have had a chance to get in anyway by smiling and giving some bored uniform an up-from-under look, maybe “accidentally” showing a hint of cleavage. But that was before she turned her name into poison with the L.A.P.D. and she don’t think lady-tricks would make the grade anymore.
She was nearly at the sawhorse, readying herself to do battle if the first line of cops tried to stop her, when she spotted Bob “Maddog” Tree coming up out of the Row, heading north, away from the action, into J-town, on the opposite side of the street.
He didn’t see her. He was looking straight ahead. And he wasn’t walking so much as striding. This was a shithead with places to go. What the hell was so important to send a reporter (ha!) shooting out of the Row away from the possibility of another horrifically murdered girl?
He turned the corner onto the street where the black man with the half-Jap son lived. Where there had been multiple men in a running gun fight during the blockade raid back in June.
Maybe there was a dead girl about to pop up.
Maybe there was some meat to the gunfire story if Tree was ignoring the police fiesta to investigate the J-town gunfight instead of the missing girl.
Decisions decisions.
CHAPTER 30
In the Clarion newsroom night-shifters were doing their best to placate a very angry man-bear in an ill-fitting brown suit who was demanding to know where Ida Bly had gone.
They didn’t know where she had gone, and their not-knowing was making the bear, who also happened to be a member of the L.A.P.D. and could therefore get away with killing the lot of them and making it look like they started it, more and more angry every time one of them shook their head or said they had no idea.
And then something weird happened. Charlie Abelman, the night editor said, “She left halfway through her shift.”
“What do you mean? What shift? She got canned.”
“Not yet. But she will be if she doesn’t have a good explanation for the editor about why she took off halfway through her day. Came back in after lunch break and then vamoosed right back out again.”
“Halfway through the day? She was just here. Take a look out a window – it’s nighttime.”
Charlie blinked, shook his head. “Wait... who are you talking about?”
George shook his head. “Who are you talking about?”
“Darlene. She’s a copy girl here.”
George moved closer, making Charlie flinch back. “Describe her. Now.”
***
Bobby Tree had taken a swing at getting something from the cops working Skid Row looking for the girl, but they had been told to clam up or else they’d be busted down to traffic cop duty for the rest of their natural born days. Not even a five-spot would get the war hero a syllable of usable press.
So, he went with the gunfire story. If there was a story.
He followed the directions the skinny bum had given him. This part of J-town was getting a do-over. The city had insisted that fire-trap apartment buildings be gutted and done up right, despite much shrieking from their tight-fisted slumlords.
Scaffolds lined the exterior of more than one apartment, making the buildings look like they were wearing their skeletons on the outside. Some of the buildings had been deemed completely unsafe and had been taken down right to their roots, the walls knocked down, their basements exposed or covered with plywood.
He could have maybe looked for bullet marks on the walls, but even if he had known where to look it was getting dark. The street lights were far apart as it was, and more than one had been shattered by kids up to no good or adults up to something even worse.
“Mister.”
He turned. There was a good-looking kid, late teens probably, hard to tell what he was. Asian maybe? Black maybe? Some mix maybe? He was standing in the open front door of the apartment building behind him.
The kid stretched out a long slim arm. Pointed a long finger – a building four down, on the opposite side. Its windows boarded up.
The kid nodded.
“I’m a reporter.”
The kid nodded again.
“I’m here about some gunfire.”
The kid shook his head. “No.” He nodded at the building across the way again.
“How do you know there’s something in there?”
“My father. He’s always watching.”
Bob looked up. The silhouette of a head in a window up above, lit from behind.
He turned. Started across the street.
“Mister. You should call for friends.”
Bob carried on. It hit him that he didn’t really have any friends except maybe Cliffy. Hundreds of people that wanted to be seen with him, zero that knew him as he really was.
A wind kicked grit at him. He came to the front door of the building the kid had pointed out. It was hanging loose on its hinges. It screeched when he opened it, stayed open, its lower corner dug into the concrete of the stairs.
He went in.
A smell of concrete grit. Mildew. Mold maybe. Rotting wood maybe. Wiring pulled out of the walls, holes where plumbing used to be, the metal probably scavenged and sold. Empty dusty bottles of bullshit booze along the sides of the hall. The lobby was small, L-shaped, hanging a left out of sight.
He took the left. Apartments began. He pushed the first open, 101, probably the super’s digs once upon a time. Empty of furniture, cupboard doors missing from the kitchen. Cracked glass in the bathroom mirror. Nothing in the bedroom, nothing in the living room, boards for windows. It was dark except for the streetlights’ glow making it around the poorly fitted window boards.
Bob could smell his sweat.
Back to the hall. He accidentally kicked a wine bottle, the skittering sound made him jump. If the kid’s father was right, if there was someone else here, they must have heard that.
He picked up the bottle. It was the best he could do for a weapon. Which was ridiculous – the skinny bum who had tipped him to this had described the sound of at least one shotgun.
Bob’s lungs closed up a bit. His history in Japan squeezed his neck.
He noticed a door that swung outwards into the hall. Its base was cleared of bottles and broken glass and plaster. Maybe he saw footprints in the dust. It was too dark for him to be sure.
This would have been so easy for him before the war. He would have leapt at the door, camera at the ready.
He heard his sweat hit the floor.
Be a goddamned man.
There was no label on the door. He hoped it was some kind of closet, maybe for superintendent supplies.
He grabbed the door knob and pulled. It wasn’t a closet. It was stairs leading down to the basement.
No light. That meant nobody was down there, right?
Probably.
Possibly.
He put his left hand out to guide himself down by feel, right hand ready with the bottle. One step, two. His left hand hit something – a light switch. He flicked it out of instinct and startled himself when unexposed bulbs, dangling from the ceiling on wires, crackled on.
Fortune favours the brave.
Down another step. No risers in the steps, just gaps. He’d never for the life of him understand how people could stand to leave stairs open like that. It made his tendons ache in anticipation of being slashed.
Fuck it.
He ran down the last of the steps, spun around. Nobody behind the steps.
He turned back. The basement was big. An electric panel. A big drum thing, maybe a water heater? He didn’t know. The room went back quite a ways and had a bend in it to the right.
He had never wanted anything more than to be somewhere else other than that basement. He actually felt like his body was already climbing the stairs, a weird reverse act of vertigo.
He had to do this fast before he passed out. He rushed forward. His feet kicked food wrappers, ripped skin magazines, used tissues that he didn’t want to think about. Check around that corner and then call it a night. You can call yourself a reporter after that - you looked, you did your duty, you-
He made the right corner and walked into the mind of a madman.
The floor – drying fruit rinds, discarded women’s clothing, stains, full garbage bags, a broken chair with a doll’s head stuck on one of its slats.
The walls – pornography on every surface, taped, glued, stuck up by other means maybe, no cinder-block left exposed to sight, all of it covered with sexual pictures of women with monster appendages drawn on in pen – horns, fangs, scorpion tails, claws, drooping melting eyes, forked tongues, third eyes in the foreheads.
There was just so much of it. It surrounded him, turned the air surreal.
Something shifted in the far corner.
Bob danced back, raised the bottle, all sweat and shakes.
Another shift, he could see the source in the corner. Someone in a filthy green sleeping bag.
“Hey! HEY! Let me see you!”
A muffled moan came from the bag. The voice was female.
Bob ran forward, dropped to his knees, and pulled down the top flap of the bag. A canvas bag was wrapped around the girl’s head, tied tightly in place around her slender neck with an old stained ribbon. Bob tore it loose and pulled off the bag and jerked back when he recognized the girl – it was the copy girl from the Clarion, the one that had a crush on him.
A rag was stuffed in her mouth, tied in place with rope. One of her eyes was bruised and swollen closed. Her nose and upper lip were bloody.