“Slow it down,” I said to Frank.
He braked to a crawl as we passed the Ford. I peered in and saw that both the front and rear seats were empty. I motioned Frank to pull up on the shoulder in front of it.
I lifted a flashlight from the glove compartment as we got out of the car. We walked back, staying on the concrete, and I flashed the light into the car’s interior. It was still empty.
I walked around behind the car and shined the light on the ground near the open door. There were clear impressions of both a man’s and a woman’s shoes, showing where they had stepped to the wet ground from the car. A churned-up area, halfway between the car and a drainage ditch that paralleled the road a few yards away, suggested that some kind of struggle had taken place. A man’s footprints led away from this spot around the front of the car onto the concrete.
I walked over to the edge of the drainage ditch, being careful not to disturb any of the footprints. The ditch was only about three feet deep, and had a bare trickle of water in it. When I turned my light downward, I saw that it also contained something else.
“Frank,” I called softly. “Chief Brown was right.”
“Huh?” Frank said.
“He finally got around to killing somebody. Two of them.”
Frank came over to the edge of the drainage ditch, carefully stepping in my footprints, and gazed down at the two figures lying there. The man seemed to be about twenty-five. He wore a Marine uniform with sergeant’s stripes. He lay on his back, his eyes gazing sightlessly straight upward. The top of his head had literally been beaten fiat. It was nothing but a red, pulpy mass. Even at the distance of several feet, there was no question that he was dead.
The girl lay on her side, half across his chest. She was a slim redhead of about twenty. She wore a white-and-green summer dress, and the top right corner of it was stained with blood. I slid down into the ditch and felt the girl’s pulse.
I called up to Frank, “She’s still alive. Get an ambulance rolling.”
He moved away toward the undercover car, while I bent over the girl to give her a closer examination. The bullet seemed to have passed entirely through her shoulder, and though she had shed considerable blood, both the entry and exit wounds had now stopped bleeding. She was unconscious, but breathing regularly.
The first rule of first aid is to do nothing that isn’t necessary. Making injured persons “more comfortable” as often as not only aggravates the injury. Since the girl’s bleeding had stopped of its own accord, there was nothing I could do for her until the ambulance arrived. I left her where she was.
Frank came back to the car just as I climbed to the top of the ditch.
“I radioed for an ambulance,” he said. “Also got the other seven cars blocking all roads out of the area. Maybe we can still net him.”
“Doubt it,” I told him. “The girl’s wound isn’t bleeding. This must have happened some time ago if her blood is beginning to clot. Call for the Crime Lab?”
“Yeah. And Latent Prints, just in case he touched the car.”
Walking back onto the road, I scraped some of the mud from my feet off on the concrete. Sirens began to sound in the distance. The sound grew in volume, its direction indicating the vehicles were coming up the freeway.
The first vehicle to the scene was a black-and-white squad car. I motioned the driver to park on the far side of the road. When the two uniformed officers got out of the car, I took them over to the Ford and pointed out the footprints made by the victims and the suspect.
“Happen to have a rope in your car?” I asked one of the officers. A rope is not standard equipment in squad cars, but many officers furnish their own equipment for their personal convenience.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got one.”
“Then I want this area roped off,” I instructed. “Be a million people around here to trample over the evidence before long.”
As the policemen were getting the rope from the squad car, a Buick convertible pulled off on the shoulder behind them. A tall, lean man wearing horn-rimmed glasses got out and walked over to me. Simultaneously, an ambulance rolled to a stop.
“Accident?” the lean man asked me.
“No, sir,” I said. “Police business.”
“You a detective?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
I turned toward the ambulance, and the lean man started around the front of the Ford. I changed direction and caught his arm just as he raised a foot to step off the concrete. “Sorry, sir,” I said. “Have to ask you to go back to your car.”
Shaking off my hand, he stared down his nose at me. “Your badge doesn’t give you the right to manhandle private citizens, Officer.”
“No, sir,” I said. “Just go back to your car, please.”
The ambulance attendant and the driver had gotten out of the ambulance meantime, and Frank was leading them in a wide arc around the rear of the Ford toward the drainage ditch. The two uniformed policemen came over and began roping off the area. Another car parked across the road, and Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher got out of it. The lean bystander started to follow the ambulance attendants.
I said to Vance, “Get that joker to go back to his car and move on,” then turned to Marty Wynn. “Any luck?”
He shook his head. “Got every road out of here blocked off, and the boys are checking every parked car. We don’t even know that he was driving a car, though, do we?”
The lean man’s voice came to us, high and indignant. “Listen, Officer, this is a public road and I’m a taxpayer. Don’t forget I pay your salary.”
The ambulance attendant and driver came from the direction of the drainage ditch, carrying a stretcher. When they reached the road, the taxpayer leaned forward and peered avidly at the girl on the stretcher. “She dead?” he asked.
Nobody answered him. The litter bearers set down their burden on the road, and while one cut away the cloth over the wound to put on an emergency bandage, the other began to start a bottle of blood plasma.
Vance came over and said to me, “How many taxpayers you figure Los Angeles has, Joe?”
I shrugged. “One out of every three population, maybe. Half to three quarters of a million.”
“I been on the force twelve years. How much you figure my salary’s cost each individual taxpayer?”
I grinned at him. “Nickel, maybe. Dime at tops.”
Vance walked back to the lean taxpayer and dropped a dime in his breast pocket. “Now we’re even,” he said. “Go climb in your car and move on before I run you in for hampering a police investigation.”
The man started to open his mouth, then changed his mind when he saw the glitter in Vance’s eyes. Stiffly he crossed to his car, got in and drove off.
The girl on the stretcher stirred, and suddenly her eyes opened. She stared up confusedly at the attendant bandaging her shoulder.
“You’re all right, now, miss,” he said soothingly. “We’ll have you at the hospital soon.”
“Nick,” she whispered. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
The attendant didn’t say anything.
“All right if I talk to her?” I asked him.
“For a minute,” he said. “She’s lost a lot of blood. Want to get her in and pump some back into her as soon as possible.”
Stooping next to the stretcher, I said, “I’m a police officer, miss. Feel up to talking?”
“Is Nick dead?” she asked in a low voice.
“The Marine?” I sidestepped. “Is his name Nick?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Nick Grotto. Where is he?”
“They’ll get to him as soon as they take care of you, miss. Want to tell us your name?”
“Nancy,” she said. “Nancy Meere.”
Glancing up, I saw that Frank was entering the name in his notebook, while Vance Brasher held a flashlight for him.
“Address?”
“Eleven-twenty-two-one Calvert. That’s in North Hollywood.”
“Yes, ma�
��am. Now, want to tell us what happened?”
“The man beat him with a gun,” she whispered. “Nick shouldn’t have tried to grab it. He hit Nick with it, and when Nick fell to his knees and grabbed the man’s legs for support, he hit him again. He kept hitting him and hitting him. When I tried to stop him, he shot me.”
“What did the man look like?” I asked.
“He looked—well, nice. Sort of friendly and polite. He didn’t even scare me until he hit Nick. Please, mister, is Nick dead?” She started to cry.
The attendant said, “We’d better get her in now,” and I stood up.
We watched as they loaded her into the ambulance and drove off.
CHAPTER IV
12:14 a.m. Lieutenant Lee Jones and Sergeant Jay Allen came out from the Crime Lab. They had Sergeant McLaughlin of Latent Prints with them, and also a civilian photographer.
I showed Lieutenant Jones the Marine’s body, and also pointed out the footprints in the roped-off area. Lieutenant Jones is a big, white-haired man who looks more like an industrial executive than he does a cop. He’s calm and never in a hurry, and if he misses any scientific evidence at the scene of a crime, it isn’t there.
Before doing anything else, Lieutenant Jones had the Photo Lab man photograph the body, the footprints, and the open door of the Ford. Then, as Jay Allen began mixing plaster of Paris in a large bowl, the lieutenant bent some two-inch-wide strips of aluminum into circles of varying sizes, binding each together at the seam with Scotch tape. These were to serve as molds for the plaster of Paris. I had seen the process many times, but it always interested me.
“You get those metal strips made up special somewhere?” I asked him.
Lieutenant Jones grinned at me. “They’re the slats from old Venetian blinds. Couldn’t work better if they’d been made for the purpose.”
Carefully he set one of the rings over a footprint and pressed gently down on it until the bottom edge had been forced about an eighth of an inch into the ground. Sergeant Allen poured it half full of plaster of Paris, and scattered a few nails in it to strengthen it. As the lieutenant set a second ring over a footprint, Frank called from the drainage ditch, “Joe!”
I walked over to the edge of the ditch and saw that he was kneeling next to the dead Marine. Vance Brasher was with him, apparently to assist him in bringing up the body. Frank held up a man’s wrist watch with a gold expansion band.
“Had this gripped in his hand,” Frank said. “Must have jerked it off the suspect’s wrist. He’s wearing one of his own.”
He handed up the watch, and I examined it under my flashlight. It was a gold-filled Gruen with an engraving on its back reading, To Gig from Min, 1944. I carried it over to Lieutenant Jones.
“Ran into some luck,” I told him. “Looks like the victim grabbed this during the struggle, and the suspect didn’t realize it’d been pulled off.”
Jones looked the watch over. “Hmm. This ought to be easy to trace.”
“Got anything aside from the footprints?” I asked him.
“Little visual evidence. Looks like the killing and shooting took place here.” He pointed to the churned-up area. “Then he dragged both victims over and threw them in the ditch. He must have gotten pretty muddied up in the process. We’ll take along some samples of the mud in case you turn up a suspect with muddy clothing.”
Jones and Allen lifted the last of the footprints and told Sergeant McLaughlin he could take over. The fingerprint expert had waited because he couldn’t get to the open door of the Ford without disturbing the ground where the footprints were.
Sergeant McLaughlin went to work on the car door first, the assumption being that if the suspect had touched the car anywhere, that was the most likely place. It would have been natural for him to lay his left hand on the window sill when he pointed the gun at his victims. There was also a possibility that he had pulled open the door himself when he had ordered them out of the car.
McLaughlin is a lean, dark man who looks a little like the TV version of Boston Blackie. There is nothing gentle-looking about him, but he handles a camel’s hair brush with the tenderness of a mother powdering an infant. Dipping the brush into a round tin of silvery powder, he gently brushed the door handle. Latent Prints uses two different types of fingerprint powder: a light-colored powder for dark surfaces and a dark one for light-colored surfaces. McLaughlin used the light powder on the chrome handle, because chrome photographs black.
A clear thumbprint came into view.
After photographing it with his fingerprint camera, the sergeant stripped off a length of the special inch-and-a-half-wide Scotch tape Latent Prints has made to its own specifications and pressed it over the print. When he peeled it off again, the print came right with it. He laid the tape across a black card, cut off the protruding edges, and there was a perfect print outlined on the card in the light silvery powder. On the back of the card he wrote, John Doe, Ford Sedan, Cal. license FAX—412, parked Nichols Canyon Rd. 300 yds. South Mulholland Dr., 2 July, 12:34 A.M. Print developed and photoed on rt. front door handle.
As the car was light tan, he used the darker-colored silvery powder on the door itself. And when he raised a palm print, he transferred it to a white card instead of to a black one.
Conscious of me watching him, he looked up and said, “Bet a Coke these both turn out to belong to the Marine or the girl.”
“Bet,” I said. “If I lose, it’s worth it. If I win, at least I’ve got something.”
The coroner’s wagon had arrived by then, and attendants were loading the body. I walked over to Frank and asked, “Get his identification?”
“Yeah. Apparently the suspect got too rattled to rob them after the killing. Wallet was in his pocket with fifteen dollars in it. Plenty of identification, too.”
When the coroner’s wagon had pulled away, I led Frank over to the churned-up area where the victims had struggled with the suspect. I had Frank stand in the spot where high-heel marks indicated the girl had been when she was shot. I stood in the prints made by the suspect and pointed my index finger at his right shoulder. There was no way to judge how far the bullet had gone after it passed through her shoulder, because that would depend on the elevation of the gun muzzle. But at least this gave us a rough idea of the slug’s direction of flight.
Marty Wynn, Vance Brasher, Frank, and I then began going over the whole area with flashlights. I was the one who finally located the gouged-out place in the dirt where the bullet had hit the ground. It was about thirty yards beyond where the shooting had taken place. I probed into the mud with a pocket knife and came up with the slug.
“Got it,” I called to the others.
I took the slug over to Lieutenant Jones, who examined it under his light and said, “Looks like a thirty-eight. Have to weigh it to make sure. Battered a little, but I think it’s good enough for comparison tests.”
That about wound up the investigation at the scene. Arrangements were made to have the Ford brought down to the Police Building when Sergeant McLaughlin was through with it.
Meantime Marty Wynn had been making periodic radio checks with the other units. He came over from the final one with a glum look on his face.
“Checked out every parked car within a mile radius,” he said. “Looks like we shut the barn door too late.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thought we probably had. The girl had been lying there long enough for bleeding to stop.”
Frank and I climbed back into our undercover car and headed back for the office.
* * * *
The next day Frank and I decided to get an early start. The night watch doesn’t begin until 5:00 p.m., and ordinarily we check in about 4:30 to read the daily bulletin, look over the message book, and read our mail, so that we’ll be all ready to go by 5:00. Today we both got to the Police Building at 2:00 P.M.
I went up to the Stat’s Office, while Frank checked with Latent Prints to see if it’d turned anything. Stat’s ran the name Gig through the mon
iker file and came up with fourteen possibles. I had R & I weed out the dead, those in prison, and those known to be in other parts of the country. This reduced it to three, and none of the descriptions of the three even faintly matched our suspect’s. Another dead end.
I walked over to the Crime Lab and talked to Ray Pinker. Pinker is a slim, balding man with a retiring manner. He’s widely regarded as the top criminalistics man in the country, but you’d never learn this by talking to him. He’s also about the most modest man in the country.
Pinker told me that our suspect wore an 8½-B shoe with new rubber heels, and that he probably had some kind of leg injury.
“He favors his right foot,” he said. “It wasn’t injured in the struggle, either. The right footprints when he initially approached the car are as light as the ones when he walked away.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How about the watch?”
“We could trace it through the manufacturer to the jeweler who bought it from the factory,” Pinker said. “But it might be faster to do it by legwork.” He handed me a card on which was written the symbol M-X-#.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Personal mark of the jeweler who did the engraving. Every jeweler has his own. Takes a microscope to see it. Locate the jeweler who uses that mark, and you should have the man who sold the watch.”
“Frank’ll love this,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“He’s crazy about legwork.”
Pinker smiled. “Must not be more than a couple of hundred jewelers in town.”
“Yeah,” I said. “From past experience, the one we want will be among the last ten.”
The only other information Pinker could give me was that the slug we had dug up was a .38, as Lieutenant Jones had guessed.
I went down to 314 and found Frank waiting there. “Anything from Latent Prints?” I asked.
He shook his head gloomily. “The thumbprint was the Marine’s. The palm print was the girl’s. McLaughlin says you owe him a Coke.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Stat’s and R & I couldn’t turn anything, either. Guess we’d better try C.I.I.”
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