The Pictures

by Guy Bolton

  He left the living room and went down the corridor, standing in the doorway of the bedroom staring at the bed, knowing the killer had probably done exactly the same. He pictured Lloyd on the mattress and was reminded that her body had for a long time gone unclaimed. She was someone who had died alone and may have lived her short life lonely. Craine felt a sudden kinship for the girl whose death he’d filed away and forgotten in a matter of hours.

  He circled the bedroom but as far as he could tell it was exactly as he’d left it. The sheets had been stripped and likely thrown out. Where the body had been there was a large brown stain covering most of the mattress. The room smelt of copper, with a layer of disinfectant and cheap perfume where Dolores Greer had probably tried to clean the floor and cover up the smell. She should burn the mattress. Blood never washed out.

  Even though the latent prints were never matched to Leonard Stone, fingerprint dusting powder flowered across the doorways and light switches. In the wall cupboard, a dozen long, jeweled evening gowns and six fur stoles hung from the rail. He hadn’t noticed them before. Whatever job she had, Florence Lloyd had plenty of money to spend on clothes.

  The bathroom appeared undisturbed. The toilet was bolted down and the enameled steel bath was freestanding. The medicine cabinet had several bottles of sleeping tablets but nothing he hadn’t seen before. A pinewood dresser stood against one wall. A hairbrush on top, a gold watch and a pair of pearl earrings—nothing out of the ordinary. He went through the drawers but there was nothing in them except jewelry: long bead necklaces, diamond earrings, precious metal bracelets. Whoever had come here hadn’t bothered to take them. So what were they after?

  He went to leave the room when his flashlight swept across the floor, revealing that the direction of the wood grain was different on the floorboards bordering the fringe of the dresser. Holding the flashlight between neck and shoulder, he tried to shift the dresser to one side; there were wheels on the base and it rolled easily across the floor. He stood there in the darkness and pointed the flashlight at the floorboards. There were two hinges at the lip of the baseboard and he could make out the clear, dark edges of a wooden square cut into the floor.

  He’d found the cellar door.

  The short staircase that led down from the access hatch had shallow treads and no handrail. Craine padded down carefully step by step, his shoulder brushing against the near wall, the flashlight cutting through the black and guiding his feet down until he reached the bottom step.

  He turned the flashlight with his eyes. The cellar ran half the length of the house. It was cool but dry, an unwelcoming oubliette with plain concrete walls and mismatched boards laid loosely over sand flooring. He felt the tug of disappointment. What was he expecting: an opium den? Leather cases filled with greenbacks? Walls stacked high with glassine bags of imported heroin?

  He kept one foot on a stable floorboard and pivoted around, flashlight held out like a pistol. There were two metal stands beside the stairway behind him that he hadn’t noticed. He recognized them as small arc lights. There was little else he could see of interest. He was about to head back up the stairs when he found what he was looking for: a narrow door in the far corner.

  Craine moved across the room, watching his step, angling for the door. Twice the boards cracked beneath his shoes, the balls of his feet digging into the soft sand below. When he reached the door, he slid back a shiny steel deadbolt pinning the door shut at the lintel and twisted the doorknob to the unseen room.

  The chamber was no larger than a closet. There was a pewter workbench along one side, a square bath filling the width at the end. A pair of elbow-length rubber gloves were draped over the side. The room smelt of chemicals. He stepped further inside—the bath was half-filled with a foul-smelling liquid.

  Looking back at the bench, he noticed a stack of white card: eight-by-ten pieces of photographic paper, empty and unexposed. Beside them were several tin canisters, unopened and sealed.

  Peering up now, he saw a red light bulb hanging from the ceiling and a brown gallon bottle on a shelf filled with God knew what. He craned his head back and for the first time saw a set of prints hanging from loose wires spread across the room: photographs, black-bleached and overdeveloped. Craine felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He glanced back at the bottle then at the tub. The liquid in the bath was developing emulsion. He was standing in a photographer’s darkroom.

  Chapter 31

  “I don’t know where you got these from but I shouldn’t be doing this,” said Crickley, the precinct’s only full-time crime scene photographer. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  They were standing under the red lights of Crickley’s photography unit, hidden in the lower basement of the precinct. It was a narrow room, low-ceilinged and windowless, the air tainted with chemicals.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “Like hell I don’t. I don’t even need to develop them to know what’s on these.” Crickley ran the celluloid strips between his fingers and held them toward a red bulb. “I mean, for crying out loud . . . these pictures—”

  “Crickley, calm down.”

  Crickley pushed nervously toward the door. “Look, I should really go talk to Simms about this,” he said for the tenth time, intent on taking the pictures to senior command.

  It was O’Neill who was trying to convince him to do otherwise. Craine had said nothing as of yet, his silence all the more intimidating. “Calm down, Crickley,” O’Neill repeated. “I need you to calm down.”

  “How can I calm down? I’ll lose my job. Lose my license.”

  “You’re not going to lose your job. No one is going to know,” O’Neill went on, with surprising self-assurance. “We need your help. You’d be assisting an investigation.”

  “Look, I can’t do this. I mean, I’m not comfortable doing this. Talk to Simms, see what—”

  “Develop the film,” said Craine, speaking for the first time. “We won’t involve you any further.”

  “If people upstairs heard about this—”

  “You have my word.”

  Crickley’s shoulders sank forward. His ruddy face was dark in the red light, his forehead wet and shiny.

  “Whatever happens, please don’t let Simms find out.”

  For over two hours they watched as Crickley worked under the dim glow of the red light, cutting the long, narrow strips of chemical-coated celluloid into five-frame sections then enlarging them using a Federal print enlarger. It was a slow, almost painstaking process, one frame of film at a time by hand, each taking three or four minutes to expose and develop and then several more minutes to soak the enlargement in a stop bath and fixing solution.

  By midnight, the developing trays were full, and rows of eight-by-ten prints hung drying from wires stretched across the width of the room. Craine and O’Neill watched intently as the metallic silver came to the surface of the resin paper and the images began to form. Soft at first, blurry, then faster, the lines more defined, the blacks inked darker.

  Crickley was right to be concerned.

  The images were of a bedroom, Florence Lloyd’s bedroom, to be precise, and the content left little to the imagination. The photographs showed a woman sprawled across a bed, wrapped in a sheet and what must only be more flesh. There was another figure in the picture, the back of their head buried between her legs and their face unclear.

  The woman had blond hair, almost white, curled up around the ears. It was Florence Lloyd. She was naked in some, hardly more dressed in others and Craine surmised that there was an order here that needed to be deliberated on.

  O’Neill shifted uneasily, and even in the red light Craine knew he was blushing. Craine looked at the photographs with earnest interest. There were dozens of pictures in total, the photographer positioned somewhere to the side, Florence Lloyd lying across the bed perhaps fifteen or so feet away. The subjects weren’t modeling; they were unposed, stolen snapshots that he assumed were taken without the participant
s’ knowledge.

  Before rushing to unnecessary conclusions, Craine considered whether the photos might have been used for blackmail. But the blackmail of whom? The man in the pictures? He looked more closely at one of the prints. The lighting of the photograph was sallow and the images grainy. Florence Lloyd’s face was held in rapture but the other figure was shrouded in shadow and impossible to identify. Could that be Stanley?

  O’Neill stood at Craine’s side. The top of his head came up to Craine’s shoulders. “You recognize the girl on the bed?”

  “That’s Florence Lloyd. I assume Campbell took pictures of her and this guy from the window.”

  “But how do you know that Campbell was the photographer?”

  “I have something to show you,” said Craine, walking over to the corner of the room where his coat was folded over the back of a chair and returning with an envelope. He put his hand inside and pulled out a stack of prints, placing the photographs that Denny had given him on the workbench beside the others. “I was given these pictures a few days ago by someone who worked with Rochelle. I have a feeling they were taken by the same photographer.”

  O’Neill and Crickley glanced at the pictures. O’Neill’s faced reddened again but this time with frustration. “Why didn’t you tell me you had these?” he said, irritated. “We agreed to tell each other everything.”

  “I didn’t know they were relevant. I’m sorry.”

  Crickley picked up one of the photographs and examined it carefully. “It’s a different camera, but that’s not to say it isn’t the same photographer. The lighting is different. The girls in these pictures are modeling,” he said, comparing the two sets of photographs, “but these new ones we have look like they were taken in low light. Like he was peeping on them.”

  “The girl on the bed is Florence Lloyd. She was killed two months ago,” Craine said, pointing from one set to the other. “If this was blackmail, then I need to know who the other person is in the picture.”

  “You see the grain on the image,” said Crickley, pulling him over to the last of the prints drying from the wires. “That’s the silver chloride crystals reacting to the light. It’s not stable, you see. The spools are acetate film but it wasn’t stored properly and doesn’t keep well in the heat. We’re lucky we got these developed at all.”

  Craine looked closer at the enlargements.

  “Is this all of them?”

  “All that you gave me, but there are some missing from one of the spools. Six, I think. I imagine he developed them.”

  “Why would he develop some and not the rest?”

  “It’s a selection process. Printing photographs takes time and money. I’m guessing your photographer would have looked at the entire roll using a loupe and then chosen the best prints to blow up.”

  “You mean the six photos with the clearest images?”

  “Exactly. In this case, I’m guessing they’re the six photos where you can see both of their faces. What you have here is the offal, the ones that were no good to him.”

  “Craine?” This from O’Neill, staring harder at Denny’s prints further down the room.

  Craine ignored him. “Can we do anything to make it clearer?” he said to Crickley instead.

  “No, can’t get anything better than this, not with this exposure latitude. Normally I could burn these lighter areas to get a better tonal range but looking at these it wouldn’t make a difference.”

  “Even if you made it bigger?”

  “Craine?” O’Neill again.

  “The smaller they are, the higher the fidelity to the negative,” Crickley went on. “Every time you blow something up you’re going to lose quality, and besides, the negative is ruined. In these summer months, the acids in the film break down. I was lucky to get these at all.”

  “Craine?” O’Neill said for the third time, more insistent this time.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve seen this girl before.” O’Neill held up one of Denny’s pictures, a blond woman wearing nothing but long gloves and a fur stole.

  “What?”

  “I’ve met her before. She was at Loew House. The night of the party.”

  Craine took the photograph from O’Neill’s hand and held it toward the light. Exhilaration made his hands shake. “You’re certain?”

  “I think so,” he said before reaching out to take the photograph back for one last check. He took his glasses off and looked again at the picture, his eyes fastened to the girl’s face. After a few seconds, he said, “Yes, I’m certain.”

  “You remember her name?”

  O’Neill nodded. “She said her name was Delilah, Delilah Deschamps.”

  Chapter 32

  July 15th

  There was no Delilah Deschamps filed at R. & I., the D.M.V. or County Parole. There was, however, an arrest sheet and employment record for a Delilah Desmond, aged nineteen years, born in Arizona. She had two prior arrests for soliciting, both in the Venice Beach area, but nothing in the past two years. Her employment record showed sporadic restaurant work and a number of three-month contracts at various studios around town. In that respect she was little different than most of the impressionable ingénues who took the bus to Los Angeles in a bid to break into the pictures, only to find themselves serving plates nine months of the year in the vain hope they might be spotted by a drunk producer.

  In the early hours of the morning, after O’Neill matched the photo to her mug shot, they took O’Neill’s car and drove to the address listed in Los Feliz.

  Delilah Desmond lived in a neighborhood of two-story houses with closely cropped lawns and matching mailboxes. There were functional family cars in the driveways—Packards, Cadillac sedans, Buicks, even a Chrysler. These houses belonged to well-off families. There was money on this street.

  The lights were off in the Desmond house but a parked Lincoln Zephyr sat in the driveway. That car cost more than most people’s salary.

  “Douse the lights,” Craine said to O’Neill as they approached the house. “Keep going but slow down.”

  The Lincoln didn’t have a license plate. In the driver’s seat a chauffeur had his head tilted back. Dead? No, his chest was rising. Asleep.

  Ascending a gentle hill, they followed the beam until they could spot a small turnoff.

  “Turn around here. We can still see the house from the corner. I want to see who comes out before we knock on her door.”

  They decided to wait until morning, each taking turns to watch the house as the other got some rest.

  “I don’t mind taking first watch,” O’Neill offered.

  “Go ahead. Really.”

  Neither one of them said anything for a long time, and after a while O’Neill fell asleep. It felt peaceful without O’Neill yammering all the time, Craine had to admit, though a part of him enjoyed having him around. He glanced at O’Neill as he snored quietly in his seat. His hat was askew, replaced by a palm that he used as a pillow against the window. Most people look vulnerable when they’re asleep but O’Neill just looked like a little boy. Yet, at the same time, he was smarter and wiser than most men twice his age. The contrast lent him a disarming quality and Craine liked that about O’Neill. He was sincere and earnest and only seemed to speak in primary colors. O’Neill spoke the truth, and it frightened Craine to hear it.

  Around five o’clock O’Neill stirred in his seat and woke up with a start, his knees knocking against the car keys in the ignition.

  “Sorry, I forgot where I was for a second.”

  He took a deep breath and blinked several times, opening his eyes as wide as he could before rubbing them with the back of his hand.

  “You want to get some sleep? I’ll stay watching.”

  “I’m okay. Getting light now, anyway. Won’t have to wait much longer.”

  O’Neill shook out a cigarette. He patted his pockets and brought out a book of matches. The car lit up momentarily as he struck a match. Craine wound down the window but there was no avoiding
the cigarette burning on O’Neill’s lower lip. A thin curl of smoke drifted through the car and caught in Craine’s throat. Chesterfields.

  O’Neill must have sensed him stiffen. “Rude of me. You want one?”

  “No, I don’t smoke.”

  “Pretty unusual. I mean, pretty rare. Everyone at the department does. Truth is, I only started a few months ago. My dad always did. Used to smoke a pipe, one of those fisherman’s ones that sticks out sideways so you can see in front of you. I inherited it too when he died but it stays in a drawer now ’cause it wouldn’t seem right to smoke it. Even looking at it makes me think of him.”

  O’Neill was staring at his feet, his eyes lost in the memory.

  Craine said, “My wife smoked. She smoked Chesterfields, like you.” He paused as an image of her formed in his mind, her smoking a cigarette on the terrace out by the pool. Michael was in the water, learning how to swim. “When I smell them it reminds me of her.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  O’Neill didn’t make a show of stubbing out the cigarette, but he did it anyway.

  “You married?” Craine asked.

  “No. I mean, I’d like to be but—I haven’t met the right person yet. Well, maybe I . . . Doesn’t matter. Either way, it’d be nice to have a family. You must feel very lucky to have your son.”

  Craine wasn’t sure how to answer this. In truth he’d never really thought about being a father as some kind of blessing. More of a role he couldn’t live up to.

  “Does he look like you?”

  “A little. Like Celia, really.” But Craine wasn’t even sure if that was true. Michael had a lot of his features. It was nature’s little trick to make you feel responsible.

  “I don’t look anything like my dad. Unfortunately.”

  “You want to be more like him?”

  “Doesn’t every kid want to be like their dad?”