I knew city editor Jim Richardson a little, from the Peete case-he was feared by cub reporters, and respected by the veteran newshounds, a chainsmoking, mostly bald, bullnecked, self-proclaimed son of a bitch.
He was also wall-eyed. Richardson’s left eye had a weak muscle, and when he looked at you, it took half-a-second for the left eye to catch up with the right. The effect was no more eerie than seeing Karloff as the Frankenstein monster for the first time.
Richardson rose behind his desk and waved at us to follow him into a glassed-off editorial chamber. He barked at several other reporters, seated in the nearby bullpen, who trailed after him into the conference room. Fowley and I were the last ones in.
Everybody had taken a chair around the big, scarred table except Richardson himself, who was expectant-fathering at its head, lighting up a fresh cigarette off the butt of his previous one. While Fowley and the three other reporters were wearing their suits and ties and, in several instances, their hats, Richardson had long since removed his tie and the sleeves of his suspendered white shirt were rolled up over Popeye-powerful forearms.
“So we’re stuck with that fucking prima donna Hansen,” Richardson said, as if this were the middle and not the beginning of the discussion.
Fowley, not missing a beat, said, “The Hat made that clear at the scene-we try to go over his head to Donahoe, he’ll freeze us out. And you know what a weak sister Donahoe is.”
One of the reporters said, “Hey, this crime beat stuff is new to me, boss. What’s the story on Donahoe?”
“He just got transferred from Robbery,” Richardson said, grimacing, cigarette dangling. “Before that he was in Administration, doing what he does best-pushing paper. He doesn’t have a clue about pushing people-captain or not, Jack Donahoe’s no match for that hotdogging Hansen.”
“Too bad,” Fowley said, and the other reporters looked at him for more. Fowley gave it to them: “The boss here has done favors for Donahoe… could easily play him, if Harry the Hat was out of the way.”
“Well, he’s not gonna be out of the way,” Richardson said. He cast his eerie gaze around the room at us, the right eye leading, the left one eventually swimming into place. “But, goddamn it, this is our story. We found it, and we’re going to keep it, and turn it into the fucking crime of the century.”
“What if the victim turns out to be a hooker?” another of the reporters asked. “How do we make that the crime of the century?”
“Okay-let’s say she died a whore,” Richardson said, gesturing with open hands. “You don’t think she started out that way, do you? She was a good little girl once upon a time, some daddy’s sweet little girl, before she started banging for bucks, and suckin’ off sailors.”
Inside, I groaned.
“I still think it’s a hard sell, boss,” Fowley gently insisted.
“Boys,” Richardson said, slapping the table, making them jump, “Jack the Ripper killed whores back in a day when a whore was considered less than human. And look at the ink that crazy bastard got.”
Behind us, the door opened, and a guy with a black rubber apron, rubber gloves, and a distasteful expression came in carrying by his thumbs a dripping-wet print, a big one-11” by 14”. Grinning, eyes gleaming, Richardson pointed to the table like he was showing a bellboy where to put the room service tray.
“Put it down-lay it right down there,” he instructed the guy, who obeyed, and left.
The print lay there, dripping moisture like tears.
“Jesus,” somebody said.
It looked just as bad in black and white: the bisected body of a once beautiful girl, on grotesque display, in the weeds and grass.
The reporters had stood, gathering ’round to get a closer look-though Fowley and I kept our seats, having already had our share of close looks at this grim subject matter-and, hardened though they were to every disaster a major city might visit upon a human being, several gasped and they to a man sat back down, faces white as blistered skin.
“Take a good look, boys,” Richardson said, arms folded, rocking a little on his heels. “This is what you’re going to be working on, till I say different… Pretty photography, don’t you think? Nice work, Heller. Guess you bedroom dicks get a lot of practice shooting dames in the raw.”
Richardson was trying to snap his boys back to attention, with the gallows humor so typical of reporters and, for that matter, cops.
But his boys-seated here and there around the big table-were staring at the grisly body, still in shock.
“What about the Mocambo, boss?” Fowley asked, the only reporter not unnerved. He was referring to a heist at the famous nightspot that had made recent headlines.
“Wrap fish in it,” Richardson said with a snort. “The heisters are behind bars, and this murderer, this wonderful fiend, is very much at large.” He sighed smoke admiringly as he surveyed the photo. “Ain’t she a pip?”
No one disagreed; no one said anything.
Sensing the pall, Richardson affected a football coach tone: “Are we going to let that prick Hansen take this away from us? Are the cops gonna control this story, or are we?”
“We need something on them,” Fowley said.
The other reporters nodded, one chiming in with, “Yeah, yeah we do.”
But their editor was shaking his head, the coach disappointed in his boys.
“Naw-pull your heads out of your asses. That fucking Hansen is as clean as he is press hungry.” Richardson spoke with authority: he had helped take down more than one local crooked administration.
“I don’t mean corruption,” Fowley said. “We give them something-so they owe us.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. If we’re out there in force, we may turn something big up before they do. It’s like you always say, boss-the cops in this town couldn’t find a horse turd in a box of chocolates.”
That got a few nervous laughs from the boys, but not from Richardson. “Yeah, that’s what I always say, and it’s true of most of the cops-but not the Hat.”
I had been trying to just fade into the woodwork, but I couldn’t let this pass.
“What’s this nonsense about Hansen being ‘clean’?” I asked, the Chicago cop in me offended. “Put him on the damn payroll, already!”
Next to me, Fowley shook his head. “The boss is right, Nate-the Hat’s a straight arrow, so clean he squeaks.”
“Yeah? And where’d he get those fancy threads?”
“Paid for them.”
“On a cop’s salary?”
Fowley shrugged. “Harry’s wife has money, plus he earns income off the textbooks he’s written. He’s also sold his life story to Hollywood two or three times… The guy has solved hundreds of murders.”
“What, like the Peete case?” I looked at their city editor, standing at the head of the table like a patriarch getting ready to carve a turkey. “Come on, Richardson-you were there back in ’44-you saw that pompous prick steal my thunder.”
Richardson waved at me dismissively. “What’s the difference whether Hansen solved those cases, or just convinced the world he did? He’s put himself up on a pedestal like no other dick in town, but I’ll be goddamned if we let him take our story from us.”
“You know, boss,” Fowley said, something sly in his voice, “the Hat ain’t partnered with McCreadie anymore.”
“No?” This perked Richardson up. “Who’s Hansen’s new Watson, then?”
“Finis Brown,” Fowley said.
“Fat Ass Brown?” one of the other reporters said. “Well, he’s no fuckin’ straight arrow.”
“Hardly. As of a few months ago, he was Mickey Cohen’s bag man.”
Cohen, who I’d met, had taken over for Ben Siegel in Los Angeles when Ben shifted his base of operations to Vegas. The bagman role Fowley was referring to probably meant Sergeant Brown was the local mob’s payoff conduit to scores of bent cops.
Shifting in my hard chair, I said offhandedly, “So him you could put on the
payroll.”
“Yeah, for what good it’ll do us,” Richardson said.
“What do you mean?”
“Hansen’s no fool-if we know Brown is bent, don’t you think the Hat does, too? He’ll likely use Fat Ass as an errand boy and keep him in the dark as to what’s really going on.”
“If we could identify her before they do,” Fowley said, drumming his fingers on the scarred table, “that would put Donahoe in our pocket, and give us leverage on the Hat.”
And, of course, a man who could have identified her sat among them-and I was starting to think that by keeping it to myself, I was just digging myself a deeper hole.
“What are you planning to do, Bill?” one of the reporters asked Fowley, flipping a finger toward the still moisture-shiny blowup of the bisected corpse. “Show this around and see if somebody can identify that?”
Fowley had no answer, but his boss did.
Richardson said, “I’m already on top of that. I have a staff artist working with Heller’s photographs to see if he can come up with a sketch.”
“Good,” Fowley said.
Another of the reporters asked, “Which staff artist, boss?”
“Howard Burke.”
The reporter nodded. “Yeah, well, Howie’s a good artist, all right-but do you really expect him to be able to come up with a representation of what she looked like before her face got carved up and beat to shit?”
“Yes, I do-the bone structure, the eyes, even the general shape of the mouth, despite that gash… plenty for an artist to go on.” Richardson leaned on the table with his palms and his smile was almost as ghastly as the corpse’s. “And then we could give that sketch to the cops, to show Captain Donahoe and Detective Hansen just how helpful we’re trying to be.”
“Boss, I’m with you on this,” Fowley said, “but they got their own artists, remember. If Howie lucks out and comes up with a good likeness, I say screw giving it to the cops-we run with the pic in this extra edition and encourage phone calls from our loyal readers and see if we can identify her before the cops can. We hand them a name, they’ll start cooperating all the way down the line.”
A name. They wanted a name Elizabeth Short and the only guy in this town who could give it to them Elizabeth Short besides the killer was sitting right beside them. I knew who she was Elizabeth Short and the cops didn’t, which gave me a head start if I wanted to try to crack this thing Elizabeth Short before they made me as a suspect, which couldn’t happen till they figured out who the hell she was Elizabeth Short but first I had to shake loose of these newshounds…
One of whom was saying, “Bill, you can forget that. The Hat’s probably identified the dame by her fingerprints, already-that’s where he made his reputation, in the Records Bureau. They say he could trace fingerprints faster than a team of ten.”
“You’re almost right, Ed,” Richardson said, and he finally sat down. He folded his hands, prayerfully. “I just had a call from Sid Hughes, who tailed the Black Maria over to the morgue.”
So they had the same slang for the black morgue wagon in L.A. as in Chicago. And when they arrested you, they probably threw you in a paddy wagon, here, too…
“Sid’s sticking to the coroner like toilet paper to a shoe,” Richardson said, panning his gaze around on his boys, the slow eye taking its sweet time catching up. “And word is Hansen’s already eliminated this girl from local fingerprint files.”
“That’s impossible!” Fowley said. “They haven’t even had time to autopsy the body!”
“That’s a fact-the coroner took one look at her and said, ‘This can wait till after lunch!’” Richardson was lighting up a new cigarette off the old one. “But they did take time to print the half of her body that had fingers on it… and a card’s winging its way to the FBI for identification right now.”
The FBI had 104 million Americans on record in their neatly cataloged, cross-referenced files. Would Elizabeth Short be in there? I wondered.
“You’re assuming the girl was in trouble,” I said quietly.
Richardson’s wall-eyes settled on me, one at a time. “Well, we know she was in trouble at least once, Heller-when some bastard decided to take her on a date that was so lousy, she just went to pieces… Anyway, she may have worked at a war plant, or some other defense-related-”
“Boss!” Fowley was sitting up, like a kid in bed who woke from a bad dream. “Are you saying they sent the prints airmail special delivery, to the FBI-in Washington, D.C.?”
Richardson exhaled smoke, impatiently. “They didn’t send ’em Pony Express.”
Now a slow grin began to form on Fowley’s pleasant bulldog puss. “That’s what you think, boss. You got any idea what’s going on out on the East Coast right now?”
“Is the East Coast my business? I’m city desk.”
“Snowstorms are grounding planes all along the Atlantic seaboard. Washington, D.C.? They’re buried to their ass in two feet of snow.”
Richardson’s eyes were narrowing, even the wall-eyed one.
Fowley was saying gleefully, “They’ll be lucky to get to Chicago. It’ll take days, maybe even a week to get those prints to Washington for identification.”
Dragon smoke poured out of Richardson’s nostrils. “Then why are you grinning like the cat that ate the canary?”
Fowley was damn near bouncing on his chair. “You want to get the cops on our side? Let’s offer them the SoundPhoto machine! We can send the prints over the goddamn wire!”
I felt sick; I thought I might puke… maybe I could do it right on that blowup and cover that grotesque picture up…
“Prints over the wire?” Richardson was on his feet again. “Can that be done? Has it ever been done?”
Fowley shrugged, grandly. “I don’t think it has been done, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be-if it works for a pic of Betty Grable’s gams, or DiMaggio’s ugly mug, why wouldn’t it work for fingerprints?”
Nodding slowly, sucking smoke, Richardson smiled and said, “Why wouldn’t it…”
It wasn’t exactly a question.
“And,” Fowley pointed out, “the SoundPhoto is something we got that the cops don’t.”
“Yeah… yeah.” Richardson pointed with his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. “And I could call Ray Richards at our Washington bureau and have him deliver them to the FBI.”
Fowley was nodding, grinning. “And we share it with the cops on the condition that the other papers don’t get the info until we’ve run our morning edition.”
The wall-eyes bugged again. “Fowley, there’s only one thing wrong with that idea.”
“Yeah? What?”
“ I didn’t think of it… Back to your desks, check if our boys in Leimert Park have phoned in with anything. We should have Burke’s sketch in a few minutes, and you can start showing it around.”
“Where?” one of the reporters asked.
“She was a good-looking piece, before she got turned into two pieces. Show the sketch at the studios, the casting agencies, up and down Hollywood Boulevard-do I have to do all the goddamn fucking thinking around here? Go, go, go!”
They went, went, went… but when I started to rise, Richardson held up a hand in a “stop” motion.
“Nate,” Richardson said, and he came over and looked right at me, hand settling on my shoulder just about the same time his left eye caught up with his right. “Stick around-we’ll talk.”
“We can hash out this p.r. business later,” I said, “when it’s not so frantic around here-”
“Yeah, yeah… but just sit back down, give me a few minutes. I gotta call the Hearst Washington bureau, gotta phone the FBI… Want me to get you some coffee?”
“No-no, that’s okay.”
“Sit, sit, sit.”
I sat, sat, sat. Alone in the editorial chamber, I wondered what the hell I was still doing here, right smack in the middle of an investigation into a crime for which I might momentarily become a suspect. My head start had evaporated
, or likely soon would, thanks to Fowley’s wirephoto brainstorm and the FBI’s 104 million sets of fingerprints.
All the while, the grisly photo of that poor butchered girl glistened on the table, taunting me… and then, as if Elizabeth Short herself had whispered in my ear, it finally dawned on me that right smack in the middle was still the best place for me. With the jump Richardson had on this case, I could be in a position to know whether Beth’s murder was in any way leading back to me.
And if Fowley’s slant on sending those prints via wirephoto really did i.d. the corpse as Elizabeth Short, the cops would owe them bigtime-meaning most everything the cops had would be shared with Richardson and his boys.
Much as I wanted to flee the Examiner, like Stepin Fetchit exiting a haunted house, I knew the best way not to be a suspect in this murder would be to solve the fucking thing-to find the maniac responsible. If I could lend my skills to the investigation, help bring it to a quick resolution, I could clear myself before I needed clearing, before anybody had even tumbled to my connection to the girl.
After all, I had known her in Chicago, hadn’t even seen her in L.A., the only contact being that single phone call.
So what I needed to do now was find some way to stay a part of this… to stay on the Examiner ’s team…
I was pondering that when Richardson came back in, as usual lighting up a new cigarette off an old one. He shut the door, unintentionally slamming it a little, glass rattling-and rattling me.
But then the city editor settled in next to me and again placed a friendly hand on my shoulder.
“We have a singular opportunity, Nate,” Richardson said, and smiled, and looked at me sideways-of course, he always looked at you sideways, even when he was looking at you frontways.
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