Angel in black nh-11

by Max Allan Collins

“It was a cover-up, Nate-don’t sugarcoat it.”

  “Just as long as Watterson is still having his jacket buttoned up for him, in the back, by valets in white, I’m satisfied.”

  “I can assure you our man is still in a padded cell. I even get the occasional postcard from him.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes, that’s one of Lloyd’s hobbies-taunting me with his threatening gibberish.”

  “I would think they’d keep the lad away from sharp objects, including pencils.”

  “It’s a mental hospital, Nate, not a prison.”

  “All the more reason to check up on him, Eliot.”

  “I will… What’s wrong, Nate?”

  “Wrong?”

  “I sense something in your voice. I’m reading a… personal involvement in this thing.”

  “I just happened to be with the reporter who stumbled onto the corpse, is all… She was a pretty girl, Eliot, and some twisted bastard butchered her… It’s sickening.”

  “I know. I know all too well. I was called to enough vacant lots and the like to view the Butcher’s handiwork… I’ll make sure Lloyd is still inside, Nate. You’ll hear from me tomorrow.”

  “Good.”

  “Don’t let this get to you. I had my share of sleepless nights myself, thanks to that fiend. We should have put his ass in jail.”

  “We should have killed him.”

  Eliot said nothing.

  “Anyway-thanks, Eliot.”

  When his voice returned, the tone had lightened. “You’re still willing to be my best man?”

  “What? Oh, sure! When is the wedding, again?”

  “January thirty-first, right here in Cleveland. Big church ceremony, the whole shooting match, family, friends. Can you and Peggy still make it?”

  “We’ll be there with bells on. I can’t imagine anything keeping me from standing up for you.” Except maybe a jail cell.

  “Betty and I are counting on the both of you… Speaking of which, how’s married life treating you, so far?”

  “So far, so good,” I said, leaving out a few details.

  “Peggy’s a great gal.”

  “So’s Betty. I know you two will be happy, Eliot.”

  His laugh had a little embarrassment in it. “Well, you know what they say-third time’s a charm.”

  This would indeed be marriage number three for Eliot. He was a hardworking, hard-drinking guy and was no doubt not terribly easy to be married to. Wife number one had been his secretary, during the Capone Chicago years, and that marriage had burned out during his tumultuous Public Safety run. I had thought his second marriage, to a terrific girl named Evie-a fashion designer up for the high-flying social life Eliot relished so-would have stuck. But nobody knows what’s really going on inside somebody else’s marriage.

  Hanging up, I looked toward Peggy, who seemed, finally, to be stirring. I went in and kissed her neck and her ear and her face, gently rousing her.

  “Where have you been?” she asked me, sleepily, violet eyes half-hooded.

  “All your life? Or just today?”

  “Today’s a start.”

  I was seated on the edge of the bed, next to her. “Actually… it was long and kind of unpleasant. I’ll fill you in, but I think we oughta grab supper, first.”

  “Ooooo… That unpleasant?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Neither one of us was terribly hungry, so we just had sandwiches and iced tea at the Fountain Coffee Shop, which was tucked away under the Polo Lounge stairway. Dressed casually, in a snappy white blouse with brown-white-checked boyish slacks, Peggy chattered about the wonderful buys she’d found, at the after-Christmas sales. I politely listened and did not point out that bargain-hunting in Beverly Hills was a contradiction in terms.

  Her hair was down, tonight, brushing her shoulders. All I could think of was how beautiful she was-and how much she and Beth Short looked alike.

  Over a piece of strawberry cheesecake we shared off a single plate, Peg began to babble about how excited she was, tomorrow being her first day on the Bob Hope picture.

  “I’ll be working with Dorothy Lamour, too,” she said. “And Peter Lorre. I’ll tell you a funny coincidence.”

  Not finding coincidences all that funny today, I managed, “What?”

  “It’s a private-eye spoof. Isn’t that a riot?”

  “Four alarm,” I said.

  As we walked hand-in-hand back to our bungalow, enjoying a cool breeze riffling the trees, she frowned up at me. “Here I’ve been babbling on and on about my fun day, and how I’m looking forward to tomorrow… and poor you, you’ve had such a long, hard day… How did you describe it?”

  “Unpleasant,” I said.

  “Unpleasant,” she nodded. “Tell me about it, darling.”

  I waited until we’d made a fire-and had dragged pillows off the couch, to make a cozy nest for us, where we fell into each other’s arms-before I told her.

  Told her what I could, that is: that I’d been with that reporter Fowley when the bisected body of a beautiful unidentified woman had been found, and that I would be working with the Examiner on the case.

  She knew immediately what I was talking about. Even on Rodeo Drive, newsboys had been hawking the Examiner ’s extra edition, and the case had been all over the radio, as well.

  “I heard the grisly details in the car,” she said, sitting up. She was in panties and bra and looked like a bright-eyed girl at a slumber party; I was in T-shirt and boxers and socks, like a pervo pop peeking through a keyhole at his daughter’s girl friends at that same slumber party.

  “You don’t seem, uh… bothered at all,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? This is a big story! This is going to be the biggest thing since the H-bomb. And my husband’s in the middle of it!”

  “I’m glad you’re pleased.”

  “This is going to make our business, out here.”

  “Our business?”

  “Our business, your business! You’ll be the most famous detective in town, you big lug, if you take full advantage. Do you and Fred have a press agent?”

  “Not really-that’s why we teamed up with the Examiner.”

  “Well, you two may want to think about getting a press agent. God, this is exciting! What a wonderful break!”

  “Yeah, I’m, uh, pretty thrilled myself.”

  Her brow tensed and she raised a palm, like somebody was swearing her in at court. “Don’t get me wrong… I’m sorry for this poor girl. She was probably no different than me, just another beauty queen looking to make it in the movies or something. But she wasn’t lucky, like I was.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She didn’t have you in her life.”

  Then she kissed me. Long and hard, her tongue tangling with mine.

  The fire cast a glowing, flickering pattern on her creamy-white flesh, as if someone were projecting a film onto her body. The dark bushiness of her pubic triangle teased through the white panties. She sat up and reached behind her and undid her bra; it slipped to her lap, where she brushed it away like a pesky insect.

  Her breasts weren’t large-they were merely perfect, delicately veined, pertly symmetrical, hard-nippled. I kissed them, I touched them, I helped her scoot out of the panties and she climbed on top of me, sat on me, riding me slowly, eyes half-lidded, smiling in that distracted way that precedes orgasm, until the smile finally blossomed, her eyes closing, hips accelerating…

  The sweetness of it lingered well after she was again in my arms, turning bitter only when she asked me once more if we couldn’t “wait” to have our first child. Things were going to be so perfect here, she assured me dreamily, with her landing her first film role, and me landing such an incredible, important case.

  I held her face in my hands and I looked into those lovely violet eyes and I said, “We’re going back to Chicago, as soon as you’ve shot your little movie and I’ve solved my big case. We’re going home and we’re having our kid, and then we�
��ll decide where we’re going to live and work… I promise you I will abide by your wishes on that score, Peg. If you want to come back here and be in the movies, well, I’ll work here, too, and we’ll hire a nanny or whatever the hell and we will have it all-yes, we will. But if you ever suggest aborting our child again, I will fucking kill you.”

  With a yelp of fright, she bolted from my arms and ran naked to the bedroom, where she shut the door, though that didn’t keep me from hearing her crying in there, as I tried to sleep on the reassembled couch.

  Dumb little bitch.

  Stupid bastard.

  8

  The prints the Examiner sent by wire to the FBI were too blurred to be identifiable; but one of Richardson’s staff photographers suggested sending 8” by 10” negative blowups. Within minutes the prints were identified as those of Elizabeth Short, who had-four years before-applied for, and landed, a civilian job at an Army base near Santa Barbara, working at the post exchange at Camp Cooke.

  A description derived from the job application was as follows: weight, 115 pounds; height, five feet five; race, Caucasian; sex, female; hair, brunette; eyes, blue-green; complexion, fair; date of birth, July 29, 1924; place of birth, Hyde Park, Massachusetts.

  In addition, the FBI had cross-referenced an arrest in 1943, Santa Barbara, California; a minor, Elizabeth Short had been picked up for drinking in a bar where she’d been with a girl friend and two soldiers. To her description were added these telling details: an I-shaped scar on her back from a childhood operation, a quarter-size brown birthmark on her right shoulder, and a small tattoo of a rose on her outer left thigh. The girl had been sent by bus back home to Medford, Massachusetts, to be given over into the custody of her mother, Mrs. Phoebe May Short.

  “Look at this little beauty,” Richardson said, gesturing to a police mug photo, side and front, of Elizabeth Short. With her dark hair tousled, translucent eyes sullenly blank, wearing none of the China doll makeup at all, under the unyielding gaze of a police photographer, she was as lovely as a movie queen’s soft-focus, airbrushed glamour portrait.

  Richardson was standing at the head of the scarred wooden conference table; he and I and Fowley were in the glassed-off editorial chamber where we’d confabbed yesterday with a whole gaggle of reporters. This morning it was just the three of us.

  “She does look better than in the shots Heller took yesterday,” Fowley said. Wearing a light brown checkered sportcoat and a darker brown tie with yellow horses prancing across it, he was seated to Richardson’s right and I was across from the reporter, on the editor’s left.

  “A living doll,” Richardson said, managing to fix both his eyes on the photo, “or at least she used to be-and that gives us a genuine star for our ‘A’ picture.”

  The editor-in shirtsleeves and suspenders-was giddy as a schoolgirl. Yesterday, when the competition’s afternoon editions appeared with the “Werewolf Slayer” story, it was two hours after the Examiner ’s extra hit the street, in a sold-out press run second only to VJ Day.

  “You want us to hit Camp Cooke, boss?” Fowley asked.

  “Sid Hughes is already on his way up there,” Richardson said, lighting up a cigarette, waving out a match.

  “We could check out that Santa Barbara arrest,” I suggested.

  “I got two men on that.” Glee was coming off Richardson like heat off asphalt. “Right now we’re so far out in front of the pack-they’re never gonna catch up. I’ve had crews out digging since five o’clock this morning, and the other papers didn’t even know Elizabeth Short’s name till they read it in our morning edition.”

  Fowley shifted in his hard chair; his tone vaguely irritated, he said, “So what’s left for the first string, if you’ve emptied the bench covering every lead the FBI gave us?”

  “The best lead of all… Get your notepad out, Mr. Fowley.” Richardson turned his eerie stare on me, his slow eye playing catch-up. “Nate, you’re the best interrogator in house at the moment.”

  I frowned. “Gee whiz, thanks-but what are you getting at?”

  His left eye was still swimming into place as he fixed his gaze on me. “Plus, you were a cop for a lot of years.”

  “What’s on your mind, Jim?”

  “You’ve had to break bad news before, I mean.”

  I’d grabbed a bacon and eggs breakfast at a diner on my way over here; the greasy remains were turning in my stomach. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “Also, you know how to work a phone.”

  That was self-evident: private detectives spent most of their working day on the phone. “What the hell do you-”

  “Just a second…” Richardson went to the door, opened it, and yelled for a copy boy to bring him in two phones. Then he looked at me again, one eye at a time, and unleashed a smile almost as ghastly as his gaze. “… I want you to locate Mrs. Phoebe May Short, in Medford, Massachusetts.”

  “That’s the news you want me to break? Her daughter’s death?”

  He strode back to the head of the table, nodding. “Unlikely she’s heard yet, unless the cops got right on it… and I don’t think Hansen even gets in till nine or nine-thirty.”

  I sighed. “All right. It’s gotta be done.”

  “Yeah… but gracefully… you know, let her down easy. First, tell her that Elizabeth won a beauty contest.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged elaborately, held his palms up. “If you just flat-out tell the poor woman that her little girl’s dead, she’s gonna go to pieces on you, Heller-you know that. We need to get all the background, before you inform her of, you know, the tragic event.”

  “You are one sorry son of a bitch.”

  “True, but if you don’t make this call for me, Heller, you won’t be working for this sorry son of a bitch any longer. You and Fred Rubinski will be on the outside of this case, as well as this newspaper, and you can pony up some real dough for a real press agent, which you will sorely need, considering the bad ink we will drown you in.”

  “How do you sleep at night?”

  “Like a dead baby. Anyway, you got the skills for this, Nate. You can do it. I know you can.”

  “That show of confidence just sends me soaring. Why don’t you have Fowley here do your dirty work? He oughta be used to it by now.”

  Fowley leaned back in the chair, raised his eyebrows, and his hands, like he’d just touched both burners of a hot stove.

  Richardson, his left eye floating, said kindly, “He’s going to be taking notes while you work your magic.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “By ‘fuck you,’ I take that to mean, yes, you’ll do it.”

  “Yes, fuck you. Yes, I’ll do it.”

  Soon two phones on long wires had been plugged into the wall, one each in front of Fowley and me. The switchboard connected us, so that Fowley could listen in.

  It took a while to track the woman down. No Medford telephone was listed for the Shorts, but by sweet-talking an operator, I was able to find my way to the next-door neighbor, who told me the Shorts rented out a flat upstairs in their house and that the flat did indeed have a phone. I got ahold of the tenant, and, before long, Mrs. Phoebe Short was on the line. I identified myself as a reporter with the Examiner.

  “Why yes, I have a daughter named Elizabeth.” The voice was medium pitched and touched with a New England accent, and its pleasantness indicated that news of her daughter’s death had surely not reached her yet.

  “Is your daughter by any chance in California?” I asked.

  “Yes, she is. She’s been out there some while, off and on, trying to break into the moving pictures.”

  Richardson was seated next to Fowley, listening in as the reporter jotted down notes; the editor’s eyes-including the slow one-lighted up like a candle in a jack-o-lantern. The Werewolf’s victim was a starlet! What more could a sleazebag editor ask?

  “Mrs. Short,” I said, “your daughter has won a beauty contest out here-Miss Santa Monica.”

  �
�Oh! How wonderful… I can’t say I’m surprised. She’s such a pretty girl-she’s won these sort of contests before, you know, starting with right here in Medford. And when she worked in the PX at Camp Cooke, during the war? She was selected ‘Cutie of the Week.’ ”

  Fowley was scribbling and Richardson was grinning.

  “She’s such a wholesome young woman,” the excited mother was saying. “She doesn’t smoke, or drink…”

  She was just arrested for underage drinking, and had a tattoo on her left thigh.

  “How long has Elizabeth been in Hollywood, Mrs. Short?”

  Now a little embarrassment seemed to creep into the proud parent’s tone. “Well, you have to understand, everyone back here was always telling Elizabeth how beautiful she was, that she was born to be a movie star.”

  “Is that right?”

  “She dropped out of Medford High in her junior year. Of course, pursuing her acting dreams is only part of why she left school. Hard to imagine, healthy as she looks, but she’s always suffered from asthma, and other lung conditions. So that sunny weather is good for her. She’s spent some time in Florida, too.”

  I didn’t want to get into Elizabeth Short’s travel habits-since they included “sunny” Chicago-so I moved the mother back to Hollywood.

  “Has your daughter appeared in any movies since she’s been out here?”

  “She’s had some small parts-what do they call it, when you’re in the background of a scene?”

  “An extra?”

  “Yes, an extra. She’s appeared as an extra.”

  “Has Elizabeth always been interested in acting?”

  “I’m afraid my daughter’s always been kind of movie struck,” the mother bubbled, “and I’m afraid I have to take credit, or maybe blame.”

  “Are you a movie fan, too?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve always loved the movies. From when they were little girls, I always took Betty and her sister Muriel to the picture show, two or three times a week. Everyone says Betty looks like Deanna Durbin, you know.”

  “There is a striking resemblance.”

  “Betty’s sister, Ginnie, is very talented, too, studying opera, and the two girls would just battle over the radio-Ginnie wanting to listen to that long-hair stuff, and Betty just loved the popular songs. Was there a talent competition for Miss Santa Monica? Did she dance? Betty’s a wonderful dancer.”