Broken Heart: David Raker #7

by Tim Weaver

  It was a single frame, embedded in the moments after the camera had dollied past Korin and started focusing in on the television. At full speed, watching it with the naked eye, its screen time would have amounted to a twenty-fourth of a second. In real time, it would have come across as a pop, a jump, a rogue frame.

  But it wasn’t any of those things.

  It was a photograph.

  Taken in black and white, the tones had been deliberately adjusted, the blacks blacker, the whites greyer, allowing it to be disguised within the shadows and half-light of the end sequence. But frozen here, on the wall of Walker’s house, we could see everything – the detail, the background, the woman in the centre of the shot.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Walker asked, pointing to her.

  She was in her mid thirties, was slim and about medium height, although it was hard to be entirely sure as she was sitting on the top step of a clapboard house, its porch extending out either side of her, her legs tucked into her body.

  ‘This is old,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, even in 1981 – when Kill! was released – this was already an old photograph.’ I paused, studying the woman more closely. She was beautiful. ‘Look at her hairstyle. Look at the kind of clothes she’s wearing.’

  Her jet-black hair was cut into an Italian style that recalled Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Her clothes were an even better barometer of when the picture was taken: she wore a full, gathered skirt, a petticoat visible underneath, and a pale blouse and dark neck scarf. She looked like she’d just come from a dance hall – or was about to leave for one.

  ‘This must have been taken in the fifties,’ I said.

  Walker studied the image. ‘So who is she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and my eyes drifted to the edges of the photograph, where the number 117 was fixed to the house, in a space next to the front door – and then to what lay beyond the house, further in the background.

  ‘What are those things?’ Walker asked.

  He was pointing to the far right-hand side of the photograph, where my own gaze had already settled. There was the hint of a dirty-looking canal, overgrown and dark. But that wasn’t what Walker had been referring to, and it wasn’t what I had my gaze fixed on either. We were both looking at the same thing: silhouettes on the horizon, one next to the other, like a forest of electricity pylons.

  ‘I think they might be oil derricks,’ I said.

  ‘Oil derricks?’

  I looked at the woman again, at the way she was dressed, at the clapboard house, at the canal, at the derricks, trying to put it together.

  ‘Venice,’ Walker said.

  I turned to him. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Venice in Los Angeles. It’s got to be. I’ve done so much research on the city for the book, I know it inside out. They struck oil in Venice in the twenties. It was like a fifty-year boom or something, and then the wells ran dry in the seventies. At one stage, they would have had these derricks all along the coast.’ He stopped, eyes still fixed on the photograph. ‘The clapboard house, the canal, the oil derricks, it’s got to be Venice. It’s got to be LA in the fifties.’

  As I processed that, I thought of those lines in the true-crime book. A notorious Los Angeles crime. Was that where this woman fitted in? Was she where this all ended up? I continued to stare at her, the altered monochrome of the photograph taking nothing away from her. In fact, in an odd way, it made her even more striking – more ethereal somehow, her pale skin reduced to a grey mask, her lipstick a dark, perfect oval.

  ‘So who is she?’ Walker asked again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, taking a camera-phone shot of her. ‘But we need to check some of the other films you’ve got. We need to see if Hosterlitz included this photograph, and the black “Ring of Roses” frame, in those too.’

  Walker did as I asked, grabbing another film at random from cold storage and loading it into the projector. This time it was Beware of the Woods, made the year before Kill!. The negative wasn’t in as good condition, magenta bias evident in a pinkish tinge to some of the actors’ faces – but it was easy to ignore now.

  ‘How will we know where to pause it?’ Walker asked.

  He meant, watching it at normal speed, how would we know if there was a single black frame like the one in Kill!.

  ‘I think he’ll put it in exactly the same place,’ I said.

  Walker stopped it before the end sequence, inching it back to the moments just before the wide shot. We found the black frame quickly after that. It was in exactly the same place as Kill!: embedded before the first frame of the wide shot, like a title card announcing a new scene. After a while, we found the photograph of the woman too, slotted in before the walnut-cased television became the sole focus of Hosterlitz’s camera.

  ‘It must be in every film,’ I said.

  ‘This is insane,’ Walker replied.

  ‘Can we check some of the others?’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Any. Just select a couple at random.’

  Walker headed back to the kitchen.

  As he did, I felt my phone go off in my pocket. When I got it out, I saw that it was Melanie Craw. She’d tried calling me while I’d been chained up at the scrapyard. I’d called her back after I got out, hit her voicemail and promised to try again later. But I never had.

  Next to me, the woman in the photograph remained frozen on the wall. The ashen tint of her skin, the darkness of her lipstick, the lightness of her clothes. But, this time, as I stared at the snapshot of her, the phone still going off in my hand, I began to see something new. Something I hadn’t spotted until now.

  A tiny shadow, cast across her neck.

  I felt the phone stop buzzing, and then Walker returned with two more film cans and made a beeline straight for the projector.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I told him, holding up a hand. ‘Wait a second.’

  He looked at me. ‘What?’

  I found the pictures of the wooden angel on my phone, and then held one of them up beside the woman on the wall. I looked at the woman again, and then back to the angel. The woman. The angel. The photograph. The phone.

  Shit.

  It wasn’t a shadow I was seeing on her neck.

  It was a tattoo of a crucifix.

  ‘Shall I change the reel?’ Walker asked.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening now. I wasn’t really listening even as we got confirmation that the black frame and the photograph were in exactly the same place in two other films, and probably the rest of the horror movies too. All I could think about was that someone – Hosterlitz? Korin? – had drawn the cross on to the wooden angel in order to exactly mirror the tattoo on the woman. Why?

  Who was she?

  If she was in her mid thirties back then, she’d be in her nineties now. Lynda Korin, Veronica Mae – neither of them was the right age to be the woman in the picture.

  So who the hell was she?

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said to Walker, looking at my watch. It was 5 p.m. I needed to get out of here, clear my head, think through my next move.

  In my pocket, my phone started buzzing again.

  I took it out, expecting it to be Craw a second time. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any number I had logged – but it was one I recognized. It was the same central London landline that had phoned me while I’d been kept at the Portakabin. I’d tried calling it back once I was out, but no one had picked up.

  Confused, cautious, I hit Answer. ‘David Raker.’

  ‘Mr Raker.’

  The voice on the line sounded taut and frightened. I’d heard it before, many times over – but, out of context, it took me a couple of seconds to place it.

  Glen Cramer.

  ‘Mr Cramer?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, wheezing a little. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I need to see you. I need to tell someone before it’s too late.’ His words
were weak and smudged, as if he’d just been crying. ‘I can’t keep this a secret any longer.’

  53

  The idea that it might be some sort of trap occurred to me the moment I ended the call. I wasn’t sure if it was because I actually suspected Cramer of being involved with Zeller and Egan – he hadn’t wanted to say much more over the phone, but I’d seen no flicker of deceit when I’d interviewed him face-to-face – or whether, after years of being lied to in my job, by families, by the victims themselves, suspicion had become my reflex state of mind. Either way, I wasn’t about to take a chance.

  Cramer had wanted to meet somewhere close to the hotel at Blackfriars Bridge where the Royalty Park launch party was going on, but I told him that wasn’t going to be possible. I needed him in a place he didn’t know and hadn’t chosen – ideally, somewhere public. But putting one of the world’s biggest movie stars in a crowd immediately raised a separate set of problems, so I told him to get a taxi from the hotel to Limehouse, without telling anyone, and I’d meet him outside the DLR station at 11 p.m., once the party was over. There was a location just around the corner where I used to meet sources during my newspaper days.

  I got there early, the sun still warm, the heat like a fever, and did a circuit around Limehouse station, checking entrances and buildings, getting a sense of the layout, the residents, the passers-by. Once I was done, I retreated to a shabby twenty-four-hour café on Commercial Road. The café was run-down and empty, its tables covered in sticky sheets of plastic, its walls ingrained with the stench of smoke and grease. I found a table by the window and got out my phone.

  The woman in the photograph. The angel.

  The crucifix tattoo.

  The case in the true-crime book.

  Was this what Glen Cramer had been talking about when he’d called me? Was this what he meant when he said, I can’t keep this a secret any longer?

  I put in a Google search, throwing ‘Angel crucifix tattoo Venice crime’ at it – and then hit Return. The page loaded in.

  At the very top was a Wikipedia entry.

  The Venice Angel – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venice _Angel_(case) The ‘Venice Angel’ was a nickname given to Életke Kerekes (b. 22 December, 1918, in Budapest) … lived in Venice, California … the house at 117 Regency Road was demolished after her death … small crucifix tattoo on her neck … the crime …

  Underneath that were additional links, related to the search.

  Martin Nemeth – Pingrove Hotel – Crimes in Los Angeles, California

  I clicked through to the Wikipedia page. I’d never heard of Életke Kerekes before. I wasn’t familiar with the name Martin Nemeth in the link below hers either, but I’d heard of the Pingrove Hotel. It had been a famous landmark in LA until the late 1960s, a place where Hollywood royalty used to gather, its location on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and North Camden Drive making it local to many of their homes in Beverly Hills, or out in nearby Holmby Hills and Bel Air.

  The page loaded in. On the right-hand side was a photograph of Életke Kerekes.

  It was her.

  It was the woman that Hosterlitz had hidden in his films.

  This picture was in black and white again, but she wasn’t on the steps of her house this time, she was in front of a white, nondescript building, smiling at someone off camera.

  She looked startling, the contours of her face like the strokes of an artist. Her eyes were bright, pools of clear water, her nose small and perfectly aligned, and – just above the neck scarf she was wearing – I could see the very top of the crucifix. It was hard to judge, but it must have been about an inch high, and sat exactly halfway between her collarbone and the line of her jaw. It was delicate, the upright thicker than the horizontal part of the cross.

  The caption underneath the picture read:

  Életke Kerekes on the American Kingdom Inc. lot, 1949.

  Immediately, without having to read anything else, I knew this had to be the case that had been torn out of the true-crime book. I knew that this woman, hidden in a split-second of a lost Hosterlitz film, had to be at the centre of whatever was going on – of Zeller and Egan’s attempts to get to Korin; of Korin’s decision to vanish in the first place. Maybe the woman was the secret that Glen Cramer had talked about. Maybe she was where everything began.

  Maybe she’s where everything ends.

  I paused for a moment, lingering on that last thought – and then I started reading the article.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  00:13:02

  Ray Callson shifts his weight on the chair and crosses his legs, running the back of his hand across his mouth. Outside, the light of the day is fading fast now, and a fully formed reflection of him has emerged in one of the windows.

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of murders,’ he says.

  ‘But this was the one you couldn’t let go.’

  He shrugs. ‘Like I said, it wasn’t what the kid had done. It wasn’t the blood. It wasn’t him sitting there in that hotel room, on the edge of that bed, crying like a baby. It wasn’t that.’

  ‘It was his choice of victim?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Callson sniffs. ‘That was the first time I ever saw a murder like that. Actually, come to think of it, over the years, I maybe only saw one or two like that. There were other guys who caught cases like it, so I heard about them, but I rarely saw them myself. Mostly you were dealing with husbands who’d offed their wives. This … I don’t know … It was like something got all screwed up.’

  A darkness forms in Callson’s face, pooling there like ink.

  ‘Can you tell me about the victim?’

  Callson heaves a long sigh, his expression softening. ‘She was one hell of a nice-looking woman, I’ll tell you that much. She was from Hungary originally, but emigrated to the US after the Second World War. Once she got here, she anglicized her name to Elaine Kinflower, and that’s what everyone knew her as – I guess it was easier to pronounce – but her birth name was Életke Kerekes. In 1953, she would have been …’ He blows out his cheeks. ‘Thirty-five. Something like that.’

  ‘You said she lived in Venice?’

  Callson nods. ‘Back then, it was a fucking dive, though. At the time she was there, the whole area had hit the skids. It used to be called the “slum by the sea”. All the souvenir shops, the bingo parlors, they were now pawnshops and liquor stores. The canals looked like rivers of shit. The tourists were gone. The only people living in Venice at that time were immigrants or the so-called “counter-culture” – writers, poets, artists, those sorts of people. She paid next to nothing to live in this run-down bungalow – but you know what? I remember going to her house and thinking to myself, “Actually, this place is real nice.” She’d made the best of what she had.’

  ‘You didn’t expect that?’

  ‘In Venice at that time? No, I didn’t.’

  ‘What was so nice about her house?’

  ‘She’d just worked real hard on it, is all. I gotta couple of daughters. I know what it’s like out there, and I know what it was like back then. Women at that time, they were treated like second-class citizens. Still are, if you ask my girls about it. Életke Kerekes probably put in twice as many hours as some of the pricks that were pinching her ass all day, and probably got half the pay in return – but she made her money count. I liked her place. It spoke well of her.’

  ‘So why is it this case in particular still eats at you?’

  He says nothing to start with as he looks off to his left, his gaze settling on the windows. But then something unexpected happens. The glare from the camera’s light attachment catches his eyes – and they flash with tears.

  ‘Mr Callson?’

  ‘There was just something wrong about it,’ he says. ‘I mean, look at me.’ He gestures to his eyes, to his tears. ‘Do you think I got like this every time I turned up at a crime scene? Do you think I was blubbing like a child every time someone got their face turned to
paste? I went to a million crime scenes. I saw a million things that should never have happened. No.’ He shakes his head. ‘No, it wasn’t that.’

  ‘So what was it?’

  ‘Maybe I’ve just gone soft. That happens when you get old.’

  ‘Do you really think it’s that?’

  He shakes his head again and leans forward to where his water is. When he’s sunk the last of it, he holds it up and says, ‘Can I have a refill on this?’ His voice is quiet, a piece of string reduced to its final cord. The glass is taken away, refilled and brought back to him, and he drinks half the water in one go. When he’s done, he places the glass down in front of him.

  ‘The press called her the Venice Angel. It was that crucifix tattoo she had.’ He gestures to his neck. ‘Back then, a woman having a tattoo like that, it was pretty unheard of. Racy, I guess, or vulgar, depending on your point of view. The media cottoned on to that. It was the way she looked too – beautiful, almost angelic. She went to some convent school back in Hungary, so that all played into it. One of the papers – the National People – gave her that nickname, and it stuck.’

  ‘Was she married?’

  ‘She arrived at Liberty Island in 1946, moved to Kansas for a time, then ended up in LA, and a year later – this would be 1948, I guess – her husband walked out on her and their young son to chase some piece of skirt to the East Coast. After that, she anglicized her maiden name and started having to make ends meet as a single mother.’

  ‘How did she cope with a young kid?’

  ‘We asked around in the days after she was found, and it turned out that she had a neighbour down in Venice who helped her out with her son. This neighbour would look after the boy – pick him up from school, give him dinner, that sort of thing – when Életke, Elaine, whatever you prefer, went to work.’

  ‘What did she do for a living?’

  ‘She had a job at American Kingdom. Started there as a typist in 1947, the year before her husband left her. Eighteen months later, she moved to Abraham Zeller’s office to work as his secretary. But she was smarter than that. By then, she was fluent in English and writing these children’s stories. We found a ton of them in her house. They were good. Real good. Her son told us she would read them to him at night, before bed. He told us his mom’s imagination was amazing.’